The Experiment

by John Darnton

  Jude registered this somewhere in the periphery of his consciousness, but paid it little attention. He was still absorbed in thinking about that afternoon.

  From the lobby of the library, Jude had called Richie Osner, the computer whiz at the paper who could hack his way into any system if he was sufficiently motivated. Jude had given him the judge's name, gone out for a cup of coffee and a stroll, and come back to check his e-mail. Osner had been motivated, all right.

  Jude had scrolled through the records he'd dug up. There were three months of the judge's credit card bills, which showed him to be a high spender with a penchant for hang-gliding and racecar driving; his selections in books and CDs, which revealed a taste for trashy novels and cabaret songs; and his driving record—no violations whatsoever, which was not surprising, considering that cops are occupationally reluctant to ticket a car with a judge's license plate. There was even a listing of the judge's prescriptions: various antibiotics, a monthly supply of Pravachol, for high cholesterol, and something called Depakote. Jude made a note to check that one out.

  Frightening, he thought, how much you can find out about a person these days by just sitting down at a keyboard.

  And, of course, most important of all, Osner had provided the judge's home address.

  Jude drove out and found it on a dead-end street in the suburbs of Tylerville. The judge's house was the last one on the street, following a parade of ostentatious mansions that used a variety of stone walls and hedgerows to block the view of passing commoners. Exactly how ostentatious the judge's mansion was, Jude couldn't see, because it was hidden by a ten-foot-high Spanish-style wall of whitewashed rocks topped off by red tiles. How the guy had managed to buy such an estate on a judge's salary was beyond him. He had to be privately wealthy.

  Securi-Corps signs were posted at strategic intervals on the strip of bright green grass in front of the wall; they featured a German shepherd guard dog, snarling and preparing to pounce. There was a large metal gate, and next to it a doorbell in its own foot-tall casita sunk into the wall.

  For a moment, he contemplated ringing it. What the hell—he could pretend to be looking for someone or to be lost. Or he could just throw caution to the winds and ask for the judge and demand to know why his presence had discombobulated him so. Somehow, looking over at the decals of the guard dogs, these did not seem to be viable options.

  Down the street, in the direction from which he had come, was a crew of three men standing beside a pile of dirt and rocks and looking down into a hole that was apparently of their own making. The markings on a truck nearby suggested they were workers for the town water-supply company. They were on a break, smoking, and from time to time they looked up at Jude—not in an unfriendly way, he thought, just curious.

  He walked over to them and engaged them in conversation with his practiced reporter's banter, until one of them who had been staring most trenchantly asked him if he was a detective. Interesting question, that. Why would anyone possibly suppose that?

  "No, not at all. I'm a reporter for the Mirror. Why did you think I was a detective?"

  The answer threw Jude for a loop, and it also constituted the only genuine break that he had had all day. When the worker delivered the information, his face assumed that self-satisfied, anticipatory look people get when they are about to impart shocking news.

  "Well, this place had been crawling with cops for days. Ever since that body was found, you know, the one that turned up in the landfill. They said he was wearing a red shirt. We seen a guy wearing a red shirt hanging around here days before. He looked like he was trying to get into the judge's house, just like you were."

  Crossing the Willis Avenue Bridge, Jude moved over to the right lane to reach the approach to the FDR, and the car behind with the glaring light did the same. Other cars were converging in the lanes to either side, but the company did not make Jude feel less nervous. The car followed him down the FDR.

  Get a grip on yourself. What makes you so sure he's following you?

  Jude calmed himself with the thought that he was, after all, on a major approach to the city. The shortcut he had taken was hardly a secret. You think you've got a monopoly on it?

  Earlier, he had stopped at a rest area on the Thruway and called his own number to check on Skyler. He had been about to hang up after the third ring when Tizzie had answered. He hadn't foreseen that—what the hell was she doing there?

  She'd sounded upset, confused, unable to take it all in. But what did he expect? How would he feel if he suddenly dropped by her apartment one day and found another woman there who was her exact double? It sounded like a scenario from The Twilight Zone. He hadn't been able to be much of a comfort to Tizzie—his mind had been all over the lot, on the day he had spent and the judge's reaction to him and the worker's bombshell. He'd tried to explain as best he could that Skyler had turned up out of the blue, that he needed help, that they were going to try to "get to the bottom of this." He'd mumbled something about trying to clarify everything, insofar as he could clarify anything, when he got home in a few minutes. He had hung up feeling he had botched it.

  He came to the sign for the Seventy-first Street exit with the car still on his rear end and flicked on his turn signal and looked reflexively into the rearview mirror. His heart skipped a beat—the car was signaling, too. He slowed down. His palm on the steering wheel suddenly felt sweaty, and he checked the mirror again. The car was hanging back about twenty feet, and its front turn signal was flashing yellow in the darkness. The exit was approaching—Jude had only a few seconds to make his decision. Abruptly, at the last moment, he swerved the wheel to the left, and the right front tire rode over the exit lane divider, so that his car shuddered back onto the highway. In the mirror, the car behind swerved gracefully back on track, directly behind. Its turn signal went out. Still on my tail.

  Now Jude was truly spooked. There was no question that he was being followed. He floored the accelerator, felt the sudden speed thrust him back against the seat and drove so fast that he didn't dare take his eyes off the road to check his pursuer. Ahead were two cars, one in each lane; he passed one, slipped in next to the other and gunned it, leaving them both in the dust. He checked the mirror briefly, but couldn't make out the cockeyed headlight in the blur of lights and movement behind.

  In no time, he came to the next exit, Sixty-third Street, and he swung the car violently to the right, fishtailing around the turn, and hit the gas again. At the end of the block, he turned on a red light to go up First. The lights were running with him, so he kept his speed at forty-five until he came to Seventy-fifth Street, where he hung a left and went two blocks until he found a space across the street from his building. He pulled in and doused the lights and waited. Nothing. He waited some more. There were no cars moving on the side street, only the lights of vehicles moving at right angles, up Third and down Second. On the sidewalk a man and a young boy passed, talking earnestly.

  Jude locked the car and crossed the street with one hand in his pocket, holding ready the key to the front door. When he reached it, he opened it quickly, looked up and down the street, and darted inside. With the door behind him, he felt a wave of relief, the illusion that home provided sanctuary.

  Standing in the entryway, he took stock. Again, he had precious few hard facts at his disposal. He didn't know who was following him or even how many people were following him, not to mention why. And he didn't know if he had really shaken them off or if they had merely dropped away, already knowing where he lived. His name was still in the book—regrettably. If they knew his name, they knew where he was. Even Skyler, for Christ's sake, had been able to track him down. Funny how he was beginning to date the start of his misfortunes to Skyler's appearance on the scene.

  He opened his mailbox and pulled out a small penknife, extracting the blade and using it to pry out a thin piece of plastic with his name embossed upon it. He closed the mailbox.

  It's not paranoia, he thought as he began the long clim
b up the stairs. It's not paranoia to think someone's after you if you're actually being followed. Under the circumstances, removing his name from the mailbox was a sensible precaution—but not, he realized, a very effective one.

  Jude found Tizzie and Skyler sitting far apart in the living room. Tizzie was a mess. Her hair was uncombed, her dress looked as if it had just been tossed on, and she leaned upon a table, cradling her chin in both hands. Skyler was dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a black T-shirt—both belonging to Jude, naturally—and he sat grimly on the couch. The atmosphere seemed charged with emotional tension, as if a storm had passed through Jude's tiny apartment. The two looked up at Jude as if he could rescue them.

  Jude tried to start off on a positive note.

  "I'm glad at least to see you two are all right."

  Tizzie stared at him. "What do you mean?" she asked. "Why shouldn't we be?"

  "I don't know, exactly. But a lot of crazy stuff has been going on."

  Jude looked at Skyler, who sat motionless in some sort of shock, and then walked over to sit down next to Tizzie. He took her hand, but she seemed barely to notice that he was holding it.

  "Look," he said. "I wanted to reach you to tell you about all this, but I didn't know where you were. I know it seems crazy—and maybe it is. I can't make any sense of it myself. I've been trying to figure it out all day, and all I come up with is dead ends."

  She looked at him quizzically, and he continued.

  "All I know is that this guy"—he made a vague motion toward Skyler with his free hand—"turned up on my doorstep. Literally on my doorstep. I couldn't get much out of him at first. His name's Skyler, and he says he was raised on some kind of weird place that sounds like something from The Island of Dr. Moreau."

  "What's that?" asked Skyler.

  "Nothing. It's a book. It doesn't matter," Jude replied irritably.

  At the sound of Skyler's voice, Tizzie stirred. She turned and looked at him, and he looked back, his eyes blazing.

  "You know, he sounds exactly like you," she said to Jude. "This is really amazing. There are two of you."

  "You don't know the half of it. Anyway, on this island—and he doesn't know where it is, by the way—there's a group of people like himself—"

  "The Age Group," put in Skyler.

  "Whatever, the age group. And they're raised to uphold science instead of religion, and they undergo strict physical regimens to make them strong and healthy, but basically, they're prisoners. They're not allowed to leave. If they do, they're tracked down by guys who are called Orderlies, who use bloodhounds. And every so often people on the island die."

  At this, Tizzie looked again at Skyler, her eyes wide in disbelief.

  "But Skyler did manage to escape. And after a couple of weeks in Georgia, he made his way up here, and he tracked me down through a picture in the newspaper, because—as you can see only too well—he looks just like me. And we can't figure out the explanation for that."

  Now Tizzie looked at Jude.

  "There's one possibility—that he's a relative, or maybe..." Jude hesitated for a second. "Maybe he's even my twin brother."

  "But... but," Tizzie was so confused she was stammering. "You didn't have a twin brother when you were young."

  "How do you know?"

  "You never... talked about it."

  "Maybe I had one and just didn't know it. You know—separated at birth."

  "Of course, I know. That's my whole field. But it's just too remarkable, too much of a coincidence."

  Now, marshaling his argument, Jude talked faster. "Think about it. What do I know about my parents? Practically nothing—except that they were die-hard scientists who belonged to some kind of scientific cult. Maybe they were engaged in some kind of elaborate experiments. When twins were born into the group, they would separate them—ship one out and raise him under totally different conditions, a controlled environment."

  "To what end?" asked Tizzie.

  "To tease out all the variables—you know, nature versus nurture. All the things we were talking about before."

  "But where's the comparison?" She was looking from one to the other. "Where's the test?"

  "It hasn't happened yet."

  "That's a lot of trouble to go to for one experiment," she said. "Not to mention the immorality of it. Separating brothers, not telling them about each other. Raising one of them with all the advantages—at least I assume you would have had the advantages, if your parents had lived—and raising the other..." She looked over at Skyler with a hint of sympathy. "... in a so-called controlled environment."

  Jude noticed that Skyler was stealing stares at Tizzie every so often. Yet when she looked directly at him, he glanced away as if it was hard to bear.

  She continued: "People do separate twins, of course—I know that more than anyone. Usually it's an unwed mother who has to give them up for adoption and some stupid, unthinking agency that doesn't realize it's healthier for them to be raised together."

  Now she was sizing up Skyler. She spoke about him in the third person, as if he wasn't there. "He looks younger than you," she said.

  "Maybe not younger, just thinner," replied Jude. "He's been through a lot."

  Suddenly, Skyler talked. "Let me ask..." he began hesitatingly. "How often does this happen?"

  "What?"

  "That identical twins are born."

  "Not very often," said Jude.

  "About four births out of every thousand," said Tizzie.

  "So any group of scientists could not have a reasonable expectation that its members would produce twins."

  "That's a point," Jude conceded.

  "And if it happened twice in a small group, that would really defy the odds," Skyler continued.

  "So what are you saying?" Jude asked.

  Skyler shrugged. "Maybe they found a way to create twins," he said.

  Skyler had not expected his remark to carry such weight, but it did. Jude sat there, at first a bit stunned, and then shot him an appraising look, as if to say: I might have overlooked something here. Tizzie appeared to be a little upset, as she had been throughout the discussion—in fact, as she had been since Jude's phone call, which had caused her to leap out of the bed, grab her dress, and regard Skyler as if he was some kind of freak.

  Jude told Tizzie about the man who had been following him on the subway, and he filled them in on the murder in New Paltz and the mystery of the DNA match. But he did not tell them that the victim had a hole gouged in his thigh or that he himself had been followed—at least thought he had been followed—on the trip back. They were already nervous enough, he figured, and both of them looked as if they still had some recovering to do from the shocks they'd already received.

  "It's just too... strange, too unbelievably strange. It's unthinkable," she said.

  "What? Which part?" asked Jude.

  "All of it. But to think that people might set up some vast scientific experiment... playing with human lives, I just can't believe it. And yet, damn it, you two do look alike.

  "And, look," she said, "you're both frowning in exactly the same way, one hand to the head. Do you notice how you're positioning yourselves unconsciously? Sitting across from each other, almost like you're mirror images. This is amazing—if you guys really are twins. I've sat in on a lot of interviews with separated twins, but never at the moment when they were reunited."

  "We don't know that that's what happened," said Jude. He noticed the split in her: the scientist in her was excited by the possibility of identical twins, but the woman who cared for him appeared distraught. He would say anything to console her.

  Skyler seemed upset that Tizzie was upset.

  The time had come, Jude thought, to take the situation in hand.

  "Listen," he said, looking at Skyler. "The first thing we've got to do is make sure you're safe. You're not safe here, because chances are, they know you're here—whoever they are. Tomorrow we've got to find you a place of your own. I think we should disg
uise you, too. I don't know if it's better for you to look like me, for people to think you're me, or if it's worse. Given all that's happened lately, I suspect it's not a good idea.

  "Tizzie, I think you should stay here tonight and not go out. That way we can all get started together tomorrow."

  He wanted her to stay for her own safety, and he was also feeling moved that she was so upset by the fact that he had a twin. It could only mean that she felt deeply for him. Maybe he had been wrong about her drawing away.

  But she insisted on leaving. She was anxious to spend the night at home, she said, since she had not been there for days.

  "Where were you, anyway?" he asked as he walked with her down the stairs.

  "Milwaukee," she said. "At my parents'."

  "How are they?"

  "Not at all well. Just old age, but it's happening so fast. It's like night falling."

  He hailed a cab for her, and when she got in, he leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. She smiled at him, but it was a brave, false smile.

  A few moments later, as he was undressing for bed—this time with Skyler on the living room couch—Jude was again struck by the sheer implausibility of the events of the past two days. More and more he was coming to the belief that Skyler was his brother and perhaps his twin. No one would have believed that this was happening, and yet it had happened—and on top of that, everything was turning out to be such a remarkable coincidence. Here he had met Tizzie while researching an article on identical twins, and he turned out to have one of his own. He went out on a murder story, and the victim had something to do with Skyler. What were the odds of things like that happening?

  He had had the strangest sensation some minutes back, when the three of them were in the living room together. So much was going on around them that was unfathomable, and so much was going on among them that was unspoken. He felt that the three of them were locked inside some phantasmal shifting labryinth, that they were a trio picked out by fate.