Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

The Real Alan Gass

He’s been living with her for not quite a year when Claire first mentions Alan Gass.

“I think I need to tell you about something,” she says. “About someone.”

Walker turns down the stereo above the fridge and readies himself for whatever comes next. They are in the kitchen — formerly her kitchen, now their kitchen. The butter crackles around the edges of the potatoes he is frying in a big cast-iron pan. He runs his hand through his dark hair, as if exhausted. If she confesses an affair, what will he do? First, switch off the burner. Second, grab his jacket and go without a word. The third step could involve fast walking, tears, and possibly a stop at the liquor store. Beyond that, it’s hard to say.

Claire is on the other side of the kitchen island with her laptop open, an old black T-shirt sagging down her left shoulder, a turquoise bra strap exposed. Until now, she’s been quietly at work. She no longer takes classes, but when she did, they had titles like “Advanced Topics in Sub-Subatomic Forces.” Thanks to a graduate fellowship, she spends most days on the top floor of the physics building at the university, thinking about a theoretical particle called the daisy.

The daisy is a candidate for the smallest particle in the universe, but no one has devised a way to observe or prove the existence of one. Doing so would probably require re-creating the conditions of the Big Bang, which everyone seems to agree would be a bad idea. The wider academic community has not fully embraced Daisy Theory, as it’s called. Claire’s advisor came up with it, and, like him, Claire believes the mysterious particle is forever locked in a curious state of existence and nonexistence, sliding back and forth between the two. Daisy Theory has helped put Claire’s physics department on the map.

“I haven’t mentioned him until now because”—she scratches her chin with her chipped electric-blue fingernail—“I was embarrassed, I guess.”

“Just tell me,” he says, wanting this over with quickly.

“All right, here it is. Okay. I’m kind of married.”

“Kind of?” He doesn’t understand. Typically, one is or isn’t married. He races through the possibilities: she’s separated from someone and failed to mention it until now; or rather, she met and married a mysterious man on the sly; or, not a man, but a woman, and what she wants to propose next is an open relationship. No, more likely this is a new and clever update on the same old fight they have about time and priorities. She’s married to her research, and he just needs to get that through his head.

“No, what I mean to say is, sometimes at night, when I dream, I dream I have a husband.”

“A dream marriage,” he says. “Okay.” He kills the burner under the pan and scrapes the potatoes onto the plates where already the green beans have gone cold.

“Tell me what you’re thinking. Does this bother you? You’re not the man in the dream.”

“Just so I’m clear,” he says. “This isn’t you telling me that you’re cheating on me?”

“I’m not cheating on you. Not unless you count dreams as cheating. Do you?”

Walker wonders if this is an elaborate test; if, maybe, he muttered some other woman’s name in his sleep the previous night. Although he sometimes dreams about sex, in the morning the details of his encounters are usually hazy and impressionistic, with floating parts that don’t connect to a specific face. He doesn’t mention this now. A dream marriage, if that’s really what this is about, should probably not bother him. He tells her so.

“So it doesn’t concern you that I’m in love with someone else in my dreams?” she asks.

“You didn’t mention love.”

“Well, I married him, didn’t I?”

“Do I know the guy? Have I met him? Please don’t tell me it’s your advisor.”

Whenever she talks about needing more time for her research, Walker knows, that includes more time alone with her advisor. She reaches across the island for Walker’s hand, a gesture that makes him suspect he’s about to get more bad news.

“It’s not my advisor,” she says. “My husband’s name is Alan Gass.”

Alan Gass only exists in her dream, she explains. He is an ophthalmologist, a tall man with bright blue eyes and a lightly bearded face. His favorite meal in the world is barbecue biscuits. He is allergic to shellfish. Years ago he played college football, but he’s put on a little weight since those days. On Saturdays he plays golf, but professes to hate what he calls clubhouse culture. He just likes the wind in his hair, the taste of a cold beer on the back nine. Claire has been married to him for almost a decade.

“Wow,” Walker says. “You have incredibly detailed dreams.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. They’re super-realistic. Sometimes I dream that we’re just eating dinner together, kind of like this. We tell each other about our day. Or we don’t talk at all. We’ve known each other so long, silence is okay at this point, you know?”

Walker takes a bite of the potatoes. Claire hasn’t shut her laptop.

“You writing Alan an email over there?” he asks, and expects a full assault of noncommutative geometry, U-waves, big gravity. But when she turns the screen, he discovers that she’s looking at a website with pictures of celebrities eating messy sandwiches and picking out shampoo at the drugstore.

“So is Alan Gass better-looking than me?”

“Silly duck,” she says, a recurring joke about his outturned feet. She shuts the laptop and comes around the island. “Silly duck with big sexy glasses.” She plucks the glasses from his face. “Silly duck with snazzy shoes.” She taps his black shoes with her socked feet. “Silly duck with perfect duck lips.” She kisses him.

He stands and wraps his arms around her waist. A former high school volleyball star, Claire is a few inches taller than Walker, and even more so right now with her blond hair up in a high, messy bun. He doesn’t mind her height, but whenever they ride an escalator together, he claims the higher step to see what it’s like.

Admittedly, her dream is a strange one — so visceral, so coherent, so consistent — but he can see no reason why Alan Gass should come between them. After imagining a real affair, he feels somewhat relieved. It isn’t as though she is actually married and actually in love with an actual ophthalmologist. What counts is that the real Claire — the waking Claire, the part of her that matters — wants Walker and only Walker, and that is the case, is it not? She says that it is most definitely the case. She kisses him, tugs his hand to her cheek. She is relieved, she says, that he finally knows her secret, a secret she’s never told anyone, not even her parents. What a weight off her shoulders. Anything he wants to ask, he can ask. She will hide nothing from him.

• • •

Over the next few weeks, new details emerge. Claire’s dreams began when she was in high school. Walker can’t help wondering about the subtle differences between himself and Alan. Alan grew up Baptist in a small town and doesn’t drink. Walker grew up Episcopalian and drinks a glass of wine every night. Alan regularly wears suits. Walker prefers tight dark jeans and designer T-shirts. Alan volunteers at a free medical clinic. Walker can’t remember the last time he volunteered for anything.

But Walker tries not to dwell on Alan Gass.

Walker is the artistic director at a theater downtown. He met Claire there when she volunteered to help at the box office one semester. He was in that particular production. It was a German play about a ghost that wreaks havoc on a town by possessing prominent citizens and causing them to behave strangely. The town believes the ghost is that of a young woman who recently drowned herself because of a broken heart. The townspeople set out to find her body, thinking that will satisfy her, but it does not. The ghost responds by taking over the body of the town mayor and hurling the man off a tall building. To try and appease the ghost, the townspeople gang up on the man responsible for the woman’s broken heart. They tie weights around his ankles and drop him in the ocean. But that doesn’t solve the problem. This man also returns as a ghost looking for revenge. It was a gruesome play. Walker played the second ghost, the heartbreaker. Despite the white gunky makeup, Claire told him he was handsome.

Alan Gass is a ghost, and Walker knows you cannot fight ghosts. They are insidious. You can’t punch a ghost or write it a drunken email. You can only pretend the ghost is not there, hope it loses interest, evaporates, moves on, does whatever it is that ghosts do when they disappear completely.

• • •

They are sitting in the back row of a half-packed lecture hall on campus. Thanks to Claire’s advisor, their university is home to a conference dedicated entirely to the daisy. He is on the stage, pacing before a giant screen of exploding charts and graphics, a headset microphone curled around his ear, a scientific evangelist with brown curls and a bright, boyish face. Daisy Theory is under attack, he warns, from all sides.

Planets, hearts, even the parts of our brains responsible for dreams — everything in the universe is made of daisy particles. The daisies come together to form larger particles by interlocking in a chain formation. No one is entirely sure what holds the chains together, but Claire’s advisor imagines them like the daisy garlands that children wear as crowns.

In theory a daisy chain could pop in and out of existence, just like the individual daisy. In theory your entire body — since every atom in it is nothing but a complex collection of daisies — could also pop in and out of existence.

“Isn’t that amazing?” he asks the crowd.

On the top of the conference program, Walker draws two flowers and gives them arms and legs and hands to hold. The figures are like cave paintings. Me, man. You, woman. This, love.

He writes, Want to be in my chain gang? and slides the program across his knee to Claire. She smiles and grabs the pen. She doodles a penis on one figure and breasts on the other. They have to avoid eye contact or else they’ll lose it.

After the lecture, a handful of people gather in a small white room with mahogany tables, where they quietly sip red wine in groups of two and three. Claire’s advisor meanders over with a barely suppressed grin on his face.

“And?”

“Brilliant,” Claire says.

Within only a few seconds, the two of them are lost in daisy revelry and Walker can only nod and smile. “We’re stretching math to the breaking point,” her advisor says, turning to Walker. “It’s almost unmath. One and one aren’t two, but onetyone.” Her advisor has his hand on Claire’s elbow, cupping it, as if propping it up. If he lets it go, her elbow might go crashing to the floor like a satellite from space. But when he walks away again, at last, Walker is pleased that her elbow stays put at her side.

“He’s got a thing for you,” Walker says.

“This again?”

“Not that I can blame him.”

“Even if he did,” she says, “it’s not like I’ve got one for him.”

On the way home, because of construction on the bridge, they have to take a detour through another neighborhood. Claire knows these streets better than him but, against her advisement, he takes a left turn. The road dead-ends in front of an old farmhouse, its giant gray shutters flapping in the wind like moth wings. It is early summer, perfectly warm, and they have the car windows rolled down. To turn around he backs their Jeep into the driveway, the brakes squealing. Another car has turned onto the street behind them. They pass it on their way back to the main road, a pearly gray Lexus. The driver’s face is obscured by lights across the glass, but Walker can see that he has a military haircut, the gray lines sharp around his ears, the seat belt tight against a white oxford shirt. But his features are blurred. He could be anyone. Even Alan.

Walker waits until they are back on the main street before asking what he wants to ask. Has she ever wondered if Alan is really out there somewhere? That’s he not just a dream? What if he’s real and dreams he’s married to a woman named Claire?

“Very funny,” she says. “I don’t think so.”

“You should ask him. What do you normally talk about?”

“The usual stuff. Books, movies. What to fix for dinner.”

“So in the dream, you’re definitely still you?”

“Who else would I be?”

“Anyone. A prairie wife, a criminal, whatever. One time I dreamed I was the king of Europe.”

“There is no king of Europe.”

“Right, but the point is, some people dream about being someone else. And apparently you don’t. You’re you, and Alan is Alan.”

She shrugs. They’ve reached the house. He parks the car along the curb, lined with tall shapely pear trees, their wilted white blossoms pressed flat into the sidewalk that leads to the front door. Claire inherited the house from her great-aunt. Her parents were both engineering professors at the university. She went away for college but came back for graduate school. Inside, Walker leans over Claire’s blue bicycle and flips the light switch on the wall.

“Okay, I have to ask something else,” he says, dropping his satchel on the hardwood floor. “Do you have sex with Alan in your dreams?”

She is ahead of him, halfway up the stairs.

“He’s my husband,” she says.

Walker knows that Claire has been with other men. He thinks about this fact as little as possible, though he knows that before him there was another student in her department, and before that a Swedish guy named Jens who actually proposed, and before them a couple of college mistakes and a backseat high school fling. She never mentioned Alan in the list.

“How often?”

“Do you really want to do this?”

“Just tell me once, and then we won’t have to talk about it again.”

She’s pasting their toothbrushes.

“If you must know, probably a few times a week. But it doesn’t often happen in the dream itself. It’s kind of offstage action, you know? For instance, the other night, we were on our way to a friend’s house for dinner, and the car ride took up the entire dream. But I knew what I’d done over the course of that day. I’d run some errands, picked up the dry cleaning. Baked strawberry brownies for dinner. The dessert was on my lap in the car.”

“I can’t get over how detailed these dreams are,” he says. “I hardly remember anything from mine.”

They both brush and spit into the sink.

“Do you remember me in your dreams?” he asks. “Does it ever feel like cheating when you’re with him?”

“Don’t get weird on me. They’re just dreams. I’m not cheating on anyone. You or him.”

They turn off the lights and climb into bed. She tickles his back until he flips toward her. She’s naked. He wiggles out of his boxers quickly, shoves them to his feet.

“You don’t need to worry,” she says, and climbs on top of him. He doesn’t need to worry. He knows that. Sort of, he does. She’s moving faster now. He has his hands around her waist, the way she likes. He mutters her name, and, thankfully, she mutters his, Walker, and when it’s over she tugs at his chest hair playfully, smiling. Then she goes into the bathroom. He can hear her peeing, and then, seconds later, she’s back in his arms, skin hot, nuzzling under his chin until she’s asleep.

He lets his breath fall in line with hers and keeps his arm draped over her side, inhaling the conditioner in her hair. He can feel her heartbeat, soft and far away. Is she with Alan now? He wonders what it must be like for her, this double life, if she closes her eyes in this bed and opens them in the one she shares with Alan. Maybe her life with him mirrors this one. At that very moment, it occurs to Walker, she could be waking up and brushing her teeth all over again, discussing the upcoming day with her husband. She could be straightening his tie, pointing out the spot on his chin he missed while shaving. She could have her warm palm flat on his chest as she kisses him goodbye, the same way she sends off Walker most mornings. The idea of her repeating these private routines with another man, even one who doesn’t technically exist, is almost more unsettling than the thought of her sleeping with him.

• • •

The phone book contains two listings for Alan Gass and one for A. Gass. Walker scribbles down all three on the back of a take-out menu. He carries the take-out menu in his satchel for two days before pulling over on the side of the road one morning on his way to work. The sky is cloudless, and across the street a long green field unfolds between two wooded lots. A row of ancient transformer towers runs down the middle of the rolling field.

He dials A. Gass first, and a woman answers. Her voice is so quiet and shaky that she has to repeat herself three times before Walker understands that her husband, Albert Gass, passed away the year before last.

Walker gets out of the car. The road is not a busy one. He dials the next number, but the Alan Gass who used to live there has moved to Columbia, the city, or possibly to the other Colombia, the one with the drugs. The man on the phone can’t remember which it was.

He dials the last number. The phone rings and rings. Walker is about to give up when the voice mail message begins.

“You’ve reached Alan and Monica,” the man on the line says. “We’re not around to take your call, so leave your name and digits at the beep.” It beeps. Walker hangs up quickly. The tall grass beneath the transformers swishes back and forth. He gets back in the car and starts the engine.

The address in the phone book leads him to a part of town he rarely visits. It isn’t dangerous or run-down; it’s just out of the way. The houses on the street are adjoining, with small grass yards in front. At one corner there is a video store. Walker doesn’t recognize any of the movies in the front window. On the opposite corner, two women smoke cigarettes outside a Piggly Wiggly.

Alan Gass lives in the middle of the block in a three-story house painted light blue, so light that it’s almost white. To the right of the front door there are three buttons, a label taped above each. The third doorbell says GASS 3B.

He pushes it and stands back. After what feels like an eternity, a small speaker in the wall crackles and a man who sounds like he might have been asleep answers with a cough.

“Bobby? That you? You’re early.”

“I’m not Bobby,” Walker says.

The line crackles. “Okay, who are you, then?”

“Sorry for just showing up like this,” he says, “but there’s a chance we know each other through a friend. Do you have a moment to talk? I promise I won’t keep you long.”

The man doesn’t answer. A buzzer sounds, and the door clicks open. The stairway inside is narrow and long, with a dirty blue carpet runner, smudged with old black gum, shredded at the edges. The door at the top of the stairs is half open.

“Mr. Gass?” he calls, and steps into the apartment. “Hello?”

The room is almost as narrow as the staircase. Walker feels like he’s looking down the barrel of a shotgun. The half of the room nearest the door serves as a living area, with a small television against one wall and a futon-couch against the other. At the far end of the hall a single window provides light. The parts of a dismantled computer are scattered across a flimsy table beneath the window. Alan Gass emerges from a room to the right of the desk. As he steps into the light of the window, his tall Art Garfunkel hair is illuminated a wispy golden brown. He looks nothing like the man Claire has described.

He cannot be the real Alan Gass.

Walker feels idiotic for coming and tries to think of the best way to extricate himself from the situation as quickly as possible. The man wears a starched red shirt with pearl buttons tucked tightly into a pair of gray corduroys despite the summer heat. He is a small man, shorter than Walker. His eyes are gray, almost translucent.

“I think I’ve got the wrong Alan Gass,” Walker says. “But just in case, do you know a Claire?”

Alan licks his bottom lip. He says that he knew a Claire once, way back in middle school, but he hasn’t heard from her in decades. So, no, currently he does not know any Claires.

“That’s all right. Like I said, wrong Alan Gass. I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing.” Walker turns to leave.

“Before you go,” Alan says, “now that you’re up here, could I get your help with something right quick? I got a kid coming later who’s supposed to help me, but he’s not the most reliable.”

Walker nods and asks what Alan needs from him. They go into the kitchen. The refrigerator has been pulled away from the wall and unplugged, the door ajar. A towel dropped across the floor absorbs the water as it drips from the defrosting freezer.

“I’m selling it,” Alan says. “Got a good price for it. Only catch is that I gotta have it downstairs by noon.”

Walker has never moved a fridge, but he knows the job will not be easy. Looking at the refrigerator, he’s not even certain that it will fit through the front door. And then there’s the matter of the staircase. But Alan says he has a dolly for that. He promises that it won’t take long. He’ll even throw in a few home-brewed beers as a thank-you. Walker says that won’t be necessary. He rolls up his sleeves. He’s ready to do this. Alan goes into a back room and returns wearing a back brace.

“Old injury,” he explains. “You don’t need to worry.”

They tip the fridge backward so that Alan can wedge the dolly underneath. Slowly, they wheel it out of the kitchen. The doorway is tight. The entire wall shakes as the refrigerator passes through the frame.

“So you’re looking for some other Alan Gass, huh?” he asks. “Never really think about there being other Alan Gasses out there.”

Walker nods. The funny part, he says, is that the Alan he’s looking for might not exist.

“Might not exist?” Alan asks.

To his own surprise, Walker tells him everything — about Claire, about the other Alan Gass, about the dreams.

“Huh,” Alan says. “That’s wild.”

They wheel the fridge out the front door of the apartment and then take a break on the landing at the top of the stairs.

“So what if I’d been him? What would you have done?”

“I have no idea. I didn’t plan that far ahead.”

“Pretend I’m him.”

Walker remembers the ghostly man in the Lexus. The white shirt. The blurry face. “I suppose I’d tell him to stay away?”

“But she’s my wife,” Alan says. “I’ve been with her longer than you have. I should be telling you to stay away. I love her and I’m never letting her go.”

“Okay, I get it.”

“You think she loves you like she loves me? She married me. That’s a sacred vow.” Alan smiles. “Whoa, you should see yourself right now. You look like you want to hit me. Is this really bothering you?”

“You’re making me feel a little like he’s the real one and I’m the dream,” Walker says, trying to make himself laugh.

“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re no dream. Look, you want to know my honest opinion? You got nothing to worry about. We all got an Alan Gass,” Alan Gass says. “We all got our fantasies. In high school, my Alan Gass looked a little bit like my Spanish teacher, only she was so… How do you say sexy in Spanish? I forget. She had this shiny dark hair and a little vine tattoo on her back and this amazing accent. I can’t tell you how many times I thought about her late at night alone in bed, if you know what I mean. But she had no blood in her veins, you follow? There was nothing to her. Her skin was made of the same thing they use for movie screens. You can project whatever you want onto someone like that.”

They lean the fridge back toward the stairs on the dolly and slowly lower the wheels down onto the next step. Alan has the dolly handles; Walker is below it, keeping it balanced. They lower it another step, and then another. Walker is sweating. On the next landing, they take another break.

“I wouldn’t care about a fantasy,” Walker says. “Fantasies I understand. But Alan Gass isn’t a fantasy. Fantasies don’t have faults. But he does, and she still loves him. That’s what’s so unnerving.”

They rock the fridge back on the dolly and drop it down another step. Walker counts off the steps as they approach the bottom. Three, two, one. They are in a very small space.

Walker opens the front door with his backside. They try to roll the fridge through, but it’s too wide for the door by almost five inches. Alan can’t believe it. He says he measured the frame. Walker glances at his watch. He has to go soon, he says. He’s already almost an hour late for work. They’re in the middle of a new production, a play that takes place on a cruise ship lost at sea. He needs to be there soon to meet with the costume designer. Alan looks exhausted. He says he understands. Even if he has to take the whole goddamn fridge apart later, they’ll get it through that door one way or another. He tells Walker to wait right there on the stoop. He’s got something for him.

Walker fixes his sleeves and wipes the sweat off his forehead. When Alan returns, he’s holding a small boxy tape deck. He pushes the Eject button and extracts a gray cassette with a thin white sticker across the front. It says I MONICA KILL DEVIL HILLS SPRING BREAK SISTER GODDESS, but that is scratched out. Below that, it says ZZZZZZZZZ.

“This is going to save you,” Alan says.

“An old mixtape?”

“Ever heard of sleep suggestion? I audited a class at the university a few years back and made a tape to listen to while I slept at night. Don’t laugh. It really did the trick. You can have this. I think it needs D batteries. Press this button, and you can record. Create your own tape. Tell her she’s married to you, not Alan. Tell her whatever you want. Once she’s asleep, press Play. Few weeks of this, you’ll never hear another word about this marriage thing.”

The machine is heavy for its size. Walker holds it like a handgun in a paper bag. He tries to give it back, but Alan refuses to take it from him.

• • •

Claire gets some bad news. A lab somewhere in Europe has constructed a black sphere and plans to flood it with something called K-matter. She emails Walker about it at work with a frowny-faced emoticon. If the experiment in Europe works like they think it will, she says, then particles cannot half exist. The researchers will have effectively disproved Daisy Theory.

That night he gets home late and finds Claire already in bed under the covers with her grandmother’s rosary beads. She isn’t religious. He’s never known her to even set foot in a church, but she loved her grandmother. The beads are wrapped so tight around her white palm that they leave small indentations when Walker pries them loose.

“Say they disprove it,” he says. “Where does something go when it stops existing?”

“Where does it go?” she asks. “Nowhere. It doesn’t exist.”

“But nowhere is somewhere.”

“This isn’t where versus somewhere else. This is being versus nonbeing.”

He strips down and gets into bed, cuddling up behind her. Once she is asleep, he waits for something to happen. He’s not sure what. Claire’s dream marriage makes a certain kind of awful sense: a theoretical husband for the woman who spends her days in a theoretical haze. Her advisor was never the threat; it was always Alan. He watches her sleep as if the drama is unfolding just behind those eyelids. Maybe she will say something in her sleep. It would be like eavesdropping on a conversation taking place in a universe that Walker cannot reach, one where Walker does not even exist. He tries to imagine not existing. He imagines darkness, the absence of thought, but then his thoughts invade, and he exists again. Claire, he wants to call out. Claire.

“Claire.” She doesn’t budge. He places his palm flat between her shoulder blades, her skin warm through the T-shirt. He shakes her gently and feels her body tense.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Where were you?”

“What?”

“Were you with him?”

“You’ve got to be kidding. Go back to sleep.”

“If you ever stopped dreaming about him, for whatever reason, would you be upset?”

She rolls over to face him. Her loose state championship volleyball T-shirt twists tight under her stomach.

“I’m beginning to regret I ever told you about Alan.”

And why did she? Guilt, he assumes, or as a provocation. A part of Walker fears this is her way of pushing him away. She turns back over to sleep. Walker climbs out of bed and goes downstairs. He digs some D batteries out of a cluttered drawer and plops down on the sofa with the tape deck. The old batteries are corroded, crusty and white. He inserts the new ones, rewinds the tape to the beginning, and presses Record.

“You are… very sleepy.”

He presses Stop, Rewind, and then Record again, his lips within kissing distance of the microphone. “You will not dream about Alan Gass. You will not dream about Alan Gass. Alan Gass does not exist. Alan Gass is not a man. Alan Gass is not made of daisies. He is made of nothing.”

He rewinds the tape and presses Record again. A new and less sinister idea: he could make a tape for himself.

“You will dream about Alan Gass. You will tell him to stay away. You will dream about Alan Gass. You will dream about Alan Gass.”

He presses Stop. This is going to take too long. He needs to think out a strategy. Is there a button that makes the recording loop?

“What are you doing?” Claire is at the top of the stairs.

“Nothing,” he says, and goes to the hall closet. He shoves the tape deck up on the high shelf and joins her in bed. That night he doesn’t dream about Alan. His dreams are uninteresting and unhelpful, a slurry mess of anxieties and fears from his waking life. He is lost and swimming in a giant ocean with small gray waves. In the distance metal transformer towers jut up into the sky crackling with electricity, and far away a boat crests each wave, a boat that he cannot reach no matter how much he swims.

In the morning he wakes up to steam slipping under the bathroom door in misty curling puffs. He can hear Claire humming in the shower. In her dreams she is able to visit an alternative universe. It’s hard not to feel a little jealous.

• • •

Everywhere he goes he sees a Lexus. Lexi. They are a species, classifiable but indistinct. He sees one in the fire lane in front of the liquor store, then another in the parking lot at the gym. The cars are empty. He feels ridiculous each time he glares into a car. The tinted windows reflect only his own face, grim and warped.

Before Claire, he once dragged a date to a five-year high school reunion and made the mistake of telling her that he’d slept with one of the girls in the room. The date wouldn’t let it go. She had to know which girl. She wanted him to point her out. She said she wouldn’t be comfortable until she knew. But why? Walker asked her. “So I can avoid her,” the date said. “Or maybe introduce myself. I don’t know. Something.” At the time, Walker found it amusing. God, he even made her guess the girl.

He makes a full tape of his Alan Gass mantras and tells Claire it’s music for the play. When he wakes up, his ears are hot and sweaty from the foam headphones and, even more frustratingly, he remembers almost nothing of where he’s been for the last seven hours, an amnesiac tourist whose film rolls have come back from the lab damaged and half developed — ocean waves, broken escalators, his mother’s scowling face, a pack of vicious blue-eyed dogs. It’s all meaningless dribble.

• • •

Walker’s Alan Gass calls with what he can only describe as amazing news — news that he won’t share over the phone. Walker agrees to meet him at a pizza buffet called Slice of Heaven.

They sit across from each other in a red vinyl booth that squelches under their butts. Aside from two dumpy women at a table on the other side of the restaurant, they are alone. Walker has already eaten lunch and doesn’t plan to stay long.

Alan is distracted. He wants pizza. A certain kind of pizza. He’s waiting for the waitress to bring it out on a tin tray. When she does, at last, dropping it on the buffet at the center of the room, Alan is up in a hurry. His body pressed hard to the sneeze guard, he loads his plate with one slice after another. He comes back to the table and takes a large bite. The pizza is yellowish and drizzled with a translucent pink sauce.

“What is that?” Walker asks.

“Strawberry cheesecake. Try a piece.” He slides the plate across the table, still sticky from the waitress’s rag. Walker declines and asks about the news that couldn’t be shared over the phone.

“Be patient. You’ll find out in”—he checks his wristwatch, digital with an orange Velcro strap—“about ten minutes.”

Walker takes the tape recorder out of his bag, slides it across the table to Alan.

“Did it work?” Alan asks.

“I’m letting it go. Like you said, some dumb fantasy.”

Alan smacks on pizza and dabs the strawberry sauce from the corners of his thin pink lips. Though a wiry man, he has the look of physical inactivity. He has a curved back, flaccid arms, and probably a poor heart. Something about this pizza buffet — the quality of the light or the greasy floor tiles, perhaps — makes Walker feel exhausted.

“Until you came to see me,” Alan says, “I’d never really thought about there being other Alan Gasses in the world. But that got me thinking. Somewhere out there is the best possible Alan Gass.”

“And somewhere else is the worst.” Walker motions to the waitress.

“I’d like to think I’m somewhere in the middle. Most Alans are. Statistically speaking.”

The waitress waddles to the table, her stockings tan as crust, her eyes green as bell peppers. Walker asks for a coffee.

“Over the last few days I’ve been digging around online and making some phone calls,” Alan says. “To other Alans.”

“And?”

“There’s an Alan Gass in Utah who runs a ranch. There’s an Alan Gass in New York who travels the country selling baseball cards.”

The waitress brings over a mug and a hot pot of coffee, its steam thick with the smell of burnt peanuts. Walker dumps three creamers into the cup, turning the liquid a cardboard brown.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” Alan says to someone behind Walker.

Walker turns. A heavy man in a blue polo shirt with eyebrows so dark and thick they look like two black holes in his flat face smiles at them. His short hair is parted neatly down the middle.

“Walker,” Alan says, “I’d like to introduce you to Doctor Alan Gass.”

The man shakes Walker’s hand firmly. His knuckles are hairy. Alan makes room for the other Alan on his side of the booth and explains that the second Alan lives only an hour north of here and when he discovered he was a doctor, well, he thought Walker might be interested in that.

“Doctor of what?” Walker says.

“Of religion,” the man says, and grabs the menu from behind the napkin holder. “Mainly Eastern philosophy.”

“You gotta try a piece of this,” the first Alan says. The second Alan says no, thanks, he doesn’t have a sweet tooth. He’s going to have a calzone.

“There’s another Alan Gass two hours from here,” the first Alan Gass says. “He’s invited me to see his collection of North American beetles. He studies them. Amazing, right?”

“I wonder how many of us there are in the world?” Dr. Gass asks.

“At least a thousand,” says the first one. “We should organize a party. Wouldn’t that be something?”

Walker imagines an army of Alan Gasses. They are the building blocks of something larger and more monumental. He sips on coffee, listening to the two men compare their lives, both of them amazed that two people with the same name can have had such different experiences and opinions of the world. How did Walker end up here, in this booth, with these men? He drops a few dollars on the table and says he must be going. Both Alans reach out to shake his hand.

• • •

The experiments in Europe — with the black sphere and the K-matter — have failed horribly. Claire comes home so excited she almost tackles Walker. The failure doesn’t exactly prove Daisy Theory, but the theory does emerge relatively unscathed. Particles, for the time being, can still half exist. Walker joins when her advisor takes the entire team out for celebratory drinks. In a suit jacket, jeans, and sneakers, his boyish face glowing, her advisor steadies himself on an assistant’s shoulder and steps up on a booth, raising his dark whiskey glass high. Claire lets out a whoop.

The music in the bar is disco music: Donna Summer, maybe, but with a newer backbeat. Claire’s advisor lures a research assistant onto the dance floor. Claire lures Walker too. They dance in the middle of the group. She spins under the flashing lights. She moves away from him. The dance floor is crowded. Bodies merge and move like extensions of the same creature. Claire orbits around Walker, but when he turns she’s disappeared. He stops dancing, the only stationary body in that sea, until she reappears again, moving away from the group and toward Walker with hands raised. She’s looking right at him. Their waists meet first.

“I want to take you home tonight,” he says.

“What?”

She can’t hear him over the music. He kisses her. Kisses are a kind of vocabulary, he thinks. This one, both lips parted, tongues touching with the most delicate of flicks, has a particular message. The message is, Let’s be happy, and that feels like the wise decision, a conscious decision to be happy.

They have to leave their car at the bar that night and take a taxi home.

“Fun time?” he asks, but she’s already passed out against his shoulder. The last round put her over the edge.

The taxi pulls up in front of the house, and Walker, too tired to do the math, tosses the driver a twenty before going around to the other side and helping Claire stand. He throws her arm over his neck, and they cross the dew-wet lawn together. She mumbles into his shoulder as he fumbles with the door key. Upstairs she crawls across the bed and then collapses, hair flowering out in all directions across the pillows. He unzips and tugs off her boots and lays a blanket across her back. He’s sitting on his side of the bed, untying his own shoes, when Claire says she loves him.

“You too,” he says, and shimmies out of his pants. He slides across the bed to her. Her eyes are closed, her face long and relaxed against the pillow. She may already be asleep — or on the verge of it. He considers testing her, giving her shoulder a light shake, but she looks so tired and content. Waking her wouldn’t be right.