Sorry Please Thank You: Stories Part 9

Here is what I know about this Charles Yu person: (1) He is a man.

(2) He works on the seventeenth floor of a downtown office building.

(3) He lives alone.

(4) He's lonely. But he hasn't always been.

Here's what I do not know about Charles Yu: pretty much everything else.

I do not know, for instance, how it is I come to enter a new universe. The mechanism for my entry into the world. I don't know how long I have lived like this. I don't know how, or whether it is even possible to predict what the world will look like the next day. I simply have to close my eyes, and wait until tomorrow in order to find out.

What is this condition? A permanent temporary. A living and walking and breathing and thinking idea, an almost-man. A contingency. Nothing essential to me, nothing particular, nothing necessary. A sum total of discrete moments, a long (or short) series of variations on an underlying person, the sum of the area under which might begin to approximate, in the aggregate, the negative s.p.a.ce of a man, all that he had not been, all that he imagined he might have been, and so, in that sense, the shape of me was the shape of Charles Yu, a Necker cube, an etching by Escher, background and foreground, an "I" limned by my real Self, my edge his edge, my boundary his boundary, one line dividing a plane, a region of s.p.a.ce, one line creating two ent.i.ties, the real and everything else.

Being what I am, I don't have direct access to the real world. I rely on inference. On what I see from moment to moment.

Charles Yu's world stays the same from day to day, hour to hour, while the world in which I exist changes whenever Charles feels like changing it. Or thinks about it. Or wonders about something. Or daydreams about nothing.

I always forget: am I the only one who knows that the world changes every day? Or do other people know, too?

Today I woke up as a man. My face is the same. Looks the same, anyway, as it did when I went to sleep. I'm looking at it in a mirror. I look okay. I feel. What do I feel? What is this I am feeling? I feel terrible. I feel like something just happened. Something big. What happened? Is that something the reason I feel terrible? If so, why do I feel terrible about it? Was it something I did, or something that was done to me? Or neither? Or both?

No one is in here with me. I'm in a room. A waiting area of some sort. Against the far wall is an aquarium with three fish: one striped silvery fish, darting in its movement, one goldfish, in the middle region of the tank, and a black fish, languid, fins trailing behind it like a flag. The water in the tank is seething, is red.

Are you waiting to see the doctor? someone asks me.

I didn't realize anyone was in here, I say.

You never do, she says.

Never? Really?

Never.

Wait, I say, do I know you?

No, she says. You don't know me. But I know you.

I get that a lot. People know me. I feel like I should know them. I feel guilty that I don't. Like I should. I feel superficial. I feel like I am a fraud. How can I not know so many people who seem to know me? Is it possible to go through life this way? Apparently, it is. I don't know myself, I don't know my friends, I don't know the people who populate my life. I can't be the only one. That gives me some comfort. That's what I tell myself. I'm a product of the world. A by-product. I didn't ask for this. This thinning out of existence. This hollowing out. My interactions with people are the bare minimum. I don't feel anything. Ever. Hardly ever. Once in a long while. And even then, it's random. The woman in the waiting room. This receptionist. She knows me. Who is this person in relation to me? How do I define our relationship, such as it is? One-off, limited, formal, constrained, dictated by our circ.u.mstances, whatever they are, dictated even by the physical reality of the counter window between us, the dimensions of the window. Is this someone I care about, cared about? Or does she know the real me? That's it. She knows Charles Yu. He's thinking about her. He's put her in this room with me. Put us in here, with a fish tank. She's about my age, dark gla.s.ses, a look on her face like she knows the truth, a truth, about me that I should know, but I don't. I think I feel something about her. I believe that. I believe that I think I feel something. There's something. That's a start. Except now she's gone. That was yesterday. The day is done.

Why would anyone imagine themselves this way? Why does my Self do this to me? What is he waiting for? Who is he waiting to see?

What shapes can the world take?

A torus, a saddle, a Euclidean plane, on a brane, on a string, in a hologram, on a speeding train, in an infinite loop, a thirty-second universe, a maximal entropy universe, a backward-arrow-of-time universe. A no-causality universe.

On the worst days, I feel fine. On the best days, I know I am not.

Every morning I wake up knowing close to nothing. About myself. Or anything else. Every morning there is only one thing that can be counted on, one thing I can be sure of, without opening my eyes.

She is gone.

Who is she?

If I could just find some clue. I have a hard time even maintaining a thought, even holding an idea in my head for more than a few moments. I can't seem to build up any kind of momentum. Details distract me. I have a hard enough time just figuring out the rules each day. Putting them together, looking at them carefully, trying to discern a pattern, a progression, any kind of underlying meaning to it all, it just hardly seems possible. I'm the cargo, not the engine. My mind just goes along for the ride.

It's hard to have a relationship in this world. Other people are not the same from day to day. I might wake up next to a woman three days in a row, or three hundred, but I never know if she'll be there the next morning, or the next hour, or if the world will change completely while I'm not looking. She might even change into another person altogether. I might recognize something in her eyes, or she might not be a woman at all. She might turn into a man. Or a mailbox. Or a region of empty s.p.a.ce. Or a feeling. Or a song. I might only recognize her as one recognizes someone in a dream, as in the way something is actually someone, and that someone is actually someone else.

This life: No need to bother with soul searching or trying to understand my nature or actions. No need to wonder why I am the way I am, why I do what I do. Just sit back and be whoever you are that day. I guess. I guess so.

Up. Morning.

I take an inventory of the world: Me.

Check.

Bed.

Check.

Sun rising.

Check.

I wake up. It is late. She is gone.

What has Charles Yu done? What is Charles Yu trying to work through? Is that what this is? A laboratory, an experiment, a controlled s.p.a.ce, a simulation, an iterative program to run again and again, under slightly different conditions?

I wake up. Take inventory. It's late. She's gone.

Underneath my life of random scenes underlies the script of his life, his worries and concerns and fantasies. Someday it will all make some sense. That's my plan, to keep plodding along, getting up every morning and going to bed every night, and in between, living through each minute, each situation, most of which make no sense, some of which are terrifying, if I keep talking to people, these people who seem both strange and familiar at the same time, if I just keep at it, that the real Charles Yu, my real Self, will emerge, what he wants or cares about or loves will make itself known.

It's late. She's gone. I take inventory.

A note.

From her: You don't know who I am.

Also: You may never know.

I have never seen her, let alone have any idea of who she might be. Does Charles Yu really know her? All he ever knew of her was who he saw every day. All I am is who I am every day. All anyone is to anyone is a series of days. Were they married? Were they in love?

How do I find her? How do I catch her? That's not how it works, is it? I can't control whether she's gone. She is gone. That's a given. There has to be a reason why she left. What am I allowed to do? What is possible? What is conceivable? Do all worlds have rules?

Do dreams?

Do they have gravity? Or physics? Chance? Or histories?

Do dreams have futures?

I wake up early. Or am I still dreaming?

The sun is rising. In the north. First sensation of the day: she's here. I go downstairs. That's her. Whoever she is. I look at her from the back, in a long shirt, her dark brown hair down just past her shoulders. I'm nervous. I don't know how long it's been since I've talked to her, I don't know if she'll remember me. What do I know about her? Let's see, she's young-looking. Younger than I would have thought. Wait, am I young? She must know I'm standing here. Name starts with. With an M? An M. That's good for now. Don't push it. It will come to you. Am I still in bed? I'm going to have to come up with a name if I'm going to talk to her. Or do I? If we're married, I wouldn't say her name. Not in the morning. Would I? Wouldn't I just kiss her, wrap my arm around her waist, nuzzle her neck? Is that what I'm going to do? What if that's weird? What if we're not like that? What if she hates her husband? What if we have a terrible marriage? What if, what if, what if? I'm trapped in a kind of what-if story, right? So what, big deal. Who isn't? Everyone I know is. What if you had quit that job, what if you had told him off, what if you had spoken up that one time, when it really mattered? What if you had made the choice you knew would have changed everything, would have made her and him and you all happy? What if the world ended today and you never told her you loved her? What if the world ended every single day of your life, and you still never told her?

What if Charles Yu hasn't lost anything? What if he is perfectly happy? What if one day I could wake up as him, flip it around? What if I could know what it was like to be real? What if I found out that he had a wife and a child and was genuinely happy? I imagine what that would be like, to be happy, and to know that not everyone is, to know that it comes at a price, and that price is a kind of loss. The happiness and loss, intertwined, both of them always existing at all times. What if I found out that the real me was content, fulfilled, grateful? How could I be happy for myself, while still remembering that someday I will lose it all, everything important, and unimportant? That everyone loses everything. Everything loses itself. What if I found out that in my real life, my Self, this Charles Yu person had never lost her, the woman? Why would he do this to me? Why would he daydream about the worst, the unimaginable? Why put me through that? Is it for fun? To satisfy his curiosity? What if he needs me? Needs me to complete him. One of us has something, the other one loses it. Everything I have ever lost, I never really had. I am the lost part of him, the lost side of him, the part that never happened.

I wake up. I take an inventory. Here is what I know about Charles Yu: (1) He is a man.

(2) He has a wife and a child.

(3) He is still happy.

(4) I will never understand him.

Things will make sense in the end. That's what I'm hoping, anyway. Deep down, I've always felt that they would, although lately I have started to wonder where I got that idea, have started to wonder about what if. What if I'm not doing this right? What if I missed something? Slept through it, didn't notice, got distracted, just plain missed it. For as long as I can remember, I have had this before-feeling, this feeling like I am in the moment before something is just about to happen, a feeling that whatever is going to happen hasn't yet happened. Recently, though, I have started to get another feeling. An after-feeling. My whole life has been all before, before, before, leading up to. And then, just like that, it feels like after. After-something. Between before and after, there was supposed to be something big, right? The present, the now, the moment. What if I somehow skipped it, what if it pa.s.sed me by and I didn't recognize it, or worse, what if I never get to do it at all? What if I go my whole life and never ask that one key question, that one what-if that I am supposed to be asking myself?

For a while, I thought I might be in a love story, but I hardly ever wake up next to anyone anymore. It still happens once in a while. When it does, the first thing I do, doesn't matter where I am, in the ocean, on the moon of some minor distant planet, doesn't matter where, doesn't matter if she knows who I am or if I know who she is or how strong gravity is or if I feel terrible or if the world is logically impossible, the first thing I do if she's there, is I tell her how nice it is to see her.

Open.

Samantha discovered it first. I don't know exactly how it started, just that I came home in the middle of the day and Samantha was standing there in front of the couch, and she actually jumped when I came through the door. I'm not sure why but that bothered me, maybe because I've always sort of suspected that people are only that jumpy when they have something to hide, and I was so much in my own head about being annoyed at Samantha that it took me a second to notice what she was looking at, which was a huge word, right in the center of the room.

"We need to talk about that," I said.

"Why? Why do we always have to talk everything to death?"

"The word 'door' is floating in the middle of our apartment. You don't think maybe this is something we need to discuss?"

We ate dinner in silence, pretending "door" wasn't literally hanging over us. Samantha went to bed early. I watched a show about poisonous lizards and drank warm terrible whiskey out of Samantha's coffee mug. After finishing, I put the mug back in the cupboard without washing it. When I slipped into bed I could tell by her breathing she was still awake.

"Say it," Samantha said.

"I'm not going to say it. You should."

"Why should I be the one to have to say it?"

"Because you brought that thing in there. That idea. You conjured it."

Our bedroom was tiny. I slipped my leg out from under the covers and opened the door with my foot, so that she had to look at it. But it was gone already.

"Samantha."

"I don't care," she said, with her back to me.

"It's gone."

"I told you to say it," she said. "Now we've lost our chance."

I woke up at three in the morning to Samantha, with her hand under my shirt, running her fingernails up and down my back. She pulled in close and kissed the back of my ear.

"It's over," she said.

"I know."

"Do you want me to move out?"

"No, I'll find a place."

"Can you get me a gla.s.s of water from the kitchen?"

I went into the living room.

"Uh," I said. "You might want to come see this."

Instead of the word "door," there was now an actual door in the middle of our living room.

"This is like that movie," she said. "Monsters, Inc."

"Actually it's like a poem I just read."

Samantha rolled her eyes at me.

"So are you going to open the door?" she said. I hesitated for a moment, and before I could say anything, she opened it and went right through. I stood there, too afraid to follow. Maybe a hole had opened up in the world, and movies and poems were coming through into reality. Or maybe we were the movie, or the poem, and this was our chance to go into the real world.

Just when I was about to go after her, Samantha came back through the door, giggling.

"Are you drunk?" I said.

"No. Okay, a little. Okay, a lot."

"You don't even drink."

She told me it was a dinner party. That everyone seemed to know her there. But it wasn't her they knew. Or at least it didn't feel that way.

"And there are all these other couples. And they know who you are, too, they keep asking about you."

"That's swinging. You're talking about us becoming swingers."

"Ew. Gross. No. It was not that at all."

"Then what kind of party was it?"

"People know us. They like us. Not 'us' exactly, it's hard to explain. You just have to come see for yourself."