The Single Twin

by Sean Little

  “Who’s playing?” Katherine knew he was bluffing. Abe wasn’t a sports guy. Never had been.

  Abe didn’t want to own up to it, though. “Uh, a blue team and a red team. I’m a...uh, big fan of those blue guys. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Katherine wasn’t buying it for a second. “Yeah. Go ‘blue team,’ I guess. I’ll be around if you need anything.”

  The image on Abe’s cell phone blinked out. He set the phone down on the table. It was hard not to end calls to Katherine without saying “I love you.” He’d said it to her for sixteen years. He would never stop loving her, but to vocalize it now felt strange. It felt wrong in a way. It bothered him that it did feel wrong.

  Through the thin walls of the cheap bachelor apartments, Abe could hear a cacophony of noises from the other unlucky souls in the building. A few were watching sports. One was watching porn. Or filming porn, possibly. It was loud sex noises of some kind. Another guy was trying to teach himself to play guitar and he kept strumming the same three chords over and over again as if three chords and the truth really would get him a recording deal.

  Abe looked at the little twenty-seven-inch flat screen TV hanging on one wall of the apartment. He didn’t have cable. He didn’t even have the internet at the apartment, save for the weak community Wi-Fi that barely worked. He was trying to save money. He wasn’t tired. He didn’t feel like reading. His eyes wandered over the small mountain of work on the table in front of him, but he did not feel like doing any of it, not at the noisy little apartment.

  Aberforth Allard stared out the window until the sun finished setting. Then, he contemplated going to bed. There was far too much noise in the little apartment complex to go to bed so early. He did not want to be alone. He did not want to be around others. He felt like he had put on the wrong skin that morning or Quantum-Leaped into the wrong life. Abe pushed himself away from the table, grabbed his wallet and keys from the kitchen counter, and left his apartment.

  He would go over to the office, he decided. It was not necessarily the best place in the world to be, but it was quiet, Duff would likely be playing Madden or FIFA in his adjoining room to their main office so Abe would not have to be alone.

  DUFF EYED THE guy who just sat next to him at the bar. The guy had committed two unforgivable sins in Duff’s mind: he was wearing sport-sandals and a man-bun. Right there, Duff hated the guy. The guy chased all the trends Duff found stupid: bushy beard for no practical reason, expensive clothes at a dive bar, drinking some nanobrew IPA with a clever pun for a name instead of a normal beer. Duff hated guys like that. He couldn’t even call them men in his head, they were just guys. Men didn’t have man-buns. Duff went to scummy dive bars just to avoid pricks like that guy, and suddenly those guys were seeking out dive bars in a feeble attempt to give themselves the appearance of street cred.

  The guy was bragging loudly to his date about his portfolio, about his car, his vacations—basically anything he could think of to make the girl interested in having any form of sexual relations with him later that night.

  In Duff’s mind, there was a clear division between clubs and bars. You went to clubs to impress girls or meet girls or anything to do with finding someone else in the world who might want to touch your winky at the end of the night. Bars were for the guys who’ve given up on anyone ever wanting to touch them to drown their sorrows in cheap, domestic, mass-produced lagers and watch baseball on shitty TVs while arguing about politics and the state of the world as if they knew how to fix everything but would not deign to give the answers to the politicians. Duff also resented microbrews, nanobrews, and the word “brew” in general. And don’t even mention the word artisanal around him, unless you’re looking for someone to throw a beer into your face.

  Duff focused his perceptive eyes on the guy for further examination. The dude’s hands were clean and callous-free. His nails were sculpted. He’d had a manicure recently. The jacket, although it looked expensive, had the telltale prick-points on the cloth over the right wrist where the off-the-rack label had been removed by someone who did not know what he was doing. The sandals showed no recognizable brand. They were probably cheaply thrifted. The khakis were by Lee. The guy was nowhere near as rich as he was trying to portray. Surprisingly, his bravado actually made Duff like the guy a little bit. Dude was talking a big game, but Duff knew he couldn’t back it up.

  The girl was a harder read. She was wearing a tight-fitting tube dress. She had generous curves in all the right spots, and the breasts were fake but not ostentatious. In a different outfit, she might have passed for natural. Her lips were puffed in a non-natural way, but it was not overblown to give her the horrible trout-pout common to bad lip injections. She had a good plastic surgeon. Her hair was coiffed well. Definitely a stylist, not a hairdresser. What’s the difference between the two? At least $250. The shoes were Jimmy Choo. The girl came from money, no doubt. She was too young to be rich without Daddy's money. Although with some of these young social media “influencers” (another word Duff despised) making generous bank for flaunting their cleavage on Instagram, who could tell these days?

  Bottom line: The dude was punching way out of his weight class. Duff figured whatever he was doing might work for a night, maybe even get this girl into bed if he took her to a decent hotel, but he’d been trying to buffalo the girl for almost an hour, and it was starting to get annoying. Duff turned his focus to the kid and started listening. He just needed one slip up in the kid’s façade, and then Duff would ream him a new one. Fortunately, it came quickly.

  The couple hit a lull in the conversation and sipped drinks awkwardly. The guy decided to load a new bullet in his gun, and he nodded toward the TV over the bar. The Cubs were playing the D-Backs. “You like baseball?”

  “I do. I try to get out to games whenever I can.” The girl smiled, glad to be out of the awkward pause in their conversation.

  “I played in high school and college. Even did two years of minor league ball.”

  This keyed up the girl’s interest. “Ooh! Minor leaguer! What was it like?”

  “Rough. You hardly make any money. You live off of hot dogs and tap water.”

  Duff snorted. If the kid knew the difference between a curve and slider, he’d grow his own man-bun. Baseball was a topic of conversation where Duff knew he could beat the kid down until he slipped up and said the wrong thing. Judging from the kid’s clothes and demeanor, it would not take long for him to make an easy error. “Excuse me,” Duff interjected. “You said you were a minor league? How long ago?”

  “What?” The dude turned to face Duff.

  “I asked how long ago you played. You look awfully young, like you could still be out there swinging.”

  “Thanks.” The dude smiled. “It was only five years ago.”

  “So, you did two years in the minors? That’d put you at what? Twenty-eight? Twenty-nine?”

  “Twenty-eight, yes.”

  “Who’d you play for?”

  The kid squinted. “What?”

  “What team did you play for?” Duff enunciated each word slowly.

  “I played in Washington State.”

  “That doesn’t tell me what team.”

  The kid started to falter. He was trying to smile and be cool. “The, uh, Bears.”

  Duff knew the kid was grasping. He went for a common name. It was a good guess. There was a team called the Bears in Washington at one point. “In 2014 you played for the Bears?”

  “You bet.”

  Duff was close to lowering the boom. He just needed to draw the kid in a bit deeper. “The Yakima Bears?”

  “That’s, uh, right. The Yakima Bears.”

  “Neat. Cool team. You’re telling me you were on the roster for the 2013 and 2014 Yakima Bears?”

  “You got it.”

  Duff let the other shoe drop. “Even though the Yakima Bears ceased to exist in 2012?”

  “What?”

  “The Yakima Bears moved to Oregon in 2013 and becam
e the Hillsboro Hops.”

  The kid started to flame red under his woolly beard. “What’s your deal man?”

  “What do you mean? I’m just a baseball fan.” Duff pointed to his Brewers cap. “I could never claim to be a minor leaguer, though. Just a fan.”

  The guy got up off his barstool and moved toward Duff, puffing his chest out. “I mean, I’m having a private conversation with my lady friend and why are you horning in on it?”

  “What was the name of the field you played on?”

  “Fuck you, fatso. You want to step outside?” The kid bumped his chest lightly against Duff’s arm. He crowded him trying to intimidate him. Duff was not easily intimidated.

  “I’m a lover, not a fighter.” Duff smiled up at him sweetly. He turned his attention fully to his beer. “Maybe try telling the lady about who you really are, not who you claim to be. Otherwise, you’re as fake as her tits.”

  If Duff had any athletic skills whatsoever, he probably could have done something cool, maybe grabbed the dude’s wrist as it swung to him, spun it inward toward the thumb, and dropped the guy to his knees like something out of a Bruce Lee film. Instead, the kid’s roundhouse right came screaming out of the corner of Duff’s eye, caught him full in the jaw, and knocked him off his barstool to the floor.

  While Duff lay on his back, stunned and aching, the girl picked up his beer and poured it on him. The cold beer snapped him out of his daze. He sputtered. He felt his jaw with his hand. Not broken, but it would be sore in the morning. “Ow.”

  “C’mon, babe.” Manbun Bushybeard grabbed Fake Titsandlips by the hand and the couple stalked out of the bar. Duff lay on the floor for a moment more.

  The bartender, a greasy former biker gang member called Wheels Wright, leaned over the rail. He looked bemused. This was not the first time he had seen someone unload some anger at Duff. “You okay, Duffy?”

  Duff gave him the okay sign with his fingers. “I’m fine. I don’t get it, though. Dude was obviously lying to her. I told the truth. Yet, she leaves here with him.” Duff checked his teeth. None were loose, but his bottom lip was already swelling, and he could taste blood from where it split.

  “Duff, you ever consider maybe she knew he was lying to her?”

  Duff climbed back to his barstool. He spat a gob of blood onto the floor.

  Wheels handed him a bar towel. “She’s a woman. She’s used to being lied to by guys. It didn’t matter to her. It’s all an act. Hell, she was probably lying to him, too. Kids like that—they’re not out looking for something long term. They’re out to get Likes and Favorites on whatever social media feeds they post their activities to. It’s all about the image they project, not reality.”

  Duff mopped the beer from his face and chest. “Whatever happened to honesty in relationships?”

  “It went out with Nixon, I think. People like that don’t do relationships anyhow. To be in a relationship, you have to be able to love someone else more than yourself, and people like those two knuckleheads will never love anything more than themselves.”

  Duff sighed. “Maybe it’s for the best, then. Hit me with another beer, Wheels.” Duff never really understood the complexities of relationships. It was better to avoid them. If all it took was loving someone more than you loved yourself, then Duff felt like he should have been able to have a lasting relationship with just about anyone on the planet.

  A commercial for the upcoming election came on the TV. Robert “Even” Stevens was running for his umpteenth term in Congress. His broad, toothy smile flashed on the screen. Duff scowled and his lip hurt. He knew the election cycle started but had so far managed to avoid the propaganda. “Stevens is running for another term?”

  Wheels shrugged. “Nice work if you can get it. Hamstring poor folks to make the rich people who line your pockets on the side happy. Hell, I’d take that job.”

  “Really? You could live with yourself if you had to cut back on subsidies for the poor?”

  Wheels grinned. “How is it any different than when I cut you off at night because you’ve had enough?”

  “When you cut me off, it’s because I’m being an asshole. When you cut meals and medicine for kids and the elderly, it’s you being an asshole.”

  “Well, I would hope my neck tattoos and criminal record would prevent me from ever having to be in that position.” Wheels popped the top on another bottle of cheap domestic and slid it to Duff. “On the house. You need something to numb up your lip.”

  “Thanks, Wheels. You just got my vote if you ever do run.” Duff took a long pull off the bottle. The fizz stung his mouth where the punch had pushed his lips into his teeth.

  “You’re an easy get, then.” Wheels watched the Stevens commercial finish. “I hope that guy gets his, though. He’s been sucking the public tit for too long.”

  “We should all be so lucky.” Duff took another pull. “Wheels, what the fuck is Instagram?”

  The ex-biker thought about how to describe it for a moment. “It’s a photo-sharing site. Pretty girls post pictures of themselves in bikinis so they can get followers, and then sell diet drinks to fat girls who want to look like them not realizing the models only look good because of genetics and Photoshop.”

  “Sounds like I would hate it.”

  “You would.”

  “Then I hereby refrain from joining Instagram.”

  Wheels laughed. “I’m sure they’ll be real broken up about it.”

  “Worst advice I ever got in school: Try hard and get good grades because it will benefit you. Truth was, you have to be pretty to get benefits in this world. No guidance counselors are out there telling the hard truth to the young try-hards in high schools these days, I promise you that.”

  “Hey, sad clown—I just gave you a free beer.”

  Duff tipped his bottle toward Wheels in salute. “Indeed, you did. That’s why I keep coming back here. You know how to treat your customers. Doesn’t change the fact pretty people get all the benefits. I once talked to a girl in a bar, she wanted me to buy her a drink. She told me she had never bought a drink of her own in her entire adult life. She had a perfect, surgically corrected face and the best boobs money could buy.”

  “Did you buy her a drink?”

  “Hell, no. I told her to try a new experience and buy her own for once. In fact, I told her she should buy me one to really broaden her horizons.” Duff took a long pull off the bottle. He grimaced at the pain. “Does my lip look bad?”

  Wheels squinted at Duff’s swelling lip for a moment. “Your whole face looks fucking terrible.”

  “Then it’s just how it should be.”

  THE OFFICE ABE and Duff worked out of was in a small apartment complex where the ground floor was zoned for commercial purposes. Technically, they weren’t supposed to be running a business from the apartment on the second floor, but since the apartment doubled as Duff’s home, the landlord let it slide. The door to the second floor was never locked. Anyone off the street could access the place.

  The door to the apartment was all steel, and Duff had bought some cheap, stick-on mailbox letters from a hardware store years ago and lettered the door with Allard & Duffy, Private Investigations in reflective gold stickers.

  The interior was simple. The main door opened to a large living room area converted into an office. Two identical desks sat along the far wall, side-by-side. The one on the left was Duff’s. It was a filthy pile of papers, old food wrappers, and crumpled soda cans. To the right was Abe’s desk. It was neater but still piled with papers, thick folders, and notebooks. They were arranged in stacks, though. These desks were living monuments to their owners’ respective mentalities.

  There was a tiny kitchenette and a small bathroom to the right, and a prison cell-sized bedroom to the left. The bedroom was Duff’s. It was outfitted with a single Lay-Z-Boy recliner, a forty-inch flat-screen television, and a PlayStation. The narrow closet was piled with clothes. There was not a single hanger to be found. The room was narrow. A queen
-sized bed would have almost filled it. Duff slept in the recliner every night. He was convinced it was better for his health to sleep in a recliner. He believed it made his apnea better, and maybe it did.

  Abe parked the Volvo in the spot designated for them in the three-story parking garage adjacent to the apartment structure and walked to the office. Duff did not have his own car. He met Duff on the stairs heading up. “You don’t look good.”

  “I never look good.” Duff pointed at his grotesquely swollen lip. “Got punched again.”

  Abe was unfazed. “It’s been about a week since the last time, so I figure you were due. Who was it today? Old woman walking too slowly in front of you? Girl Scout selling cookies in a location that inconvenienced you?”

  “Called a dude out for lying to his date at Wheels’s place.”

  “That old chestnut.” Abe clapped Duff on the shoulder. “You haven’t honked anyone off for months.”

  “I know. Figured I’d dust it off, work it back into rotation. The classics never go out of style.”

  “Let’s get you some ice.”

  They started heading up the stairs. “What brings you here this late?”

  Abe shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to be alone. Figured I’d come do some paperwork or something.”

  “I told you to just move into the office with me.”

  “Where would we put a bed? Or even another recliner?”

  Duff thought for a moment. “Bunk beds. Dude, I always wanted bunk beds. We could get rid of the recliner and get bunk beds.”

  “I’m forty-five years old. I’m not climbing up into a bunk bed every night.”

  “You could have the bottom bunk.”

  “I’m not letting your fat ass sleep above me.”

  Duff conceded. “You’re right. Dumb idea, I guess. Bunk beds would have been cool, though.”

  They stopped at the door to the apartment. Abe moved to key into the office, but hesitated. The door was open very, very slightly. Someone was inside. Abe pointed with his key at the discrepancy between the door and the frame.