Epilogue: A Virtually True Story
“Something funny is happening,” I overheard my friend saying to his girlfriend, as they cooked a meal together.
Nothing overly elaborate mind, not too simple nor too complicated, just one of those typical meals couples cooked together during winteral nights indoors.
“Everything I like is out of fashion.” I pondered his words briefly – rolling them around my head - before letting them go, and returning to my crossword.
They returned to me the following afternoon, as I sipped my Styrofoam coffee, and awaited an already delayed bus. The sentence struck me as a little uncharacteristic. What precisely had he meant? Did he know himself? And should I even care?
As I waited for the bus, I kept an eye out in all directions. I was hiding at the time from my ex-landlady, who happened to live in the same neighbourhood as my friend.
The problem, precisely, was that I owed her 500 dollars, that is if you included a rough estimate for the repairs to a door I had damaged, having accidentally locked myself out of my bedroom. However, in truth the 500 valuation was, like most things in my life, merely a rough approximation. As much a contrivance, concept or pesky variable, as every other object and notion that circulated my loose mind on its daily rotation.
My mind drifted off of the topic of my landlady, onto something inconsequential until being abruptly stopped dead, by the arrival of my longed for bus.
I’d been first in the queue, but inevitably the last to embark. As I was dropping my single note and coin into the fair slot I glanced down the bus to view the other passengers (as was my habit) and caught site of a true beauty sat on the left hand side at the back. This town had no shortage of good looking women, but this one was a standout.
Almost as quickly I locked eyes with the much older woman sat next to her – My Landlady.
I panicked, instinctively looked away, and then looked at the bus driver. He looked annoyed, and motioned me on, as I realised I was holding up the bus.
I sat down near the front. Trying not to look guilty, even though she obviously couldn’t see my face from her position. Thinking about it now, I realised that she hadn’t looked at all surprised or angry herself. In fact, she had the countenance of a casual observer, a stranger.
As the journey progressed I did my best not to look at her, even out the corner of my eye. Instead I occupied myself with the strangers on the streets, the babbling children, and the overly made up girls hawking their ignorance into cutting edge cell phones.
Allowing myself to be consumed in a waste of life and technology so as to avoid the potential danger of the situation.
There were many rumours about my Landlady, and although I had no idea which were true, she was surely not one to let things go.
Seven minutes into the journey I couldn’t resist a covert peek at the woman’s features. And I was struck by two terrifying, undeniable facts simultaneously. The first was that this was not my landlady, and the second, even more disconcerting truth, was that she was somebody else.
As if on cue the bus shuddered a hydraulic halt and the doppelganger stood to disembark. Something – alien and unquantifiable - compelled me to follow. I didn’t think I had done anything quite so irrational before. Even when you factored in the incredible likeness, it remained a strange act.
We got off the bus in an area in which she looked out of place, being far too pretty and well dressed for the decaying surroundings. It looked like a part of town that was something once. Yes, it suddenly struck me, she was far more pretty than my landlady. How could I ever have related the two? They were clearly on completely different trajectories.
I followed her past an out of business pizza shop and a laundrette that threatened to go the same way. She turned right into an alley, and tentatively, excitedly, keeping my distance, I followed her.
A stray dog crossed the alley with liquid eyes of electric white. On the left hand side was a discarded whack a mole game – depicting the stupefied grins of various commander-in-chiefs. Old cartons of oranges were stacked high up one wall. The place smelt of copper and onions. The woman went into an open doorway (which had eluded me before) like a ghost passing through a tree.
I follow. Into darkness, into depth. I have no sense of the dimensions of the room, and the air is weightless. But I keep on walking with only the slightest sense of fear.
And within moments I find myself in a new space. A long, brightly lit corridor, approximately three metres wide. Straight, linear, uniform. The metal is other worldly, and every edge and every angle gleams with moon fire. It is lined, evenly and symmetrically, with glass cases holding bizarre and diverse exhibits. A lone figure stands at the end of the corridor. Grey in shade with no discernible facial features. Now the fear comes to me.
As I walk down the corridor voices whisper out from nowhere – a compound voice – I recognise some of the layers but can name none:
your brother’s madness, your brother’s madness…why did he destroy all your toys???
A jade cast of Shakespeare.
The taxidermist carcass of a Midwest serial killer, a genius with a taste for children.
An extinct and obscure invertebrate from the depths of the Amazon.
A carved dog skull.
How could you leave them to die???
A darkened deed from the halcyon days of frontier injustice.
A manuscript that no one will ever read.
A beguiling game of tiles.
The myth of love bottled in a phial and labelled with its chemical name.
That shack, in that shack too long, shared with killers and thieves from around the world, all those men and women with broken eyes, lost in the woods and calling it their home…
The figure at the end of the corridor takes on form, and I see that it is the beautiful doppelganger. Except she is even more striking than before and I find it hard to hold her gaze.
Time to stop your writing…a thousand musings walking the fine line of pretension…
The truth is I’d been ignoring these creeping voices in my head for months, telling myself that they would go away, but they just kept coming back. And back…
She steps aside to allow me an unobstructed view of the final display case, which links the two rows of display. A huge – uninterrupted and illuminated – floor to ceiling pane of glass.
But this case doesn’t hold the obscure, macabre or valuable. These items are more akin to the average flea market or car boot sale. Old toys, outdated video games and valueless books. Average things taken from average lives.
As that sense of foreboding creeps up my oesophagus, I ask her what it means.
“These are the things that your friend has lost.”
I reply with a puzzled gaze.
“The things that are out of fashion. The dead things.”
“What are they?”
“They are the reflections. But you are too broken to see them clearly.”
I turn to interrogate her further but she has vanished. Perhaps she had never been there to begin with.
When I turn back the glass has vanished and I have access to all the goods. They are suspended on a dozen glass shelves, which appear virtually invisible. And I notice for the first time a gap in the proceedings, the fourth shelf completely empty.
I look more closely at the dusty bric-a-brac and out of date apparel. Run my fingers over scrabble tiles and spinning tops, prod the keys of an old hand held arcade game.
Then my eyes fall upon an icon of my own history. A faded copy of Operation. The buzzer had broken and despite my good intentions had never been fixed. Had remained that way up until the last time I saw it in the summer of 1987. This thrift store detritus, this waste product of living, seems to be the very lacuna of my soul
I lift it from the shelf, wipe away the dust and begin to cry.