The Reflections
by Edward Daschle
Paul had read online that Ishøj Strand was where he could cruise for sex, if that was what he wanted. He’d taken the metro and a train from Vanløse, and then spent the morning at the museum. In one gallery, a cloven cow floated in a tank of blue liquid, and in another murals collaged from garbage decorated the walls. A broken wagon wheel in particular caught Paul’s eye, and he took a selfie with the wheel as his halo. Lunch at the museum was overpriced, though even after a half a year in Denmark it took him a moment to figure out what too expensive meant in kroner—he still always did a rough conversion back to dollars in his head. But from where he was sitting, he could look out at the water while he ate. Below, blond families ran from the gray waves breaking into lacy foam; bunches of stinking seaweed sat in clumps as though baled; and far beyond, at just about the edge of where Paul could see, a rough-hewn, stone jetty cut the beach in two.
Past the jetty there was a vast thicket of scrub, scratchy, hard, and dark. But on the thin stretch between the water and the scrub, naked men on beach towels tiled the fine and pale sand. Paul made his way carefully through the scrub, watching the horizon and his now approximate goal. Occasionally, he saw men stand up, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs. It was like a harvest of mandrakes revealing themselves to the world. When he reached the water, he hopped down the bank and stood there feeling especially conspicuous, fully clothed as he was and with his backpack making him look more like a hiker than a cruiser.
“Hvad fanden laver du?”
“Oh, sorry, I don’t speak…” Paul said in return, though it took him a moment to see the elderly man who had croaked up at him from the sand. The man looked like an overturned amphora, flaccid penis an unintentional imperfection in the craftsmanship. “Just English.”
“Strip or move along,” the man said.
Paul moved along. He wasn’t about to strip on command and set a precedent he didn’t mean to uphold. He figured he’d find an open space and set himself up there, but either way, he couldn’t walk much longer, if he did, he’d end up making a loop of his wanderings and turn back without ever joining in. Some of the men he passed glanced up at him, others appeared to be sleeping. A few were jacking off languidly, but none were actively fucking. That must happen amongst the scrub, Paul thought, in the sandpit clearings where they might find a modicum of privacy.
Finally, he found a gap where he could lay down his towel. He slipped off his clothes and then lay on his stomach, letting the cloud-filtered light have its way with his shoulders and ass. And soon enough he began to relax. He realized he hadn’t been without any distractions—no music, audiobook, or podcast—for ages. Forget fucking, forget the old men who wouldn’t satisfy him anyways, he could just lie on the sand in blissful silence. Maybe even pass the rest of his life that way.
The man who appeared beside Paul was young, he thought, though he didn’t look up at first to see, judging instead by the tanned toes and smooth nailbeds.
“Sorry, I don’t,” Paul said when the man began to speak to him in Danish.
“Do you want some company?” the man asked in English without even the light accent Paul had come to expect from Danes, and Paul turned to him. He was already undressed, his towel draped over one shoulder, and Paul let his gaze wander up the man’s body, pausing at the lovely and familiar cock.
“Jesper,” the man said casually, introducing himself. But this man wasn’t “Jesper” he was Caleb. He was blond, brown-eyed, tall, and pale, but even beyond the superficial, Paul would’ve been more than certain no matter how he introduced himself that this was Caleb. Even the shape of his penis was the same as Caleb’s had been. And the same as his own. Because Caleb was Paul’s doppelgänger.
***
Paul met Caleb in the figure drawing class he took as a college sophomore. The first model Paul sketched was an older woman with curves and folds to her body. He’d been embarrassed at first, on her behalf for being alone in her nudity, but then too on his own for being so unaccustomed to nudity. As she danced through a series of fifteen-second poses, Paul slowly relaxed his shoulders and back, and his lines became stronger, longer, and looser. In the following weeks, the nudity of the models stopped bothering him, and he thought idly about signing up to model in the following semester when he wouldn’t know the other students. It might be an interesting experience, and he’d heard it paid okay.
Though not usually late, he was late the day Caleb modeled. In his apologetic rush, he was even more confused than he might’ve been when he saw his doppelgänger with a fist under his chin posed somewhat like The Thinker. He took a lurching step and blinked, wondering if this was one of those dreams he hated where he went through all the work of a whole day and then had to do the work again after waking up.
“Take an easel, Paul,” his professor said while she circled.
Paul set up his easel but found he could only hover his charcoal over the vast, blank page. While to either side of him his peers sketched furiously, long, loose lines of their impressions filling page after page, Paul stood there gazing at his naked reflection who inextricably wasn’t mirroring his static stare. The experience was unnerving, but Caleb was entrancing. There was a confidence in the strong lines he made of his body while he posed. And maybe this confidence made Caleb look nothing like Paul to everyone else, because none of his classmates were leaning over to ask him if the model was his long-lost twin or something, Parent Trap style.
Halfway through the class, while in a pose reminiscent of Flashdance, Caleb got hard. His cock stuck straight out from his arched body like Excalibur in its stone. And yet, to Paul’s embarrassment if not Caleb’s, he maintained his pose.
“Cover up please,” the professor said in a brittle, tired voice. Caleb raised his head languidly. He stepped down from the platform and hobbled across the cold, concrete floor of the studio, leaving his bobbing genitals blatantly uncovered.
“Sorry about that, won’t happen again!” Caleb said with offhanded ease and a smile, while he hopped his pants up his bare legs and then shrugged his shirt over his head.
“Of course,” the professor said with a gentle frown, “but I think we’d better end here for today. Alright, everyone, chiaroscuro, don’t forget, due next week!”
Caleb was still tying his shoes when Paul rushed by him out the door, uncertain about whether he hoped to meet his double again or not.
***
“It’s been a while,” Paul ventured once Jesper lay down beside him. He hoped Caleb would acknowledge the game he was playing. But instead of a revelation, Paul felt a hand on his cock. Paul waited a moment while he got hard, but he thought he understood the rules and didn’t say anything more. After a few moments of jerking him off, Jesper turned to Paul eyebrows raised. He released Paul’s cock and grabbed his hand to guide it to his own cock. They jerked each other off in silence for a time, the waves white noise, the sun white heat on their backs.
“C’mon,” Jesper said softly and stood, hands cupped around his cock and balls to hide his erection. Paul followed Jesper into the waves, watching the other man’s ass. Since he didn’t spend much time looking at his own ass, it was easy enough to pretend that this was the ass of a man named Jesper. That this wasn’t a copy of his own ass walking down the beach before him, a copy of Caleb’s ass, which had given him so much trouble.
They dried off while the other sunbathers looked on, and then Jesper guided Paul further up the beach into a clearing in the scrub. Paul was about to say something, because despite what they had already done, sex with Jesper was not what he wanted, not until he got a better handle on what was going on. A middle-aged man, however, had followed them, already slowly jerking off before they’d even started.
“I should get home,” Paul said, glancing at the man, as though this were the reason. “I have stuff to get done tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
***
“Fuck!” was the first thing Caleb said to Paul. They were both at the Halloween Pride Party. “You were in that figure drawing class. Disaster, right?”
“I figured you’d have blocked it out,” Paul said, with a casualness he maintained like a pressure sealed lid, waiting to explode.
“Nah, it was whatever, I mean what was I supposed to do, right? It was just a natural thing,” Caleb said, and laughed.
Paul nodded.
“Hey, we’re matching,” Caleb said then, gesturing between the two of them.
“What?” Paul said, pulse beating fast, constricting his throat. Was Caleb about to acknowledge what they were? And really, what were they? He’d thought in the days after the figure drawing class that he’d imagined the similarity, the result of a night of little sleep and an 8 AM class. But now here was Caleb again and here was Paul newly arrived at the party without a drink in him. And Caleb still looked to Paul like his perfect copy. Though would Caleb say he was the copy or the original?
“Frank-N-Furter,” he then said. “Great minds.”
“Oh, yeah,” Paul said and crossed his arms across his corseted chest. He was uncomfortable in the costume; it made him look like he’d had a lot of sex before, though he hadn’t. He was as fresh as they came. He’d managed to convince himself to put on the heels and the bad wig and the fishnets and the corset because alone in his room the costume had made him feel powerful in a way he’d lost as soon as he’d arrived at the party. But now here was Caleb, lounging in all his camp glory, all that power reclaimed and embodied.
“So, what’s your major?” Paul asked, uncertain of how else to move past the disaster of the art class.
“ Art,” Caleb said, “it’s kind of my thing.” He shrugged. “So hey, since you’ve already seen my dick, want to make out?”
Paul wasn’t certain he did, but also wasn’t certain he didn’t, and so he did. Because if Caleb had offered then maybe whatever similarity Paul saw was only in his own eyes. And besides, he’d never kissed anyone before and who would be safer to kiss for the first time than his double?
***
Jesper and Paul dressed and walked back to the station, where they missed one train while Jesper bought a pain au chocolat from the 7/11 but caught the next. Two girls slipped onto the train just before the doors closed and Jesper quickly pulled his hand out of Paul’s shorts. The girls took the seats opposite while Paul pretended he’d been on his phone and Jesper grinned through the graffitied window.
“I have an uncle in Texas,” one of the girls said as the train pulled away. She sounded Russian, Paul thought, maybe Ukrainian or Czech, but not Danish, though he wasn’t certain. “He said I could visit him. He’s very American. He shoots rabbits from his back porch.”
The other girl laughed. “But I heard America’s dangerous. You could get lost there and disappear forever. You could be kidnapped.”
“I guess, but isn’t that the dream? To disappear in America?”
“Yeah.”
Paul and Jesper got off at Central Station; Jesper had suggested Paul join him in the city before heading home, and Paul, still hoping Jesper might come clean, had gone along with it.
“Disappear in America?” Paul asked.
“It can happen, America’s a dangerous place,” Jesper said with a shrug.
“Yeah, but so is Russia, I mean they sounded Russian.”
“I suppose they both seem that way, just depends where you’re from.”
Outside the station, Tivoli was loud and alight, tinny music playing, shimmering rides clattering by, people talking and screaming as they dropped. It was colorful and golden at the corner of Paul’s field of vision, though no matter where he looked everyone was wearing black.
***
They weren’t together after Halloween, not exclusively anyways. Sometimes at parties they kissed, other times Caleb hooked up with different guys after Paul went home for the night.
“Are you guys brothers?” a drunk girl at a party asked them. Inexplicably, she’d decided to ask her question only after they’d pulled apart to breathe, Caleb still with his hand up the back of Paul’s shirt.
“Absolutely,” Caleb said before grabbing Paul’s crotch and kissing his neck.
“What the fuck,” the girl said before the throbbing throng sucked her back into the darkened living room.
Caleb moved from Paul’s neck to his earlobe, but Paul couldn’t feel a thing. He’d gone cold and numb. Maybe she’d just been doing that straight person thing, always confusing gay couples for brothers. But maybe not. And he didn’t know which was worse: that he was crazy and was the only one who saw Caleb as his double, or that he was crazy and went to parties each weekend with the goal of kissing his twin.
***
“Let’s get something to eat,” Jesper said while they walked across Rådhuspladsen past city hall. The temporary green walls blocking pedestrians from the construction work underway were still up, eyesores, though in the winter they had offered welcome relief from the biting winds that ripped across the square.
“It’s still early,” Paul said.
“Then we can get some beers and head to Ørstedsparken for a bit, I want you to tell me all about yourself,” Jesper said. He took Paul’s hand, fumbling with it for a moment before he got their fingers correctly interlaced.
“I really can’t,” Paul said, but he knew he sounded like he didn’t mean it. Somewhere between the beach and the city, he’d begun to believe that Jesper wasn’t Caleb. That maybe there was a factory out there somewhere pumping his doubles out into the world to fuck him up and make him fall in love. Because bitterly, he realized he was falling for Jesper. Was narcissism the only way he could love?
“You’re making this difficult,” Jesper said, neither scolding nor playing coy. “C’mon the sun is shining. We are young and you are lovely. Stay, we’ll have a good time.”
Paul looked up to the empty blue sky and sighed.
“Okay,” he said. Jesper smiled and pulled him close.
***
During their junior year, Caleb and Paul took a soft break from each other to study abroad. Caleb had enrolled last minute in a yearlong art program in Rome, and though Paul had hoped to join him, by the time Caleb had told him where he was going, the deadline had passed. And so instead, Paul winded up spending a frigid spring in Denmark.
When they returned for their senior year, Caleb’s art had advanced significantly and his professors both at home and abroad had taken notice. He’d even received the Rome program’s distinguished student award. Paul, however, had created nothing new. Even the pictures he’d taken looked like those any tourist might take, and he deleted them from his phone and computer not long after reuniting with Caleb.
“I think I’m going for honors,” Caleb told Paul late one night at the start of the semester while they lay together in bed.
“Yeah?”
“My advisor says I’m there.”
Paul’s advisor hadn’t said anything to him about the matter, but he’d been thinking about honors over the summer when he wasn’t thinking about Caleb. Paul turned on his side to face him. The light from the streetlamp was flooding through their bedroom’s cheap mini blinds, striping Caleb with shadows in the pattern of a piano keyboard.
“I’d like to paint you,” Paul said, and placed a hand on Caleb’s chest.
Caleb held his gaze and then turned on his side away from Paul. He took Paul’s hand and pulled him close, grinding his ass into Paul’s crotch until Paul was hard and distracted. Later, they fell asleep.
Over the course of the semester, Paul painted Caleb. He considered painting Caleb as gay icons, as saints, and he started painting him as the major tarot arcana until Caleb told him the idea was derivative, which Paul admitted it was. Caleb was cagey about his own portfolio. Every moment he wasn’t with Paul he was in the studio and yet he didn’t let Paul in, didn’t let any notion of what he was working on slip out.
When at the end of their senior year Caleb debuted his honors portfolio, the work was entirely new to Paul. A series of pale paintings ringed the exhibition room. The paintings featured fences, hedges, flowers, and, in one, a pickup truck, all covered in cloth. It was like looking at a whole world put away and protected from dust. It was not what Paul had expected, but it crumbled his insides and left him shaky. Paul had finally settled on a theme for his own portfolio; a collection of the surrealist paintings, scenes from dreams he’d recorded over the past year, his central work a painting of Caleb, blue skinned and striped, lying on a moonlit beach as though he were both the dreamer and another dream. But where Caleb’s work had a cohesive vision, Paul’s work scrambled this way and that, less a curated exhibition than a retrospective on his college arts career. The final piece in Caleb’s portfolio took what was left of Paul’s delicate internal architecture and blew it away as a puff of dust. The piece was a painting hanging alone on the last wall of the gallery depicting a sleeping figure covered in a gossamer cloth, a cloth so fine every feature of the man underneath could be seen and recognized as Paul’s own, or else as a self-portrait of Caleb. The figure was striped with light and shadow. Paul wondered abstractly if the first thing he’d do when he had his own portfolio back from being graded was destroy it.
At the end of the night, they sat beside each other on the floor with their backs to the wall, shirts untucked and halfway unbuttoned. Paul stared at their shared likeness in the painting opposite until Caleb straddled him.
“Fucking amazing, right?” Caleb said, while he finished unbuttoning Paul’s shirt. Paul didn’t say that he’d wished Caleb had showed him the work while it was in progress. He didn’t think he could stand to hear Caleb tell him why he hadn’t. And he didn’t ask Caleb how they both ended up painting such similar central pieces. Because again he didn’t think he could stand to hear the answer, not that night, maybe not ever. They had sex on the gallery floor, and then not long after the semester was over.
***
That night they went to a club Paul had noticed before, but never visited. A line of men in tight, black jeans or else tight shorts and very little else stretched down the block. Though it was well past midnight, it was still warm, and nobody looked tired. Inside, the atmosphere was cloying and moist; sweat dripped down the walls as groups of men bounced off each other like midges. Jesper ordered shots and Paul threw them back with abandon, not sure whether he was hoping for clarity or stupefaction.
A short, dark-haired man grinded up against Jesper, bucking his hips boisterously. Jesper wrapped his arms around Paul so that the man was pressed between them. For a time, the three of them moved together, flowing with the high decibel current of the music and then the man stood on tiptoes to whisper something in Jesper’s ear before discreetly revealing a small container of something.
“Not interested?” Jesper asked when Paul didn’t immediately follow as the man led him to the toilets.
“Why the fuck are you?” Paul yelled at Jesper over the music. “Can you tell me that? What the fuck is this? Mirrors fuck me up. I keep thinking…and it’s insane, or I am! All these years and I was just starting to think that maybe…and then you show up. And I can’t—”
***
A week after graduation, Caleb vanished. He’d taken half of everything in the apartment, though since they shared it all even down to their underwear, Paul couldn’t say with any certainty that Caleb had taken anything of Paul’s with him. Paul texted and then he called, but nothing got through or was returned. Either Caleb had set up new accounts or else he had blocked Paul from messaging him with brutal fastidiousness. He tried calling up his friends next, but they had very little to say about the matter, all offering little more than halfhearted condolences about the breakup. Only then did Paul realize their friends were all Caleb’s friends before they were his friends. It wasn’t that Caleb had taken from him, it was just that what they’d shared had started out as Caleb’s and remained so.
***
Or maybe that was only what Paul wanted to yell at Jesper, because all Jesper did was smile, shrug, and follow the dark-haired man. Paul charged out of the club, oblivious to the tall, skinny Danes he was pushing aside like corn stalks. This time, he would be the one to leave. But instead of leaving, he squatted with his arms around his knees for what felt like half the night. He hadn’t meant to wait for Jesper, but there Paul was still sitting just outside the club when Jesper emerged and joined him.
“There you are!” Jesper said. “You alright?”
“Yeah, sure,” Paul said. “Just not feeling it, you know?”
“That’s too bad, I know a better place nearby,” Jesper said. “I can show you.”
“I’m not new to the city.”
“Oh? I thought you were, how long…?”
“Eight months,” Paul admitted.
“That’s nothing at all!” Jesper said, and tugged Paul to his feet.
“No, I guess not, but I can’t, not,” Paul said, annulling the “tonight” before he’d spoken it because the word implied something he didn’t mean.
“Yeah, okay,” Jesper said. “Take my number, we can go another night then.”
After they exchanged numbers, because Paul figured this would be simpler than denying him, they walked up to Nørreport Station where they could both take the Metro home. They would be going in opposite directions.
“Vi ses i morgen,” Paul said before remembering what it meant in English. It was one of the few phrases he did have, what he and his coworkers always said to each other at the end of the day before they left the office. But Paul didn’t intend to see Jesper the next day, he didn’t want to see him ever again.
Jesper smiled, and as the metro doors shut, Paul saw himself three times over, twice in the double layers of glass, every version watching him. And then Jesper was gone, shot away into the dark, leaving Paul alone with his reflections.
Edward Daschle (he/him/his) is a fiction writer currently studying in the University of Maryland’s MFA program. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest, the land of serial killers and Sasquatch, deadly mountains and overcast skies. His fiction has previously appeared in Grim & Gilded.