Robert Lennon - Familiar

It’s mostly white men, and most of the white men have beards. They are all holding plates of food and cans of soda. Nobody else seems to have brought down the binder. Elisa chooses a chair halfway back, along the inside aisle, and sets her binder down on the seat. Then she goes to the buffet and helps herself to a sandwich and a can of soda.

She wanders around the edges of the hall. More people keep coming in — there have to be 150 here now. Her arms are trembling a little bit: they are tired from the drive. Why did she come exactly? She wants to go back to her room and hook up her laptop and talk to these people on the internet. These aren’t the people she knows — these people have faces and bodies, their personalities are manifest on their faces. A frizzy-haired woman, whip thin, cackles at a bearded man’s joke. A chubby boy stands alone, wincing: he looks like a graduate student in some impractical subject. A pale man in a plaid shirt is swaying as if in a gentle breeze. Elisa keeps her smile carefully calibrated to deflect unwanted attention. And how is she supposed to eat her sandwich with this soda can in her hand?

She returns to her seat, balances the binder on her lap, and uses it as a table. She faces forward and waits. In spite of herself, she scans the room, in vain, for Silas.

Eventually the lights dim and grow bright again. People sit down. Somebody, a round-faced man, settles in beside her, wiggling his behind on the chair. She suppresses a wave of panic. The lights go dark and stage lights come on and people applaud. When a man walks onto the stage, they applaud again, louder this time.

He’s lanky, easy, charismatic in a nerdy way. He wears khaki pants and a white shirt that looks like a tablecloth. He bought that shirt for himself, Elisa thinks.

“Good evening, and welcome to the seventh annual MetaphysicsNet-SciFiTV conference!” Applause. “I’m Peter Turner, founder of MetaphysicsNet, and I’m happy to say that this year’s conference is our biggest and best yet!” More applause. Peter Turner describes what is in store, which is to say what is listed in the binder on Elisa’s lap. We like things to be redundant, she thinks. It’s a comfort to us to be told what we already know. Because we don’t trust ourselves — we need to be reassured.

Indeed, Elisa feels reassured. She is grateful for the repetition. There is something mesmerizing about this experience: sitting in this large dark room with all these strangers, the carpeted floor and walls swallowing sound, so that there is no echo. The PA system on the verge of feedback but never reaching it. She can hear the hum of the air-conditioning and feel a faint vibration underfoot, as though powerful generators are operating directly below her. The man beside her is breathing evenly through his mouth, and every now and then the breaths give way to a chuckle, after which the breaths speed, then slow, then settle. The speaker begins, then ends, a sentence; when he’s through he begins another.

All around her, the spectacle of humanity in control of its emotions and actions. All around her, calm anticipation. She tucks her unfinished meal underneath her seat and folds her hands together on her binder. She closes her eyes.

Peter Turner introduces the opening speaker, who receives a loud ovation. She hasn’t heard of him — he works in Hollywood. He’s the consultant for a famous TV series about UFOs. People laugh as he speaks but Elisa isn’t hearing the words. She is thinking about the other Lisa, in the other world. She is convinced that this other iteration of her is also at this conference, that world’s version of this conference, and that she is sitting in this same folding chair — that the two of them are still similar enough to have chosen the same seat. She feels that Lisa’s hands on her own binder, feels them intertwined with her own. The other Lisa is thinking about her, too. Their hearts stutter against one another, then synchronize. Their breaths ease into phase. They have two sons and both are alive. They are married and they are separated. They work at a college and they work at a lab. They drive matching Hondas and are forty-six years old.

She is dimly aware that something has changed. There’s noise. Somebody is touching her arm.

“Miss? Miss?”

It’s the man beside her, the round-faced man. He’s tapping her. She opens her eyes. The lights are on, and people are standing up. The man is younger than she is, but he is still calling her “miss.” He says, “You’re spilling your soda.”

She looks down. Her soda can is leaning at a sharp angle in her hand, and a pool of liquid is flowing toward the edge of her conference binder. She stares at it in incomprehension. I don’t drink soda. Maybe it was the other Lisa who chose it? Maybe she has switched — she’s that Lisa now. She’s back in the other world! Panic is rising in her chest; she gasps for breath.

“Uh… here,” the man says, and he drops a paper napkin onto the spill. Then he takes the binder and can from her hands, brushing her thigh with his fingers in the process. “Sorry, sorry,” he says. “You fell asleep?”

He sets the binder and soda on the carpet. She blinks at him. It’s making sense now. She calms down. I’m myself, not her. His ID says RueTheDay.

“I don’t think so,” she says.

He’s smiling at her now. He says, “Yes, you did. You’re CrackedLisa!”

“Oh,” she says. “I’m — yes, sorry.” She holds out her hand. “I know you.”

“What a pleasure!”

“Yes!”

“That talk was so awesome. Do you watch Depths on SciFiTV?”

“I — ah, no. I don’t.”

The man talks for a while. She remembers his avatar: it’s a version of himself, rendered as a character from the cartoon South Park. The resemblance really is strong, uncanny even. He’s very animated, around thirty. He wears a wedding ring and there are sweat stains under his armpits.

They stand up. He calls over a friend, an energetic woman it is clear he has a crush on, a crush that embarrasses him. She is curvy and pouty and also around thirty; her name is nottennis. Elisa knows her, too — she’s the kitten wearing a jetpack.

Elisa listens to them talk. She answers a few questions. They seem excited to have an older person interested in the same things they are, although she hasn’t recognized a single reference from either of them yet. She follows them out of the room and into the hotel bar, where she meets more people, shakes a lot of hands, and allows a tall, professorial type to flirt with her. His beard is prematurely white and there is a kind of flair to his personal awkwardness that she likes. She considers, then decides against, going to bed with him.

It occurs to her that she’s wearing a wedding ring. She can’t decide whether or not to take it off. If she leaves it on, maybe men will be less guarded with her, with less apparently at stake. But then again they might not even try. And is that what she wants, to hook up? Maybe a part of her does. She hasn’t had much sex lately — why doesn’t she want it more?

She leaves the ring on. She imagines that, in a parallel world, perhaps not the one she knows, she has taken it off and it has changed everything.

Several times throughout the evening a woman glances at her from across the room. She is around fifty, quite heavy, moon-faced. She wears round eyeglasses and a pink blouse with ruffled collar and sleeves and a capacious, coarse yellow skirt that reminds Elisa, in its thick folds, of the valance over the window in her hotel room. The woman isn’t wearing a lanyard, and she seems to have a glow, like the moon itself. Her movements are slow and deliberate, as though they have been choreographed.

Elisa doesn’t look for Patricia, because somehow she knows that this woman is her, though the woman is nothing like she imagined. They do not approach each other or introduce themselves: she isn’t sure why. She feels disengaged in general from the conference, in fact — out of place and insufficiently interested. The bar is getting more crowded now and people keep jostling her from behind, reaching around her for their drinks. Bits of conversation intended for others are inadvertently shouted in her ear. really sucked after season three. and boobs out to here. which isn’t in the remake. lifetime of gastrointestinal whatever. She looks around the room for Silas and could swear she sees Betsy Orosco exiting.