Familiar Distortion

When I woke up this morning, it was all different. Everything was exactly the same as yesterday, but somehow utterly wrong. I once heard a comedian say that while he was asleep, thieves stole everything in his house and replaced them with exact duplicates. Funny then, but now? It’s damned creepy. And it’s not just the objects in the house. It’s the house itself, the air inside it, the physics of it. It’s just alien. The sounds are off. Not muffled, but flat. It’s as if nothing reflects. All the surfaces of everything in every room absorb all the sound. It’s all one horribly familiar distortion.

I’d eat, but I’m not hungry. And who knows what I’d find in the refrigerator? Some sort of odd, food-shaped synthetics masquerading as nutritive substance? Or perhaps gray bricks the consistency of clay duplicating the function of food instead of the form?

There’s some problem with the quality of light, as well. It's as if it moves slower than itself. It's diffuse and thick. Although the street outside looks sunlit, there are no shadows. The light comes from everywhere and nowhere at once; syrupy, almost palpable.

Every day since my retirement I’ve pulled a chair to the parlor window to watch the complex rhythms of the afternoon traffic. It ebbs and flows like the breathing of some massive beast. Today I can’t move the chair, so I stand. The window will not open, so I look through it. I see no cars or trucks, no utility vehicles; just a thin stream of people. Very few, walking almost furtively. Do they want to hide? The light is such that I can’t clearly make out their faces, but guarded hostility emanates from them.

It suddenly feels important to me to make contact with one of these passers-by. I rap on the glass of the window, but instead of the expected TACK TACK TACK sound, I hear nothing. I may as well have been knocking on a brick wall. For a brief moment, I get the strange notion that the window is not a window at all and no one is walking past. It is a screen, only showing images of the neighborhood. But no, one of the passing children is stopping and turning toward me.

When he looks me full in the face, his features sharpen into perfect focus. He smiles; a wicked, terrible, we-share-a-secret smile that is completely bereft of goodwill. Then he nods and winks, and before his eye reopens, it begins to slide down his cheek. His smile lazily rolls over like a spot of oil on water, becoming a silent cry of terror, lopsided and horrible.

I turn away from the window shuddering and go to the front door. That monster-child outside must know what’s happened to my house.

That’s when I realize that I have no front door. There’s not even a spot for it. Window, picture, telephone table, corner.

No door.

“Who’s doing this to me?” My voice is distant, like a bad recording.

I run to the back door, but between the refrigerator and the grandfather clock is a blank, seamless expanse of wall precisely the same shade of pale green as the rest of the wall. It’s as if there was never a door there.

No doors, windows won’t open, children with melting Picasso faces. How can this be happening? Even my own voice, as I weep in impotent rage, sounds far away and almost disembodied.

I return to my bedroom, which thankfully is still there. I lie on the bed expecting the roughness of the old wool blanket. It’s now softer than flannel, like a cloud I could sink into. The bed seems too small, though I am the only one in it.

I wait for sleep, praying to wake from this nightmare soon. At long last, though no change occurs in the light entering the room, it feels like night. I sleep.

I open my eyes and the light is still precisely the same. Seconds may have passed, or eons. I don’t feel rested or refreshed, but then I hadn’t felt tired to begin with. Somehow I’ve got to get out of here. Whoever has done this to me--some sick practical joker, aliens, whatever--must let me go!

I’ve got to get some help. I go to the phone, but lifting the receiver takes both hands. I listen, but there’s no dial tone. A woman’s voice chatters at me in some language that sounds freshly concocted. Her voice stops abruptly, then is followed by a series of violent arrhythmic clicks as if the receiver on the other end is tumbling down cement steps. After the clicks, a high-pitched whine of feedback screeches into my ear. The weight of the receiver combined with the hopeless sound of the feedback defeats my flagging resolve. With trembling, struggling hands I return the phone to its cradle.

I feel a growing weariness. Sadness, onerous and oppressive, blooms like a black rose from the soil of my heart. With no help, and no way out, I’m snared. Isolated. A prisoner in my own house.

I go to the bathroom to splash some water on my face, but the spigots do not turn. It’s as if they’re welded into place. With a frustrated but unsurprised sigh, I stand and look into the mirror.

Nothing is reflected. Like black ice on a frozen road, the mirror seems to shine with darkness. My reflection, and the reflection of the room behind me, are nowhere in the chrome frame of the mirror. As I watch, the glossy onyx shine of the mirror fades. The blackness in the mirror becomes flat, then viscous and swirling. Its inky opacity sucks the surrounding light.

I back into the bedroom, not taking my eyes from the roiling black unmirror. As I move through the doorway, the bathroom itself wavers as though seen through a heat haze. The orange bedroom wall spreads across the doorway, and wobbles into place.

The bathroom ceases to exist. All traces of it just vanish.

I gasp and rush forward, but the wall is completely solid. The bathroom is gone.

A new idea strikes me like a paranoid insult. What if the belongings and the house itself were not taken and replaced? What if I am the replacement?

I return to one side of the cramped bed and weep, feeling no tears on my cheeks, sobbing inaudible cries into the thick, stagnant, yellow sunlight.

After some immeasurable time, I hear rattling sounds, followed by the staccato click of high heels on hardwood floor. What? Was my door somehow returned and reinstalled? Silently?

Allison enters the room. My ex-wife, the one who said she left because I’d grown so distant. She’s still the most beautiful woman in the world. Her face falls as she comes in, crumpling into sadness. She looks through sudden tears at the bed beside me. She shrieks, putting a hand involuntarily to her mouth.

I’m over here, I yell, but I make no sound. The bedside table vanishes, and the walls fade from orange to an odd, ashy gray. I roll over to see what Allison is screeching at, and it all becomes clear.

Spooned up behind me on the bed is a waxy-skinned, withered body. Cool gray flesh hangs from the bones of the face, and the gummy eyes are slightly open under drooping eyelids. I am cuddled up with a dead body.

And the body is mine.