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Memento | Nov 01 2005

Last night K and I were discussing a story idea for Oblivio, a piece about a parallel apartment to our own, or rather a parallel world with a parallel apartment in it. In the story I’m the one who discovers the parallel world, stumbling on it through a hidden panel in our bathroom. The parallel apartment is identical to ours except for one detail: K. She’s there but she’s different. What she is, in a sense, is perfect—a version of K without any of the things that drive me crazy about her. Notably it was K who thought of this twist; I wouldn’t have dared.

In our original conception, time spent in one apartment is time absent from the other. So whenever I’m cavorting in the parallel apartment with the “perfect” K (let us call her K2), I’m absent from the real world apartment and from the life of K1. It’s a form of cheating, really, particularly since I’m obliged to conceal the truth of where I am when I’m in the bathroom—and not just from K1, but from K2. I’m betraying both women.

This didn’t seem so interesting, to write about cheating on K with a more “perfect” version of her, so I changed the story to include two Michaels, one in each apartment. In this conception, whenever I leave one apartment, the other Michael remains behind, and so neither K is ever betrayed, exactly. To say this another way, whenever I pass through the bathroom gateway, I switch bodies as it were, embodying the other Michael. My recent story Chickpeas uses a similar conceit. There I split myself into two Michaels, one of whom, the one I embody, observes the other from the outside, without having access to the other’s experience.

I hope this is clear now. There are two ongoing Michaels, and I switch between them.

I thought about this for a time, asking myself what I’d do in such a circumstance. Would I try out life with K2? Would I switch over to K2 permanently? Is K2, in other words, who I really want? My answer surprised me. I decided I wouldn’t try it and certainly wouldn’t switch over. Why? Because K2 seems so foreign. I tried to explain this to K (I mean the real life K), but all I could say is that the operation kills the patient. Now, though, I would change this to say that the operation obliterates the patient, replacing her with someone else entirely, a stranger.

I liked this, for it made me consider K’s “faults” in new light: K is not K without them.

Curious, I asked K what she’d do in the same circumstance. She didn’t hesitate. “I’d switch,” she said, smiling.

I roared with laughter. We both did.

Still laughing, I asked K if she might preserve any of my faults. At first she said no, but then she reconsidered. “Something small and harmless,” she said. “As a memento.”