The (Other) You Read online

  Kizer graduated third in their class of 422; Smith graduated twelfth, but was admitted to UC–Santa Cruz with a full tuition scholarship while Kizer had only a part-tuition scholarship at Stanford.

  Away at college they’d lost contact, or mostly. But each returned to San Rafael in their late twenties. Married within a few months of each other. Started families, established careers. Only just coincidental, each man has fathered three children: girl-girl-boy (Smith), boy-boy-girl (Kizer).

  At a short distance the wives of Smith and Kizer might—almost—be mistaken for each other but it’s strange, at least Smith thinks it’s strange, that Lisa (Smith) and Emma (Kizer) have never quite become friends despite their husbands’ urging.

  When Smith asks Lisa why, Lisa merely shrugs and insists that she likes Kizer’s wife well enough; possibly, Emma responds in a similar manner if Kizer asks her about Lisa.

  One of Smith’s (secret) fantasies is Kizer in love with Lisa, which leaves him breathless and excited as well as humiliated, emasculated; while, oddly, Smith feels little attraction for Kizer’s wife, Emma, who in turn seems indifferent to him, if not, unless Smith is imagining it, just slightly resentful. Of course, she is jealous. Her husband’s closest friend, to whom he owes his life.

  At the age of forty-nine Smith is beyond adolescent rivalries and so no longer measures himself against Kizer: wife, children, career. House, cars. Kizer is arguably better-looking than Smith, as he’d been the better student in high school, but Smith is in better physical condition, he is sure; though stricken with sciatica last year, which is why he’d cut back on squash. Still, in better condition than Kizer who has been afflicted since childhood by asthma. Surely still a stronger swimmer than Kizer which was why on the rain-swollen San Miguel River, Boy Scout camp, when the boys were eleven years old and their canoe overturned, it was Smith who (desperately) managed to drag (frantically struggling) Kizer back to the canoe so that each boy, skinny, shivering with cold and fear, could hold on to it until help came.

  Saved my life! Oh God thank you.

  Kizer has never quite said.

  Why, Smith can understand. Some memories are so traumatic it is wisest to forget. Amnesia like a spray-washed wall.

  Yet: Smith sometimes feels trapped in a dream he doesn’t (quite) realize is a dream in which he is trying again to swim to his struggling/drowning friend while simultaneously trying not to let go of the overturned canoe; then, trying to explain to Kizer something both elemental and obscure, crucial for both to comprehend so that Smith’s very brain aches with the effort which is the mysterious effort of the dream: neurological, muscular. Even as his tongue is thick and clumsy, his words stumble and falter.

  Your name is called. You turn, and it is yourself—yet not you.

  In actual life if Smith were to stammer such nonsense Kizer would laugh in that soundless way of his, rocking with laughter as if it pained him. For over the years, decades, Kizer has been the one to deflate Smith’s existential quandaries. When Smith takes himself too seriously, count on Kizer to puncture the balloon.

  Dear God. If something has happened to Kizer, what will you do?

  Smith tries to think. Does not dare think.

  Looming over him is a waiter asking if he’d like a drink? while he’s waiting for his friend?—Smith peers up at a tall lanky-limbed young man, wispy beard, dreadlocks halfway down his back. White? Food server with (unwashed, oily) dreadlocks?

  Damned Purple Onion, hiring freaks. Hippie pretensions, health-food and “gluten-free.” Smith glances around searching for the waitress with the buzz-cut hair—or had that been another lunch?

  Anyway, the Purple Onion doesn’t serve drinks. Dreadlocks must mean one of their health-food concoctions—carrot-avocado-yogurt smoothie, pomegranate-lemon-spritzer, “Green Rush” (kale, spinach, broccoli, seaweed liquefied). Next time Smith will insist that Kizer meet him somewhere else.

  Smith thanks the waiter but no. He will wait for his friend before ordering.

  Turning back to his book, rereading a passage already marked with yellow highlighter. Time is an illusion in which we “remember” the past but not the future. As quantum physicists have revealed—but distracted by the fact that Kizer is uncharacteristically late, and hasn’t called or texted, possibly Smith’s phone is malfunctioning in which case if there’s an emergency Kizer won’t be able to reach him. Yes, this must be the case! Smith shoves back his chair, hurries to the hostess to explain the situation and ask if his friend might’ve called and whoever answered the phone inside the restaurant failed to relay the message to him out on the terrace . . .

  The hostess listens with a little frown of sympathy. But no—“Mr. Kizer hasn’t called today, I’m sure.”

  “You know my friend’s name?”—Smith is taken aback for (he is sure) he hadn’t (yet) given it.

  3.

  Returning to his table Smith feels a light tap on his arm.

  “Excuse me? Were you talking about ‘Nate Kizer’? I couldn’t help but overhear.”

  Smith is confounded: here is an individual he has never seen before, he’s sure, who yet seems familiar to him.

  A stranger in his late forties perhaps, in olive-tinted glasses, peering intently, quizzically, at Smith.

  “Y-yes. ‘Nate Kizer.’ We’re having lunch together, today.”

  “We’re having lunch together, today. Nate and me.”

  Strained smiles. Stares of disbelief, suspicion.

  How is this possible? Smith is thinking—Obviously, there is some simple explanation. A mistake.

  “Obviously, there is some explanation. A mistake.” The stranger speaks slowly with a clenched jaw.

  Such a situation would call for levity, one might think. Yet, Smith and the man in the olive-tinted glasses exude an air of hostility, distrust.

  Carefully Smith says: “If this is Friday June ninth, there’s no mistake. Kizer and I are having lunch today, we were supposed to meet at 1:00 P.M.”

  “We were supposed to meet at 1:00 P.M. Kizer and me.”

  The two men stare at each other, perplexed and resentful.

  Smith sees that the other, the stranger, is gripping his cell phone. No doubt he too has been trying to call Kizer without success.

  “Possibly a joke? Or—”

  “—a mistake. Kizer’s—”

  “—he wants us to meet?”

  No! Can’t believe this. Kizer would’ve alerted Smith, he’d invited someone else to join them.

  Something disturbingly familiar about the man who has dared to touch Smith’s arm, to stop him on his way back to his table. His voice is nasal, sounding like Smith’s own voice when he has a stuffed head; his manner is awkward, as if his limbs are poorly coordinated, or he has back pain. His not very attractive face is asymmetrical as if there were an uneven crack down the center and half the face has resettled, as after a seismic shift.

  His (coarse, sand-colored, graying) hair is receding sharply from his forehead, his eyes appear to be deep-socketed, glistening. Unlike Smith who is wearing, as he often does, a fresh tattersall shirt, clean khakis and running shoes in reasonably good condition, the other is wearing a not-fresh shirt of no distinction, jeans beginning to fray at the knee, sandals that expose bony white toes. His forehead is furrowed and mildly blemished, or scarred, from adolescent acne. His mouth is an asymmetrical smirk that disguises (Smith guesses) an underlying unease.

  “And you are—?”

  “Matt Smith.”

  “Matt Smith? Well—I’m Matthew.”

  Staring at each other. Slow blinking. Is this a joke?

  “Well! What’s your middle name?”—(Matt) Smith steels himself.

  “‘Maynard.’ You?”

  “‘Maynard.’”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “You’re joking. Right?”

  Surge of belligerence between the men. Rush of adrenaline. One is obviously an impostor, but—which?

  “No. I am not joking. If you’d like to
see I.D. . . .”

  “If you’d like to see I.D. . . .”

  Now (Matt) Smith realizes: the other’s olive-tinted glasses with metallic frames are near-identical to a pair of glasses he’d once had, replaced with the black plastic frames and bifocal lenses he is now wearing.

  Smith, that’s to say (Matt) Smith, feels a wave of dizziness. As if the terrace floor is beginning to shift beneath his feet. (Earthquake? San Rafael? Not unknown.) He is thinking that something like this has happened before. He has survived, previously. Or had it been a dream, and not real? Is this a dream, and not real?

  A name is called, it is your name. You turn, you approach—it is yourself, though not (literally) you. He feels a rush of curiosity about the other man that leaves him weak, sickened.

  Seeing the expression in (Matt) Smith’s face, (Matthew) Smith pulls out a chair at his table. “Hey, man—you’re looking kind of pale. Better sit down.”

  “I—I don’t think that—”

  “Yeah. You’d better.”

  (Matthew) Smith is brusque, bullying. (Matt) Smith feels a surge of repugnance for the man, a sensation of dread deep in the gut. Just as he’d felt often as a boy, confronted with older, more dominant boys. Wanting to scream at them Go to hell. Leave me alone. Don’t touch me! Yet, (Matt) Smith sits at the table as bidden.

  Soon it is established: both (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith live in San Rafael, (Matt) Smith on Buena Vista Street and (Matthew) Smith on Solano Street; each was born in San Rafael on July 24, 1969; the names of their parents are identical—“Cameron and Joellen Smith.”

  Coincidence? Not very likely.

  And yet—what else, but coincidence?

  In his shock, disorientation (Matt) Smith yet has time for a petty satisfaction—Buena Vista is a much more elegant street than Solano, more expensive houses, quieter neighborhood. Whoever (Matthew) Smith is, or is presuming to be, he is less affluent than (Matt) Smith as well as heavier, slack-jowled.

  “Guess we must be related? Somehow . . .”

  “Must be. Yes.”

  “Except—I’ve never heard of you before . . .”

  “—never heard of you before.”

  “Jesus!”—whistling thinly through his teeth.

  As (Matthew) Smith speaks (Matt) Smith glances about the terrace at other tables. Trying to get his bearings. (Is the floor shifting? No.) There is the hostess in her striking wraparound skirt, there is the (white) kid with the skimpy beard and dreadlocks tumbling down his back. It’s a warm balmy June day, hazy sky like a smudged watercolor. Sfumato—is that the technical term? Bizarre that the other diners, mostly women, are chattering companionably together oblivious of (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith in their midst each as confounded by the other’s existence as by the appearance of a basilisk. Covertly glancing at each other fascinated, repelled.

  (Matt) Smith tries to speak, has to clear his throat: “Well! What’re the odds . . .”

  (Matthew) Smith coughs, laughs: “. . . fucking coincidence . . .”

  Embarrassment settles between them. Sudden shyness.

  “D’you think . . .”

  “Do you think . . .”

  “Some sort of—genetic . . .”

  “Orphans, from the same family? Adopted—”

  “But I’m not—adopted . . .”

  “I’m not. At least I think so . . .”

  “I think so, too. I know so.”

  The men are excited, breathless. Wanting to laugh and yet each feels threatened, endangered. (Matt) Smith worries that it is some sort of bullying contest, the rougher and less civilized will triumph.

  But no, not possible. Not on the terrace of the Purple Onion.

  (Matt) Smith notices that (Matthew) Smith has been reading a magazine while waiting for Kizer—looks like Scientific American. (This, too, is an obscure coincidence, for (Matt) Smith subscribed to Scientific American as a brainy high school kid years ago. But he has long since allowed the subscription to lapse.) Seeing that (Matt) Smith has noticed the magazine, (Matthew) Smith says with an embarrassed shrug: “It’s a paradox how we ‘see’ objects with our eyes—objects and one another—yet with a microscope we ‘see’ a very different micro-reality, magnified. Which is ‘real’? Is one ‘more real’ than the other?”

  Why, (Matthew) Smith has intellectual pretensions! (Matt) Smith resents him all the more.

  “We see what we want to see.”

  “We see what we’ve been told to see.”

  “What we’ve been told we want to see—that’s what we ‘see.’”

  (Matt) Smith and (Matthew) Smith laugh together, guardedly. Shyly glancing at each other.

  (Matt) Smith concedes: “There’s a natural bias in humankind toward the unexamined. For what we think to be common experience. We have to suppress—censor—what contradicts our sense of the ‘real.’ Otherwise—”

  “Of course! ‘Otherwise.’”

  There is a pause. The men reconsider. (Matt) Smith still finds the situation unnerving but is beginning to feel that yes, he might master it, control it, come out on top somehow with an anecdote Kizer will find wonderfully entertaining when (Matt) Smith recounts it to him.

  Not very politely, in fact rudely (Matthew) Smith snaps his fingers at the dreadlocked waiter who has been hovering nearby in the hope that, at last, the men have orders for him. “Hey? Over here? Drinks for both of us.”

  (Matt) Smith orders a pomegranate-lemon spritzer. Not with much enthusiasm but the spritzer seems the most palatable drink at the Purple Onion. (Matthew) Smith orders a Bloody Mary.

  “Bloody Mary? Here? They don’t serve Bloody Marys here.”

  “Of course they serve Bloody Marys here. Why’d we come here, if they didn’t? Ask Kizer.”

  “Kizer doesn’t drink at lunch . . .”

  “Kizer certainly drinks at lunch. And drinks are served here.” (Matthew) Smith appeals to the dreadlocked waiter who laughs politely as if (Matthew) Smith has said something witty. Indeed, on the table is a drinks list.

  Drinks at the Purple Onion Café? Since when? (Matt) Smith is amazed.

  “Since they reopened. After the renovation. You must have heard, since you live in San Rafael, that a suicide bomber set off a homemade bomb here last fall?”

  (Matt) Smith has not heard. Or rather, (Matt) Smith has heard, but—“That was just a ridiculous rumor, Matthew. It never happened.”

  His heart trips. Just slightly. Calling the other Matthew.

  “Certainly it happened.”

  “No. Certainly it did not.”

  “Look, I live in this town. The bombing was big news. Three people died plus the teenaged bomber. Half the restaurant collapsed, they had to rebuild. It just opened again, when?—in March. I met Kizer for lunch, we sat on the terrace and talked about how strange it felt, to be having lunch here—where people had died . . .”

  Lunch with Kizer? Here? Renovation? (Matt) Smith doubts this.

  “You can see by the wisteria, there hasn’t been any damage. Those trees by the parking lot . . . The Purple Onion was repainted, I think, and some alterations were made, but—not . . .” (Matt) Smith begins to stammer, this is so absurd. Suicide bombing! Purple Onion! “Someone played a prank, called in a bomb threat but it turned out to be a hoax. The Café was evacuated, in fact Kizer and I were supposed to meet for lunch that day but the area was cordoned off. False bomb threats were called in to the high school and the hospital, too, that day . . .”

  (Matthew) Smith retorts: “Those bomb threats came after the bomb at the Purple Onion. There was an actual bomb here. A kid from the neighborhood, high school dropout, he’d made a bomb at home and just walked over here with it.”

  No, no! Nothing remotely like that happened. (Matt) Smith is laughing, frustrated. Trying to remain calm in the face of the other’s obstinacy as he has had to do, as a rational person, through much of his life. “It was a stupid prank some high school kids played to get one of their classmates in trouble. This poor kid, innoc
ent kid, he’d been bullied mercilessly . . .” (Matt) Smith’s voice is shaking. Recalling those terrible days when Lisa called him in his office sobbing on the phone. Trevor refuses to go to school. He has locked himself in the bathroom, I am so afraid he will hurt himself . . . Why can’t you come home!

  (Matthew) Smith continues to insist that yes, there was a suicide bomb here. Asks the dreadlocked waiter who grimaces, smiles nervously, says yes he guesses so, last year, before he’d moved to San Rafael and started working here, yes there was said to be a suicide bombing. Here.

  (Matt) Smith shakes his head. Ridiculous! His face is hot with indignation but damned if he will continue this fatuous exchange.

  It is clear that (Matthew) Smith is a damaged personality. The kind of person who pursues a subject when it is evident that others do not wish to continue. Gratified, vindicated, (Matthew) Smith yet takes a new tack, lowering his (nasal, maddening) voice in a way to suggest sympathy, pity.

  “I know, Matt—you don’t want to think about it. That is your prerogative. That is only natural. You and your wife—I would imagine—whoever she is—would rather—rather not.” But now (Matthew) Smith has gone too far, uttering the words your wife.

  “And you? Do you have a wife?”—(Matt) Smith sneers.

  Barely can (Matt) Smith bring himself to look at (Matthew) Smith’s coarse asymmetrical face. Barely, to acknowledge the watery eyes just visible behind smudged olive-tinted lenses.

  “I have an—ex-wife.”

  “Ah. I see. Ex.”

  “You don’t ‘see,’ I think.” Now (Matthew) Smith’s voice is quavering, indignant. (Matthew) Smith glances about the terrace with an angry smile. (Where the hell is his drink? How long have they been waiting?)

  Next question should be, what is the ex-wife’s name? But (Matt) Smith refuses to ask this question, just yet.

  4.

  Damn Kizer! Now forty-five minutes late.

  And no call from him, no explanation or apology.

  At least, their drinks have been brought by the dreadlocked waiter: Bloody Marys for each.

  (Matt) Smith doesn’t recall ordering a Bloody Mary but hey, this is fine. Tomato juice for physical well-being, vodka for confidence.