My Double
by Robb White
I took an empty stool at the end near the door and ordered a whiskey. Maybe it was my agitation causing me to drink too much. I kept ordering whiskey shots with a water back until I was buzzed, and my throat scorched. That spreading glow of warmth was a sure sign my legs would be rubber when I got off the stool.
Stumbling out of the bar, bumping shoulders with passersby who muttered under their breaths or called me names, I was too busy concentrating on walking straight like a toddler putting one foot in front of the other.
At the crosswalk of Freddie’s Grill, I spotted him on a bench eating from one of those paper boats of French fries. I headed for him, my eyes glazed but my focus zeroed on him, my double, a man who could have been my identical twin, a man I saw a week ago and had been looking for ever since. My brain reeled the closer I got. I intended to grab him by the shirt if I had to, pin him down, and hear him speak. If he had my voice, too—what then?
About halfway across, the fender of a car clipped me behind the knee, and I went sprawling head-first to the other side of the street. My head stopped short of smashing into the curb. That, anyway, was what the bicycle cops wrote in their report after I declined a trip to the hospital. Apparently, I was so belligerent that any pity for me dissolved, and I was arrested for public drunk and resisting arrest. At the Sheriff’s in the county seat six miles away, I was booked, fingerprinted, had a buccal swab taken, and my DNA entered into CODIS, the national database of persons arrested or convicted of crimes. After the processing, a deputy led me to a cell where I spent a long night listening to the guy in the bunk below cope with the DT’s.
I bonded out the next day, pled guilty at my brief sentencing, and as a citizen with no criminal record and “ties to the community,” as my lawyer said, I was ordered to serve a month in the county caboose. My wife packed her bags and stuck a post-it note to the fridge. It said only three words: “The Last Straw.”
My welding job at the manufacturing plant was history as soon as my arrest made it into the police beat of the Herald-Tribune. One month after my release, life returned to normal. I’d just picked up a minimum-wage job driving a tow motor at the recycling center. “Normal,” that is, until that pre-dawn knock by two detectives in SWAT gear.
I was charged with two counts of murder in the commission of a felony, and two counts of aggravated felonious assault. They told me my DNA matched skin cells taken from a baseball bat used in a recent vicious crime. Cops are allowed to lie by the courts, so I didn’t panic. I asked for my lawyer and that ended this interrogation. I was booked for the second time in weeks. One cop asked me where I got that running scar down the right side of my face when he told me to stand up for the cuffs.
“What scar?”
The cop snorted as if I were joking with him.
Two days later I was shaving with the plastic Bic they give inmates when I noticed it in the mirror: a zig-zagged stripe of dead-white skin that started under the right zygomatic arch and disappeared into the beard below my jawline. I know what scars are on my body and the closest one to my face is on my left palm where I slid on a piece of buried glass at ten years old. I didn’t know how that scar came to be there. Every time I tried to remember; a black wall came down.
At my trial, I wanted to take the stand, but my milquetoast lawyer talked me out of it. He said I’d do more harm than good with my history of blackouts and the forensic evidence.
That evidence turned over to my lawyer in discovery was “a Walmart tote of incrimination,” according to the prosecutor. The Assistant D.A. who prepared it wished him “good luck” and winked. It started with closed-circuit film from an all-night Dairy Mart where a red ragtop Wrangler was caught passing in the early morning hours. It also included witness statements attesting to an altercation with a man in the parking lot of the Crow’s Nest. He identified me by my scar on my left eyebrow. The worst was my DNA on that baseball bat.
My lawyer refused to believe I was nowhere near the crime scene. I can’t alibi myself for that night because my wife couldn’t be traced. I remember drinking and going for a long drive in my Jeep to clear my head. My double was all I could think about. I remember pounding the dashboard with my fist—even ripping the mirror off the windshield. No one can understand the frustration of living in a small town, seeing “yourself” on every street corner, yet not being able to confront your lookalike.
That’s all I remembered about that night, I told him: no altercation at the Crow’s Nest, a sports bar I avoided.
He looked at me. “Blood from the cut on your hand was on that bat. How do you explain that?”
My double . . . He’s behind everything that had gone wrong with me.
The crimes I’m accused of? At two-forty in the morning two days after my release from county lockup, a security guard behind the medical offices plaza on Lake Avenue received a call from his wife on Tryon Road less two miles away. Someone moving around in the storage barn behind their house where the family powerboat and four-wheelers were stored. She sent their eighteen-year-old son out to check. He grabbed a baseball bat and left for the barn. When he didn’t answer his cell phone, she called her husband. He sped home, strapped on a holster with a Taurus Bulldog and raced to the barn.
Using his laser sight to sweep the grounds for the intruder, the guard gave the intruder a target. He stepped from behind a fir tree with the boy’s Louisville slugger and bashed the guard’s head in. The boy was found unconscious from a blow to his head. Life-flighted to Cleveland’s brain-trauma unit, he barely survived. She went in search of her missing men and was found lying beside her husband with a crushed skull, brain matter leaking from her nostrils. Cops theorized the killer’s swing improved with each victim.
My lawyer stood up, shoved papers into his valise, and started to leave the conference room for inmates and their lawyers.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not death-qualified.”
“You can transfer DNA,” I said. “You know that, right?”
He ignored me, looked back once, and left. His expression told me everything.
Here’s where it gets confusing. My pro bono lawyer wanted me to plead to diminished capacity based on “a lifetime of alcohol abuse.” He found a shrink willing to state—after a couple brief interviews—that I was “the most delusional human being” he’d ever encountered. After the second interview, he insisted on carrying a man-down into our interview. At my trial, he testified that my “submerged but true persona” was “a boiling magma of repressed violence” able to burst through the surface of my personality at any provocation. He accused me of having “a homicidal affect” and called me “a cicada buried in the dirt for seventeen years.”
I am the meekest of men. I carry no grudges. Yes, I’m an alcoholic. But I don’t skulk inside people’s storage barns and knock their brains in during the wee hours of the night. The prosecution had some tool-mark expert testify that the scratches on a tire iron in my Jeep’s trunk matched jimmy marks on the face plate of the hinge on that barn.
My lawyer’s shrink hung my “fantasy” of a double around my neck. He said my binge-drinking blackouts had worsened until I began blaming a fictional lookalike for all the calamities in my life: the arrest for public drunkenness, the failed marriage, losing the job. I’d “slipped into this phantom-me so to blame him.”
My double disappeared from Northtown on the day I was sentenced given the LWOP sentence—Life Without Parole. I just missed lethal injection in the death house in Lucasville on the Ohio River. I never told anyone—not my wife or my lawyer—that I first saw him seventeen years ago on a street corner in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
When that creep from the parking lot identified me on the witness stand by the scar on my forehead, a zigzag of dead tissue resembling a tiny white spider, I jumped up from the defense table and called him a liar. Two deputies pinned me to the floor and cuffed me up. The judge ordered me confined to an isolation cell.
Divorce papers arrived a month later. I’m currently in SHU, the segregation unit, at Youngstown State penitentiary, a super max. I had to defend myself from a greasy slug of a convict who tried to extort me in my own cell. I bit off part of his nose and pulled out one eyeball with my thumb. The Violent Prisoner Extraction Unit stormed in to take me down. The monkey mouths on my tier who shout at the “new fish,” called me “Bug Boy” when they pushed me past them hogtied on the gurney.
The prison shrink’s a secret boozer. He’s fascinated by my case. He can’t get enough details about my “cicada-persona,” as he called it. He wants to write a paper on me, he says, and he’s going to use “the Wrangler wave” to describe the emotional trigger for what he calls my prolonged fugue states. What a moron. Drivers of Wrangler Jeeps wave to one another on the highways just as motorcycle riders do. It’s meaningless. The day I passed my double driving an identical red Jeep on Ninth Street, I waved out of habit. I only glimpsed the driver. But I knew him from that accidental sighting back in Arkansas seventeen years ago long before I became a problem drinker.
On the day, I’d just left a college bar and picked up a copy of the student newspaper. I normally ignored it, a stupid rag full of academic gibberish and pretentious poetry. But that day I saw a photograph of me—not me, but my double. It was drawn by a police photographer of a rapist on campus. People looked at me differently from that day on. I had to transfer to another college. Nothing seemed right after that. I lost my bearings, began drinking, flunked out, and started drifting from place to place, the jobs always getting harder and the money shorter.
If I don’t get chalked up again, I can get back to general population, so I nod, smile, and listen. He read a passage to me from a thick diagnostic manual on mental disorders. He called it his “bible.” I considered it bullshit, but I humored him. I’m not crazy.
Yesterday afternoon, he had a book delivered to me from the library with my chow. I found a passage that is sure to please him in our next session. I’ve memorized it:
“But things that fall hopelessly apart in theory lie close together without contradiction in the paradoxical soul of man.”
Stumbling out of the bar, bumping shoulders with passersby who muttered under their breaths or called me names, I was too busy concentrating on walking straight like a toddler putting one foot in front of the other.
At the crosswalk of Freddie’s Grill, I spotted him on a bench eating from one of those paper boats of French fries. I headed for him, my eyes glazed but my focus zeroed on him, my double, a man who could have been my identical twin, a man I saw a week ago and had been looking for ever since. My brain reeled the closer I got. I intended to grab him by the shirt if I had to, pin him down, and hear him speak. If he had my voice, too—what then?
About halfway across, the fender of a car clipped me behind the knee, and I went sprawling head-first to the other side of the street. My head stopped short of smashing into the curb. That, anyway, was what the bicycle cops wrote in their report after I declined a trip to the hospital. Apparently, I was so belligerent that any pity for me dissolved, and I was arrested for public drunk and resisting arrest. At the Sheriff’s in the county seat six miles away, I was booked, fingerprinted, had a buccal swab taken, and my DNA entered into CODIS, the national database of persons arrested or convicted of crimes. After the processing, a deputy led me to a cell where I spent a long night listening to the guy in the bunk below cope with the DT’s.
I bonded out the next day, pled guilty at my brief sentencing, and as a citizen with no criminal record and “ties to the community,” as my lawyer said, I was ordered to serve a month in the county caboose. My wife packed her bags and stuck a post-it note to the fridge. It said only three words: “The Last Straw.”
My welding job at the manufacturing plant was history as soon as my arrest made it into the police beat of the Herald-Tribune. One month after my release, life returned to normal. I’d just picked up a minimum-wage job driving a tow motor at the recycling center. “Normal,” that is, until that pre-dawn knock by two detectives in SWAT gear.
I was charged with two counts of murder in the commission of a felony, and two counts of aggravated felonious assault. They told me my DNA matched skin cells taken from a baseball bat used in a recent vicious crime. Cops are allowed to lie by the courts, so I didn’t panic. I asked for my lawyer and that ended this interrogation. I was booked for the second time in weeks. One cop asked me where I got that running scar down the right side of my face when he told me to stand up for the cuffs.
“What scar?”
The cop snorted as if I were joking with him.
Two days later I was shaving with the plastic Bic they give inmates when I noticed it in the mirror: a zig-zagged stripe of dead-white skin that started under the right zygomatic arch and disappeared into the beard below my jawline. I know what scars are on my body and the closest one to my face is on my left palm where I slid on a piece of buried glass at ten years old. I didn’t know how that scar came to be there. Every time I tried to remember; a black wall came down.
At my trial, I wanted to take the stand, but my milquetoast lawyer talked me out of it. He said I’d do more harm than good with my history of blackouts and the forensic evidence.
That evidence turned over to my lawyer in discovery was “a Walmart tote of incrimination,” according to the prosecutor. The Assistant D.A. who prepared it wished him “good luck” and winked. It started with closed-circuit film from an all-night Dairy Mart where a red ragtop Wrangler was caught passing in the early morning hours. It also included witness statements attesting to an altercation with a man in the parking lot of the Crow’s Nest. He identified me by my scar on my left eyebrow. The worst was my DNA on that baseball bat.
My lawyer refused to believe I was nowhere near the crime scene. I can’t alibi myself for that night because my wife couldn’t be traced. I remember drinking and going for a long drive in my Jeep to clear my head. My double was all I could think about. I remember pounding the dashboard with my fist—even ripping the mirror off the windshield. No one can understand the frustration of living in a small town, seeing “yourself” on every street corner, yet not being able to confront your lookalike.
That’s all I remembered about that night, I told him: no altercation at the Crow’s Nest, a sports bar I avoided.
He looked at me. “Blood from the cut on your hand was on that bat. How do you explain that?”
My double . . . He’s behind everything that had gone wrong with me.
The crimes I’m accused of? At two-forty in the morning two days after my release from county lockup, a security guard behind the medical offices plaza on Lake Avenue received a call from his wife on Tryon Road less two miles away. Someone moving around in the storage barn behind their house where the family powerboat and four-wheelers were stored. She sent their eighteen-year-old son out to check. He grabbed a baseball bat and left for the barn. When he didn’t answer his cell phone, she called her husband. He sped home, strapped on a holster with a Taurus Bulldog and raced to the barn.
Using his laser sight to sweep the grounds for the intruder, the guard gave the intruder a target. He stepped from behind a fir tree with the boy’s Louisville slugger and bashed the guard’s head in. The boy was found unconscious from a blow to his head. Life-flighted to Cleveland’s brain-trauma unit, he barely survived. She went in search of her missing men and was found lying beside her husband with a crushed skull, brain matter leaking from her nostrils. Cops theorized the killer’s swing improved with each victim.
My lawyer stood up, shoved papers into his valise, and started to leave the conference room for inmates and their lawyers.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not death-qualified.”
“You can transfer DNA,” I said. “You know that, right?”
He ignored me, looked back once, and left. His expression told me everything.
Here’s where it gets confusing. My pro bono lawyer wanted me to plead to diminished capacity based on “a lifetime of alcohol abuse.” He found a shrink willing to state—after a couple brief interviews—that I was “the most delusional human being” he’d ever encountered. After the second interview, he insisted on carrying a man-down into our interview. At my trial, he testified that my “submerged but true persona” was “a boiling magma of repressed violence” able to burst through the surface of my personality at any provocation. He accused me of having “a homicidal affect” and called me “a cicada buried in the dirt for seventeen years.”
I am the meekest of men. I carry no grudges. Yes, I’m an alcoholic. But I don’t skulk inside people’s storage barns and knock their brains in during the wee hours of the night. The prosecution had some tool-mark expert testify that the scratches on a tire iron in my Jeep’s trunk matched jimmy marks on the face plate of the hinge on that barn.
My lawyer’s shrink hung my “fantasy” of a double around my neck. He said my binge-drinking blackouts had worsened until I began blaming a fictional lookalike for all the calamities in my life: the arrest for public drunkenness, the failed marriage, losing the job. I’d “slipped into this phantom-me so to blame him.”
My double disappeared from Northtown on the day I was sentenced given the LWOP sentence—Life Without Parole. I just missed lethal injection in the death house in Lucasville on the Ohio River. I never told anyone—not my wife or my lawyer—that I first saw him seventeen years ago on a street corner in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
When that creep from the parking lot identified me on the witness stand by the scar on my forehead, a zigzag of dead tissue resembling a tiny white spider, I jumped up from the defense table and called him a liar. Two deputies pinned me to the floor and cuffed me up. The judge ordered me confined to an isolation cell.
Divorce papers arrived a month later. I’m currently in SHU, the segregation unit, at Youngstown State penitentiary, a super max. I had to defend myself from a greasy slug of a convict who tried to extort me in my own cell. I bit off part of his nose and pulled out one eyeball with my thumb. The Violent Prisoner Extraction Unit stormed in to take me down. The monkey mouths on my tier who shout at the “new fish,” called me “Bug Boy” when they pushed me past them hogtied on the gurney.
The prison shrink’s a secret boozer. He’s fascinated by my case. He can’t get enough details about my “cicada-persona,” as he called it. He wants to write a paper on me, he says, and he’s going to use “the Wrangler wave” to describe the emotional trigger for what he calls my prolonged fugue states. What a moron. Drivers of Wrangler Jeeps wave to one another on the highways just as motorcycle riders do. It’s meaningless. The day I passed my double driving an identical red Jeep on Ninth Street, I waved out of habit. I only glimpsed the driver. But I knew him from that accidental sighting back in Arkansas seventeen years ago long before I became a problem drinker.
On the day, I’d just left a college bar and picked up a copy of the student newspaper. I normally ignored it, a stupid rag full of academic gibberish and pretentious poetry. But that day I saw a photograph of me—not me, but my double. It was drawn by a police photographer of a rapist on campus. People looked at me differently from that day on. I had to transfer to another college. Nothing seemed right after that. I lost my bearings, began drinking, flunked out, and started drifting from place to place, the jobs always getting harder and the money shorter.
If I don’t get chalked up again, I can get back to general population, so I nod, smile, and listen. He read a passage to me from a thick diagnostic manual on mental disorders. He called it his “bible.” I considered it bullshit, but I humored him. I’m not crazy.
Yesterday afternoon, he had a book delivered to me from the library with my chow. I found a passage that is sure to please him in our next session. I’ve memorized it:
“But things that fall hopelessly apart in theory lie close together without contradiction in the paradoxical soul of man.”
Robb White has published several crime, horror, and mainstream stories in various magazines and anthologies. He’s been nominated for a Derringer for his crime fiction. A third private-eye novel featuring Raimo Jarvi will be published this summer. “The Girl from the Sweater Factory,” a horror tale, was a finalist in The Dark Sire Magazine’s 2020 awards. Recent horror stories are "The Backyard Digger" in The Yard and "The Tick Bite" and “You’ll See, She Said” in Black Petals. Betray Me Not, a collection of revenge tales, is his latest work. Follow him on Twitter @tomhaftmann or on Facebook at facebook.com/tomhaftmann.