I came to save you all but I am too late

The lunatics were right.

I speak of the lonely ranters and pamphleteers that approach you on street corners, all of them carrying the burden of some horrible truth that only they know, be it the secret satanic motives of Christian rock or George Bush’s planning of the 9/11 attacks. I shrink from these poor souls, even as I can’t help but admire their willfulness in professing a reality completely contrary to the accepted facts. Would that I had such self-confidence.

But I have slowly come to realize there truly is a conspiracy lurking beneath the surface of the everyday. Its tendrils burrow into the most innocuous moments of our lives and claim them for its own purposes--purposes that are beyond knowing not only by those outside the conspiracy, but those inside it as well. The size of this conspiracy might as well be infinite, for like infinity its exact proportions can never be contained within a mortal mind. Its goals are unknown; they could be either benign or malignant. It is possible that the conspiracy has grown to such proportions that ordinary moral categories can no longer be applied to it.

I apologize if this all sounds vague, but I have only begun to grasp the significance of the conspiracy. All I can tell you is that it exists. I know this because I am a part of it.

Not willingly, of course. The conspiracy works like some sort of terrorist organization, drafting people into its shadow army before they are even aware of what is happening. By the time they understand, they are in too far to resist. Individual operatives are unaware of others in the organization. They may encounter another agent briefly, but only once. There are no regular contacts.

Years after the fact, I only realize now that my first encounter with the conspiracy occurred when a cashier at the grocery store casually noted how closely I resembled her brother-in-law Jim. “Hi, Jim,” she would say whenever she saw me. It became a harmless joke between strangers, and I accepted it. My face is just a bit common, I would tell myself. There’s nothing strange about looking like someone else. It happens all the time. If it had ended there, I would not have thought any more of it.

My second encounter with the conspiracy occurred when I worked at a fish market/restaurant. Some of my coworkers claimed that one of the regular patrons of the restaurant looked almost exactly like me. One waitress even liked to say that this man ate just like me. How does he eat like me, I would demand to know. How do I eat? What on earth does that even mean? And the waitress would half-heartedly say something about how he holds his utensils, or sits at the table, or something like that, and then she would carry on insisting that we were practically identical in every way.

This went on for some time without me ever seeing my double. Still, my coworkers kept me well-informed of when he had been in, what he had eaten, how similar to me he had looked while eating, etc. Undoubtedly, he was just as well-informed of my own comings and goings. Christine, one of the waitresses, even took to calling him Joe, much like I had been called Jim by the cashier at the grocery store. All three of us were linked, switching names as casually as hats, all of us as interchangeable as front-line soldiers in a war (but what war did we fight? The generals told us nothing). And still, I had not yet met this other Joe.

Finally, the encounter happened after weeks of build-up. As I was standing alone behind the counter, I watched as a man left the restaurant. His hair was a light, sandy brown, and he had a mustache. He seemed a couple of inches shorter than me and probably thinner. But as he passed, he stared at me and I met his gaze. Neither of us spoke, but I could read his thoughts and he mine. We both were thinking the same thing: this is my twin and I look nothing like him.

But despite the fact that we did not look alike and were years apart in age, we recognized each other. How could we recognize each other as identical twins and not actually be similar in any way?

That is the conspiracy. Jim and Joe, Joe and Jim, the unseen army, a legion of pseudo-twins, all vaguely reminiscent of each other and yet completely different. What is the source of this indefinable similarity? Were we born out of test tubes? Grown in pods? Are we robots? Is our blood oily and black? Were we siblings back on the old family homestead on Mars? I fear I may never know.

We walk among you. Aren’t you afraid of us? My god, I’m afraid of us. Don’t you see that something horrible is at work, some unseen force shaping life into a grotesque parody of normalcy? And yet, the conspiracy runs so deep that its corruption of reality may well pass for truth. Perhaps we have lost all reference points, and now we wander this desert guided by mirages and drinking down sand like a cool glass of water.

I wish I could turn myself in and blow this thing wide open, but what hope is there in that? What could I say? I know no one else in the organization, except one person I never met and another I saw once. I do not know when I will be called, or what I will be required to do, but it is inevitable and I am helpless before it. Deep down, buried somewhere in my brain like a microchip sending me secret messages, I know there is a purpose to these coincidences that will slowly, monstrously unveil itself to me.

I have said too much; I haven’t said enough. You may scoff, but do not feel so secure. Someday, you too may be approached. We all may be drawn into this eventually. The entire human race--my god, think of it, every single living person--may be involved in this thing. Yes, it could be that big. Do you think the lunatics were making this conspiracy stuff up? Like me, they know because they’re part of it already.

So remember, if someone tells you how much you look like some person named Jon or Jay, know that it is already too late. You were part of the conspiracy from the start.