The Other

Katharina did not recall their neighbor’s door to be this close to theirs, nor so similar, but she was too spent to give it much thought. She looked over the two seemingly twin doors for a moment, then opened the one on the right with her key.

The living room beyond seemed to look exactly like how she had left it, but Katharina had a strange feeling that something was off. She could not put her finger on it, but something was different somehow.

She went over the room thoroughly, letting her eyes land on each piece of furniture, clutter and decoration more slowly and with more purpose than usual.

Her favorite bulky sofa was in its usual place at the farthest corner of the opposite wall, slanted to face the room at the same angle as always. Its weathered leather was cracked in about the same areas that Katharina remembered. She could feel the phantom scratching of the peeling armrest against the skin just above her right elbow, on which she usually leaned when she sat there.

On the tall round cedar end table beside it stood the same yellow lamp and the same stack of books and even the same plastic cup that held yesterday’s overpriced coffee. It was still a quarter full and its distinctive green straw showed signs of having been battered by Katharina’s teeth at the tip.

Katharina’s eyes then went to the wall above the sofa and the table, a huge expanse of creamy white that was mostly covered by a gallery of framed photos from various stages of her life with Michael.

There was a massive one of their wedding, a few from their honeymoon road trip, a spatter of important family occasions from his side and hers, and finally at the bottom-right, just beside the frame of the archway leading to the kitchen, was the oldest of the bunch: a photo from the house party where she and Michael had met, sneakily snapped by their common friends who had been thrilled to see them hitting it off.

It was a terrible picture. They weren’t looking at the camera and the angle was bad. But Katharina and Michael liked it up on the wall just the same

Katharina’s gaze had almost slid off the photo when something caught her eye. Squinting, she made her way across the room, going around a pile of Michael’s shoes haphazardly scattered on the floor near the entryway. Her fingers ghosted along the glass of the photo frame.

There, she thought, was the oddity. It was a very small detail, so small it was no wonder she had had difficulty finding what exactly it was that felt different, but now that she had her eyes on it, she was sure.

The walls of the room in the photo were a muted red. But this was wrong. This was not how she remembered the night she had met Michael.

It had been at Sarah’s house, on her 22nd birthday, and this particular photo had been taken in the rec room upstairs, which was entirely covered by a moss green wallpaper. She and Michael had bonded over their nostalgia of 90’s cartoons. She had sat on the arm of the wide couch facing the room’s only TV and Michael had stood beside her as they chatted.

Their friends had taken the photo from behind, so only the back of his head and a side quarter view of hers could be seen, but their poses were accurate to her memory. The color of the walls, however, was a different matter.

Coldness swept over Katharina’s body and her skin prickled as her fine hairs stood on end.

How could an old photo just become wrong one day?

Could it be that her memories were jumbled somehow?

Vaguely, she thought back to the way the neighbor’s front door had seemed almost a mirror to theirs.

Now that she put some effort into thinking about it, she knew for certain that neither how it had looked, nor its proximity to their own front door, aligned with what she could remember from two years’ worth of walking past it on her way home.

She must be confused, Katharina thought.

Perhaps it was the stress, the lack of sleep. She, after all, hadn’t had a moment’s rest since yesterday’s frantic rush to St. Joseph’s.

Katharina had been lounging on the sofa yesterday afternoon, reading and sipping her expensive coffee, ignoring the slight scratching that the cracked leather made against her skin, when her phone began vibrating so forcefully it almost shot off the surface of the end table beside her. The screen had read ‘Michael’, and she had fully expected it to be him simply telling her he was on his way home.

He had a tendency to be clingy like that, or maybe the word was ‘thoughtful’. Either way, Katharina hadn’t even thought to drop her book or her coffee and simply squeezed the phone between her shoulder and her ear.

“Hello,” she said, but she was only half there. The rest of her remained in the page of her book, which she now flipped to the next.

“Hello,” she heard back from the phone, but the voice was not Michael’s. This caught her attention and her hand froze on the page she was thumbing.

The voice proceeded to talk, and Katharina’s movements became both very frenzied and very slow at the same time, the latter mostly because she was shaking uncontrollably. She closed her book and piled it on top of the others on the table, then set down her unfinished coffee beside it. 

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she breathed hoarsely into the phone still squeezed against her shoulder. “I’m going there now,” she emphasized. “So please, please tell Michael to hold on.”

After that, everything was a mad rush as she fled to their bedroom to get her purse, then to the door, her hands clammy and unstable as she locked it behind her, and then to the street to flag down a taxi. She couldn’t be trusted to drive in her state, and in any case, there was nothing to drive.

Michael had taken the car, and now, as she had just been told by the police officer who had called her from Michael’s phone, that car was lying overturned off the side of a road somewhere, its hood and windshield shattered, the driver’s seat covered with the blood Michael had left behind after he was extracted by rescuers and taken to St. Joseph’s.

The car had suffered from what seemed to have been an almost head-on collision. The impact had sent Michael’s car, with Michael in it, flying backward until the roadside barrier broke its momentum. It seemed to have been a hit-and-run.

When this was first relayed to her, Katharina did not have the time or the capacity to care about the details of the accident. All she had in her mind was to get to Michael’s side at the hospital as soon as she could. All of her was condensed into that one goal. Nothing else existed, and nothing else would ever exist again until she was able to hold his hand and hear him say, in his clingy, thoughtful manner, that he was about to come home.

In retrospect, Katharina thought it was strange that whatever Michael had hit, or whatever had hit him, was able to escape the collision so unscathed that no trace of it could be found. But she brushed it off. It was for the police to figure out. All that mattered was that Michael had survived.

He was stable now. He was still unconscious, but stable, and Katharina had been urged by concerned family members to go home and get some rest before she too collapsed. She had been hesitant to leave the hospital, but now, staring at the oddity that used to be a fond reminder of the first time she had met the love of her life, she was starting to think that yes, maybe they were right. She had been through an incredible amount of stress, and she was in dire need of rest.

“I must be losing my mind.”

It was Katharina’s exact train of thought and it was said in her voice, but it was not her mouth that spoke. A chill rolled over her body again, her fine hair going so thoroughly stiff her pores stung.

She turned around, and there, across the room by the front door, where she had been only moments ago, was another Katharina, just as wide-eyed and pale with fear as she knew she was.

“It must be the stress,” the other Katharina said out loud, her eyes not breaking contact with hers. “My mind can’t take it. I’m going crazy,” she murmured.

Slowly, as though it was all she could manage, she dropped to the floor and sat among Michael’s scattered shoes, hugging her knees. “I’m going crazy because Michael is gone,” the other Katharina whispered, almost choking on her own words.

It was barely louder than a breath, but Katharina heard her.

She had thought she could go no colder, but she had been wrong. In her peripheries she could almost see ice creeping along the walls and the floor, little tendrils snaking around her ankles and up her legs, freezing her blood where they touched. When she spoke, she thought she could see her breath.

“What do you mean Michael is gone?” She asked the other Katharina unsteadily. “He was stable when I left the hospital,” she blabbered on.

It was an impossible scene; there couldn’t be two of her. Katharina was aware of this, but at the same time, it did not matter who or what this doppelganger was. All Katharina knew was that she had to convince her that Michael was alive.

“The doctors said he was safe,” Katharina explained, sounding more desperate and defensive than she intended. “They said he was going to make it!”

The other Katharina said nothing. She only continued to sob into the arms that hugged her knees as she sat pitifully on the floor.

The ice enveloped Katharina now. Her breath was coming out shallow and in small misty clouds. The other Katharina continued to wail, louder and louder and louder. Katharina could not think. It was all too much. Her head pounded. She felt like she was about to explode.

“NO!”

Katharina screamed, so loudly it shattered the ice her mind had conjured and spooked the other Katharina enough to make her stop crying. They stared at each other for a second that stretched for a long, long time.

Then Katharina strode to the front door, stepping around her doppelganger. “Michael is not dead,” she claimed resolutely. “I’m going to St. Joseph’s now and I’m going to prove it.”

Her hand was twisting the lock open when the other Katharina spoke up.

“St. Joseph’s?” She asked, confusion breaking through her grief. “Where is that? They took Michael to St. John’s. There isn’t a hospital in this town called St. Joseph’s.”

Katharina didn’t turn around. Her mind was reeling, putting the pieces together. It was an impossible scene. It had been a series of impossible scenes: the twin door that shouldn’t have been there, the wrong color of the walls in the picture, the other Katharina, Michael dead, a non-existent hospital.

It was all impossible, unless… maybe…

“Hey,” the other Katharina spoke softly. By the tone of her voice, it seemed that she was coming to the same conclusion as her.

A soft rustle of clothes and a shuffle of the scattered shoes on the floor informed Katharina that her doppelganger was getting up and coming closer.

“Hey,” the other Katharina said again. It sounded as though she was just behind Katharina now, but still, Katharina didn’t turn around to face her. She couldn’t. She was, for the first time that afternoon, so thoroughly frozen it felt as though even her heart had stopped beating.

“Am I really losing my mind?” The other Katharina sounded as scared as she felt. “Have I gone crazy?” She asked, “Or are you not even me?”

She laid her hand on Katharina’s shoulder.

A shockwave erupted from the point where their bodies touched. Katharina found herself propelled forward, her face violently slamming against the front door. She screamed, and the other Katharina screamed, and for a short eternity, they were screaming together with what seemed like so many other similar voices in a chorus of wild, primal fear.

Then it was over, and Katharina was screaming alone, her eyes shut tight, her body pressed against the front door, her fingers clutching its wooden face with the desperation of a cornered animal.

Panting and sobbing, Katharina slowly peeled herself away from the door. Her cheek stung where it had hit the wood. Her knees were weak and her heart, no longer frozen, was beating so hard against her ribs it hurt.

But she was fine. And she was alone.

She cautiously surveyed the room behind her. There was no trace of there having been another Katharina mere moments ago, and when she stole an almost fearful glance over at the photo of her and Michael’s first meeting, the walls were green again.

--

A week later, Katharina escorted Michael home. He was in a wheelchair and his neck was in a brace, but thankfully it was going to be temporary. His body would heal, the doctors had reassured, and so would his mind. They just had to give it time.

There were blank patches in Michael’s memories, and he seemed perpetually confused about little details. Even with the accident itself, Michael had only very vague memories.

He recalled he was driving home when the road forked unexpectedly into twin paths, then out of nowhere, so suddenly he was barely able to swerve, there appeared another car in front of him and they crashed.

The police were yet to find this other car, and Michael’s account helped very little as he only recalled it to have seemed exceedingly similar to his. “It was like a mirror,” he had described. “It was like I crashed into a reflection.”

It was shock, the doctors had explained. Michael was still in shock. He would be fine. Katharina held on to those words with all the strength she could muster.

It was shock. That was it. He would get better.

“Welcome home,” she greeted Michael as she pushed his wheelchair into the front door of their apartment.

She tried her best to keep her mind from even going there, but she could not help feeling relieved that there was only one door to their apartment this time. The neighbor’s door was the correct distance away and looked markedly different from theirs.

Inside the living room, a quick glance to the gallery of photos reassured Katharina that her and Michael’s oldest photo together depicted the moss green walls of Sarah’s rec room that she remembered.

She heard Michael wheel himself further into the apartment, past his scattered shoes, as she worked on the lock and safety chain of their door.

When she turned back to him, he was in the middle of the living room, his wheelchair facing the opposite wall, and though his head was stiff in its brace, it was not difficult for Katharina to figure out what he was looking at.

Dread fell on her like a bucket of water, and the ice that had crept along the walls that day a week ago when she had seen the other Katharina came back and turned the room colder than a morgue.

“Kat,” Michael whispered from his wheelchair, his eyes fixed on the photo of the time they first met. “There’s something wrong with this picture.”

Katharina’s breath came out in wisps of white. Michael slowly turned his wheelchair around to face her. He had that look of confusion again, his staple expression since the accident.

“Hadn’t we met in a room with red walls?”