“Yes.” His certainty was off-putting. It seemed almost out-of-character.

“Don’t you every wonder why?”

“I’m a philosophy major. That’s all I do.”

I chuckled.

“Look, it’s simple. There’s a switch on the wall. You turn it on, you might die. You do nothing, you won’t die. What do you do?”

I had to think about it for a second, but yeah, the way he phrased it, it was obvious. You do nothing. “Point taken. But still, you never get curious? After years of not turning the switch on?”

“Look, I’ll tell you a quick story.” He folded his blade back into the handle. “The first college class of my life, the professor came out with a small black box with a question mark painted on it. He set it down in front of the lecture hall and asked us what we thought was in it. People took all sorts of guesses and then one kid finally raised his hand and said, “˜the answer.’ “˜Yes!’ the professor shouted, and he went on to give a basic definition of philosophy as the “˜history of human questing after answers.’

“Well, every week, he brought that box back and used it to make some new point about the kinds of questions we ask or about the underlying cultural assumptions we make or about what it means for something to exist, right? He never ran out of lessons based on the box. I mean, this guy was a really good professor. You went to class just to hear what he’d say about that damned box.

“And then, on the last day of the semester, he asked us all if we wanted to know what was in the box. Everyone shouted yes, of course. And then he asked, “˜Shall I open the box?’ And again, everyone shouted yes. We were like crazed children, poised on the edges of our chairs. But then that one kid – the one who had raised his hand on the first day of class – he raised his hand again and said, “˜No, don’t open it.’ And everyone went nuts. They were yelling at him and calling him crazy. But the professor quieted us all down and said, “˜Think about this. Think about it for a few minutes. And if your answer’s no, you may leave. I’ll see you on the day of the final. I’ll be back in ten.’

“And with that, he walked out of the room, and we all sat there, dumbstruck. Minutes ticked by; people were kind of whispering to each other. And then one by one, people started leaving. They started filing out the back door. And I mean, everybody. After ten minutes, everybody had left. Except me.

“When the professor came back – it had been more like 20 minutes, actually – I was the only one left. And he asked again, “˜Shall I open the box?’ And I went down to the front of the lecture hall and said, “˜Yes.’

“So he unlocked it -it had been locked, of course – and he opened it up. But I didn’t look inside. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Cuz it’s more fun not knowing.” He flipped his knife open and came at me.

I glanced from Jake to Petra and back. Jake wasn’t even looking at me. He was locked in a murderous stare with Petra. It was clear who he was targeting first. I wondered if I should go for Jake, take advantage of his being distracted, or go after Petra, who would be outnumbered.

As usual, my indecision decided for me. Petra lunged at Jake, slicing skillfully with a backhanded stroke that brushed Jake’s lower lip and chin. Jake dropped to the ground and swung his leg at Petra, who jumped and did this sort of barrel roll move. It was pretty sweet, actually. But as soon as he landed, I kicked him hard, right in the ankle.

He fell toward me, swinging his knife-hand in my general direction. His wrist slammed on the rim of the dumpster, sending the blade flying from his grip. He screamed. The knife clunked against the inside wall of the dumpster.

I tried to jump over him, thinking that it would be better not to have my back to Jake. But Petra caught my foot mid-air, and I fell on top of him. He flipped me onto my back, straddled me, and squeezed the tendons in my wrist, causing my grip on the switchblade to falter. I couldn’t hold on. So I kneed him in the crotch.

He gasped. I saw Jake stand up and raise his knife in the air. I kneed Petra again, pushed him off me, and scrambled to get out of the path of Jake’s knife, which met with Petra’s shoulder.

Now Jake was on top of Petra, who was madly swinging his limbs in the air. Jake got a hold of Petra’s right arm; I grabbed the other and held it to the ground.

Jake plunged the knife into Petra’s neck. With flecks of blood flying through the air, Jake and I locked eyes. “Thanks,” he said.

“No problem.”

Petra began screaming – a gargled, dying scream that’s never pleasant to hear, so I covered his mouth. Didn’t want some vegan hippie coming out from the co-op’s back door to find us.

“I always forget how good that feels,” Jake said. We stood and faced each other. Round two.

“Do we really have to do this?” I asked.

He was sitting on a bench. When he saw me, he put his head in his hands.

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “This is our second meeting?”

He sighed. “This is not good.” Then he stood up, grabbed my arm, and walked me away from the entrance of the store. I dropped the box of Not Dogs, but when I went to pick them up, he yanked at my arm. “Did you see Julie?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Julie. She just went in the store. Did you see her?” He continued leading me around to the back of the co-op. We stopped at the dumpster. (It’s always a dumpster.)

“Julie’s here?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Shit.”

“Yes. Shit.”

“Well, what should we do?” I asked.

He pulled a knife from his pocket and flipped it open. “We don’t have a lot of options.”

I checked my pocket. The switchblade was still there.

“Listen, man, it was nice meeting you,” he said.

“Likewise.” I flicked the switch of my knife. It wouldn’t open. I shook it a couple times and tried the switch again.

“Oh shit. Did I give you the broken one? I didn’t mean to.” He stepped toward me. I jumped, ready to use my fists. “Here. Let me see it.” He closed his own knife and put it back in his pocket. I tossed mine to him.

He jimmied the switch a little and the blade flipped open. Just as he was passing it back, I heard footsteps behind me. I turned around, and three of us simultaneously shouted, “Fuck me.”

The third was standing there, mouth agape, reflecting the expression on my own face.

“So there was a third,” Jake whispered.

The third hung his head. “I saw the two of you and I ran. I thought I could avoid it.” He had a hint of an accent I couldn’t quite place.

“There is no escape,” Jake said.

“I know.” The third offered me his hand. I shook it. “I thought that maybe if you didn’t see me, I could avoid the whole thing. I’m Petra.”

“But we did see you,” I said.

“Yeah. I know that now.”

Jake shook Petra’s hand. “Crazy name, Petra.”

We stood there in that awkward triangle for some silent seconds until Jake spoke up. “Listen, do you think we can get started? My girlfriend’s in the co-op.”

“Is she hot?” Petra asked. Jake glared at him, but Petra just winked back.

We readied our knives; Petra’s was holstered to his shin. He had this Euro-cowboy look going: tight, metrosexual pants; black boots. His clothes alone almost made me want to kill him.

I was limping when I walked through the front door of my apartment. Maggie was on the couch, crocheting an afghan for a friend of ours who was pregnant. She noticed immediately. “What happened?”

I plopped down next to her, relieved to be off my feet. “I met this dude who convinced me to skip class and drive with him to Mt. Hood and go sledding.”

A smile stretched across her face. “Nice one. And you collided with a tree?”

“More or less.”

She had her glasses on, and she was wearing a winter hat with her hair down. She was so cute, sitting there wrapped in a blanket. “Hard day at class?”

“Hard day at life,” I wanted to say. My right leg hurt, I had a massive headache, and I was facing the promise of an unpleasant fight for my life tomorrow. What did I care about class? “What’s for dinner?”

“Not Dogs.” Maggie had recently decided to go vegetarian, and she was slowly taking me with her. It occurred to me this could be my last meal. “You were gonna pick them up, remember?”

Shit.

There’s this co-op near our apartment that sells all things organic and natural. How Not Dogs are considered natural is beyond me, but at least the name is accurate. They’re definitely not meat. They’re disgusting is what they are.

I truly understand the whole vegetarian impulse – the reluctance to eat something that was once sentient. Maggie has some good arguments. “If you’re not willing to eat a cat or a dog, then why are you willing to eat a pig?” she says.

I get it. But if meat is a travesty, imitation meat is a total perversion. It’s rubbery, dry, and not-of-this-earth.

Maggie was right, though; I was supposed to pick up the Not Dogs. So I hobbled out of our apartment down to the co-op. (Harmony and Balance Co-op, to be precise. Please.) I glanced past the fake cheese, the fake breakfast sausage, and finally found the fake hot dogs. Then I took them to the fake cashier – some white guy with dreadlocks – and got the hell out.

The next perversion was waiting for me outside. It was Jake.

You don’t get used to seeing alternate versions of yourself. Ever. It’s always strange. It’s always a little jarring. It always makes you question the very fabric of reality. But you come to a certain understanding that it will happen. And you resign yourself to it like people resign themselves to living in an apartment that faces a brick wall or to needing to work 60 hours a week to support a family or to never having gone to college. It’s the flip side of the American dream, which is just as much about what we’ll put up with as it is about what we’re seeking.

But there are limits. When I heard Jake say, “Are you all right?” my brain short circuited. There he was, still in the driver’s seat, fighting with his airbag. Hadn’t I just seen him outside? I gaped at the stranger in the seat next to me for what felt like half a minute. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think.

And then he said, “Dude. I must be going nuts. I swear I just saw you running through that guy’s yard over there.”

It took a good five seconds for me to understand him. And though I thought, “Yeah, me too,” I couldn’t utter the words. Of course, the car accident may have had something to do with my vertigo. I don’t know. The whole thing was pretty dizzying.

I felt Jake’s hand on my forehead. “Whoa!” he said. “You don’t look so good.” He opened his door and told me to crawl across the seats to him.

I think the movement did me good, got the blood flowing back to my brain or something. Once outside, I could at least speak again – enough to point out to Jake that the convertible had no driver.

“Holy shit,” he said. “I think we just got in an accident with a third.”

“What’s a third?”

“A third!” he said. “Another one of us!”

“That can happen?”

“Well, I didn’t think it could, but . . .”

I stumbled a little and Jake caught me. He guided me over to a curb and told me to put my head between my knees. It helped.

The clearer the world became, the more I began to understand how screwed we were. The prospect of Maggie finding out that my “twin brother” and I got in a car accident – well, let’s just say, it would have been awkward.

But then it dawned on me that I could leave. I could simply walk away. “Listen, I don’t want to wait around for the police to get here and discover that we don’t have the same last name and . . .”

“Hey, I understand,” Jake interrupted. “In fact, fuck it. I’m leaving too.” He stood up and offered me his hand.

We didn’t look back; we just left.