Coming up Four

Lydia’s replica is downstairs washing dishes. I don’t know what the replica thinks about washing the dishes while upstairs the real Lydia and I are trying to be as passionate and agile as we were ten years ago. At least I think this is the real Lydia. Lydia has so many replicas that I have long stopped trying to detect imperfections or idiosyncrasies through which I could tell each of them apart, or even tell them from the real, original Lydia. Perhaps the woman I have been swirling about the bed with is a replica just as pliant, just as resistant, as the real Lydia. What is real?  If I cannot tell the difference, does it even matter?  I think:  not to me.

I don’t even know how they coordinate tasks. I don’t know what they feel or think or fear about each other. I equate it to hive life. I’ve never myself wanted a replica. I think I am too lazy to work out the ethics of it. It is possible that with replicas some sort of hive mentality develops, perhaps. You would have to be in some way affected by all those other editions of you. The original person might be overwhelmed by the presence of so many copies. Slowly, it could take you in, driving you away from a “you” and towards an “us”. Maybe. Or maybe the original becomes the master, operating any number of slaves. I guess Lydia knows. I do not, and she is not telling.

“I think I’ll go downstairs and get a beer. Want one?”  Lydia is already at the bedroom door, one shoulder wedged out, the words spilling from an erogenous split in her jangling hair.

“No, I’m fine. I’ll get out for a minute and meet you back in bed when you have that beer.”  I stretch a leg and slide the sheet down a bit. The unnatural stack of my spine pops and I feel less like wadded paper and more like a folio.

I hear her bare feet slugging the wooden steps, some creaking, others not, as she slips and slides and thuds barely in control to the first floor. I wait until I hear her barely mumble something to her dish washing replica, and then I get out of bed, stretch my moribund muscles to unknot the key to my afternoon’s resolve. I am slow to the door and drag myself around it, turning for the upstairs bathroom.

Ahead of me, the door opens and out steps me. Me, in every seeming way. The hair perhaps tousled differently, perhaps the mouth turned around. But me. Startled, but instantly understanding the predicament, I say to myself, “You’re a replica!” And the replica starts, head tilting back in my signature way, mouth hanging open a minute, eyes focusing, and slowly says, “No, you must be the replica!”  

I assume Lydia had this replica commissioned, and I don’t know when Lydia did it, nor how she has kept it so long from bumping into me. We never discussed it. She has always known I would abide her replicas, would even appreciate them at times, but did not want one myself. I did not see the need, did not want the responsibility, if there were responsibility. But here is another me. Another me doing even what I was preparing to do, given his exit from the upstairs bathroom.  I want to know what plan she is working from, what she intends with this breach of trust. There is some scheme, I’m sure, and I want to know what it is.

“I never wanted a replica.”  I am talking to myself.

“No, I never wanted a replica.”  The face is mine, the voice is mine.

“So what are you doing here?”  One of us is getting angry about the other one.

We, the two of me, hear Lydia coming back up the steps. When she reaches the top and can see around the corner, there are the two of me looking confusedly back at her. Almost as one, we ask the immediate question, “What is going on here?” and “Did you plan this?” and “Which one of me is the real one?”  A cell of doubt was beginning already to make me a different man, one inch less a unit and one inch more a member. I wonder if the replica is feeling the same.

Lydia for a second or two eyes the two of me, switching one to the other – perhaps for detail, perhaps in judging the point to which she should make a response – her lips parted, her gaze measuring the whole of my confrontation as though a window being measured for curtains. A bead of sweat from her now warming beer falls on her bare leg and she pulls it parenthetically back.

Her face is half plotting, half innocence. She can cross-play her intentions like that, a sheepishness that originally drew me to her. She sets her beer down on a low dresser we keep in the upstairs hall for lack of the space for it anywhere else. Half turning she says, “I believe we will need two more beers.”  And off she goes, unmindful of anything we or I might say, with her akimbo slap-dash descent of the stairs being the last we see of her.

We, the two of me, stand there discontinued by the sudden discovery, awaiting the explanation-and-reveal only Lydia can provide. Our arms dangle, our eyes follow the empty space she has left, mirrors of mystical discovery. She must be the architect of this dilemma, so she must be the resolution. She has all the reason locked up, and we are going to have to wait for her to set it free.

And in a moment, we hear Lydia coming back up the straight strand of stairs, the body of her as dis-angular as usual, the creak of the revealing stairs. And behind her the parasympathetic sounds of the Lydia who had been washing dishes earlier ascending behind her.

Or perhaps it is the dishwashing Lydia who is in front. Each orbits the other and I cannot tell what is a center. I suspect what she has in mind, the blood in the both of me beginning to rewind itself at the thought, and I worry that many of me might be so easily distracted. Has she but found a new use for replicas?  Or is the real Lydia even here?