The OK End of Funny Town

by Mark Polanzak

  UNIDENTIFIED LIVING OBJECT

  One day my clone shows up at my door. He’s not looking so hot. I hang up on the person from the B-movie memorabilia store and tell my stammering, shivering clone to come in. His ratty blanket falls off his shoulders as he grabs mine, moaning a half apology of some sort.

  I guide him with his twisted ankle to my couch. I put the blanket around him again and fetch the tea that I just happen to have on. He nods, shivers, wraps his hands around the mug. My first guess, I mean after immediately jumping to the conclusion that he is my clone, is that he’s just some homeless guy who looks a hell of a lot like me. His hair is longer than mine, to his shoulders. He’s got a beard bushier than I’ve ever tried. He’s thinner. But, when you see your clone, no matter the prevalence of facial hair or difference in heft, something clicks and you just know that he’s made up of the exact same stuff as you.

  I’m not a particularly open or generous person, and I wonder what I would have done if it were anyone but, essentially, myself at my door in need of comfort. I imagine the guy who wears those ascots—the guy my ex left me for—how would I greet him? I wonder if this is going to catch on, this door-to-door panhandling. It really works well. On the street I won’t give someone tea, or change, sometimes, even when I have it. But if those same people showed up at my door … You know, that just might work for those folks. I wonder if they’ve tried it already, if I should tell them about it. But then I emerge from my thought-vortex and look down from the slowly spinning ceiling fan to my clone, and he’s really in bad shape. He’s missing some teeth. It’s not so much his looks, but his mannerisms that make me so sure he’s my clone. He pulls on his earlobe and clears his throat at the same time I do, and the deal is sealed. I draw a bath, light a candle because I’m really caring now, and place my red-and-blackcheckered robe on the hamper for him. He whispers an apology as he sinks below the water. I shut the door and put up a hand. It’s nothing. Rest.

  He’s had a bowl of soup I reheated, and a grilled cheese, which I made on the spot. I stare at the bowl in his hands, this little white bowl with a blue lip. In a flash, I remember buying the bowl—I stood in the aisle of the massive home-goods store, looking at the infinite array of bowl options. I didn’t like the blue-lipped bowl; I chose it for how cheap it was. But it’s fine. It’s okay. It does the job. That bowl’s mine. And I watch this other me dipping bread into my bowl at my kitchen table. He’s in a fresh pair of khakis, clean tee, and my old barn jacket that I used to wear all the time in college. It looks good on me, I think, looking at my clone; why did I ever stop wearing that old barn jacket?

  All of a sudden, my clone heads for the door with renewed vitality. I try stopping him, and I finally grab hold of his arm. I can see that he wants out. He’s furious with confusion or sadness. I ask if he’s got somewhere to go while flipping open my wallet and handing him twenty bucks. He walks down the road, turns around, and for a blink I can see myself standing in the halo of soft living room light in my doorframe. I see this real me in his home. Me, from a distance. Am I envious of that guy, with his cozy dwelling and stocked cupboards and little curiosities? Or is he just some random schmuck? Either way, there I am. Here I am, alive. Then, my clone marches into shadows, vanishing.

  Entering my girlfriend’s place is like crossing enemy lines. I have to sneak up on her, or else she’ll flake on me. I knock, but obviously she can’t hear me over the buzzing of her power tools and blaring of techno-rave. I try the knob and feel something pushing back against the door from the inside. She finally notices me, and I stop trying to enter. I peer through the narrow opening and spy about a dozen flat-screen televisions, showing color-bars and hanging by nooses on the far wall.

  “Hold on. Hold on! Give me a fucking second!” I see her run back and forth, in a welding mask, cutting this way then that way. Existing. Disappearing. She doesn’t like for me to see her artwork before it’s finished. Something clunks on the other side of the door, and it gives. “Okay.”

  “What’s that?” I place my blazer on the hook and point to the TVs.

  She yanks a curtain across the room to conceal the mass. “Televicious,” she whispers, begrudgingly. She waits. I ponder it. “That’s what’s fascinating about you, Jerry.” She approaches, studying my face. “You don’t get it. You simply never get anything I do. It’s so fresh.” And she’s out of sight, in her studio, hiding her projects from me.

  Laura’s artwork is concerned with busted flat-screen televisions, monitors, personal assistant speakers, computers, and tablets as far as I can tell. I have never liked her stuff all that much. Before I met her, I would joke with my ex about how ridiculous art like that was: conceptual stuff that makes no sense. She hid this side of herself from me when we started dating. She told me she was an artist, graphic designer, but then one day she showed me her portfolio, her real passion, her true self she even said. I was supportive about the collages of wires and circuit boards until she didn’t need my blind support anymore. I’m still kind about her pieces, but now she has regular shows, and critics write think-pieces about her messaging. She is happy with me just not getting it. I have become a cute thing. Cute and ignorant. But I’m not dumb, and I think she knows it, too. But here I am. Her dummy.

  On nights when she’s into her project, there’s no room for me. But I watch her float around her place, build her secret installations, and see flashes when she’s photographing her sculptures. I eat her Brigham’s and hint at streaming movies on properly functioning TVs. I stand most of the time at Laura’s. Tonight, she’s possessed. She asks me to hand her wrenches and washers while running from room to room. I watch the news with the captions on.

  I started living in Somerville three years ago, after I moved out of my ex’s in Cambridge. Pushed a town over for rising rent. It’s a fine place to live, I guess. Laura’s been living here ever since college. She absolutely loves all the artists and musicians. She’s from rural New Hampshire, and she’s excited to now live in a town with fewer monster trucks than bookstores. Her childhood home is now a gas station. She showed me once. We bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked a couple where she used to sneak them in her brooding youth: her side yard, the parking lot. I worried about the tanks blowing up. She is the first girlfriend I’ve had since getting the heave-ho by my ex. Right now, though, in her apartment, I try to look at her as if for the first time with snap judgments. I must have had them, back in one second, way off in the past. What does she do? What’s she like in bed? The initial wonder—those playful, hopeful unknowns—it’s all irretrievable. We know what we are now. An okay thing. I think she thinks we’re okay.

  When the news ends and the late night talk show starts, it’s clear that Laura’s not slowing down, so I head off to the D and D for hot chocolate. On a newspaper rack inside the shop, a magazine cover shows two identical labcoated scientists. The headline: HUMAN CLONED. I ask the girl behind the counter if she knows anything about it.

  “I don’t just work at this donut hole,” she says through blue lipstick. I didn’t mean to offend her, but I actually didn’t assume she existed outside this moment in time, pouring hot chocolate, now that I’m forced to think about it.

  “If you did just work here, that would be fine with me.”

  “I’m in college. I bet there are thousands of clones out there.”

  “Really? That many?” I sip my hot chocolate, lean on the counter. “Wouldn’t the people who were cloned know?”

  “No. Not if they were too young, like zero or something.”

  The curtain is drawn back from the wall of now powered-off TVs when I return. Laura’s sitting on the floor and stretching her back. She has to do this weird stretch where she sits with her butt on her heels and leans back. Every night she does this before bed. It’s a weird position, but just something I always see at this point. I put a cup of hot chocolate on the floor in front of her so that she’ll smile when she bends forward. I sit on the couch and flip open the magazine.

&
nbsp; “I finished Televicious,” she says, still stretching.

  “Tremendous,” I say. I hate it when she’s working. The gallery openings are okay though. I’m somewhat of a curiosity for her artist friends. They look at this dude, this me, wondering how I’m at Laura’s savvy side. I wonder, too, I guess.

  “What are you reading?” She’s done with the weird stretching.

  I tell her about my clone showing up at my place.

  “So, some lunatic could have killed you in your own home and you’re reading about DNA splicing?” She takes her hot chocolate.

  “No. You should have seen him. He was my clone. He was me.”

  “I’m not in the mood.”

  “Have you given any more thought to living together?” I put the magazine down and wait.

  “Would your clone have to live with us?” She’s not taking me seriously. And I don’t want to get sad and hurt again, so I drop it. “You’ve been reading too much for Nexus.”

  She’s talking about my job. I am an editor for a popular science-fiction magazine. We are specific about science fiction: no fantasy. And we don’t like it when people confuse the two. There is that much bigger journal, Fantasy and Science Fiction, which has set a mixed tone, and we have been fighting that tone with our concentration on sci-fi. We want robots, futuristic computers, colonies on Mars, mad scientists. As I like to define it: if you have a dragon, you’re submitting to the wrong place; if you have a test tube, show us the experiment. I see it all—predictive dates of death etched on human skulls, revealed post-autopsy; starfish genes spliced with butchers’ DNA when they lop off a finger; little green aliens heralding cures for cancer, but who get killed by humans (heavy, moralistic). I write my own stories, too. I wanted to be a science-fiction writer, actually, but after years of never seeing a single published piece, I made a lateral move to editing the stories of more talented folks. It’s okay, though. Really. I get some satisfaction from my work. It’s okay.

  Our offices are in Cambridge. If mad scientists were to concoct clones and fountains of youth, chances are they’d be doing it in Cambridge, where Nexus is, right between Harvard and MIT and, to a lesser extent, Tufts. There are boatloads of discoveries made in Cambridge because of these institutions, and this has probably fueled the sci-fi market, where our contributors take the next logical step after researching the last real-life step that local laboratories have already taken.

  Today, I’m reading a submission from Lesley Ofrichter, a writer I’ve been fighting for, trying to get her published for years now. Her stories all have the same three elements: secret experiment in a clandestine laboratory, the experimental subject escaping from the laboratory, and that secret experimental subject seeking out its creator for a reckoning. It’s formulaic, but it works for me. I love them. This one’s about a little pink piglet that has been given a red-tailed hawk’s wings. Zachary, the secretive scientist, is a ladies’ man. When the piglet bursts out of its cage and flies through the laboratory window and on over to Zachary’s house, his latest flavor-of-the-month lady friend is trying to get Zachary to talk seriously about living together. He’s thinking, when pigs fly. And then, the gruesome, flying piglet crashes through his window, and Zachary makes serious changes to his womanizing ways, reinvents himself completely.

  “Jerry,” Pratt, the head editor, is calling me into his office. Pratt has final say on everything. “Do you have something to send my way for the November issue?”

  “I have a new Ofrichter story—”

  “God, she’s still at it, eh? You know I’m not a fan.”

  I don’t do anything. The story’s fate hangs in the air.

  “I’ll take a look, but you have to show me at least two other pieces.”

  “Of course.” I maintain my cool, but I still haven’t won, haven’t assumed the position of authority. I won’t hold my breath for “Porcine Heights.” But Pratt will spring for lunch, and it will be fine. Here’s me at my job, talking with my co-worker, or my boss, or my intern.

  What Ofrichter would write for my situation with my clone is that my clone comes to my house, but he isn’t disheveled and in need of help. I would be the one who needs help. And he would fix me, show me the mistakes I made, the changes I need to make. Or my clone would be superhuman, threatening me with cement fists for answers: Why did you make me? Of course, in my real life, I didn’t make my clone, and I don’t have answers for him. I have no idea how he exists. But Ofrichter would have my clone find me again, and in a fit of rage, coax the answer out of me: I made you to be the perfect me. I made you the way I wanted to be …

  I’m flipping through a newsletter I get on sci-fi conventions, which has this section in the back for Martian figurines, UFO posters, actual ears of corn from crop circle sites. I haven’t been to a basketball game since I was ten. This is my hobby. Here’s me looking into the cost of a robot can opener. I hold up a toy flying saucer to the sun coming through the bay window in the kitchen. The phone rings. It’s Laura. She’s getting her show ready.

  “Where is it again?” I ask.

  “Porter Square. Behind the big sculpture that you always call the alien satellite.”

  “You know, as well as I do, that thing is sending up coordinates.”

  She’s not listening. She’s with her artist friends at the gallery that’s putting up her latest installations. I can hear their turtlenecks swishing in the background. This is the group I mentioned before: the one that I’m a curiosity to.

  “Should I bring wine?” I ask.

  “No, Jacob has outfitted the whole thing.”

  “What does the installation mean, so that I can pretend to be hip tonight, honey?”

  “Never change, Jerry.”

  She tells me when to show up, what to wear. I hang up and go back to inspecting the flying saucer. I make a noise with my mouth that I think is a ray gun.

  The article on clones says that in the future you’ll be able to tell clones from real people because clones won’t have belly buttons. I think about this. This minor detail, the no belly button, is horrifying. It’s like, I never thought about it, but belly buttons are nature’s stamp of authenticity. If all clones were to be missing one ear, one finger, a tooth, if they were all hairless or something, it wouldn’t be so bad. They’d be noticeable, but not scary. The missing belly button, though, seems hideous. The belly button doesn’t do anything, but to be missing it makes me think that cloning is so unnatural. The missing belly button makes me question my stance on cloning, when I had been so into it before. With Nexus. With my own clone and all.

  Fifteen minutes before I’m supposed to be heading out to the T and on over to the gallery opening, my clone appears at my door. He’s doing even worse now. He has a black eye. Dried blood runs from his nose to his upper lip. He’s in the khakis and shirt I gave him last time. The barn jacket’s left arm is missing. He collapses in my arms, and I half drag, half carry him to the couch, where I prop him up.

  I startle my clone when I dab his nose and eye with a moist towel. He flinches and moans while I clean him up.

  “Doesn’t look good,” I say. His nose is blown up, his eye getting puffier. “But, you’ll be okay.”

  “I’m sorry,” he moans. It’s fascinating: I can hear my own voice. Although it’s as if it’s me talking after being punched in the throat, I can hear my own rhythms coming out of him. He begins to cry, but I stop him.

  “Oh, no you don’t. You’re going to be fine. Everything is going to be fine. You are just a little bit confused right now. You are going to make it. Trust me. Get up.” I stand and put out my hand. I’ve shocked him, and he stops his little sobs. He pushes up off the couch. I put my hand on the top of his head and then drag it slowly, flat over my own. “Remarkable,” I say.

  I’ve got him in the shower, and I’m putting out another suit, tie, and slacks for him to wear to the opening. I knock on the bathroom door, “Come on. We’ve got to go!” I think that this is tough love. “There’s food at the ga
llery.” In case he’s angling for a round of soup and sandwiches.

  With his hair pulled back into a ponytail, held together by one of Laura’s forgotten purple hair elastics, and my suit on, exactly as ill-fitting as it is on me, he looks presentable despite the black eye, which I suggest he cover up with dark aviators. But how does he feel?

  “Disappointed. Confused.” He’s wobbly, and finally he reaches for the arm of the couch and sits.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Gary.” He lightly pinches the bridge of his nose, and when he shivers with real pain, I cringe with the phantom type.

  “Gary? I’m Jerry.” He nods. I nod. “How did you find me, Gary?”

  Gary raises his hands as if under arrest. Then he drops them. “I have no idea where I am. I have no idea how I got here, where I’ve come from. All I can remember is looking up from a dirt road to this great white light that all of a sudden cut out. I only know my name because it was in my emptied wallet. I’ve got no clue who I am.” He’s serious. He’s looking right into my eyes, I think, through the aviators.

  “You still have a chance to clean up. Every day is a new opportunity, you know?” And I think that if he can read, he could probably do my job. I wonder if he can lick envelopes, work his way up at Nexus. But, no, he wouldn’t want that. What he should do is write his story. I imagine him as an amnesiac whom I could help retrieve his origins and tell the world.

  I decide he’s my burden now. I look around my place, at the flying saucer on the shelf, at the magazine on cloning on the coffee table, at the last issue of Nexus on the bookcase, the photo of me and Laura on the mantle, taken what seems like a lifetime ago. I look at my clone: me, in the middle of my living room, in the middle of my life.