Doubles by Nora Gold

Reviewed by Jerry Levy

The unnamed protagonist in Nora Gold’s Doubles is a math whiz, akin to a prodigy. Only 12-years-old, she is highly adept at it, loves the process, its complexity, and is able to make sense of the world with numbers. She attributes human behaviour to them. The number 1, for example, goes hand-in-hand with loneliness (and also the number of teeth left in her grandma’s mouth!), 0 with being a “nobody.” She’s all over prime numbers, indicating people whose age is associated with one, say 19 or 29, are unique, since they only have two very distinct positive divisors: 1 and the actual number itself. That’s it. As she says, they’re independent and proud. “Good enough as they are, and no one can take away their power because they are whole…” If Charlie Epps, the brilliant mathematician on the TV show Numbers who uses his mathematical expertise to solve complex criminal cases, were in need of an accomplice, he might need not look any further than the young woman in Doubles.

Despite the fact that our protagonist believes zeros have certain positive traits, her father reminded her of its more negative ones when a man and woman dressed all in black came to his home and spirited her away to Valleyview Children’s Farm. “You’re nothing,” he said. “You’re a zero. And you’ll never be anything but a zero.” Those were his last words to her. So if she believes them, considers herself a non-entity (which is only reinforced as the story progresses in Valleyview), then despite the fact that she feels zeros have certain positive, even magical attributes (such as when you multiply anything by a zero, it erases that other number’s identity, killing it off), then her regression into self-perceived nothingness, even “zero-ness,” seems inevitable. Starting at home and then at the Valleyview, she descends into a dark rabbit hole, morphing into Child Zero.

Valleyview. The name sounds idyllic. It is anything but. It’s a decrepit social services institution where wayward and unwanted kids are housed and the counsellors come and go. Moreover, the latter seemingly don’t care about the kids. They simply watch them, constantly. As our protagonist, Child Zero, laments: “They stare at us non-stop as if we’re animals in a zoo.” And, “They never let you out; you can never go off alone, even for one moment.” She slowly starts to sink in a quagmire of boredom, day in and day out, and becomes afraid she’ll lose her mind from it. In truth, there is nothing much to do at Valleyview except stare at Disney TV (or very occasionally at murder shows when the counsellors step out for a time) or else skim through old car and fashion magazines. The kids have no schooling and the library is the size of a broom closet, with only 3 skinny wooden bookshelves. And the lone math book Child Zero has is ancient, over 20 years old: She asks for a newer one and waits patiently for its arrival, only to be eventually told it can’t be ordered because it’s too costly. All of $3. In essence, she is a prisoner in the worst kind of institution, one where kids are isolated from the world at large and devoid of love, responsive caregiving, and motivation. Through no fault of their own, they lose their dignity, integrity, and all sense of true self. And, to make matters worse, illogical and insane verbiage comes out of the mouths of the counsellors; one talks of Valleyview as being “in loco parentis,” Latin for “In place of a parent.” Such nonsense, as if horrid Valleyview can possibly act as an alternate and loving parental entity for the kids!

This binary notion is seen throughout Doubles. Child Zero considers herself one-half of a double state. While she is locked up in Valleyview and cannot escape, she imagines her other half, her doppelgänger, has gone to live in her house, doing all those things she had done previously. So before going to school, her other half feeds the pigs and chickens, cleans up after breakfast, gets her younger sibling Hank ready for school, plays hopscotch with friends and poker with her Grandma, prepares supper, and basically assumes her life. Takes it over and has wonderful adventures. In German, such copies were called “Double-Walkers.” And of course, literature has many stories of a double, since it’s the perfect device to explore a person’s darker traits. In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double, for example, a lowly and antisocial government clerk by the name of Golyadkin encounters his much more assertive doppelgänger. The latter secures a job within the original’s office and in short order, surpasses all of Golyadkin’s abilities and achievements, both professionally and personally, so much so that at the end of the story, the original government clerk is shuffled away into a mental hospital. Golyadkin’s double seems to exist only to torment him. And in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story William Wilson, the narrator encounters his own doppelgänger, someone who bears the same name, is of the same height, looks like him, copies his clothing, how he walks, and was born on the same day. And when William enrols at Oxford University, his doppelgänger follows suit, eventually forcing the original to depart the school in disgrace. As time goes by, his imposter thwarts the original’s ambitions and frustrates him at every turn, drawing his ire. So much so that the original William Wilson stabs his double in the heart with a sword. But after such a diabolical deed, he looks at his reflection in a mirror and sees himself covered in blood. His doppelgänger then comes to meet William, telling him that he has only succeeded in murdering himself.

Dostoyevsky’s and Poe’s doppelgänger stories suggest that these are cases of a very unreliable narrator, men who are genuinely mentally deranged and only imagine the events that unfold. It has also been said that these Double-Walkers often appear in a person’s life as a foreshadowing of death or doom. Can we assume the same of Child Zero, then? She seems to devolve the longer she stays at Valleyview. She says this of herself: “Maybe I’m going crazy, too. Sometimes nothing seems real. I don’t feel like an I anymore, just a She. I watch myself the way they watch me. I observe this girl as if she’s a stranger. She goes to lunch. She goes to supper. She spends her days in the rec room with other kids and counsellors and a blaring TV. Once in a while, she writes something in a notebook. She. She. She. I’m becoming a She, not an I because I’s are able to feel things. I’s are alive. My I is fading so fast that it might not be here tomorrow.”

Nora Gold’s Doubles is a very deep, philosophically-tinged narrative of a life gone awry, of what can happen to a vibrant, vital child when neglected and uncared for. Where there are no answers because no one asks questions. A gifted writer, Gold’s story is both poignant and troubling and will leave an indelible impression on the reader. A highly recommended read.

Doubles is published by Guernica Editions.