Other Kelly, page 1
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Kelly was twenty minutes late, which was usual for her by now.
“Sorry!” she said, with a smile that was mostly teeth. “It was hilarious—turns out that the leak from my kitchen they said they fixed had just moved across the ceiling to my closet and I didn’t know for two months, so my stuff all molded. I had to buy a new coat on my way. Isn’t that like the most Me thing you’ve ever heard?”
It was pouring. Marshall had bailed at eleven minutes and Kyle had gone with him, so Diana was inside pleading to change the reservation. Kelly, carefully staying out of Diana’s sight, nudged under the awning with Erin and me.
“It’s cute, though, right?” Kelly said. “I mean like, I got a cute coat and a story out of it, at least. It’s kind of funny, right? Like, it will be fine.”
“It’s already wet,” I said. “Why didn’t you buy an umbrella?”
“It’ll get rained on at home anyway,” Kelly said.
She looked over her shoulder; in the middle of the sidewalk, standing in the rain that dissolved right before it touched her, Other Kelly watched the traffic.
* * *
“—and then Carver said he couldn’t come because he was at an intensive dog-training course Thursday and Friday, but he volunteered me because ‘he believes in team responsibility,’ so I spent two fucking days in a sexual harassment seminar taking notes like Carver can even read, and now I’m behind on my actual work, so I have to go to the office after this.” Kelly stabbed her waffle.
“When are you going to leave?” Diana said. “Like, he’s a dick, we get it. You know the deal.”
“But it took me a year to even find it,” Kelly said. “I have prescriptions. What am I supposed to do?”
“Date doctors,” Erin said.
“Hey,” said Kyle, who had been doing that for the last four years as he tried to get his music career going.
Other Kelly was staring at a couple outside who were well into a breakup. (She would stare at anything. She should be staring at Kelly—why else was she here?—but she hardly ever did.) Her place setting was empty. She didn’t eat, or sleep, or talk. She just showed up anywhere we had invited Kelly.
“I just can’t keep going like this,” Kelly said, wobbly, pushing a piece of bacon around her plate, the fork shrieking a little when she pressed too hard.
Other Kelly looked over, almost, at the sound of the fork—Kelly looked up, like she was waiting, like she knew Other Kelly was about to say something—but then the woman outside was shouting “You’re fucking kidding me,” so loud it echoed off the glass condos on either side of the street, and then burst into tears, and we ended up watching that for so long that I was at home and sorting through twenty emails I’d missed before I wondered what the hell Kelly had been hoping to hear.
* * *
By the time Kelly told us, her downward slide didn’t feel like a dramatic change in direction anymore, just a slowly permanent state; I’d waited a while for her to hit bottom, but even before Other Kelly showed up I realized it was all just falling. When she sat down and told us with a straight face that she’d seen herself passing her in the street, we all looked at each other, hoping this was the floor.
“Does your carbon monoxide detector have batteries in it?” asked Erin.
“Don’t fucking talk down to me. I’ve seen her. I saw her every day this week.”
“I’m not talking down to you,” said Erin, who absolutely was. She was a counselor at one of the high schools where rich people sent their kids to do drugs in peace. She didn’t know any other way to talk.
“Is she following you?” I asked.
“Not quite. She’s always where I am, but not like she’s waiting for me. Like somebody dropped her out of a plane right there and she’s heading back to where she came from. We just keep … passing.”
Kyle sat up—he’d suggested leaving Kelly out of this dinner, but he was clearly repenting now—but Diana beat him to it. “How did you notice her?”
“Because she’s my fucking double, Diana. You notice stuff.”
Diana made half a face before Erin kicked her under the table to stop Diana saying whatever she thought about Kelly’s powers of observation. (Diana had come into the group by way of Marshall and Erin. Kelly was a lot unless you had decided to be her friend beforehand. Diana had not.)
Marshall frowned, looking halfway to actually concerned. “So this woman is, like, copying you and stalking you?”
God, why would she bother, I thought before I could stop it, and hoped it hadn’t showed on my face.
“She is me,” Kelly snapped. “She’s not copying. She is me.”
“Yes,” Kyle said under his breath, already typing into his phone. He kept his keyboard noises on; everything he typed always sounded eighty letters long.
“Kelly,” Erin started, and I shook my head at her, because the way Erin said Kelly’s name before she asked how therapy was going was enough to piss off a much more patient person than Kelly was.
“There are a lot of people in this city,” I said instead. “This can’t be the first time somebody’s seen someone who looks exactly like them.”
“Correct,” said Kyle, turning so that everyone could see the website in his hand. “I knew I’d seen this—look, it happens all the time! God, imagine meeting your double and he’s also in coach. Like you have a cosmic twin that you actually managed to cross paths with, out of eight billion people in the whole world, and neither of you can get your shit together enough for business class.” He started typing again. “Oh my god they were both going to Disney. Oh, this is sad.”
“Yeah,” said Kelly. “It’s them we’re sad about.”
“Next time stop her. See what the deal is,” Erin said. “She’s got to be curious, too.”
Other Kelly wasn’t curious about much of anything, as it turned out, but even there, she and Kelly were alike.
* * *
Not exactly, though. That was the thing.
I mean, you knew who she looked like—she was Kelly, nobody doubted it, the first time she’d ever showed up Marshall had said “Oh shit” under his breath and Erin had edged halfway off her bar stool. She was wearing something I recognized of Kelly’s, before Kelly had started forgetting her clothes in the laundry room and putting them in the dryer on high to kill whatever happens to wet clothes in a washer overnight. Now everything Kelly wore pulled a little, everywhere. (Other Kelly’s clothes fit her. Other Kelly’s clothes were always clean.)
When you looked right at Other Kelly, of course, something was missing. The lights were off, somehow; an empty house. But it didn’t matter. No waitress or security guard or taxi driver ever glanced at Other Kelly with concern.
I avoided looking at Other Kelly for very long, but I didn’t look at Kelly for very long anymore, either. What was the point? You knew somebody or you didn’t. You could do something or you couldn’t. Other Kelly wasn’t Kelly, and I could always tell; anything else was Other Kelly’s business.
Kyle was the one who got really obsessed, at first—not even when Other Kelly was there, just random moments where Marshall and I would be getting McDonald’s with Kyle at four a.m. and he’d look up from his fries like a meerkat and say “Fuck, I bet it’s killed Kelly already” and start typing so loud nobody could even talk until he was finished. He had a phone full of photos of people posing with their doubles.
“Those doubles are people, asshole,” said Marshall once, a warning to shut up about it, but if Kyle was smart enough to take a warning he’d have stopped being a musician already, and he said, “How would you know—they show up on camera, doesn’t mean they’re a person,” and kept typing until Kelly texted back.
Marshall rolled his eyes, but it was true. In the group photo at New Year’s, Other Kelly was there, in the same thing Kelly was wearing (it fit her better), looking right into the lens. She wasn’t smiling, but still she seemed perfectly normal until you saw Kelly with her arm outstretched to take the picture, dress pulling at her shoulders, grinning like her skull was about to make a run for it, and realized that one of them was very wrong.
(Eventually Kyle stopped texting Kelly. She was never dead. It was fine.)
* * *
I couldn’t remember how long Kelly and I had been friends, which made me feel sort of responsible for her whenever she was going off the rails in front of everyone, even though I was not responsible for her, which I reminded myself about a lot. I’d still tried—“When she
But if Kelly had gone off the rails enough to accidentally summon Other Kelly, there was nothing I could have done about it. I asked her to museums with me for a year and a half before I gave up (she didn’t even say no, just wouldn’t answer when I asked, until I’d end up going anyway and sending a picture of some miserable painting from whatever room I was in; she’d write back lol same sorry i couldn’t make it!! instantly), and Kelly never asked anyone to meet her anymore, so I’d given up even waiting for that.
She hadn’t been surprised when Other Kelly showed up. She’d treated Other Kelly the way she treated tax season.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Other Kelly, though. It wasn’t the kind of thing you told your friend who already hated her job whose clothes kept getting jacked up in the dryer, but Kelly already looked like half the girls in the new condos—every time one of them was walking a dog I had a half second of wanting to call after her, horrified Kelly thought she could handle a puppy. Other Kelly looked exactly like Kelly, but so did all those girls. It wasn’t bone structure we were all scared of. Whatever you saw when you recognized Kelly was something deeper, some essential quality that only Kelly had, and I couldn’t stop trying to guess what it was.
Had been, I guess. She shared it with Other Kelly now.
“They are literally the same person,” Marshall said when I brought it up, not quite like he’d sounded with Kyle, but close. He was hanging around after we were finished, and some not-Kelly had come out the door with a French bulldog while I smoked out my kitchen window, and I knew better—we weren’t supposed to talk about Other Kelly—but it had slipped out before I could stop myself.
“But you know what I’m saying. Remember that time you started making fun of that girl’s purse on the train because you thought Kelly had finally given in to pink and it wasn’t Kelly?”
He flinched, and after a second he flinched again, different. “That’s a regular mistake, though. I wouldn’t do that with—I mean, I’d never just start talking to—if I. If I saw.” He gnawed on his tongue a second, like he could massage the right word out, but it never came. Nobody had ever invoked Other Kelly out loud. We knew better.
“But,” I said. I stopped—I couldn’t talk about her, either—but I wanted to say, The eyes are different, even though they shouldn’t be. Something about the mouth is so different. Why does Kelly look older than Other Kelly? What’s wrong with whichever one of them is more wrong?
“I keep thinking about it,” I said. “All Kyle’s photos. Somebody just like you, and you never knowing.”
“Not you,” he said. “You look like somebody about to get shot to death in a Renaissance painting.”
He was trying to insult me; it was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard.
* * *
Other Kelly had an ASMR channel. None of the others had seen it, but I couldn’t sleep nights. She sat at a table close to the camera, so you only saw her to the neck, her long brown hair swinging a little as she moved; she held silver rings at the very tips of her fingers—fingers that were slightly longer than Kelly’s, no one could say those hands were the same—and tapped the covers of hardback books. It was doing pretty well.
* * *
Kelly called an emergency meeting the day Carver made her fax some legal thing without looking at it. It was already after nine when she got out of work (lol fucking kill me she wrote, underneath the last three lol fucking kill mes). By the time she made it to my place we’d eaten the takeout, and all I had was cereal. She ate three bowls without stopping, her gaze shaken loose from anything actually happening. Probably still back in the office; she told me once that she kept a Swingline on her desk for whenever she finally snapped, and imagining his skull busting open was the only way she could keep coming to work.
She started talking during bowl four. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, he said, it’s that this is really important, and we don’t want anyone to be able to complain about your performance. It was his divorce papers. He turned out the light in the room so I couldn’t see it. He took my phone back to his desk, too. He took my fucking phone!”
She dropped onto my futon, which I’d bought as small and uncomfortable as possible so nobody would sleep over at my place, which everyone respected but Kelly.
Diana was perched on the other side, at the very edge where none of the metal bars could dig into your back. I was in my wobbly desk chair, and Erin was sitting on my desk so she wouldn’t have to sit on my futon. Marshall and Kyle had been omitted, because when Kelly was going to cry she didn’t like men to look at her. Other Kelly stood by my bookcase, where she might have been looking over my books, if she could read.
(She couldn’t—Kyle had checked. She just liked to look at them. She’d stare at anything, except Kelly.)
Kelly dragged her skin outward under the heels of her hands, like she could pull it tight enough to hold back tears. “Honestly, fuck my job. The insurance won’t help when the ulcers eat me, I might as well bail. Everest would be less demanding. At least up there if you collapse everybody just leaves you to die in private like normal people.”
Diana set down her drink, a little sound that always marked something shitty about to come out of her mouth, and said, “You’re right. Go.”
“We’d miss you,” said Erin, almost like she meant it.
Kelly looked around like she’d actually been expecting a better response. Then she looked at Other Kelly.
Erin and Diana pretended not to notice, but I couldn’t help it and I looked over, too. Other Kelly had given up on my books and had wandered to my window. Two pigeons were fighting over something on the sidewalk outside.
Kelly watched Other Kelly, waiting, picking absently at her cuticles. The silence held a long time. Eventually Kelly shoved her bowl of cereal across the table, toward Other Kelly, slow and deliberate enough that nothing spilled.
“Come on,” she said. “You must be hungry.”
Other Kelly never moved. At some point Kelly started crying. Erin pulled up the car service she used that was so exclusive I’d never heard of it, face lit up bright green for a second as it loaded. Outside, the pigeons were still fighting, a battery of wings.
* * *
I had seen myself, once. I’d gone to the Met on a free Friday because I was trying to meet people who weren’t the people I already knew. I didn’t—I was bad at meeting people, it’s how I’d ended up with the people I already knew, Kelly had pulled people toward us until we were all locked in orbit and I had absolutely no idea how you started that all over again from scratch—and it was so embarrassing to be there alone that after a while I’d just kept turning into whatever gallery was empty. In a small room of lesser works nobody was interested in, there was a big painting of some peasant-y kitchen full of light and people. I was sitting on a stool off to one side, peeling potatoes.
It was an old enough painting that the other me had probably died of something disgusting and preventable right after posing for this, so I tried not to get romantic about it, but in the painting I seemed like I knew what I was doing; I had something in my hands, and I understood what was being asked of me.
I wondered if the woman next to me, who was pulling feathers off a duck, had ever met herself here. If someday I would meet that woman—if she was still alive, if she was somehow here. If she’d even recognize me when she saw me, when this potato peeler was all she had to go on; for someone who had my face, she didn’t look like me at all.
