My Vanishing Twin Page 5

  But Walter did not want to talk to it. Talking to it might make this all the more real. And this was already plenty real.

  But Walter could not justify saying nothing at all.

  So he took a breath, refreshingly deep and smooth in comparison to the mutant being’s, and forced out the first words he could conjure…

  “I am Walter,” he said as flatly as Dr. Grunburg might deliver a terminal diagnosis.

  The twin smiled.

  At least Walter thought he smiled. His blue-black line-lips, when raised at the corners, presented a portrait more aptly representative of a man in severe and chronic pain than a man expressing joy. But something in the peering eyes almost antithetically conveyed a sense of satisfaction, of connection.

  “Thank you,” said the twin. Then he added, “For my life.”

  In the wake of these words comprehended, Walter felt something he had not felt in longer than he cared to remember. He felt his heart. It cracked and slowly molassesed its way through his chest.

  Were Walter presently immersed in a less incomprehensible moment, he might well have brought to bear some profound realization about the lack of connection he felt to the accumulation of daily events that masqueraded as the sum total of his life. He might even have discerned a spot or two wherein he could take responsibility for whatever had transpired to bring his typically leaden state of being into his daily life. As things were, however, Walter could do little more at present than simply hide this unexpected swell of emotion deep down underneath his apathetic exterior.

  As Walter tried to speak, the emotions swallowed his words.

  He had to clear his throat and try again.

  “What do you think,” Walter managed to get out without betraying his stoic guise, “your name should be?”

  The twin did his version of smiling again. Only this time the smile was even deeper, conveying the appearance of even greater pain.

  “Whatever you think,” the twin offered back. “I trust you. You’re my brother.”

  Walter heard Veronica’s tears accelerate into sobs. Even the nurse, whom Walter only now noticed standing behind the wheelchair, was in uncontrollable tears. And if Walter was not mistaken, his own cheeks had somehow become streaked with warm paths turning quickly cold as two clear droplets kamikazed onto the stiff, white hospital bed sheets, leaving temporary gray-beige stains of varying diameter.

  Shortly after the twin had been taken away to rest, Dr. Grunburg entered Walter’s hospital room accompanied by two other doctors flanking him, one on either side. These doctors nodded whenever Dr. Grunburg spoke. The one on the right occasionally wrote what couldn’t be more than extremely brief sentence fragments into a metal chart that he clutched to his chest in between these flash flurries of transcription.

  The doctors, even in triplicate now, could explain very little, other than to assure Walter that he was responding well to the surgery and that the twin was responding favorably as well. The doctors said Walter should be grateful. Veronica assured them that he was. Walter said nothing, secretly wishing them all misfortune—but merely of the nuisance variety, not anything truly horrible. Though they stood a few feet in front of him, Walter felt as distant from these men in lab coats as he had ever felt from anyone or anything in his entire life. He nevertheless took some solace in the fact that there were three of them now, lessening Dr. Grunburg’s monolithic role in his existence, a role which Walter had never really granted but nevertheless had found himself forced to live with.

  “The twin is progressing at a much faster pace than we had anticipated,” Dr. Grunburg all but yawned as he tossed his eyes between Walter, Veronica, and a file in his hand. “His language capabilities seem fully formed at birth. He has taken to walking almost immediately—although his gait is imbalanced, almost violent, and will likely always be so. All of his bodily systems are functioning at sufficient levels to allow him to exist unencumbered by assistance devices of any sort. He can eat and digest solid food. His circulation is strong. He can think and reason at levels apropos of a highly intelligent adult.”

  “And,” Veronica added, “he seems to be a very kind-

  hearted man.”

  This comment did not appear to register as valid or meaningful to any of the doctors in the room. It did, however, spark just a miniscule shred of resentment somewhere deep and unexamined within Walter. A shred so small it passed all but unnoticed in this pressing moment.

  “Based on your progress and barring any complications,” Dr. Grunburg went on, “you and the twin should be released this Friday, allowing for three days of recovery. Just as I had predicted.”

  “You never made that prediction,” Walter corrected. “You wouldn’t even tell me how long the surgery would be.”

  “I might not have shared it with you,” the doctor demanded, loudly but not exactly defensively. “But this was exactly what I thought would transpire.”

  Walter curdled with hatred toward this man, but did not bother responding for fear it would lengthen the already disappointing amount of time he had been forced to spend with Dr. Grunburg in this, presumably his only, lifetime.

  Veronica, of course, had finished the guest room in time.

  It wasn’t glamorous: no new coat of paint, no cohesive design, just furniture moved from another room into this one and detritus moved out of this room and into a newly rented storage bin. The space was clean, a comfy twin bed pushed into the back corner. “Or, as you and the twin might call it,” Veronica had joked, “a bed.”

  The twin settled into his room seamlessly, unconcerned with what the room once was or might one day be, simply elated and grateful to have a space of his own.

  Walter and Veronica kept finding themselves compelled to explain certain things that the twin picked up on immediately: the light switches, the toilet, where the food was located and when to eat it, how air conditioning worked, how they didn’t really disappear when they left his plane of vision. But the twin seemed prepackaged with all of this information already in place, and much more, prompting Walter’s eyes to pop open mere seconds after having closed them for sleep that first night home as a sudden and alarming thought occurred to him.

  Walter beelined down the hall and burst into the twin’s room…

  “Everything I’ve heard, everything I’ve said, everything I’ve done, have you experienced everything that I have experienced over the past thirty-five years?”

  The twin was not startled by Walter’s sudden appearance. Quite the contrary, he delighted at now living in a world where people could burst into your room. But he set aside this savory joy for a moment, casting his stare off and thinking a good long moment before answering…

  “I don’t know. From my perspective, I only began concretely processing phenomenon from the moment that I was removed from your abdomen. I first remember a bright, piercing light. While I intuit from your behavior, and Veronica’s as well, that this is incommensurate with the conventional development of a person being born, my knowledge is limited by my experience of existence. As such, this is my normal. So I cannot compare it to your normal.”

  “Connie Mulder,” Walter stated. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

  The twin considered before shaking his head and shrugging, which for some reason only involved movement in his left shoulder, the one that sat lower.

  Walter needed a grimacing moment to take this in. He had no reason to believe that the twin was lying, or that he even knew how to lie at all, for that matter. Besides, reasoned Walter, if they had truly shared all of his life experiences, then why the hell does the little guy talk so unusually?

  “How,” Walter asked, “do you know what ‘incommensurate’ means?”

  “Disproportionate. Out of sympathetic measure,” the twin replied.

  “But how?” Walter insisted, before elaborating a touch. “How do you know that when I don’t kn
ow that?”

  “I read the dictionary.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “In the hospital. I felt compelled to accelerate my familiarity with language so I could greaten my facility with communicative skills. I wanted to bring myself up to the level of a native speaker with years of experience equivalent to my technical age.”

  “Right,” Walter puzzled over this presumably unintentional insult. “The whole dictionary?”

  The twin sensed that this unsettled Walter a bit.

  “People don’t do that, do they?” the twin asked, suddenly embarrassed.

  Walter did not respond at first. He wasn’t sure what there was to say about this anyway. So he took a moment to consider before offering up a general statement that seemed at least thematically related to the twin’s question. “People do lots of things,” Walter stated, apropos of what he was not sure, exactly. But it felt like an honest enough thing to say.

  Then he turned off the light and retreated to his bedroom, satisfying himself, for now at least, with the knowledge that all of the humiliating private moments of his life, and there were plenty of them, still seemed to be his and his alone.

  3.

  For the next five days, Walter slept.

  That was all.

  He got up on occasion to use the restroom or to drink some water, maybe eat a piece of toast.

  Other than that, he just slept.

  Veronica knew how he liked both his water and his toast, so often times he would call to her from bed for assistance and she would answer, sometimes from the next room and sometimes from the bed, right beside him.

  Walter noticed her response time gradually increasing, especially and counterintuitively when she happened to be lying right next to him.

  On several occasions, Veronica attempted to remind Walter that the doctor had recommended he resume regular, low-impact activities immediately to help with the healing process.

  Walter insisted that sleep was as low impact as it could get.

  Veronica had observed this bitter shade to Walter’s personality not so gradually expanding over the years, a deeply resigned and depressive side to him that was, in its worst throes, stubbornly resistant to any and all positive stimuli. But in the past she had never seen it last more than a day or two at a stretch, most typically centering around specific topics or circumstances but flowing and ebbing at a moment’s notice. But when the alarm clock finally went off on the Monday morning of Walter’s planned return to work, the bitterness was still so deeply there and in full bloom that Walter could not force himself out of bed, which was odd considering all of the sleeping he had done since the surgery.

  When he woke up again, he was already an hour late for work.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Sheprick,” Walter muttered into the phone, still lying beneath the covers of his lately all-too-familiar bed. “There have been unforeseen complications. I’ll need a little more time.”

  “How much time is a little more time?” Mr. Sheprick shot back.

  “Probably the rest of this week.”

  “The rest? The week has only now begun. You mean five days, then?”

  “I have some healing to do. As it turns out, I had a very large tumor removed. At least fifty pounds.” Somewhere amidst his varied and plentiful sleep states of the last week, Walter had pored through countless scenarios before deeming this one the most effective and direct explanation for his sudden change in appearance. It was admittedly quite gross. But it was far less demeaning than were he to have had liposuction. And it was certainly far less demeaning and horrifying than the actual truth. Not to mention profoundly simpler.

  “That’s impossible,” Mr. Sheprick replied, panicking Walter a touch since this was the first time he had tried out his painstakingly deliberated-over explanation.

  “It’s quite possible, actually,” Walter defended, “inasmuch as it happened. The doctors did not anticipate as prolonged a recovery time. But as it turns out it’s going to take longer than…”

  “Where was this fifty pound tumor hiding?”

  “My abdomen. Turns out I wasn’t fat.” Just as Walter had anticipated, it felt exhilaratingly wonderful to be acquitted of the perception that the strains, stresses, and ravages of mundane existence had degraded his self-respect and concurrent life choices into a resultant caloric intake and sedentary lifestyle that had turned him considerably fat.

  “So you had liposuction?” Mr. Sheprick replied, instantaneously sucking the air out of Walter’s newfound pride and replacing it with the stubborn truth that correcting such erroneous presuppositions about his mostly fictionalized explanation of his medical circumstance would be far more difficult than he had anticipated.

  “I did not,” Walter fired back. “I had a tumor removed.”

  “Whatever you say,” Mr. Sheprick offered. “This week it is, then. Be back next week. The machine must keep churning.”

  “Thank you for your understanding.”

  “I’m doing what the law mandates,” answered Mr. Sheprick without so much as a tinge of irony.

  “Well…” Walter fumbled, “thank you for your compliance, then.”

  “Yup,” said Mr. Sheprick, and hung up the phone.

  Walter rolled over and closed his eyes.

  He eventually fought his way back to sleep, wrestling first with the lingering guilt of having gained the weight that he had never really gained at all.

  “Walter?” a gravelly squeak of a voice prodded Walter from his sleep.

  Walter opened his eyes to find the twin at eye level and maybe a foot from his face. The twin was not crouching. Rather, this was his natural height.

  Walter suddenly realized that the single thing he had been enjoying most about sleep lately was its ability to create pockets of time wherein the twin and everything involving the twin, for all practical purposes, did not really exist.

  The twin smiled, giving the outward appearance of deep suffering.

  “What?” Walter begrudged.

  “Shouldn’t you be getting up?” the twin gently suggested more than asked, really.

  “Why?” Walter demurred more than asked.

  “For work,” the twin replied innocently. “Or just for life.”

  “I’m healing. And you don’t need to look after me.”

  “It’s been more than a week now, since the procedure.”

  “I know my body. It needs more rest.”

  “Let’s take a walk, at least. Or see some sights. The doctor said activity would be good. For both of us.”

  “What sights? I’ve seen this city’s sights.”

  “Everything is a sight to me,” the twin said as his eyes widened, the excitement in his tone made Walter want to sleep forever.

  “Twin, I don’t want to do anything. Other than this. Minus the talking to you part.”

  The twin took in a small gasp of air and his face contorted into his version of hurt, which was more of a startled, joyous expression but with a clearly wounded and sad quality in the eyes. The twin did his best, which was not very convincing at all, to hide his emotions as he shrugged his lower-hanging shoulder and turned to walk his choppy, violent steps out of the bedroom. Walter listened to the awkward, stabbing, arrhythmic gait make its way down the hall and back into the second bedroom that was supposed to be an office but had never made it past a storage room. Until now, anyway.

  Walter rolled over and closed his eyes.

  Yet again, he eventually fought his way back to sleep, wrestling this time with the guilt of having hurt the infuriatingly innocent, sweet, and delicate thing that now lived just one door down the hall from him.

  Walter awoke shortly after sundown to an awful, shrill, violent honking sound assaulting its way up the hallway and into the bedroom, forcing Walter bolt upright, heart pounding.

  “Veronica?” he yelled out
.

  Suddenly the aural assault stopped.

  All was silent but for some whispers and some shooshing.

  “Veronica?” he yelled again.

  “What?” she called back, seemingly angry.

  Walter did not appreciate her tone. He forced the covers back anyway and dragged himself out of bed. “Are you okay?” he asked, certainly angry, as he inched his way cautiously along the hall.

  “Of course. I’m here with Twin.”

  Walter eased his way into the living room to find exactly what Veronica described: she and Twin. They were discordantly calm in light of the heinous din of terror that had just fog-horned throughout the apartment. So calm that Walter considered it wholly plausible that someone might be hiding with a gun or a knife behind the couch, having instructed everyone to act normally or he would kill them all.