The Body Double Read online

The Body Double

  Copyright 2015 by Roman Theodore Brandt

  Table of Contents

  The Body Double

  About the Author

  Dedication

  The Body Double

  There's a diner at the wrong end of the highway. I've seen it before, but I don't know where. There's one other car in the parking lot when I pull in, and it's the same make and model as mine, but a different color in the glow of the parking lot. I'm so hungry I started thinking about eating my own hand before I found this place tonight. My headlights shine on flashing signs and abandoned tires as I pull into a space.

  Inside the diner, it smells like food. Diner food, of course. Greasy fries and hamburgers, pies hardening into plastic. Coffee over all the other smells. That's how it is with these places. They're all coffee and pie. I don't see anyone working, but there's a man far down the counter wearing a coat that looks like mine, and he's a collection of rough fabrics in the harsh overhead lighting.

  I sit down at this end of the counter and take out my wallet. "Anyone working?" I ask the guy at the other end of the counter, and he chuckles.

  "Sure," he says.

  I look around, my eyes taking the place in. It's a sad collection of beaten-up booths and mid-century memorabilia. "Anyone working?" I call out, and the door behind the counter bursts open. A woman comes out, wiping her hands.

  "No cause for yelling," she says, tossing the towel onto the counter.

  "I didn't see anyone," I tell her.

  She tumbles a coffee cup down from a hook and puts it in front of me. "Coffee?"

  "Please."

  "Just 'cause you don't see no one don't mean we ain't here." She smirks at me and turns to grab the coffee pot. "I been here your whole life," she adds.

  "How do you figure?"

  She looks at me, still smirking. "Well you can't be more than thirty. I been here thirty-five years."

  "Right here, in this same spot," I say to her, because I have no idea what I'm saying anymore.

  Her lip curls up high on one side. "Right here," she says. She taps her finger on the Formica countertop. "Right in this same fuckin' spot, waiting on you to come grace me with your presence, Mister."

  "That's dedication," I say to her.

  "You want food or don't you?"

  "A hamburger, I guess."

  The man down the counter laughs a little, and she turns away to cook the hamburger at a grill that looks like it's not been cleaned in the whole thirty-five years she's been here. She flips the patty to cook the other side, and the diner smells like cooking meat and onions.

  "Been waiting nearly my whole fuckin' life on you to walk through that door," she says.

  The man down the counter laughs again. "Shut up, Daisy," he says to her. She doesn't respond, but instead brings my hamburger over to where I'm sitting and goes back into the back room again.

  "She's not the best at what she does," the man says.

  Something about him is familiar. His voice or something makes me think I know him.

  "Have we met?"

  He laughs again and turns to look at me. "Every day of our lives," he says. His face is familiar. I've seen him before, the stubble and the angles of his jaw.

  "Where have I seen you? I’m usually good with faces."

  He smiles and turns back to his coffee. "Oh, just about everywhere," he says.

  I take a bite of my hamburger, and it's about like every other diner hamburger I've ever had.

  "We come here every day," he says.

  I look over at him, and he's stirring his coffee. "I've never been here," I tell him.

  He looks over, raising one eyebrow at me. "Sure you have. You were here yesterday. We had this conversation, only you asked me how old I was."

  "I wasn't even in the state. You're thinking of someone else."

  "No," he says. "It was you."

  This guy's making me uncomfortable. I figure I'll go to the restroom to get away from him for a minute, so I make my way down the hallway to the men's room. After I've done my business, I wash my hands, and I look up in the mirror. I see the stubble and the angles of that jaw again, dancing in the light and shadows from the swinging, bare bulb overhead. This time it's me, though. It's my face. I touch the mirror, leaving hand prints on the glass.

  "I know where I've seen you," I say to myself. I pull my hand away, but my reflection doesn't move.

  "I told you we met before," he says in the mirror.

  *

  I'm out the restroom door and hurtling across the diner a second later. The man at the counter is grinning. "When are you gonna stop running?" he asks as I reach the door. "It's really starting to piss me off."

  Daisy is back up front now. "You gonna pay for that?" She calls after me, but I'm already out the door. I hear the door slam shut behind me as I run to my car, stumbling over a discarded bottle and sending my face into the side of the only other car in the lot. There's a blinding ache in my temple for a second, and I'm on the ground with the dark world spinning around me. I hear the diner door open and I shove myself off the ground with the world still spinning and close the distance to my car, yanking the door open.

  "Eventually, you'll stop running," he's saying to me as he gets into his own car, and then my car is out on the road, tires squealing. I know how this ends, like a recurring nightmare, but I can't undo it. I look into the rear view mirror to see his car pulling out onto the road with Daisy's form backlit against the glow of the open diner door.

  The desert is colder than ever, a painted night landscape of dead ocean bottoms and land formations reaching for the sky, middle fingers to the ozone. All I need is a way out, an intersection, a turn off.

  I glace into the rearview mirror again, but the road behind me is empty. There's no car in sight, but I'm still running. I know better than to slow down.

  *

  We meet farther down the freeway, head-on. I don't know how he got ahead of me and turned around, but our bumpers crumple, cars colliding and spinning away, sending broken glass across the pavement. Tires screaming, wiper blades flapping against invisible rain in the darkness, our headlight beams bounce over potholes, plastic rims rolling away down the road. My car slams headfirst into the ditch and flips over with the engine roaring in protest, wheels spinning in the air, a single turn signal flashing in the night, sending blind distress signals out. Then, everything is dust. I’ve got blood in my mouth and a metallic buzz in my ear. The world is upside down, flashing orange outside the windshield. I hear a car door creaking open far away.

  I’m here, my brain tells me. I’ve arrived. This is the place.

  My thoughts make no sense right now, with my brain jumbled around on impact. The turn signal makes this clicking and clicking, the sound echoing in my ear canal, thundering against my ear drum. His shoes are on the pavement outside; black shoes far across the road, lit by the beams of my headlights. His soles are crunching across gravel and glass, coming toward me. I’m hanging by my seatbelt, strapped into the seat, blood rushing to fill my head with the pounding of my heart. I’ve got nothing left. I’m trapped. We’re the only cars on the road for miles, I bet. No one is coming to help me.

  The shoes stop just outside my passenger window, waiting. I know who it is. His voice is just like mine, right down to how he pronounces my name. “Frank,” he says, high above the glistening shards sticking out of the window frame.

  My hands are fumbling for the seatbelt buckle, now. I want out of the car. I want to run away. I’ve been running away for years, and I’m not done running. My thumb pushes the little button down, and I land on the ceiling of the car, cracking against the rear view mirror and the dome light. My foot hits the horn, but I can barely hear it over the throbbing behind my eyes. “Fr
ank,” he says again, louder this time.

  “I’m not done yet!” I yell at him. "Leave me alone!" I hear him laughing.

  I crawl out the driver’s window with glass slicing me open and I'm bleeding on the pavement at his feet. I can almost stand up, but my knees are fucked up, sending screaming signals up and down my spinal column, and I crash into the ground, coughing. He climbs up the side of the ditch and sits down to watch me struggle. My fingers claw at the concrete, leaving red marks and skin cells, and all I want to be able to walk away. Running would be even better. “You’re a mess,” he tells me.

  I laugh a little, and I turn my head to look up at him. His eyes are cold as insect eyes, dead and black. He watches me for a while, and then he looks up at the moon, high above us. “I'm tired, Frank,” he says to me. Far away in the darkest parts of my brain, I feel voids opening to swallow my memories. He picks up a pebble from the ground next to him and tosses out onto the road. "It's time you stop running," he says.

  The headlights go out. The turn signal is gone. The wiper blades stop, and the world goes silent. I know he’s there, waiting. There’s a sound in my head, faint at first, then louder, a ringing in my ears growing and growing until I think I might not be able to take it anymore and that the world might exist as nothing more than this sound, filling the canyons and overflowing into lakes and suburbs, crashing between skyscrapers on both coasts, and then suddenly, there's nothing. There's no sound, no world. Only silence.

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  I was born in the wastelands of the American Midwest, and I still live there, much to everyone's regret. I started writing as a teenager as a side effect of what psychologists refer to as the "personal fable." I believed that I was unique, that my personal life story impacted the world, and that the world revolves around me. In my mid-twenties, I picked up writing again because I was sick of reading slosh and tired of having to go back fifty years to find books I actually want to read. I was especially over the only gay literature available in 2008 being soft core porn romance bullshit with jacked, oiled-up porn stars on the covers. I decided that if I wanted to read something that wasn't 500 pages of comma abuse and boners, I'd have to write it myself.

  And so I did. It may not be the best, but it's what I want to read. Thank you for the support, and I hope my writing means something to you as well.

  MY OTHER BOOKS:

  Drive

  Ghosts

  Michael

  Midnight at the Bowling Alley

  Country Roads are Why I Moved Away

  The Last Bus Home

  A Column of Ash

  Meet Me at the End of the World

  Confessional

  Future Spacemen

  Spin the Bottle

  Visit my Goodreads page, where you can further abuse me by leaving me comments and questions and rating my worth as an author by a vague five star scale! Click click! Do it!

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  This story is dedicated to my partners in writing, a very select group of people who are also writers. They are all extremely talented and they write things that I look forward to reading (a rare thing these days because, in my opinion, there's a lot of literary slosh in the world right now) and they have all at one point or another helped me shape one of my typo-riddled landmines into a finished book. Without the guidance of these awesome folks, I wouldn't have the courage to publish anything I've written. I'd like to say that I do everything myself, but without the help of these people and being constantly inspired by their ability to keep writing and creating new works, I'd have given up long ago. I am inspired almost every day by you guys, even by things so mundane and inconsequential as status updates on social media, so thank you.

  Gypsy Snow

  Chelsey Barker

  Millicent Rosethorn

  Joe Egly-Shaneyfelt

  Eli Verger

  If I forgot anyone, I'm sorry. I blame my advanced age.

  I want to extend a very special thank you to all of my readers for your support and encouragement during the 2013-2014 season. I'd like to extend it like the neck of a giraffe, but alas. I have no god-like abilities. You'll have to accept some kind of mechanized extension.

  Table of Contents