The Double of My Double Is Not My Double

I saw my double at the mall a couple of weeks ago. I was sitting on a bench outside a clothing store. Lynn was inside, checking out the sales. My mind was pretty empty as I watched the intermittent trickle of shoppers on their way to something else. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a person sit down next to me. I turned and saw who it was and laughed. “Hey,” I said. “How’s business?”

He was dressed in a rumpled suit and tie and he looked tired. Sighing to catch his breath, he sat back. There was a weak smile on his face. “Double drill,” he said.

“Knowing me, I wouldn’t think there’d be that much to it,” I told him.

His eyes half-closed and he shook his head.

“You must be at it all day,” I said.

“And into the night,” he said. “On top of all of it, I’ve had to get a part-time job.”

“You’re moonlighting as my double?”

“I’m dipping things in chocolate at that old-fashioned candy store on Stokes Road. Four hours a day for folding cash. Remember a couple of meetings back after we started talking, I told you I was living in that giant house out by the wild-animal rescue, the last cul-de-sac before the road turns to dirt? The mortgage on that place is crushing.”

“I thought you were living with like four or five other doubles, splitting the cost,” I said.

“Yeah, but my double salary isn’t cutting it. Dipping things in chocolate, though, pays extraordinarily well. I make a hundred dollars every four-hour session.”

“That’s pretty good. What do you dip?”

He leaned forward and took out a pack of cigarettes. He offered me one, but I’d quit, and he looked slightly wounded by my refusal. When he sparked his big chrome lighter, I noticed the pale hue of his complexion, the beads of sweat, the slight shaking of his hands. There was a pervasive aroma of alcohol.

He took a drag and, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, said, “You name it, I’ll dip it. It started with fruit, and by the time they brought in the first steak, I knew it was gonna get out of hand. Finally, the old Swedish guy who runs the place took off his shoe and handed it to me. A chocolate loafer. After I fished it out and it dried, he and his wife laughed their asses off.”

“You don’t look well,” I told him. “You’ve put on weight and you’re pale. You look like the Pillsbury dough boy on a bender.” The right arm of his glasses was repaired with Scotch tape.

“Well,” he said. “This is what I’ve come to talk to you about.”

He was a wreck. I looked away. Nobody wants to see themselves tear up, watch their own bottom lip quiver.

“It seems I have a double,” he said, his voice cracking slightly.

A moment passed before I could process the news. “You’re a double and yet you have a double? How’s that work?”

“It’s rare,” he said, “but it happens. You know, as your double, I don’t bother you that often. I’ve not brought you any ill luck like in the legends. I’m just around and you see me maybe once or twice a year, we have a friendly chat, and I go on my way. The kind of double I have, though, is not benign, as I am to you; it’s an evil emanation.”

“Is your double also my double?” I asked.

“Not precisely. He’s not got our good looks. For the most part he exists as a cloud, a drifting smog. But he can take physical form for short periods of a few hours. A shape-shifter. Insidious. He’s always hovering, repeating what I say in a high-pitched voice, appearing to my friends and fucking them over, making them think it’s me. When I complain to him, he laughs and pinches my second chin. All night, he whispers paradoxical dreams into my ear, their riddles frustrations dipped in chocolate. He’s my double, but your psyche used me to birth him.”

“You’re losing me,” I said. “Are you saying I’m responsible?”

“Well, it’s your orbit that I’m trapped in. Everything issues from you. He’s been haunting me for the past six months. Can you think of some bleak or grim thought you might have had back half a year that could have sown the seed?”

“Grim thoughts?” I said. “I have a couple dozen a day.”

“He’s trying to supplant me as your double. If he takes my position, your ass’ll be in a sling. He’ll grind you down to powder.”

“What are we gonna do?” I asked.

“He goes by the name Fantasma-gris.”

“Spanish?”

“Yeah, it means Gray Ghost.”

“I don’t even know Spanish,” I said. “I did a couple years of it in high school. I can say meatball, count to ten, that’s it.”

“Somehow something about Fantasma-gris dribbled out of your mind. Just sit tight till I figure out a plan,” he said, resting his hand lightly on my forearm. He stood quickly. “Then I’ll be back in touch.”

“A plan for what?”

“To kill him.” He spun away then and lumbered off down the center of the mall. I watched him go and realized he was limping. I was wondering what was with his suit and tie. I hadn’t worn one in three years.

“Are you ready?” asked Lynn. She was standing before me, holding a big bag from the store she’d been in. I got up and put my arm around her shoulders as we headed off.

She said, “Let’s go get dinner somewhere.”

I agreed. We left the mall and went out into the parking lot. As we drove to the restaurant Lynn had decided on, I was preoccupied, thinking about Fantasma-gris. I wanted to tell her about it, but she’d made it clear years earlier that she didn’t want to hear any double talk. When I’d finally cornered my double downtown one day and spoken to him for the first time, I told Lynn about it.

“What do you mean, ‘a double’?” she’d said.

“A doppelgänger. My twin. It’s metaphysical, you know, like a spirit. I’ve been seeing him around for about a year now, and today, I went up to him and told him I knew what he was.”

She smiled and shook her head as I spoke, but at one point she stopped and squinted and said, “Are you serious?”

I nodded.

“Do you understand what you’re saying?” she’d asked.

“Yeah.”

“You better get to a shrink. Don’t think I’m heading toward retirement with a kook.” She’d walked over to where I sat and leaned down to put her arms around me. “You gotta get your shit together,” she said.

Lynn made me an appointment and I went to see this woman, Dr. Ivy, who asked me about the double. I told her everything I knew. Her office smelled of patchouli and there was low, moaning music piped in from somewhere. She was a very short, fairly good-looking woman with long dark hair and a faint scar on her right cheek. For some reason, I pictured her cutting herself on her own plum-painted thumbnail. Every time I spoke, she nodded and jotted things down on a pad. I was transfixed by the sight of an ivy tattoo on the wrist of her writing hand, and at the end of the session, she wrote me a scrip for some head pills.

I bought them and read the warnings. In print so tiny I had to use a magnifying glass to read, it said my throat could close up, I might get amnesia, bleed from my asshole, lose my hearing, develop a strange taste of rotten eggs in my mouth, or be drawn to reckless gambling. I took them for two days and felt like a walking sandbag. On the third morning, I flushed them down the bowl. I’d learned my lesson. I never went back to see Dr. Ivy, but then I never mentioned my double to Lynn again.

At the restaurant, I ordered ravioli and Lynn got a salad. We both had wine, me red, her white. The place was dark but our table had a red candle. We talked about the kids and then we talked about the cars. She told me what was going on at her job. We bitched about politics for ten minutes. All along, though, I wanted to tell her what the double had told me in the mall, but I knew I shouldn’t. Instead, I said to her, “I was thinking about Aruba today. That was a great vacation.”

She took my cue and started reminiscing about the blue water, the sun, the balcony in our room that opened onto a courtyard filled by the branches of an enormous tree with orange flowers and crawling with iguanas the size of house cats. I reminded her of our jeep journey to the desert side of the island and the stacked stone prayers that littered the shore. It was a great trip, and I took real pleasure in recalling it with her, but yes, I had an ulterior motive.

It was on that vacation that I first saw my double. While she spun out her descriptions of the Butterfly Pavilion, an attraction we’d visited, or the night we ate at a restaurant on the edge of a dock, ocean at our backs, party lights, a guy with a beat-up acoustic guitar playing “Sleepwalk,” I was, in that memory of Aruba, elsewhere, standing at midnight, after she’d fallen asleep, smoking a joint on the open second-floor landing of our building.

Beneath me was a lighted trail that cut through the tall bamboo. I was bone weary, and my eyes were half closed. We’d gone kayaking that day. I wondered how the kids were getting along without us but my thoughts were distracted by the strong breeze whipping the bamboo tops. I was just about to flick the roach away and ascend the concrete steps to my left when I saw someone pass by on the path.

The fellow was about six foot, a little stooped, thick in the chest and well overweight. He leaned into the wind, holding a floppy white beach hat to his head with his left hand. With the next gust, his yellow Hawaiian shirt opened, the tails blowing behind him to reveal his gut. He turned his head suddenly and looked up at me for a moment before disappearing into the bamboo. The glasses, the big head, his dull look seemed familiar. I tried to place where I might have seen him before, but I was too tired.

The next day, we took a jeep over to the barren side of the island and visited an abandoned gold mine. There was a three-story busted and rusted concrete and tin structure built into the side of an enormous sand dune. The place was spooky inside and Lynn and I held hands as we went from room to room. There was nothing really to see but rotted furniture and rusted metal bed frames in a maze of rooms that led on to other tunnels and rooms. I started to feel claustrophobic, and said I’d had enough. She agreed.

As we made our way toward where we remembered the exit being, another party of sightseers passed by in a hallway to our left. An older gentleman with a cane and a white-haired woman following him. She nodded to us and smiled. Then a second later, the guy from the night path went by, whistling, the sound of his tune echoing through the rooms and back into the heart of the sand dune. I saw him for only an instant, but knew it was him and knew I recognized him from somewhere.

At least three more times, I caught sight of him in Aruba, and then in the last few days we were there, he seemed to have vanished. The next time I saw him was on the plane going home. Lynn and I had taken our seats, and he passed down the aisle toward the back. His presence surprised me. I sat up, and as he went by, he looked down, straight into my eyes. It wasn’t until after takeoff that I realized he was me.

I was petrified the whole flight home, thinking doppelgänger. Trapped with one in midair, no less. In Poe, in Hoffmann, in Stevenson, the double was always grim business. I didn’t even want to consider the dark foreboding of legends and folklore. But, for all my perspiration, we landed safely and that was that. I saw him briefly at the baggage terminal, walking away, carrying a battered blue suitcase. A few months went by before I caught sight of him in town one snowy afternoon.

“I love it when we can get away and have adventures,” said Lynn, almost in a whisper. She lifted her wineglass and motioned for a toast.

“Me too,” I said. The glasses clinked. After that I put the double out of my mind, and by the time we went to bed, I’d convinced myself it was all nonsense.

Two days later, I went out to the garage to put a couple of old pizza boxes in the recycle container. I put the boxes in the container and let the lid slam down. As I turned, he struck the chrome lighter and lit a cigarette. I did a little jump and grunted. He’d never been anywhere near my house before. Although my heart pounded, I felt immediately indignant.

“I’ll only be a minute,” he said, sensing my anger. “I have a plan to get rid of Fantasma-gris.”

I took a deep breath and calmed down. “You know,” I said, “I don’t know . . .”

“Listen, if he gets through me, you’re next. Believe me, you’re through if he takes me out.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

“Someday this week, it’s gonna go down, so be ready. And I’m warning you, this is gonna be viscerally brutal. Savage. I don’t want you to think this is in any way some kind of psycho breakdown bullshit, you know, all a fancy. There’s gonna be blood involved.”

He spoke in a harsh tone, and as he went on, I inched back away from him. He looked worse than he had at the mall. I realized he must be sleeping in that suit.

“Whatever,” I said, and brushed past him into the house, locking the door to the garage behind me. Lynn was in the kitchen, and I went up there to be close to her. She seemed to me to have powers greater than the double’s. I really wanted to tell her, but I didn’t.

“Were you calling me?” she asked. She stood at the stove, stirring chili. “I thought I heard a voice from the garage.”

“I was singing,” I said and put my arms around her. Right then is when I wished I hadn’t flushed the pills. Reckless gambling seemed preferable.

The next day, while Lynn was at work, I made an emergency appointment with Dr. Ivy. I knew it was grasping at straws, but I thought if all else failed she’d write me another scrip to cancel the double. For the first five minutes of the session, she gave me shit about stiffing my second appointment and not calling. I just grinned and said sorry when she was through. Finally, she picked up her pad and pen, the music came on as if by magic, and she said, “So, last we spoke, you told me of your double.”

“He’s back,” I said.

“Tell me,” she said and leaned forward, her pen at the ready.

“I just want to make one thing clear at the start,” I said. “The double of my double is not my double.” She nodded as if she understood, and I let it all out for her—the meeting in the mall, the invasion of my garage, and Fantasma-gris. It took me the whole hour to tell her. When I was finished, there was only one minute left of the session for her to speak.

“I’ll write you,” she said. “What did you do with the last prescription?”

“I threw it in the toilet.”

She stared hard at me and tapped her pen on her prescription pad. I noticed that the tattoo around her wrist wasn’t ivy at all but actually barbed wire. “Here’s something different,” she said. “There’ll be a slight sense of euphoria, but it should allow you to get through your normal day and also eradicate your double problem.”

“Sounds awesome,” I said and meant it.

“A slight sense of euphoria” was a bit of an understatement. The next day, after Lynn left for work, I took one of the pills and settled down to a doubleless eight hours. A half hour later, sitting at my computer, Dr. Ivy’s cure kicked in, and the world appeared literally brighter. Things looked crisp. I breathed more deeply and sat up straight. I was hyperaware. Looking at the story I’d been writing, I couldn’t get to the plot because the shapes of the letters were too distracting. A few minutes passed and then I was floating on a pink cloud, everything recalibrating to a slower focus. I felt so good, I actually laughed.

The drug made me brave, and instead of getting back to work, I dove deep into a rational analysis of my double, determined to figure it all out as much as I could. Staring out the window at the trees and the white house across the street, I plumbed and divided, spinning theories to rival relativity. I kept returning to one question, though. Why Aruba? To answer it might be to solve the puzzle. I got an urge to write up what I remembered of the vacation, to make an official dossier about it. I opened a new screen and wrote as fast as I could, rarely stopping to correct errors.

An hour into it, my ardor for Aruba dried up and I found myself fluffing off, surfing the Web with the word “doppelgänger” in the Google search box. I stumbled upon a site that had a news story about scientists who were able to induce in their subjects the experience of having a double by electrically stimulating a region of the brain known as the left temporoparietal junction. The subjects reported a “shadowy person standing behind them.”

I thought back to the night I’d first seen him, scurrying down the bamboo trail. That day Lynn and I had gone ocean kayaking. The plastic board you were supposed to float on didn’t look anything like any kayak I’d ever seen. I couldn’t keep from falling off it. I’d teeter for a few minutes and then over I’d go. Repeatedly getting back up on the thing in deep water exhausted me in no time, and I was just barely able to dog-paddle to a broken-down dock I used to get back on dry land. I wondered if somewhere in the mêlée, I’d maybe hit my head and the double was born of a concussion.

I couldn’t recall a bump, but I was sure I’d solved the puzzle of Aruba. The revelation gave me a sense of accomplishment and confidence until five minutes later when, looking out the window, I saw a car just like mine pull up out in front of my house. The door opened and my double got out. He walked around the car, dressed in that rank suit, heading for our front door. The sight of him made my heart race. “Something’s wrong here,” I said aloud. There was a knocking at the front door. Shadow, the dog, went nuts, barking like the vicious killer he wasn’t. I got up from my chair, feeling slightly dizzy, slightly doomed, and went to put a shirt on. Once I was up, I hurried, not wanting the neighbors to see me in his condition.

I pushed Shadow away and opened the door. “You shouldn’t be here,” I said.

“But I am.”

“I took these pills that are supposed to cancel you.”

“Fuck those pills,” he said. “What do you think? I’m playing games?” He stepped toward the door as if to enter, and I shut it quickly. He got his forearm on it before I could lock him out and he pushed his way in, sending me stumbling backward a few steps.

“I want you out of here,” I said.

“Calm down,” he said and closed the door behind him.

I backed away into the kitchen, looking right and left for a pair of scissors or a knife lying on the counter. He followed.

“We’ve got a job to do,” he said. “Fantasma-gris is coalescing like a motherfucker.”

“I’m not killing anyone or anything,” I said, and noticed he wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“I’ve got him tied up in the trunk of your car. We’ll off him and then drive out to the Pine Barrens and sink his body in some remote pond. I have two twenty-pound dumbbells. Nobody has to know.” He pushed back the bottom of his suit jacket and grabbed a pistol he’d had in the waist of his pants.

The instant I saw the gun, I was useless with fear.

“Let’s go,” he said and waved the gun at me.

I went to the living room and stepped into my shoes, grabbed my sweatshirt. We left through the front door. The double drove. I sat still, breathing deeply, in the passenger seat. As he pulled away from the curb, I heard a banging and muffled screams issuing from the trunk.

“If you want to get rid of him,” I said, “why don’t you just get rid of him yourself? Leave me out of it.”

“Step up to the plate and quit your whining,” he said. Then he turned and yelled over his shoulder, “Shut the fuck up,” to Fantasma-gris, who was making a racket.

We drove south toward the Barrens on the long road that led past the animal rescue and eventually turned to dirt. Just before the asphalt gave out, he made a left and drove slowly down a short block of enormous old houses with porches and gabled roofs. We came to a driveway through the trees that opened into a cul-de-sac. At the turn farthest in sat a huge wreck of a house, brown paint peeling, cedar boards fallen from the walls, the supports of the porch railing busted out.

“My place,” he said, turning off the car. He pointed to it with the gun.

“Nice,” I said.

“For the money, it’s not so great.”

I noticed that two of the second-floor windows were broken and there were bricks missing from the chimney.

“Okay, let’s get this asshole out and kill him. I figure we can do the job in my room and then take him out to the woods after nightfall.”

We got out of the car. It was cold, headed toward evening, and the breeze was reminiscent of the one in Aruba when I’d seen him on the bamboo trail. My mind was knotted with plots to escape.

“Aren’t there other people in your house?” I asked. “They’ll hear us shoot him.”

“Just doubles. They don’t give a shit. They’ve got their own losers to contend with.” He went to the trunk and I followed him. Holding the gun at the ready, he put the car key in the lock and turned it. The trunk slowly opened upward, and I peered inside to catch a glimpse of Fantasma-gris.

I don’t know what I expected, some kind of smoke goblin maybe, but what I saw was like a white marble or limestone statue of a guy in a fetal position. “What the hell?” I said.

“He’s hardened,” said my double. “I dipped him in white chocolate. That’s how I caught him. He was at my job this morning, busting my balls, and I finally snapped. I grabbed him quick and threw him into the vat. By the time he crawled out, I’d gotten my gun from my jacket on the back of the dipping-room door.”

“This is crazy,” I said.

“You’re telling me. Grab his ankles, we’ll take him up to the house.”

Fantasma-gris was a lot lighter than he looked. He was nowhere near as big as us, and I can’t say his face, a mask of white chocolate, looked anything like me. I had a passing inclination I’d seen it before, though. His lips still moved and mumbled threats. He cursed and called us names. At first it freaked me out, but by the time we reached the steps of my double’s place, I found him annoying. On the way in the front door, I accidentally slammed his left foot on the door jamb and half his shoe with half a foot cracked off. He howled like a wounded animal within his sweet shell. A quick look told me he was hollow.

The old house was falling apart, water stains on the ceilings and molding coming loose. There were cracks in the lathing of the walls. The floor of the foyer was bare, worn wood. We carefully set Fantasma-gris down so we could take a breather. The double waved me over to him. I approached and he put his arm lightly around my shoulder, the gun to my stomach.

“I have to go straighten up my room before you’re allowed in,” he whispered, his breath on fire with booze. He was sweating and ripe with the scent of body funk dipped in chocolate. “If you do anything foolish, I’ll hunt you down and kill you and take over your life. You understand?”

My mouth was so dry. I nodded.

“Now, go sit in the parlor with May till I come back.” He pointed to an entrance off to the left of the foyer. I took a step toward it and saw a near-empty room filled with twilight, dust bunnies slowly rolling across a splintered floor, bare walls, a dusty chandelier. In the corner by a cold fireplace, a tilting couch on three legs with torn and sweat-stained floral upholstery. At the upright end sat a woman reading a book. She looked over as I entered. Out in the foyer, Fantasma-gris repeatedly screamed, “Fuck.”

The minute I saw her face, I knew I knew May from the neighborhood. Lynn was actually pretty good friends with her. “You’re May’s double?” I asked.

She nodded and smiled. May was our age, a big-boned woman with a ruddy face. She was the swimming instructor at the local Girl Scout camp in the summer. Lived around the corner from us, next to the lake.

“You look just like her,” I said.

“Well, that’s the idea,” she said.

“Do you know me?”

She nodded but said nothing.

“How is May?” I asked and sat carefully on the broken end of the couch.

“She’s all right. She had a hysterectomy last fall and I think she’s starting to slow down a little. Overall, though, she gets along.”

“You live here with my double?”

“Yeah, me and a few others.”

“What’s he like? You can be honest.”

“No disrespect, but he’s a total dick. I think he’s crazy.”

I heard someone descending the steps at the back of the house. “Listen, do me a favor,” I said. “Get word to my wife that I’m here and to come get me. You know her, right?”

“If I get a chance,” she said. “I’m due downtown in a couple of minutes. May’s in the grocery store, and I’m scheduled to appear in the frozen food aisle. If I get a chance I’ll have her call Lynn.”

I gave her a silent thumbs-up and then my double was at the entrance.

Before we lifted Fantasma-gris, my double broke off his double’s pinkie finger and stuck it in his mouth like a cigarette. “Got a light?” he said. Screams of agony issued from the chocolate.

His room was on the second floor and I was out of breath by the time we arrived. We set the double up in a chair. The position he’d come from in the trunk was perfect for sitting, although he was somewhat slouched forward. I was afraid if he fell, he’d shatter all over the floor.

“How come the Fantasma smog didn’t leak out when I knocked his toes off? The fucking thing’s hollow,” I said.

“The chocolate is his prison.”

I took a seat on the edge of his bed and my double settled down at a little table by the window. Our prisoner faced me, but my double stared out the window. “As soon as it’s nightfall,” he said, “we go to town on him.”

“Why nightfall?” I asked.

“Cause that’s the way you kill him. In the dark.”

While I considered whether to bolt for the door or not, I looked at Fantasma-gris’s face. The white mask was off-putting. It had very prominent cheeks, eggshell smooth, that I recalled having seen before in a book, on a Noh mask from the fifteenth century.

Out the window, through the trees, there was still the sight of a thin red line at the horizon with night layered on top. Fantasma-gris was whispering to me, trying to communicate something, but I couldn’t make it out. He seemed to be losing power.

“Okay, now,” said the double. He lifted the gun and cocked the trigger. “Let’s have some fun.” He pointed it at me.

I put my hands up and turned my head.

“Get up.”

I stood, trembling.

“Go over and eat his face.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“Get the fuck over there,” he said and fired the gun into the ceiling.

I jumped and was next to Fantasma-gris in an instant.

“Bite his nose off to spite his face.”

I leaned over and opened my mouth, but the prospect of sinking my teeth into a white chocolate nose made me sick. So very faintly, I heard, “Help me, help me . . .” I gagged and then turned away.

“I said eat his damn face,” said the double and lunged from his chair toward me. I reached down, grabbed Fantasma-gris’s right arm at the wrist with both hands and pulled it off. The double meant to pistol-whip me, but I brought the chocolate arm around like a baseball bat and hit him in the side of the head. White shards exploded everywhere and my double went over like a ton of bricks. The gun flew out of his hand. My instinct was to run, but I remembered all along that I’d have to get the keys from him.

I leaped on him and fished the keys out of his left pocket where I’d seen him stow them earlier. Just as I got up and made to split, he grabbed me by the ankle and tripped me. I went over and smashed into our prisoner, who toppled to the floor with me on top of him and was crushed to smithereens. The leg of the chair rammed into my stomach and knocked the wind out of me. I couldn’t move.

As he predicted, there was blood. It trickled out of the corner of my double’s mouth. He fetched the gun and aimed it at me. “I’m through with you,” he said.

The door opened then and Lynn walked in. “What the hell’s going on here?” she said, standing with her hands on her hips. The double immediately lowered the gun and gazed at the floor.

I finally caught my breath and said, “You see, my double. I told you.”

“Give me the gun,” she said and walked straight over to the double and took it out of his hand. “You two are ridiculous.”

The double said, “My double is pretending to be me and tried to kill me. He busted my head with a chocolate arm.”

“No,” I said, “I’m the real one.”

Lynn backed up three steps, raised the pistol like they do in cop shows and pulled the trigger once. I squinted with the din of the shot, and when I looked, my double had a neat round hole in his forehead. His eyes were crossed and smoke issued from the corners of his mouth. He teetered for a heartbeat and then fell, face forward, on the floor. The body twitched and convulsed.

From out in the hallway, I heard May’s voice ask, “Is everything all right in there?”

“Swell,” called Lynn, and then stepped around behind the double, took aim with the gun again, and put two more slugs in the back of his head. She dropped the gun on top of him and said, “Let’s get out of here.” She helped me up and we held hands, as we had in the gold mine. Passing May on the stairs, Lynn called a thank-you over her shoulder.

We got into my car and I breathed a sigh of relief. The double was gone for good. “How’d you know which of us was the real one?” I asked as I hurriedly pulled away from the curb.

“It didn’t matter,” she said. “Whichever one of you was in that fetid fucking suit wasn’t coming back to the house.”

“What if you chose wrong?” I asked.

“Come on,” she said. “I know you.” Then she disappeared.

Later that evening, I made coffee and Lynn and I sat on our respective ends of the couch in the living room. “You’ll never guess who I met today,” I said.

She took a sip of coffee. “Who?”

“Your double,” I said.

She was about to raise the cup again but froze. A smile broke out on her face.

“You need a trip to Dr. Ivy,” I said.

She shook her head. “I know, what a hypocrite, but I didn’t see my double before you told me about yours.”

“Why didn’t you let me know?”

“It didn’t matter as much if I had one, I just didn’t want you to go crazy.”

“So you’re as crazy as I am,” I said.

“In my own way.”

“But your double was actually helpful. How come yours is cool and mine was an asshole?”

“Think about it,” she said.

I did and while I did she took a folded napkin out of the pocket of her sweatpants. She held it up in the palm of one hand and opened it with the other. Between her thumb and index finger, she lifted up a white chocolate ear and let the napkin flutter down. She broke off a piece and handed it to me. We had it with our coffee while she told me that it was in the chapel with the image of Copernicus on the ceiling, in that ancient castle in Krakow, where we’d been told we could experience “The Ninth Chakra of the World,” that she’d first seen herself.

A Note About “The Double of My Double Is Not My Double”

Doubles (doppelgängers) abound in Crackpot Palace—some more obvious than others. I’ve long been interested in the phenomenon in literature and film and have somewhere among my things a sheet of paper on which for years I kept a list of stories, novels, and movies in which I encountered the Double theme. Some sharp editor will someday take this theme up for a story anthology and create a very interesting book of fiction. The doppelgänger seems to go beyond the bounds of imagination, though. In my story offered here in the collection, the scientific study that the protagonist mentions stumbling upon online is actually real—the fact that the electrical stimulation of a region of the brain known as the left temporoparietal junction caused subjects to report a “shadowy person standing behind them.” To offer more evidence that the double phenomenon might be more than mere fiction, one can also consider the testimony of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s experience with the Third Man syndrome. He writes about it in his book South. He was on a mountain-climbing expedition on St. George’s Island, beyond the tip of South America, in severe polar conditions. His party, comprised of himself and two other men, was under great stress, carrying on through stark glacial conditions for a thirty-six-hour stretch. He and the others reported feeling the definite presence of a fourth person in their party. Other Antarctic explorers and mountain climbers have also admitted to the phenomenon, as well as those involved in storms at sea and shipwrecked castaways. Scientists believe that the syndrome is related to great physical and mental stress and may be the impetus for the concept of the guardian angel. T. S. Eliot was influenced by having read Shackleton’s firsthand account of the experience and included these lines in his poem The Waste Land:

 

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

- But who is that on the other side of you?

I often wonder if other fiction writers sometimes experience the sensation of being at least two people—the one who lives life outwardly, moving amid the populace, talking, laughing, gossiping, eating meals, and participating in history, and the one who writes the stories. They often seem like two different people to me. The one smarter and more capable about everyday life but not really knowing how to write stories, and the story writer, who feels lost in the everyday world, intuitive and adept when it comes to characters and plots and the flow of language. Crackpot, I know.