What's in a Name

One crisp and cool fall day, Gregory took the day off from work and decided to take a walk in the park catty-corner from his apartment building. The park was beautiful and still. The early frost melted into delightful dew on the bright green leaves and the shaggy moss hanging from the trees. Gregory liked it so much that he asked himself why he couldn’t walk through the park every day. So, he decided to switch to work from home.

He had the spare bedroom with the big window in it converted into his office and his girlfriend, Threresa, moved her stuff into his bedroom. He brought all of his office things home and set them up on his brand new adjustable-height standing desk. In the warm light of the early fall days, he gazed out of his window over a cup of coffee before beginning the day.

About a year later, he began the day from the couch, his laptop in his actual lap, not bothering to shower before answering messages that had piled up in the dark hours of the day. In the year since working from home, he’d not ended up going for early morning walks in the park more often. In fact, he estimated that he hardly ever left his apartment at all.

Theresa had moved out sometime over the summer, she said it was suffocating living with someone who refused to go outside, a hikikomori, a borrowed word from Japanese which means severe social withdrawal. Gregory lived on amazon deliveries. His trash was disposed through the incinerator chute down the hall. One day, realizing that his car’s registration was going to expire, he searched for his keys, but could not find them for hours because it had been so long since he needed to use them. He let his registration expire, but renewed his parking spot online, paying an extra fee to store an unregistered vehicle.

When Theresa complained to Gregory, he had a litany of reasons to stay in. He was saving money. There wasn’t anything outside that was really all that interesting anyway. You could watch anything you want from the media server he built. They could order-in any food they wanted. People could come over to his place to visit, couldn’t they? Isn’t it too hot or too cold or too wet or too windy? Is it really worth it to get all dressed up to go out there?

One day Theresa didn’t come home, then a few days later came by with boxes.

Since then, Gregory found himself victim of a profound loneliness. It was as if Theresa had been a shield against the waves of aching solitude that crashed against him day after day. Now that she was gone, he was cast to the maelstrom and he felt like he was drowning. He woke up some nights gasping for breath as if surfacing from a dark sea.

Gregory decided to return to the office. He just couldn’t shake the feeling that staying at home all day was killing him, even though he kept fit by riding his stationary bicycle every day and lifting the weights in his home gym while he navigated endless spreadsheets at his desk.

The first day back was awful.

He had to use public transportation and he hated having to wait for the bus, he hated the smell of the bus, he hated handling the money for the bus, he hated the anxiety of waiting for his stop on the bus, he hated the rules on the bus, he hated the bus driver, the nameless faceless blob perched upon his or her throne of judgment, occasionally ejecting someone from the bus, but never the guy with the nappy dreads who stank of destitution. He hated the bus.

Security didn’t recognize him and he had to provide identification to enter the building. When he found his desk, it had been turned into storage space by the interns and he had to explain to a bunch of 20-year-olds that no, he was not trying to harsh their mellow, but that he sat there and he needed the space.

No one recognized him, but then he recognized no one either. It occurred to him that the majority of people that he knew from working from home also worked from home and so he would not see them at the office.

The walls were beige cast in mercurial orange or indium violet depending on the hallway he walked down. The air tasted dusty. The coffee was sub-par and resembled used motor-oil that had been thinned with turpentine. There was always someone sneezing nearby, but Gregory could never identify him or her even though the sound often made him leap up from his seat and scope around like some kind of cubicle dwelling meerkat.

Gregory bemoaned the variety of meetings that he had to attend, how he had to gather his things and cart them off to some room on the other side of the building, sit with people who had no idea what was going on and then listen to their pointless questions. At least at home, he could take those minutes to do something else, like, go to the bathroom or get a snack.

Gregory dutifully did his work and then at the end of the day, after the sun had set, he walked down the street in the brisk fall air and stood by a post to wait for the goddamned bus.

After a week of this, Gregory’s thoughts began to latch on to the term “Kafkaesque”, but he knew a little better. Really, Gregory thought, this was the fog of clinical depression. The black dog that had hounded him since high school, it was back again after Theresa left. Or maybe, was it before?

He took the drugs as prescribed, but always forgot to make a note to himself to talk about adjusting the dosage with his doctor. A symptom of depression? A side-effect of the medication? Or simply absent-mindedness? Gregory could not be compelled to decide.

One day, Gregor is particularly absorbed in a project when a co-worker that he does not recognize comes up to him. He slips the earbuds out of his ears to suddenly hear the man in the middle of his comment, “-- riddled with floating-point errors,” the man laughed. He had a big belly that a paisley tie tried to conceal, but failed horribly. His face was red with laughter, his eyes wet. “You’re hilarious, Samson! Let me know the next time you’re presenting and I’ll be there, even if it’s SRO!” Without Gregory saying anything at all, the man walked away, chuckling to himself and seeking out a more talkative target.

Strange. He didn’t remember giving a presentation. He didn’t even remember that man who was just talking. He decides that he needs some exercise, he needs to wake up. He decides to take a circuit through the building’s cubicles. As he’s walking, it occurs to him how ugly and dry and desiccated everything is around him. The anodized aluminum, the industrial tweed, the foam padding, the gypsum drywall, the expanded polystyrene of the dropped ceiling tiles. It’s such a contrast to the living luscious green of the park that he never bothers to walk through.

He turns down a hallway and is a few yards away from an intersection of hallways when he sees a group of people walk perpendicular to him, ostensibly towards the cafeteria. They are talking and laughing and pulling up the rear is… himself!

He catches only a glimpse, but he catches the eye of the imposter for a moment and there’s this sense of knowing that is teleported through his body. Gregory rushes up to the intersection and looks down, but no one is there. He’s hyperventilating, he takes a seat in a cubicle to catch his breath and settle his head. He must be dehydrated. Or maybe it’s sleep-debt? Maybe he’s coming down with narcolepsy or something? He’s begun to dream while still awake. After a few minutes, he’s feeling much better, but he can’t seem to shake the image of himself walking with the group.

On Friday, Gregory is bored, sitting at his desk waiting for the day to end. He’s done all the work that’s going to get done this week and is reluctant to begin work for the next week. He considers going home early, but the office had been reprimanded on Tuesday for cutting days short. It’s not that he’s afraid that he’ll get in trouble, it’s just he doesn’t want to be inconvenienced when his superiors find out and he’ll have to explain himself. There is a group of people talking in the kitchenette. Male and female voices and quiet laughter expand out of the small space until there is a sensation like the volume being turned up on the scene as if in a sitcom. A voice booms out among the group and Gregory recognizes it as his own voice!

“Happy hour at Flint’s down the street, everybody!” Gregory’s impersonator booms, “First drink is on me!”

Gregory leaps up and speed walks to the kitchenette, which he finds empty except for Linda, who is extracting her lunch box from the communal refrigerator. “Where did everyone go?” Gregory said to no one.

“Probably to Flint’s to take you up on your offer,” Linda said, jealous pettiness lining her voice.

“Hmm,” Gregory grunts and returns to his desk. He decides to crash his impostor’s happy hour, to figure out what’s really going on. He decides he needs a disguise, so he rustles through the coat rack until he finds a New York Yankee’s hat and an Arsenal scarf. He perfects his costume with day-glo yellow sunglasses.

Flint’s is a very large bar and inside, Gregory is able to hide quite effectively on the opposite side of the bar from the pool tables and dart boards that his coworkers are gathered around. The bartender asks if he wants a drink and he puts a fiver down and asks for a PBR. “We don’t got PBR. We got Hamms,” the bartender says and Gregory nods in assent, waves her off, hoping that she’d not drawn attention to him.

Now, Gregory had a clear look at the man, the bastard, the impostor! They were identical in every way. They wore their hair the same. They had the same scar under their right eye. Did they get that scar from when their brother shot them with an airsoft pistol when they were kids? He was even wearing Gregory’s clothing! The striped green and white sweatshirt, the dark brown corduroy pants, the scuffed up leather boots.

He was laughing with their coworkers. Gregory wondered what his name was. If he was aware of their similarity. If perhaps people mistook Gregory for him. Maybe this was all just a misunderstanding. Perhaps they just bore some incredible likeness and he was just as weirded out as Gregory when he saw his double strolling through the office.

But then, Theresa was there, in the crowd! Where did she come from? She wound her way through bodies up to the imposter and slid her arm around his lower back the way that she would do to him in busy venues. His stomach churned as anticipation became reality, she always stood on her toes to kiss him on the cheek after this little maneuver and across the room, he saw her do it to the imposter.

Gregory was filled with rage. This doppelganger had stolen his girl! Hell, he’d been stealing the limelight at work for that matter! Shit, what else was he after? Next thing he’s paying off his car’s registration and driving around like he owns it!

Gregory watched his impostor excuse himself to go use the bathroom and he decided to confront the man. Careful to not be noticed, he ducked behind railings and doorways to get to the hallway that led to the bathroom. One way in and one way out. The doppelganger was trapped. But when he opened the bathroom door, it was empty. Empty and silent. Not even the dripping of a tap to break the aural void.

Back in the bar, the group was starting to really get loud and have a good time. Gregory looked around for his impostor, but he couldn’t find him anywhere. Suddenly there was a narrow arm around him and Theresa stretched up to give him a kiss. Gregory was so surprised that he lost control of his body.

“What’s wrong,” Theresa asked with genuine concern. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“I bet you’re surprised to see me,” Gregory half-barked, half-stuttered, the adrenaline causing havoc on his neural-motor systems.

“After you’ve gone to the bathroom?” She said, and then conspiratorially, “Was it a big one?”

“No,” Gregory barked, “That’s not what I meant. I meant, where have you been?”

“Are you okay, Gregory?” Theresa asked, “You’re kind of freaking me out.”

A sense of anxious relief fell on Gregory. Maybe he’d been dreaming. Maybe Theresa had never left, that he’d just been having one of those waking nightmares. He felt ill.

“I think I need to go home,” Gregory said.

“Let me take you,” Theresa said, reaching for her coat.

“No,” Gregory barked and then calmed, “No, thank you, but I think I need the fresh air.”

“Okay,” Theresa said, “See you at home.”

Gregory burst out of the bar’s doors and began to slide down the street on the damp brown leaves gathering in the sprinkling rain. He felt crazy. Theresa’s words kept coming to him “See you at home.” and “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!” what was this? Some kind of joke or prank? Was he having some sort of mental crisis? He’d long since been aware of the soul-sucking gray-zone of depression, was this the long-feared other-side-of-the-coin? The manic phase?

His cloth espadrilles that he wore in the office were completely wet after two blocks of tramping in puddles. He was cold, but he still pulled his jacket tight around him, he tucked the free end of the Arsenal scarf down the front of his jacket. He was a ball of nervous, anxious energy fretting down the street. He felt weaponized, dangerous to the people he passed by, as if they might inadvertently set him off and then what happened would be out of his hands.

Outside of his apartment building, he saw Theresa’s car, parked where it normally would be and a wave of relief blew through his mind. He went into the lobby, soaked through, security looked at him funny, like they didn’t recognize him. But who would blame them? Gregory had just walked ten blocks in the rain in a panic. He did not look his best. Security didn’t hassle him because he had his card to get on the elevator.

On his floor, he walked up to his apartment and inserted the key, the lock turned like it always did, but instead of seeing Theresa on the couch like he might see on a typical weekend night, he stood face to face with his impostor. “You!”

“How’d you get in here?” the impostor said, fear twisting his face.

“How did I get in here,” Gregory said. “How did you get in here?”

“Look, pal, I live here and I don’t know how you got a key, but you gotta give it back,” the impostor said, pointing to the keychain in Gregory’s hands.

“This keychain?” Gregory said, raising his hand up expecting to see the rubber duck keychain charm that he got from Theresa when they first started dating, but it wasn’t on these keys. Gregory looked at the tray on the counter where he normally kept his keys and spare change and sure enough, a set of car keys with a rubber duck on them. “What? How could that be?”

But before any answer could come to him, the doppelganger grabbed the keys out of his hand and kicked him in the chest with a deftness that made Gregory jealous. He’d got to Tae Kwon Do for months to learn how to kick like that, hoping to deploy it on an invader just like this.The kick laid him out on his ass in the hallway. Gregory was wincing from the surprise and pain of the kick, so more heard than saw his apartment door close, the deadbolt find its home with a clunk.

Gregory was now indignant, he got up and yelled, “You’re going to jail, my friend! You’re going to jail!” and he marched down the hall and took the elevator to the lobby where he intended to call the police from the security desk. Like a surgeon removing a cancer from a chest cavity.

The police were already in the lobby when Gregory got there. Gregory tried to speak, but for some reason, he could not form words. He tried to run back to the elevator to use the reflective surface of the elevator doors to check to see if he had the characteristic drooping of a stroke victim, but the police took him down before he could take three steps. They held his arms, they held his legs, they put zip ties on him to hold him still. Gregory shouted wordlessly about having a stroke, but to no avail.

When he was fully tied up, one of the officers leaned down and said, “Hey, do you have an ID? Can I look in your pockets? Is there anything in there that’s going to hurt me?”

Suddenly Gregory had his tongue back, “My wallet’s in my back pocket, I live here. Please call the ambulance, I think I’ve had a stroke.”

“Emergency services are on their way,” the one cop said as he felt the other one rifle through his pockets. There was a pause. The way that he was trussed up, he couldn’t help but stare at the polished marble flooring. “You don’t have a wallet on you. We’re going to have to take you in to sort this out.”

He started to fight against his binds. He whimpered and felt panic rise is his guts. The cop told him to be still and the other one asked, “Let’s just start with your name. What’s your name.”

The panic was now palpable, his mind raced for a name, his name, but he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember his own name! “I can’t remember!” he wept, “Oh my god, I can’t remember my own name!”

…

Gregory and Theresa are walking through the park catty-corner to his apartment and it’s a beautiful crisp fall morning. The dew is dripping off of the branches of the trees and beating a beautiful tattoo on the bright green leaves.

Theresa is telling Gregory about the sonogram appointment and he’s filled with a pleasantly warm feeling even though the cold threatens to cut through his jacket.

After some time in walking, they pass by a culvert where a homeless man is barking meaningless strings of syllables, his neck wrapped in a dirty and torn Arsenal scarf.

“He even took my name,” the unwell man laughs, “He even took my name!”

“What do you think he meant by that?” Theresa asked, clearly disturbed by the man’s words.

“Who can tell,” Gregory said and kissed the top of her head, squeezed her hand reassuringly. “Who can tell?”