What if you woke up in the middle of your day, in the middle of an email, in the middle of a life that wasn’t yours?

The Mirror Test
by Jeffrey S. Morgan

“Hey, Corey. You ok?” I heard her voice behind me, but I wasn’t listening. I was reading an email.

You know how sometimes someone can say a bunch of shit to you, like real English words filled with tone and inflection, but to you it’s like they just rattled off a string of Chinese? Like when a physicist starts talking about math. So I’m looking at this email that just rolled in and it says:

Corey,

Please pull the mid-month actuals from CARE, compare it to Q3s results and slap it into a deck for the Thursday Pow-Wow.

Dale Simmons
Manager – Reporting
ST&T, Inc.
“You are the acorn that becomes the oak.”

Now I get it there are English words on the screen. I know how to read them and I understand the meaning of most of those words, but I don’t understand what the hell it means. I’ve no idea as to what CARE is, but I assume it’s a computer system or program. I can tell from the capital letters. I don’t know what an actual is nor how it became a noun but I can figure out what Q3 means. Quarters are quarters in the business world. Thursday’s meeting won’t be very fun for Dale since I won’t be getting him his actuals. Which leads me to Dale.

I don’t know Dale. Oh I mean I know of several Dales in this world, just not this one. But the whole email confuses me. I don’t even work for ST&T. At least not anymore.

Right after college I needed a job. The tech world was just getting started so I parlayed my skills into a phone job with ST&T. While I worked there I knew of 8 Corey Stones in the directory. I used to get emails for the one that worked in a different building. Used to drive us mad. If I was on vacation and someone emailed me instead of him, the issue languished for a week. We kept a sense of humor about it, though. We told people we were twins. If someone contacted us accidentally we’d close our chats with, “Tell him I said ‘say hi to Mom’.”

But I don’t work for ST&T anymore. I jumped from ST&T during the Great Recession (risky I know).  I work for Compaq as a Systems Engineer helping Sales people sell stuff, scoring sweet discounts on their gear. Plus I get to keep getting paid, which has worked out for me nicely. This Corey sounded like he worked in Finance. Ugh, how boring. I do not have a penchant for numbers.

Leaning back in my chair I pivoted toward my cubical wall, scanning the things tacked up over years. There was a picture of my brother on our trip to the Grand Canyon, his beard grizzly over his wide grin and my eyes dilated with terror. Beside it a picture of my Mother and Father, holding hands at the beach. Above that looked like me and my wife at our wedding, cutting a tall white cake.

I allowed my eyes to linger on her long hair, her slender arm peeking from the sleeve, her smile as I shoved cake at her clumsily. I really looked happy that day, obviously thinking of the future, the places we’d go. Nothing of the misery of living or the drudgery of  work, the fear and the agony of loss. These kids looked happy. Happiness is highly underrated. All too often we speed past the years where the strength of youth could be combined with the spiritual truth that in fact most things in life are those little things we’re told not to sweat. Instead we experience happiness as a byproduct of consumption, not to put too fine a cynical point on it. But these guys, they’re like every new couple. Having a ball at their wedding and thinking about the fun coming later. That’s not a bad thing either.

I had to imagine how happy they were because while that was definitely me in the photograph, the woman was most certainly not my wife. I was divorced and not to her. As beautiful as she was,  no bells rang in my skull. I couldn’t place her at all.

You know how you can start to hyperventilate in a stressful situation? Your breath comes in short, ragged gasps and you start to sweat down your back. I looked over at the monitor and scanned my email. The subjects all smacked of Finance or reporting; a sense of peril grew in the pit of my stomach and my shoulders arched, like I was suddenly prey. Was I was sitting in someone else’s cubicle? Yes, you wandered into someone else’s cubicle. Someone who happens to look like you and puts pictures of you on his wall. Maybe this woman photoshopped me into her picture? Something told me a woman didn’t sit in this seat, though.

Clearly I’d lost my mind. That was the only possible answer. A blood clot might cause temporary amnesia, or a blow to the head. I ran my fingers around my skull to feel for sore spots. I sat still, aware of my body, searching for sensations of pain or discomfort. I tried to remember what I watched last night and it got even more frustrating. You see, I remembered what I saw on TV. Doctor Who premiered last night; me and my son sat down to watch it live, something we never do. I ate pudding and he ate a popsicle. We laughed at the Daleks and the dogs barked whenever one of them spoke.

And I remember my ex-wife too. She is most definitely real, I can vouch for that. I can clearly see her shape, stretched out on the bed enticing me with her index finger. Her voice in my ear and her hand on my back, all etched into my mind like young love carved into the base of a tree. The fights that led to our eventual divorce, innocent at first, still fill me with sadness now that I my anger wasn’t a problem. I recall the day she moved out, me standing in the kitchen watching as the door closed and locked behind her. The room echoed and from the other room Jones, our Aussie, whined. This other woman, these guys looked happy.

“Corey,” repeated a voice behind me and I remembered; someone was there.

I turned and smiled reflexively and said, “Howdy. What can I do for you?” Did I squeak or did someone step on a duck?

Behind me stood a short, round woman in her late 60s, cat-eye glasses and a tablet in her hand. She narrowed her eyes and replied, suspicion in her voice. “You ok, Corey?”

“Great. Never better.” Did I laugh out loud?

“Uh huh,” she grunted, looking at me for a long second. Sucking in her breath she continued, “Johnson asked for status on Crowd Systems. Can you send him the results from last month and make sure they’re at the top of the wins?”

And I think I popped. Maybe I simply slumped forward. Maybe I screamed, clutching my head in agony, I don’t know. All I know is I opened my eyes some distinct time later to find people looking down at me. Their eyes told me they cared, if only because no one likes it when a co-worker dies in their cubicle. That brings the mood down.

“He’s awake. Marge, he’s awake.”

And for the second time that day I wished I wasn’t.

To Be Continued in Part 2