The strange thing about seeing your own face four times in three weeks is that it isn't dramatic.

  You'd expect something dramatic.

  Thunder. A violin somewhere. Maybe a priest.

  Instead it mostly felt like a headache.

  And a logistical problem.

  Because if there were several versions of him walking around the city, statistically one of them should be doing better than he was.

  The young one had looked comfortable. Which was suspicious.

  Comfort usually meant you hadn't noticed the problem yet.

  The problem being that small delay between living your life and realizing you're living it.

  Like a half-second gap.

  He'd had that gap for years.

  Now apparently it came with visual aids.

  Four Merlyns.

  Possibly more.

  Either he was hallucinating

  or identity was less stable than people pretended.

  He found the second explanation more comforting, personally.

  If the self was unstable, then his confusion wasn't a defect.

  It was accuracy.

  Which would mean the other versions were just different attempts.

  One that decided life was easy.

  One that figured something out.

  And one lying here with a bandaged head wondering which of them was the real mistake.

  The funny thing was that none of this was actually tragic.

  Meaninglessness didn't destroy the world.

  It just removed the instructions.

  Inconvenient.

  But not fatal.

  There was even an advantage if he thought about it long enough.

  If nothing really mattered, then technically nothing was stopping him either.

  Not confusion. Not failure. Not even the possibility that he was one unfinished draft among several.

  So if the universe insisted on being meaningless…

  Then fine.

  He would keep observing.

  If there were multiple versions of him walking around tonight, one of them would eventually figure out what was going on.

  Hopefully it was him.

  But honestly?

  He wouldn't bet on it.

  He went to work the next morning because there was no compelling reason not to.

  That was how most of his decisions operated now — not chosen exactly, just insufficiently refused.

  He got up.

  He dressed.

  He made coffee he drank standing at the counter in four minutes flat, because sitting down to drink it implied a relationship with the morning he wasn't prepared to have.

  The commute was uneventful until it wasn't.

  He was half a block from the office when the man ahead of him slowed at a crosswalk.

  Same height.

  Same shoulders.

  Even the same slightly tired way of walking like gravity had negotiated a small permanent discount on his spine.

  Merlyn stopped.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The man turned the corner and disappeared.

  Merlyn stood there for a moment on the pavement, people moving around him, and then he laughed. Not loudly. Just a quiet, tired sound that escaped before he could decide whether to let it.

  "Great!" he muttered. "Now there are five of us."

  “Besides,” he muttered,

  “If one of the other versions jumps off a roof first, I can always learn from his mistakes.”

  He rubbed his forehead.

  For approximately four seconds he considered the obvious solution.

  Therapy.

  A psychiatrist.

  Medication and a professional who got paid to listen to exactly this kind of thing without visibly losing confidence in the person saying it.

  He arrived at the office at 8:30 AM.

  The production company occupied the fourth floor of a building that smelled permanently of fresh coffee and old carpet.

  Twelve people worked there on any given day.

  Merlyn had been editing their commercial and documentary footage for two years, which meant he knew the precise rhythm of everyone

  Who arrived early?

  who left late?

  who talked too much near the coffee machine?

  who had a broken heart due to a breakup?

  He knew it well.

  He sat at his desk, put his headphones on, and opened the project he'd been cutting all week.

  An advertisement for a telecommunications company. Forty seconds. A family gathering around a table, laughing, sharing a meal, shot in the warm amber light that meant connection and belonging to anyone who'd ever taken a marketing brief seriously.

  Merlyn cut the footage with the automatic precision of someone whose hands knew what to do without consulting him.

  Trim the pause. Tighten the cut. Find the frame where the woman's laugh looked genuine rather than performed.

  There.

  That one.

  His supervisor passed by mid-morning, glanced at the monitor.

  "That's good work. The timing on the laugh especially."

  "Thanks" Merlyn said, with the correct expression.

  His supervisor moved on.

  Merlyn looked at the frame he'd selected.

  The precise moment someone's joy looked real rather than constructed — and thought, not for the first time, about the specific irony of this job.

  He spent his days doing exactly this: cutting reality into coherent narratives. Finding the authentic moment buried in hours of performance and placing it where it would do the most emotional work.

  He was very good at it.

  He pressed play and watched the family laugh in the amber light.

  He felt nothing about any of it.

  He went out for coffee at half past twelve.

  The café two buildings down was run by a man who never made conversation — his greatest possible quality, in Merlyn's view.

  He ordered the same thing he always ordered and stood by the window while it was prepared.

  The street outside was ordinary.

  People moving.

  A delivery motorcycle navigating around a parked car.

  Two elderly men outside a tea house with the practiced stillness of people who had long ago made peace with having nowhere urgent to be.

  He was watching the motorcycle when he saw the figure of someone.

  Same height.

  Same coat — not similar. The same coat. The grey one Merlyn had bought two winters ago in Karak?y.

  The figure stood with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the building like he belonged there.

  He turned slightly as a woman passed him.

  Merlyn saw the face.

  Not his.

  Relief moved through him so quickly it was almost embarrassing.

  Just a stranger.

  The man turned back to the entrance and walked inside, as if everything about the moment were perfectly ordinary.

  Merlyn picked up his coffee.

  He went back to work.

  He did not think about what his face had looked like on the other man — the total absence of the gap, the unself-conscious ease of simply existing in a body without any part of it feeling like a performance being conducted from slightly outside.

  He did not think about that at all.

  His hand was steady on the cup.

  Mostly.

  The call from Selin came at 3:50.

  He stared at her name on the screen for four seconds, calculated the costs, and picked up.

  "You left" she said. Not accusatory. Worse — certain.

  "I wasn't feeling well."

  "Your message said that."

  "It was true really"

  A pause. The particular kind that meant someone was deciding how directly to say a thing.

  "Merlyn."

  "Selin."

  "I watched you leave. You were fine thirty minutes before that. You were talking to Deren and you seemed present — actually present. And then something happened and you went into that thing you do where you disappear inside your own head and then physically leave the room."

  He had no immediate response to this.

  "I made an excuse" he said finally. "I'm sorry."

  "I don't want an apology. I want to know if you're alright."

  Outside his window the city was doing its afternoon things. Traffic below. A pigeon navigating the ledge of the building across the street with the focused incompetence pigeons brought to all navigational problems.

  "My head was hurting," he said. True. Had been true all day, the bandage at his hairline a steady low reminder.

  "Your head was bleeding in a taxi and you don't remember why. That's not a headache, Merlyn you idoit"

  "I probably knocked it somewhere. I was tired."

  "You don't remember."

  "I was tired."

  Silence.

  Then: "You're allowed to need something. That's not a character flaw."

  He opened his mouth to say he knew that.

  He said: "I know."

  She didn't push further. That was what made her difficult — she always knew exactly where to stop, which left him no argument to have, no unreasonableness to push against. Just a statement sitting in the air, unhurried, waiting.

  "Come for dinner this week" she said. "Not a party. Just dinner."

  He said he would try.

  He meant it slightly more than he usually meant things.

  After he hung up he sat for a moment with the phone in his hand.

  You're allowed to need something.

  He sat with that for a while.

  The problem was he didn't know what he needed.

  “The bigger problem was that I wasn't sure whether the answer was something a person could give to him or not.”

  As Merlyn was thinking of that

  At four, Bar?? appeared at the edge of his desk with the expression of someone delivering mildly interesting news.

  “Hey man did they tell you about the new editor?”

  Merlyn removed one headphone. “No”

  “Started Monday. Helping with the documentary backlog.”

  Bar?? leaned against the partition.

  “Hande says he’s good.”

  “Okay.”

  “Quiet guy. Keeps to himself.” A pause. “Here.”

  Bar?? turned his phone around.

  It was an employee profile photo. Plain background. Neutral expression. The kind of picture meant to show a face without saying anything about the person.

  Merlyn stared.

  The face on the screen was his.

  Same jaw.

  Same eyes.

  Same slight asymmetry between them.

  “Danish Smith” Bar?? said. “That’s the new guy.”

  Merlyn kept looking at the screen.

  “Yeah,” he said after a moment.

  “Do you find something odd about him?

  Baris reply curiously “No, he looks normal”

  Bar?? slipped the phone back into his pocket.

  “Drinks Friday if you’re around.”

  He walked off.

  Merlyn put his headphone back on.

  Danish Smith.

  A different name.

  A different person.

  A face that apparently only he thought looked familiar.

  He didn’t look up for seventeen minutes.

  When he finally did, slowly, with the careful casualness of someone trying not to look like they were looking, he found the far editing station across the open floor.

  Merlyn looked back at his own screen.

  His jaw was tight.

  He pressed play on the timeline.

  The family gathered. The woman laughed. The amber light did its work.

  He watched the clip through to the end and when it finished he sat back in his chair and looked at it with the particular exhaustion of someone who had done a thing correctly and felt nothing about having done it.

  He saved at five thirty-one, packed his bag, and left the office without looking at the far editing station again.

  Almost.

  At the door he stopped.

  He couldn't have said why.

  He stood there a moment with his hand on the frame, the corridor ahead, the office behind.

  Then he walked to the elevator and didn't look back.

  He lay in bed at 8:45 PM and looked at the ceiling.

  The water stain was still there.

  Still waiting on a report he was never going to file.

  The thoughts moved through without urgency — that was what the meaningless did now, removed the spike from things, left them flat and continuous. A stream with no particular current.

  There was a man with his face that will be working in his building.

  There had been a man with his face standing outside his building.

  There had been two men with his face watching a taxi from a pavement.

  There had been a young man at a birthday party laughing without effort at something someone said.

  There had been a man on a subway, three weeks ago, with his jaw and his hands and the way he held stillness like it cost something.

  Five encounters.

  Or should he say…one encounter, five times.

  Or something else entirely — some structural looseness in the architecture of the self that he had always half-suspected and was now being confirmed by a universe with a very specific sense of humor.

  Selin's voice came back to him, quiet and certain.

  You're allowed to need something.

  He turned onto his side.

  The city outside the window kept moving. Still lit. Still populated. Still doing what cities did — containing everyone, meaning nothing, going on.

  He thought about the figure at the far editing station.

  The clean stillness of his shoulders.

  The way he leaned into his work without armor.

  The worst thought arrived without announcement.

  What if he's the fake one?

  And even worse is that he is no longer technically fine?

  Not as panic. Not as horror.

  Just a question, flat and quiet, lying in a row with all the others.

  What if he's the version that was supposed to be here. What if I'm the draft that didn't know it yet?

  He stared at the ceiling.

  Outside the window, the city kept going without him.