Damned Lies!

by Dennis Liggio

  “You and Jill have been dating how long?” I asked in exasperation.

  “A year.”

  “And Jill and Claudia have been best friends how long?”

  “Three, I think.”

  “And you never thought to mention the fact that Claudia wanted me to take her to prom?”

  He shrugged, then yanked the wheel, putting us into a screeching turn, which flung me against the car door. “I guess it never came up.”

  I never went to prom. Part of the reason is I didn’t have a date lined up, attempts to curry Claudia’s favor notwithstanding. Part of the reason was money; prom could be quite expensive and my funds were limited. But the final reason was that I was off fighting the forces of darkness that night, and I would not have been able to attend without really neglecting my date. The forces of darkness do not do formalwear, so they have no tolerance for prom and all its niceties[4].

  We arrived at school and were herded into the gymnasium. We were lined up according to last name, which put me between one annoying rich girl I didn’t like (a preexisting condition) and a more hung over spoiled rich girl who I could’ve tolerated if her voice was an octave lower. The sober one kept having conversations with the other girl, which made the conversations go through me. The hung over one didn’t speak as much, but laughed in a high pitched chitter which was maddeningly like the screech of nails on a chalkboard. When pomp and circumstance started, I couldn’t be more thrilled. We walked out of the gym and onto elevated platforms placed in the middle of the football field. This faced the football bleachers where our families were arranged.

  Since we were outdoors in the middle of the field on elevated platforms, the already windy day was made much worse. Besides the random whip of the wind pulling at skirts, scarves, and jackets, there was many a girl's perfect hair destroyed. For my own part, I found that the wind went the opposite direction of how my hair usually parts, so I spent much of graduation with my hair in my face. Suffice to say the pictures from that day are hardly flattering.

  We stood on tiers on the platform, the line wrapped up and down each tier serpentine. One small blessing is the way our last names coincided: I was on the platform just behind and slightly left of Bruce. This made it possible to lean over and talk to him during the ceremony. Since the speeches went on, and on, and on, this was a very good thing. How many times can you really listen to someone quote “Oh the Places You’ll Go”, Khalil Gibran, and out-of-context Shakespeare? If we were really lucky, we might get some oft-repeated words from Joseph Campbell. When we weren't suffering through the most common graduation quotes and platitudes, we dealt with other hopeful graduation gibberish.

  “And as you graduates go forward into life, never backward, but following the dreams that you yourselves established over a long period of growth into the young leaders you shall now become, never forget that the challenges of life are both unpredictable and are learning experiences to mold you into the persons you shall become. But forget not those along the way, making sure to give back and give forward to the community, so that they can share in the benefits of you on your longer journey of personhood as it goes forward.” And so on.

  The keynote speaker was someone unknown to me. We had Telly Savalas graduate from our school; couldn’t they have gotten him? That would have been a great speech. He gets up there, turns on the mic. “To all the graduates…” pause, then his signature phrase: “Who loves you, baby?” Smile, everyone laughs, end speech, done. And everyone would have fucking loved it.

  Does everyone remember who Telly Savalas is? No? Am I old and out of touch? Okay, kids, go ask your parents. I'll wait.

  Boredom had me scanning the crowd. I saw my family, who waved randomly if they even thought I might be looking in their direction. Yes, Mom, I saw you. Then I scanned for people I might know, mostly friends’ parents and parents of my enemies. I saw Bruce’s family: his mother portly and proud, his father thin and distant, Victor vague and pale as usual, his sister hot and perpetually stoned.

  I froze and then scanned back. I had just a quick look and then barely caught the back of someone running down the bleacher steps. Was that…?

  I leaned forward and whispered in Bruce’s ear. “I think I just saw my clone.”

  He didn’t respond at first. He was actually listening to the speech! I flicked his ear and said more insistently, “I just saw my clone.”

  “No shit?” he said. “I guess seeing you graduate is an interesting experience for him too.”

  “He was supposed to stay at home!”

  Bruce shrugged. “Was he? I guess he didn't. Who knows? He’s your clone. Would you follow that order?”

  “I thought there was something when he was made to make him more subservient, more willing to follow commands.”

  Bruce chuckled. “When did we ever tell you that? He’s like you in every way. Every way. Which is almost unfortunate, now that I think about it. The only difference is that Victor thinks he probably will dissolve in a few months. Probably. Maybe? Hard to tell with Victor. But he said if it happens it's the universe correcting itself or something. Didn’t he send you an email or something?”

  I leaned back with a harrumph and spent the rest of graduation pouting. I scanned the bleachers the rest of the event and saw nothing. I thought I might have seen him when I grabbed my diploma, but I could have just been paranoid and reading into that mysterious stranger that was idling behind the left bleachers.

  The ceremony finally ended and the field became a madhouse of beaming graduates and fussy parents, with pockets of people opening and closing every minute or so as people made room to take photos. My mom came and gave me hug, then remained next to me, holding my arm, while my dad patted me on the back. My brothers congratulated me in their own ways. After that, they took me out to a nice dinner.

  When I arrived home, I found a way to discreetly excuse myself and made for the basement. My bedroom was on the second floor, but I had taken over the basement once most of my brothers went to college. Except for when my mom did laundry, it was my Sanctum Sanctorum. All my cool stuff was down there.

  I found my clone on the couch beneath the stairs reading a copy of Max Stirner’s “The Ego & Its Own.” He tilted his head around the book when he heard me. He raised his eyebrow but said nothing.

  “You were supposed to stay home!” I said.

  “I did stay home. I’ve been reading. Did you bring me home any food from the restaurant?”

  I tossed him the doggie bag I had packed. I would’ve liked to finish my entire meal from the restaurant, but I had some responsibility to my clone. And ordering a second entrée just to pack it up would have been suspicious.

  “I saw you at graduation,” I said.

  “You must have seen someone else,” he said, opening the bag.

  “I know it was you,” I said defiantly.

  “Really? Didn’t know you had so much practice recognizing yourself in the crowd, you must be that good. That paranoid, more likely.” He rifled through the bag. “Seriously? You brought me a third of a piece of baklava and cold steak fries? I have the same appetite you do.”

  I ignored his comment. He was clearly lying to me. I had no doubt.

  This was when I first suspected that my clone might be evil.

  Retail Rage

  June, 1994 - Long Island, New York

  I admit that it might not initially seem like my clone was evil from that last interaction. I had Angela, my favorite nurse, read that part, but she didn't quite see the same evil I did. She did demand to watch me take my meds and had the doctor check me again, but I think that's unrelated to my clone's evil quotient. But trust me, there was evil in those duplicate eyes, in that smarmy yet devilishly handsome smirk. Trust me.

  Of course, teenage me wanted to be sure, not possessing the vast wisdom I acquired over the years. If I was going to go on a summer adventure, I wanted a non-evil clone. I did not want to come back to find him sitting in the living room after he redecorated my
parents' house with the family's entrails. I didn't want to come home to find my life and my good name in shambles. I thought my job was the perfect way to find out.

  The day after graduation, I hadn't left town yet but I was due at work. I decided this was a dry run for how the whole summer would be. For that day, my clone would work my job, while I would find something to occupy myself and stay out of sight of anyone who might realize I was in two places at once. My clone didn't understand why we even needed a dry run; if he was me in every way, why bother testing it? He did not know I suspected him. My clone did say he wanted me to go on the adventure. He admitted that if he was going to be stuck working all summer, he at least wanted to enjoy the summer without having to share. I admitted that was a fair point, but reluctantly. Best not to give him too much credit, lest it be repaid with homicide.

  I worked in a bookstore. Working in a bookstore could have been cooler if I didn’t happen to work in a bookstore in the mall. We traded in the musty book smell, interestingly obscure books, and literati street cred for corporate masters, overdone lighting, and more James Patterson than you could shake a stick at. Rather than having a good spread of titles, they focused more on having many copies of the “It” titles. They’d rather keep shelves full of extra copies of NY Times bestsellers and Oprah’s book club novels that no one was buying than use that space for variety.

  Of all the people I worked with, there were two that stuck out: Sebastian and Marina. Sebastian was in his thirties, skinny, had long scraggly hair, an equally scraggily beard, and an opinion about everything. He talked and moved as if perpetually on a caffeine high, which was probably more or less accurate. He somehow knew where every book was in the store, though he wasn’t always forthcoming about it. He never moved up to management, but instead carved out his domain in the SciFi section. He was the only one who stocked it and the only one who cleaned it up; everyone else avoided that quagmire. The end caps were changed only by him, often in defiance to our corporate handlers. He put the books that he felt people would want to read, not the books corporate demanded we display based on what they were trying to push. For SciFi, the fan-based approach actually worked better than the corporate, and it was often that a regular customer would ambush him and hold him for ten minutes or longer just talking about their favorite novels.

  Marina is strangely relevant for this story, in that I always wondered if she was a clone. Nearly every bookstore seems to have one of her, especially the corporate bookstores. The names may change, but they’re all essentially Marina. They are always older, usually in their forties. They wear glasses and dress in almost grandma-ish patterns of pink and pastel. They are typically overweight. It is obvious they have never had sex in their lives, yet they always manage the Romance section of the store. That’s not a cop-out by any means. Romance novel management is a full time task. Many titles come in weekly and are intended to only last a few months on the shelves before being replaced. So they do a very essential service for their store and do it well, but unfortunately, they also tend to be pedantic and nosy. Why every store has one, I don’t know. Maybe there are cloning vats at corporate headquarters. Maybe the Harlequin romance section is the siren call to them, drawing them from all corners of the universe. Once drawn, they dedicate their lives to Harlequin like some heathen god of fabricated love, over time becoming that familiar personality and body type.

  On this day, Marina nearly saw me when she looked out the front of the store into the endless shambling streams of mall walkers. I turned quickly and took a bite of my gelato, which caused me to wince because I have cold-sensitive teeth. I’m sure she didn’t see the camera. When I looked back, she was going about her business. I didn’t want her to see that I was both outside the store in street clothes and inside dressed for work. I knew I should have used a fake moustache.

  Yes, I was spying on my clone.

  I sat down at a mall bench across from the store. People passed back and forth in front of me often enough that no one in the store would notice if they didn’t look closely. Besides, from my experience, when you work in a store, you focus on the store and don’t spend much time looking at what’s outside of it. I had a camera with a high powered lens and a long range mic. Thanks goes out to Trevor for letting me borrow the gear from when his father was suspicious his mother was cheating[5].

  I sat on the bench in a long coat which concealed the gear, an earpiece to listen, and sunglasses just because. It was June, so a man wearing a long coat indoors attracted some attention. In retrospect, I’m just glad mall security didn’t question me on suspicion of flashing my junk at passersby.

  I tuned in the mic to hear my clone. I had to tune out all the closer noises. On most days at the store, I worked the information desk at the back of the store. I had always hated ringing people up at the register. I was much more satisfied answering questions, furiously typing on the computer's keyboard, then racing to the shelves to put a book in someone’s hand. Someone else could deal with the repetitive task of taking their money and shuffling them out the door.

  My clone was at the information desk with Sebastian. In an even worse case than myself, the managers knew that Sebastian hated working the register, and let him stay at the info desk. He was a legacy at the store some eight years, going through a long succession of managers, so each new manager had just stayed with what worked. My clone was slouched over, leaning on the desk, his head resting on a propped up arm. It was a boring day. Sebastian was rattling on once again about his theory that the Dune books post-God Emperor are the best of the series, due to Herbert’s style really coming into its own. My clone’s response was the same I always tiredly gave: “I just can’t buy the idea that Duncan Idaho is suddenly the most important person in the universe.”

  Sebastian harrumphed and then shut up. Momentarily at least. Then he embarked on another familiar rant, this time about how Robert A Heinlein’s writing career was just a complicated ploy to get him laid. Not that I didn’t think there might be some truth in that, I just had heard it so many times before, a sentiment echoed on my clone's face. All in all, it looked to me like another boring day. That was no good.

  This wasn't the ideal situation to find out the true nature of my clone. I suspected he was evil and Victor had said there was a chance my clone was homicidal, but I hadn't seen evidence one way or the other. He had been around a few days and nobody had died yet, but I didn't think that cleared him of being a killer. I had realized stress would be the key. Chances are he could be easily set off in a murderous rage by stress. I'm pretty sure every time someone has gone postal, stress had been the thing that tipped them over the edge and set them off. But a day so boring would give me no chance to see that. I needed to see my clone stressed out. I realized I would have to try to enrage my clone and set him off.

  I pulled out the voice modulator I had also gotten from Trevor. His dad had been hardcore. He had even called his wife’s work with a fake voice, trying to uncover any evidence of infidelity. Luckily I needed it for just this task. I grabbed a quarter and called from a nearby payphone. I still had a great angle to see my clone from the phone.

  Sebastian grabbed the phone first when it rang. I cursed and hung up. The look on Sebastian’s face was priceless. But I didn't want to talk to Sebastian, I needed my clone to answer. If I asked for him, it would seem suspicious. I ended up waiting for twenty minutes for a customer to ask Sebastian something, which had him digging through the unorganized mess that was the Self-Help aisles. I called again. My clone picked up.

  This was a particularly dark time to work in a bookstore. For the previous few years, Anne Rice’s Vampire novels had been big sellers, and there were a fair amount of people who came in looking for either those or the erotica she wrote under a pen name. But this year was the worst of all of them. Hollywood had come out with the feature film of the first book, Interview with a Vampire, starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. This put the interest in the book to overdrive. Now it was no longer just belove
d by gothy teens and awkward women who denied their interest had anything to do with unrequited sexuality. Now there were women from all walks of life requesting it because it was a movie with Brad Pitt. Worse, they would send their boyfriends in to grab the book. The movie-fans and their boyfriends never knew the name of the book. They’d walk in, look at the shelves distractedly before coming to the info desk and asking confusedly, “I’m looking for that book with the vampires. They made that movie.” Whoever was at the desk would sigh heavily, then lead them over to a gigantic display of all of Anne Rice’s novels that the customer had blindly passed by. More often than not, the person would then just stare stupidly at the display. We’d sigh again, then take the correct book and hand it to them before walking away dejected and with all faith in the reading public gone.

  My clone got on the line and gave the typical bookstore greeting. Hearing “How can I help you?” said to me in my own voice was an odd experience I was still getting used to.

  “Yes,” I said, speaking into the voice modulator. “I’m looking for that book. The one with the vampires.”

  He sighed. “Yes, Interview with a Vampire.”

  I took a long pause. “No, that’s not it.” I paused again. “I’m trying to remember the title.”

  “Okay, do you know anything else about it?” he asked.

  “Well, I think they made a movie of it.”

  “Interview with a Vampire?” he suggested again.

  “No,” I said distantly. “That’s not it. I think if that were it I would remember the title.”

  “So what else do you know about it? There are other vampires books, but I'd need more information to zero in on it,” he said. I could tell he was already very irritated. “Was it Poppy Z Brite? I think you want Poppy Z Brite.”

  “No, not that Zebright person,” I said. “I think… I think the movie had Brad Pitt in it.”