Quasi-fictionconstruction
Scott
Scott had been missing for three weeks, and then, one rainy August morning, he seemed to have come back.
The summer after our freshman year of college, Scott, Star, Aaron and I shared a sublet in Brooklyn. It was a three bedroom, a duplex in one of those metal-and-glass buildings that were popping up all over the place, and technically only three people were supposed to live there. Aaron had the small front bedroom because he was a boy with no possessions, I had the big back bedroom because I was a girl with many possessions, and Scott and Star shared the top floor because they were boyfriend and girlfriend and had the most possessions of all. They also shared a house key, which was not really a key but a card. That's why it wasn't weird that Scott rang the buzzer at his own apartment.
He rang it at 9am. It was a Saturday.
Star, being Scott's girlfriend, had taken his disappearance the hardest. She'd spent most of those three weeks drunk, and sometimes high, and she'd kept herself alive on a diet of coffee and stale Wheat Thins. She'd come down with a nasty cold, and I had spent the past five nights awake listening to her sob-interspersed coughs.
Aaron pressed the buzzer and unlocked the apartment door. He glanced at me and I shrugged and continued pouring my coffee. We both figured it was the girl down the hall who always forgot her key. But then, our apartment door opened and Scott's silhouette eclipsed the glare coming from the building's skylight.
Aaron ran up to him and clamped his hands on his shoulders. "Well, holy shit." He wrapped him in a hug. Scott's arms remained at his side. "You fucking came back. We thought that... Star!" Star clattered down the stairs from the top floor. Her hands flew to her face and she shrieked and she nearly tripped over the breakfast bar stools. I hung back in the kitchen and kept drinking my coffee, feigning nonchalance. I never know what to do when big, emotional things happen. I usually try to wait them out.
I'm full of weird compulsions, and a main one I had that summer involved identifying people's body somatotypes. Even though I knew somatotyping was all but hogwash, one step away from phrenology, my brain couldn't help but do it. Somatotypes are: endomorphs, mesomorphs, and ectomorphs. I am a classic ectomorph. Endomorphs are fat and round, mesomorphs are muscular, and ectomorphs are tall and thin. Star was an endomorph but I never told her that because she was a recovering bulimic. Aaron was also an endomorph. He was obese. Scott was a true mesomorph, very muscular. Because of my compulsion, the first thing I noticed on that morning--involuntarily!--was that Scott had seemed to change body types during his three week absence. He was no fatter or thinner, but his shoulders were slightly less broad, and his torso looked a little too narrow and it didn't taper as much to the waist. The Scott in the doorway I classified as an an ectomorph. I put my coffee cup in the sink and walked closer.
Star had smushed her face into Scott's chest and was not letting go. Aaron was talking nonstop, filling him in on everything that had happened since he'd disappeared, demanding to know where he was and what happened, but not waiting for answers. He was pink in the face and kept trying to hand Scott his mail--bills, an issue of Rolling Stone, credit card offers--which we had been saving in a shoebox vigil atop the Ikea nightstand that we were allowing to pass as a coffee table.. Scott smiled at Aaron and made the requisite "mmhm" sounds, and his arms had finally left his side and were wrapped around Star. His hands mimed efforts at grabbing the messy piles of paper from Aaron. I cleared my throat. Scott and I locked gazes.
"So....?" I asked.
He smiled. "For the love of God, please don't make me get into it."
"No, really." I crossed my arms. "Explain."
"Jessie, leave him alone," Star said, her voice muffled by Scott's shirt. The shirt was purple, distressed looking, and featured a fake advertisement for a clam-shucking business. It was not the kind of shirt I'd ever seen Scott wear.
"Fine." I turned to walk to my room. I had some thinking to do. "Welcome back, Scott. Nice shirt."
Scott was the closest thing I had to a best friend. We had known each other since we were ten and his mom bought the house across the street from my parents' house, in Bayside, Queens. We threw water balloons at each other, played Nintendo together, and teased each other through puberty. We'd gone to high school together, gotten through my parents' divorce and his father's death together, and now we attended the same university. I knew him well, and I knew there was no way he would ever disappear for three weeks and come back with no explanation.
Looking back, I'm at a loss to explain why I didn't do something right away.
Star called a house meeting on our balcony on Sunday morning, while Scott was ostensibly at church. She stood hunched over the ledge, looking alternately at the concrete below and at the projects in the distance.
Star's name wasn't always Star--apparently, a Ren Faire phase at the age of sixteen inspired her to beg her overindulgent adoptive parents to legally change her name for her birthday. They did. Her original name was Jennifer. By eighteen, the phase had passed. Star alleged to have never regretted the change, though.
"So, that guy who is living with us now is not actually Scott," she said. Her announcement was received by a long silence.
"How do you know?" I was relieved both that I was not the only one who had noticed, and that I was not the person who had to bring this up.
"I know. I know Scott. This guy is very close. A doppelganger. But I'm serious. We have a big problem here. He's not Scott."
"When did you know?"
"Fucking immediately," she said. I shot her a skeptical look. She sucked on her cigarette and coughed. She'd never been a very convincing smoker, and only seeked to try anymore under great emotional stress. "I wanted him to be Scott just as much as anyone else. I really did. But he just... he just... ain't." Star was also never a very convincing sayer of "ain't," It sounded too delicate and quaint, over-pronounced, coming from her tiny doll-like mouth.
"Then why...uh... did you sleep with him?" Aaron attempted a goofy laugh. "Like, ten times or something last night." Aaron was never known for his subtlety. He''d been roommates with a guy I dated in our freshman dorm and he regularly peed in the sink instead of the toilet if something wasn't going his way.
Star narrowed her eyes. "I had to make sure."
"Why'd you do it, like, fifteen times then?"
Star's eyes were slits of hate. "Aaron, maybe twice. Maybe. And because I miss Scott and because I'm lonely and because...because maybe I was fooling myself, and because maybe I wanted to!" She coughed again. "Asshole," she said quietly, almost as an afterthought.
We took a moment to reflect on the nature of our collective stupidity.
"Well, what now?" I asked. "We all agree he's not Scott. But he seems to think that he is Scott. Or at least that he can fool us into believing he is Scott. Which, by the way, he has done." Star started to say something, but closed her mouth. "He has. We believed him enough to, well, accept him. He slept at our apartment."
"So let's kick him out," Aaron said. "Easy. Done."
Star threw her cigarette off the balcony and it landed in the middle of a pigeon cluster. They flew away in a disarray of greyscale feathers. We all filed back inside.
It was not easy, though, to evict this person who was not Scott. We weren't sure why. He was so much like Scott, such a near facsimile, that any time one of us tried to start the process, we'd chicken out for fear that maybe we were wrong, that maybe it was really Scott after all, and that maybe we were all insane. He countered every hint that something was amiss with a curious or bewildered smile. Like Scott, he was slippery and charming, and like Scott, he fit with us in a certain way; he completed the household. It was horrible to admit it, but we liked him. So for the next few days, we stalled. We made excuses. We avoided. We sleuthed. We tried to find evidence that this new Scott was really not our Scott, and evidence that maybe he was. We tried to catch inconsistencies, and we'd call them out accusatively, and then we would feel guilty as we fell asleep at night. On the tiny, off chance that it really was Scott, and that he had undergone gigantic and mysterious changes during his time away, we had a hard time being anything but passive-aggressive or polite.
Since the age of fifteen, Scott had performed elaborate calisthenics in the mornings. He'd wake up at five and go for a run, and then come back and do sit-ups, then push-ups, then weights, and then a bit of yoga. Aaron was the most in tune to this fitness routine, partially because of his jealousy over Scott's near-perfect (mesomorph!) physique, and partially because his room was right next to the living room where Scott grunted and banged into the floor over and over again during early morning hours. Aaron was the one who noticed, then, that this new Scott was not doing his exercises. He asked him why, and the Scott replacement replied that he'd been feeling lazy. But the next morning, he woke up at five and did exercises. But still, the exercises were in a different order. Aaron came out of his room at 6:30 on Wednesday and stood with his arms crossed, looking down at the person who was not Scott posing in the downward dog.
"All this bullshit aside. Tell me the truth, right now. Are you really Scott?"
He pushed out of the downward dog and sat cross-legged on the floor. "Um, yeah. I'm Scott. Hi. Are you really Aaron?"
It should be noted that he got the tone and inflection and diction completely right. It's exactly what Scott would have said.
"I mean, because you completely changed the order of your exercises. Yoga before situps? Come on. You're not fooling anyone, dude."
"You're insane," the person who was not Scott said, tracing with his finger the curlicue pattern on our Kmart oriental-style rug. But the following morning, yoga was last.
Aaron relayed the exercise story to us at another meeting that Star called, that same Wednesday. This one was at the diner three blocks away. Scott had been spending a lot of time in the apartment and didn't seem to be leaving soon. So Star, Aaron and I had each fabricated excuses and we sneaked out of the apartment at staggered times. I felt irrationally guilty, as though I were leaving behind a newborn baby to go discuss its adoption into a family of wolves.
We sat in the booth furthest back. I played with my straw wrapper and Aaron chattered about a girl he thought flirted with him on the train. Star tapped her water glass with her fork. "So I invited us all here because Scott is still living with us even though we said we were going to kick him out."
"I think we should call him FakeScott, not Scott. It's confusing." I looked down at my menu and decided to order pancakes, even though it was 6pm.
"What about ErsatzScott?" Star posited. She was tying a little knot into her long, bleach-blond braid, over and over again, and then undoing it.
"Overdone. Too Philip K. Dick," I complained.
"Heh. Dick," Aaron said.
"Shut up, Aaron," Star and I said in tandem. She smiled at me, as though to note that we finally agreed on an issue.
"FakeScott isn't quite right. He's not...fake. He's a very, very close approximation." I said. "Physically, he's nearly identical. Except for the body composition. Very, very close, though."
"Close enough that Star's still ...." Aaron never knew when to stop.
"I think that's over." I patted Star on her pale little hand. It was a condescending gesture. She scowled, silent.
The waitress, an elderly redhead ectomorph with a nametag that read "Iris," came and took our orders.
"How about just....NotScott," I said. "Because he's not."
"I wish he were," Star said. "I really wish he were."
"We all do."
"What do you guys think really happened to--?" Aaron began. But Star shook her head, and he stopped.
We looked at each other and then down at the speckled mauve and tan formica table. The bigger problem had yet to be solved.
"Maybe I'll try something again tomorrow," Aaron said, his tone uncharacteristically timid.
I sighed. I raised my eyebrow at Star.
"I'll do it," she said. "Give me three days, and I'll do it."
Aaron rolled his eyes at me.
Later that night, Star sidled next to me on the living room futon while I was watching "Batman" and asked to talk to me alone. I paused "Batman" and climbed the stairs to her room and sat on the floor, which was littered with dirty area rugs and ashtrays and empty bottles of Guinness and Brooklyn Lager. It seemed weird to sit on the unmade bed, especially since NotScott had been there so recently. There is something disconcerting about viewing the intimate artifacts and dwellings of a person one does not trust.
Star sat on the edge of the bed, holding a bottle of Jack Daniels between her knees. "So, I think I'm pregnant," she said.
I laughed. I didn't believe her, since Star was the kind of girl who always thought she was pregnant. "Well, it's not mine, since I'm female and we've never had sex."
She said that she was well aware, and was only telling me because of the delicate situation, and because maybe I'd understand because I was a woman too. I ignored the obnoxious appeal to my femininity and asked her to elaborate on this delicate situation, and she said that she was unsure whether to tell NotScott.
"He's not the father," I told her. "Scott is. He is not Scott. Pretending to be the man who is the father does not make him the father."
"But I slept with him, too. Very willingly. It almost makes it like I was in on his plan to impersonate Scott. Like I am a co-conspirator! It implies that I believe him! And that I have to keep it up, so it's like.... it's his." She issued forth a miserable hiccup. "I miss Scott. So much. So so so so so much."
"I miss him too." I hated the feeling of tears welling in my eyes. I did not want to have a female-bonding crying time with Star, of all people.
"What should I do?" She took an impressive gulp from the bottle.
I shook my head.
I did corner NotScott once with the intent of evicting him. He was alone and appeared to be lost in thought, sitting on the stairs that lead up to Star's room. It was late at night, around 11:30. I was wearing blue pajamas with rhinoceroses printed on them. I sat beside him.
"Scott," I tested.
He nodded at me. "Hey."
"Are you ever going to tell us where you were?" It felt weird to talk to this person who wasn't Scott as though he were Scott, but as Aaron, Star and I had discussed, once we started, it felt impossible to stop. It was as though we had made a singular, fatal error in judgment that was undoable due to the very laws of physics. We felt like the moment we treated him as though he were Scott was akin to having jumped off a very high building, and that even though we wished we hadn't done so, continuing to pummel downwards was the only option.
NotScott shrugged and smiled. "Jessie, the thing is, I don't remember. I swear."
"Don't remember. Really."
"Really. I think I had amnesia or something. Or I still have it, even. I don't remember anything."
"You don't remember or you don't want to tell me?"
"I don't remember. Ask Star. She's been bugging me constantly about it. I said the same thing to her."
I was surprised that Star even asked. I'd been thinking, just that day, how strange it was that neither Aaron nor Star seemed to care much about NotScott's explanation of where Scott had been, or where NotScott came from. It comforted me to hear that Star, too, was curious.
"Seriously, ask Star," NotScott said. "Or Aaron. I think Aaron's convinced that I'm not--"
I stopped him. I was not ready for that bold of a discussion. I was only comfortable with the back roads of this conversation. "How did you remember us? Or how to get home? Do you remember your mom?"
"I remember my mom. I remember some things. I just don't remember... certain events."
This felt too convenient. I was certain he'd picked up on the fact that he and I were old friends, and that he was waiting for me to quiz him on his childhood. This was his guard against it. I was going to thwart him anyway.
"Do you remember some events though? You have to. This morning, you remembered when you met Star." Star had asked him, while the four of us sat around eating doughnuts, if he remembered how they met. Instead of making him recreate the details, though, she told him the whole dumb story and asked if he recalled it. She also ate both the bavarian creme and the boston creme, my favorites.
"Yes. I remember that, and a few other things."
"Why don't you tell me one?"
"Jessie," he said. He touched my shoulder. It took effort from every muscle in my body to not recoil. "Don't make me do this right now. Another time. Later. Why are you being weird?"
"Do you remember when we were eleven and we went to the movies to see "Mrs. Doubtfire" and the guy sitting in our row exposed himself to us and we called the police and your mom threw a giant fit at the movie theater?"
He laughed. "Of course. Nothing could make me forget that time."
"That's funny, because it never happened." I stood up.
NotScott stood up, too. "I know that. It's just hard--you don't understand!" He sounded exactly the way Scott would have sounded.
"I do understand. Too late."
Yet still, I didn't say the words "you are not Scott." I also didn't say the words "get out of the apartment." And he certainly didn't go.
I began, by NotScott's one week anniversary in our apartment, to experience more paranoia. At my darkest, I no longer even believed NotScott was human. What he was doing to us, seemed to me, completely inhuman. It was too much. It was too bizarre. I researched all sorts of demons, monsters, vampires, witches, ghosts, werewolves. Aaron found me amid my pile of books and laughed. "The dude is not a werewolf," he said, picking up the book called "Werewolves." "The one thing he has in common with Scott is that he has no body hair. Come on, Jessie."
Aaron had a point. NotScott also hadn't attempted to bite us, or eat us, or kill us, or harm us in anyway. All he did was live with us. He watched television with us and ate in the same kitchen and still slept in Star's filthy bed. He joked with me about Aaron farting, and made fun of shows on the Lifetime channel. He killed a roach in the bathroom. He made an excellent omelette. I admit I ate it with gusto. He acted, truthfully, very much like Scott, and that was why it was so hard to get rid of him. We all missed Scott so much that this stranger--this imposter, this slightly skewed version of Scott--offered us, I'm ashamed to admit, great comfort. With NotScott there, we did not have to worry as much about what happened to Scott. A few beers and some mild squinting, and there he was, sitting in the living room and reading Scott's books and wearing Scott's clothes, making Scott's sarcastic comments and pop culture references, eating the same kind of pretzels that Scott liked and making the same complaints about their sodium content. So what if he was an ectomorph and not a mesomorph? So what if he was a little bit taller and had slightly more widely spaced eyes and more squarely shaped teeth? It was sick, and none of us would have admitted it, but the unspoken truth in the apartment was that NotScott helped.
Besides, being so much like Scott made him a great guy. If I had met him in another context, I would have been charmed by how much like Scott he was, albeit startled by how much like Scott he looked, and I would have liked him. I told Aaron this, and he shook his head and crossed his arms over his massive chest, which was clad in a faded pink tie-dyed tshirt.
"You totally would have been creeped out, still."
"Why?"
He launched into an explanation of the uncanny valley: People like robots more the more humanoid they get--to a certain point. That point begins the descent into the uncanny valley. If they are too humanoid, robots seem creepy and people are repulsed. But if robots are so humanoid that they're completely indistinguishable from people, then people like them again. "Hence, valley." He made a demonstrative dip with his hand. "I think there is a Scott uncanny valley, and NotScott is, well, towards the right-hand edge of the graph. If he were just a little more like Scott, we wouldn't be able to tell at all, and we'd completely accept him, right?"
The idea of a better Scott impostor upset me. "I don't know. I feel like I could always tell it wasn't Scott."
"This one almost tricked you. And you've known Scott way, way longer than Star or I have."
"I noticed immediately that NotScott was an ectomorph."
Aaron snorted and asked why I didn't say anything. I told him that I didn't know why. I said that maybe NotScott had us all under a spell. Aaron snorted again and threw the werewolf book playfully at my head, but he looked a little more worried than before our conversation.
Two nights later, there was a ruckus upstairs in Star's room. The sound of glass breaking summoned me from my room and Aaron from his, and we started up the stairs.
NotScott and Star stood at opposite ends of the room, which was dimly lit only by a few bodega candles placed at odd intervals on the floor. The bed was unmade and covered in clothes. "Get out of this apartment!" Star screamed. "You're not Scott! We all know it! You know it and we know it! We've all been talking about it! I'm absolutely sure now you're not Scott! It's done! It's time! Get the fuck out!"
It was a start.
"She's gone nuts," NotScott said, apologetically. "I don't know what's going on."
"Well, I think she has a point," I said.
"A point? What are you talking about?" NotScott rubbed his palms on his jeans--really, Scott's jeans, jeans I helped Scott pick out a year before--and smiled quizzically.
"You're not Scott!" Aaron yelled. It was as though a spell had been broken. Aaron's face was pink. "You're not Scott! You're not Scott! What the fuck are you doing pretending to be Scott!"
"Hey, hey. Easy. Easy," NotScott said. He approached Aaron with his arms outstretched, as though he wanted a hug. It was very strange. "Aaron, what's going on?"
"Not easy! What's going on is you're not Scott!" Aaron was hyperventilating and turning purple. "I can't believe that you're not Scott and you're... here!"
NotScott stepped closer to Aaron, and Aaron flinched. NotScott touched Aaron on the arm, and Aaron grabbed NotScott by both shoulders and slammed him against the wall. "I want you to admit that you're not Scott. I want you say it to all of us and I want you to tell us you're sorry and tell us who you really are and why you--"
"I don't know what you're talking about! Aaron!"
Aaron pinched NotScott, hard. NotScott screamed. "Good," said Aaron. "Good. Now let's see if you bleed or if you're a monster or a robot or something."
"WHAT? A robot?"
"Aaron--" I said. "He's not a--" But it was too late. Aaron slapped him across the face and then pummeled him in the nose. Scott crumpled to the ground and did, indeed, bleed.
"What the hell is wrong with you, asshole?" he shouted, his hand over his nose. Blood dripped onto the parquet floor and onto Scott's yellow tshirt that NotScott was wearing.
"He's not a robot," announced Aaron.
"I could have told you that," said Star.
"I think the bigger question is, what is wrong with you?" I asked NotScott, who remained on the floor. "You have a lot of explaining to do. We're not pretending anymore, and neither are you. So?"
"Okay," NotScott said. "Okay, okay. You want me to say I'm sorry. For what? I'm sorry. Don't let him hit me again."
"You're sorry? Sorry? As though that..." Star sank down on to floor. She held up a small black notebook. "This. I found this. This is why this is happening." She threw it at me. I caught it. I flipped through it. It seemed to be a diary.
"A diary? Really?" The handwriting was, as expected, very much like Scott's. But the content was off. It seemed to be in another language. Something with a lot of umlauts. Scott did not speak another language, let alone one with that many umlauts. I flipped forward to the end, to see if there was anything incriminating, but most of the book was blank. "What language is this?" I threw the book at Aaron.
Aaron caught it and slammed it down into NotScott's chest. NotScott grabbed it and shoved it in his back pocket. "Leave," Aaron said. "Now."
"It's not a language," Scott called to me, looking at me over Aaron's shoulder. His eyes were big and panicky. "I had these syllables running in my head, and--"
"No. Seriously. Umlauts?" I said.
"What?"
Aaron held NotScott by his hair. "Leave," he repeated.
"Wait..." Star reached her arms outward, towards NotScott. "Can't I ...?"
"He's not Scott!" I yelled. "We know for sure! We're done! What is the matter with you!"
Star began to cry. "But he's the closest we're ever going to get to Scott, ever again!"
NotScott stood up, walked across the room, and hugged her. Blood dripped from his nose into her hair. Then, without another word, he turned around and walked down the stairs.
We thought that maybe he'd left us and that we just didn't hear the front door slam, but when Aaron, Star and I came downstairs a few minutes later, we found him sitting in the living room, thumbing through the New Yorker. "You guys hungry?" he asked. He still had blood on his face. His voice wavered. "I might order dinner. Mexican?"
Star opened her mouth and closed it again. Aaron made a sound that was between a laugh and a groan. I pulled the bag of menus from the top of the fridge and threw them at NotScott. "Fine," I said, as though signing a pact. "Fine."
"Fine," he agreed.
Star was right. NotScott was the closest we ever got to Scott, ever again. He lived with us for the rest of the summer. Star drank herself a miscarriage, and when the sublease was up on the apartment, we all moved out to live with other people in different neighborhoods, to get away from those weird weeks, from each other, from our uncertain selves.