Сара Пинскер - Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea - Stories

The elevator chimed and let us in. We stood silent while it descended; I used the time to study the others. Hair and clothes had been the easiest ways to catalogue differences at first, but I was starting to see that we fell into a few different basic phenotypes. The host and the other athletic Sarahs on one side of a spectrum that ranged lean to soft. Still no way to suss out anything beyond the superficial without asking.

Once the other Sarahs had walked away, the host answered my question as if there had been no gap. “Secord Island is a tiny dot in the Atlantic. I won’t bother getting into the geopolitics, but it’s independent in nine identified worlds. Three are home to private mansions, six to private resort hotels. In this one and only this one, one of us is manager, though she’s one of the more distant iterations I identified, from a subset who went to university in Nova Scotia and then stayed in the east. This place was perfect. So inhospitably perfect we were able to guarantee to our sponsors and grantees that nobody would go AWOL. One weekend, in and out. No risk.” She flashed a rueful smile.

“What do sponsors and grantees get from this?” Mabel had asked me, and I’d wondered ever since. I repeated Mabel’s question.

“The usual name recognition, for those in worlds where they exist. And if it goes well—if it had gone well, I guess—the chance to explore doing it for other purposes: recreational, educational. There’re a couple of travel companies, a couple of charitable foundations, a couple of think tanks. I’m hoping I’ll still be able to convince them her death would have happened anywhere, nothing to do with the event.”

I nodded. “One more thing. Is there a way for me to talk to your other committee members? You’re the ones who would have known her best.”

She looked for a second like she was going to say no, but then she lifted her walkie-talkie to her lips. After a brief back and forth, they agreed to meet me at registration after the keynote.

“Anything else?” she asked. “I still say there’s no point in you investigating before the police get here, but if you think there is, I’ll cede to your expertise.”

I wasn’t sure if that was a dig or not. She was probably right. I had no idea why I was still asking questions. Except I did like having something to do, and I was suspicious of anything dismissed too easily. If I were lying in a hotel fridge, I’d want someone asking questions for me.

A crowd bottlenecked at the dining-hall entrance; I guess none of us liked arriving too early. We didn’t like jostling either, so the result was a polite alternate-right-of-way situation that worked itself out pretty quickly. The room was still arranged in a constellation of eight-person tables, but a microphone had been set up on one end of the room. I peeled off to find standing room beside the entrance, where I could watch the speech and the crowd at the same time.

The host walked to the microphone. She wore small heels with her dress. Heels always made me walk like a moose on a frozen lake, but she came across comfortable and confident. I couldn’t help coveting her poise. She glanced at the clock above the door—for a moment I thought she was looking at me—and then started to speak without consulting her notes.

“Welcome, friends. First, I think by now many of you have heard we’ve had a death at the conference. One of my committee members, perhaps the person who worked most closely with me, Sarah Pinsker. It’s so strange to say that name, my own name, the name that many of you call your own, in this context. We’re still waiting for the authorities to arrive to tell us what happened. We’re also working to inform her family, and to find the proper way to memorialize her. I’m sure she’s in all our hearts.

“I say ‘in all our hearts,’ and I know it sounds clichéd, but it’s literally true. She is every one of us. So we can imagine what her loss will mean to her own world and her own family. At the same time, it’s impossible to imagine. Even now, when I say her name, you picture yourself, not her. Not the things that made her distinct from you or me. In that way, we grieve her as friend and family, not a stranger, even those of us who didn’t know her as an individual.”

The door creaked, and I looked over to see the DJ slipping from the room. The speaker continued.

“You all took such pains to get here, it didn’t feel right to cut the weekend short. I’m sure she would have wanted it to go on, because I know I would have wanted it to go on, after all our work. Tonight’s dance is cancelled, out of respect. There’ll be rooms available tonight and tomorrow for support groups if anyone needs to process in that setting. There will also be a Shabbat service in the chapel tomorrow morning at ten if anyone wants to say kaddish for her, led by Rabbi Sarah Pinsker. Stand up, Rabbi?”

A Sarah stood, raised a hand in solemn greeting, then sat again. The only rabbi, I thought. Was there a panel on our more unexpected career choices? I knew what had led me down my road, but not what had led her down hers.

“Without invalidating anyone’s grief or confusion, I have to say that this death, tragic as it is, highlights the reason we’re here: to learn from each other. I’ve got a panel tomorrow where I’ll explain in more detail how this all works, but I think this is a fitting moment to explain the basics, to explain how we are all different and the same.”

Her tone changed, as if she was now on more comfortable ground. “It’s human nature to center ourselves in the narrative, but I encourage us all to consider the larger picture. I’m standing here before you not because I am the first, or the best, or the trunk of a branching tree. I’m here due to two things I can own: a discovery and a decision. I’m the one who figured out how to open a door; I’m the one who invited all of you to walk through it. Nothing more, nothing less.

“There are others among us who are as accomplished in their own fields, who could invite us through other doors, figuratively speaking. There are others among you who made ordinary decisions that nonetheless changed you significantly: leaving school, pursuing higher education, adopting children, or not. Even the smallest decisions, like kissing someone instead of waiting to be kissed.”

I wondered how many of us thought of Mabel.

“I’m sorry I’m not feeling up to doing my whole intro-to-quantology speech, but I can leave you with one more thing to think about, something that may provide comfort on a night like tonight. Not only can I say nobody here is prime, I can also say all of us have always existed. It’s hard to wrap your head around, but it’s true. Those divergence points, where we discuss pets and girlfriends and boyfriends, wrong turns and big decisions? They work backward and forward. The moment a divergence point sparks, the new one has always existed too.

“I tried to invite Sarahs with some variety, to learn from each other, but Sarahs who are still recognizably us. This conference exists in infinite variations: some where I invited a different group of Sarahs, some where you chose a different dessert, where you sat next to someone else at dinner, some where my friend Sarah is still with us. They are no more or less valid for having diverged, no more or less real. You are all you, we are all we, constantly shaped by and shaping worlds.”

It was a good line, delivered by a good speaker, meant to buoy everyone. What would it be like to be a good public speaker? To be a discoverer of worlds? We all clapped, both for her speech and her attempts to reconcile the moods of the occasion. That was why I clapped, anyway. I kept extrapolating outward from myself.

I spotted the older Sarah I’d had a drink with earlier, and went to stand beside her as the crowd started to file from the room. “In the bar a few hours ago, you pointed at someone and said she was the host. How did you know?”