* * *
I should have been flush with triumph. My rival lay dead, killed by my own hands. My life was again mine to command. I was a hero.
Instead, a cold dread filled me. But why? He was a golem. A construct with as much soul as a cardboard cutout. It made as much sense to weep over a dismantled lawnmower.
I was briefly disappointed that his body did not disappear in a puff of smoke (with or without sound effect), but I was grateful to have a corpse to loot. The car keys were in his right front pocket. I drove out of the city behind the wheel of my Corvair, radio loud. My back, aggravated by the torque of my skull-bashing swing, throbbed. I needed a drink.
I pulled off the freeway at a bar I’d visited before, an oasis on the way to the suburbs. I’d never seen women there, or any man younger than thirty. It was a place for divorced men, or those in the midst of divorce, or those contemplating it. In other words, a bar for men.
I took a seat at the bar. The Diner’s Club card slid from my wallet like the sword from the stone. A double Scotch, I told the bartender, and keep it coming.
Ah, to have my own wallet again! My credit cards, country club membership card, the plastic photo album—all exactly where I had left them. True, the Surrogate’s face still clung to my driver’s license, and his horsey smile still beamed from the pictures of me alongside my wife and daughter. That persistence worried me, but I decided that I would think no more of it until morning. Night was a fade-to-black that allowed the stage to be reset. One spin of the earth to right all wrongs.
“Tough day, huh?” a voice to my left said.
He was about my age, perhaps a few years younger, and dressed in the uniform of an air force officer. He had a famous face. Had I seen him on television? In the papers? It looked as if he’d been in the bar a while. His shirt was rumpled, his tie loose. His blue jacket draped the back of the bar stool.
I waved down the bartender. “And one for my friend here,” I said.
We drank for a while, and I signaled for another round. “My wife is a witch,” I said.
“I hear you,” my friend said.
“Our whole marriage,” I said. “It’s just been one crazy thing after another. Reality derangement on a weekly basis.”
He nodded in commiseration.
“I tried to restrain her,” I said. “Demand that she act like a normal person. By God, I told her, we will live as ordinary citizens, obeying the laws of physics and the rules of polite society.”
He laughed into his drink. When he smiled I remembered where I’d seen him. He was the astronaut. The one who’d come down on the wrong beach. He said, “That never worked for me—restraint. She’d promise to do better, but—”
“Exactly!” I said. “Something comes up, some emergency, then it’s back to her old tricks. Just like her crone of a mother. Runs in the family, my friend. The old woman pops in at all hours, doesn’t even knock. Can’t even call me by my real name. If I’d known what I was getting into with that family—but you’re married, right?”
“Thought about it,” the astronaut said. “I don’t know, though. My girl worships me, but…” He winced. “She’s impulsive. It’s a full-time job just to keep a lid on her.”
We drank to our misery. I shook a pair of Dilaudid into my hand and chased them with another shot. The astronaut raised an eyebrow.
A thin red line ran across my palm, the cut from the hanging wire.
“An accident,” I said. “But the pills are for my back. If it wasn’t for these babies I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. My wife would say, Do you really need those? No, only if I need to be in pain every God damn day. But that’s her, always trying to change me. But you know who’s changing? Them. Your girl may worship you now, but she’ll start to get ideas. Oh, it’s 1969, and suddenly you’re not good enough for them. The next thing you know, the locks are changed and you can’t see your kids.”
“You’ve got kids?”
“A daughter,” I said. I showed him the picture in my wallet.
“Beautiful,” he said. Something wistful in his voice.
“All women are witches,” I said. “But daughters? Daughters are angels.”
* * *
The next time I awoke—again, wrong word, but my vocabulary for these events is inadequate—it was morning, and I was lying in a familiar bed of cedar mulch, staring up at those same damn trees. Unseen birds sang overhead.
I stopped myself from sitting up. My back was at that moment free of pain, but I was sure that the next move would be agony. I had been drinking, I remembered that. Drinking with the astronaut. I’d showed him a picture of my daughter, and he’d showed me a picture of his girlfriend, a beautiful blond Persian girl. And then?
Fragments floated up from memory. That drive home in the dark. Coasting down Mockingbird Lane, aiming for the driveway. I don’t remember why I’d decided to come home then. My plan was to wait until morning, but at some point bar logic had asserted itself. Midnight then. The spell of the Trickster would be broken like Cinderella’s charms.
Too late, I remembered the force field. I gripped the wheel, bracing for impact, but then suddenly I was through it. I braked before I hit the garage door. The Corvair, it seemed, was my passport into the castle, my Trojan horse.
I don’t remember entering the house. Suddenly, I was in the living room. A voice spoke to me, and I turned.
My wife stood on the darkened stairs. She wore a white gown. There should be no moon indoors, but she seemed to glow in the moonlight. “Sweetheart?” she said. Her voice was soft, filled with concern. Once, a tone that had been reserved for me.
I issued the traditional greeting of men of my station. “Honey, I’m home!”
She recognized me then. “How did you get here?” she said. I remember the shock in her voice. The way she suddenly reached for the bannister. She had not expected to ever see me again. I felt a hot flush of triumph. You’re not as powerful as you thought, are you?
“I’m back now,” I said. “Let’s just go to bed.”
She released her grip on the bannister and pointed at me. She spoke a word that vanished into the sudden wind.
And then? The void.
I lay on my back in the stiff grass, staring at the blue sky between the tree tops. I had returned from that timeless dimension a second time. I had fought my way back. True, I had no memory of the fight, but that meant that it must have been an unconscious struggle, an action of the soul, not the intellect. My spirit had instinctively returned me to my home, and these trees. Arborvitae, I remembered, means “tree of life.”
The birdsong became repetitious, as if on a continuous loop. I began to prepare my body to move, when I heard the patio door scrape open. From the far side of the trees came my wife’s voice. “Don’t you worry, dear. I’m sure they’ll love your presentation. And I’ll just whip up something for the barbecue.”
“Whip up?” a man’s voice said, worriedly. “You don’t mean…?”
I sat up, and stifled a yelp of pain.
My wife said, “Relax, dear.” She could have been speaking to me. But no, it was the Usurper. Alive.
Had I imagined the murder? I looked at my right hand, then my left. There were no wounds. The cuts had disappeared. But I remembered so clearly wire biting into my flesh, and into his…
I leaned back and peered between the trees. My wife and the Fraud stood on the back patio. She had her hands on his chest, calming him. She wore tight capri pants that showed off her lovely calves. Her blonde hair was tied back. And the Ringer looked as good as new. He wore one of my best suits, and if his neck was injured below that collar there was no hint of it. His hair was perfect.
He kept yammering about how important this presentation was, how vital it was to impress the “Minute Mom” clients. Not a word of his recent murder. My wife responded as she always did, cajoling, reassuring. It was a conversation we’d had so many times. But that hectoring tone he used—had I ever been that much of a whiner?
>
Then my daughter’s voice. “Mommy, Daddy, look!” She stepped from the kitchen, a tiny, towheaded girl, holding a plate stacked high with pancakes and topped with a pile of whipped cream. “I made my own breakfast!”
Daddy. She’d called him Daddy.
“You see?” the Ersatz Husband said. “This is exactly what I’m talking about! Poof!”
My daughter’s lower lip trembled. My wife stooped to take the plate from her. “He’s not angry at you, honey.” She looked up at him. “For your information, I made the pancakes—the old-fashioned way. She only put on the whipped cream.”
The Duplicate threw up his hands and marched into the house.
What an asshole.
I did not stand up. I did not throw myself at the invisible boundary that surrounded the house. I knew what would happen if my wife saw me.
* * *
My second attempt on his life required tools. A gun would have made everything easier, but I didn’t own one, or know anyone who did. That was not the world we lived in. We were decent people. Instead, I gathered materials available in my local hardware store: a hammer; plastic garbage bags; an ultra-fine point scratch awl with hardwood handle; and duct tape. On my train ride into the city, I carried the supplies in one of the garbage bags like a hobo.
I was forced to take the train. My hands may have been healed, and the bottles of painkillers in my pocket magically refilled, but the Corvair’s keys were gone. The wallet as well. They were no doubt back in the Claim-Jumper’s pockets. As for the stolen Plymouth, I supposed it was still parked on 10th Avenue, if it had not already been towed. I did not go looking for it. I walked from the Penn Station to the private garage under my office building. The Corvair sat in my reserved space.
It was 3:30 PM, well after lunch, well before quitting time. No one was on this level of the garage. I swung the hammer at the rear passenger window. The window cracked, but did not break. I frowned. How could glass be more resilient than the back of a skull?
I swung again and the window shattered. Very satisfying. I glanced around, but no one shouted, no one came running. And if they did, would they even see me? On the train, no one looked me in the eye. I had moved into another category of existence: not quite invisible, merely beneath notice. More proof that until I reclaimed my life, I would be nothing.
I reached in and unlocked the door. The floor mats glittered with broken glass. I hadn’t planned on that. I turned the mats over, then put the garbage bags over them. I lowered myself to the floor, the hump of the gas tank under my belly, and braced myself on forearms and knees. Glass crunched under my elbows.
In thirty seconds, the position became excruciating.
I climbed onto the back seat and lay on my back. I figured I’d be safe there for the time being. I never quit before five, and I bet the Polyester Me didn’t either. At, say, 4:30, I would crouch behind the driver’s seat. Then when he slipped behind the wheel I would rise up like an assassin and press the awl to his jugular. “Drive me home,” I would tell him.
A face appeared at the window. “Napping at your age?” she said. It was my mother-in-law.
I tried to scramble to a sitting position, but scrambling was no longer an option in my condition. Any radical change in position required at least three discrete moves, the stop-action choreography of a steam shovel.
My mother-in-law opened the door and said, “Would you hurry it up and come out of there? If I’m going to be seen rolling about in the back seat of a car, there are younger, handsomer men on that list.” Hairspray had fixed her red hair into architecture. Her eyebrows were razor-edged weapons.
With thumb and finger, she extracted a shard of glass from the window frame. “So what is the master plan, Dick?” She never called me by my real name. “You aren’t going to strangle him again, are you?”
I pulled myself out of the car, straightened my jacket. “So,” I said. “You can see me.”
“If only you could see yourself. You look ridiculous. How do you expect this to work? Keep killing the man until my daughter forgets to conjure him back? Or until she banishes you for good?”
“She can try,” I said. “I’ll keep coming back. My soul is strong.”
She burst into laughter, a shower of tiny knives. “Oh, Derwood, you have no more soul than an old sweater, and you’re unraveling every day. Do you even remember your life before the wedding? Your sports victories in college? Your tragic injury?”
“It was an accident. The muscles in my back snapped—”
“Like banjo strings, yes, yes. That was to give you character. As well as something to talk about—mortal men love their sports injuries, according to my daughter. But you, you took the idea and ran with it.” She waved a hand dismissively, and began to walk away. The hammer was still in my hand.
“Not that I blame you,” she said. “If I were in your situation, I’d be tempted to become a drunk as well, if not one so grandiose and wordy.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “You can’t stop torturing me?”
She realized that I wasn’t following her, and turned. “You’ve never understood me. I have only, ever, wanted what was best for my family.”
“You’re protecting him, aren’t you?”
“Who, the new Dick? Nonsense. He doesn’t need protection. Though I must admit to cleaning up the mess before my daughter had to deal with it. Really, Durbin—there was blood all over that office! I didn’t think you had it in you. You’re the Spartacus of Morons.”
“Damn it!” The hammer seemed to rise of its own accord. “This is my family! Stay out of it!”
She rolled her eyes—and the world rolled with them. The cement floor tilted beneath me, and then I lay on my back, staring up at her bemused face. The hammer was in her hands. She tossed it away, and it struck a nearby car with a thunk. “Look at you,” she said. “All bothered and bewildered.”
She leaned over me, her hands clasped behind her back. “You are absolutely wrong for my daughter,” she said. “A mistake from the beginning.”
“Screw you.”
“Language, Dundicus. I was about to add that you are also just what my granddaughter needs right now.”
“I am?”
“Evidently.”
“Wait—you’re the one bringing me back?”
She pursed her mouth in mock pity. “Oh, you poor thing. You really did believe that you were doing this on your own, didn’t you?”
She straightened, tucked a stray hair into place. “I must be going. I only dropped in to offer you a word of advice: You can’t murder your way out of this, as entertaining as I would find that.”
I pushed myself to a sitting position. My back was on fire. “What then?” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”
She strolled away from me. “Be the better man, Delwyn.”
“I am the better man!” I shouted. But she was already gone.
* * *
I waited for him in the parking garage, loitering between the cars. The Nemesis emerged from the elevator talking and smiling, leading two other men I didn’t recognize. Clients. Men from the Mom’s in a Minute account. They walked with him to the car, and I realized that my plan would not have worked. The men were coming home with him for the barbecue.
I slipped behind a delivery van. They expressed shock when they discovered the broken window, the obvious burglar tools left at the scene.
“That’s life in the Big Apple,” one of the clients said, his voice echoing.
“Not the kind of thing we get in Des Moines,” the other said.
The Pseudo Me looked about warily but did not spot me. Did he retain any memory of his recent death? Some subliminal dread? Or had his just-add-water brain been wiped clean by his resurrection? “Probably just kids,” he said, and smiled winningly. He used his jacket to sweep the broken glass from the upholstery, and they drove away.
I took the train back to the suburbs.
The sun had set by the time I reached Mockingbird
Lane. I approached my house from my neighbor’s yard and took up position in the now-familiar spot behind the trees, atop the soft pile of mulch. The party was well under way. The guests were scattered across the patio and backyard: the three clients, my white-haired boss and his bewigged wife, several other men from the office with their wives, laughing and drinking in the flickering glow of the tiki torches. Mr. Ditto mixed gin and tonics on the outdoor bar while my wife chatted up one of the Iowans. Something delicious cooked on the grill, making wonderful smoke.
My daughter went from person to person carrying a tray of canapés. I could tell she was proud of herself. She asked one of the men from Des Moines, “Would you care for another?” So precocious. Of course they adored her. The client nodded to her supposed father and actual mother, signaling his approval—and then let his gaze linger on my wife. She was easily the most beautiful woman there: blonde, long-legged, otherworldly. No man dared make a pass at her, no woman could hope to measure up to her.
It was fascinating to be an audience to the party and not a participant. The anxiety I felt whenever we allowed visitors into our home was replaced by almost giddy anticipation. Something was bound to go disastrously wrong; my own dinner parties had turned to catastrophe countless times. People and props would line up like dominoes, awaiting the inevitable trigger—a spilled drink, a puff of smoke, a levitating table—making a panicked guest, say, fall back into the grill, which would tumble and set the trellis aflame, which would… you get the idea. And then my wife, unnoticed on the sidelines, would in the blink of an eye set all aright.
I edged forward and my foot sank into the depression I’d found earlier. My shoe crunched against something firm that gave way like cardboard. I stepped out of the hole, and my daughter called, “Daddy!”
I looked up. She was running toward me. She saw me, and she was beaming.
“You’re home, you’re home!”
My first reaction was fear. I was not supposed to be here, I was not to be seen. Then the fear untwisted and I dropped to my knees. She threw herself into me.
“I knew it,” she said. She pressed her smooth cheek against my stubble. Her hair smelled fresh and clean. “I knew you’d come back.”
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