Eclipse 4: New Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Jonathan Strahan

  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 an appointment for me and I’d gone 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—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 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 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 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 knew 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’d seemed to have vanished. The next 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 doppelganger. 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 wine glass 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.”

  “OK,” I said. “OK.”

  “Someday this week, it’s gonna go down, so be ready. And I’m warning you, this is gonna be 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 chilli. “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 about 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, t
he 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 hyper-aware. 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 it could be. 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 a red hair 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 “doppelganger” 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 first saw him, scurrying down the bamboo trail. That day Lynn and I went 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 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 mother fucker.”

  “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 drive way through the trees that opened into a cul-de-sac. At the turn furthest in sat a huge wreck of a house, brown paint peeling, cedar board 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 two of the second-floor windows were broken and there were bricks missing from the chimney.

  “OK, 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 saw 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 the 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 c
oming 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, and 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.”