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“You ever feel,” I shouted, “you’re on the verge of a bombshell annihilating discovery?”
“Swimming once I found a big chunk of something awful. Ambergris! I thought. Sell it to a perfume factory for thousands! I ran to show the damned stuff to the lifeguard. Ambergris? Horseflies! I flung it back in the sea. That kind of annihilating discovery?”
“Maybe. Genealogies. Genetics.”
“From what year?”
“Lincoln,” I said. “Washington, Henry the Eighth. God, I feel as if I found all Creation, some obvious truth that’s been sitting right in front of us forever and we didn’t see. This could change history!”
“Or spoil it,” said Mr. Lemley. “You sure you ain’t been drinking back there in the stacks? Don’t stand there. Go!”
“One side or a leg-off,” I said.
I read and tossed, tossed and read, but there were no really new annuals. Phone calls and airmail was the answer.
“Jeez Christopher,” observed Mr. Lemley. “Can you afford to do that?”
“I’ll die if I don’t.”
“And die if you do. Closing time. Lights out.”
The annuals streamed in during the week before graduations all across the country.
I stayed up two nights, sleepless, riffling, Xeroxing pages, tallying lists, twinning pasteups of ten dozen new faces against ten dozen old.
Christ, I thought, you damn stupid blind idiot on a runaway train. How do you steer? Where the hell is it going? And, oh God, why?
I had no answers. Gone mad, I mailed and phoned, sent and got back, like a blind man in a closet sorting clothes, trying inanities, discarding reason.
The mail was an avalanche.
It could not be, and yet it was. All biological rules? Out the window. The history of flesh was what? Darwinian “Sport.” Genetic accidents that birthed new species. Derailed genes which spun the world afresh. But what if there were freak/sport replays? What if Nature hiccuped, and its needle jumped back? Then, having lost its genetic mind, wouldn’t it clone generation after generation of Williamses, Browns, and Smiths? Not related by family, no. But mindless rebirths, blind matter trapped in a mirror maze? Impossible.
Yet there it was. Dozens of faces repeated in hundreds of faces across the world! Twin upon twin, in excelsis. And where did that leave room for new flesh, a history of progress and survival?
Shut up, I thought, and drink your gin.
The cascade of high school annuals continued.
I flipped their pages like decks of cards until, at last …
There it was.
Its arrival blew a hole in my stomach.
There was a name on page 124 of the Roswell High annual, published this week and just arrived. The name was:
William Clark Henderson.
I stared at his picture and saw:
Me.
Alive and graduating this week!
The other me.
An exact replica of every eyelash, eyebrow, small pore and large, ear fuzz and nostril hair.
