by Charles Yu
He thought things could go on like that indefinitely, with him going to work and pretending it had not happened and then coming home and not talking about it with Patricia. And he was not entirely sure that such a state of affairs would be wholly undesirable. At the very least, it was better than scaring her.
Then one day she came home and found David sitting on the couch, devastated. He had the TV remote in one hand, but the television was turned to a test signal. In his other hand he held a glass half full of warm bourbon.
"I don't understand how this happened," he said.
"How what happened?"
He thought she was kidding. He said nothing.
"How what happened?" she repeated.
He realized she was not kidding. Why was he hiding it from her? Eventually, she would find out. He decided to show her. He pointed at David, at himself, at his self.
"This," he said.
***
THE BASIC FACTS of his identity were the same as ever. His name was still David Howe. People still called him by this name when they were talking to him. Or, rather, when they were talking to David. When talking to one another, if they wanted to make reference to the person in the world associated with him, they said the words "David Howe" and everyone knew what they meant.
As far as he could tell, David was still the same age: forty-seven, soon to be forty-eight.
David still made the same salary, that certain amount of money transferred every two weeks out of the firm's account and into the possession of the legal entity known as David Howe. This amount was more than David rightfully deserved, and he knew it. A lot of other people knew it, too.
David still liked dogs over cats, beer over liquor, and hockey over football. David still cared about people, but only to the extent it made sense to care about them, and no further. These were the basic facts about David Howe and they did not change.
The first thing he noticed about David was that he noticed David.
For example, David's emotions. The basic range of David's emotions repeated itself in a fairly regular cycle: fear, desire, excitement, boredom, anger, envy. Not always in that order, but between those six feelings, most of David's waking hours were covered.
The difference was that now, when David felt something, he could observe it. He could watch the world through David's current emotional state like a slide in a projector, or as through a colored filter on a lens.
If David got angry, he could see the world through David's anger. It wasn't just the racing thoughts, the murderous impulses, or that he could feel David's face flushing bright red, David's pulse quickening. These things were not anger. It was that he knew a moment before David said something what David was going to say. He could see what anger itself looked like, how vaporous, unformed rage first cooled and condensed into fluid, volatile thought, how that liquid then crystallized around particles into individual words. He could see how David's anger was apparent to others long before David was actually angry, and long after David thought it had subsided.
Although he could watch the world as if he were every bit as angry as David, at the same time, if he wanted, he could stop. Even if David were in the middle of a rant or a tantrum or an intense fit of screaming, he could stop. Doing so did not cause any detectable wavering of David's conviction or decrease the intensity of David's anger. It was just that David's feelings were no longer his feelings. Feelings were optional, an activity, something he could do. He could choose to be angry along with David, or he could choose not to. It was as simple as that. He could do the same with happiness or sadness or jealousy. He liked the subtle variations between glee and gladness, envy and bitterness. He liked the kiddie emotions as well as the grown-up: indignation, ennui, nostalgia. David was predisposed to a postadolescent flavor of malaise in which a lot of gazing out the window was done. He liked this, too. He liked insouciance and cultivated indifference and plain old detachment. He could feel all of these, and more, just as David felt them. Still, when he looked in the mirror, he saw David. The harder he tried to concentrate, the more he saw only David. He had to remember. He was David.
Another change was that the past simply did not seem real anymore. Where he had gone to school, where he had worked, places he'd been. The things he had purchased, used, consumed, thrown away. All of it seemed like details in a story. But the story was not about him. David was the one who had gone to private school, who had a job at the big firm, who drove a new car. David was the one who had purchased and assembled a seven-thousand-dollar stereo system. David had been to Dublin, to Chiang Mai, to Buenos Aires. He had never been anywhere.
Sometimes he felt like a boy whose whole life had been spent upstairs in a small bedroom. All day long, he sat at his desk, drawing pictures and staring out the window at the backyard below, where nothing ever happened. He had been doing this for almost half a century when, one day, in walked another person who looked just like him. This person put his things down and went to another desk and began drawing his own pictures and he realized that in all those years, his whole life up to that point, he had not been living in that room alone. There had been another boy in there with him, sitting on the other side of the room, staring out an opposing window with a different view. The other boy's view was of the front yard, where everything happened. Out of that window, the other boy could watch neighbors and friends chatting, mailmen doing their jobs, kids playing, strange men driving slowly down the block and then back again. This other person went in and out of the room whenever he felt like it. He went downstairs for dinner every night. He went away to school for a while and came back grown up. This other boy, now a man, had read books, slept with women, smoked pot, married, cheated on his wife, gone to church on Easter and Christmas, and all the while he had never left the room. This other boy was David Howe and they had lived in that cramped space within feet of each other for their entire lives, breathing the same air, hearing the same sounds, sleeping together under the low ceiling, and they had never spoken, never even noticed each other. It was as if he was in the first person and David Howe was in the third person and between them was an immense chasm of silence.
And even though he now knew about David, he was fairly certain David still had no idea who he was. He did not know if David was even capable of finding out.
The only time he thought David might have some clue about his existence was in David's dreams.
In one of these dreams, which was more of a nightmare, David was the captain of a lonely boat. It was a fast, sleek, powerful boat, but it was still lonely. There was no one on it except David. He stood at the helm in an immaculate captain's uniform, steering the boat across glittering blue green water, glassy and endless.
The nightmare part was that in the dream, the world was completely silent. Not one sound. Not a bird nor a breeze nor any sea life jumping into the air, not a wave slapping against the boat. The speeding prow just sliced through the ocean without resistance, without any drag or pitch, as if the boat were made of something weightless and the water could do nothing but slide off its smooth, impervious hull.
In another of his dreams, David dreamed of a man, a man who was not David. The man lived on a remote island too tiny to be on any map. The entire island was the size of a small house.
In this dream, the man could not remember ever having been off the island. No one had ever visited the island and, as far as he could tell, no one even knew he existed. The man had nothing to do except think about the boat. The man knew about the boat because once a bottle had floated to his island and inside was a picture of the captain on his boat. The man did not know what to do with it, so he kept it safe, buried in the dry sand, and, once a day, dug it out and looked at it.
In this dream, the man survived by catching small fish off his little beach. While he fished, he thought about the captain in his boat. The picture when he found it had already been faded and mostly ruined by salt water and the sun, but the man could plainly see that it was a beautiful boat. He wondered about
the captain, if they would ever meet.
All day long, the man fished and slept and occasionally swam out a bit into the cove, as if this might get him just that much closer to the boat. At night, he closed his eyes and pictured the captain out there in the vast oceans of the world, gliding across the face of the calm, deep water, never stopping.
***
AS THE WEEKS and months passed, he grew more accustomed to being David. Not everything was for the worse. A few pleasures remained. Some were even heightened. He liked to hear music through David's ears. Rachmaninoff or Mahler. He liked David's taste in food, his preference for very hot showers. He enjoyed going to the outdoor market on Saturday mornings, especially when it rained, standing under the tarp in the middle of all the produce crates, hearing the pelting drops, the scent of ripe apples and the slightly metallic smell of rain rising off the wet pavement.
He also began to understand more than David's emotions. He began to understand belief and doubt in David, faith and knowledge, forgetting and remembering. He learned that although David felt plenty of shame and guilt, David did not feel sorry. David never felt sorry. He was sorry, but David never was.
In fact, being sorry was the only thing he did that David did not do. He began to suspect that the whole purpose of this, this thing that had happened, his whole purpose, apart from David's purposes, was to do just that. To be sorry. Not to feel sorry: If one could feel sorry, then David would have been doing it. David liked to feel everything. David was a feeling addict.
He knew David was never sorry because, in the past, David never apologized to Patricia, even when he was wrong. Now, when David raised his voice or was quicktempered or inconsiderate with her, he would try to make David apologize. Most of the time, David's mouth resisted and the words came out sounding twisted and cruel or callous or insincere. But once in a while, when David was drowsy or not paying attention, he could sneak in and say something without David interfering.
It often happened on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon when David was lying on the couch, watching television, and Patricia walked through the room, just going about her business, going about her life, not complaining much, not even complaining at what her husband had become or was becoming. He would wait until she was past him, almost out of the room, and quickly, softly, as if exhaling, he would whisper, "I'm sorry ... for ... all of ... this." She would look confused, but he could tell it touched her.
Still, in time, David and Patricia drifted further apart. He began to feel that he would never be sure whether she knew or not. Sometimes he was sure she did. Sometimes he was sure she didn't. How it was possible that the woman who had lived with David for fourteen years could have trouble seeing something so obvious, seeing all that he was becoming or had become or would become, seeing him in all of his grotesque proportion and fleshy solidity, he did not claim to understand. Only that it made a kind of perverse sense: that the person closest to him would be least likely, or perhaps least able, to be shocked.
Throughout the autumn, many nights passed during which neither of them said a word. It seemed to get colder by the hour. Evenings they usually stayed in the same room, in the den with the heat turned up all the way. They ate dinner and then cleaned up in silence. After, David would read in the corner, an entire magazine cover to cover or, once in a while, a biography, slightly foxed, that he'd first read in college. Patricia would sit on a dusty old chair they'd bought together as newlyweds and grade her students' compositions.
Some evenings, if she finished early, she'd go to the kitchen and pour David a scotch and usually a sip of wine for herself. David would say thank you and they would sit there silently, drinking a bit, then a bit more.
On some cold, bright nights, the moon in the window, filling the room with light, they would fall asleep facing each other: David on his left side, Patricia on her right, David's hand on her hip. On these nights, he could wake up an hour or two before dawn, while David was still dreaming of boats and islands, and listen to Patricia's nose make those small fluttering noises. He would lie there inside David's body, feeling its gurgling machinery, it softly emptying and filling itself with air, just waiting until sunrise. He considered these to be good nights.
Then there were very good nights, when David had worked late or had an extra few drinks and David's body was especially tired. Being inside on those nights was like lying submerged in a bathtub filled with maple syrup. Interesting but not entirely pleasant. He could feel David's fatigue as a kind of viscosity, a massiveness. He knew David wouldn't be up for hours, and on these very good nights, he could do more than listen and lie there. On these nights, after waking, he would wait a few minutes, just to be sure, and then he would begin.
He was not entirely sure what he was doing. It was not moving. More like agitating or even resonating. It was his version of shouting, kicking, and flailing. Inside David's heavy, sleeping mass, he was small, slight, nearly weightless. But through monumental effort, he could force David's eyes open while David still slept. He strained, he agonized, he clung to every millimeter of progress. Slipping back into sleep would be defeat. More than defeat. Oblivion. He did not get these chances often and losing one was crushing. He never knew when or if he would ever get one again. He would usually have to force one eyelid open first, then the other. The second one was always easier. He had no idea how long it took. It could have been only a minute, but it felt like hours.
Once he had David's eyes open, his next task was to use David's voice box. With practice, he had gotten to the point where he could manage small whimpering noises, like a confused animal. He was not sure how David looked and sounded to Patricia. He guessed that what she saw was probably not what he intended.
What she saw was not his thrashing and flailing inside. That only registered as mild pain or discomfort or bewilderment. What she saw was the body of her husband lying there, jaw slack, eyes watery and motionless. The first time she saw this, the first time he was able to open David's eyes and quietly stare at her in the dark, she was so terrified she fell out of bed and onto the hard floor, waking David.
But with each instance, she became less alarmed. In time, she seemed to understand that the person she was looking at was David and was not David, was her husband but was also a stranger.
They would lie there together, Patricia in her body and him in David's body and he would look at her, look right at her without any of David's knowledge or memory or guilt, he would look at her like he had never seen anything in the world before, like he did not know his own name or hers. Patricia would sit up in bed and take David's head in her lap and they would just look at each other, and for a few minutes, it did not matter what he had become, what had happened, what they could do about it. It did not matter where the boat captain was, where he was headed, where he had been. She was fine not knowing anything about him, and he was fine not knowing anything at all. He was fine just lying there inside that softly slumbering body as she stroked David's hair, saying to him, over and over again, I know, I know, I know, I know, while on the other side of the world, in his silent, gleaming boat, David sailed and sailed around the unending ocean.
Problems for Self-Study
1. TIME T EQUALS ZERO
A is on a train traveling due west along the xaxis at a constant velocity of seventy kilometers per hour (70km/h). He stands at the rear of the train, looking back with some fondness at the town of (6,3), his point of departure, the location of the university and his few friends. He is carrying a suitcase (30kg) and a small bound volume (his thesis; 0.7 kg; 7 years).
Using the information given, calculate A's final position.
2. Assume A is lonely. Assume A is leaving (6,3) in order to find someone who could equal his love of pure theory. A says to himself, "No one in a town like (6,3) could possibly equal my love of pure theory." Not even P, his esteemed adviser and mentor.
A suspects P is a closet empiricist, checking his theory against the world instead of the other way around.
A o
nce barged in and caught P, hunched over his desk, with a guilty but pleasured look on his face, approximating, right there in his office.
3. RELATIVE MOTION
Across the train car, A spots B. Assume B is lovely.
(a) A immediately recognizes that B is not a physicist.
(b) Still, he calculates his approach.
(c) A wonders, Into what formula do I plug the various quantitative values of B? Could B, A wonders, though she clearly lacks formal training in mechanics, ever be taught, in some rudimentary sense, to understand the world as I do?
(d) A notes her inconsistent postulates. Her wasted assumptions. Her lovely inexactness.
(e) He decides to give her a test.
(f) A says: If a projectile is launched at a 30-degree angle to the earth, with an initial velocity of 100 m/s, how far does it travel?
(g) B notes his nervous and strange confidence, his razor-nicked chin, his tie too short by an inch, an uncombed tuft of hair. She is charmed.
(h) B humors A.
(i) B says: Well, doesn't it depend on how windy it is?
( j) Ignore the wind, says A.
(k) But how can I ignore the wind?
(l) Ignore the wind, says A.
(m) Are you saying there is no wind?
(n) A says, The wind is negligible. He says this with a certain pleasure. The other passengers roll their eyes.
(o) A says, It does not matter for the purposes of the problem. Besides, A says, it makes the math too hard.
(p) A looks at B's dumb, expectant, beautiful face. He feels pity for her meager understanding of physics. How can he explain to her what must be ignored: wind, elephants, cookies, air resistance. And: the morning dew, almost everything in newspapers, almost everything owing to random heat dissipation, the taste of papaya. And: the mass of the projectile, the shape of the projectile, what other people think, statistical noise, the capital of Luxembourg.
