One Brother Shy

by Terry Fallis

  I was a little disappointed the software hadn’t yielded more and different photos. But it was my first pass. I spent the next two hours selecting different base face shots from my bathroom selfie shoot and poring over the results. The same three photos of me kept emerging, along with two other shots, both taken at Facetech events. I was starting to feel discouraged. While the software was working well, it was only serving up photos of me. I skipped the remaining “long hair” base face shots and selected the first of my simulated short hair photos, with the part in my hair on the left side. The cartoon face set about its spinning. As expected it took about two minutes for the results.

  The same photos once again filled the screen. Since I’d seen them all before, I scrolled to the bottom, where a single new photo slid into view. It was a shot of me standing and speaking at a lectern. My hands in the photo suggested I was in the midst of making a rather compelling point. The sign on the front of the lectern read “IAPP-UK Conference – London 2014.” I thought back to that day in London when I’d given that keynote, feeling and looking calm, cool, collected, and confident. Then it struck me. I’d never ever been to London, and I hadn’t been calm, cool, collected, and confident since late 2005.

  When the spotlights found me, I could feel their warmth. I was no longer cold, but something much worse.

  CHAPTER 5

  I was giddy. I was light-headed. My pulse was pounding. My stomach felt like someone else’s. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him. It was strange and surreal to be looking at yourself knowing that it wasn’t really you. I gathered myself and read the caption.

  Innovatengage founder Matt Paterson addresses the 2014 conference of the International Association for Public Participation U.K., in London.

  Matt Paterson. Matthew Paterson. A good solid name. Looking at him was looking at me. There was really no longer any doubt. Certainty settled in my gut, belief in my heart, and conviction in my head. This was not just some guy who looked a little bit like me. This was not a fluke of birth in a foreign country an ocean away, where two parents produced a son who happened to resemble me in some respects. No. No way. It was clear. Utterly obvious to anyone with passable vision. We were once one egg. We split. We were born. Then we were split a second time…for nearly twenty-five years.

  I had found Matt Paterson. I had found my identical twin brother.

  While I stared at his photo, my mind raced. My thoughts swirled. I didn’t attempt to rein in the chaos. I couldn’t have if I’d tried. A split-second cerebral sampling from that frenzied moment yielded:

  • Holy shit, I found him.

  • Who is Matt Paterson?

  • What does he do?

  • Where is he from?

  • I found him.

  • What is Innovatengage?

  • I want to show Abby.

  • The miracle of a high-speed Internet connection and software I helped develop allowed me to locate a perfect stranger, and my twin brother, on a different continent, in under two hours. Unbe-fucking-lievable.

  • What’s his story?

  • Mom, it’s okay. Don’t worry. Don’t fret. I found him. It’s okay.

  • But why didn’t you tell me?

  • Short hair on us looks better, much better, but…

  • Is he married?

  • I wonder if anyone ever connects him to Gabriel?

  • Does he have children?

  • There’s no wedding ring on his finger.

  • I like his jacket but I don’t think I could pull off that shirt.

  • I feel different, now.

  • I found him.

  • I found him.

  • I feel different.

  Overwhelmed, I looked away from the screen for a moment and concentrated on breathing. I held my own hands. I rocked for a minute. I’d read somewhere that rocking is soothing to our species, in a primal sense. Then I looked back at the image I’d somehow found, my needle in the Internet’s haystack. He was still there. Matt Paterson was still at the lectern, seemingly in full rhetorical flight. We almost looked noble, even heroic. In that instant, the need to see him move and hear him speak overpowered everything else. I flipped over to YouTube and typed “Matt Paterson, Innovatengage” into the life-giving search bar.

  In an instant, there were several hits. The first one was from that same IAPP-UK conference. I stopped myself from hitting the Play button and hauled my earbuds from the side pocket of my backpack. The speakers on my MacBook Pro were pretty good, but I wanted the best audio fidelity I could get to hear him for the first time. I plugged in the buds and pushed them where they belonged. Then I hit the white triangle.

  We were speaking with an English accent. He was speaking with an English accent. But it was my voice. Initially, I wasn’t focused on what he was saying. I was listening to the lilt, the pitch, the timbre of his voice. Except for the accent, it was my lilt, my pitch, my timbre. After a few minutes, I started concentrating on his words and his performance. Even without speaking notes, he had an easy and confident speaking style. He cracked jokes on the fly that made his large audience laugh. In short order, it was clear he was funny, humble, self-deprecating, but very smart, confident, and fully engaged in the moment. For a time I narrowed my focus to three specific sentences early on in his remarks. At the 5:42 mark he said:

  In this era, earning the social licence to build massive infrastructure projects is not just an option, not just recommended, not just preferred, it’s absolutely essential. Public engagement, scaled digitally, to secure social licence, has become the new corporate imperative. Ignore it at your financial and reputational peril.

  I opened a notebook and wrote down these three sentences. I listened to them over and over, following the words I’d written, until I knew them by heart. I closed my notebook. Then I recited the lines, mimicking Matt’s cadence and inflection. I worked at it for several minutes, repeating the lines, tweaking words, perfecting the accent. I don’t know why I did this. Then, after listening to him one more time, I used an MP3 recording app on my iPhone to perform the sentences in my voice, in our voice, but with Matt’s English accent. I’m good with accents. You already know I used to be an actor. It was a big part of my pre-Gabriel high school life. I loved the excitement of performing. I loved slipping into a different character, particularly if a foreign accent was involved. I loved the warmth of the stage lights, at least until I didn’t.

  I wasn’t happy with my first few recordings, so I erased them. I played Matt again. Then I recorded those three sentences one more time. Got it. With a second set of earbuds I’d pulled from my desk drawer, I put Matt’s YouTube clip in my right ear, and my iPhone recording in my left. It took me a minute or so to sync up the two tracks. When played perfectly together, it sounded like a single stereo recording from Matt’s U.K. keynote. You honestly could not tell there were two different voices, largely because there was really only one voice. Our voice. Twins. Identical twins. I had found him.

  It was now 6:45. Morning light was spilling through the office windows, though the sun would have to be much higher in the sky before it reached my cubicle. I spent the next half hour or so watching Matt Paterson in every YouTube clip I could find. Some were media interviews in which he spoke about his company or played the role of subject matter expert about digital public engagement, stakeholder consultation, and the concept of social licence. He was unfailingly articulate, polite, and informed. Occasionally, his obvious sense of humour crept in. I liked him. Even if he weren’t my identical twin brother, I would have liked him. He came across as a nice guy who’d been well brought up. I stopped to wonder who had brought him up.

  I easily found the Innovatengage website. Before reading about the company, I clicked on the Leadership Team menu item. Matt’s name headed the list of four.

  Matt Paterson, Founder

  mattpaterson@innovatengage.co.uk

  Matthew Paterson started Innovatengage in 2013 following a short stint as a political staffer for
the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, and Skills. Before that, he earned a Masters in Social Science of the Internet from Oxford where he examined the concept of “social licence,” and the Internet’s potential to scale public and stakeholder engagement, an emerging staple of modern government and business. The award-winning Innovatengage platform Matt Paterson conceived is changing the way organizations engage with their audiences. He is a sought-after speaker, and lives in London.

  I read his short bio through twice. He’d gone to Oxford. He’d worked in British politics. He’d started a company when he was twenty-three and built an online engagement platform. He had an email address. I had his email address. I could just fire off an email right that second if I wanted to. I could have connected with him right then. Hell, I could have picked up the phone and called him right then. At that hour, he might have just been munching on a sandwich at his desk. This thought elevated my heart rate. I leaned back from my computer. I had only one chance to make that first connection. And I’d never get it back if I botched it. It was tempting, but I needed to think.

  By then, people were drifting in to the office. Some nodded my way, or waved, though many just ignored me as they passed through to their cubicles. They weren’t jerks. In fact they were really very nice, almost to a person. They’d all, at one time or another, tried to engage me, tried to involve me in the day-to-day office social dynamic. You know what I mean. “How was your weekend?” “Can you believe what Simone said in the status meeting yesterday?” “I think Susan and Brent might be seeing each other.” “Is that a new top?” Okay, no one has ever asked me about a “new top.” But the other stuff, yes. They’d all tried. But I just couldn’t ever seem to give them enough back to keep myself in the play. I just couldn’t.

  I smelled Simone breeze in shortly after 8:30, which was early for her. She wore the same powerful, trachea-constricting fragrance every single day. Always the same scent. Always. Actually, neither scent nor fragrance was anywhere close to the right word. But “stench” just sounded too harsh to my ears, though my nose was on board. While I waited until she settled herself in her glass-walled office, I read a little more about Innovatengage on the website. It was referred to as a “start-up” in the “About the company” section. There were two principal lines of business. First, Innovatengage developed, and was constantly innovating, an online engagement platform that allowed organizations to move their costly public and stakeholder consultation programs on to the Internet where so many more people could participate. Instead of attending an inconveniently timed and located public information session in some sterile hotel function room or community centre, interested individuals could visit the engagement site online, review the same materials, ask questions, respond to surveys, watch a video about the project, offer feedback on any aspect of the project, upload an audio comment or question, and almost anything else you could conceive.

  Instead of always seeing the same fifteen well-known stakeholders attending the town hall meeting and providing utterly predictable feedback, the Innovatengage platform allowed thousands of people to go online and participate in a meaningful exchange. Through this innovation, Matt’s company could scale the old-school, bricks-and-mortar regional road-show stakeholder consultation program, making it far more effective and efficient, and far less costly. And many more people had the opportunity to participate. Win-win. Very cool, I thought, and with an almost limitless market potential in what Matt described in one of the YouTube videos, this emerging age of social licence.

  Second, the consulting side of the business provided customized advice and counsel to clients on how to develop and execute successful public digital engagement programs using the Innovatengage platform. If I understood it correctly, you didn’t need to buy the advice and counsel if you didn’t want or need it. Clients could just pay Matt’s team to put their own branding on the Innovatengage platform, and then the client could take it from there, on their own. Interesting.

  I glanced over to Simone’s office. There she was, ensconced behind her desk. Let’s get this over with, I thought. I got to my feet and forced myself to walk over to her office door. I just stood there, knowing that I’d entered her peripheral vision. I waited a bit, and eventually she looked up. I managed a slight smile. Her face did not say, “Hey, Alex, it’s great to see you. How are you holding up?” No, her expression was more along the lines of “You, again. What do you want this time?” I’m quite good at reading her facial expressions.

  “It’s you, again,” she said. Then she sighed in a very big way – big, as in hyperventilating big. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. What do you want this time? My nine o’clock is going to call any second.”

  What do I want this time? Well, how about what I’ve always wanted? But alas no, you keep showing up every morning.

  “Um, there’s been a major development related to my mother’s death that means, well, I just have to take care of a few things,” I replied. “Sorry.”

  “What exactly do you mean? What’s happened?”

  I found out about three hours ago that I have an identical twin brother in England who doesn’t even know I exist, and I have to find him. That’s what’s happened.

  “I can’t really say, but I must travel out of town for a few weeks, and then…”

  “Stop!” Like one of the Supremes, she raised high her stop sign hand. “Wait! Just wait! For a moment there I thought you said you were going out of town for a couple of weeks. Surely I misheard. I did misunderstand you, didn’t I?”

  Your ears are working fine. It’s your brain and people skills that are constantly misfiring.

  “Yes. Technically, you misheard me. I said a few weeks, not a couple of weeks.”

  “Don’t you fuck with me, Alex,” she snapped – and I mean she snapped in every sense of the word. “Do not – I repeat – Do. Not. Fuck with me! I am right out here on the ledge!”

  Yeah, well, why don’t you put us all out of our misery and just step off?

  The eyes and ears of every other person in the vicinity were trained on Simone’s office as her voice reverberated throughout the floor. Even Abby in our remote cubicle popped up from behind our partition like a startled meerkat with a pained look on her face.

  “Sorry. I have no choice,” I said, looking at the floor. “I’ll use the rest of my bereavement leave and then I’ll start on the four weeks’ vacation I still have. Sorry.”

  “Alex!” she shouted.

  I physically recoiled from the impact of her vocal waves striking my chest.

  WHAT!

  “Yes?” I replied in almost a whisper.

  “The Gold beta is mission-fucking-critical to this company and it’s all on my head. Are you reading me? I’m sorry your father died, but the Gold beta must be rolled out on time, or none of us here are going to have a job.”

  You want mission-fucking-critical? At this precise moment, finding a twin brother I never knew I had is my idea of mission-fucking-critical.

  She stopped to breathe some more before continuing.

  “So I don’t care if you need an emergency heart transplant or if the steel plate in your skull needs rustproofing, taking time off right now is JUST NOT HAPPENING!” she shrieked.

  Oh it’s happening. It’s happening.

  I had nearly retreated out of her office, but realized that I needed to move back in. The thought of Matthew Paterson in London somehow made it a little easier to step back into the furnace.

  Let’s try it again and I’ll speak slower.

  “Again, my role in Gold is essentially over. The code is written. It works. The platform works. We’ve done all the QA we can…”

  Her face instantly morphed from rage to rage-perplexed. It was a subtle change, but I got it.

  “Sorry, Quality Assurance. We’ve done all the Quality Assurance we can at this stage. As I’ve explained, it’s now over to the UX team – sorry – User Experience team and Design to make it look pretty. My part is done. Over.
Finished. It’s off my desk. Abby can handle any minor coding variances that UX and Design might need.”

  She actually looked frightened. Well, frightened and apoplectic.

  “No. No. No…”

  Thankfully, the phone on her desk rang. Her nine o’clock call, right on time. She froze and stared at her phone.

  “Um. I’ll just speak to HR on my way out. See you when I get back. I’ll stay in touch with Abby,” I said as calmly as I could.

  She remained transfixed by the phone, by then on its third ring. On ring five, I pointed to the flashing button.

  “I know. I know!” she yelled, reaching for the phone.

  I spoke to Carleen, our HR director, on my way back to my desk. She was very curious about what had just gone down in Simone’s office. I explained. I was just as cryptic about the true reason for my unplanned hiatus from the office, but she was completely reasonable and sympathetic about it all. She also apologized for Simone’s psychotic behaviour, though she used a milder term. I think it was “somewhat unusual behaviour.” I thanked her.

  Abby waited one nanosecond after I sat down at my desk before using her feet to propel her swivel chair to my side of the partition.

  “What the fork was that all about?”

  Fork?

  I remembered to make eye contact.

  “Nothing. Just Simone being, you know, Simone,” I replied.

  “Yeah, but she sounded deeper in bat shit there than she usually does.”

  Yep, and that means a whole lot of bat shit. Full immersion.

  “Well, I just told her I’m going away for a few weeks, you know, to deal with some family stuff. And she wasn’t very happy about it.”