Miles Greaves
I was sitting at my diningroom table consuming cereal, Cheerio by Cheerio, pinching and perching each O onto the crown of my tongue and then swallowing and then repeating, when I peeked over my knuckles and noticed that my wife Amy was gone, replaced where she had just been standing by a different yet seemingly equivalent Amy, and I erupted into gooseflesh, mountain range after mountain range. This new woman must have, I reasoned, been plucked from some repeating farm of Amys hiving in some endless aisle of apartments stretching, perspective point to perspective point, on either side of my own, strung taut across gray space, like a beam of cubicles; plucked up like a kitten from a box and breathed on like a lens and dropped into my wife’s blouse and skin, like a pearl of chlorine onto the eye of the world, to stand before me, now, like a triangle among circles. This new woman was laminated freshly over the radiator and couch and her fetal, squeaky molecules hummed in place, like a weather map in a room full of weathermen, but other than that she stood like the old Amy used to stand, exuding the same colors and heat, bobbing on the same toes, in the same socks, on bones of the same length and bend, in flesh of the same heft and density. She circled my welcome mat, looking for shoes, and announced, still looking, that she was getting beer, and would return. Then she stepped into the original Amy’s sneakers and left, and I slumped over my cereal, protectively gripping my scalp, as if beset by owls.
I had loved my wife. We had been to Portugal together. And Costa Rica. And we’d record and then watch Top Chef every Friday, after work, and our families met for Thanksgiving, and she’d buy me Cadbury Creme Eggs, et cetera, et cetera. But now where had she been displaced to? What world? Was she sad? Were the trees there made of teeth? Would she try to return, but fail and fail and fail? Would she acclimate, in time? Where would she be buried? I saw, then, in a vision, my wife, wading alone across an endless field of vertical worms, and I thought about weeping, but my grief was so sudden and expansive that it precluded any actual weeping before that weeping could occur, like a sudden ouroboros, blinked into and out of being, so I just sat there, instead, with the tears gestating behind my eyes, without undamming, like a moon behind a keyhole. But then another horrific, more selfish thought occurred to me, which supplanted that original horror, despite myself.
What, I wondered, if this new Amy nibbles my neck off as we make love, expecting my hips to continue on and on instructionlessly? Or what if she bears me into the ocean one day, like a selkie? Or what if she leaches onto my belly and remains there, like a remora? Or worse: what if she differs from the old Amy, but so subtly that I’d never be able to definitively prove those foul differences? At this thought I almost screamed, in part because I could already half-see the follow-up question standing behind it, pacing, and I tried not to consider it, but I had to, it insisted upon itself, it insisted upon itself: what, I wondered, if this new wife was a teetering heap of spiders, wadded into a tender, elastic Amy-suit, that would torture me, daily, by behaving exactly like my actual wife—by forming the same sentences that she would have formed, and by scratching her elbow at the same time of day that she would have scratched her elbow? What if the spiders tortured me, daily, by counting to ten? The spiders would count successfully every time I asked them to, enunciating each accurate numeral, but they didn’t mean to, they didn’t mean to, they arrived at ten only due to some offensive, preposterous chance, conceiving of the actual numbers only in shadowy spidernumbers, like “pupa” and “thorax,” that tumbled in hairy waves up and down the inside of Amy’s bustling body, but still they would accidentally finish with “eight, nine, ten,” every time, every time, every time I asked them to, like the one chimpanzee that finally types King Lear, but again and again and again, never on purpose, until finally dying, finally. At that I almost screamed again, or thought about almost screaming again, as I contemplated the unscratchable suspense that would dog me, day in and out, as the spiders hinted at hinting at hinting at themselves, every morning at breakfast, but demurred every time, on the cusp of revelation, like an orgasm that would never arrive, leaving me certain but uncertain, flickering between knowing and not knowing, the rest of my life, like Schrodinger’s cat, translucent and forlorn and haunted, from now until my death.
I stood from my cereal, as if from the possibility of the spiders, but the thought followed me up off the table, I could see it, like a sunspot on my pupil, so I fled to the living room, but the thought followed, so I fled to the kitchen, but the thought followed again, so I stopped in front of the microwave, and stood there, as my panic matured toward its zenith, and I gripped the microwave with both hands, as if holding a face, and I stood there, now at the airless peak of my horror, opening and closing my hands, until, miraculously, out of nothing, I remembered something, and my eyes widened briefly, as if having seen some hopeful form in the distance.
I had read once that there was no such thing as pure identity; that there was no property equal to being me, or being this, or being that; that there was no black cue ball lolling in my stomach, with my name tattooed across its equator, that could be used to pick me out of a parade of all things, like toasters and lollipops, when all else failed—instead we were just the sum of the descriptions we could pin to each other, like donkeys made entirely from tails, or pompoms without cores. I could have, for example, stripped my actual wife of every description that clung to her, and flattened them out and laid them on our bed to dry—in one column, the roll of her skull; in another, her love of Arrested Development—and I could have peeled and peeled but days later, when I was out of things to say about her, there would have been nothing at the bottom of those qualifiers, no hook to hang them on, no bone, just a blank circle of air, like a barber shaving a head into nothingness. And the same was true of the spiders: I could flay them of their descriptions, like pulling petals from a weed, and lay them next to my real wife’s descriptions, to index, but when I was done I’d find just another hollow eye, there’d be nothing to grip, and squint at, and compare to my wife, it would just be void versus void. And because of this, if the spiders’ descriptions on the bed were the same as my wife’s—if I could go the rest of my life without seeing, say, a single spider scamper from the new Amy’s nostril into the new Amy’s ear—and there was no one thing I could definitively say about the new Amy that I couldn’t say about the old Amy, then they were in fact the same Amy, even if I knew they were not, even if I knew it in the nucleus of my heart, and wept nightly over it, I had no right to complain, or mourn my real wife’s abduction, or the spiders that replaced her, because it had not happened, or because I could not say it had happened, which was the same thing.
It’s the same thing! I thought, and my lips tensed, as if to smile, but before they could I remembered something, and sobered.
You’ll still have to confirm the Amys’ sameness, I reminded myself. My god that’s right, I thought, and sat at the dining-room table again and gripped my scalp again, as if beset by owls again, as I waited for the new Amy to return, to officially determine if she was in fact identical to my wife, and as I waited I visualized the various forms that her deviations might take, and as I visualized these deviations my stomach rolled in me like a crocodile, and I began sweating in my seat, like a man holding his hand in front of a hole in the earth, waiting, waiting, waiting. I tried reading a newspaper, but couldn’t; I tried reading the Cheerio box, but couldn’t; I tried thinking of any other subject available to me, but couldn’t. Eventually I either slept or ceased thinking, defensively, and I was only aware of myself again when the Amy entered the apartment. I exploded upright and centered the woman in my vision and immediately began charting each nook of her visible cells, as if memorizing a necessary code, with my heart echoing out of my mouth. She was holding a grocery bag and wearing a maroon shirt with doily-like sleeves, and jeans, and her hair, which was a little darker than her blouse, was tied in a low ponytail. She stood on the shoe mat, seeming to think about something for two seconds, three seconds, and then looked across the apartment at me and said, “I got Blue Moon,” and moved into the kitchen. There she set the grocery bag on the counter, next to the cutting board, and extracted the beer, with her right hand, and tried fitting it into the refrigerator, but spilled something, and cursed. Then she put the rest of the groceries away in the cupboard above the sink and threw the grocery bag into the garbage. Then she continued passed me, into the bedroom, and disappeared, and called, “I’m getting in the shower,” and then reappeared, crossing the hall with a towel, and disappeared again into the bathroom. There was a pause, and then I heard the shower-water start, and the Amy begin to la-la-la inanely, and I lowered my forehead onto the tablecloth again and began thinking, and thinking, and thinking. Then I raised my head, and my face gravitated toward the ceiling, like an elated sunflower, and I announced, to myself:
The spiders are indistinguishable from my wife!
They were! The spiders had pronounced each of the ten words they’d spoken in the same faint California accent as my actual wife; and the sentences they formed with those words were ones my wife would have formed; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera—identical! Identical! Identical! I began vibrating with glee, and then I grinned dramatically, until my molars were exposed to the apartment-air: nothing had happened to me! Nothing! And while sure, yes, I would miss my wife; and while sure, yes, the spiders were probably mocking me under Amy’s back-skin, like a six-fingered hand under a puppet, they were nevertheless maintaining their external poise, and expertly feigning their similarity to my wife, like an unblinking eye opposing the sun, in an act of profound professionalism, my god, my god, life can and does occasionally bloom into ringing, resplendent gardens.
MILES GREAVES lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his fiancée and their two small boys. One of his stories won first place in Zoetrope: All-Story’s2018/2019 short-fiction contest, and another appeared in Tin House.