Seeing doppel.
He smokes, of course, because I let him. Doesn’t mean I’ll let him have the good stuff. Silk Cut, or Gauloises, maybe. Harsh and bitter and nasty. I glare at him through the haze.
“Yeah?” he says.
“I’m getting tired of it.”
“What?” he says. “The lies? The deception?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Christ, I don’t think I’d ever realized how acerbic he comes off, sometimes. How sarcastic. Cocksure and arrogant. —Is his voice sliding ever eastward, over the Atlantic? Is mine getting more Southern? “You know I’m probably not going to do anything about it.”
“Except bitch at me.”
“Why not? What else have I got to do around here?”
“Nobody’s stopping you from getting anything done.”
“You are!”
“And whose fault is that?” He smiles. We both have beards, naturally enough, but they do different things to our smiles. His is unpleasant. (I am told by those in a position to know that mine is more, shall we say, goofy.)
“Elias,” though, is what I say next. Struck by a sudden—insight?
“Elias,” he says. Skeptical. “Your last and least pathetic attempt at creating a truly evil person.”
“That’s who you’re starting to remind me of in these little chats.”
“Please,” he says. “Elias was adolescent transference at best; irresponsibly inept psycho-social lashing out. —Or did you miss the significance of how the other character you played then was such a monstrous suck-up?”
“Don’t try to psychoanalyze me,” I snap. (I honestly had missed it. Till now.)
“You and I,” he says, grinding out his cigarette, “are playing for altogether different—and higher—stakes. On a considerably more public stage.”
I have to laugh at that.
“It’s getting more public all the time,” he says, coolly, shaking out a fresh cigarette.
“For you, maybe. A little.”
“What’s good for me,” he says, sighing, “is good for you.”
“And what’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
And that’s when he laughs. “Pretty much. But it was me that got you into Dante’s for free that night.”
“Which was such an effort for you, I’m sure.”
“Did I get what I wanted in return? I don’t remember ever seeing that write-up…”
“You know that wasn’t my fault.”
“Whichever. But it is both of us being spoken about. Elsewhere. Sometimes in the same breath.” That grin again. “You nearly had a heart attack when you stumbled over that one.”
“You exaggerate.”
“Perhaps. Nonetheless: you are, I think, afraid. Of what? Paraliterature is paraliterature.”
“It’s not that simple,” I say. “It’s hardly that simple.”
“It sounds to me like someone needs to remember the lesson of the Mark of Cain.”
“And emet, yes, yes. Thank you for showing me of the error of my ways.”
He smiles, a little—pleasantly—and nods appreciatively. “Emeth. But that was a good idea of yours.”
I frown. “I’d thought you were the one who came up with it.”
He looks away, down at his keyboard. Sucks in some smoke and blows it out. “You had a point in coming here? Aside from pestering me?”
“Ada,” I say.
“Or Ardor,” he says. “What about it?”
“Who gets it?”
“You? Or me?”
“Precisely.”
He waves a hand dismissively. “Go ahead and take it. My plate is pretty full at the moment.”
“Gee,” I say. “Thanks.” It isn’t as withering as I’d hoped.
“Just maybe don’t write anything about it until you’re sure you’ll finish it. This time.”
“You haven’t finished it yet, either.”
“Of course not,” he says. “And yet,” musingly, “we will think different things about it…”
“Will we?”
“If people remembered the same,” he says, “they would not be different people.”
“Think and dream are the same in French,” is what I say—I think—but I’m not sure, because one of us says, “Douceur,” and for a moment it’s almost like I’m the one sitting there, tie loose, almost but not coughing on a lungful of bitter nastiness that suffuses effortlessly into my thirsty blood, and I’m peering up at him, ratty sweater puckered by an old blob of translucent caulk, in dire need of a haircut. “Douceur,” I say, again, or not, and he shakes his head—“Silk Cut,” he says—and coughs once, wetly, into a curled-up fist, and the moment passes.
“Do you?” he says, suddenly serious. “Want me to stop?”
Well, no, I don’t say. That’s not what this is about, I don’t say. I just—I just— I just can’t find the words. (Which is the crux of the matter. Isn’t it?)
“That isn’t really feasible,” is what I end up saying, and I wince (inwardly) at my glaring lack of charity.
“All right, then,” he says. Stiffly.
So I turn to go. And that sonofabitch just goes right back to typing.
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