by Douglas Lain
“Brian?” the taller Virginia asks.
“I can’t really help you here,” I say.
The two women step back from each other, walk around the table, and then meet on the north side of the room by the kitchen counter. The shorter Virginia puts her hand down on top of our pine paper towel rack, then lets it fall from their to the textured plastic cutting board underneath, and then reaches up to stroke the taller Virginia’s hair. She runs her fingers through the other one’s bangs and this one, the one in the sweater dress, shivers. The Virginia in tweed strokes the other woman’s left arm, pushing up the sleeves of her sweater.
“Brian,” the shorter one asks. “Who is this? Who did you bring home?”
“I think she’s you,” I say. “That is, that’s what I thought before. I wouldn’t have brought her home otherwise.” It dawns on me now what must have happened and who this second Virginia must actually be. “I think I know what’s happening,” I say. “Let me introduce you to Asket.”
“Asket?”
“It’s a Pleidien name. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re a Pleidien?”
The woman in the sweater dress touches her face, perhaps checking to make sure all her features are still in place, and then slowly nods.
“Asket,” she echoes. “That is my name, isn’t it?”
I pull Virginia aside, pull her away from this woman who seems to be but isn’t my wife. Out in the hall, I try to explain it all to her. I tell her about Asket visiting the University’s art department, explain our tour of the flying saucer museum and reading room. I tell her that the plan was to convince Harold to start working on flying saucers again, to get him to help me write one now that the market for such a book is huge, and Virginia nods at this, but I can tell she’s not listening.
“She’s beautiful,” Virginia says. “I’m beautiful?” she asks.
She is, but not like that. The real Virginia is shorter, like I said, and her hair is a darker blond. Virginia’s nose has a different shape, it’s a little larger.
My wife takes my hand and leads me back into the kitchen. “Your name is Asket?”
Asket shrinks back a bit. She looks cold in that short sweater. “What?” she asks.
“Your name,” Virginia repeats, “it’s Ask…It?” Virginia is smiling very brightly now, as if she’s just received a present, something she always wanted. She’s circling the alien, putting her hands on her occasionally, reaching out to touch Asket’s hair, standing on tiptoes so that their eyes are even. “You’re a Pleidien, but you look like me. Somehow it seems like you really are me. It’s like you’re who I’m really supposed to be.”
“I am you,” Asket says. “I’m Virginia.”
“But your name is Asket?”
“I…I guess so.”
Virginia makes coffee for everyone and then opens a package of Pepperidge Farm crescent shape cookies. I decide that she’s handling this very well. She presents the cookies to Asket on one of our better china saucers, watches intently as her double bites down on one, watches as Asket uses her front teeth to scrape some jelly into her mouth. She seems fascinated when the alien takes a sip of herbal tea.
We all agree that what Asket is doing isn’t just an impersonation. An impersonator gives you the surface of a personality.
“When Rich Little impersonates Johnny Carson or Jimmy Stewart he just mimics their mannerisms,” Virginia says. “His impersonations diminish them. When Rich Little pretended to be Johnny Carson he made Carson seem smaller. He made Carson seem shallow, less genuine than he’d seemed before. But you, Asket, you aren’t doing that at all. Seeing you makes me feel bigger than I am.”
Asket is sitting very politely at our kitchen table, a guest in what must seem to her like her own home. At the moment not only isn’t Asket imitating Virginia, they appear as opposites.
“I wonder if she’s psychic,” Virginia asks. “Pleidiens are supposed to be psychic, aren’t you? You can read minds, see into souls? Is that how you do it? Are you reading me?”
Asket doesn’t know how she’s doing anything. She says she doesn’t really know what is going on, and then she mumbles under her breath that maybe Virginia is the impersonator. “Maybe I’m Johnny Carson,” she says.
But we’ve gotten past the moment for such debates and Virginia doesn’t pay this comment any mind at all. She’s confident that she’s the original and instead of defending herself she leaves the room. She leaves us, Asket and me, to drink coffee, to pick at the remaining cookies, and to try to make conversation.
“Are you cold?” I ask.
“A little,” she says. Asket pulls down on her sweater again, and I watch as she rises out of her chair a bit so that the fabric can slide down just a little more.
“I could get you a blanket,” I say. “Or maybe some pajamas?”
Virginia is back with a package of index cards and a pair of scissors with orange handles. She cuts the cellophane, removes it, and then finds a Sharpie from one of the kitchen drawers. She’s determined to test her double’s psychic powers, and she is drawing on the index cards with this aim. She draws stars, wavy lines, squares, and circles, until she has twenty or so stacked up in front of her on the counter.
“I’m going to test you,” she says to Asket. And Asket nods. She already understands what is expected of her.
Virginia moves her pile of index cards to a spot between them, to the center of the kitchen island, picks up the first card, and takes a clandestine look. She does an effective job hiding the design and then glances at Asket expectantly. “Which one is it?” she says.
The Zener card game has been around for a long time, of course, and the idea is that if Asket can correctly guess which card Virginia is looking at, if she can do that more often than would be statistically normal, then we can assume that some sort of psychic connection is at work.
“What I expect is that there will be one hundred percent accuracy,” she says to Asket.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I wouldn’t think so.”
Virginia frowns, a bit surprised by this rebelliousness, surprised that there could be a difference of opinion between them.
“What do I see?” Virginia asks.
“Wavy lines.”
“No.” She turns the card around and shows us the circle. “What about now?”
“A plus sign?”
“No.” Again the correct answer is circle. “What about now?”
“Wavy lines?” Asket asks.
This is wrong too. It’s almost as if Asket is psychic but she’s purposely giving the wrong answers. The final score is much worse than chance alone would predict, but Virginia doesn’t appear to notice this backward confirmation.
“There must be some kind of connection,” Virginia says. She’s finally found herself and she isn’t about to let herself pass unexploited or unexplained.
Asket actually is psychic. She demonstrated her telepathic ability on the flying saucer, but Virginia is not psychic. If Asket is some kind of spiritual copy of her would her psychic ability be suppressed?
“Are you holding out on me?” I ask Virginia. “Have you been developing strange powers all along and not telling me?”
Virginia pauses, not sure of the nature of my query. “What’s that?”
“She’s your double. You’re not psychic so she’s not psychic,” I say.
I pick up the index cards and ask Virginia if the card depicts wavy lines or a star, giving her better odds, but she gets it wrong.
She frowns at me like this is my fault and then she sticks her tongue out as she’s concentrating and wants me to try it again, to pick another card.
I’m not interested in this game anymore. Looking back and forth from Asket to Virginia and back again I realize that I too have an opportunity that I’m not willing to pass up. While my wife (I assume she’s the one who is my wife, that I even have a wife) can’t allow herself to miss an opportunity to know herself as another, I’m realizing what it is that I’m not will
ing to let pass. That is, if they’re both in some way or another Virginia, what I’m planning shouldn’t be that difficult to arrange.
“Maybe we should try something else?” I suggest.
“Like what exactly?” Virginia asks.
“What’s your earliest memory?” Asket asks.
“My earliest memory?” Virginia echoes. “That’s good. Only, I shouldn’t be telling you. You should tell me. What’s your earliest, or strongest, memory from childhood?”
What Asket remembers isn’t a memory at all, or it isn’t a memory of something that happened, but rather is a memory of what never happened because her parents forbid it. She’d grown up in Durango, Colorado, a small Southern town, not far from New Mexico and situated very near Mesa Verde National Park. Mesa Verde is where the cliff dwellings of the aboriginal Pueblo people are, and what Asket remembers, her strongest recollection, is that she’s never visited Mesa Verde. Her parents, who were strict Baptists, believed that the dwellings were Satanic. The Indians who lived there worshipped many gods which made them satanists or, if not actual satanists then satanic. What Asket remembers is that Virginia’s parents had forbid her from visiting the cliff dwellings.
“It wasn’t a big problem for me. None of the locals were very interested in the cliff dwellings. That was for the tourists. Nobody questioned why I had never been. When I was a teenager I stopped thinking about it, but at ten I felt strange about it. It was strange to be afraid of a place, of a space. There were ghosts just out of town, demons about sixty miles west on US 160. I believed it too,” Virginia says.
We’re out of coffee now and I consider fetching some beer or wine from the refrigerator. I think there is a bottle of white wine in there, but I find myself unwilling to leave my place at our kitchen table made from unvarnished oak and I find myself looking up at the chandelier, frozen by contradictory impulses. The chandelier is really just a bare lightbulb but it’s surrounded by a disjointed web of iron rods intersecting from every angle. It more of a modernist sculpture hanging over us than a proper chandelier, but it’s what Virginia picked out. Who was I to disagree with her on such matters?
“On a different subject, do you remember when Erin White got a color television?” Virginia asks. She’s talking to her double and not to me.
Asket does remember. None of the members of her church watched much television and children weren’t allowed to watch at all, but Erin’s family let her watch. They’d purchased two color Zeniths, one for the TV room and one for the kitchen, and Virginia made sure to drop in on the White family as often as she could.
“Come on and Zoom, Zooma, Zoom!” Virginia says. She’s singing the introduction to a WGBH children’s television program from the early ’70s, a program that most 13-year-olds might’ve shunned but that to her untrained eyes was decadent.
“Forbidden music,” Asket says. “Do you remember the very first sound before the theme song started? The sound for the WGBH logo?” she asks.
“Not really,” Virginia says.
Asket swallows hard, preparing to make the noise, and then opens her mouth. A staccato series of electronic notes, a quick repetition of ascents and descents, flow from her only to be drowned out by a rising note that sounds more like a violin than a voice.
“You really are an alien,” Virginia says. “Do it again.”
Asket obliges her and sings it again. What we hear is so close a reproduction of the notes that accompanied the WGBH logo as it filled television screens back in 1972 that I almost believe she has a tape recorder in her throat. There must be some kind of machine in there.
But my wife presses on, quizzing Asket on the intricacies of nostalgic ephemera. She’s supposedly testing Asket but she’s not stopping to consider the answers.
“What was your favorite summer day ice cream?” she asks.
“You mean from an ice cream truck? That’s easy, orange cream push-ups.”
“I remember. They came in polka dotted cardboard tubes and I’d lick the plastic syringe inside, get every last drop of the artificial flavoring,” Virginia says.
But these memories don’t prove anything except for the breadth of Asket’s knowledge on American life in the ’60s, and when Virginia pauses to reconsider, Asket asks if she might be excused. It turns out that she’d like to change out of her sweater dress and into one of Virginia’s robes or some pajamas after all. Virginia nods at this, as if Asket staying the night was never in question.
“Harold told me to call him when I figured out that she wasn’t my wife,” I tell Virginia when Asket is gone.
“He figured it out before you did?” she asks. She doesn’t sound perturbed or surprised, but is just noting it as a fact.
“I think I’ll wait to call him until tomorrow,” I say. “What do you want to do until then? Should we send her back to her saucer?”
“The problem,” Virginia says, “is that I’m having a hard time figuring out something that is unique to me. That bit about the strongest memory was good, that was a good question, but even that wasn’t really unique to me. All of the people who grew up in our church would have had a similar memory. Every time I think of something to ask about it turns out that my head is filled with junk. All I can come up with are details that don’t belong to me. A push-up ice cream treat, how is that personal to me, to us? It’s junk.”
“I think we should let her stay over,” I say.
“Junk. ‘Junk’ by Paul McCartney. The album came out in 1970 but I started listening to it five years after its release during the car trip to New York. I would listen to Paul McCartney in a Studebaker, a car I’d inherited from my aunt, outside of Long Island. It was the first time I was so far from home.”
Asket comes back and she’s wearing one of Virginia’s robes, a black silk kimono-style robe that is also a bit short on her, only this time Asket is wearing a pair of Virginia’s jogging pants. She’s wearing purple sweatpants.
I miss the sweater.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Asket says. She gestures to the sweatpants.
“Uh,” I say.
“No problem,” Virginia says.
“Do you remember the Old Fashioned Pizzeria at Four Corners?” Asket asks, turning the tables.
“No,” Virginia says.
“Sure you do,” Asket says. “It had a player piano on the main floor and you could put in a quarter and the keys would move on their own. It played ‘Charleston’ and ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas.’”
Virginia is nodding now. “It was a restaurant for tourists and birthday parties but it scared me. Do you remember? Do you remember what was on the second floor?”
Asket joins us at the kitchen table. She leans across and takes Virginia’s hand. “There were dummies dressed in period costume on the second floor. Boaters and cloche hats. Female mannequins in short dresses and male dummies in red and white striped vests,” she says.
“They were frozen in place, stuck in conversation, stuck in history,” Virginia says.
Watching them from my spot under the ugly chandelier, I sense that this is all going to work out in my favor in the end. They’ve pushed past the formalities, gotten past polite inquiry, and to something more substantial. There is an intimacy developing here.
“It was clear they were just dolls, but I thought…” Asket starts.
“You thought that they were corpses,” Virginia says.
What my wives imagined was that that they, that all of the tourists were fake too. No matter how much pepperoni pizza they ate, how many Cokes they drank, they were maybe dead already. The present was already just a display, just an adequate enough reproduction put together for some future race that, while invisible, was already there.
“They were staring up at us,” Virginia says. She’s gazing into Asket’s eyes. “The future already existed. There was already a place, maybe a place like the cliff dwellings, where the future already existed.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “The cliff dwellings were fro
m the past.”
“There really is a future like that. There is a future already. A place where people are already looking back on you and I belong to that. I already stand aside from this now. I’m already outside of it,” Asket says.
That’s how it happened. That’s the explanation for her trick, her explanation for how she became Virginia’s double, and it is also how the three of us end up in bed, or more accurately, it’s how they ended up climbing onto our kitchen table.
The fantasy of a threesome has been in the back of my mind for a long while, it’s something I picked up from Playboy and Penthouse magazines I guess, something I’ve seen in films of various kinds, but actually doing it in the cold kitchen light, watching as both wives crawl onto the tabletop, shoving aside placemats, watching them fumble and caress while I’m momentarily frozen in this designer chair, it isn’t quite living up to expectations. Standing next to them I worry whether this table will support all of our weight. There isn’t room for me anyhow. I finally decide to simply offer a hand or other appendage when the need arises.
All in all this feeling of separation, of not quite being where we appear to be, gets more pronounced as we go along. The sense of disconnection intensifies in stages, and at each step, but I’m determined to see this through, and I grab hold of one of them, not sure which one, and take her hips in my hands.
“Wait a minute,” Virginia says. She’s the one I’m holding. I’m holding onto her hips, she’s got her hands on Asket’s thighs. “Wait a minute. This doesn’t feel right. This feels grubby. I feel grubby.”
Asket takes her hands, to reassure her I think, but I let go and step back. I’m confused as to what’s going on. I don’t quite know who is rejecting whom or what’s gone wrong.
“I’m sorry, but this is beneath you, isn’t it?” Virginia says.
Asket doesn’t say anything but just leans forward. It’s impossible to say whose mouth finds whose first, but it’s clearly Virginia who breaks it off.
