The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares

by Oates, Joyce Carol

  Yet not one: two.

  At a fever pitch childhood passed for the demon brother who was first in all things. At a glacial pace childhood passed for the smaller brother who trailed behind his twin in all things. The demon brother was joyous to behold, pure infant fire, radiant thrumming energy, every molecule of his being quivering with life, appetite, me me me. The smaller brother was often sick, lungs filled with fluids, a tiny valve in his heart fluttered, soft bones of his curving spine, soft bones of his bowed legs, anemia, weak appetite, and the skull subtly misshapen from the forceps delivery, his cries were breathy, bleating, nearly inaudible me? me? For the demon brother was first in all things. In the twins’ crib the first to roll onto his stomach, and the first to roll onto his back. The first to crawl. The first to rise on shaky baby-legs. The first to toddle about wide-eyed in triumph at being vertical. The first to speak: Mama. The first to drink in, to swallow up, to suck nourishment from all that he encountered, eyes widened in wonder, in greed, his first word Mama not an appeal or a plea but a command: Mama! Belatedly the smaller brother followed the demon brother, uncertain in his movements, poorly coordinated his legs, his arms, the very tilt of his head questionable, and his head quivering on frail shoulders, the eyes rapidly blinking, watery, seemingly weak as the facial features were less defined than those of the demon brother of whom it was claimed proudly He’s all boy! while of the smaller brother it was murmured Poor thing! But he is growing. Or it was murmured Poor thing! But what a sweet sad smile. In these early years the smaller brother was often sickly and several times had to be hospitalized (anemia, asthma, lung congestion, heart-valve flutter, sprained bones) and in these interims the demon brother did not seem to miss the smaller brother but basked in the full attention of their parents and grew yet taller and stronger and soon it could scarcely be claimed that the brothers were twins—even “fraternal” twins—for observers would react with baffled smiles Twins? How can that be possible! For by the age of four, the demon brother was several inches taller than the smaller brother whose spine curved, and whose chest caved in upon itself, and whose eyes blinked teary and vaguely focused, and it came to seem that the brothers were not twins but, simply, brothers: the one older than the other by two or three years, and much healthier. We love the boys equally. Of course. At bedtime the demon brother sank into sleep with the abruptness of a rock sinking into dark water, come to rest in the soft dark mud below. At bedtime the smaller brother lay with opened eyes and stem-thin limbs twitching for he feared sleep as one might fear sinking into infinity Even as a young child I understood that infinity is a vast fathomless chasm inside the brain into which we fall and fall through our lives, fall and fall unnamed, faceless and unknown where even, in time, the love of our parents is lost. Even the love of our mothers is lost. And all memory waking from a thin tormented sleep like frothy water spilled across his face and he’s struggling to breathe, choking and coughing, for the demon brother has sucked up most of the oxygen in the room, how can the demon brother help it, his lungs are so strong, his breath so deep and his metabolism so heated, naturally the demon brother will suck up the oxygen in the brothers’ room where each night at bedtime their parents tuck the boys in, in twin beds, kissing each, declaring their love for each, and in the night the smaller brother is wakened from a nightmare of suffocation, his weak lungs unable to breathe panicked and whimpering in a plea for help managing to crawl from his bed and out of the room and into the hall, collapsed partway between the brothers’ room and their parents’ room where in the early morning the parents will discover him.

  Such meager life, yet such life struggles to save itself!—so the demon brother would recall, in contempt.

  Of course we love Edgar and Edward equally. They are both our sons.

  This declaration the demon brother knew to be a lie. Yet was angered by the thought that, when the parents uttered the lie, as they did frequently, those who heard it might believe. And the smaller brother, the sickly brother, with his caved-in chest, crooked spine, wheezy asthmatic breath, yearning teary eyes and sweet smile wished to believe. To rebuke him, the demon brother had a way of turning on him when they were alone, for no (evident) reason pushing him, shoving him, wrestling him to the floor, as the smaller brother drew breath to protest straddling him with his knees, gripping the breakable rib cage like a vise, thump-thump-thumping the little freak’s head against the floor, the moist hard palm of a hand camped over the little freak’s mouth to prevent him from crying for help Mama mama mama faint as a dying lamb’s bleating and so unheard by the mother in another part of the house downstairs in her bliss of ignorance not hearing the thump-thump-thump of the smaller brother’s head against the carpeted floor of the boys’ room until at last the smaller brother goes limp, ceases to struggle, ceases to struggle for breath, his pinched little face has turned blue, and the demon brother relents, releases him panting and triumphant.

  Could’ve killed you, freak. And I will, if you tell.

  For why were there two, and not one? As in the womb, the demon brother felt the injustice, and the illogic.

  School! So many years. Here the demon brother, who was called Eddie, was first in all things. As the smaller brother, who was called Edward, lagged behind. Immediately in elementary school the brothers were not perceived to be twins but only just brothers, or relatives sharing a last name.

  Edgar Waldman. Edward Waldman. But you never saw them together.

  At school, Eddie was one of the popular boys. Adored by girls, emulated and admired by boys. He was a big boy. A husky boy. He was a natural leader, an athlete. Waved his hand, and teachers called upon him. His grades were never less than B. His smile was a dimpled smile, sly-sincere. He had a way of looking you frankly in the eye. By the age of ten Eddie had learned to shake hands with adults and to introduce himself Hi! I’m Eddie provoking smiles of admiration What a bright precocious child! and, to the demon brother’s parents How proud you must be of your son as if in fact there were but one son, and not two. In sixth grade, Eddie ran for president of his class and was elected by a wide margin.

  I am your brother, remember me!

  You are nothing of mine. Go away!

  But I am in you. Where can I go?

  Already in elementary school the smaller brother Edward had dropped behind his twin. The problem wasn’t his schoolwork—for Edward was a bright, intelligent, inquisitive boy—his grades were often As, when he was able to complete his work—but his health. So frequently absent from his fifth grade classes, he’d had to repeat the year. His lungs were weak, he caught respiratory infections easily. His heart was weak, in eighth grade he was hospitalized for weeks following surgery to repair the faulty heart valve. In tenth grade he suffered a “freak accident”—observed only by his brother Eddie, in their home—falling down a flight of stairs, breaking his right leg and kneecap and his right arm and several ribs and injuring his spine and thereafter he had to hobble about stricken with shyness, wincing in pain, on crutches. His teachers were aware of him, the “younger” Waldman boy. His teachers regarded him with sympathy, pity. In high school, his grades became ever more erratic: sometimes As but more often Cs, Ds, Incompletes. The smaller brother seemed to have difficulty concentrating in his classes, he fidgeted with pain, or stared open-eyed in a haze of painkillers, scarcely aware of his surroundings. When he was fully awake, he had a habit of hunching over his notebooks, that were unusually large, spiral notebooks with unlined pages, like sketchbooks, and in these notebooks he appeared to be constantly drawing, or writing; he frowned and bit his lower lip, lost in concentration, ignoring the teacher and the rest of the class Slipping into infinity, a pleat in time and a twist of the pen and there’s freedom! The pen had to be black felt-tip with a fine point. The notebooks had to have marbled black-and-white covers. The teacher had to call upon “Edward” several times to get the boy’s full attention and in his eyes then, a quick flaring-up, like a match lighted, shyness supplanted by something like resentment, fury. Leave m
e alone can’t you, I am not one of you.

  By the time the brothers were eighteen, Eddie was a senior bound for college, president of his class and captain of the football team and in the school yearbook “most likely to succeed” and Edward was trailing behind by a year, with poor grades. He’d begun to arrive at school with a wheelchair, brought by his mother, now in the throes of spinal pain from a slipped disk, and in this wheelchair he was positioned at the front, right-hand corner of his classes, near the teacher’s desk, a broken, freaky figure with a small pinched boy’s face, waxy skin and slack lips, drowsy from painkillers, or absorbed in his spiral notebooks in which he only pretended to take notes while in fact drawing bizarre figures—geometrical, humanoid—that seemed to spring from the end of his black felt-tip pen.

  In the spring of his junior year, stricken with bronchitis, Edward didn’t complete his courses and never returned to school: his formal education had ended. In that year, Eddie Waldman was recruited by a dozen universities offering sports scholarships and, shrewdly, he chose the most academically prestigious of the universities, for his goal beyond the university was law school.

  Resembling each other as a shadow can be said to resemble its object. Edward was the shadow.

  By this time the brothers no longer shared a room. The brothers no longer shared—even!—the old, cruel, childish custom of the demon brother’s wish to harm his smaller twin; the demon brother’s wish to suck all the oxygen out of the air, to swallow up his smaller twin entirely. Why be this other here—this thing! Why this, when there is me!

  Here was the strange thing: the smaller brother was the one to miss the bond between them. For he had no other so deeply imprinted in his soul as his brother, no bond so fierce and intimate. I am in you, I am your brother, you must love me

  But Eddie laughed, backing away. Shook hands with his sickly brother for whom he felt only a mild repugnance, the mildest pang of guilt, and he said good-bye to his parents, allowed himself to be embraced and kissed and went away, smiling in anticipation of his life he went away with no plan to return to his hometown and to his boyhood house except for expediency’s sake as a temporary visitor who would be, within hours of his return, restless, bored, eager to escape again to his “real” life elsewhere.

  2.

  Now in their twenties the brothers rarely saw each other. Never spoke on the phone.

  Eddie Waldman graduated from law school. Edward Waldman continued to live at home.

  Eddie excelled, recruited by a prominent New York City law firm. Edward suffered a succession of “health crises.”

  The father divorced the mother, abruptly and mysteriously it seemed, for the father, too, had a “real” life elsewhere.

  Eddie entered politics, under the tutelage of a prominent conservative politician. Edward, suffering spinal pain, spent most days in a wheelchair. Inside his head calculating numbers, imagining equations in which the numerical, the symbolic, and the organic were combined, inventing music, rapidly filling large sheets of construction paper with bizarre yet meticulously detailed geometrical and humanoid figures in settings resembling those of the surrealist painter de Chirico and the visionary artist M. C. Escher. Our lives are Möbius strips, misery and wonder simultaneously. Our destinies are infinite, and infinitely recurring.

  In the affluent suburb of the great American city, on a residential street of large, expensive house, the Waldman house, a clapboard Colonial on a two-acre lot, began by degrees to fall into disrepair, decline. The front lawn was unmowed and spiky, moss grew on the rotting shingle boards of the roof and newspapers and flyers accumulated on the front walk. The mother, once a sociable woman, began to be embittered, suspicious of neighbors. The mother began to complain of ill health, mysterious “hexes.” The mother understood that the father had divorced her as a way of divorcing himself from the misshapen broke-backed son with the teary, yearning eyes who would never grow up, would never marry, would spend the rest of his life in the fevered execution of eccentric and worthless “art.”

  Frequently the mother called the other son, the son of whom she was so proud, whom she adored. But Eddie seemed always to be traveling and rarely responded to his mother’s messages.

  In time, within a decade, the mother would die. In the now derelict house (visited, infrequently, by a few concerned relatives) Edward would live as a recluse in two or three downstairs rooms, one of which he’d converted into a makeshift studio. The embittered mother had left him enough money to enable him to continue to live alone and to devote himself to his work; he hired help to come to the house from time to time to clean it, or to attempt to clean it; to shop for him, and to prepare meals. Freedom! Misery and wonder! On large canvases Edward transcribed his bizarre dream-images, among galaxies of hieroglyphic shapes in a sequence titled Fossil-Figures. For it was Edward’s belief, that had come to him in a paroxysm of spinal pain, that misery and wonder are interchangeable and that one must not predominate. In this way time passed in a fever-heat for the afflicted brother, who was not afflicted but blessed. Time was a Möbius strip that looped back upon itself, weeks, months, and years passed and yet the artist grew no older, in his art. (In his physical being, perhaps. But Edward had turned all mirrors to the wall and had not the slightest curiosity what Edward now “looked like.”)

  The father, too, died. Or disappeared, which is the same thing.

  Relatives ceased to visit, and may have died.

  Into infinity, which is oblivion. But it is out of that infinity we have sprung: why?

  It began to be, as if overnight, the era of the Internet. No man need be a recluse now. However alone and cast off by the world.

  Via the Internet E.W. communicated with companions—soul mates—scattered in cyberspace of whom, at any given time, there were invariably a few—but E.W.’s needs were so minimal, his ambition for his art so modest, he required only a few—fascinated by the Fossil-Figures he displayed on the Web, who negotiated to buy them. (Sometimes, bidding against one another, for unexpectedly high sums.) And there were galleries interested in exhibiting the works of E.W.—as the artist called himself—and small presses interested in publishing them. In this way, in the waning years of the twentieth century, E.W. became something of an underground cult figure, rumored to be impoverished, or very wealthy; a crippled recluse living alone in a deteriorating old house, in a deteriorating body, or, perversely, a renowned public figure who guarded his privacy as an artist.

  Alone yet never lonely. For is a twin lonely?

  Not so long as his twin-self continues to exist.

  The brothers were never in contact now yet, on TV, by chance as sometimes Edward flicked through channels like one propelling himself through the chill of intergalactic space, he came upon images of his lost brother: giving impassioned speeches (“sanctity of life”—“pro-life”—“family values”—“patriotic Americans”) to adoring crowds, being interviewed, smiling into the camera with the fiery confidence of one ordained by God. There was the demon brother elected to the U.S. Congress from a district in a neighboring state, the smaller brother hadn’t known he was living in; there, the demon brother beside an attractive young woman, gripping the young woman’s hand, a wife, a Mrs. Edgar Waldman, the smaller brother hadn’t known he had married. The demon brother had been taken up by rich, influential elders. In a political party, such elders look to youth to further their political heritage, their “tradition.” In this political party the “tradition” was identical with economic interests. No values, no morals, no goals other than economic interests. This was the triumphant politics of the era. This was the era of the self. Me, me, me! There is me, me, me there is only me. Cameras panned rapturous audiences, fervently applauding audiences. For in me, there is the blind wish to perceive we. As in the most primitive, wrathful, and soulless of gods, humankind will perceive we. In the most distant galaxies, infinities of mere emptiness, the ancient yearning we.

  So Edward, the left-behind brother, hunched in his wheelchair, reg
arded the demon brother glimpsed on TV with no bitterness nor even a sense of estrangement as one might feel for a being of another species but with the old, perverse yearning I am your brother, I am in you. Where else can there be, that I am?

  Here was the inescapable fact: the brothers shared a single birthday. Even beyond their deaths, that fact would never change.

  January 26. The dead of winter. Each year on that day the brothers thought of each other with such vividness, each might have imagined that the other was close beside him, or behind him, a breath on his cheek, a phantom embrace. He is alive, I can feel him Edward thought with a shiver of anticipation. He is alive, I can feel him Edgar thought with a shiver of revulsion.