Robert Lennon - Familiar

Only as she is falling asleep do the tremors subside. She wakes at landing with a desperate need to pee, and hobbles out of the airplane in actual pain. The feeling of release, when she reaches the women’s room, is profound, and she presses her palm to her forehead and moans.

Derek isn’t picking up his cell. It’s Sunday, she doesn’t know what he could be doing. She gets a cab. Out the window it’s cloudy and cool and her body aches from sleeplessness and her bout of shaking.

At home, something’s different, she isn’t sure what. The truck is missing, but she calls out to Derek anyway. In the bedroom, she dumps her bags on the floor, then lies down on the bed. She falls asleep. When she wakes up it’s dark and she notices that the closet door is open. It looks half empty.

She walks down the stairs. “Derek?” The only light is from the kitchen, where she finds a piece of paper folded into thirds with her name written on it in his handwriting. She picks it up, turns it over, unfolds it, and reads.

Lisa,

I had to leave for now. I need some time to think things over, and I think you do too. I’m staying with a colleague and will be in touch.

Maybe you’re right and we should revisit the past. But I don’t know why you would go to California instead of telling me what’s going on. I assume you had a bad trip. I hope I’m wrong.

Sorry

Derek

When she’s finished reading it a second time she folds it back up and drops it on the table. Through the open kitchen window, from somewhere far off, she hears the sound of a girl screaming, then the scream trailing off into hysterical laughter. She goes to the refrigerator, pulls out a block of cheese, and eats the entire thing standing there with the door open. Then she goes to the living room and plays the game again.

Time begins to accelerate.

Elisa spends the next two months attempting to restore her life to the one she lost. She throws out most of the clothes in her closet, then buys new clothes in her old size, as an incentive. She is almost there anyway, having eaten little over the past two weeks, and continues walking back and forth to work.

She gets an apartment. Derek is shocked; perhaps this is her intention. They have lunch together every week or two, and each time seems, to her, more pointless than the last. Derek’s shock gives way to hurt and eventually to acceptance. She doesn’t tell him anything, and doesn’t ask him anything, about the past. (She does not go to see Amos, either, despite the voicemail messages he’s been leaving.) Soon, she is certain, Derek will realize that there is no longer any real reason to meet, and they’ll stop, and their separation will harden into established fact. Her new place is downtown, four blocks from the frame shop. It’s a one-bedroom apartment, and she has decided to use the living room as an art studio. Through one of the windows it is possible to see a little wedge of lake, tucked up against the diagonal of a church steeple: a real lake view, without having to climb onto the roof.

Sam doesn’t reply to her e-mails. She tries calling him at Infinite Games, but is told he isn’t in. She doesn’t leave a message.

The bearded man who has her old job at Killian Tech is still there in the corner office, plugging away. She looks at the company website and finds out that his name is Wayne Pratt. He has a personal website where he posts close-up photographs he has taken of various plants. His CV is available for download, as well. She downloads it: it now sits on the desktop of her computer.

She stops by the frame shop twice. Both times, he isn’t there. In retrospect, she thinks she probably knew he wouldn’t be, at those times. Desire seems very far away right now. She doesn’t miss him; something about being in this body, being this Lisa, has undone her desperation. But she misses desire itself, she misses need.

After reading the classifieds every morning for a month, she sees an ad for a blue 1991 Honda Accord with 153,000 miles on it. She buys it, then sells the Intrepid. She spends some of the difference on beaded seat covers like her old ones. The first time she drives the car with the seat covers on, she cries. She considers, then abandons, the notion of trying to crack the windshield in the same pattern as the old one.

Her separation from Derek deepens her friendship with Judith. She resists this for a couple of weeks, as it wasn’t part of the old life, and the woman is annoying. But it is nice to have a friend. After a time she begins to look forward to their lunches with nervous excitement, joy even, and she doesn’t understand why. It is almost a cleansing ritual. They usually eat in the food court at the supermarket, where Judith can talk as loudly as she likes and Elisa can scream with laughter. Elisa never talks about herself, just listens to her friend natter on.

After one of these lunches, picking up a few groceries before returning to work, Elisa passes Betsy in the tea and coffee aisle. Their eyes meet and the younger woman looks away. Did she recognize her? She’s thinner now, so perhaps not.

She begins to spend much of her free time online, on the MetaphysicsNet parallel worlds forum. She actually registers and chooses a screen name: CrackedLisa. She regrets the name a couple of weeks later, but by that time she’s already begun to develop her identity.

The forum is carefully moderated. No apparent crazies. They divide into two main camps, people who philosophize and theorize about the concept, and people who think they have evidence of its real-world existence. It is not common for people to believe they are in a parallel world; at least no one says so. But she senses they are there, lurking. She reads back through the archives, three years’ worth, digesting it all. People recommend books and she borrows them from the library. It becomes her hobby. She starts painting diptychs: nearly identical panels, save for slight differences. She doesn’t tell anybody what she means by them. Of course there’s nobody to tell except Judith, who wouldn’t understand.

If there is pain from her separation, she is not conscious of it. She doesn’t long for Derek. It’s as though he’s a food that spoiled and that made her sick, and now she never wants to eat it again. She is certain this will change, but so far nothing.

It’s as though she’s suspended between the two worlds. Or living in a world that is one subtracted from the other. Nothing at all seems real now.

October. It’s unseasonably warm, even under a dark gray sky. The orange and yellow boughs of maples whip in a hot wind but the leaves don’t fall, not yet. The streets seem empty. The details don’t match. It’s fall break at school so she gets a couple of days off, and decides it’s time. She goes to the frame shop. He’s there. He has grown his winter beard already. She asks him to come to lunch.

They eat at the usual place, the Asian café. Elisa watches him carefully as he eats. He is so familiar: the careful way he has of keeping his beard free of food: he opens his mouth a little too wide, takes smaller bites. (Or is this, in fact, familiar? Is this a thing he used to do? It’s suddenly unclear what is memory of their past together, what she has generated as part of her fantasy of him.) He has asked for an extra napkin and holds it under his chin every time he lifts the chopsticks to his lips. His movements aren’t stiff, they’re controlled. Fluid and hard. He talks about jazz. She doesn’t want him to talk about jazz, he’s not supposed to be interested in it. But she nods, listening.

She mentions her separation and his brow furrows as it does every time he must process new information. He makes a sound, a kind of clicking with his mouth, like a hard drive being accessed. The clicking isn’t right — he didn’t used to do that. She’d like to point it out to him, to make him self-conscious about it, but it’s too soon for that kind of intimacy.