The sound of tapping on his keyboard woke him up. Vincent wasn't a paranoid personality, nor was he a very light sleeper, but it seemed to him that for the third time this week one of his housemates were "borrowing" his computer for whatever stupid reason they had in mind this time around. First it was to "check the going prices of a 3080 these days" then it was to "see if those books I ordered shipped yet." Who knew what they were really doing, the machinations of terrible housemates are indecipherable. All that mattered was that someone was messing with his stuff while he slept.
Ready to tell them to get the hell out of his room and stop messing with his stuff, Vincent rolled over and saw Vincent.
Vision bleary, Vincent blinked a few times to clear the sleep from his eyes. The Vincent at their- no- his computer hadn't noticed that Vincent was awake yet and kept to his task.
Vincent stared, trying to figure out what to do or say.
"I'm dreaming, aren't I?"
The Vincent at the computer calmly looked towards the Vincent in bed, seemingly unsurprised by the Vincent in bed talking to him.
"I dunno, maybe," was his only response.
Both Vincents sat in silence for a minute or two, the one at the computer continuing in his task.
"What're you doing?"
"Researching for that mercury short story. I've been looking into the symptoms of elemental mercury consumption and I got bad news: for the amount Tanner eats there aren't any symptoms. Seems like it mostly just passes through harmlessly."
"Oh."
"We've either got to scrap the idea entirely or find a way to make the sickness make sense."
"I'm not sure I'd like to scrap the idea. I think there's something there."
"Sure, sure, just something we need to figure out."
There was another moment of silence between the two. The Vincent at the computer was the one to break it this time.
"You're awfully calm about this."
"Were you expecting me to freak out?"
"I mean, yeah, we're kind of an anxious mess who only recently stopped being afraid of the dark. Most people grow out of that by the time they're like twelve, not when they're twenty. I know if I saw myself in my room in the dark I'd be spooked."
"What's the point of being scared of a dream?"
"If that's the perspective you're taking."
"Should I be scared?"
The doppelgänger Vincent simply shrugged.
The two sat in silence again, neither paying attention to the other. Vincent stared up at the ceiling, reaching for some feeling of surprise or terror. It was almost worrying how little he felt in regard to the situation at hand. He'd said it himself - or rather the other him had said it - he was a mess who couldn't watch horror movies, showed up to places fifteen minutes early, refused to ask others for help for fear of becoming a burden, and, up until recently, slept with a lamp on. In spite of it all, a sense of serenity had washed over him.
Vincent was jolted out of his thoughts by a teddy bear landing on his chest.
"Oh, sorry man. I didn't mean to spook you, just seemed like you had gone comatose or something. Figured maybe something paralyzing had set in so I tossed you Blue Bear. Couldn't hurt, right?" Vincent 2 said, eyeing Vincent 1 with concern. Vincent 1 looked again at the teddy bear that had fallen into his lap. It was a faded blue, the once soft fur now matted by time and hugs.
"I'm fine. Just got lost in thought is all," was his response after a pause to collect himself. "Look, I don't need some stupid teddy bear. Put him back where he was on the desk," Vincent 1 tossed Blue Bear back to Vincent 2 who quickly returned it back to Vincent 1.
"Dude, I'm you. You don't have to lie to me. We both know we still like hugging him when we're anxious. It's fine, no one else is here. Also, can we talk about his name? 'Blue Bear.' Not our proudest creative moment, is it?" Vincent 2 chuckled. Vincent 1 looked at Blue Bear, back once again in his lap, before giving him a quick squeeze and saying, "Yeah, not my best work. But I was like, one, so I think it's okay."
Vincent 1 glanced at the alarm clock on his nightstand: "1:28 AM." He sighed as he leaned up to turn the lamp on, "I don't think I'm going back to sleep tonight. Not right now at least." Vincent 2 shot a look at Vincent 1, "I thought you thought this was a dream?"
"Well, it feels real enough to warrant me talking like I'm awake."
Vincent 2 shrugged, turning back to his computer. "Whatever, man."
Looking to change the subject away from the esoteric, Vincent 1 brought up the short story again. "You said elemental mercury was basically harmless in the quantity Tanner eats, right?"
"Yeah, he also hasn't had frequent exposure to it either. It's a double-whammy of 'doesn't work.'"
"Well, Tanner's an idiot, right?"
"I'd like to think that's fairly obvious."
"What if I threw in a line about him eating something terrible and make the symptoms match food poisoning? Something like sushi from a Texaco."
"Wouldn't that be a bit subtle? A little too easy to pass over?"
"I could make it a more prominent detail."
"Maybe. Feels a bit too much like deus ex machina though."
"I don't think it meets the definition of deus ex machina. Plus, the people stumbling on the island and saving the kids in Lord of the Flies is deus ex machina, but it's still a great story and a good ending."
"Well, it's writer deus ex machina at the very least. But I guess it could work."
Crawling across the bed, Vincent 1 reached for the messenger bag lying on the floor. Retrieving his laptop from inside it, he sat back in his bed and opened the file. Vincent 1 reached over to the nightstand once more and grabbed his ear buds, it was instinct at this point to put them in when he was writing as it helped him focus by drowning out everything else. Vincent 2 stood out of the desk chair and hopped onto the bed, sitting next to Vincent 1.
"Here, I'll help you write out the new stuff, two brains are better than one."
"I'm not sure that works if it's the same brain twice."
"Semantics. Pass me an ear bud, I wanna listen too."
Vincent 1 took his right ear bud out and handed it to him, "let me skip to something good."
Vincent 2 gave him a confused look. "You do realize that we're the same person, right? Whatever you play, I'll enjoy."
"Well, I'm already doing it, too late to stop now," Vincent 1 retorted. Soon, he came to a song that caught his attention. As the first mellow guitar notes began playing, the doppelgänger looked to his counterpart and sighed. "Chose 'Pnr,' huh? You realize how much of a cliché we are, right?"
"I try to not think about it."
"That's a blatant lie. We think about it a lot."
"That seems unhealthy."
"Probably."
"Let's just get to work on this."
"No point in self-reflection, except for all the benefits and growth."
"Am I really this much of a prick?"
"No, we donate blood. That's easily the biggest prick in our life right now."
"Can you go five minutes without some slap-back comment or back-handed compliment, you asshole?"
"Can we?"
"Maybe with the aid of something silver and sticky."
"That's one of the dumbest comebacks I've ever heard."
Refusing to perpetuate the endless cycle of biting indictments of his attitude, Vincent 1 got to work on the short story with his doppelgänger interjecting suggestions every-now-and-then. Almost twenty minutes passed before Vincent 1 broke himself away from the story. Lost in some new thought, he stared forward into nothing before abruptly closing the laptop. "It's not good."
Vincent 2 rested his head in his hands, leaning into his lap. "Well, it ain't like we're on some deadline. We'll just keep working through it until it comes out how we want it to."
"The idea's fundamentally flawed and I'm trying to shoehorn a solution into it just to make it work."
"Not sure it meets the definition of shoehorning. Plus, I think it's working pretty well, if we word it right, I bet we can make it better than the original idea. Just because it doesn't work right now doesn't mean it won't ever work and that the idea needs to be thrown out."
"Weren't you the one calling it 'writer deus ex machina' earlier?"
Vincent 2 shrugged. "Opinions change. Just like ours will once we fine tune it a bit more."
"That's optimistic of you."
"You're being a cynic."
"You're calling the kettle black."
"Look, we're just a bit stuck in our head right now, we think like this about almost everything we make."
"'Stuck in our head' is definitely accurate."
"Shut up, you know what I meant. Let someone else who isn't us take a look at it and tell us what they think of it."
"No one wants to read this crap, it's better to not bother people with stupid stuff like this."
"We need to stop being so paranoid about 'bothering' other people. We're not running ourselves down some isolationist, self-sufficient path to enlightenment. That doesn't exist. Humans are social creatures who lean on others."
"I don't think I've ever heard a more slippery slope than that. Just because I don't want to bother someone else with pointless stuff doesn't mean I'm trying to be some sort of monk."
"Sure, we don't want to bother people with stupid stuff like that and almost every other issue we face."
"Everyone has enough to worry about by themselves, no reason to throw my baggage on too."
"I really hope you can taste the absolute irony of this whole conversation."
Vincent 1 tossed the laptop onto his bag lying on the floor, too irritated to be cognizant of the device's fragility. He shoved Vincent 2 off of his bed, but not before snatching the ear bud out of the copy's ear. Returning them to the nightstand, he flicked the lamp off and laid down under the covers. "I'm gonna try to get some sleep before my alarm goes off. You can do whatever, just don't bother me."
"I thought this was a dream?"
"Well I'm sure being 'awake' in a dream isn't exactly the most restful kind of sleep."
"Denial will only get you so far."
Vincent 1 didn't respond to this last comment, instead focusing on slowing his breathing and thinking about anything that wasn't short stories, worries, or, God forbid, himself.
"Whatever, man," Vincent 2 mumbled before sitting back down in the desk chair, a squeak of protest arising from the worn hinges as he leaned back. "Whatever."
Soon, Vincent 1 drifted into sleep, the calm breathing he had been forcing before became natural. Clutching tightly to Blue Bear in his sleep as he fidgeted, his muscles weakly responding to whatever dreams were passing through his mind.
The blaring alarm tore Vincent from the haze of sleep, muscle memory causing his hand to slap the snooze button to shut it up. The early morning sunlight leaked into the room through the cracks in the blinds as Vincent stood up out of bed, stretching and yawning. He'd been right, whatever kind of sleep he'd been having during the doppelgänger dream was far from restful, but it was too late now to worry about that. He thought through the events of the dream as he slipped on his clothes, quickly discarding it as leftover junk being processed by his brain. Packing up his bag and slipping the laptop back inside of it, he left the room to head to work, leaving Blue Bear alone on the bed, an ever vigilant watchman.
