by Tina Amiri
Morgen answered this with a pistol-cuff and a swift kick to Andrew’s already devastated leg.
Andrew hid his face and refused to answer, but he also briefly passed out.
“Not yet, asshole. Wake up!”
Morgen slapped the gun into Steve’s hand and scanned the tidy walls of the living room. He didn’t expect the search to take long with the house being so far from cluttered. Like in some benign game of hide-and-seek, he spotted something that struck him as feet peeking out from beneath a thick robe of a curtain. He strode over to the picture window and pulled out the thin metal rod that had supported sheers, prior to one of Night’s hallmark window-breaking rock-tosses that Morgen had both experienced and heard about.
Morgen examined the rod and then turned to Andrew, who suddenly had trouble returning a solid gaze.
“I had to,” Andrew stated frantically as Morgen approached. “I did it because I had to do something to try and protect us both from what was happening.”
“Aw, that’s so nice. I feel all warm,” Morgen quipped, breathing through an open mouth. “Then, allow me to return that kindness on Night’s behalf.”
Andrew attempted to back away, but Morgen’s pace quickened, forcing Steve to jump out of his way.
“I didn’t do it like this,” Andrew protested. “I gave him pills! I made him sleep!”
“No time,” Morgen grunted. He reached back with the metal rod and wacked it across Andrew’s hands as they came up to protect his face. When Andrew cringed, Morgen slammed it over his shoulders, which caused him to double over with an enormous gasp. The rod came down, again and again, until Andrew could no longer resist screaming, yet Morgen refused to stop until he’d depleted his strength—but not his rage.
“There, asshole. Did that feel like love?”
Staring vacantly, Morgen eventually noticed that blood had seeped through Andrew’s shirt, delicately…like the whimpering that filtered through the air. Close behind him, his quiet accomplice had winced himself into a tight, upright hunch.
Morgen pitched the rod at the fetal form at his feet and lumbered into the corridor. “This was supposed to be my new room,” he presented to Steve, gesturing to the cellar door. “But I think he should have it.” He staggered back into the living room, squatted beside Andrew, and planted a kiss on his head. “Nice meeting you, Granddaddy. And to answer your question, Night couldn’t live in this world after what you did to him. He just couldn’t fit in…so he killed himself.”
From the corridor, Morgen nodded at Steve, and then at the black opening, before he shaped a pistol with his fingers and fired a pretend bullet. He didn’t witness the final drama as he threw up over the veranda, or after he balled himself up in the passenger seat of Steve’s car. He only heard the gunshot.
Chapter Nineteen
Night kept a vigil at Morgen’s bedroom window—at least, this is what Sandy observed through a pixilated image on his television. When this got too boring, Sandy went out to rent a movie, but he couldn’t wait to see what his surveillance system would capture when nobody was supposed to be looking.
****
“You latched that door, right?” Morgen slurred, scrunching himself tightly against the passenger door.
“Wha’ does it matter? He fell all the way down and…you heard the gun.”
Steve’s reply sounded ominously evasive. Morgen straightened himself in his seat and took a pill bottle out of the duffel bag by his feet.
“I don’ think you got jus’ a cold. But you know…I could take you to someone who can help you.”
“I’m fine, Steve, except I do have a cold, and I almost had my lights put out by a lunatic. Now drive so we can get the hell back to civilization.”
****
Like a bloody, tormented creature surfacing from the depths of hell, Andrew emerged from the cellar, one appendage at a time. By now, Morgen would be well on his way back to California, but he figured he still had at least fourteen hours left to find out about Night’s real status and confirm how big a liar his twin actually was. On his hands and one knee, Andrew crawled into the kitchen. There, he pulled a towel from the stove handle and tore it into pieces that he used to seal the leaking hole in his leg.
Using every strip of material barely contained the hemorrhaging, and he dreaded the thought of having to make up a story if he had to turn to the hospital. Aside from his shot up leg and battered body, yet one more aggravation came from having dislocated his shoulder at the bottom of the steep basement stairs. He’d already managed to reset it, but now it begged for ice.
“You just wait, you vicious little shit,” he muttered. “Your turn is still coming.”
He was a sore hideous mess, but he was alive, and determined to recover. The fulfillment of his plans would be now be delayed for weeks or months—thanks to Aileen Coleman’s demon-child—and that truth alone supplied him with the anger to move rather swiftly. He grabbed a broom from the pantry, turned it upside-down, and then used it like a crutch to make his way to the telephone in the living room. He found that the mounting cord was still intact, the jack a bit mangled, but not broken.
For over an hour he played with the prong using a tiny pin and some pliers and he tried and retried the jack in the outlet until a dial tone surged through the line. He laughed with the receiver against his ear and then frowned when he realized that he had to make the journey into his den where he kept the paper he’d found in Lila’s purse. Breathing his way through the pain, he limped there, and back, and then dialed the Dahlsi’s telephone number.
“Hello,” he said, not expecting his voice to come out so butchered. “Would Morgen happen to be available?”
****
Sandy clutched the receiver between his shoulder and his ear as he rewound the tape in his VCR to see what interesting shots he might have gained during the evening. “Um…he went out earlier, but he might have come back. I don’t really know. Do you want his direct number so you can keep trying him?”
****
“Absolutely. I would love to keep trying him.”
Andrew disconnected with a quick tap, grinning as he redialed, but his jaw loosened when he heard the frantic hello at the other end of the line.
“Hello to you, Morgen. You sound well…”
“Okay… Who’s this?”
Andrew hung up and looked at the ceiling. “Oh, Night. Don’t you even recognize your own father anymore?” He tried to suppress his giddy relief, and amusement, as his body hurt too much to laugh. It didn’t stop him from talking to himself, though. “Or should I say, it’s astounding how fast you can drive, sweet Morgen? Lincoln County to L.A. in less than two hours…” This time, he did chuckle. “Simply astounding.”
****
Night’s slight tan drained from his face at the sight of his brother, early the next morning, when he reentered Morgen’s suite.
“What did you do?” his voice trembled like distant thunder. “Why are my old clothes on the floor—and why is your hair that color?”
Morgen sat up slowly, dragging his hands down his face. He looked mangier than ever with the addition of bruises along his cheekbones, and yet he smiled. “Just thought I needed a change. You don’t like it? I’ll dye it back, don’t worry.”
“You went there, didn’t you?” Night voice began to quiver. “After I told you—”
“I made him pay, Night. And I have to say I’m sorry for giving you such a hard time. You really didn’t stand a chance of being normal, living there with Psycho.” He fell back again. “God, I feel like crap. I thought dying would be easier than this.”
Night felt himself flush. “What did you do, Morgen? I told you to forget about him until I was ready!”
“I can’t wait that long and, thanks to me, we can both forget about him, finally. He’s already been after you, Night. I did it for you—”
“I don’t care! And I think you just did it for yourself!”
Morgen dropped his legs over the edge of the bed. A glare
sliced through his stolen auburn bangs that dipped lower than his prominent cheekbones. “Why do you even give a shit after everything he did to you?”
Night smashed his fists against his sides. “I wanted to get back at him in my own way! And now he’s really going to try to get back at one of us…unless you killed him! Did you kill him, Morgen?” A few seconds lapsed. “No…”
Morgen rocketed upright. “Christ, you’re an idiot. I should’ve just brought you back there so you two could’ve lived and died together like the pair of freaks that you are!”
“Oh, shut up…just shut up because maybe this isn’t any better—maybe you aren’t any better! You’re just like him…telling me what to do, and then I do it, and then you’re still not nice to me! I hate trying to understand everything, and I hate trying to understand you, and sometimes I even hate you!”
“Careful. You need me and my life.”
“No…I don’t.”
Morgen’s features contorted. “Excuse me? You can’t do shit by yourself. You’ve never made one move without my help. You came here a freak, and now that you know a little more, you’re just a freak with fewer excuses.”
Night squashed Morgen’s cough when he tackled him to the ground. “Call me a freak if you want—but I’m still better than you!”
Morgen started to both laugh and cough with Night’s hands pressing on his chest. “Please, enlighten me… In what way?”
“I’m everyone’s favorite…your parents, your manager, Beth… What, you don’t believe me?” Night popped up and left the room. He burst back in carrying the infamous newspaper, which he threw at Morgen. “Remember what Doris did for you on the beach the other night? By the way, I was there—and I got there all by myself. Well, I know that Beth never did that for you.”
Morgen pulled the paper away from his chest and scowled at the front page. His breaths became even more labored. “You’re proud of this…?
“Shut-up, Morgen. You know, maybe I don’t belong here. Maybe I don’t understand a lot of things, but I’ve done everything you’ve ever asked me to do. Couldn’t you have just been nice to me?”
With his complexion washing over in red, Morgen inched away from Night. “You’ve lost all possibility of me ever being nice to you. Get the fuck away from me—get the fuck out!”
“Good luck, Morgen. You know…you deserve to be sick, and I hope that your pain is as bad as I remember it.”
“And I hope you’ll enjoy getting fucked for a living because you’re no goddamn good for anything else!”
Night came forth and slapped Morgen so hard that it reactivated Andrew’s handprint from the previous day. “…And what exactly are you good for?”
In the common room, Night slowed down only to recover a small piece of paper from his duffle bag that Morgen had dropped in the middle of the floor. He grabbed his brother’s wallet, and car keys, before he marched down the hallway and into the private stairwell that delivered him to Morgen’s parked car. Every motion felt mechanical as he reversed out of the driveway and sped from the neighborhood that should always have been home. Driving, he felt no emotion, direction, or worth, whatsoever. For the first time in months, he felt like himself.
****
“Beth didn’t see you before she left for school this morning,” Brigitte relayed when Frederick stepped into the bedroom. “She’s going to stay over at her friend’s house tonight. She sends her love.”
He grunted. “I think she sends her love too readily.”
Brigitte paused at her vanity, letting go of the pin on the lapel of her blouse. “You’re not serious… You’re actually lending credibility to that ridiculous hoax in that newspaper?”
“I want the list of guests who came to our party.”
“How is that going to help? Nobody’s going to confess to having any part in this thing, so leave it alone. You have more important things to think about these days. And for goodness sake…how can you doubt your children?”
He was silent as he searched inside his closet for a suit jacket.
Brigitte stopped watching him and smiled at the mirror. “Wasn’t Morgen really something that night?”
“He was something…but he wasn’t himself. He’s like two people all the time. I’m not sure whether he was high, or if he sent his twin to put on that show for him.”
Brigitte snapped her fingers and giggled. “That could explain the photograph.”
Frederick faced her. “How can you laugh about this? There is nothing amusing about the possibility that this isn’t any hoax…that our two adopted kids decided to play Adam and Eve. Maybe we should have opened up to the media, a long time ago, about adopting our kids, but what were the chances that it would come out like this?”
After an uncomfortable pause, Brigitte replied. “I don’t believe it’s real. And, do you know what else? I don’t remember a time when you accepted my decision to bring Morgen into this house. Do you feel the same way now about Beth?”
Frederick balked. “Where’s this coming from?”
“You don’t even realize how often you imply exactly that—about Morgen anyway. As far as you’re concerned, everything about him has been wrong since the very first day.”
He walked over to Brigitte and placed a quick kiss on her forehead. “You’re right. There’s been a lot wrong, but I’ve never regretted anything about our family.”
“You’re a very good politician,” Brigitte stated wryly. “Just give our son more credit. You saw the real Morgen perform that night, and I’m sure the side of him that we both worry about, at times, will fade away with his success.”
****
In the middle of city chaos, Night found a telephone booth and reached into his pocket for the small slip of paper that revealed Lila’s home and work telephone numbers. He threw in too much money, but he didn’t care. Lila’s home number didn’t work, so he called the hospital.
“Lila…?” repeated the woman who answered the call. “If you mean Lila Hughes…”
“Yes, I need to speak with her right away.”
“I’m sorry, Sir. You must not have heard. I don’t know how else to tell you… Lila had a terrible accident on the trails…”
He felt his mind-numbing, and the sensation quickly spread through the rest of his body. “An accident…?”
“Yes, they say she tried to recover her hat on a steep ledge, and she slipped…”
Night hung up the phone and stared through the dirty glass. His real mother, Daphne, Lila… Morgen was right; Andrew needed to be stopped, irrespective of his own petty desire for revenge. He scanned the concrete horizon, crushed by the truth of how much he’d depended on Lila to be his contingency plan if it didn’t work out with Morgen.
Tears washed away his view of the city as his thoughts fired down countless dead ends. Just briefly, he hoped he would find Morgen dead when he reentered the house—since returning there appeared to be the only viable option. He would take Morgen’s body to the place that had already been prepared for the occasion, and he would bury it, along with all the stress and aggravation that came with knowing him.
But he didn’t mean it one bit. Morgen was part of him, a binding curse if nothing more, and somehow he knew his brother would also have come to the same conclusion by this time today.
****
Sweating and wheezing, Morgen scrunched himself against a nightstand in the corner of the guestroom and groped for the telephone behind his head. He figured the strain of this catastrophe would kill him long before the effects of his raging cancer.
He didn’t want to call Steve for help and be forced to tell him about his illness. Night would come back, but he had to find a way to explain his own absence from the household, until that time. As ridiculous as it would be to die of starvation within the walls of substantial wealth, he had to acknowledge that possibility. If someone knocked on his door, he couldn’t let them see him in his current state—and what if someone decided to come in anyway? It incensed him that he needed
Night more than Night needed him, at this point. Even worse, he needed Night even more than he hated him right now.
“Are you crying?” Night asked through a simper, standing in the doorway.
“Asshole!” Morgen pitched the handset at Night who watched it hit the wall beside him.
“You’re the asshole, Morgen, and I’m only here because it’s the easiest thing for me to do. Why should I lose everything I’ve worked for when you’re not even going to be here for much longer?”
Morgen answered him with a simple hand gesture.
Night showed him a more complex one before swaggering past the bed to reach the bathroom. “I have to get ready. I’m meeting everyone at some retreat tonight. We’re planning our tour. You should be thrilled.” He took another step but stopped at hearing Morgen’s stern voice.
“He would have found you, Night. And if you’d gone there by yourself you would have spent eternity in his basement. Did you know you had a basement?” Congestion hampered his speech like never before. “He’s been trying to get to you since you left. Therefore, I saved your ass, and who knows how many other asses by knocking Gramps off.”
“I’m not happy about it, Morgen…but you only killed him because of what he did to me, right, so thanks.”
Morgen barely nodded. “Don’t mention it.”
****
At the bathroom sink, Night pushed a clean blade into the handle of his razor. He opened the faucet, glanced into the mirror, and did a double take. The razor hit the mirror as he spun and ran back into the guestroom where Morgen stood coughing into his arms.
“Morgen, look at this…!”
But Morgen bolted past him, smashing doors aside as he tore through the suite. Night chased after him, but only to have the bedroom door thrown in his face while Morgen, on the other side of it, burst into an even greater coughing frenzy. Night charged in, causing Morgen to cringe the other way while blood from his mouth leached from between his fingers and trickled to his elbow.
Night’s whole demeanor sank as his brother swiped copious amounts of tissues from a nearby table to clean himself up.