I Think We've Been Here Before

by Suzy Krause

She stares at the phone, trying to remember what the news is, exactly. It scratches at her brain like something she has forgotten instead of something she doesn’t know yet. What a strange sensation, but not an unfamiliar one. This is how she felt at the doctor’s office, too, the day they got the news about Marlen’s cancer, right before the doctor opened his mouth. It was like she already knew what he was going to say, even the words she’d never heard before. Is it a trauma thing, to become a bit psychic?

But there’s something else. The familiarity isn’t limited to Marlen. It’s the scenes flashing across the screen, the mud on the rug, the look on Irene’s face. The silver hoop earrings on the news anchor. Tripping a déjà vu wire in her

The world, it would seem, is ending. And when she finally accepts this fact, she finds she’s not overly surprised by it.

He knew he was going to die because he woke up one morning, about a year ago now, and had this thought: I need to write my book.

He feels a lot of things, and he isn’t sure what to do with any of it.

Time is weird when you’re running out of it. It passes in clumps, like clods of mud falling off the wheel wells of a car—hanging on, then suddenly letting go. One minute seems to last an eternity, then four hours are gone—and it feels like a tragic loss every time, considering how few of them are left in general.

Same realities, different emotional impacts, and he doesn’t know what makes the difference from one day to the next, why one day he’ll wake up and grief will wash over him and drown him in his bed, and the next day he’ll wake up in the same empty room and understand that this is just how it is now.

She’s not sure if it counts as a date for a man to invite you to his panic attack and then tack ice cream onto the end of it, but she tells herself it does.

Watching someone throw up feels much more intimate than talking someone through a panic attack, though she feels, objectively, that these should be switched, or at least equal. They’re both insides-on-the-outside events.

“To represent the constant passing of time,” says Petra. “And the idea that maybe when it is all over, everything will be flipped upside down and we will live it again in reverse.”

There will come a point at the very end of it all when no one will be able to deny what is happening. No one will say, The earth is not on fire, or I’m not melting. These will be incontrovertible facts, and in that one gorgeous, horrifying moment, the only one like it in all of human history, wars will cease, the food chain will level, the wealth gap will slam shut. Everyone will be on the same page about everything. It could be an incredibly unifying experience for humankind if it were not also so obliterating.

she says life is like a record that you listen to over and over, unable to remember each time that you’ve heard this before.

But, most importantly: his grandfather, who is neither panicking about the end of the world nor pretending it’s not happening. He’s somewhere in the middle, and that’s where Ole wants to be too. Here in the middle with his grandpa.

Petra peers at Nora over her glasses, her eyes narrow and dark, her pupils too large. “Is it possible,” she’s saying, “that memory is a construct relating to gravity and entropy and complexity, and there could be moments of misplaced complexity that make memory happen in the opposite direction?”

Pretend Petra is still going. “Perhaps there could be a glitch in the way time goes, and you could remember something that has not happened yet, people you have not met. Like you and that guy . . .”

Her mind clatters along a track, and suddenly she knows where the track will end. Somehow she already knew it when she met this man at Begonia. She thinks of Petra and her beloved physicists and the idea that they have been here before. It really does feel that way. Still. It’s weird.

And though Marlen is deliriously happy, out of his mind with joy, a feeling that might physically lift him up into the air, he doesn’t feel at all surprised.

she can see the bird mural from here, the same one visible from the front window of Begonia. Not the whole thing, and not very well, just a sliver of it through the buildings, part of a blue jay, part of a parrot, part of a robin. It’s a bit disorienting; she hasn’t gained a sense of the city yet and would not have thought it possible to see that street from this vantage point. But it’s comforting. Grounding. Something about that mural feels nostalgic, like when you come across a children’s book in a used bookstore that you vaguely remember your mother reading to you when you were small.

Sometimes it really strikes her how strange it is to be an adult daughter, to stand in front of the person who has known you your whole life and finally understand what it’s like to see things from the perspective they had when you were a kid, but to also understand that they have lived another whole lifetime since then.

Hilda wants to believe the world is ending because, for her, it is.

He’s gotten a haircut, and it crosses her mind that she has always liked his hair like this, even though she knows she’s never seen it like this before. She wonders if these flashes of false familiarity will decrease as she gets to know him, replaced by actual memories and knowledge.

sometimes she remembers him putting his arms around her, even though she knows—she knows!—it has never happened. The truth, it turns out, is sometimes the truth whether it is even true or not.

Nora’s cat jumped on the counter and began poking at the cans with her nose.

She holds up a necklace; it reminds her of her mother. “My mom would love this,” she announces, more to herself than to him. She shoves it into her purse. “No, it’s not stealing.”

Is that independence? Just being so constantly, acutely aware that no one’s taking care of you, no one’s noticing what’s wrong, pretending that’s fine even if it’s not?

Maybe you can be dependent and independent and have someone dependent on you all at the same time with no real problem.

No matter how far they walk, no matter which way they go, she finds the same thing at every destination: a memory. As though she’s wandered these streets for years with Mr. Schmidt.

She seems to be looking directly at him; she’s smiling and she has a streak of blue paint across her forehead,

“Quantum entanglement, maybe?” he says, as though that were a complete explanation.

“Okay, so quantum entanglement is basically when a group of particles become linked in such a way that they can’t be described independently of each other, even when they’re separated by great distances.

And once they’re linked, they’re”—he gestures behind them at the painting—“they’re linked forever, I think, and it doesn’t matter how far apart they are. Like, you could put one of the linked particles in a spaceship and send it to the moon, and whatever you did to the remaining particle on Earth would also happen to the one on the moon. They act like one particle, even though they’re far apart.”

“I’d really like to do that for you.” More crying. “I wasn’t generous enough in this life. I did so many things I regret, and I didn’t do so many things I should’ve done . . . please let me do this one thing . . .”

But he recognized that it was okay if she lost her mind a bit, that she needed this, and that though she was painting, what she was really doing was grieving. He’d been there too.

Just as in the kitchen, the dining room did not bring closure either. She now has to run out for more paint, and this time she buys a lot more of it. At this rate, the whole house is going to be painted, inside and out, by the time it’s destroyed. And hopefully that will accomplish whatever it is that she needs it to accomplish.

begins to explain it to her, how scientists have discovered that particles can become linked, that you can put one of the linked particles in a spaceship and send it to the moon, and whatever you do to the remaining particle on Earth will also happen to the one on the moon. They act like one particle, even though they’re far apart. “Can the particles in my body become entangled with the particles in someone else’s?” she asks. She loves this idea, and he knows it’s because Nora is so far away. “Yes, absolutely,” he says, quickly and confidently, even though he’s not actually sure. He’s not a physicist.

“Cool,” says his son. “Thanks, Grandpa.”

And this boy, in Iver’s living room, it’s not Arnie after all, is it? Because this boy is not eleven. This boy is not dressed like Arnie. He’s a little taller, a little wider; his hair is a little redder. It’s not that Iver didn’t know this before now; it’s that Iver didn’t want to know this, so he put it off for a while. Ignorance really is bliss, even if you have to force it.

“The problem with finding out you’re going to die soon, but not immediately, is that there is time for the shock to wear off, and you’re left with decisions to make and difficult conversations to have and, worst of all, so many mundane, ordinary life things that still have to happen up until the bitter end. Going to the bathroom. Washing the dishes. Small talk at the gas station. Making and eating food. It seems like all of that should stop, like a person should be able to say, ‘You know what? I’m going to opt out of these things now. They’re for people who need to exist for another forty years. They’re the currency with which you pay the human rent—and why should someone pay rent when they’re being evicted?’”

“None of us have ever gone through this before. Hard to get it perfectly right the first time.”

what if childbirth is a metaphor. A message. A little message to all of humanity, to remind us that our bodies know what to do, and that everything will be okay?”

He feels foolish and wonders if the people around him realize that old age doesn’t automatically confer boundless wisdom and goodness upon a person, though he remembers believing this once, that everyone older than him should by virtue of their age automatically act better than him. At every stage in his life, he’d thought the next one would bring a feeling of having it all figured out, but it only tended to bring a feeling of having more to figure out than he had ever realized.

Maybe we’ve become entangled.”

For Nora, she has chosen birds. All kinds of birds, toucans and falcons and blue jays and flamingos and penguins.

“I liked the ending.” “Like, when they all die?” “But they don’t, do they?” He laughs. “No, I guess they never do.” “And you are a prophet, so . . .” “You think I got it right then?” “I hope so.”

She turns to face the giant bird mural across the street, the chaotic flurry of wings and beaks and talons, the colors muted in the dim light. The mural that feels as though it had been painted for her, like a present from the universe. A lovely parting gift.

This is what he means about the minutes touching. It’s like he’s already seen the thing that’s about to happen, sitting at the kitchen table with his father. And maybe this is how time has always worked; maybe time is all over the place, only perfectly linear in a person’s memory, like a deck of cards being thrown into the air and then gathered and put in order after the fact. There’s no way to know for sure.

Hank finds a recipe in a weathered cookbook and reads the ingredients as Ole paws through cupboards. He’s lost, Hank realizes with some amusement. He doesn’t know where anything is. But he’s trying. It’s a metaphor for them. Lost but trying.

Three things cross her mind during this kiss: Wow, I have less than a month left to live, and still I’m not sure I can go the rest of my life without this man, and Déjà vu.

How unfair that time only goes one way, that by the time you understand how much you will miss something, it’s only because you’re already missing it.

“I brought you something,” says Nora, after they’ve both had to pull away and dry their faces on their sleeves. “A little souvenir.” She looks sheepish, like she knows that souvenirs are maybe a Before Times thing. Hilda doesn’t think this is necessarily true. She accepts the small box, handmade from green felt. Inside, a small silver locket.