“You’ve been watching too many crime shows.”
“What else am I supposed to do while you’re hanging out in all those chat rooms pretending to be a married father of three looking for some side action?”
“It’s called a fantasy life, Wayne. Maybe if you had one, you’d understand.”
“You have no idea what I fantasize about.”
We exchanged a look. Both of us knew that was not exactly true. While we couldn’t technically read each other’s thoughts, there was an inexplicable connection that clued us each into what the other was thinking.
Kirk finished his coffee. “Why are you always such a downer? You always think the worst thing is going to happen, and then—”
“It does.” I tugged at my tie, feeling claustrophobic. The clock on the bedside table read 6:35. “Were going to be late for work.”
We used to take turns driving to work, but then Kirk got his license revoked for excessive speeding. My brother may be graceful on the dance floor, but his foot is made of lead. Not only did he blast through a school zone, he almost hit a student. A little boy. A cop’s son. Kirk was damn lucky they hadn’t thrown him in jail. He should also be glad I hadn’t strangled him, because of course he tried to tell the judge that it was me, his little brother, who was speeding in front of the Amish Friends School. Thank God the crossing guard’s testimony vindicated me.
“He had his arm waving out the sunroof,” she said, nodding toward Kirk. “I seen him screaming at the kids to get the hell outta his way.”
“I was only trying to save them.” Kirk eyed me as if I’d been the one who was hell-bent on taking out a bunch of grade-schoolers.
“Then why,” the crossing guard countered, “were you callin’ ’em all little bastards and sayin’ you was gonna mow ’em down?”
Kirk had never liked children. I suppose this came from the high volume of cruelty children had leveled at us when we were ourselves children. And, it must be said, as adults we still come across a lot of rude kids. They’ll scream in terror. They’ll run away from us. The worst will come up and poke at me, as if I’m some Halloween costume. Some of them kick. Some of them punch. A few have even bitten like dogs, clamping their incisors on my arm. It must be a primal urge that compels them to think Kirk is afflicted with some sort of tumor that needs to be chewed off him. Or maybe their parents are just rude, Big-Gulp-guzzling, flip-flop-wearing cretins who haven’t bothered to raise well-mannered children.
If Kirk hated the children, I hated their parents. These were idiots who’d raised their kids to behave as they like, not as they should. There was no such thing as an “inside voice” for these monsters. There were no manners, no loyalty, and no sense of being but a cog in the greater wheel of society. These were the spoiled idiots who’d bought million-dollar homes on their thirty-thousand-a-year salaries. These were the ones who’d leased Porsches when they should’ve been driving Camrys. They were ticks sucking off the fat of the American dream. And their children were worse, because at least the parents knew better. The kids would be nothing but parasites.
Just like me.
“Wayne.” Kirk had been fiddling with the radio. He was looking at me—staring, really. I wanted to smack him for the expression on his face.
I said, “Just keep your foot away from the gas pedal, please. We can’t afford for both of us to lose our license.”
He stared at me for a beat longer, then went back to the radio.
We weren’t meant to read our medical records, but when we were seventeen, Kirk had perused our charts while we waited for the doctors to come poke and prod and scan and magnetize and radiate and all the other horrors medical science rains down upon the conjoined.
“You’re a parasite,” he’d told me, but I was already reading the words over his shoulder.
Through extensive testing, Drs. Shelby and Lovett have concluded that subsequent to his lack of full heart and intestinal function, combined with the obvious inability of twin number two to survive without twin number one, the designation of “parasitic twin” should be used going forward to describe Wayne Edgerton.
This was 1990. We didn’t have computers where you could WebMD something awful about yourself in the privacy of your own home. We went instead to the university library, where we had to pull from the card catalogue the stack number for a book entitled The Psychological Dysnomia of the Parasitic Twin, written by a man with the jackassian name of Bonneau F. Von Heffinger.
Our hands shook as we opened the first page.
Dysnomia, from the Greek for “lawlessness.”
“Sounds more like me than you,” Kirk had said—the most generous statement that has ever come from his mouth before or since.
The parasitic twin, wrote the esteemed Dr. Von Heffinger, also known as an unequally conjoined twin, is created when twin embryos in utero do not fully separate. As is often found in nature, there is the Darwinian dichotomy; one must struggle against the other for both hormonal support as well as the limited sustenance available in the womb. Thus, one embryo becomes dominant at the expense of the other.
“Now, that really sounds like me,” Kirk mumbled, licking my finger so I could turn the page.
In stark juxtaposition is the parasite, which cannot survive without the host. The underdeveloped twin is completely dependent on the dominant twin, also called the autosite. This uneven relationship will often create a lifelong pattern of dependence and hostility.
Kirk had closed the book on that last sentence. His reading comprehension had never been good, but I could tell he got the gist of the passages. I braced myself for the expected joke, the casually cruel comment that would pierce my soul like a hot knife through a balloon. He had this look on his face—a flash of understanding, a flaming fury burning in his eyes—and then it was gone.
Kirk dropped the book on a nearby table. He checked my watch, then said, “Why don’t we try that new Mexican place for lunch?”
At seventeen years old, we were not exactly clueless about our condition. We’d grown up knowing something was seriously wrong. Why else would people in the street stop and stare? Why else would our mother and father abandon us on the steps of the university hospital with a note reading, “Please study thems freaks to help others never live to this same nightmare what nearly tore us apart.”
Altruistic, one might say. Child abandonment, others might claim. And still others might be shocked by the appalling syntax.
But our parents had abandoned us to medical study, and study us the medicos did. We were in state care. No one was going to stand up to the doctors who wanted to immerse Kirk’s hand in boiling water to see if I felt pain. No one told them they were wrong to stick probes into my brain while Kirk performed math equations so they could ascertain whether my thoughts were assisting him. No one ever stood up for us to say that we were not guinea pigs. We were not freaks. We were human beings.
Over tacos, we decided that we weren’t going to go to the hospital anymore. Our eighteenth birthday was less than a month away. We would officially be adults, no longer in the shackles of state care. Thanks to news stories over the years, we had money in the bank. Strangers who had never met us had sent in cash and checks to ward off having a conjoined set of twins in their own family. Over a hundred thousand dollars. That was a lot of money in 1990. It’s a lot of money now, but what it meant to us then was freedom. Freedom from tests. Freedom from scrutiny. Freedom from tyranny.