Judy in Her Good Robe

The other me started calling the day after my ex-wife Shauna's funeral. I didn't pick up at first. When I saw my own phone number blinking on my caller ID I thought, well that's weird, and checked the number again. I thought it may have been a telemarketer, or someone from my hometown toying with me, which would have been a strange and fruitless prank to pull off, but more unlikely things have happened.

Hello, my own voice said back to me. And I said Hi since I'm never as formal as a Hello type of person. This was the first difference between us, though there would be many more to come. What's with your calling? I asked, as if there could be a simple answer to this, some tidy explanation. But my own voice replied, I'm calling to check in with us, to see how we're doing, and I had to think about that for a while.

That the woman on the other end of the phone was another me, I'll admit, took some time to register. Her voice was familiar, but not so much so; it didn't match the voice I'd lined up with myself. I thought back to my own answering machine, the recordings I'd made many times over many years, trying three times, no, four, to sound slightly bothered but kind. I thought about those VHS tapes of myself in another life as I laughed and narrated vacations and camping trips to a black clunker camera. That recorded voice never felt true, but there it was. Squealy and smaller than I'd imagined.

I don't know if I can trust this, I said.

I got myself comfortable on the couch, used a finger to momentarily bend open a window blind.

That's fair, she said. And again, I noted that we reached for different words to express ourselves, me and this other me.

My God, is it really you? I wanted to know. By you I mean me?

Ask me anything, she said. Really, anything.

I became obsessed, just then, and for some time after, with building elaborate quizzes about my life. How would I finally test someone to determine my truth, to ask after the exact pith of who I am? What moments, I wondered, could define me? What is the point of my life?

Our life doesn't have a point, other me said, a bit sarcastically. I didn't appreciate this tone, because I recognized the way I myself have used it. When annoyed, or tired of someone. When I don't feel like bothering anymore for any small reason of my choosing.

Of course our life has a point, I said. We were born, and then the accident, and then Aunt Helen's gray rubbery steaks for so many years, and then Jim, and then Shauna, and now this, I gestured around to no one in my empty living room, a half-warmed glass of whiskey spilling from my left hand.

If you really think about it, other me said, Shauna was before Jim.

She wasn't. The civil thing we had was nine years ago, and Jim was nine years before that.

But you loved her first, other me reminded me. You loved her ever since you were thirteen, remember?

She was onto something here. I had loved Shauna all my life, and would continue to do so even after her death. More, I think—much more. The day of Shauna's funeral, in fact, was the worst day of my life so far, and I didn't like being reminded of it. She needed me, is what it was. Shauna in her polished poplar casket way deep down in that hole, the Kaddish recited, and the rabbi who made us each take turns shoveling dirt onto her. The slap of pebble and sand on that perfect wood about did me in, and when it was my...