Operation Shylock

as I sat.

“Hey,” he said, laughing, “you don’t entirely trust me,” and came around to take the chair across the table.

An indication of how stunned I’d been out in the lobby — and had remained even off by myself in the bathroom, where I had somehow got round to believing that victory was achieved and he was about to run off, never to dare to return — was that only when we were sitting opposite each other did I notice that he was dressed identically to me: not similarly, identically. Same washed-out button-down, openneck Oxford blue shirt, same well-worn tan V-neck cashmere sweater, same cuffless khaki trousers, same gray Brooks Brothers herringbone sports jacket threadbare at the elbows — a perfect replica of the colorless uniform that I had long ago devised to simplify life’s sartorial problem and that I had probably recycled not even ten times since I’d been a penniless freshman instructor at the University of Chicago in the mid-fifties. I’d realized, while packing my suitcase for Israel, that I was just about ragged enough for my periodic overhaul — and so too, I saw, was he. There was a nub of tiny threadlets where the middle front button had come off his jacket — I noticed because for some time now I’d been exhibiting a similar nub of threadlets where the middle button had yet again vanished from my jacket. And with that, everything inexplicable became even more inexplicable, as though what we were missing were our navels.

“What do you make of Demjanjuk?” he asked.

Were we going to chat? About Demjanjuk no less?

“Don’t we have other, more pressing concerns, you and I? Don’t we have the prima facie case of identity appropriation to talk about, as outlined in point four by Professor Prosser?”

“But all that sort of pales, don’t you think, beside what you saw in that courtroom this morning?”

“How would you know what I saw this morning?”

“Because I saw you seeing it. I was in the balcony. Upstairs with the press and the television. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. Nobody can the first time. Is he or isn’t he, was he or wasn’t he? — the first time, that’s all that goes round in anyone’s head.”

“But if you’d spotted me from the balcony, what was all that emotion about back in the lobby? You already knew I was here.”

“You minimize your meaning, Philip. Still doing battle against being a personage. You don’t entirely take in who you are.”

“So you’re taking it in for me — is that the story?”

When, in response, he lowered his face — as though I’d impertinently raised a subject we’d already agreed to consider off bounds — I saw that his hair had seriously thinned out and was striated gray in a pattern closely mirroring my own. Indeed, all those differences between our features that had been so reassuringly glaring at first sight were dismayingly evaporating the more accustomed to his appearance I became. Penitentially tilted forward like that, his balding head looked astonishingly like mine.

I repeated my question. “Is that the story? Since I apparently don’t ‘take in’ what a personage I am, you have kindly taken it upon yourself to go about as this great personage for me?”

“Like to see a menu, Philip? Or would you like a drink?”

There was still no waiter anywhere, and it occurred to me that this dining room was not even open yet for business. I reminded myself then that the escape hatch of the “dream” was no longer available to me. Because I am sitting in a dining room where there is no food to be obtained; because across from me there sits a man who, I must admit, is nearly my duplicate in every way, down to the button missing from his jacket and the silver-gray filaments of hair, that he has just pointedly displayed to me; because, instead of adjusting manfully to the predicament and intuitively taking control, I am being pushed to within an inch of I don’t know what intemperate act by this stupidly evolving, unendurable farce, apparently all this only means that I am wide awake. What is being manufactured here is not a dream, however weightless and incorporeal life happens to feel at this moment and however alarmingly I may sense myself as a speck of being embodying nothing but its own speckness, a tiny existence even more repugnant than his.

“I’m talking to you,” I said.

“I know. Amazing. And I’m talking to you. And not just in my head. More amazing.”

“I meant I would like an answer from you. A serious answer.”

“Okay, I’ll answer seriously. I’ll be blunt, too. Your prestige has been a little wasted on you. There’s a lot you haven’t done with it that you could have done — a lot of good. That is not a criticism, just a statement of fact. It’s enough for you to write — God knows a writer like you doesn’t owe anyone any more than that. Of course not every writer is equipped to be a public figure.”

“So you’ve gone public for me.”

“A rather cynical way to put it, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes? What is the uncynical way?”

“Look, at bottom — and this is meant with no disrespect, but since bluntness is your style — at bottom you are only instrumental.”

I was looking at his glasses. It had taken this long for me to get round to the glasses, glasses framed in a narrow gold half-frame exactly like my own. … Meanwhile he had reached inside his jacket pocket and withdrawn a worn old billfold (yes, worn exactly like mine) and extracted from it an American passport that he handed across the table to me. The photograph was one taken of me some ten years ago. And the signature was my signature. Flipping through its pages, I saw that Philip Roth had been stamped in and out of half a dozen countries that I myself had never visited: Finland, West Germany, Sweden, Poland, Romania.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Passport office.”

“This happens to be me, you know.” I was pointing to the photograph.

“No,” he quietly replied. “It’s me. Before my cancer.”

“Tell me, did you think this all out beforehand or are you making the story up as you go along?”

“I’m terminally ill,” he replied, and so confusing was that remark that when he reached across for the passport, the strongest and best evidence I had of the fraud that he was perpetrating, I stupidly handed it back to him instead of keeping it and causing a fracas then and there. “Look,” he said, leaning intensely across the table in a way I recognized as an imitation of my own conversational style, “about the two of us and our connection is there really any more to say? Maybe the trouble is that you haven’t read enough Jung. Maybe it comes down to nothing more than that. You’re a Freudian, I’m a Jungian. Read Jung. He’ll help you. I began to study him when I first had to deal with you. He explained for me parallelisms that are unexplainable. You have the Freudian belief in the sovereign power of causality. Causeless events don’t exist in your universe. To you things that aren’t thinkable in intellectual terms aren’t worth thinking about. A lot of smart Jews are like that. Things that aren’t thinkable in intellectual terms don’t even exist. How can I exist, a duplicate of you? How can you exist, a duplicate of me? You and I defy causal explanation. Well, read Jung on ‘synchronicity.’ There are meaningful arrangements that defy causal explanation and they are happening all the time. We are a case of synchronicity, synchronistic phenomena. Read a little Jung, Philip, if only for your peace of mind. ‘The uncontrollability of real things’ — Carl Jung knows all about it. Read The Secret of the Golden Flower. It’ll open your eyes to a whole other world. You look stupefied — without a causal explanation you are lost. How on this planet can there be two men of the same age who happen not only to look alike but to bear the same name? All right, you need causality? I’ll give you causality. Forget about just you and me — there would have been another fifty little Jewish boys of our age growing up to look like us if it hadn’t been for certain tragic events that occurred in Europe between 1939 and 1945. And is it impossible that half a dozen of them might not have been Roths? Is our family name that rare? Is it impossible that a couple of those little Roths might not have been called after a grandfather Fayvel, like you, Philip, and like me? You, from your career perspective, may think it’s horrible that there are two of us and that you are not unique. From my Jewish perspective, I have to say I think it’s horrible that only two are left.”

“No, no, not horrible — actionable. It’s actionable that of the two of us left, one of us goes around impersonating the other. Had there been seven thousand of us left in the world, only one of us, you