Why did the universe do that to us, and not, say, to ducks or dormice? Because the universe apparently concluded after a couple million years that experience is a terrible thing to waste. It's dangerous out there, things go bump in the light, and it therefore makes sense that the fewer events we have to put ourselves through, the better, the more we can learn from each, the safer we'll remain. Time travel allows us to pay for an experience once, then rerun it on the screen behind our foreheads at no additional charge as many times as we like. With each repetition, we're in a position to learn something new. And how astonishing is that?
Listening to her, I felt blurry.
I felt fine and then I felt blurry.
Like someone was beginning to erase me from the back of my head down.
I closed my eyes, opened them, and something occurred to me, and the blurriness became grayer, and Aleyt pushed on, saying more astonishing still is the fact that most of us would stake our sanity on the intuition that there's someone home in our sensoria, a conscious process humming along up there, that, not to put too fine a point on it, we're us, we're first-person people saddled to the same selves from birth to blackness — and yet it just so happens that our thoughts, our satisfactions, our sorrows consist entirely of always-altering physiological activity in those tissues stuffing our skulls, sparks and sluices, that's all, nothing more, sluices and sparks, and those overly familiar near-death experiences of white radiance and delft-blue serenity and relatives beckoning to us from the dazzling threshold? Let me tell you something, honey, said Aleyt. Those experiences aren't eyewitness reports of jubilant souls parting company with their bodies, no, sorry, no, they're simple symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain. And that peculiar conviction we cling to that there's an I occupying the swivel chair in our cranial control room, scanning the walls of displays, pulling the strings called our muscles? Nothing but an involved hoax perpetrated by our bushy dendrites behind our backs. And how astonishing is that?
This, in a word, was the vertiginous understanding that drew Aleyt in: the rowdy idea that our minds are unable to grasp why those neural crackles and snaps observed from the outside should give rise to the impression of subjective experience from the inside, because—
Because—
Because it's not you, I said, is it?
It's not any of us, Aleyt said. That's the thing I just can't shake. I mean, how bizarre. That's the thought that kept me coming back to the scene of the crime my entire undergrad education, though these days, um, well, you know, what with Jerry and the kids…
No. I mean, you're not you. Her. Aleyt.
Her expression remained steady.
Want another latté? she asked, all perky. My treat. I'm thinking what the heck. Calories be damned. Actually, you really should try Toffee Nut Crème. It'll change your life.
You're somebody else. That's why you don't look like her or speak like her or feel like her.
People change, I guess, she said, shrugging. You know how it is.
Not that much, they don't.
You'd be surprised.
The blurriness spread like the first swells of flu from the back of my skull into the bottom of my throat.
UnAleyt studied the brown top of her forest-green cup.
I posed a question to the part in her black bob that made her head look too small for her body:
How'd you find me?
She looked up quickly and laughed.
I didn't find you, silly. You found me. Remember? That's what's so wonderful about these website thingies. All you have to do is sit and wait long enough. I knew you'd eventually get around to dropping by. Everybody wants to figure out where their childhoods went, right? You sure you won't take me up on another cup of caffeine?
You do thish lots, I said.
Startled by the slur, I raised my hand to my mouth to check what was going on down there.
UnAleyt's eyes crinkled.
Do what?
What you're doing. Thish. This. Who are you?
It's really good to see you, Moira. I'm so happy things worked—
Fuck you, I said, rising, wobbly, my knees befuddled.
The teen sponging the counter at the cash register glanced over in our direction, smiled like employees in coffeehouses across the country smile at their patrons, like we've been fast friends forever, then returned to what she was doing, her smile wiped clean as the wood veneer beneath her palm.
One of her buddies stacked chairs upside-down on tables across the room.
UnAleyt appeared shocked by what I'd said.
Moira. Hey—
And you get exactly what out of all of thish?
Out of what?
Some stupid rush or something?
She read me as if reading a difficult calculus problem. Then she became two people with six eyes and four noses. They all asked:
You okay, hon?
I'm fuh-fuh-fuh-fine.
You don't look fine. You just went all pasty. Here. Let me have a—
Fuck you twice, I said, stepping past her, weaving for the door that immediately started skating away from me.
Have a great evening! the kid behind the counter called after what was left of Moira, and, next, icy night air was splashing my face, and her heart was banging hard and slow in the center of her brain, panicky and hurt, ashamed and rattled, fizzy and increasingly indistinct, and I was aiming myself across the parking lot, was bending over her Corolla, was sorting through the keys multiplying on my keychain, which is when UnAleyt's gloved hand landed on Moira's shoulder and loitered there, only Moira didn't pay any attention to it, she didn't pay attention to it some more, I just kept clinking through her options, and next the gloved hand squeezed.
Stop, Moi. Please. Really. Stop for a second here, okay? I don't get what just happened back there. What just happened back there? Tell me. What did I do that ticked you off so bad?
Moira kept clinking.
Look, UnAleyt said. I'm clueless. Help me out here. I think maybe you think I'm somebody I'm not, but I'm not. I'm me. Honest. I'm who you thought I was. Am. Aleyt.
Moira's keys were abruptly big and clumsy as tennis racquets, her hands small and jittery as mouse mitts.
You shouldn't be driving, honey, you know that? UnAleyt said.
Moira tried to shrug off her gray glove, but that only caused its twin to join in, caused the imposter to say: Come on over to my minivan, okay? We don't have to do anything or anything. We can just sit inside and listen to the radio and rest until you feel more like yourself. Remember how we used to lie in bed next to each other playing Sgt. Pepper's over and over on your plastic stereo? “A Day in the Life”? Remember? We can do that. We can drive to my place. We can have a sleepover. Jerry won't mind. And tough if he does. What about it? Whaddya say?
No we dinnit, Moira said. I dinnit have a plastic stereo and we dinnit meet the Beatles and you're making all thish shtuff uh—
I want to say that's when I found the right car key, I want to say it wasn't, I want to say that after some more fumbling I may or may not have snicked it into the lock, I may or may not have tried to add something to what I already thought I thought I had already added, although I'm not sure what that possibly could have been, I want to say that there may or may not have ensued a minor scuffle in the shadowy coffeehouse parking lot beneath a spindly undressed elm next to my desert-sand Corolla, then several thousand years passed, then a picosecond, and then I awoke in this place, wherever this place is, wherever it isn't, let's call it, what, let's call it a stuffy basement room with a mattress in the middle and bare brick walls all around and no windows in sight and a door whose knob turns both ways, clockwise and counter-clockwise, only when it does nothing happens, it may be bolted, unless it's stuck, there's always that option, too, it may be stuck, I feel drunk, and a space heater by that door and a brash bare fluorescent light hanging on wires from the ceiling like in a shed and a rickety side table with one leg shorter than the others on which are piled three of my videos and one blank cartridge and a camcorder and a pen and a marbled notebook in which I may or may not have started writing everything I know, everything I don't know, here, in this, I'm not really sure, maybe I haven't begun yet, maybe I will, maybe I won't, but what I'm sure of is that there is also a beat-up television with a built-in VCR player on the floor by the door, because I've watched them all, the videos, that is, I've watched them all, I recall that very well, I think, paying close attention, I recognized me in each one, on my bed at home, doing the things I did, except these aren't the cartridges I normally use, no, look at the label, they're somebody else's, these videos are copies of copies of the videos I made, I want to say, I think, I think I want to say, and who would have thought I'd become my own underground industry without knowing it because—