“But the life he had lived! As we drove on, it gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach. See, he had lived a life right close to the one I had imagined living, there every winter in my little New York apartment. My life there—well, it was just sitting in boxes, one after the next, and watching people talk or talking myself. That was my life. But this Tom! He had gone and done what I wanted to do. And he didn’t know what the rest of his life was going to be like, laid out for him like the road in front of us. I realized that I loved my cross-country drives because I crossed country—that during the times when I wished that I could turn the car around in New Mexico and head back to New York, there to turn and come west again, and keep on like that, as if the Volvo were on a pendulum hanging from the North Pole—it was because I wanted to stay in the country, to be out in it. I began to feel the emptiness of my life, the emptiness I had felt when I looked in the shaving mirror in my apartment in New York, looking at the lines under my eyes and thinking I could have lived a different life, I could have made it better.
“I got to feeling so low that eventually I suggested to my double that maybe I was no more than a hallucination he was having. It seemed to make sense. He had made the strong choice, I the weak—didn’t it make sense that I was no more than a ghost come to haunt him, a vision of what would have happened if he had made the mistake of returning to New York?
“ ‘I don’t think so,’ he answered. ‘It’s likelier I’m a hallucination of yours, that you stopped and picked up along the way. You’d have to be a hell of a hallucination to ferry me all the way across New Mexico, after all. No, we’re both here all right.’ He punched me lightly in the arm, and the spot he hit got very warm.
“ ‘I guess we’re both here,’ I admitted. ‘But how?’
“ ‘There was too much of us for any one body to hold!’ he said. ‘That was why we had trouble sleeping.’
“ ‘I still get insomnia,’ I said. And I knew why—I had lived my life wrong, I had chosen to live in boxes.
“ ‘Me too,’ he said, surprising me. ‘Maybe from sleeping on the ground so much. But maybe from living such a life as mine.’ For a moment he looked as discouraged as I felt. He said, ‘I don’t feel like I’m doing anything real sometimes, ’cause no one else does. I’m against the grain, I guess. It can cut into your sleep all right.’
“So he had his troubles too. But they sounded like nothing compared to mine. He was healthier and happier than I, surely.
“The storm picked up and I put on the windshield wipers, adding their squeak to the hum of the engine and the hiss of the wet tires. Our headlights lit up gusts of rain, and on the other road trucks trailing long plumes of spray roared by, going east. We put Beethoven’s Third on the tape deck; the second movement was up, sounding like noises made by the storm. We sat and listened to it, and talked about when we were a kid. ‘Do you remember this?’ ‘Oh, yeah.’ ‘Do you remember that?’ ‘Oh man, I never wanted anyone else to find out about that.’ And so on. It was pretty friendly, but it wasn’t comfortable. We couldn’t talk about our different lives anymore, because there was something wrong there, a tension, a disagreement even though neither of us was satisfied.
“It was starting to rain harder, and the car was buffeted hard by wind. Very little was visible outside the cones of light from the headlights—the black mass of the earth, the black clouds above. The march from the second movement, music grander than you folks can imagine, poured out of the speakers, matching the storm stroke for stroke. And we talked and laughed, and we howled and pounded on the roof of the car, overwhelmed by all that was happening—because the two of us being there meant we were special, you see. It meant we were magical.
“But right in the middle of our howling the Volvo sputtered, at the top of another rise. I pressed on the gas, but the engine died. I coasted onto the shoulder and tried to start it. No luck. ‘Sounds like water in the distributor,’ my double said. ‘Didn’t you ever get that fixed?’
“I admitted I hadn’t. After some discussion we decided to try and dry it off. That wasn’t going to be easy, but it beat sitting in the car all night. We got out our ponchos, and luckily the rain diminished to a steady falling mist. By the time I got my poncho on, my companion had the hood up and was leaning over the engine. He had a small flashlight in one hand, and was pulling at the distributor with the other. I reached in and three Barnard hands went to work on it, taking the distributor cap off, pulling it apart, drying it, getting everything back together dry. My double ran to get a plastic bag while I hunched over the engine, feeling its warmth, my poncho extended like a cape. My double returned—we were working at emergency speed, you understand—and he leaned over the engine, and then all four of our hands were working on the distributor with uncanny coordination. When we were done clamping it down he dashed to the driver’s seat and started the engine. It caught and ran, and he revved it. We had fixed it! As I closed the hood my double got out of the car grinning. ‘All right!’ he cried, and slapped my hand, and suddenly he leaped up and spun in the air, howling out the vowel-y Navaho chant we had learned as a boy—and there I was spinning with him, swirling my poncho out like a Hopi dancing cape, screaming my lungs out. Oh it was a strange sight, the two of us dancing in front of that car, on that high ridge, hollering and spinning and stomping in puddles, and I felt—oh there isn’t the word for the way I felt at that moment, truly.
“The rain had stopped. On the horizon to the south little lines of lightning flashed from low clouds into the earth. We stood side by side and watched them, two or three every second. No thunder.
“ ‘My life feels like this,’ one of us said, but I wasn’t sure who. And my right arm was hot, where it touched his left arm. I looked at it—
“And saw our arms met to enter a single hand. We were becoming one again. But it was a left hand—his hand. Then I noticed our legs came down to the same boot, a right boot. My foot.
“On the forearm wavering between us I could make out the reddish tissue connecting our arms, like burn-scar tissue. And I could feel the hot pulling and plucking. We were melting together! Already we shared part of the upper arm, and soon we would be joined at the shoulder like Siamese twins, and I felt the same burning in my right leg, oh, our time was up! First arms and legs, then torso then heads!
“I looked in his face and saw my mirror image, twisted with horror. I thought, that’s what I look like, that’s who I am, our time is over. Our eyes met.
“ ‘Pull,’ he said.
“We pulled. He grabbed the fender with his right hand, and I stepped out with my left foot, trying for traction in the muddy gravel. I leaned out and pulled like I had never pulled before. That forearm stuck out between us like a claw. We gasped and grunted and pulled, and the scar tissue above the elbow burned, and stretched, and gave us back a little of our arms. It was as painful as if I held onto something and deliberately tried to pull my arm off. But it was working. We both had elbows of our own now.
“ ‘Hold on tight,’ I gasped, and dove for the road! Boom! Rip!—an instant of agony, and I crashed onto wet asphalt. I pushed myself up with both hands. My feet were both there, I shook my right hand violently, grabbed my right boot. I was whole again.
“I looked at my double. He was leaning against the car, holding his left forearm in his right hand, shaking. Seeing it I felt my own trembling. He was staring at me with a furious expression, and for a second I thought he would attack me. For a second I had a vision, and saw him leap on me and pummel me, fists sinking into me and never coming out, so that we struggled and bit and kicked and melded into each other with every blow, until we became a single figure hitting itself, prone on the gravel, jerking and twitching.