“Come in,” a feminine voice trills from inside, and I push open the door. A middle-aged woman sits typing on her computer. Her blond hair is folded into a glossy updo. A bookshelf holds a dusty, leather-bound set of encyclopedias that I would guess to be at least one hundred years old. Otherwise the office is entirely modern, ergonomic chairs and the latest touch screen devices.
“May I help you?”
“Um, yes, I’m Charles, Charles Lang? Peter said to stop by HR to pick up some paperwork.”
The woman doesn’t respond, instead diving into a filing cabinet beneath her desk. She emerges with a manila envelope marked with my name.
“Make sure to get your paperwork completed and signed by the end of the week,” she says, handing me the envelope. She then checks the Post-its lining the edge of her computer monitor. She plucks one from the right corner.
“Also,” she continues, “you have an appointment with Katherine DeFazio on the first floor”—she checks her watch —“five minutes ago. You better get going. She’s in room 106.”
“I’m sorry, who’s Katherine DeFazio?”
“I don’t know. I’m just the messenger.” The woman returns to her typing.
I enter the adjacent stairwell and trample down the steps. Who’s Katherine DeFazio and why didn’t Peter tell me about our meeting yesterday? I wonder if she’s a client of ours, if she’s expecting me to have something prepared. I lick my lips over and over again, my mouth arid. Ava shares in none of my anxieties, instead giggling and pulling on my hair as if I’m some sort of carnival ride. Ava—I didn’t consider how inappropriate it might be for me to bring a small child to a meeting. I suppose it’s too late to do anything about that.
Room 106. Katherine DeFazio, MFT. I pause for a moment. The black letters look crooked. There’s an amateurish quality to them. They look like they’ve been spray-painted onto the door with a stencil.
“Mr. Lang?” A young woman pokes her head out of the room. She’s beautiful, her dark, straight hair cropped short in a bob. She wears a warm shade of red lipstick that makes her seem mature, although she’s at least several years younger than me. She has thin, fine eyebrows reminiscent of a doll’s, the kind of wide eyes preteens reserve for celebrities.
“Um, yes, yes, that’s me. Charles, you can call me Charles.”
“Katie. Katie DeFazio,” the young woman says, sticking out her hand. “Why don’t you come inside?”
I shake Katie’s hand and follow her into the room, shifting Ava up onto my shoulders. The office is not what I expected. The sharp fluorescence of the lab has been replaced by the glow of flickering candles. A violet hydrangea sits on a coffee table next to a box of tissues. Several watercolor paintings hang on the walls, depicting meandering sunsets, flowers blooming in springtime, and a sailboat drifting away at sea. I sit down on one of the couches as the woman lowers herself into a black leather chair across from me. Ava wriggles down onto the rug, playing with the marionette of the girl.
“Sorry, I didn’t—”
“Don’t worry, I love children.” Katie takes a folder out of the desk and opens it on her lap. I notice she keeps sneaking glances at me. I shift my gaze downward, studying the backs of my hands.
“Katie, would you mind telling me what we’re meeting about?”
Katie’s cheeks flush bright red. “You mean, Peter didn’t tell you?”
“I can’t say that he did.”
“Well then.” For a moment, it almost seems like she’s rehearsing something under her breath. “Well, we’re going to be meeting over the next several weeks, to see how you’re feeling. How you’re adjusting.”
“Like a therapist?”
“You could say that. Sorry for the surprise. Peter mentioned that it was a condition of your resumed employment?”
“I suppose that makes sense.” I look up. Katie smiles, an earnest smile. I don’t know if it’s real or not. She looks even younger sitting down, like she’s barely out of college.
“Would you mind telling me what’s in the file?” I ask. “Not every single detail, just, you know, any main points. If that’s okay.”
“Of course.” Katie opens the file, skims through it.
“Well, there’s not much, hmm, all right, two and a half years ago, patient reported the disappearance of his wife, Julie, and daughter, Jess … continued with position at the lab but coworkers reported observing increasingly manic and depressive behaviors … psychiatric evaluation inconclusive but suggestive of posttraumatic stress disorder … January 31, 2010, psychotic episode while at the lab … and then nothing has been recorded since then … is this difficult to hear?”
“No, it’s helpful, actually. Sort of. Peter mentioned that I had an aneurysm six months ago?”
“Right. Peter did say something about that.”
We sit in silence. Ava manipulates the marionette onto the coffee table.
“So how are you, Charles? How are you feeling today?”
“I … I—” The room swirls and fades around me.
November 14, 2004
Age Twenty-Six
Julie sits on the floor of the living room, her legs splayed out to one side. Her hair coils down her back, dragging across the ground, like a snake in waiting. Charles squats down beside her, frowning slightly. He’s still in his slacks and a dress shirt from work. Towers of cardboard moving boxes surround them as well as an entire militia of marionettes. Julie hums to herself as she helps the marionettes to their feet, allowing them to interact with one another. Charles touches Julie’s arm.
“What’s wrong?” Julie says without looking up. She adjusts the shirt collar on one of the marionettes, sewing a rip.
“The baby was crying, you know. Just now. I fed her and rocked her to sleep. Did you even hear her?”
“I was distracted. I’m sorry.”
“You spend all day with those marionettes. I’m beginning to worry.”
“Trust me, Charles. It’ll all come together.”
“Julie.”
“They were a gift from my mother.” Julie clutches the marionette to her chest, her eyes wide like a scared child. She looks fragile enough to break into a million little pieces. “You don’t like them, do you?”
Charles turns so that he’s facing Julie. He does his best to soften his tone. “It’s not that. I just don’t understand why they’re so important to you.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you why.”
“Try me.”
“Well, they have answers. They exert influence, and if you ask them the right questions, if you can learn to understand their language …”
“Answers? Like what sorts of answers?”
“They’re predictive, in a way. If you know the questions to ask, the way to feel the answers.”
“What do you mean?”
“How do you think we came to bump into each other that night at the tavern? How do you think I knew when to be there?”
“It was coincidence. Chance. Luck.”
“It was meant to be. It was a story my mother had told me over and over again, when I was little. I just hadn’t realized what it meant at the time.”
“Julie, you can’t honestly believe in all that, can you?”
Tears well up in Julie’s eyes, her eyelids quavering in the face of a flood. She hadn’t always been this delicate. She had been stronger, fierce even, but since they had reconnected, since they had had Jess, there was just something intangibly different about Julie, something fleeting.
Charles rises, folding his arms across his chest. He remembers a dream he had the night they slept together in the cave, a dream he had decided not to tell Julie in the morning. The dream had involved an image of himself, his dream self, sleeping side by side in the cave with Julie. Except that in the dream, he had awakened in the middle of the night to a strange burning sensation in his hands and feet. He had looked down to discover that extending from his wrists and knees were two sets of long, woven strings continuing out of t
he cave, through the stars, and past the moon to a wooden cross in the middle of the universe. Every once in a while the strings would pull up or down, causing his arms and legs to move. The next morning, as he’d pulled on his damp, dusty clothes, Charles had told himself that it was just a dream. He repeated this again and again, not wanting to admit to himself that a part of him was sure the dream was real.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I overreacted,” Charles finally says. He sits down again on the floor, taking Julie’s wet face in his hands and kissing her forehead. She crumples against him, lighter, less solid than she should be. “But if you’re right, what does that mean? That we have no free will? That everything is fated?” Julie doesn’t answer. “What about my parents? Were they just destined to die?”
Julie wipes her nose and kisses the back of Charles’s neck, underneath the tuft of hair in the area she calls his kiss garden. There’s something ghostly about the way her lips graze his flesh. “It’s just a way of getting information. Isn’t that what scientists spend their entire lives doing? Looking for ways to read the world? This is just the way my family learned to do it. My grandmother taught my mother and my mother taught me.”
“And what if the marionettes tell you something you don’t want to know? What then?” The night is too dark. The air is too still.
“I don’t ask questions like that,” Julie murmurs. Her voice grows fainter. Charles reaches to take hold of her as she dissolves away into the nighttime.
“CHARLES, HOW ARE YOU FEELING?” KATIE ASKS THE question again. Ava continues to play with the marionette. I look up at a clock across the room. The second hand ticks by. It feels like hours have gone by, but no time has passed. The rest of the session remains uneventful, and after we finish, I hardly remember what we’ve discussed.
I take the elevator back upstairs and slide my keycard into the slot. Ava hangs down around my shoulders, her small fingers sunk into the grooves of my shirt collar. The doors open and I step inside the lobby, empty except for a dark-haired man in a lab coat. He whistles to himself behind the counter in the kitchenette. He stirs his coffee in time with the whistling, using the disposable wooden stick to conduct. For a moment, I’m sure I’m hallucinating, or maybe still in a memory.
“Steve?”
The man glances up, startled. “Charles? Is that you?”
Steve looks practically the same as he did in high school, the same nest of black curls, the same round spectacles and flushed cheeks, except that he’s taller, slimmer, a slight hunch to his shoulders, wrinkles skirting across his forehead. He sets down his cup of coffee.
“Uncle Steve!” Ava squeals. She swings down as if dismounting from the jungle gym on a playground.
“May I?” Steve asks. I nod. He scoops her into the air, swirling her around and around, enveloped by a chorus of giggles that seem like they’re coming from more than one little girl.
“No more! No more!” she finally gasps, and Steve sets Ava down, plopping a big kiss on her head.
“Now you go run around, honeybunch, and don’t get into any trouble.”
As Ava streaks down the corridor, Steve turns to me. There’s a strange look in his eyes, something indiscernible, almost like excitement and sadness and apprehension all mixed into one.
“I take it you two know each other?”
“You used to bring her around quite a bit. I’ve missed her. She’s grown so much in the past six months.”
I pause. “And I imagine we’ve been working together for a while as well?”
Steve nods. “About three years. Give or take a few months.”
“Am I okay, Steve? Am I going to be okay?”
“Of course, Charles. Your memory will come back. You’re going to be fine.”
“Can I ask you—”
“Yes, of course.”
“How did it come about? The two of us working together? All I can remember is being kids and then you running away …”
Steve takes off his glasses. He massages the ridge of his nose. “I know. I wish I’d done things differently, but it was all I could think to do at the time.”
“Where were you? Julie and I couldn’t believe you’d just left us.”
Steve turns to watch Ava for a moment. She loops back toward us, chattering away to the marionette. “I bummed around Europe for a while, Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic, crashed on couches or in the street, did odd jobs for folks. Eventually I saved up enough money to get to London, applied to school, got a scholarship. I studied bioengineering, met Richard. We decided to move back to the States. I called you when I got back. I thought you would hate me. I was kind of afraid you wouldn’t even remember me. I know that sounds crazy but it had been over ten years since we’d last talked. You were kind, though. Empathetic. You got me an interview with Genutech.”
“What did I say? Did I tell you about anything that had happened since you left?”
“A little. Not much. I really had to pull it out of you. You told me that your parents had died, that you were living in their old house. That you had married Julie. That you had a daughter named Jess.”
“Did you meet her? Did you get to meet Jess? What was Julie like then?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t get to see either of them when I moved back, before they …” Steve frowns. “Well, I kept suggesting we all get together but it never quite worked out, and then a few months later … I think you were too nice to say it, but I’m pretty sure Julie wanted nothing to do with me. Which I get. Ultimately it was my fault. I just took off. It was a selfish thing to do.” Steve checks his watch. “Sorry, Charles, I have a meeting to get to, but I’m glad you’re back.”
“Steve?”
“Mmm?”
“Do I seem different to you?”
Steve’s smile sinks, his words anchored down. “I have to go, Charles. I’ll see you soon.”
Before I can say anything else, Steve has already disappeared, leaving behind nothing but the discarded stirrer from his coffee. Ava abandons the marionette, bored, and tugs on my sleeve. “Can we go see the jellyfish?”
“Sure thing. It’s about time I updated my notes.”
Ava claps her hands together, grinning as I unlock the door to my room at the lab. The blinds are open on the windows above the tanks and shades of orange and pink smear across the wall in the early morning light. Ava presses her face up to the glass, mesmerized by the luminous bodies of the jellyfish, the way they swoop around each another, their tentacles reacting warmly to one another’s touch.
“They seem so peaceful. They’re like angels,” Ava whispers, as if talking any louder will disturb the jellyfish. I can see what she means, the way the jellyfish just sway from side to side with every vibration of the water. I make my rounds, recording the progress of my experiments, examining marine samples in petri dishes under the microscope, thinking about how grateful I am that the memory loss left my scientific knowledge un-harmed. The tanks are so tall that I have to stand on a footstool to reach into each one, rubber glove up to my right elbow, taking each jellyfish into my hand so that I can inspect it more closely and describe any changes in coloration, size, or behavior. Several of the tanks hold the jellyfish that are part of the control group, while others have been exposed to various chemical catalysts. About two-thirds of the tanks appear empty, but in reality, each contains a tiny sample of undifferentiated cells in a miniature incubation chamber at the bottom. I make my way around the room until I reach the last tank, my eyes fastened to my clipboard, searching for patterns.
I almost don’t notice it, distracted by the numbers and figures already written down, but just as I’m about to step down from the footstool, I see a slight glint out of the corner of my eye. Inside the incubation chamber is a tiny, iridescent jellyfish, shimmering silver and purple in the water. I blink once, twice, wanting to make sure I’m not imagining it, that I don’t have something in my eye. But no, the truth is that from just a few transdifferentiated cells, I’ve created a life.
January 29, 2004
Age Twenty-Six
Julie asks Charles to meet her in the park. The day feels like January, the air clear and crisp, slightly wet. Charles pulls his scarf more tightly around his neck, checks to make sure the rose is still safely stowed in his breast pocket. Charles finally spots Julie standing beneath a broad oak tree, her cheeks pink with the cold. He jogs up to her and wraps his arms around her, pecking her on the lips. Charles takes out the rose and hands it to Julie.
“What’s this for?” Julie says.
“I know it’s probably silly, but it’s been exactly a month since we saw each other at the tavern, and I just wanted to give you a little something,” Charles says.
“The color is … well, it’s brilliant. I’ve never seen a color quite like it.” The rose is somewhere between deep violet and blue, a color that seems to shift in the sunlight. Julie smiles and tucks the rose into her bag. She takes Charles’s hand and leads him to a bench to sit down.
“Charles, there’s something I need to tell you.”
“Is something wrong?”
“I—I’m pregnant,” Julie says. For several moments, it feels like time freezes. The wind grows still, the birds perching silently, the woman by the drinking fountain pausing midstep. Charles holds Julie in his arms, brings her close into his chest so that her head is burrowed into his shoulder. Julie looks up at Charles and when their eyes meet, they both grin.
“We’re going to have a baby,” Charles says, barely able to contain his excitement.
“Yes, we are!” Julie starts to laugh. “I was so scared to tell you. I don’t know why. I thought maybe you would freak out or be angry or something.”
Charles takes Julie’s chin in his hand and kisses her. “I love you, Julie. I want to marry you. I want to have children with you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and the fact that we’ve created something beautiful together is just, it’s spectacular.”
Julie squeezes Charles’s hand. “I feel the same way.”
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