Three young women had come in and sat down at the next table, each of them with a baby monitor. Look at that, said Lena, pointing to the three baby carriages parked outside in the cold, they’re getting their kids used to the fact that life is no bundle of laughs. I don’t think it’s possible to get used to cold, I said.
Lena stood up and took our empty cups back to the counter. On her return, she stopped and looked at me briefly. There are simple explanations for everything, she said in a cheery voice. What’s that then? I asked. You’re mad, and this is all a product of your imagination. In that case you’d better go back to your hotel, I said. I’m not scared of you, she said. I want to hear how the story ends first. I can’t tell you the end of the story, I said, the only stories that have endings are the ones in books. But I can tell you what happened next.
Neither of us knew where we were, so we just decided to go on in the same direction, wherever that led us.
This second encounter with my doppelgänger threw me for a loop, I said. Once again, I tried to make a story out of what had happened, but whatever I tried or wrote, I had the feeling someone was standing behind me, making fun of me. My whole life seemed ridiculous and false. When I thought about telling my girlfriend I loved her, I seemed to hear the other fellow saying the same thing to his girlfriend like an echo from the future. His words sounded as though they’d been taken from a cheap romance. When I remembered how we used to kiss, I saw him and her kissing. I was jealous of him, it was as though he was stealing my memories by reliving them. At the same time, I could feel, years before he first met my girlfriend, how he would lose her again. But the worst thing was that I started to question my love and hers, and everything that had happened between us. Our whole history felt like a failed rehearsal for a theatrical flop.