My Vanishing Twin Page 22

  By some force even faster and more hardwired than reflex, Walter quickly wedged his foot in the closing door.

  “You don’t think I’m happy?” he asked, authentically offended.

  “Move. Your. Fucking. Foot.” Veronica accentuated each word with a forceful, sledgehammer of a kick.

  “You don’t think I’m happy?” Walter insisted again.

  “No!” she said, her kicks now far outnumbering her words. “Goodbye!”

  “Come to my show,” Walter found himself insisting. “Tonight. Mayne Ridge Park. At sundown. You’ll see!” Walter wasn’t quite sure what he hoped to prove with an invitation to a performance from which he was presently quite desperately attempting to hide. But he nevertheless found himself holding firm on this point. “Tonight!” he insisted yet again. “Say yes!”

  “I will do anything if it gets you to leave!” Veronica fired back.

  “Great!” Walter said before finally removing his foot and retreating from the doorway, enabling Veronica to slam the door those last few inches. “Mayne Ridge Park!” he added through the wood of the door. “Tonight!”

  “I came here to invite you to see what I’ve been doing,” Walter explained when he next landed in yet another familiar doorway, this one attached to Beau Chalmers’ still inexplicably nice home.

  “No, thank you,” Beau said flatly and started to close the door.

  Excluding, of course, the last conversation they had had in this very same doorway, Walter had seldom seen Beau anything but excitedly agreeable about most everything. This was one of the main reasons Walter had come here, so that tonight’s audience would contain at least one person who thought the real Walter Braum was brilliant. Walter was not certain how, exactly, to read Beau’s current reaction, other than to note that it was most certainly not agreeable.

  “I’m sorry about your job and Sheprick Consolidated and everything,” Walter pleaded, which was at least enough to get Beau to stop short of closing the door entirely.

  “I lost my job, Walter,” Beau spat from behind the almost closed door. “We lost our jobs.”

  “I should have done things differently,” Walter conceded. “I can’t change that now. But come see the show tonight. You’ll see.”

  “What will I see?”

  “I don’t know,” Walter explained in earnest. “You’ll see parts of me that even the people that know me don’t really know.”

  “Speaking of,” Beau interrupted, his anger softening now into disappointment as he pulled the door open and brought himself to stand once again in front of Walter, “why would you hide it from me that you gave birth to your brother?”

  “What?” Walter found himself asking, the word falling from his mouth as his body shot instantly through with a pang of panic that seemed to harden every fluid element of his biology. “What did you just say?”

  “I thought we were friends…” Beau continued only for Walter to cut him off…

  “Repeat the words you just said to me,” Walter enunciated each word, needing to confirm what he strongly suspected he had just heard. “I want to hear the words that you just said.”

  “Your brother,” Beau said. “You gave birth to him.”

  Walter sucked in a quick, bitter jolt of air into his lungs and staggered a few steps back as though he had been punched in his already aching abdomen. A once-familiar slipstream of anxiety washed over Walter. Its sudden resurgence reminded him how long it had been since he’d carried that weight of his life as a salesman. At the same time, he marveled over how instantaneously that very same distance had just vanished. “Why,” Walter narrowed and sharpened his previous point of inquiry, shuffling his feet forward to reclaim the few steps he had just conceded, “in the name of all fuck would you think that?”

  Beau’s face crinkled into a confused furrow. He waited just long enough to confirm that Walter was, indeed, serious before retreating briefly into the house and returning with today’s newspaper, which he extended to Walter.

  The front page headline read: Pregnant Man Births Twin Brother.

  “Why,” Walter even further pinpointed his query as he took two more steps towards Beau, these inches proceeding beyond his initial position on the stoop, “in the name of all fuck would they think that?”

  “It was in a medical journal,” Beau answered innocently as he retracted the newspaper and started scanning for the name of the journal.

  “What fucking medical—” Walter stopped suddenly, the obvious turning undeniable. “Motherfucker!” he screamed bitterly as he clawed the paper from Beau’s hands and flung it to the ground, startling Beau several steps back from the doorway.

  Once the paper hit the ground, Walter immediately snatched it up.

  “Can I have this?” he insisted in the form of a question.

  Beau nodded, afraid to speak, but Walter had already spun around and rushed off the stoop, away from Beau’s nauseatingly beautiful home.

  The next cognizant perception Walter experienced was his bursting a door open and, seemingly without even taking a single step to get there, instantaneously arriving at a once-familiar receptionist’s window, newspaper still clutched in his irate death grip. The nondescript, heavyset woman behind the glass recoiled, her eyes widening and her jaw falling slack. “Where is Grunburg?” Walter called out to everyone in earshot as he raised the newspaper over his head and waved it about. “Where are you, Grunburg?” he yelled into the space behind the window.

  All heads in the waiting room, as well as the entire suite through, snapped up to see what was going on.

  “You apathetic, unfeeling son of a bitch!” Walter proclaimed in full voice. “This is my life, you son of a bitch! This is who I am that you are fucking with! This was mine!”

  The receptionist fumbled to find the panic button mounted underneath her desk only to see, in this time of first need, how inopportunely the button had been placed underneath the reception desk, its location actually forcing her to lean closer to the window and, in turn, the very party causing the panic itself. She extended her arm awkwardly forward and groped about while attempting to hold her trunk back in self-preservation. Mercifully, Walter backed away from the window and charged over to the door that led back to the exam rooms, allowing the receptionist time and space enough to find and push the button. Upon finding the door locked stronger than the force of his pulls, kicks, and body checks, Walter came rushing back to the reception window and began crawling through it, screaming as he went, “This is a life you are fucking with!” Walter’s initial lunge through the window caused the receptionist to set off a chain reaction of screams that bounced throughout the office and the reception area as people began to scatter, making for any unlocked door they could find. It took much maneuvering, squirming, kicking, and flailing but Walter eventually made his way through and spilled out onto the floor.

  By then, two unimpressive security guards, presumably at in-between phases in professional trajectories otherwise unrelated to public safety, had come through the front door and into the reception area. “Sir,” they each called out repeatedly, as though this was the only detail, likely misremembered, that they had soaked up during the training video they had been forced to watch on their first day. “Sir. Sir.”

  Walter found his way to his feet and started darting around the recently vacated office in search of the one straggler he hoped was too proud to flee.

  “Grunburg!” Walter yelled as he hurried into and out of each exam room, finding no one.

  “Sir!” the guards kept yelling. One was now fumbling through a massive ring of keys at the same door Walter had just failed to open while the other was attempting to follow the offending party’s path through the reception window. Lacking Walter’s singularity of cause and vision, however, the guard was finding such a feat quite challenging. “Sir! Sir! Sir!”

  When the last exam room proved vacant, Wal
ter noticed, through its large plate glass window, that former inhabitants of the office suite were now gathering in the parking lot five floors down. Displaced by Walter’s diatribe, they nevertheless could not resist the itch to stop, now that they considered themselves out of harm’s way, and look back to see what potentially horrible thing was going to happen next. Positioned in the very middle of this cluster of patients and employees was Dr. Grunburg, tall and calm and staring on flatly.

  “You are not a man!” Walter screamed while shoving an exam table out of the way so that he could press himself as close to the window, and in turn the object of his outrage, as possible. “You are not a human man!”

  As was his wont, Dr. Grunburg did not react, looking dispassionately right at Walter.

  So Walter kept right on yelling, every ounce of everything in him pressing full force out through his lungs directly, squarely, perfectly at this worst kind of banal and inert man. “At least I fucking care about something!” Walter exclaimed, slamming the newspaper headline against the glass over and over again. “At least I fucking care!”

  Dr. Grunburg’s unrelentingly placid indifference made Walter question whether the plate glass window might actually be blocking out all of his sound and intention. But upon widening his gaze just a little, he found that literally every person around the doctor was looking on with fear, panic, or sorrow. Or some combination thereof. “At least there’s something left of me!” he yelled out, uncertain of what, exactly, he was saying anymore. “When you strip it all else away! But there would be nothing left of you! There would be nothing there! But there’s something left of me! At the very least there would be music! At my core! For you, there’s only silence!”

  With a sudden thunk and a snap, the door to the exam room slammed shut, ripping Walter’s attention from the window. “Sir!” a voice called from the other side of the door. “We have barricaded you in until the police arrive to apprehend you.”

  “Please stay calm, sir,” the other voice called out as well.

  Walter had no idea why, but he suddenly found himself chuckling. And that chuckle quickly ramped up into a full-fledged laugh.

  “Is he laughing?” Walter heard one of the voices ask the other.

  After a moment of observational silence, the other voice called out, “Why are you laughing, sir?”

  This just made Walter laugh even harder before exclaiming, confused, “Why the hell aren’t you apprehending me?”

  “We are security officers, sir. We are not police. Please stay calmly where you are, sir.”

  “So you chased me in here to…what, then?” Walter scoffed through his chuckles.

  “Please stay calm, sir.”

  This response only heightened Walter’s laughter to a cackle.

  “Were you planning on trapping me in a room the whole time?” Walter somehow managed through his burgeoning hysterics. “That was the whole game plan?”

  When no response came from the other side of the door, Walter found his laughter turning into guffaws. He steadied himself and lowered into a chair in the corner. He leaned his elbows forward onto his knees as his guffaws turned into a teary breathlessness from which he could not escape and soon enough he found himself vacillating indiscernibly between hilarity and full-force bawling, like a child brand new to understanding his emotions.

  Walter closed his eyes and tried to slow himself down. He took in a long, gradual, deliberate inhale.

  Then he exhaled. Smoothly.

  By his fourth such breath, Walter’s emotions had begun to steady and he opened his eyes to find his vision resting squarely upon the newspaper still clutched in his hand.

  He slowly scanned the words of the lead article.

  His name was not mentioned directly. The article referenced an essay in The Journal of Modern Medicine, authored by Dr. Marcel Grunburg, MD. The essay, and subsequently the article, technically kept all names anonymous. But the descriptions of Wallace were so specific as to be unmistakable were one to come across him.

  “Sir,” one of the guards called out, unsettled by the sudden silence.

  “Do you think he killed himself?” asked the other guard, not as quietly as he probably thought he had.

  The article also quite particularly rendered many of Walter’s life circumstances. It gave his age, described his physical demeanor, commented on his relationship and its struggling status, depicted his middling career in sales of hotel amenities. It even attributed a sizable weight gain to him without clarifying that the weight gain was incidental to his medical circumstance. The article also gave a profile of the city in which he lived, naming the state outright even if it did, technically, stop short of naming the city itself. To anyone who had even casually known Walter Braum during his many years at Sheprick Consolidated, his connection to these circumstances would be unmistakable.

  Conspicuously missing from the article were all the things that had transpired since he had been released from the hospital, like his music and…

  “Tonight!” Walter snapped to and checked his watch, the hands of which shot Walter to his feet bolt upright. He had little more than an hour until his performance was scheduled to start. He scanned the room for exits. The windows did not open. There was only the locked door. He approached and tried the handle, which did not give.

  “Let me out of here!” Walter yelled through the door.

  “He’s not dead,” one of the guards muttered to the other.

  “Stay calm, sir,” replied the security guard, a quiver in his voice. “The police will be here any minute.”

  “Open up,” demanded Walter as he stepped back to get a running start and threw his body full force into the door.

  “Stay calm, sir! There’s no need for violence!”

  “Stop calling me ‘sir!’” insisted Walter as he got another running start and bashed once again into the door. But it didn’t give.

  “Please just calm down, mister,” the guard pleaded.

  Walter planted one hand on the displaced exam table and the other on a nearby chair and began kicking at the door’s handle with repeated, swift kicks. The handle first bent, and then it broke. Then it fell to the floor. And Walter kept right on kicking, splintering the wood and working loose screws. He kicked and kicked until his foot cracked straight through to the other side of the door. And then he kicked some more. Just because it felt good. Then he reached into the hole and tried to pull out what was left of the bolt just as the security guards began swatting at his hand with what appeared to be a baton. Walter took several steps back. He channeled his energy into a plaintive and singular focus, simultaneously enormous and pinpointed upon that door. He understood exactly how he had gotten himself here.

  Walter closed his eyes.

  He charged full bore at that door.

  Everything turned into a cracking-crashing-squeaking-tumbling-jostling bed of noise and spin.

  When Walter’s bearings returned, he found himself on top of the door which itself sat atop the two security guards. Drywall dust powdered the air. Doorframe and wood and wires and plastic littered the floor. Walter scurried to his feet and ran out a back exit just as police officers made their way through the front door of the suite. “Sir!” they yelled, making Walter wonder what the hell was up with this salutation. “Stop where you are, sir!”

  But Walter did not.

  He hurried down several flights of stairs and out the back of the building where he made his way into the city at large, quickly getting lost in all of the people therein.

  2.

  As the sun set on Mayne Ridge Park that evening, Walter hid huddled in the security and solitude of some nearby bushes, peering intermittently out upon an exuberant crowd a hundred or so yards away that far outnumbered both his ability to count and to estimate. It had to be in the thousands. They stomped and chanted and whooped and cheered even though nothing had started hap
pening yet.

  “Music! Music! Music!” the crowd exhorted. “Music! Music! Music!”

  Walter checked his watch. He had been there for nearly an hour now and only two minutes remained until, according to Wallace’s schedule, the performance should begin.

  Walter was fully cognizant of how tenuous a long-term plan life in a public shrubbery seemed. But given the varied events of his day, this nevertheless felt like perhaps the only reasonable place left for him to be, the whole city over. And staying here actually seemed like an equally reasonable pursuit for at least as long as it remained viable, which could not possibly be much longer given the potential riot that the crowd might start should it’s hunger for the fictional Walter Braum, whom they nevertheless considered absolutely real as gravity, not be satiated.

  “Music! Music! Music!” The volume and fervor of the crowd’s invocation grew louder and louder. This single word, chanted over and over again, repeated metronomically until it turned from a word into a simple noise. “Music! Music! Music! Music! Music! Music!” A noise that quickly became just a sound. A sound that Walter stopped trying to understand. A sound that Walter simply heard, letting it wash gently over him. “Music! Music! Music!” A sound that effortlessly shifted into a series repeating of tones. “Music! Music! Music!” Tones that fit themselves seamlessly into a melody. “Music! Music! Music!” A melody that unearthed within Walter a single shred of stillness upon which he could focus. “Music,” he muttered to himself. And he considered the thought that perhaps this, and only this, was truly what all of the furor was about. Not any one version of Walter Braum or another, real or perceived, perfect or pockmarked, kind or cold, smart or foolish, but a simple love of music and all the ways it can make us feel that life on its own simply cannot.

  “Music,” he repeated to himself, as if testing the word out.

  Then he backed himself out of the shrub. And before he could talk himself out of it, he started walking across Mayne Ridge Park towards the unthinkably huge gathering just outside the open gate at the park’s entrance.