Orbit 11 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Night

  * * * *

  I stayed the next few days in an Erie downtown motel. Erie is an especially gray city, the proper setting for what I went through there.

  Take my advice, never lose a person. Hopes are raised and shattered several times a day. Police get leads, then drag you down to view some frump who bears so little resemblance to Shelley you have to shove the printed description in their faces. People learn of your plight and dispatch professional commiserators to you. Each telephone ring is a hopeless reminder, each knock a reason for hiding in the closet.

  Finally I fled Erie and retraced my route to Union City, on the familiar mythical trip for an Answer. There I interviewed some residents whose names Bill supplied one day when he visited me at the motel. I got a composite picture of Shirley Graham. She’d come to the town eight years before and immediately had become popular with its citizens. All descriptions of her were close reminders of Shelley. Shirley, a first-grade teacher, apparently spread joy everywhere. Some of the men rolled their eyes and told me how stacked she was.

  “She was too good,” a couple of old biddies said. “Never trusted her. Nobody’s that good who don’t have something going on the side.”

  Shirley’s departure from the town had been as abrupt as Shelley’s disappearance. I had a hell of a time finding out where she went until I discovered a girlfriend of hers partial to pink catawba wine. She told me that Shirley had become uptight over something and had skipped to Canton, Ohio. I left the girl in a bar with a brand-new gallon of catawba reflecting pinkly her giggling face. I drove nonstop to Canton.

  * * * *

  In Canton I located Shirley Graham quickly through a few inquiries and some minor deceptions. A chief of detectives bought a yarn that I suspected my wife to be hiding in Canton under the alias Shirley Graham. He checked records and found a listing for her in North Canton, a suburb. He gave me directions to her home and a warning that I’d be hanging upside down in hot water if I caused any trouble. “Some fellas are in such misery over missing wives,” he said, “that, when they find them, they clobber ‘em.” Clever people, these Cantonese.

  I sped to North Canton, where the Hoover sign shines benevolently over the city. I’m not sure what I expected to find there. I did not want to do anything to Shirley Graham, I just wanted to see her. Go to Hades, Canton style, for a glimpse of the duplicate Eurydice.

  No symbols, stranger. Just call the cards.

  I went to the designated address. It was a muggy night. My drip-dry clothes dripped and dried. Gnats poked into my ears and nostrils. Dust (Hoover emptying a few test models?) coated my tongue and throat.

  As I knocked on the pretender’s door, I rehearsed many bright opening remarks, none of which I ever used. Although prepared to discover a pretty girl with a strong resemblance to Shelley, I wasn’t ready for Shirley Graham. The resemblance wasn’t merely strong, she was Shelley’s exact duplicate, down to the finest detail. No distracting mole, no slight gradation in shade of hair, no extra wrinkles beside the eye—nothing that I could see which in any way marked a difference in physical appearance.

  I gaped.

  Shirley asked me my business several times before I collected myself enough to respond. Saying that Bill had told me to look her up when passing through North Canton, I convinced her I was harmless.

  The night I watched Shirley Graham intently, trying to discover an unShelleylike gesture, intonation, point of view. It seemed that this pleasant beautiful girl shared every characteristic of Shelley’s that I could remember.

  I didn’t tell her about Shelley, the love of my life.

  I made up a new name for myself.

  I made a pass at Shirley that first night.

  She turned me down. With a smile. But only once.

  Two nights later I moved in with Shirley Graham. It had taken two days with Shelley, too. Maybe I should have been troubled by that.

  * * * *

  To describe my life with Shirley would be merely to repeat what I’ve already related about life with Shelley. Shirley anticipated my every whim, led me through my moods like an affectionate tour guide. I spent my first days with her dazzled. She’d dust a bookshelf and I’d think: Exactly the way that Shelley did it, the same casualness, the same rate of speed. She’d slip off a skirt and I’d think: Shelley’d push it flat-palmed down her ass exactly like that, her thumb inside the zipper in the same way. She’d add a little movie-ballet skip to her walk performing the bedroom and I’d think: I remember Shelley performing the same step exactly, even to the left foot being raised to midcalf height.

  In bed—the same. No. Better. Not better in the sense that she used any new tricks or was more adept, but better because my loss had trained me to appreciate Paradise regained. I entered Paradise with a sharper realization of its blessed gateway and found inside the manifold gifts of God, the God of my agnostic imagination.

  Events had occurred so rapidly that I had trouble catching up with what had happened. I slowly came to realize the uniqueness of my good fortune. I had passed from tragedy to an incredible stroke of luck in a few days. How many millions of times has someone, after losing the love of his life, wished despairingly for that person’s return or, failing that, the sudden emergence of an adequate replacement? How many millions of people have spent the rest of their years with only the memory of the loved one to live with? Or married too quickly a wretch or a simpleton to stare at across narrow breakfast nooks all the remaining hellish days of life?

  But I’d beaten the mourning-period game. I’d hardly had time to accept the loss of Shelley, and here I was a few days later sharing bed and board with her exact duplicate.

  I loved Shirley. In a way it was a love for the image in the mirror, the affectionate awe due a superb imitation. But it was sincere—something like, I suppose, the luxurious contentment men of earlier times felt when they bought their second brandnew Model T Ford.

  Shirley seemed happy. I felt ecstatic all the time. I had the world on a string and could bounce it off the moon.

  Like I said, you tend to overlook hubris.

  * * * *

  I was not a complete selfish cad. I mourned the loss of Shelley. How could I help it while Shirley was a walking playback of her? I checked often by phone with the Erie police for progress reports. They had the same message always. Nothing new, no reports of her in the continental U.S.A. or Canada.

  I did my duty sacredly, though I must admit I don’t know what I’d have done if they had turned Shelley up.

  I arranged with my brother to take over the administration of our business in Rochester. (We had converted my father’s sedate clothing store into a mindblowing head shop.) He hated the extra work but liked getting more than half the profits. In return he sent me adequate if not abundant monthly stipends, which I supplemented with an occasional odd job.

  I promised Shirley a wedding. She was too nice a girl to toy with, and I couldn’t risk losing her. Later I realized that, if I did marry her, I’d be liable for bigamy charges. If I told her I had a wife, she’d split. If I just forgot to marry her, she might notice.

  One day, several months after I found Shirley, I came home from an active day at the Family Billiards Parlor, where I hustled young mothers and old widows for fifty cents a rack. I’d had a good day until a paper boy on a break from his route took me for all my profits. I pranced out of the parlor, muttering to the owner that such riffraff would bring down his enterprise’s good name.

  Shirley sat on the living room couch. Stiffly. Ignoring the odor of déjà vu, I sat beside her and tried to kiss her. She offered my lips the back of her neck.

  “Something the matter?” I said, rushing-in fool that I am.

  In a series of choked phrases she told me. Canton’s crusading chief of detectives had paid an official call, because he’d discovered my dual identity and wanted to be a nosy prick about it.

  “Why did you come here,” she said, “specifically to look for me? Why me? What were your purposes?”

/>   I tried to think of answers that might work. Whatever I stammered out, it was completely unintelligible, a string of pronouns and disconnected verbs.

  “How in bloody hell could you move in here when your wife had disappeared just a week before? Your wife! What kind of monster are you?”

  “A phoenix, if you’ll give me the chance.”

  “I’ll build you a fire.”

  At that moment I wished I had a duplicate, one who would click on in a crisis, solve the problem with the proper selection of reason and emotion, then turn the field back to me for the easy stuff.

  “Do you want to know my side?” I asked.

  “I know your side. That’s why I’m crying.”

  “How could you know? That motherloving cop only knows part of it himself.”

  “I know. I have abilities.”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “No, not yet. I need a few more minutes.”

  We sat in silence for a half hour or more.

  “Are you ready?” I finally said.

  “Ready for what?”

  “To tell me my side.”

  “Bastard!”

  “You girls change personality quickly. Too fast for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what I meant by ‘you girls’?”

  “I know what you meant. All I needed was your wife’s name which was on the missing persons report he showed me. Give me a few more minutes.”

  “For what?”

  “Breathing.”

  Another long silence. Then she spoke first for a change.

  “Poor Shelley. Poor uncompromising Shelley.”

  “Poor Shelley? What do you mean, uncompromising?”

  “What it usually means. She didn’t bargain. Apparently she barely hesitated.”

  “What’s the connection between you and Shelley? Why are you two so much alike in looks, manner, temperament?”

  “We’re identical robots manufactured by a mad scientist. One of us tripped and fell into a Xerox machine. We’re one time traveler existing concurrently in two trips to the same time period. We’re the Doublement twins. Any of the above, some of the above, none of the above.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No.”

  “Damn it, you owe me an explanation.”

  “Eat. Molten. Lava.”

  Silence, my turn to speak first.

  “Shelley—is she dead?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “Quit toying with me!”

  “I’m not. That was truth.”

  “Suicide?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Yes? . . .”

  “She no longer exists.”

  “No? . . .”

  “Her power of choice was restricted.”

  I couldn’t make sense out of Shirley’s cryptic statements. The truth seemed to be there somewhere, just outside the reach of my comprehension. Shirley stood up.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “I must leave.”

  “Why?”

  “For the same reason Shelley left you.”

  “Stay.”

  “I’d like to. I can’t.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “You duplicates always walking out on me. Both you and Shelley made me happy, idyllically so. I don’t deserve such treatment.”

  “Sure you do. Don’t be so petulant. Anyway, you’re lucky.”

  “Lucky?”

  “You’ve lived with the two of us, a mathematical possibility we hadn’t taken into account. And I know exactly our capabilities. You’re lucky. It computes, baby doll.”

  She walked toward the door, a stiffness in her movements. “I must leave now,” she said.

  “There are differences, you know, between you and Shelley. She played this bit hysterically.”

  “There’s more than one kind of hysteria. But you’re correct, there are differences. Shelley had her world disintegrate suddenly, I suspect, judging by what I could infer from the missing persons report. I’ve had all afternoon.”

  “What are you going to do now? Bargain?”

  “Probably. Another difference for you: I consider compromise.”

  We stared at each other. Outside it was that gray period between sunset and the dawn of streetlights. I could not see Shirley’s face very well. A thick black line seemed drawn around her.

  “Can I go now?”

  “Could I stop you?”

  “No.”

  “A last request?”

  “Sure.”

  “Withdraw with a good exit line.”

  She smiled. A uniquely Shirley smile.

  “You were a pretty good fuck,” she said.

  “What do you mean, pretty good?”

  “Have I ever lied to you?”

  She left the house. I heard the hedges beside the house rustle as she took the path to the backyard. I couldn’t keep from going to the kitchen and watching her through a window. She didn’t do much. She looked around the yard, up at the darkened sky, down at the row of plastic garbage cans, level at the small clump of trees which passed for a woods in the suburbs.

  Maybe her outline became shimmery. Maybe not.

  She went into the woods; I mentally collected womb symbols while looking out at nothing.

  I packed and left town that night. I had plans.

  * * * *

  Charlotte was difficult to locate. I’d been bombed the night I talked with the waiter and I couldn’t recall the name of the bar. All I remembered was red-velvet walls and a flashy Western layout. The number of Denver restaurants with red-velvet walls and Old West decor has at least one comma in it. But I really didn’t mind the search. I am an authority on red-velvet walls. Anything becomes relevant if your life has direction.

  Eventually I found the bar, the waiter, and Charlotte.

  Charlotte, so like Shelley and Shirley that comparisons are pointless.

  Charlotte lasted two years. I sometimes wondered why I did not desire more variety, a taste of another flavor of lotus. But I was never bored with Shelley, Shirley, or Charlotte. Any memory of the others which Charlotte evoked was stimulating rather than nostalgically enervating. Change is what’s boring, monotonous. Sameness is a continual challenge, almost impossible to maintain. Repetition, knowing that you’ve done it right before and can do it right again, is satisfying. If I had merely lost Shelley and not pursued my quest, I would have had to adjust, destroy myself with acceptance of change, let tragedy have a final curtain.

  Sometimes I speculated on the origins of my lookalike trio, but I didn’t really care who they were or where they’d come from. Why should I? It was truth, after all, that had sent each of them away.

  Charlotte departed for reasons unknown. I passed her in the hall of our apartment building, recognized the look in her eyes. The bedroom telephone was off the hook.

  I mourned briefly, felt some regret, but only a slight sense of loss.

  Because I had heard about Sherry, Charlene, and Elizabeth from three separate barflies who remarked on their amazing resemblance to Charlotte.

  Sherry already had a husband, to whom she was intensely loyal. Elizabeth was a false lead who bore little resemblance to the loves of my life. Charlene was the genuine article. I courted her exactly as I had the other three, and established the same relationship.

  We’ve been a perfect blend for fourteen months now. I rarely worry about losing her. What must be, must be. Besides, I have compiled a backlog of six new names already.

  I have this recurrent dream. I hear that somebody else is onto my secret and is fast using up the supply of available duplicates. I polish my sixgun and send Bob Steele to him, challenging him to a showdown. He comes riding into town, the sun at his back, a sinister silhouette. Light flashes from the oily surfaces of both our guns. He steps out of the shadow. I find that he looks exactly like me. He is my duplicate. But that doesn’t bother me. I shoo
t him down anyway.

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  * * * *

  Philip Jos é Farmer

  FATHER’S IN THE BASEMENT

  The typewriter had clattered for three and a half days. It must have stopped now and then, but never when Millie was awake. She had fallen asleep perhaps five times during that period, though something always aroused her after fifteen minutes or so of troubled dreams.