Perfect Strangers

“Have we met before?”

The stranger looked deep into Frederick’s eyes as if willing him to admit they knew each other.

“No,” Frederick said, trying to move away.

It was cold, the snow had started to sleet down and in his war-torn town there was little to keep a person outside except necessity.

“Have we met before?” The man grabbed at his arm and would not allow him to leave.

Frederick glanced at the dirt blackened fingers gripping onto his coat sleeve and grimaced with distaste.

“No,” he repeated more firmly, though without the heart to get angry with the man.

The way the stranger’s eyes rolled in his head and seemed to fail to focus on anything was becoming all too familiar in the last year or so. People shaken out of their wits by the bombing, the shooting, the sudden death. Loss took everyone differently and this man looked as though he had lost far more than his mind.

“Have we met before?” The man insisted, it was no longer a question, but a plea and he clamped both hands onto Frederick’s arm.

Something happened then, it was as if an electric charge coursed between them, not painful, not even unpleasant, but a connection that made Frederick frown and look closer at the man.

He was so caked in grey dust and dried blood that it was hard to make out his features, but two lines had been carved into the grimy face by rivulets of tears running down his cheeks. Though long since dried up, they revealed that beneath the ghostly mask there was an older man with lightly tanned skin.

“Have we met before?”

The words were like a mantra to him, murmured through the thick beard that clumped on his chin, patches of it missing where barely healed burns could be seen.

“Have we met before?” His voice dropped to a whisper, and it seemed as though his strength was about to give out.

Frederick could not fathom why he was still stood there talking to yet another victim of the chaos his world had tumbled into. Homeless, traumatised people were an everyday sight to him; he must have walked past a half dozen such individuals before this man had somehow latched on to him.

Yet he still could not pull himself away.

Suddenly, and completely out of character for a man who usually preferred to keep a healthy distance from anything resembling charity or kindness, Frederick found himself taking the man’s arm back and inviting him to his own apartment.

Not knowing what had sparked this random action, Frederick found it best not to contemplate it too hard as he led the man away down the street, feeling his weight falling more and more upon him until he was almost carrying him.

The old man proved lighter than Frederick would have supposed. He could have been made of air, so insubstantial was he. At times, for a brief moment, Frederick would feel as if the man had vanished from his side entirely and would look over to confirm he was still there, still clinging to him.

The stranger said nothing, not even repeating his question, content, perhaps, that someone had at last listened to him and taken pity on his suffering.

In Frederick’s freezing apartment, the man finally detached himself from his saviour’s arm and was persuaded to sit at the small Formica table in the kitchen, with its overly cheery orange blossom design. Frederick went about the ritual of lighting the stove which would begin the epic task of taking the edge off the chill in the room.

Once, Frederick would have heated this apartment to the point he could walk around in shorts and a t-shirt in the winter, but that was now a nostalgic memory, so distant it almost seemed like a dream.

Frederick made a mug of coffee for his guest and then himself, brewing it on the stove in a pan. He had no milk, he never used it, but he did have a bowl of sugar he placed to one side of the stranger’s mug.

He watched him from the corner of the kitchen, trying to fathom what had come over him. What had made Frederick inexplicably ignore his usual selfish inclinations and pull this man into his life?

The stranger picked up his mug left-handed, just as Frederick did. A silly, chance thing to notice, but oddly it pleased Frederick to realise they had something so mundane in common. The man took the mug to his lips, blew on the hot coffee, and took a sip before choking.

“You ok?”

The stranger looked at Frederick with those dazed, empty eyes.

Haunted.

That was the word for that expression.

“Have we met before?”

Frederick pulled a face, remembering he had brought a madman into his private sanctum. What an idiot he truly was! What ridiculous urge had caused him to invite this battered stranger into his home?

Maybe the fellow would murder him? Put those big, filthy hands around his throat and throttle the life out of him, and he would deserve it for being so stupid. No good deed goes unpunished, as his father had liked to say.

The stranger took the mug to his lips again, carefully balancing the fingers of his opposite hand around the rim as if stabilising it.

Frederick went to take a sip from his mug and saw, with a flash of surprised recognition, that he was doing the exact same thing. Two strangers who handled a mug in the same exact fashion, what were the odds?

The stranger drank more coffee and started to choke again. Maybe his throat was damaged from breathing in smoke, he might even have suffered internal burns similar to those on his chin if he had had the misfortunate of breathing in scorching hot air. There were plenty of ways people could be damaged these days, most of them unexpected and catastrophic.

Coughing harder, the stranger lifted up his hand to his mouth, balling the fingers into a fist and revealing a glimmer of his wrist and forearm. Frederick looked on in astonishment as he saw the fading tattoo on the man’s arm. Relatively unmarred by dirt, the tattoo was that of three swallows taking flight, to symbolise the journey to renewal and new life.

The exact same tattoo Frederick had on his own left arm, in the exact same place.

An odd chill now crept through his body. How could this stranger be so identical to him? It was not possible.

Frederick started to feel as if he was walking in a dream, one that was fast turning into a nightmare. He hastened to ground himself. It was all just coincidences.

Coincidences happened all the time.

So the man was left-handed and drank his coffee in the same manner as Frederick? No doubt there were thousands of people who did the same. The tattoo was odd, but it had been a standard one in the shop Frederick had used for his, and probably the tattooist did a dozen a day. Why should it be so ridiculous to meet a man with the same tattoo?

Frederick tried to calm his suddenly fast beating heart. He was examining the stranger with fresh eyes and each glance he took of him bought a fresh pang of surreal anxiety running over him.

The man’s hair colour was close to his. Admittedly, it was caked in all manner of filth, and burned in places, but it was the same colour where he could just make out some cleaner patches at the roots. His eyes were the same light brown too. But none of that meant anything. People shared the same features all the time, and in this particular town light brown hair and brown eyes were far from uncommon.

Frederick ordered himself to calm down, to stop this nonsense, but the part of himself that listened to reason seem to have abandoned him. Now he was looking into the stranger’s face, trying to see past the grime to the skin beneath. It was hard, but at the corner of one eye, where the tears had welled and fallen to wipe away the smeared mask of dirt, he could just make out a faint puckering of the skin.

It was a curious indentation that seemed to have no rhyme or reason, but which Frederick recognised because he looked at that same curious marking in the mirror every morning.

That was the scar he had received when he had stumbled as a child into the corner of an electric fire. The cut had come close enough to depriving him of an eye and had left him with the permanent reminder of how dangerous clumsiness could be.

And this man had the same scar.

Frederick felt a shudder of revulsion creeping over him. He might have to throw up. But first he had to get the stranger out of his apartment and out of his life. Whoever this creature was, this doppelganger or ghost, he had to be removed from Frederick’s presence for normality to be restored.

Gulping down on the bile surging up his throat, Frederick stepped forward and grabbed the man’s arm.

“You need to leave!”

“Have we met before?”

The strange spark of electricity he had first felt when the stranger touched him now flashed over Frederick again, but whatever this bizarre connection was he did not intend to allow it to anchor him to this madness. The man had to leave.

“We have never met before!” Frederick snapped at the man, and it was if a spell was broken.

The dazed eyes grew more focused, the shocked stare became more intense, and the stranger pulled himself away from Frederick. He looked at him now with eyes that saw everything and the madness that had seemed to be lingering over him evaporated.

“You are wrong, but that does not matter,” the stranger said quietly. “We shall never meet again, Frederick.”

With that the stranger left the apartment, knowing how to reach the front door and find the route down the staircase without needing to ask. Frederick had frozen in place, the words ringing in his ears as the front door clicked closed and he was left alone.

“He knew my name.”

Frederick managed to sit down in a chair before he fell down, all the strength had gone from his legs. Whoever the stranger was, he had known Frederick. His plea to know if they had met before now made an eerie sense.

Frederick only hesitated a moment before he rushed for the front door, hoping to catch up with the stranger and to ask in his own turn the question that had plagued him for the last hour.

“Have we met before?”

He rushed downstairs and exited the building. There was little sign of life outside and with the dusk drawing on most people would be heading for their homes, hoping to survive another night without being bombed to pieces in their sleep.

Frederick never went out on the streets at night these days, but he was out there now. He hurried down the road, his feet echoing on the concrete. The stranger could not have gone far, yet there was no sign of him.

He retraced his steps back to where they had first met, beside the old, abandoned shoe factory that was home now to nothing more than packs of feral rats. He stood in the middle of the road and looked all around him, trying to catch sight of the man who was his double and whose presence seemed to auger some terrible doom for the original.

Just as it seemed he must have imagined the stranger and their bizarre conversation, he saw a shadow moving into deeper shadows near where the mesh fencing of the factory had been ripped open. Frederick did not hesitate, but rushed over, following the figure who now moved inside the abandoned factory with a confidence that might have suggested he owned the place.

“Wait! Wait!”

Frederick found himself inside; conveyor belts hung limply around him, steel machines stood like silent sentinels and the distant scamper and squeal of rats filled the room with an unearthly aura.

“Wait!”

The stranger was stood by one of the old machines, leaning back against it as if he had anticipated the arrival of Frederick and had been wating for him.

“Who… who are you?”

The stranger blinked in the growing dark.

“You should go home Frederick.”

“You are me, aren’t you?” Frederick said, the words spilling from his mouth in a rush.

He felt both elated by this miracle as well as sickened by the possibility.

Was he going to turn into this madman with scorched beard and skin plastered with dirt?

“You should go home,” the stranger repeated.

“How is this possible?” Frederick demanded. “A time slip? A forgotten twin I never knew about? A clone?”

“Or is this some form of madness you are descending into because you have shut yourself away from the world in order to survive?” The stranger countered. “I wondered all those things myself.”

“And? What is the answer?”

The stranger shook his head.

“I don’t know.”

Frederick felt his enthusiasm dim and turn into anger.

“You don’t know? You walk into my life, show me that there are two identical versions of me, except one appears older, and then tell me you do not know how that could be?”

“I am as confused by the matter as the day I first bumped into myself when I was your age.”

Frederick felt faint and his legs gave out beneath him. He slumped to the floor almost in a heap and curled his arms around his knees.

“This has all happened before, of course it has. You… we… have already met ourselves once before,” he trembled. “But when did it begin?”

The stranger shook his head.

“Maybe there was a first Frederick or maybe there was always this loop, I only know how it will end.”

“What? End? How can it end? You are older than me, that must mean I have many years ahead of me too.”

“Does it?” The stranger looked at him with a pitiful expression. “Please, Frederick, leave and go back to your apartment.”

“Not until I have answers! If you cannot provide them, then we shall just have to work this out together somehow!”

“Maybe there are no answers. Maybe miracles cannot be explained.”

“This is no miracle!” Frederick snapped. “A miracle is something that cures people or helps them. Your appearance merely confuses me.”

“Frederick, you must go home now. Time is running out.”

“You can’t just tell me what to do! Not so long ago you were a stranger stood in the street, lost, and not knowing who you were. You were the one who sought me out!”

“That was a mistake. I was confused because of the bomb.”

“The bomb?” Frederick shook his head. “What bomb? We haven’t suffered an air strike in three weeks.”

“The bomb that is coming tonight,” the stranger murmured.

“What are you saying? You were confused by the bombing that had not yet occurred?” Frederick clasped his head in his hands.

“I was wrong. I am going mad. I must be talking to myself, hallucinating things.”

“You are not hallucinating, and you must go home tonight, or all of this will be over forever,” the stranger hurried to Frederick and hauled him to his feet. “Go now, I beg you!”

Frederick shook him off and stepped away from him.

“Maybe it’s the cold catching up with me. Can the cold make your brain stop working?”

The stranger looked at him with an expression of pity and despair.

“Please…”

“No, don’t say it! You want me to go home, I get it!” Frederick snapped.

The stranger simply shook his head.

“It is too late. All too late.”

“What are you…”

Frederick heard the thin high-pitched whistle. It cut through his anger and sliced to his heart. He had time to glance at the doorway of the factory and think about moving before the bomb landed atop the building and exploded.

Fire raged. Concrete and metal fell. The conveyor belts snapped, and the room became an inferno.

Pulling himself solemnly out of the wreckage of one of the machines that had fallen and saved him from being crushed, the stranger patted out fires from his beard. He dragged himself across the rubble to the limp body of Frederick lying on the floor, the air sucked from his lungs.

Cradling him as grey dust floated down onto his face, mixing with his own sweat and the blood from a head wound, the stranger began to keen over the corpse.

“I told you… I told you it would end tonight.”

The tears ran down his cheeks, cutting lines through the dust of the explosion that coated him. He hugged Frederick for a few moments, then the fire grew too fierce, and he had to leave before he was consumed by the flames.

Stumbling out onto the street, the stranger found himself losing sense of what had just occurred. The memory of moments before slipped away and he stood on the pavement staring at the people who were rushing over to see what had happened, hoping to stop the fire before it engulfed the street.

As a familiar looking man ran past him, he put out his hand and caught his arm.

“Have we met before?”