Vikalpam

Twice Today is a highly metaphorical journey into the last moments of Joe Oliver. A man who is paralyzed from the waist down and at the end of his rope. As he ponders escape from his tragic and guilt-ridden past, he sits with a pistol on his lap and takes one last moment to reflect on the events that have culminated to his despair. These events are displayed through the lives of some small town citizens. In particular, the stories are related through the tales of four separate groups; two grade-school bullies rebelling against all that is good, a group of three dishonest teenagers who spend all of their earnings on drugs, a young couple whose relationship is on shaky ground due to dishonesty between the two, and a mother and daughter moving back to the mother's hometown in which the daughter is having difficulty coping with the idea of her parents getting a divorce. It is through the tales of these groups that the town becomes a macrocosm for Joe's own life; the events in his life are shown as repeating in the lives of the current town residents.

Three stories. We see, but little is explained. In "The Married Couple," a salesman pays a call on an old customer who is with his wife in the upstairs bedroom of their ill adult son. Another salesman may beat him to the punch, but not before disorienting changes. A maid scrubs the floor. "In the Penal Colony": a man arrives at a penal colony where an officer demonstrates a bizarre apparatus, one that punches a message into the skin of a prisoner strapped beneath it. Who will be punished? In "Fratricide," a man is murdered at night by someone he knows well. A woman grieves.

While his daughter Pauline attends school in France, Emil Cheraud establishes a fashionable gambling-house in New York. Upon her return, Pauline begs her father to close the establishment, and he promises to do so that very night at midnight, but when she enters his library shortly after the appointed hour, she finds him dead. Determined to bring the murderer to justice, Pauline assumes control of the gambling-house, hoping to trap the criminal into a confession. Three men are suspected, all of them in love with Pauline: one who owed her father a fortune; another who boasted that he would kill a man to win her affections; and a third, Jimmie Dreen, whose coat button was found at the scene of the crime. The evidence points strongly to Jimmie, with whom Pauline is in love, until Pierre, Emil's servant, confesses that he killed his employer upon learning that he had lost his job. Much relieved, Pauline agrees to marry Jimmie.