One Brother Shy

by Terry Fallis

  “No. But I’m starting just after I drop you off.”

  “Okay, but you must keep me up to speed. I can help. You may know that I’m good with computers and the interwebs and such,” she said.

  Yes, you are. I’ve seen your work. You’re funny, too.

  I smiled.

  “I know. I will.”

  When I pulled up in front of the Facetech office building, she turned to face me and put one hand on my shoulder. I looked at her hand and then at her.

  “Sorry, people say I touch too much. I can’t help it. I’m a tactile person. I touch people. It’s what I do,” she said.

  Touch away. I seem to find myself liking it. Not sure what that means.

  “It’s fine. Um…it’s kind of nice.”

  “Are you okay? You know, I could turn my routine dentist’s appointment into a full-on emergency root canal,” she offered. “It could happen, you know.”

  “I’m okay. Thanks for coming.”

  It really meant a lot to me that you were there.

  “It really meant a lot to me that you were there,” I finally said, being sure to lift my eyes to hers when I spoke.

  She smiled, patted my shoulder, and stepped out of the car. I stayed in the car, and exhaled.

  I watched her walk into the building. At the door, she turned and waved before disappearing inside. I’m pretty sure she’d taken it upon herself to fix me, but even so, it felt good. Scoring the trifecta, a car horn honked in my direction for the third time in the last twenty minutes or so. I waved an apology to the driver behind me and started for home.

  I wasn’t sure entering my apartment would ever feel the same again without my mother in it. I’d had plenty of time to prepare for the inevitable, yet it was still surprising to arrive home and be alone. You can intellectualize the situation as much as you want – and I did quite a bit of that, thank you very much – but it still hadn’t fully prepared me for the reality of her sudden absence. But in one sense, through her loss, I had gained a twin brother. It was time to find him, if I could.

  I didn’t really know how or where to start the search. I called the Ottawa Civic Hospital where I’d, or rather, we’d, been born nearly twenty-five years ago. It took a while to get anywhere. I finally reached someone in hospital records. It was a very simple question.

  “My name is Alex MacAskill. I was born on December 23, 1990 at the Civic. My mother’s name is, was, Lee MacAskill. This may sound odd, but I’d like to know if my mother gave birth to identical twin boys that day.”

  “Don’t you already know?” the woman asked.

  If I knew the answer, why would I be asking? I have other things I could be doing, like flossing, or baking a cake, or building an ant farm. Lots of things.

  “No. You see, I’ve just discovered that I may have an identical twin and I’m trying to confirm it,” I explained.

  I heard her working a keyboard for a few minutes, before silence prevailed.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not able to disclose that information except to the patient. Protection of patient privacy is a very big deal here.”

  The patient would be my mother, and I’m pretty sure she already knows the answer to my question.

  “You mean, you can only disclose it to my mother?”

  “If the patient, Lee MacAskill, is your mother, then yes.”

  Past tense. Was my mother.

  “She died, Tuesday morning.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  “So as her only next of kin, can you now tell me instead?”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t,” she replied. “The privacy laws are clear on this. But you can appeal this decision to the hospital ombudsman, if you wish. But I can tell you she’ll not bend the rules on something like this. There’s not much wiggle room here.”

  We had a brief discussion about wiggle room but I was getting antsy on the phone so I thanked her and hung up.

  I then searched online for late December 1990 birth announcements in the Ottawa Citizen. Just having submitted Mom’s obituary the day or so before, it was a little strange to be now searching birth announcements. The Citizen gets you coming and going, literally cradle to grave. It took a little mouse manipulation, but I eventually found my own birth announcement. It was just for one baby boy.

  Lee MacAskill is proud to announce the arrival of her son, Alex MacAskill, 8 lbs, 6 ozs, born the night of December 23rd, 1990. Heartfelt thanks to Dr. Millar and the nursing staff at the Civic.

  Short and sweet. There were no other likely brotherly candidates among the birth announcements for that entire week. So I went online and tried to track down a certain obstetrician named Dr. Millar. It didn’t take long to find him. The search engine spit back several pages of “Ottawa, Ob-gyn, Millar” hits. The first entry was his obituary from 2013. So far, my search was going exceedingly well. I might have had better luck finding my bro by staking out crowded intersections and scanning pedestrians’ faces.

  I checked my email and found one new message from Laura Park. Knowing what it was, I clicked it open anyway.

  TO: Alex MacAskill

  FROM: Laura Park

  RE: You know

  Hi Alex,

  Sorry, but I’m trying to balance perseverance and pestering.

  Not sure if I’m succeeding. Please, I want to write about your story. I know it was a long time ago, but I also know how others have been affected by similar experiences. I think you might benefit. It might even help you put it behind you. I know from interviewing others who knew you then and were there that night that it had a profound effect on you. This might help. Could we talk, please?

  Laura

  I deleted her email. It was not the first time, and would probably not be the last.

  —

  Malaya arrived in the early afternoon. We tagged for old time’s sake when she came in the door. She saw that I was busy working on my computer at the kitchen table, so she made the bathroom the goal of her cleaning mission. I didn’t see her again for two hours. Pungent chemical scents wafted through the apartment. They effectively cleared out my sinuses while Malaya cleaned the bathroom. At about 3:30, my MacBook Pro and I moved to the living room couch so that Malaya could bring her frenzied cleaning road show to the kitchen. Not only did she sterilize the cupboards and counters, but she also broke out the oven cleaner and deployed antibacterial wipes against every square millimetre of refrigerator real estate, inside and out. It’s a wonder neither of us passed out from the fumes. Actually, I may have passed out briefly at one point.

  We had dinner together at the table at 5:30. For both of us, it had been our first real meal of the day. Chicken pot pie. We needed it. Both of us.

  “My supervisor called me yesterday,” Malaya said between mouthfuls. “With Mrs. MacAskill…you know, gone, I’ve been assigned to a new patient. I must start there on Monday. It’s a little closer to where I live, but it’s not the same.”

  “I know. She called and left a message here saying the same thing,” I replied. “And that’s just fine, Malaya. I’ll be fine. You’ve done wonderful work here, and I’m grateful – so was my mother – but it’s time. Maybe your new patient will be friendly and interesting.”

  She nodded. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and brought her napkin up to her face.

  “It’s okay, Malaya,” I said in a spasm of originality. “It’s okay.”

  “I don’t usually feel so bad when a patient dies. There have been five other patients I’ve worked with who have died, and I was a little sad, but I was okay. Your mother was different.”

  “Yes, she was.”

  Malaya gave me a hug when she left and we even tagged one more time out in the corridor to close the circle. She was a little weepy as she disappeared into the elevator, and I may have been a bit, too.

  Back to work. I thought about calling Melany Franken for advice on my search but ultimately decided against it, largely because it was well past quitting time when it occurred to me. I was ab
out to pump the surname “MacAskill” into Google and start wading through the thousands of pages of entries, when I kicked myself. Obviously, my twin brother would not have my surname, if he were even alive. All I really had to go on was that he was born on December 23, 1990, in Ottawa.

  Given its mass popularity, I tried Facebook next. I used the online community’s help functions, with some assistance from Google, and learned that I could actually search Facebook by birthdate. So I plugged in December 23, 1990, and started to scan the results. It was a little like sipping from a water cannon. I tried to refine my search parameters to make it easier – like limiting it to males, born in Canada, who looked just like Ottawa’s very own Alex MacAskill – but there were serious limitations on the search function. Even excluding all those born on December 23 in a year other than 1990 seemed impossible. I gave up after marvelling at how many people in the world began their lives two days before Christmas as I had. Of course, it only found people who had included their birthdate in their Facebook profiles, and lots didn’t. To make matters worse, I was also out of luck if no profile photo had been uploaded. Obviously, I needed to see the person to know.

  It was a little like scouring the world for exactly the right haystack – and let me remind you, there are millions of gigantic haystacks from which to choose – and only then beginning the search for the teeny tiny needle hidden somewhere inside. And even if I somehow found that teeny tiny needle, it might very well draw blood. In short, winning the lottery three times in a row offered much better odds.

  At 10:30, I realized I was ravenous, again. You wouldn’t think scrolling through thousands of Facebook profiles until you were bug-eyed could lead to hunger, but there you are. I ordered a pizza, which seemed easier than reheating the leftover chicken pot pie. After all, the phone was in reach, but the fridge and microwave were a good four strides away.

  I ate in front of the TV. SportsCentre brought me up to date on all the scores and highlights from the night in Major League Baseball. The playoffs were just around the corner and my Blue Jays were in the hunt. But I couldn’t focus on baseball. I guess when your mother dies, and you’ve discovered after nearly a quarter-century on the planet that you have an identical twin brother, it doesn’t just bring perspective, it inflicts perspective. Baseball, even the Jays reaching the postseason, didn’t seem to matter so much any more.

  I turned off the television, shoved the two remaining pieces of pizza into the fridge, and returned to the world of Facebook. It was really all I had to work with. At 2:45 a.m., I pushed back from my kitchen table and shuffled into the bathroom, overcome with the futility of it all. There must be a better way. I turned on the light. Every surface in the bathroom shone so much it hurt my eyes. It was as if I’d stumbled onto a TV set in mid-take. I could even see myself, in considerable detail, reflected in the lustrous floor. It would have to last for a while. Malaya’s magic would not be returning to these parts any time soon.

  I splashed some water on my face to sweep out the cobwebs and looked at my reflection in the mirror. My long hair hanging well below my ears, I looked like I was pining for the 1970s. I’d often tried to grow a beard. Nothing alters your appearance like a beard, so I really threw myself into the effort. But I simply couldn’t do it. I could get a nice set of mini-muttonchops going, but there was a spot along my jawline on both sides that steadfastly refused to sprout hair of any kind or colour, to connect my sideburns with my chin spinach. So no beard.

  I stared at myself for a long time. I was just lowering my eyes when the answer hit me like a runaway train. I am an idiot! I shoved a hairbrush and my MacBook Pro into my backpack, grabbed my car keys, and bolted out the door. Why had I not thought of it sooner? Why? I literally slapped the side of my own head while in the elevator. It hurt more than I’d intended, but I guess I deserved it.

  It was strange driving through Ottawa in the middle of the night. The nation’s capital is pretty quiet in the evening, let alone in the wee hours of the morning. I was nearly alone on the roads. I made it to my office in seventeen minutes flat, including waiting for a particularly long red light. In the elevator, the little news monitor mounted near the ceiling told me it was 3:06 a.m. I should have been dead tired. I had been dead tired not that long ago. Now I was wide awake. Too-much-caffeine-awake. Fallen-through-thin-ice-awake.

  When the elevator opened, I walked right past the Facetech doors and into the men’s room. The lighting inside was quite good, though the surfaces weren’t nearly as polished and bright as in my own post-Malaya bathroom. I stood face-on to the mirror and raked my hair until there was some semblance of order. Then I grabbed my iPhone, opened the camera app, and took several shots of me in the mirror. For some, I held the camera below my face shooting up, for others I elevated it and shot downwards, always leaving my face unobstructed. Then I took my brush and parted my hair in the middle. I took more photos. Then I parted my hair on the opposite side from my traditional look and took more shots. I went through the same routine again – you know, left part, centre part, right part – but this time, I brushed my hair back behind my ears to at least simulate a shorter cut. More photos. I even wet my hair and slicked it straight back and flat against my head. It looked ridiculous, but I wanted to cover all my bases. Click, click with the camera. Finally, I turned slightly and took a bunch of off-centre, angled shots. I probably snapped a couple of dozen photos.

  My security card let me in through the office back door that opened into the staff kitchen. It was very dark inside. I used the flashlight app on my iPhone to make it to my cubicle. I slipped my laptop into the docking station on my desk and my very large Apple monitor burst bright to life giving me all the light I needed. I unlocked my drawer and pulled out my Samsung Portable SSD T3 hard drive and plugged it in to my MacBook Pro. The three terabyte hard drive held the still-not-quite-yet-beta version of Facetech Gold, our latest and greatest facial recognition software. It was still too secret to run from our servers, hence the portable hard drive in my locked drawer.

  Traditional facial recognition software is designed to identify similarities and differences across various facial features. Our faces have certain markers, or landmarks, that are distinguishable. Software is used to compare faces, measure certain point-to-point distances, put it all together, and declare whether the “base face” is the same as or different from test faces. Some of these defined measurements are the distance between the eyes, the width of the nose, the length of the jawline, and the depth of the eye sockets. Some software also assesses the shape of the cheekbones. These distinguishing features are often called nodal points. Most experts agree that there are about eighty nodal points in each human face. Too much information? I don’t think so. Bear with me. In an ideal world, the systems work best when the photos are taken head on, with good lighting, and very little facial expression. Current facial recognition software just isn’t that effective. There are too many variables and too many limitations.

  Not to sound like an infomercial, but at Facetech, we’ve refined the software to the point where we can examine about 120 nodal points with more precise measurements of other features never before included in similar software. We’ve also figured out how to accommodate varying lighting levels and face angles. Our estimates suggest that when it’s ready for prime time, Facetech Gold will deliver a 40 per cent improvement in results. So it’s a big deal in our world.

  I moved all my bathroom mirror portraits from my iPhone to my laptop. Then I opened our software and spent several minutes uploading the photos to the Facetech Gold platform. I started by designating the first shot as my “base face.” I was anxious as my cursor hovered over the big green Start button. I hesitated, just to let the significance of the moment hang in the air around me. What appeared on the screen in the next few moments could change everything. I clicked and a cartoonish face spun on the screen as our new software did its thing. In short, it was pawing through all the photos of faces on the Internet, comparing them to the base face I�
�d uploaded, and then spewing out the photos of those that matched and their respective URLS where they were found. It took a few minutes to do all of this. I know that doesn’t seem like much time to accomplish such an extraordinary feat, but our goal was to turn minutes to seconds. And we were nearly there.

  The whirling face vanished and the results screen appeared. I think I stopped breathing at this point, but even without respiration, my eyes and hands still worked. I looked at the photos and web addresses arrayed on the screen. I was an engineer. I did things methodically and logically, even when searching for my twin brother. I started at the top and worked my way down the list. A header line indicated that there were thirteen photos that “matched” the base face, or in this case, my face. I soon discovered that there weren’t thirteen different photos. The first photo had come up ten times. It was a shot of me taken at the Facetech booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a year earlier. I didn’t even know the photo existed, but I remembered well the few days I had to suffer in our booth on the vendors’ trade show floor. I hated every minute of it. So many people. And I had to speak to them like it was something I didn’t mind doing. I was miserable. I wore a Facetech ball cap the entire time. The photo shows me being miserable, my bright red Facetech golf shirt and ubiquitous CES Vendor lanyard around my neck. But that aside, the software worked. It found me.

  And there were two hits on a photo taken at a Facetech retreat at Chateau Montebello a couple of months ago. It was a group shot of a team bonding exercise everyone else had enjoyed and I had endured. There was Abby standing next to me, beaming. I looked like I’d just eaten a rotting prawn. Obviously, four of my colleagues in the shot had posted the photo to their Facebook walls. I had not. I had no Facebook account in my own name and no plans to start one. But several years ago I had opened a phantom account under an alias that allowed me to browse and search. I’d never posted anything.

  Finally, there was a single positive result on a photo in someone’s Flickr account taken at an Ottawa Senators hockey game. This one really showed the power of Facetech Gold. It was a selfie of a family of three ardent Senator fans taken by the father. There I was, two rows back and just barely in the shot, turned away from the family and watching the play on the ice. Even so, it came up as a match.