Sorry Please Thank You (11 page)
Read Sorry Please Thank You Online
Authors: Charles Yu
Then Frëd appears, sticking his big face through the clouds. I was right: he’s a child. Hasn’t hit puberty yet. A god-child. Even gods have to grow up, I guess.
“Hey Frëd,” I say.
“Actually, no umlaut,” he says. “It’s just plain Fred.”
“Well, good to finally meet you face-to-face, Fred.”
“Things aren’t looking too good for you,” he says. “I’m sorry about all of this.”
“Why are you sorry?”
He looks at me like, you don’t know?
“What?” I say.
“This world, all of this, all of your world,” he says, trying to find the words. The tingling gooseflesh of comprehension starts to creep up my arms and the back of my neck. My mind strains for a grasp of what it is he is getting
at, like trying to visualize higher dimensions. Fred either can’t say or doesn’t want to say.
“I’m just sorry to have put you guys in this position,” he says. “And now I have to go.”
“So, that’s it? That’s all we get? No proper ending? The forces of good and evil, geography, history, destiny, when you have to go, you just pull the plug and all of this just goes away?”
“Let me ask you a question,” Fred says. “What do you believe in? Do you believe in yourself? In your team? In heroism? In good? Do you believe in anything?”
“That was more than one question,” I say. “I want to believe. I believe I am capable of believing.”
“I guess that will have to do,” Fred says, and with a wave of his hand the clouds part and projected onto the sky are two paths, two alternate futures for me.
In one direction is The Path of Legends:
You have fought enough battles. Your record, while imperfect, is enough to earn you a place in the Hall of Eternity. Choose this path and you can vanish from the ordinary world. Perhaps you watch over the ongoing struggle, content in the knowledge that you have played your part. Perhaps you leave your plane of existence and become a minor deity yourself.
In the other direction is Honorable Death:
On the field of the most gruesome battle in history, you shall meet your foes and do battle. You may prevail. You may be defeated. You may prevail even as you are defeated. You may end up killing your enemy and, in the process, killing yourself. Rejoin your team now and find out.
“Select Your Path,” Frëd says, resuming his god voice.
Trin is bleeding from her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.
Byr has lost an arm.
Rostejn has lost both arms.
Fjoork is in the process of being eaten by an orc.
Krugnor is looking up at the sky. He seems to have given up.
Maybe Frëd is just Fred. Maybe we have been praying to a nine-year-old whose mom keeps yelling at him to clean up his room. Maybe this is all just a game, an elaborate architecture created by some intelligent designer, out of what, boredom? Grace? Perverse curiosity? Some kind of controlled experiment or attempt to reconcile determinism and free will? What is my score? What is a health bar? Here I am, outside my own story, no longer moving to the right, or to the left. On the other side of the edge of the screen, off screen. After the end of the game, I can see it for what it was. You know what? I can know all that and still care. I can know all that and at the same time know that it matters. It has to matter. So our deity might have to leave for a while. So he may or may not have meant to make things this way. So we might be left on our own down there. So maybe he never meant for any of this to happen, this wasn’t the story at all, he wishes he could just hit the button and start all over.
That doesn’t make it any less real. That doesn’t mean we should give up down here.
“I really gotta go,” Fred says. “It’s your story now.”
He looks at me like, I’m sorry, but what am I supposed
to do? And he’s right. He’s a minor power at best. He can’t get us out of this. He’s a nice guy, good at what he’s good at, but this is our problem.
I can see Trin and Krugnor down there getting their asses kicked. Things will suck if I go back down there. All of my friends might get killed. And even if they live, they will be horribly maimed and probably blame me forever for this shit that I got them into. But still. No one said it would be easy, or fun, or good, or clean, or that I would have any glory or comfort or a moment of rest in all of my days. But if I have anything at all I am still the Hero. I am here. This was my story. This is my problem. I’m going back down there to fix it.
Chapter 5: Extended Family Relations
Living in close quarters with your Immediate Family you have no doubt begun to see the sometimes tricky dynamics, both fiscal and psychosexual, that often come into play between humans.
As a result, you may now find yourself looking around at other possibilities for joy, housing, points of reference, or shared sorrow. One rich and untapped source of experiential material is your Extended Family.
Extended Family Relations are often confusing for new humans, who cannot see the point of having human contacts that are neither potential sexual partners, nor business partners, nor enemies. The following may be useful in helping you sort through some of the many underutilized resources at your disposal.
Cousins are really the meat and potatoes of the Extended Family Relations menu. As the paradigmatic nonnuclear relative, they serve as the foundation of any well-diversified
portfolio of human contacts. In a nutshell, cousins are your optional brothers and sisters. They are people to whom you owe nothing, who owe you nothing, but who can be important to you, if you wish.
Your aunt is moderately useful for experimentation, as a kind of laboratory for testing what will work and what will not work in your interactions with your human mother.
A word of caution: if you have a very oblivious-looking aunt, do not assume that she is what you perceive her to be, no matter how harmless she looks. Sensory data can be deceiving. Despite appearances, this aunt may be every bit as clever as your Earthling mother. In fact, she may very well be your Earthling mother, hiding in a different person.
There are other issues related to aunts that are beyond the scope of this volume.
Cousins can be a source of repeated use and considerable pleasure. This is especially true in your golden/declining years. As your genetically unrelated Persons of Life Significance (these are often called Friends or Enemies and will be covered in a future volume) begin to die away, or as you learn that you really know absolutely
nothing about (and find yourself growing increasingly wary of) anyone who is not a blood relative, cousins can sometimes rise to prominence quite unexpectedly. Examples include: the Occasional Visiting Cousin, the Far Away but Close at Heart Cousin, and the very common General Proximity Cousin (who has moved to within fifty miles of your residence as one/both of you enter late middle age, for no good reason either of you can discern, other than the odd comfort of general proximity). Perhaps you have such a cousin. Perhaps you are such a cousin.
Great-uncles have been the source of much controversy in recent years. There are really two schools of thought on great-uncles. One school says that great-uncles are almost too tenuously connected to be of any relevance to you, being no more than a sibling of someone two generations removed. The other says that they love you very, very much. Both are correct.
Remember the simple rule: you are to your father as your father is to your grandfather.
Therefore, if you are male and terrified of your father, you should be exponentially more terrified of your grandfather.
There are other issues related to your Earthling grandfather that are beyond the scope of this volume.
If you have a great number of cousins, you may find it of interest to note the Mendelian ratios and allele distributions of certain physical characteristics among them. A chart can be helpful.
Note how dominant and recessive traits have distributed themselves among the second-generation offspring of your Earthling grandparents. Sometimes you will recognize that very similar subsets of the pool of genetic elements that make up your Earthling body can be recombined in subtly varying proportions to disastrous effect in your cousins. Or, you may find the opposite to be true. If either is the case, it may be hard to properly utilize your cousins.
Cousins often care about you more than you will ever know, or could ever possibly guess. It is not at all uncommon to realize this very late in life. To avoid the possibility of wasting potential affection, admiration, and shared sorrow, check to see if any of your cousins look up to you as an older-brother figure or someone whom they pattern their lives after, especially any only-children cousins you may have.
There are other issues related to cousins that are beyond the scope of this volume.
Every morning I find myself in a different universe.
There doesn’t seem to be any order to the days.
One day I might wake up floating in the middle of a seething red ocean.
The next day I’m in a desert of frozen silver sand.
Most mornings, when I wake up, the rules have all changed.
Once in a while, though, I wake up in a place that feels comforting. The atmospheric pressure. The way gravity bends light, I can feel it: something familiar, something in my muscles, in my cells, my atoms.
First thing I do is tell myself who I am. This is right after I wake up, before I open my eyes. Who am I? Do I remember? Can I do it? Can I be honest? This isn’t touchy-feely. If I’m not honest with myself in an empty, soundless universe, then who will be?
Second thing I do is I check for gravity. It’s no fun crumpling to the floor or floating away.
I suppose the idea is this: I’m not real. I am some sort of alternate version of an actual person living somewhere in the actual world.
I have a Self. I’m his hypothetical. His guinea pig. His proxy, his personal test subject. I’m a lab rat in his thought experiments. A day player. The stunt double for his philosophical train tracks. A crash test dummy in a collision-testing facility for metaphysical safety.
It’s not a comfortable realization, i.e., that I am, in fact, not a realization at all. But it makes sense. It explains a lot. Why I don’t have feelings of my own. Why I always feel like I know what I was supposed to be feeling, but I can never just feel that feeling without being conscious of it, being aware of it.
Also, this feeling I’ve had, for as long as I can remember. A derivative feeling. I am not Charles Yu. I suppose that could be my name, too, but it has never sounded quite right to me anyway. Charlie, maybe. A secondhand version of the name. For a secondhand person.
The real me is out there, somewhere, sleeping soundly in his bed. Every morning, he wakes up the same person.
Every morning, I wake up some weird version of him.
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 space 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 space, one line creating two entities, 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 circumstances, 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 glasses, 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.
