When I went to the photo booth to get my passport picture, the photos were already in the slot, developed, waiting for me. Three in a row, a man with white skin and cropped brown hair smiling twice, then frowning. It was a forced, faked show of a frown. His eyes were lit with crazed energy and his cheeks were puffed up with suppressed laughter—a silly person making a winking show of toughness. And he was, somehow, me. Not recently, certainly not today, but the me of five years ago, of carefree college days. His was a familiar, comforting presence. But he was a memory. He belonged in my mind or on my camera roll, not here, freshly printed, in this photo booth.

The photos were still on the monitor. They were larger, 4K, and the colors looked better on screen. Green flecks in the eyes. Notes of blonde in the hair. Pink bumps of acne on the forehead. And there, on the cheek, was the mole. I reached up and felt for the scar—gone, lasered off, years ago.

Enter credit card. Take a photo. Pay now. The home screen had loaded. The photos were gone. I took the print outs from the slot. There I was. Well not me. Not anymore. I held up the photo in the light. I squinted, couldn’t make out the mole.

“Excuse me,” I said to a mall cop. I held out the photo. “Have you seen this man?”

The cop laughed. “Yeah, I have.” He pointed at me. “That’s you.”

-                 -                 -

I became a detective, scouring the mall for clues. I asked vendors, shoppers, laconic teenagers. No one had seen anyone but me.

-                 -                 -

That night, I spent hours scrolling reels on Instagram. I stopped to watch a monkey on skis. The clip was set to a pulsing dub beat and a heavily accented voice kept repeating “in the snow, in the snow, in the snow.” I forwarded the monkey video to five other accounts—two college friends, my brother, the girl I saw twice a year, and Phil, my buddy.

I was watching a video of a Turkish woman cooking goat meat inside a pumpkin when Phil called. I accepted and minimized the call.

“You see this?” he asked.

“What?” I said.

“The monkey on skis.”

“In the snow, in the snow, in the snow.”

“So good.”

“I sent it to you.”

“Really?”

I watched a hippo maul a white couple on safari. “Why’d you call?” I asked.

“Oh nothing, just I saw you earlier and you didn’t say hi.”

“Huh,” the man’s head exploded, close-up in the hippo’s jaws, “I must not have seen you.”

“No man, you locked eyes with me. And then you ran right past.”

“Ran?”

“Yeah, you were booking it.”

“Wasn’t me,” I said, scrolling past a kid singing about Ocean State Job Lot. “I haven’t run in years.”

“I mean he looked a little different. He had like an earring.”

“I don’t have an earring.”

“You could’ve got one. It was at the mall. They have a Claire’s.”

“Did I,” I paused, corrected myself, “Did the guy you met, did he have a mole on his cheek?”

-                 -                 -

Phil’s lead came to nothing. Even though it must have been the guy. I even went back to the mall and tried to access the security footage, but the cameras were just for show—unplugged, unrecording, blind. And the earring was just mystifying. I had never had one. Although I had wanted one, back in my carefree college days.

In bed, I tossed and turned, worrying. I expected there might be another run-in. That I might get a frantic call from my mother. Or see strange reflections in the glass walls of buildings. But nothing happened. The guy, if there ever had been one, was gone. And all I had were the photos and Phil’s confusing memory.

So I gave up detectiving and returned to my previous task: passport renewal. I needed a new passport so I could visit Canada. The girl I saw twice a year lived in Montreal. It was my turn to visit.

I had originally sought out the mall photo booth for two reasons. The first being its privacy—there was no need to work with a photographer. Secondly, vanity—I could retake photos until getting one I liked.

But now, having already failed at the mall, I went to Walgreens—where a mouthy associate took a digital photo of me in front of a white vinyl sheet. The photo, which she printed out and laughed at, was horrible: my hair thin and spiky, like a meadow of tall dead grass; my smile wan and lifeless, like an inchworm curled up dead after rain. I paid eighteen dollars and left.

In deepest horror, I contemplated this new official visage. What might happen if I allowed this disgusting image to be entered into my government record? Would I be targeted for questioning? Would my bags be rifled through? Would I be denied blankets and basic in-flight refreshment? Of course I would. Every gate attendant, every TSA agent, every saucy in-flight siren, they’d all laugh at me. I’d become an international pariah, always boarding last, eternally stuck in the middle seat eating stale Smartfood.

On the other hand, there was the problem of my trip, if I didn’t send in the passport renewal today, I’d be unable to make the visit. I’d lose out on my biannual sex weekend and, in doing so, likely lose out on all biannual sex weekends to come.

Oh, it was an impossible choice: ugliness or loneliness. Then I got a message from Phil. Just some meme. Something to do with that kid’s song about Ocean State Job Lot. It wasn’t important, but I had this realization. Phil! The photo! The guy who looked just like me! I rifled through my desk and found it. He looked a little younger—and there was that mole—but it could easily be me, it was passport size, and he looked good. He looked like a guy who got served that key extra nip of in-flight Maker’s Mark. He didn’t even have the earring. Nothing to worry about there.

And so it was done. It was easy. It was perfect. It was good. And soon, signed and sealed, it was in the mail.

-                 -                 -

The government emailed me a code to track my new passport. I entered it online and it took me to an ancient website. I was prompted to identify an object of personal significance, asked to name the street I grew up on and other such intrusive things. I filled out the questions, observed that my passport was processing in Texas, and then promptly logged out and forgot all my answers.

-                 -                 -

Three weeks passed. My passport was nowhere to be seen. There were only ten days left until my flight. I tried to log into the government website. I failed. I had forgotten the color of my first bike. I called the help number and spoke to a woman in the Philippines. She suggested I wait another week. I suggested that she die. Then I hung up and waited another week. No passport. I called my biannual sex kitten and told her I wouldn’t be coming this year. She called me a jerk and told me to “go fuck off forever.” I hung up, swiped away the minimized call, kept watching reels.

-                 -                 -

It was a week of great mourning. My sex life was over. My legal document was missing. I was a failure.

All I was good for was browsing social media in bed.

I scrolled reels until they stopped being in English and then switched to the boring, still photography part of Instagram. I nearly had a heart attack. There he was, the guy from the photos, standing next to my Montreal ex-Intermittent Mistress with that dumb fake frown from the photo. Shock reverberated in my brain like noise in a kettle drum. I saw black and blue and streaks of white light. My phone clattered to the floor. And then I was sick, on top of the phone. For some hours, I lay on my back in mute horror. I was confused and shocked at the coldness of the world. In the snow, I thought. In the snow. In the snow.

After some time, as the nausea began to fade and a dull, annoying headache set in, my phone began to vibrate under the sick. With a square of toilet paper, I picked it up. It was an unknown 263 number. Montreal, said the phone. I wiped it clean and accepted.

“It’s me,” said a man.

“Who?” I asked.

“You, dummy.”

“I’m not a dummy.”

“Neither of us are.”

“Thanks,” I paused. “Look what is this about? I’m having a very hard day.”

The call ended. Another request popped up on my screen. The 263 number wanted to Facetime.

“Oh, it’s you,” I said to the guy who looked just like me.

“Yeah, dummy,” he said.

“Did you steal my passport?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, holding up the purloined document. “But you stole my photo.”

“How’s Montreal?” I asked.

“It’s nice. Like France, kinda.”

“France?” I asked. “I thought you were from another dimension or something.”

He laughed. “Other dimensions have France,” he said.

“Is anything different?” I asked.

“Well, a few things—we’ve got East Russia, steroids in National League Baseball, and Steve Jobs invented the interdimensional shifting ray.”

“How’d he make that?”

“Well, it was that or the iPhone. He flipped a coin.”