Clones in Guelph (cont'd)

Around four o'clock the band stopped playing and to fill in the time I began to sketch in a notebook from the crocodile suitcase. The handsome man who had been reading the book began to walk towards me, and asked me what I was drawing. It was a totem pole with faces looking in opposite directions. I handed it to him. He looked at it for a while, then gave it back to me. He then picked up one of the canvasses that was leaning against the bushes and said it seemed to depict good and evil in the same face. He covered one half of the face with his hand and I saw happiness and generosity. He covered the other half of the face and I saw a sinister screeching demon. I had not before noticed this quality of duality in the painting.

He said his name was Lenny. He asked me if I wanted to go and get something to eat. I nodded, pleased. He said he had to go home and get some shoes so he could get into the restaurant, and he would be back in a few minutes. He lived close to the square. I worried that going home to get shoes was a pretext for getting rid of me, that he had changed his mind, so I waited skeptically continuing to draw the totem pole. I noticed yet another oriental man wearing the same suit and carrying the same briefcase floating gracefully across the street and disappearing into the shopping complex. What did this mean?

Lenny returned, and we walked to a restaurant, in a direction opposite that taken by the oriental men. As we waited for the table, I told him about one of the paintings he had been looking at. It was a portrait of Erin, beautiful dead Erin. She had been stabbed in the abdomen many times in her townhouse near the school we both went to in Toronto. This had happened nearly twenty years ago. Her murder was still unsolved.

Recently, triggered by a picture of Erin accompanying a memorial fund announcement in the boarding school newsletter, I had began to have memories of being in her townhouse when she was killed. She led me down a long hallway, and lit a joint. I inhaled and the hallway seemed very long and full of echoes. The hallway led into a dining room, where some men were waiting. Erin was very worldly and knew all about guys. I thought we were going to have a party. But they jumped us and they killed her. I was knocked on the head and woke up in my room in the boarding school with a skull full of fuzz and buzz and the housemother was asking me if I knew anything, anything at all about Erin. I said no.

Lenny was interested in my story about Erin Gilmour, and I was glad to have confided in someone who seemed to take me seriously. I had called the Toronto homicide squad to tell them what I knew. I had seen the face of the man who had molested me then hit me on the head while his buddies killed Erin. I could hear her screaming. The first time I called they said they had re-opened the case. When I called after that, I kept getting an answering machine and no-one would return my calls. For some reason the investigation was being stymied. I was being shut up. I called the school to ask about Erin, but they said she had been killed two years after I left the school. They must be participating in the cover-up.

I began to live with Lenny. Something strange was happening. One day his eyes seemed blue, and another day his eyes seemed green. Some days he seemed taller than others. Some days his arms seemed more muscular than others. Some days his hair was slightly curly, and other days it was straight. I began to think about the identical oriental men I had seen going into the shopping complex, and other times that I has witnessed identical people walking about the streets of Guelph. I began to realize that I was living with more than one man, and they all looked alike. Their movements were very similar, as if they practised being alike. They used the same expressions, and their personalities were very similar, but the longer I lived with them the more I realized that they were in fact several people. Guelph was a clone colony.

From listening to secret broadcasts on the television and radio I learned more about the clone colony. Whenever I turned on the radio or the television, I heard voices talking above the regular programming. Someone was interfering with technology to help me know what was going on.

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burton@pigdog.org