Shatterday
Everything that is appropriate to say about this final entry of the current grimoire has been said in the general introduction, “Mortal Dreads,” with the possible exception of this:
There is a curse over the door to my tomb. It says, Beware all ye who enter here—because herein lie the proofs of observation that we are all as one, living in the same skin, each of us condemned to handle the responsibility of our past, our memories, our destiny as elements in the great congeries of life. And if you find these dark dreams troubling, perhaps it is because they are your dreams.
It’s been nice visiting with you.
And when next the full moon rises, and the sounds from beyond the campfire are ominously semihuman, we will gather again and I’ll listen to your tales and then write them up in my way, and give them back to you.
Until that time.
Not much later, but later nonetheless, he thought back on the sequence of what had happened, and knew he had missed nothing. How it had gone, was this:
He had been abstracted, thinking about something else. It didn’t matter what. He had gone to the telephone in the restaurant, to call Jamie, to find out where the hell she was already, to find out why she’d kept him sitting in the bloody bar for thirty-five minutes. He had been thinking about something else, nothing deep, just woolgathering, and it wasn’t till the number was ringing that he realized he’d dialed his own apartment, He had done it other times, not often, but as many as anyone else, dialed a number by rote and not thought about it, and occasionally it was his own number, everyone does it (he thought later), everyone does it, it’s a simple mistake.
He was about to hang up, get back his dime and dial Jamie, when the receiver was lifted at the other end.
He answered.
Himself.
He recognized his own voice at once. But didn’t let it penetrate.
He had no little machine to take messages after the bleep, he had had his answering service temporarily disconnected (unsatisfactory service, they weren’t catching his calls on the third ring as he’d insisted), there was no one guesting at his apartment, nothing. He was not at home, he was here, in the restaurant, calling his apartment, and he answered.
“Hello?”
He waited a moment. Then said, “Who’s this?”
He answered, “Who’re you calling?”
“Hold it,” he said. “Who is this?”
His own voice, on the other end, getting annoyed, said, “Look, friend, what number do you want?”
“This is BEacon 3-6189, right?”
Warily: “Yeah… ?”
“Peter Novins’s apartment?”
There was silence for a moment, then: “That’s right.”
He listened to the sounds from the restaurant’s kitchen. “If this is Novins’s apartment, who’re you?”
On the other end, in his apartment, there was a deep breath. “This is Novins.”
He stood in the phone booth, in the restaurant, in the night, the receiver to his ear, and listened to his own voice. He had dialed his own number by mistake, dialed an empty apartment… and he had answered.,
Finally, he said, very tightly, “This is Novins.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at The High Tide, waiting for Jamie.”
Across the line, with a terrible softness, he heard himself asking, “Is that you?”
A surge of fear pulsed through him and he tried to get out of it with one last possibility. “If this is a gag… Freddy… is that you, man? Morrie? Art?”
Silence. Then, slowly, “I’m Novins. Honest to God.”
His mouth was dry. “I’m out here. You can’t be, I can’t be in the apartment.”
“Oh yeah? Well, I am.”
‘‘I’ll have to call you back.” Peter Novins hung up.
He went back to the bar and ordered a double Scotch, no ice, straight up, and threw it back in two swallows, letting it burn. He sat and stared at his hands, turning them over and over, studying them to make sure they were his own, not alien meat grafted onto his wrists when he was not looking.
Then he went back to the phone booth, closed the door and sat down, and dialed his own number. Very carefully.
It rang six times before he picked it up.
He knew why the voice on the other end had let it ring six times; he didn’t want to pick up the snake and hear his own voice coming at him.
“Hello?” His voice on the other end was barely controlled.
“It’s me,” he said, closing his eyes.
“Jesus God,” he murmured.
They sat there, in their separate places, without speaking. Then Novins said, “I’ll call you Jay.”
“That’s okay,” he answered from the other end. It was his middle name. He never used it, but it appeared on his insurance policy, his driver’s license and his social security card. Jay said, “Did Jamie get there?”
“No, she’s late again.”
Jay took a deep breath and said, “We’d better talk about this, man.”
“I suppose,” Novins answered. “Not that I really want to. You’re scaring the shit out of me.”
“How do you think I feel about it?”
“Probably the same way I feel about it.”
They thought about that for a long moment. Then Jay said, “Will we be feeling exactly the same way about things?”
Novins considered it, then said, “If you’re really me then I suppose so. We ought to try and test that.”
“You’re taking this a lot calmer than I am, it seems to me,” Jay said.
Novins was startled. “You really think so? I was just about to say I thought you were really terrific the way you’re handling all this. I think you’re much more together about it than I am. I’m really startled, I’ve got to tell you.”
“So how’ll we test it?” Jay asked.
Novins considered the problem, then said, “Why don’t we compare likes and dislikes. That’s a start. That sound okay to you?”
“It’s as good a place as any, I suppose. Who goes first?”
“It’s my dime,” Novins said, and for the first time he smiled. “I like, uh, well-done prime rib, end cut if I can get it, Yorkshire pudding, smoking a pipe, Max Emst’s paintings, Robert Altman films, William Goldman’s books, getting mail but not answering it, uh…”
He stopped. He had been selecting random items from memory, the ones that came to mind first. But as he had been speaking, he heard what he was saying, and it seemed stupid. “This isn’t going to work,” Novins said. “What the hell does it matter? Was there anything in that list you didn’t like?”
Jay sighed. “No, they’re all favorites. You’re right. If I like it, you’ll like it. This isn’t going to answer any questions.”
Novins said, “I don’t even know what the questions are!”
“That’s easy enough,” Jay said. “There’s only one question: which of us is me, and how does me get rid of him?”
A chill spread out from Novins’s shoulder blades and wrapped around his arms like a mantilla. “What’s that supposed to mean? Get rid of him? What the hell’s that?”
“Face it,” Jay said—and Novins heard a tone in the voice he recognized, the tone he used when he was about to become a tough negotiator—”we can’t both be Novins. One of us is going to get screwed.”