Other Worlds Than These

matched my racing heartbeat. Todd Cooper and Tommy McAfee stood behind a man kneeling on the bare boards with his wrists plasticuffed. Ernie Wright stood in front of him, studying an ID card.

“Tell me what you think, Lieutenant,” Tommy McAfee said, and jerked up the prisoner’s head by his hair.

“Is he on the list?”

“Take a real good look,” Tommy McAfee said. Both he and Todd Cooper were lit up, grinning. “His eyes, the colour of his hair… You don’t see it?”

“Show the lieutenant that ID,” Todd Cooper said.

Ernie Wright handed the card to me. He had a baffled, dazed expression, as if he’d run full-tilt into an invisible wall.

“You see it?” Tommy McAfee said, as I studied it. “You see it now?”

The name under the black and white photo card was Ernest C. Wright.

Tommy McAfee’s grin widened when he saw my reaction, “I reckon we found ourselves Ernie’s double.”

“Bullshit,” Ernie Wright said. “He’s nothing like me. He doesn’t even have the same date of birth.”

“Oh yeah? Then how come he just told us he was born in the same dipshit town as you? His parents have the same names as your parents, he has your name, and he has your eyes, too,” Tommy McAfee said, jerking the prisoner’s head up again.

It was true, the prisoner’s eyes were the same sharp blue as Ernie Wright’s, and his hair was the same dirty blond. But otherwise he didn’t look much like Ernie Wright at all. He was shy about fifty pounds, his face was leaner and paler, and he had a mustache.

“He’s your doppelganger, dude,” Dave Brahma said. “Your dark half.”

I asked if they’d found any explosives or weapons.

“There isn’t anything to find,” Ernie Wright said.

“Ain’t this sweet,” McAfee said. “Ernie is in love. In love with his own self.”

Brahma asked the prisoner why he had all these books.

“I’m a teaching assistant at Brooklyn University,” the man said.

His voice was lighter than Ernie Wright’s.

“Yeah? What do you teach?” McAfee said.

“American literature.”

Ernie Wright shook his head.

“If you’re a teacher, I guess you’re a party member,” McAfee said, grinning at me. “This guy is guilty of something, Lieutenant. I can smell it.”

“There were fifty million party members,” the man said. “Including everyone who worked in every university and high school. It was the law.”

“All these books,” McAfee said. “I bet we could find something subversive. What do you say, Lieutenant? Shall we take him in?”

I thought that this was more about the beef Tommy McAfee had with Ernie Wright than about uncovering a potential suspect. I pulled my knife, cut the plasticuffs that bound the man’s wrists, and looked straight into McAfee’s grin and asked him if he had a problem.

No one said anything. The man knelt on the floor, rubbing his wrists, carefully not making eye contact with anyone.

“Move on,” I said. “Everyone, right now.”

Ernie Wright was staring at the man. Then he shuddered, all over, like a man waking in the middle of a dream, and marched straight out. The fallen lamp wheeled his shadow over the bookcase and ceiling. As McAfee, Cooper and Brahma trooped after him, I remembered that I was still holding the man’s ID card.

“Sorry,” I said, and dropped the card in front of him and bolted from the apartment, thoroughly spooked by the situation.

The men ragged Ernie Wright about his alleged double or doppelganger on the ride back to Emerald City. Most of it was good-natured, but he turtled up, hunched in the back of the APC in a glowering silence that he broke only once, when Tommy McAfee told him that something must have gone badly wrong with his life, seeing as he’d ended up in the shit, while his doppelganger had a good job, an education…

“That’s the point,” Ernie Wright said. “That guy, he isn’t anything like me. So can your shit, McAfee. It ain’t right. It isn’t even funny.”

After a silence, Dave Brahma said in his doper’s drawl, “Know what they say about your doppelganger? That it’s just like you in every way, but it doesn’t have a soul. And it knows that, and it wants one real bad. So if you ever meet it, it’s like meeting a vampire hungry for, like, your exact blood type. One look, it can suck the soul right out of you. Turn you into what it was, make itself into you.”

“There’s something to that,” Leroy Moss said. He was at the wheel of the APC, inclining his head so that the men in the back could hear him over the roar of the engine. “Everyone agrees that there can be no miraculous multiplication of souls. If there are two people the same, one in the Real, one in some other history, there can be but the one soul. And you can’t divide a soul, either, so only one person can be in possession of it.”

“You ask me, all the munchkins lack souls,” Todd Cooper said. “They’re all ghosts.”

It was a common belief. The munchkins were spooks. Unreal. And because they were unreal, it didn’t matter what you did to them.

“That’s what doppelganger means,” Dave Brahma said. “It’s German for ghost double.”

“They say it’s okay to fuck your doppelganger,” Todd Cooper said. “Really. It’s like jacking off. Only, you know, double the fun.”

“Yeah, but the only problem is, you have to waste him right afterward,” Tommy McAfee said. “Otherwise, he’ll waste you.”

Most of the men laughed. Dave Brahma said, “It must have been pretty intense, Ernie, meeting your own ghost back there.”

Ernie Wright didn’t reply. I turned around and told the men to knock it off, but Tommy McAfee had to have the last word.

“The big question is, which is the ghost and which is the man? You think about that, Ernie.”

A couple of days later, I saw Ernie Wright sitting on one of the plastic chairs in the R&R area, barechested in shorts and sandals, reading the pamphlet we’d all been given before coming through the mirror, A Brief Guide to Other Histories. I asked him how he was doing, and he said he was doing fine.

“Pretty interesting reading you have there.”

He shrugged.

“You read it carefully, it’ll explain why that guy isn’t really your double.”

“I know it,” Ernie Wright said. “I knew it when I saw he was three years younger than me.”

“As I understand it, if he was born after the history of this sheaf split from the history of the Real, he has to be a completely different person,” I said. “Because all of his experiences are different from yours.”

I’d been reading A Brief Guide to Other Histories too, after that night.

“That’s pretty much what it says here,” Ernie Wright said. He was holding the pamphlet in one hand, his forefinger marking his place. “You are what you do, and what’s done to you. The sum of all your experiences. Him and me, we’ve had such different lives we aren’t even like brothers.”

“That’s how I understand it,” I said.

“Still,” he said, “I guess we had the same mother and father.”

I didn’t understand the significance of that remark then. It was hardly my fault. I had trouble remembering the names of all my men in my platoon, let alone the details of their lives before they’d joined up or been drafted. But even though I could hardly have been expected to remember that Ernie Wright’s mother had died in childbirth when he was just two years old, that he’d been brought up by a father who was a bitter and violent drunk, I still feel guilty about what happened. I still have the irrational idea that I should have known about Ernie Wright’s unhappy childhood, that I should have done something to prevent what happened next, instead of making some inane remark about being pleased to see that he was putting the encounter in perspective.

“It was weird,” he said, “but weird shit happens through the mirror. We just have to deal with it.”