The Fourth Dimension is Death

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I never did think Dale Wormley looked like me. We all have that experience, I suppose, the false twins out there in the world, people who are claimed by our relatives and friends to look astonishingly like us. A roommate or a brother comes home and says, “I just saw somebody on the bus and I could have sworn it was you, I almost said something, it was absolutely uncanny.” And for a little while we find ourselves wondering about that doppelganger, what that other life might be, is it better or worse than our own, happier, sadder, easier, more exciting...

Well, I met my doppelganger, and I don’t believe he looked that much like me. And I didn’t envy his life, either. Nor his death.

If your face and voice become known to the public in a positive sense, because you’re a famous politician, perhaps, or a major sports figure, or, like me, because you did time for five years as the lead in a successful television series, your doppelganger may turn out to be someone who will try to make a career out of that accident of similar appearance. There are now “talent” agencies specializing in celebrity look-alikes and celebrity sound-alikes (there’s even a kind of ghostly living still to be made from looking like Charlie Chaplin or sounding like W. C. Fields, which is a joke on somebody), and the result is, from time to time it becomes necessary for a person in my position to guard the shores of his own existence, to beat back incursions made by the doppelganger into what is, after all, private turf.

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