Category Archives: Short Stories

Maggie’s expression melted into concern. “Is something wrong?”

What was I supposed to do? Tell her I’d been wondering for the past 30 hours whether I’m insane? Tell her that the revelation of a hot lunch date only confirmed that I’m not? And that the alternative to insanity is actually more disturbing? “No, I’m fine. How about Chinese food?”

I think she could tell I was lying. But she put on a happy front. “Ooh, I was hoping you’d say that.”

I grabbed my keys. “The usual?”

“Yes, please.”

I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

When I was sixteen, I had a brief stint working at a Chinese restaurant in the mall – The General’s Chicken. (They billed themselves as the Kentucky Fried Chicken alternative, and their logo was of a Colonel Sanders look-alike with squinty eyes. Not very PC, but, hey, this was northern Illinois we’re talking about.) One day, the manager put me in a chicken costume and had me flap my wings as I stood just outside the food court. I only did it once, but it was for a six-hour shift on a Saturday, and now every time I go to a Chinese restaurant and smell the scents of scalding sesame oil and hosein sauce wafting through the air, I’m back in that bird suit, flapping my heavy wings, and smelling my own breath.

Tonight was no exception. Just outside the front door, I recalled the ridicule I’d been forced to withstand. And then someone hit me in side of my head. I fell to the ground, my ears ringing.

Through my star-filled gaze, I saw Eric Two looking down at me. “Let me guess,” he said. “Szechwan chicken.”

I held my ear and moved my jaw a few times. “Kung Pao,” I said.

“Let’s go around back. We don’t want anyone breaking up the fight.”

I didn’t have the first clue on how to fight somebody. He did. When I charged at him, he threw me against the dumpster. It hurt, but not as bad as I made it sound. “Ow, Jesus! My arm!”

He smiled.

“I think you broke it,” I said.

He took a step closer. “Told you I was good.” He was holding a knife.

I remained cowering against the dumpster like a hurt animal. I noticed a pair of chopsticks on the ground.

“Your girlfriend thinks I’m pretty good, too.”

*Just a warning: It gets pretty Rated R from here on out.*

Maggie asked if I wanted to play snooker that night, which is our code for you-know-what. Since it’s my policy to never say no, I said yes. “Let’s do it in the bathroom,” she said, which we both like on account of the two mirrors on opposing walls. You can see an infinite array of pornographic parallel universes. It’s trippy.

But as anyone might anticipate, given my particular situation that day, the mirror was problematic. “Is something wrong?” Maggie asked. “You’re not acting like yourself.” I had to laugh at that one, even as I put my clothes back on. The shame.

She insisted we meet for lunch the next day; she also insisted that I was suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (also known as SAD, which I find funny – imagine going to a shrink and having him tell you you have sad. Thanks, asshole. But it’s sadness).

Turns out Jasper was still mad at me, though. He put me in the West Hills and then had me riding up to St. John’s and down to Sellwood – obscure locations I had never ridden to, and which required lots of map-reading. I called Maggie, told her I didn’t know if I’d be able to make it. She was nice. “No problem. I’ll be at home. If you make it, you make it. If you don’t, you don’t.”

There are some perks to having your girlfriend believe you’re sick.

I saw Eric Two everywhere I went. Hovering amongst the window displays of the boutiques on 23rd, in the windshields of minivans parked curbside in the West Hills, in the cyclists I passed as I cut through Ladd’s Addition. Nothing materialized, though. And the fact that he wasn’t where I thought he might be but he might be anywhere I thought he wasn’t – it screws with you, you know? Your brain begins to process everything in this convoluted syntax.

I suppose death is always right around the corner. But murder isn’t. And when your murderer is yourself, well, you don’t exactly feel safe.

Still, I didn’t believe it would all come to pass. Not really.

But then I got home.

Maggie was aglow when I walked through the door. “Hey. How was your afternoon?” she said. It was a comfort to see her smiling face.

She jumped up and kissed me. “You’re in a good mood,” I said.

“Well, yeah. I had a great lunch.” She winked and then kissed me again – a dramatic smooch on the cheek with a “muh” to finish it off.

I held her an arm’s length away and stared into her eyes. I knew then that I could kill him. I was capable.

When you’re a kid, adults tell you you can be anything when you grow up – the president, an astronaut – you name it. “Even an ornithologist?” I’d ask them. And they’d say yes, though they thought it was strange, which you could tell by the way they’d raise their eyebrows and pause too long before replying, “Sure, you can be an ornithologist.”

Except they’d also chuckle a little. So you’d start to wonder if you really wanted to be an ornithologist; you’d look for signs that people who study birds are dumb or silly or have less status. (Not that you knew what status was, but you could see how janitors were treated.) And then you’d start to believe wholeheartedly in the utter stupidity of studying birds for a living. Dad would ask you one day, didn’t you want to be an ornithologist? And you’d kick the ground and say “naw.”

But then one June on a trip with your parents to see Grandma in Iowa, you’d pull over at a rest stop near Des Moines and let the dog go running in the unusually large pet exercise area and you’d see a bird limping and dragging its wing until your dog chased it and it flew away; Dad would explain to you that it was a killdeer and that it was faking the broken wing. And just like that, you’re in love again.

If you’re me, though, what happens next is you wake up after your 21st birthday and you have a hangover and you think to yourself, shit, if I’m going to be a fill-in-the-blank (president, ornithologist), I’ve gotta get crackin’. You might even make some lists. (1. Go back to college. 2. No more weed.) But your buddies show up around 2:00 and you sit around playing Super Mario Brothers for an hour and then you realize you haven’t eaten anything, so you go get a Donor Kebab and pretty soon it’s Monday, and then pretty soon it’s three years later and you’re twenty four and Maggie asks if you want to move to Portland.

I didn’t tell Maggie about Eric Two.

My delivery to the glass building was 30 minutes late, which meant I had to forfeit $15 per the 50-cent-per-minute fee reduction policy for late deliveries. I also had to face the wrath of Big Jasper, the trucker-cum-bike-messenger who ran Magpie Messengers. He assigned me to Beaverton for the rest of the afternoon, which had me running some ridiculously hilly routes to locations too far away to make hiring a bike messenger practical.

The long rides gave me plenty of opportunity to ponder whether to tell Maggie about the other me. But the farther I got from downtown, the less I trusted my senses. You ever hear those stories about little kids forgetting what their dead mothers look like? That was how I was beginning to think of Eric Two – like a dream deferred to the point that I questioned its existence.

So I didn’t tell Maggie.

Did he really, after all, look exactly like me?

For the second time, I was tempted to walk away.

“We both have 36 hours to live; we’re like ticking time bombs. And the only way to diffuse the bomb is to kill the other guy.”

“Kill? As in murder?”

“Well, I don’t think of it as murder. But yeah, that’s basically what it is.”

“So the next time you see me, you’re going to try to kill me?”

“I probably will kill you. I’m pretty good, actually.” He was clenching his jaw.

“Why aren’t you killing me now?”

“Oh, that’s right. Thanks for reminding me. You’re not allowed to do anything during the first meeting.”

I laughed. “You’re messing with me, right?”

“No.”

“Who makes up these rules?”

“Um, I’ve never really asked.”

“So let me get this straight. You’ve met other people who look exactly like us? And you’ve killed them? And you’ve never stopped to wonder why?”

“Dude. After the first one, you just kind of know it’s right. I wish you could experience it.”

“But I’m not going to because I don’t stand a chance against you?”

“Correct.” Now he was smiling.

I was sure now that he was joking with me, so I humored the bastard. “Alright, well, do you have any tips?”

He stood up. “Do you get queasy at the sight of blood?”

Boy, do I ever. TV surgery, gangster films, and Animal Planet have all been known to send me into a whimpering fetal position. “Yes, very much so.”

“Get over that.” He walked through the crowd of pigeons like he was Clint Eastwood or something. “Oh, by the way,” he added, “no guns.”

“Why not?”

“Too easy.” And with that, he turned the corner, leaving me with the increasingly courageous birds who, I discovered, were eyeing a half-eaten sandwich that had been discarded below the bench I was sitting on. And here I was beginning to think I was the bird whisperer or something.

We walked through alleys, past dumpsters reeking of stale beer, under fire escapes and a web of telephone wires. Pigeons cooed overhead. Rats scuttled through the shadows; one tipped over a glass. I was tempted to turn and run. Instead I made conversation. “So, what do you do?”

“I trade futures on the S & P 500.”

“Really?”

“Naw. I tend bar at a nightclub.”

“Oh.”

“You know what hot chicks are willing to do at four a.m. when they’re drunk and stoned?”

I thought maybe it was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer. We emerged from the alley onto an empty street, full of store fronts with “For Lease” signs displayed in the windows, no other people in sight. He sat on a bus stop bench.

The city was still pretty new to me. I had followed my girlfriend Maggie when she said, “Let’s move to Portland” since I trusted her and I had nothing to lose. But I didn’t feel as comfortable with this other me. “Um, where are we?”

He ignored my question and countered with one of his own. “So what’s your name?”

“Eric.” I was starting to doubt myself. As, I suppose, I should have. If you met a guy and followed him to some abandoned street, I’d be inclined to call you a dumb ass. “What about you?”

He nodded. “Eric.”

“No kidding?”

He didn’t answer. He said, “Well, so I’m your first, which means I have to explain.” A pigeon ambled toward us on the sidewalk; he picked up a pebble and threw it at the bird.

I noticed several other pigeons strutting toward us, and a smattering of sparrows on a telephone wire. I notice birds; it’s “˜cause I wanted to be an ornithologist once.

“Within 36 hours, we’ll meet again. It will seem to be by chance. But it’s guaranteed to happen. We don’t have to arrange a meeting or anything. It will happen. Understand?”

The concept didn’t make much sense, but the words did, so I said, “Got it.”

“When we do meet again, we’re going to fight.”

I examined him closely, wondering if he clenched his jaw like I did when I was trying not to laugh.

But his face was sincere. A mixture of envy and pity, maybe? It was like the expression I saw on Maggie’s face just last week when we spotted a young mother with twin toddler boys, both of whom seemed like a handful. He sighed. “Because if we don’t, then we’ll both die.” I hadn’t asked the question, but he’d answered it.