“Doppelgänger”

The name caught my attention at once.

I slowed my step and tried to make out the little shop across the street. My overactive imagination immediately answered the half-formed question of what a place with a name like that might sell.

I pictured rows of cryo-pods inside, packed with thousands of clones. The first customer walks in, and one of the pods bursts open with a noisy hiss. Cold mist spills out, and a pale, hairless body rises from within, belonging to no one yet. Wet drops of nutrient fluid slide down its skin…

“Miss!”

Someone brushed past me, slamming a shoulder into mine.

“S-sorry!”

At the right moment, words always seemed to break apart. I was thrown back into the crowd like a particle in Brownian motion. The sign slipped out of sight behind me, and I was already critically late. I only turned around once, but met nothing except the puzzled looks of passersby, which made me pull myself together and flush with shame.

The call-center phone rang every thirty seconds. That office buzzed like a little beehive.

I answered, droning out the line from the sheet taped to my workstation. We weren’t allowed to say more than five scripted phrases. The only creativity permitted was combining them in ways that kept the customer from noticing that, essentially, we were saying the same thing over and over.

“Miss, I’m not interested.”

“We can offer you a dop–” I caught myself. “an add-on.”

That strange sign would not leave my head. It kept tangling my thoughts, and now my words too. I carried on with the call, trying to gather myself piece by piece into the ideal sales operator I clearly wasn’t.

It didn’t work.

So when lunch came, I ran for it. As early as I could.

“Alice!” A coworker in absurdly high heels click-clacked toward me with a food container in hand. “So, how are you?” Her voice was so high I found myself worrying the glass in my hand might crack.

“Fine…”

She immediately started dumping food onto her plate while dumping a pile of useless information onto me. Her monologue about the new Schiaparelli collection and celebrity gossip drifted into anniversary plans, then into a dinner recipe…

Oh God. That was the first time I truly, sincerely wished a doppelgänger would replace me.

I nodded in silence, not listening at all, which sometimes made my responses come out at the wrong moment. But she didn’t seem to care whether she was talking to me, at me, or straight through me.

I kept turning the sign over in my head. Doppelgänger. What kind of word was that? It felt like I had first heard it as a teenager, and since then had never once seen anyone use it. Usually people just said clone or double…

“Doppelgänger?”

Back then I was an angular teenager with greasy hair twisted into a bun, sitting on a friend’s couch and eating chips.

“Yeah! Like an evil double!” He shoved a fistful into his mouth and licked his fingers.

“Like, the whole plot is based on it, that–”

“So basically like a twin?”

“No!” He bounced in place, and the couch dipped almost imperceptibly beneath him. “This one wants to kill you. Absolutely.”

I tilted my head, pulling the old blanket higher around myself.

“Why?”

“To take your place!”

“Why?”

He blinked, thrown off, and spent a second thinking, his mouth twisting slightly.

“Because.”

That was the end of the conversation, and after that I never heard the word again.

“Doppelgänger.”

I stood staring at the sign, shifting uncertainly in front of the entrance.

I don’t remember how the day passed, or how the last call ended. I don’t remember how my feet brought me back here, or what I thought about on the way. I only remember the sign appearing before my eyes and my own reflection in the glass door looking strange to me. Foreign.

I don’t know how long I stood there, but when the door opened from the other side, my whole body jolted as if struck by an electric shock. I stepped back.

“Good afternoon.”

A man in a strict plaid suit smiled softly, and the corners of his mouth were framed by fine branches of wrinkles.

I wanted to say something, but shame broke my expression for good. It turned plastic, like a doll’s face. And the awkward smile in it was like a crack in a hard surface.

Had I really stood there that long, enough for him to think I wanted to come in?

“Oh, no.” I threw up my hands, trying frantically to shake off the unpleasant pressure constricting me. “I’m not a customer!”

“No?” He raised an eyebrow and adjusted his glasses, looking me over from head to toe. Slowly. Under that gaze, my body shrank as though it had been scalded.

“You seem… customer enough for me.”

He smiled, and I tried to read the logic of the conversation, to understand what exactly I was supposed to say. We simply stood there in silence. One second. Two. Three…

He kept smiling, waiting for something.

“R-right.”

I nodded, without knowing what to. I don’t think he had asked a question.

And then I was inside.

The place was small, tucked into the corner of the main street beneath the residential floors above. All the way up to the counter, suits, ties, hats, and canes hung in rows along the walls. It felt as though someone had copied this shop in the past and pasted it onto the notebook margins of a modern city. Ridiculous, and somehow, because of that, endearing.

I followed the old man, not knowing what I could possibly buy in a shop so obviously meant for men. Dust motes drifted in the air like tiny fairies from another age. I lifted a finger and caught one. Dust was just dust. As it always was. And yet here, for some reason, it seemed beautiful. Genuine.

“A good suit should frame its owner.”

I hadn’t even noticed when the short shopkeeper began taking my measurements, running a yellow tape along my arms.

“It should emphasize what matters,” he said thoughtfully as he measured my shoulders. “And hide the rest.”

I swallowed.

“I’m not sure this suits me…”

I looked around the room. The suits were varied enough: brown, gray, striped, wide-cut… but all of them looked equally old-fashioned and equally male.

“Nonsense, my dear.”

The gray-haired old man finished taking my measurements and carefully folded his glasses into his breast pocket.

“Besides, we’re not merely a suit shop.”

He winked, and the word Doppelgänger flared up at once in my mind.

“We sell… well, you know what they say. In new clothes, you become a new person.”

I froze. For some reason, his words made my mouth go dry. Not from nerves or fear. From thirst. I pictured myself in a new bright red suit tailored to my body, with styled hair and glowing skin. Sitting with one leg crossed over the other, laughing loudly in a noisy company. Myself – but confident. Myself – and not myself at all. And somehow, because of that, beautiful.

I swallowed the dry lump in my throat. The man noticed and smiled.

“Everyone wants to become better. Sometimes all one needs is…” He folded the measuring tape behind the counter. “A little push.”

At home I couldn’t sleep.

“You can pick it up in a week.”

I didn’t even know how much had been charged to my card. Or what exactly the suit would look like. Or when, exactly, “in a week” meant I was supposed to come back.

The suit.

I kept thinking about whether it really would make me… better. If you left only the good parts and cut away the spoiled edge, would that still be me? Strictly mathematically – yes. Philosophically… philosophically I couldn’t answer, and so the question tormented me, gnawing at my mind like a worm.

“Alice!!”

Brightly manicured fingers snapped in front of my face. I jerked, nearly dropping my lunch.

“I’m asking, are you going to Sam’s party on Saturday?”

Sam was another coworker. The friendly kind, who was on easy terms with everyone. I looked away.

“I wasn’t invited.”

The girl laughed in surprise, looking me over – hunched up like a boiled shrimp. Just as quiet, just as red with shame.

“That’s what I thought.”

She realized how that sounded and awkwardly added, “For some reason.”

As if neither she nor I knew perfectly well what the reason was. The reason hung there in the air between us, driving me to run. To lock myself in a bathroom stall and finish eating there. As usual. I swallowed cold rice that now tasted of the disinfectant used on the bathroom walls. The rice was bland. Safe.

The days dragged on in sickening sameness until the day finally came. I don’t know how I knew that today was the day I was supposed to pick up the suit. I just woke up on Saturday morning and knew: today. At two p.m.

“Good afternoon!”

The old man opened the door again, and sticky sweat broke out across my back. Because the fact that he had sensed my presence even before I knocked was strange. Frightening.

But at least he noticed me… I shook off that bizarre thought.

When I put the suit on and stood in front of the dusty mirror… the old man smiled in satisfaction.

And I froze.

The red suit fit me exactly. Perfectly. Making me exactly the way I had imagined. Foreign. Exquisite.

Not me, and therefore better.

Exactly as I had wanted, deep down, without ever daring to say it aloud.

The old man nodded to himself, as if ticking off a box in his head.

“It suits you very well.”

I turned in front of the mirror.

“Exquisite work! But…”

My own voice sounded brighter somehow, as though life had finally entered it – along with that strange confidence that could make other people believe too.

“I don’t know if it’s quite…”

“What you wanted?”

The precision of it made me flinch. I turned and saw that the wrinkles on his face seemed somehow deeper now. His face resembled a crumpled plastic bag.

“This is it.”

“But…”

“This is it.”

He said it again, and somehow I understood too. It really was.

In the new suit my stride grew longer, my back straighter.

I felt as if someone else was walking in my place.

Office, calls, lunch…

Wait.

What had I done at lunch?

I sat at my desk, trying to dig through my memory.

Time had passed far too quickly. Strange.

The days that usually dragged had turned into colorful scraps from magazines in a scrapbook.

The suit smiled wider, laughed louder, and, on the whole, people liked it more than they liked me.

On the days it was in the wash and I came in wearing an ordinary white blouse, I saw puzzlement and disappointment on people’s faces.

But let one elegant leg in red step over the threshold, and the crowd came alive. Calling. Wanting.

“So what are you wearing to Sam’s? The party’s tomorrow.”

I blinked. I felt like she had already asked me that.

“I wasn’t invited.”

The girl’s eyes widened.

“What? Of course you were! You’re the life of the party! Last time we…”

I lifted my eyes from my lunch container.

Last time?

We had definitely seen each other…

Wait, what day was it today?

She kept chirping on, but I wasn’t listening. My trembling fingers scrolled through the calendar.

And with horror I realized that I couldn’t remember what I had done for the past month.

Not a day.

Not two.

A whole month.

There were marks in my calendar from meetings that had apparently gone brilliantly.

Messages and voice notes in my chats that I did not remember.

Messages that sounded better than anything I could ever have recorded.

But not a single memory stood behind them.

As if someone had carefully lived my life for me.

I ran a hand over the fabric of my jacket. The smooth red cloth was perfect. Sleek. Not a single crease in it, though I had never ironed it once.

Doppelgänger.

The word shot through my body in horror, naming the address.

I stood in the middle of the tiny office kitchen, and the suit wanted to stay. To go back to work. Because it did it better than I did. Lived better.

And for a second I almost agreed: I could just leave everything as it was.

I looked in the mirror and saw a beautiful woman, one people fell in love with. Confident. The kind you always want. Want to be with, and become, all at once, because she inspires that much admiration.

But in her I did not recognize myself, though the features were the same.

I bolted.

Bang! Bang!

I hammered on the shop door hard enough to make the glass rattle and tremble like rice pudding.

The old man opened it after a delay, as though he had deliberately waited for me to calm down. As though this were the first time.

“Is something wrong?”

He looked out without letting me in.

“It’s…”

I didn’t know what I wanted to say. The suspicion was vague, more like a sixth sense than a thought.

“Is something wrong?”

He repeated the question, adjusting his glasses.

I hesitated.

By now I was loved. Respected. Desired.

“This suit… what is it?”

“The original, perfected.”

His smile stretched, pulling his wrinkles taut like strings.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?”

I froze like a wax figure gone cold.

Gooseflesh rippled over my body.

What I had wanted. I opened my mouth – and couldn’t answer.

Had I wanted it? Of course I had.

I had wanted not to stammer. Not to blush. Not to disappear into the crowd.

I had wanted people to choose me.

I had wanted it every day and every night until I fell asleep.

I had wanted some cool, grown-up version of me to come and replace the child-self who awkwardly occupied my body.

I had wanted to become someone else…

…but not to disappear completely.

The old man nodded in silence, as though he had read my thoughts. Or perhaps all his customers thought the same thing.

He opened the door a little wider, inviting me in with one hand. I moved one foot forward–

“No. Only you.”

He stopped me and tugged lightly at the red fabric.

“This…”

“Don’t be afraid.”

He looked at me calmly. Waiting.

I looked down at the red cocoon wrapping my body, which already was transforming inside.

I took off the jacket.

Slowly.

The fabric slipped down with a soft rustle.

It was as though they were not peeling clothes off me layer by layer, but peeling away me.

I slid down the pencil skirt.

It slipped easily over my stockings.

As though that was how it was always meant to happen.

I could feel the cold wind brushing against my legs, sending shivers down my delicate skin.

It was as if invisible hooks were running along my tights.

The shoes.

Black, elegant heels with red soles.

I set them beside the rest of the clothes on the ground.

They lay on the pavement like a bloodstain after a murder.

All that remained now was my pale, soft body, swaying in the wind and trembling. As though the corpse had risen and left.

My feet touched the cold, grainy asphalt.

It scratched between my toes, pulled at my soles, and made my legs tremble.

“Now, please.”

He stepped back, letting me in.

I walked inside, and the warmth of the room washed over me.

As though I were home.

Now there was only me – awkward, unwanted, but me.

He led me farther in, and I looked back only once.

The door was closing forever, but from the corner of my eye I saw her.

A tall brunette walking away proudly.

I could see only the straight back in the red suit.

My back.

And that sway from the hips.

Tomorrow she would go to the party.

Then she would get the promotion I had been denied for so long.

Then…

I watched her until the door closed.

And I watched her go farther and farther, already living in my shoes.