Sorry Please Thank You

by Charles Yu

  Why would anyone imagine themselves this way? Why does my Self do this to me? What is he waiting for? Who is he waiting to see?

  What shapes can the world take?

  A torus, a saddle, a Euclidean plane, on a brane, on a string, in a hologram, on a speeding train, in an infinite loop, a thirty-second universe, a maximal entropy universe, a backward-arrow-of-time universe. A no-causality universe.

  On the worst days, I feel fine. On the best days, I know I am not.

  Every morning I wake up knowing close to nothing. About myself. Or anything else. Every morning there is only one thing that can be counted on, one thing I can be sure of, without opening my eyes.

  She is gone.

  Who is she?

  If I could just find some clue. I have a hard time even maintaining a thought, even holding an idea in my head for more than a few moments. I can’t seem to build up any kind of momentum. Details distract me. I have a hard enough time just figuring out the rules each day. Putting them together, looking at them carefully, trying to discern a pattern, a progression, any kind of underlying meaning to it all, it just hardly seems possible. I’m the cargo, not the engine. My mind just goes along for the ride.

  It’s hard to have a relationship in this world. Other people are not the same from day to day. I might wake up next to a woman three days in a row, or three hundred, but I never know if she’ll be there the next morning, or the next hour, or if the world will change completely while I’m not looking. She might even change into another person altogether. I might recognize something in her eyes, or she might not be a woman at all. She might turn into a man. Or a mailbox. Or a region of empty space. Or a feeling. Or a song. I might only recognize her as one recognizes someone in a dream, as in the way something is actually someone, and that someone is actually someone else.

  This life: No need to bother with soul searching or trying to understand my nature or actions. No need to wonder why I am the way I am, why I do what I do. Just sit back and be whoever you are that day. I guess. I guess so.

  Up. Morning.

  I take an inventory of the world:

  Me.

  Check.

  Bed.

  Check.

  Sun rising.

  Check.

  I wake up. It is late. She is gone.

  What has Charles Yu done? What is Charles Yu trying to work through? Is that what this is? A laboratory, an experiment, a controlled space, a simulation, an iterative program to run again and again, under slightly different conditions?

  I wake up. Take inventory. It’s late. She’s gone.

  Underneath my life of random scenes underlies the script of his life, his worries and concerns and fantasies. Someday it will all make some sense. That’s my plan, to keep plodding along, getting up every morning and going to bed every night, and in between, living through each minute, each situation, most of which make no sense, some of which are terrifying, if I keep talking to people, these people who seem both strange and familiar at the same time, if I just keep at it, that the real Charles Yu, my real Self, will emerge, what he wants or cares about or loves will make itself known.

  It’s late. She’s gone. I take inventory.

  A note.

  From her:

  You don’t know who I am.

  Also:

  You may never know.

  I have never seen her, let alone have any idea of who she might be. Does Charles Yu really know her? All he ever knew of her was who he saw every day. All I am is who I am every day. All anyone is to anyone is a series of days. Were they married? Were they in love?

  How do I find her? How do I catch her? That’s not how it works, is it? I can’t control whether she’s gone. She is gone. That’s a given. There has to be a reason why she left. What am I allowed to do? What is possible? What is conceivable? Do all worlds have rules?

  Do dreams?

  Do they have gravity? Or physics? Chance? Or histories?

  Do dreams have futures?

  I wake up early. Or am I still dreaming?

  The sun is rising. In the north. First sensation of the day: she’s here. I go downstairs. That’s her. Whoever she is. I look at her from the back, in a long shirt, her dark brown hair down just past her shoulders. I’m nervous. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve talked to her, I don’t know if she’ll remember me. What do I know about her? Let’s see, she’s young-looking. Younger than I would have thought. Wait, am I young? She must know I’m standing here. Name starts with. With an M? An M. That’s good for now. Don’t push it. It will come to you. Am I still in bed? I’m going to have to come up with a name if I’m going to talk to her. Or do I? If we’re married, I wouldn’t say her name. Not in the morning. Would I? Wouldn’t I just kiss her, wrap my arm around her waist, nuzzle her neck? Is that what I’m going to do? What if that’s weird? What if we’re not like that? What if she hates her husband? What if we have a terrible marriage? What if, what if, what if? I’m trapped in a kind of what-if story, right? So what, big deal. Who isn’t? Everyone I know is. What if you had quit that job, what if you had told him off, what if you had spoken up that one time, when it really mattered? What if you had made the choice you knew would have changed everything, would have made her and him and you all happy? What if the world ended today and you never told her you loved her? What if the world ended every single day of your life, and you still never told her?

  What if Charles Yu hasn’t lost anything? What if he is perfectly happy? What if one day I could wake up as him, flip it around? What if I could know what it was like to be real? What if I found out that he had a wife and a child and was genuinely happy? I imagine what that would be like, to be happy, and to know that not everyone is, to know that it comes at a price, and that price is a kind of loss. The happiness and loss, intertwined, both of them always existing at all times. What if I found out that the real me was content, fulfilled, grateful? How could I be happy for myself, while still remembering that someday I will lose it all, everything important, and unimportant? That everyone loses everything. Everything loses itself. What if I found out that in my real life, my Self, this Charles Yu person had never lost her, the woman? Why would he do this to me? Why would he daydream about the worst, the unimaginable? Why put me through that? Is it for fun? To satisfy his curiosity? What if he needs me? Needs me to complete him. One of us has something, the other one loses it. Everything I have ever lost, I never really had. I am the lost part of him, the lost side of him, the part that never happened.

  I wake up. I take an inventory. Here is what I know about Charles Yu:

  (1) He is a man.

  (2) He has a wife and a child.

  (3) He is still happy.

  (4) I will never understand him.

  Things will make sense in the end. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway. Deep down, I’ve always felt that they would, although lately I have started to wonder where I got that idea, have started to wonder about what if. What if I’m not doing this right? What if I missed something? Slept through it, didn’t notice, got distracted, just plain missed it. For as long as I can remember, I have had this before-feeling, this feeling like I am in the moment before something is just about to happen, a feeling that whatever is going to happen hasn’t yet happened. Recently, though, I have started to get another feeling. An after-feeling. My whole life has been all before, before, before, leading up to. And then, just like that, it feels like after. After-something. Between before and after, there was supposed to be something big, right? The present, the now, the moment. What if I somehow skipped it, what if it passed me by and I didn’t recognize it, or worse, what if I never get to do it at all? What if I go my whole life and never ask that one key question, that one what-if that I am supposed to be asking myself?

  For a while, I thought I might be in a love story, but I hardly ever wake up next to anyone anymore. It still happens once in a while. When it does, the first thing I do, doesn’t matter where I am, in the ocean, on the moon of some minor
distant planet, doesn’t matter where, doesn’t matter if she knows who I am or if I know who she is or how strong gravity is or if I feel terrible or if the world is logically impossible, the first thing I do if she’s there, is I tell her how nice it is to see her.

  Open

  Samantha discovered it first. I don’t know exactly how it started, just that I came home in the middle of the day and Samantha was standing there in front of the couch, and she actually jumped when I came through the door. I’m not sure why but that bothered me, maybe because I’ve always sort of suspected that people are only that jumpy when they have something to hide, and I was so much in my own head about being annoyed at Samantha that it took me a second to notice what she was looking at, which was a huge word, right in the center of the room.

  “We need to talk about that,” I said.

  “Why? Why do we always have to talk everything to death?”

  “The word ‘door’ is floating in the middle of our apartment. You don’t think maybe this is something we need to discuss?”

  We ate dinner in silence, pretending “door” wasn’t literally hanging over us. Samantha went to bed early. I watched a show about poisonous lizards and drank warm terrible whiskey out of Samantha’s coffee mug. After finishing, I put the mug back in the cupboard without washing it. When I slipped into bed I could tell by her breathing she was still awake.

  “Say it,” Samantha said.

  “I’m not going to say it. You should.”

  “Why should I be the one to have to say it?”

  “Because you brought that thing in there. That idea. You conjured it.”

  Our bedroom was tiny. I slipped my leg out from under the covers and opened the door with my foot, so that she had to look at it. But it was gone already.

  “Samantha.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, with her back to me.

  “It’s gone.”

  “I told you to say it,” she said. “Now we’ve lost our chance.”

  I woke up at three in the morning to Samantha, with her hand under my shirt, running her fingernails up and down my back. She pulled in close and kissed the back of my ear.

  “It’s over,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Do you want me to move out?”

  “No, I’ll find a place.”

  “Can you get me a glass of water from the kitchen?”

  I went into the living room.

  “Uh,” I said. “You might want to come see this.”

  Instead of the word “door,” there was now an actual door in the middle of our living room.

  “This is like that movie,” she said. “Monsters, Inc.”

  “Actually it’s like a poem I just read.”

  Samantha rolled her eyes at me.

  “So are you going to open the door?” she said. I hesitated for a moment, and before I could say anything, she opened it and went right through. I stood there, too afraid to follow. Maybe a hole had opened up in the world, and movies and poems were coming through into reality. Or maybe we were the movie, or the poem, and this was our chance to go into the real world.

  Just when I was about to go after her, Samantha came back through the door, giggling.

  “Are you drunk?” I said.

  “No. Okay, a little. Okay, a lot.”

  “You don’t even drink.”

  She told me it was a dinner party. That everyone seemed to know her there. But it wasn’t her they knew. Or at least it didn’t feel that way.

  “And there are all these other couples. And they know who you are, too, they keep asking about you.”

  “That’s swinging. You’re talking about us becoming swingers.”

  “Ew. Gross. No. It was not that at all.”

  “Then what kind of party was it?”

  “People know us. They like us. Not ‘us’ exactly, it’s hard to explain. You just have to come see for yourself.”

  It was us, but we were performing.

  I could feel myself not quite being myself, but a little better, wittier, like I was doing everything for the benefit of someone else.

  When I would talk to Samantha, it was like we were speaking lines. As if someone were watching, and we were trying to give off an impression. And the impression we were giving off was that we were happy, and in love, and that we flirted with each other and made each other laugh all the time.

  At one point during the party, I put my hand on the small of Samantha’s back, and whispered in her ear, “I love you,” and it felt so natural that I felt like I really did, and it didn’t matter that I never did things like that back on the other side of the door.

  But it wasn’t us. I had never put my hand on the small of her back. I didn’t even like that phrase, “small of her back,” and even as I was doing it, I felt more like I was “putting my hand on the small of her back” than actually doing it. It was a gesture more than an action, and I was not actually doing it because I wanted to touch Samantha. I was doing it just so that I could feel myself doing it, so other people could see that we were the kind of couple that showed each other affection in this way.

  “I like it there,” I said.

  “We should go back tomorrow,” Samantha said, and the way she said it, I knew she’d have gone back with or without me.

  It was five a.m. We were in bed, lying on top of the covers, wide awake, our heads buzzing with the clinking of flatware and the hum of conversation.

  We went back the next night, and the next. We were practicing something that we had no name for. Neither of us wanted to talk about what the “door” was. Neither of us wanted to take a chance that we might ruin a good thing. Every night, we would get home from work, get dressed without talking, and go through the “door.” Whoever would get home first would call the other one to confirm that the “door” was still there.

  We got good at whatever it was we were doing. We learned how to arrive at the party, and how to leave it. We learned to stay until just the right moment, the point in time during a party when you know you should make your exit, find the “door.” If we stayed too long, there would come a point when the party had peaked, and everyone knew it, and yet there was nothing to be done. Being at a party at that point made everyone still there feel lonely, and trapped, and a little bit desperate. On the other hand, if we left too early, we would get home and feel like we’d left part of ourselves somewhere else, as if our centers of gravity had been displaced, moved somewhere in between Here and There, and we were no longer where we were. We were nowhere.

  I started to realize that I was more there than here. It was the same for Samantha.

  When we had first started going through the “door,” we lived our lives here, and went to the other side to be other people. But we were becoming those people, even though those people were us, and now, on this side, we were increasingly finding ourselves unsure of what to do, how to act or treat each other when there was no one to see how we “acted” or “treated each other.” I would try to touch Samantha’s cheek and she would move away. When she was getting dressed for work, I would try my old move, circle my arm around her waist, but she would turn around and give me a look, as in, what-do-you-think-you-are-doing. And even though I didn’t show it, I felt the same way. It felt counterfeit, somehow, to be good to each other when it was just the two of us. It was as if. As if we were actors in a play with no audience, and I was still insisting that we stay in character, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it anymore. Whoever we were on that other side had followed us through. We needed our audience to be us. To be “us.”

  I went less often, and eventually stopped going altogether. At first she said people were wondering what had happened to me, but after a while she stopped talking about it, and I didn’t want to know. I assumed the story had changed. Or maybe she’d changed it.

  One morning she came back from over “there” just as the sun was rising. She slipped into the bathroom to take a shower. I heard her singing a song I didn’t recog
nize. She came out, dripping wet, drying her hair, still singing softly to herself.

  “It doesn’t make sense for you to keep your stuff here anymore,” I said.

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  I went to go get her bag from the closet and that’s when I noticed that the outer wall to our apartment was missing.

  “Hey, you might want to come see this,” I said.

  She came out into the living room, still naked. We both stood there, as if being presented on a stage, standing on our marks, as if under an invisible proscenium.

  “It’s like we’re in a diorama,” she said.

  I inched toward the edge and looked down. We were on the top floor of a five-story walk-up, and it was a good fifty or sixty feet down to the sidewalk. I could see the top of the large tree right outside the base of our building. I felt like this was an opportunity, or a sign.