Free Thirst by Ken Kalfus

suffered this disorder, because both selves had vague memories of their lives stretching back into childhood.
    Harrah never asked himself which of his apartments was better (the one on the East Side was located on a quieter, better-kept block, but had much less closet space than his Columbus Avenue walk-up), nor which of the two women he preferred. It did not occur to him that he was being unfaithful to either woman.
    For years Harrah went on with his everyday life, going to sleep at night in one apartment, immediately waking in the second apartment to attend to his other job (both selves worked in import/export), returning to the second apartment to sleep, and immediately waking
again in the first apartment, in the morning following the first night. Perhaps he came to assume that all people suffered this condition, that it was a normal aspect of reality, which was arbitrarily made up of many bizarre phenomena that convinced us of their rightness only by their frequent occurrence. Anyway, this would explain why everyone he knew complained of being tired all the time.
    Harrah experienced every day twice, waking twice and sleeping twice. The weather, the ball scores, and the news events that dominated each world usually differed, but not by much, and not in any way that had any real impact on his lives. The television programming in each, however, was identical, and he usually found himself watching the same program twice. Sometimes he’d travel back and forth between both selves in a single day. If, for example, he took a midday nap, he’d immediately wake up in the middle of the night in his other apartment, unable to return to sleep for another fifteen or twenty minutes.
    He grew accustomed to these two lives, though he was still occasionally confused—say, in recalling which subway line to take home or, at a movie theater refreshment stand, for which woman he was buying popcorn. Anna preferred it without butter. Also, while he was in one world the detailed features of the second faded in his memory. He could never recall all the digits of his other phone number, and once when he went over from his East Side apartment to Columbus Avenue to look at the other building in which he lived, the
block was not as he remembered it, and he couldn’t recall the address, and he wasn’t sure if it might not have been somewhere on Amsterdam Avenue instead.
     
    After some time Harrah came to ask himself whether it would be appropriate to establish one or the other of his relationships on a more formal footing, or to perhaps secure both relationships. Nothing had really changed in his feelings for the two women, but Harrah thought it might be wrong to remain casual about these affairs for much longer, and that furthermore he was at the right age to marry. He believed he could sense the underlying question of marriage straining each relationship, or at least he imagined that this question should be straining each relationship, though neither woman had ever expressed interest in making a long-term commitment. Harrah suspected, without any evidence, that this issue was more likely to be on Anna’s mind than on Lillian’s, but Harrah could not help attributing the concerns of one woman to the other, even though the women were not similar at all. In fact, to simplify things, he had always assumed that the two relationships were at equal stages of development.
    Harrah never spoke to either woman about this issue. For a while it was nearly foremost on his mind, but his jobs were too demanding for him to dwell long on personal matters. He more or less put the question aside, as if by considering it he had resolved it. Now he gave more thought instead to his dual existence, or whatever it was, which raised innumerable questions about the nature of reality, but his spring busy season
arrived and he had to shelve this speculation as well. Then one afternoon while passing the shoeshine stand at Grand Central Station on his way home to the East