My Doppelgangers

(I)

Lionel and Christine took some time off from their teaching jobs in Paris and set off on a trip around the world. It was one of the deals where the airline offered unlimited travel for 30 days, so if you wanted to see a lot of cities in the world, and you were willing to take a lot of flights, you could. They traveled cheap and light. Paris to London, London to New York then New York to Los Angeles. They stopped to spend a few days at my place while preparing for the next leg of their trip, through Central America and South America. Later, they would go across Asia and Africa.

I was working a few of the days they were here, but I managed to take them to the beach and for a drive through the canyons. We played some tennis and went out for dinner. Lionel bought me a T.C. Boyle novel to thank me for my hospitality and I took them to the airport where they caught a flight to Mexico City, then a bus to the coast, then a boat to Belize.

After the boat docked they walked across town to their hotel. Along the way, they were approached by locals.

“Why don’t you come stay with us?” a guy asked them.

“Because we’ve got a room at a hotel,” Lionel answered.

“Come on, come stay with us,” he urged.

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

The locals got exasperated, or maybe insulted.

“What are you afraid of?” another guy asked. Then he hissed an insult: “You’re going to be afraid all your life.”

Lionel and Christine went on to Bolivia, then Peru. They were taking a flight out of Lima bound for Buenos Aires. That was about 10 days after they’d seen me. So they knew what I looked like recently. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t seen me for a year or two.
But there I was at the airport in Lima. Of course, I wasn’t. It was another guy who looked just like me.

“Eh ben, dis-donc, qu’est-ce que tu fais ici?” Lionel asked the guy. (“Wow, what are you doing here?”)

The guy was an American and spoke French, so he understood, But he stared at Lionel and Christine blankly while explaining that he didn’t know them.

I have a pretty distinctive voice, it’s kind of high and nasally. The guy also had my voice.

So Lionel and Christine were convinced it was me. And that I was playing with their heads. Maybe the stress of the travel, the plane flights, the weird world of Latin America had gotten to them. Anyway, they weren’t happy I was teasing them. They started getting angry.

“Stop playing with us,” Lionel said to the guy. “What are you doing here? How did you get here?”

The guy insisted he didn’t know them.

“We just stayed at your place for a week in Los Angeles!” Christine screamed at him. “You can’t do this to us. We know it’s you! Stop this! It’s madness.”

The guy insisted.

“Sorry. It’s not me,” he said.

Lionel raised his voice.

Arrete de te foutre de nos gueles!

And then he said he hit me – well, what he thought was me. He wouldn’t have hit this guy. Unless he was absolutely convinced it was me. Which he was. It was probably more like a push, though, I imagine. Not a real punch. I hope.

At that point the guy figured the only way to get these crazy French people off his case was to show him his passport and business card and drivers license, which he did – much to their astonishment. They had really thought it was me.

Lionel called me when they got back to Paris a few weeks later to tell me the story. He said the guy was our age – a young businessman from San Francisco. And he had my voice and he looked just like me and he had the same haircut, kind of on the long side, almost shoulder length. And the same hair color and the same voice and the same mannerisms and even wore the same kind of clothes.

“Did you get his name and number?” I asked. “Did you get his business card?”

He didn’t.

“Oh, man,” I whined. “Did you remember that I was adopted? Didn’t you think this guy could be my twin brother?

“I forgot about that,” Lionel said. “But I told him your name. And where you worked. So he might call you.”

If I had his name, I could use it on a fake ID, then fly to another city, rent a car and use it to rob a bank. I’d throw out the dye-pack they put in the money bag, drive away and the FBI would arrest him.

But he knows who I am. So he is in San Francisco, planning to use my name on a fake ID, fly to another city, rent a car and use it to rob a bank. He’ll throw out the dye-pack they put in the money bag, drive away and the FBI will arrest me.

“What are you afraid of? You’re going to be afraid all your life.”

(II)

It was my birthday. Brigitte was leaving her teaching job to pick me up and take me out to dinner. She said goodbye to one of her students, Elisabeth, who asked her where she was going all dressed up like that. She told her it was my birthday.

“Oh, that’s funny, it’s my mom’s birthday, too,” Elisabeth.

Elisabeth’s mom, Mrs. B., came to see Brigitte after school a few days later.

“Happy birthday,” Brigitte said.

“And happy birthday to Steve,” Mrs. B. said. “That’s why I came to see you. Would you mind if I asked you a couple of personal questions about that?”

“Uh, well, I suppose …”

“Tell me, was Steve born in 1957?”

“Yes, he was.”

“Oh!” Mrs. B. said with heightened interest. She had cleared the first hurdle. “Do you know where he was born? Was he was born in New York?”

“Yes, yes, he was, in fact.”

“And do you know, on the off-chance: Was he adopted?”

“Uh, yes, he was.”

This was getting a little intense. Mrs. B. paused.

“Do you mind if I ask: Is he Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know if he was adopted through a Jewish agency? Do you know if the birth parents were Jewish?”

“Yes, that’s what happened,” Brigitte answered.

Mrs. B. paused for a moment before explaining.

“Because I was born on Oct. 13, 1957 in New York. And I was adopted through a Jewish agency. And I was told I had a twin brother.”

I went to my mom’s apartment that weekend and told her about Brigitte's conversation with Mrs. B.

“Could this woman be my twin?” I asked my mom.

“No!” my mom insisted. “I wanted two! I asked for two! I wanted a brother and a sister or twins or older, younger, it didn’t matter! If there were two, I would’ve got them! I would’ve got her two!”

I thought about it for a while and took my mom’s word.

I had dinner with Mrs. B. a few nights later. We were studying each other’s faces for any clues. They say fraternal twins don’t resemble each other, but we had to look. How could you not look? I told her what my mom said.

“That doesn’t matter,” Mrs. B. answered. “I’ve been investigating. They had a policy to separate brothers and sisters. They didn’t place them together.”

I didn’t know if I should believe Mrs. B. or not. That sounded inhuman. That sounded insane. Why would adoption agencies have that policy?

In any case, there was another reason my mom would know I wasn’t Mrs. B.’s twin.

After my mother died, I sorted through all her photos. I found out what I had long suspected: My birthday was changed so that if my biological parents tried to track me down they wouldn’t be able to find me. Mom’s photo album of my baby pictures had the original date of Oct. 27 scratched out and replaced with Oct. 13.

I had suspected this for some time. When I was 19, I filed the application for my passport and I needed a copy of my birth certificate. The date on it was the 27th, not the 13th.

“Hey dad,” I said. “Why does it have this date?”

He didn’t answer right away.

“Is it just the filing date, and not my birth date?” I suggested.

“Yeah, that’s it,” my dad said.

I’d always wondered about my birth date. My mom gave me hers. We had the same birthday. What are the odds of that? Three-hundred and sixty-five to one.

“You were my birthday present,” my mom used to tell me when I’d ask.

The day I asked her about Mrs. B, I also asked her about the birthday. I thought it was ancient history by then. Maybe she’d tell the truth.

“Mom, did you change my birthday?”

“No.”

“You can tell me. I won’t be mad.”

“No.”

“Swear?”

“I swear.”

Maybe she’d been telling the lie so long it had been absorbed into her psyche as the truth.

So I couldn’t be Mrs. B.’s twin. Unless her adoptive parents had done the same thing and chosen the same fake date. That’s possible, isn’t it?

Was I upset that I had been celebrating a fake birthday my whole life? Yes. Was I upset that I’d thought I was a Libra but was really a Scorpio? Yes. But then I realized: I have two birthdays. I am the man with two birthdays! My birthdays are Oct. 13 and Oct. 27.

I am a Libra and I am a Scorpio. I am my own double.

Plus, everybody knows: Scorpios are hot.