Damned Lies!

by Dennis Liggio

  “Yes! I know, you’re talking about Interview with a Vampire! It has Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in it!” I could see the spittle flying out of my clone’s mouth through the camera lens.

  “Yeah…” I said distantly. “No… no, that’s not it. I’m sure that’s not it.”

  “WHAT?”

  “I saw it in another bookstore and I just didn’t pick it up. It’s a thick paperback. It’s like black, and has this like gothic white writing on it with just the title and the author’s name.”

  My clone still stood at the info desk, the phone held to his ear and a nervous tick in his eye. With pure hatred in his eyes he stared across the store at the Anne Rice display where black paperbacks with “Interview with the Vampire” written in white flowery script taunted him. I swear I could see a pulsing vein in his forehead.

  Through gritted teeth he responded: “I’m. Going. To. Put. You. On. Hold. For. A. Moment. While. I. Check. Is. That. Okay?”

  "Oh, sure,” I said happily. “Did I mention they just made a movie based on the book?”

  My clone slammed down the phone, and I was greeted with soothingly banal hold music. Through the camera, I saw the door in the back of the store slam. The break room and stock were beyond that door. It was the only private place the employees had away from customers.

  This is when I expected to find out how evil my clone was. What would he do? He was an evil version of me, so maybe I'd know what was coming. Maybe he had stashed guns back there and would go on a shooting rampage. Maybe he was a knife person. I wondered if that felt right. I guess I could do shivs if I were really angry. Stabbing just seemed so unpleasant with the blood and everything. Bombs? Was he a bomb person? Would I be a bomb person if I was a killer? There was a possibility that he would reveal his true nature as the diabolical herald of some eldritch god, and his anger would cause him to open three mouths and chant the litany to summon the demonic beast to our world, the gate opening right over New Orleans to make sure Anne Rice got what was coming to her.

  None of these things happened. I almost thought we were at DefCon One when Miranda wandered back to the information desk. She looked around and then opened the back room door, asking in a pestering voice why no one was at the information desk. I leaned forward, just waiting for the moment when my clone's rage would explode. If I were going to start a killing spree, she would be an excellent first kill. It would set the tone for the whole thing: SICK OF IT ALL. I could just see Sebastian giving an interview: “Officer, if you had her nagging you, you would also consider going postal. Thirty-seven stab wounds? Yeah, I guess that is excessive. I would probably have stopped after twenty. Why? Tennis elbow. Twenty is my limit.”

  Unfortunately, this did not set my clone off. I heard an angry shooing from the back room and Miranda walked off in a huff. But there was no killing, no violence. I began to doubt my homicidal clone’s commitment to being homicidal.

  After two minutes, my clone came back out, red-faced and breathing heavily, clearly trying to calm down. His arms were slack but heavy. Sebastian came back to the info desk, immediately slowing his walk, his look alone asking what happened. There was a brief conversation where my clone told Sebastian the series of events. I couldn’t tell if Sebastian was genuinely concerned, or that face was all he could do to keep from busting a gut. After the story, Sebastian suggested my clone “go shelve some books”, and that Sebastian would handle the call.

  This effectively ended my attempt to push my clone over the edge. I guess I should have hung up. But I wanted to see if I could push the joke farther.

  “Hello, thank you for holding,” said Sebastian as he picked up the line.

  “Hi!” I said. “Someone was helping me. You can tell that guy that I think the movie had Brad Pitt in it!”

  Unfortunately, Sebastian had worked there enough years that he was sufficiently proficient in dealing with difficult customers. He winked at my clone, who had stopped by the info desk with an armload of books to see how he handled it. “I’m sorry, sir,” said Sebastian. “We don’t carry that book.”

  “But you didn’t even figure out which –“ I protested.

  “I think I know the book you’re talking about,” he said, “But I can’t remember the name either! But Barnes & Noble across the way has it. I know I've seen it there. You should give them a call.” We loved fucking with the Barnes & Noble guys. They always seemed so high and mighty with their café and copious amounts of square footage. If we had that square footage and freely running caffeine, maybe we could’ve been a real bookstore too.

  There was not much I could do. He had beaten me in the arcane arts of customer service self defense. I had no counter. “Okay,” I said sadly. “I’ll call them.” Then I hung up.

  I switched back to listening to the mic.

  “You just lied to them,” my clone said.

  “It got them off the phone,” said Sebastian.

  “But we had the book they were looking for,” my clone said.

  “Eh, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t really care if we lose a customer. He was on the phone. Nobody’s gonna fire us if someone on the phone doesn’t come in, they only care about tangible in-store customers. Phone customers are theoretical customers. And frankly, I consider one less person reading Interview with a Vampire a good thing.”

  “But it’s our job to help them,” pointed out my clone.

  “Eh, fuck em,” said Sebastian with a grin. “Nobody in retail really wants to help people if they can help it. We're all here because we can't be somewhere else. I’ve worked retail for over a decade. I know this. You know this.”

  My clone nodded sadly, but still did not seem convinced.

  I was nonplussed. Not only did my clone not kill someone[6], but he was actually put off by not helping retail people. Who cares about retail customers? They're not real people. I was confused. Not only was he showing himself to not be homicidal, but I was even disappointed in him, which I guess meant I was disappointed in myself. Grow some balls, Me.

  I dialed Bruce on the phone.

  “Operation failed,” I said. “No evidence of evil found.”

  “Why are you even calling me?” he said. “I have nothing to do with this.”

  “You’re my assistant. You handle mission control.”

  “Mission control – what? Dude, even if you wanted to include me in your weird schemes, you need to tell me. How am I supposed to know what the fuck you’re doing? I thought you were at work.”

  “The clone’s at work.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “Watching the clone work.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line before he answered. “There’s something very fucked up about you. I can never put a finger on it, but this is a good example.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “Okay, let me lay this all out for you. You wanted more time this summer. To solve this problem, you made a clone to work your job, so you didn’t have to work and had more time, yes? The clone actually agreed to work for you rather than telling you to fuck off, which I’m surprised as fuck about. But then, you don’t trust the clone, so you’re spending your free time, which you gained by creating the clone to work for you, by watching the clone and making sure they work.”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding to myself. “That's all correct. But I don’t follow. What’s fucked up about that?”

  Click. The phone call ended.

  “Hello?” I said tentatively.

  The Journey Begins

  June, 1994 - Penn Station, New York

  Nurse Angela said that there still was no good evidence that my clone was evil. She even went farther to take a personal stab at me and suggested that I was more evil than my clone. Oh how she wounds me! If she didn't deliver me both my blessed pain-relieving medications and the legal pads that sustain my effort, I would declare her dead to me and exile her to the salt mines of Tyros VI, the condiment planet.

  Unfortuna
tely, Dear Reader, my teenage self agreed with her, or agreed with her enough. I decided that my clone was safe enough for me to leave in my place when I went off to seek my adventure. Admittedly, I did not have a real plan of what I was doing. I knew vaguely I wanted to be far from home and experience new things, but that opened the whole world as a possibility; anywhere but here. In addition, I didn't have much money. There was a reason why I needed my clone to work all summer for me.

  I asked Bruce if I could borrow money and he laughed at me. After he finished laughing and wiped the tears from his eyes, he reminded me that he was getting twenty percent of my clone's wages for money I already owed him for the apparatus.

  Victor didn't have any money but he did offer to give me a device to carry with me, on the condition that I field test it and not mention his name during any legal investigation of the results of field testing the device. He also could not guarantee my safety. In true Victor fashion, he paused and then revealed that he could in fact guarantee that I would be very unsafe if I carried the device, but nothing directly life threatening unless I used it outside the parameters of the theory. I declined his offer.

  I went up to see their hot sister for a minute to try to convince her to give me a goodbye kiss or at least some going away weed, but Bruce quickly ushered me back downstairs and out the front door.

  I went home and snuck inside, in case my clone was around. I grabbed my backpack and stuffed it with some essentials. A change of clothes, a bottle of water, a dog-eared copy of On The Road, a roll of toilet paper, and a half empty pack of breath mints. Hardly provisions for an epic quest, but it's what I had.

  Without direction for my adventure and nervously alone, I did the obvious move for someone in the tri-state area: I took a train into Manhattan to see where fate would take me. I was moving against the flow of commuter traffic, going into the city as the weekday was ending, so I had an uneventful trip that brought me straight into Penn Station.

  I had been to Penn Station before on a multitude of occasions, but I still was uncomfortable with the sheer volume of people packed into that underground complex. Penn Station was one of the most popular destinations to arrive or depart the city, as well as the ideal place to switch up trains to go elsewhere. At popular hours of the day, the station is mobbed with people coming and going, as well as those who are waiting for their train to pick a boarding platform. There's not enough space for everyone to wait somewhere away from everyone else, so people are just standing around wherever they can see the big board showing the train platform numbers. I'm talking hundreds of people in a very small area. All talking and waiting. There's a roar like no other.

  In the past, I dealt with the crowds by just moving ever on towards my destination, slipping in and out of passing eddies of people, finding gaps like a spaceship in an asteroid field. Through focus on getting to wherever I was going (like a true New Yorker), I could tune out all the crowds. But now I was here alone and with no destination. The crowds spilled out around me and the combined echo of countless conversations reverberated off the walls and rattled through my skin. I began sweating and wondered if I was sick.

  I stumbled away from the main crowds, going down a corridor to find a less thick grouping of people. I found air as fresh as I was going to find in an underground subway terminal and stumbled to the ground, clutching my head. Everything was throbbing and the world seemed strange.

  I found that I had fallen next to a crippled veteran. He wore his military jacket and held a cardboard sign saying, "No legs? No problem!" over his tip cup. He was missing his legs, but I still didn't understand the sign.

  He lifted his tip cup towards me with a smile and rattled it. I shook my head. His attitude changed immediately. "Get out of here! This is my spot!" he growled.

  I pulled myself to my feet and stumbled down the hall. I'm not sure why I was feeling so sick. Where was I? I knew Penn Station was labyrinthine, but it had always been predictable: convenience store, pizza place, newsstand people buy porno at, convenience store, pizza place, repeat ad nauseum. But now I found myself in a strange part of Penn. There was a video arcade, a bookstore, and a fortune teller's place with a beaded curtain.

  I couldn't remember the last time I had seen an arcade or bookstore in Penn Station. They had them years ago, but I had thought they closed down to allow space for more convenience stores. The arcade was way too loud and flashy for my sick feeling. I looked into the bookstore and realized it was actually just a porno bookstore, not a real bookstore. That explained why it still existed. But the rush of pink bodies and prefabricated lust in a porn store was not appealing to my strange dizziness. So I found myself parting the clichéd beaded curtain in search of some peace of mind.

  The interior was dim and incense assaulted my nostrils, giving me a fierce sandalwood and lavender high on top of my sick dizziness. However, the dim interior was blessedly lacking in people and noise. In fact, it was strangely quiet. It didn't seem like the interior of a subway terminal. It looked like a room in someone's house. It had all the requisite random objects and oddities I expect of a fortune teller's house (thanks, TV!), but it seemed out of place from where I had just come from.

  In the center of the room was a small circular table at which sat a woman I did not notice at first. She was neither stereotype of wizened old woman or silk-covered gypsy. She was in her forties, slightly overweight, her hair brownish-red. She wore a dress of green fabric with yellow trim highlights. The dress was old fashioned, I guess to play up the fortune teller angle.

  "Sit," she said calmly, gesturing to the seat across from her with an outstretched palm.

  "I'm not really looking to get my fortune read," I said.

  "You are here, why else would you be here?"

  "I was really just looking for somewhere I could find some peace," I said.

  "As are all of us in this human journey," she said loftily.

  "No, I mean I wanted to get away from the crowds," I said. "Look, is it possible for me to sit here for a few minutes? I'm not feeling well."

  "To stay, your fortune must be read."

  "Great, and it costs a ton of money, right? I know this is your place of business and stuff, but I'm really not big on the whole fortune telling scam."

  "As we are meeting with you in the midst of your youth, I will settle for five dollars as a token of your confidence in what I reveal," she said. "As to whether it is a scam or not, I leave that for you to determine. But if you wish to stay, your fate must be read."

  "Five dollars?" I said, "I'm not sure." Truth be told, I did not have that much money. I could spare five dollars, but I was not sure I wanted to.

  "I did not know that he would be so cheap," said another voice, that of an old woman. It seemed to come from off to my right, but I saw no one. Within the clutter of antiques and knick-knacks, I did see a very old portrait of a very old woman. It was the old black and white style of photo from the first cameras. The woman had a dour expression. I'm not sure why my eyes were drawn to that.

  From my left, I heard the voice of a young woman chuckle. "You have forgotten what it was like to be young. When you first start out, what little wealth you have seems like all the money in the world." Again, no one was there. My eyes were drawn to an old music box, open and unwound. A ballerina stood in the box, motionless and musicless.

  "Please, ladies," said the fortune teller, "you aren't helping. You're just confusing him."

  I could swear the old woman portrait made a noise like harrumph.

  I very carefully slid into the chair across from the fortune teller. I dug in my pocket and pulled out a crumpled and balled up five dollar bill. I pushed it across the table into her hand. She nodded to me and from the folds of her dress produced a deck of cards.

  "Shuffle these," she asked.

  I took the cards in my hand. The cards were larger than playing cards. I could sense they were old, not like modern cards that are stiff and waxed. These cards were yielding but not fragile or creased.
The back of the cards had a pattern of clockwork mixed with knots drawn in black and silver. I shuffled the cards and handed them back to the fortune teller.

  She turned over the first card and placed it on the table. The image was of a jaunty fellow dressed in many colors shown in the middle of taking a big step.

  "The Fool," she said. "This card represents you."

  Well, I did suddenly feel foolish for getting my fortune read. I guess a sucker is born every minute and I had just been born.

  "This is the start of a journey," she said. "Note that he is about to take a step into the world and he carries a stick with a bag on it. Also notice that he appears to be stepping off a cliff. You're starting on something that could be risky."

  Of course I knew that. I wondered if that was easy to read from looking at me. Young kid, full backpack, in the crossroads of a subway station.

  "Next is what is behind you," she said. She turned over the next card and placed it next to the Fool. "The Mirror." The card showed a woman looking into a full length mirror. The reflection was her, but the facial expression on the reflection differed. "You have just left something that is very familiar and like you. Probably too familiar, and it made you uncomfortable."

  I made no reaction, but I had that feeling you get like you're being watched. I felt it from my left and right.

  "Next is the near future. Often this is the crossroads of your journey," she said as she turned over the next card and placed it on the table. She looked at it for a moment before saying anything, her expression conflicted. Her voice was hesitant when she read the card title. "The Fart."

  I admit that those old artists were impressive when they depicted this card. They somehow managed to juxtapose the bare ass of an epic prankster with an earthquake. The foreground image was a man bent at the waist and holding his ankles. His pants were down and his round ass was clearly displayed. A bronze trumpet projected from his butt and had a full 360 degree curve before widening to an opening. Behind the man in the background was a less detailed image of a large building like a skyscraper being hit by lightning.