Robert Lennon - Familiar

But he was still smart. She would like to tell him what had happened to her, to ask his opinion. He would certainly have one. He’d dismiss immediately the notion that she had lost her mind, go right for the science. “Where did Han Solo go?” she asked him once when he was six, having watched him, in play, tuck his action figure behind a sofa pillow. “Sucked into a hole in the space-time continuum!” was his reply.

Twenty minutes seem to have passed, here in her office. The document file open in front of her makes no sense. She closes the word processor, opens a web browser, and clicks in the search box.

She is thinking of Sam when she types the words “parallel worlds,” then adds “physics” and “study” and “university.” This is the kind of thing they talk about these days, in her real life, summer nights out on the porch when he has come over for dinner and Derek has gone to bed, Sam smoking with his chair tipped back and his feet up on the railing. Sam would take the idea seriously, at least for an hour. But what the internet gives her is a lot of science fiction. Television shows and novels. There are scientists who have theorized the existence of parallel universes, but nobody who is actually trying to figure out what is in them. This is the purview of cranks, dreamers, and Hollywood screenwriters.

She wants to look harder, to find somebody who is actually looking into this idea, who thinks of it as palpably real. Instead she finds herself googling Silas again, digging more deeply into the search results. There is a reference to “Silas Brown of Infinite Games, minefield on gamedev.org.” She searches for minefield, gamedev, and ends up on an internet forum for hardcore gamers, video game testers, and game developers. And there is indeed a member named minefield.

Minefield appears to be belligerent, impulsive. He has been banned multiple times. In the hierarchy of the game development world, he appears to be among the most successful professionals who still post on internet forums. There are celebrities in this world, and he is not among them, but he has some small fame here, in this community of hobbyists, wannabes, and up-and-coming professionals.

He is clearly among the most knowledgeable members of the forum, and Elisa can tell, after half an hour of reading the threads he visits, that questions are often asked with the sole purpose of luring him into the open. At times he is very generous with what must be basic advice. He answers a question about coding convex rotating polygons. He advises somebody on creating realistic intelligent motion in virtual crowds. (None of this makes any sense to Elisa; it’s like a map of a foreign country. She has never played video games, beyond Pac-Man once or twice, at the pizza shop, with a boyfriend, in 1984.)

But every now and then minefield will respond to a question with withering personal criticism. You’re fucking pathetic. You come here expecting something for nothing. That is the stupidest fucking question I’ve read on here in six months. He tells people they’ll never amount to anything. He mocks their ideas, their spelling mistakes, their screen names, their graphic avatars. His victims fight back, weakly, trying to justify themselves. The forum breaks into camps, attacking or defending minefield. Members say they’ve had enough, threaten to quit the board. Moderators are summoned and issue warnings. Minefield mocks the moderators. The thread is locked. Minefield is banned. Minefield comes back, feigning contrition, and it all begins again.

It has to be Silas. He is everything she remembers. He is as charming as he is vitriolic; you feel proud when he accepts you, and when he turns on you, you blame yourself.

Elisa remembers something now, something from the months leading up to the crash. Silas brought a girl home after school one day. She might not ever have known it had the girl not sneaked out of his room to use the bathroom: Elisa saw her at the end of the hallway, darting across from one door to the other. They must have come in while she was out, or entered quietly through the back. Whatever the case, they were here, together: Silas and a girl, in the house.

She heard the girl return to Silas’s room. She waited a few minutes, then sneaked down the hall.

They were very quiet. Elisa could hear them kissing, hear them shifting on the bed. Then the girl said, “I really need to do this, Silas.”

“Shh.” Silas groaned quietly, then spoke to her in a tone she hadn’t heard before: commanding, certainly, perhaps condescending, but gentle. He said, in a near-whisper, “All right, let’s see it.”

The bedsprings creaked; Elisa heard a zipper. Not her clothes, her backpack. Then a grunt of effort as something was hauled out of it. The pages of a book, being turned. “What don’t you get?” was Silas’s question, weary, skeptical.

“The whole thing,” she said.

“Dude,” he said, “this is easy.”

“Dude,” the girl said, not without sarcasm, “for you. Not for me.”

Their conversation continued, with Silas dominating, talking about straight and curved lines, the slope of a line. F of X, F-prime of X.

Derivatives. He was explaining calculus to her — helping her with homework.

Elisa withdrew. She had never seen or heard him with a girl. He never brought one to the house. This one must have insisted. She withdrew to the kitchen, where she could still hear the doors open and close, and idled until the girl seemed to be leaving. Then she headed down the back stairs and busied herself in the storeroom, pretending to look for a particular can of paint, so that she could catch a glimpse as the girl headed out the back.

It worked. She was alone, a small thing with a giant backpack. She started when she saw Elisa there, gasped.

“Oops, sorry,” Elisa said.

“Yeah, sorry, hi,” the girl said, hiding her face behind her hair and scuttling away, through the door, across the patio, and into a gap in the hedge. Elisa was surprised again — she wasn’t pretty. Plain, in fact, the face flat and broad, lank hair, thick glasses. She was done up like a punk, with pierced nose and lip and a black leather jacket. Her jeans were tight on her heavy hips; her exposed hairy ankles must have been cold, as it was a dry clear winter afternoon, near dark.

Were they having sex? Something she would wonder, later, after he was dead: had he ever slept with a girl, or with girls; this one or others? She wouldn’t find condoms or any other evidence among his possessions, afterward; but then again she would never look very hard. Some of his things are still there, in boxes, in the other life. They might contain anything at all, or nothing.

A week later Elisa was at the supermarket and saw the girl there, buying a can of Coke and a chocolate bar. She was with a friend, a skinny blond-haired thing in a ratty knitted hat. “Oh, hey,” the girl said, hiding her face behind a curtain of hair, and Elisa said, “How are you?”

“I’m good,” Silas’s girl said. She appeared eager to leave; Elisa was on her way in, these two on their way out.

And then Elisa said, quietly, conspiratorially, “I hope he’s treating you well,” and the girl’s face froze, and her friend’s mouth made an O of delighted shocked surprise.

“Uh huh” was the reply, and they were gone. Elisa imagined them gasping and cackling in the parking lot, and felt as embarrassed as she had ever felt in her life. She was worse than her mother, worse than Derek’s even. She had visited humiliation upon this poor child, and brought it down on herself as well. But she had wanted to warn the girl. Silas was trouble, after all.

After he was dead, she came to believe it was only Sam they failed — they allowed his brother to dominate him, to wear him down. Maybe if Silas had been the older one, they would have pushed back harder. Maybe there was some part of them that believed Sam ought to be able to fend for himself, being bigger and (so they thought, at first, and maybe they were right) smarter. Maybe they knew all along he was gay, maybe on some level it made them uncomfortable. C’mon, don’t be a pussy, fight back. Later, when Sam came out to them, the first Christmas of his college career, she wondered if Silas had ever abused him, had subjected him to incest, if Silas had somehow made him gay. Nothing in her memory would suggest that Sam had ever been anything but what he was, yet she thought it nevertheless. Derek too. Sam’s sexuality a problem, Silas its cause.