And then I wasn't sure where I was. The streets looked familiar. My phone rang. It was a different ring, a ring I hadn't heard before. And then I felt backwards. An outside-inness. An upsidedown overunder. A discontinuity. I felt discontinuous. And where were you, where were you in all this?

*

I am trying to explain something that I have tried to explain before. It was as if a ringing ended, a noise I had heard so long I had forgotten. It was like getting glasses for the first time. You can see every leaf on the tree. As if they took a bore depth of your very self, the very depth of you cored. Only the cored depth is empty. Only there is nothing to core. There is no sample returned.

*

The trip through made me puke. I wretched on the sidewalk—no one was around. I was down on my hands and knees puking and then dry heaving and then panting.
     I puked in the dirt by the pavement where the dogs shit, and when I was done I pushed some leaves over the sick with the toe of my shoe. My stomach hasn't settled yet. It's been weeks and my stomach still hasn't settled.

*

(x,y) is the empty open place (where space is it moves in space)

*

And when it was over I made my way down the familiar seeming street. The same cars were parked down the sides, but leaves had collected around their wheels. I put my hand in my pocket and felt keys. I found my apartment building and put the silver key in the building door and it worked. I put the gold key in the apartment door and it opened. Everything in the apartment looked familiar, but the place was a wreck. There were things I couldn't find.
     And the cat. The cat was different.

*

I am trying to tell you something. A wormhole opened up. I have moved through the wormhole space. Now I am in a new universe—many things are different. Here. Many things are the same.
     I am not saying I think I could reverse this & find our previous universe again. I have been sucked in. I will have to learn its ways.

*

That first night I didn't sleep. The phone rang, I didn't answer it. I cleaned. I did laundry. I opened unread bills. I pulled expired condiments out of the fridge. I fed the cat who ate, leapt up and pawed at the window.
     Are you an inside or an outside cat, I asked. The cat didn't answer, but the empty fridge purred. I've thought of unplugging it because every few hours it whirs into life, not knowing how empty it is.

*

You know a time capsule—people put in newspapers, novelty items, personal effects. They seal it up and bury it in some new construction or by city hall and put their faith in it that sometime, in the future, people, different people or their own future selves, will find the little manufactured artifact.
     There is another kind of time capsule that actually contains time. Time encapsulated. The encapsulated time is contained within a person. It is not linear. It is a totality of possibilities, a paradox, the boundaries of the expanding universe; imagine the growing map.
     I hold this time in me.

*

Wormhole Suzanne comes over. Wormhole people are always coming over. It is hard to find time to yourself in the wormhole universe. I have tried to not answer the phone, but then they come and knock on my door. Suzanne has come over a few times now and I pretend not to be at home. But then she leaves me messages saying she's getting worried about me and so this time I let her in. The house is very clean, cleaner than before, which surprises her. I've spent a lot of time cleaning. I have scrubbed the linoleum in the kitchen on my hands and knees with a scrub brush. I have mopped the ceiling and washed the windows. I have cleaned the closet shelves, laundered the drapes, bleached the sink. I keep a bunch of dirty clothes I think are yours in a paper bag in under the bed.

*

I've decided to make a map. A new mental map. I have a picture of where I came from, but now I have to fit another universe in. I need to find out how the universes are connected.
     I needed a bigger map, so I've started going west.
     I am looking for clues.
     I am also wondering when and if I might run into my wormhole self. Mail comes for her. Magazines I've never ordered. I opened a letter congratulating her for buying her first house. Where is this house, I wonder. The letter doesn't say.

*

I offer wormhole Suzanne some coffee. We sit on the couch together in the living room, by the window that looks out over my street. Both on the couch, facing not each other exactly but some third point in space. The old couch, upholstery faded and worn on the arms, cat scratches on the legs—this couch came through with me, I think.
     It is a sunny day, which makes us kind of quiet. We watch the light hit the leaves of the plants in my apartment. We watch the shadows the leaves cast on the floor. Suzanne isn't sure what to say to me and so she suggests we get out of town. Her wormhole family has a cabin at the lake. I have to think whether regular Suzanne had a cabin at the lake. Maybe she had a beach house. Coffee cools in our cups. Wormhole Suzanne says why not invite my sister. Sure I say. Sometimes I think maybe it is my real sister in the wormhole but I don't know.

*

See how the light shines through the spaces between each and every leaf? I have seen during a solar eclipse the leaves act as pinhole cameras, and project thousands of inverse, eclipsed suns on the ground, thousands of crescents. Perhaps all the leaves always act like this—projecting suns on the ground below which blend into shadows.
     If the leaves are always acting as pinhole cameras then they are inverting and reflecting all the light that reaches them, from the sun and the stars and the shining plasma, making tiny maps of the universe all around us. That light is a record of time, a record of distance, and the tiny maps are tiny histories.
     And then also there is the light they eat. The plants are eating the light and making the maps.

*

Even with Suzanne, I am looking for something in the shadows. When Suzanne leaves the cat stays, draws its tail back and forth across the floor, marking a lazy, looping curve.

*

The sinusoid: the irregular vascular shape in the leaves and the liver.
The sine: the fold, the pocket and the return.

*

I've started going to a new grocery store, four blocks west.
     In the grocery store I can't buy anything you and I used to get because they don't have it. The young blond wormhole girls who work at the registers try not to let on that they don't speak English, nodding at what I say and counting my change quietly in their own language.

*

A bird flies in through the kitchen window I've opened to let out the bleach smell. It lands on the chandelier in the kitchen shaped like green vines with blue flowers. Perched on a metal branch, the little golden bird looks at home in the chandelier.
     While I am trying to find a camera to take a picture of the bird on the chandelier, the cat kills it. The dead bird lies on the table. When I see it dead I feel bad that I didn't get a chance to take the picture, and then I feel worse about the bird.
     I'm not sure what to do with the bird. I can't bury it anywhere. But I don't want to throw it away. I consider putting it in a spare pot with soil but I wrap it in an old handkerchief, take it down to a little patch of grass in the alley, and cover it in yellow leaves.

*

To get west I cross a street called Western. On the other side of the street is a bus stop. On a telephone pole behind the bus stop there is a card board painted picture of a unicorn's head. The unicorn is decapitated. Across the bottom, in red paint, someone has written: death to unicorns.

*

The cat has started eating the plants. Perhaps her stomach hurts. Maybe I haven't been buying her the right kind of food.
     In the morning there is a little pile of puke, all green with chewed leaves, in the kitchen. I clean the sick up with toilet paper, put it in a plastic bag, throw it in the trash can in the alley.
     In the alley I look for the little bird carcass under the leaves, pushing them around with my foot. I'm hoping to see a corner of my handkerchief, just to know the bird is okay, but I can't find it anywhere.

*

I read that a rare map dealer had for years been sneaking into the special collections of Yale library and removing maps from atlases with a razor blade. He'd sell the stolen maps to collectors. And no one noticed that the maps were missing because he replaced them with masterful fakes. One day a librarian caught him red-handed—razor blade in his coat pocket, maps up his sleeves—which began a quest to track down all the maps he'd stolen, in order to reassemble the atlases. And then someone noticed the fake maps weren't worm eaten, as the real maps were. When the investigators put the real maps back in the atlases, the holes opened, all the way through.
     It was finding the wormholes that put the atlases back together again—the holes from maps to maps. To map this universe, I picture the totality of multiple universes shaped like an atlas—the universes overlaying one another, folded and stacked—and wormholes running between and through.

*

If you keep going west you get to California. On California there is a plant store where I thought there was a restaurant. At the store I buy a mum called hardy. It's flowers are little yellow globes and small like leaves. When I get the plant home I don't pot it but set it on the kitchen table. The cat jumps up to eat the leaf smelling flowers.

*

On my way home from the store, carrying the flowering plant, I find a flyer blowing around the leaves. I pick it up and it says we buy ugly houses. I wonder if my wormhole self's house is ugly.
     I have the plant in one hand and the flyer in the other when I see a handkerchief caught against a chain link fence. I try to determine if it is the one I put the bird in, but I can't be sure.

*

Wormhole Suzanne and I pack for the lake. She has the same car as regular Suzanne. We pack bathing suits and sunscreen and lots of booze. My wormhole sister gets dropped off with her bags. My old sister could tell what people were thinking but were afraid to say. My wormhole sister keeps looking at me like she wants to ask me something.
     The lake house is two hours north of the city. It sits on a cliff and we will have to walk down a hundred and twenty wooden steps to get to the water. The flies will be horrible and the water will be very cold, but we'll put on our bathing suits and sunscreen as soon as we get to the house and go down for a swim.
     I tell WH Suzanne and my WH sister that I don't really want to go to the lake. All the packed bags are in the car and we stand in the apartment.
     Go on without me, I say.
     This trip is for you, says Suzanne.
     It's the wrong time, I say.
     But it is not actually the wrong time. It is actually the wrong space.
     When I unpack from not going to the lake, I find your toothpaste, hidden in the back of the cabinet. I take off the cap, touch my tongue to the rim of the open tube, just to taste your mouth in my mouth.

*

This is where my desire and the laws of nature intersect: I know you moved through but just not to here.

*

And I wish.
     I wish you and I.
     I wish you and I could have talked about the wormhole universe phenomenon. We talked about wormholes, but we just chatted about it—one of us would say, 'did you know?' and the other one would say 'wow' and it wasn't ever about learning anything true, factually true; it was about compiling information, and it was about both thinking the same things about the world. We talked about wormholes, but it wasn't an experience we shared.
     I also wish we had worked harder on telepathy. I would like to ask—are you mapping your wormhole universe? I would like to ask—how are your wormhole friends?

*

The streetlight outside my window casts the shadow of an elm tree branch across the bed. I close the curtains to keep out the light and the shadow. The shadow stays on the curtains and when the draft moves them, the cat chases the branch.

__

I started writing this when I was living in Chicago and I heard about a recently-married local musician, along with two others, being killed in a horrific wreck. Over time, the musician and the wreck disappeared and were replaced by wormholes, Duchamp's idea of the infra-thin, and map-making. Chicago stayed the same.