Lavender

Part 2

   Walks down the street seemed surreal.  People would call out to him, "Bill, how're ya doin' today?" and "Lovely autumn we're having this year, don't you agree, Mr. Taffiworth?"  Eventually Phil learned to smile and respond in kind.  But it all felt so phony.  Who was this William Taffiworth and what the hell was he doing hijacking Phil Marden's identity?  The man stopped and pulled out his wallet so he could stare again in disbelief at his driver's license.  There it was, as plain as day...his own face staring back at him, with the name William J. Taffiworth printed beneath the DMV photo.

   What the hell had happened?  Had he lost his mind?  And most dreadful of all, what had become of his wife, the lovely, irreplaceable Peggy Ann Marden?  When he would ask his neighbors, they would either laugh and quip, "Old Bill, always a joker!" or give him a blank stare and a shrug of their shoulders.  Peg seemed to have fallen off the face of the Earth, with nary a soul, besides himself, taking the slightest note of the loss.

   His life had become a confusing mish-mash of dark shadows and half truths, vivid memories that seemed to have no basis in reality, and an unfamiliar world that left him baffled and questioning his own sanity.  He had no idea who this usurper William Taffiworth was.  In his heart of hearts he knew he was really Philip Marden, and he was equally sure that his undying love belonged to the raven-haired Peggy Ann.

   Other things in his life came in and out of focus, registering in varying degrees of sense and gobbledygook.  He knew he had to be employed somewhere, and while he wasn't sure where he was headed, his steps instinctively led him to City Hall, where he discovered he worked as a tax accountant.  He found his desk, and almost cried out when he discovered Mr. Taffiworth's name posted there.  Seething with anger, he gritted his teeth, but somehow managed to hold himself back from seizing up the offending nameplate and heaving it across the room.  Instead he simply turned it face down and then grumpily he settled into his desk chair.

   He seemed to know what he was doing, and though he wasn't sure of his coworkers' names, most of their faces struck a familiar chord with him.  By lunchbreak, he had picked up on everyone's identity, and was more or less functioning normally.  Once in a while he would forget to respond when somebody would call out to Bill Taffiworth, but eventually he grew accustomed to playing that charade.

   On the trip home, he kept hoping against hope that upon arrival at his front door, his beautiful Peg would rush out and greet him with a bear hug and a passionate kiss.  But the porch was unoccupied, and when his key turned the lock and the door swung open, it revealed an interior just as cold and empty as the porch had been.  "Peggy?" he called out once, but then knowing it was pointless, he didn't repeat himself.

   Though he became quite good at the game of pretending to be someone who he was not, he was always more than a little frustrated by the end of the day.  And as evening turned into night and he prepared for bed, the only thing that kept him going was the desperate hope that somehow during his slumber, a miracle would occur and the next morning would find him finally back in his proper space and time, living the life of Phil Marden and waking up to sweet pecks on the lips from his dear Peg.

   When morning would arrive once again and he would find himself alone in the overly spacious queen-sized bed, the man would groan, then sadly prepare himself for another day of wearing the uncomfortable mantle of William Taffiworth.  To be honest, it wasn't a bad life; Mr. Taffiworth seemed to have neighbors who liked him well enough, and as was the case with his coworkers, everyone who lived nearby looked familiar and had names that eventually seemed to click in his mind.  And while his job as a tax accountant was far from glamorous, he discovered that on payday, it was at least financially rewarding.

   Right from the start, the man tried his best to figure out what had become of his wife.  Peggy and he were madly in love, even all these years later, and though of course their passion had cooled as time passed, still the two of them were inseparable.  Phil couldn't imagine any life that would be worth living if he didn't have Peg Marden by his side.  Just the thought that she was now missing would bring him to tears, and he swore to whatever gods there were that he would never give up his search for her.

   To that end, he began a campaign of going door to door in his neighborhood, asking whoever responded to his knock if they knew who Peggy Marden was and if they had seen her recently.  Uniformly, the answer was always no, usually accompanied by strange stares and looks of puzzlement.  Detailed descriptions of his wife did nothing to aid in his quest for her, but Phil vowed that he would not let repeated failures dissuade him from his search.  

   Initially he only questioned those folks who lived on his avenue, but as the days grew into weeks, he widened the parameters of his hunt to include nearby side streets.  As his search moved further from his home base, he began seeing fewer and fewer faces that he recognized, and he eventually reached a point where on one who was answering the doors looked familiar.  He finally had to call off the campaign; he was just spinning his wheels and getting nowhere.  But he wasn't about to give up.  There had to be another way, something else he could do to find his wife.

   Of course, one of the most obvious of game plans would've been to seek out the local police and file a missing person report.  But Phil Marden was painfully aware of how undoable that was.  The authorities would have him fill out any number of documents and questionnaires, which he would have to file under the name of his alter-ego, William Taffiworth.  Which would then lead to the police asking what relation this missing woman was to him.  Phil had run the scenario through his head multiple times, and always reached the same conclusion...the cops would think he was crazy and either throw him out of the precinct house or worse yet, have him locked up in an asylum.  No, this search was going to be something he would have to do on his own.

   Posting flyers about town might help, he mused, and he thought about the goodly number of locations in his city that sported accommodating billboards covered with ads, pet searches, and help wanted requests.  All of the effective ones usually included a photograph of one form or another, and it dawned on Phil that this would be a vast improvement over his poor endeavors to verbally describe his wife to his neighbors.  He looked through his house and came to the shocking realization that there were no photos of Peggy to be found anywhere.

   How could this be?  Phil distinctly remembered a photographer at their wedding; hundreds of pictures were taken, and a grand album had been assembled to display to family and friends.  But it, and any other photos of his wife, had disappeared from their home.

   Had some conspirators who kidnapped Peg been so intent upon removing every memory of her that they had also stolen all of her photographs?  How improbable would that be?

   The man pondered the absurdity of it all, then hit upon an idea; he had an ace in the hole for resolving this dilemma.  The digital camera that his wife had given him for Christmas two years ago was sitting on a shelf in his study.  Surely there would be snapshots of her stored on the machine's memory card.

   Entering the study, Phil strode to the bookshelf where the camera was resting and picked it up.  He turned the device on and began clicking through the photos he found there.

   Sure enough, dozens of pictures were stored therein, photographs of a small, dark-haired woman, mostly standing or sitting alone, but sometimes posed next to him.  "Aha!" the man chortled.  Here was proof that he was not losing his mind.  He wife was a real person, not a figment of his imagination.

   But then he looked closer at the images, and to his dismay, he discovered that in every single photo of this woman, her face had been smudged and blurred beyond recognition.  What the hell was happening?  Maybe he was going crazy after all.

   In desperation, the man grabbed a pencil and a sheet of paper and did his best to draw a picture of his wife for inclusion in the flyer he would create.  He was far from a professional artist and his attempt looked like nothing more than a child's scrawl, but it was better than nothing at all, he reasoned.  Once he had the flyer assembled, he printed up hundreds of copies and hung them around town, at every billboard or telephone pole where he could get a push-pin to go in.