“You what?”
“I sneezed.”
“No, I meant what happened that brought you here. If ‘here’ is the right word for it. You didn’t travel any physical distance, right?”
“No. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still standing in the same space, physically. Some dust or pollen made me sneeze and everything flashed and now here I am looking at you. If you is the right word.”
“This can’t be real. You, or rather I… must have had a stroke or something and my brain is cut off from sensory pathways and it’s having a dissociative effect that my brain is interpreting as an out-of-body experience. That’s why I think I’m looking at myself; having a conversation with myself.”
“So, you think I’m a hallucination?” Tommy asked himself.
“Not an out-and-out hallucination. More like an illusion. A trick of some kind caused by some sort of neurological malfunction.”
“If we’ve had a stroke or something, shouldn’t we call an ambulance?”
“Well, apart from the obvious visual hallucination that I’m talking to myself, I seem to be fully capable of movement and sensation. Of course that could all be illusory. We might be lying crumpled on the floor in soiled undergarments, the last of our life ebbing from us slowly.”
“That’s cheerful. I wonder why there’s two of us. Maybe one of us is the right hemisphere of the brain and the other is the left hemisphere and this ‘conversation’ is just the two halves of our brain chatting across the corpus callosum.”
Tommy studied the watery hazel eyes that stared back at him. This Tommy had a few nicks and abrasions on his neck like he used to get before he changed his brand of razor. This Tommy was wearing a blue shirt with the logo for the band Narcolepsy emblazoned on the front. He had bought, and was wearing, the gray one.
“So, you went to the Narcolepsy show?” he asked blue shirt Tommy.
“Yeah, I couldn’t believe the tone the guitarist was getting out of his rig. You should have been there. It was incredible.”
“I was there,” said gray shirt Tommy.
“No way. The club was half-empty and I would have remembered seeing you.”
“Likewise.”
“You’re wearing the same shirt that I almost got. The same freaking shirt!” blue shirt Tommy started shrieking.
“Okay, dude, calm down. For some reason the shirt seems to bother you more than the fact that, to all appearances, we’re the same person.”
“No! Stop!” blue shirt Tommy sobbed. “You. Are. Not. Real.” Each syllable was punctuated by his fist slamming into the armrest of the corduroy-clad thrift-store couch. Clouds of dust rose from the barrage and gray shirt Tommy sneezed. Blue shirt Tommy sprang to his feet and stared at him wildly.
“Who are you? What the hell happened?” he demanded.
“I sneezed.”
Literature in Small Doses 