The Daydream Comes to an End
by Joseph Dante La Rocca
A man is being haunted by himself. Not by his fears, his thoughts, nor any abstract ‘himself’; a doppelgänger is appearing in the corners of his life. Their first encounter was outside the corner bodega, below the same apartment he’s lived in since ‘15. A man walked out wearing a familiar Zig-Zag hoodie, the same kind he used to wear religiously in the chill of winter. There was a sense of nostalgia to the encounter, and he missed seeing the double’s face, instead lost in memories where his hands were nestled warmly within the hoodie’s pocket. By the end of its life, it was basically a rag caked with nicotine and budd stains, and it probably ended up getting thrown out whenever he last emptied his closet. A couple of hoodies went that way, each one seeming to stain up faster than the last. But the first one was the original, it lasted the longest, and who knows when it finally became useless.
During their next encounter, he noticed. He saw his double standing across the subway platform before work. As his anxiety flared up, he had to question if he was simply too stoned in that moment. But every subsequent day he saw himself somewhere, moving through crowds just too far away. It was a time of disbelief and curiosity and trepidation. Somewhere in the city was a man sharing his face. Whenever he saw himself, he was paralyzed. He felt an urge to put aside his inhibitions and solve this mystery. Do something about it; run up to it or follow it like a detective, anything, but he couldn’t find the conviction to do so, and after he had let the double disappear, he would berate himself for having done nothing. But after that, he daydreamed: that this man was a cousin he didn’t know of, or that it was a long-lost twin his parents had put up for adoption. At home his imagination would grow wilder: that he was special and a part of a secret cloning experiment, or that a ghost from the future was here to warn him about a catastrophe he could prevent. He convinced himself that at the end of this mystery something extraordinary would be revealed to him, the kind of thing it felt like he had been waiting his whole life for.
Weeks of speculation came to a boil when he spotted the phantom leaving the bodega once again, wearing that same sweatshirt. He let go of his hesitations and sprinted after it, shouting a couple of times before getting close enough to catch his doppelgänger by the shoulder, certain that it, too, had been waiting all this time to meet him. He let loose a big, smiley-grin over his heavy breaths, saying, half-ironically, “Hey, dude, got a cig I could bum?”
When the lookalike turned around, it did not reciprocate the smile. It was several years younger, thinner, without the beard he currently has, and it stared at its older counterpart. The older him retracted his hand. His smile faded. The younger one crept back slowly, grimacing as they gazed in silence at each other, until, finally, it walked away, looking back once more before leaving the older one alone. He stared at his hand in quiet and a sense of dread came over him. He had done something he shouldn’t have, but he did not know what that was.
The younger him has appeared as frequently as ever since then. The older one hides from it. His thoughts have been possessed by it. He wishes he never saw it. He searches through old photos to recount the details of his life, trying to understand what year it was from, what he was doing back then. Possibilities rage throughout his head: is it a ghost, is it a time traveler? He wonders what would have happened if they spoke during their first encounter, and if that would have changed anything at all.
His closet is stuffed, never having been emptied, and the hoodie lies below it all, stained, under nothing of value. What weighs on him above all else is that face, the grimace his younger self gave, how it lacked all emotion besides disgust. Intense disgust. He cannot escape that overwhelming feeling of disgust. All he thinks of does not explain that face. Just one worry comes to him. One where he isn’t the real him, and the younger one is truly real. That’s why his face, his judgment, is so inescapable.
He is alone in his room, looking the same as it has since ‘15, searching for what was so disgusting about himself. Isn’t he content? Hasn’t he done what he could have? Things just never worked out, what makes the younger one think that he could have done any better? He will never know the answer to these questions. His future does not exist. His eyes burn dry as he licks a rolling paper filled with tobacco and budd, and he can already feel the room, and himself, fading.
Joseph Dante La Rocca grew up in Somers, New York and now resides in Brooklyn, New York. He studied writing and poetry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and has been published by Sky Island Journal for his short story The Sound of Iron. Currently, he writes with Sackett Street and works in Sales and Marketing.