I was in the laundromat the other afternoon, thinking laundry day thoughts. While I was unloading the dryer, I started to feel watched. There was someone standing next to my basket watching me unload my laundry. I tried to ignore her. It was the young red headed woman I noticed was looking at me on the way in.
"Wow," she said finally. "You have a lot of laundry there." I looked at the laundry and I looked at her, unsure of what to say. Half of it was my girlfriend's laundry. What exactly was she trying to say to me?
"You just did laundry a few days ago." She continued. I asked myself whether this was true, trying to remember when I last did laundry. Did I talk to her and completely forget? Was I fucked up and rambling at her? I couldn't remember seeing her before. It was an embarrassing situation.
"A few days ago?" I asked.
"Maybe it was last week," she said.
"Yeah, it was probably last week."
She was looking down at my basket. I was unloading some colorful woman's underwear. I also noticed a few pin striped uniform shirts in the basket: the shirts my company requires me to wear, and clean.
"I remember you unloading those shirts, and that I recognized them. You work for Meticulous Messenger. We use them where I work. I've seen you at my office before."
"Yeah, I do work for Meticulous," I said. "I'm an M & M." It wasn't a fact I was very happy about, just then.
How much longer would this stillborn conversation continue? I was getting the feeling that she might be a lonely southerner. Her manner of speaking seemed to be covering some kind of accent, as if she were making an effort to talk like people in these parks talk. If she was from the South, then she might not understand that it was nothing personal, but I just didn't feel like talking with her at the moment.
Then, for seemingly no reason at all, I had a radical change of heart. I realized that I might have been a little uptight and self-centered. It dawned on me that if I would just be a little more open for the moment, I might find her an interesting person to talk to. But I didn't end up hearing much about her.
"I am a bike messenger," I said. "Just before coming here to do my laundry, I had a long talk on the phone with my mother on the topic. She can't understand why I am a bike messenger. She says I should be doing more with my life, or at least want to do more. At the time, it sounded to me like she was saying that bike messengers were losers, and therefore I was one too. I tried to explain it to her. But she kept reaching back to the sixties to try to understand it from the perspective of being young. She told me: 'You're riding around the city, looking at things. But what you're really looking for is yourself. You're riding around in the city where you grew up, still looking for yourself."
I looked up at the young red headed woman. She looked uncertain. I thought perhaps she wasn't drawn into the story yet. She'd get over her surprise if I continued my story. I continued:
"My mother was right in a sense she didn't even understand. You see, she meant that I've been spending all this time 'looking for myself' as in asking myself who I am. But I've literally been looking for myself. I have seen myself, or someone who looks exactly like myself many times. I mean that quite literally, you understand." She nodded her head.
"There is an exact duplicate of myself around town. There could be more than one for all I know, because he looks exactly like me. Some times he picks up my deliveries before I get there. I almost got fired once because he picked up a package I was supposed to get and then he didn't deliver it! I told theboss I didn't pick up the package, but the guy in the mail room told him that it was me, that I signed the package out in the log book. He described me exactly. I've been seeing my duplicate at work and off work every once in a while for about four months now.
"My messenger number is 'one-o-nine' but other messengers call me 'ten-nine' because that's messenger code for 'could you repeat that please?' They see me come around and then leave, and then my duplicate comes by. They think they end up telling me everything twice. One day I lost my radio, and he found it. Now, he answers for me on the radio. He sounds like me too. He's trying to take over my life. He wants to take over my job, my room, my friendships, everything.
"Now you're telling me that I was here a few days ago," I said addressing her more directly for a moment, "but I don't remember. So I am wondering if you have simply mistaken me for someone else, which happened to me a lot before the duplicate. But that's not it, because you remember the shirts, and there's no one at work who looks like me. In a way I'm relieved that you see him too. But if that's true, it means that he has some work uniforms now. I have no idea how he could have got them. It could also mean that he's been using my shirts, and washing them too. He could be in and out of my house all the time now.
"That would be had, because I hear he's not a great person. The stories I hear about him make him sound petty and narrow minded. I would say that he's a bad person. Not that he's malicious, he's just someone I wouldn't really like to hang around with. That's why I'm trying to find him. I have to stop him. And let's face it; I have to do it myself, because nobody else would believe me.
"Anyway, to answer your question, last night I went to a party. It seemed I was getting the cold shoulder from most of the people I knew there. When I was riding my bike home something weird happened. I was riding alone down a dark, deserted industrial street. When I was only a little ways home I saw my duplicate sitting on my bike, under a street light, looking back at me. He had this contemptible, sneering grin on his face. Then he took off. I chased him almost ten blocks. I caught up with him on Seventh Street while he was crossing Bryant;. you know, right at the freeway off ramp. He ran the red light and I followed him. I got right up behind him and as I reached over to grab him..." I couldn't find the words to describe it to her.
"Then everything went quiet for a microsecond, and it seemed to me that I rode right into his body. That's the only way I can describe it."
"That's the last thing I remember about last night. This morning the phone woke me up and it was my mother. So you'll forgive me if I act a little confused."
I looked up at her. The expression on her face also confused me. I couldn't quite read it.
"Wow," she said noncommittally. "What a trip."
"Yeah."
We both stood there looking at one another for a long moment. Hopefully, wewere totally opaque to one another. I stuck my thumbs into my pants pockets, and looked down at my laundry basket. The fly on my pants was wide open.
The timer on the dryer behind me chirped. "Excuse me," she said smiling. "My drying's done." I excused myself and got out of her way.
I turned back to her while she was unloading the dryer and introduced myself. "My name's Mark, by the way."
"Mine's Mary."
"Well, I guess I'll see you around, Mary."
"See you later, Mark."