by Ken Foxe
If my shadow ever spoke, I’d imagine he would sound exactly like me. Everything else is the same, every limb, every hair, the way he nods and smiles, the gap between his two front teeth. I don’t know if he is mute, but he has never uttered a single word. Every minute of every day, he is there. Sometimes behind me, beside me, in front of me, standing, often sitting, never resting. Forever jotting down his thoughts in a Moleskine notepad. He holds his silver pen in his left hand, even though I am right-handed. And when I go to look at what he is writing, he always jerks the page away.
He is getting bolder, his physical interventions becoming more frequent. Just last week, he slashed the tyre of my bicycle when I wasn’t looking. A fortnight ago, he tore a branch from a sapling along the canal. I think I drive him mad, just as he drives me mad. He sees the opportunities I’ve had, cannot understand how I have let them pass by. I see him tutting, throwing his eyes to heaven, and a quiet fury in his face that wasn’t there last year. It’s as if he thinks I have been wasting both our lives.
He has been with me since I can remember, all the way back to that period when my memories are fuzzy like a photograph that wasn’t developed right. Back then, he would come and go like he had other matters to attend to. Perhaps in the shadow world, he had different tasks.
My parents thought he was an imaginary friend, and I suppose I became convinced of that too. Other children played with their imaginary friends though; mine just lowered his head any time I tried to speak to him. If I went to touch him, he would move, more quickly than I could, so that my fingers would be left trailing in the air.
He seemed to grow at the same rate as me, so that he was almost always my mirror image. If my mother cut my hair, he might vanish for half an hour and then come back with the same ‘style’. He wore the same clothes as me, and if my trousers had a rip in the knee, so did his. I can’t say if he felt my pain because I can’t ask him. But I know he has a scar where we had our appendix out. I am certain he did not feel the loneliness I felt from having a perpetually silent companion. Because if he did, he could have just answered me.
I’ve lived a solitary existence all my life despite never being on my own. Even though no one can see my shadow, other kids sensed it. Like there was something different about me, a little askew. The way my eyes would mid-conversation get drawn inexplicably away. Or times they’d catch me whispering questions to my other half even though I knew there’d be no answer.
It wasn’t so bad. I always liked my own company. I was one of those people happiest when reading a book in a quiet library or under a night light in my bedroom. Or maybe that’s just how I adjusted to things. My parents were my best friends all my life, and the only two people that really knew about my shadow. They were killed in a car accident last year. I remember when the call came to break the news, my shadow didn’t look at me for the rest of the day.
I was in second year of school the first time I saw a psychiatrist. I patiently explained my dual existence and the doctor seemed surprised that somebody so young would have developed such concrete delusions. The shadow sat on the walnut desk throughout, taking his own account of the appointment.
The psychiatrist put me on medication. I didn’t like it; it made me feel like a spectator to my own life, almost as if I was looking down on both myself and my shadow. At the next appointment, I said I had fabricated it all – that it was all a fiction. I’d only said it because I was being bullied in school. That much was true.
It taught me a lesson that my unspeaking twin should not be spoken of. Not with my parents, not with my teachers, and certainly not with a medical professional. Besides, my shadow did me no harm. All he ever did was write in his pad. I learned to ignore him even as he lurked in the corner of my eye. He hadn’t turned on me yet, was still giving me every chance to make something of myself.
I remember there was a new girl moved onto my road. She was a goth, black hair, black clothes, black make-up et cetera. This strange friendless teenage boy on her street seemed like a good experiment. I remember when she tried to kiss me, how my shadow stood behind her, averting his eyes. I couldn’t do it with him pretending not to look. I still regret it; it’s never happened since. I’ve never let anyone get close enough to me. She went away to university in Manchester not long after; I stayed in Dublin and went to DCU.
I remember in my final year of secondary school sitting in the office of a kindly career guidance officer named Michael. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself as I was only seventeen. My grades were good, and I was going to have options. As I was getting ready to leave, Michael said to me: “I know this school has been tough for you at times Vincent. But people like you and me, we thrive in university – you’ll find your tribe.” I clung onto those words like a baby grasping on fingers.
I remember we were sitting in the Larkin Lecture Theatre for induction. There were a hundred or so other students in our computing class; I’d never been in a group that size. Our tutor was explaining the year ahead, the expectations, how we needed to find the right balance. How, the failure rate in our course was high but always fair. I sat there on my hands, nervously wondering if any of these people would like me. My shadow, invisible, oblivious to everyone, sat in the front row scribbling notes.
My first nervous breakdown arrived that Christmas. I could blame exams, the fact I still hadn’t found my “tribe” or give any of a hundred excuses. The ungilded truth is it had been coming all my life. I remember lying on the bed of a room in a private psychiatric hospital, my shadow pacing back and forth. It was like he blamed himself, that he would have to account for what had happened.
I was sitting on a sofa in the hospital’s café, my mother by my side stroking my hand softly, afraid I might break. The tables were spread out at much greater than normal distance.
“You still see things, don’t you?” she said.
“Only one thing,” I said.
“Like when you were young?” she asked.
“It’s never changed.”
“And what does he say to you? Does he tell you to do things?”
“Never.”
The shadow sat across from us in a wicker chair. He was stroking the little unkempt beard we’d grown, seemed lost in thought. My mother caught me looking at him.
“Is he here now?”
“Always,” I said. And then I caught myself and told her she could not tell anybody. That I was not a risk to myself or anybody else. That she could go to sleep safe in the knowledge that I’d still be here in the morning.
I think telling my mum was cathartic so that I was not always stumbling beneath the weight of my secret. I recovered that time, and for some time. Through trial and error, my psychiatrist Dr Maxwell managed to reset my mind. He found just the right combination of two anti-depressants. I remember the day before I was discharged, sitting in his office in a well-worn black leather armchair. “This doesn’t have to define you,” he told me. “You’re only a young man.” I took those words and built armour from them.
That hard shell was sturdy enough that I could return to university. I made some friends in college but got close to none of them. At the long tables of DCU’s canteen, a large group of us – young men, acne and spectacles – would eat bland food and wash it down with bitter coffee. I would pretend to listen intently to the conversation, waiting until we were ready to return to the computer laboratory. And as we would ramble back to our red-brick building, I would lag lest I get caught in one-to-one conversation.
Being a little odd in that class was not so unusual, but even among the outsiders, I was still further outside. Does that sound dreadful? It wasn’t – I had years to get well-adjusted to solitude. My true love had been found in programming a computer, in the perfect melody of ones and zeros. I was happy in front of a screen, listening to the whir of hard drives and the faint tapping of keys. The shadow remained ever-present at my shoulder. Perhaps he was checking to see if my code was correct.
I graduated in the top ten per cent of my class and was recruited immediately, taking up a graduate position with Google in Dublin’s thriving Silicon Docks. I stayed living at home with my parents; I think my mum was happy to have me close at hand. They still treated me as a fragile thing, an item to be delicately handled. But day-by-day, you could see them growing more confident in my ability to survive. Even my shadow seemed pleased with my progress, did not seem to need to write nearly so much. Each of his Moleskine notebooks would last a little longer before he had to get a new one. Oftentimes, I’d catch him dozing during the day.
I had more money than I knew what to do with. My job paid well, and I was good at it. Quickly, it paid even better. I had no rent to pay, had to almost force my mother to take a few hundred euro for ‘lodgings’ each month. I tried an office party just once, vomited because I was not used to alcohol, and had to be taken home in a taxi.
The shadow sat by my side; I think he was worried I might have to get my stomach pumped. That was the end of my social life in Google but what of it? I bought a few nice things, nice shirts and suits, a Swiss watch, the best phones, tablets, games consoles, and laptops. Truth is I would’ve been just as happy working on an old Amstrad or Commodore. My bank balance grew healthier – if only I’d had something purposeful to use it for.
A big project came up at work on cloud-based applications, back in the mid-2000s. The company wanted me to lead a team of four people, said I was ‘the right person for the job’. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea when it was suggested. But my shadow was standing directly beside my boss in his glass-walled corner office, nodding his head vigorously in encouragement as if urging me to take it on.
I remember saying to myself: ‘I’m ready for this.’ I felt strong at the time, like my mental health difficulties were harmless shrapnel from another life.
“Vincent, do you want to do this?” my boss said, sensing my doubt.
“Yes,” I said, my fingers quivering. My words were firm, but the foundations were set in silt. It’s so easy to say in hindsight of course – but I should have known better than to pay heed to my shadow.
We had stand-up meetings every morning, me and my team in one of the small conference rooms overlooking Barrow Street. There was supposed to be a time limit of fifteen minutes, but I could never keep to it. I would stammer my way through them, fidgeting, obsessing over small details that had nothing to do with me. The room, its small round table, its six chairs, and gigantic beanbag, its Nespresso machine, became a prison of my self-doubt.
I knew I was an impostor, and my eye would constantly be drawn to the corner of the room where stood my shadow, his face chiselled with disappointment. The team tried to tolerate my management ‘style’, did their best to help. But we were falling behind and after eight torturous weeks, a complaint was made about me. Thinking back on whoever made it, who could blame them?
“Why don’t you take a vacation?” my boss said, and I knew it wasn’t a question. “A couple of weeks off to recharge your batteries.”
“Sure,” I said. I packed up my laptop and took the train home. I wouldn’t leave the house except to cycle my bike down through the Strawberry Beds. I could sense the words ‘not again’ in every sentence my parents spoke to me, poorly disguised in their soft entreaties.
One evening, my mother sat at the end of my bed, tenderly rubbing my feet through the quilt, convinced me to go back to the psychiatric hospital. That was the end of my career as such. I had jobs afterwards, but in junior positions where I would work slowly, and always pretend I knew less than I did. It was self-protection just in case anybody ever thought I should be promoted. I remember days where I got my daily work done by 11am and spent the rest of my hours reading articles on Wikipedia. I suppose that’s when the shadow first started to turn against me.
Life took on a predictable and disheartening rhythm. A new job, later an apologetic resignation letter. Sometimes, there would be in-patient treatment while other times, a few weeks at home would suffice. This process, in one form or another, would be repeated every couple of years.
It was like the world’s most tedious rollercoaster, an infinite track going up and down, the shadow always stuck fast behind the bar next to me in the car. My parents aged more quickly than they should have and spent far too much of their precious time picking up my broken pieces.
I was in one of my steady periods. My dad was retiring from his job in the civil service. He’d always spoken of a cross-country drive across the United States, and I had money sitting in my bank account doing nothing and with no plans for it. I arranged it all with my mum, the sailing from Southampton to New York, a luxury campervan, the first-class tickets back from Los Angeles. They would ring me every night to see how I was, subtly probing as to whether I was ‘really’ okay. It was the trip of a lifetime until a deer ran across their path on a corkscrew mountain road forty miles west of Denver.
Hard to believe it’s already been a year. I was certain I’d break down because I had collapsed beneath much lighter weights before. But it didn’t happen that way. That first week, there was too much to do. Getting them home, the funeral, the burial, my abiding companion in sombre silence beside me in his black suit.
The sadness knotted tight around me but in a melancholic way. There was a kind of guilty relief too – with nobody left to disappoint except my shadow. I took bereavement leave from my job, and I never went back. I had no need to work, was free from the lowly data entry positions that punctuated the late years of my so-called career. The house in Clonsilla was left for me along with my parent’s savings.
I found a new routine cycling along meandering back roads. On sunny days, I’d sit off on the Royal Canal watching ducks and swans sail by. In coffee shops in Leixlip and Maynooth, I’d drink cappuccinos, eat cookies, and read a book. I was happy to do nothing, contentedly trapped in a sort of blithe stagnation. My shadow though, he hated it. On the bike behind me, he’d struggle to keep the wheel as my thighs and calves grew stronger. Along the grassy canal banks and in the cafés, he’d pace up and down as if he had something more important to be doing.
He hit me last night while I was reading. It wasn’t so much the force of the punch but how he caught me unaware. He must’ve been standing right behind me, and he connected square on the side of my head, so that my ear was ringing. He sat on the floor in front of me, his head in his hands, like he immediately regretted it.
“How dare you?” I screamed. “After everything I’ve been through.” I was hysterical. “Go on, say something,” I roared. “As if you could have done things better?”
The shadow looked at me; captured my eyes in a long gaze. He seemed to be looking through me, in me, over me, and around me. The next thing I knew, I was sitting silently on the floor with a Moleskine pad and a silver pen. I tried to speak but no words were forthcoming from my lips. All that was left was to jot down notes of his life to come.
Ken Foxe is a writer and transparency activist in Ireland. He is the author of two non-fiction books based on his journalism and a member of the Horror Writer’s Association. He has had around three dozen short stories published in a wide variety of journals, magazines, and anthologies. You can find him on Instagram (@kenfoxe) and Twitter/X (@kenfoxe).