Part 2
Alternatively, uncensored final draft here.
A switched off the bedside lamp and kicked back, hands behind head. It had been numerous years since peaceful slumber had forsaken him. Sleep was luxury, sleep yielded secret passageway to memory, sleep was the godsend elixir meant to negate troubles from the day - but it was not a resource he could tap into. Each night he napped for four dreamless hours, from 2 to 6 AM, and would wake up positively energized. He could pull two all-nighters in a row and still only needed four hours to fully recharge. Rather than calling insomnia, he thought he could no longer be spent.
He had tried psychotherapy with his psychiatrist. It seemed he had an abnormally compulsive conscious mind, to the point that his subconscious could not freely surface even when he was asleep. A spent a fortune seeking remedy, but the most he had ever gotten was a sleeping pill that yielded stone-cold coma, still without dreams. He was left with time. Perhaps, at the expense of dreaming, he felt he ought to use that time to invest in his future.
But reality could not be this simple, and he never believed those nightly extra hours were yielded to him for free. He felt he was the embodiment of the picture of Dorian Gray, that some unseen part of him was secretly bearing all the ugly weight of exhaustion and abuse that the rest of him was seemingly spared. This could be his spine, his heart, his stomach, his skin - he obsessively passed them all through radioactive scan. Report after report came back desirously clean, but that was meaningless to him. He feared that if he could not pinpoint - much less protect - this one spot, this central pillar that bore the weight of his existence, then one day, if it were to snap without warning, he could be driven to raising a gun to the head, or succumbing to schizophrenia.
But for now, things were still under control.
Even lying here, in a silence through which he could hear his own blood flow, A was keenly conscious of time. Time, stretched like Egyptian cotton over a mummy, like hair on a woman who let it grow uncut for her entire life, like muddy tides of the Mississippi in late summer, a journey sans destination. When young, his father once took them on a far trip. They hitchhiked on a truck full of rubber tires and came across the Mississippi, old old Mississippi. A remembered that father had said, People called her the Mother River. He noted that although she wasn't as wide as he had imagined, she ran much, much longer than what he thought. The truck rumbled onward for a very long time, but still she ceaselessly pointed into the far distance. Thus, to him, three things came to share a common concept: mother, river, and time.
You could easily traverse a river, but don't think you can ever translate its flow lengthwise.
A closed his eyes. His watch ticked like water, his damp shoes slowly floating up. Water rose to meet the edge of his bed, and then stopped. She did not mean to drown him; she only wished to isolate him. She loved him, but she rendered him alone.
A weight suddenly dropped onto his body, and he awoke with a start to see B sprawled on top of him.
"Still awake?" B whispered.
"Mhh," he answered with an ambiguous groan.
"Can't fall asleep?"
"It's been like this."
"Aren't you full of energy."
A smiled helplessly, squinting with effort but could not make out B's face.
He plunged and met A's neck with his teeth, rhythmically stimulating his skin using his tongue.
"Don't do that."
"Why? Don't tell me you don't want it."
"I don't want it."
"You don't want it!" B seized him by the shoulders, growling into his ear. "Then why did you come! Why did you agree to whatever I asked! You clearly know what I want!" His voice was hoarse, and A's ear rang.
"B." He tried pushing him off, but his arms were numb from prolonged cramping under his head.
"Alright. Alright. We'll fix that insomnia." B reached a hand to turn on the bed lamp, studying A's face. He retrieved a cigarette from the nightstand and stuck it between A's lips."Hold this for me," he said as he brought a flame close.
He pulled the lit cigarette from A's mouth, inhaled through, and promptly met A's lips. Tenderly he parted them, working his clenched teeth open with his tongue. A put up no resistance, so smoke and tongue entered his mouth, gentle like a dove amongst clouds. A closed his eyes, feeling exhaustion wash upon him in one wave, threatening to flood his solitary island. But this water was not the icy cold he had anticipated. Instead she was warm, mild like his body's warmth.
A was at last reunited with sleep.
-
He awoke dizzy the following late afternoon, alarming himself when he saw the time. He had lost track of how many years it had been that his watch had consistently told him, upon waking, that sunrise was yet hours away. This time, it was the evening sun that greeted his heavy lids.
B was nowhere in the room. He grabbed his coat and dashed out the door, and, expectedly, the car was gone. He touched his pocket. The wallet was still there, but cash had vanished. He sank back on the bed, annoyance bubbling. This feeling was so familiar that he remembered at once the hint from the neon light the night before.
On a snowy Christmas when they were ten, B stole his hidden allowance money and disappeared without even a secret note. Father refused to believe that he knew nothing, dragged him to the living room, and beat his back with a broom. A did not recall pain, nor did he resent father even in memory. He only registered the blinking Christmas lights over the window which he and B had hung up together, and the sight of white billowy snow. Three days later B returned as if nothing had happened.
How long was three days? Two nights of sleep, three times breakfast. Not enough to finish a show, and not enough for even dinner leftovers to go bad. A couldn't understand why, in memory, the separation from B that time had felt so long - longer even than the past sixteen years. The following morning he sat waiting on the bench outside the lighted window, his eyes sweeping across white fields and white roads. They lived in the far countryside where few cars passed. He turned on the blinking lights when it became dark, thinking he must have fallen into the Mississippi because father had once said, River water is cold. It can freeze you to death.
On the third day, B walked home. His foot sank with every other step in the snow, his coloring unobtrusive against the surrounding white. His progress was slow as a crawling ant, but A spotted him right away. He wasn't excited, surprised, or moved to tears. He felt he should have been worried to the point of going out in search. B saw him too and picked up into a run, all the way to him, his clothes and hair laced with ice. He felt bubbling annoyance as B smiled at him, and his clenched fist flew into his face. B wobbled backwards, and A struck him again. He fell to the ground, panting as he threw down his backpack. "Look what I brought back for you," he said in high notes.
-
Without a warning B kicked open the door, and A jumped. He handed him a cup of coffee and a warm hamburger, stripping out of the army jacket. In his usual half-taunting tone he said: "I thought you'd be up at least by checkout time."
A couldn't speak.
"Had a good dream? Any big-tittied hot babes?"
A ran a hand over his stubble. "I dreamt my toes were soaked rotten by water."
B shrugged. "You must love horror movies."
"Where did you go?"
"There's a town close by. I went to explore since you weren't up. Oh, and I took some of your money, I'll get you back later. Who knew, my luck has been terrible since you came. Looks like we'll have to drive through the night."
"How much is left?"
"Twenty bucks. But we'll be golden if we stay out of motels and avoid the tolls. We can take turns driving and still make it there the day after tomorrow." He took the map, planning enthusiastically.
He was born unable to worry.
A got dressed, cleaned up his face, and prepared to go.
-
He proposed that he drives the first shift, and B did not protest.
B switched on the radio with near full volume. A reporter described yet another serial murder case, not unusual for their time. "What a career," B commented.
A reached a hand over to the volume knob, but B waved him away. He asked, "Don't you mind how loud this is?"
He shrugged and turned it off altogether. "You know that my ear's gone bad, A."
He hesitated. "I do remember, but it wasn't as bad as this."
That was another story from their childhood.
B laughed. "Everything worsens with time. But still it could be worse yet, so if you want to say something, better tell my left side. Or just be loud, or at least have me see you. Otherwise all I hear is a whisper in the wind, or terrible radio static." He twisted to fold up one leg. "But I'm still sensitive to your voice. I can filter out background frequencies any time to catch the enemy signal."
"I remember you were doing a band."
"You always remember outdated stuff."
"I couldn't get in touch with you."
"You never even tried. But it's okay, I'm not mad."
"I remember seeing you and your band in the paper once. I bought your record."
"I'm touched, but really, I don't do that anymore. My ear's bad, my throat's bad, it wasn't a gig I could keep at. But that wasn't the real reason, of course. When you don't want something anymore, any excuse becomes a legit reason."
"What happened to your throat?"
"Your concern really doesn't come by easy." He pulled out a cigarette and rolled down the window a slit. A shivered as the cold gushed in.
"If you smoked less, you probably could have sung for some more years."
"If your ear's bad, you counter by turning the music up, and then you have to talk even louder over the music. No matter how you yell, you still can't hear, so the ear gets worse and the throat gets worse. What do they call this, a vicious cycle? More like karma."
"You should have taken a break," he looked at B. The latter stared straight ahead, an empty smile crawling across his face. "It's okay, never mind. I can still hold conversation with you, so what does it matter if I can't hear? Too much damned noise in the world anyway, and most people you don't even need to talk to. Like C, the guy you saw at my place. Even though he had a loud mouth, I never really heard a thing he said. We had no need to talk." B chuckled to himself again.
"But I like the way you trash-talk."
"Let's talk about you. I want to know how you got divorced. I get fired up just thinking about it."
A did not answer.
Night always fell sooner on overcast days. Wind blew through tall grass on either side, forming waves along the road. Dark clouds overhead felt stiflingly low.
B did not insist for a reply. He leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes.
A turned the radio back on, switching to a music station. Silence forever bore a weight he couldn't stand.
He didn't know since when he had begun to fear being in B's company. At the same time he had also always yearned to be by his side, and thus did not know what to do. B had always been B. His devil-may-care attitude and cynicism were not born from animosity for the world, but instead stemmed from an urgent desire for life, vitality, sexuality. Even more so than A, he had had a natural sensitivity for sensation. Most troubling was his hatred for himself. Like a pupa he lay, cocooned in his own emptiness. Even in childhood, everything he did pointed to his inner self abandon. Life was dispensable to him, no loss.
"You got kids?" B did not open his eyes, tapping his hands to the music's beat.
"Yes, two. Age six and four."
"You got to work fast!
"A. All the strangest occurrences in the world together couldn't offset me as much as the news that you got married. You don't like women at all."
"You know, after you walk down the road of life for a while, suddenly you just want someone to walk with you. Otherwise what's ahead feels like too much, and you don't think you can make it to the end alone."
A thought it must be the slow music playing at nighttime - or the dry and warm air circulating a closed space - that filled his head with strange ideas. He saw himself as a slit-stomached fish lying on a bank, the occasional river splash wetting his dorsal fin. He might be on the verge of death, but he had never before felt an exhilaration such as this, as air flooding his gills. He hungered for someone to open him up, to spill him.
"You know that's not a thought you, or I, would ever have."
"People change as they grow old."
"You still wouldn't."
"I tried visiting her and the kids, a few times. I couldn't even look at them. I hid behind a corner, watching them cross a street. With them I always see the shining figure of a righteous person, a figure I wish I could stand up to become, a figure who can live and reap all of life's proudest achievements. But in the end, all I can do is hide in a corner, and watch from afar as that hope incinerates to dust."
"Looks like you need a person you can tell everything to."
"Perhaps. But I still didn't want to see you."
"Rare that you're this frank."
"You always make me think back to my teens, always reminding me of how powerless I am against time."
"I thought we made a bunch of excellent memories. They say the advantage of twins is you can save the trouble of mirrors. But hey, I have people lining up all over who want to sleep with me, I can't possibly look that old."
"No. Maybe you don't know how it's like being the older kid. To me, you'll always be like twelve or thirteen, especially since all these years we were apart. The person I see aging in the mirror is only me; your image is forever locked with details untouchable by time. This doesn't change even if we are face to face now."
"The way you put it makes me want to barf, but I feel right now is a very appropriate cue for us to commence bawling all over each other's shoulder."
"Not bad."
Part 4
Part 5
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