A magical-realist journey through a recurring nightmare I've had for several years. The concept of the doppelganger is fascinating, and this story has been through ten iterations before finding a final form.
Enjoy the journey through the mind of James/Mike/Ben.
:)
A magical-realist journey through a recurring nightmare I've had for several years. The concept of the doppelganger is fascinating, and this story has been through ten iterations before finding a final form.
Enjoy the journey through the mind of James/Mike/Ben.
:)
Being and Been
As James reached for the door, something didn’t feel right. The light changed behind his eyes and a wave of nausea passed through his guts. His mind dropped away into a great blankness and he stared at his hand almost touching the knob, but stilled. A stranger’s arm. A stranger’s hand holding a slip of paper now gone.
A breeze swirled about his trouser legs, hotter and darker than the twilight air, and he noticed a flutter of white—the shred of paper against the leg of his slacks from the breeze whispering down the sidewalk. A few dried leaves shushed into the street. And as he thought about reaching down for the paper, sure enough there came the same arm with the rough-looking hand at the end of it, snatching the scrap of paper from his trouser leg and bringing it up before his eyes. The paper was thick—he noticed this even with the strange hand—and softened and wrinkled from being palmed, the surface smeared. He could barely read the handwriting, feminine, but there was no mistaking what was written. A man’s name.
Mike Wesner.
The name meant nothing, even as the sound of it formed within his brain. But again, something wasn’t right. His fingers rubbed at the paper. A gritty, dry sound. He looked to the right, the neighboring redbrick apartment building, then another, then another. To the left, the same. Tenement after tenement, similar but smaller, receding into the distance beneath a purpled sky. Across the street, the apartment windows looked back receded, concave, and a bird cut through the sky on the periphery. A dog barked in the distance, deep but lazy. There was no sign or motion to indicate something terrible amiss in the universe—no screaming, no thunder, no fire or ice—only a tepid suburban infinity on the edge of decline.
His eyes lit upon a child’s bike tipped over in the yard across the street.
But it’s just a bike tossed on the ground. Not a sign of—
A car hummed along the street and he watched the shape of it, round and compact, getting larger and louder until passing in a mindless groan. The driver—a thin man, all angles—sat and stared ahead as if nothing were the matter and faded, smaller again until gone. Blinking, James almost remembered something important but it ran from his thoughts like a naughty child, laughing in the dark of his mind.
James turned back toward the door and looked at the paper . Mike Wesner. With a churn of guts, perhaps from his lunch, he reached again for the knob, almost surprised when it opened beneath his hand.
Into the building and up the stairs, a sense of unreality followed James into his apartment and he immediately stopped behind the closed door—his own smell, comforting and stale and his own but… And that was all, just a “but…” in his mind and nothing more, like the door being a shade too dark or the now-carpeted entryway or the piece of paper in his coat pocket. When he stopped breathing for a moment, the sound of it uncrinkling could be heard and he exhaled and took it out again in the better light, smoothing it out on his (his? There was a coffee mug much like his own on the small table, but with… but…) entry table that wobbled with the effort, making a blocky, wooden sound against the floor. He looked again at the name.
A knock on the door—all knuckle and purpose—caused him to spasm and turn. His door. A darker brown than before, but close. Nearly his door.
Stepping up to the peephole unbreathing, he squinted into another rounded dimension. A man stood there, biting his lower lip and looking side to side. Two days of stubble across his squarish face, when he flicked his dark eyes—slightly bloodshot—at the peephole, James instinctively stepped back at the sudden intimacy.
The man knocked again, louder. When he called out, his voice was calmer than it should’ve been for all the knocking.
“Come on, buddy,” he sang. “I saw you go in from down the hall.”
So this man was a neighbor, this man James had never seen. But at the same time—
“Dude,” the stranger said, rubbing his chin to an audible scrunching of stubble even through the muffle of the door. “Open up.”
James put his hand to the knob and breathed. His heart bound against his throat. He turned the knob and stood in the thin opening, trying to keep the wonder or fear off his face. The man, only a few inches shorter, smiled and widened his eyes.
“What? You spooked or something?” He jerked his chin and dipped into the doorway and James had no option but to step back and let the stranger enter. He watched as the man casually stepped past him into the small living room, stretching his arms with a great groan, then plopped on the couch, sprawled and comfortable. He looked at James and smiled.
“Yeah, you’re spooked over something,” he said. “You’re still in your coat.”
James looked down at his body, noticing for the first time the tan overcoat buttoned almost to the neck. A formal coat. He must’ve forgotten he wore or even owned such a thing.
“Aren’t you hot?” the man said from the couch, shifting his weight and putting a tattered sneaker on the coffee table. “Fuck, I haven’t been over here for months and Kelly is really up my ass right now.”
James unbuttoned his coat, listening.
“And you know I’ve got to get out of there—away from the kid. Just for a minute,” he added quickly. “Don’t get me wrong. I love that little girl, but sometimes I wish Kelly stayed home and I went out to work, but fuck. The job situation is no better now than two years ago when…”
James allowed the words to continue without paying them much mind. He tossed the coat over the back of a chair beneath the window—the chair different, the wall outside the window beige instead of gray. He turned and sat down, not looking at the man sitting on the couch (tan instead of blue) and grasped his hands together, pressing them to quiet a tremor along his limbs. His mind swirled in a red fever of thought over the strange man sprawled on his couch with a foot up as if he’d been here a hundred times, as if he knew James in any way, as if he knew the strangeness permeating the apartment, his door (he looked at it suddenly for a moment) and the entire world. His hands were slick between each other and he twisted a ring on his finger—a familiar motion even though the ring didn’t feel right in the pale groove of skin in which it slid.
“I said,” the man repeated, sitting forward and no longer smiling. He waited for eye contact. “You don’t look too good. You okay or what?”
“Yes,” James said too quickly and was surprised at the timbre of his voice. He cleared his throat. “I’m… I’m just feeling a little…” his voice faded into a mutter without depth and he tried to remember, could hear the laughter of the thought, hiding.
“Well of course you’re feeling a little,” the man said then guffawed, slapping a leg with a broad palm. “A little this, a little that.” The smile returned. He leaned back. “After last night, I’m surprised to even see you alive and kicking. And before you start a fire rubbing your hands like that, maybe you should take off the hospital band.”
James looked and saw the pink band with printing and a scrawl of pen and yanked at it vigorously.
“Makes you look crazy or something.”
And the band finally snapped. James crumpled it and threw it to the floor.
“How did you get out?” he asked, but James was far away. His mind broiled to a new pitch of cacophony. He slumped heavily in the chair and buried his face in the humidity of his hands, becoming momentarily lost in the flash and bubble of light behind his eyes.
“Something isn’t right,” James said, the words muffled by his palms. His voice, deeper, coming from a point deeper within his chest.
“Well, no shit,” the other said, probably smiling. “I saw the paramedics haul you away after all the commotion and your eyes were blown open. Your lips were blue! I thought you were dead and was going to come over and check on your old lady, but Kelly made me—”
“What?” James said and blinked until the blur melted to clarity. The neighbor had his arms behind his head and focused on a point in the air, on nothing. A change had enveloped him, a stiffness. His shoulders jutted up around his ears and he suddenly looked tired, relieved at no longer having to smile perhaps.
“Listen. It’s none of my business, really.” He ran a hand through his hair and it clumpled back into place. “I just—I don’t know. I mean, sure we’re not that close. I hardly know you. But when anybody—even a neighbor—is hauled away with blue lips… Well,” he said, fidgeting with his shoe.
“And my… my old lady?” James said awkwardly enough to make the other laugh—a sudden, harsh sound.
“Gina?” He rolled his eyes at James, a glint of fun at their edges. “She ever hear you call her that?”
“Gina?” James said, making sure. He twirled the ring on his finger, a gold band. He’d known a Gina or two in his life. He was almost certain of it. But his girlfriend’s name was Sarah. Looking, the man sat there, smiling again, staring at James. “Gina’s fine,” James said, like it was a predetermined condition. The sun is hot. Gina is fine.
“Umm, yeah,” the man said and rubbed his chin, making that scratchy sound. “Listen,” he said and made to rise. “It’s none of my business, really. But if and when Gina ever comes back, you should probably have something better.” He gave James a weighted look. “Something good to say.”
James stared at his hands and the tremor still there at the very tips of his long fingers. He heard the neighbor sigh and get up, step toward the door and clear his throat. It wasn’t until he cleared it a second time that James—mind blank and oblivious—looked at him again.
“Sorry to bother you, buddy.” He opened the door and almost left—the hallway light flickering behind him. “You’re still spooked. Of course. Who wouldn’t be?”
A silence descended, a ringing in James’ ears, but he didn’t speak.
“Anyway,” the man said too brightly. “You know where to find me.”
“Okay,” James eventually mumbled and put his face back into the warm comfort of his palms.
“Yeah. I’ll tell Kelly that you’re okay. She was pretty bugged out by the whole thing.”
“Thanks,” James said again, getting up with great effort and stepping to the door.
“No problem,” he said and turned, the smile again. “And we shouldn’t be such strangers, Mike. Come by for a beer sometime.”
And the man turned into the hall too quickly to see James’ face fall into confusion.
Mike? he wondered. When he thought to glance into the hall, a door was already closing some three doors down.
#
The next morning, James Robinson began a new life as another man—this Mike Wesner. The pictures on the wall of his apartment showed him with a woman he’d never met, though she did resemble Sarah a little. He took a shower and got dressed and went to work—all strange and different but known to him somehow. For instance, there was a tube of Crest toothpaste on the bathroom sink but he hated Crest and always bought Arm and Hammer. He nicked himself twice while shaving, as if he didn’t remember the shape and curve of his face. When he left the apartment building, he knew to turn left instead of right, as he had always done, to make his way to the bus.
Needless to say, he underwent a thousand shocks that first day—his face, home, clothing, neighborhood, commute, job and workmates—they were all familiar but not the same in any way. Names were different. His office partner was now Theresa instead of Marguerite. Apparently, he was upper middle management in a pulp distribution company in Bergenfield, New Jersey (instead of upper middle management in an auto parts distributor in Hackensack).
He very nearly shook apart those first few days—called “Mike” (or Michael once in a call from his mother (though James’ mother had been dead six years now)) by all manner of strangers he knew as if remembered from a dream, with specific histories and shared memories down to the details (who was standing where when Mike famously fell during an office birthday party at the Continental—a Jersey City hipster bar—three years ago… except James thought he fell over a purse (not down a few stairs) and it was in a restaurant, a dinner for one of the office ladies’ retirement) but he found it best to smile and nod nonetheless. He had no other recourse and knew, felt in the core of his being, that if he voiced his confusion, his frustration and anger and fear, then he would surely either be seen as insane or would actually go insane, gone.
#
Gina—whoever she was—never returned, but James (Mike) found himself living in the click and whirl of a machine. He lived one day into another, like anyone, and found them passing with surprising regularity. The less thought he put into the strangeness of his existence, the easier it was to live—blankly and without the deeper stirrings that trouble the mind. Television became a great part of his life, a place where he could sit and not think for great stretches of time. He talked almost nightly with his mother, coming to know her and already knowing her too.
Make no mistake: He lived just as thoroughly as any of us. He ate and pooped and slept and dreamed. He laughed and sighed and stared at nothing between surface thoughts of his mind. Like you, he was bored at times and yearned for something more, but couldn’t allow the uncertainty enter his thoughts—the important thought that would not come, the unfamiliar sameness of the world around him. After many weeks or months, he even caught himself turning suddenly, expectantly, whenever he heard his name.
“Mike! Hey, Mike!”
It all became so natural that, one night after returning from his position in upper middle management at the pulp supply company, he didn’t understand the sudden weakness, nausea, that poured over him as he tried to open his door. His knees buckled, like a stranger’s legs beyond his control suddenly beneath him. Sweat broke out on his forehead and his hands trembled with the keys. Thankfully, he’d made it inside and managed to shut the door before his legs stopped working completely. In two steps, all feeling left his limbs, the nausea lifted from his guts, and he fell on the floor all akimbo, splayed out like a suicide.
Mike was perfectly aware of the rough fibers of the entryway rug against his face but was unable to move in any meaningful way, as if his arms were rubber and he was encased in pudding. The world slanted on its side. The air was thick and heavy—like breathing wool—and his eyelids fluttered more to remain open than to close. With a vertical horizon of wood flooring beyond the rug, Mike could see the dark void of nighttime windows beyond his reading lamp alit. But he hadn’t left it on. Worse, at the very edge of vision, he could just make out the slumped shape of a man in his armchair, head lolled to the side and unmoving. At first he thought it might be the neighbor guy, back for a friendly chat, but no… this was a different man. Mike could tell by the larger shape, the broadness of shoulder, the shorter hair. He gulped at his fear and tried to remember what it was…
For how long Mike lay there sprawled and dead with exhaustion, he didn’t know. He looked at the man slumped in the chair, a mere silhouette, and managed to roll onto his back and found that not only could he breathe a little better, but could flop his limbs about with more control. In excruciating slow and clumsy movements, he slid and crawled and clawed his way a few inches toward the door. The weakness! His legs were still useless, but his arms strengthened with each inch gained.
The man in the chair coughed or gurgled, a low and terrible sound that made James seize up and stop breathing. He listened. The man made another throaty mumble, perhaps an attempt at speech.
“—” Mike found the words dying in his throat, but he only tried to say who are you? He tried again, but his voice wouldn’t take purchase with the thick air and he managed his own strange gurgling.
For a brief moment, the room was filled with this sound—the two men grunting and groaning incoherently.
Mike quieted himself and clawed another inch toward the door. His fingers almost worked as they should, though numb, and the nausea returned. Sweat dripped from his chin. He breathed and gathered himself and managed to slide against the rug and his fingers grazed the door. From behind him, a voice washed over him, a bucket of sound thrown and sloshed into his mind.
“Back,” it said, deep and breathy. “Further.”
Mike clawed his way to the door and rose against it, using the brown (too dark) surface to pull himself up then around so he sat back against it. He could see the man in the chair again, and felt a strand of drool swinging from his lips as he blubbered the air.
“You…” the man said.
Mike was surprised to see gray at the windows of the coming dawn. Hours must have passed. And the man in the chair, still slumped, managed to raise his head into the light of the lamp.
His upturned and illuminated face caused a ripple of dread to pass through Mike’s entire being. His heart thudded uncontrollably and his head vibrated against the door. His entire body took on a tremble. The face, the man’s face, looked almost like his own—the same tired expression, same nose, different cheekbones and lighter hair, but… Mike marveled at the man and tried to gather himself further against the door. He managed to wipe the slobber from his lips with the back of a sleeve. The man sat there, slumped in the chair and staring with a steady rise and fall of his chest, a measured blinking of eyes. A smile flickered across his features for a moment. Mike noticed a hospital band on his wrist, pink.
“Got you now,” he said and sighed.
They shared a silent minute of staring and deep breathing.
“Got what?” Mike managed and then descended into a weak cough.
“You,” the man grumbled. “Me. I’ve got me. And you… well, I don’t care about you.”
“But what have—” Mike stopped. The room spun and pitched as if on rough waters and he had to breathe, grip the floor and close his eyes and breathe. Eventually, the sensation passed but he could feel it nearby like an unwanted thought, its return inevitable. He hoped talking would keep it back. “What did you give me?” Mike asked, winded.
“Give you?” the man said, his voice stronger now. “I didn’t give you shit. If anything, you took from me.” He stared at Mike with a bemused look of knowing what the other doesn’t. “Where’s Gina?”
Mike made to shrug but almost tipped over. He caught himself and inched his way, groaning, upright again.
“I said, where’s my Gina?” the man said, his voice breaking into a rasp at the end. “What did you do to her?”
“I—I didn’t do anything,” Mike said, his own voice a little smoother but still requiring far more effort than it should. “I never met her. Only heard about her from a neighbor.” He breathed and watched the unflinching scowl of the man sitting in the chair. A triangle of early morning light pooled at his leg. So if the guy came to poison him, it didn’t work. And if he meant harm, he could have done it a thousand times by now. Mike tried to calm himself. The man, whoever he was, obviously wanted something, and not just Gina but—
“Get out of my house,” the man said, his face a mask of malcontent. “Take the coat by the door.”
Mike realized his face was contorted in confusion, his mouth open and eyes pinched up in a strange disgust. The feeling came again and he swooned as the earth became jellified. He turned to the side and vomited a thin bile just as another ripple tossed him to the floor. He closed his eyes and breathed until everything came to rest again.
“The weakness. That’s how you know you’re close, so you know,” the man offered as Mike righted himself and wiped at his mouth.
“Close to what?”
“One of you. One of your other yous.”
“Okay,” Mike said, suddenly angry for some unknown reason. “I think you should leave.”
The other laughed mirthlessly. “If anyone is leaving, it’s you.”
“This is my house, my apartment,” Mike said, his voice tapering off.
“Listen,” the man said, a listing outline on the chair with a halo of light at his head. “I don’t know how to explain it, but there are a lot of people out there living the life of another person but they don’t know or want to know about it.” He stopped and breathed as if winded from the effort of speech. “One day, I started living another guy’s life. I was no longer Mike, but Charles. Good ‘ol Chuck Henderson. It was confusing for a while, but I did the best I could until I realized Chuck wasn’t me and I found this other fellow, Jordan something-or-other, who I thought was me but turned out to be somebody else just as lost and confused.” He breathed and chuckled, a dry sound. “So I took his place and really started to figure things out, started asking the right questions. And that’s how I found you, living in my life and sleeping with my wife and probably fucking it up as bad as I fucked up yours.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember Sarah? Yeah, Sarah’s gone. And don’t even think about ever contacting your parents or siblings again, not unless you want to go through a very painful, embarrassing revelation.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mike managed, his mind swirling with confusion. Sarah yes, but he had no brothers or sisters.
“You will,” the man said flatly. “Now, take the jacket by the door… not mine but that denim one. Take it and go.”
“What?”
“I’ll call you a cab as soon as I can move.”
#
After nearly a half hour of effort, Mike left the familiar and unfamiliar apartment, looking down the hall as he opened the door with sweat trickling down his ribs, and felt himself revitalized, getting stronger with each step away. It was already midmorning and he couldn’t recall if it was a weekday or what. He pulled the denim jacket against him and smelled a strange maleness not his own. He clumsily took the stairs and walked past the bank of mailboxes in the wall and looked again at his own, at the name Mike Wesner on the box for his apartment. Outside the building, a cab idled at the curb. He got in and sighed at the back of the cabdriver’s head, a tightly cropped afro with a shadow of gray, and tried not to turn around as the cab lurched from the curb and into motion without a word. As they drove, Mike stared at the floor of the cab and twisted the wedding band—for a women he did not know—and tried to catch the important thing he needed to remember, the thing, a piece of knowledge buried in the noise of his thoughts.
Forty silent minutes later, James was dropped off at another apartment building. Several times during the ride, when he wasn’t furrow-browed in thought, he made to speak but clicked his mouth shut in embarrassment and confusion. What would he say? So when the cabbie slowed and stopped and simply waited—didn’t turn around or ask for fare or anything—Mike paused and eventually slid out of the cab and stood on the sidewalk. The cab pulled away with a chirp of tires and he stood there looking at a door to an apartment that was strangely familiar. He put his hands in the pockets of the jacket and felt something there like an old dollar bill. Looking both ways, rows of redbrick apartment buildings to the left and right receding into the bright morning horizon, he made his way to the apartment building.
As he reached for the door, he didn’t feel right. The light changed behind his eyes and a wave of nausea passed through his guts. His mind dropped away into a great blankness and he stared at his hand almost touching the knob, but stilled. A stranger’s arm. A stranger’s hand that held a slip of paper now gone.
A breeze swirled about his legs, cool and calm, and he noticed a flutter of white—the shred of paper against the leg of his slacks from the wind. A few dried leaves shushed into the street. And as he thought about reaching down for the paper, sure enough there came the same arm with the rough-looking hand at the end of it, snatching the scrap of paper from his trouser leg and bringing it up before his eyes. The paper was thick—he noticed this even with the strange hand—and softened and wrinkled from being palmed, the ink smeared. It was nearly a child’s handwriting, blocky and masculine, but there was no mistaking what was written. A man’s name.
Benjamin Mallard.