It occurred to me quite randomly yesterday that I have converged two people into the same person. Have you ever experienced this? Have you ever forgotten someone’s face and then replaced it with another? Maybe think a little about it first. Let me explain.
Back in the early 90’s, one of my teenage summer jobs was cleaning houses. My employer drove around in a blue Volvo with all his equipment in the back of the car shepherding myself & my friend from nice house to nice house to dust shelves, sweep floors, vacuum carpets, mop bathrooms, assassinate weekly home spider invasions, polish mirrors, that sort of thing. I’m not really certain how old I was at the time, maybe 15? 16? I have some very distinct and not so distinct recollections of him: Born again Christian, always upbeat, definitely an extrovert, possibly a gravelly-voiced white dude, maybe in his late 30’s or 40’s. I recall we almost got into a terrible car accident on the freeway once. His survival instincts had kicked in fast as lightning, reacting quickly to veer out of the way of the vehicle that was about to make all our lives defunct. He was a bit shell-shocked and kept talking about how amazed he felt to have had the wherewithal to check his mirrors and react so perfectly. #Quicksilver
There are other snippets here and there floating around my memories. I remember how fascinating it was to go around all these nice strangers’ homes cleaning their wares and not be intrusive. I was always very careful. Except when it came to the every other weekly occurring spider annihilation at THAT ONE blue house near the lake. Never took casualties. Never enough vacu-suck for that creepy crawly nightmare. Seriously every other week it felt like they were just playing dead, having a laugh at my expense and then showing up again like malicious spider zombie demons.
Fast forward to my early days living in D.C. There was a bartender-manager who eventually left his gig and opened his own place to some success for a few years before sort of just disappearing into industry oblivion. (Read: he may have moved to the suburbs.) Minus the born again Christian vibe, my memory of him is essentially a clone of the Cleaner. I am not sure when exactly my mind decided to make them a single visual relic. Intellectually, I realize they are completely different people. And yet, if I think of them separately (however fuzzily) I cannot help but conjure only the image of the Bar Owner. I think my brain just let the Bar Owner sort of overpower the identity of the House Cleaner, at first slowly and then completely. Don’t be freaked, but the associative memory of these two unconsciously morphing into one being with the face of the latter now forever ingrained in my head is not unlike T-1000 in Terminator 2 assuming the body and voice of his victims. Aside from the murdery part, of course. Although, now that I think about it more, I have essentially killed off the Cleaner in my head and replaced him with the Bar Owner.
On the flip-side of what is fast becoming a dark macabre doppelgänger story, I cannot help but also summon to mind that excellent cameo scene in Wandavision when her “brother” re-enters her life looking not at all like her dead sibling Pietro, but very much like the version of Quicksilver Peter from the X-Men Days of Future Past film. They are to us, born from the same comic book character mythos, albeit from different storied universes. Yet, most noticeably, they have different faces and bodies. They are the inverse of each other’s doppelganger and I applaud this meta move within our pop culture’s ever expanding sensibilities for the ability to understand itself and tease.
I wonder if I will ever be able to sever the Cleaner & Bar Owner from each other and see that just as Pietro and Peter are not the same person, so are they not. I may be too far gone. If I ever meet the Cleaner again, I feel certain I would have no recollection of his true face. I find this mildly disturbing. Mind over matter has veered off the path of quick silver and into liquid metal, you might say.
