Edi was out of town visiting her mom and I have to admit it: I was looking forward to having the apartment to myself for a few days.   But she hadn't been gone more than twenty minutes when the doorbell rang out, startling me from the latest volume of Little Lulu.  I checked the little peephole in our door to see who it was since we never get visitors except pizza guys who get the wrong address.  The fisheye made the person's goatee bulge obscenely toward the lens, while his eyepatch seemed distant and remote, like a lonely, distant storm cloud.  It was my evil twin.  I opened the door.  "I'm sorry.  We gave at the office."

My evil twin rolled his eye and tossed his hands in a sarcastic approximation of a laughing fit.  "Ahhhh, ha, ha, ha.  Jesus, where do you get your material, Mad Magazine, 1978?"

"Oh, and how would you answer the door?"

"Curare-tipped blowdart, motherfucker.  What if I was the postman come to kill you?"  He wiped his high black boots on the welcome mat, as if trying to rub out the sentiment.  "Postmen are allowed to kill people in the Mirror, Mirror universe."

"Everyone's allowed to kill people in the Mirror, Mirror universe!  Infanticide is an Olympic sport, for Christ's sake!"

"Yes, but postmen don't even get demoted for failing.  So they're particularly sloppy and reckless at it.  You don't know the number of people I've seen with their throats cut by a Jiffy Lube coupon after being blinded with trial-size shampoo."

I nodded.  "And I hope I never will.  I guess you won't go away, so you might as well come in."  My evil twin picked up his evil black duffle bag and chucked me on the chin on his way in.

I made some popcorn and we sat on the couch.  "So…" I said.  "Problems with the girlfriend again?"

My evil twin squinted.  "Sure, sure.  Wave the agonizer over the wound a little more, why don't you?  We're opposites, remember?  So as soon as you got in good with Edi there, Boom!  Back to the single life for me."

I grabbed a handful of popcorn and looked at it carefully.  Communal food was always best with the evil twin considering his fondness for slow-acting poison, but I still had to be careful.  "Really?  So me getting married is going to doom you to being alone and unloved forever?"

"Nah, not the way most marriages work.  I try to be philosophical about these things.  It's like that saying goes:  'There's always more brain-eating earworms in the desert…and in your ear.'"

I turned my head to one side and tapped quickly.  Nothing came out.  My evil twin laughed and picked out a particularly burnt piece of popcorn and nibbled at it.  "It's a figure of speech, dude.  We've got those in the Mirror, Mirror universe too.  Anyway, even if you guys do have a happy marriage, you gave me a nice long run with all those years you spent being miserable and single. You deserve a shot at happiness.  And if worst comes to worst, I can always murder you and take your place in the marriage."

"I think Edi would notice, what with the, you know, uni-optical thing and everything."

"Yeah, you'd think, but a survey in Cosmopolitan Magazine showed that it took people up to two years to realize their spouses had started wearing eyepatches and goatees."

"Was this in the Mirror, Mirror Cosmo or the Cosmo we have here?"

My evil twin flicked an unpopped kernel at me.  "That's the great thing about Cosmo; it's the same in both universes."

"I can see that," I said.  "So you're not here because you got fired, or your girlfriend kicked you out, or have a warrant out for your arrest because you started stalking the Mirror, Mirror Bea Arthur again?"

"No, no, no! No, wait.  That was supposed to be no, no, yes.  Dude!  Mirror, Mirror Bea Arthur is frickin' hot! But actually, I could have dodged that rap anywhere.  I came because you mentioned in your blog you'd have the weekend alone and I figured since you never invite me over now that you're living with Edi, we could have some quality time together.  You know, play a little PS2, read some funny books, watch a little TV."

I looked up at my evil twin.  "Uh, that's great, but, uhh…"

My evil twin peered at me and wiped his buttery fingers on his eyepatch, a habit I detested.  "What?"

"Well, I kinda quit playing video games.  More or less.  It's been three months."

My evil twin went completely silent.  His pale face bore the blank look of shock.

"And I don't really watch TV. We don't have the reception here.  Just what we rent or what people loan us."

A sweat broke out on my evil twin's forehead.

"And, well, I read most of the comic books when I work at the store.  And then I write reviews for them for the CE website.  So I don't really read as many comics throughout the week, frankly."  My stomach rumbled and I patted it lightly.  "Oog, my stomach.  You didn't poison me, did you?"

A single tear rolled down my evil twin's cheek.  "Why would I poison you," he shouted, "WHEN YOU'RE ALREADY DEAD!?"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa.  I don't know what—"

"You don't play video games?  You don't read comic books?  You don't watch MTV and bitch about how they don't play music videos any more?"  He grabbed me and began shaking me rapidly.  "What! Have! You! Done! With! Jeff!"

I pulled free.  "No, dude, it's not like that.  Really, it's me.  I just—I dunno.  I realized I wasn't getting as much done with my life as I'd like…"  "I'm aghast," my evil twin half-sobbed.  "I'm agog.  You're—You're your own evil twin now!  Everything you were, you're not any longer.  Dear Lord.  No wonder I wasn't that broken up about being single.  I've been free to play video games and read comics and poison Klingons—or better yet, people who have weddings dressed as Klingons!  I thought it was just because I was enjoying my freedom or something.  I'm free because you're trapped!"

"Look," I said, putting a hand on his shoulder, "you're making a mountain out of molehill with this…" And at that, my evil twin stood up, shaking.  "What are you talking about?" He yelled hysterically.  "That doesn't make any sense!"

I stood up and tried to think of a Mirror, Mirror equivalent.  "You're making a massacre out of a few precisely planned murders."  My evil twin thought about this for a moment.  "How?"

"Look," I said.  "It's not like I'm not reading comic books.  It's not even like I've given up on video games completely!  I just don't have as much time as I used to.  And not because of Edi—because I'm not young anymore.  Depending on which actuarial table you read, more than half my life is gone—and that's in a best-case scenario!  I'll still play video games at some point, but once I've felt like I've done more with my life.  There are more important things that beating God of War."

My evil twin leaned close.  "Do you have God of War?  I hear it's really, really good."

I looked around the apartment, as if someone might hear us.  "It is?"

He nodded enthusiastically.  "Dude.  You can, like, pull the wings off of harpies.  And you can whip out a medusa's head and turn your enemies to stone.  And there are boobies!"

"Well," I said, "My friend Joel did loan it to me recently, but I wasn't planning…"

My evil twin waggled his fingers before my eyes like a man hypnotizing a chicken.  "Boo-Bees," he crooned in a soft falsetto.  "Boo-Bees."

Sixteen hours later, we were still playing, taking turns making Cratos whip flaming chains of death down the throats of struggling minotaurs.  "Okay," I said.  "There.  Convinced I'm not my own evil twin?"  My evil twin bobbed to one side as he whipped the controller in a semi-circle.  "Well…" he said.  "Let me ask you something.  You've still got that Bush guy in office, right?  He got re-elected?"  When I confirmed this, my evil twin continued.  "And all those guys got tortured over in Abu Ghirab just for information a lot of them didn't have, right?  A-and wasn't I reading that one of your major news publications, like, retracted a story about the torture that went on—not because the story wasn't true, mind you, but because the White House got upset about it, and the nature of the torture upset a lot of Moslems?  And aren't you guys still not signing the Kyoto Protocol, and still not providing national health care even though the current system is driving your companies out of the country to outsource their labor?  And aren't you still at war in a country over something that happened almost four years ago because of a terrorist sect not even in that country?"

I didn't say anything.  My evil twin made Cratos jump on the back of a fire-breathing three-headed dog and began stabbing each head, one after the other.  "So, sometimes I wonder if the reason why I wear the eyepatch and have the goatee is because I'm not you from an alternate dimension, I'm you from your near future when all the torture and the agonizers and the poisonings just become part of the national psyche.  Maybe you are your own evil twin—you're just not him yet."

I tried to think of something to say to that, but I couldn't think of anything.  And I wanted the chance to play God of War again.  So I poisoned him and figured we could talk about it some more if he revived.  The eye patch fit pretty neatly, too.