Sorry Please Thank You (13 page)

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 assumed 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 airship, 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.

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