Robert Lennon - Familiar

Isn’t this something she has wanted, every now and then? Hasn’t everyone wanted this? To just throw it all overboard, the bad decisions of the past, and start over? Her life, at this moment, is a nightmare: she is tired of pretending, she is tired of trying to figure things out. Let it go. Derek would do it with her, he would let it all go. Wouldn’t he?

A new life. Starting now.

The phone rings once. Neither of them moves. It doesn’t ring a second time. She feels it, that ring, as if it’s a nail the universe has created, that has pierced her and fixed her to the sofa. She doesn’t move or speak, other than to squeeze Derek’s hand, a gesture that could mean anything. Sorry. Please. Love. Help. Get closer. Go away. In the end, he goes away. He kisses her sweating forehead and disappears with his plastic bag. A few minutes later she hears, from a distant part of the house, the sound of an electric drill.

That night an e-mail arrives from Sam: I don’t get it. What are you doing? When Derek goes to sleep, she books a plane ticket for California.

By the end of the following week she has mastered her job. It hasn’t been hard. To other people, she has just appeared forgetful. She’s made up for it with excessive cheerfulness. Half her day she spends online, following Silas on messageboards. She thinks she has found iterations of him in other places — other gaming forums, a forum about motorcycles, another one about serial killers. The latter, she discovers, is famous for rumors that some members of it are actually murderers — twice in the past, apparently, new members who joined discussions of killings turned out to be the killers. Silas is very interested in this phenomenon — he is always accusing people of being killers, and then, as on his game developers’ forum, ends up temporarily banned. Finding him has been easy — though he uses different names on every forum, he always has the same signature line on his posts, an unattributed quotation: He saw himself in a strange city with his friend, except that the face of his friend was different.

The first part of the week went this way: after work on Tuesday, she appeared at the usual time to be picked up by Derek. But instead of getting into the car, she leaned in the window and told him she wasn’t going to therapy. If he was going home, she would ride with him. But if he was going to see Amos, she would walk.

He appeared stricken. He gazed through the windshield and gripped the steering wheel with both hands and said, “I’m going to go.”

“I’ll walk home.”

“In those shoes?”

“I brought sneakers.”

They looked at each other. She should have kissed him. Instead she took a step back. He said, “Lisa. Are you going to leave me?”

For too long, she said nothing. Because that’s another thing she could do with this third life. She could start over on her own. But she did eventually say, “No.”

“Do you love me?”

“I love you.”

She sounded certain of it, to her own ears, but she didn’t know if she meant it or if her conviction came from her need to say it. Derek accepted it, accepted her love. He drove away. And she changed into her sneakers there on the curb and walked home. And in fact she has continued to walk home every day, even in the rain.

Now it’s Friday, not quite noon. She could leave if she wanted to, but this office has slowly turned into a sanctuary. She likes it here: it’s the place where she knows what’s going on. She has a set of papers in her hand — printouts of some budget material for an interdepartmental committee, on which handwritten notes have been made. It needs to go to physics. She reaches for a campus mail envelope, then stops herself. It’s a nice day.

Physics is on the other side of the science quad. She walks in a perfectly straight line, ignoring the cement paths, cutting through the grass, diverging only to avoid hitting trees. A young Asian man holds the heavy wooden door open for her; she nods her thanks.

The office is hot. They don’t have air-conditioning, for some reason — just fans. There is a sense here of confusion and dishevelment — she likes it. She finds the department’s equivalent of herself and hands her the papers. But of course that’s not really why she came, is it. She doesn’t admit it to herself until she is standing at the front desk, where the assistant, a woman around her own age, is chatting with a second woman, this one younger. They are talking about a movie they have both seen.

“Sorry to bother you,” Elisa says to the assistant. “But I have kind of a strange question.”

Both women look at her.

“Is anyone in this department — any of the scientists — studying the concept of… other… that is, parallel, or multiple, universes?”

The assistant says, “Like science fiction?”

“Well — not really. Or I guess maybe, but I mean in reality.” She feels like a fool.

“Oh, geez, I really don’t know,” the assistant says.

Elisa claps her hands together, steps back from the desk. “Thanks. Sorry to bother you.” Only once she’s nearly to the stairs does she let out breath — she doesn’t know what made her think that was a good idea.

But a voice stops her—“Hey! Uh, hello?” It’s the young woman. She is half-jogging down the hall, in the manner of someone who rarely moves faster than walking speed.

“Hi.”

“Hey!” The girl is out of breath. She arrives where Elisa is standing, gets a panicked look in her eye, takes half a step back. “I’m a postdoc here?”

“Ah.” She is small and cute — cat-eye glasses, blue hair. A physics woman.

“I’m Betsy. I’m… yeah. So the multiverse?”

“Oh! I’m Elisa. Is that your field? Parallel… whatever?” She’s embarrassed now — embarrassed to utter these words in this building, embarrassed to say “whatever” to a woman half her age.

“No, no. I’m doing experimental stuff — radiation patterns from quarks.”

“I see.”

Betsy takes a wallet out of the pocket of her jeans — a man’s wallet — and slides a business card out from behind her driver’s license. Her hands are trembling slightly. Elisa is impressed, for some reason, that she has business cards. It reads BETSY OROSCO, PHYSICS. And a web address. “That’s my site,” she says. “It’s kind of a… physics blog?”

“Cool,” Elisa says, and feels herself blush.

But the girl is encouraged. “Yeah, and, ah… I’m kind of interested in this stuff. The multiverse stuff. I mean, I post about it sometimes. It’s a hobby.”

“Physicists have hobbies?”

“Yeah, more physics!”

Betsy invites her into her office, and Elisa follows her to the end of the hallway, up a flight of stairs, and around a corner. They have to duck as they pass beneath an inexplicably low section of ceiling, and then they’re in a little cul-de-sac with three doors. Betsy opens the one on the left and leads Elisa inside.

The office is intimate, cramped even, but higher than it is broad, with bookshelves on three walls covered with textbooks, papers, and unusual objects: toys, oddly shaped bits of wood, machine parts, circuit boards. The fourth wall is empty save for a tall narrow window. In front of the window there is a green aluminum desk, and, on a filthy Oriental rug, two stained aluminum-frame upholstered chairs. Betsy climbs behind the desk. It bears two laptop computers, a cell phone, and many stacks of books and papers. Elisa sits in one of the chairs, which is familiarly uncomfortable. She says, “How long have you been working here?”

“A year.”

“You’ve really made yourself at home.”

Betsy’s face reddens. “I like to make a nest.” And then, surprisingly, she says, “I’m thirty-two, you know.”