by David Arnold
“Go on, then.”
“You’re my best friend, Noah. Since we were twelve and I came out to you, and we whizzed out the window like the tiny bosses we were. You’re not everyone else to me. To me, you’re you. And I shouldn’t be everyone else to you. Four days ago you apologized for not being there for me, and I one hundred percent accept that apology, but part of being there for someone is not bullshitting them. You don’t wanna tell me something, fine. Just don’t blatantly lie about it and expect me to go along with that, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay. So. How’s your back?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my back, and there never has been.”
Alan rolls down the car window. “Cool. Now, let’s whiz out these windows.”
* * *
On the way to Ambrosia’s Bed & Breakfast, I recount to Alan the details of my conversation with Mr. Elam, and to Alan’s credit he never once shifts back to the fact I’ve been perpetuating a lie since summer. He doesn’t care that I don’t want to talk about it; he just doesn’t want me to lie to him.
“One plus one plus one equals one,” Alan says, repeating the last line of my story, about how Mr. Elam’s wife loved math, and how it factored into their family motto.
“Yeah.”
“But it doesn’t.”
“Alan.”
“What?”
I shake my head. “Almost hard to believe you were in remedial math.”
“You’re saying one plus—”
“I’m saying of course it doesn’t equal one. I’m saying if it was a family motto, it probably meant they were a family of three, but still one family.”
“Okay, that makes sense. But I’d like to go on record as not appreciating the remedial math dig.”
“It is so recorded.”
“What happened next?” asks Alan.
“He’d basically given me his whole life story and not once mentioned a kid. So I asked if he had one.”
“And?”
“And he showed me the door. That was Monday. Yesterday he was a no-show for the walk.”
“Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe his knee gave out or something. That happens sometimes to old people.”
“That happens sometimes to any people.”
“Wait, isn’t that it?” Alan points to the passing AMBROSIA’S BED & BREAKFAST sign in the front yard.
“Yeah, I’m gonna drive his route just in case, see if we can find him that way first.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t have the code, Alan, which means we’re ringing the doorbell, and I don’t know who’s going to answer, or if anyone even will answer, nor do I know how they’ll respond to my request to see one of their tenants because I’ve never known someone who lived in a bed-and-breakfast, so it’s kind of foggy protocol, okay?”
I can almost hear Alan’s blink. “It’s exhausting, isn’t it?” he says.
“What.”
“Being you.”
“You have no idea.”
I follow the route from Mill Grove to Ashbrook, both of us keeping our eyes peeled for Mr. Elam. Even with the heat on, the cold outside is beginning to seep through the windows. I crank it up a notch and zip up my jacket.
“So,” I say, eyes on the road. “You seeing anybody?”
“Am I seeing anybody? No, I’m not seeing anybody. Why, you looking?”
“You wish.” One hand on the steering wheel, I raise the other arm and kiss a bicep. “But seriously, you used to be, like—a serial dater.”
“I do love that Cap’n Crunch, though.”
“Come on. Talk to me. Let’s Dean and Carlo this bitch.”
“Noah.”
“Alan.”
“We’re currently freezing our walnuts off inside your fun gay ballsack, driving around the neighborhood, looking for some old guy with a goiter.”
“Dude, some respect.”
“Sorry. Looking for Mr. Elam. Point is, I can’t Dean and Carlo under such conditions.”
“What about Len?” I ask. “Or was that like a one-time thing?”
“Len who?”
“Kowalski.”
“What about him?”
“Len Kowalski.”
“Just saying his name over and over isn’t really helping, yo.”
“You know, your make-out session at the Longmire party. I didn’t know if maybe someth—”
“Hold up,” says Alan. “Me and Len Kowalski.”
“Yeah.”
“You saw me and Len Kowalski making out at the end-of-summer party at the Longmires’.”
“See, once you start saying his name, it’s hard to stop, right?”
“Len Kowalski?”
“Okay, let’s not get carried away,” I say.
“That little guy used to egg your house, or did you forget?”
“Alan, I’m not mad. People do all sorts of stuff they can’t remember when they’re high.”
“Okay, look. I’m honored to know that in some alternate universe you believe I made out with Len Kowalksi, and you still want to be friends with me. But dude, come on. None out of ten.”
“Really?”
“Afraid this falls squarely in the category of one of your changes. Never happened.” It’s quiet for a second, while Alan blows into his cupped hands. “You ever considered that, though?”
“Considered what.”
“An alternate universe.”
In the darkness of my desk drawer at home, I imagine an elegant list of four possibilities entitled WTF HAPPENED. “Sort of.”
“And?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I mean, I know it’s out-there, but—it’s a possibility, right?”
Shortly after writing my Concise History on the birth of the word multiverse, something had occurred to me that made that particular explanation, while not entirely impossible, highly improbable.
“What year did the Cubs win the World Series?” I ask.
“2016, I think?”
“And how long did they go between World Series wins?”
“I don’t know, like three hundred years?”
“And what happened on September eleventh?”
Alan gives me a look like, Come on.
I say, “And the President of the United States is . . . ?”
“Please, Noah. Don’t make me say his name.”
“Exactly.”
“What’s your point?”
“Point is, all the things that have changed revolve around me. I just can’t believe that’s how a parallel universe works, that my dog, who could barely walk across the living room without crapping himself, can now leap tall buildings in a single bound, but the Cubs couldn’t bring one home for a hundred and eight years.”
“I think you’re wrong about that.”
“It was definitely a hundred and eight.”
“Not that,” says Alan. “I mean your logic. I don’t know much about, you know . . .”
“Quantum theory?”
Alan nods. “But your entire conclusion negates the experience of Mr. Elam, Philip Parish, the Fading Lady—”
“Fading Girl.”
“Whatever. You know next to nothing about the origins of your Strange Fascinations. All you’re thinking about is how they relate to you and your life, but guess what? They have lives of their own. Maybe they’re dealing with similar shit, only you don’t know because you don’t know them.”
“Penny hasn’t changed. I know her.”
Alan takes a beat; then: “Do you?”
I can almost see her drinking that macchiato, claiming to have been born in the wrong decade. “So what, then? Penny, Mr. Elam, the Fading Girl, Philip Parish, the ghost of Mila Henry—you’re suggesting all o
f us, as a group, spontaneously fell into a wormhole and traveled to a parallel universe?”
“What I’m saying is, to you the changes revolve around Noah Oakman. But what if they don’t?”
Alan was right. How did I know the Fading Girl hadn’t changed, or Philip Parish, or Mila Henry? I didn’t. I’d taken what I knew of them, how they intersected with my life—a video, a photograph, a drawing—and condensed the unknown complexities of human beings down to single-cell organisms.
For all I knew, Mr. Elam once had an urn with the ashes of his pet rhinoceros.
Alan’s challenge still hangs in the air when I pull to a stop outside Ambrosia’s. Not surprisingly, Mr. Elam wasn’t out walking. I shut off the engine, and for a second we just sit there in the silent coldness.
“So.” Alan blows into his hands, his teeth a symphonic chatter. “Ringing the doorbell, yeah?”
I don’t know if there are other worlds out there, worlds where Alan hooked up with Len Kowalski, where Mr. Elam’s wife never got cancer, where I never followed Circuit that night. And while I may never know the possibilities of my many mirrored lives, I know the possibilities of this one.
I open my car door and climb out into the bitter cold. “Well, Alan, don’t just stand there.”
62 → floods
“Forgot to warn you,” I whisper, ringing the doorbell. “He loves bourbon.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think? Mr. Elam.”
“Conveniently, I, too, love bourbon.”
“But seriously, if we get in here today he’ll give you bourbon and drink you under the table.”
“Sweet. Let’s get liquored up and talk more about wormholes. Space-time contingencies, phantom theories and shit.”
“Quantum, Alan. It’s quantum theory. And space-time continuums. Or continua, I suppose.”
“Love it when you talk nerdy to me, yo.”
The door opens and an older woman with long silvery hair, big bright eyes, and the permanent imprint of a smile says, “May I help you?”
All told, this woman is lit up with more youth than most kids I know put together.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m here for— I was wondering about Mr. Elam.”
“You’re the one he’s been walking with every day. Thank you for that.” She angles her head up the stairs. “I don’t care what he says, Mr. George needs companionship more than he knows!” She rolls her eyes, lowers her voice. “He’s in a mood. Par for the course this time of year. You two, come in out of the cold and have some tea. I’ve got everything but those nasty dregs of the devil, Earl Grey.”
I recognize her voice as the one who’d greeted us Monday when we’d first walked in. And for the second time I step into the warmth of the entryway, the old rugs and thin-slatted hardwoods and distant crackling hearths of Ambrosia’s Bed & Breakfast wrapping me in its arms like a well-worn quilt.
“So he’s okay, then?” I ask.
The woman’s laugh is as bright as her eyes. “I don’t suppose I would go that far. But yes, Mr. George is his usual amount of okay. I’m Ambrosia, by the way.”
Alan and I take turns introducing ourselves, after which Miss Ambrosia ushers us into a nearby sitting room (the location of that crackling hearth) and then shuffles off to the kitchen for tea.
“This place is like . . .” Alan’s eyes rove around the room—the gold-framed pastoral paintings, the dark wood of the coffee table, the grandfather clock, the fizzing flames in the oversized fireplace. I feel it too, a deep and instinctive urge, three words firmly planted in the kid-psyche: Don’t touch anything.
Miss Ambrosia returns with a tray, which she sets on the coffee table. I have some vague recollection of drinking tea once: a soggy bag on a string, a few bitter sips, and I was out. But this is clearly a different experience altogether, almost ritualistic. There are saucers and strainers and multiple kettles and a little box of leaves (no bags or strings to be found), and just when I begin to wonder if Miss Ambrosia is messing with us, she says, “Four minutes to steep,” sets a timer on her wristwatch, and smiles at us over the table.
It’s weird for a second until Alan is all, “How ’bout dem Bears, though?”
“Alan.”
Miss Ambrosia waves me off. “Big game tomorrow. You give me twenty points, I’ll take the under. Best defense since ’85, but the offensive line is a sieve, don’t you think?”
Alan looks sideways at me, then says, “Ohhh-kay, see, we don’t actually speak football? Yeah, I was just being a douche.”
“Alan.”
“It’s quite all right,” Miss Ambrosia says. “I enjoy the look on young people’s faces when they see I know a thing or two about sports. Football is my favorite, though. Very strategic game. Not to mention all the skull-cracking.”
A surprise a minute, this one.
“So no football,” she says. “What sports do you like?”
Sometimes you’re in a room, talking sports with the elderly owner of a bed-and-breakfast while waiting on your loose-leaf tea to steep, and you wonder if life is inherently this random, or if you are.
“I like baseball,” I say.
“Camp Cubbie, yo.”
Miss Ambrosia looks from Alan back to me. “Camp Cubbie?”
I completely forgot about Camp Cubbie. “It’s nothing. Just this thing my dad put on when we were little kids—like a club—to make sure we grew into good Cubs fans.”
“Worked like a charm on that one,” says Alan, pointing at me. “Not so much on me. I mean, I get bits and pieces of different sports. Like football, for example. I know what a touchdown is.”
“That’s a start,” says Miss Ambrosia.
“And a down, I think.”
“Very astute,” she says.
“Also a sack,” says Alan, a coy smile growing on his face. “I know all about sacks.”
Before he can move on to his go-to sports metaphor about scoring with balls, I say, “Miss Ambrosia—”
“Just Ambrosia is fine,” she says.
“Okay. Ambrosia. We really appreciate the tea and whatnot, but we’re here to see Mr. Elam. I can’t really go into—”
The alarm on Ambrosia’s watch goes off, and she’s back in action. Before Alan and I know it, we’re balancing little saucers on our knees, trying not to clank the teacups around like the complete amateurs we are.
“Pure,” says Ambrosia between sips. “That’s the one word I use to describe a good cuppa. How do you boys like it?”
I cough, wipe my mouth with my sleeve. “Very pure.”
“Pure as the driven snow,” says Alan in a low voice.
“Alan.”
“Will you please stop saying my name like that?”
“Will you please grow up for like a half hour?” I take a giant sip for dramatic effect, which ends up scorching my tongue and throat.
Ambrosia smiles warmly over her saucer. “I like you boys. You remind me of my own when they were your age. Not without bickering, but that’s to be expected from those you love.”
“Makes sense,” says Alan. “Noah’s basically in love with me, so . . .”
The clinking china gives way to the ticking grandfather clock, which gives way to the popping fire, and even though we’re in no real hurry, I’m feeling a pressing sense of urgency. “Ambrosia . . .”
“You would like to see Mr. Elam,” she says, sipping her tea.
“If possible, yes.”
She nods once—sets her saucer on the coffee table, stands, and leaves the room.
“Dude,” says Alan.
“What?”
“You pissed her off.”
“I didn’t piss her off.”
Alan sips his tea with an elevated pinkie. “She gives us tea, pure as a joyous virgin, and this is how you repay her.”
“Shut up, Ala
n.”
Ambrosia returns with a manila envelope, hands it to me, her smile gone. “He asked not to see you anymore.”
I stand up, take the envelope, try to process how it relates to Mr. Elam not wanting to see me. “Okay. Is it . . . just me?”
“It’s got your name on it,” says Ambrosia.
“No, I meant—it’s just me he doesn’t want to see?”
“Yes,” she says; it sounds like an apology.
“Okay. Well. Okay, then. Thanks for the tea.”
Alan and I head toward the door when Ambrosia says, “‘On that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.’ Genesis, chapter seven.” The old woman’s voice is packed with expectation, like we’re both in on the same secret. “You know, in the Bible, Elam was Noah’s grandson.”
A beat of silence as this information sinks in. “Okay, that’s weird,” says Alan. “Am I the only one who thinks that’s weird?”
Ambrosia puts a hand on my shoulder. “Thank you. For helping him.”
“I didn’t do anything. We just talked.”
“Sometimes talking is doing something, Noah. You provided a lonely man with company. And company can be a restorative salve.”
When I think about Mr. Elam’s room—from the photos with no people, to the uniform leather-bound books, to his dead cat’s urn—the entire place radiates loneliness, and I can’t help but think the room is a reflection of the man.
“What happened to him?” I ask. “I mean—I know about his wife dying of cancer and all, but . . .”
Ambrosia flinches. “Is that what he told you?”
I nod, and she quietly begins a story, the story of a family on their way to Milwaukee for Thanksgiving, “going to see Mr. George’s sister,” she says, driving on I-94 when a truck driver heading in the opposite direction fell asleep at the wheel. “That truck drove right through the median and head-on into Mr. George’s car, killing Barbara and Matthew on impact, and it’s a flat-out miracle Mr. George got out with nothing but a limp. But he doesn’t see it that way. He thinks he should have died in their place, as if that’s even the way it works.”
