Thirst (8 page)

Harrah did not consider it to his advantage that this sleep disorder allowed him to maintain relationships with two women at once. It was often a nuisance: two birthdays to recall, two sets of personal endearments,
and many complications. Sometimes he’d doze off after lovemaking and immediately find himself in his other apartment with the other woman who, perhaps, after spending the night, had just awakened in a romantic mood. He might then doze off again and return to the apartment where the first woman could either be seeking more attention or have gone into the shower.

Neither Harrah’s two groups of friends nor his two families noticed anything unusual about him—he was a remarkably ordinary young man, regardless of where he awoke—and he never discussed his affliction with anyone. Perhaps when the condition first manifested itself he had thought no more than that the second existence was an extremely vivid, if uneventful, dream, but very shortly he lost track of which life was the dream and which was real. Nor could he recall how long he had suffered this disorder, because both selves had vague memories of their lives stretching back into childhood.

Harrah never asked himself which of his apartments was better (the one on the East Side was located on a quieter, better-kept block, but had much less closet space than his Columbus Avenue walk-up), nor which of the two women he preferred. It did not occur to him that he was being unfaithful to either woman.

For years Harrah went on with his everyday life, going to sleep at night in one apartment, immediately waking in the second apartment to attend to his other job (both selves worked in import/export), returning to the second apartment to sleep, and immediately waking
again in the first apartment, in the morning following the first night. Perhaps he came to assume that all people suffered this condition, that it was a normal aspect of reality, which was arbitrarily made up of many bizarre phenomena that convinced us of their rightness only by their frequent occurrence. Anyway, this would explain why everyone he knew complained of being tired all the time.

Harrah experienced every day twice, waking twice and sleeping twice. The weather, the ball scores, and the news events that dominated each world usually differed, but not by much, and not in any way that had any real impact on his lives. The television programming in each, however, was identical, and he usually found himself watching the same program twice. Sometimes he’d travel back and forth between both selves in a single day. If, for example, he took a midday nap, he’d immediately wake up in the middle of the night in his other apartment, unable to return to sleep for another fifteen or twenty minutes.

He grew accustomed to these two lives, though he was still occasionally confused—say, in recalling which subway line to take home or, at a movie theater refreshment stand, for which woman he was buying popcorn. Anna preferred it without butter. Also, while he was in one world the detailed features of the second faded in his memory. He could never recall all the digits of his other phone number, and once when he went over from his East Side apartment to Columbus Avenue to look at the other building in which he lived, the
block was not as he remembered it, and he couldn’t recall the address, and he wasn’t sure if it might not have been somewhere on Amsterdam Avenue instead.

 

After some time Harrah came to ask himself whether it would be appropriate to establish one or the other of his relationships on a more formal footing, or to perhaps secure both relationships. Nothing had really changed in his feelings for the two women, but Harrah thought it might be wrong to remain casual about these affairs for much longer, and that furthermore he was at the right age to marry. He believed he could sense the underlying question of marriage straining each relationship, or at least he imagined that this question
should
be straining each relationship, though neither woman had ever expressed interest in making a long-term commitment. Harrah suspected, without any evidence, that this issue was more likely to be on Anna’s mind than on Lillian’s, but Harrah could not help attributing the concerns of one woman to the other, even though the women were not similar at all. In fact, to simplify things, he had always assumed that the two relationships were at equal stages of development.

Harrah never spoke to either woman about this issue. For a while it was nearly foremost on his mind, but his jobs were too demanding for him to dwell long on personal matters. He more or less put the question aside, as if by considering it he had resolved it. Now he gave more thought instead to his dual existence, or whatever it was, which raised innumerable questions about the nature of reality, but his spring busy season
arrived and he had to shelve this speculation as well. Then one afternoon while passing the shoeshine stand at Grand Central Station on his way home to the East Side, he was struck by a clever idea. A collection of business cards that others had placed to advertise their services covered the wall by the polish and shoelace display. Harrah thumbtacked his own card there.

On his way to work from the West Side the next morning, he returned to the train station. He was surprised—and even disturbed—to find that his card was still there at the shoeshine stand, with his Seventh Avenue office and East Side home telephone numbers. He removed the card. When he reached the office, he called his East Side apartment. There was no answer. He tried several times during the day. That night he went to sleep on the West Side and awakened immediately in the East Side’s bright morning sunshine, uncomfortably aware that a ringing telephone had been disturbing him, on and off, for the past several hours.

One evening a few weeks later, he was cooking pasta in his East Side apartment and couldn’t find his colander. After searching in vain through his cabinets and even the hall closet, he was forced to drain the water by tipping the pot over the sink and holding the spaghetti back with a fork. Several strands went down the drain and the spaghetti remained wet and became soggy. A few days later the colander turned up—in Harrah’s Columbus Avenue apartment, neatly stacked beneath the Columbus Avenue colander. He pulled the two colanders apart and stared at them for a long while, almost afraid to put them down.

Nothing like this had ever happened before. It was an impossibility; of course, this whole business was impossible, but he had come to accept it and the various rules that consistently applied to it. The colander violated those rules, putting everything else in doubt. And although he was at first pleased to have found the colander, he soon realized that he had no way of returning it to his East Side apartment and would have to buy a new one anyway.

Other objects began to misplace themselves and turn up in the other apartment: a tie, a felt-tip pen, an unread book by an Argentine author he had never heard of, a supermarket-bought bag of cookies, and, most maddeningly, the television remote control, which, missing from the East Side, was totally useless on Columbus Avenue. Lillian asked him about the cookies.

“Pathmark
brand?”

She wrinkled her face in incredulous disgust, an unattractive gesture. Harrah normally stocked this, his East Side refrigerator, with David’s Cookies—the shop was only a block away. Because there was no such shop near his place on Columbus, he occasionally bought cookies in the supermarket there. They would sit in his West Side refrigerator for months. He hadn’t even missed them.

Harrah shrugged, but perceived that she now harbored certain unflattering suspicions about him and his taste, though there was nothing she said and no change in her manner. Anna left her umbrella one night in his Columbus Avenue apartment and it too turned up on the East Side, in his hall closet. It was an ordinary black
umbrella, one that men and women could carry with the same inconspicuousness, but Harrah thought Lil took unusual interest in the article, stopping just short of inquiring how he had obtained it.

One day he had a lunchtime errand down in the financial district, where, as he was stepping from a cab, he saw Anna cross a street. He hurriedly straightened out the tip with the driver. Anna disappeared around the corner of a building. As Harrah rushed to catch her, dodging several pedestrians rushing in exactly the opposite direction, he realized that he had awakened that morning on the East Side—in other words, that it was a Lillian day; he even had a date with her that evening. He stopped and considered the implications. Before this, he had assumed neither woman existed in the other’s world. For the first time he felt ashamed about maintaining two romances at once. But perhaps this woman wasn’t Anna at all; did Anna really wear her hair like that?

Harrah began hurrying again, but with less confidence, unsure now what he would say to her if it were indeed Anna. He saw the woman at the end of the block, which teemed with office workers and businessmen. She walked briskly, in a gait that Harrah now recognized as characteristically Anna’s. As she reached a set of revolving doors, Harrah called her name. The doors swept up and devoured her.

She was gone when he entered the lobby. Harrah told the uniformed man at the desk Anna’s name but couldn’t recall the name of her firm (which he knew, anyway, was located uptown). Harrah smiled helplessly, apologized for being in the wrong building, and left.

He met Anna for dinner in the evening of the day that began that night when he went to bed.

“I thought I saw you down by Nassau Street,” Harrah said. “Was it you?”

“Me? When?”

“Yesterday. Or maybe it was today. Things have been hectic. I’m not sure.”

“No, I can’t imagine the last time I was that far downtown,” Anna said.

“I was sure it was you.”

“What was I wearing?”

Harrah couldn’t remember. As he tried to summon the details of the encounter from his memory, they evaporated. “I don’t know. I called your name, but you didn’t turn around.”

“How could I? It wasn’t me.”

Harrah used his lunch break the following day to return downtown, though he knew that finding this woman, this other Anna, was a nearly impossible task: the volume of people on the street was too great, they moved too quickly, most of them were rarely on the same block at the same hour every afternoon. Harrah didn’t even know if the woman worked in the building she had entered; like him, she may have been on an errand from another part of the city. Nevertheless, in subsequent wake-on-the-East-Side days, whenever he could get away from the office, he stood on the corner of Pine and Nassau, in the roaring traffic’s boom, eating a hot dog, waiting for her to show up.

He never told Anna that he was doing this nor, of course, did he tell Lillian. The hot dog vendor, however,
guessed that he was waiting for a woman and winked every time Harrah bought his lunch from him. Meanwhile, as the memory of the chance meeting faded, Harrah began to doubt that it had ever happened. Then one afternoon he saw her, walking jacketless down the street, carrying a white paper deli bag gingerly, as if it contained a cup of coffee or soup that had already spilled and wet the bag.

“Anna!” he called, approaching.

She smiled uncertainly and squinted into the oncoming mass of people, looking for a familiar face. He called her name again and saw that she was puzzled.

“Do I know you?” she said, not quite stopping for him.

“Yes, it’s me, Harrah. You don’t recognize me?”

She studied him for a moment. Harrah, who looked no different regardless of which apartment he left in the morning, offered her what he thought was his most typical expression.

“No, I don’t,” she said, shaking her head—exactly how she always shook her head!—and breaking eye contact. She pushed on past him, her head down, evidently dismissing him as another street crazy.

“Anna,” he repeated, hurrying to keep up with her against the tide of other pedestrians.

“How do you know my name?” she asked sharply.

Harrah produced his most disarming smile.

“I know all sorts of things about you,” he said.

He paused to give an example, such as some funny personal detail about her apartment, or where she had summered as a child, or her favorite movie, but none
was at hand. He was aware now that what he had just said was vaguely threatening.

She broke away and surrounded herself with a small group of office workers headed down the block.

Harrah stood there, blinking in the raw sunlight. He watched her as she lost herself in the crowd, just the back of one head among many.

The next morning he called Anna at work.

“Did someone accost you on the street yesterday?” he asked her.

“No. Why?”

This put Harrah at ease. Ever since the previous day, a blister of anxiety had swelled against his heart. Her expression of non-recognition had remained painfully vivid in his memory. They now talked pleasantries for a few minutes. As the conversation approached its conclusion, Harrah’s unease returned. He thought he detected an unpleasant edge in her manner. She seemed preoccupied and eager to get off the phone. He decided to dismiss this as a product of his overactive imagination, though, in fact, no one had ever considered his imagination overactive at all.

“So,” he said, “are you doing anything for dinner tonight?”

“Actually, I am.”

Harrah was stunned. It was Friday. The question had been only a throat-clearing courtesy. He had assumed they would have dinner together, as they usually did on Friday nights. He was about to ask her what her other plans were, but there was something in her voice, or
rather in the silence at the other end of the line, that made him stop.

“All right then,” he said, a little coldly.

The two of them now had nothing to say to each other.

At last, she said, “Well, I’ll be speaking to you.”

“Okay,” Harrah said, and then he added abruptly, “Listen, you know those plans you have tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Break them.”