Alien Worlds

I have no idea who I am right now.

I flew into Houston in one time-line, switched multiverses there, and returned home as a new unfamiliar being.

The first time this ever happened was after my parents announced their decision to divorce. The day had started one way, with Pop-tarts, checking on the salamanders in the basement window well, collecting crab-apples at the bottom of the hill, making a willow tree whip to snap at the target I had drawn on the driveway with a chalky rock.

And it ended another way, with my mother and brothers piled into the car, heading two hours south to my grandparent’s farm for the weekend while my father packed his things and moved out of our family house.

My grandparents had just gotten back from a trip to Hawaii, and I was convinced they weren’t my grandparents. They felt strange to me. Off. They were tanned. My grandmother seemed to have lost weight. She looked taller, her neck longer. This couldn’t be my beloved, familiar, comfortable grandmother. She was an alien. She had been body-snatched. I didn’t say a word to anyone because I didn’t want the alien to know that I knew this was not my grandmother.

She came upstairs after I’d settled myself in the four-poster bed with the goose feather mattress, as if she knew how particularly horrifying this day had been for me specifically. She hugged me tight, her beaded necklace pressing into my cheek. I didn’t hug the alien back. She wasn’t my grandmother after all.

The next morning Alien Grandma and Alien Grandpa made the same big breakfast they always made when the grandkids were there. Kix cereal with blueberries like on the box, and cinnamon swirl toast from the magic old toaster that just swallowed the toast slowly and automatically without a lever.

My old grandparents were gone, but these new ones were pretty close, even though there was something obviously not-the-same about them. But they were nice, and loving, and seemed to think that I was someone they already knew and loved, and I decided to get used to them.

I was ten years old the first time I switched from one multiverse to another, but it was just the first of many switcheroos. Sometimes it would happen after a small, seemingly inconsequential act or event that would suddenly reveal itself to me as a single gesture that would change everything forever. Sometimes the switch was obvious – moving states and cities, leaving careers, and starting new ones, getting married, having the baby I would raise to adulthood placed in my arms for the first time.

Sometimes the switch was dramatic: 9/11, a car accident that no one should have survived, a ruptured appendix, news of the death of a mortal enemy or a dear friend, a cancer diagnosis, a pandemic.

Derealization. That was what my psychological training taught me to call it. A kind of dual consciousness where nothing seems real, even though one retains the awareness of the sensation of unreality. A transitional symptom, sticking around for a longer or shorter period after a shock or a reorganizing, disorienting, life-changing event.

It has even happened once before in Houston, of all places. I was twenty and took a wild leap, leaving college to audition to be an acting apprentice at a regional theater.  I sobbed and sobbed after the audition was scheduled, because I knew, even before I booked the tickets to fly in and present my monologues, that the world would change permanently and again.

Forty years later I flew again to Houston, knowing that I wouldn’t come back the same no matter what. Two years of wonky results on flow cytometry testing seemed to suggest that there were persistent re-emergences of leukemia/lymphoma cells  - miniscule values, inconsistent, disappearing and reappearing. The local doctors assumed that there would be correspondence or correlation between the disordered cells in my blood and those drifting up and down my cerebrospinal fluid. But my own lived experience told me they were divorced, that the presence or absence of low amounts of leukemia in a blood test said nothing at all about whether leukemia was impossibly present in my central nervous system.

I flew to Houston because I wasn’t ready to accept the local doctor’s decision to put me back on a hard and disabling chemotherapy with so little data.  It was time to get back in the care of a specialist  who had seen rare and unique cases before and wasn’t frightened by so much uncertainty. I flew into Houston prepared for a battery of painful, claustrophobic, and invasive tests. Instead, they reviewed my case history, my past results, drew seventeen vials of blood and then told me my case was resolved. No tests, no treatment needed.

There was an immediate rush of relief, giddy mania, a wild frenzy to check out of the medical hotel in the hospital district and check into a downtown hotel with a pool deck and room service.

And then a tidal wave of exhaustion.

And then I became the alien, as my inner world opened out onto a strange flat horizon, a completely empty inner space. Not happy or unhappy. No joy, no distress, no desires, no preferences, no wish list, no urgency. An emptiness, a detachment that I have only read about in Buddhist texts and sutras – a state that seemed impossible to attain- and probably not worth pursing – by effort. Peaceful. Neutral. Totally desireless.

The timeline had switched again, and it did not deposit me “back” in an old or familiar world, but plopped me in a new one, unknown and unknowable, beyond anyplace I have been before.

Nothing at all ahead of me except whatever might emerge.

Cancer, who has been a profound teacher for the past seven years, had finished the semester, and handed me my final assignment for the time being. School was out, and I had been suddenly released from classes with no plans, no goals, no aspirations. Graduating at all had been a such long shot that I had no plans for after.

I came home to my children, my husband, my home, my animals, and they all seemed familiar enough. But I wonder if I came back a little off, my neck a little longer, a little alien?  Do they notice that I “returned”  to them from another realm? Surely the dogs smell it. I am an alien inserted into a story, an actor in a dream where I am playing a character in a secure remission that I don’t quite know how to inhabit.

I suspect there is a Martha I switched stories with – one turned upside down with a spigot in her spine dripping cerebrospinal fluid like maple syrup into a bucket, one that is gritting her teeth as they bore into her hip bone with a hand drill, one learning all about new treatment options, one snoring the day away on valium after her second set of MRIs without contrast this time. I left her back there somewhere.

And somehow, I stepped out of her shoes, and into these new brand-new ones in a strange new world. They seem nice and comfortable enough, and I suspect that after some time as a strange new person, in a new world, in new shoes, surrounded by those who seem to know and love me, that I’ll get used to it in time.