My Vanishing Twin

by Tom Stern

  “What the fuck?”

  Dr. Grunburg’s face soured. For the first time since Walter had come to know the doctor, the man seemed at a loss. “I’m not sure what information that question seeks to acquire,” declared the doctor, flummoxed.

  Walter considered this a small and irrelevant but nevertheless nominally satisfying victory. A feeling he clung to resolutely for the time being, as though it were all he had right now.

  “We’ll just have the surgery and we’ll go from there,” Veronica insisted, breaking the silence that had yet again filled the car’s cabin the length of the red-light-and-traffic laden car ride from the doctor’s office to their current location a few miles from home.

  “I should be able to stipulate anything at all that I would like removed from my body,” Walter decried.

  Veronica did not answer. So Walter went on…

  “If I wanted my teeth extracted, I could have them extracted.”

  “This isn’t a tooth,” Veronica dismissed calmly.

  “It’s like a freak-tooth,” Walter upheld.

  “It’s your brother,” she corrected, unable to withhold a bit of indignation from her tone.

  “Or my bearded sister,” Walter corrected.

  Veronica pulled the car over to the side of the road with a sudden, swift jerk.

  “Would you please think about this seriously for a moment?” she demanded. “This is real. This is happening. You are not in control. But you can make something of this.”

  “I am taking this dead seriously. This merits a complete and total fucking meltdown, which is what I am rapidly approaching. You’re the one humanizing the Goddamn thing, if not downright infantilizing it.”

  “It is human. That is what humanizes it. Not me.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you!” Veronica spat back. “Have you ever thought that maybe this is a good thing?”

  “Of course not,” Walter countered angrily. “No sane person would! And stop inserting yourself into this! It’s not about you!”

  “You’re right! It’s not about me!” Veronica nearly screamed. “It’s not about you, either! It’s about the kid! Or the adult! Or whatever age it is!”

  “Bullshit!” Walter yelled even louder than Veronica screamed. “This is absolutely about me!”

  “You’re not a victim here!” Veronica came right back.

  “Then what the hell am I?”

  “Some people would love to have a brother!”

  “Not extracted from their intestines!”

  Veronica got out of the car, slammed the door, and started walking along the side of the road.

  Walter got out of the car, too, slammed the door even harder, and called after Veronica…

  “I’m going for a fucking walk!”

  Veronica did not respond.

  So Walter did what he said he was going to do, in the direction opposite the one in which Veronica was heading. He was not proud of his actions. But for God’s sake, he needed to act, even if he was ashamed by what he was about to discover he was attempting to do.

  Was Eleanor a friend of Veronica’s and, consequently, an acquaintance of Walter’s?

  Yes.

  Were Walter and Eleanor surprised to run into one another at a local coffee shop on a random day a few months back?

  Yes.

  Did Walter proceed to “meet-up” with Eleanor four, maybe five, subsequent prearranged times at the same coffee shop?

  Yes.

  Did Veronica know about any of these meet-ups?

  No.

  But all of this conceded, nothing physical had transpired between Walter and Eleanor.

  They had merely talked.

  Albeit about fairly intimate topics.

  Walter could really talk to Eleanor. In a way that, for example and without blame, he could not really talk to Veronica anymore. A way he could not help but presume he had been longing to talk to someone for a not insignificant amount of time.

  Should Walter have shared this concern with Veronica?

  Absolutely.

  Did he?

  Absolutely not.

  Could he have told Veronica that he feared and suspected that their inability to talk was irreparable?

  Yes.

  Could he have made up an excuse, any excuse, to end his relationship with Veronica before he let his conversations with Eleanor develop?

  Of course.

  But Walter simply did not know how to be certain that he did not want to be with Veronica anymore, even if he could not really talk to her. And this, of all topics, seemed like one he should be certain about before acting.

  Walter also did not know exactly what he wanted when it came to Veronica anymore, an admittedly alarming truth after spending several years with her. But given this uncertainty, how was he supposed to know what to make of a single detail like his inability to truly talk to her? Perhaps this detail was a mere trifle in the grand scheme of things, poised to disappear if he just waited one more day? Or perhaps it was a pernicious cancer lingering on the collective and metaphoric pancreas of their relationship?

  How the hell was Walter supposed to know such weighty things?

  He was just a Goddamn salesman with a Goddamn person surreptitiously living inside of him for decades, but he was supposed to know something about this?

  Furthermore, it is from well within this context of layered and nuanced uncertainties about life and love that Walter was confronted with the truth that Eleanor just so happened to be a “call girl of sorts.” Granted, he did not know this at all upon initially running into Eleanor. Did he know this after the robust, impromptu, hour-long, and surprisingly intimate conversation that ensued thereupon in which both parties opened up about themselves in an emotionally frank and essentially nonsexual manner?

  Yes.

  Did this mean that he also knew this information when he set up their first “meet-up” thereafter?

  Yes. It did. And he would have readily admitted this if the topic were ever to come up with anyone other than himself and Eleanor.

  Did Walter consider asking Veronica if she knew that her friend, Eleanor, was a call girl of sorts?

  Yes.

  Did he decide to ask?

  No. Because he could not really talk to her in the first place.

  Besides, he felt it was safe to presume that Veronica likely would have said something to Walter by now if she had known that her friend was a call girl of sorts. For her, such a detail would be a novelty, a point of interest worth sharing and guffawing over in stupefaction. Whereas for Walter, the possession of this detail seemed a far thornier topic of conversation. And Walter conceded that this, in and of itself, suggested something illicit about his actions. But he had not done anything at all illicit. So he resented the implication, even though he was the source of the implication.

  Could Walter have told Veronica that he was meeting up with Eleanor for coffee?

  He could have.

  Would it likely have raised quite a few suspicions that, particularly at that point in time, one could argue were completely unfounded?

  Yes.

  Could Walter have told Veronica that he was meeting up with a call girl of sorts?

  He supposed he could have told her that, too. Although it certainly would have raised even more suspicions that one could argue had the definite appearance of being founded.

  And is there a difference between a call girl of sorts and a call girl?

  Walter supposed there was not.

  Except for the fact that Eleanor did not seem to do this as her sole means of financial support. In fact, Walter wasn’t even entirely clear that she did this for money at all. All he had been able to glean from what she had told him, without his having to uncomfortably ask for clarification, was that she was a considerab
ly successful financial analyst and she had what she called “encounters” occasionally with different strangers. They would inform her of their “interests” and she would either suffice or deny these requests.

  Did Walter find this massively arousing?

  He did.

  But nothing physical had transpired between Walter and Eleanor. Not that day of their first meet up or any day since, straight on through to the present. And furthermore, Walter really liked to think that his relationship was with Eleanor the human being and not Eleanor the call girl of sorts. Walter did not imagine that Eleanor felt she was having conversations with a salesman for Sheprick Consolidated but with Walter the human being, a man in whose companionship and empathetic ear she presumably took at least some modicum of solace or joy.

  That was all.

  That was it.

  Full disclosure.

  Up until that day, when Walter and Veronica took diametrically opposed walks away from their temporarily abandoned car and the chamber of impenetrable silence that had commandeered the vehicle’s cabin for a second time in as many days.

  And even on this day, absolutely nothing physical transpired between the two. This was not what pushed this whole series of encounters into a space that Walter struggled to cleanly justify. It was instead the fact that his walk, which had begun as a simple effort to get away from Veronica and her car, had presently and without conscious deliberation landed him in the middle of the same coffee shop where he had previously met up with Eleanor four times, maybe five.

  And he did not want any coffee.

  And when he did not find her there, his heart sank.

  And when he found no one else there that he recognized, he felt relief.

  And he ordered some coffee that he did not want, just so none of these people that he did not recognize would suspect him of anything illicit.

  And then he took a seat by the window and watched the people and the cars go by.

  And he decided that he would find Eleanor’s address in the white pages, in case he was ever in a similar circumstance again.

  At which point, Walter noticed a pit in his chest.

  In fact, it was more than just a pit. So much more that he decided he would call it “the pit.” And as he contemplated the pit, it finally dawned on him that in this moment—which he feared might very well be one of those rare, defining types—of the countless infinitude of people in the world, including those who knew nothing, something, and everything of his medical circumstance, Walter came here because he wanted to be around one and only one of them.

  Walter hoped this didn’t really mean anything much. But inasmuch as he did not want to be around anyone who knew he had inside of him his living, bearded twin (which he had decided to dub henceforth his “medical circumstance”) and inasmuch as almost every human being in the world fit into this category, other than Veronica and Dr. Grunburg and maybe a nurse or two who had read Walter’s file, Walter was fairly confident that it meant quite a bit.

  2.

  “I won’t be in the rest of this week or the next two,” Walter explained to the telephone receiver the next morning, which in turn conveyed the explanation to Walter’s boss, Mr. Sheprick. “I have a medical circumstance. But all will be well.”

  “What?” Mr. Sheprick three-quarters-yelled back into his telephone receiver. The man never seemed to understand that volume enhancement was not necessary when speaking into a telephone.

  “I have a medical circumstance I need to tend to,” Walter yelled back, allowing the man, as he always subconsciously did, to dictate their conversation’s sonority.

  “I’ll tend to your business accounts and fulfillments in your absence,” came the loud, stock answer always offered whenever Walter needed time off. Mr. Sheprick always maintained a level of professional demeanor that transported Walter back to what he imagined the 1940s must have been like, which was likely not too long before the start of Mr. Sheprick’s founding of Sheprick Consolidated.

  “Thank you, sir,” Walter replied.

  “Not at all. I’ll keep the engine churning.”

  Mr. Sheprick also leaned quite heavily on the metaphor of business as a machine in his communications, which Walter had always found a bit odd inasmuch as they sold physical amenities to hotels and motels across the country—bar soaps, hangers, shampoo bottles, irons, the like—and there was little to nothing mechanical about any of this.

  Mr. Sheprick, per usual, hung up the phone without an official salutation.

  Walter hung up the phone as well.

  He thought perhaps making this call would motivate him to get up off the living room floor, which was the only place he had felt like being ever since getting back from the coffee shop the previous afternoon. Unfortunately, it did not.

  “What does that mean? ‘Medical circumstance?’” asked Beau Chalmers, Walter’s coworker and work-friend, so classified because outside of the unique dynamic that is a professional environment Walter would most certainly not be this man’s friend irrespective of what Beau believed deep down in his soul. In truth, Walter more or less hated Beau, but nine daily hours of persisting animosity aimed at the adjacent desk was more tension than Walter could bear. So he had made the strategic decision to semi-befriend the man. A decision that came with consequences of its own, including the need to guard the more personal aspects of his life from being known.

  “It’s personal,” deflected Walter, still on his living room floor an hour after speaking with Mr. Sheprick, with whom he was now annoyed with for sharing this private information with the office at large, a practice probably commonplace back in the 1940s but most certainly no longer acceptable. Walter wasn’t even sure how Beau had gotten his home phone number. Perhaps this was yet another nuance of the etiquette surrounding modern privacy that was lost on Mr. Sheprick.

  “Then it has to do with your penis or your butt,” continued Beau, delving directly into the type of speculation that Walter so desperately hoped to avoid.

  “It really doesn’t, though,” Walter insisted.

  “Why are you being so secretive with me?”

  “I’m not sharing my medical history with a colleague.”

  “We’re not talking as colleagues. We’re talking as friends.”

  “We’ve been over this, Beau. We’re not friends. We’re work-friends.”

  “Why are you so afraid of opening up to me, Walter?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “It’s your penis. Or it’s cancer. Or it’s cosmetic. A nose job?”

  “You think I could keep a nose job concealed from you?”

  “So you admit you’re concealing this from me? You can trust me,” Beau practically pleaded.

  “To be clear, Beau,” Walter stated frankly, “I do not want to open up to you.”

  “I’ll just call Veronica, then.”

  “Go for it,” Walter dismissed.

  “I can? Really?”

  “Veronica doesn’t know who you are!”

  Beau gasped and fell into a silence that somehow, even though silence is a lack of perceptible information, conveyed the man as absolutely crestfallen and deeply wounded.

  “You know what? It’s not me you’re afraid of opening up to, it’s life,” he eventually proclaimed through the most vulnerable of near-whispers.

  “I’ve got to go, Beau. It was inappropriate for you to call me.”

  “I,” Beau exclaimed and then fell aggressively silent a moment more before mustering enough indignant courage to add, “am not your punching bag.”

  Walter could not help but hang up the phone.

  “I’m not your punching bag!” he heard Beau declare again right before the receiver touched down. In the pristine silence that settled back in throughout the living room, he thought long and hard about once again getting up off the floor. But he never came to a decisio
n to do so, which in and of itself was effectively a decision to stay on the floor.

  When Walter finally did get up from the living room floor, late, late, late that night, he found Veronica still up and cleaning out the second bedroom, which had initially been conceived of as an office before somehow semi-blamelessly becoming a generic storage receptacle.

  It took Walter a moment of standing and staring before it dawned on him…

  “It wouldn’t live with us,” he barked insultingly, since this truth was just that obvious to him.

  “Where did you think he was going to live?” Veronica barked back, essentially rhetorically, since the answer to this question was just that obvious a truth to her. She did not even bother to stop cleaning out the room.

  “First of all,” he explained, “it might not even survive.”

  “In which case, we’ll finally set up the office,” she countered.

  “And even if it does survive,” Walter went on, “it’s going to be thirty-five years old, maybe.”

  “Thirty-five-year-olds don’t need homes and families?”

  “We’re not its family!”

  “Of course and absolutely and completely we are,” Veronica declared.

  Walter could not help but concede that, technically (and in most every other way imaginable as well) she was right.

  “It might be self-sufficient,” Walter redirected.

  “Or he might need a lot of attention, care, and assistance,” Veronica persisted.

  “We aren’t equipped to do this.”

  “Yes, we absolutely are.”

  Against every impulse in his body, Walter decided to take a step into the room.

  He realized, only after taking the step, that he had intended this gesture to impress upon Veronica the weight and severity of his position on this topic. But inasmuch as Veronica barely even looked up at him as she carried right on with her box sorting, he felt fairly confident that it failed to convey anything at all.