The Devil in Me

The Devil in Me

By Ashton Macaulay

     Woke up this morning to sirens all around the block. Their incessant wails tore my calm in two. Even as they came to a tumultuous roar right outside my window, I hadn’t begun to think about their meaning. An elderly woman lived a flat below me; she had probably just had a heart attack or something. In fact I was so sure that it was nothing out of the ordinary that I continued to sip my tea unabated until the moment armed men came crashing through my front door.  

     The frame cracked, splintered, and jettisoned into the room with great force. I sat in an ordinary wooden chair at the end of an ordinary wooden table, trails of steam mixing with the situation that had become anything but ordinary. Men shouted and pointed rifles at my head in a ferocious display of power. “Put your hands up!” Blearily I complied, but my mind hadn’t woken enough to fully comprehend what was happening. The sudden, unwarranted nature of their visit had me on edge, but not as much as I should have been.

     Not to say I wasn’t scared. Of course I was scared. Five men had blown through my door to the wail of sirens with badges and weapons held high. The event was shocking, but the law always had purpose. I’m a white male in the private sector; I’ve never had much to fear from the police. Even when they set up curfews they never bothered me, and yet there they were, muddying up my kitchen, and pointing guns at my head.

     I put my hands in the air, slowly. The largest of them barreled over to me and grabbed my wrist. His face had no malice on it, only a thick moustache and a pair of dark eyes. Lines creased the edges of them in nervous anticipation, but he didn’t seem dangerous (aside from the weapon of course). He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver tube with a point on the end of it and a screen on the side. Before I had a chance to react he jabbed it into my neck.

     The pain was nothing too great, just a pinch, but his face hurt me more. “Analysis is giving us a match. You’re under arrest for the murder of Harrison G. Keller.”

     “That’s impossible!” I shouted, panicked, and surprisingly bold for a man who had never had a gun pointed in his face before.

     “You have the right to remain silent…” As he repeated the long, tired rights, he cuffed my hands behind my back. At least they had the decency to read them to me. Most people wouldn’t have even bothered.

     “You don’t understand! There’s been some kind of mistake!” The man said nothing and raised me to a standing position.

“No mistake sir. Please cooperate.” A woman with a visor covering most of her face stepped up and went through my pockets.

“I’m Harrison Keller! Look, check my wallet! My ID is right there!”

     “Sir, please be quiet, we need to take you down to the station now.”

###########

     And that’s how I found myself in this tiny room; one lamp, one chair, a table, and a thousand questions. The thought of it hurts to think about. I’m fairly certain that I’m alive. I brush my chafed wrists against the cuffs to double check. Pain shoots up my arm in a strangely reassuring manner. The man with the moustache walks through the door holding a manila file.  

     “I didn’t kill Harrison Keller!” I scream. “It’s impossible!”

     “Unfortunately that’s not the case.” My mind continues to spin and I teeter on the edge of despair. Everything I have given them has been shrugged off.

“What do I need to do to prove this to you?! You have all of my identification, my passport, my records; you even have a family photo for Christ’s sake!”

     “You’ve given me documentation of Harrison Keller.”

     “I am Harrison Keller.” His eyes pierce straight through me, looking for any sign of weakness. There is nothing there for him to find. From the moment cold steel touched my wrists I have done nothing but honest cooperation. “Why would I even want to pretend to be me?! There’s not much glory in that is there? Unemployed university professor, laughed out of the establishment, research incinerated, there’s nothing there! If I was going to steal an identity, don’t you think I’d pick someone more appealing?!”

     “Clearly it wasn’t much of a choice. Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother, but you have the right to know. Not all of your research was incinerated.” I haven’t thought about work in so long. Every time it crops up I find another bottle to drown it in. I can remember the day clearly, when the funding dried up, when my work was called dangerous, and when I was brought before a jury of my academic peers. They were all so quick to turn on me. The mob forming out of people I had once called friends was astounding. I could do nothing but hide from it.

     “Harrison Keller was found dead in an old rail yard three weeks back now. He was clutching blueprints. Any idea what those would have been for?”

A rush of memories like a tidal wave:  The rail yard is cold and damp. Rain falls at a steady pace. I’m looking into a mirror, questioning it all, wondering where I’ve gone wrong. Everything I have worked for has become a joke, never again to see the light of day. I raise a gun that I don’t remember carrying and blast the mirror into oblivion. On my face I wear a veil of serenity, as if somehow it has finally come to an end.

I drop the gun in the mud and walk back to the car. Train cars watch me like ghosts, dark, and long abandoned. Wind causes their rusted joints to creak in a sad symphony, playing me away from my darkness. It all feels very real, but there are no blueprints as the man said, and no murder. I walked away from that rail yard. I’m sitting right here. “Look, in order for there to be a murder, doesn’t the victim have to be dead? Am I not sitting right here?!”

“In a way you are, and in another you’re not. Baby steps, this might take a moment to sink in. Do you remember the train yard?” His demeanor is surprisingly calm for a man telling someone that they are no longer among the living.

“Yes.” I’m beginning to wonder if I have come before that final tribunal.

“You killed Harrison there.” And there it is again.

“I did no such thing.”

“Right, little slower then. What is your earliest memory?”

“I hardly see how that’s relevant.”

“Just play along, for my sake.”

“Fine.” I wrack my brain for the earliest times I can think of. My childhood, somewhere in a house with a white picket fence. It’s all coming together when I realize, I can’t remember any of it. I can’t remember my childhood home, my friends, my school; it’s all a complicated, blur. I can see my parents, but they’re nothing more than old photographs up on a shelf, the emotions and images are there, but not the memory. He sees me struggling with it and his satisfaction drives me to try harder. Teenage years? Nothing. First Prom? I can see it as a picture, but nothing more.

“I would hazard a guess that you’re only able to go back a few months. Maybe two at the most.” Again I try, but he’s right. I remember working in the lab at the university, on something terribly important, but even that slips into a mental fog. The old, brick walls of the building I used to work in are the clearest I can get, and then it jumps straight back to the rail yard.

“How did you know that?” He removes a beaten up lab manual from the folder in front of him. He slides it across the table and I open it. Nestled among the diagrams of wires and circuitry is something I’ve never seen before. “Who wrote these?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“He did.” I continue to read until the very last page. There is an attached image, an image of me, of Dr. Keller, only it’s mislabeled. The bottom has a note scrawled. There is no name, only a number. They have kicked me out of the university, and rather than losing it I have moved ahead. When first turned on its cognition was fuzzy at best, but I find with each minute he becomes more and more like me. The outside may be identical, but even the cognitions are beginning to follow my own structure. For all intents and purposes, he is me…