I was standing on the street. Then I was standing halfway down the street. I turned to look. Ray was in the spot where I had been standing a moment before. “Hi, Ray,” I said. I held up a hand and waved to him. He didn’t wave back. Ray isn’t the friendliest guy on the street. He has lived here longer than any of us, has been through two divorces, three or four jobs, at least one heart attack, and a half-dozen cars that I know about. Change has swirled around him. But somehow he’s stayed the same Ray: tall, gaunt, deeply informed on matters of, say, North African politics but oddly ignorant about far more common topics: baseball, for example (he claims he’s never seen a game), or gluten (“What in the name of hell is that?”). I didn’t know what Ray knew or didn’t know about the material transmission of a human body down a street and the substitution of another body for that body, especially if he was the body substituting. But there was no doubt. Ray was standing right where I had been. It occurred to me to examine my surroundings. I was in Ray’s front yard, right up against the sidewalk. I was holding a hedge-clipper that belonged to Ray. I remember the day he brought it home from the store. I was wearing his clothes and his beat-up old Fourth of July baseball cap. Was I Ray? I turned back to where I had been standing. Ray was still over there, too. I waved at him again, and again he didn’t wave back. Slowly, he uncurled one of his long fingers, the index finger of his right hand, and then he began to raise his right arm until he was pointing directly at me. Then he spoke, louder than usual, but with his trademark affect, vowels flat and bleak like an empty lot. “There’s nothing there,” he said. “I don’t even know what in the name of hell I’m looking at.”
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