This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us

by Edgar Cantero

  At the foot of the bed there was an empty bottle of bourbon and a box of Ritz crackers. Gathered around the coat stand there was a guitar and some dead cans of beer. Out of curiosity, Ursula reached for the guitar and accidentally knocked the cans over.

  Kimrean’s brown eye shot her a glare that managed to drop the room temperature 10ºF. Ursula hurriedly picked up the guitar and placed it against the wall and sat back on the edge of the bed, hands crossed on her lap.

  By then, Adrian was lost in his thoughts again. A breeze rocking his hair was the only thing separating him from a black-and-white Tim Burton prop.

  URSULA: Where’s Zooey?

  ADRIAN: Sleeping.

  (Pause.)

  URSULA: Can I sleep with her?

  A bullet shell snapped under Kimrean’s shoe.

  Adrian rounded on the rickety little kid on the bed, her size 5 feet swinging in the air.

  “Are you—you— What the fuck?!” he settled with in the end. “What’s the deal with girls and bad boys anyway?”

  “Am I the bad boy there?” said Ursula, amused by his anger. “It’s no big deal; I just want to snuggle.”

  “Yes, it is a big deal, and no, you can’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “For a million reasons!”

  “I’ll take one.”

  “Because— You little— Oh, God,” Adrian struggled, clutching his scalp, trying to sort through the million reasons for one that was remotely close to a PG-13 rating. “Because, for fuck’s sake—don’t they teach you anything in school?! ‘Don’t talk to strangers’ and shit like that?!”

  “But I know Zooey.”

  “Obviously not enough!” he terminated. “So no, you can’t snuggle with her. It’s wrong, it’s inappropriate, it’s gross.”

  With that he turned around, taking the argument with him, and Ursula just sat frustrated, appalled that this would count as a dialectic victory for the grown-up.

  “What the hell is wrong with you,” she said, lowering her head.

  (Turns around again, louder.) “What the hell is wrong with me?! I’m the one—”

  “No, not you,” Ursula said, blocking off his rant with hardly a whisper. “I know what’s wrong with you: you’re a jerk. I meant, what’s wrong with you people.”

  A gentle thunder underscored that perfect comeback.

  Then there was silence. Silence from the broken ceiling fan, from the harbor, from the deactivated private eye, frozen in mid-charge.

  “You all make me feel like I’m growing into a monster,” the eleven-year-old girl said. “I don’t know what it is. Well, I guess it’s the boobs,” she added, checking a fold on her T-shirt. She confronted Kimrean. “Is that why you hide yours?”

  Adrian, craning over the kid, his rage defused, looked into her eyes if only to avoid looking anywhere else—on her body or his.

  Ursula went on, like an unstoppable storm of soft little-girl voice: “It’s not just that they don’t want me in my father’s swimming pool—which is unfair enough, but whatever. It’s the same in the Caymans. I used to be everyone’s favorite; the staff, the bodyguards, everyone complimented me. Now I show them a new outfit, they stare at the ground. I’m supposed to be proud of all the new things going on in my body, but if I talk tampons, everyone’s embarrassed. I cuddle with my friends, everyone stares; I bump against my PE teacher, he jolts like I’m toxic. Everyone’s all happy I’m turning into a woman but freaked out I’m not a child anymore. Like I’m in the gray area, and anything can happen.”

  She shrugged, her miniature mouth somewhat angled into a timid smile.

  “You should’ve seen my father’s men when I arrived for Mikey’s funeral the other day. How confused they were when they saw how much I’d grown. Like, ‘Should we scorn her because she’s a kid? Or should we objectify her because she’s a woman? What kind of shit should we make her feel like?’ ”

  She paused, and since no one seemed to challenge her, she added, “Zooey is the only one who acts normal around me.”

  Adrian, who had stayed in reverential silence, could not help a scoff there. “Yeah, Zooey is the paradigm of normalcy.”

  The kid frowned at the words but still managed to reply, “You live in an office in ruins with a you-shaped hole opening into the bathroom.”

  “Zooey doesn’t like you because you’re her friend, or her bestie, or her shopping buddy,” Adrian mocked. “She likes you because she likes everybody! Men, women, young, old—she can’t tell the difference!”

  “Okay, so she’s friendly.”

  “I don’t mean friendly, I mean—”

  “I know what you mean, Adrian, grow up.” She glared back at the shocked brown eye in front of her. “What? It’s funny to joke about me being killed, but saying the word sex in my presence, that would be crossing the line? Screw your rating system, man.”

  She didn’t sound spiteful or even loud. Just tired.

  “I just want to lie in bed with somebody because I’m cold and alone and I want to feel safe. You’re supposed to be the brainy one—is that too hard to grasp?”

  “It’s hard to grasp that of all people, you pick Zooey,” he replied.

  “At least she’s not condescending. You’re just jealous because I choose her over you.”

  “JEALOUS?!” Adrian cried, leveling up to a new tier of helplessness. “I don’t want to be chosen by anyone! I hate people! I hate being touched, I hate sex, I hate that she loves it! I hate being stuck in the middle!”

  “Good,” the girl said, ever slightly above the whisper threshold. “There’s no need to worry then.”

  And she took Adrian’s hand and tugged him toward the bed.

  Kimrean looked around, caught unaware by the sudden tension drop. His arm barely pulled back on instinct.

  “Worry about what?”

  “About this being wrong or inappropriate. Zooey’s asleep, and you hate touching people, so…”

  She gently yanked Kimrean to sit on the bed, and then she prodded their head down all the way to the pillow and hoisted their legs on the mattress, and Kimrean—the mannequin, the marionette, the dummy—could not move a muscle by themselves. Zooey was asleep; Adrian the Left Brain was stunned to have walked into a logic trap.

  Ursula crawled over to the far side of the mattress, toed off her Panzer shoes, and pulled the sheets over all three, up to their necks.

  She leaned her head on the pillow and didn’t close her eyes.

  They stayed guessing at each other’s shape in the dark, and their mutual hair, and the contours of the sheets, and the sound of their breaths, and the glint in their eyes, while the rain hummed Ani DiFranco songs on the rooftops.

  * * *

  —

  “Which one is her eye?”

  Adrian took a while to engage. The question seemed easier than silence anyway.

  “Green. The left one. Pretty much everything on the left is hers.”

  He heard her frowning against their shared pillow.

  “You can’t move the left side of your body?”

  “Yes, I can. We both can move everything. But the left half is hers. Body cells on this side are feminine: XX chromosomes. Gwen has most of it mapped out.”

  Lying on his right side, he caressed his left shoulder.

  “This arm is hers. The navel is hers. We don’t know about the legs yet.” He stretched his right arm, which was hiding under the pillow. “This one’s mine. But the scar tissue on the wrist is hers, strangely.”

  “What happened?”

  “Zooey tried to chop my hand off with a meat cleaver. Kid stuff.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  Ursula nestled deeper in the bed, shrugged the sheets a little farther up.

  Adrian went on with the roll c
all: “The brain is shared: she’s got the right hemisphere; I got the left. Lungs are mine. Kidneys are hers. Liver is mine. Heart is hers.”

  “I could have guessed.”

  “You’re old enough to know the heart is just a muscle that pumps blood through your veins; it has nothing to do with character.”

  “Sure.”

  Ursula’s hands were both under the covers. She used neither of them to point at the next question. “Whose is the…between your legs?”

  Adrian allowed a blank second, free of implications.

  “That’s kind of shared too.”

  He counted a few raindrops on the windowsill, then resumed.

  “I guess at first they decided I was boy enough, but just in case they still gave me an ambiguous name like Adrian. Afterward, when Gwen identified Zooey, she chose her own name. It’s a character from Salinger.”

  That sounded like a smite.

  “Why do you hate her?” Ursula asked.

  Some other ambient circumstance or meteorological occurrence that doesn’t even deserve to be specified delayed the answer.

  “She’s my sister,” Adrian said. “Siblings hate each other.”

  “Not always.”

  “You just lost two in one week and you don’t look too broken up.”

  “Half brothers. And I hardly knew them. But I didn’t hate them.”

  “You didn’t because they never interfered with your life.” Adrian sat up on his elbows. “Mikey had fifteen years on you. You two never shared a bedroom. He never stole your clothes. He never mistreated your Monster High dolls.”

  “I don’t play with Monster High dolls.”

  “You don’t know what it is. To have a twin. Someone who is always there, in the same room. In the same underpants. Pulling your body, always in the wrong direction.”

  He shifted, face to the ceiling.

  “We’ve been fighting since before we could speak. No wonder our birth mother just gave up on us; can you picture what we were like as toddlers? When Zooey isn’t making a scene in a public place, it’s because we didn’t agree on going to the place in question. I want to go to the library—Zooey wants to go to the beach. I’ve got a test tomorrow—Zooey is sniffing glue. I’m taking the test—ooh, time to masturbate. That’s every day in my life. So, in answer to your question, ‘Why do you hate her?’…let us just say that communal living takes a toll.”

  “But it’s her life too. You two are the same person.”

  “We are not the same person,” he said, almost raising his voice. “We are as different as it gets. We’re each other’s antipodes. She’s pure right brain—she lives on fantasies and whims, she’s like a freight train of emotions, derailed. I am intellect, observation, scientific reasoning. I’m the one doing the detective part of being a detective; she does the smart-ass quipping and heavy-drinking part—with my liver, incidentally. I provide for both of us; I take us through school and interviews so we can live outside a psych ward. I want stability; she can’t sit still for five minutes. I want harmony and routine; she wants noise and never having sex with the same person twice. I calculate; she guesses. I plan; she improvises. I use logic; she daydreams. I’m rational; she’s a wacko.”

  “She has fun; you’re boring,” Ursula whispered.

  “Oh, you think that makes her fun? Acting on impulse, with no consequence? With no inhibition?”

  “That’s what you’re there for—to stop her before she does something too crazy. You complement each other.”

  Adrian muffled a macabre laugh. The moon pointed out a vile smirk on his face.

  “That’s what Gwen told you, isn’t it? That we spent the best part of our lives going from hospitals to foster homes and from foster homes to juvenile pens, until she arrived and unraveled our file and finally told us apart. That she took DNA samples and proved before doctors and judges that we were two people, not one schizophrenic who needed to be put away, right? Then tell me why we’ve been in ten different loony bins since then? Why we were in Claymoore just last week? Oh, right: it’s just a rest home.”

  The whole upper half of his body was speaking now; his left hand seemed to be holding a cigarette, but it wasn’t.

  “Do you think Zooey is cool? Let me walk you through some highlights of Zooey’s life: at age five, Zooey gets sad because Santa didn’t bring her a fire truck, so she has one delivered to our foster home by lighting the bed on fire. And right after that, she remembers that Santa won’t come unless she’s asleep, so she gets into the bed! Age seventeen: Zooey’s driving to Encino, gets the munchies, decides to drive through a Hard Rock Cafe that didn’t have a drive-through! Do you know the Cadillac’s rear sticking out of the wall in every Hard Rock Cafe now? We gave them the idea—we considered suing! Age twenty-four: Zooey needs to spend the night sequestered in a hotel room in Raleigh, North Carolina, before testifying in a trial for a case we helped solve. Just to pass the time, she decides she will drink everything in the minibar and refill the bottles with rubbing alcohol; she does that, then she drinks the rubbing alcohol too, and the next morning she testifies against the judge. In the wrong courtroom. In South! Dakota!”

  He refueled oxygen, never looking away from Ursula, never really noticing the panic in her face.

  “The truth is,” he recapped, “we are not a dangerous schizophrenic who needs to be put away. We are two distinct individuals, one of which is dangerous and needs to be put away.”

  He rubbed his nose. The room was starting to shiver because of the cold breeze.

  “But of course, it’s the old conjoined twins problem,” he said. “If one of them commits a crime, must we incarcerate him? Or does the good twin’s right to freedom prevail? How is it my fault that she’s dysfunctional?”

  He fell silent after that, the question left behind for the audience to study, like any ancient philosophical problem deserves.

  A minute later, Ursula felt she’d mulled over it long enough and sat up too for the rebuttal.

  “You are not the good twin. You are just as dysfunctional,” she said, enunciating carefully so as not to trip on the word. “If she lacks everything you have, then you must lack everything she has: No sensitivity. No empathy.”

  “Lacking empathy or sensitivity does not make me unsuited to live in society,” Adrian said. “On the contrary, it kinda helps. Most successful people usually skimp on those things.”

  “Right,” the kid said, disgusted. “And they become my father.”

  “The world is heartless outside your father’s business too. You’ll find out when you join us in Grown-up Land,” Adrian said, standing up like a parent closing the bedtime storybook. “See how far you get without stepping on anyone’s toes.”

  Rain continued its gentle drumroll on the rooftops outside. On the chessboard, the black and white figures glared hatefully at one another, eternally, for reasons long forgotten.

  Adrian Kimrean remained just as still, on the rim of the spotlight, fixed on Ursula’s feet in her colorful leggings.

  “Toes,” he repeated.

  Ursula released the pillow she’d been squeezing against her chest. “Say what?”

  Adrian shook himself out of the trance, then fished back the crumpled check from his shoe and tossed it on the bed.

  “Go to the hotel; I need to think.”

  “What? Now?!”

  “Scram.”

  “It’s raining!”

  “It was raining when you got here, Columbus is just around the corner.”

  “But what if they’re—”

  “They won’t.”

  He wasn’t facing her anymore; he had wandered to the center of the room, seeing nothing but concepts, faces, sentences registered in the last two days, replayed in fast motion.

  “You really are kicking me out,” Ursula said. She didn’t bother to append a
question mark.

  Adrian didn’t even roger that.

  It was cold out of the bed. Ursula had packed only a hoodie before leaving home. She layered on, put on her shoes, dilating the ritual of tying her shoelaces to give time for a change of heart she knew would not happen. She slung her backpack over her shoulder and walked herself to the door.

  On the glass panel she read the vinyl letters, mirrored:

  “You can’t keep me away too long, you know,” she told him. “Zooey said I’m the femme fatale of this case.”

  The machine snapped off.

  Adrian strode toward the door, his wake pushing Ursula out onto the landing while he stopped on the threshold. He stuck his mannequin face inches from Ursula’s and spewed out the last speech of the night.

  “First, you are not a femme fatale; you are barely a femme, and if anything, chronologically, you are practically fétale, a pun that I assume will go over your head just like the hand of the ‘you must be this tall’ sign at the teacups ride in Disney World. And second, the only archetype you fulfill at this time is that of the damsel in distress—that is a weak, passive, and utterly annoying stock character who is good for nothing but whining while she waits for the hero to come and rescue her, all for the promise of a sexy scene at the end of the story to consummate a romantic plot that the hero will have forgotten about in the next episode, but since in your case the sexy scene won’t happen unless we move the show to Saudi Arabia, I don’t even see the point of your character staying alive for that long, nor do I see your beloved, micro-attention-spanned Zooey mourning you for more than ten seconds before she moves on to the next sweet-faced, air-headed, dime-a-dozen, stupid useless bimbo!”

  A bolt of lightning struck a rooftop two blocks away, or in some other county, or in Idaho—who cares. Slowly the air flowed back into the depleted space between both characters, bringing the smell of petrichor.

  Thunder boomed. From the lightning before, maybe.

  The child on the landing snorted, a tear trailblazing down her cheek.

  She said, not allowing her voice to crack, “Do you realize that, since you’re so incapable of loving Zooey, she must be the one who loves you?”