I found all of this on the internet as soon as I got home. In human history—the internet suggested—doppelgängers often foretell death. Soon after his first election President Lincoln saw two reflections of himself in a single mirror. He described one self as “a little paler” than the other; the First Lady described it as a bad omen that her husband wouldn’t live through a second term. English poet Percy B. Shelley saw his doppelgänger point out to sea not long before Shelley died on a sailing trip. English poet John Donne saw his pregnant wife’s doppelgänger holding an infant at the same instant his live wife suffered a stillbirth many miles away. Before her death Queen Elizabeth I saw her doppelgänger inert on her royal bed. In Scottish legend fairy creatures give birth to sickly babies that look the same as healthy human babies, and thereafter try to swap out their kid for yours.
These were stories of surrender to an outside force—but an outside force in the shape of the self. I found plenty of stories about people who killed their doubles in order to take their identities. I had read that 36 percent of murders go unsolved. How many of those cases might be explained by a doppelgänger asserting his right to who he is? According to the internet, superstition holds that should you see your doppelgänger, you will want to kill it and it you. Only one of you can survive as you—this is evolution to the extreme. The other you is your most dangerous predator.
On the other hand these were all stories about white people, who aren’t used to being mistaken for someone else. How much did their reflections haunt them? After my adoption I used to stand at the mirror every night and slap my cheeks, trying to make them as red as my new parents’. What happened to the Other People in those stories? To answer this question took a little more digging.
In the 1600s a Spanish priest went on a mission to New Mexico and found the Jumano people carrying crosses and saying Catholic prayers. He wrote home, asking who had gone before him. But he was the first. The Jumano described meeting a “lady in blue.” Upon his return to Spain the priest found a blue-habited nun who claimed she had visited New Mexico—in her dreams. She never left her convent, yet she knew the landscape and people in perfect detail. She had colonized reality with her imagination.
And yet the story that really hit me wasn’t that one. It was the story of Emilie Sagée, a white schoolteacher in the 1850s whose students often saw another her beside her (though she never did). While Ms. Sagée wrote questions on the blackboard, her double would walk in and write the answers in the same handwriting. The second Ms. Sagée’s appearance physically depleted the first. Thirteen students gave the same account. Once Ms. Sagée was inside and they spotted her outside. They gathered around her double. The second Ms. Sagée started teaching them everything other teachers refused to touch: shortcuts to answers and sexual innuendos and what other religions said about God. One boy tried to touch the double’s arm: He felt nothing. As soon as the lesson ended the first Ms. Sagée collapsed.
Maybe that was what I felt—my energy draining out of me and into someone else, someone who lived a life I could not, someone with the answers to my life. I guzzled a bottle of Pinot Grigio on the sofa by the empty box, searching the internet on my phone. Then I called the operator and asked for my ex-wife’s number. The operator said the number was private. After a second bottle of wine I got drunk and rang the upstairs doorbell.
My upstairs neighbors were a cis straight able couple in their midtwenties, an Asian woman and a white man who used to have friends over late at night and now never did. For some reason, maybe because my cat died, I couldn’t enjoy the change; I felt sorry for them. In their silence above me I heard my ghost cat meowing. More than once recently I had woken in the middle of the night to find the man’s moonlike face outside my window, mouth and eyes gaping like craters. I tried knocking on the glass and waving him away, but he ignored me. I almost thought he was an illusion, until it happened when Yumi was over. She hid under the covers. Later she didn’t want to walk to the bus, and as we got in my car the man stared down from his own window—at Yumi, it seemed. “Maybe he has Asian fever,” Yumi whispered. That time, after I drove her home, was the first and only time I saw her apartment. She collected dolls. That was what I remembered, a collection of rag girls that she never talked about and that didn’t seem to fit with what I knew about her.
Upstairs I knocked on my neighbors’ door until a deep radio-perfect voice demanded patience. I waited for four minutes and fifty-three seconds. The sun was setting, and artificial light came on beneath the door. Shadows passed between the light and me. Shuffling noises started and stopped. It sounded like someone moving stacks of paper. Finally the door cracked, and the man slipped through and shut it behind him. Immediately I wished I had stayed in my apartment. I wondered what the other me would do in this situation. Why did I do things I didn’t want to do?
We faced each other at the top of the stairs. My neighbor kept one hand on the doorknob. After plenty of time to change he had come out of his apartment in a tank top and floral shorts. He must have been trying to intimidate me. I almost tripped down the stairs. I caught the railing, and wine rose up my throat. Before he had shut the door I had noticed photos of women strewn across my neighbor’s living room. Though it occurred to me that my perceptions were probably only half-reliable.
His weight shifted to his back leg and he said in that radio voice: “Aren’t you the dude from downstairs? What are you doing up here?”
I asked whether his girlfriend was in. He sniffled.
I tried again. “I would just feel more comfortable talking with her?”
“I guess you’ll have to feel uncomfortable then.”
Well. That was typical.
“Nice tracksuit,” he said.
“Did you feel an earthquake?” I asked him.
“Huh?”
“Did anyone break in recently and steal some toys?”
“What?”
“Have you seen anyone around who looks exactly like you?”
He opened and closed his mouth a few times, like a fish. “Okay, restart. Try making sense this time.”
“What exactly,” I asked, “are you hiding in your apartment?”
When he sniffled again I realized he was smelling me. I had a strong impulse to sniff my armpits. The other Matt was probably scentless.
“Give me a break,” my neighbor said finally. “I opened the door because I know you, but we’ve really never known each other, have we?”
I wondered. He slipped back inside and shut the door in my face.
He and his girlfriend had lived above me for two years, and I had listened to them come and go so many times I could tell the difference between the growl of their Volkswagens, I didn’t even have to look. Wasn’t that as well as anyone knew their neighbor? It was easy for him to never think of me.
Inside a smart speaker beeped, and the voice of an older woman crackled. “Not right now, Mom,” my neighbor said. “Mom, not now. I had a bad day that just got worse. No, I don’t mean you.”
I was not the other Matt, but I was alive. Slowly I descended. Having been spat on earlier, having learned I was a lesser me, what could a shut door hurt me? In other words why did it hurt so much?