Two for the Show by Jonathan Stone

. . .”
    But she is already down the porch steps.
    “You’ll know it soon enough,” she calls back behind her.
    I know it already.
    My doppelganger.
    I lie in bed, unable to sleep, staring up at the ceiling, obsessively thinking of him lying a few feet from me, in the next room. My doppelganger. Cut off, isolated, unknown by the world, a world unaware, unseeing. I can’t hide it from myself. It was like seeing myself, a truer, stripped-down, abandoned version of myself, lying there in the tub. A metaphor of my aloneness. Should I have left him there? For one part of me, the appropriate action was to leave him, to not touch anything, to have no one know I was there. The other part of me, though, couldn’t leave him, had no choice but to take him. It was like rescuing myself. But rescuing myself entails action, and action creates visibility, and visibility creates consequences. It produces evidence, it leaves a trail, it risks traceability. I lie there thinking about that precipice—that fine edge between action and inaction, that line between subject and object, between observer and observed—that I have traversed today. That fine edge that can cut you, slice you deep.
    To find someone chained to a tub in a motel. It is shocking, and yet it is Vegas. It is the expected perverseness of Vegas, and the half-expected perverseness of a desert motel. It is a tableau of utter foreignness, yet has the shock of recognition, as if a vision toward which my whole life has been leading. The naked, withered form chained in the bathtub. Unknown, alone. Mine to pass by—to close the door quietly, to leave to whatever crime is underway. Or mine to save.
    So much sympathy for my withered doppelganger. Is my own soul that withered, that isolated? My own tetherless, transient motel soul?
    There in the dark, my mind churns: the vision of Debbie turning away, looking across the desert at the familiar emptiness—literal and metaphoric—ahead of her once again. The same desert that I look across now, from my bedroom window, the same vision of emptiness. That’s the thing about Vegas—once you’re beyond the lights and noise and panoply of merry distractions—there’s the communion of the desert. The measureless sameness of scrub and sand that you all look out on, equally. Lying there, I watch her walk out into that desert again, over and over.
    Vegas is so simple—Manichaean, elemental. Blinding bright light, surrounded by unforgiving blackness. Noise and sound, surrounded by high silence.
    After a few days, Dave gains a little weight. Dave puts on a little muscle. Dave’s hair begins to grow back in. I am nursing him back to health.
    “What do you want to do? What do you want to do with your freedom? Go after them, or start over? Those, it seems, are the only two choices, and I’ll support you either way.”
    He looks at me. “I have a third choice,” he says.
    “What’s that?”
    “To stay here.” He smiles.
    “That’s not a choice,” I say.
    He nods. He knows.
    Of course, my work goes on during all this. I must work without Dave—shriveled, slowly recovering Dave—knowing what I’m doing. Though I’m tempted to share the secret of it with him—that’s how special his status is. My computers are in my office, their contents accessible only by passwords and codes, so I have no worry about Dave looking around.
    The first night, as Dave lay stretched out on the couch in front of the television, drifting in and out of sleep, I took a small risk. I flipped through the channels, and stopped, as if by chance, on Wallace’s show. I had to watch anyway, professionally, especially now, and I could do so in another room of the condo, but it was easier to keep an eye on Dave if I could watch him and the show at the same time.
    I watched Dave drifting in and out, glassy-eyed, trying to focus on the screen.
    But he was more attentive and alert than I thought.
    “He is amazing,” Dave whispered at one point. Apparently taken