thing, bob, specter, christian
A Short Story
ABOUT THE WRITER
Eric Kong Angal is a writer and worker raised in and currently living in Seattle, Washington. He is currently laboring on his first full-length book, tentatively titled Men Who Tell Stories. You can find him on Twitter.
And so Bob, you know Bob. He’s going on and onandon about some thing he’s of course trying to pawn off on me—not trying to give it away for free, or anything, but just trying to pawn it off for a cheap price, like maybe say $50—and he keeps calling this thing an ottoman but really it’s just a couch, I feel like the word sofa is too fancy for it, it being the sofa, it being what we will heretofore refer to the sofa or couch as, this thing. I distinctly remember the heat being, for lack of a better word, putrid, that day. I remember kind of distractedly and self-consciously visualizing what I looked like standing there not quite on the sidewalk, and in the heat, which was powerful. It was like the heat itself had replaced the air, and instead of actual air there was just heat—the air but scorched. Remembering now that I could feel the pavement through my sandals, and there were glistening stains arranged in these almost too-perfect quadrants splayed like wet digits across my shirt, and meanwhile, Bob, talking about the thing. Bob wasn’t sweating, I’m sure of it. I could not make out those crystalline fractals sprouting from the cheekbones and forehead, glistening and collecting on the bulbous part of the nose. I could not.
So then. And did I mention that I’m not standing on the sidewalk? I was pushed outwards, street-wise, by the thing, which let’s just say resembled some sort of protrusion, some sort of blister, peeling from Bob’s lawn and into or rather onto the sidewalk, pushing away passersby, sort of looking like it was encroaching on something even though really a sofa or couch or common neighborhood detritus thing being put off on the sidewalk for sale or pickup isn’t exactly a rare spectacle in the suburbs, and yet nonetheless the thing encroached, like an intransigent specter. And Bob that profound son of a bitch was really trying to pawn me this thing while I just sat there, apricating, the atmosphere akin to a couple of focused heat lamps. Not wearing much more than a Hawaiian shirt and a single layer underneath, and sweating apoplectically, my skin giving way to sheets of this stuff. And in the distance, waiting, trying to be patient but being tested, my sweet Emily, hands not quite on hips but getting there. I remember she was wearing an array of summery type clothes that looked good and fit well. Nothing doesn’t fit my Emily well, you know that. Oh, you wish. And while Bob was droning on and on and onandon about the thing, I was, like I said, distractedly and self-consciously examining, in my mind’s eye, a rough draft of what I could’ve looked like, there, on the sidewalk. Examining, internally, the various textures of my face; the latticework of the half-frown I had stretched over sunburnt lineaments, and how they could’ve looked, and how serious I looked to anyone who could’ve potentially been watching from a distance. How much sweat was spread across my well-defined chest. How my hair glistened in the overhead light, that right-at-noon sort of blinding light. More an atmosphere of burning, effulgent light rather than just a blue sky and some light. What my shades reflected as they sat perched on the bridge of my nose, perfectly symmetrical to both earlobes, resting on a calculated apogee of sorts; they reflected Bob, I imagine. But perfectly. A perfectly symmetrical Bob being reflected in each perfect, slanted lens of sheer black, whose surfaces remained non-osmotic and completely impenetrable, one-sided. How crisp the folds were in my Hawaiian shirt, which was adorned with a nice floral pattern. I don’t know what type of flowers they were, no. What my thumbs were doing with the lisp of a trouser pocket. Where I was on the pavement, what my feet were up to. Et Cetera.
When suddenly, like out of nowhere, I see myself. There’s Bob, right? Just talking, his mouth going yah yah yah, just sort of making the same rotations and emitting random vowels and plosives, and I’m nodding. And there’s Emily. She’s maybe twenty or thirty or forty feet yonder. Her position in my memory now seems kind of inchoate and irrelevant to the situation. And then, in the corner of my vision, I shit you not, no lie, I see, standing perfectly still, me. Like, another me. Just standing there, looking over at my conversation with Bob, hands in his or I guess my pockets. He’s like standing there with his feet spread, o, maybe yea so far apart, with his arms crossed approvingly, almost like paternally. It was the weirdest thing. Just for an instance or maybe longer, I noticed this geist, this perfect simulacrum of myself. Immediately I turned, of course; who would not? Who wouldn’t turn if they saw someone who looked exactly like them out of the corner of their right eye, dressed in identical garments, possessing the same face and the familiar expression you give yourself right before you turn away from the mirror and turn out the light every morning; you know the expression, you know you do. We all have the expression. And so I turn. Honestly, who wouldn’t: who.
So I just need you to hear me out on this. I haven’t told anyone this before. Never. Not for three years. For a while part of me thought that it could’ve just been some hallucinatory experience fomented by Lysergic dross floating around in the ether of my mind, which somehow possibly got reactivated. But I know that this cannot have been the case. I know it actually happened that day. Not some endogenously perpetuated psychic backwash, not the stuff of dreams, not some projection of the subconscious, and so on. But a physical copy of myself, possessing texture, boundary, magnitude, scope. Let’s just say that if you licked his arm, you would be tasting a very real salinity. And, so, yes, it’s bothered me for quite some time; for three years and sixty-eight days, is exactly how much time I’ve had to consider what happened that afternoon.
Perhaps you are afflicted with a similar sense of urgency regarding an issue you cannot tell anyone. Maybe you’ve, um, worn my proverbial shoes. Maybe you know what this is like. This feeling of having this sort of memory that is too real to be a dream, that occasionally haunts you from time to time. That pulses in your head like the flutter of wings, a dull and invariable buzz. That you can sort of be distracted from for days or sometimes weeks (not more than two weeks, though) and even though you seem to have successfully subdued it into dormancy it bursts anew, a secretion of mental pus. And this will happen at random times. Like sometime you’ll be sitting and drinking a coffee and reading the news and a sort of snapshot of this let’s just say moment burns itself into your retinas. Instills in you a sense of vague urgency. Perhaps you know what I mean. I see how your hands arrange themselves into anxious geometries, there, behind your glass. Which is empty, by the way. Here. And the look in your eyes. The downshift in your gaze. Very apparent. I see this. I won’t ask why this is, because now I will share something with you:
Things became a sort of blur as I blinked and looked and blinked again. By this point Bob had recognized something was awry; not necessarily wrong, but awry. Amiss. I could feel myself squinting; in my head, I could visualize myself squinting, still can, perplexed at the sight of the unwarranted doppelganger. My mouth creating that curious sort in which it was obvious I was about to ask: ‘What?’ You know. Feet repositioning themselves so I can square my chest at this spectacle in open curiosity.
And this paternal expression and general standing there and looking confident and put-together and let’s just face it, let’s just say it: looking sexy, you know, doesn’t exactly change or go away, but instead the doppelganger becomes more assertive and starts walking closer. He’s maybe twenty feet away. At this point I’m looking over at Bob to see if he’s seeing this; he’s not. Let me assure you that he’s not. He’s confused, but in a different way. Emily at this point is distracted and is on her phone and doesn’t even realize that anything’s happening. There’s sort of this silence, which permeates. No dogs bark and no wind blows. No birds, no cars, nothing. The heat continues. This doppelganger, perfectly comfortable, walks up to us. Looking at first at Bob and then at me. And then at the thing and then at Bob and then at me, again. Like he was taking in the scene or something, sizing it all up. Slight smile to his face, you know, lips upward, not unnatural. Like something I’d do. A you know ‘happy’ smile, not a faked or forced smile, but something characteristically genuine. Unlike the sort of smile you give yourself in the mirror. The eyes spoke to a similar tune. I could see his profile, beautiful side profile it is that I have, and noticed how perfect it was. His teeth were perfect as well, like mine. His teeth, like mine, to the t. Uncanny. I don’t remember at this point any of my little physical ticks. Complete absorption with the aforementioned subject, specter.
And this is the kicker. Gleaming eyes, teeth like the sun. I promise you I’m not lying. He goes up to the couch, and, and—how do I say this—he—okay, you’re going to need to listen very closely to what I’m about to say—
“I loved her, Christian. I loved her. I had my children with her. I had all of my children with her. We took out loans together. She’s wearing a $30,000 rock on her finger that I am still essentially in debt for purchasing. Love will burn a hole in a penniless wallet. It disguises itself at first as a depreciating asset but really is just an expense, Christian, to put it into vernacular you could-slash-do understand. Quantifying something like love. The idea of love as equating to a type of currency.”
“—actually onto the couch, which made me, as a result, commensurately discombobulated. Bob is also ‘bobulated. Aha. Dunno what Emily was thinking; never talked to her about it. I’ve tried but she won’t let me–perhaps she’s waiting for her therapist to give her the green light, so to speak. I still think she thinks the whole thing was just some kind of freak accident. But anyway, by this point it’s fairly obvious that something’s wrong. That some specter, incorporeal to all but me, is essentially fucking with tangible objects. No one’s believing what they’re seeing. I start to turn away; so does Bob, but he fucks up, turns toward the thing, which he then trips over. Trips over the thing. Which slows him down, and he falls on the ground, and he yells; I still remember the sound of the yell, more like a yelp than a yell, by all means pathetic and desperate and panicked but in retrospect, sort of plangent and kind of sad. At this point Bob is only a blotch of messy gray-pink in my peripherals. Mentally I can still visualize the scene perfectly, with Bob only being pixelated garbage in the corner of my figurative screen. I’m shouting at Emily to run run run, again, not seeing whether or not she was okay but just mostly sprinting in a direction primarily away. Point being though, Bob is in bad shape. I lose sight of him almost immediately and he continues to scream. What happens next I cannot describe. What happens next is more some sort of—”
“Christian, I’m not much more than a broken heart on weak knees.”
“And the thing I think affected me the most was the fact that the whole time, I was thinking primarily not of Bob or of Emily or even my own safety, but really was just totally and comprehensively consumed with the fact that the doppelganger looked so good, you know? This thing that bore my resemblance. I kept thinking: Is that what I look like? Because if so, I look good. The hair, the locks of hair. I’ve spent countless hours studying my own hair, my face, scrying my lineaments, examining them to see if they match the doppelganger’s, to see if the doppelganger is in fact not some enhanced version of myself which looks better than I do but is rather a direct and untampered reflection of my true appearance. This is the sick part, is that when Bob’s moribund form lay splayed across the burning pavement, and the shreds of the thing lay in pieces on the ground, I was primarily consumed with the thought of the face being that of my own and of visualizing myself being the one who ripped into Robert like that, with the golden teeth like sun and the nose all perfectly at 60 degrees perpendicular to the amazing jawline I witnessed and the face symmetrical in ways almost artificial, that face of mine and his, and that I was well let’s just say I was captivated and leave it at that, and in more than one way satisfied. I don’t know, what does that say. The fact that I wasn’t necessarily surprised by some trans-dimensional assault by a possible demonic entity or wayward poltergeist, in complete daylight, outside, but was more taken aback by the stretched-perfect lineaments it possessed, that were my own? That I could see myself do these things in perfect visualization and experience a kind of well let’s admit it fucked up satisfaction in noticing the torsion of my defined physique at peak physical performance swinging a grown man in a threehundredsixty-degree circle and throw him for many yards? That I was searching for a look in its (my) eyes that I came to recognize as a look I possess every so often myself? I guess so yeah you could say that yeah I’m a bit of a narcissist, but really, is one’s life not just a gradual degeneration into mental and physical entropy, whose redeeming qualities are inherently self-centered, not necessarily solipsistic but more a confirmation that in one way or another I am good, that I am passable by means of some abstract self-ascribed criteria we all endogenously create and maintain? And that in that instant I experienced, in some perverse way, a confirmation that I am good, somehow? Seeing myself like that, although it was not me, but seeing a reflection of myself performing feats of truly Olympic, nay, superhuman caliber; is that not in some way supposed to fuck with my idea about what I can subsequently do, what I am capable of? A confirmation of my capacity? So yes, I felt in more ways than one a sense of very real satisfaction. Does that make me sick? Does that make me wrong?
“Is it maybe bad, Christian, that all I can seem to think about when I look into her cold, reptilian eyes with their unfeeling gaze and unsettling depth, is of what it was like when I met her: Heat and Flash, sunlight and embers of cold-turned autumn leaves on the sea; and the bountiful love we shared in-between scarce-caught glimpses of each other–is it maybe bad that in the depths of my heart I have always loved her and still love her, the way her supine form rests like a cresting wave in our bed, the way her hair flows onto my pillow and how I draw her close to bathe in its essence; O, Christian, how she smells; even unbathed and in a light sweat, she is an olfactory, pheromonal delight of qualia, which was mine to experience, mine only; and how, Christian, how I could only ever think about that day when we were young, in a grove overlooking the coast, when she gave herself to me for what was our first time, both of us, in the grass, in the shade, sunlight bleeding through the latticework of the trees, and I remember her lips pressed up against my ears, and how in the frenzy of our love they made circuits across my face, and when we were finished she told me how she loved me, and I told her that I loved her too, and that we looked into each other and saw a very tangible example of a love which would hold fast for the ages, a love more than the sum of its parts; and we rested there. And it was good. Okay. Okay, I’ll stop.”
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