Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu Page B

and I was still insisting that we stay in character, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it anymore. Whoever we were on that other side had followed us through. We needed our audience to be us. To be “us.”
    I went less often, and eventually stopped going altogether. At first she said people were wondering what had happened to me, but after a while she stopped talkingabout it, and I didn’t want to know. I assumed the story had changed. Or maybe she’d changed it.

    One morning she came back from over “there” just as the sun was rising. She slipped into the bathroom to take a shower. I heard her singing a song I didn’t recognize. She came out, dripping wet, drying her hair, still singing softly to herself.
    “It doesn’t make sense for you to keep your stuff here anymore,” I said.
    “I was thinking the same thing.”
    I went to go get her bag from the closet and that’s when I noticed that the outer wall to our apartment was missing.
    “Hey, you might want to come see this,” I said.
    She came out into the living room, still naked. We both stood there, as if being presented on a stage, standing on our marks, as if under an invisible proscenium.
    “It’s like we’re in a diorama,” she said.
    I inched toward the edge and looked down. We were on the top floor of a five-story walk-up, and it was a good fifty or sixty feet down to the sidewalk. I could see the top of the large tree right outside the base of our building. I felt like this was an opportunity, or a sign.
    It seemed like I should say something. So that’s what I said.
    “It seems like I should say something,” I said.
    “Look at that,” Samantha said. She pointed to the word “open” hanging out there, just above the horizon line.
    I thought back to that afternoon when we first saw the word in our apartment. How I had come home from work when I wasn’t supposed to, when she wasn’t expecting me, and how that disruption in our regular pattern had spread into a larger dislocation through the closed system of our physical and verbal environment. I’d come home a moment too early, before she’d had a chance to put her costume on, and something had changed, and we could never go back.
    “There it is,” she said, pointing to the place where our wall used to be.
    And the word “door” was back, hanging there like an airship, waiting to take us somewhere. It started to drift away, and Samantha reached out and grabbed on to the first “o” and pulled herself up, straddling the letter, the quotes like wings, keeping her in midair. She looked at me, waiting to see what I would do. I wanted to ask her if she wanted me to follow her, but I knew that was exactly the kind of thing she couldn’t stand about me. I could let her go by herself, and tell her I’d be here when she got back, knowing I would never see her again. Or I could go with her, and we could keep looking for new doors, we could keep going until we found the place, or the movie, or the poem, or the story. The story we were meant to be in together, the one where there were no more “she saids” or “she dids,” the story where everything we said and did was exactly what we meant and felt, and if we never found it then we would keep opening doors until they were all open.

Note to Self
    Dear Alternate Self,
    I read in the paper today about the quantum multiverse and how there are billions of me out there. Did you know about this? Anyway, I have a proposition for you to consider. If you would be interested in more information about my idea, please write me back and I will explain in greater detail what I am thinking.
    Anxiously awaiting your response,
    Me.
    You.
    Us?

    Dear Self,
    I was just about to write you the same thing.
    Yours truly,
    You

    Dear Alternate Self,
    You were? Whoa! Wait, what?

    Dear Self,
    I think you’re confused.
    Yours truly,
    You

    Dear Alternate Self,
    I’m confused? I think you’re confused.
    Anyway, whatever. Here is why I’m writing. This