My Vanishing Twin

by Tom Stern

  “We really don’t have a choice anyway,” she added, dismissively.

  Walter, for some strange reason, decided to react by taking one more step forward, as if this added movement would magically articulate what his previous gesture had entirely failed to convey. Not surprisingly, this step also failed to communicate anything at all about Walter’s stance on this topic. In fact, upon coming even further into the room, Walter could actually feel the plaintive inevitability of Veronica’s point of view taking over their conversation.

  So Walter reconsidered his strategy, if one could even call it that, and immediately retreated from the room altogether. And he did not stop there. He continued down the hall and all the way back to the living room in an effort to outrun any further inability to deny Veronica’s side of this disagreement.

  Upon reaching the living room, he stopped and turned back only long enough to yell out…

  “How can you be so fucking reasonable about all of this shit? It’s insulting!”

  …before laying back down on the floor.

  Veronica finally stopped sorting boxes and stepped out into the hallway. But she refused to walk all the way into the living room, stopping instead three steps down the hall from the storage room and calling out…

  “Because one of us fucking has to be.”

  While Walter could concede intellectually that Veronica had a point, he nevertheless insisted that he had a point, too. A point that she was entirely missing. Namely, that sometimes being reasonable about a completely unreasonable circumstance just feels really shitty.

  Granted, he did not know how to say this. And even if he did, he probably wouldn’t have said it. Not to her. Not anymore.

  He could hear her breathing in the hallway for a good long moment. Eventually she turned and headed back into the room that they would, from this moment forward, consider the second bedroom.

  On the morning of the procedure, Walter awoke at 4:00 a.m. at the tail end of a dream he could not remember but that nevertheless instilled in him a near panic. He sat bolt upright with a pulsating and repeating anxiety surging through his veins and a whopping fear permeating his mind, sending an almost mantra-like phrase looping through his brain at maximum volume: today could be the day that I die.

  Walter found himself sneaking into the bathroom with his cell phone.

  He turned on the fan. He sat on the lid of the toilet.

  He even scrolled through his contacts list and brought his thumb to hover over Eleanor’s name. But he stopped short of calling, struck by a thought…

  If I die today, he reasoned, and a mourning Veronica, in an effort to feel connected to my last traces, were to check my phone to see the last person I called…

  So Walter pushed Eleanor from his mind. He wasn’t sure what he really wanted with speaking to her right now anyway. But nothing else seemed potent enough a topic to keep his mind on anything other than the looming surgery.

  Walter checked the clock on his phone. It was 4:08 a.m. His anxiety swooned.

  He stood up and climbed into the shower.

  He turned the knobs hot and positioned his shoulders underneath the falling water.

  His stomach ached with hunger, not having eaten for the past sixteen hours, per Dr. Grunburg’s pre-op instructions. “The procedure will take either one or eight hours,” the doctor had dispassionately explained as a nurse with cold hands had gracelessly taken measurements of Walter’s living girth.

  “Is seven hours,” Walter had scoffed, “as precise a window as possible? This is, after all, my life we’re talking about.”

  “If it goes past one hour, what does that mean?” Veronica had rephrased the question at hand.

  “It could mean a lot of things,” the doctor had replied.

  “If it takes eight hours, then what does that mean?” Veronica had tried again.

  “That, too, could mean a lot of things,” the doctor had explained in a tone that suggested the man thought he was satisfactorily answering this and all other questions.

  “When will I know if the twin is coming out?” Veronica had demanded.

  “Can we not call it that?” Walter had also demanded.

  “All surgeries come with risk,” Dr. Grunburg had demanded, too. “Depending upon how your twin is gleaning nutrition, blood, and oxygen from your body, removing him could be fatal.”

  “To him or to me?” Walter had spat.

  “All surgeries come with risk,” the doctor had repeated.

  “You’re not answering my question,” Walter had attacked. “Are you saying that I could die?”

  “Death is a possible side effect of any surgery.”

  “But is it a likely side effect of this specific surgery?” In his mind, Walter had tacked the word “asshole” on to the end of this sentence.

  “There are no alternatives, Mr. Braum. The twin will, in all likelihood, continue to grow. You cannot live with a physically maturing person inside your body indefinitely.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “Your question is not relevant.”

  “My death is not relevant?”

  “Your death is certain if you do not have the surgery. So your death is not a risk of the surgery. Your life is a risk of the surgery. Which is why you have no alternative.”

  “But if you can’t remove it safely, you’re going to leave it in?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Even though I cannot live with a person inside of me indefinitely?”

  “Not removing the twin, if the outcome of removal is either uncertain, dangerously complicated, or likely fatal, would allow you to potentially live somewhat, if not considerably, longer. There would be no reasonable alternative in such a scenario.”

  “Yes, there is! It dies and I live.”

  “I am a doctor. I value life in the deepest sense,” Dr. Grunburg had monotoned. “It mystifies me.”

  Suddenly the shower was pouring cold water onto Walter’s shoulders.

  So he got out. He had no idea how long he had been standing there.

  He checked his phone, which read 4:23 a.m.

  Veronica was awake now.

  She was a flurry of activity up and down the hall. Searching for keys, pulling on clothes, brushing teeth, searching for keys, drinking some water, sorting through mail, cleaning out the fridge, straightening the living room, searching for keys… She could barely look at Walter.

  “What time do we go?” Walter eventually asked her.

  He heard her answer, but he could not hold onto her words long enough to comprehend them.

  Eventually he found himself in the passenger seat of Veronica’s car.

  He stared out the window as she drove, but he could not decipher the imagery for the swirling thoughts occupying his fidgety mind.

  Veronica said nothing.

  She flipped through radio stations, disinterested in both news and music, it seemed, simply in pursuit of something to do.

  The car ride passed slowly. He took comfort in that. In the distance between now and the surgery. Then he found himself standing in the lobby of a hospital.

  Someone was putting some forms into his hands.

  Veronica took the forms out of his hands.

  She crossed the waiting area and found a seat that seemed to have been manufactured in the 1970s: a plastic curved something in slightly warmed earth tones. She pored every ounce of her focus into the forms, piercing through them with her stare.

  Walter did not move from the reception desk. He did not know how to. Eventually the nurse behind the desk said something. Walter could not process her words, but they nevertheless somehow motivated him to take a few steps back and away from the desk. He assumed that this was what she was after.

  These few steps put Walter smack in the middle of the lobby, though, which st
ruck him as an even less opportune location for a soon-to-be-admitted patient. But it did not seem to prompt anyone to say anything more to him, comprehensible or otherwise. So he stayed there. For what seemed like quite some time. And then even more time. His legs were growing tired. But at least he was not in surgery.

  Upon finishing the forms, Veronica walked them back up to the desk.

  As she returned to her seat she asked Walter to come sit down. But he couldn’t, even though he understood her words. Not that he said this. He couldn’t do that, either. So he just kept standing there. For an even longer while. Until eventually a woman approached with a wheelchair and said, “Mr. Braum, you can come with me.”

  So he did.

  Ceiling tiles slid slowly past into a room that smelled like nothing but the chemical part of clean. Penetrating lights burned down, flatly and unflatteringly illuminating the contents of the room. The same woman who had brought him the wheelchair in the lobby started speaking to him again, only now through a paper mask that covered the lower three-quarters of her face. A cloth cap covered all of her hair, too. She looked awkward and synecdochic now, a rogue set of eyes and the bridge of a nose assuming the whole of this woman’s character in the absence of any added context. Walter could not remember what she had looked like before, but he suspected she had been a perfectly pleasant-looking woman. Walter could not make much sense of her muffled words. Nor could he read her now-concealed expressions. A clear plastic something was placed over Walter’s mouth and nose. It was perfectly contoured to do so, a nuanced and elegant creation for a most unusual and non-geometric shape. It emitted a sharp hiss. Walter spied a wall clock out of the corner of his eye. 7:44 a.m. He noticed a glass window lined with doctors staring down onto him. Lots of them. Twenty. Twenty-five. More people knowing what Walter did not want known. They held notepads and pens. They held laptops and tablets. They wore lab coats or scrubs or lab coats and scrubs, some of them. They pored over every detail of the room. Walter feared that he might well run into one of these people out in the world some day and while he would not recognize them, they would more than likely recognize him. Except for the funny, cottony, poofy bonnet that had been put on his head. Maybe the added context of his hair in a public setting would be enough of a mask to keep them from placing him after all. He would have to be certain to never shave his head and to wear hats sparingly. A man in scrubs, face semi-concealed, stepped into the periphery of Walter’s vision with a syringe in hand. He emptied it plaintively into a tube that ran to Walter’s arm. As all sensation tapered off into nothingness, a bliss set in and lifted away, lighter than air, the tangled train of Walter’s thoughts. In that last lingering moment before all went blank, Walter felt perfect. Except for the part of him that longed for this fleeting peacefulness never to leave.

  When Walter awoke, he found himself staring blankly forward into a blurry mass that slowly clarified into what appeared to be yet another ceiling. Walter loathed his brain’s unstoppable reflex to convert phenomenon into coherent, defined perception, longing instead to just linger here in the uncertain a moment longer. But instead, his mind began articulating thoughts, the first of which was that he had, clearly, survived the surgery. Hanging high on one of the walls, just inches below the edge of the ceiling, Walter’s eyes further sharpened upon a digital clock.

  Five twelve in the evening, the clock told him.

  Nine and a half hours, his mind calculated.

  A jagged ache sprinted up Walter’s abdomen.

  “Walter?” he heard Veronica’s familiar voice ask. “Are you awake?”

  But Walter was not ready to speak. He did take a deep breath, however, and he sighed it out. Which was all Veronica needed to hear. She grabbed his hand. She squeezed it. A high-pitched moan gave way to sobbing. “Doctor Grunburg says you made it through,” her words mooshed together by her sobs.

  Walter did not react, holding instead to the last vestiges of peace and calm quickly eroding from his consciousness.

  “Did you hear me, Walter?” she reiterated, semi-intelligibly through her tears. “I’m telling you that your twin is alive, Walter.”

  While one might expect to feel relief or even confusion in a monumental moment in life such as this, Walter actually found himself feeling nearly nothing at all right now.

  He recounted to himself his current circumstances, calling to mind the absurdity of it all and figuring that this would trigger the missing emotions. But it did not. It merely caused him to question the existence of his very ability to feel, wondering if maybe this strange loss had been an unanticipated consequence of his surgery. The only feeling Walter could find anywhere inside of him amounted to nothing more than a sense of annoyance with the fact that Veronica persisted in referring to the bearded thing as “your twin.”

  This annoyance quickly swelled, though. And it shifted into a bit of a panic over the sudden and practical realization that Walter would soon need a reasonable explanation to give others regarding his sudden weight loss. This simple detail had not occurred to him until now. And in so dawning, it brought with it a relentless torrent of further interconnected and ancillary practical complications and details…

  Walter now had a sibling.

  This sibling could very likely be some mutant form of life.

  This sibling might very well, as Veronica had predicted, need to be cared for.

  The nature of this care could very likely be taxing and complicated. It might include diaper changes, bathing, potty-training, education of both mind and character, basic manners, etc…

  The sibling would presumably have no one other than Walter and Veronica to care for it.

  “Have you seen it?” Walter found himself asking with his first post-surgery words. They were admittedly inelegant in comparison to what he figured one might say in the ecstatic wonder that probably should follow such a crucial, massive, cathartic, and landmark chapter in one’s life.

  “Him,” Veronica corrected. “And no. Not yet.”

  Walter exhaled, relieved for some reason.

  “It’s definitely a boy?” Walter asked, questioning whether she was using the masculine pronoun out of knowledge or as a mere extension of her already persistent urge to humanize whatever had been living inside of Walter.

  “A man,” Veronica corrected again. “They’re calling him a man.”

  Walter took a long, slow breath in.

  “What the hell do we do now?” he could not keep himself from asking.

  He expected Veronica to snap at him for asking this. But surprisingly, she did not. In fact, she did not say anything at all at first. She just sort of waited. She considered her words. And then she said, “I don’t know.” And then she added, “I guess we wait.”

  Even though Veronica was mistaking Walter’s big-picture question for one that applied to only this moment in this room right now, her words were nevertheless the first words he had heard since his diagnosis, and perhaps even well before then, too, that seemed completely and entirely honest and sensible. Walter closed his eyes and searched for any lingering trace of that perfect calm he had awakened into not too long ago. He found none of it.

  Walter heard the sound of the wheelchair first. The gentle, daresay harmless, sound of rubber wheels on the painfully germless tile floor.

  Veronica stood up.

  Walter very much wanted her to sit down, to act normally, to let him see his twin first just as any decent, considerate person might. But he said nothing. He didn’t even turn his head to the door in an effort to spy the twin before she could. Instead, he just held on to the last, sparse, dwindling shreds of what he had heretofore known to be his normal.

  Then came the swoosh-swipe of the privacy screen pulled back.

  Veronica’s affectionate gasp.

  More wheelchair rubber. And another swoosh-swipe.

  And now, everything was private except for the sounds that f
looded effortlessly under, through, and above the thin curtain that reached neither floor nor ceiling.

  Walter said nothing at first. He did not turn his head.

  He steeped in that last modicum of remaining quiet.

  Until the sound of a breath separated itself from the silence. The breath was off-key and erratic, uneven. It patternlessly vacillated between smooth and jagged exhalations and inhalations.

  Walter considered the possibility that perhaps this sound alone was all he would ever need to know about who his twin was, thereby alleviating the need to actually see and engage with the living thing. But before too long the sound was sullied with a cracked, gravelly, high-pitched voice emerging out of the same jagged wind propelled from the exhalation. The voice possessed a sharp, wet, unevenness that smacked of innocence and newness. Its tone seemed to suggest both a declaration and a question…

  “Walter?”

  Veronica was crying now. The sound of her sniffling and faintly squeaking seceded from the ocean of quiet now overtaking the room.

  This is it, thought Walter.

  He wasn’t quite sure what he meant by this, but he was confident that he meant something significant and profound and meaningful. But before he could explore this thought further, he found his neck in motion, forcing his head, and in turn his eyes to the source of the jagged breathing. Something strange came into Walter’s sight. Its skin was more pink than skin could possibly be, more coarse than skin as well. But it simultaneously maintained a somewhat shiny, reflective property that suggested dampness. Its ears were not quite right, both disparate in size and asymmetrical in their location on its skull. Its eyes each maintained different degrees of resting openness. And their whites were closer to beiges. Its lips were so thin they were more like lines drawn in a dark, knotted blue color. And its posture slouched, or more curved really, and leaned out into atrophied, un-straight limbs each of their own unique length and hang. His limbs seemed to have a spontaneous number of angles in them, too, exceeding the customary singular knee or elbow joint. These non-traditional angles appeared cosmetic more so than functional, likely not acting as a true joint. Its hair was severe in thickness and texture, but blonde if not outright yellow and collected into clusters placed on its head and face as if by an abstract sculptor intentionally eschewing reason. Its beard, specifically, was not at all what Walter had envisioned—even if he only now realized that he had been envisioning anything at all. It wasn’t even a beard, really, as much as a handful of randomly assembled rogue follicle communities. Its neck wouldn’t straighten quite enough such that it could look at Walter without peering out of the top corners of its eyes. Each breath the odd being took registered like a small shock to its feeble system, injecting it with a jolt, a surge, a violent intake of air before evacuating in three to four short waves that jostled one into the next in decreasingly severe measure before settling into a fleetingly brief moment of stillness and relaxation before the next inhale sparked into motion. It was clearly more masculine than feminine. And more masculine than androgynous. But Walter could not quite put his finger on what, exactly, suggested this gender. Nor could he pinpoint how, exactly, all of this hung together in a form that managed to be recognizable as a human person. But it did. Even if it was an unsettlingly odd one. “Walter?” it said again, as if perhaps its feeble voice had not been adequately projected the first time.