Robert Lennon - Familiar

The waitress comes out with Elisa’s food, looks temporarily puzzled, finds her, brings the meal to their table. Elisa thanks her.

“You were saying.”

“Yes — I’ve become preoccupied with jazz recordings. On records, I mean.” This is characteristic — interrupted and asked to continue, he will do so without the slightest hesitation. As though to be offended is beneath him. “There’s something about the physicality of it, I think. The needle dragging in the groove.”

She had used to find this kind of conversation pretentious; Larry taught her to enjoy it. She’s missed it these past few weeks. But now it is irritating her all over again. She sits on her hands and draws a breath.

“You should go ahead and eat,” he says.

“What did you get?”

He smiles. “The same.”

They walk to the frame shop together and Elisa pays for her frame. She doesn’t open it, and he doesn’t ask her to. Unspoken between them is almost everything. He’s single. He saw her wedding ring.

“We should do that again,” he says, as she leaves.

She hesitates before saying, “We should.” The hesitation is almost, not quite, enough to be embarrassed by. She is bewildered by the effort it is requiring to achieve the proper mindset for infidelity. It seems important to want him. We should. A necessary obligation.

She returns late to the office and nobody cares. At her desk, she unwraps the photo. It’s a nice frame. Silas leers out of it — it’s as if he’s in a rock band, posing for an album cover. The cocky self-satisfaction. The pleasure of knowing that the family has shaped itself around him. (Stop that: He’s just a teenager. Of course he’s cocky. So were you.) She puts the picture back into the drawer it came from.

That last year, the year before he died, Elisa and Derek considered separation, seriously enough to make plans, to announce them even. They would separate the children, as well — in fact that was the entire point, or so they told themselves. Derek actually volunteered to take Silas. It was like him to do this. He was better at managing his aversion to Silas than he was his pity for Sam. Silas had begun to display the crowing satisfaction of the winner of a card game. He tidied his messy room, packed up some old things, had a friend drive him to Goodwill to drop it all off. (Maybe it was Ricky Samuelson, his killer. Maybe in the van he died in.) He was preparing for the next phase of his life, one he had created for himself, that he appeared enthusiastic about and eager to get under way. And Sam resigned himself to Elisa with depressing immediacy, looking up from the book he was reading, nodding once at her tear-stained face before returning to the book.

They had said too much, she and Derek. They had pointed out each other’s shortcomings, using the children as illustrations. They indicated what qualities of each parent had been brought to bear upon the suffering of each son, which problems might have been avoided but for which habit of being, which blind spot. And each had accused the other of the very thing they feared the most about themselves: that they regarded their own child as frightening and repulsive.

Rule 5. Do not use the children to attack your partner.

They changed their minds, of course. Self-disgust was punishment enough. Silas made his disappointment known, and so, cruelly, did Sam, though it barely had a chance to register before Silas’s death rendered it all meaningless. Did it happen in this life, too — the decision to separate, the announcement, the retraction? It is too exhausting even to speculate.

She peers at the clock in the corner of her computer screen. Two forty. She’s glad it’s still early. She doesn’t want to go home. She stalks Silas online for a little while, does a web search for his sig line, trying to find another online iteration of him.

It would be a relief to be mad, wouldn’t it? To accept Amos’s diagnosis and embrace this notion, that the events she remembers with such intensity and conviction are the products of an imagination broken by guilt and grief. She could submit to more therapy, to medication. She would be given paid time off from her job. She could wave goodbye as Derek went to work in the morning, spend the day catching up on her reading, allow herself to be treated gently and a little fearfully, as any sick person would be. She could put that weight back on and give herself over to Derek’s carnal needs. And her own, for that matter.

What does a crazy person look and sound like? Certainly not like this — showing up on time at the office every morning, staying until five, sending and receiving e-mail, taking meetings in clean and tidy clothes. No — she wants to be, she feels like, a person to whom something inexplicable has happened. If there is madness, it belongs to the universe, not Elisa Brown. The mind is not enough to explain it.

This reminds her of something. She does a search for “William James multiverse.”

Betsy was right, James coined the term. There are many hits. One of them is a forum, MetaphysicsNet. She reads it for a while. Past lives, alien intelligence, magnetic energy, parallel worlds. The parallel worlds subforum is crowded and extremely active. It’s a hot topic, thanks to recent movies and television shows. There are a lot of threads discussing its plausibility, based on scientific and psychological research.

She bookmarks the site, turns off the browser, does a bit of work. Judith comes in, closes the door behind her, whispers “I fucked him,” in reference to whom Elisa can’t remember, then describes the encounter in detail. Elisa has come to like Judith, she has to admit. Judith is full of life. Judith is abidingly real. In this world, Elisa clearly has come to appreciate things that are alive and present. This Elisa is more accepting. Talking with Judith, she thinks she ought to adopt this way of being, then bristles at the notion that, in yet another way, the worlds are bleeding together.

When Judith is gone, Elisa tips her head back, gazes at the sprinkler and water pipes overhead, falls asleep. She dreams that she is performing oral sex on Larry, that he fills her up like a water balloon, and she begins emitting heat and light like a sun. She wakes up gagging and gasping for breath. Her neck hurts.

The working day is over. Derek picks her up. They go home, eat, drink, end up making love, though without particular intensity, and for no apparent reason other than that it has been a while. They go to sleep. Drifting off she thinks, All of this is impossible, we’re doing impossible things. People do impossible things, all day long.

A few days later she is reading an e-mail she has received from a man named Hugo Bonaventure. It’s full of exclamation points. He’ll be on campus all day Tuesday and Wednesday! He would love to talk about the multiverse! There’s a cell number.

Clearly this is Betsy’s friend. When she gets to work, she calls him.

“Yes, yes!”

“Mr. Bonaventure?”

“Yes, yes!”

They agree to meet the next day. His office is in the Keller Center, about as far from the biology department as it’s possible to get and still be on campus. When it’s time to go, she wishes she’d brought shorts and a floppy hat, as the air is very hot under a cloudless sky. She is glad, however, that she has abandoned the pretense of bringing formal shoes to work, and now wears sneakers all day.

She remembers the last long walk she took in Wisconsin, before the switch — around the cemetery and the park down the road. She stood over Silas’s grave and for the first time didn’t cry. She felt sadness, but also acceptance and relief. The memories this act stirred up were mostly memories of other visits to this cemetery, when her feelings had been more profound. (This is what happens, she supposes, to dramatic events: they create feelings that create other feelings, memories that give way to memories of having them. The older you get, the more life seems like a tightening spiral of nostalgia and narcissism, and the actual palpable world recedes into insignificance, replaced by a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. The sunshine today agrees: it has rendered the town in high relief, grainy and posterized, the colors too bright. So fake it’s a new kind of real.)