Robert Lennon - Familiar

There’s a list of support staff. And there she is. Graduate studies coordinator. No picture, no job description.

She could call in sick. It would be easy — she’s been out of town, she could have picked up a virus. Nobody would find this unusual — it would buy her some time.

But then what? She will have to go to work eventually. She will have to do something.

The way she sees it, there are two choices. Fake it, or not. If she chooses not to fake it, to quit her job, she’ll be starting over. She’d have to depend upon Derek’s love and patience, which, however devoted ( resigned might be the better word) he might seem in his present incarnation, she knows have their limits. In this life, she will be the woman who suddenly dropped out, who had a nervous breakdown — though she is not dropping out, is not having a breakdown. Or, at least, she doesn’t feel as though she’s having one. Is a breakdown a thing you feel, or a thing that changes your relationship to other people? In any event, friendships will end — though what does she care? She didn’t have many in her real life, and she is not invested in this one.

It occurs to her to wonder what this means. She thinks, I expect that this is temporary, and that I will soon return to my real life. But, if this is my real life, then I am a woman whose only emotional investment is in an imaginary life. Thus, I am insane. And so I’d better hedge my bets — I’d better be invested in this life. Just in case.

She realizes now that she will never be able to explain to anyone what has happened. No one she knows now, at least not in her real life, would understand. Elisa doesn’t understand, for that matter. How could she explain?

No — she will have to fake it. How hard, really, could this job be? It’s summer — there are no graduate classes in the summer, right? It isn’t academic application season, she doesn’t think. From Derek, she knows that summer is the time for overhauls, for long-term projects. There will be time and space to figure it out. And once she has done so, she can figure out the rest. Whatever it is that has happened to her.

It’s decided, then. She’s going to give it a try. She’s going to go to work. Of course the implications of that decision won’t begin to reveal themselves for several hours, but there’s nothing she can do about it now.

There is something she can do, however, and with Derek still asleep and the house quiet, this seems the time to do it. She moves the cursor to the search bar and types Silas’s name into it. She reaches for the ENTER key, lets her finger hover over it a moment. Pulls it away.

It isn’t clear when this happened to her; perhaps it happened to everybody at once. But at some point the internet became more real than the physical world. There was a time when it seemed like a dream — an impossible thing with uncertain implications. And then suddenly it was everything. There are people, she knows, who don’t use it, who have no presence on it, who can’t be searched for, who can only be accessed by going to their house and knocking on their door. But those people are the dream now. They’re like ghosts.

There was a time, she thinks, as her hand moves back toward the keyboard, when a physical artifact — a letter, a piece of clothing, a room full of still-unopened boxes in another world — was the conduit to what could be known about a person. Touch that thing, hold it, smell it. Inhabit it. Close your eyes and remember.

Now, you search first, remember later. We don’t need memory anymore — the internet has replaced it. And it’s a good thing for Elisa, because it is all she has. She lets her hand fall. She hits ENTER.

There are, it turns out, many Silas Browns. A blind computer scientist, an audio recording engineer. But it doesn’t take long to find her Silas, her living son. He is a programmer for a video game company. There he is, photographed in a parking lot in front of a low buff-colored cinder-block building, standing unsmiling in a small crowd of other unsmiling young men. She leans close to the screen. Her throat catches: he’s an adult, he’s really there. He’s wearing sunglasses.

The company is called Infinite Games; they make violent first-person fantasies for game consoles. Titles like Berserker 4 and Ultimate Warlock. She searches a little more. They’re popular, these games, but not all that popular. Popular enough, though, so that Silas appears to be quite successful. He is quoted in magazines and on gaming websites. There are a lot of pictures of him, almost always in direct sun. He wears his hair slicked back, gelled, and his arms are crossed. It’s tempting to think that this is how she imagined he would be, if he’d lived, but the truth is she’d never imagined such a thing, never allowed herself that indulgence. Here, he looks like a third brother, another person entirely.

California, that’s where he is. She feels both relief and longing. He isn’t near. And it would seem that he is not in frequent touch.

But he’s alive. Something has kept him alive, has given him a viable life. Something that was lacking in the other world. The real world.

Because that’s what this is, isn’t it? Unreal? Or, an alternate to the real? She has been put here for a reason, surely. To do something. To find out what she did wrong in her real life, to find out how she could have saved her son. This is a dream she’ll wake up from, once she learns what she is supposed to learn.

But even as she thinks this, Elisa has her doubts. Because she doesn’t believe in God. And what else could have put her here?

A few hours later, she is standing in the driveway, ready for work. Derek will drive her there in his pickup — that seems to be their routine. The notion of Derek driving her anywhere seems absurd. The other car is obviously hers, she could drive herself. But this must be something they decided to do. For their marriage?

Everything so far today has been excruciating. She wanted to make coffee — but does she make coffee? Or does Derek make coffee? Their coffee machine was the same, but the can of ground coffee was not in its familiar cave in the freezer, enfolded in frozen years-old hamburger rolls. Instead there were whole beans, and a grinder. How many to put in? How fine to grind them? She made choices, proceeded. The grinder was startlingly loud. Would it wake Derek up? It didn’t; he didn’t get out of bed, anyway. The coffee brewed. There was half-and-half in the refrigerator — hers? It didn’t matter, she drank it black. She was hungry, ravenously hungry — this body of hers was hungry. She wanted to make the oatmeal she liked to eat in her real life, but there was none in the cupboard. She stood for five minutes in the middle of the kitchen, wondering what in hell this woman ate for breakfast. In the end she settled on a banana.

She didn’t know what to do after that, so she took another shower. When she reached the bedroom, Derek had woken up and gone downstairs. The clothes in the closet repelled her, but she put some on. Another skirt and blouse. In the mirror, she looked like a moderately attractive office worker.

Probably she ought to put on makeup, but she didn’t.

Derek smiled at her in the kitchen but said nothing. They read the paper. She drank more coffee. She looked at the clock. She said, “I’d better get to work.”

He appeared surprised. “Why so early?”

“There’s some stuff from the conference I want to get in order.”

Derek frowned. “I can go in early.” He folded the paper.

“You’ll drive me?”

“Of course,” he said.

Now he comes out the door, locks it behind him. They get into the pickup. He pulls out and they head toward campus.