by Anthology
I closed my eyes, and waited to die. There was a sound like an explosion, and I thought, is that it? Am I dead? Then I thought, that can’t be it; I’ve got a lap full of glass.
I opened my eyes again, and saw a grey-haired woman with my face, holding what was left of the second table lamp. Bobby was right; she was about an inch or two shorter than me, and maybe five pounds heavier. She reached down and picked the gun up from the floor beside the other, unconscious, Joanna, and pointed it at me. “I think you owe me an explanation, don’t you?”
I told her everything. She didn’t believe me of course, until I showed her the two metal eggs in her pantry. “I’m a bit of an artist myself,” she said. “One of my paintings was in an exhibition at the town hall. Maybe you’d like to have a look at some of my paintings later; they’re up in the attic.”
Then there was the problem of what to do with the other Joanna. When we went back up to the bedroom, she was starting to wake up. “Wha’ ?” she said, “What happened? Where am I?” Joanna Callahan and I stood on either side of the bed where we’d left her firmly tied down with a length of laundry-line. She looked from one side of the bed to the other. “Who are you guys supposed to be, the Bobsey Twins?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have hit her so hard,” said Joanna Callahan.
“I’d be dead if you hadn’t,” I reminded her.
“And so would I, if what you say is true,” she sighed.
“What’s going on?” said Joanna on the bed. “Who are you bozos?”
“Don’t you know me?” I asked her.
“I never saw you in my life!”
“Do you know who you are?” Joanna Callahan asked her.
“Of course I do! I’m . . .” She frowned in concentration. “Oh shit.”
“You stay with her,” Joanna Callahan told me. “I’ll just run and get my first aid kit from the kitchen.”
Before I could think to ask her what she had in a first aid kit for amnesia, she was gone.
“Why don’t I remember who I am?” asked Joanna on the bed.
“You’ve had a nasty crack on the head,” I told her. “You fell down the stairs.”
“Why am I all tied up?”
“To keep you from falling down again. Stay there, I’ll be right back.” I ran downstairs to the kitchen. The pantry door was open, and there was only one metal egg: the one I came in. Joanna Callahan had stolen the nicer one, with the padded lining.
“Bitch!” I shouted, kicking the refrigerator. “Fucking bitch!”
Then Joanna upstairs started screaming for help. She was making a hell of a racket; someone would call the police if she kept that up. I ran back up the stairs and found the bed tipped over onto its side, and Joanna wriggling around on the floor, trying to break loose. “Help!” she kept screaming, “Somebody help me!”
The front doorbell rang, and Joanna started screaming even louder. I stuffed a pillowcase down her mouth; that shut her up. The doorbell kept ringing and I heard a woman’s voice call my name. “Joanna! Open up! Are you okay?” Toni. I grabbed a scarf out of the wardrobe to hide my Flickering Flame hair, then I ran to the window. “Toni!” I called down, faking a yawn. “Sorry, I must have been asleep.”
A large, dark-haired woman wearing a brown cardigan sweater over a white blouse and brown skirt looked up from the street. She was wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses so thick they reminded me of Mister Magoo. She had “small town librarian” written all over her. Definitely not the right sort of Toni.
“Joanna, are you all right? I thought I heard you screaming for help!” Joanna with the pillowcase in her mouth was trying to stand up with a bed tied to her back.
“I was having the worst nightmare! Hold on, I’ll be right down.” I ran down the stairs to the kitchen, then remembered something and ran back up again. The other Joanna was squirming around more than ever, making a lot of “Hmph!” and “MMMMMM!” sort of noises. I had to admire her determination. “Don’t worry, Joanna. Someone will untie you in a minute, I promise. But it won’t be me.” I put the gun back inside her blue canvas bag, and slung it over my shoulder.
I was halfway down the stairs when I heard Toni say, “Bob! Thank God you’re home! There’s something wrong with Joanna!” I reached the bottom just as his key turned in the lock. By the time they reached the bedroom, I was already in the pantry, squeezing myself back inside my uncomfortable, unpadded, metal egg. There was a lot of screaming and shouting going on upstairs.
I heard Toni say she was calling the police, and then I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. I pulled the capsule door down over my head, and stared at a row of unlabelled buttons. I didn’t have the slightest idea which one to press, so I pressed them all. I heard Toni’s voice outside the capsule, saying, “What the . . .” and then I was ripped into a million pieces.
I pushed the door open and found myself staring up at a cactus. I was dizzy and more than a little nauseous; I waited for the cactus to stop spinning before I tried to sit up. The moment I raised my head, the cactus started whirling again, faster than ever. I’d been broken down and reassembled for the third time in less than half an hour, and I didn’t think my body could take a fourth; at least not yet. I pulled myself out of the capsule, fell to my knees, and vomited onto scorching hot dust. I crawled on all fours towards a clump of stunted bushes a few yards away, and rested in the tiny patch of shade they provided.
I don’t know how long I was there; I think I must have fallen asleep. All I know is when I opened my eyes again, a man was standing over me, his face a mixture of surprise and concern. “You all right?” he said. He had white hair down to his shoulders, a full white beard, a round face with chubby red cheeks, sparkling brown eyes, and an enormous belly. Santa Claus in blue jeans.
“No, I’m not all right. I feel like hell and I don’t have the slightest idea where I am.”
The man knelt down beside me. “My house is just the other side of that hill. Don’t try to move; I’ll carry you.”
“No, it’s okay. I can walk.”
“Now you just lean on me,” he said, helping me to my feet. “And don’t you worry ’bout a thing; my old lady’ll get you fixed up in no time. She’ll be interested to see you. Real interested, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”
“What do you mean, interested?”
“You’ll see. Believe you me, you’ll see.”
A pair of large dogs—one black, one brown—lunged forward to greet us as we approached a large adobe house painted in a myriad of colours. Each of the outside walls was like a mural, one side adorned with children running through a field, another with a cityscape of high-rise buildings lit by a reddish-gold setting sun, another a series of geometric shapes in primary colours. Behind the house was another building, a bright red barn almost as big as the house.
“Down Horace! Get down, Charlemagne! Down boys,” the man said as the dogs leapt around us, barking excitedly. “This here lady doesn’t feel too well.” Then he raised his voice to a shout: “Jo-aaannn-a!”
A woman appeared in the doorway. Wearing an ankle-length denim dress and a string of beads. Centre-parted, waist-length hair. Brown, streaked with grey. “Who you got there, Mark?”
“This lady’s sick. Help me get her inside the house.”
She ran forward, and slid an arm around my back. I closed my eyes; I didn’t want to look at her face.
“Oh my God, Mark,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. Ain’t it the strangest thing?”
I woke up with a dreadful case of sunburn; my face and arms were bright red. I raised my head and saw the woman who had introduced herself as Joanna Hansen standing in the bedroom doorway, holding a mug of coffee. Her salt-and-pepper hair was tied back in a long ponytail, and she was wearing sandals and a cotton kimono. I looked around for my clothes, and didn’t see them.
“I put them in the wash,” she told me. “Borrow anything you want from that closet.”
I pulled on a pair of jeans and a denim shirt, a
nd went down to the kitchen. Mark was making hotcakes in honour of my visit. He was under the impression I was a long lost cousin of Joanna’s—at least that’s what I’d told him the night before.
I’d known Mark Hansen back in 1967, when we were both art students in San Francisco. It was the Summer of Love, and he had long black hair and drove a VW van. So there actually was a universe where I’d said yes when he asked me to go and live with him in the desert. In his day, he was every bit as gorgeous as any twenty-two year-old male model. I wondered if there was a universe where he hadn’t ended up looking like Father Christmas.
“I can’t get over it,” he said to Joanna. “All these years you had a cousin that’s your spitting image and you never even knew she existed!”
“Yeah,” said Joanna, eyeing me suspiciously, “I can’t get over it, either.”
I had told them both the most ridiculous pack of lies the night before, how I’d been on my way to visit Joanna and my rented car had broken down in the middle of the desert, and Mark, at least, seemed to believe it. I knew Joanna was waiting for the chance to get me alone; that’s what I would have done.
Her chance came that afternoon, when Mark drove into town to get the shopping. We were sitting on the front step, sipping iced tea with slices of lemon, when she finally said it: “Isn’t it time you told me the truth?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I don’t have a cousin named Annabel.” (Annabel was the first name that popped into my head the night before; I don’t know why.) “Not even a long-lost one, like you claim to be. So who are you, and what were you doing out in the middle of nowhere, covered in plaster dust and broken glass? And how come you look so much like me? I’m warning you, I want the truth.”
“You’ll never believe it.”
“Try me.”
“Okay.” I put down my glass of iced tea, and looked her right in the eye. “Do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you’d made some different decisions along the way?”
“I haven’t done acid since 1975,” she said when I was finished. “Don’t you think it’s time for you to give it up, too?”
“I told you you’d never believe me. Maybe if we could contact Toni; she might be working on something similar in this world. Maybe she even got it right in this one.”
Joanna Hansen shook her head. “Toni’s dead. She died a long time ago,” she said. “O.D.’d.”
“What? She can’t be dead!”
“Why not? If I’m supposed to believe you, then where you come from, my two kids were never even born!” Mark had shown me pictures of them the night before: two extremely dishy young men, one twenty-five years old, the other only twenty-one. Then I remembered whose children they were.
“Oh yeah,” I said, “Joanna Callahan apparently had some kids as well.”
“And she just up and left them.”
“More than once,” I said. “I mean, more than one version of her left more than one version of them.”
“How do you know I won’t steal your machine, so I can be rich and famous in New York?”
“You don’t know where I left it.”
“You think I couldn’t find it if I wanted to?” She laughed. “You ought to see your face; you’ve gone bright green. Well, you sit out here and worry yourself sick about whether I think being you is such an attractive prospect or not. Meanwhile, I’ve got work to do. Help yourself to anything you want from the fridge.”
And then she left me, sitting alone on the step.
I was still there when Mark came back, two hours later. The dogs leapt out of the truck and ran towards me, barking and wagging their tails. A second later, I was on my back, having my face licked. “I’ve never known those dogs to take to someone as quick as they’ve taken to you,” Mark said. “It’s like they’ve known you all their lives.”
“I noticed,” I said, pushing them away.
“Where’s Joanna?”
“She said she had some work to do.”
“Then she’ll be in her studio. Haven’t you been in there yet?”
I shook my head.
“I thought she’d have given you the grand tour by now,” he said. “Never mind. Help me get the groceries in, and I’ll take you around.”
A short while later, he led me around the back of the house to the large building I’d assumed was a barn. “Please don’t think she’s being rude, abandoning you like that. It’s just that she’s got this big show coming up in a couple of months, and she reckons she’s nowhere near ready.”
“Show? What kind of show?”
“Joanna’s an artist; didn’t she tell you?”
Of course, I thought, Mark and I had met in art school. So what was this Joanna’s art like? More puppies and flowers? No, I thought, this one’s an old hippie; I’ll bet she weaves native-style blankets and sells them at craft fairs. Then Mark opened the door and my mouth dropped open.
This Joanna, like me, was a sculptor, and like me, she worked mostly in metal, and—this is a hard admission for me to make—she was every bit as good as me. Maybe even—this is an even harder admission—a little better.
I touched the twisted trunk of a metal tree with shiny flat leaves. Tiny men hung like fruit from its branches, each with a noose around his neck, each with a completely different and individual expression of pain or horror on his face. I wished I’d done it. Though in a way, I had.
“That one’s already sold,” Mark told me. “Some museum in Europe’s offered her a couple million for it, and she’s told ’em they can have it after the show.”
At the sound of the words: “couple million”, my heart almost did a flip-flop. It was all I could do not to clutch at my chest. I took a few deep breaths, counting to ten on each inhalation.
“So where is this show of hers?” I asked him, trying to sound nonchalant.
“The Museum of Contemporary Art,” he told me, adding, “That’s in New York.” As if I didn’t know. And I’d been so worried this Joanna might want to trade places with me. “Didn’t you see that TV show they did about her?” he asked me. “It was on prime time, coast to coast.”
“I’m afraid I missed it.”
We found her at the far end of the building, working on a rather familiar arrangement of six black and white television sets called “Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm”. She couldn’t figure out why I thought that was funny.
Then she switched it on, and I saw that unlike mine, each of her screens showed a different woman doing a different repetitious task: one scrubbing a floor, one doing dishes, one hanging laundry, one ironing shirts, one chopping vegetables, and one slashing her wrists, over and over again, in an endless loop.
I wished I’d done mine like that—though of course I would, now. There was nothing in Joanna Hansen’s work I wouldn’t be proud to call my own. If I couldn’t get back to my own world—and I was beginning to doubt I ever would—then this one would suit me just fine. But making the switch might be difficult with Mark around; it would have to be done gradually.
I offered to help Joanna in her studio, and learned exactly where she kept everything. I got her to tell me her complete history under the pretext of trying to figure out just where our paths had diverged. I got Mark to tell me everything I’d need to know about him under the pretext of finding him a fascinating conversationalist, which he never was, even when we were students. I went through every photo album and every scrap book, memorizing the details. I sat through slides and home movies. And I nagged Joanna about her hair, told her it made her look much older than she was, and reminded her of all the photographers that would be at her opening party in New York. “Just trim the ends a little,” I told her. “Just cover the grey.” I finally convinced her to let me cut it—a much quicker process than waiting for mine to grow—but I couldn’t get her to colour it; I had to let myself go grey.
Within three weeks of my arrival, Joanna Hansen and I were indistinguishable.
One morning when Ma
rk had driven into town, I told Joanna it was time for me to leave. I put on the clothes I had arrived in, slung the blue canvas bag with the gun in it over my shoulder, and thanked her for everything. Then, as though it were an afterthought, I asked her if she’d like to see the time machine.
I led her out into the desert, to the spot where Toni’s metal egg sat hidden behind a cactus plant. “That’s it,” I said.
“It doesn’t look very comfortable.”
“Why don’t you try it for yourself?” I said. “Get inside, see how it feels.”
“No thanks.”
I pointed the gun at her. “Get inside.”
“You can’t shoot me,” she said.
“I can and I will if you don’t do what I tell you.”
“No, you can’t. That gun isn’t loaded; I took the bullets out ages ago.”
I pointed the gun straight at her and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. “You bitch! You’ve been through my things!”
“Damn right. I did that the first night you turned up. You think I’m stupid or something? Now,” she reached into one of the pockets in her denim skirt, “this gun is loaded.” She was holding a little semi-automatic pistol. “As you were saying, Joanna, it’s time you went back to your own world.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “That was only a joke with the gun; I was never going to shoot you. What I was going to suggest is that we work together, sort of interchangeably. You could get twice as much done, and nobody would ever know.”
“Good-bye, Joanna.”
I got inside the machine, and the next thing I knew it was the 29th of April, 1994, a little after 6 P.M. , and I was back in Joanna Callahan’s pantry, with swollen joints and a raging headache. As I struggled to pull myself up, I noticed another metal egg. This one not only had a padded interior, but a row of little flashing lights along the outside.
Someone was coming. I ran through the kitchen and out the back door. I crouched down outside the open kitchen window and listened to the phone ringing, then my voice: “Toni! Thank God! How did you find me? How did you know what number to call?”
