Jaymie had fully intended to register his clone. It wasn’t like he planned on hiding the poor man in the basement for the rest of their lives. He could afford the fees; he had a day job, after all. What he hadn’t expected was that the clone would disappear within an hour of its creation. Having shown such a complete lack of gratitude, Jaymie reasoned that it could go ahead and register itself.

When Jaymie had received the first notice from the collection agency, he’d shrugged it off. He figured that if he hadn’t been able to track down his clone, what luck would the government have?

The doppelganger perched on his bed was correct—Jaymie had been searching for him several hours earlier. As soon as Jo had shown him his mail that afternoon, he’d begun to suspect that Aaron’s disappearance had something to do with this creature.

He’d wandered downtown, trying to think of a strategy for finding the second Jaymie, whom he hadn’t seen since its invention almost six months ago. Finally, he’d asked himself: if he had no band and no family to care for, where would he go?

He looked for the seediest dive he could find. At his first stop the patrons gave him the type of stares that served as their most lenient first and final warning that he was not of their ilk and they weren’t impressed by his gently-used, thrift-store fashion sense and scruffy hair. He pretended he was looking for the cellphone repair shop two doors down.

At the second bar he walked into, he was instantly rewarded.

“Jaymie! There he is, a whole day late!”

“Oh, you know, uh, Jaymie? Good! Great!” said Jaymie.

“Very funny!” The jovial middle-aged man behind the bar spoke with a rich eastern European accent. “You forget to come to work yesterday? I should fire you.”

“Ha! I know this sounds unlikely, but I’m not Jaymie,” said Jaymie. “I’m his twin brother, Aaron. I’m trying to find him, because we were supposed to Skype our dad today.” As soon as Jaymie committed himself to lying for the entirety of the conversation, it became very easy to do.

“This guy, he’s full of jokes! I like you, Jaymie. Ok, you’re not fired. Come on then, help Big Niki with Happy Hour,” said the man, who was clearly Big Niki.

“No, seriously. I’m looking for Jaymie. Can you tell me if he’ll be in tonight?”

“What! He never mentioned this twin brother!”

“We’re not very close.”

“Jaymie, Jaymie, you’re always the trickster, aren’t you…” This exchange continued for some minutes until Jaymie was able to convince the barkeep that he was not his awaited employee. Big Niki finally revealed that the man he knew as ‘Jaymie’ was scheduled for a shift the following day at four P.M. “If the joker decides to show up,” he grumbled. He began wiping the counter with an enthusiasm that Jaymie suspected would strip it of its finish in short order.

“I lost my phone, with my contacts. Could you give me his number?” Jaymie asked.

“Haha! He doesn’t have a phone, the funny clown. You sure you’re brothers?”

“I don’t blame him—they’re so distracting. I wouldn’t bother with one either if I didn’t have a…” Jaymie forced himself to stay on track. “And you don’t happen to know where he’s living?”

“You don’t know? And you’re the twin brother, is what you’re telling me!” The man laughed and shrugged. “You sure you’re not playing a big joke, here, Jaym—what’s your name again?”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re sure you don’t know?”

“Does anybody know?” the man chuckled. “No, he didn’t tell me. I don’t ask about that kind of thing! A man is entitled to his privacy. What else has he got?”

A second bartender appeared behind the counter in time to hear the end of their conversation, and Jaymie repeated his question. She only shook her head and frowned.

“Hey, you know how to pour a drink, Jaymie’s Twin?” asked Big Niki. There was something about the man Jaymie found comforting, and he briefly wondered how long it would take him to learn to bartend—likely more than five minutes but less than an hour. Actually, he could probably just do it.

“Thanks, but I have something pressing. And alcohol is one of those things—I’ll have it every day for a week or two and then I’ll need it every day. You know?” The bartenders knew. He thanked them and bid them goodnight.

“He has a twin brother—what a funny family!” Big Niki turned away to pour another foamy beer for a patron who’d just finished his last sip, the new glass smoothly replacing the old one in his palm the moment it was empty. He blinked at it, startled, and continued drinking.

Jaymie wandered for another hour and asked at two more places where nobody recognized him. Then he went home; it was growing late and he wanted to check on Rex. As it turned out, Jo had walked them to Maggie’s house for the comfort of their best friend, so he called to apologize and reassure them that he was on track and would explain everything soon, and then he sat on his bed rereading his mail, and before he knew it he’d fallen asleep.

***

“What are you doing in my bed!”

The clone gazed at Jaymie with an aggressively jubilant expression, like a fan who inspires you to thoroughly Google yourself to confirm your address isn’t available on the internet.

“My friend at work said you were asking for me!” it replied. “She came and told me right away—said she was annoyed I never told her I had a twin. She’d gotten suspicious that maybe it was a conspiracy against her and she’d been sleeping with you some of the time when she thought she’d been sleeping with me! I had to explain that I was a clone, not a twin! We had a good laugh.”

“That’s insane,” Jaymie said. He backed up against the headboard, as far as possible from where the other Jaymie crouched, grinning, at the end of the bed. He turned on the bedside light and looked the clone over.

He was, of course, quite handsome. He had Jaymie’s laughing brown eyes and crooked smile. He too was clean shaven, having likely discovered by now that they couldn’t grow a proper beard. He had the same wavy hair, though his had grown down to his shoulders and was more unruly than Jaymie’s; this was probably the result of not having someone around with whom he matched his DIY haircut at regular intervals. (People occasionally asked Jaymie and Aaron why they continued to do this as adults. They never gave a straight answer.)

To an outside observer, their hair would be the only distinguishable difference between Jaymie and his clone, yet Jaymie was acutely aware of something off-putting and vaguely threatening about the man’s animated crouch and eager scrutiny, as though he were something wild, leering at Jaymie from the shadows, ready to pounce.

“So, what can I do for you?” asked the miscreation, and Jaymie took a deep breath, tried to calm his thumping heart, and explained that his brother had disappeared the night before.

“I’ve been trying to find him,” he finished. “I thought maybe you’d—I don’t know…” he trailed off helplessly.

“You thought I’d know? I’ve literally never met this person,” said the amused clone. “I don’t even know his name!”

“It’s Aaron,” said Jaymie, more out of surprise that the clone didn’t know than because he thought he could benefit from telling him. “Brzezinski.”

“Wait, our name is Bursinski? I thought it was Bukowski, like, this entire time!” He let out a delighted yelp of laughter.

“It’s Brzez—Wait, our name? No. That’s my last name. What name have you been using?”

“‘Jaymie Bukowski.’ Like you. That’s who I am, remember? I’m you!”

“You’re not me!” Jaymie snapped in annoyance. “Jesus! Go be your own person! I’m Jaymie. I was Jaymie twenty-five years before you were. Just pick a different name! Literally any other name.”

“I like ‘Jaymie’.” The clone beamed at him.

Jaymie let out a string of swears partly triggered by his fury at the creature and partly by his stress over the prolonged absence of Aaron. He forced himself to take a few more deep breaths. His palms were too hot and he had that horrible constrained feeling in his legs, like when you’ve been running ten kilometres every day, but then today you skipped it.

“‘Jaymie’ is taken!” he seethed. “You can be… Fuck it, you can have ‘James’—throw in a ‘y,’ even, if you like it that much—or be ‘Jimmy’ if you really want!”

The other Jaymie stretched his legs out comfortably on the bed, leaned back on his hands, and thought. Jaymie forced himself not to ask if the clone was intentionally tormenting him.

“Ok, I’ll be ‘Jimmy,’” he said carelessly, as though adopting a new identity was no more inconvenient than agreeing to play a different character in Mario Kart so Jaymie could be his favourite one. “But I want that stupid ‘y’ too. Jymmy.” Jymmy grinned, satisfied with his new moniker.

“Sure, have your ‘y’. Jymmy. Shit. What have you even been doing all this time?”

“I make poems and play the piano—like you! But mostly I watch porn,” said Jymmy happily.

“Of course you do,” Jaymie muttered.

“Did you know there’s a growing niche market for clone porn? Could be very lucrative, if you ever need to make some cash—I know I could use a side hustle—”

“Ohmygod no!” Jaymie spluttered.

“It’s not like we’re related—”

“What the fuck is wrong with you!”

Jymmy shrugged. “I’m a six-month-old baby genius prodigy who’s been exposed to the full depravity of internet culture without having learned societal norms and taboos yet?”

“This is all new to you? You have none of my memories?”

“None. It’s funny, because I have all your skills, but no idea how I got them! I found out the other day I can play barre chords on guitar—or, like, how did you learn that if you want to sleep with a girl, you shouldn’t tell her anecdotes about all the other girls you’ve slept with? Because I somehow instinctively knew that if I made sure not to do that, then girls would probably like to sleep with me. And they do!”

“Of course you’re a horny psychopath… I realize I’m partially responsible for this…”

“Partially? You made me, brah! Like, I’ve looked up how human babies get made, but I don’t know what kind of crazy porn stunt you had to put yourself through to conceive me!”

“You were made in a lab,” said Jaymie through gritted teeth.

Six months ago, Jaymie had volunteered to be cloned. It wasn’t a procedure he’d normally be interested in—unless he was drunk, or someone dared him to, or one of his dear siblings died and he needed a new one, etc.—but it just so happened that he and Aaron had had a major falling out only days earlier.

In May, the Bukowski Brothers had been invited to go on a one-month tour of eastern Canada opening for a band of post-punk environmentalists called Dead Zebra Beach. DZB (not to be confused with the hallucinogenic substance Dimethylzygomine, or DMZ, which their fans were also excited about) had released their debut album and gained the type of internet following destined to emerge, proliferate, and die out within a short period of time, much unlike the pernicious zebra mussels and other invasive species that were the subject of many of their songs. (These songs were hailed as “musically ambitious, lyrically complex, and angsty enough to send your inner teen into an orgasm of self-pity,” by Free Press reviewer Lucas Yarbrough.)

Jaymie calculated that, with their timing, they just might hit the sweet spot in the middle; hundreds or thousands of young people could be exposed to the brilliance of the BBBFB. Also, supporting environmentalism was important. He’d enthusiastically signed on.

The Bukowskis had been writing music and recording demos for two years. Though they’d always jammed together, it had taken most of their lives to eschew their destiny as a backing musicians and take more artistic roles. That spring, Jaymie had his first full set of original music and the recently acquired belief that it was actually good.

Only ten days before the tour, Aaron pulled out under the pretense of needing summer classes to graduate. Jaymie knew he was just nervous. He was sure that if Aaron gave it a chance, they’d have the best time of their lives, but there was no budging Aaron when he’d gotten the idea in his mind that something was going to be unbearably nerve-wracking.

Aaron offered to help find a replacement, which Jaymie obstinately refused, arguing that they wouldn’t be a family band—but really he’d been nervous too, and he hadn’t wanted to undertake an exhausting and potentially unrewarding working-trip without his best friend, and maybe that was the part of the reason he’d canceled on the tour. (If this seems uncharacteristic of the adventurous and extraverted Jaymie Brzezinski, it is helpful to consider that he'd toured briefly as a backing keyboardist before, and so knew the cocktail of anxiety and fatigue that one lives with chronically on any indie tour longer than a few days. Or, consider the mind of a beginning artist, vacillating over whether their work is any good and whether the audience hates them and is too polite to say so, and looking for any excuse to give up on themselves.)

He was livid at Aaron’s inconsiderate departure; he called off the band and moved away for his infamous Adderall Couch Stint. During this time, certain sketchy, entrepreneurial friends of his began a clone lab in their basement and asked if he’d be a beta subject for the enterprise, free of charge. He hadn’t slept in five days and he had an idea for a harmony line on one of his new songs that he needed to hear with two voices to see if it would work. He agreed.

He spent half an hour trying to teach his clone to play the drums, explaining that the other instruments in the BBBFB were taken (except lead guitar, but he didn’t want any of his own style of pentatonic wankery on his songs, so that was off limits too). He’d left the clone at the kit to practice, gone for a cat-nap, and never seen the man again. Two notebooks and a fifty-dollar bill were also missing.

Jaymie was understandably annoyed, but he reacted in what he believed to be the only reasonable and mature way, which was to move on and forget about the whole thing.

The twins had gotten lonely; Aaron had rejoined the band and begun to see a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist to work on his anxiety, and peace had reigned. The next time Aaron quit—alarmed by the increase in murders—Jaymie was too tired to hate him and, conveniently, Sasha supplied them Colin, and the internet bestowed Jo upon them, and that had been that.

The government did not forget. After a number of scandals of the sort easily imaginable to anyone familiar with the exploitation of populations who are vulnerable, uneducated, and/or without access to money or lawful work, they were cracking down on cloning. In their investigations, they came across Jaymie’s careless, loud-mouthed friends’ business, shut it down, and learned the names of their clients via a combination of threats and bribery, hinting at lower fines and less jail time for he who talked.

Jymmy stood up and perused the stack of books he’d just noticed beside Jaymie’s bed. “Do you read these? I doubt it. It’s funny—back when I was born, I thought you seemed kind of weird and grumpy, but the more I find out all the cool stuff we know how to do, the more I think, Maybe he’s alright!” He regarded Jaymie fondly as he slipped one of the smaller books into his jacket pocket.

“I need to go find Aaron,” said Jaymie, grabbing his wallet from the bedside table before the clone’s interest could shift to it. “God, he could be lost or trapped somewhere, in pain, or worse—bored!”

“So. You really thought I took your brother?” the clone snickered. “Why would I want him? Does he look just like me and he wants to do clone porn?”

“No, he definitely doesn’t!” Jaymie said angrily. “I don’t know. I thought… maybe because… you haven’t got one?”

“Interesting,” the clone seemed to be carefully considering him. “And I’d want one, why?”

“Because you… you’re alone!”

“I see,” said Jymmy. “Go on.”

“Go on? What more is there? I’ve always had siblings around. Who do you care about? What do you even do all day? —Please don’t answer that.”

“I hadn’t even thought of getting some siblings, honestly. And I know how to have company, when I need it.” He winked, and Jaymie wondered if his own winking appeared as predatory as this, and resolved never to do it again.

“Ok. You didn’t take him. You haven’t seen him.”

“I definitely didn’t, although you’ve started to have me sold on this whole sibling thing. Maybe it’d be neat to have company that isn’t trying to sleep with me… I have Big Niki, though…”

Jaymie looked around at the mail still strewn across his bed. Dick Dale had joined them and was attempting to recline in such a way as to enshroud as many envelopes as possible with his long sixties hair.

“Shit. I think I know what happened,” said Jaymie.

“Hmm? What happened where? Oh, your brother. Right.” Jymmy petted the cat absently.

“I need your help,” Jaymie told him. “The collection agency came, but they couldn’t find you. I think they’ve taken him as collateral.” His stomach did a queasy turn just thinking about it, and then he noticed one final oddity, and asked, “Are you wearing my pants?”