Sorry Please Thank You: Stories Part 10

It was us, but we were performing.

I could feel myself not quite being myself, but a little better, wittier, like I was doing everything for the benefit of someone else.

When I would talk to Samantha, it was like we were speaking lines. As if someone were watching, and we were trying to give off an impression. And the impression we were giving off was that we were happy, and in love, and that we flirted with each other and made each other laugh all the time.

At one point during the party, I put my hand on the small of Samantha's back, and whispered in her ear, "I love you," and it felt so natural that I felt like I really did, and it didn't matter that I never did things like that back on the other side of the door.

But it wasn't us. I had never put my hand on the small of her back. I didn't even like that phrase, "small of her back," and even as I was doing it, I felt more like I was "putting my hand on the small of her back" than actually doing it. It was a gesture more than an action, and I was not actually doing it because I wanted to touch Samantha. I was doing it just so that I could feel myself doing it, so other people could see that we were the kind of couple that showed each other affection in this way.

"I like it there," I said.

"We should go back tomorrow," Samantha said, and the way she said it, I knew she'd have gone back with or without me.

It was five a.m. We were in bed, lying on top of the covers, wide awake, our heads buzzing with the clinking of flatware and the hum of conversation.

We went back the next night, and the next. We were practicing something that we had no name for. Neither of us wanted to talk about what the "door" was. Neither of us wanted to take a chance that we might ruin a good thing. Every night, we would get home from work, get dressed without talking, and go through the "door." Whoever would get home first would call the other one to confirm that the "door" was still there.

We got good at whatever it was we were doing. We learned how to arrive at the party, and how to leave it. We learned to stay until just the right moment, the point in time during a party when you know you should make your exit, find the "door." If we stayed too long, there would come a point when the party had peaked, and everyone knew it, and yet there was nothing to be done. Being at a party at that point made everyone still there feel lonely, and trapped, and a little bit desperate. On the other hand, if we left too early, we would get home and feel like we'd left part of ourselves somewhere else, as if our centers of gravity had been displaced, moved somewhere in between Here and There, and we were no longer where we were. We were nowhere.

I started to realize that I was more there than here. It was the same for Samantha.

When we had first started going through the "door," we lived our lives here, and went to the other side to be other people. But we were becoming those people, even though those people were us, and now, on this side, we were increasingly finding ourselves unsure of what to do, how to act or treat each other when there was no one to see how we "acted" or "treated each other." I would try to touch Samantha's cheek and she would move away. When she was getting dressed for work, I would try my old move, circle my arm around her waist, but she would turn around and give me a look, as in, what-do-you-think-you-are-doing. And even though I didn't show it, I felt the same way. It felt counterfeit, somehow, to be good to each other when it was just the two of us. It was as if. As if we were actors in a play with no audience, and I was still insisting that we stay in character, but she couldn't bring herself to do it anymore. Whoever we were on that other side had followed us through. We needed our audience to be us. To be "us."

I went less often, and eventually stopped going altogether. At first she said people were wondering what had happened to me, but after a while she stopped talking about it, and I didn't want to know. I a.s.sumed the story had changed. Or maybe she'd changed it.

One morning she came back from over "there" just as the sun was rising. She slipped into the bathroom to take a shower. I heard her singing a song I didn't recognize. She came out, dripping wet, drying her hair, still singing softly to herself.

"It doesn't make sense for you to keep your stuff here anymore," I said.

"I was thinking the same thing."

I went to go get her bag from the closet and that's when I noticed that the outer wall to our apartment was missing.

"Hey, you might want to come see this," I said.

She came out into the living room, still naked. We both stood there, as if being presented on a stage, standing on our marks, as if under an invisible proscenium.

"It's like we're in a diorama," she said.

I inched toward the edge and looked down. We were on the top floor of a five-story walk-up, and it was a good fifty or sixty feet down to the sidewalk. I could see the top of the large tree right outside the base of our building. I felt like this was an opportunity, or a sign.

It seemed like I should say something. So that's what I said.

"It seems like I should say something," I said.

"Look at that," Samantha said. She pointed to the word "open" hanging out there, just above the horizon line.

I thought back to that afternoon when we first saw the word in our apartment. How I had come home from work when I wasn't supposed to, when she wasn't expecting me, and how that disruption in our regular pattern had spread into a larger dislocation through the closed system of our physical and verbal environment. I'd come home a moment too early, before she'd had a chance to put her costume on, and something had changed, and we could never go back.

"There it is," she said, pointing to the place where our wall used to be.

And the word "door" was back, hanging there like an airs.h.i.+p, waiting to take us somewhere. It started to drift away, and Samantha reached out and grabbed on to the first "o" and pulled herself up, straddling the letter, the quotes like wings, keeping her in midair. She looked at me, waiting to see what I would do. I wanted to ask her if she wanted me to follow her, but I knew that was exactly the kind of thing she couldn't stand about me. I could let her go by herself, and tell her I'd be here when she got back, knowing I would never see her again. Or I could go with her, and we could keep looking for new doors, we could keep going until we found the place, or the movie, or the poem, or the story. The story we were meant to be in together, the one where there were no more "she saids" or "she dids," the story where everything we said and did was exactly what we meant and felt, and if we never found it then we would keep opening doors until they were all open.

Note to Self.

Dear Alternate Self, I read in the paper today about the quantum multiverse and how there are billions of me out there. Did you know about this? Anyway, I have a proposition for you to consider. If you would be interested in more information about my idea, please write me back and I will explain in greater detail what I am thinking.

Anxiously awaiting your response, Me.

You.

Us?

Dear Self, I was just about to write you the same thing.

Yours truly, You Dear Alternate Self, You were? Whoa! Wait, what?

Dear Self, I think you're confused.

Yours truly, You Dear Alternate Self, I'm confused? I think you're confused.

Anyway, whatever. Here is why I'm writing. This morning, I was eating breakfast (I had Cheerios with thin slices of banana and nonfat milk), and I was reading the paper and came across an article in the science section about the multiverse (I don't normally read that section, but Cheerios with sliced banana is my favorite and I still had about a third of the banana left unsliced, so I had a second bowl, not a full bowl, about a third of the original bowl, so that the Cheerio-to-banana-slice-ratio would be correct). I had finished browsing the sports and business sections, and Dear Self, You randomly picked up the Tuesday science section.

Dear Alternate Self, That's right. How did you Dear Self, Know what you were going to say? Come on, dude.

Dear Alternate Self, Oh, right. Gotcha. Nice one, heh. Don't I feel silly.

Dear Self, I feel silly for you.

Dear Alternate Self, Anyway, what was I saying?

Dear Self, You were saying ... wait, before we get into that, can I bring something up?

Dear Alternate Self, I think I know what you're going to say.

Dear Self, Yeah. You probably do. In fact, there's like a 99.99999999999 percent chance you do. You aren't my alternate self. You're still confused. Wait, does that mean I'm confused? Now I actually am confused.

First, and this is kind of a small thing, but it is not unrelated to the bigger thing that I want to say, there is the matter of how you address me. I don't think it should be "Dear Alternate Self." It should just be "Dear Self." I'm not a version of you, or a copy. I am you.

Dear Alternate Self, Identical in every way, down to the quantum state of every last particle. I couldn't agree more.

Dear Self, Right. And that's what this is about, isn't it? Quantum computation. That's why you are writing to me, to yourself, to ourselves. How can I be so certain? Because that's why I am writing to you. So don't call me Alternate Self. Just Self. You call me Self, I call you Self.

Dear Alternate Self, Will do.

Dear Alternate Self, Whoops, sorry.

Dear Self, This isn't going to be-it can't be-a dialogue between the two of us, at least not in the way that you (and I) was/were thinking when we wrote that first letter to each other. You write to me, I think about what you wrote, I write back to you. Whatever interaction is to come of this, that's not how it works. Right?

Dear Self, Right. Gotcha. On the same page now. Let's dispense with the formality of the letter and just write to ourselves, in one long letter. How does that sound? Sounds great. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Can you stop that? Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Stop it. Okay. Okay, so this is what we're thinking. You're getting us a little off track here, already, and for reasons that will become more clear to you, it's especially important for me to stay on track. The problem, I guess, is that I'm not exactly sure what that entails. That's why I am writing this to you. Actually, I don't know exactly why I am writing this to you. I just know that I am. Writing this to you, I mean. But wait, I guess I'm not even sure about that. First principles. Back to basics. Foundational a.s.sumptions. I am who I am. You are who you are.

Who am I? I am you. And you are me. Are we the same person? Depends on what you mean by person. I don't have a good working definition of person, which I am guessing means you don't, either. a.s.suming, as noted above, that in your reality there is still something called science fiction, you should be familiar with the idea of multiple universes. You have to be, because when I say "you" I mean my intended reader for this writing, which is, by definition, a version of me who understands this concept. Okay, so, multiple universes: the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including your universe) that together make up all physical reality.

Anyway, I guess this is probably the first thing we should have established.

The multiverse? It's real.

There are an inconceivably large number of copies of you. I'm one of them. (Are you sitting down? I am.) I'm not a particularly notable copy, I'm pretty sure there cannot be such a thing. But between you and me, I might be interesting, because, up until the moment you read the third sentence of this paragraph, you didn't realize that I existed, that there are countless versions of you and me out there. We had been trading letters back and forth, but we hadn't said it to ourselves, to each other yet. And now that we have, we both know it. You know it now, so I know it. And/or vice versa. I'm the one telling you this. I guess I'm notable in that I was sitting here, in my universe, and I realized that if there is a multiverse, then I should be able to communicate with other versions of myself by simply writing to myself in my own universe. The trick, I guess, the hard part, was in figuring out how to word it, and to whom to address it. I figured I had to couch it in terms that would be palatable to you, so I wanted to mention science fiction, but not actually call it that, so that you would know that I had a certain level of self-awareness, especially about how crazy all of this sounds. But now I am thinking that, since I could have called it science fiction, but didn't, there is a world out there in which I wrote this to you, but did call it science fiction, in which a version of you/me is reading this, thinking it is all science fiction, which is fine. Let's forget him-he was bound to happen anyway. He split off from us the moment we started this letter. You are my intended audience. And I suppose I am yours. So, I didn't call it science fiction, because, well, my life is real and so is yours and even though this may seem impossibly remote and fantastical and too abstract to matter, it matters to me, and I know that it matters to you, too, and sitting here, thinking about all of the possibilities, lost and never known, all of the regrets, all of the would haves and could haves and should haves, three different types of universes, all of them every bit as real as the one you are in right now. In fact, maybe you are in one of them. What is "is" to you is "could have" in the eyes of someone else.

What we've created here is a s.p.a.ce, a kind of meeting place for other versions of ourselves. Like a time travelers' convention, it can take place anywhere. Just by putting this down on paper, by addressing a letter "Dear Self." My note to self is entangled with your note to self. So you're sitting there, like me, writing this to yourself.

We're corresponding.

We are correspondents corresponding in our corresponding universes.

Is that what writing is? A collaboration between selves across the multiverse? I've written stories that had to be wrung out, drop by drop, in the arid environment of the desert of your imagination.

You've written other stories that came in a rush, your forehead clammy, feverish, trying to just keep up with the words as they were pouring out-but from where? Nowhere you can go back to. Nowhere you understand. Do you think you know how writing works?

I've seen a lot of things, and you've probably seen a lot of things. What is happening right now as you read this? Am I the writer and you the reader? Or are you writing it and I'm reading it? If you think you are writing, do you feel like you know where it's coming from? If you think you are reading, is this information you are learning, pa.s.sively? Or do you feel like you could be creating it? Does it occur to you as a voice in your head? Your own voice in your own head?

I feel, of course, that I am writing all of this, and it is all coming from me, but then again, how can I be sure?

How can I be any more sure than you are?

Dear Selves, Hey guys!

Whoa.

What was that?

I don't know.

We split off again.

You guys started without me!

Aaaaaaghhh!!!

Don't flip out.

Who are you, how did you get in here?

What do you mean? I'm you. I'm totally you guys.

No you're not. You're like, in a different font.

Aaaggh! What happened? What is happening?

I switched into his font!

HEY GUYS.

Aaaggh! Now what's happening?

Okay, stop freaking out.

How can I not freak out? It's getting worse.

Sorry I freaked you guys out.

I hereby convene the Hundred and First Annual Conference of Our Self.

Who is that?

It's you.

No it's not.

It is.

I'm not talking anymore until I find out what's going on.

Me neither.

SAME HERE.

h.e.l.lo?

h.e.l.lo?

h.e.l.lo?

h.e.l.lo?

h.e.l.lo?

How many of us are there? h.e.l.lo. h.e.l.lo. h.e.l.lO. Hi. Yo. We have a quorum. Meeting's in session. Ready and waiting. Do we know what we're doing? What's the plan? Anyone have a plan? Anyone. Someone go first. Please, someone, anyone, go first. Someone, anyone.