Standing under the shower, he came to his senses. He was amazed how quickly, with one single phone call, the nightmare vanished. It simply came unglued like a plastic advertising sticker and flew away in the wind. Sobered up, cheerful, he set about tidying the whole apartment. He washed the floor and windows. He dropped off his underwear, which had been lying in the corner since that day, at the laundromat. He for the first time ever phoned his daughter.
“Imagine, such nonsense!” he said, chuckling into the receiver. “I knew they were supposed to go on tour, but I simply forgot.”
“Everyone’s so nervous!” The daughter gave a Chekhovian sigh, and it was obvious she was thinking of someone else as well.
“The Irish call one’s double his fetch,” she said in parting. “I’ll send you some pills. That should help.”
That evening they gave the performance. And they say he played Caesar as never before, fiercely, implacably, desperately. In such a way that before the ovation, when the emperor exits into eternity, a pause hung in the air for a few seconds—as in olden times, when the spectator truly believed what was happening on stage.
Returning home, the actor didn’t feel his usual fatigue. On the contrary, blood was racing through his veins, his energy was overflowing. He even got out of the cab and walked home on foot, swinging his arms widely.
Not like the one which he had lived.
He entered his apartment. Without taking off his coat, he began to wander around the room.
He stood looking out the window, watching how persistently and interminably the cars moved around the ring. Then his gaze fell on the telescope. It was pointing to the streetcar stop, as before. And rubbing his palms, he triumphantly sharpened the focus.
In the lens, two round-shouldered teenagers stood shifting their feet and spitting noiselessly. He moved the tube forward a millimeter and saw next to them a man with a briefcase.
His twin, his double. That very one.
When he ran out onto the street, the kids were trying to snatch the briefcase out of the man’s hands. An empty jar was rolling along the asphalt. A hand flashed, the sound of a dull, crunching blow. The double clutched at his face.
“Hey!” shouted the actor across the street. “What do you think you’re doing!”
And he stepped out into the road.
The impact of a car flipped him around several times in the air. He fell, and tumbling along the asphalt, he came to a stop, his arms flung wide.
Through the dark sludge that was flooding his consciousness, he was able to see his double take off down a side street. Then someone’s hands ran along his body, and he thought about the flutist, how she would undress him, caress him. But these were other hands. Fast and clumsy, a man’s hands. They dug into his pockets and grabbed his watch. Then wiped it off with disgust on the sleeves of his raincoat.
“Look at this weirdo, he’s a copy,” sounded over his ear. “Same face.”
There was some spitting and a swish of fabric. The last things he saw were two pairs of tattered sneakers retreating swiftly down the street.
PART III
DADDY LOVES ME
BY MAXIM MAXIMOV
Her students hated her. For not being young, pretty, or fun. For not being different from who she was. Or they loathed her for something altogether different. Who knows what reasons people find to hate each other …
Although she was, like her colleagues in humanity, made up of 90 percent water, that water was not potable, which in a different circumstance may have, at least partially, influenced the formation of sympathy toward her in her students as well as others around her.
Dad had called her Danaë. According to her passport she was Danaë. For her students and colleagues she was Dana Innokentievna, a teacher of Russian language and literature.
She had mutual feelings for her students, not because she thought it necessary to answer loathing with loathing, but just because it happened to be so: she was hated and she also hated. A pure coincidence of feelings directed toward one another (if it is allowed that hate is a feeling).
