Jude

by Jeff Nesbit

  That was typical of Jude. When all else failed, pretend to fall in line with social conventions and graces until a better idea came along. College was a logical next step for those with means and money—both of which we now possessed. So off to college we went.

  Jude clearly had his eye on greater horizons, though he refused to talk about them in any specificity with me. Since Professor Asher had gone to Harvard as an undergraduate, we were now legacy kids. Not a sure thing, by any means, but Jude doubled on his bets by making Professor Asher donate to assure his spot at Harvard. He had his crimson wardrobe selected by the spring.

  I went another direction. I had no real interest in college, a degree, or anything else for that matter. Honestly, I was a bit terrified at the prospect of living beyond Jude’s shadow for the first time in my life. I didn’t tell him that, of course. But it was literally freaking me out.

  I figured it would be a bit weird and awkward to follow Jude to Harvard. I know that identical twins do that sort of thing all of their lives. They dress alike, hang out together, do all manner of things together, and quite often, make certain their lives intersect at every conceivable point. But Jude wanted to go out on his own, test his wings by himself. I could sense it. He wanted to fly toward the sun, and he didn’t want a companion on that flight. I knew it. I could clearly see it. So I quietly applied to a few schools outside of the Ivy League and settled on Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in the end.

  Neither of us embraced or even said much beyond a quick good-bye when it was time to head off to college. That was fine with me. I wasn’t sure how I would manage as it was, and the last thing in the world I wanted was for Jude to see me in my moment of weakness.

  “See ya,” I called out to him as he finished packing his Harvard wardrobe into the back of his convertible. “Call me every once in a while.”

  “No worries,” he yelled back. “We’ll see each other. Remember—everywhere is just a plane trip away.”

  We both laughed. Now that we had our own trust funds and a great deal of wealth at our disposal, that had become a running joke between us. We’d gone from wards of the state to jet-setters, thanks to a bit of surreptitious work and sacrifice on Jude’s part. We were, in fact, never more than a plane ride away from each other or any destination on the planet. It seemed remarkably funny and surreal to us both.

  I didn’t bother to look back at the farm as I left in my own black BMW two-seater. Professor Asher wasn’t on hand to see us off. I wasn’t entirely sure where he was, to be honest. His wife said good-bye to us, at least, on our way out. I wondered if I would ever be back to that place.

  Once I’d hit the open road, I flirted with the notion of just staying on I-81 as I drove south and west along the Appalachian Mountains, having decided to take a longer, more scenic route rather than the fastest. I didn’t have to go to college. I could merely keep driving south, work my way around the country, and see whatever suited my fancy.

  But I didn’t. I dutifully followed the directions that led me out of southwest Virginia and into North Carolina. I arrived at Duke’s campus that evening, unpacked my bags in the freshman dorm to which I’d been assigned, and prepared for the mind-numbing efforts to register for class, buy books, and get started with the next phase of my own education.

  The one and only convenience I’d arranged was to pay extra for a single room in the freshman dorm. I had no desire or interest in a roommate. Jude had been my one and only roommate and companion my entire life—and I didn’t want to face the prospect of trying to adjust to a stranger while I also adjusted to life without Jude.

  It was a colossal effort to shift into the mind-set of college life. Who learns for the sake of obtaining knowledge? Who delays life for four years or more while they prepare intellectually for what they might do later in life? It was a bit jarring to me. Despite Jude’s half-hearted order to me that it was the logical next step, I still had no use for it and wanted nothing to do with it.

  Until I went to class. And then I got it. Suddenly, beautifully, almost magically, I understood. There was an entire other world out there that I’d never imagined. There was so little room for intellectual pursuit in America’s public schools, which seem obsessively focused on making absolutely certain that the dumbest of us pass standardized tests.

  College was precisely the opposite—it rewarded intellectual pursuit and philosophical passion. Any pursuit of any kind of knowledge was possible.

  You could pretend that the world was illusion—that it was a mere figment of your collective consciousness—and you could find a philosophy class to reward such an intellectual journey.

  If you were concerned about social injustice on other continents—or in America, for that matter—there were classes that grounded you in the basis of such injustice with historical, social science, and political teachings and writings.

  And if you wanted to coast through college without thinking all that much about anything other than where the next frat party would be that weekend, you could do that as well. There were no intellectual limits.

  I was beyond mesmerized. I could, in fact, see myself studying and reading and philosophizing in a college setting for years with no thought at all for what might come next. For the first time in my life, I was in love with learning. Granted, I could afford to drift. Unlike my peers at Duke, I would never worry beyond college about how to earn a living. Jude had taken care of that.

  But that hardly diminished my ardor for learning. I was like a kid who’d been starved of sugar and who was now unexpectedly locked inside a candy store.

  Largely because I couldn’t settle on any one topic—and largely because there didn’t seem to be any rules against it—I took on three different majors. I knew that I’d eventually have to settle on one of them for an actual degree, but that could wait. For the time being, I took classes in political science, international relations, and English as often as I could.

  Jude and I talked frequently during our first three years of college. We visited each other. It was an easy trip from Raleigh-Durham airport to Logan in Boston, and we both made the trip several times a year. Neither of us went back to the farm for Christmas holidays. We took groups from college with us on skiing trips to Switzerland or safaris in Swaziland instead.

  And we didn’t return to the farm for the summer months either.

  The summer between our third and fourth years, Jude went to New York for an internship with a brokerage firm on Wall Street. I joined him at an apartment in the city for an internship with NBC News at 30 Rock.

  We were both about to turn twenty-one, which would be exciting because not only would it be legal to drink alcohol, but we’d be eligible for a much larger share of the trust than the spending money we’d been limited to as part of a legal guardianship.

  It would be our last summer together, in one place.

  Unbeknownst to me, Jude had already made plans for the next phase in his life. He called on his forces toward the end of that summer.

  At first, I assumed he’d merely grown weary of living off his trust fund. He wanted access to more. Jude had never been one to wait patiently, and I figured he’d decided that he may as well cash in all his chips sooner rather than later.

  Professor Asher and his wife contracted malaria while on a trip to sub-Saharan Africa. It happened suddenly. We’d heard, via email, that he’d gotten sick, and then his wife had as well, and that they’d both been flown to a hospital in South Africa for drug treatment. But they were much too far gone by that time. Their vital organs had already been compromised. Both were dead within the week. The bodies were flown home, and the memorial service was held in Charlottesville a few days later.

  Jude didn’t say much on the flight back to Virginia from JFK in New York. I didn’t dare ask him whether he knew anything about what had happened.

  But a casual comment made me think.

 
“He was starting to get religion,” Jude said on that flight back for the funeral, “and beginning to feel sorry for all those kids over the years. He was muttering in his emails about giving it up and maybe coming clean. The trip to Africa was the first of many he was planning, part of an effort to set up a philanthropic foundation. He thought it might be a good idea to set up a foundation with his money before he died, so he could do some good. He was taking a serious look at how he could cut us out before we turned twenty-one. I couldn’t have that. There was no way I could let that stand.”

  I didn’t probe any further. I could imagine the way Jude had thought it out, though. If Professor Asher did, in fact, put his fortune into a foundation, Jude—and I, for that matter—would lose access to most of it. And it had to happen before we’d turned twenty-one and could make legal claims. While it made sense to me that a man such as Professor Asher would want to make amends at the end of his life and “do good” with his wealth, I could also see Jude’s point of view.

  But whether Jude could direct forces halfway around the world was another question entirely. But I didn’t doubt his abilities to direct such forces.

  After all, if human beings were only a plane trip away from any spot on the planet, then surely those who weren’t bound by plane schedules could easily reach any spot on the earth as well, whenever they wished.

  Chapter Eleven

  I made up my mind on the plane ride back from our Caribbean vacation. Sandy helped. She was delighted with my decision. I could actually see the smallest flicker of hope of a meaningful relationship.

  “Oh, come on, you can’t be serious,” John Hargrove said, leaning forward in his desk chair. “A book? You’re going to take a sabbatical to write a book? About what? Global warming? There are like fifty books on that subject, and a new one gets written about every other week. I mean, Bill McKibben’s written about half of them, and they haven’t convinced people yet.”

  The long-suffering science and environment editor at The New York Times was most likely jealous of my decision. I could afford to take a sabbatical, write whatever I felt like, and if an agent didn’t like it or a publishing house didn’t jump at it, I could just buy one of them and tell them to publish and market the book. I’d be jealous of that too.

  “No, not global warming—though I do wish someone would write a real book about it someday that isn’t built on predictions of likely future scenarios and computer-generated models about what might happen to the polar bears,” I explained. “Some serious person should let the world know that the human species is in serious trouble because of our addiction to fossil-fuel-based energy. We’re headed toward a tipping point of no return. Things will be quite bad in the relatively near future, with consequences that will cause a rapid transformation of what we now know as human civilization.”

  “But you won’t be that serious person, I hope. Right?” Hargrove waggled a querulous brow.

  “No, not me, I’m afraid.” I laughed. “Not that I wouldn’t mind giving it a try.”

  “So what’s your book about then?”

  I hesitated. I wasn’t normally shy or reticent. But I also wasn’t quite sure if Hargrove would understand why I wanted to pursue the topic of the book I had in mind. It might seem … strange to him.

  “Well,” I said slowly, “you know how there have been quite a few books on radical Islam fundamentalism since 9/11? Books on why and how people become jihadists, and why America has become a target?”

  Hargrove narrowed his eyes. “You’re not—”

  I jumped back in. “No, not that subject. I don’t know the first thing about Islam or jihadism. I would never consider taking that up. No, I’m only using that as a reference point. What I’m more interested in is why extremist hate groups have managed to rise in America and why we seem to have such an uncivil social dialogue in this country.”

  “So you want to take a look at the Christian Brigades.” Hargrove frowned. “You’re still upset that you were shot by one of them, aren’t you?”

  “No, no. It’s not really that. But I don’t completely understand what drives that sort of hate—or why it might be focused on someone like my brother.”

  “It’s simple. They go after politicians all the time. People with that sort of crazy don’t discriminate. If it gets them on CNN, that’s the only motivation they need.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But Jude isn’t elected yet. He isn’t anything, really, other than a wealthy, famous person who’s running for one of a hundred seats in the Senate.”

  “Who successfully bet against the Japanese yen and then the Chinese yuan, chaired the Federal Reserve, and is now one of the most widely regarded economic forecasters in the world,” Hargrove added.

  “Inside baseball, for Wall Street types and bankers. Not the public,” I countered. “People of wealth and means know Jude—not the unwashed public. The public doesn’t read Forbes. The keepers of the financial temple know all too well who Jude Asher is. But the people? They don’t have a clue who he is, what he stands for, or why anyone would be motivated to hate him or even oppose him at this point.”

  Hargrove cocked his head. “So that’s what you’re curious about, then? You want to know why an extremist group like the Christian Brigades would take an interest in your brother and target him?”

  “Among other things, yes.”

  “So, fine. Do that in your spare time. That’s what the Internet is for—to search through hysteria and conspiracy-theory nonsense. I mean, good grief, just read through the thousands of awful comments on some of your own stories if you’d like to do some original research on hate speech.”

  “Yeah, I’ve had some doozies on a few of my stories,” I said with a grin.

  “So maybe that guy was really going after you—and not your brother,” Hargrove half joked.

  “Yeah, well, then he got his guy. My leg still hurts. The doctors said I’ll probably have a permanent limp.”

  “I’m sorry about that.” Hargrove’s eagle eyes met mine again, this time even more intensely. “But I’m still waiting to hear why you need to take time off to write this book.”

  What I clearly could not tell him was that I wanted to write this book partly as a way to understand the forces that surrounded and served my brother—and which had somehow not managed to get in the way of an attacker when Jude had started to pursue public office. No, that wouldn’t do at all.

  “I just need to clear my head a bit, ask a few questions, and see what emerges,” I said instead. “I want to do some research and see where it takes me, that’s all. I need some time to do that.”

  “Can I at least get a few occasional dispatches from you from the field as you’re wandering the nation on your quest?”

  “Sure, why not? I can manage that once in a while.”

  “Good,” Hargrove said. “So we won’t lose you entirely.”

  “No, not entirely. Just for a time.”

  Chapter Twelve

  I was pretty sure I saw the first of them in human form at the memorial service. He was standing off to one side, respectful, polite, observant, and generally distant from the small handful of tenured and retired faculty members who came to pay their respects to Professor Asher and his wife in Charlottesville.

  I can’t tell you why, exactly, I felt with some certainty that he was one of them. Perhaps it was just that he didn’t seem like he was there to pay his respects to the dead professor and his wife as they were lowered into the ground at a small cemetery behind a respectful mainstream Presbyterian Church at the edge of the small college town. He seemed like he was there as a courtesy—as if he were a dispassionate observer of the human condition at a moment of great sadness.

  Funerals are not happy places. But, as is often the case, you can learn a great deal at times of crisis or despondency. In this instance, I noticed that Jude instantly took command of the situation. He gr
eeted every person in the receiving line at the church and thanked them for their concern and prayers. He was unwavering in his willingness to stand there and express his depth of concern and care for his adoptive parents, who’d so graciously rescued him from the state.

  And I kept an eye on Jude as he finally walked through the rows of crosses and headstones to greet the man who’d stood so patiently observing the service.

  He was impeccably dressed. He’d clearly either come from money or inherited it. I assumed it was inherited wealth, not new money. He was far too comfortable with his regal bearing and attire to have come into it recently. The polite, observant, well-dressed young man looked as if he’d been well off for quite a long time. He was a bit too far away for me to see his features, but I could imagine he was quite handsome and imposing. That would make sense.

  They talked for a few minutes. I could tell, just by Jude’s body language, that my brother was paying very close attention to the conversation at hand.

  When it was obvious Jude would be a bit longer, I drifted inside the church to get out of the heat. I wandered into the kitchen, found a can of Diet Coke in the refrigerator, and leaned against the sink. I enjoyed the way the cold, carbonated soda burned the back of my throat on the way down.

  “He’s a friend,” Jude said, startling me.

  I turned and faced my brother as he strode through the doorway that led from the church hallway to the kitchen. “A friend? You have those?”

  Jude smiled. “Yes, I have friends now, at college. As do you, I believe.”

  “I very much doubt that the man you were speaking to is a friend from college. And why isn’t he here with you now, in the kitchen?”

  “He doesn’t have much use for churches,” Jude said casually.