As I awake one morning from difficult dreams, I find that my husband has transformed into two people. One Ezequiel lies beside me in our bed, as always, half-sitting up and typing furiously on his laptop. The other Ezequiel sits on the floor beside the bed, his legs crossed and eyes closed, meditating.

“Is everything okay?” I ask.

“Of course, Fredo,” says Ezequiel, the typing one. “We’re fine. You should go back to sleep.”

He’s right, it’s still early for me, but sleep evades me. I’m kept awake by the sound of Ezequiel’s typing, and by the disturbance of a single word echoing in my head.

We.

At first, I try to carry on as if everything were normal. I go into the office as usual, hoping that when I return there will be only one Ezequiel. But at the end of the day, there are still two of him.

It’s my turn to make dinner, so I chop vegetables for a shrimp pasta, with sautéed eggplant on the side. I cook enough for three—what else am I to do?

Dinner is pleasant enough. I tell Ezequiel about my day at work, attempting to mediate a dispute between two colleagues. He tells me he’s working on a new project, something he’s excited about, but doesn’t share details.

The new Ezequiel doesn’t talk much. Perhaps this won’t be so bad. Perhaps this is just a new twist for us to manage, like when we first had to move to San Francisco. Perhaps things will remain the same for me and Ezequiel, with the occasional quirky addition of a doppelganger who hangs about quietly meditating. It will cost some extra money, having another mouth to feed, but perhaps the new Ezequiel can pitch in. If he has even half the smarts that my Ezequiel has, then he’s eminently employable. Software engineers are in constant demand in the Valley.

Halfway through dinner, I notice that the new Ezequiel has eaten two helpings of eggplant, but hasn’t touched his shrimp pasta, which has always been one of his favorites.

“Aren’t you hungry?” I ask.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s just that I’m a vegetarian.”

I look at my Ezequiel’s plate, and he’s eaten plenty of shrimp scampi.

“Oh,” I say.

“It’s nothing personal,” says the carnivorous Ezequiel, gesturing toward his vegetarian twin. “It’s a matter of ethics.”

I look back and forth between the two of them, utterly disoriented. The vegetarian has finished eating. He closes his eyes and concentrates as if reading a book on the inside of his eyelids. “It’s approaching,” he says, eyes still closed. “Still far, but nearer than it has ever been before. And closer to the surface.”

“I know,” says Ezequiel. “I already finished the schematics.”

The Ezequiels nod at each other.

“Is that why there are two of you now?” I say. “Because of this thing that’s coming? What’s getting nearer?”

Ezequiel holds a finger to pursed lips and lets out a silent shush. “Quiet your questions. One of us, two of us, three of us. These are illusions. Only being has meaning.”

“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, and look at the other Ezequiel, the one I’ve been thinking of as my Ezequiel. “Can you explain to me what he’s saying?”

He glances at me and gets up to clear the dishes. “You worry too much, Wilfredo.”

I’m left alone at the table, dumbfounded. Ezequiel never calls me by my full name.

The next evening I return from the office to find our apartment in disarray. The living room floor is strewn with metal parts, tubing, glass, and tools. Ezequiel is standing in the middle of it, screwing two parts together. He looks up at me, without stopping the screwing. “My new project,” he says. How odd. In the past, Ezequiel has always worked in software, not hardware. But I don’t comment. I wouldn’t want him to think me unsupportive, not when there’s so much going on.

The other Ezequiel is in the bedroom, which has been stripped of all furniture. The television, the bed, the nightstand—all gone. So are the paintings and photographs that had hung on the walls until this morning. The room is empty, save for a plain blue rug in the middle of the floor, and a tray of candles and incense beside it.

“Where are we supposed to sleep?” I say.

He gestures at the rug on the floor.

“You know I have a bad back,” I say. But does he know? Perhaps only the other Ezequiel knows that.

“We must simplify, Wilfredo,” says the Ezequiel in front of me. “From that, all else will follow.”

“Simplify my aching back,” I mutter, and trod out of the room.

At night, I bring some pillows in from the sofa, attempting to make my spot on the rug somewhat comfortable. Ezequiel sits beside me, typing on his laptop, while the other Ezequiel kneels on the far side of the room, meditating in front of four candles. The room is mostly shadows, lit only by the glow of the laptop on Ezequiel’s face and the flickering dance of candlelight on the walls. I curl myself up against Ezequiel and touch his arm, look up at his face. He keeps typing but allows my hand to remain there, our bodies gently touching.

After a sleepless hour, Ezequiel closes his laptop and sets it on the floor beside him. I reach for his cheek, thinking we’re about to kiss goodnight. But then the other Ezequiel blows out his candles, and the room goes dark. Bare feet pad across the hardwood floor, and another body crawls onto the rug. The other Ezequiel shoves his way between us. He lies on his back, no pillows, his palms up and his legs spread wide. “Corpse pose,” he says. “Highly conducive to mindful rest.”

Part of me wants to climb over him and shout at Ezequiel for bringing this doppelganger into our lives. Part of me wants to physically drag the other Ezequiel by the leg of his mindful corpse pose out of our apartment and bolt the door behind him. But my anger is overwhelmed by fear, fear that if I lock out one Ezequiel, I will lose the other.

I turn on my other side and try to sleep.

I begin to worry that neither Ezequiel is my Ezequiel. They both call me Wilfredo, when they address me at all.

I search the city for the true Ezequiel. I go to his favorite cafes and restaurants, the Whole Foods where we do our weekly groceries. He is nowhere that I look, but I run into an old friend in Noe Valley.

“How’s Ezequiel?” she says. “It’s been forever since I saw him.”

“Oh, he’s fine,” I say, because the truth is too embarrassing, and too elusive.

On the weekend, Ezequiel tells me that his new project is ready, pointing at four enormous crescent-moons of metal and glass resting against the living room wall. They’ve rented a truck. Its front car has room for three. I help the two Ezequiels load the crescent-moons onto the truck’s flatbed. The pieces are heavy and awkwardly shaped, and it takes all three of us to get them down the stairs. I feel so relieved—so happy—that they still need me.

It must be a long trip we’re taking, because Ezequiel packs a duffel bag with extra clothes and dried food. I pack a bag of clothes for myself too. The other Ezequiel brings only a baggie of candles and incense.

Ezequiel drives, and I sit in the passenger seat, with the other Ezequiel between us. After two hours through winding roads, we get to a remote pier. We unload the big pieces of metal onto the dock, and Ezequiel begins screwing and welding the crescent-moons together. I hold the pieces for him as he welds, fetch things from his toolbox. The other Ezequiel takes off his sandals and walks to the edge of the pier, sits and dangles his feet in the water, staring out at the sun and the bay.

As Ezequiel completes the assembly of the half-moons, I realize it’s a small submarine that he’s constructing. Not torpedo-shaped, but round and nonthreatening, like the yellow ones you see on the science channels. It’s a grey metal sphere, not much bigger than a liferaft, a curved window of glass in the front. I worry it won’t work, but when we push it into the water, it plops in and floats to the surface, bobbing like an apple in a barrel of water.

Ezequiel goes first, jumping onto the submarine and grabbing it by a handle, then climbing into the hatch on top. The other Ezequiel takes off all his clothes and dives naked into the water. He emerges from the water and climbs up the ladder on the side of the submarine. His smooth brown skin glistening wet, he silently crawls into the hatch.

I can see the two of them through the glass, inside the submarine as it bobs in the water. Ezequiel is leaning over, pressing buttons and pulling levers. The other Ezequiel, still naked and wet, sits in one of three chairs, staring out the window. He’s beautiful. They are both so beautiful, even now. They’re waiting for me.

I leap off the dock, trying to land on the submarine, as the first Ezequiel did, but I miss. I fall in belly-first, and the water greets me with a brutal slap. Disoriented, it’s hard to get my head above water. I tread over to the submarine, climb up the ladder on the side. Neither Ezequiel comes to help me. As soon as I climb into the hatch, Ezequiel seals it behind me. The submarine dives, faster and deeper than I’d expected.

The purpose of our expedition is unclear to me. The Ezequiels answer my questions cryptically, or with silence. Within hours, we’re far out at sea. The dark waters are lit only by the headlights of the submarine. We pass schools of blue-brown fish and color-changing jellies and steer our way through forests of algae. Ezequiel photographs every creature that we see, taking careful notes of them on his laptop. The other Ezequiel sits in ceaseless meditation. Every few hours, we snack on trail mix or dried fruit. There’s a tube where we can dispose of our waste. It’s cramped inside the submarine, but Ezequiel has thought of everything. We sleep in our chairs. At the center of the vessel, there’s just enough room to stand and stretch.

The journey goes on for days. I feel stir-crazy. It’s too much, being inside this tiny sphere of metal and glass at the bottom of the ocean. But the Ezequiels are unbothered by it, engrossed in work and meditation. So I go along with it, hoping that we’ll soon find whatever we’re looking for so we can go back to land and home.

I’m half-sleeping in my chair when Ezequiel’s laptop starts beeping like a heart monitor.

“It’s near,” says the other Ezequiel, with a transcendent happy smile. Ezequiel steers us deeper, and the submarine casts its light on a sheet of red rock.

But then the rock moves. It happens so fast, all I see is a blur of red scales and a massive red tongue as the submarine is swallowed whole by the sea beast.

Within the belly of the beast, a slimy wetness seeps into everything, and it’s too dark to even see shadows. We’ve abandoned the submarine, which has been dented and rendered useless by the beast’s maw and the juices of its stomach.

I power on my phone, turn on the light. The battery is running low, but I can only withstand so many minutes of darkness. In the phone’s blue light, I see fish bones everywhere, and dozens of half-digested carcasses: jellies, octopuses, and several large sharks. The beast’s stomach is a swampy graveyard of the sea.

The light catches Ezequiel, a dozen meters away. It’s too slippery to walk, so he crawls on his hands and knees, groping at the walls of the inside of the creature’s stomach, hoping to map its perimeter and find an exit. But it’s been hours, and he’s only crawled in circles.

A few feet away, the other Ezequiel sits cross-legged, palms up, meditating. “Om,” he says, letting the “m” stretch into a hum.

I crawl my way toward Ezequiel, and shine my light along his path, hoping to help his search.

“If we got in, there has to be a way back out,” he says, as we crawl through the slime. We are again united in purpose, side by side, his fingers occasionally grazing mine as he gropes for purchase on the slippery floor. Sometimes we are rocked about by the movement of the beast swimming through the water, and we catch each other’s bodies as we tumble. Amidst the stink of acid and half-digested fish, I feel elated to be so close to him again. I feel sure that Ezequiel is right, that an exit is within our reach, if we work together to find it. We can leave the other Ezequiel behind, oming his way to oblivion.

We finally find a hole, which Ezequiel believes to be the entrance to the esophagus, but it’s too slippery for us to climb through. My cell phone has run out of power, and we’ve already gone through half of the other Ezequiel’s candles. Ezequiel is getting increasingly desperate. By the light of one of the few remaining candles, he rifles through his duffel bag until he finds a pocketknife. He snaps open the blade, his face determined.

“If we can’t find a way out, then we’ll make one,” he says, crawling his way toward the wall. Under the candle’s dim glow, he stands, raising the knife. With a single, decisive movement, he stabs the inside of the sea beast’s stomach. He pulls the knife out and stabs it again. All around us there’s a rumbling moan.

The other Ezequiel looks on, his mouth gaping, horrified that the beast is being harmed. He crawls over to Ezequiel and stands in front of him, grabs his arm mid-stab and stops it. “We’re here,” he says. “We’ve found it. And now you’re hurting it.”

“I didn’t come here to die in it!” says Ezequiel, pushing the other one away and lifting the knife toward the beast.

“Sacreligio!” shouts the other Ezequiel.

“Survival is not sacrilege,” Ezequiel says, and stabs the beast again.

The other Ezequiel rushes him, knocking the knife from his hand. The two Ezequiels stare at each other, eyes and arms locked in struggle. They know they’re evenly matched.

It’s the first time they’ve been at odds. I see my opportunity and seize it. I take the other Ezequiel by the elbows and pull him back. We slip and fall onto the slimy stomach floor. Ezequiel, now free of the other Ezequiel, picks up the knife. He stabs the beast again, this time digging the knife in and twisting it. The beast lets out a wrenching moan, and the floor itself rumbles. The ceiling and walls close in around us as the beast’s stomach contracts. Then we are propelled, all three of us, back out to the ocean, riding a jet-stream of fish bones and bubbles and bile.

We swim for the surface, following the light. The fresh air is a feast for my starving lungs.

The submarine is nowhere in sight, and Ezequiel says that it must still be stuck inside the belly of the beast. The other Ezequiel glares at him with a look I know well, a glare he once reserved only for me—an intimate alchemy of anger and disappointment.

Ezequiel points to the horizon. Land! The three of us swim toward it. The Ezequiels are faster than I am, and I struggle to keep up. Within a half-mile of the shore, I have to stop. My arms can go on no longer. I can barely tread water to stay afloat.

The Ezequiels are far ahead of me. One of them looks back and sees me struggling. They turn around and swim back to me.

The other Ezequiel takes me in his left arm and swims sidestroke with his right, gently pulling me through the water.

I let my body go limp and begin to sob. I hadn’t expected them to come back. “Thank you,” I say between sobs. “Thank you.”

It’s a small island, one I’ve never heard of, but it has a thriving tourist industry. Nearly all the locals speak English. Ezequiel wires for money, buys us new clothes, and gets us a room in a local hotel. We order room service, and Ezequiel and I feast upon roast chicken and steak, while the other Ezequiel eats three servings of pasta and vegetables. The silence is tense. I feel embarrassed at how much pleasure I feel, knowing that this time it’s not me at the center of the silence.

After we eat, tiredness overtakes tension. The three of us collapse on the bed and fall into a deep sleep.

I awake to find one Ezequiel stroking the other. Ezequiel is lying on his side, leaning into the other Ezequiel, his fingers massaging his chest. The other Ezequiel is lying on his back, palms-up in his favored meditation pose, his eyes closed and his penis erect.

Ezequiel sees me seeing him and lowers his eyes in shame, as if I were his mother and I’d just walked in on him masturbating.

It’s been so long since Ezequiel and I made love, since long before there were two of him. I feel so jealous. No, not jealous. Excluded. Even after their fight, there is more affection between the two of them than either has with me.

I married one person, not two, and I won’t let them leave me out any longer. I push myself up and sit on my knees. I reach over and kiss Ezequiel, our lips meeting just above the other Ezequiel’s chest. He kisses me back, his tongue touching mine. I so missed the touch of his tongue.

I pull back and see that Ezequiel is still massaging the other Ezequiel. The smooth skin of one flows into the other, and so does my desire. I kneel over and kiss the other Ezequiel’s nipples, while Ezequiel’s hands work their way down the other Ezequiel’s torso, to his testicles.

The other Ezequiel spasms and opens his eyes. “Oh no,” he says, sucking in air. “No, I shouldn’t.”

He spasms again and ejaculates, letting out a moan that carries more regret than pleasure. He pulls away from us, sits up and brings his legs over the side of the bed. He puts his hands on his forehead and shakes his head. I look over at Ezequiel, who is looking down at the sheets.

The other Ezequiel gets up and goes to the bathroom, and Ezequiel follows. There is the sound of running water and hushed recriminations.

I lie in bed alone, straining my ears to make sense of the whispers. I feel jealous even of this, of the intimacy of their anger. I miss the time when Ezequiel’s soft harsh words were a special weapon he wielded only in the privacy of our universe of two.

When did this happen, this feeling of always abruptly being on the outside of everything?

The next day we walk to the docks. Ezequiel has rented a small motor boat and scuba gear. The two Ezequiels both change into wetsuits and strap scuba tanks to their backs. Ezequiel hands another set of gear to me. I hesitate, not sure where we’re going or if I want to go with them. But then I think how thoughtful it was of Ezequiel to rent a third set of scuba gear for me, how they both came back for me, how the other Ezequiel swam me safely to shore. I’m not on the outside now. They want me to be part of this. I put on the wetsuit and strap on the tank.

Ezequiel pilots the boat out into the ocean. After a few minutes, he turns off the motor. The island is just barely in sight at the edge of the horizon. We’re at roughly the same spot where the sea beast spat us out.

Ezequiel checks his gear and dives in, and the other Ezequiel follows. I do the same.

It’s been years since I went scuba diving, and I was never good at it. It feels unnatural to breathe underwater, but I work to breathe evenly. I keep floating upward or sinking deeper without meaning to, and I fall behind as the Ezequiels swim ever deeper into the sea. Where are we going? Does Ezequiel mean to recover his submarine? To kill the beast? What do they hope to accomplish?

Then I see it, just visible at the outer rim of the beam of Ezequiel’s dive-light. I’d never gotten a good look at it from the outside. Its long neck stretches through the water, its wide fins spread like perfect sails, its deep red scales shimmer in the light, its long tail undulates gracefully, its every movement full of sacred beauty.

On all sides, the great beast is circled by every creature of the sea that I have ever seen or imagined. Whole schools of fish striped and plain, bright and dull; dolphins frolicking with joy; jellies and squids reaching toward the beast with thousands of tendrils; humpback whales that would be giants in any other company but are dwarfed by the great sea beast. Every one of them, every creature, even the seaweed, is reaching out for that beautiful beast, singing to it, circling it, bending their bodies in supplication to its majesty.

The two Ezequiels swim toward the circling schools of sea creatures. They join the procession, both of them pressing their palms together in prayer and folding their bodies. They haven’t come here to kill the beast. They have come here to worship it.

I swim toward the Ezequiels, but swimming this deep is difficult, and I can’t catch up to them. I wave my arms and legs in big circles to get their attention, but they’re not looking back for me. They’re looking at the beast and at each other, caught up in the rapture of their devotion.

The beast is the most magnificent thing I have ever seen, and even now part of me wants to join the Ezequiels and every creature of the ocean in bowing to it, in dedicating my life to a journey of mystery beneath the sea. It would be a beautiful journey.

But it’s time I stop contorting my heart to fit into journeys and dreams that aren’t my own.

I turn away from the Ezequiels and their beast and swim toward the surface. No matter what I do, I can’t get any higher. I panic, my breathing quickening. I’ll never get back to the surface. I begin to hyperventilate.

Then I realize that every time I inhale, I rise slightly. Of course I do. Air is lighter than water.

I take in a deep breath, and my lungs fill up like hot air balloons, carrying me up, up, up to the surface. The Ezequiels and the sea beast and all the creatures of the sea shrink into the distance as I rise away from them. I reach the surface and climb back into the boat. I rev up the motor and turn toward the shore. My body feels heavy without the buoyancy of the water, but my lungs feel relieved by the taste of fresh air, and my eyes are delighted by the sun.

I’m not sure where to go next. But wherever I go, I know that it will just be me, one person.