LAS VEGAS, NEVADA — Retired neurosurgeon and 2016 Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson arrived at The Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada Thursday morning, saying he was “pumped and ready.” The only problem? The debate had already taken place two days earlier, and Carson had been on stage the whole time, or had he?

“That was my stand-in,” Carson later told reporters as he confusedly left The Venetian having not debated a single person, “every important leader has a stand-in, don’t you see?” Carson explained that he got the idea for a stand-in when he watched the movie “Dave,” starring Kevin Klein and decided he’d like to be able to be in two places at once as well. “I can’t sleep, take a nap, and catch some shut-eye all in three different places can I,” Dr. Carson asked rhetorically.

So he searched the country far and wide, looking for someone who looked enough like him that with “a little glue and a lot of eye contact” they could trick the American people into thinking they were the real Ben Carson. The search did not go according to plan however, when Carson found that while he could identify several people who looked enough like him, “none of them could sound as if they were nodding off on black tar heroin every time they opened their mouth” and he knew that “nailing [his] sleep-deprived cat personality” was going to be the key to whole deception.

“At one point I thought we were going to go with this really nice gentlemen from Akron, Ohio,” Dr. Carson told the assembled media, “but he was actually alert and formed semi-coherent, non-rambling sentences, so we knew he’d blow the cover off the whole thing faster than you could…” and then Dr. Carson trailed off and gestured toward something on a far wall with an barely audible, monosyllabic noise coming out from his lips.

When the search for his double brought him to an old, abandoned landfill, he was “ready to give up all hope.” But then, he found a large box of rocks “and none of them could speak.” Carson knew he’d found his analogue. “We strapped an early 80’s Speak n Spell onto the box, applied some Hollywood fancy-shmancy makeup and special effects, and — violin! — you had yourself a perfect Ben Carson stand-in,” Carson told the audience of reporters and Venetian hotel guests.

“Well, I was going to do a little debatin’ today,” Carson said as he left the hotel grounds, “but it being two in the afternoon, sunny and bright out and my schedule being tightly packed like it is, there’s no better time than the present for a quick nap – ” and with that, he immediately fell asleep.