by Tom Stern
Wallace let his sentence trail off so that Walter could finish it on his own.
And Walter did just that, as he tore a corner from his danish and put it in his mouth. Instead of focusing on what Wallace hadn’t said, however, Walter puzzled over what he had said. Not so much the words, even, as the way in which the words had been spoken. As Walter chewed on the danish and the words, he honed in on something unusual about Wallace’s tone. Something unfamiliar about it. Something a bit defensive. A touch juvenile, even. And this was not at all Wallace’s way.
“Wait… You?” Walter said before he had even fully processed the thought he was thinking.
Wallace immediately feigned a lack of comprehension…
“Me what?”
Walter did not reply, though, as the thought he was about to think had reached a tipping point and was currently dawning on him. It was a horrifically unthinkable thought, indeed. From not only a purely physical standpoint but also from a biological one. There weren’t actual genetic deterrents per se, but it seemed there might as well be. Not to mention the cultural mores being hatefully ignored by such a taboo act. But beyond all of this, it was the violation of trust that he was most focused upon right now, how irrelevant a non-consideration his very existence and feelings must be to them.
Then it dawned on Walter that the only thing keeping this just-barely-thought thought from taking root and thoroughly poisoning the entire landscape of his being was the fact that he did not yet have absolute confirmation of what was becoming to him an increasingly apparent truth. Walter reasoned quickly, though, that maybe if he could avoid confirmation, then maybe he could just go on with his life, for now anyway, as though nothing was really any different. It was perhaps the only victory possible anymore, small and temporary though it may be, in this horribly evolving sequence of suspected events.
So Walter did what any man in his situation might do…
“I’m late for work,” he stated, getting up from the small table in the corner of the modest room and expediting his morning preparations.
Wallace did not even bother to check his watch. Or to insist that Walter had plenty of time to get to work, which he would know to be true had he checked his watch. Instead, Wallace just sat there, poorly masking his complicity in Walter’s attempt at delusion and thereby further supporting what Walter all but knew at this point to be true. An innocent man in this circumstance would undoubtedly voice some lack of understanding as to the sudden change in behavior and mood.
“You should go,” Walter insisted.
Wallace, again, said nothing. Which spoke volumes.
He started gathering his sweatshirt and his leftover apple fritter. Then he started for the door.
Walter had been staring blankly at the top of his desk for nearly forty-five minutes when Beau Chalmers placed a burned CD atop the desk and within Walter’s narrowed plane of vision.
“You gotta hear these guys,” Beau exclaimed. “They’re geniuses. I think they should be big influences on our sound.”
“They’re not geniuses,” Walter replied, unable to pull his mind away from straining not to think the thought it had honestly already thought.
“You haven’t even heard it yet,” Beau deflated.
“Genius comes along maybe once in your lifetime. It’s not some loose term to liberally apply to anything and everything that you simply like.”
“Genius means brilliant.”
“No,” Walter shot back. “Genius means someone whose thought or actions transcend all that has preceded him or her and whose abilities expand or fundamentally reshape what heretofore had been known as possible.”
“No one does that.”
“No one in your lifetime. Because there will likely only be one. But people do it. Mozart did it. Einstein did it. Gandhi did it.”
“Our band is not going to be Gandhi.”
“Then why are we doing it?” Walter spat, further attempting to keep his mind distracted from the one thing it was already laser-focused on. “The world has enough derivative music.”
“How can you call us derivative?”
“Point well taken. I can’t call us anything because we don’t really exist.”
“Yes, we do! We exist! We’re emerging!”
Walter couldn’t bear this conversation any longer, so he simply stopped talking. But this just sent his brain right back to the one place he did not want it. So he started talking again.
“Maybe we should just start lessons,” Walter spat.
“Now?” Beau nearly blew a gasket. “We don’t even have a name yet! And we agreed that defining the sound was first and foremost. Without an identity we won’t know who we are.”
“Maybe we just need to start, though.”
“I haven’t even researched the best tutors.”
“Maybe we should just try to play. Or buy a book on playing.”
“Walter! This isn’t a toy we’re playing with here. This is the band!”
Walter took a breath and then offered…
“Maybe it’s not the band.”
“What’s not the band?” Beau asked, anxiety now fluttering rampantly throughout his insides.
“Nothing,” Walter said as he got up from his desk, picked up Beau’s CD, and headed across the hangar and out the door.
“Everything’s the band,” Beau called after him.
Out on Mission Street, Walter spotted Wallace making his asymmetrical way toward the hangar with his ever-thickening file tucked semi-under his arm.
As the two approached and passed one another, Wallace did not wave.
He did not even look up.
He just kept walking, in silence. But for his loud, herky-jerky breath.
This, in and of itself, said pretty much everything that Walter pretty much already knew to be true at this point and before he could stop himself, Walter turned back and caught up with Wallace, which wasn’t particularly difficult given Wallace’s erratic gait.
“How the hell could you start…” Walter began, but just as quickly came to a halt when he realized that he wasn’t really sure what, exactly, to call it. He didn’t imagine they were actually dating, per se. And who knows if it was even physical. Or if it even could be physical. Whatever the scenario specifics, there was clearly some sort of bond or connection that surpassed the threshold of appropriateness. “…an emotional affair with Veronica?” Walter clunkily finished his thought.
Wallace stopped walking.
He turned to face Walter.
He took in a deep, unsmooth breath.
“You’re my brother,” Walter refused to wait for what surely would be some useless pap of an excuse. “I carried you inside of me for thirty-five years.”
Walter honed all of his attention in on Wallace’s face, waiting to soak up every tiny twitch and nuance of whatever bullshit the little goblin decided to offer up as smokescreen.
Not surprisingly, Wallace began crying.
The tears arced their spurting semi-circles from his eyelids before reconnecting with his cheeks. This was less of a spastic cry than Walter had previously witnessed, more of a controlled one, which made Walter confident that he had adequately made his point even in lieu of a clear category for whatever was transpiring between Wallace and Veronica. These tears, however, conjured no sympathy at all from Walter, simply stirring instead what was beginning to feel like a bottomless cauldron of his resentment.
“This isn’t about you,” Walter demanded. “This is about me.”
Wallace nodded through his tears.
But not the type of nod that demonstrates agreement as much as it simply acknowledges that words have been received.
“Maybe you don’t know this,” Walter continued, “but brothers don’t take up with their brother’s ex-girlfriends.”
Wallace put up his hand, searching now fo
r words as he continued to cry.
“We,” Wallace finally mustered before pausing yet again under the erratic weight of his tears…
“We,” he tried again, able to add only one word there
after, “are…”
He took a few more breaths and stymied his tears.
Walter suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to be anywhere else in the entire universe by the time that Wallace finished his sentence.
“We…are…in…love,” Wallace sputtered before going right back to crying.
While Walter technically heard each of these words clearly and immediately, and while none of the words were any different from what he already more or less knew to be true, he still required another solid ten to fifteen seconds to really take them in.
He did not process them in that time. Instead, this now-confirmed truth just sort of hovered in reality, somehow outside and in front of Walter’s cognition. He could see it as one might see a cloud or a bird, but still he could not quite process it.
“No!” Walter eventually found himself replying pointedly. “You are not!”
He turned then and walked away from Wallace and away from Sheprick Consolidated.
Wallace turned with him and struggled through his tears to explain, “It…just…happened. No one…meant…anything…by…it.”
Walter turned right back, just as suddenly as he had left, and returned to Wallace before spouting one last thing he desperately wanted to say…
“And you had better believe I’m not paying for your fucking business school!” he shouted.
His words lifted a great and unexpected weight from his shoulders.
He then found himself walking away again, but this time back toward Sheprick Consolidated. He could see nothing but the hangar in front of him as he approached. A singular, clean tunnel. He knew exactly what he needed to do next, to keep his head from exploding and his intestines from turning themselves inside out. But also to make certain that he would no longer have the means, should his resolve later weaken, to make good on Wallace’s business school arrangement.
He walked through the door and stopped smack dab in the center of the hangar’s workspace.
He took in a deep breath and conjured the words…
“Walter, I just heard!” Mr. Sheprick exclaimed, bursting from his office.
“What?” Walter replied, suddenly panicked numb by the thought that the world at large somehow knew of his humiliating-but-not-quite incestuous situation.
“A Harvard man! I’m so excited!”
Walter looked about. All eyes were now squarely upon him.
“What?” Walter repeated, undeterred in his resolve even by what sounded like an admittedly remarkable accomplishment, assuming of course that it was indeed correct. Nevertheless, Walter took in a breath and began again to say what he had come back to say…
“A full scholarship!” Mr. Sheprick cut Walter off, again. “He got a full ride!”
Had a heart been left inside of Walter’s chest, it would have sunk and Walter would have reeled. Instead, Walter just stood there, rendered inert, incapable of feeling anything for sake of a helpless numbness that engulfed him head to toe.
They say that sometimes twins have extra-sensory connections that link and bind them. Walter did not believe that. But at this moment he knew with absolute certainty, and without even looking, that Wallace was standing in the doorway behind him. He did not know why he even bothered to look over his shoulder to verify, but he did. And there was Wallace. His eyes were red and swollen from crying. But only Walter noticed such a detail against the standard severity, atypicality, and unexpectedness of the little freak’s features.
Cueing off of Walter’s glance, everyone else in the hangar turned to find Wallace as well.
“There he is!” yelled Mr. Sheprick.
And then Mr. Sheprick did two things that Walter had never seen him do.
First, he ran across the hangar. Walter had never before seen this man move any faster than a bored drunkard might.
Second, he grabbed Wallace in his arms and hugged him as deeply as a father might hug his son in the proudest of moments.
Had Walter even a shred of a desire left to connect with even a single human being on this entire planet, he surely would have been seethingly jealous of this display of unabashed acceptance and approval from his employer and maybe kind of de facto mentor of many years.
As it was, however, still he could feel nothing, even as he watched Mr. Sheprick and Wallace’s embrace, their figures silhouetted by the bright light burning through the open hangar doors behind them.
From behind Walter, a spattering of applause began.
At first it sounded like just a person or two before swelling to include all five employees of Sheprick Consolidated, other than Walter of course.
Walter knew what he knew, but just to verify, he turned around to find everyone, even Beau Chalmers, standing and applauding with gusto.
The only thing Walter could think to do now was, yet again, precisely what he had come back into the hangar to do in the first place before being twice interrupted.
Walter took in a breath, all the more convinced now of this path of action, even if it had lost some, if not most, of its resonance.
“I quit!” he yelled out, echoing broadly throughout the hangar.
But the words and their echoes were nevertheless lost in the applause and the whistles and the exclamatory rejoices.
So Walter tried again…
“I fucking quit!” he bellowed.
But still no one heard.
So he did the only thing he could think to do, the only thing by his estimation befitting his current circumstance. He left.
And just as no one had heard his voice, no one noticed his departure.
No one except for Wallace. His sad, ruddy eyes peered just over Mr. Sheprick’s shoulder as the older man clutched Wallace’s little body tightly to his chest. Wallace’s tiny, misshapen stare followed his twin brother all the way to the hangar doors before it was finally forced away when Mr. Sheprick started to spin the uneven little mutant around in circles as though they were in the ending of a highly unusual eighties romantic comedy.
As Walter walked away from the hangar for the second time that day, cheers and whistles sounded bitterly behind him.
The streets were filled with people who could not understand Walter Braum’s incomprehensible mess of a life. Their oblivion was a caustic dagger stabbed into the empty space that had once housed his heart. The streets they travelled were filled with spite. The cars filling those streets, too.
Nothing, animate or otherwise, so much as batted a sympathetic eye at Walter’s misfortune. The buildings didn’t care. They were happy with the pure utility of their existence. And the planes overhead, they couldn’t even see Walter from way up there.
Walter found himself arriving at Eleanor’s apartment building.
He climbed the stairs to the third floor.
He walked a sharp vector down the hallway to her door.
He knocked.
There was silence.
Until the door clicked, turned, opened.
And there was Eleanor, dressed in a black, silk robe with God only knows what, if anything, on underneath.
“Hey, Wally,” she said, so glycerin and porcelain and soothing that finally he could at least begin to feel the breath in his lungs again.
Words spilled from Walter’s mouth.
He wasn’t sure what those words were, exactly.
But he watched as they turned Eleanor’s eyes wide, pushed her a step and a half back from the door, and prompted her to pull, ever so slightly, the top of her robe further closed.
She nevertheless begrudgingly let Walter in.
But she sat further down the couch than she normally did.
And her “services” were much more…procedural…than they had been before, moving immediately past foreplay right into orgasmic pursuit. And even then she stuck to only one position. He was accustomed, by now, to more like maybe five or six. But she just straddled him and grinded consistent as a freight-train.
And then it was over. She climbed off. She sat in a chair he had never even noticed before in the corner of the bedroom. She said, “I’ve got other things, Walter. You should go.”
So Walter got up.
He pulled on his pants.
He only now realized that he hadn’t even taken off his shirt. Or, more accurately, that she had never taken off his shirt.
She pulled on her same silk robe.
She walked to the door.
He followed.
She opened the door and he stepped out.
He turned back to say goodbye just as she said, “Thank you for your patronage these past months, but I think we should terminate our professional partnership.”
Then she closed the door.
It was quiet again.
Quiet enough to think.
So Walter thought.
And only now did he uncover the words.
The words that he had spoken fifteen-ish minutes ago when last he was standing right in this exact same spot in the universe.
She had said, “Hey, Wally.”
And he had said, “I love you, Eleanor. I’m in love with you.”
2.
“My Veronica’s in love with a mutant./ He is a Harvard MBA student,” Walter sang quietly to himself, struggling with the meter and its impact on possible melodies.
It was 3:47 a.m. and Walter had written these words on the back of a crumpled take-out menu that had been sitting on his hotel room floor for days. He declared that this was the start of what would become the band’s first song. He couldn’t be certain, but he thought that perhaps these lines would be the first part of the song’s chorus.
But this was as far as he could get right now.
And depending on the hour, he kept remembering the melody of the two lines entirely differently. He assumed there must be some way to write down a melody, but he didn’t know how to read or write music. So he tried to sing it in his head over and over, hoping that it would stick.