Will & I

by Clay Byars

  Among my most memorable visitors of this period was the doctor who’d operated on my carotid artery fistula. The surgery had been in Atlanta. Dr. A. was in Birmingham to give a presentation at a medical conference downtown and came by to see me beforehand. He and my father had become friends the previous fall, after the wreck. They were both self-made men who had little tolerance for bullshit and backed up their words with actions. I think he liked the fact, or at least I liked it for him, that most people would never guess what he did for a living.

  As soon as he entered the room, I sensed a rising anger beneath his affability. Thanks to the blood clot Dr. Cohen had caused by cutting my vertebral artery and partially clamping it, the intricate work he’d done to restore proper blood flow to my Circle of Willis (the circle of arteries that supply blood to the brain and surrounding structures), while at the same time closing up the leak in my carotid, essentially became wasted effort.

  He had me show him what I could do then, which wasn’t much compared with the last time he’d seen me. He put his hand under my foot and told me to push. Then to spread my fingers out as much as possible. Finally, he shined a pen light in my eyes and had me track his finger back and forth before asking some basic questions that required only a minimal response. Will and my father waited in the hall for his assessment. Will told me later that when Dr. A. had finally walked out, before saying anything else, he looked at my father and said, “That motherfucker.”

  14

  Around that time a close childhood friend of ours, of Will’s and mine, died in an accident in Sewanee, where we were all at school together. His name was Caldwell. Most of the names in this story I’ve changed, but for some reason I can’t change his. We’d known him since preschool and had grown up playing tennis with him at the country club where our parents were members. Like us, Caldwell spent a good portion of his adolescence there. An impudent little Napoleon with rosy cheeks and thick black hair—waitresses didn’t stop offering him kids’ specials until he was about seventeen—we couldn’t stand him initially. He wanted to fight all the time and would never stop coming at us. But he was fiercely loyal and reliable, a high school Eagle Scout. I trusted him with money and secrets. Yet he thought nothing of putting himself in danger if it happened to lie on the way to what he wanted. I’d already taken him to the hospital once, the semester before the wreck, when he’d ridden somebody else’s bicycle into a stone sundial and bent the frame. I don’t know what he was after that night.

  One afternoon he came by the treatment center to see me. It was the third or fourth time he’d been to visit since I’d arrived. Will was there, too. The semester was about to start, they were on their way back to school. Caldwell gave me a bumper sticker that read DOGSHIT BREATH. He’d picked it up in Florida on a fishing trip. It was true: Candy brushed my teeth every day, but the nutritional supplements I was made to consume, though I couldn’t taste them, gave me putrescent breath. Caldwell had commented on it during his last visit. Will put the bumper sticker on my wheelchair. Eventually, my speech therapist made me take it off. Apparently it offended some of the other patients and therapists. And probably her. She was a Christian literalist in most matters—she would copy in little Bible verses at the bottom of my speech exercises. She pointed out that I didn’t own the wheelchair, which was true.

  While the sticker stayed, though, I enjoyed it. I needed to set myself apart from the religiously happy, insane-asylum feel of the treatment center. However good the therapists were, and however much I needed their instruction, I didn’t want to have to join their team to receive it. I didn’t mind the Christian rock they occasionally pumped into the therapy rooms, why should they mind my DOGSHIT BREATH? But because I’d yet to pass my swallowing test and be cleared to eat solid food again, I didn’t want to trouble the waters. So without much protest I let them peel it off. It occurs to me now how thoughtful a gift the sticker was on Caldwell’s part. He’d known it would provide me with a tiny dose of amusement each time they wheeled me down the hall. Something about the spirit of his joke, too, I liked. It was a humor we shared. When you’re in the hospital for a long time, you get sick of being seen as primarily an object of pity, encouragement, whatever; it’s alienating. The bumper sticker, crude as it was, told me that Caldwell and I still shared the same world.

  One afternoon, about a month later, after that day’s last therapy session, Candy was wheeling me back to my room when I looked up and saw my mother and a few other people gathered outside my door. They were frowning, and when they saw me, they looked down. They didn’t say anything as we approached. Candy remained silent, too. She pushed me past them into the room. The minute I saw Will sitting on my bed I got scared. Candy stopped my chair in front of him, then went out, shutting the door.

  “You know it’s not good news, don’t you?” Will said.

  My heart was pounding. “Where’s Dad?”

  “He’s all right, he’s in Houston. You know Phi Point?”

  “Who?”

  “You know the bluff, off campus?”

  I nodded.

  “Two nights ago, Caldwell went out there with a couple of people. It was really foggy, and you know how that path is.”

  Our school, which was in the mountains, had famous fog, which could roll in with an almost liquid density and turn a clear afternoon to night in seconds.

  “They decided to hold hands on the way out to the rock, all three of them, in case somebody fell.”

  He looked at me matter-of-factly.

  “Caldwell got too close to the edge.” He waited. “His neck was broken when they found him.”

  I burst out laughing. Now I knew this wasn’t real.

  “Shut up!” he said. “I’m fucking serious!”

  That made me laugh even louder. How could anything else possibly happen to me?

  “You know, sometimes I really wonder.”

  I erupted again.

  “You’re an asshole,” he said, standing up. “Bye.” He left the door open as he stormed out.

  I didn’t go to the funeral. My therapists decided it could have a negative impact on my progress—one of them said it and the rest adopted the theme. I was named an honorary pallbearer.

  On the day of the funeral Will came to visit with a group of our old friends and fraternity brothers, people who had known Caldwell. As soon as they crossed the threshold, it became an exercise in endurance. I knew they could stay for only a minute, but it felt like an eternity. No one could understand me, and I felt more removed from my former life than ever. They didn’t know how far I’d come—I was now able to stand up for a full second under my own power—only how far I was from where I’d been. I wanted to say, Don’t mind this temporarily spastic and drooling bag of skin. I’m still me underneath, but I didn’t. I felt trapped in a costume I couldn’t even tell anyone was a costume. How could these be the same people I’d known, and thought knew me, acting as if I had entered a permanent state of otherness? One girl told me my eyes were so alive.

  Will was strangely silent throughout the visit. He seemed uncomfortable and anxious to go. Partly he was giving our other friends a chance to talk—not that anybody had much to say—and partly he was … I don’t know. He didn’t want to look too closely.

  “We need to head on back,” he said, before anyone else had suggested it. He looked at me. “You don’t care, do you?”

  15

  Will uses primarily his left hand, by habit, but he’s almost completely ambidextrous. He plays tennis left-handed, but he writes and plays Ping-Pong with his right. He can switch his dominant hand with relative ease, especially in tennis, something I was never able to do. Once, when his collarbone was broken, he beat Caldwell 6–0 while playing right-handed (and in dress shoes). For the first twenty years of our lives, that had been the only physical difference between us, apart from the hole in his heart, which no one could see. We were still the same internally in so many ways, I knew. But now we looked very different. Our twinship had been alter
ed.

  The kind of twins Will and I are—male-male monozygotic (two identical boys)—is the rarest form of twinship, statistically. There are more likely to be fraternal (or sororal) twins than identical, and there are more likely to be female identical than male identical. It’s also true that male-male identicals possess the highest overall degree of DNA overlap. We are the most identical. The reasons for these differences are poorly understood even by the scientists (just as we don’t understand why a certain tribe in Africa, the Yoruba, has an astronomically high twin rate—although in that case it may have something to do with a certain type of yam they eat). It’s accepted as a myth in the medical community that twins run in families, although there are plenty of examples to give the myth credibility. My uncle, my father’s older brother, had two sets of twins.

  I wrote that ours is “the rarest form of twinship,” but that should be changed to “the rarest form of relatively common twinship.” There are some extreme forms. Apart from conjoined twins—identicals born with their bodies fused—there are parasitic twins, where one twin dies in the womb and its body disappears into the other (often to reappear alarmingly later in life, in X-rays). There are also chimeric twins, where one twin disappears into the other but continues to live. This condition was discovered when doctors found that a woman did not share the DNA of a child she’d given birth to. It turned out that her lost twin’s womb had nurtured the baby. There exist “mirror image” twins, those who for unknown causes split apart later in the gestation process (a week after conception, say) and who, although they look alike, will possess curious asymmetric tendencies, opposite-handedness, the same birthmarks but on different sides of the body, even dramatically opposite temperaments. Finally, there are, weirdest of all, the varieties of “semi-identical” twins. These are twins who share their mother’s genes while each having the genes of a different father. It happens most frequently through a process known as superfecundation—the mother releases two eggs, and both get fertilized, at different times, by different men—but there’s another scenario, the weirdest of the weird, called sesquizygotism, which occurs when two sperm cells fertilize one egg, forming a curious three-part creature, a “triploid,” which then splits apart.

  Here’s what I find interesting about monozygotism, the kind of twinship Will and I possess. Monozygote: one zygote. The zygote is what we call the cell created by the sperm and egg, when they join. So, it’s postfertilization. It divides, in the case of twins, but before it divides, it exists there in the womb as an entity, the original zygote, the product of the man and woman. There was a moment before Will and I split apart that we were literally one being.

  In many ways, our relationship hasn’t changed since the wreck and stroke, and in some ways it has. We are no longer physically equal, but we are more open with each other than we used to be. My condition is a subject we can now joke about, to mutual amusement. Anytime there’s a disagreement between us about a fine point of memory, he will say, “That must have gotten lost in the dashboard.” Once a week, at least, I have dinner with him and his wife, Betsy, and their three girls.

  Betsy and I used to date as well, when we were in high school. My senior year. I’m used to it now, but I’ll admit, it was strange at first. Especially after they had kids, one of whom looks and acts more like me than like her father.

  I remember the afternoon he chose to tell me. It was about seven years after the stroke. A lot of time has gone by since then, and even more since high school. Will and I were over at my grandmother’s apartment watching television. When the show ended Will got up, stretched and yawned in an obviously voluntary way, and said he’d see me later. At the door he turned back like he’d remembered something.

  “You don’t care if I ask out Betsy, do you?”

  Silence. Everything around me seemed to drop. I tried to smile to show I wasn’t bothered. “Why?” I whispered.

  He noticed the effect of his words on me. “We’ve just been talking recently. I wanted to ask her out if you didn’t care. I won’t if you don’t want me to, but you know I wouldn’t care if it was you.”

  I took a deep breath. My mind went straight to the basest places: they’d been carrying on behind my back! But what Will had said was true—he wouldn’t care. That was just it. I would. I did.

  Later, when I’d gotten over the shock, I had another feeling, a sense that I was losing my individuality (a strange feeling for an identical twin to get from his brother). Betsy had been one of my last links to my former life. Will and I had always shared a lot of the same friends (though not all). We’d even dated the same girl before. But Betsy was part of the story of my life, not Will’s. I couldn’t understand how she could do this …

  “Look,” he said. “If you’re going to get pissed off and feel betrayed, fuck it.”

  “No, go ahead, go ahead. Why would I care? I don’t want to date her.”

  “You sure? You’d tell me.”

  I nodded.

  Along with the competitiveness that had always existed between Will and me, there was selfishness, I knew, in my stunned reaction. What right did I have to wish the two of them apart, especially when I had no intentions of my own? Betsy had just come out of a long relationship with my best friend throughout childhood, and that hadn’t bothered me. Why should this? And yet how could it not?

  I was as surprised as anyone at how quickly I warmed to the arrangement. Betsy and Will soon became the main people I hung around with, when I hung around with people. After all, she knew me better than almost anyone did—even better than some of my other family members—better than everyone except him. I suppose a person could say, What choice did I have? But the truth is I enjoy spending time with them, with people who know me well. I spend Christmases with them, I occasionally go on vacations with them. I love their children, their three daughters. The only time I ever saw Betsy get embarrassed, when the subject of our having dated came up (she would say she didn’t, but it looked that way to me), was when the girls found out and wouldn’t stop teasing us about it. They thought it was hilarious, but they seemed to have forgotten about it the next time I saw them. Still, Betsy is someone else I can trust implicitly. With her degree in accounting, and with a little help from Will, she even manages my money for me.

  16

  After three months the doctors started letting me go home for weekend days. The first outing was still a good week away when a skeptical excitement crept into my stomach. I had progressed by then to an electric wheelchair that I could power myself, and I could stand a little more, sluggishly shuffling back and forth from the bed to the door of my room. But I still couldn’t bend my right arm, and I couldn’t straighten the left. There’s a natural tendency in stroke patients for the damaged arm to pull in close to the body, so my left stayed a little crooked, and I would find myself becoming aware of it around other people, and self-consciously trying to straighten it. My legs remained abnormally weak. I would try to stand, and it felt like something was physically fighting me. In the chair I could get around, but I avoided using it as much as possible.

  “Now, you sure you’re ready for this, man?” Candy said as she maneuvered the chair up next to my bed that Sunday morning, leaning over it and moving it along with the joystick.

  I looked at her like she couldn’t be serious. Going home was the major motivation for me now. The idea I’d taken shelter in at first, that I would soon magically wake up and be fine, had faded by then—it was almost completely gone—but home was still home. It was comfort. That was changing, too, of course, the way it would have been for anyone my age. Home had become both a refuge and a confinement. But I also wouldn’t be going home in the same shape I’d been in when I left. I could no longer do the things I’d done last time I was there, and I knew this meant countless daily reminders of how much ground I had to make up. When I was in the hospital, it was possible to feel the stroke as part of the larger surreality of some exotic experience, but against the mundane backdrop of home, realit
y would be starker. Still, it was better. It was an escape. Or at least it was mine.

  My father came driving up right as Candy and I got outside. He stopped parallel to the sidewalk and turned off the engine. He then stepped out of the car with his wide, camera-ready smile. “Okay, boy, let’s get you home.”

  It was the first time I’d been in a car, as opposed to an ambulance, in over five months. There was nothing to remind me of my incarceration. Simply sitting upright in a normal car seat while moving through traffic gave me an unexpected sense of freedom.

  At home, while my father fumbled around getting the chair put back together, I saw that actually getting into the house was going to be a problem. The kitchen sat up about six inches higher than the garage.

  “Wait a second,” my father said. “Let me get that board we used for Amanda.”

  “No!” I said. “I don’t need it.”

  He looked at Candy and chuckled. “Just how do you plan on getting in the house, then?”

  Without answering I backed the chair up from the threshold. I motored forward again, hoping the momentum would carry me over, but I simply banged into the little step. I then turned around and backed my chair up to the step and, helping with my arms, lifted my feet out of the footrests. With my feet flat on the smooth concrete garage I tried to summon enough strength to push down and lift myself up and over. But since my chair was motorized, it was heavier than a regular wheelchair, and I couldn’t make it budge. After a few more tries, I conceded that I was going to need help. Yet when my father got behind me to push, I started screaming at him. I wanted Candy to push me, or rather, I didn’t want to give him and his assumptions the satisfaction.