Sometimes I wonder who that is in my basement, a form that’s obviously a visitation. A “that” not a “who.” A friend who never left the party, who decided to stay on? No. A memory of myself swimming or that old man who’d come by the house with his basket of breads, who said, “Are you a twin?”
My wife asked me who that was walking beside me at night. She said, “Sometimes when you’re walking down the hall, it sounds like there’s someone with you. It’s been happening for years.”
I told her that in El Paso we walk heavier, that we’re often taken for two people, breaking the veracity of the census, that often we were taken for a larger crowd when it was just the ten of us standing at the front of the auditorium.
I’m two people, I joked with her. But I still wonder who that other resemblance is. Sometimes the mirror shakes. Sometimes in the shower, I find myself lathering a second image reflected on the glass stall, and for a moment, I forget where I’d put my fingers.
“Maybe the doctor would know what to do about this doubleness you have, this doppelgängering shade?” my wife said. “Ask him how a person might emanate a second self.”
“How would I explain that to him?” I said.
It wasn’t just me, my wife, that old man.
“Who’s that other one with you,” the hotel manager said.
“I’m alone,” I said with a credit card in my hand.
He said, “Are you sure?” He looked out the window, inquiring. He said, “I could’ve swore there was two of you.”
I told him my El Paso story, the one about crowds. He said, “El Paso? What country you from?”
“Which one of you will die first?” my wife asked.
“The other me,” I said. “The one you think you see. The one the other day I heard say that peace is real.”
“Sometimes you’re a real charmer,” she said. She looked over my shoulder and shuddered.
