Subcutanean

Epilogue

I hope this finds you well, if it finds you at all.

I walked by our old house this morning. The whole yard was flooded, caution tape everywhere. Empty driveway. Whoever lives there now must have abandoned ship while they waited for the plumbers to sort it all out. But it gave me an idea.

I always wondered what you must have felt, waiting on the other side for your Ryan to come through, imperfect though you knew he'd be: waiting while the whole place started to shiver and crumble and expand around you. Maybe you thought we both died down there. Maybe you did too but I don't think so. I bet you were smart enough to run.

I hope you found another way back up to the surface, like I did. Took some doing. There were no more power bars by the time I made it out and hadn't been for a while. But I did make it out, in the end.

Maybe it would be better to let you keep thinking I'm dead. Maybe I shouldn't be writing this. But I think you'd rather know. There's a difference between dead and gone, despite the expression. I think you'd prefer knowing that one Ryan, at least, survived. I never really did understand how you think, but I'm reasonably sure about that.

Water gushing up from the basement windows. A mess. But I found a little whirlpool in the swamp of the front yard, a big exposed pipe sucking liquid back in. Back down. That's where I'll drop this, I suppose. Maybe that pipe just leads to the city sewer system, but maybe, if I'm lucky, it goes a lot deeper.

I'll triple-bag the shit out of this first, though, because, and I hate to say this, the letter you gave me didn't survive my swim through.

The seal on that baggie must not have been tight. When I finally pulled it out, back on the surface, the letter was soaked through and mostly illegible. Something seemed to have expanded it, too. All that was left was a nightmare of bloated wood pulp and smeared squiggles. Too much of both. But after a lot of tweezer work, I pieced together a little. Not the whole story, but enough to maybe get the gist.

We were wrong, weren't we? About you guys being trapped on the wrong side, like us. We could never figure out why you didn't use your keys to come through, since you should have had them both, one bent on the counter and the other stuck in the door. We didn't think how easy they'd be to miss. How the two of you, coming back from an expedition to your own side, might have gone straight through without seeing them at all.

How the four of us all ended up trapped together. Only you had no need for the keys or to get back through, because you were home where you belonged, on your own side. The problem was that two doppelgangers had followed you through.

Us.

You figured it out a lot quicker than we did, I think. How that loss of synchronicity had pulled our twin houses partially apart, like a gardener starting to separate two potted flowers. Even if we'd had the key, the connection through the fridge was gone. Too shallow, too close to the surface. What would we have found in there, if we'd forced it open? Maybe an endless tunnel of fridge insides: vinyl walls paved in vegetable drawers, stretching to infinity, going nowhere. How's that for a road to hell?

So you had to figure out a different way to get rid of us. We were sleeping in your beds. Eating your food. Stealing your lives while you lurked below, afraid to come near us and push things even further out of sync, sneaking up to steal food in the middle of the night, thieves in your own house. And the only way to send us back was to find another connection point, a deeper one, down where roots still twined together. And prod us into finding it, too. You had a lot more time to explore than we did. Downstairs became your home.

You couldn't explain things to us, not directly. Because if we'd also realized how much things had diverged, it would have tugged our universes even further apart. So you tried to find the subtlest ways to send a message. Saying things without changing hardly anything. Tweaking the note, the video. Pulling us back from the dead-end of the crawlways. Nudging us away from the red herrings closer to the surface, to deeper explorations. Toward the new way through you'd discovered. A flooded tunnel, buried deep. A way to get us back home.