Sandra, who I was meeting for the first time, who was not my girlfriend Yumi, told us the story of how she had ended up outside The Cave. The story started a week earlier—Sandra knew how to spin a tale. She had gone away on a business trip to pitch an ad campaign to a makeup company (the campaign would sell beauty not as everlasting but as everchanging, a slogan that would, ironically, last longer), and when she returned, triumphant, she was surprised to find her boyfriend had moved out without warning. He had taken everything he owned. The next day he didn’t come back. He wouldn’t answer his phone. Sandra spent an entire week trying to get in touch. She did everything except call the police, who would only say he had left her. His parents either wouldn’t tell her where he was or didn’t know. After a week of binge eating (and binge drinking) Sandra decided that for the sake of her health, she had to move on. She had always had an iron will—she had quit smoking cold turkey, on a dare—so she set her mind to it. That same night she dreamed that she was driving through a tunnel supposed to take her to another world—a tunnel so long and dark that after a while it seemed more like a deep cave, as if she were driving into herself—and before she found the end she woke up, dripping with sweat. Once she had gotten hold of herself she packed two suitcases and took off in her actual car, bursting with some kind of leftover determination.
Sandra said she left with only the desire to leave, as her boyfriend had left, no thought about where she would go. After several hours the desire began to fade. She didn’t know what to do, she had already put in the effort of leaving. That was when the earth shook. Sandra took the nearest exit and, as if with the last of her dream energy, seemed to come upon a sudden city. She said the skyline had seemed to pop up out of nowhere. She didn’t remember it being there before the quake. She chose one random side street after another, trying to find somewhere to eat, until she saw the sign for The Cave. It was a symbol from her dream. A parking spot opened right in front of her—she tried to wake herself, she was awake—and as soon as she got out of her car, up walked her mirror image in prison stripes (as Sandra described Yumi’s uniform). In other words, while I was in The Cave, at the exact same time, Yumi and Sandra had been just outside, huddled in the car, having a conversation that eventually required drinks.
I knew the rest. It was an unbelievable story—even staring at the evidence of their same bodies I could barely believe it. And yet, to me, the most unbelievable part was what came next.
First the ants returned, all over me, and then Sandra leaned in so close that our noses nearly touched. “You’re seriously not you?” she asked. “You’re seriously freaking me out. What’s with the tracksuit?”
“Matt’s got some stuff to work out,” Yumi said, pulling me backward.
Sandra hunted in her purse and took out a photo.
I moved closer. Yumi didn’t stop me. She moved closer too. I moved closer still. Yumi moved closer still. Neither of us knew what to tell each other. It was the first time in a long time that I had seen Yumi completely silenced.
“This is a photo of my boyfriend and me,” Sandra said. She pointed. “That’s my boyfriend, Matt. Who went missing. And that’s me. Now do you get what I’m saying?”
Matt was my name. The boyfriend in the photo was me.
I didn’t remember living with another Sandra. I didn’t remember taking my things and leaving her. It occurred to me that this other Matt was a me who had disappeared himself—myself—as if unwilling to wait for someone else to do it. The universe had a terrible sense of humor (Exhibit A2: the shared names). On the other hand humor was a matter of context.
The other Matt had my same slightly wavy black hair, my same prematurely balding forehead, my same flat nose, my same wide cheeks, my same square chin, my same fat lips that had always seemed to belong to someone else. But the really creepy part wasn’t that we shared facial features. It was that those features which never seemed to come together on me . . . they all seemed perfect on him.
How to explain? I had seen myself in a mirror thousands of times and yet barely could have described myself. At one glance you would remember the other Matt for the rest of your life. He was a person whose presence you knew would be instantly missed, someone you would regret not getting to know. It was obvious that people loved him, that he was clever, successful, generous, authoritative—it was like he glowed while I stayed dull. The glow in that photo was impossible to look past. It was a glow that made everything else appear. You could see by it. No one ever got that impression from photos of me or me.
Sandra said the other Matt had started out writing copy for travel magazines and ended up the one Asian on a team that coined slogans for entire cities and states. Of course someone had written “Virginia Is for Lovers” and “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas.” Matt’s ultimate achievement was adding all four words of “Home of Your Now” to the eight-word slogan “City of Your Future, Home of Your Now.” Sandra said Matt was famous in the industry, often invited to speak on panels with his white peers.
He was the me who had succeeded at being the Matt we were both capable of being.
I did some quick calculations: It wasn’t fair, etc.
Sandra said she had dated Matt for six years until the day she came home to find every last one of his possessions gone, photos of him cut out of every single album and even cropped out of every JPEG on her computer, as if he had never been with her at all. In other words the perfect me had not only disappeared but erased all evidence of himself—so who was I?
I was fucked.
“Did his things vanish first?” I asked. “Or did everything go at once? You didn’t know he was going to disappear? There weren’t any signs?”
“Wow,” Sandra said. “That’s definitely not what Matt would say.”
“This is not going well,” said my girlfriend.
But it was just like in her lecture notes: We wanted what we didn’t have. I wanted to glow, so I knew I didn’t glow.
“You and Matt were very happy?” I asked.
“You look just like him,” Sandra said with such desire it shook me. She stood and went to the window, turning her back to us. A car honked for two seconds, tires screeched, doom marched on.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Yumi whispered to me. “Don’t think like that.” She went over to her doppelgänger and rested her hand on that same arm. They mumbled to each other lovingly. They comforted themselves. They had words I couldn’t speak, Yumi/Sandra words. Like me Yumi asked questions, but the difference was she could still be satisfied by answers. What did Sandra do for fun? For self-care? For exercise? What were Sandra’s parents like? Where was she ticklish? What Yumi wanted to know was complete and different from what I wanted. She wanted to know what other lives she could have had. I wanted to stay alive.
THE UPSTAIRS NEIGHBOR
In nature doppelgängers exist because of evolution. Edible grapes evolved to look like poisonous fox grapes. King snakes evolved to look like poisonous coral snakes. Their safety is in the appearance of a deadly other. On the other hand it is wrong to talk about evolution as if a species can choose its path. The real reason for its change are predators. A snake resembling a coral snake survives because its predators fear to eat it. Under those terms of survival two different species sometimes evolve to look the same in two different places, like two butterfly species both with spots resembling owl eyes. In either location predators mistake those spots for owls, and so those butterflies survive to have sex and birth butterflies whose spots even more resemble owl eyes, and so on and so forth, until separate species appear the same because their survival has appeared the same. Scientists call this cryptic biodiversity. Doppelgänger species can look so similar that only DNA testing can tell them apart.