Crackpot Palace

by Jeffrey Ford

  “I love it when we can get away and have adventures,” said Lynn, almost in a whisper. She lifted her wineglass and motioned for a toast.

  “Me too,” I said. The glasses clinked. After that I put the double out of my mind, and by the time we went to bed, I’d convinced myself it was all nonsense.

  Two days later, I went out to the garage to put a couple of old pizza boxes in the recycle container. I put the boxes in the container and let the lid slam down. As I turned, he struck the chrome lighter and lit a cigarette. I did a little jump and grunted. He’d never been anywhere near my house before. Although my heart pounded, I felt immediately indignant.

  “I’ll only be a minute,” he said, sensing my anger. “I have a plan to get rid of Fantasma-gris.”

  I took a deep breath and calmed down. “You know,” I said, “I don’t know . . .”

  “Listen, if he gets through me, you’re next. Believe me, you’re through if he takes me out.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  “Someday this week, it’s gonna go down, so be ready. And I’m warning you, this is gonna be viscerally brutal. Savage. I don’t want you to think this is in any way some kind of psycho breakdown bullshit, you know, all a fancy. There’s gonna be blood involved.”

  He spoke in a harsh tone, and as he went on, I inched back away from him. He looked worse than he had at the mall. I realized he must be sleeping in that suit.

  “Whatever,” I said, and brushed past him into the house, locking the door to the garage behind me. Lynn was in the kitchen, and I went up there to be close to her. She seemed to me to have powers greater than the double’s. I really wanted to tell her, but I didn’t.

  “Were you calling me?” she asked. She stood at the stove, stirring chili. “I thought I heard a voice from the garage.”

  “I was singing,” I said and put my arms around her. Right then is when I wished I hadn’t flushed the pills. Reckless gambling seemed preferable.

  The next day, while Lynn was at work, I made an emergency appointment with Dr. Ivy. I knew it was grasping at straws, but I thought if all else failed she’d write me another scrip to cancel the double. For the first five minutes of the session, she gave me shit about stiffing my second appointment and not calling. I just grinned and said sorry when she was through. Finally, she picked up her pad and pen, the music came on as if by magic, and she said, “So, last we spoke, you told me of your double.”

  “He’s back,” I said.

  “Tell me,” she said and leaned forward, her pen at the ready.

  “I just want to make one thing clear at the start,” I said. “The double of my double is not my double.” She nodded as if she understood, and I let it all out for her—the meeting in the mall, the invasion of my garage, and Fantasma-gris. It took me the whole hour to tell her. When I was finished, there was only one minute left of the session for her to speak.

  “I’ll write you,” she said. “What did you do with the last prescription?”

  “I threw it in the toilet.”

  She stared hard at me and tapped her pen on her prescription pad. I noticed that the tattoo around her wrist wasn’t ivy at all but actually barbed wire. “Here’s something different,” she said. “There’ll be a slight sense of euphoria, but it should allow you to get through your normal day and also eradicate your double problem.”

  “Sounds awesome,” I said and meant it.

  “A slight sense of euphoria” was a bit of an understatement. The next day, after Lynn left for work, I took one of the pills and settled down to a doubleless eight hours. A half hour later, sitting at my computer, Dr. Ivy’s cure kicked in, and the world appeared literally brighter. Things looked crisp. I breathed more deeply and sat up straight. I was hyperaware. Looking at the story I’d been writing, I couldn’t get to the plot because the shapes of the letters were too distracting. A few minutes passed and then I was floating on a pink cloud, everything recalibrating to a slower focus. I felt so good, I actually laughed.

  The drug made me brave, and instead of getting back to work, I dove deep into a rational analysis of my double, determined to figure it all out as much as I could. Staring out the window at the trees and the white house across the street, I plumbed and divided, spinning theories to rival relativity. I kept returning to one question, though. Why Aruba? To answer it might be to solve the puzzle. I got an urge to write up what I remembered of the vacation, to make an official dossier about it. I opened a new screen and wrote as fast as I could, rarely stopping to correct errors.

  An hour into it, my ardor for Aruba dried up and I found myself fluffing off, surfing the Web with the word “doppelgänger” in the Google search box. I stumbled upon a site that had a news story about scientists who were able to induce in their subjects the experience of having a double by electrically stimulating a region of the brain known as the left temporoparietal junction. The subjects reported a “shadowy person standing behind them.”

  I thought back to the night I’d first seen him, scurrying down the bamboo trail. That day Lynn and I had gone ocean kayaking. The plastic board you were supposed to float on didn’t look anything like any kayak I’d ever seen. I couldn’t keep from falling off it. I’d teeter for a few minutes and then over I’d go. Repeatedly getting back up on the thing in deep water exhausted me in no time, and I was just barely able to dog-paddle to a broken-down dock I used to get back on dry land. I wondered if somewhere in the mêlée, I’d maybe hit my head and the double was born of a concussion.

  I couldn’t recall a bump, but I was sure I’d solved the puzzle of Aruba. The revelation gave me a sense of accomplishment and confidence until five minutes later when, looking out the window, I saw a car just like mine pull up out in front of my house. The door opened and my double got out. He walked around the car, dressed in that rank suit, heading for our front door. The sight of him made my heart race. “Something’s wrong here,” I said aloud. There was a knocking at the front door. Shadow, the dog, went nuts, barking like the vicious killer he wasn’t. I got up from my chair, feeling slightly dizzy, slightly doomed, and went to put a shirt on. Once I was up, I hurried, not wanting the neighbors to see me in his condition.

  I pushed Shadow away and opened the door. “You shouldn’t be here,” I said.

  “But I am.”

  “I took these pills that are supposed to cancel you.”

  “Fuck those pills,” he said. “What do you think? I’m playing games?” He stepped toward the door as if to enter, and I shut it quickly. He got his forearm on it before I could lock him out and he pushed his way in, sending me stumbling backward a few steps.

  “I want you out of here,” I said.

  “Calm down,” he said and closed the door behind him.

  I backed away into the kitchen, looking right and left for a pair of scissors or a knife lying on the counter. He followed.

  “We’ve got a job to do,” he said. “Fantasma-gris is coalescing like a motherfucker.”

  “I’m not killing anyone or anything,” I said, and noticed he wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “I’ve got him tied up in the trunk of your car. We’ll off him and then drive out to the Pine Barrens and sink his body in some remote pond. I have two twenty-pound dumbbells. Nobody has to know.” He pushed back the bottom of his suit jacket and grabbed a pistol he’d had in the waist of his pants.

  The instant I saw the gun, I was useless with fear.

  “Let’s go,” he said and waved the gun at me.

  I went to the living room and stepped into my shoes, grabbed my sweatshirt. We left through the front door. The double drove. I sat still, breathing deeply, in the passenger seat. As he pulled away from the curb, I heard a banging and muffled screams issuing from the trunk.

  “If you want to get rid of him,” I said, “why don’t you just get rid of him yourself? Leave me out of it.”

  “Step up to the plate and quit your whining,” he said. Then he turned and yelled over his shoulder, “Shut the f
uck up,” to Fantasma-gris, who was making a racket.

  We drove south toward the Barrens on the long road that led past the animal rescue and eventually turned to dirt. Just before the asphalt gave out, he made a left and drove slowly down a short block of enormous old houses with porches and gabled roofs. We came to a driveway through the trees that opened into a cul-de-sac. At the turn farthest in sat a huge wreck of a house, brown paint peeling, cedar boards fallen from the walls, the supports of the porch railing busted out.

  “My place,” he said, turning off the car. He pointed to it with the gun.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “For the money, it’s not so great.”

  I noticed that two of the second-floor windows were broken and there were bricks missing from the chimney.

  “Okay, let’s get this asshole out and kill him. I figure we can do the job in my room and then take him out to the woods after nightfall.”

  We got out of the car. It was cold, headed toward evening, and the breeze was reminiscent of the one in Aruba when I’d seen him on the bamboo trail. My mind was knotted with plots to escape.

  “Aren’t there other people in your house?” I asked. “They’ll hear us shoot him.”

  “Just doubles. They don’t give a shit. They’ve got their own losers to contend with.” He went to the trunk and I followed him. Holding the gun at the ready, he put the car key in the lock and turned it. The trunk slowly opened upward, and I peered inside to catch a glimpse of Fantasma-gris.

  I don’t know what I expected, some kind of smoke goblin maybe, but what I saw was like a white marble or limestone statue of a guy in a fetal position. “What the hell?” I said.

  “He’s hardened,” said my double. “I dipped him in white chocolate. That’s how I caught him. He was at my job this morning, busting my balls, and I finally snapped. I grabbed him quick and threw him into the vat. By the time he crawled out, I’d gotten my gun from my jacket on the back of the dipping-room door.”

  “This is crazy,” I said.

  “You’re telling me. Grab his ankles, we’ll take him up to the house.”

  Fantasma-gris was a lot lighter than he looked. He was nowhere near as big as us, and I can’t say his face, a mask of white chocolate, looked anything like me. I had a passing inclination I’d seen it before, though. His lips still moved and mumbled threats. He cursed and called us names. At first it freaked me out, but by the time we reached the steps of my double’s place, I found him annoying. On the way in the front door, I accidentally slammed his left foot on the door jamb and half his shoe with half a foot cracked off. He howled like a wounded animal within his sweet shell. A quick look told me he was hollow.

  The old house was falling apart, water stains on the ceilings and molding coming loose. There were cracks in the lathing of the walls. The floor of the foyer was bare, worn wood. We carefully set Fantasma-gris down so we could take a breather. The double waved me over to him. I approached and he put his arm lightly around my shoulder, the gun to my stomach.

  “I have to go straighten up my room before you’re allowed in,” he whispered, his breath on fire with booze. He was sweating and ripe with the scent of body funk dipped in chocolate. “If you do anything foolish, I’ll hunt you down and kill you and take over your life. You understand?”

  My mouth was so dry. I nodded.

  “Now, go sit in the parlor with May till I come back.” He pointed to an entrance off to the left of the foyer. I took a step toward it and saw a near-empty room filled with twilight, dust bunnies slowly rolling across a splintered floor, bare walls, a dusty chandelier. In the corner by a cold fireplace, a tilting couch on three legs with torn and sweat-stained floral upholstery. At the upright end sat a woman reading a book. She looked over as I entered. Out in the foyer, Fantasma-gris repeatedly screamed, “Fuck.”

  The minute I saw her face, I knew I knew May from the neighborhood. Lynn was actually pretty good friends with her. “You’re May’s double?” I asked.

  She nodded and smiled. May was our age, a big-boned woman with a ruddy face. She was the swimming instructor at the local Girl Scout camp in the summer. Lived around the corner from us, next to the lake.

  “You look just like her,” I said.

  “Well, that’s the idea,” she said.

  “Do you know me?”

  She nodded but said nothing.

  “How is May?” I asked and sat carefully on the broken end of the couch.

  “She’s all right. She had a hysterectomy last fall and I think she’s starting to slow down a little. Overall, though, she gets along.”

  “You live here with my double?”

  “Yeah, me and a few others.”

  “What’s he like? You can be honest.”

  “No disrespect, but he’s a total dick. I think he’s crazy.”

  I heard someone descending the steps at the back of the house. “Listen, do me a favor,” I said. “Get word to my wife that I’m here and to come get me. You know her, right?”

  “If I get a chance,” she said. “I’m due downtown in a couple of minutes. May’s in the grocery store, and I’m scheduled to appear in the frozen food aisle. If I get a chance I’ll have her call Lynn.”

  I gave her a silent thumbs-up and then my double was at the entrance.

  Before we lifted Fantasma-gris, my double broke off his double’s pinkie finger and stuck it in his mouth like a cigarette. “Got a light?” he said. Screams of agony issued from the chocolate.

  His room was on the second floor and I was out of breath by the time we arrived. We set the double up in a chair. The position he’d come from in the trunk was perfect for sitting, although he was somewhat slouched forward. I was afraid if he fell, he’d shatter all over the floor.

  “How come the Fantasma smog didn’t leak out when I knocked his toes off? The fucking thing’s hollow,” I said.

  “The chocolate is his prison.”

  I took a seat on the edge of his bed and my double settled down at a little table by the window. Our prisoner faced me, but my double stared out the window. “As soon as it’s nightfall,” he said, “we go to town on him.”

  “Why nightfall?” I asked.

  “Cause that’s the way you kill him. In the dark.”

  While I considered whether to bolt for the door or not, I looked at Fantasma-gris’s face. The white mask was off-putting. It had very prominent cheeks, eggshell smooth, that I recalled having seen before in a book, on a Noh mask from the fifteenth century.

  Out the window, through the trees, there was still the sight of a thin red line at the horizon with night layered on top. Fantasma-gris was whispering to me, trying to communicate something, but I couldn’t make it out. He seemed to be losing power.

  “Okay, now,” said the double. He lifted the gun and cocked the trigger. “Let’s have some fun.” He pointed it at me.

  I put my hands up and turned my head.

  “Get up.”

  I stood, trembling.

  “Go over and eat his face.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “Get the fuck over there,” he said and fired the gun into the ceiling.

  I jumped and was next to Fantasma-gris in an instant.

  “Bite his nose off to spite his face.”

  I leaned over and opened my mouth, but the prospect of sinking my teeth into a white chocolate nose made me sick. So very faintly, I heard, “Help me, help me . . .” I gagged and then turned away.

  “I said eat his damn face,” said the double and lunged from his chair toward me. I reached down, grabbed Fantasma-gris’s right arm at the wrist with both hands and pulled it off. The double meant to pistol-whip me, but I brought the chocolate arm around like a baseball bat and hit him in the side of the head. White shards exploded everywhere and my double went over like a ton of bricks. The gun flew out of his hand. My instinct was to run, but I remembered all along that I’d have to get the keys from him.

  I leaped on him and fished the ke
ys out of his left pocket where I’d seen him stow them earlier. Just as I got up and made to split, he grabbed me by the ankle and tripped me. I went over and smashed into our prisoner, who toppled to the floor with me on top of him and was crushed to smithereens. The leg of the chair rammed into my stomach and knocked the wind out of me. I couldn’t move.

  As he predicted, there was blood. It trickled out of the corner of my double’s mouth. He fetched the gun and aimed it at me. “I’m through with you,” he said.

  The door opened then and Lynn walked in. “What the hell’s going on here?” she said, standing with her hands on her hips. The double immediately lowered the gun and gazed at the floor.

  I finally caught my breath and said, “You see, my double. I told you.”

  “Give me the gun,” she said and walked straight over to the double and took it out of his hand. “You two are ridiculous.”

  The double said, “My double is pretending to be me and tried to kill me. He busted my head with a chocolate arm.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m the real one.”

  Lynn backed up three steps, raised the pistol like they do in cop shows and pulled the trigger once. I squinted with the din of the shot, and when I looked, my double had a neat round hole in his forehead. His eyes were crossed and smoke issued from the corners of his mouth. He teetered for a heartbeat and then fell, face forward, on the floor. The body twitched and convulsed.

  From out in the hallway, I heard May’s voice ask, “Is everything all right in there?”

  “Swell,” called Lynn, and then stepped around behind the double, took aim with the gun again, and put two more slugs in the back of his head. She dropped the gun on top of him and said, “Let’s get out of here.” She helped me up and we held hands, as we had in the gold mine. Passing May on the stairs, Lynn called a thank-you over her shoulder.

  We got into my car and I breathed a sigh of relief. The double was gone for good. “How’d you know which of us was the real one?” I asked as I hurriedly pulled away from the curb.

  “It didn’t matter,” she said. “Whichever one of you was in that fetid fucking suit wasn’t coming back to the house.”