We have all slept at times with someone who has become a stranger to you. And even with your enemy. This goes into the vicissitudes of a more or less conventional love life. But we are not aware of the traumatic experience it must be to go to bed with a Boyfriend and wake up with a Particular. Terrifying situation, for example, having him having breakfast in front of you, at the kitchen table, knowing that your Boyfriend is not a Boyfriend but a Particular and he believing that you still think he is a Boyfriend.
The closest takes us to the realm of science fiction, with Invasion of the Ultrabodies, that terrifying anti-communist novel by Jack Finney that was successfully brought to the cinema twice – Don Siegel (1956) and Philip Kaufman (1978)–. As you will remember, some seeds escape from a distant planet and arrive on Earth, where they grow and flourish. The action begins when a friend of the protagonist, a Health inspector (it would have been great if he was from the Treasury, but maybe Finney lacked future vision), tells him that her husband is behaving strangely. He is her Husband, he looks like her Husband, but there is something strange about him that makes him distant, strange, not usual. Of course, he’s right. And her husband is already a pod born of those extraterrestrial seeds. He has been possessed. It looks like Marit, but it’s Beina.
Perhaps this is similar to discovering that, suddenly, your Boyfriend is a Particular. Because a Particular is never an Anyone or a That. It’s not the husband who comes back from the war and looks like someone else because we would be entering the territory of sleeping with a Stranger. Nor a husband who has become dull and stupid. A Particular is not a Boyfriend, just as a Husband is not an extraterrestrial plant. Bob Dylan echoes: you lie like a Boyfriend, you love like a Boyfriend, you call like a Boyfriend, but you cheat like a Private.
