Robert Lennon - Familiar

That’s what lies ahead for the Man and Rose and her mother: suburban decay and ennui, pollution and filth, death and obscurity. Game over.

Elisa wonders what sequence she would have been shown had she chosen to set fire to the family home.

She turns off the television and the game console and lies on her back on the living room carpet. She ought to be tired, but she isn’t. Instead, her mind is clear. She closes her eyes and thinks. When she hears Derek enter the room, she says, “You’re right.”

“About what?”

“I’m going to go talk to Amos.”

There’s no response. She opens her eyes, tips her head back. There he is, upside down. He’s staring at her.

When she calls the therapist, he tells her to come right over.

She gets lost. All she remembers is the name of the road — Orton Road — and that it’s on the west side of the lake. Eventually she finds it, goes the wrong way on it, drives for miles in confusion. Then she backtracks and everything begins to look familiar.

Clouds have moved in and the temperature has dropped. There will be a thunderstorm. The meadow behind the therapist’s office is empty of deer and the grasses are bent by the wind. When she knocks on the office door, nobody answers. She hears her name being called: he’s behind her, on the back stoop of the main house. He turns and goes inside and she follows him.

The house is low and close and smells like frying meat. It has the air of being lived in alone — somehow clean and squalid at once. Books are everywhere and the old windows distort the outdoors. He leads her into a living room, dark and comfortable, with a sofa and coffee table and desk and easy chair. This is where he spends all his time, clearly. He stands in the middle of the room and gestures at the sofa.

Elisa sits down and waits for the therapist to do the same. Instead, he paces for a moment, as though measuring his thoughts. He seems smaller today, more intense and professorial. The kind of professor who doesn’t get tenure. His demeanor, his house suggest a man who has withdrawn from active life, declared himself an observer.

At last he lowers himself into the easy chair. He knits his hands together. There is a wobble in his voice, the slightest sign of nervousness, as he says, “You were to have been open with me.”

“I have been.”

“Something is different.”

She has dressed in business clothes, a skirt and blouse. She catches herself tugging the skirt down over her knees.

He says, “Do you want to tell me what it is?”

“I’m not sure I know.”

He is agitated. His hands separate and rejoin. She is reminded of cell mitosis, the first time she saw it: a black-and-white film, in high school, that somehow seemed more real for its flickering jerkiness. The jittering little lives, straining to separate. The nucleus, exploding into two, pushing at the edges of its tiny world, stretching the cell walls until they broke. And then each half, identical now save for experience, drifting apart. As if they were never one.

Amos Finley twitches. Flinches, maybe. “The way you are — it reminds me of the way you were when you and Derek first came to me. You’re being cagey — secretive. But nothing is supposed to be secret here. Didn’t you promise that?”

“Did you make that promise, too?”

He tries on an expression of hardness. But what she sees in his eyes, his slump, is a kind of panic.

She says, “I can’t remember. The promise, I mean.”

In response he closes his eyes for several seconds. Sits up. His back creaks, or maybe it’s the chair. When he opens his eyes again it occurs to her that he might be in love with her. The thought makes her sad, though not with pity. Rather with a sense of the impossibility of everything. The number of emotions in the world that can’t find purchase anywhere and are wasted. The therapist, she can see, is at a loss. There is some authority he had over her that is clearly no longer accessible to him.

“Listen, Amos,” she says. In her tone she is aiming for tenderness. “I’m not trying to be difficult. I honestly don’t remember.”

He is gripping his knees now, working at the fabric of his slacks. “What… precisely… have you forgotten?”

“Everything,” she says. “Everything up until a few weeks ago.”

He is gazing at her, frowning.

She goes on: “I don’t remember coming to you, or any of the promises we made. When we were here a couple of weeks ago, it was like the first time I’d ever seen you. I don’t recognize my life. My job. Derek — he’s — he’s not the same. Do you understand?”

He sits back, sighs. “You come back from a trip you took alone. To a business conference. And you begin to act nervous and confused, as though you’re trying to conceal something. Then you cease therapy entirely. And now you want to tell me you have… amnesia?”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

She sits back, stares up at a corner of the room. She has a sudden desire to clean this house — to haul these old chairs and lamps out to the curb, rip up the carpet, scrub every inch of the place. She would like to reform this man, reform his life. She says, “Amos, were you ever married? Do you have children?”

The question seems to surprise him.

“Humor me,” Elisa says. “Pretend I don’t know anything about you.”

“Twice divorced,” he replies, quietly. “An adult daughter. From whom I am estranged.”

“Have we slept together? You and me?”

The question startles him. “No.”

“Okay. Good.” There’s an energy in the room now that she likes — she feels as though progress could be made. She feels like the woman who just finished that video game — a person who can find a path and walk down it. “Good. Maybe you can help me.”

“That’s what I am trying to do,” he says.

“We need to make a new agreement. A new promise. Because the woman who promised things to you and Derek — that was somebody else. That wasn’t me. We’re going to make a new deal, just between us.”

He shifts in his chair. It is clear that he doesn’t like it. But he’s curious enough to play along. He says, “Go on.”

“When I’m here with Derek, I will try to be that woman, but you need to understand, I don’t remember. You need to help me out.”

“I am here to help you.”

“Here’s the thing, Amos. It’s not that I forgot. It’s like I never knew. I remember everything, but I have different memories. I remember my son, Silas, dying, nearly a decade ago. And Derek and me drifting apart. And I’m having an affair with a man named Larry who now, here, doesn’t seem to even know me. And I have a different job, and I wear different clothes, and my house is messier.”

He is scowling, concentrating.

She says, “A couple of weeks ago I was driving in my car, and it all changed, the car and everything, my clothes, my body, and I became this person. Who is in therapy with you. And is not having an affair, and has a marriage with these rules in it that I don’t know where they came from.

“This is not my life, ” she says to him, leaning forward. She is excited, astonished, that she is managing to say exactly what she means to say. “This belongs to somebody else. Some version of me that you know and I don’t. And I am pretending to be that woman.”

She slumps back in her chair, lets out breath. “That’s why I’m different,” she says. “Because I’m somebody else.”

There.

For a while, Amos Finley simply stares at her, and Elisa stares back. He closes his eyes, rubs his beard. He drums his fingers on the armrest of his chair, opens his eyes again, gives her a long appraising look. Then he gets up and leaves the room.