There are many things in this world that grow larger when pursued directly. A shadow is one of them, and a rumor is another; and the Tall Girl began to suspect that a mistaken identity might be a third.
For two days after the arrival of Cassian Rook in the doorway, she pursued the matter with a zeal which was not altogether unlike indignation and not altogether unlike scholarship. She carried a notebook with such seriousness that several people mistook her for somebody from student government, which did not improve her temper. She stopped acquaintances between classes, detained girls at coffee counters, and once intercepted a young man descending a staircase with such abruptness that he nearly apologized for crimes he had not yet committed.
The results were at once richer and less reliable than before.
The difficulty with collecting evidence on a college campus is not that there is too little of it, but that too much of it has passed through the human mouth. Facts at Benedictine did not walk from one person to another; they were dressed, corrected, interpreted, sympathized with, and very often improved. By the time the Tall Girl had spoken with seven students and one somewhat absent-minded professor, she had learned not only that there was another girl like her, but that the other girl was in French, out of French, on a service committee, leading a prayer group, avoiding a prayer group, carrying a violin case, and possibly engaged to a man in Omaha. None of these things could be established; all of them were related with the cheerful confidence peculiar to the half-informed.
Her roommate, who possessed the useful capacity of becoming more practical as others became more abstract, took over the management of the inquiry before it collapsed entirely into philosophy.
“No more asking, ‘Have you seen my ghost?’” she said. “It leads people.”
“It does not lead them more than they are already led,” said the Tall Girl.
“Yes, but it leads them in your direction. Ask exact questions. Time. Place. Clothes. Words. Not vibes.”
“I do not ask for vibes.”
“You collect them,” said her roommate.
This was not wholly unfair.
So they revised the method. The Tall Girl made columns in the notebook. One for place. One for time. One for who had made the identification. One for what had actually been seen. One for what had been inferred afterward. Under this last category she began to place an astonishing quantity of material.
There are men who say they believe in reason, but their reason consists mainly in never separating what they know from what they assume. The Tall Girl now found herself surrounded by such men and women at every turn. A girl had “seen her” outside the abbey after evening prayers; what she had actually seen was a tall figure in a dark coat turning toward the hill. A boy had “spoken with her” near the student center; what he had in fact done was ask a question of a tall girl with long hair who had answered briefly and moved away. A professor believed she had passed him in a corridor carrying a stack of books in both arms, but when pressed admitted that what fixed the impression was not the face, which he had barely seen, but the unusual height combined with what he called “a somewhat thoughtful or severe air.”
“A severe air,” repeated her roommate when this was reported. “That is a great triumph. You’ve become an atmosphere.”
The Tall Girl shut the notebook with mild violence.
“It is always the same,” she said. “No one sees her. They see one or two things and complete the rest. Height. Hair. Coat. Silence.”
“Yes,” said her roommate, peeling an orange with the concentration of a surgeon. “Which suggests your double is either a person or an equation.”
“I do not know whether that is clever or stupid.”
“It can be both. That’s what keeps life lively.”
The oddest part of it was not the repeated mistake, but the repeated insistence. Once corrected, people did not merely admit the possibility of error. They seemed affronted by it, as if reality had played a trick on them personally.
A girl in a cream sweater declared she had certainly seen the Tall Girl by the science building on Tuesday afternoon.
“I was in philosophy,” said the Tall Girl.
“Well, perhaps afterward.”
“No. Then I was at lunch.”
The girl frowned, not with uncertainty, but with resistance.
“But it was you.”
“How do you know?”
The girl opened her mouth. It was plain that she had never, in the full dignity of her being, considered such a question.
“You were tall,” she said at last.
“That narrows the kingdom but not the county,” said the Tall Girl.
Her roommate had to bite her knuckle to stop laughing.
By the end of that afternoon the inquiry had produced a pattern, but it was not yet a solution. The supposed appearances of the other one clustered in certain kinds of place: corridors, doorways, campus paths at dusk, the edges of gatherings, moments of arrival or departure. Rarely in full conversation. Rarely in bright light. Nearly always when the witness had already expected to see someone.
That evening the Tall Girl spread her notes across the bed while her roommate sat opposite her with knees drawn up beneath a blanket like a magistrate in exile.
“It is all thresholds,” said the Tall Girl.
“What?”
“Look. Doors. Hallways. Path crossings. Outside classes. Near events beginning or ending. People do not make the mistake in the middle of anything. They make it while entering one thing from another.”
Her roommate leaned over. “Huh.”
“It is not ‘huh.’ It is important.”
“Yes,” said the roommate. “But it can still be ‘huh.’”
The Tall Girl traced one line with her finger.
“It is not just that they are inattentive. They are transitional.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning they are partly occupied already. Their bodies are in one place and their minds in the next.”
Her roommate nodded slowly. “So they see what they expect to meet.”
The Tall Girl looked up.
“Yes.”
There was a silence then, not because either had run out of words, but because some sentences do not so much conclude a thought as ring around it. Outside the window a group of students were crossing the lawn in scarves and coats, their talk blown to pieces by the wind. They looked for a moment like figures in some old lantern show: bright here, gone there, reassembled under another light.
Her roommate broke the silence first.
“All right,” she said. “Suppose that’s true. What then?”
“Then,” said the Tall Girl, “I do not look for a girl who resembles me. I look for where people are prepared to recognize me before they have seen me.”
Her roommate stared.
“That sounded unpleasantly like Rook.”
The Tall Girl’s expression changed at once.
“I resent that.”
“As well you should.”
She gathered the papers together, but the name had been spoken, and once spoken it seemed to remain in the room with a composure of its own. Cassian Rook had not been seen since his appearance at the doorway, which made him either coincidental or strategic. The Tall Girl did not yet know which possibility was more irritating.
The answer came sooner than she expected.
It was the next afternoon, in the library. She was seated near a window with a small stack of books she had not opened because she was too busy watching people pass outside the glass and trying to decide whether observation was a science or a moral failing. The room had that peculiar scholarly hush which is not silence at all, but a constant negotiation among pages, chair legs, coughs, and private guilt.
Someone sat down in the chair opposite without asking permission.
She looked up and found Cassian Rook turning a pencil between his fingers as if it had been made only to wait.
“This,” she said, “is becoming a habit.”
“No,” said Rook. “A habit would imply I lack alternatives.”
She closed the book before her.
“Do you always begin by answering remarks that were not questions?”
“When the remarks are inaccurate, yes.”
He glanced at the notebook beside her hand.
“You have been industrious.”
“You have been informed.”
“Those are not necessarily the same thing.”
He had a way of speaking which made every sentence sound as if it had been tested elsewhere before being brought into public. She had met bright young men before; college was full of them as a pond is full of reflections. But most of them advertised their brightness in exactly the way bad merchants advertise a weak product: by noise, enlargement, and excessive emphasis. Rook did none of this. He spoke almost lazily, and because of that one had the uncomfortable sense that he chose precisely how much intelligence to show and how much to leave folded away.
“Were you looking for me,” she asked, “or for this table?”
“Neither. I was passing and saw that you were making exactly the mistake I expected.”
“I am delighted to hear I am predictable.”
“Everyone is predictable. The proud merely object to the word.”
She ignored this.
“What mistake?”
“You are still trying to identify a person.”
The Tall Girl rested both hands flat on the table.
“And what are you trying to identify?”
“A mechanism.”
He said it without drama. Yet because he said it so plainly, the word seemed at once larger than the room.
“The mechanism,” he went on, “by which people convert fragments into certainties. It is really one of the few amusements available in higher education.”
“It seems to be your chief amusement.”
“One must specialize.”
The Tall Girl regarded him a moment.
“There is another girl, then.”
“Oh, almost certainly.”
“That is not the same as knowing.”
“No,” said Rook. “It is merely superior to ignorance.”
She would have liked to answer sharply, but the truth is that she was interested now, and interest is the thing that most often disarms contempt.
“Have you seen her?”
He rolled the pencil once across the table, stopped it with one finger, and said, “Perhaps.”
“Is that another one of your brilliant evasions?”
“No. It is precision. If I tell you I saw a tall girl crossing a path in a dark coat, I have seen something. Whether I have seen your phantom is another matter.”
“You enjoy this.”
“I enjoy distinctions.”
He leaned back slightly in the chair.
“You are asking the wrong question. The useful question is not, ‘Who is she?’ It is, ‘At what moment do people decide she is you?’”
The Tall Girl was silent.
Rook studied her with an expression that was not quite amusement and not quite approval.
“You have almost reached it,” he said.
“I dislike being spoken to as if I were a puzzle box.”
“That is fortunate,” he said. “Because you are not one. You are the fixed point in someone else’s mistake.”
That landed more deeply than she liked. It was not an insult. If anything, it was too accurate to be one.
She opened the notebook and turned it toward him, though she was not sure afterward why she did so. Perhaps because one does not often meet a man who can be answered only by being tested.
“Then answer that,” she said. “Where does the mistake happen?”
He looked over the columns without touching the page.
“At the edges,” he said.
“I know that.”
“Then why are you still sitting in the middle?”
She frowned.
“The middle of what?”
“The campus. Events. Days. Your own identity. You are approaching the matter as if truth were seated politely at a table waiting for introduction.”
He rose.
“Go where the recognition forms before the recognition is spoken. Go where people are turning, arriving, half-seeing, half-thinking. The edges are where names fasten themselves.”
He started away, then paused.
“And,” he added, “pay attention to who corrects themselves fastest. They will tell you more than the others.”
He went off among the shelves with the same economy with which he seemed to do all things, neither hurrying nor lingering, and vanished at the turn like a sentence cut off just before its most useful clause.
The Tall Girl remained seated for some minutes, annoyed in a manner which would have been simpler had it not been so mixed with respect.
When she returned to the room and recounted the interview, her roommate threw up her hands.
“He is impossible.”
“He is insufferable.”
“He is also probably right.”
“Yes,” said the Tall Girl. “Which is making me worse.”
Her roommate narrowed her eyes.
“Did he flirt?”
The Tall Girl looked scandalized.
“No.”
“All right. Good. Because if his version of flirting is handing out epistemology, he can go elsewhere.”
The Tall Girl laughed then, and the laughter did more good than argument.
That evening they carried out the first truly deliberate experiment.
There was to be a campus event in one of the common spaces after supper—something social and religious and academic all at once, which is the Benedictine way of arranging that people talk earnestly while balancing paper cups. The Tall Girl had no interest in the event itself. But it offered what she wanted: arrivals, departures, expectations, and a crowd predisposed to half-recognition.
She and her roommate took up a position not in the room, but outside it, where the corridor opened into the stairwell and several paths of approach converged. They stood with a gravity which, had anyone noticed it, would have suggested espionage in a pious republic.
“I still think this is absurd,” murmured the roommate.
“It may be absurd and useful.”
“It may also be absurd and useless.”
“Yes,” said the Tall Girl. “But that is true of many experiments.”
Students passed them in groups, singly, talking loudly, talking softly, checking phones, straightening sleeves, saying hello over shoulders without stopping. The Tall Girl watched faces, not because she expected to see her double, but because she was trying to catch the exact instant in which a face recognized something that was not there.
At first nothing happened except what always happens on a college campus: greetings, partial greetings, gestures standing in for greetings, and at least one exchange consisting entirely of eyebrows.
Then a girl approaching from the stairs looked straight at the Tall Girl, smiled with immediate recognition, and lifted a hand.
“Hey—you made it.”
The Tall Girl did not answer.
The girl came nearer, her smile still present but now weakening slightly under the pressure of proximity. At six feet away she slowed. At four feet away she frowned.
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I thought you were—”
“Yes,” said the Tall Girl. “You thought I was.”
The girl blinked. “That is so weird.”
“What did you think I was?”
The girl laughed. “No, I mean—who. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
“Someone tall?”
“Yes.”
“Someone with long hair?”
“Yes.”
“Someone you expected to see here?”
The girl hesitated.
“Yes,” she said.
The Tall Girl nodded once.
“Thank you.”
The girl went on looking mildly alarmed, as if she had stumbled into an oral examination she had not studied for.
When she had gone inside, the Tall Girl turned to her roommate.
“There,” she said quietly. “Before she reached me she had already decided.”
Her roommate nodded. “And she was expecting the other girl.”
“Yes.”
“Do we know that?”
The Tall Girl thought a moment.
“No. But we know she was expecting someone. Which may be enough.”
They remained where they were for half an hour and observed three similar incidents, though none so clear. In one, a boy started a greeting toward the Tall Girl and changed course before the first syllable was finished. In another, a girl stared hard at her from the far end of the corridor, then visibly revised the thought before coming nearer. It was all very small, very fleeting, and yet so regular that the Tall Girl felt for the first time not merely surrounded by mistakes, but standing beside the machine that made them.
And then the machine altered.
It happened after the event had ended, when students were spilling back into the hall in the talkative untidiness that follows all organized human fellowship. The Tall Girl and her roommate had moved slightly aside to let the traffic pass. A group of three girls came out together, laughing. One of them looked directly at the Tall Girl—and stopped laughing.
For a moment the corridor noise seemed to thin around that face.
The girl was pale now, and not merely embarrassed.
“You,” she said.
The Tall Girl waited.
The girl stepped nearer.
“You were just inside.”
“No,” said the Tall Girl.
“Yes,” said the girl, with alarming certainty. “You were at the back near the wall. You were standing with someone.”
“I was here the entire time.”
“No,” said the girl again, and now there was something almost frightened in it. “I saw you.”
Her two companions had fallen silent.
The Tall Girl said very gently, “What exactly did you see?”
The girl swallowed.
“You were wearing—” She stopped. “No. Maybe not that. But it was you.”
“Did you see my face?”
The girl stared.
“I—”
“Or did you see someone of my height, in the same sort of coat, where you might expect me to be?”
The girl’s eyes flickered with the effort of undoing a certainty too quickly tied.
“I don’t know,” she said at last.
That was all. Yet it was the first honest answer the Tall Girl had had in days.
Afterward, when the corridor had emptied and they were walking back through the cold, the roommate shoved her hands deeper into her coat pockets and said:
“Well. We are getting somewhere.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
The Tall Girl looked ahead. The lights of the campus lay in intervals across the dark like stations on an uncertain route. Beneath them students crossed and recrossed, became silhouettes and then names, then silhouettes again.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that the other one exists.”
“That seems fair.”
“But I think she exists less than people think she does.”
Her roommate gave her a sidelong glance.
“That sounded very philosophical.”
“It is not philosophy. It is proportion.”
“You’ll have to explain the difference sometime.”
The Tall Girl did not answer. She was thinking of the frightened girl in the corridor. Not because the incident had been dramatic, but because it had been exact. The witness had not merely mistaken her. She had mistaken her and then watched the mistake collapse in front of her. That was useful. That was almost kind.
Back in the room, the Tall Girl opened the notebook and wrote several new lines beneath the old ones.
Recognition often occurs before the face is seen.
Expectation supplies identity.
The correction happens only at close range.
Some people are more honest in the correction than others.
Then, after a pause, she wrote:
Why have I still not seen her?
Her roommate, already half under the blanket with a book she did not intend to finish, said, “Because she’s avoiding you.”
The Tall Girl looked up.
“Do not say that unless you mean it.”
“I don’t mean it. I mean maybe.” She lowered the book. “Have you noticed the weirdest part?”
“There are many candidates.”
“You never mistake her for you.”
The Tall Girl stared.
Her roommate sat up a little.
“Everybody else is doing this constant accidental exchange. But you never see a girl and think, ‘There I am.’ That means either you’re more observant than everybody else—possible, annoying, and true—or she isn’t actually all that much like you.”
The Tall Girl did not speak for several seconds.
“That,” she said at last, “is a very important point.”
“I know. I was saving it until I deserved some credit.”
The Tall Girl went back to the notebook.
If the other girl had been her true likeness, then surely she must have seen something by now: a figure from behind, a crossing silhouette, a turn of the head that would send the heart one beat wrong. But she had never once done so. Not once. The mistake belonged entirely to others.
Which meant—what?
That the resemblance was real but partial? That the campus contained not one double but many fragments of one? That people were building “the other one” out of several girls the way men build legends out of several lives?
The thought was so strange and yet so natural that it seemed at once absurd and right.
She wrote another line:
Perhaps “the other one” is not one person but a shape distributed among several.
The words looked wild on the page. Yet when she had written them she felt the distinct, almost audible click that comes when one part of a lock has turned.
The next afternoon she got the second turn.
She was crossing one of the paths between buildings when she saw, at some distance ahead, a tall figure in a dark coat with loose hair moving toward the science building. The figure had precisely the kind of outline that must have trapped half the campus into error a dozen times over. For one instant the Tall Girl’s breath caught—not because she thought, There I am, but because she thought, There is the sort of thing.
She quickened her pace. The figure turned the corner of the building. The Tall Girl followed.
By the time she reached the corner the path beyond was nearly empty. A boy was descending the steps. Two girls were moving away in conversation. Near the door stood Cassian Rook, as if he had been posted there by the invisible committee that arranged his entrances.
He looked at her once, then down the path from which she had come.
“You are close now,” he said.
The Tall Girl, already weary of his habit of speaking like a man annotating reality, said, “Did you see her?”
“I saw someone.”
“Who?”
He looked almost disappointed.
“You are still asking for identity when you ought to be asking for structure.”
“I am asking,” said the Tall Girl, “because there was just now a tall girl in a dark coat with long hair who turned this corner and disappeared.”
“Yes,” said Rook.
“And?”
“And she turned this corner and disappeared.”
“There is nowhere to disappear to.”
He inclined his head toward the science building doors, the descending path, the side walk leading toward another hall.
“There are at least four places to disappear to. More, if one counts the human tendency to stop looking the moment a thing becomes inconvenient.”
She took a breath and kept her temper, which at that point deserved some recognition.
“Do you know her?”
Rook regarded her for a moment with that same calm attention that somehow managed to be both impersonal and intolerably direct.
“I know,” he said, “that you are nearing the point at which the question changes.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that soon you will no longer ask, ‘Who is the other one?’ You will ask, ‘What is it that everyone is making out of her?’ And when you ask that, you will be almost finished.”
“Finished with what?”
“With being mistaken for someone else,” he said. “And perhaps with mistaking everyone else for observers.”
He walked away before she could answer him, leaving her with the absurd wish to call him back and the stronger wish never to speak to him again.
She stood for some moments under the cold afternoon light, looking from path to door to steps. If the figure had entered the building, she was gone. If she had descended the path, she was gone. If she had turned aside, she was gone. But the disappearance no longer troubled the Tall Girl as it would have done two days before. For the first time, she was not interested in the vanished girl chiefly as a person. She was interested in the act by which a person became a story.
That evening she told the whole thing to her roommate, including the glimpse, the pursuit, and Rook’s exasperating remarks.
Her roommate listened with her hands around a mug of tea.
“So you finally almost saw her.”
“No,” said the Tall Girl. “I finally almost saw the shape of the mistake.”
Her roommate closed her eyes.
“You are becoming unbearable.”
“Perhaps.”
“No, definitely.”
The Tall Girl smiled faintly. Then the smile vanished as a new thought struck her with the suddenness of a bell.
“What if,” she said, “someone is being measured by this?”
“Measured?”
“Yes. Not in height. In reactions. In assumptions. In who speaks, who corrects, who does not.”
Her roommate stared. “You think Rook is behind it?”
The Tall Girl shook her head slowly.
“No. Not behind it. But near it.”
“That is somehow not comforting.”
“No,” said the Tall Girl. “It is not.”
She took up the notebook once more and wrote at the bottom of the page, beneath all the careful observations and half-formed theories:
The other one may be real. But the larger thing is what people build from half-seeing her.
Cassian Rook is watching the same thing.
Need one clear identification from someone who saw both badly and then better.
Need to know whether the other girl knows this is happening.
She set down the pen.
The room was quiet now except for the little sounds of pages and heat and winter pressing faintly against the glass. The Tall Girl looked at the title she had written on the first page:
THE OTHER ONE
It no longer seemed exactly right.
There was another girl somewhere. That much she now believed. But there was also something much larger moving through the halls and paths of Benedictine College: a false image assembled from hurry, expectation, politeness, embarrassment, and the lazy confidence with which men claim to know one another.
The other one was not just a girl.
She was an idea wearing a coat.
And because that thought at once clarified and darkened everything, the Tall Girl turned to a new page and wrote a new heading beneath the first:
THE SHAPE OF A PERSON
Then she closed the notebook.
“I do not like this,” said her roommate from the bed.
“Why not?”
“Because it feels like the point where a thing stops being funny.”
The Tall Girl looked out the window into the cold, lit campus where figures crossed in twos and threes under the lamps, appearing, disappearing, and appearing again.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“I think it is.”