Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

“I just had the most intense episode of déjà vu,” William said, as if Otto’s thoughts had sideswiped him. “We were all sitting here—”

“We are all sitting here,” Otto said.

“But that’s what I mean,” William said. “It’s supposed to be some kind of synaptic glitch, isn’t it? So you feel as if you’ve already had the experience just as you’re having it?”

“In the view of many neurologists,” Sharon said. “But our understanding of time is dim. It’s patchy. We really don’t know to what degree time is linear, and under what circumstances. Is it actually, in fact, manifold? Or pleated? Is it frilly? And what is our relationship to it? Our relationship to it is extremely problematical.”

“I think it’s a fine idea for you to have a sculpture,” Otto said. “But I don’t consider it a necessity.”

Her face was as transparent as a child’s. Or at least as hers had been as a child, reflecting every passing cloud, rippling at the tiniest disturbance. And her smile! The sheer wattage — no one over eleven smiled like that. “We’re using the tea-bag-in-the-cup method,” she said. “Greater scope for the exercise of free will, streamlined technology…”

“Oh, goody,” William said. “Darjeeling.”

Otto stared morosely at his immersed bag and the dark halo spreading from it. How long would Sharon need them to stay? When would she want them to go? It was tricky, weaving a course between what might cause her to feel rejected and what might cause her to feel embattled…Actually, though, how did these things work? Did bits of water escort bits of tea from the bag, or what? “How is flavor disseminated?” he said.

“It has to do with oils,” Sharon said.

Strange, you really couldn’t tell, half the time, whether someone was knowledgeable or insane. At school Sharon had shown an astounding talent for the sciences — for everything. For mathematics, especially. Her mind was so rarefied, so crystalline, so adventurous, that none of the rest of them could begin to follow. She soared into graduate school, practically still a child; she was one of the few blessed people, it seemed, whose destiny was clear.

Her professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her assertions.

A tremendous capacity for metaphor, Otto assumed it was; a tremendous sensitivity to the deep structures of the universe. Uncanny. It seemed no more likely that there would be human beings thus equipped than human beings born with satellite dishes growing out of their heads.

He himself was so literal minded he couldn’t understand the simplest scientific or mathematical formulation. Plain old electricity, for example, with its amps and volts and charges and conductivity! Metaphors, presumably — metaphors to describe some ectoplasmic tiger in the walls just spoiling to shoot through the wires the instant the cage door was opened and out into the bulb. And molecules! What on earth were people talking about? If the table was actually just a bunch of swarming motes, bound to one another by nothing more than some amicable commonality of form, then why didn’t your teacup go crashing through it?

But from the time she was tiny, Sharon seemed to be in kindly, lighthearted communion with the occult substances that lay far within and far beyond the human body. It was all as easy for her as reading was for him. She was a creature of the universe. As were they all, come to think of it, though so few were privileged to feel it. And how hospitable and correct she’d made the universe seem when she spoke of even its most rococo and farfetched attributes!

The only truly pleasurable moments at the family dinner table were those rare occasions when Sharon would talk. He remembered one evening — she would have been in grade school. She was wearing a red sweater; pink barrettes held back her hair. She was speaking of holes in space — holes in nothing! No, not in nothing, Sharon explained patiently — in space. And the others, older and larger, laid down their speared meat and listened, uncomprehending and entranced, as though to distant, wordless singing.

Perhaps, Otto sometimes consoled himself, they could be forgiven for failing to identify the beginnings. How could the rest of them, with their ordinary intellects, have followed Sharon’s rapid and arcane speculations, her penetrating apperceptions, closely enough to identify with any certainty the odd associations and disjunctures that seemed to be showing up in her conversation? In any case, at a certain point as she wandered out among the galaxies, among the whirling particles and ineffable numbers, something leaked in her mind, smudging the text of the cosmos, and she was lost.

Or perhaps, like a lightbulb, she was helplessly receptive to an overwhelming influx. She was so physically delicate, and yet the person to whom she was talking might take a step back. And she, in turn, could be crushed by the slightest shift in someone’s expression or tone. It was as if the chemistry of her personality burned off the cushion of air between herself and others. Then one night she called, very late, to alert Otto to a newspaper article about the sorting of lettuces; if he were to give each letter its numerological value…The phone cord thrummed with her panic.

When their taxi approached the hospital on that first occasion, Sharon was dank and electric with terror; her skin looked like wet plaster. Otto felt like an assassin as he led her in, and then she was ushered away somewhere. The others joined him in the waiting room, and after several hours had the opportunity to browbeat various doctors into hangdog temporizing. Many people got better, didn’t they, had only one episode, didn’t they, led fully functioning lives? Why wouldn’t Sharon be part of that statistic — she, who was so able, so lively, so sweet — so, in a word, healthy? When would she be all right?

That depended on what they meant by “all right,” one of the doctors replied. “We mean by ‘all right’ what you mean by ‘all right,’ you squirrelly bastard,” Wesley had shouted, empurpling. Martin paced, sizzling and clicking through his teeth, while Otto sat with his head in his hands, but the fateful, brutal, meaningless diagnosis had already been handed down.

“I got a cake,” Sharon said. She glanced at Otto. “Oh. Was that appropriate?”

“Utterly,” William said.

Appropriate? What if the cake turned out to be decorated with invisible portents and symbols? What if it revealed itself to be invested with power? To be part of the arsenal of small objects — nail scissors, postage stamps, wrapped candies — that lay about in camouflage to fool the credulous doofus like himself just as they were winking their malevolent signals to Sharon?

Or what if the cake was, after all, only an inert teatime treat? A cake required thought, effort, expenditure — all that on a negligible scale for most people, but in Sharon’s stripped and cautious life, nothing was negligible. A cake. Wasn’t that enough to bring one to one’s knees? “Very appropriate,” Otto concurred.

“Do you miss the fish?” Sharon said, lifting the cake from its box.

Fish? Otto’s heart flipped up, pounding. Oh, the box, fish, nothing.

“We brought them home from the dime store in little cardboard boxes,” she explained to William, passing the cake on its plate and a large knife over to him.

“I had a hamster,” William said. The cake bulged resiliently around the knife.