My doppelgänger smells like wet fur and Old Spice.
Even when we’re sitting in the dry air conditioning of my Jeep Cherokee, the scent — heavy with notes of yeast and nutmeg — is overpowering. It’s Friday morning. We each have a jumbo slurpee sitting fat in our respective cup holders. One is Coca-Cola and one is blue raspberry. Our hairs are tied up in high ponytails, and we’re driving along the Santa Monica Freeway.
* * *
We’ve been hanging out for the past three and a half months, my doppelgänger and I. It’s been unusual, a kind of long-lasting psychedelic experience. When we look one another in the eyes, which we do frequently — frankly, sometimes we just sit and stare at each other — there’s an unexplainable familiarity, like we’ve known each other for eons. We frequent the hardware store together, moseying down the aisles side by side, each with a respective basket slinging from our forearms. People can’t help but stare; some ask if we’re twins. There’s remarkable satisfaction in telling them that we’re doppelgängers: different parents, different immediate ancestry (my doppelgänger is Turkish, I’m Korean).
I had only noticed my doppelgänger because she was sitting out in the pouring rain, her bangs splayed against her forehead like damp leaves.
As storms swept through Los Angeles in February, I had started frequenting a gas station in Culver City. I purchased a box of Twinkies from the 7-11 and parked my car near the curb so I could eat and watch people as they wrestled to hold their umbrellas with one hand and maneuver the gas nozzle with the other. I had started the tradition because I had grown tired of listening to my father rattle on and on about the storms. He had developed an obsession. In the evenings, he sidled up next to me on the couch and scrolled through pictures of a mid-latitude cyclone that was pushing wet air into an atmospheric river. Imagine a traveling river in the sky that will then, swoosh, release itself above us, my father exclaimed, fingers disappearing into his thinning white hair so he could scratch his scalp vigorously.
One evening, when the rain was just a soft drizzle, I drove to the gas station and sat with the air conditioning turned off, feeling my underboob sweat collect. I split a Twinkie in half and used my pinky to scoop out the cream filling. Eat the guts first, always. As the cars filed out, I noticed a woman sitting on the curb just outside the station. She, too, was eating a Twinkie — her pinky in her mouth. I put on my eyeglasses that were hanging from the lanyard around my neck. I observed the woman, how she had the same energetic eyes as I did, cautious, darting wildly at anyone that walked by. Even when she was seated, you could tell that she was short, no more than 5’2”. I was so moved by our resemblance that I stepped out of the car and approached her.
Nour. That’s my doppelgänger’s name. When I told her my name, Aeram, she asked me its origins. I couldn’t tell her, only that my parents had gone to a professional name-giver in Korea, someone that studied the placement of the moon and the stars to see where my fate was situated in the context of the galaxy. I was meant to make explosions in the west, I told her. She pondered, then said it sounds like the brand of a cherry liqueur she had tried in Lithuania that tasted a bit like rot.
It took extensive convincing to get Nour in my car. She said that she doesn’t get into vehicles with strangers.
“The percentage of women getting murdered once they leave their house is 55%,” she said. “The percentage of women getting murdered in their house is also 55%.”
I pointed to her unibrow with the same lack of confidence in growth as mine, the three moles along her left cheek, the square of her jawline.
“We’re identical, you and I,” I said. I was standing under an oversized golf umbrella that I had found in my garage. I moved closer to her so that her raincoat would have a chance to dry. It weighed heavily on her shoulders; even though they were on her shoulders, and not mine, I could feel the mass of water strain my neck and back. Was this what twins felt? An instant transference of burden, a supernatural ability to embody exactly what another feels.
She was hesitant, at first, but I could tell that she, too, couldn’t ignore our likeness. Her dark brown eyes stared, her eyelashes short and cast downwards like mine. It was only when the rain pummeled against the roof of the umbrella, slamming so fiercely that we both flinched — our shoulders jerking upwards in indistinguishable shock — that she finally got into the passenger’s seat.
I gave her one of the Twinkies from my stash in the backseat of my car. She accepted without an expression of gratitude but ate it quickly, consuming it in two hasty bites. I passed her my grape Fanta, which she drank from by positioning the bottle far from her chin and allowing the soda to cascade into her mouth.
She mumbled something about germs, and how they fester.
“Like leeches,” she pronounced.
After washing down the custard, she lay back in the seat, exposing the velvet fabric to irreversible water damage, and looked calm. She turned toward me and leaned closer. She took her time studying me, trying to figure out, as I was, how it is that I am existing before her right now. She pointed to a scar along the side of my right eyebrow.
“I don’t have that.”
I explained to her that I wasn’t born with it. I had nicked the skin on the concrete edge of a pool as I was swimming up from the deep end. I had been reenacting the scene from The Little Mermaid when Ariel emerges from the water onto a rock whilst flipping her hair back. Sensual and serene. I was 24 years old.
“That’s very irresponsible,” Nour said. “You should’ve been more careful.”
Her face had grown sullen, as if the realization that her doppelgänger had been a reckless, stupid young person saddened her profoundly. Or, maybe, seeing her own face scarred permanently troubled her. Regardless, Nour has since divulged to me that, despite appearing sorrowful, she felt an instant closeness to me in that moment. Something pure, like when children who’d just met on the playground hold hands after sharing a bag of gummy bears.
She told me about herself. She lives in West Hollywood with six roommates, one of whom is a Sofía Vergara impersonator, and another of whom is a hateful house cat that sprays on all her clothes. She, herself, is an actress who works as a server at the Chinatown Express on Venice Boulevard. It had been a big decision to move to California, but necessary to secure the role of her dreams. Once you’re 40, she emphasized, pointing to her own deflated breasts, changing anything requires a full rewiring of the brain. She’d moved from Charlotte, North Carolina, where she was living with her cousin, only four months ago. Before that, she’d been living in Turkey with her family, studying to become a mathematician.
I had asked her what it meant to be a mathematician, and she said, dryly, You eat numbers, You drink numbers, You fuck numbers.
Naturally, the questions piled on — she asked if I’m also an actress, to which I chuckled, unreasonably flattered.
“I work in construction,” I said.
Nour looked confused and slightly judgmental. Then her face brightened, “You’re an architect?”
“No. I’m a construction worker. Do you know Sorry Not Sorry on West Pico? The beer garden? I built that. Well, with the men, they were a part of it too. It’s wood in there,” I explained. “Redwood wood.”
It was clear that I had lost Nour in conversation. Her eyes drifted to the tan line from my hard hat that stained the middle of my forehead. I wondered if Nour thought me ugly, even though we are identical. Having worked in construction for 20 years, I’ve found that people think women in this field are repulsive. Like we are ogres that enjoy hauling slats of wood and digging trenches.
Without her asking, I said that I’d been involved in building landmark locations in the area: a number of boutique hotels close to the Santa Monica Pier, and most notably, the Trader Joe’s on 32nd Street. She inquired about whether I get paid well to control the cranes and bulldozers. Instead of answering her question directly, I told her that I had once used an excavator to demolish a four-floor Planet Fitness. I could tell that this impressed her. Her lips curled into a smile with such enthusiasm that she left a smudge of lipstick on her front tooth.
“Your tank is nearly empty. You’re not going to fill?” She pointed to the gas tank indicator, glowing bright orange toward the E. Most evenings, filling the car up was the first thing I did, but at times I’d go days unconcerned about running out of gas, hoping to become stranded. I knew just what I’d do: put on my hi-vis vest so that even the blindest of drivers could see me on the winding road, and hitchhike so I could officially go missing. It’s titillating — the idea of being the only one to know where you are.
I explained to Nour that, sometimes, the purpose of my coming here is grotesquely pathetic — to escape the grating complaints of my mother and the obsessions of my father. I still sleep in my childhood bedroom in the house that I’d been living in my entire life. A stain remains on the ceiling from when I had thrown a chicken wing just to see if it’d stick. When my mother is at work at the meat processing plant, and my father — retired and paranoid — is out digging a trench around the perimeter of the house to keep it from flooding, I lock myself in the guest room, pretending that I came to visit only for a couple hours. I nap restfully, dreaming kaleidoscopic dreams. At night, past 9 p.m., we all sit together for dinner. Across the table, my mother assesses me and tells me I look like a retiree with leathery orange skin, the ones that putter around Florida in broken Havaianas flip flops.
I omitted that I had never tried to move out and my parents, in turn, didn’t bring it up either. It was understood between us that we are a unit to live, die, suffer, and dine together. Now, the prospect of leaving is as impossible as ever. To be an unmarried, nearly 40-year-old woman with hands as callous as a dog’s elbow is the equivalent to suddenly being orphaned without reason. The places that you can go diminish, and the people that adore you — you realize there are so few.
Nour looked out at the rain, pensive, and said, “I know abandonment. My parents don’t speak to me anymore. They don’t understand me.”
Then she yelled loudly, “Hayalim!!!”
Which I later learned translated to, My dream.
That first night, through rain and thunder, I drove her to my house in Gardena. My parents had already been asleep for hours. I drew her a bath and lent her a pair of fuzzy blue shorts and a cotton t-shirt with the NBA logo on the right breast. Like me, Nour’s right breast is noticeably bigger than her left. I sat her down on a stool and stood between her thighs, a dryer in my hand as I combed out her bangs. We slept huddled together like penguins on my bed that night. When she left in the morning, we exchanged numbers, promising to be in touch. Hours later, after Nour had gotten off her shift at Chinatown Express, we met at the Denny’s. We shared the Grand Slam family pack: eight buttermilk pancakes, a perfect number of bacon strips, an unreasonable amount of eggs and hashbrowns. We cleared our plates, and have been inseparable since.
About a week ago, Nour called to tell me that she’d seen something while wandering along Sunset Boulevard, which she often did to get into character. Nour has never been to an audition. She isn’t diverse in her range as an actress. She only wants to play one character, really: a charming sex worker whose life is turned around after meeting a wealthy businessman. She’s been waiting for the revival of this role since moving from Turkey seven years ago. The American Dream, Nour will say, her eyes nearly bulging out of their sockets from the optimism of it all. She’s only ever watched Pretty Woman dubbed in Turkish. She says she prefers it that way. With certain languages, the impact is more visceral. She’s watched it over 200 times. What she wants is to be Julia Roberts, which we’ll never be. Our mouths are too small and sloth-like to ever be able to smile from ear to ear like her. Sometimes, Nour will get snippy with me when I remind her that she’s attached to a narrative so far from her own upbringing in central Istanbul, being shuffled from tutor to tutor, eating top-quality kokoreç.
“That’s the beauty of acting. You are you beyond yourself,” she’ll say nonsensically.
Acting is astral projection, disguised. To exist in another form in a different world; suddenly, an ugly, unloved woman becomes all smiles and teeth. Then she finds herself seduced on a piano.
Nour sounded excited over the phone. She texted me a picture of an ad taped to a traffic light pole:
AUDITION, FRIDAY, 5/26, 2:30 PM, MARIONETTE THEATER on Wilshire Boulevard.
Premise: a sex worker is paid to accompany a software engineer to techcrunch. an attraction develops between the two, and the software engineer is unable to let the charming sex worker go.
email matthoover03@matthoover.me for details.
It bothered me more that the premise was written in full lowercase than the fact that the call for auditions had been taped to a traffic pole. The premise, I told Nour, was taken directly from the synopsis of Pretty Woman written on IMDb.
She chuckled at the plagiarism. Then her voice quivered with emotion. “My time is here. Finally.”
Nour believes in signs from the universe. She claims that deep in her soul, her ruh, she is but a fleck of dust, wandering directionless along with the wind.
We have to go, she nearly shouted.
“We?”
“Didn’t you see the bottom of the ad?”
I zoomed in on the photo. Below the premise read: seeking an Asian actress (21-25 years old) to play the role of Elsa, a sex worker with vibrant energy.
“We are identical, but I’m not Asian. When we stand beside each other, you look so overwhelmingly Asian, and due to our similarities, people assume that I am Asian. But when I’m alone, they would never think I am.”
“Well, what are you thinking?”
“That you audition for me. And once you get the part, I’ll take over. Since they’ve seen you, they have no reason to doubt what I am.”
I pointed out the age range they were looking for. The sun exposure from my construction work has aged me to look like a burnt squash. Above the increasing noise around her, she lied loudly, “Don’t worry about that! You’re as ripe as a cherry in summer!”
I say yes to most things that Nour requests of me. If I don’t, it feels like I’m saying no to myself, keeping myself from indulgence, preventing myself from experiencing pleasure, even though her pleasure isn’t my pleasure. Our desires are separate, I understand that. But it’s much easier to acquiesce when there’s another one of me — someone that is strangely and infinitely more precious because they are both me and not me.
The next time I saw Nour, she brought three pages of dialogue for me to practice. She had emailed the matthoover03 address and learned that the director, writer, producer, and the one who will be playing the software engineer is a student at UCLA named Matt Hoover, who was born in 2003.
Nour and I have been running lines every day for the past seven days. The scene is of Elsa and the software engineer after a TechCrunch event. Elsa is eating from the buffet of room service as she asks questions about what he enjoys about “building digital worlds.” The dialogue is meant to be sexy. I’m supposed to chew, appear breathless, heave my chest, feign interest, and inquire, all at the same time. Nour has enacted what this would look like, her mouth ajar, jaw moving left and right like a camel’s.
I’m working on a project building a wellness center in the outlet mall downtown, which requires me to saw and slice rubberwood all day. Long after I leave work, debris lingers in my lungs, causing me to cough aggressively and at random. When I have one of my fits, Nour hits me on the back, hard. She’s been waiting for this role, she reminds me. Then she becomes gentle like a madam and forces me to drink tea. I haven’t had dinner with my parents all week. On Wednesday, my mother had stayed up waiting for me. When I came home past midnight, she said to me, her voice gravelly from sleep, that at my age, at my parents’ age, mistakes are no longer surprises. If I came home with a full belly, they would accept it. She was referring to pregnancy, I realized. She still saw me as impregnantable. Briefly, I was pleased, filled whole with the expansiveness of possibility.
* * *
As we exit the freeway, Nour sips from the last of her slurpee and points toward a gaggle of beige buildings in the distance. She guesses that one of them is a Taco Bell. Her eyes gleam. She shifts in her seat, spreading her smells. Nour says that we need to eat before the audition. If you go in hungry, you’ll feel like yourself, she warns. Nour has a fondness for Taco Bell; she believes them to be sacred places where people meld into one. The rich, the poor, the young and old: once you have a chalupa in your hand, you’re just a person, delightfully consuming.
As we get closer to the cluster of buildings, Nour brings her thumb and index finger together, mimicking the holding of a bell, and swings her hand back and forth jubilantly. I drive toward the beige building with blinding white lights emerging from the window, cashiers in mauve, collared shirts.
Once inside, we order four chalupas each and grab handfuls of their Diablo hot sauce before taking our seats at the back corner of the restaurant.
Nour stares, amused by a group of elderly women sitting in the booth across from us: six of them, trays of open wrappers before them. A couple of them have open hot sauce packets in hand and are squeezing morsels onto their fingers before lapping it up with their tongues. Among the group, there is an unspoken comradery in having survived — collectively, albeit separately. They’ve writhed in hospital beds from pain that is unique yet familiar, endured the loss of their innermost valuables, consented to what will never be returned to them. These women could’ve met just yesterday and they would know what the other has been through. This intimacy, I’m hungry for it.
“I’d been reading up on doppelgängers,” I say in between bites of my second chalupa.
Nour, without turning away from the hot sauce-licking women, asks what I’ve found out.
“There was a Japanese man who traveled to Mexico City for vacation and met his doppelgänger at the resort he was staying at. A famous Mexican opera singer. The Japanese man staked out for days, watching from afar, until one night, he followed the singer to the lobby bathroom and stabbed him to death.”
I had discovered the article weeks ago but held the story close to my chest. It had been disturbing to imagine Nour and I stabbing each other endlessly, our survival instincts strong, both too stubborn to die.
Nour casually unwraps her third chalupa. “It makes sense.”
“How so?” I had hoped that she would be disgusted, and that I would, in turn, be moved by her revulsion to stabbing me.
“Most people are frightened to meet someone that looks like them. In myth, your doppelgänger is the devil, coming to steal your life.”
Wilted lettuce escapes the corner of her mouth. “You and I have nothing to worry about, of course. We are repulsed by each other’s lives.”
Swirling Diet Coke around the inside of my mouth, I compare Nour’s circumstances to mine.
Relentless chasing of an impossible dream, infatuation with the hope that one can truly become somebody else, her family estrangement.
Everything I don’t want to see my parents show me with their stories of being children in post-war Korea, starvation rampant, desperation high. We nearly sold our kidneys to come to this country, my father frequently reminds me. And now, I am not worth the sacrifice. I am a womanly disappointment, failing to meet the expectations burdened to me. Did I dream of being a construction worker? No. Secretly, I had wanted to become a famous scholar, with thoughts so profound that others quoted me. It wasn’t even the profession of being a scholar, more so the allure of being quoted. I had tried to be pretty, whitened my teeth and shaved my knees, but beauty is like having a reservation at a beach-side table. You’ve either called ahead, or you haven’t.
All our miscellaneous grievances, born of different origins but manifested into similar pallets of feeling. We are both swimming in an acid pool of inadequacy.
Like Nour, I am a person of yearning. Unlike Nour, I no longer know what I am yearning for. Nour creates her own pitfalls, coming here all the way from Turkey to fail as an actress, but she is still living with purpose. She aches for something. She doesn’t care that it’s unattainable. True passion makes love to failure. I had seen that on a bumper sticker before.
Nour motions for me to hurry up with my remaining chalupa. She wants to get to the theater early.
Chewing through my final bite, I ask Nour if she would have killed me had I been living the life she wanted. More specifically, I ask her if she would’ve killed me had I resembled Julia Roberts. She opens a hot sauce packet, tilts her head back, and squirts the entirety of it into her mouth. Her eyes balloon, tears welling in its corners without daring to fall. She sniffs loudly, refocusing herself.
“I would’ve had to,” she says, wiping sweat off her upper lip. “What other way could there be?”
With that, we hear screaming — aged voices, but piercing. A head of white curls flaying uncontrollably, desperate smacking against the granite table, a group of the Taco Bell employees sprinting, a few of their uniform visors falling along the way. One of the old women who had been licking hot sauce off her finger is choking, the inside of a half-eaten taco spread across the tray in front of her like blood and guts.
Nour rises, motions for us to leave. In the commotion, we exit the Taco Bell and return to the Jeep. The face of the sun is bright and glowing like that of a pregnant suburban woman. Rain isn’t expected again until next week, but my father is distrusting of blue skies. He will obsessively be monitoring the movement of the clouds.
During the fourteen minute drive to the marionette theater, Nour and I are quiet, staring out our respective windows. It’s after we park that Nour says, “It must be the beef she choked on. Some of those pieces are hard. Like pebbles.”
I had been thinking about the woman the entire way, wondering if she had survived. While walking to the car, Nour didn’t look back once. But I did. I had even put my glasses on to get a better look. Through the window, I saw the heimlich being performed. The violence of an act meant to save: the elderly woman’s head was jerking back and forth, her small body squeezed in the arms of a woman three times her size. I couldn’t see the expression on her face. I’m sure if I had, I would never forget it.
I go into the marionette theater by myself so that Nour can “preserve” her identity. There’s a line of young Asian women waiting to audition. A short line, but I’m surprised to see that there are others that responded to the audition call. They are beautiful, and as soon as they spot me, I can see them unseeing me immediately. I am not their competition. I’m stout, overtly, almost disturbingly tan, and have hair tough like a horse’s mane.
I’m the last to be called. The stage is draped with scarlet red curtains and gold tassels. Chandeliers hang importantly from above. Matt Hoover is a cross-eyed, large-breasted man with greasy blonde hair. Once I walk on stage, he explains that his dad is friends with the owner of the marionette theater, which is why the audition is here. Then he says that he’s not a weird guy, just a man with an artistic vision. I can’t really tell where he’s looking, or whether he’s registered that I don’t fit the description of the woman he wants.
With urgency, he gets into character. In an attempt to elicit emotion in myself, I think about the elderly woman that was choking, how she might be dead now, her last words spoken under the fluorescent lights of the Taco Bell, the tiniest piece of beef acting as the culprit. I think about her friends, who lost a friend, someone they’ve known for decades, while casually sharing a meal. The tragedy of a split second gone wrong, how disenchanting the act of living can be, the discriminatory nature of time. I should feel the weight of something profound, but I’ve already accepted that the woman is dead and I am not right for the part. I accept it the way I do all other disappointments.
I go through my lines, trying to deliver them the way Nour did, but I’m not seductive nor convincing.
I say the dialogue in a monotone. Matt Hoover punctuates his words: coding, innovative, tongue.
Mid-way through one of his lines, Matt Hoover pauses, tells me that he’d like for me to try from the top again. You’re lacking feeling, he says. He urges me to dig deeper, search harder for the emotions to fully embody them.
“You have to sound like you want it.”
“Want what?” I ask.
Matt Hoover is taken aback by my question. He runs his hand through his hair, moving the part from right to left.
“Want more.”
“Of what?”
“Of whatever else is out there.” Matt Hoover steps closer, his blue eyes gazing through his cross-eyedness into mine. “There is more to life than what’s right in front of our faces.” He says this so sincerely that, for a moment, I think that he’s peered into me in the ten minutes of time we’ve been together in this theater and is now communicating what he believes I need to hear. Quickly, he shatters this illusion of care by adding, “Say the lines with this in mind, but sexy.”
I take a breath. I think of Nour, how long she had waited for this opportunity with her hands clasped together, optimistic that one day it would come. I envision hopefulness, what color it might be, what song it may dance to: a warm canary yellow, Rickey Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” I try to absorb this color, this song, into my body, to drink in its energy. Strangely, but unsurprisingly, the image of my parents floats by. Would they be proud if I got this role?
I read from the beginning of the scene. I bring my voice a couple octaves higher to enact the sexiness and say my lines with an eager confidence, enunciating, my stance firm on the ground. I give it my all, like each word is precious, like I had written it myself.
By the time we’ve run through all three pages, I’m out of breath.
Matt Hoover breaks character, moves both hands through his hair, destroying the part he’d created earlier. He sighs so deeply that his chest expands out like blown bubble gum, then deflates.
“You’re the worst whore ever,” he concludes before waving me away.
We knew this would happen. This ending is predictable, safe. Imagine if I had gotten the part: Who would build the wellness center? Who would have dinner with my parents?
Nour is waiting for me, slumped in the driver’s seat. As I walk toward her, my mouth stretches into a ripped smile. I yell, “We got it!”
What possesses me to lie, I’m unsure. Perhaps I want her to bask in this rare opportunity to be exactly who she sees herself as. When will this moment come again? It may never. It will never.
Triumph overcomes her. Nour is sobbing and laughing, her fists up in the air as if ready to punch God for trying to keep her from her destiny. Seeing her face light up, watching that unibrow sing, I forget, briefly, that this joy is born from a fabrication. I want what she has. I’ve never felt what she’s feeling. I want it so bad that I could kill her for it. I could kill her right now.
Ji Hyun Joo is a writer raised in San Diego, CA and Gyeongido, South Korea, currently based in Astoria, NY. She completed her M.F.A in Fiction at Columbia University, where she is a recipient of the 2020 Felipe P. De Alba Fellowship and a nominee for the Henfield Prize. Her fiction has been published in The New England Review, the Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins, and Fractured Lit.
Photo by: Larm Rmah