My eyes begin to adjust. I can see the grey box of the bathroom in the surface of the mirror. It’s empty! The other one has gone to bed!
I WON’T GO TO THE SQUARE TODAY. It’s a new week and I’m in Bookshop. I put on a good pair of slacks and a dark blouse with bits of shiny thread in it and I open the store at ten. Before I left, Ian asked me again about going in for “your interview.” He’s trying to trip me up. Or he’s scared. He tells me he doesn’t want it weighing on me; I should get it over with. But nothing is weighing on me except him being sneaky. Do they think I killed her? He was with me the whole time. Except for when I went down the alley, but she was already dead by then. I couldn’t have done it.
The shop is the only place I feel safe right now. I told Terrence not to come in. There is work to be done, and thank goodness for it. I’ve got half an hour to sweep and straighten, do some bookkeeping.
The part of the bookstore that was supposed to be the café is blocked off by bookcases on wheels. They slide apart to give access to the office and unshelved inventory, as well as the bathroom and the door to the rear of the building. My overhead went down when I closed the café, but I can’t do readings or have people gather and talk over one of my amateur flat whites. (The Pavoni would take an hour to heat up right now.) If I keep the bookshelves open I can see all the way to the street.
I’ve been making money. That’s what Excel tells me. Money goes in a pattern like the Krebs cycle. “Everything about money is imaginary,” Ian is fond of saying, as if there were no luck involved in his schemes, the ones he is suddenly in denial about, and he’s actually an expert on money. “Capital does what people will it to do. But they’re not meeting under a tree on Wall Street anymore. They send the idea of money over the internet to a bank, or a lender, or a debtor. Mood decides what happens to it, whims. Nothing real is happening. We are using computers to trade something that doesn’t exist.”
Oh shut it. I still like the rows with the numbers in them that are supposed to relate in a direct way to my actual wealth, or the things that wealth could buy. I could buy myself something nice, says this electronic bookkeeping program.
It’s almost ten thirty. It’s a gorgeous day. I need normality. Time to put the trolley out with the dollar books, turn the sign. I leave the door open to let the air in. Books create must.
This is a neighbourhood of young mothers and gay men with small dogs and people with blue hair in miniskirts and stars of professional sport. Terrence says he sold a copy of The Feminine Mystique to R. A. Dickey last week. Bookshop is in a stretch of businesses that bring what used to be a barren strip of Dundas to life. There is a butcher here, who specializes in salamis and sausages, and a baby apparel store and the standard-issue coffee shop with people bent over laptops. But people come, bless them, and I have a vocation of sorts to keep my mind off what is going on around me.
Most people who browse don’t buy anything. But you still bring in two hundred dollars a day, no matter how dead it is, and that’s plenty to stay afloat and that’s all I want. I want to keep coming into my shop whenever I care to and to afford a hand like Terrence.
Weekday afternoons in the early summer go like a blur. People have questions. Someone brings in a box full of stuff and you have to disappoint them. Or you buy a little. The boxes in the back room are all full of volumes waiting to be shelved. I close at six although the sun won’t set until after eight.
At the end of the day, there’s $420 in the till.
IF I HAD BEEN LOOKING CLOSER, I would have seen something that only began to pull at my attention as it got late. A sped-up version of the day, taken by a camera pointing out the front window, would have shown steady flashes of pedestrian traffic and shadows lengthening to the east against a blur of vehicles. Every second a streetcar would blink in the frame. I’d have seen a stillness behind it if I’d known to look for it, a red stitch flashing in the middle ground. Briefly absent midafternoon, back until close. That’s what I took unconscious snaps of all day long: my doppelganger standing on the opposite sidewalk in a red flannel coat. She stood there for eight hours. But when the day was over, she was gone.
SHE RETURNS THE FOLLOWING DAY. In her red coat. Are you ready to murder me now, Ingrid?
I stay in the back half of the store. I can pull the rolling bookcases closer together and hide behind them. I’m more convinced now that she doesn’t mean well. She’s cleared the way, removed the witnesses, and there’s only my living body standing between her and a new life. She’ll be able to fill up that buggy of hers. If I see her begin to cross, I can go out the back. She looks pitiable, though. She’s been crying: her face is streaked with white mottles. It’s perfectly dry outside, but her hair is astraggle, as if she’s cried so much the tears started coming out of her follicles.
I have a good view of her from here. I get out Ritt’s lotus-pond picture and study it. I look across the road to the weeping Ingrid Fox. I can’t remember being there because I wasn’t.
You can look at yourself in pictures or even on video, but you still don’t have the experience others do of you in the world. Now I see what others see. And would I look at that thing over there and think it contained multitudes? Look at her! She’s unremarkable. I wonder what’s really under her imposter’s skin. Muscle and bone, or stuffing? Maybe a hundred tiny servos operate below her face.
A man appears at the cash desk. He looks around and sees me peeking through the space between the bookcases. “Oh, hello. If you could just—”
I put the photo away and walk stiffly to the front. “Inventory never ends.”
“Sorry?”
“Three dollars.” Macrobiotics for Dummies. Some of the titles in that series are a bit on the nose. He unfolds a five from a bundle of bills and drops it on the counter. When he leaves, he crosses the street and takes Ingrid’s arm and…
…he touches her!
I HAVE THE STORE CLOSED UP in less than thirty seconds. I stay on the north side of Dundas, crouching and running along. They’re holding hands, Ingrid and the man who bought the book. Is this the husband? Why didn’t he freak when he saw me? Did he even look at me? Now I can’t remember. Did I look at him?
They’re a hundred metres ahead on the other side of the street. He looks nothing like Ian; he’s maybe average height, but he’s so stout he looks shorter than he would if he were thinner. Good luck on the macrobiotic diet there. Or maybe it’s for her. She’s gripping his hand hard; his arm is stiff. Ingrid walks with her head down, listening to him speak. One side of his face shows his emotion and his love. His lips move. She nods.
We continue across Bathurst Street, pass below the Toronto Western Hospital, where I have come twice this year to get my retinas stitched back on with laser beams by a doctor whose identical twin also does eye surgery. This seems significant now, if only because the set of things that could be significant grows by the moment.
They lock into the route Ingrid took when I lost her at Spadina and Dundas, and they cross at the same corner and go into the heart of Chinatown. Only on tiptoes can I see a flash of her red crying coat down the road. I slip in and out of the crowd, high-stepping it and dodging people. I smell five-spice, overripe banana, duck fat. At Huron Street I run across on the yellow. Before Beverley Street, they turn right. I slalom through humanity to get to them and they’re way ahead now, walking south on a side street. I check the name when I get there: Pine Street.
I’m a stone in the river as people flow past me. The old Chinese ladies make a rustling sound when they brush by, like they’re made out of paper. From behind a postbox at the top of the street, I watch them unlock the door of a house on the east side of the street. She’s still crying. He takes her hand off the knob and holds her. I can’t see his face but I think he’s crying, too. My tongue thickens in the back of my throat.
I return to Dundas, where the swarm swallows me and I’m singular again. I have to look at myself right away. I find a Starbucks bathroom and I stare at my face. I’m on
both sides of the mirror now.
I inspect the prominent vein under my left eye. My teeth are off-white with the front ones atilt one way or another, like stones in an old graveyard. My skin is not as pink or fleshy as it once was, the way the kids’ faces are. It’s tending to translucent.
I remember standing in the mirror as a child, staring into my own eyeball. I lined one eye up against its reflection and shut the other. I saw a slippery black void but that’s where I was: in that void. My face was wrapped around muscle and bone. Before Ingrid, it was my face alone. Now I exist as myself only inside my own dark eye.
THE WEEK CREEPS ON. Ingrid doesn’t return to her post at the top of the park, but I feel trapped when I’m in the bookstore now, almost as though she can see me better for not being present.
I’ve resisted doing much doppelganger research because I haven’t wanted to know. Now I think I need to. Clearly, she still can’t see me. Neither could her husband.
I have a complete set of World Book from 1965 on top of Reference. It’s twenty volumes long. A set of encyclopedias seems more antique than a Gutenberg Bible now. I’ve decided anyone who actually wants it can have the whole set for a dollar, but no one has ever enquired of its price. I pull the stepstool over and get down the D volume.
Dop·pel·gang·er. Apparition of a living person. From the German: double walker. Sometimes sports an umlaut. Said to presage death. Abraham Lincoln witnessed a double image of himself in a mirror on a number of occasions, and each time one of the faces looked like him, while the other was aged and sick. The first Queen Elizabeth saw her own corpse lying in state when she was getting into bed one night and she died soon afterwards. And Shelley’s doppelganger visited him on a terrace and asked him: “How long do you mean to be content?” Two weeks later, he drowned at the age of twenty-nine.
The Egyptian Ka has the same thoughts and feelings as its counterpart. The Irish fetch presages long life if seen in the morning, death if seen at night. La Llorona cries for a lost child and goes in search of one it can steal away…
I return the volume to its place, feeling no better for having deepened my knowledge.
THE STREETS ARE EMPTY at midnight as I drive along Dundas under a fine rain. Electric lights make colourful bouquets of fireworks in the wet road. The parking is free up at the corner of Pine, though not all of the spaces are available. There are speakeasies and gambling holes in the Chinatown malls shut up for the night, but much of the neon is still glowing and there are cars in small bunches all the way back to Spadina.
The west side of Pine Street is given over to a narrow park that backs onto a high brick wall: the back of a church. Its window casings are made of stone. In one of them a sign reads: VR Studio for Rent. A bench sits back in street-lamp shadow under a tree almost directly across from Ingrid’s house. She’s at 36. Ingrid lives close to the Art Gallery of Ontario. I can see some of it across the street beyond the rooftops.
The houses along Ingrid’s street are dark except for a few lamps and a bunch of televisions splashing light. Sometimes when you see an actual TV screen through a window, from a sidewalk or as you pass in a car, you realize how many layers you look through every day to connect with others. Through a window, see a show in which a character is seen in a mirror watching a television show. Navigate a world where half of everything you know is a reflection, a refraction, or a memory. Working theories are almost always incomplete or dead incorrect, including all the important ones you’re operating under. No brakes, no map, off you go.
Ingrid’s house is dark. I’ve sat for half an hour, studying every aspect of it. There is no way to the front door except by crossing the driveway, and in approaching the house you become visible, eventually, to seven of 36’s windows.
Two hours later, I feel the chill and stumble up to the car, my joints unforgiving, and get the hoodie that’s in the trunk. When I return, I’m rewarded with a light in a third-floor window! A yellow light, a bathroom light. A shadow on the wall leans in. It’s her; her short hair falls forward. She stands and tosses her head back, hand cupped to her mouth. She washes her face. The box of light winks out. I imagine I can hear her footsteps in the upper hallway and I cast my own house as hers and see her bare feet on the runner and then the cool wood in the bedroom for a few steps before the soft white shag rug that leads her to her side of the bed.
Then I imagine myself-sitting in a shrink’s office. Diplomas and a rubber plant. Do you think anyone else can see her? he asks me.
Her husband can see her. He bought a book in my store and went right over and gave it to her. He took her arm.
But if you’re seeing her, maybe you’re seeing him as well, do you know what I mean? Do you think you’re seeing things?
If I’m delusional then you could be part of my delusion, Doctor, so how can I answer that?
Well, you’re right. Not all of my patients are as insightful as you are. The problem for you is that you could talk yourself into anything.
So what’s your diagnosis?
Well, there could be any number of reasons why a person perceives something that isn’t there. Amputees frequently have pain in their missing limbs, did you know that?
Are you suggesting we were once Siamese twins?
No. I’m saying that there are a surprisingly large number of somatic conditions that can cause realistic hallucinations. But how do you know she’s not simply a very good likeness of you? Have you spoken to her?
No. But I’m sitting across from her house at two in the morning.
Ah. Do you do this a lot?
Not yet.
Why are you doing it?
I want to see her again. I want to talk to her.
So why don’t you? Go. What are you afraid of?
My phone says plink, snapping me out of my inner therapy. It’s a text from Ian. Where are you?
Long walk. I’m coming home.
It’s the middle of the night. People don’t go for walks at two in the morning. Where are you?
I couldn’t sleep. I thought the air would be nice.
I see the car is missing.
I took it.
To go for a walk.
I drove to the walk.
You’re in the park.
I’m really not. I just wanted to get out of the neighbourhood.
You’re at the market. I don’t reply. Where are you?
Walking. To the car. I’m coming home.
—
However, I’m not hurrying home on his say-so. I sit for another half-hour. I want my patience to be rewarded with another sighting. I’ll take any part of her: a wrist, a shoulder. But the house remains dark. I cross the street with silent, mincing steps, a cartoon mouse on the prowl. I have to go halfway down her driveway and flatten myself against the side of her house. I slip along in shadow, around the corner to the door. Three wooden steps up, each with its own creak. I put my hand on the cold chrome handle and depress the latch and it slips down in its slot without catching. It’s locked. I pull my hand away and a lace of steam seeps out of the keyhole.
MY DREAMS ARE BAD. Although I slept in my bed, I also watched my body sleeping, from a vantage point in an upper corner. I hung above myself, looking down. I saw a distortion simmering in the air beside the bed, and it expanded and then contracted until it disappeared, like something slithering into an invisible hole. I saw my body struggling. Something or someone was on top of me. I felt it up against me, too, pressing me to the ceiling. In my bed, I took shallower and shorter breaths and strangled for air. I tried to speak, I tried to say, Don’t let her in! but I couldn’t make a sound with my phantom mouth. I don’t remember the rest of this dream. I don’t know if I made it back into my body.
IAN IS STILL ASLEEP when I leave the house at eight, and this time I walk all the way to Pine Street. At this hour, the pong of yesterday’s garbage is still a layer of air with undertones of diesel, bile, and turps. I walk along Dundas and pass a phalanx of vegetable pruners and choppers in front of
a produce store, the elbows of hairnetted women churning, their feet buried in trimmings.
I go down Pine and stand at the end of the church wall and watch number 36, my heart pounding. The husband comes out at nine on the dot and stands at the bottom of the driveway, a leather briefcase held in front of him. He’s the man in Ritt’s lotus-pond photograph, the one in focus. A black Corolla drives up and he gets in. It could be the same car that took Cullen. I write down its licence number. It’s one of those vanity plates that cost an extra $310. It reads: SCTMSG.
Then nothing happens. Voices from other streets. A prickle of fear creeps over my back and shoulders. A plane flies by in the street’s upper windows and I look behind myself and see it in the sky, pointing east.
At ten, I cross. I walk up Ingrid’s driveway with purpose, like I have something to leave in the mailbox. I mount the steps, which go eek, ack, ohh, and knock on the door. I hear the knock echo inside the house. I wait. I knock again.
No cars going by, no neighbours on stoops. I try the handle, but the door is locked. My palm leaves a sweat stain that vanishes into itself. I go back down the steps to the driveway and look down the alley between 36 and 34. A grey-painted gate opens onto a small backyard. At the end of a concrete patio there’s a vegetable patch with the first of the summer’s green tomatoes. Sliding glass doors look in on a kitchen. On the other side of the glass is an oak table with four chairs around it. The kitchen is spacious, with new cabinetry and a rolling butcher’s block. I like it. I can see them moving around each other in that space. She ducks her hip, he lifts a tray into the air. She says whoops, he says pardon. The kitchen is empty. There is nothing on the counters.
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