Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  Yes. Yes, Elisa is thinking, nobody knows, nobody understands. And this ought to reassure her, because it means that whatever she wants to be true about this experience, whatever she would like to believe has happened to her, is possible. It doesn’t matter what Betsy Orosco or Hugo Bonaventure thinks, it doesn’t matter what the guy at Caltech thinks, it doesn’t matter what Amos Finley thinks. They can’t tell her otherwise, can they?—because they don’t know. They can’t know. The only person who can decide what it is that has happened to her is herself: the experience is hers to define, and hers to explain or not. Her life, her consciousness.

  But instead of feeling reassured, she begins to feel panicked. Because it occurs to her that what she wants—what she has wanted all along—is not simply to know. It is to be believed. She has placed her greatest need in the hands of other people—strangers in an alien world.

  They are all strangers here, even herself.

  Elisa senses a movement to her right. It is Patricia. She is placing a twice-folded rectangle of paper on the seat between them.

  52.

  Elisa leaves the paper there. She knows it is for her but can’t bring herself to pick it up. The room is decorated in various shades of beige and gray and the paper is the whitest thing in it. It lies slightly open, the four corners lined up sharply, pointed at her. She can see into its maw, where a few lines of text have been printed.

  The science fiction writer is speaking now. Somebody has asked him how parallel worlds should be depicted in stories, if the concept is bound by rules. His response is impatient; he speaks as though it is beneath him to be asked such a thing.

  “Every compelling concept is bound by rules. But I can’t sit here and tell them to you. They’re determined by the story.”

  But Elisa is still staring at the paper. She detects movement and looks up to find that Patricia has turned her head and is gazing at her with moist and beatific eyes, smiling faintly, pitying her. Patricia blinks—no, she bats her eyelashes. The smell of her perfume is stronger now.

  And now Patricia stands up and walks, floats almost, out of the room. To Elisa this seems disruptive, drastic: isn’t there a kind of hush in the room just now, a suspension of movement and sound? But nobody seems to notice it happening. All that is left is the paper on the chair and the voice of the science fiction novelist.

  “… for instance, in my last book, Familiar, which maybe some of you have read…”

  “Very fine piece of work,” says the TV producer.

  “Why, thank you, Roland, have your people talk to my people. But in that book, the protagonist, a young man in search of his twin, enters parallel worlds through the pages of a book, a sort of enchanted book also called Familiar…”

  The blogger says, “Everybody loves the po-mo,” to scattered laughs.

  Elisa is only half-listening. She reaches out and picks up the paper. Her dry hands make a sharp sound, sliding against it, unfolding it. She looks up to see if anyone has noticed. But nobody is paying attention.

  The message has been printed on a computer. It reads:

  I know what you are going through… I can help you… I will come to you… we will talk… a better life awaits… don’t worry. There is an answer to all your questions… a solution to your problems… don’t worry… soon. Patricia.

  Somehow the message reads like a code—it seems to say more than is printed here. She reads it again and again, straining against the possibility of hope. Could Patricia be the one? Why not? Someone just said something about the rules being determined by the story. This is her story, isn’t it? She, Elisa, can make the rules.

  The voices of the panelists fall silent. She looks up and catches Betsy frowning at her from the dais, as though trying to figure something out.

  Elisa’s fingers begin to twitch. The paper in her hand crackles and she rises to her feet. She’s angry.

  “Betsy!”

  The room turns to her. There’s a wildness in her voice, a raggedness that is almost sexual. Her breaths catch in her throat and suddenly her heart is pounding so frantically against her blouse that she thinks she can see, on the periphery of her vision, the fabric moving. She tries to calm herself, to tamp down the desperation in her voice, but it’s hopeless. She says, “I wonder if you might talk about my experience of this phenomenon. What we talked about last year. And where you stand on that.”

  Someone coughs. The silence deepens. Betsy opens her mouth to speak, then closes it again and glances at the papers in front of her. She looks up and says, “I know that… I’m not sure…”

  “You sent me to your friend Hugo. He was going to do tests… well, he was going to have his friends do them. Tests. On my things.”

  She doesn’t sound like herself at all.

  “A tube of lipstick. And a list. One from both worlds, one from this one alone!”

  Betsy is frowning again. She says, “I don’t think…” and then trails off. She’s gripping a pen in her fist and is clicking the nib in and out with her thumb.

  “I went there—to the lab. They gave me my things back. They didn’t know you, or Hugo.”

  Into the eerie quiet of the room, Betsy says, “I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about that.”

  Elisa says, too quietly to be heard, “Did you ever believe me?”

  And by now someone else has raised a hand, asked the TV producer a question. Elisa is still standing, still staring at Betsy, who is still clicking her pen. Eventually Betsy looks away, and Elisa sits down. She is not entirely sure what specifically she just said. The folded note is still in her hand. Her heart is still racing.

  And then the room is empty, or nearly so, the neat rows of folding chairs have been disrupted and young people wearing eyeglasses and ID tags are bustling about pushing them back into place. Some people are standing near her, it’s nottennis and RueTheDay. There’s an electric, frightened intensity about them: at first she assumes it’s because they are attracted to one another, that RueTheDay is contemplating an affair. And maybe they are, maybe he is. But then she asks them what they’re doing next, are they going to the movie premiere in the ballroom, and they are strangely evasive. Nottennis takes a step back, bumping into someone to whom she must apologize.

  “Uh… yeah,” says RueTheDay, “I think maybe we’ll make our way there eventually.”

  “We have to do something else first,” nottennis adds.

  “Maybe we’ll see you there?”

  Elisa nods, folding the paper in her hand into a still-smaller rectangle. “Sure. Sure.”

  The two of them retreat with evident relief, while Elisa stands blinking, wondering what just happened. She looks around the room. People are clustered in little groups, stealing glances at her. Betsy Orosco seems to have left, and the three male panelists are laughing about something at the dais.

  She fears, is in fact quite certain, that she has made a fool of herself.

  53.

  That night she attends a talk on alien abductions and a panel on the possible alternate forms intelligent life might take. She meets a couple from the forum named Seth and Janet. These are their screen names. They tell her they just found the idea funny, giving themselves “normal” names to use online; they say they’ve taken to calling one another Seth and Janet around the house. Elisa didn’t realize they were married. They don’t seem to have been at the panel discussion this morning; they didn’t witness her performance.

  She goes with them to the hotel bar and the three of them drink. A lot. Seth announces at some point that he’s going to kiss Elisa; Janet tells him to go ahead, in fact she dares him. He does it, and the two of them kiss for a while. He’s only a few years younger than she is, and is quite attractive, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist and a bit of hair poking out of his collar from his back and chest. Janet whoops and laughs and then takes over, kissing Elisa with evidently equal enthusiasm. It isn’t as unpleasant as she might have imagined, though it is indeed unpleasant. They invite her up to their room
and Elisa says no at least twenty or thirty times. At some point they leave the bar. “But we’ve had such fun!” Elisa shouts after them. They are laughing too hard to hear.

  Then she’s with RueTheDay and nottennis, and they’re laughing at her too. At times they whisper things to each other and then look at Elisa and crack up. She finds herself asking anyone who will listen that it is imperative that they wake up CharlesSmith and bring him down here immediately, and if they don’t do it, by God, she’s going to go do it herself. Then she is in the elevator and her hand is flapping uselessly against the glowing numbers. Somehow she manages to hit her floor and staggers back into the corner.

  She hasn’t been this drunk since… college? She can’t remember very far back. The elevator heaves and sways. It stops, and the doors open, but she doesn’t get out, she just remains pinned to the back wall, staring out at the hallway: a vase full of fake flowers on a round wooden table, a seascape hanging above it. There are voices. The doors close, and then, a moment later, open again. Three people get in, a man and two women; they are talking and laughing, the man looking over his shoulder.

  “… she was like, ‘Okay, fine!’ And I was like, ‘Fine!’”

  “Of course she’s like that.”

  “Did you meet her mother?”

  “Oh, God.”

  “And then that coat.”

  “She called it ‘vintage.’”

  “Well, we shouldn’t make fun.”

  “Oh, yes we should!”

  The doors open. The people get out. It’s the lobby—the elevator has gone back down without Elisa noticing. She hits the button for her floor again. This time she’ll do it—she’ll get out of the elevator and go to her room. As the doors close and the elevator begins to rise, she studies an advertisement affixed to the wall above the buttons. It reads, “Good times, good friends. Your one-stop dinner solution on game day!” The phrase seems hilarious; she snorts and giggles. Then she sighs, loudly, and begins to feel as though something in the elevator is different.

  It’s a change in the light, a change in the space. She groans a little and it sounds wrong. For no reason that she can fathom, she says “Ow.” She fixates on the spot where the horizontal crack between the doors and floor meets the vertical one between the doors. It’s sort of sexual. The elevator stops. The doors open and the spot vanishes and she says “Whoa.”

  Three people get in, a man and two women; they are talking and laughing. The man is looking over his shoulder.

  “… she was like, ‘Okay, fine!’ And I was like, ‘Fine!’”

  “Of course she’s like that.”

  “Did you meet her mother?”

  “Oh, God.”

  “And then that coat.”

  “She called it ‘vintage.’”

  “Well, we shouldn’t make fun.”

  “Oh, yes we should!”

  Elisa tries not to move or make a sound. She has backed into a corner of the elevator, in an effort not to be seen. She is terrified. None of the people look at her. The door opens onto the lobby and they get out and Patricia gets in.

  “Patricia?” she says, and her voice sounds very small and far away.

  Patricia smiles that same beatific smile. She nods and presses the button for Elisa’s floor. How does she know? Maybe she doesn’t, maybe it’s her floor too.

  As the elevator rises, Elisa’s breaths become shallower, faster. “Patricia,” she says, “if they’re out there…”

  The elevator stops. The doors open. “Is there? Anyone there?”

  Patricia shakes her head no, still smiling. She holds out a hand to Elisa and Elisa takes it, and allows Patricia to lead her into the vestibule.

  But they’re there. All three of them. And one of the women is saying, “And she said, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t come to the party after all.’”

  “You have got to be kidding me,” says the other.

  “I am not. So I said, ‘Fine, then,’ and she was like, ‘Okay, fine!’ And I was like, ‘Fine!’”

  “Of course she’s like that.”

  “Did you meet her mother?”

  And as they enter the elevator the man looks over his shoulder, back at Elisa, who stares at him in horror. He blinks, and then the doors close and the people are gone.

  There’s a hand on her elbow. There’s a smell of perfume. She is being guided down a hallway. She has had the presence of mind to dig her key card out of her pocket and now she is fumbling to slip it into the lock. But Patricia’s soft hand is there to guide her. She is led into the room, to a chair, she is pressed down into the chair and then a soft shape is in the near-blackness of the room pulling back the comforter and sheets on the bed.

  “Thankyou,” Elisa is saying, “thankyou,” and then her shoes are being removed, and her socks, and she’s lying in the bed on the cool rough sheets and it feels so incredibly wonderful that she wants to cry.

  “Is this real?” she wants to know, but no one answers.

  Then she’s awake again, the room is spinning, and she is kneeling in front of the toilet vomiting, with a warm hand, a hot hand actually, pressed into the middle of her back. “Gedditoff,” she says and tries to brush it away, and the hand disappears.

  She manages to brush her teeth and drink some water. Beside her, someone is cleaning the toilet with a wadded-up bit of toilet paper. She has the impression that it is perhaps Elisa, the other Elisa, come to visit this world. (Wouldn’t that be nice, she thinks—we could be friends.) A peculiar sensation overcomes her—as she is nearly awake enough now, nearly sober enough now, to be disturbed by the presence of a stranger in her hotel room—of not quite being disturbed, or of contemplating being disturbed; she is aware that she can make, if she wishes, a decision about how she will feel. Her thoughts, though, are close and cluttered and bloated, jostling against each other in her head, and she can’t keep them still enough to follow any one of them to its conclusion. She really just wants to get back into bed. She has taken her pants off, or somebody has, so she is standing here in the nightlit bathroom in her underwear and a linen blouse stained with flecks of her own sick, and the figure at the toilet rises, and the toilet flushes, and then she is led back to the bed and is asleep again.

  54.

  When Elisa wakes it is not yet morning, or it is morning and the heavy curtains have been closed, and Patricia is sitting in the chair, which she has moved to the side of the bed and in which she seems to be praying silently. The only light comes from the night-light in the bathroom, and the glowing alarm clock, which is blinking 12:00, and the strip at the base of the door. Elisa feels hollowed out and queasy; her mouth is filled with paste. She sits up. A glass of water stands on the end table, so she picks it up and drinks from it. Patricia is staring at her.

  “I’m here to help you,” Patricia says.

  Her voice is unexpectedly rough and deep, like a heavy smoker’s. Perhaps, in a previous life, that’s what she was. She is holding something in her hands—a rosary? Elisa can’t quite make it out, only the pale thick fingers working at it.

  She is so tired—more tired, if this is even possible, than she was when she collapsed into bed. She wants this strange woman to leave so that she can go back to sleep. It would be simple enough to tell her so. To ask her to leave. Elisa draws a deep breath. She says, “I don’t think you can.”

  “Take my hands.”

  “Patricia. You are Patricia, right? I’m sorry, I just need to sleep. I need to sleep.”

  The desk chair is positioned two feet from the edge of the bed. Elisa yawns. It is possible that she falls asleep again, sitting up with her head against the bedboard, for a few minutes, or maybe an hour. When she opens her eyes, Patricia is still waiting. Her hands are empty now and lying, palms up, fingers spread, against the floral print of her dress. Her glasses are hanging around her neck on a chain. The gloom makes her seem both more and less real.

  That’s it: Elisa must submit, or the woman will never leave. She drags herself to the edge of
the bed, keeping the sheets twisted around her waist, covering her thighs. She drops her legs over the side, so that her knees are even with Patricia’s; just an inch separates their bodies. Elisa reaches out and places her two hands, faceup, onto the other woman’s palms.

  “Okay,” she says, “help me.”

  Patricia nods, once, and her heavy features rearrange themselves into a small, slow frown, a scowl of concentration. Her fingers close on Elisa’s hands.

  Elisa is so disappointed now: both in the conference, and in herself, for the way she has behaved. Why did she kiss those people in the bar? Everyone saw her do it. Why did she ask Betsy that question? It seems to her that she has run out of chances, not just here, but in her life. That this is the way it will be now: things will keep being left behind and never returned to, and life will take on a depressing, inevitable forward momentum, like a glacier’s, slow and inexorable. And then it will end.

  (She is wrong, of course. Things will change, they always do. There will be times when she looks back a few months, a week, even a day, and wonders at how innocent she was then, when the fabric of life felt so different. How could she be so oblivious to things that, in the here and now, are so obvious? Of course she will go back to Derek, eventually. He will, in fact, beg her to do so, going so far as to propose marriage to her a second time, though they won’t have divorced.

  It is true that the boys will stay disappeared, that she won’t see them again for a long, long time. But they’ll be in touch, after a fashion. She and Silas will seek each other out online. He will use his sig lines as signals to her. He will go by various names, on various forums; he will track her interests, her obsessions, hovering at the boundaries of her attention, moving out of view when she gets too close. He won’t respond to messages. This will be their private game. They will follow one another’s iterations, they will die off and respawn in unexpected places, and she won’t tell Derek. And when at last he appears to her in the flesh, when he brings his brother to her as well, to forgive, it will be as sudden and inexplicable as everything else he’s done, yet it will feel perfectly natural to her, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, like everything else in the strange, enormous, echo-filled room that is her life.