He and I
It was Easter. The adults were in Grandma's eat-in kitchen gossiping over drinks and coffee, and my cousin, Vinny, and I were in the living room playing with the new Nintendos DSs Grandma had put in our Easter baskets. I suppose I was having fun. Maybe I laughed. That would have been too much for Vinny, who liked other people to be miserable.
He glared at me and growled, "You were supposed to be twins, but you ate the other one!" His lip curled up in a sneer over his brace-girdled teeth.
I just stared at Vinny calmly with my right eye. Vinny was eleven, and I was only seven. How did I keep my composure in the face of an older cousin's scorn? Well, Vinny was and always had been mean enough that I never hero-worshipped him just because he was older. He taught me by example how not to treat my siblings. Or anyone else, for that matter.
And I stared because I was a lot more interested in exploring the frightening idea that he had just proposed than in caring about his sneer and vitriol.
I stared with my right eye; I don't have control of the left one.
I stared so long I wasn't seeing Vinny anymore, until he spluttered in a high-pitched, breaking voice, "Why are you staring at me?"
And I realized that the curled lip was not disgust—it was fear.
He broke me out of my thoughts, and I jumped up and did what any seven-year-old would have done: I went to ask my mom if he was right.
When I asked my question, the kitchen fell silent. The grownups all looked at each other with pained and serious grownup expressions.
"Did I eat him?"
"Well, no, of course not..." my mother's voice fluttered and died. She looked at my father, but he wasn't any help. He never was.
My grandmother put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me in close. "Who told you that?" she asked, peering at me owlishly through her oversized trifocals.
I turned just a little towards the living room, and before his name was even out of my mouth, Uncle Henry was shouting, "Vincent!"
"Maybe we should talk about this at home," said my father, "at another time."
I looked around at all the grownups. They knew something about me I didn't know, something so bad that they wouldn't even talk about it.
And worse, they had told Vinny.
Vinny and Uncle Henry were having a fiercely quiet argument in the living room, and Aunt Vera started clearing plates.
"You didn't eat him," Grandma reassured me with a squeeze.
"No, no, of course not," agreed my mother.
Vinny's voice erupted suddenly: "'Cause he's a freak!"
Everything stopped again. Everyone paused what they were doing. April, who was asleep on Grandma's bed, woke up and started whimpering.
I marched straight into the living room and punched Vinny in the stomach. Then, I ran into Grandma's bedroom, and hugged April, and told her everything was okay. Someone closed the bedroom door most of the way, so that the room was dark except for one narrow strip of light that folded over the dresser and onto the floor, and I laid down with April until she went back to sleep.
Baba, she called me then. Baby-talk for Bobby.
I heard the front door close behind Aunt Vera, and Uncle Henry, and Vinny. I wouldn't see him again until he graduated high school.
My dad stuck his head into the bedroom. I expected that I was going to get in trouble for hitting Vinny, but all he said was, "Get your stuff packed up, Buddy."
"I have to go to the bathroom," I announced, and then ran to the bathroom and closed the door.
Vinny was right. I was a freak. He'd just put a word to a bunch of random facts I knew about myself but didn't understand—the only time Vinny was ever more articulate than I was.
I looked at myself in the mirror, out of my hazel eye with the long black lashes, which is my only good feature. The gray left eye on the drooping side of my too-wide face looked back at me. I had been told it was blind, and my left ear was deaf. I could not see out of the one or hear out of the other. But looking into that eye now, I knew it wasn't blind. Someone was looking out of it.
"Can you hear me?" I asked.
He didn't answer.
"Blink twice if you can hear me."
Nothing. Maybe that ear was deaf.
I used Grandma's lipstick, and wrote him a note on the toilet paper, and held it up in front of us while watching him in the mirror. The gray eye looked at the note. It showed no reaction, no expression, no response.
But it looked at the note.
When I came out, my mother was waiting for me, holding my jacket and my hat and mitts.
I had a twin. I had a brother.
"Mom, I didn't eat him. He's here!" I pointed to the left side of my head, to the gray eye.
There was a flash of something on her face, something that made my stomach plummet. It was a look I had never dreamt I would see on my mother's face because she loved me. It was horror. I had managed to show her something even a mother couldn't love.
It evaporated quickly. She pulled the hat down on my head, almost over my eye. "That's not true. Now, go and give Grandma a hug and kiss goodbye, and tell her thank you for the gift."
That was my most memorable family holiday. I learned so much that day.
I'd been ugly back then. Uglier than I am now. I frightened people. When I was a child, parents didn't let their children play with me. I grew up to be six-foot-two, weighing 250 pounds, and I tended to walk with my hands in my pockets and my hood up. I still do. Sometimes, people who met me unexpectedly after dark screamed and ran away.
My eyes did not move or blink in sync with each other. My left hand had and still does have seven fingers, and my left arm has two ulna bones. I can't move the outside pinky at all, but it does move. It did move. Past tense. My left hand used to draw, but I was not directing it when it did. It preferred crayons and markers over the big-kid colored pencils.
Sometimes, my left hand would bang on things. The table, the floor, my leg, or just flap in the air. Once, when I was five, my mother told me to stop it, and I told her I couldn't. It wasn't me doing it.
"Of course, it is," she snapped. "Now, stop."
I would get hold of my left hand with my right and stroke those two extra fingers like a small animal to calm that arm down. It worked even better if April did it. Sometimes, my left hand would reach out to her just to be petted.
We were twins, he and I.
I did not eat him. We were the result of an incompletely split egg. I was the autosite, and he was the parasite. I don't like the word parasite, but that was the word they used. He was composed of an eye, an ear, part of an arm and two fingers, and some kind of brain mashed into the spare room in my skull.
I have a scar on my left hip where an extra vestigial limb was removed when I was a newborn. That's an extra leg. My mother said it was small and malformed, and that every nurse and doctor in the hospital had to come and have a look at it. And the rest of me. I was born a freak.
I limped, and I couldn't run, but I was otherwise strong and able-bodied. I am intelligent and educated, but no one will hire me. For anything. My looks are my disability.
I mostly stay inside my tiny bachelor apartment and make a meager living at freelance editing and writing. Thank God for the internet and Amazon. If I go out at all, it is in the wee hours, and I go to the twenty-four-seven grocery where the skinny little clerks bumble my checkout and don't charge me or mischarge me for half my items. The old Asian guy at Mom & Poppa Convenience thrusts his chin out in a show of belligerence, if not bravery.
When we were kids, April was my shadow. Because she grew up with me, looking the way I did, and what she called her "half-brother," it never bothered her. I was Bobby, and he was Baba.
I did my best to shield her from the sticks and stones that were rained on her for being the sister of a monster, but my only weapon was my monstrosity, and that only made things worse. I am not a fighter, by nature. So, instead, I turned my attention to taking care of Baba.
When I did my homework at the kitchen table after dinner, my right hand would work out math problems or write answers to geography questions, and Baba would draw with our left hand. My parents pretended not to notice. I kept paper handy so he wouldn't draw on my homework. April would sit with me and color and call her coloring homework until she was old enough to have real homework of her own.
It occurred to me one day, that if he could draw, he should be able to print. He was drawing Tux, our cat. Underneath the picture, in block capital letters, I wrote C A T.
He stopped drawing for a minute and then continued, eventually covering my letters.
I didn't give up. When he was done with his drawing, I turned to a fresh page, drew the kind of cat I could draw, composed of a circle, two triangles, simple eyes, and whiskers, and wrote C A T under it.
"What are you doing?" asked April. She was in first grade now, and I was in fifth.
"Trying to teach him to print."
He started drawing a cat, correcting my geometric simplicity. At least he recognized what I meant.
April came around the table and popped up between my arms. She took a crayon and wrote C A T below where I had written it.
He stopped drawing.
April turned around and addressed my gray left eye very seriously. "You're eleven years old. You ought to know how to read and write. Like this." C A T, she wrote again.
He wrote C A T.
"That's it!" I said, temporarily taking over the left arm, and accidentally throwing the crayon across the room. April clapped.
When I was a teenager, full of hope, or at least hormones, I asked April how I could ever explain my twin to a girlfriend.
April shook her head. "Don't even try." At ten, she was full of confidence and wisdom. "If you tell her about him, she will run screaming."
Later in life, after one of her own breakups, she said to me, "I was wrong when I told you that. It's always better to be honest. Any girl who runs screaming isn't worth having."
I shrugged. "It's moot, anyway." They all ran screaming or at least retreated with a gasp at the sight of me. Me and Baba. No Beauty had ever wondered if this Beast could be her Prince Charming.
He and I lived alone.
When I was twelve, my parents took me for to an appointment with a new doctor. I didn't want to go. I was used to Dr. Broadwell, and he was used to me. But they told me that this was a specialist as if that meant something important.
Dr. Blythe talked to me in a syrupy voice. I don't know if the people who talk down to kids like that think it will disarm them. That voice always puts me on edge.
Dr. Blythe explained that he wanted to give me a better life by making me look more "typical."
"Normal," my father translated, unnecessarily.
I knew what typical meant; I knew what Blythe meant.
"Well, now, we don't like to use the word normal." Dr. Blythe clawed the air with two fingers, what I learned later in life was called air quotes. "There is nothing abnormal about you, Bobby. You just have a different appearance. What I want is to help you look less different."
I knew that there is nothing abnormal about you was a lie.
He gave me a dumbed-down explanation about how vestigial twins happened. He said most surgeries to "correct" this kind of thing were done in infancy, but this had to wait until I was big enough and strong enough to withstand the surgery. Apparently, they don't like to do brain surgery on the soft skulls of infants.
"And also," my father added under his breath, "until we could afford it."
Blythe wanted to remove the partial brain from the left side of my cranium. This posed no risk to my brain, he'd said. The two were not intertwined in any way, and there was, in fact, a thin piece of skull between them and separate blood supplies. After this, they would rebuild my skull and my face through a series of plastic surgeries. I still wouldn't be able to see out of my left eye, but they would replace it with a glass eye that was the same color as my right.
It wouldn't hurt, said Blythe. I would be asleep.
"What do you think of that, Bobby?" Blythe asked me.
"Robert," I corrected him. Only April got to call me Bobby anymore.
Blythe checked his notes, as if I did not know my own name, and smiled a ghastly smile. "What do you think about that, Robert?"
"What will you do with him?" I asked.
"Him?"
"If you take his brain out of my skull, where will you put it? How will he get around?"
"The partial brain is not a person," said Dr. Blythe, with a nervous little laugh. "It's not really alive. A lot of people would like to study it."
I blinked and sat back. He wanted to take my twin's brain out of my head—which would kill him—and put it in a jar and study it, like in a Frankenstein movie. Apparently, specialist meant mad scientist.
They meant to kill him. My twin. My brother.
My mother was asking questions, but all I could hear was the sho-shoosh of blood in my ears. Baba was a person. He was alive. He was conscious.
The schoolyard bullies and revolted grownups I'd dealt with daily had nothing on Dr. Blythe. He didn't just want to taunt or punish us for our deformity; he wanted to kill Baba.
I had suffered, at that point, eleven years of name-calling, shunning, and verbal and physical violence because of Baba. I had done my best to protect him and take care of him. I made sure he had paper and crayons. I was teaching him to spell. What in the world made anyone think I would want, or even consent, to him being murdered?
"NO!"
I jumped out of my chair and shouted.
Dr. Blythe looked startled.
"Sit down," said my father.
"You can't can't kill him! He is a person!"
"Son, sit—"
And then I got hysterical. I didn't remember much. They gave me a shot.
I am not much loved by this world. How could I not pity a being less loved than I was? How could I not love my twin brother, even if he was only half there? It was my job to protect him. My parents had abdicated that responsibility.
It didn't go any better a few months later when they took me to see Blythe again. My parents refused to believe in Baba, but at least they did not force me to have any surgeries.
It took a very long time to teach him to print. Sometimes, he ignored my lessons. Sometimes, he would form perfect letters, and then he would decorate them. They were drawings of letters. April's encouragement helped. If Baba loved anyone in this world, it was our sister April.
By the time I finished high school, he could label his pictures with simple nouns in capital letters. That was all.
I tried questions. Are you happy? Can you hear me? Who is that (pointing at April)? What color is the sky? No answer, no response.
It made me sad—I wanted more from him—but there wasn't more to be had. He was all he could be, and it was up to me to be the big brother and take care of him.
A couple of months ago, Baba began to draw dead people: skulls and skeletons, scenes from movies where people were hanged or shot or drowned or hacked to pieces. And every time he drew one of these things, I wondered exactly how many horror movies I had seen in my life and if I should have been exposing him to that. Did he understand it? Was he frightened? Did he think I—or we—were a monster and that the villagers were coming with pitchforks? He was unable to answer my questions.
One evening, I was watching something not morbid, and he was drawing what looked like the final scene of Hamlet. I picked up a crayon and wrote D E A D below the picture.
He copied the letters.
Thereafter, all his dead people got labeled D E A D. This was the first time he had used a word to express a concept, or state, rather than to label a simple noun.
I kept a sheaf of these drawings and showed them to April the next time she came over.
"This is disturbing," she observed.
She looked Baba in the eye. "Why are you drawing dead people?" She held them up so he could see what she was talking about.
He reached out for the drawings, and she brought them to him. He turned the stack over and began drawing things quickly: a full glass and an empty glass; up arrow and down arrow; an open door and a closed door. The images were hastily sketched in a few perfect lines, like Japanese ink drawings.
"Opposites," said April, looking down at the pairs of images.
He kept going until he had filled up the back of the paper with pairs of images that were opposites.
Then, he turned up one of his D E A D drawings, a young blonde girl on an autopsy table from CSI or some show like that. He took a fresh paper and drew April. I was afraid he was going to draw her dead or being killed, or something gruesome, but he didn't. He sketched her in the way he always did, the figure that I knew meant April. Then, instead of labeling it A P R I L, he put a line under it for the word.
April took the crayon and wrote A L I V E.
He copied the word: A L I V E.
Then, he tossed that paper aside. It fluttered to the floor like a leaf. On a fresh page, he began drawing in hard, fast lines.
He was drawing us.
A L I V E, he wrote under the right side.
D E A D, he wrote under the left.
"No, no, no, You're not dead!" April took our head in her hands and looked into that gray eye. I wondered how much of her touch he could feel. "You're not dead." She let us go, turned to the paper, and crossed out D E A D, and wrote A L I V E.
He drew a knife driven into his eye.
"No! No, no, no!" cried April.
Her distress made him put down the crayon.
I got up and went into the bathroom so we could see each other in the mirror.
"We are both alive," I said to him, even though I knew he couldn't hear me or understand me.
April's frowning face looked over our shoulder, and his attention was on her.
"We may not have much else, but we have that."
I held up the picture he had drawn, crumpled it up, and tossed it in the waste bin.
The gray eye looked away.
After that, he stopped drawing. I put the paper in front of us. I picked up a crayon with our left hand. He put it down. I read or watched TV with the little portable table set up in front of us, as always, with paper and crayons handy. I tried a new set of markers. I bought him a pad of real sketch paper. I bought him the Crayola Ultimate set of 152 colors with the built-in sharpener.
Nothing.
I began to worry that maybe it wasn't a wish he was expressing, but a reality. Maybe he was sick. But how could he be when I felt the same as always? And how would he know? Just in case, I went to Dr. Broadwell for a checkup, which I never dido. It meant going out in the daytime and sitting in a waiting room full of people.
When we were kids, my parents always took April with us when they took me anywhere. They wanted to show the world that they could produce a normal child. I was just a glitch.
I asked April to go with me. The companionship of a pretty girl makes people less afraid. It's okay. The monster is tame. It has a handler. She shields me, and I shield him.
In the waiting room, a teenage girl stared and tried to take a picture of me with her cell phone, but her mother slapped her hands down like a cat disciplining a kitten. A toddler asked his grandmother was what was wrong with me and was answered with a hushed and serious lecture on manners. I pretended to ignore all this and read my book, but my eye kept running over the same sentence. April patted my arm reassuringly.
Dr. Broadwell said I was fit. Heart still doing its regular irregular thing, lungs good. Reflexes reflexing. Everything fine in the turn-your-head-and-cough department.
"You could lose a little weight. Maybe get a little more exercise." That was the worst thing he had to say.
That night, I sat in my apartment, feeling, for the first time in my life, really alone. Rejection from strangers was bad enough. I was used to it. I expected it. It had brought me to a dark place before: I had seen those rooms and walked that floor, as the poet said. But during those times, I was never alone. Baba was always there, needing my care.
Aside from Dr. Broadwell's clinical poking and prodding, the last time a human being had touched me was when April held our face in her hands to talk to him. Now, my twin had retreated behind a wall that I couldn't breach.
I was cooking dinner one night after our checkup, and I suddenly noticed we held the butcher knife in our left hand.
I had not picked it up.
He wasn't doing anything but looking at it. I took over the arm and put the knife down.
He picked it back up.
"No." I grabbed my left wrist in my right hand. There was no struggle. I put the knife down again and walked into the living room. I petted the hand, although I wasn't sure which of us needed the comforting.
He reached out towards the table in front of the armchair. I was so relieved. He wanted to draw. Baba was back!
He drew us. He broke the points off the new crayons with his intensity, making thick, shiny wax lines on the paper. Us, mutilated, cut up, bones protruding, dead, decomposing. The images went down furiously. I could only stare in horror for a few minutes.
"No!" I got up so he couldn't reach the paper, and he dropped the crayon. I went into the bathroom.
"What are you telling me? Do you want to die? Do you want to kill us both? Look, I saved you. I take care of you, as well as I can. What more do you want from me? What else can I do for you?"
His gray eye stared impassively back at me. That was all it ever did. It was incapable of expression.
I started to cry. I wanted Baba to be happy. I couldn't take care of April when she was a kid. I always felt that I was barely scraping by taking care of myself. I couldn't even manage house plants. I wanted to be able to love and nurture someone effectively. I needed to be able to do that. I needed Baba to thrive, to prove to myself that I was not a monster. I was surrounded by monsters, and the only human beings were the ones who could see past my deformity. To be a human being myself, I had to be capable of love and care.
Baba's failure to thrive was proof that I could not provide enough love and care. I had failed at being a human being.
I went to my chair in the living room and put our left arm down on the TV tray. He didn't move it. I was afraid that I had frightened him with my tears. I don't cry often. It doesn't soften the bullies. I stroked his fingers like a frightened pet. I said soothing things, which I knew he couldn't hear, but we shared the same blood supply and the same hormones, and if it helped calm me, then I supposed that helped him. He was quiescent.
I just sat for a while. I didn't want to go back into the kitchen. I had protected him from Dr. Blythe, and now I had to protect him from himself.
If I couldn't cook, I would order pizza. It wasn't so much that I was hungry, I just wanted to make the day normal again. I picked up my phone with my right hand and thumbed the app for Domino's.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him open the box of markers and take one out. I tried not to notice. I didn't want to spook him.
I was looking through the coupons screen when he punched himself in the eye. I didn't have any sensation on that side, but the impact rocked our shared skull.
Then, our left arm dropped to the table. There was blood. I knocked over the little table getting up, and crayons flew everywhere.
It took me a moment to make sense of what I saw in the bathroom mirror. There was the white barrel of a marker with a bright pink end sticking out of the place where our left eye had been. His eye. There was blood and liquid. Only an inch or so of marker protruded.
It took me a minute, but when I realized what he had done, I screamed. And screamed. He hadn't just put out his eye—he had driven it into his brain. I put my hands on the counter, and bent over the sink, and screamed and retched into it.
Eventually, I was out of breath, and my throat was too raw to scream anymore. There was pounding on my door, and a voice called, "I'm coming in!"
It was one of the neighbors, a young guy with tattoos instead of a shirt. He stumbled backward when he saw me, with a look of horror on his face.
I was used to that.
"911," I rasped, but someone had already called them, and the sirens were closing in.
The doctors removed some of the damaged brain matter. And then more weeks later because it was necrotizing. And then it just seemed that the safest way to avoid infection and gangrene was to remove it all.
I had that plastic surgery that Dr. Blythe had wanted me to have years ago.
I look more typical now. Not a monster, just an ugly man, with scars on his half-shaven head, and tenderness in the trimmed and tailored skin on the left side of his face. They built up the thin skull on my left side, what had been an interior wall, by using the piece they had taken from the left side. They dried and ground it and packed it inside some kind of mesh. It will grow into new bone. There is no fear of rejection because it's my own after all.
They want to give me a glass eye to match my right eye. I can't bear the thought. For now, I wear a patch
And I sit here in my apartment and I mourn. All the things I gave up for him, and it wasn't enough. I couldn't make him happy. I couldn't make him fulfilled.
I kept him a prisoner in our body.
I am a monster after all.
Originally published in Night Terrors, Vol. 23
Original photo by MEHRAX on Pexels