Part 1

My nephew is coming to live with me today—he’s been through a rough spot with his mom, but I’m going to try and cheer him up while he’s here, at my house, which is at the center of existence. That sounds like bragging, but it’s really more a matter of fact—and of inconvenience. There’s a door at the end of a landing on the third floor, and yes, it has three floors and a basement but I’m not rich, it’s not rich thing, it’s just a center of existence thing. The door opens on a hallway that has no business being anywhere, much less on the third floor of a converted Catholic church. Back in the early 1920s, it was a church, but when my grandfather bought it, he just started adding floors until he could finally reach the ceiling on his tip-toes.

None of that really matters compared to the door, though, and the hallway behind it. The hallway is lined on either side with even more doors, and it continues onward, possibly forever. I haven’t really tried to count the doors, but I have walked, ran, even ridden a bicycle down that hallway in pursuit of its end. For all intents and purposes, it doesn’t end. There are only two meaningful directions—homewards, leading back into my home and my reality, and forwards into the unending hall and its many, identical doors.

The doors lead places, because they wouldn’t be worth much if they didn’t. The curious bit, though, it that they lead to places that look exactly like my house, if my house were somewhere or somewhen else. Sometimes I see women, my dopplegangers, creeping down the hallway; usually they’ll duck into doors to avoid me. Some stop and say hello—these are the ones who’ve done some research, who’ve Googled endlessly recursive hallways and figured out that my house—our house?—is at the center of existence. They’re nice enough, for the most part. Some have better hair than I do and some are fatter or thinner or an entirely different ethnicity, but almost always recognizably me-ish. The most annoying ones are the ones who have their shit together, the grinning bitches that come out of their doors in pinstriped power suits with attaché cases and a whiff of perfume on their bosoms. They’re the ones who talk down to me, the ones who have a family and a career and they’ve figured out the mysteries of the hallway, mapped its systems and unraveled its schema.

"Oh," they like to say, "you’re the lucky one. The one that lives at that end of the hall." The way they say that, pointing as if it was part of the word itself, makes me want to punch them in the stomach. The others can’t stray very far from their doors—it’s easy to get irrevocably lost and the hallway seems to resist all forms of demarcation. I tried chalk and then permanent markers, but they just faded off the door in about a minute. Even worse, the doors move, sometimes up the hall and sometimes down but always in pairs—two parallel doors sliding across the hallway in perfect synchronicity, gliding behind other, stationary doors. Mine is the only one without a partner, the lonely door at one end of the hall.

So it’s a fixed point.

Sometimes, the me’s with their shit together try to insinuate that the hallway is a graduated scale from least to most perfect. They never mention which end of the hall is the least—they don’t need to, with the way they look at me, brushing some imagined filth from my sweater. I could point out that the hallways goes on for at least eighty minutes at a brisk pace on a ten-speed Schwinn, and so they’re categorically pretty damn indistinguishable from imperfect if you really got down to the nitty-gritty, but I haven’t. I’m saving that one, polishing it up, letting it get sharper and sharper in my head. One day, one of them will do something to me. I know it. And I’ll look up at her and slam that fact down in such an ice-cold tone that she’ll probably explode into tears on the spot, sob into the dark hardwood of the endless hallway and ball and ball and beg for me to take my logic back.

Today, the me’s with their shit together are staying put in their own houses, too busy to wander infinity. One of me walks out of her door, though, but she obviously doesn’t have her shit together—her hair is standing up like she’s been electrified and her face is sagging like she’s holding all her weight just beneath her eyes, and mouth, and chin. She looks up at me and smiles feebly.

"Hey other me," I say to her, "do you have a nephew?"

"No," she says back, "but I do have a niece that’s supposed to be living with me."

"How’s that going?"

"I think she’s hiding here somewhere," the other me says in a voice that sounds almost too exhausted to care and then adds: "but that’s not very helpful."

"I’ll keep an eye out for her," I say. "What does she look like?"

"Do you have a nephew?"

I do.

"Probably like him, with slightly different chromosomes."