Robert Lennon - Familiar

“We have to do something else first,” nottennis adds.

“Maybe we’ll see you there?”

Elisa nods, folding the paper in her hand into a still-smaller rectangle. “Sure. Sure.”

The two of them retreat with evident relief, while Elisa stands blinking, wondering what just happened. She looks around the room. People are clustered in little groups, stealing glances at her. Betsy Orosco seems to have left, and the three male panelists are laughing about something at the dais.

She fears, is in fact quite certain, that she has made a fool of herself.

That night she attends a talk on alien abductions and a panel on the possible alternate forms intelligent life might take. She meets a couple from the forum named Seth and Janet. These are their screen names. They tell her they just found the idea funny, giving themselves “normal” names to use online; they say they’ve taken to calling one another Seth and Janet around the house. Elisa didn’t realize they were married. They don’t seem to have been at the panel discussion this morning; they didn’t witness her performance.

She goes with them to the hotel bar and the three of them drink. A lot. Seth announces at some point that he’s going to kiss Elisa; Janet tells him to go ahead, in fact she dares him. He does it, and the two of them kiss for a while. He’s only a few years younger than she is, and is quite attractive, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist and a bit of hair poking out of his collar from his back and chest. Janet whoops and laughs and then takes over, kissing Elisa with evidently equal enthusiasm. It isn’t as unpleasant as she might have imagined, though it is indeed unpleasant. They invite her up to their room and Elisa says no at least twenty or thirty times. At some point they leave the bar. “But we’ve had such fun!” Elisa shouts after them. They are laughing too hard to hear.

Then she’s with RueTheDay and nottennis, and they’re laughing at her too. At times they whisper things to each other and then look at Elisa and crack up. She finds herself asking anyone who will listen that it is imperative that they wake up CharlesSmith and bring him down here immediately, and if they don’t do it, by God, she’s going to go do it herself. Then she is in the elevator and her hand is flapping uselessly against the glowing numbers. Somehow she manages to hit her floor and staggers back into the corner.

She hasn’t been this drunk since… college? She can’t remember very far back. The elevator heaves and sways. It stops, and the doors open, but she doesn’t get out, she just remains pinned to the back wall, staring out at the hallway: a vase full of fake flowers on a round wooden table, a seascape hanging above it. There are voices. The doors close, and then, a moment later, open again. Three people get in, a man and two women; they are talking and laughing, the man looking over his shoulder.

“… she was like, ‘Okay, fine!’ And I was like, ‘Fine!’”

“Of course she’s like that.”

“Did you meet her mother?”

“Oh, God.”

“And then that coat. ”

“She called it ‘vintage.’”

“Well, we shouldn’t make fun.”

“Oh, yes we should!”

The doors open. The people get out. It’s the lobby — the elevator has gone back down without Elisa noticing. She hits the button for her floor again. This time she’ll do it — she’ll get out of the elevator and go to her room. As the doors close and the elevator begins to rise, she studies an advertisement affixed to the wall above the buttons. It reads, “Good times, good friends. Your one-stop dinner solution on game day!” The phrase seems hilarious; she snorts and giggles. Then she sighs, loudly, and begins to feel as though something in the elevator is different.

It’s a change in the light, a change in the space. She groans a little and it sounds wrong. For no reason that she can fathom, she says “Ow.” She fixates on the spot where the horizontal crack between the doors and floor meets the vertical one between the doors. It’s sort of sexual. The elevator stops. The doors open and the spot vanishes and she says “Whoa.”

Three people get in, a man and two women; they are talking and laughing. The man is looking over his shoulder.

“… she was like, ‘Okay, fine!’ And I was like, ‘Fine!’”

“Of course she’s like that.”

“Did you meet her mother?”

“Oh, God.”

“And then that coat. ”

“She called it ‘vintage.’”

“Well, we shouldn’t make fun.”

“Oh, yes we should!”

Elisa tries not to move or make a sound. She has backed into a corner of the elevator, in an effort not to be seen. She is terrified. None of the people look at her. The door opens onto the lobby and they get out and Patricia gets in.

“Patricia?” she says, and her voice sounds very small and far away.

Patricia smiles that same beatific smile. She nods and presses the button for Elisa’s floor. How does she know? Maybe she doesn’t, maybe it’s her floor too.

As the elevator rises, Elisa’s breaths become shallower, faster. “Patricia,” she says, “if they’re out there…”

The elevator stops. The doors open. “Is there? Anyone there?”

Patricia shakes her head no, still smiling. She holds out a hand to Elisa and Elisa takes it, and allows Patricia to lead her into the vestibule.

But they’re there. All three of them. And one of the women is saying, “And she said, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t come to the party after all.’”

“You have got to be kidding me,” says the other.

“I am not. So I said, ‘Fine, then,’ and she was like, ‘Okay, fine!’ And I was like, ‘Fine!’”

“Of course she’s like that.”

“Did you meet her mother?”

And as they enter the elevator the man looks over his shoulder, back at Elisa, who stares at him in horror. He blinks, and then the doors close and the people are gone.

There’s a hand on her elbow. There’s a smell of perfume. She is being guided down a hallway. She has had the presence of mind to dig her key card out of her pocket and now she is fumbling to slip it into the lock. But Patricia’s soft hand is there to guide her. She is led into the room, to a chair, she is pressed down into the chair and then a soft shape is in the near-blackness of the room pulling back the comforter and sheets on the bed.

“Thankyou,” Elisa is saying, “thankyou,” and then her shoes are being removed, and her socks, and she’s lying in the bed on the cool rough sheets and it feels so incredibly wonderful that she wants to cry.

“Is this real?” she wants to know, but no one answers.

Then she’s awake again, the room is spinning, and she is kneeling in front of the toilet vomiting, with a warm hand, a hot hand actually, pressed into the middle of her back. “Gedditoff,” she says and tries to brush it away, and the hand disappears.

She manages to brush her teeth and drink some water. Beside her, someone is cleaning the toilet with a wadded-up bit of toilet paper. She has the impression that it is perhaps Elisa, the other Elisa, come to visit this world. (Wouldn’t that be nice, she thinks — we could be friends.) A peculiar sensation overcomes her — as she is nearly awake enough now, nearly sober enough now, to be disturbed by the presence of a stranger in her hotel room — of not quite being disturbed, or of contemplating being disturbed; she is aware that she can make, if she wishes, a decision about how she will feel. Her thoughts, though, are close and cluttered and bloated, jostling against each other in her head, and she can’t keep them still enough to follow any one of them to its conclusion. She really just wants to get back into bed. She has taken her pants off, or somebody has, so she is standing here in the nightlit bathroom in her underwear and a linen blouse stained with flecks of her own sick, and the figure at the toilet rises, and the toilet flushes, and then she is led back to the bed and is asleep again.