Robert Lennon - Familiar

She tells him this. She says it was smooth, the transition: sudden, but clean. “There were no… artifacts. From the change itself. It didn’t feel like something was happening. It was just, there was one thing, and then there was another.”

If he is disappointed in this, he doesn’t let on. He says, “Okay, very good, now I tell you straight from the bat, yes, maybe I think you are delusional? But perhaps not?”

“Uh… all right.”

“But this is a thing we, that is, science, this notion, this idea, it is something real? We think, there are many ways for an event to transpire, the laws of physics allow this, there are probabilities, and all these probabilities are perhaps real, they have the same chance of being real, you see? A thing happens, any thing at all, it creates the universe of happening and the universe of not-happening. Do you understand? Always there is the branching, and every branch is a universe, and they are all real.”

Her skin is puckering as the sweat evaporates from it and she shivers. She stops trying to make out Hugo Bonaventure’s face. He’s just a blank surrounded by light. That’s enough. She says, “So this is real? The worlds are real?”

“Well, okay, sure. This idea of real, maybe this is not so important for the physics, do the math, maybe it’s a little fanciful, one can make it with the math, sure, but to test it, how do you do this, okay? how do you make the experiment?”

Her shivering has intensified. She feels very strange — as though her body is making energy. As though she is not quite in control of it. She clenches herself, clamps down on herself from the inside, in an effort not to melt here, to lose herself. The sofa is very soft and she feels very far down in it.

Hugo Bonaventure says, “This group, my colleagues, they do an experiment, okay? They take the tiny metal, like a tongue, a tiny thing, you barely see it with your eye, yes? and they make it very cold, it is called the ground state, the lowest possible energy, yes? And here, at this place, the metal, because it is small and cold, here you don’t have the disruption to the quantum state, correct? So they can make the measurements. And they pluck this metal—” He reaches out and flicks a finger. “—they pluck it, and they see that it is vibrating, yes? But it is also not vibrating.”

He pauses, as if to let this sink in. She is nodding now, nodding the way he is nodding: they are nodding at one another.

“This is, then, okay, the universe where the object is plucked and the universe where the object is not plucked. My friends, they test it, they see both states.”

“Both universes?” she asks him. “At once?”

“That is correct, yes, yes.”

“You’re saying they have seen this? Another universe?”

“They do, they see this.”

She says, “Could they see me? The other me?”

He gets up. He paces for a moment in front of the coffee table. She is still fixated on the spot he has left: the image of his head, the void his head has imprinted on her vision, is left behind.

“Not quite, no, this is not possible. You are far too large.” He lets out a kind of cackle. “Ha ha! no, I cannot say that to a woman, but yes, you are too large for the physics to see. The outside forces, they push against you, yes? they disrupt the quantum state. But maybe they can test!”

“Test me?”

He suddenly lopes around to her side of the coffee table and sits down beside her. She can see him clearly now: here he is. In profile, he is a study in extremes: his nose and chin appear even longer now, and bent, his brow a shelflike protrusion. His body gives off a moist nervous heat, and she realizes that the air-conditioning has made her really, really cold. The long pants that tortured her on the way over are now woefully inadequate.

He points to her bag, which she has brought with her and which is sitting on the floor between her sneakered feet. He is snapping the fingers of both hands. “You can give me, what do you say, two possessions?”

“I… possessions?”

“Two things you own, okay? One thing you have in both universes, the other one you have only here. Ha! we would like the thing only from the other universe, but you can’t give this!”

Elisa picks up the bag, holds it on her lap like an animal. “You want to take my things and… test them?”

“Not me to test them, my friends in California! No lab for this here, ha ha, sorry New York State, it’s not so good. But my friends, they are doing this research, they can test maybe, okay? You give me two things, I send them, maybe we find something out, you never know.” And he puts out a palm and beckons with his long fingers.

She gets it. One thing from here, one thing from there. She opens up her bag, roots around. The first thing she sees is a tube of lipstick she bought for an academic dinner years ago, some gala thing involving a guest of Derek’s department, to which she had been persuaded to go. She used it that one time but didn’t like the color, and doesn’t like lipstick, and she never used it again. But here it is. She removes it and hands it over to Hugo Bonaventure.

“This was in the other place,” she says.

“Okay, okay, very nice,” he replies, and wedges it into the breast pocket of his shirt, beside the tape recorder. She’s a little disconcerted — shouldn’t he place it in some kind of specimen bag, affix a little label to it, something? But he’s the scientist here, not her, not anymore.

She peers into her bag again. The light is dim; it’s hard to see. There’s her driver’s license, which is different from her old one, but she needs that. She opens one side pocket, then the other. Shoves her hand into each. Comes out with a piece of paper.

It’s the list, the five rules. The paper is creased and furred, the words, in her own hand, blurry and fading. She reads,

4. Account for your time.

Her fingers fold the paper, pointlessly, in half, concealing the list, and she hands it to Hugo Bonaventure.

“And this is from only here?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“It is, how to say it, it is not from recent, but it is before you see the change?”

She nods. “That’s right. It’s old. It was in my bag when I got here.”

His acceptance of this strange frame of reference appears total. He tucks the paper, insouciantly, into the pocket with the lipstick.

And then, abruptly, he stands up and sticks out his hand. “Well! Okay! I send these things away!”

“I… well, all right then.”

She takes the hand, thinking he means to shake, but in fact he pulls and she rises, involuntarily, to her feet. For a moment she thinks she might topple over, but she manages to right herself, with the help of his free hand on her shoulder.

“Ha ha!” he says. “It is like we do the dance.”

Her limbs ache — the air-conditioning has frozen her muscles solid. She feels dizzy and tiny lights zoom across her field of vision. Hugo Bonaventure is saying something. Then he is withdrawing, crossing the room, climbing the stairs. He waves from the landing, and Elisa waves back.

She goes out into the insane light and begins the trek back to the sanctum of her office.

Next Friday morning. It’s August now. She rises early, showers, takes her already-packed bag out to the pickup. Derek would ordinarily be the first one in the driveway, standing next to the open driver’s side door, his arm on the roof, or leaning against the hood and scrolling through his phone. But today he’s trailing behind. There has been an air of desperation in the house, as though time is running out; his eyes have lingered on her too long, too many times. He’s been waiting for her to do something, say something. She knows what it is, and hasn’t. This is part of what makes him a good lawyer — his ability to draw out a rival with silence. But it isn’t working with her, because she doesn’t know what to say.