Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu

after, there was supposed to be something big, right? The present, the now, the moment. What if I somehow skipped it, what if it passed me by and I didn’t recognize it, or worse, what if I never get to do it at all? What if I go my whole life and never ask that one key question, that one what-if that I am supposed to be asking myself?
    For a while, I thought I might be in a love story, but I hardly ever wake up next to anyone anymore. It still happens once in a while. When it does, the first thing I do, doesn’t matter where I am, in the ocean, on the moon of some minor distant planet, doesn’t matter where, doesn’t matter if she knows who I am or if I know who she is or how strong gravity is or if I feel terrible or if the world is logically impossible, the first thing I do if she’s there, is I tell her how nice it is to see her.

Open
    Samantha discovered it first. I don’t know exactly how it started, just that I came home in the middle of the day and Samantha was standing there in front of the couch, and she actually jumped when I came through the door. I’m not sure why but that bothered me, maybe because I’ve always sort of suspected that people are only that jumpy when they have something to hide, and I was so much in my own head about being annoyed at Samantha that it took me a second to notice what she was looking at, which was a huge
word,
right in the center of the room.
    “We need to talk about that,” I said.
    “Why? Why do we always have to talk everything to death?”
    “The word ‘door’ is floating in the middle of our apartment. You don’t think maybe this is something we need to discuss?”

    We ate dinner in silence, pretending “door” wasn’t literally hanging over us. Samantha went to bed early. I watched a show about poisonous lizards and drank warm terriblewhiskey out of Samantha’s coffee mug. After finishing, I put the mug back in the cupboard without washing it. When I slipped into bed I could tell by her breathing she was still awake.
    “Say it,” Samantha said.
    “I’m not going to say it. You should.”
    “Why should I be the one to have to say it?”
    “Because you brought that thing in there. That idea. You conjured it.”
    Our bedroom was tiny. I slipped my leg out from under the covers and opened the door with my foot, so that she had to look at it. But it was gone already.
    “Samantha.”
    “I don’t care,” she said, with her back to me.
    “It’s gone.”
    “I told you to say it,” she said. “Now we’ve lost our chance.”

    I woke up at three in the morning to Samantha, with her hand under my shirt, running her fingernails up and down my back. She pulled in close and kissed the back of my ear.
    “It’s over,” she said.
    “I know.”
    “Do you want me to move out?”
    “No, I’ll find a place.”
    “Can you get me a glass of water from the kitchen?”
    I went into the living room.
    “Uh,” I said. “You might want to come see this.”
    Instead of the word “door,” there was now an actual door in the middle of our living room.
    “This is like that movie,” she said.
“Monsters, Inc.”
    “Actually it’s like a poem I just read.”
    Samantha rolled her eyes at me.
    “So are you going to open the door?” she said. I hesitated for a moment, and before I could say anything, she opened it and went right through. I stood there, too afraid to follow. Maybe a hole had opened up in the world, and movies and poems were coming through into reality. Or maybe we were the movie, or the poem, and this was our chance to go into the real world.
    Just when I was about to go after her, Samantha came back through the door, giggling.
    “Are you drunk?” I said.
    “No. Okay, a little. Okay, a lot.”
    “You don’t even drink.”
    She told me it was a dinner party. That everyone seemed to know her there. But it wasn’t her they knew. Or at least it didn’t feel that way.
    “And there are all these other couples. And they know who you are, too,