Robert Lennon - Familiar

Elisa’s reads:

Dear Boys,

Things have been changing in our lives and we wanted to talk to you about these changes. We have separated, but are in close touch with each other, and have come to realize that it was wrong to cut off contact with you years ago. We realize that it would be difficult for you to forgive, and don’t expect you to. But we want to open the lines of communication. Will you talk with us about this?

We are so sorry. We hope that we can all be some kind of family again.

With love,

Elisa and Derek

It takes her ten minutes to write the letter and two hours to decide whether or not to sign it “Mom and Dad.” When it’s settled, she opens her e-mail to send the draft to Derek, and finds that he already has sent his to her:

Silas and Sam:

It is probably a shock to find a letter from your parents in your mailbox, and I hope you have opened it and are reading it now. If you haven’t — if you instead threw the letter away unopened — then we can hardly blame you, given our recent history. We are writing to tell you that we now believe our decision three years ago to cut off communication with you was wrong: it was extreme, insulting, and unnecessary, and the worst part is, it didn’t even work. It may surprise you to learn that we are now separated and living apart, and we are separated from you as well. And in a sense perhaps you are, and maybe always have been, separated from each other. This last is also our fault, certainly as much as it has ever been yours. We are finally beginning to accept that we were not good parents; we did not deal with your troubles well, nor our own, either.

This realization is particularly difficult for me, as I grew up, at first, without a good father, and later with no father at all. My father was a bad man — he was domineering, belittling, violent, and sadistic, and he beat my mother and nearly drove her to madness when I was a boy. It was a relief when he finally left, and over the years of my late childhood I watched my mother transform herself from a tired, beaten-down victim to a self-sufficient, strong, loving parent. I admire her deeply, and cherish the relationship I have with her today. I am glad she has been a part of your lives, and I know that I hurt her terribly with the decision your mother and I made together. Maybe she has been in touch with you — I have not asked her.

I never talked much about my father to you, because I didn’t want him to have any effect on my family, but now I fear that he has had all too powerful an effect, and I have allowed his influence to ruin our lives together. I am sorry. I have lived a life of fear and passivity, and look at where it has brought us.

We would like to ask you to please consider restoring communication with us.

This letter is not signed, and neither is the e-mail he sent it to her in. Derek has never said these things to her. He never said anything about being afraid, or feeling passive, never told her that his father beat his mother.

The loneliness she feels, sitting in her apartment in front of her laptop, is so profound that she wants to go to Derek’s house, to go home, take him to bed. Beg him if necessary. Instead she sends him her version, and a few minutes later he agrees that it is the better choice.

They send the letter; the boys do not reply. Eventually Derek sends his version. They are still waiting.

Now she returns to her apartment. Now she gives up trying to remake this life into the old. She drinks, heavily, every Friday night with Judith. This was Elisa’s idea, and Judith seems delighted by it, though it isn’t as if she doesn’t have lots of other friends, with more in common than she has with Elisa. Elisa should be more grateful, she thinks. Indeed, this new ritual is a kind of penance, for the days, some months ago, when she thought she might become friends with Betsy, the physicist. But clearly the woman has decided that she is some kind of freak. In retrospect this attempt at friendship seems silly, and an insult to Judith, her actual confidante and reliable, if ill-matched, pal. One of the things they talk about is Larry, whom Elisa sees again, several times more, with a growing sense of futility and effort and unease. It just isn’t him, he isn’t the man she loved, and she isn’t the woman who loved him. It isn’t even close, really, and soon she stops returning his calls. She avoids walking past the frame shop now and doesn’t eat at the Asian café. She artificially maintains the sense, in her own mind, that theirs is a relationship coming to an end, so that she can have something to talk about with Judith. But in truth it never really got off the ground.

She thinks about Derek all the time. She would like to make amends but isn’t sure what she wants to do with them. So she does nothing. They, too, have stopped getting together for coffee.

Elisa no longer wants to go back. Indeed, she is increasingly frightened, throughout the month of January, by the possibility that she might now be sent back against her will, in an instant, the same way she got here. She begins to think in terms of cause and effect: What did I do to cause this? What should I do to prevent it from happening again? She once feared the apparent randomness of her situation. Now she fears that some intelligence might be behind it, after all. She lies awake at night in her apartment with her jaw clenched, imagining having to mourn Silas a second time.

And as for Silas, he has disappeared. The forums say that he has left Infinite Games, though no one knows why. Minefield hasn’t posted for weeks. She doesn’t know where Sam is, either.

The one thing she does with any regularity that gives her some satisfaction, or at least some relief from her boredom and anxiety: she spends several hours a night on MetaphysicsNet. This allows her to transition from eating to sleeping without drinking too heavily, though she does drink. There is an almost frenetic level of activity on the parallel worlds forum. She begins to wonder if what happened to her happened to many people, at the same time, all of them conspiring in anonymous silence, afraid to speak out. At times she feels as though the claim is on the verge of being made, by almost everyone. And then, at other times, she feels completely alone.

Every day somebody seems to have discovered a new book, or study, or TV program, or blog on the subject. Every day the full membership gathers in a thread devoted to the latest thing and discusses it frantically. Elisa begins to think of the other forum members as actual friends. Joereilly lives in Palo Alto and in his avatar is posed, fat and bearded, in front of a sports car. Misstake is a lesbian with bangle earrings. Rare Fern is from Vancouver, British Columbia, and is supposedly a twenty-five-year-old woman whom all the men on the forum constantly flirt with. Of course she might as well be a man, any of them might be anyone. She has exchanged several private messages, and more recently e-mails, with a woman who calls herself DippedInSunshine, but whose real name is Patricia. Patricia is a divorced mother of three adult children, the youngest now in college. She is unfailingly cheerful, both on the forum and in private correspondence, but not, Elisa senses, frivolously so. Her cheer is genuine and stems from an actual, if groundless, belief that things will turn out all right for Elisa.

Elisa has told her about the letters they sent to the boys. She has told her about her guilt, Silas’s disappearance. She doesn’t tell her that Silas is dead, in a parallel world. Patricia’s responses have been perhaps the only kindnesses she has been done in many months that actually have had any effect. They are written in an evident rush, in a kind of rolling, opportunistic grammar, punctuated only with ellipses. I know this is hard to accept… but you will love again… your wayward boy and romance as well… to be grieving… is good for the soul… you need to heal… it will take time… but believe me your life has just begun….