Now, that’s an unusual way to start a class. I thought he was just kidding around, so I laughed.
“Was it something I said?” he asked me with one raised eyebrow.
“You startled me a bit, sir,” I replied. “Sorry.”
“Perfectly all right, young man,” he said benignly. “Laughter’s good for the soul. Enjoy it while you can.”
I glanced around and saw that fully half the students were grabbing up their books and darting for the door.
Professor Conrad looked at those of us who’d remained. “Brave souls,” he murmured. Then he looked directly at me. “Still with us, young man?” he asked mildly.
His superior attitude was starting to irritate me. “I’m here to learn, Dr. Conrad,” I told him. “I didn’t come here to party or chase girls. You throw, and I’ll catch, and I’ll still be here when the dust settles.”
What a dumb thing that was to say! I soon discovered just how tough he really was. He crowded me, I’ll admit that, but I stuck it out. He was obviously an old-timer who believed in the aristocracy of talent. He despised the term “postmodern,” and he viewed computers as instruments of the devil.
He had his mellower moments, though—fond reminiscences about “the good old days” when the English Department resided in the hallowed, though rickety, Parrington Hall and he was taking graduate courses from legendary professors such as Ebey, Sophus Winther, and E. E. Bostetter.
I maintained my “you throw it and I’ll catch it” pose, and that seemed to earn me a certain grudging respect from the terror of the department. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I aced the course, but I did manage to squeeze an A out of Dr. Conrad.
I was a bit startled at the beginning of winter quarter when I discovered that I’d been assigned to a new faculty advisor—at his request.
Guess who that was.
“You’ve managed to arouse my curiosity, Mr. Austin,” Dr. Conrad explained, after I rather bluntly asked him why he’d taken the trouble. “Students who work their way through college tend to take career-oriented classes. What possessed you to major in English?”
I shrugged. “I like to read, and if I can get paid for it, so much the better.”
“You plan to teach, then?”
“Probably so—unless I decide to write the Great American Novel.”
“I’ve read your papers, Mr. Austin,” he said dryly. “You’ve got a long way to go if that’s your goal.”
“It beats the hell out of pulling chain, Dr. Conrad.”
“Pulling chain?”
I explained it, and he seemed just a bit awed. “Are you saying that people still do that sort of thing?”
“It’s called ‘working for a living.’ I came here because I don’t wanna do that no more.”
He winced at my double negative.
“Just kidding, boss,” I told him. And I don’t think anybody’d ever called him “boss” before, because he didn’t seem to know how to handle it.
By the end of winter quarter that year I’d pretty well settled into the routine of being a working student. There were times when I ran a little short on sleep, but I could usually catch up on weekends.
I finished up the spring quarter of ’94 and spent the summer working at the door factory to build up a backlog of cash. Things had been a little tight a few times that year.
The Twinkie Twins were high-school juniors now, and they’d definitely blossomed. Their hair had grown blonder, it seemed—chemically modified, no doubt—and their eyes were an intense blue. They’d also developed some other attributes that attracted lots of attention from their male classmates.
Looking back, I’m sometimes puzzled by my lack of “those kinds of thoughts” about the twins. They were moderately gorgeous, after all—tall, blond, well built, and with strangely compelling eyes. It was probably their plurality that put me off. In my mind they were never individuals. I thought of them as “they,” but never “she.”
From what I heard, though, the young fellows at their high school didn’t have that problem, and the twins were very popular. The only complaint seemed to be that nobody could ever get one of them off by herself.
It was during my senior year at U.W. that I finally came face to face with Moby Dick. The opening line, “Call me Ishmael” and the climactic, “I only am escaped to tell thee” set off all sorts of bells in my head. Captain Ahab awed me. You don’t want to mess around with a guy who could say, “I’d smite the sun if it offended me.” And his obsessive need to avenge himself on the white whale put him in the same class with Hamlet and Othello.
Moby Dick has been plowed and planted over and over by generations of scholars much better than I, though, and I didn’t really feel like chewing old soup for my paper in the course. Dr. Conrad was our instructor, naturally, and I was fairly certain that he’d take a rehash of previous examinations of the book as a personal insult.
Then I came across an interesting bit of information. It seems that when Melville was writing Billy Budd, he kept borrowing Milton’s Paradise Regained from the New York Public Library, and I began to see certain parallels.
Dr. Conrad found that kind of interesting. “I wouldn’t hang your doctoral dissertation on it, Mr. Austin,” he advised, “but you might squeeze an MA thesis out of it.”
“Am I going for an MA, boss?” I asked him.
“You bet your bippie you are,” he told me bluntly.
“Bippie?”
“Isn’t it time for you to get back to Everett and make more doors?” he asked irritably.
I considered the notion of graduate school while I was trimming door stock that evening. It was more or less inevitable—an English major without an advanced degree was still only about two steps away from the green chain. With an MA, I could probably get a teaching job at a community college—a distinct advantage, since the idea of teaching high school didn’t wind my watch very tight.
I had a sometime girlfriend back then, and she went ballistic when I told her about my decision to stay in school. I guess she’d been listening to the ghostly sound of wedding bells in her mind, which proves that she didn’t understand certain ugly truths. Her father was a businessman in Seattle, and mine was a working stiff in Everett. I don’t want to sound Marxist here, but old Karl was right about one thing. There are real differences between the classes. A rich kid doesn’t have to take his education too seriously, because there are all kinds of other options open for him. A working-class kid usually only has one shot at education, and he doesn’t dare let anything get in his way, and that includes girlfriends and marriage. The birth of the first child almost always means that he’ll spend the rest of his life pulling chain. Reality can be very ugly, sometimes.
This is very painful for me, so I’ll keep it short. In the spring of 1995, the twins attended one of those “kegger parties” on a beach near Mukilteo, just south of Everett. I’m not sure who bought the kegs of beer for them, but that’s not really important. The kids built the customary bonfire on the beach and proceeded to get red-eyed and rowdy. There were probably forty or fifty of them, and they were celebrating their upcoming graduation for all they were worth. Along toward midnight, things started to get physical. There were a few drunken fights, and a fair number of boys and girls were slipping off into the darkness for assorted boy-girl entertainments. At that point Regina and Renata decided that it was time to leave. They slipped away from the party, hopped into their new Pontiac—a graduation present from their folks—and started back to Everett.
Regina, the dominant twin, probably drove. Renata had her driver’s license, but she almost never took the wheel. They took the usual shortcut that winds up through Forest Park. It was in the vicinity of the petting zoo where they had a flat tire.
As best the authorities were able to reconstruct what happened, Regina left the car and walked to the zoo to find a phone. Renata stayed with the Pontiac for a while, then went looking for her sister.
The next morning the twins were di
scovered near the zoo. One was dead, raped and then hacked to death with something that wasn’t very sharp. The other twin was sitting beside the body with a look of total incomprehension on her face. When the authorities tried to question her, she replied in a language that nobody could understand.
The authorities—assorted cops, detectives, the coroner, and so on—questioned Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf extensively, but they didn’t learn much: the boss and the missus were shattered and even in the best of times, they couldn’t translate the girls’ private language—they couldn’t even tell the girls apart. So after the cops discovered that Regina was the dominant twin, they assumed that it’d been Regina who’d been murdered and Renata who’d gone bonkers.
But nobody could prove it. The footprints routinely taken of all newborns turned out to be missing from the records at Everett General Hospital, and identical twins have identical DNA. Logic said that the dead girl was most likely Regina, but logic wasn’t good enough for filling out forms.
Les Greenleaf nearly flipped when he saw his daughter listed as an “unidentified female” in official reports.
The surviving twin continued to answer all questions in twin-speak, and so the Greenleafs had no choice but to put her in a private sanitarium in the hope that the headshrinkers could wake up her mind. They had to fill out papers, of course, and they arbitrarily listed their surviving daughter as Renata—but they couldn’t prove it either.
The murder remained unsolved.
My folks and I attended the funeral, of course, but there was no sense of that “closure” social workers babble about, because we couldn’t be certain which girl we were burying.
We didn’t see very much of the boss at the door factory that summer. Before he’d lost his daughters, he’d usually come strolling through the yard a couple of times a day. After the funeral, he stayed pretty much holed up in his office.
In August of that year that I had an even more personal tragedy. My folks had visited the Greenleafs one Friday evening, and as they were on their way home, they encountered what the cops refer to as a “high-speed chase.” A local drunk who’d had his driver’s license revoked after repeated arrests for “driving while intoxicated” got himself all liquored up in a downtown bar, and the cops spotted his car wandering around on both sides of Colby Avenue, one of the main streets in Everett. When the lush heard the siren and saw the red light flashing behind him, he evidently remembered the judge’s warning when his license had been lifted. The prospect of twenty years in the slammer evidently scared the hell out of him, so he stomped on his gas pedal. The cops gave chase, of course, and it was estimated that the drunk was going about ninety when he ran a red light and plowed into my folks. All three of them died in the crash.
I was completely out of it for a week or so, and Les Greenleaf took over making the funeral arrangements, attending to legal matters, and dealing with a couple of insurance companies.
I’d already enrolled for my first quarter of grad school that fall, but I called Dr. Conrad and asked him to put me on hold until winter quarter. My dad had been shrewd enough to buy mortgage insurance, so our modest home in north Everett was now mine, free and clear, and the life insurance policies covering both of my parents gave me a chunk of cash. Les Greenleaf suggested some investments, and I suddenly became a capitalist. I don’t imagine that I made Bill Gates very nervous, but at least I’d be able to get through graduate school without working for a living at the same time.
I’d have really preferred different circumstances, though.
I kept my job at the door factory—not so much for the wages as for something to keep me busy. Sitting at home wallowing in grief wouldn’t have been a very good idea. I’ve noticed that guys who do that are liable to start hitting the bottle. After what’d happened in August, I wasn’t too fond of drunks, or eager to join the ranks of the perpetually sauced-up.
I made fairly frequent trips to Seattle that fall. I didn’t want the university to slip into past tense in my mind, so I kept it right in front of me. As long as I was there anyway, I did a bit of preliminary work on my Melville-Milton theory. The more I dug into Paradise Regained, the more convinced I became that Billy Budd was derivative.
It was in late November, I think, when Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf and I actually got some good news for a change. Renata—we had agreed among ourselves by then that it almost certainly was Renata in that private sanitarium—woke up. She stopped talking exclusively in twin-speak and began answering questions in English.
Our frequent contacts with Dr. Fallon, the chief of staff at the institution, had made us aware that twin-speak was common—so common, in fact, that it had a scientific name—“cryptolalia.” Dr. Fallon told us that it shows up in almost all cases of multiple births. The secret language of twins isn’t all that complicated, but a set of quintuplets can invent a language so complex that its grammar book would run to three volumes.
When Renata stopped speaking in cryptolalia, though, her first question suggested that she wasn’t out of the woods yet. When a patient wakes up and says, “Who am I?” it usually gets the psychiatrist’s immediate attention.
The private sanitarium where she was being treated was up at Lake Stevens, and I rode up with Les and Inga on a rainy Sunday afternoon to visit her.
The rest home was several cuts above a state-supported mental hospital, which is usually built to resemble various other state institutions where people are confined. This one was back among the trees on about five acres near the lakeshore, and there was a long, curving drive leading to a large, enclosed interior court, complete with a gate and a guard. It was obviously an institution of some kind, but a polite one. It was a place where wealthy people could stash relatives whose continued appearance in public had become embarrassing.
Dr. Wallace Fallon had an imposing office, and he was a slightly balding man in his midfifties. He cautioned us not to push Renata.
“Sometimes all it takes to restore an amnesiac’s memory is a familiar face or a familiar turn of phrase. That’s why I’ve asked you three to stop by, but let’s be very, very careful. I’m fairly sure that Renata’s amnesia is a way to hide from the death of her sister. That’s something she’s not ready to face yet.”
“She will recover, won’t she?” Inga demanded.
“That’s impossible to say right now. I’m hoping that your visit will help her start regaining her memory—bits and pieces of it, anyway. I’m certain that she won’t remember what happened to her sister. That’s been totally blotted out. Let’s keep this visit fairly short, and we’ll want it light and general. I have her mildly sedated, and I’ll watch her very closely. If she starts getting agitated, we’ll have to cut the visit short.”
“Would hypnotism bring her out of it?” I asked him.
“Possibly, but I don’t think it’d be a good idea right now. Her amnesia’s a hiding place, and she needs that for the time being. There’s no way to know how long she’ll need it. There have been cases where an amnesiac never recovers his memory. He lives a normal life—except that he has no memory of his childhood. Sometimes, his memory’s selective. He remembers this, but doesn’t remember that. We’ll have to play it by ear and see just how far she’s ready to go.”
“Let’s go see her,” Inga said abruptly.
Dr. Fallon nodded and led us out of his office and down a hallway.
Renata’s room was quite large and comfortable-looking. Everything about it was obviously designed to suggest a calm stateliness. The carpeting was deep and lush, the furniture was traditional, and the window drapes were a neutral blue. A hotel room in that class would probably cost a hundred dollars a night. Renata was sitting in a comfortable reclining chair by the window, placidly looking out at the rain writhing down to sweep the lake.
“Renata,” Dr. Fallon said gently, “Your parents have come to visit you, and they’ve brought a friend.”
She smiled rather vaguely. “That’s nice,” she replied in a fuzzy sort of voice. Dr. Fallon
’s definition of “mildly sedated” might have differed from mine by quite a bit. It looked to me as if Renata was tranked to the eyeballs. She looked rather blankly at her parents with no sign of recognition.
Then she saw me. “Markie!” she squealed. She scrambled to her feet and came running across the room to hurl herself into my arms, laughing and crying at the same time. “Where have you been?” she demanded, clinging to me desperately. “I’ve been lost here without you.” I held her while she cried, and I stared at her parents and Dr. Fallon in absolute bafflement. It was obvious from their expressions that they had no more idea of what was going on than I did.
FIRST MOVEMENT
ADAGIO
CHAPTER ONE
“What’s happening here?” Les Greenleaf demanded, after Renata had been sedated into a peaceful slumber and we’d returned to Fallon’s office. “I thought you told us that she has total amnesia.”
“Evidently, it’s not quite as total as we thought,” Fallon replied, grinning broadly. “I think this might be a major breakthrough.”
“Why does she recognize Mark and not us?” Inga sounded offended.
“I haven’t got the faintest idea,” Fallon confessed, “but the fact that she recognizes somebody is very significant. It means that her past isn’t a total blank.”
“Then she’ll get her memory back?” Inga asked.
“Some of it, at least. It’s too early to tell how much.” Fallon looked at me then. “Would it be possible for you to stay here for the next few days, Mark?” he asked. “For some reason, you seem to be the key to Renata’s memory, so I’d like to have you available.”
“No problem, Doc,” I replied. “If the boss can drop me off at my place, I’ll grab a few things and come right back up the hill.”
Regina's Song Page 2