Doubles

We waited in the half-dark of an early winter evening. The light is that specific shade of green that it goes this time of year when pressed through city lights. All the pretty people I used to know are living in other cities under other names. I press my face against the window. Outside, snow isn't even bothering to fall.

This is all just a set up to tell you something else. It was strange that night, to feel so distant from everywhere and everything, riding the train uptown after work in the pitch black, where you can only make out bits of neon. I wasn't expecting to run into anyone I knew because I don't know anyone anymore. I make a habit of keeping silent on the train, trying to disappear into myself.

That's why it was so strange to see myself reading the newspaper two rows up. I recognized myself immediately, which is strange, because I'm often confounded by what I see in the mirror. What was strange was how calm I seemed, flicking the pages of the Wall Street Journal as if they had meaning. I wanted to approach, but I seemed engrossed in the seemingly random configuration of numbers and figures that passes for financial markets throughout the world.

I wasn't sure what to make of this slippage in time, of a different me traveling on that same train to some other destination. I hear you reader. Shouldn't I have assumed that some sort of time travel had been discovered, or, that I was going completely insane? I assumed neither, and I'd like to point out that you'd have likely done the same. For, once seeing oneself in the body of flesh, of checking every angle in the available reflection of mirrors, eventually becomes as real as the sun rising, or the light of a far away star--something like abstractions given flesh, clothed now in the light of reality. The strange part, I came to realize on that long ride home, is the existence, or seeming existence of all the people I'd known before--my first grade teacher, the homeless man I gave a quarter to in the spring of the year 2001, the owner of a Springer Spaniel who smelled of cigarette ash. And what to make of all the people that had passed out of my memory altogether? Could they be said to be, in any sense, real anymore?

And that, as I'm sure you've already deduced, is how I figured out why there would be two of me riding that lonely train home in the dark of the night. For surely this version of me, this slightly odd replica, existed in order that no one should slip from my memory. Certainly, it seemed obvious to me, he was keeping the boy who picked his nose in the second grade in mind. And another version of me was living somewhere out east, thinking about the tall boy that I taught how to play basketball in fifth grade, and still someone else to remember the bent head of a dead bird lying in a pillow of browned needles, and another, remembering the exact length of the comet's tail as it traveled across the bit of the universe that we could see from the hood of a car, and still another, brooding over the spidery veins in her forearm as the tip of my finger arced along her smooth flesh, and a last one, sitting on a train car, not knowing a damn thing about the world, just trying to remain conscious long enough to take the short bus ride home.