Robert Lennon - Familiar

But the main thing that day was the trip itself, the way it fit into what her life had become. A ritual for her to wrap her guilt and grief in, so that she could separate it from the rest of her days. And then, eventually, this package, this bundle, began to feel familiar. Comfortable to carry, easy to set aside.

This was the year she realized she had moved on. As much as that was possible. She realized that she had moved on, that her life had been restored to her. And then the thing that happened happened.

She wishes she’d brought a bottle of water, though the walk is less than a mile. By the time she’s nearly there she’s sweaty and her bra and sneakers are chafing. She needs new clothes. She needs some air-conditioning.

The Keller Center for Theory and Practice is a kind of science-meets-humanities think tank, housed in a nineteenth-century brick mansion. Professors inside and outside of the college apply for fellowships there; they are supposed to get new ideas about their work by talking to one another. They hold monthly lectures and receptions, which she has never attended. Or maybe this version of her has — she doubts it, though. She arrives ten minutes early and stumbles in through the heavy oaken front door, expecting to find a receptionist, some cubicles — an office. Instead the place has the look and feel of somebody’s house — someone unusually tidy but blind to the ravages of time. The front room, a parlor really, contains too many sofas, all of them worn and lopsided and from the seventies. She flops down on one and spread-eagles herself, her burning limbs.

The building is silent, save for a slow pulsing drone that must be an air conditioner: it is very cool here. A broad low table before her is covered with academic journals and, oddly, back issues of a glossy men’s magazine. Light is blasting through the leaded windows but the room still seems gloomy. She likes it — she wants to move in.

The next thing she knows somebody is poking her in the shoulder and she is reflexively wiping drool from her face.

“’Ello? ’Ello? Is Missus Brown?”

“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

She gathers in her arms and legs, blinks, tries to look over her shoulder. But he isn’t there.

He’s in front of her now, on the sofa across from her, a tall gangly man in shorts and button-down shirt. She can barely make out his face, as he is backlit by the blazing afternoon sun. But his hair, his massive ball of curly reddish-blond hair, glows so brightly she can see the shape of his skull beneath it.

“Is very comfortable here, no?”

“I guess the heat did me in.”

“So you are tired, yes, I see. We will talk right here then, okay?”

“Where is… are you the only one here?”

“Yes! They have all gone away in summer!” He flutters his hands.

“Of course.”

“So! So! I am speaking to Betsy Orosco! You want to talk about the multiverse! This is good, people like it, it’s in the TV shows and movies a lot, you know?”

“Yes.”

He’s so tall, and the sofa he sits on so old and sunken, that his knees come up to the middle of his chest. He keeps them spread far apart and his legs are very hairy and she can see right up the leg of his shorts to the outline of his balls underneath a pair of white briefs. Somehow this seems cosmic, profound. Why does a man need two? Why not just one, a big one, dangling beneath the penis like a veined and whiskered egg? No, it has to be twins. She thinks of the poor redundant sperm, born daily and reabsorbed, unused, by the body: a cycle, the two balls in tandem, equal partners, competitors perhaps, in this Sisyphean undertaking. She laughs, but it comes out as something more like a sob.

“So…” says Hugo Bonaventure. “Something unusual, correct, you are saying is happening to you, yes?”

“Something unusual, uh huh.” She sits up straighter now, rubbing her face. She still can’t quite make out Bonaventure’s features.

“You are professor of what?”

“It’s not… I’m not a professor. I work here. At the college.”

“Okay, okay…”

“I am just a regular person,” she says, and marvels that those words would ever come out of her mouth. “I just want to know.”

“Okay, okay…”

He nods, nods, is waiting for her to speak. And it occurs to her that she has no idea what she wants to say. There is a long silence.

“How much did Betsy tell you? About my… situation?”

“Just, how do you say,” he replies, making curves in the air with his hands, as though illustrating a voluptuous woman, “you give me the, not the silhouette?”

She doesn’t understand, and then she does. “Outline.”

“Yes, the outline, thank you, yes. I make the recording?”

He taps his shirt pocket, where there is a bulge the size of a pack of cigarettes. She understands that he has a tape recorder in there and is requesting her approval. Without thinking she tells him sure.

She collects herself and goes through it all for him. Her life before it happened, the trip to Wisconsin, the drive, the moment of change. The differences. She tells him about telling Amos Finley, “my psychiatrist,” she calls him. Toward the end of this monologue Hugo Bonaventure appears to grow agitated, impatient. She has discovered that if she closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them while they are trained on his face, she can catch a glimpse of it before her pupils contract from the light. His nose and chin are long, his eyes deep. He appears handsome and a little bit frightening, an exemplar of that extreme kind of effete masculinity accessible only to men without the slightest awareness of its existence. “Okay, okay,” he says. “Okay, okay.”

“Yes?”

There is a pause, punctuated by nodding, as though he is charging himself up. He says, “Okay, you say this moment, there is a change, can you give the description again? Of what it is like?”

“All right.” She tells it again, more slowly this time, trying to add detail. The positions of the clouds. The rivets on the guardrail. The shape of the crack in the windshield. She nearly chokes up describing the crack, realizing that she might never see it again. The chip, like a leaning triangle, where a rock struck it, and the strange way the crack rises from it, ruler-straight, for six inches before it veers off to the left, then right, and heads for the upper corner of the glass. Hugo Bonaventure nods, taps his bare knees with his long fingers.

“Yes, yes, I ask you questions now, okay?”

“Sure.”

“When this happens, yes? there is a sound?”

“What kind of sound?”

“I don’t know this,” he says, “only you know this, the kind of sound. Maybe there is a ring, a vibration, something—” He claps his hands together and the claps echo off the high ceiling. “—something like a pop, a bang?”

She had not considered this possibility. A pop? A bang? She says, “The window was open, and then it was closed. So the wind noise was gone — the wind shut off.”

“Yes?”

“But it was smooth. The change. The old car, it was noisier, and the new one is quiet. More solid. Everything went quiet.”

“So a lack of sound. But no pop, bang, ring.”

“No,” she says. “Nothing like that.”

“Okay, tell me, okay, do you smell something different? Or in the air, yes, there is some kind of crackle? Current?” He raises his hands and wiggles his fingers. She can hear them whispering against one another. “You feel anything on your skin? Something electrical? Or maybe some flash, there is light, not outside light but inside, on your retinas, you see? the pop of light, the impulse, pop! you see?”

“Yes, I see. Let me think,” she says. She is trying to remember. The smell. Yes, it changed. There was the smell of the road and of the dusty interior of the Honda and then the stale recirculated air and plasticky odor of the new car. And the temperature changed, and there was the movement of air, of the hairs on her arm. But there was no pop, no flash. There was no smell that didn’t seem to come from what was around her.