Photo by Benjamin Balázs on Unsplash
When Tim was a child, he’d heard that the reason we don’t like seeing ourselves in photos is because it’s a flipped version of what we see in the mirror. He took this to imply that it’s only in photos that we ever see ourselves through the eyes of others. He thought it was telling that it makes us uncomfortable.
Tim was uncomfortable to say the least when, four weeks before his twenty-eighth birthday, he found the corpse in the crawlspace.
He’d been in Toronto for a week on business and to return to the sort-of less snow-driven Michigan neighborhood where he lived with his wife Charlotte had been a relief. Tim loathed business trips, preferring to stay close to home. So badly did he miss his wife during them that to spend more than a few days away was, he’d noticed, stressful for him. He tried to make up for his absences when he was home and Charlotte had always been, and continued to be, more than understanding. She had her own job to keep her busy, she would tell him; he needn’t worry.
But it wasn’t necessarily a “worry” so much as an ingrained sentimentality of which he’d been aware since he’d become a teenager and began to develop emotionally debilitating and soul-pancaking crushes. Emotional organization, the work of sequestering feelings and peeking to check them out when needed was something that Tim had been working on for years. He now prided himself on having become an emotionally stable and well-adjusted adult – a man.
Strolling up the walkway to his home that evening, he was anticipating a quiet dinner at home with Charlotte. They’d unwind, catch up, then maybe curl up on the couch together and watch a movie. A perfect decompression after the trip.
But when he opened the door and called out “Hey, I’m home!” he received no answer but silence. The lights were on, but as he closed the door and began to walk about the house, it became clear that Charlotte wasn’t home.
Must be working late, he thought, and went into the kitchen. When he did, he saw that there was already a bowl of spaghetti with some kind of red sauce on the table, looking like someone had just begun to eat from it. The chair was pushed back from the table, and Tim thought that it looked like Charlotte had sat down to eat, then been called in to work with such urgency that she abandoned her meal. This was plausible – she worked at a hospital.
But she knew he was coming home this evening; and surely she knew he would want to catch up over dinner, so why would she eat without him? Tim looked around the kitchen for a note of some kind but could find none. He took a bite of the spaghetti; the sauce tasted off, but it was still a little warm. So, he must have just missed her. Disappointed but brushing it off easily, he took a beer from the fridge. Opening it, he sipped and listened to the silence of the house.
Coming home, he always noticed more about his house than he usually did: the way the light from the overhead in the kitchen hit the hallway just right at nighttime and made a perfect ninety-degree shadow stabbing into the hall, the scent of rooms less frequently occupied (such as, lately, his small study) that he could only think of as “neglected,” or the way the stairs seemed to creak exactly every third step (something he’d not taken the time to prove).
There was still a bit of spaghetti left in the strainer that sat in the sink, and so Tim decided to go ahead and eat, since he didn’t know how long Charlotte would be. But when he opened the fridge to get the marinara, he recalled how it’d tasted, and he threw it out and went down to the basement to get a bottle from the shelves where they kept extra canned and bottled goods.
The stairs down to the cellar creaked in the typical cellar-style as he descended them. At the bottom of the stairs, as he reached to turn the lights on, he noticed that the lone lightbulb in the crawlspace was on and gleaming low yellow light around the corner. Tim went to go turn the light off, and there he was.
He lay on a black tarp darkly slicked with blood. The man was the same age and build as Tim and looked like he must have weighed about the same. His hair was cut in the same style, probably to compensate for what Tim could see was already thinning brown hair – the same as Tim’s.
And the clothes he was wearing looked awfully familiar; they could have been taken right out of…Tim’s closet.
And the mole on his jaw, where it curved to rise to the cartilage of his right ear…precisely resembled Tim’s.
Crouching there in the crawlspace, he began to feel, through his shock, like he was being watched. The longer he stared at the body, the more this feeling deepened, widening and becoming exponentially darker and louder.
Tim felt the world he’d known begin to drip at the edges, slow at first, as though a black blot had appeared on his previously bright and orderly canvas, a dark bead moving from the dot to slowly run down the length of it; darkness in no rush at all. He didn’t tremble, he didn’t feel ill or dizzy. Tim temporarily went blank, and he left the crawlspace. He did not, however, leave the basement. Sitting down on the bottom step of the stairs, he tried to articulate what was happening.
He looks like he’s dressed up as Me.
No,
he looks just like Me.
Wait,
a twin – that’s it...?
Tim attempted, sitting there on the step, to recall his childhood. At first, he felt as though he were standing in the eye of a storm, the natural equivalent of the stillness of that paralyzing fear and awe of chaos. But slowly there were images that began to crystallize through the haze. His childhood bedroom, neat and orderly as his parents had made sure he kept it; child-desk in the left corner and childbed in the right. He saw and remembered the soft blue of the walls, the paper-white of the ceiling and low burgundy carpet. Tim saw and remembered the way the window formed a pane of light on the floor that the shadows pulled apart at the edges as it glided across the room growing thinner until it was but a sliver by twilight, then gone.
Then he saw the hallway on the second floor of his childhood home. Going as he would to his parents’ room, Tim watched through memory’s faithless eyes the journey little Tim would make down the hall to “good morning” his parents, and as he did, he saw no other room, no miniature doppelgänger, no sibling.
No,
not a twin. They couldn’t have afforded two…
But,
maybe they gave him up. Maybe -
What…?
- maybe he came here to find Me.
Tim stood too quickly, and he had to sit back down on the step. When he was able to stand, he wobbled slightly at first. He wasn’t aware of making the decision to go back upstairs, he just did. Gliding ghostly to the fridge, he grabbed and opened a beer, then slid into a seat at the kitchen table. The beer steadied his nerves just enough for him to not feel closed in upon by the house itself.
There was the matter of what to do next. Throughout his life, Tim had moved for the most part confidently through the minutes that made up his days. Decent performance in school, B average in college, only a couple months of transient employment before finding his rhythm so to speak and settling into the kind of life that he’d never thought he didn’t want. Now though: now there had arrived a sudden and quiet crisis that he’d no experience with. This kind of catastrophe of Self was quite foreign to Tim. It was as though he’d been shuffling a deck of cards without noticing, throughout his whole life, and suddenly his hands had slipped, the deck splattered across the floor, his abrupt awareness of it ringing in his ears and blackening his vision.
Tim took a drink of beer. Were one or both of his parents still living, he might have called. Were he at all close with any of his living relatives, he might have tried to get in touch.
But no.
He could think of not a single person who would be familiar enough with his child/youthhood to provide clarity about those years that had begun to break apart like a clear bottle on a hot sidewalk, fragments of memory seeming to glint with final farewells as they crunched under time’s gum-soled tennis-shoes. Tim tried to think back to when he first became cognizant of his Self, and though he couldn’t narrow it to a moment, he determined his Self to have come online around age eleven. Everything prior was too scattered to make any sense of. So now, drinking contemplatively in the kitchen, Tim attempted to integrate into his Narrative of Self the presence of something he had never seen, but now realized he’d always felt.
It simply hadn’t been tangible. Since he could remember, Tim had felt vaguely watched. He recalled his mother telling him it was God looking out for him; he recalled his father telling him it was the Government. Tim himself had always figured it was a little bit of both. He also figured that, since his parents didn’t express concern, what he felt was not only normal but common. Up to the present moment, Tim had lived occasionally looking over his shoulder or resisting the urge to. He’d been to shrinks who told him he was just self-conscious and doctors who told him he was anxious; he’d thought enough of it to have it checked out, but not enough to think that it was a problem that demanded immediate investigation and remedy.
It was just a thing that he lived with.
But now…now…now there was no denying that something in his life was horribly, deeply wrong. A structure that he did not understand but had always been faintly aware of had made itself violently apparent, and he felt as though he’d discovered an extra limb; for how long had it been there? Was it removable? Who had noticed, who had been too polite to say anything about it to his face? everybody? Who’s in on this?
And there it was: conspiracy. Once the suspicion of it arose, the cascade of connections real and imagined began its exponential expansion into the frantic depths of Paranoia.
The drips at the world’s edges began to run. They cut ruts through the woods, coursed through caverns, swelled to beads and burst like zits to splatter in Tim’s helpless face. His heart quickened, and he took a sip of beer.
Then he remembered Charlotte.
Initially, what he felt was a slow panic – she wasn’t here, he hadn’t seen her. So where was she, and was she safe?
Tim tried calling her, but it went straight to voicemail. Shit.
But why would her phone be off? Why would she not try to reach him if she were going to be gone long, or if she’d had to flee the house?
Tim finished the beer in several slow gulps. Frustrated for a moment, he thought about breaking the bottle against the floor, but he didn’t. Instead he went back down into the basement, bending and turning into the closeness of the crawlspace. The corpse lay unmoved. Tim couched beside it. Looking closer this time, he could see that his eyes were the same shade Tim saw when he looked in the mirror.
No,
that can’t be it. Not a twin.
Wait,
perhaps a…no.
The notion that occurred to Tim then was one that he resisted letting himself recognize. He had to coax it from within himself, where he was beginning to realize it always had been.
No, what?
…clone.
He’s a Clone.
And there it was.
The dam broke.
What do I do? What else don’t I know? Who knows about this? Who killed Him? How long has He existed? Who created Him? What?
What?
Wait,
And of course he would get here, to the very bottom of the Pit of Self:
who created Me?
What if…
No…
Shock abating, the panic returned. As Tim began to hyperventilate, as he tried desperately to convince himself – without much success – that he wasn’t a Clone, he heard from upstairs the sound of the front door opening.
***
It had been so much easier than she’d thought it would be, and when he’d come home early from Toronto to surprise her, well it had just been the perfect opportunity. He’d told Charlotte that he’d skipped his flight, that he’d gotten someone who owed him a favor to take his place on the trip, that he didn’t have to leave her.
The bastard. Some days Charlotte felt as though he’d smother her in her sleep just so he could keep her. So clingy was he that he’d skipped out on a trip that could have netted him a raise; and that was when she knew she’d never be able to shake him.
Unless…
Within an hour of his being surprisingly home, she knew she’d kill him. He seemed somehow even more clingy than he usually was, and Tim was usually unbearable. Now his suffocating neediness seemed amplified, her husband rendered a grotesquely annoying caricature of himself.
The gun was something that she hadn’t really expected to use when she bought it. Tim had protested, reminding her that accidental firearm-related deaths occur nearly constantly. But Charlotte had countered with the argument that many of those guns were in the hands of folks who tended to vote Red, and that thinking things through before making decisions – such as whether to pull a trigger – wasn’t something they were exactly predisposed to doing. He couldn’t really disagree, and so he’d only insisted that it be kept in a discreet gun safe. And so the little revolver was kept in a safe of appropriate size, nestled in Charlotte’s closet on the floor against the wall and covered over with a couple shoeboxes.
That night, she removed the boxes and entered the combination. That night, she loaded the chamber with one bullet so she couldn’t be too impulsive. That night, she walked right up to him as he sat at the kitchen table eating buttered spaghetti, and Charlotte looked into Tim’s smiling face as he said “what’s the matter, honey?” and as she brought her arm up to press the muzzle of the gun against his forehead she could have sworn she saw his face drop down into an expression the coldness of which frightened her enough to pull the trigger. Afterwards, the expression remained not only printed on his face, but in her mind’s eye as well. Charlotte began to doubt not only her actions, but whether she had even known the man she’d just killed.
Had her husband been masking his personality all along? Was the face she saw the one that he kept from her, reflective of his inner Self? Perhaps he’d been a psychopath; perhaps he’d planned to drive her insane, or even kill her himself.
But despite her doubts, the cruelly inexpressive glare that he had fixed on her in his final moment convinced Charlotte that she’d known all along that something was wrong, something more than his intolerable possessiveness, and that she’d been right to kill him. Something, intuition maybe, had saved her life, Charlotte thought.
Setting down a black tarp they’d had in the garage, she wrestled the corpse onto it. She cleaned up the blood from the floor, chair, wall, and table and dragged the body down the stairs to the basement and across the cold cement floor to the crawlspace. After cleaning up the blood that had tracked down the stairs and across the floor, Charlotte sat on the bottom step of the cellar stairs and thought about what to do next. It came to her with surprising ease.
On her way back from the hardware store, with the axe sitting in the passenger seat, she told herself that the clerk would never think anything of the woman who came in just before closing because her husband needed to chop up a tree that had fallen in the yard.
She told herself to imagine that that was all she was doing: chopping wood.
***
Tim stayed at the top of the stairs as the front door opened and Charlotte let herself in, and it took him a moment to register the axe she held one-handedly. Otherwise, she moved as though nothing were amiss, seemingly completely unaware that the world had begun to run, muddle, scream blurrily in his face in unknown languages.
Help, he thought, and stepped from the hallway into the entryway, reaching out to her as he spoke his wife’s name.
And the color vanished from her face. Charlotte hadn’t even been that pale when she had had the worst flu Tim had ever seen. The axe dropped from her hand, the head thudding the floor and the handle following sideways with a clatter as Charlotte fainted in a heap.
And Tim crouched by her side, gently shaking her shoulder. He waited for her to wake into the same haunted newness in which he now dwelt.
Dylan Boyer is a Goddard College MFA graduate. His work has previously appeared at The 96th of October. An omnibus of previously self-published work is forthcoming. Boyer lives somewhere, where he does stuff. He can be found on Instagram @grumblefish27, just don’t be weird about it.