Crackpot Palace (17 page)

The door opened then and Lynn walked in. “What the hell's going on here?” she said, standing with her hands on her hips. The double immediately lowered the gun and gazed at the floor.

I finally caught my breath and said, “You see, my double. I told you.”

“Give me the gun,” she said and walked straight over to the double and took it out of his hand. “You two are ridiculous.”

The double said, “My double is pretending to be me and tried to kill me. He busted my head with a chocolate arm.”

“No,” I said, “I'm the real one.”

Lynn backed up three steps, raised the pistol like they do in cop shows and pulled the trigger once. I squinted with the din of the shot, and when I looked, my double had a neat round hole in his forehead. His eyes were crossed and smoke issued from the corners of his mouth. He teetered for a heartbeat and then fell, face forward, on the floor. The body twitched and convulsed.

From out in the hallway, I heard May's voice ask, “Is everything all right in there?”

“Swell,” called Lynn, and then stepped around behind the double, took aim with the gun again, and put two more slugs in the back of his head. She dropped the gun on top of him and said, “Let's get out of here.” She helped me up and we held hands, as we had in the gold mine. Passing May on the stairs, Lynn called a thank-you over her shoulder.

We got into my car and I breathed a sigh of relief. The double was gone for good. “How'd you know which of us was the real one?” I asked as I hurriedly pulled away from the curb.

“It didn't matter,” she said. “Whichever one of you was in that fetid fucking suit wasn't coming back to the house.”

“What if you chose wrong?” I asked.

“Come on,” she said. “I know you.” Then she disappeared.

Later that evening, I made coffee and Lynn and I sat on our respective ends of the couch in the living room. “You'll never guess who I met today,” I said.

She took a sip of coffee. “Who?”

“Your double,” I said.

She was about to raise the cup again but froze. A smile broke out on her face.

“You need a trip to Dr. Ivy,” I said.

She shook her head. “I know, what a hypocrite, but I didn't see my double before you told me about yours.”

“Why didn't you let me know?”

“It didn't matter as much if I had one, I just didn't want
you
to go crazy.”

“So you're as crazy as I am,” I said.

“In my own way.”

“But your double was actually helpful. How come yours is cool and mine was an asshole?”

“Think about it,” she said.

I did and while I did she took a folded napkin out of the pocket of her sweatpants. She held it up in the palm of one hand and opened it with the other. Between her thumb and index finger, she lifted up a white chocolate ear and let the napkin flutter down. She broke off a piece and handed it to me. We had it with our coffee while she told me that it was in the chapel with the image of Copernicus on the ceiling, in that ancient castle in Krakow, where we'd been told we could experience “The Ninth Chakra of the World,” that she'd first seen herself.

A Note About “The Double of My Double Is Not My Double”

Doubles (doppelgängers) abound in
Crackpot Palace
—some more obvious than others. I've long been interested in the phenomenon in literature and film and have somewhere among my things a sheet of paper on which for years I kept a list of stories, novels, and movies in which I encountered the Double theme. Some sharp editor will someday take this theme up for a story anthology and create a very interesting book of fiction. The doppelgänger seems to go beyond the bounds of imagination, though. In my story offered here in the collection, the scientific study that the protagonist mentions stumbling upon online is actually real—the fact that the electrical stimulation of a region of the brain known as the left temporoparietal junction caused subjects to report a “shadowy person standing behind them.” To offer more evidence that the double phenomenon might be more than mere fiction, one can also consider the testimony of Sir Ernest Shackleton's experience with the Third Man syndrome. He writes about it in his book
South
. He was on a mountain-climbing expedition on St. George's Island, beyond the tip of South America, in severe polar conditions. His party, comprised of himself and two other men, was under great stress, carrying on through stark glacial conditions for a thirty-six-hour stretch. He and the others reported feeling the definite presence of a fourth person in their party. Other Antarctic explorers and mountain climbers have also admitted to the phenomenon, as well as those involved in storms at sea and shipwrecked castaways. Scientists believe that the syndrome is related to great physical and mental stress and may be the impetus for the concept of the guardian angel. T. S. Eliot was influenced by having read Shackleton's firsthand account of the experience and included these lines in his poem
The Waste Land:

 

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

- But who is that on the other side of you?

I often wonder if other fiction writers sometimes experience the sensation of being at least two people—the one who lives life outwardly, moving amid the populace, talking, laughing, gossiping, eating meals, and participating in history, and the one who writes the stories. They often seem like two different people to me. The one smarter and more capable about everyday life but not really knowing how to write stories, and the story writer, who feels lost in the everyday world, intuitive and adept when it comes to characters and plots and the flow of language. Crackpot, I know.

Daltharee

Y
ou've heard of bottled cities, no doubt—society writ minuscule and delicate beyond reason: toothpick-spired towns, streets no thicker than thread, pinprick faces of the citizenry peering from office windows smaller than sequins. Hustle, politics, fervor, struggle, capitulation, wrapped in a crystal firmament, stoppered at the top to keep reality both in and out. Those microscopic lives, striking glass at the edge of things, believed themselves gigantic, their dilemmas universal.

Our research suggested that Daltharee had many multistoried buildings carved right into its hillsides. Surrounding the city there was a forest with lakes and streams, and all of it was contained within a dome, like a dinner beneath the lid of a serving dish. When the inhabitants of Daltharee looked up, they were prepared to not see the heavens. They knew that the light above, their Day, was generated by a machine, which they oiled and cared for. The stars that shone every sixteen hours when Day left darkness behind were simple bulbs regularly changed by a man in a hot-air balloon.

They were convinced that the domed city floated upon an iceberg, which it actually did. There was one door in the wall of the dome at the end of a certain path through the forest. When opened, it led out onto the ice. The surface of the iceberg extended the margin of one of their miles all around the enclosure. Blinding snows fell, winds constantly roared in a perpetual blizzard. Their belief was that Daltharee drifted upon the oceans of an otherwise frozen world. They prayed for the end of eternal winter so they might reclaim the continents.

And all of this: their delusions, the city, the dome, the iceberg, the two quarts of water it floated upon, were contained within an old glass gallon milk bottle, plugged at the top with a tattered handkerchief and painted dark blue. When I'd put my ear to the glass, I'd hear, like the ocean in a seashell, fierce gales blowing.

Daltharee was not the product of a shrinking ray, as many of these pint-size metropolises are. And please, there was no magic involved. In fact, once past the early stages of its birth it was more organically grown than shaped by artifice. Often, in the origin stories of these diminutive places, there's a deranged scientist lurking in the wings. Here too we have the notorious Mando Paige, the inventor of submicroscopic differentiated cell division and growth. What I'm referring to was Paige's technique for producing superminiature human cells. From the instant of their atomic origin, these parcels of life were beset by enzymatic reaction and electric stunting the way tree roots are tortured over time to create a bonsai. Paige shaped human life in the form of tiny individuals. They landscaped and built the city, laid roads, and lurched in a sleep-walking stupor induced by their creator.

Once the city in the dome was completed, Paige introduced more of the crumb-size citizenry through the door that opened onto the iceberg. Just before closing that door, he set off a device that played an A flat for approximately ten seconds, a preordained spur to consciousness, which brought them all awake to their lives in Daltharee. Seeding the water in the gallon bottle with crystal ions, he soon after introduced a chemical mixture that formed a slick, unmelting icelike platform beneath the floating dome. He then introduced into the atmosphere fenathol nitrate, silver iodite, and anamidian betheldine to initiate the frigid wind and falling snow. When all was well within the dome, when the iceberg had sufficiently grown, when winter ruled, he plugged the gallon bottle with an old handkerchief. That closed system of winter, with just the slightest amount of air allowed in through the cloth, was sustainable forever, feeding wind to snow and snow to cold to claustrophobia and back again in an infinite loop. The Dalthareens made up the story about a frozen world to satisfy the unknown. Paige manufactured three more of these cities, each wholly different from the others, before laws were passed about the imprisonment of humanity, no matter how minute or unaware. He was eventually, himself, imprisoned for his crimes.

We searched for a method to study life inside the dome but were afraid to disturb its delicate nature, unsure whether simply removing the handkerchief would upset a brittle balance between inner and outer universes. It was suggested that a very long, exceedingly thin probe that had the ability to twist and turn by computational command could be shimmied in between the edge of the bottle opening and the cloth of the handkerchief. This probe, like the ones physicians used in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to read the hieroglyphics of the bowel, would be fitted out with both a camera and a microphone. The device was adequate for those cities that didn't have the extra added boundary of a dome, but even in them, how incongruous, a giant metal snake just out of the blue, slithering through one's reality. The inhabitants of these enclosed worlds were exceedingly small but not stupid.

In the end it was my invention that won the day—a voice-activated transmitter the size of two atoms was introduced into the bottle. We had to wait for it to work its way from the blizzard atmosphere, through the dome's air filtration system, and into the city. Then we had to wait for it to come in contact with a voice. At any point a thousand things could have gone wrong, but one day, six months later—who knows how many years that would be in Dalthareen time—the machine transmitted and my receiver picked up conversations from the domed city. Here's an early one we managed to record that had some interesting elements:

“I
'm not doing that now. Please, give me some room . . .” she said.

There is a long pause filled with the faint sound of a utensil clinking on a plate.

“I was out in the forest the other day,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“I'm not sure,” he told her.

“What do you do out there?” she asked.

“I'm in this club,” he said. “We got together to try to find the door in the wall of the dome.”

“How did that go?” she asked.

“We knew it was there and we found it,” he said. “Just like in the old stories . . .”

“Blizzard?”

“You can't believe it,” he said.

“Did you go out in it?”

“Yes, and when I stepped back into the dome, I could feel a piece of the storm stuck inside me.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” she said.

“I don't know.”

“How did it get inside you?” she asked.

“Through my ears,” he said.

“Does it hurt?”

“I was different when I came back in.”

“Stronger?”

“No, more something else.”

“Can you say?”

“I've had dreams.”

“So what,” she said. “I had a dream the other night that I was out on the Grand Conciliation Balcony, dressed for the odd jibbery, when all of a sudden a little twisher rumbles up and whispers to me the words ‘Elemental Potency.' What do you think it means? I can't get the phrase out of my head.”

“It's nonsense,” he said.

“Why aren't
your
dreams nonsense?”

“They are,” he said. “The other night I had this dream about a theory. I can't remember if I saw it in the pages of a dream magazine or someone spoke it or it just jumped into my sleeping head. I've never dreamt about a theory before. Have you?”

“No,” she said.

“It was about living in the dome. The theory was that since the dome is closed, things that happen in the dome only affect other things in the dome. Because the size of Daltharee is, as we believe, so minuscule compared to the rest of the larger world, the repercussions of the acts you engage in in the dome will have a higher possibility of intersecting each other. If you think of something you do throughout the day as an act, each act begins a chain reaction of mitigating energy in all directions. The will of your own energy, dispersed through myriad acts within only a morning, will beam, refract, and reflect off the beams of others' acts and the walls of the closed system, barreling into each other and causing sparks at those locations where your essence meets itself. In those instances, at those specific locations, your will is greater than the will of the dome. What I was then told was that a person could learn a way to act at a given hour—a quick series of six moves that send out so many ultimately crisscrossing intentions of will that it creates a power mesh capable in its transformative strength of bending reality to whim.”

“You're crazy,” she said.

There is a slight pause here, the sound of wind blowing in the trees.

“Hey, whatever happened to your aunt?” he asked.

“They got it out of her.”

“Amazing,” he said. “Close call . . .”

“She always seemed fine too,” she said. “But swallowing a knitting needle? That's not right.”

“She doesn't even knit, does she?”

“No,” she said.

“Good thing she didn't have to pass it,” he said. “Think about the intersecting beams of will resulting from that act.”

She laughed. “I heard the last pigeon died yesterday.”

“Yeah?”

“They found it in the park, on the lawn amid the Moth trees.”

“In all honesty, I did that,” he said. “You know, not directly, but just by the acts I went through yesterday morning. I got out of bed, had breakfast, got dressed, you know . . . like that. I was certain that by midday that bird would be dead.”

“Why'd you kill it?” she asked.

There's a pause in the conversation here, filled up by the sound of machinery in the distance, just beneath that of the wind in the trees.

“Having felt what I felt outside the dome, I considered it a mercy,” he said.

“Interesting . . .” she said. “I've gotta get going. It looks like rain.”

“Will you call me?” he asked.

“Eventually, of course,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

F
unny thing about Paige, he found religion in the later years of his life. After serving out his sentence, he renounced his crackpot science and retreated to a one-room apartment in an old boardinghouse on the edge of the great desert. He courted an elderly woman there, a Mrs. Trucy. I thought he'd been long gone when we finally contacted him. After a solid fifteen years of recording conversations, it became evident that the domed city was failing—the economy, the natural habitat were both in disarray. A strange illness had sprung up amid the population, an unrelenting, fatal insomnia that took a dozen of them to Death each week. Nine months without a single wink of sleep. The conversations we recorded then were full of anguish and hallucination.

Basically, we asked Paige what he might do to save his own created world. He came to work for us and studied the problem full time. He was old then, wrinkles and flyaway hair in strange, ever-shifting formations atop his scalp, eyeglasses with one ear loop. Every time he'd make a mistake on a calculation or a technique, he'd swallow a thumbtack. When I asked if the practice helped him concentrate, he told me, “No.”

Eventually, on a Saturday morning when no one was at the lab but himself and an uninterested security guard, he broke into the vault that held the shrinking ray. He started the device up, aimed it at the glass milk bottle containing Daltharee, and then sat on top of the bottle, wearing a parachute. The ray discharged, shrinking him. He fell in among the gigantic folds of the handkerchief. Apparently he managed to work his way down past the end of the material and leap into the blizzard, out over the dome of the city. No one was there to see him slowly descend, dangerously buffeted by the insane winds. No one noticed him slip through the door in the dome.

Conversations eventually came back to us containing his name. Apparently he'd told them the true nature of the dome and the bottle it resided inside. And then after some more time passed, there came word that he was creating another domed city inside a gallon milk bottle from the city of Daltharee. Where would it end? we wondered, but it was not a thought we enjoyed pursuing as it ran in a loop, recrossing itself, reiterating its original energy in ever diminishing reproductions of ourselves. Perhaps it was the thought of it that made my assistant accidentally drop the milk bottle one afternoon. It exploded into a million dark blue shards, dirt and dome and tiny trees spread across the floor. We considered studying its remains, but instead, with a shiver, I swept it into a pile and then into the furnace.

A year later, Mrs. Trucy came looking for Mando. She insisted upon knowing what had become of him. We told her that the law did not require us to tell her, and then she pulled a marriage certificate out of her purse. I was there with the Research General at the time, and I saw him go pale as a ghost upon seeing that paper. He told her Mando had died in an experiment of his own devising. The wrinkles of her gray face twisted, and sitting beneath her pure silver hair, her head looked like a metal screw. Three tears squeezed out from the corners of her eyes. If Mando died performing an experiment, we could not be held responsible. We would, though, have to produce the body for her as proof that he'd perished. The Research General told her we were conducting a complete investigation of the tragedy and would contact her in six weeks with the results and the physical proof—in other words, Mando's corpse.

My having shoveled Daltharee into the trash without searching for survivors or mounting even a cursory rescue effort was cause for imprisonment. My superior, the Research General, having had my callous act take place on his watch, was also liable. After three nerve-racking days, I conceived of a way for us to save ourselves. In fact it was so simple it astounded me that neither one of us, scientific minds though we be, had leaped to the concept earlier. Using Mando's own process for creating diminutive humanity, we took his DNA from our genetic files, put it through a chemical bath to begin the growth process, and then tortured the cells into tininess. We had to use radical enzymes to speed the process up given we had only six weeks. By the end of week five we had a living, breathing Mando Paige, trapped under a drinking glass in our office. He was dressed in a little orange jumpsuit, wore black boots, and was in the prime of his youth. We studied his attempts to escape his prison with a jeweler's loupe inserted into each eye. We thought we could rely on the air simply running out in the glass and him suffocating.