Prosopagnosia Blues

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own. Lucy saw it too. This was the third day.

He was almost me. That was the worst part. We had similarities, overlapping features and mannerisms. He moved when I moved, if I waved at him he waved right back in tandem, but he wasn’t me. Except he also was. He wasn’t my father (I looked like my mom), he wasn’t my brother or cousin (I was an only child and if I had any other relatives I’d never met them), no, he was a me from another world, like I had a twin separated at birth who’d lived an entire different life. Not a nice one either.

Our stats: My name was Billy, he was called William the Pleaser. I knew this about him without knowing how or why. I knew all kinds of things about him, more every time I saw the bastard, and even though there was no way I could’ve been I was certain of every one. We were the same height and weight-just under six feet and just under two-hundred pounds-but he was better distributed, fewer fat deposits, and, shit I don’t know, he was just bigger. Both technical Caucasians, he was so deep tan he could’ve been mistaken for Latin or Mediterranean, the extra melanin from all his work in streets and fields and quarries beneath the open sky, another thing I instantly knew without having any clue how, whereas my skin was sickly pale from my various health issues and all the time I spent indoors. We were forty-four; I looked younger but he looked *better*, the way some people do, aging into their bodies well past the time most of us hit our peak and just start diminishing. Compared to him I looked childish, like my evolution had been paused. Even his scars, and there were many slicing across his skin from the naval on up, somehow accentuated his handsome fearful symmetry.

My hair was dark brown, worn long and thinning at the top. His hair was cut short but still thick and so towhead blonde it was near white, you’d be sure a man his age couldn’t sport such a shade naturally and assume he bleached it but I knew he hadn’t. My eyes were same as my hair, a little yellow in the whites, while his were pale Arctic-glacier blue pools inside luminescent sun-on-fresh-snow sclera shot through with glaring red veins, roadmap atlas of some frozen wasteland Hell.

I’d been next to nowhere and had done little in my life, never strayed more than two hundred miles from the hospital I was born in and mostly worked the same bullshit job in the Tyson chicken factory since high school. William the Pleaser swam in the Irish sea, explored the Viet Cong tunnels at Cu Chi by torchlight, and claimed he’d “spoken to God on the mountain” but wouldn’t specify what they discussed. He had eaten fire and drank from the Ganges. He sold opium, fireworks, and guns.

He didn’t breathe like me. I was a nervous guy in the best of times and it got worse when I saw this familiar stranger staring back at me, believe, but no matter how rapid, how shallow my ins and outs came his chest-broader and deeper than mine-rose and fell regular as the mail. The stranger breathed slow, steady, and so damn deep.

I lived in North Carolina and first saw my double in winter, overcast outside, and the only thing behind me was a shower curtain. Every time I saw him there was a view of the greater world outside over his shoulder, a window or sliding glass door or just landscape with a wooden railing in the foreground, this last the view from a mirror on the outside wall of a porch. I knew this despite the fact there was no way I could, I’ve already told you about that right? Anyway his outside world was Texas, near the Mexico border, desert scrub drenched in voodoo zombie asylum twilight in mid-August. I couldn’t know the exact location of the view, could’ve been anywhere in the American southwest not to mention any number of other countries, and there was definitely no way I could know what time of year it was, deserts don’t change much season to season, but as I’ve said before I still did.

The first time I saw him was early morning as I was shaving, fresh out of the shower and wearing only a towel. The mirror was still steam-clouded, took me a few seconds to notice anything wrong. First tip wasn’t his face so much as what wasn’t on it-I'd lathered up the Barbasol from cheeks to neck yet my reflection was bone dry. I froze, Gilette five-blade halfway between jaw and hairline right by my ear. In the half second before I leaped back, screaming as I struck the tub and fell on my ass, ripping the shower curtain and the rod holding it down around me and striking the back of my head on the protruding soap dish, I didn’t get the chance to glean any real details, fixed on only two things: the face staring back at me wasn’t mine and its corresponding hand held not a supermarket-safe plastic-sheathed shaving tool but a gleaming straight razor, its brass handle painted barber pole red, white, and blue. Later, thinking back on the latter, I understood to him the colors didn’t represent their modern shave-and-a-haircut meaning but their older signifier: bloodletting. Trimming his whiskers wasn’t its primary use, it just happened to be handy for this task as well.

That first morning, and every time I saw him afterwards, William the Pleaser wore some manner of smile. A few times it was buried down so deep you could only detect the mirth in his eyes or the cock of his head, more often his lips curled some degree upwards...but most of the time he was grinning. “Grin like a shark” is an expression I’d heard plenty of times before he appeared, you probably have too, and you could call William’s grin sharklike but that didn’t quite fit. A shark’s grin, or a mongrel dog’s or a wolf’s, isn’t really a grin but the pulling back of lips to allow the now-exposed fangs and canines room to do their work, no emotion or even conscious intention attached. William the Pleaser’s grin was both, emotion and practical application.

Did I forget to mention the part about our teeth? Sorry. Mine were pretty regular-looking, a bit crooked as my parents couldn’t afford any orthodontics for me back in the day, but William the Pleaser sported a set of big’n’straight pearly whites most people would’ve needed braces, hours of surgery and rigorous dental hygiene to replicate. Of course, none of those could account for the length of said teeth. Or how sharp they were. The only way to describe them was to say they were too much of both.

I didn’t say anything about Him that first day. Told Lucy I’d screamed because I saw a spider. Normally I don’t like being laughed at but just then I counted it as a blessing because it bought me time. Hopefully to look in the mirror again and prove I’d just imagined my demonic self. The image had been so vivid, even in that fractional-second glance, I figured I must be going crazy. Assuming that other guy wasn’t real, that I hadn’t actually seen him. As that long long first day dragged by I decided I preferred insanity to whatever the opposite suggested.

That night I finally got the courage up to look in the mirror again. Half-courage, really, since the first mirror I looked in wasn’t the harsh fluorescent pimple-popping bathroom shaver but the floor-to-ceiling bedroom number Lucy and I used when we were going out to make sure we looked correct. Church or job interview or an evening on the town, whatever, my wife and I took our respective measures there. It had been my mother’s, she’d kept it right by the main entrance to my childhood home since she was always so concerned and fascinated by her appearance. After she died Lucy had raised mild protest about taking it to our place, half-joked she didn’t want such a clear vision of herself and if I had even the barest lick of sense I wouldn’t either, but I insisted without really knowing why and she’d demurred. That had been ten, maybe even twelve years before the morning I first saw William the Pleaser and the night I looked for him again hoping to see literally anything but his razorblade smile.

I didn’t see the sight I’d been hoping not to see. What I saw was much worse.

More detailed, more unwillingly illuminating. Comprehensive.

I saw all of him.

Although, in the two following days, more details I’d either missed or blocked out were revealed. I’ll get to them in due time. Assuming you can bear to hear. They say the scariest thing, from the shadows of the grinning great white in that Spielberg movie to Death Itself, is the unknown, and not like I’d thought much about such things up to then I more or less agreed and I bet you think so too. Well, brother, not then. Not for me, not with William the Pleaser. Might be easier for you, I guess, seeing as HE isn’t YOU. Meaning he’d scare you if you saw him but only up to a point. Lots of people are scary. But none of them, trust me, not a one, is as scary as you your ownself. He was, and is, ME. That, dear reader, is fucking terrifying.

Thing is, though, even if you believe me, even if you think you understand, you’re probably assuming that’s the top (or bottom, I dunno), that’s as bad as it gets. But, if you’re of a mind to stick, I’ll tell you why you’re wrong. Because seeing him, even in the greater increasing detail, wasn’t the worst.

The worst, or the beginning of the worst, was that third day I saw him.

Because that was when Lucy saw the William the Pleaser version of HERSELF in the mirror. That was new. I hadn’t really thought about it at the time, realized only later every time she looked into the mirror she took care to stand at such an angle she wasn’t reflected. Makes sense, I guess. Until that third day, when she didn’t. That was a lot, a lot, a lot worse. For me, for her, for everyone. Depending on when you hear this, probably for you too.

And it was only the beginning.

I never saw, or could comprehend, all the many differences between my Lucy and William the Pleaser’s version. I knew my wife as well as anyone can know another but she wasn’t me, right? I didn’t have the, well, I guess telepathic link to her double I had to mine.

But I knew His version was called Lucinda. Because HE knew it.

Like the other version of me, Lucinda was very different from Lucy but still the same. Big difference between my double and my wife’s: hers wasn’t grinning. Or smiling. Her mirror-image loomed out of the looking glass and looked angry. She looked pissed off. Lucinda looked fucking furious.

I won’t go down the list of their different similarities, their shared physical diversions, like I did with William the Pleaser and myself. Too many to name and too easy to get confused. But there was one big one worth mentioning because it was like the opposite of the dynamic between me and my reflected refraction. Pardon the pun, or don’t seeing as I don’t give a shit either way, but it was another sort of mirror image.

My Lucy was beautiful, and that’s not just the biased opinion of a guy who knew he would’ve been lucky to have anyone who’d let him put a ring on it, as it were, nope, she was gorgeous. Even into the middle-age decline we all go through she was a double-take-on-the-street looker, and when she was 22 she could drop jaws from Hemingford Home to Hollywood. Even now I’m still not totally sure why she went on so much as a single date with me let alone accompany me to the altar, all I ever did was remind myself often as I could that, in this one single regard, I was a lottery winning-level lucky son of a bitch. Her skin was white as bone, Caucasoid kabuki, and her black as a bucket of tar hair sparkled in sun and fluorescent light alike.

Lucinda’s hair was dishwater blonde, unlike her man you knew she dyed it and did a crappy job besides. Her eyes were dull and cloudy, her features dowdy and heavy and sagging like a bulldog, and even at a glance you knew Lucinda outweighed Lucy by twenty pounds at least. Their skin went opposing shades as well but Lucinda’s color was all flush and sick gin blossom, this was a woman who had lived HARD. Hard and fucking mean for every fucking second.

Here’s the kicker: Lucy dressed casual, just like me, like she had fuck all to dress up for, seeing as she rarely did. That third morning, when Lucinda first appeared, she was decked out in old faded jeans and a shapeless round-the-house smock top, one of several to be found in her half of our dresser. Lucinda wore a business suit, an off-white number that looked, somehow, both expensive and trashy, ill-fitting and over-used. It damn near screamed lack of taste, just cause neither Lucy or myself could afford them finer threads didn’t mean we didn’t know at least a little bit about fashion, and suggested nothing so much as the wardrobe choice of someone who found themselves with a suddenly inflated clothes budget and made every wrong choice imaginable with it.

On Lucinda’s too-wide, off-white lapels were four pins, two on each side, clearly the only things on her with any clear thought or intention behind them, and they spoke volumes my wife and I almost couldn’t bear to consider.

One was the stars and stripes of the USA, and diagonally across from it were the Stars and Bars of the once and, the implication was clear, future Confederate States of America.

Beneath the rebel flag from the land of cotton was a red circle with big and bold white letters: Make America Great Again.

Above the flag of my country, the one we were supposed to honor and protect, the one my daddy, grandaddy, and two uncles I’d never met supposedly died for in various foreign conflicts, was the fourth pin. Blue stripe circling a red field displaying that eagle we’re all so familiar with from the movies and TV and, of course, our money. Written in the same shade of gold as the eagle, were the words Representative, and United, and States...and Congress.

(Author’s note: this is the first of several first-person interludes in a magical realism novel I’m writing, think The Satanic Verses in Trump’s America. The sinister-looking disco ball in this story's photo image will come into play later, to my regret I couldn't fit it in here but it will make a significant appearance later on. Any similarity between Lucinda and certain members of the United States House of Representatives, specifically any from the state of Georgia, is entirely coincidental. William the Pleaser has no particular inspiration beyond my nightmares.)