Day Twenty-One
This passage has one of my favorite parts at the end. I’ve been waiting the entire story to write that part. It didn’t fit in as well as I’d hoped, but it’s still good. I still like it.
Word Count: 47,468
They all set out after the rain had stopped. They walked the street, looking for signs of ambiguous figures, hunting for what had already been hunted and killed. There they would find nothing, and there Walters would find everything. Walters had not noticed it before, or rather had not made the very distinct connection that the store clerks and owners were still gazing at him as he walked by.
This had only happened since he’d gotten the pin.
He began to wonder if the group he had met truly was composed entirely of imposters. Now that he thought about it, the employers and employees at those stores seemed to have a high turnover rate. It wouldn’t be any turnover rate at all if they were simply constantly changing their form. Walters pondered on this, losing track of his own group. As he wandered further and further away, he came to the back alley yet again, completely lost in thought. One of the store managers had followed him, curious as to the actions of a vagabond wannabe.
He tapped Walters on the shoulder. Walters turned around, surprised, and then settled down.
The manager asked Walters if he was a thief. Walters, unsure of what this meant, played the equivocator. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn’t. He’d “stole” before, albeit his true criminal actions amounted to nothing serious – the occasional stolen music, a pirated piece of software here and there, nothing to get him sent to jail – this was not the meaning he was going for. Instead, he was more concerned about finding out whether or not a “thief” was a member of the group of thieves. If equivocation was the way in, then lie he shall. If he had to become something he was not (aside from what was already going on), he would do so. He wanted to find out more about the group, who were his only hope in truly reversing what was happening to him.
He had looked at himself that morning, shocked. In the mirror was that other face. He had taken out the lapel Genome and looked at it once again, gliding his fingers over its smooth surface, when he noticed its face. He held the face up to the mirror, parallel to his own. The two faces were almost identical.
This sudden shock caused him to examine the rest of his body; he looked at every part, comparing it to the pin. He wasn’t too far off from being a lookalike. The process must be going faster, less pain being generated, with more output.
He realized that if this man in front of him was not one of the thieves, then he had no idea about his current condition – that is, he assumed that the thieves did know about his condition, possibly a wrong accusation, yet not unfounded.
“Someone stole something very important from me,” the man in front of him stated.
“I didn’t happen to see this. How so is it important?” he replied, keeping his true, clueless position hidden.
“Why, it fulfills wishes, good man! The world’s powers at my fingertips, and now gone. What a brief candle ‘twas!” The manager’s facial expressions warped and twisted into excitement. His hands began to rise in sorrow of his tremendous loss.
“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with it. You must have mistaken me for someone else.”
“I must not me, for I saw such an item in my good stranger’s pocket.” The manager pointed to Walters’s pocket. “The pocket, the pocket! In the pocket is where it be – oi, are you listening? The pocket, stranger!”
Walters felt it odd that this man should call him stranger when he was, himself, the stranger of the two. Yet he felt compelled to reach into his right pocket, where the manager had pointed, and pull out whatever might be in there. Sure enough, out came the lapel pin. The man in front of him began to jump, gleeful and giddy, awaiting the return of his most precious item.
“Before I give this to you,” Walters began, “would you have happened to have lost such an item while running frantically away from your very own store?” He did not actually think the pin had come from the man’s store, but he suspected that if a shop owner or worker had to steal from any store, it was more likely to be the one they worked at.
“I dare say not. It comes from m’own store, yes indeed, but I’d never steal it!”
Walters put it back into his pocket. “I’m afraid this doesn’t belong to you. Now scurry along and get back to whatever work you were doing before you wrongly accused me of thievery.” The man did indeed scurry off, leaving Walters all alone in the alley. The curious actions of the manager had left Walters puzzled. He did not know how to explain what he was thinking.
Perhaps he thought that if a man had stolen an item from their own store they would remember it, even though they could just as easily force themselves to forget. There was something behind it all that he couldn’t wrap his mind around, a glue holding the entire group of thieves together that just wasn’t within his capacity to comprehend. His mind stuck to it, but ultimately failed to perceive the answer. He finally decided that fate would give him the answer soon enough if it needed to.
Jenna found him in the alley and quickly threw her arms around his body. She’d thought he had run away, or gotten lost, or died. She didn’t know what to make of his condition, so every abnormality was a cause for tragic discomfort that shook the very foundations of nature. Finding him was the greatest source of joy she could hope to get her meek, scrawny hands on. “You were looking for those bastards, weren’t you? That’s just like you.”
He wanted to tell her that he’d simply spaced out, but the words never came. If they had, they would have been unpleasant to the ear, mimicking that of unpleasant scrapings on chalkboards. He also did not want to lose the little respect he probably had left in her. As she clung to his body, her lifeless fingers encircling him, trapping him, he felt not the love he had once felt for the woman, but complete boredom. His disinterest in seeing his wife was only made more interesting by the appearance of Katrina and Reedy. For some reason he was especially delighted to see Carpenter, but withheld his excitement.
Carpenter detected it, and smiled. Jenna released Walters, and the group reconvened. While Walters was gone, they had all been out gathering quick information. Apparently there had been various sightings of such figures throughout the pedestrian road, though every single one was unconfirmed and probably untrue, because ambiguous figures are such common things for one to see. The eye is an organ that isn’t to be trusted, and though people such as Dr. Reedy knew this, he was unsure whether or not the other members of the group did. More so he wondered: Exactly why he had taken a leave of absence from work for this rubbish investigation? Did he finally care about a patient?
At the end of the tedious meeting, it was decided that they split up and loiter around the road for a good few hours. If nobody spotted anything, they would return to the apartment, where they would meet and retire for the day. All in all, a fairly easy task not to be bogged down by intrusions except for the very people they had been looking for. Walters again refused, stating that not only was it a pointless effort, but a bad idea in general, but was once again met with rejection because of his apparent “mental instability.”
He was to go with Jenna so as to be kept in surveillance for the duration of the walk. Jenna was happy to have him by his side, even if he was “abnormal.” Even if he didn’t look the same, he was the same person to her – he still acted, for the most part, like her husband. Whether he looked young or old was of no consequence, even if he seemed a bit more out of touch with reality now than he had before she’d returned home.
The whole investigation ultimately ended in failure. Nobody spotted a single thing, and Walters has suspected that this was because of his interaction with the group that morning, or with his interaction with the suspected thief just hours ago. He had told them again and again that it would end in failure, and now was his only change to say that he was right. It was the only change he had to prove his sanity.
“I was right,” he said.
“Yes, dear, you were.” Jenna sounded like she didn’t care, or didn’t want to admit it. This was unlike her, but perhaps she did not want to have been wrong for one shining moment of her life. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been right before, but she was almost always inferior to Walters in defending herself. So she would defend herself in the only way she could in this situation: not address it at all.
Reedy was tired of walking around and tired of doing work to investigate Walters’s condition. There were no leads, no edges on the top8ic that could move them forward. Walters’s condition was so utterly mysterious and so completely ridiculous that there was no hope to research it. That was why they had rested their hopes in this group, but there was no group. Reedy had even seen them, and now he himself doubted once again their existence.
They were all gathered in the apartment by this time. Walters knew that if he didn’t tell them now, they would never be able to find out. He had to let them know about his encounters, his experiences.
“I saw them this morning,” he said abruptly, interrupting the current conversation between Reedy and Carpenter about effective uses of viral genetic altering and applications to Genome advancement as well as its effect in history. Both had agreed that it held no place.
“Saw who this morning?” Carpenter asked.
“Who we’ve been looking for this whole day. Who I told you was a fruitless question to search for. Who, stubbornly, you led us all out to look for anyway. I hid it from you, but you’re all so stubborn that you need to know. Yes, I had contact with them. They exist. They must exist. In fact, they were you, but they weren’t you. They looked exactly like you, talking to me, saying things you would say, but there were others behind them so incredibly different–”
He was cut off. They thought he had had a dream – it was obvious. He knew that it had not been a dream. It was far too vivid. He remembered waking himself up, examining himself, leaving the house and coming back, slipping back into bed before Jenna noticed. How could his story not check out? It was real, one hundred percent accurate, and yet completely unbelievable. Nobody could believe that there was a group of people that had copied them, much less a group of people surrounded by suspicious store clerks. And where on Earth would they have gotten the exact dialogue of each person from? Only if they had actually become the person could they know that.
Perhaps, then, the people in front of him were who he had been searching for after all. Perhaps, although he had completely protested the idea at the time, it really had been all three of them at the alley that morning. No, he thought, it was impossible. He had seen Jenna asleep in her bed. There was no possible way she could have gotten to the alley faster than him when it took her long enough just to realize that he’d been missing when they walked together just hours ago.
The guests left. They were no longer guests, but intimate acquaintances, even friends. They were the only other people besides this mysterious group of thieves that Walters could confide in. Despite his frustration with them, he was glad they were there, helping him, especially Dr. Reedy who had set aside time from his egotistical schedule to think of somebody else for a change.
That night, just after he and Jenna had gone to bed, Jenna asked an interesting and seemingly unprompted question.
“Greg, do you miss Mike?”
Walters didn’t know how to respond. He gave a simple, “Of course I do.”
“I missed the Anniversary again. I know that must upset you. I never was able to get to know Mike that well. I heard a lot of things about him, especially the negative side.”
“There were quite a few things about him that bothered me, but it wasn’t worth his death.” Walters couldn’t believe he and her were only discussing this after forty years of knowing each other, and over thirty years of being married to each other.
“I kept on hearing that he was a vicious addict. I asked one of your friends at the time, ‘Where are these crazy accusations? Why is his best friend saying these things about him?’ That man responded, ‘It’s true.’” Walters only nodded, choking on his own memories. He didn’t want to remember any more, but his wife pressed forward. “Do you remember what the first thing you said to me was when he died?”
“Something about ‘I told you so.’?” Walters put on a puzzled face. He wasn’t really sure whether or not he had said that first or second.
“ ‘I will not cry for this man.’ ” She wasted no time in putting the phrase out, smiling thereafter as if to show some horrid pleasure in telling him what he’d so easily forgotten.
Walters had cried, however. Jenna knew he had as well. All people cry for death, and Walters was no exception. Jenna had known that the tears would come gushing out from every pore in his body as soon as the news was revealed, and that the imprint would last forever. There had not been a single doubt in her mind on the issue, and it was easily confirmed with this conversation, just as it had been confirmed forty years ago.
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