It was brutal work. He and Jav kept stepping away to push damp paper towels into their eye sockets, laughing through the streaming tears, blowing their noses and going back. Meanwhile, Micah quietly chopped and chopped, only making the occasional swipe at his eyes.
“All right, old man,” Jav said. “What’s your secret?”
“Contact lenses,” Geno said.
Micah smiled, shaking his head. He made an exaggerated swallow and said, “Spit.”
“What?”
“The chemical in onions is attracted to moisture. It loves your tear ducts. So you have to trick it by giving it something else wet to love. You let the spit collect in your mouth and keep your mouth open just a little. Gross, but effective.”
Geno tried it. Beside him, Jav went quiet, lips twisting, clearly trying to keep the laughter back as he worked up some spit.
“Don’t drool,” Micah said, pointing his knife across the table.
“‘Sgusting,” Jav said through his teeth.
It actually did work. With the gooey puddle behind his bottom teeth, Geno could chop through a good seven or eight onions before his eyes needed a break.
“That’s a good trick,” he said. “Where’d you learn it?”
“I don’t remember. Here or there.” Micah corralled his last batch into one of the big silver prep bins and reached for his cup of coffee. A line of blue numbers was tattooed on the inside of his forearm. “When I was a boy starving in Greece, we used to save up our spit for hours. Swallowing it a little at a time to trick our stomach into thinking it was getting soup.”
“When was this?” Jav asked, as Geno went on staring. He’d never seen a concentration camp number in person.
“Winter of forty-one, forty-two,” Micah said. “Three hundred people a day starving to death. Corpses frozen in the streets.” His bushy eyebrows raised over the rim of the mug. “Friend of mine lived through the siege of Leningrad. Each has stories about hunger only the other believes.”
“I can’t even imagine,” Jav said. “How old were you?”
“During the famine? Thirteen.” Micah set down the cup and wiped off his hands. “Aora,” he said, walking toward the stove. “We’ve cried enough. Time to light the hearth.”
Geno found Jav’s sober gaze with his own. Jav slowly shook his head, his red, damp eyes closing a moment, then opening. “Historias de anhelos que sólo el otro cree,” he said softly.
Stories about hunger only the other believes.
Micah clanged the three big kettles onto the front burners. Into each he glugged copious amounts of olive oil and a half-pound of butter. Soon the smell of frying onions was curling up in Geno’s stomach, making it rumble and growl.
“Javier, presiado,” Micah said. “Toast up some of that bread there, yeah?”
Presiado, Geno thought, his ears curious. All morning Micah and Jav had used words that sounded like Spanish, but weren’t. Like komo etash instead of Cómo estás. Presiado sounded like precioso. Precious.
“Do you speak Spanish?” he asked.
“Ladino,” Micah said, turning the flame down low under the kettles. “Sephardic Jewish dialect.”
“It’s like drunk Spanish,” Jav said.
“Like Spanish got plowed and had a one-night stand with Yiddish.” Micah scooped fried onions onto buttered toast and ground black pepper on top. “There. Wrap your bellies around that, habibis.”
Geno sank his teeth through caramelized goodness into toasty gold. Jav poured them more coffee and the three men sat eating, mostly silent except for tiny grunts of pleasure.
“Fried onions on toast,” Jav said. “So simple, but you never think of it.”
“Simple food is best,” Miach said, reaching to switch on the radio. He turned the dial through talk, static, classic rock and rap before landing on an oldies station. Real oldies. Big band and crooners from the 1940s. Music Analisa Gallinero liked to listen to on Sundays. When Micah warbled along to Dinah Shore’s “Shoo Fly Pie,” Geno sang a little, too.
Shoo fly pie and apple pan dowdy
Makes your eyes light up, your tummy say “Howdy…”
“See,” Micah said to Jav. “This boy knows good music.” As his hand reached to ruffle Geno’s hair, the blurred, blue numbers fluttered on the skin of his forearm.
Finishing his simple breakfast, Geno thought about stories of hunger nobody would believe. Corpses in the street. A starving teenager with a carefully-guarded mouthful of saliva, watching as he became 157701. The horrors he had witnessed up until that point. All the horrors yet to come. The lengths gone to survive. The will to stay alive, so he could become an octogenarian listening to Glenn Miller and frying up onions on toast.
As Geno ate and thought, a hundred questions piled up in his head.
He asked none. He wasn’t sure he’d be one of the others who would believe the answers.
Stef didn’t make many rules for his clients, but each of them was given a brand-new sketchpad and required to do one drawing a day.
“I can’t draw,” Geno said.
“This isn’t about talent,” Stef said.
“I don’t know what to draw.”
“Draw anything. Think back to your kindergarten self. What things did you draw at school? What did your mother hang on the fridge?”
Geno came to his first private session and opened the pad to show two boys, dressed alike. Stars filled the two inches of space between their bodies.
“Is this you and your brother?” Stef asked.
“Yeah.”
“Can you tell me about the stars?”
Geno got up and walked away to the windows. He stood looking out at the High Line a long time, then came back to sit. “The stars,” he said, clearing his throat. “It’s called Nos.”
Stef was quiet. Geno picked up a yellow colored pencil and started coloring the galaxy between the boys.
“Nos,” he said again. “It means we or us in Spanish. And it rhymes with dos. Two.”
“Tell me more.”
“It was the bond. The place where two became one. Probably sounds crazy to you.”
“Who am I to say what it sounds like? I’m not a twin.”
Geno’s shoulders relaxed a little. He picked up scissors and cut up the center of the paper, through the starry bond, severing the twins. “Anyway, I don’t go there anymore.”
“Because your brother died?”
“Because he fucking set me up,” Geno said through his teeth. “He lured me into a trap. He… He fucking sold me.”
Stef nodded.
“I couldn’t believe… How could he just…? My own fucking brother.” The chair scraped against the floor and Geno was over by the window again, forehead and palms pressed to the panes.
Inside looking out, Stef thought, remembering the young boy from the domestic violence shelter and his art project with the flashing lights.
Geno came back again. He fitted the two pieces of paper together, lining up the edges. Then he separated them, took one and crumpled it into a ball. He seized the scissors and jammed the points straight down into the wad. They stood majestically for a moment, then toppled over.
“I feel like Michael Corleone in The Godfather,” he said. His voice turned husky. “You broke my heart, Fredo…”
“He betrayed you.”
Geno smoothed the paper. “I can’t take him out in a rowboat and shoot him.”
“Would you?”
Tears tracked down Geno’s face as he cut his twin into pieces. “Probably not. I wouldn’t know what to… I don’t know what I’d do if he were alive. I don’t know what to do now he’s dead.”
Stef checked the urge to sigh heavily at the fuck-load of unresolved shit this boy needed to work through. “Do you ever remember a time,” he said, “when you and Carlos were… Hold on, I’m not sure w
hat I’m asking.” He made a quick sketch on his own pad: two men and the starry bond between. “This is the place of two.” He circled the stars.
“Nos. Rhymes with Dos,” Geno said. “And we had names in there. Secret names. He was Los and I was Mos. God, I never told this to anyone.”
“You’ll find we go back and forth between two kinds of secrets in therapy. Nos and your hidden names are private, privileged secrets from the experience of being a twin. Those belong to you and I don’t want you to think I’m pushing you to betray them. They’re vastly different than the secrets that were imposed on you. The secrets that threaten to hurt you if you reveal them.”
“I know, I get it. It’s just hard to explain.”
“Here’s where I’m trying to go,” Stef said, circling the stars again. “When you overdosed on Vicodin and your friends called nine-one-one, they told police your name was Carlos. They said you told them the abduction and sexual assault happened to your brother, Geronimo.”
Geno nodded slowly. “Yeah, I…switched us.”
“When did you start being him?”
“It was just the once.”
Stef sat back a hair, confused. “The night of your suicide attempt was the first time?”
“The only time.” Geno’s upper lip curled at the corner. “What, you think I’ve been pretending to be him all this time?”
“It was the impression I got when Dr. Stein first explained the situation.”
Geno dragged his hands through his hair, hunched over the table a moment, poised on an edge. “What I did… I know what I did. I had to do it to survive.”
Stef sat still and waited.
“I did become someone else. Sort of. Or I split part of my head in two so it could be like…” The boy pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and spoke behind them. “It was all happening to someone else.”
“It’s an extremely common defense tactic,” Stef said. “Disassociate from the situation to the point where you float up above yourself, looking down.”
Geno brought his face out, blinking. “Exactly like that. I was outside my body, watching it happen. It was the only way I could get through it.”
Stef’s finger touched the paper and circled the stars. “You watched from here?”
“Yeah. As Mos.”
A click in Stef’s mind as two links of a chain joined. “Mos watched what was happening to Geno.”
“Yeah.”
“So you were split into the two aspects of yourself. Not split into you and Carlos.”
“No. Shit, I didn’t want anything to do with him. When I went into Nos, the first thing I did was kick him out.”
“You kicked him out.”
“Hell, yeah.”
“So for the first time in your life, you were truly alone in the world.”
“Mm.” Tongue clamped between his teeth, Geno cut the pieces of Carlos into even smaller slivers.
“Are you still aware of the stars?” Stef asked.
“He’s dead.”
“I know. But I wondered if they were still a presence.”
Pieces of paper drifted through Geno’s fingers like snowflakes. “We always spoke in we. We’re doing this. We went here. We want that. We slept in the same bed until we were six. I mean, we had bunk beds, but we were always in one together. Tangled up tight. That’s how we were born. When they did the ultrasound on my mom, the doctor laughed and said, ‘Forget it, you’ll never deliver them this way. Look at them, they’re in a knot.’ Dad said during the C-section, it took a long time to sort out whose limbs were whose and what cord attached to which kid.”
His face was filled with a soft nostalgia, as if he remembered the day well. Stef imagined it was a story told at every Thanksgiving and birthday.
“Anyway,” Geno said. “What was I saying?”
“You were talking about bunk beds.”
“Eventually we started sleeping apart. When we were ten, we got our own bedrooms. But after my mother died…”
A long pause.
“The night of the funeral, Carlito came in my room. ‘Can I crash?’ And I wanted him to. I needed him there.” He glanced up at Stef. “I mean it’s not like we were spooning or cuddling or any of that shit. But in the morning, we woke up and our ankles were stacked up like Lincoln Logs. It just happened.”
“It was comforting.”
“Yeah.”
“For nine months of your life, you lived in a little world where it was just the two of you. Floating together. All you needed was each other. Nos sounds like the continuation of that place. I’m not a twin. I can’t begin to understand the depth of the bond, but it makes perfect sense to me.”
“I’ve never really talked about it.”
“Probably a lot of people ask if you could read each other’s minds.”
“Oh, God, all the time. It was ridiculous. The most we could exchange was a greeting. Like I’d think Nos and throw it out there. Then I’d hear his voice come back saying Dos. I couldn’t dial into his train of thought. Sometimes I could feel what he was feeling. Extreme emotions. If he was really upset or really scared or really tired. I remember once, I had a shit day. One of those days where everything goes wrong and he said to me, ‘Push it over to my side tonight. I’ll hold it. Get some sleep.’”
“Did you?”
Geno laughed a little. “I did. Gathered it all up and imagined handing it to him. Not even imagined. It felt real. Throwing it across the stars so he could take it. I went right to sleep.”
“Was there ever a situation so intense or upsetting, for both of you, you couldn’t pass anything to the other?”
Geno’s eyebrows furrowed a moment, then smoothed out. “I don’t really get what you’re asking.”
Stef smiled. “Neither do I, to be honest.”
Geno’s shoulders rose and fell. “Oh well.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s the journey, not the destination.”
“Oh, that’s one I’ve never heard before, doc.”
Stef laughed. “Every cliché was original at one point.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“No. At some point I may go for a Ph.D., but no plans at the moment.”
“Mm.” Geno swept cut-up paper into a pile next to the intact drawing of himself. A bit of starry border left at his hip. “Are we done today?”
“We’re done.”
“See ya.” Geno pushed back and stood up. Only a few steps away, he turned and pointed at the table. “What do you do with that?”
“This?”
“All the stuff I make in here.”
“It gets saved in your folder.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
“When I get out, I take it with me?”
“Sure. It belongs to you.”
Geno rolled his eyes. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Whatever you want. Chuck it. Burn it. Wipe your ass with it.”
A bubble of laughter made Geno’s face into something beautiful. “Good one, doc. You need more lines like that.”
Geno told Stef about Nos.
He gave up his secret name.
It ought to have felt like selling his soul. Instead, it felt like he had gifted his greatest treasure to Stef. Entrusted it into his hands. A surrender so solemn, it bordered on holy. A vulnerability that left Geno free.
I am letting you hold the most elemental part of my being. If anything happens to me, it’s on you.
The broken bond once connecting him and Carlos now regenerated and attached itself to Stef. Not filled with stars, but with winged horses holding strung bows at the ready. Protection instead of sympathy.
I trust him.
He felt a weird guilt that he wasn’t bonding as intensely with any of the other residents. He suppos
ed he didn’t have to, but it bothered him.
“If I had to pick anyone I identify with,” he said to Stef. “I guess it’s Jeff and Chaow.”
“Why?”
“Because all the other guys in my group therapy were raped by someone they knew. Me, Jeff and Chaow, we were raped by strangers. Not that it makes a… See, now I sound like an asshole.”
“We’re talking about how you feel,” Stef said. “Not what is or isn’t, not how it sounds. All right? We’re identifying emotions. Not labeling them as good, bad, moral, twisted, right, wrong. Emotions don’t hold onto adjectives that way.”
Geno’s eyes flicked toward the ceiling. “If you say so, Finch.” The tone was flip but beneath the dismissive snark, he fiercely believed the things Stef said. It gave him courage to try to explain what he meant.
Being in an environment with other men who’d been raped did help. It helped in that it didn’t hurt him. Their company and affinity didn’t shame him. He trusted their compassion and empathy. “I know, man” from the circle of chairs wasn’t lip service. They knew. Some of the guys had been humiliated by police and dismissed by doctors. Some had family who denied the rape happened, others had friends who declared it wasn’t rape. They knew how the personalized shame could become crippling when others carelessly, or even deliberately validated it. Making themselves the victim for having to hear your twisted, made-up story.
Men like you are the reason we need rape hotlines in the first place. You sick piece of shit.
All the residents had a Ruby of some kind. Someone who was supposed to help but didn’t. All the men at EP respected Geno’s ordeal and his recovery, and he respected theirs. Especially Pablo, who’d been raped with a broken mop handle and still wore a colostomy bag. He probably would the rest of his life. He talked about it freely, but he only laughed about it with Geno. Much like Geno and Chris Mudry had the privilege of making dead mom jokes, he and Pablo could make bag jokes. It was their bond.
But none of it helped. It didn’t fix anything. It didn’t make a tangible difference.
A micro-betrayal on top of all the mini and maxi ones.
I just want to be a normal guy. Nothing about my life will ever be normal again.
A Charm of Finches Page 33