Return of the Body Snatcher

It's always been a fine bar in which to waste a Sunday afternoon, so that's where we were, and that's what we were doing. We picked up a couple of sandwiches across the street, then showed up at the bar about 10 minutes after the doors were unlocked. Got a first round, then took a table in the back.

The sun was out, but the wind remained irksome. I'd been locked in my apartment for the past four or five days, sitting cross-legged on a broken chair in front of a machine. My head hurt, my legs were numb and my back had become a spasmodical wonderland. I knew I had to replenish myself with beer from dirty taps and some human contact before I went all funny?or funnier?in the head. Especially since I had another day or two of the same thing in front of me.

It was working, too. The quivery stress was ebbing, the pain barely noticeable anymore. We were speculating idly about friends we hadn't seen in a while, and joking about some horrific crimes we'd heard about on the news that week. By 2 o'clock, the sandwiches were a pleasant memory, the "pastrami stares" were beginning to fade, and we were nearing the end of our third round. A few more people had come in, and were now crowded around the bar. One woman was holding a tiny dog in her arms.

When it came time to go get the fourth round, I hesitated. When the bar is empty, and the sun is shining through the front windows, I'm usually able to maneuver my way around the silhouettes of chairs and tables to get a refill, then return them to the table without incident. When there are people around, however, and they've been reduced to two dimensions in my eyes while remaining three dimensional in everybody else's, well, that's when I have trouble.

Even that last round was a little troublesome, as I hadn't seen the older women on either side of me when I plinked the empties down on the bar. There was a long period of silence until the woman to my left asked, "You want something or not?" I hadn't seen the bartender approach, and now this woman had me all flustered.

But anyway. Now with the crowd around the taps much larger and more mobile, I knew I'd have a bad time of it.

"Umm..." I said to Morgan, "could I ask you a favor?"

"Of course you can," she said, taking the glasses and heading toward the bar. I pulled a cigarette from my pocket and lit it.

When she returned a few minutes later, she was smiling. As she set the fresh pint in front of me, she whispered, "The other you is here."

"You're kidding."

I didn't need to ask her what the hell she meant. I knew. It had been a long time, but I guess I expected it one of these days. I'm just sorry it had to happen here, in this particular tavern. It was a portent of bad possibilities.

"The woman holding the dog?" Morgan pointed out. "He's with her."

"Great."

Worse, moments after she told me all this, the man, woman and dog sat down at a table just a few feet away from us. Like he always did.

"He's bleached his hair," Morgan whispered.

It's a start, I thought. Of course, it may have only been a side effect from spending so much time bathed in God's Holy Light. Damn him, anyhow.

It all started three years ago. April of 1998. Morgan and I were sitting at a different bar?our home bar at the time. It was dark outside, and it was even darker in the bar.

I couldn't see a goddamn thing until, out of the ceiling or out of the sky or out of nowhere, a beam of heavenly light appeared, focusing itself two tables away. Sitting at that table, two tables away, bathed in that beam of intense pure white light, was me. Or someone who looked too much like me for comfort. I pointed him out to Morgan and she confirmed what I thought I was seeing. It quickly turned into a very strange evening.

Stranger and more unnerving still was the fact that this Stranger, after appearing from within a heavenly glow, soon became a regular at the bar. He started showing up just minutes after we'd arrive, every single night.

"You're here again," Morgan would tell me whenever he walked through the door.

He seemed friendly enough, and was often seen surrounded by a large group of friends (which, in itself, was proof that he was an impostor). I never spoke a word to him, even though Morgan suggested it a few times.

"I already know what I think about most everything," I told her. "What would be the point?"

After we switched our home bars, however?about a month after all this began?we never saw or heard of him again, which was a tremendous relief. I thought about him every once in a while, what he might be doing, whether or not he had returned to his heavenly father's home, how he spent his days (performing Good Deeds was my guess?playing his lute for orphans in the burn ward, that sort of thing). And so on.

But until now, it had all been nothing but idle and infrequent speculation.

Fortunately or unfortunately, there was no beam of light on him this afternoon. And given the flow of the natural light in the bar, I couldn't see him at all. I just had to take Morgan's word on things.

"He still looks exactly like you," she said. "Apart from the hair."

"Is he wearing his hat today?" I asked, still worried.

"No, no hat."

"And his brow's still a little heavier than mine, right?"

She looked. "Yeah. A little bit. He eyes are more deeply set."

That was always hard to imagine, actually, given that I once had a German photographer make reference to my "apelike" brow.

This particular bar has a resident cat, which is something I always like to see in a bar?though this one was obviously hiding somewhere at the moment. When the woman who was with the other me unchained her small bulldog, the first thing it did was click briskly over to the cat's food dish, beneath the jukebox. It sniffed the food, then turned and clicked back to the table. It was one of those dogs that never stops moving.

Moments later, the dog returned to the cat's dish, this time dipping its head and, in an instant, devouring all the food that was there. Then it moved on to the water dish, and neatly finished that off, too.

Neither the woman nor the other me said a word about it. They seemed to think it was cute or something.

"So much for going around doing good deeds," Morgan said. "Now he seems like kind of an asshole."

"Yeah," I agreed eagerly, "a real jerk."

The room, as they say, became rationalized in that moment, as all the details began snapping together.

Bleached hair? Bleached blond hair on a man is almost never a good idea. The roving dog business, too?if Jesus could set a herd of pigs (demon-possessed or not) charging off a cliff into the sea, then this guy, blessed as he apparently had been at one point, could certainly deter a dog from eating the food of an innocent cat. What's more, his beam of heavenly light was missing.

"It wasn't a beam of heavenly light," Morgan insisted. "He was sitting in front of a window."

"No, no?I'm pretty sure it was a beam of heavenly light."

"It was just the light coming through the window."

I held firm, however. There's no denying that it had been there that first night. And now it was gone. What could it mean?

I'm fully aware that, for most people, having it pointed out that some stranger looked just like them would garner little more than an "Oh yes, look at that." Possibly grist for a brief mention over the dinner table that night, but nothing more, and soon forgotten. So what was so different here?

Well, first of all, there was that spear of light direct from God's hand. That had to mean something.

Way I see it, he was sent down here on a mission to do Good Deeds. To do his job to the fullest, he had to stop by the bar every night to suck the life force from me. After a year or two, though, he got bored with the goodness routine, and chose instead to dedicate himself to rampant assholery.

That Sunday encounter might've been a fluke, an accident, a mistake. It awaits to be seen, though. If he starts showing up every night again, we might have to find a new home bar?never an easy task. But necessary, if it'll help me stop the daily ectoplasmic vampirism.

I've always been a strong believer in the value of "creative paranoia."

Far from what the old song tried to convince us of, I don't believe that paranoia?in proper doses?will "Destroyah." Quite the opposite, actually. A little blast of paranoia now and again can help to make our casually dreary lives much more interesting, if we just give it a chance.

As a sidenote, I would just like to mention that I find it interesting that "Destroyah" was the name of a giant monster who battled Godzilla in three Toho Studios productions, beginning with 1995's Godzilla vs. Destroyah. He was an enormous (of course) armored, flying, bipedal crustacean who came equipped with a destructive "micro-oxygen spray," and was capable of shooting laser beams out of his horns.

Could it be possible that I was simply mistaking "God's Holy Light" for this laser beam? I don't know. It certainly is something to think about.

But I'll have to do that later. Right now I should probably sit back down cross-legged on a broken chair in front of a machine, to see if I can get some work done.