Kelly Link: Get in Trouble: Stories

Alan sat out on the patio, a bottle of wine under his chair, the wineglass in his hand half full of rain, half full of wine. “Lindsey!” he said. “Want a drink?” He didn’t get up.

She said, “Alan? It’s raining.”

“It’s warm,” he said and blinked fat balls of rain out of his eyelashes. “It was cold where I was.”

“I thought you were going to make dinner,” she said.

“Oh.” Alan stood up and made a show of wringing out his shirt and his peasant-style cotton pants. The rain collapsed steadily on their heads.

“There’s nothing in your kitchen. I would have made margaritas, but all you had was the salt.”

“Let’s go inside,” Lindsey said. “Do you have any dry clothes? Where’s your luggage, Alan?”

He gave her a sly look. “You know. In there.”

She knew. “You put your stuff in Elliot’s room.” It had been her room, too, but she hadn’t slept there in almost a year. She only slept there when she was alone.

Alan said, “All the things he left are still there. Like he might still be in there, too, somewhere down in the sheets, all folded up like a secret note. Very creepy, Lin-Lin.”

Alan was only thirty-eight. The same age as Lindsey, of course, unless you were counting from the point where he was finally real enough to eat his own birthday cake. She thought that he looked every year of their age. Older.

“Go get changed,” she said. “I’ll order takeout.”

“What’s in the grocery bags?” he said.

She slapped his hand away. “Nothing for you,” she said.

close encounters of the absurd kind

She’d met Elliot at an open mike in a pocket universe in Coconut Grove. A benefit at a gay bar for some charity. Men everywhere, but most of them not interested in her. By the time Alan’s turn came, he was already drunk or high or both. He got onstage and said, “I’ll be in the bathroom.” Then he carefully climbed off again. Everyone cheered. Elliot was on later.

Elliot was over seven feet tall; his hair was a sunny yellow and his skin was greenish. Lindsey had noticed the way that Alan looked at him when they first came in. Alan had been in this universe before.

Elliot sang that song about the monster from Ipanema. He couldn’t carry a tune, but he made Lindsey laugh so hard that whiskey came out of her nose. After the song, he came over and sat at the bar. He said, “You’re Alan’s twin.” He only had four fingers on each hand. His skin looked smooth and rough at the same time.

She said, “I’m the original. He’s the copy. Wherever he is. Passed out in the bathroom probably.”

Elliot said, “Should I go get him or should we leave him here?”

“Where are we going?” she said.

“To bed,” he said. His pupils were oddly shaped. His hair wasn’t really hair. It was more like barbules, pinfeathers.

“What would we do there?” she said, and he just looked at her. Sometimes these things worked and sometimes they didn’t. That was the fun of it.

She thought about it. “Okay. On the condition you promise me you’ve never fooled around with Alan. Ever.”

“Your universe or mine?” he said.

Elliot wasn’t the first thing Lindsey had brought back from a pocket universe. She’d gone on vacation once and brought back the pit of a green fruit that fizzed like sherbet when you bit into it, and gave you dreams about staircases, ladders, rockets, things that went up and up, although nothing had come up when she planted it, although almost everything grew in Florida.

Her mother had gone on vacation in a pocket universe when she was first pregnant with Lindsey. Now people knew better. Doctors cautioned pregnant women against such trips.

For the last few years Alan had had a job with a tour group that ran trips out of Singapore. He spoke German, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, passable Tibetan, various pocket-universe trade languages. The tours took charter flights into Tibet and then trekked up into some of the more tourist-friendly pocket universes. Tibet was riddled with pocket universes.

“You lost them?” she said.

“Not all of them,” Alan said. His hair was still wet with rain. He needed a haircut. “Just one van. I thought I told the driver Sakya but I may have said Gyantse. They showed up eventually, just two days behind schedule. It’s not as if they were children. Everyone in Sakya speaks English. When they caught up with us I was charming and full of remorse and we were all pals again.”

She waited for the rest of the story. Somehow it made you feel better, knowing that Alan had the same effect on everyone.

“But then there was a mix-up at customs back at Changi. They found a reliquary in this old bastard’s luggage. Some ridiculous little god in a dried-up seed pod. Some other things. The old bastard swore up and down that none of it was his. That I’d snuck up to his room and put them into his luggage. That I’d seduced him. The agency got involved and the whole story about Sakya came out. So that was that.”

“Alan,” she said.

“I was hoping I could stay down here for a few weeks.”

“You’ll stay out of my hair,” she said.

“Of course,” he said. “Can I borrow a toothbrush?”

more like Disney World than Disney World

Their parents were retired, living in an older, established pocket universe that was apparently much more like Florida than Florida had ever been. No mosquitoes, no indigenous species larger than a lapdog, except for birdlike creatures whose songs made you want to cry and whose flesh tasted like veal. Fruit trees no one had to cultivate. Grass so downy and tender and fragrant no one slept indoors. Lakes so big and so shallow that you could spend all day walking across them. It wasn’t a large universe, and nowadays there was a long waiting list of men and women waiting to retire to it. Lindsey and Alan’s parents had invested all of their savings in a one-room cabana with a view of one of the smaller lakes. Lotus-eating, they called it. It sounded boring to Lindsey, but her mother no longer e-mailed to ask if Lindsey was seeing anyone. If she was ever going to remarry and produce children. Grandchildren were no longer required. Grandchildren would have obliged Lindsey and Alan’s parents to leave paradise in order to visit once in a while. Come back all that long way to Florida. “That nasty place we used to live,” Lindsey’s mother said. Alan had a theory that their parents were not telling them everything. “They’ve become nudists,” he insisted. “Or swingers. Or both. Mom always had exhibitionist tendencies. Always leaving the bathroom door open. No wonder I’m gay. No wonder you’re not.”

Lindsey lay awake in her bed. Alan was in the kitchen. Pretending to make tea for himself while he looked for a hidden stash of alcohol. There was the kettle, whistling. The refrigerator door opened and shut. The television went on. Went off. Various closet doors and cabinet drawers opened, shut. It was Alan’s ritual, the way he made himself at home. Now he was next door, in Elliot’s room. Two clicks as he shut and locked the door. Other noises. Going through drawers, more carefully this time. Alan had loved Elliot, too. Elliot had left almost everything behind.

Alan. Putting his things away. The rattle of hangers as he made room for himself, shoving Elliot’s clothes farther back into the closet. Or worse, trying them on. Beautiful Elliot’s beautiful clothes.

At two in the morning, he came and stood outside her bedroom door. He said softly, “Lindsey? Are you awake?”

She didn’t answer and he went away again.

In the morning he was asleep on the sofa. A DVD was playing, the sound was off. Somehow he’d found Elliot’s stash of imported pocket-universe porn, the secret stash she’d spent weeks looking for and never found. Trust Alan to turn it up. But she was childishly pleased to see he hadn’t found the gin behind the sofa cushion.