Split
Florescent lights shone down on Patricia’s head, illuminating the sweat she felt budding along her hairline.
She sat at a table across from three confident professionals, real adults who wore well-pressed suits, sleek sheath dresses. The lone woman had voluminous waves and perfectly applied makeup. Patricia’s own hair hung limp around her plain face. Her cheap cardigan draped her skinny shoulders like a giant poncho. How dumb she looked. How juvenile.
“Three words to describe yourself,” one of the men said.
“Um…that’s tough. Like, how do you boil yourself down to three words?” Her voice sounded alarmingly high-pitched. “Oh, I know! Hardworking. So that’s one. And, well I’m responsible and … let me think.” She closed her eyes, trying to see where the third and final word might be hiding. All she saw was an infrared Rorschach on the back of her eyelids.
The silence seemed to stretch on and on. She opened her eyes. They stared at her with blank faces, inscrutable.
She wanted to say, “Look, I get better grades than everyone you interviewed.” She wanted to say, “While everyone gets wasted, I study.” She wanted to say she’d never missed a single class, had never been late in her life, took everything she did seriously.
“How about your worst quality,” the other man said.
“Is that a trick question?” She laughed nervously.
The woman tapped a pen relentlessly against the table.
Patricia’s mouth grew dry.
This was why she wanted to direct, not act. The spotlight was too much. They expected her to be personable, like she was interviewing for an anchor position, not an intern position, where she’d likely only be required to fetch coffee and unjam the copier. But they acted like they needed the perfect person, like they could tell who the perfect person was based on a thirty-minute interview, like they could tell everything worthwhile about her in that miniscule amount of time.
Patricia left the television studio humiliated. She tried to reassure herself that everything was fine, she still had a chance, only to be overtaken by another voice saying no, you were horrible. You’re going straight back to Mom and Dad’s after graduation. She’d sleep in her childhood room surrounded by her childhood things. She’d help her mother around the house. Between chores, they’d watch daytime TV—because her mother’s viewing habits were less discriminatory than hers—before napping from boredom rather than actual exertion.
Patricia had only taken a few steps outside when she felt dizzy, everything tilting a little, growing fuzzy. She put her hands on her knees, breathed deep. Her insides grew too big for her skin; bones, muscles, organs pushed against her. With a yell, she felt her insides burst free. She fell to the ground.
After, there was relief.
When she opened her eyes, Patricia saw herself, an exact duplicate of herself, sitting right next to her. The same long dark hair fell across her face. They were even wearing the same thing, down to the black heels her mother had long since lost use for. Patricia reached out but this other self, this Other Patricia, stood before she could touch her.
She followed her double onto the bus. This Other Patricia looked so small, her legs like little sticks in those scuffed up heels, feet barely scraping the floor. She stared out the window, face blank as plastic. Was that how Patricia’s face, the real Patricia’s face, always looked? She felt like she was in a dream, watching herself move through the world.
The Other Patricia didn’t look at her until they reached their dorm suite. Patricia waited for something momentous, for their bodies to float up and collide, for an explosion to shake the universe. But nothing happened. The Other Patricia only glanced at her with that same glazed expression, like she’d always lived a life in which there were two Patricias. Maybe she had. Maybe she’d been living alongside the real Patricia since she was born, invisible until this moment.
The Other Patricia rifled through her roommate Hillary’s top dresser drawer, pulling out a bag of joints. She sat against the bunk beds the real Patricia shared with Hillary. Patricia had begged her parents to live off campus senior year, but they didn’t like her living in the city. They at least wanted to know she was safe on campus. Never mind girls got assaulted on campuses every day. Girls got assaulted everywhere every day.
The Other Patricia lit a joint and inhaled deep. The real Patricia didn’t like smoking pot, dreading the loss of control of her thoughts, words, actions, Hillary mocking how frightened she looked. Or she’d laugh uncontrollably for no reason, terrified she would die of oxygen deprivation. But the Other Patricia looked so calm.
Patricia sat beside her double on the floor. This close, the Other Patricia’s skin seemed almost translucent. Patricia swore she could see smoke snaking down the Other Patricia’s trachea. Chicken pox scars and giant pores overwhelmed her face, which meant they overwhelmed Patricia’s face too. Did everyone think she looked gross? DidDylan?
The first time Patricia met Dylan, he’d been reading D’entre Les Morts, ill-translated to The Living and the Dead, the source material for Vertigo. She admired his smooth skin, his long lashes, his unwavering concentration. She sat beside him on the campus bench, trying to act casual, like she just happened to glance his way and notice what he was reading.
“That’s a good book,” she said.
“I like it,” he said. “But I like the movie better.”
People always said books were better than movies. Sometimes it was true. But when it came to true visionaries like Hitchcock, it wasn’t. She was glad Dylan thought so too. It felt like a sign.
The bedroom had a smoky sheen to it. Patricia started feeling lighter, like she was floating. She leaned her head against Hillary’s mattress.
“At the end of Vertigo, do you think Judy slipped or jumped off the bell tower?” she said.
“Hell if I know,” the Other Patricia said.
It always seemed so ambiguous. Hitchcock wanted it that way, Patricia’s mother said the first time they watched it together. He directed the camera to stay locked on Scotty, so Judy slips sideways out of the frame. Patricia had been awed by the power of such decisions, how something so small could create such mystery.
“Judy sees the nun’s shadow and thinks it’s Madeleine’s ghost,” Patricia said. “She’s scared, maybe takes a step back, accidentally falls. Or she jumps because she’s too afraid to face the woman she betrayed.”
“Judy only worried about Scotty ditching her. Not that she helped kill someone,” the Other Patricia said. “If she didn’t feel guilty, she shouldn’t be scared.” The Other Patricia took another hit. The smoke hung in the air. She hunched her shoulders and wiggled her fingers at Patricia, emitting a series of dramatic Ooos. “I’m Madeline’s ghost come to haunt you!”
It was dumb, but Patricia couldn’t help laughing at the silly voice mocking the movie she revered, making her reverence itself seem a little dumb. She didn’t feel self-conscious like she would with Hillary. Even her secondhand high wasn’t making her paranoid, so her laughter was enjoyable for once, not catastrophic. She felt safe.
The doorknob rattled.
Patricia jumped up. She threw open the window and sprayed Febreze in front of the fan. A stream of mountain-fresh particles danced around the room.
“Hide!” she said, but the Other Patricia remained slumped against the bed. Patricia dove into the closet just as the front door opened.
Between the door slats, Patricia saw strips of Hillary stacked in horizontal lines. “It reeks of skunk in here,” Hillary said. “You have to breathe into the dryer sheets.”
“Sorry,” the Other Patricia said.
Hillary plopped down on the bottom bunk, legs dangling beside the Other Patricia’s head. “I just had my interview. It was fantastic. I think I have a real shot.”
Hillary had already submitted her application by the time she asked Patricia if it was okay. But Patricia figured Hillary was so irresponsible, there was no way she’d get the internship over her.
“How’d it go for you,” Hillary said.
The Other Patricia shrugged. “Could’ve been better.”
“I’m sure you blew them away. You’re so smart and responsible.”
The Other Patricia snorted.
“You okay? You seem a little, I don’t know, apathetic,” Hillary said.
Patricia accidentally coughed. She clapped her hands over her mouth. This was it. Hillary would open the door and realize there were two Patricias.
But Hillary didn’t even glance toward the closet.
“You have to be careful with this stuff.” Hillary took the joint that Patricia forgot to hide. “You’re a rookie.”
She’d coughed so loud. How could Hillary not have heard? Was she that self-involved? Patricia opened the closet door. This time, Hillary did look, but she didn’t seem to register Patricia’s presence.
“Damn, it’s windy,” Hillary said. She shut the window and left with the rest of the joint.
Patricia wandered into the hallway. “Excuse me,” she said to a couple passing girls, but they kept walking. “Hey,” Patricia said, louder this time. When she tapped their shoulders they turned, but seemed to look right through her.
She ran outside, tapping every student and professor she ran into, shouting in their faces, aware she looked like crazy, free to act this way only because no one showed any signs of hearing her. Seeing her. She was invisible.
Ever since they first moved in together freshman year, Patricia shut herself in the bathroom to get ready so Hillary couldn’t critique her method or products.
Now, she stood in the living room, makeup burying the coffee table, watching the Other Patricia apply mascara right beside Hillary, getting ready for a party at Dylan’s. Hillary stared into a vanity mirror, working on an expert cat eye.
“Done,” the Other Patricia said.
Hillary looked her over. “Why don’t you let me do your eyeliner for you, Patty? It’s really thin.”
Patricia waited for her double to say sure, to let Hillary reapply her makeup like she was incompetent.
“I like it this way,” the Other Patricia said. “I still look like myself.” So self-assured. Patricia wondered how the interview would have gone if only the Other Patricia had appeared an hour sooner.
Dylan lived in a one-story house off campus. The door was open, so they walked right in. A bunch of people were locked in a surprisingly boisterous Tetris tournament in the living room. In the dining room, people played a drinking game. Dylan wasn’t in either.
Patricia quickly lost sight of Hillary. But the Other Patricia moved confidently through the house, saying hey to everyone, high-fiving any hand that greeted her, downing a Jell-O shot thrust her way. In the kitchen, she unabashedly fumbled with the tap. She didn’t even flinch when some guy said, “Drink much?” Patricia would have avoided it just to not look stupid.
Soon, the Other Patricia’s confidence rubbed off on her. She played tricks on people, laughing at their bewilderment when they looked for the culprit and found no one.
As the party grew more crowded, Tetris gave way to bad dancing and too-loud music. The relentless bass hurt Patricia’s head. There was no where she could walk without being crushed by bodies. They radiated so much heat that she began to feel light-headed. Everyone grew fuzzier and dimmer, like they were evaporating, or maybe she was.
Patricia leaned against a wall to steady herself, pushing aside a kissing couple who fell to the floor and continued kissing like nothing had happened.
The Other Patricia touched her shoulder. “Let’s go outside.”
Patricia followed her to a bench on the porch, where there were still too many bodies but at least it was cool, at least it was quieter.
Suddenly, finally, there was Dylan. Fitted black t-shirt, ankle boots, messy hair that made him look effortlessly cool.
“What’s up, Patricia?” Dylan asked.
“The ceiling,” the Other Patricia said.
It wasn’t something Patricia would ever say, but it was nice to sit back and let the Other Patricia take the reins, bypassing all the anxiety. She felt like she’d pulled off some great trick.
Dylan sat beside the Other Patricia. He nearly sat on top of the real Patricia, but she slipped out of the way just in time. She leaned against the porch railing, pushing aside yet another couple.
“Shit, I’m drunk,” the girl said.
“Hey, I like your shoes,” Dylan told the Other Patricia. The three of them looked at the scuffed red high tops she’d had since high school.
“These old things?” the Other Patricia said. “I got them from my drug dealer. I’m not sure what they’re laced with, but I’ve been tripping all day.”
Hillary had told Patricia that joke. She’d rolled her eyes and called Hillary a dork, but Dylan laughed.
“You should do stand up,” he said.
“You’re teasing me,” the Other Patricia said.
“Maybe.”
He moved closer to the Other Patricia, smiling. A hand found its way to her thigh, far above the knee. “Listen, would you want to, I don’t know.” He paused. “Hang out sometime?”
“I guess that wouldn’t be so bad.” The Other Patricia smiled.
If he kissed her double, would Patricia even feel it?
They couldn’t find Hillary anywhere. Finally, someone said she left with “some guy.” Any other night it would have bothered Patricia. But she felt more secure beside her double.
The next bus wouldn’t arrive for forty minutes. They could walk back to campus in that time. Patricia figured walking was better than standing idly at the bus stop anyway.
“We should suggest the movies to Dylan,” Patricia said as they walked. “Then we don’t have to worry about what to say. If we go out after, we can just talk about the movie.”
Suddenly the Other Patricia hurtled to the ground. Someone was ripping her purse from her shoulder.
Patricia didn’t think. She chased after him, grabbed his shirt. He fell backward, looking startled. He charged at the Other Patricia since she was the only one he could see. He swung the purse at her head. She clutched her eye. He pushed her back to the ground, kicked her in the ribs. Patricia tried to shove him off her double, but her hands fell right through him. She tried to push him again and again, growing angrier and angrier, until finally, she knocked him over. She pulled at the purse.
“What the fuck?” he said, but he kept a firm grasp and yanked it away before running down the street.
Patricia followed her double to the bedroom, watching as she rifled through Hillary’s dresser.
“What are you doing?” Patricia said.
“I have a headache.” The Other Patricia grabbed Hillary’s joints. She put on Vertigo and settled onto the couch.
Patricia sat beside her, examining the eye that was already puffing up. “You should ice that before it swells shut.”
The Other Patricia closed her eyes. “I’m so tired.”
Patricia made an ice pack and held it to her double’s face. “We should go to the police,” Patricia said. “I can describe him, I’m sure of it.”
“It was too dark, too fast, too fucking blurry.”
She’d started the film halfway through, so Judy was already running to the top of the bell tower, pretending to be a suicidal Madeleine. When she reached the top, there was Gavin, his dead wife limp in his arms, the real Madeleine. It was the only moment the audience ever saw her. You couldn’t get a good look at her before her treacherous husband pitched her body from the tower.
Patricia always assumed Madeleine and Judy were identical strangers. But it occurred to her then that she didn’t know if Madeleine even looked like Judy at all. If she was soft-spoken and well-mannered like Judy made her out to be. She was obliterated by Judy’s riveting portrayal of her, swallowed whole by this character, this fake woman who never existed in the first place.
Hillary came home the next morning.
“Sorry for ditching you,” she said. “You get back okay?”
“No biggie,” the Other Patricia said. She didn’t say anything about the mugging. Her eye hadn’t bruised but her ribs had. Patricia wished it were the other way around, so Hillary had to notice, had to force the Other Patricia to act since she, apparently, could not.
When it was time for class, the Other Patricia refused to leave the couch.
“You go, if it’s so important to you,” the Other Patricia said.
Patricia forged a doctor’s note claiming mono.
While the Other Patricia lay around—at good times watching movies, at bad staring at the wall—Patricia diligently completed assignments. She was so close to graduating. But she struggled more and more to touch things, to get a firm grip on the world.
When Patricia returned from class on Friday, the day of their date with Dylan, the Other Patricia was asleep on the couch. She shook her shoulder. “It’s time to get ready.”
“I’m not going.”
“But you’ve wanted this for so long.”
“You’ve wanted this.”
It hadn’t occurred to Patricia that they might not want all the same things. She certainly couldn’t make the Other Patricia go. Maybe it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t really be her on the date. She supposed she only hoped that she’d gain her corporeality back and when she did, Dylan would already be her boyfriend.
“Call him at least,” she said. “Tell him you don’t feel good.”
“What difference does it make?”
“He’s waiting for us. For you.”
The Other Patricia went to the bedroom. She rifled through Hillary’s top drawer, second, third, and finally the bottom drawer, where the joints lay hidden beneath a stack of jeans.
“You can’t keep stealing Hillary’s pot. Look—she even moved it,” Patricia said.
The Other Patricia silently returned to the couch, joint in hand.
“Will you please just do this?” Patricia said. “Dylan’s perfect for me.”
The Other Patricia snorted. “He doesn’t even like you.”
“Why’d he ask me out then?”
“He asked me out, because I was flirting, because he thought I’d fuck him.”
Patricia didn’t think that was fair. She was the one he talked to first, long before the Other Patricia ever emerged. He only sat beside her double on the porch because he mistook her for the real Patricia.
“We have stuff in common. Movies. Hitchcock,” Patricia said.
“Why would you go out with someone just because of some old dead dude who didn’t give a shit about women?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Madeleine and Judy are just pawns to torture and kill,” the Other Patricia said. “Judy’s death isn’t even supposed to be sad. I mean, do you even care when she dies? Do you grieve for her lost potential, the way she’s been manipulated and used by one man after another? You don’t do you?”
Patricia had seen Vertigo so many times her perspective was muddled by the reactions of a long line of Patricias younger than her. She tried to remember the first time she watched it with her mother all those years ago. Had she mourned Judy? She couldn’t be sure.
Hillary returned later that night, chipper and glowing.
“Patty, guess what!” She rushed to the couch and sat on Patricia.
“Jesus.” As Patricia stood, her body inhabited Hillary’s for one brief moment where she felt not just Hillary’s skin invade her own, but her blood, heart, brain. Patricia shuddered and quickly moved to the armchair.
“Hey,” Hillary said, drumming the Other Patricia’s butt. “I got the internship!”
Patricia stared at her. It couldn’t be true. She had to be lying.
“After the summer, there’s a good chance they’ll hire me fulltime! Bet I’ll be anchoring the local news in a year.” A director couldn’t have manufactured a better smile to show how insensitive she was, how smug.
“What’d you do, blow the boss?” the Other Patricia said.
“Excuse me?” Hillary said.
“You skip class all the time, you smoke pot all the time, your grades are embarrassing.”
Patricia could tell Hillary was trying to contain her anger, her outline quivering, but she couldn’t even care, because the Other Patricia was right. She felt her own body quivering too.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Hillary said. “I know you wanted the position, but I can’t sabotage my future just to spare your feelings. Do you have to be such a bitch about it?”
The Other Patricia burst out laughing.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Hillary said.
“You called me a bitch,” the Other Patricia said. “You called me a bitch. It’s hilarious.”
“I miss the old Patricia. The one who was nice and polite and responsible.” Hillary headed to their bedroom.
“The kiss-ass, you mean,” the Other Patricia called after her. “The one who made you feel good about yourself and the shitty things you do.”
Before she slammed the bedroom door, Hillary said, “Hey, if you could stop stealing my pot, that’d be great, thanks.”
Effing Hillary. She only got the job because she was so pretty and confident she made you believe everything she was saying. It didn’t matter how hard Patricia worked.
“You look like shit,” the Other Patricia said suddenly. She extended the joint. What did it matter anymore? So Patricia took it. Rather, she tried to take it. But her hand moved right through it. She kept trying to grasp the joint but she couldn’t.
The Other Patricia brought the joint back to her own mouth. She blew the smoke at Patricia, trying to give her a secondhand hit. That’s when Patricia realized she could no longer breathe. And it didn’t matter.
Patricia felt herself fading, growing fainter and fainter through the night. By the morning, she could see through her skin, down to the muscle, to the bone, looking through layers of herself at the cold tile floor.
She left the Other Patricia behind.
It was warm out. There was a gentle breeze, the sky bright with only wisps of clouds. If this were a movie, she would have demanded overcast skies, brutal winds, unseasonably cold temperatures. She’d be shivering as she walked down the street, looking abject, dark hair whipping her face that the audience would know she didn’t have the will to push back.
The breeze grew stronger, funneling through her face, torso, legs, until it grew so strong it picked her up, carried her away from campus, through the city, pushing her farther and farther north to the suburbs, all the way home. She floated to the earth, landing softly in her parents’ yard.
The house vibrated with the thrum of the vacuum. She found her mother in the living room. The older Patricia got, the more alike they looked. Both much too short, hair much too dark, face far too serious.
“Mama,” she said. Of course, her mother didn’t turn around. She returned the vacuum to the closet. She fell to the couch and turned on a soap opera. She slumped down, looking abject too. Patricia sat beside her. She tried to stroke her cheek, but her hand fell through her mother’s skin.
Maybe she wasn’t the real Patricia after all. Maybe the Other Patricia was. Maybe she was the one who’d consumed the Other Patricia her whole life, overtaking her, up until now.
This Patricia, whoever she was, curled up on the couch, head floating just above her mother’s lap, imagining she was resting in it. She continued to lay there after her mother got up and finished her chores, and all through the night, and the next day, and the day after that, until she’d grown so light, so faint, she could no longer see herself.
Melissa Brooks is a Chicago-based writer with an MFA in Fiction from the University of San Francisco. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Identity Theory, Litro, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. Her short story, “Closed Casket Calling Hours,” was included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions.
