The sight of Nathan’s doppelganger forced all the blood to rush out of Nathan’s legs toward the safety of his stilled heart. Spying one’s double is a frightful thing.
Nathan found his double in the lobby of the Elephant Car Wash on Hudson. This was one of those car washes that provides a full service experience while customers wait in a lobby thumbing outdated magazines and drinking tepid coffee, waiting to see their car float by. Nathan was sitting there anticipating his Beamer to cruise by under the huge, spinning brush.
The car was momentarily forgotten as he watched himself approach. Nathan could see that although this man looked almost exactly like himself, the similarity was not quite flawless. The man’s skin was pale, almost yellow, like he had jaundice, and the blue under his eyes betrayed a parade of restless nights. He was also much thinner, by about thirty pounds Nathan guessed, and wore a leather jacket with a tear in the seam of the left sleeve. Everything else was him though, the same brown eyes with flakes of gold, the premature grey above each ear, the distinctive dimple in the left cheek.
“Feel strange?” Nathan’s double asked. He did not appear surprised by this odd meeting and sat down next to Nathan as if sitting with a brother. “I remember how I felt when I first saw you - oh shit!”
The Beamer was doused with soapy water whose ph level had been precisely adjusted to most effectively remove grime accumulated from the city’s streets.
“I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met,” Nathan answered looking up from the lobby’s dog-eared edition of Forbes. Nathan mused that perhaps they were only similar in appearance, yet were still different in all others ways. In other words, Nathan struggled to believe they were separate persons. Nathan’s ghostly twin chuckled.
Brushes whirled like dervishes, flicking dirt to the floor and down the drain.
“I guess we haven’t. My name’s Nathan. It’s a pleasure to meet you finally.” The doppelganger thrust out a hand in greeting. Nathan only looked at it, shocked by the boniness, the wart at the base of the thumb, the crud under the fingernails. This was some joke schemed by his co-workers back at Brassman Bags, Nathan thought. Someone is watching with a camera somewhere. In a few minutes, his boss will leap from behind a potted palm. The video will be played to help unwind after the next team-building retreat. He is, what was the word . . . punked?
A huge spinning drum of a brush ran over the hood of the Beamer then up over the windshield, removing the splattered remains of insects accumulated along the drive out of the city to Nathan’s lake house.
“Where did they find you? It’s incredible,” Nathan said, moving to touch his double’s face, thinking it to be some sort of Hollywood make-up job. The double slapped Nathan’s hand away.
“Don’t be touching the face. This isn’t some joke, someone fucking with your head and having a laugh at your expense. I even know what you’re thinking.”
“Somehow you know my name, which I suppose wouldn’t be too hard to find out,” Nathan thought aloud.
“I knew to find us here. You’re such a sucker for ritual. You come the first Thursday of each month to get your car washed. There it goes by now.”
Indeed, it was rolling by the window under a curtain of undulating blue strips hanging from the ceiling, soap suds flowing down.
“You’ve been following me?”
“I’m a bit more qualified than the average fucking stalker. I am you. Don’t you think I have sort of right to see how I live?”
“You’re talking in riddles, and I’m going,” Nathan said, slamming the Forbes to the coffee table and rising.
“I read about us in Fortune about eight months ago. You have the article framed on the wall of your office. You made the rag’s list of top ten masters of the universe on Wall Street. Remember, ‘Soaring in the nose-bleed section of risk,’ ‘Master of the deriverse,’ the ‘Genius who structured the chocolate derivative?” What the fuck is a chocolate derivative anyway? So few analysts understand it that you’ve single-handedly led your bank to corner the fucking market. You know how I came across that article? Huh?”
“No.” Nathan wanted to flee the unstable man who knew too much.
“It was in the public library. I was pulling tricks in the bathroom for some brown. When things got slow, I’d sit in the stacks with all the magazine back issues, and there I was on the cover smiling, holding a big chocolate bar, but yet I didn’t remember all this stuff the magazine said I knew how to do. And where was all this fucking green I was making?”
“Listen, I think you’ve just latched onto an idea . . . maybe got yourself some back alley plastic surgery to make the fantasy a bit more real for you . . . but it’s not.”
Nozzles shot streams of warm liquid wax at the Beamer.
“That’s where we’re wrong Nathan. This isn’t a fantasy or dream at all. You remember when you were finally adopted?” the ghostly twin asked.
Nathan thought back to his ninth year. He had run away for two days and slept in a tent in a nearby park. The cops had found him, taken him home to a scared and angry pair of foster parents. The next day Nathan mowed the lawn and begged his foster parents not to call social services. He was adopted three months later.
“Yeah, I see you remembering back. Here’s the kick Nathan - you made all the right decisions. You mowed the lawn, behaved yourself, smiled when the situation called for it. Look what happened Nate? I didn’t mow that lawn, behave myself, smile when a smile would have helped me. I went another way. I wasn’t adopted. I made some bad decisions, a whole life of bad decisions to be honest - I’ve got nothing to hide. I’ve been in jail, addicted to everything from oxy to heroin, been stabbed within an inch of losing my life. You’re a smart guy, you know what a decision tree is right? We’re both sitting under it ‘cept you are on the sunny side, and I’m on the dark.”
Outside, one pair of minimum wage workers ran shammies along the Beamer’s fenders, while another pair vacuumed the carpets and leather seats inside. All these services were part of a Wash Deluxe.
“How’s the wife? Is she a good piece of ass still? The kid not getting on your nerves?”
“Listen, you can try to scare me as much as you want, but leave my family alone.”
“Nathan, you don’t see yet. They are my family also. I’ve structured a new deal. I’m getting all my bad decisions washed away today. There aren’t many feeling in the world like starting new. This has been an eye-opening experience getting to meet me. Now, if you will excuse us, our ride is waiting now, and we’ve got to design the next cutting-edge strawberry derivative.”
Nathan walked out the swinging door. Outside, he took his keys from the cleaners. The last specks of detritus, picked up from the floor of the Brassman Bags employee parking garage by Nathan’s Italian leather wingtips, were sucked up into vacuum cleaners. Nathan dropped a ten in the tip box and drove off, leaving something of a dusty shell behind.