John Hanson's Doubles

John Hanson liked to think of himself as doubled. When he had been a boy at the Minaki lodge he and his brother played a videogame called Kung Fu, in which two fighters moves across a two dimensional plane and produce sudden, deadly kicks or punches, as well as acrobatic leaps, which had to be expertly timed by moving two joysticks in different combinations. John thought endlessly about the game when he wasn’t playing it: pulling the joysticks apart made the fighter do a spinning roundhouse, tapping the left up and the right down then the left down and the right up did a flipping topspin kick. The moves in Kung Fu defined gravity and all logic. What thrilled him equally was the silence before the first blow, as the two warriors advanced and retreated, jumped forward or over their opponents, waiting for the right moment to strike. The matches were often over with only one move, which is why it had to be perfectly executed. Much preparation and deliberation were required. Executing a blow and failing to kill one’s opponent outright opened oneself up for an easy loss. The fact that there were two joysticks instead of the regular joystick and two buttons like most other games made him feel like he was playing two games at once, and the fact that the movements had to be combined in secret (and to his mind, infinite) ways meant that there was a mystic exponential growth of sophistication and technique involved in the doubling of anything. At night he would imagine what incredible spectacles he could make if he had another version of himself. He would perform incredible shows on stage, where he and his double would move in perfect synchronization, speak at exactly the same time, and then begin a battle to the death, in which almost an hour of silence would be concluded with one, deadly blow. Then it occurred to John that these spectacles would be dangerous, for if he was still in synchronization with his double, were he not able to control his two selves in different ways, he would be in danger of killing both versions of himself outright, meaning that there would be no more John Hanson at all. This fear coincided nicely with early puberty, when he began to think more of sex than of kung fu. He decided that a double of himself would also be ideal for giving and receiving sexual pleasure. In the act of love no one dies. But it would be a controversial thing to put on stage.