by Tina Amiri
The land sloped softly toward the bay and Night found a boulder, close to the top, that eclipsed him while providing the perfect vantage point. The moonlit water illuminated the entire show: Doris giggling as Morgen chased after her and then whirled her into a mutual embrace. Their mouths came together and they remained this way for so long that Night found himself holding his breath to the memory of an identical scene with him and Daphne.
Soft rock music from her car radio swelled over the tiny cove while they settled down on a quilt with two plastic glasses and a bottle of wine. The moonlight cast both human figures a ghostly gray, especially pale Morgen with his platinum hair that gave him a monochromatic look in any light.
It had been a warm day, but the hour brought in a cool breeze that made Night shudder. The two bodies on the beach didn’t seem affected by the temperature. Morgen accepted Doris’s hand as she stood up to dance to the music and they cuddled like they both knew it would be their last time. It astounded Night that this was the same Morgen…and it angered him.
Morgen didn’t appear sick as he swayed elegantly, showing Doris charming smiles and, of course, a chipped tooth that only made him look more sympathetic. His stylish clothes filled him out as he moved unhampered by his usual pain.
With parted lips Night watched how Doris began to help his brother out of these clothes. Morgen’s fingers found each of the tiny gold buttons on the front of Doris’s dress, gradually parting the silky fabric that billowed in the breeze and tumbled off her shoulders unassisted.
The dress pooled around her feet and she kicked it to the side, along with her shoes. Her black bikini briefs came in a satiny, lacy version of Morgen’s, but her matching bra stole the show, charming even distant eyes with its gold embellishments and enchanting gleam.
Night had to switch his focus when she molded over her partner, coating him with honey hair. She seemed in love with his face, kissing his mouth, nose, eyelids, and brow. Night recalled how Daphne had loved his face too. Hauled back in time, he could feel her hot breath on his skin now.
By the time Night focused again, Doris had left Morgen’s neck to travel further down his body, using her mouth as well as her fingertips. When she reached his waist, her face lifted and Morgen helped her to pull off his underpants. He unclasped her bra, and she tossed it behind him before her mouth returned to his primed parts.
Beneath his dark clothes, Night’s skin became sultry. He pressed his elbows into his groin as the sensation of Beth and the image of Daphne collided. Now hard and ready himself, he sent his hand below, only to end up mindlessly crushing his fingers between his thighs as he watched Doris go down on his brother. He couldn’t see beyond her strawberry mane, but he remembered every measure of time from when the action veiled by a girl’s long hair had been his pleasure.
But here was something new… Morgen swapped positions with her and threw away her last stitch of clothing. Though she didn’t have the parts that he and his twin had, it didn’t seem to limit her share of ecstasy. Morgen climbed up between her knees while the moonlight reflected off every curve it could reach. With one hand beneath her to prop her up, Morgen traveled her mysterious caverns with his tongue and even enlisted his free hand until she began to produce cries like Night’s mind had already started to conjure. Over the music, and over the whoosh of the sea, the girl’s rich breaths and envied whimpers became more pronounced and frequent. Morgen crawled forward and pressed his narrow pelvis between her legs. She guided him, and even without a book, Night understood what she’d just helped him do.
Their breaths stayed out of sync, as though they wanted to pass the moment back and forth to one another. It completely surprised Night when Doris flipped her body around, still beneath Morgen, and they continued in much the same way. Their movement became more aggressive until he heard their successive cries.
The familiar emotions of emptiness, anger and greed converged inside Night’s pounding chest as he watched them run into the waves, making it a game to freshen up. Morgen finally looked spent when he returned to the blanket, hardly drying off before flopping on his back. He revived when Doris kneeled next to him. Then, dressed in their beach towels, they picked up their wine glasses, intertwined their arms, and took a sip—toasted, Night assumed, the band’s big break that they owed completely to him.
****
Using his skeleton key, Sandy entered Morgen’s empty suite through the guestroom to retrieve his long-play, voice-activated tape recorder from where he’d velcroed it, behind the toilet tank.
In his own suite, he rewound all eight hours of it and listened to the exchanges between Morgen and his twin. He shook his head at Morgen’s limitless cussing capacity and at the defenseless replies of the brother who Sandy had been ready to indict as an asshole simply for having Morgen’s face.
Morgen’s chiding voice came first. “Christ, you’re not still going out like that, are you? I wish you’d do something with your hair. You look like you’re still in the seventies—like Sandy—when you leave it like that.”
Sandy adjusted the position of his legs beneath his desk and glared at the speaker. “Then are you ever gonna hate your new seventies look on the front page of Storm, when you see it, prick.” He’d missed a few words beneath his muttering, but after a series of false starts, where the recorder had waffled between whether or not it detected enough noise, Morgen’s voice continued. It sounded clearer now, as though he’d made the commitment to fully enter the bathroom.
“Turn your head upside-down, like this. Now stick your hand in the gel and run it through your hair with your fingers… Now scrunch it like this and pull. …No! Yeah. Like that.”
“Uh… Are you sure?” came a cautious reply, obviously from Night when he saw the results in the mirror.
“Do whatever you want. I’m getting’ a fucking head-rush.” A harsh sigh faded from the bathroom.
Sandy snickered in his palm. This was too easy, and so unbelievably perfect. His recent stab at doing business had turned out to be lucrative and his future projections already blew his mind.
Silence followed and then: “You gotta go, Night. Remember everything I told you…”
“Night…?” Sandy repeated. “Morgen and Night?” He slapped his knees and laughed out loud. He’d long ago learned from Brigitte the many connotations of Morgen’s name.
Following some indecipherable rustling, some drawers banging and the toilet flushing, many times, the dialogue from a later episode came through perfectly clear.
But he hadn’t counted on their conversations taking such a morbid turn. He considered the potential in finding out more about the mysterious Andrew and the twin from Oregon—and certainly about Morgen’s secret illness—but it wasn’t crucial to his current scheme. For his efforts to deliver large amounts of cash, he needed pictures of the twins, some jaw-dropping proof that could be captured succinctly on the cover of Storm. He would have to put his own curiosity aside and focus on what the public would find even more shocking than today’s headline about their enigmatic young idol.
****
“You told me you had a gun, right?” Morgen asked Steve on the telephone, after outlining their mission.
“Yeah. No. I mean it belongs to my brother.”
“Bring it. I’ll meet you at the park.”
Morgen rummaged through his guestroom closet until he found the prize he was after; the duffel bag his brother had brought with him from Oregon. It still contained the dark slacks with pale pinstripes and the mock-turtleneck sweater Night wore the day he burned down the Emerald Shore. Morgen threw his personal medications in with the clothes, then discreetly left the house, on foot, through his garage.
Where the grand properties ended and the park began, Morgen collapsed on a bench beneath a towering valley oak tree. The sweet, innocent scent of wild roses still couldn’t persuade him to rethink his scheme. He stood up when Steve’s old Datsun ripped around the corner.
“Morgen…you not really gonna kill no one, righ
t?”
Morgen sighed as he plunked himself down in the faded passenger seat. “Steve, you were worried that I didn’t care about my brother. Well, now you get to help me dish out some justice to the asshole who ruined his life. You should be with me on this—one-hundred percent.”
“I don’ know. It’s a long trip and my car is old. And why you wanna take me to do this? You even know where we gonna go?”
“Don’t worry about it, Steve. We’re going to have a blast, and all expenses are on me.”
Eight hours into the trip, Morgen already writhed in his seat, and an hour after that, he begged Steve to pull over at a motel, hoping he would feel better by morning.
While Steve grabbed a meal in the diner, next door, Morgen curled up on a bed, coughing and shivering, in the seclusion of his own musty room. A fever had moved in, along with his usual aches and nausea.
He ignored the knock on his bolted door, not even an hour later, as he sat injecting himself with morphine he’d recently acquired from a brand new source. Then, he opened his pill bottle and cursed. He needed to have his prescription refilled—and soon—but then he questioned if this medication even made a difference anymore.
****
Night steamed when he realized that Morgen had, once again, furtively slipped from the property. His brother had mentioned he might visit someone for a couple of days, sometime, but Night didn’t expect him to really vanish without any warning.
Also, Morgen’s selfish exploit with Doris, two evenings ago, had left her ever more devoted to him—only it wasn’t Morgen who had to receive her when Sandy announced she was on her way up the stairs.
He thought he performed well in kissing her at the door, and she seemed game when he proposed lunch on the boardwalk, but their conversation grew more awkward with every nacho they consumed. He couldn’t contribute much, every time she talked about something he hadn’t experienced, either with her or otherwise. Luckily for him, Doris knew he had to get to the studio by three o’clock, so she simply tried to make the most of their waterfront stroll on their way back to the car.
“If it wasn’t for the other night, Morgen Dahlsi, I’d be sure that you didn’t care for me anymore.” Her fingers tightened on his well-earned calloused fingertips as her eyes pulled the other way. “Oh my God,” she pronounced hoarsely, separating from his hand so she could reach the newsstand. She dug into her purse and hastily fed some coins into the metal slot. When she had the tabloid newspaper in hand, she spun the front page into Night’s face. “Look!”
Night reeled back as the bold letters of Morgen’s family name, and a recognizable image, snagged his eyes and nearly yanked them out of his head.
“It looks so real,” Doris chortled, squeezing in beside Night to share his view of the paper. “No wonder you’re losing interest in me when you’ve got a hot sister who’ll do that for you!”
He gaped at the murky shot of Beth arched over him during their most intimate encounter. Details were unclear, as no flash had been used to take the picture, but forms and colors were all intact, including some details of the Dahlsi’s living room. The only other warm bodies that had stayed home that evening were Morgen and Sandy. Sandy!
“I…I don’t know where this came from,” Night stammered, his voice thin, but Doris only laughed and slammed his hip with the newspaper.
“It’s just a stupid tabloid, Morgen. Who knows where they get this shit. I just feel bad for your father. I wonder what kind of bastard would stoop this low, for any reason. Here…you’ll probably want to save this one.” She pushed the paper at him and cracked up with laughter.
“We should get going,” Night grumbled. “I don’t want to be late.”
****
Steve glanced at Morgen as they drove up the coastal highway. “You look bad, my friend. You sick again like two years ago?”
“I just have a cold,” Morgen grunted. “What’s your problem?”
Steve’s eyelids lowered. “I can sometimes tell when you lie.”
“Well, maybe you’re slipping. Just drive, Steve. I’d like to get there today.”
Steve marveled at the ruggedness of Lincoln County. “Your brother is from here? How do you know he didn’ go back?”
“I told you, I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. He’s insane, remember?”
“I hope you’re not insane too, my friend.”
Morgen refused to further the conversation, and he didn’t speak again until they blew out of Brookings. “We need to stop at a hair salon.”
“Man…wha’ do you need to do that now?”
Turning to Steve, Morgen’s chin dropped like his voice. “Think about it, Steve.”
“Oh.”
Morgen came out of the small shop in Florence with his platinum hair transformed into a rich auburn. Even his eyebrows and lashes had been tinted authentically. Any differences between Andrew’s Night of the emerald shoreline and the authentic California boy were now minor, disputable, or, at least, explainable.
“You’re crazy,” Steve declared when he saw him.
Under the increasing cloud cover, Morgen returned a snide look through his shades before he snapped the radio on and grinned.
****
“How do you like working with a trainer?” Brandt inquired in his studio, inspecting Night up and down as though he could mark his progress through his clothing.
“It’s kind of fun,” Night peeped beneath the blazing light of Brandt’s split-atom energy.
Brandt laughed. “Glutton for punishment, huh? Good.” He clutched Night’s shoulders and rattled him briefly. “You’ll have to maintain this while you’re on tour. It may still seem far away, but the tour is coming. Now, it’s about time we make some decisions regarding your make-up. I have a photo shoot scheduled for next week and I’ve worked it around your video shoot.”
Night chose to dive in, rather than wait to be thrown into the well of humiliation. “Speaking of make-up…what do you think you can do about this?” He stood up with his back turned to Brandt and pulled off his designer top.
Brandt shot backward and grabbed his teased scarlet hair. “For God’s sake, Morgen! What…what the hell? When did this happen? What is this? Don’t answer.” He held his one hand out while the other one stayed on his head. “If this is some weird sex thing with you? Remember that you have a responsibility to this industry, the public—yourself, for God’s sake! How the hell could you let this happen?”
Morgen’s suggestion had, in fact, been to implicate one regretful night of drugs and sex, which finally led Night to follow through on an earlier recommendation: to buy a book. While he did find the excuse to be valid, it still didn’t make any sense to him. “There’s more.”
“More?” Brandt sighed. “Well…show me.”
Night’s face tested every shade of natural blush as he dropped his loose-legged khakis and stood before Brandt in just his underpants.
“I assume that your ass matches your legs and back? …You know, I’ve dealt with a lot of different things,” Brandt proclaimed. “Hairy bodies, tattoos, freckles, birthmarks, but this…this is new.”
“I don’t want anyone else to know,” Night implored after he’d put his clothes back on and sat down. “What am I going to do?”
Brandt mused with his fingers on his lips and then pulled them away abruptly. “You’re going to leave it to me. It’s not that bad, really. I have to do full makeup on you anyway—at least for any shows and videos. You’re so darn pale. And you tan like a redhead.”
Night barely looked up. “So you think you can do something?”
Brandt kept his eyes narrowed at him for another moment before he answered. “It’ll add at least another hour to your makeup. And you better plan ahead if you’re going to be taking off your clothes for any of your fans. This isn’t the kind of publicity you want. Shit. If you really want to hide this from people, you might also want to demand that I become your exclusive stylist.”
Night nodded at th
e floor.
“What were you thinking?” Brandt demanded in earnest, this time.
He drew from Morgen’s prescribed response. “I guess I just let things go too far, once…a long time ago.”
“Huh-huh? A long time ago? You must have been a wild one at twelve.” Brandt’s crossed arms fell. “Well, I hope you found yourself some different pastimes and friends. I’m definitely not coming to any of your parties.”
After Brandt had tested an army of paint tones on Night’s skin, he finally settled on one shade of tan. He did the same to darken his complexion, and then pledged to transform his hair color to a gleaming, indisputable platinum, in their next session.
“Thanks to me, you’re going to look amazing. You’re going to have the power of your signature tiger. Girls are going to build shrines to your image. To the world…you’re going to be irresistible.”
****
Even Sandy spent the day advancing his business endeavors. Both Morgens were off the property, granting him the break he needed to finally install the Sony Watchcam that he’d picked up at the tradeshow in San Francisco. With his complimentary camera bag slung over his shoulder, which contained the camera unit, cable, and a drill set, he picked the lock to the empty suite and then slipped into Morgen’s bedroom.
He surveyed every inch of Morgen’s north wall, skipping over the John Lennon poster until he settled on the precise spot along the bookshelf at the foot-end of Morgen’s unmade bed. Loaded with volumes of music industry bibles, novels from childhood, a few strangely-random library books, pieces of sheet music, and every odd dust-laden artifact, Sandy rationalized that Morgen was unlikely to notice the small rectangular box among the mess.
The drill bit screamed with excitement as Sandy pumped it through the wooden backboard of the shelving unit, through the insulated wall, and right through to the back of the massive wall unit inside his own suite. He fed the cable through the hole and positioned the camera as far back as possible, between some dusty books that appeared destined to remain that way. The most stressful part of the installation was cleaning away the debris without leaving noticeable tracks in the dust.