Vanishing Twins

by Leah Dieterich

  We could also shut out the noise while we tried to work. It got particularly noisy at five o’clock on Fridays, when people gathered at the kitchen island to get drunk on agency-provided beer and wine, until they moved on, either to their homes if they had children, or to a bar to eat happy-hour appetizers and get drunker if they didn’t. Since Ethan didn’t drink, we never joined them. If we were working late, I’d often venture out into the kitchen, pour myself a whiskey, and bring it back to our office.

  “Just let me smell it,” Ethan said one night.

  I walked over to his desk and held the glass of whiskey under his nose. He closed his eyes and breathed in.

  After the painter came a sculptor. The painter stopped talking to Eric altogether. We chatted for an hour about this and other dramas at the residency. I felt guilty about instant-messaging with Eric when I was supposed to be working, but Ethan chatted with his wife just as frequently, and they lived together.

  “Do you have those headlines?” he asked without turning around. I remembered I’d promised him lines for a billboard, and told Eric I had to go.

  One last thing, Eric said. The sculptor had asked if he had condoms in his studio.

  LOL, I wrote back, though it did not correspond to actual laughter.

  Eric: I don’t know if I want to have sex with her or not.

  Me: You’ll know in the moment. Just go with the flow.

  Eric: And you’re ok with this?

  Instead of asking myself that question, I imagined Eric and I switching roles. In my head I told him I wanted to have sex with Elena, who was still in town for a few more days, and I gave the response I wanted to hear.

  Me: I’m fine. I love you, and the most important thing is that I know you love me more than anyone else.

  Eric: I feel the same way.

  Me: And that we make it all work somehow.

  I saw the quotation bubble appear to show that he was typing something, but then it went away. I waited. It reappeared, then went away again.

  Though I kept a journal during that summer, saved our emails and instant messages, I have no record of him telling me that he had sex with the sculptor. But I know they did. I recall him saying it wasn’t great and he didn’t plan to do it again. I find it odd that in all the correspondence I saved there is no confirmation of it after the fact. Only the foreplay.

  The next night, Elena and I parked the car on Cahuenga and walked down the alley hand in hand. I was aware of her gait next to me and compared it to my own. We were in sync, but I felt as though I were hovering above the pavement, as if it were snow with a fresh layer of ice on top. I didn’t want to crack the surface and make holes in it. I wanted to make myself light enough so that what was happening between us might go unnoticed by the universe.

  In the bar, we sat in a booth and peeled the labels off our beers. “I want to be physical with you,” she said.

  I laughed. I wasn’t sure if this was a too-literal translation from Spanish or just endearingly straightforward.

  “Don’t you?” she said.

  We drove to her cousin’s house where she was staying. The drive itself felt like a shrug. We said hello to the cousin and her husband and walked down the hall to his music studio, where they had put a mattress on the floor for Elena to sleep. We closed the door behind us and smiled. She laughed about the look they had given her, incredulous and admiring.

  She lay back on the mattress and I stretched myself out on top of her. Her belt buckle dug into my waist, so I rocked back onto my knees and took it off her. I rubbed my face against her stomach, pulling on her underwear with my teeth.

  I went running into the woods. I felt my way in, deeper still. I heard the sounds of animals panting and breathing, but I wasn’t scared. I was an animal too, and I was running. I was using all four limbs. The smell of moss and mushrooms filled my nostrils as I ran over felled trees and trickling streams, skidding across great swaths of marshy grass, tripping, sliding on my belly through the mud, chin lifted so I could breathe.

  We reached inside each other as though reaching into our mothers, trying to pull our long-lost twins out by the hand. Come! Come! Our voices echoed. I cannot face this world without you. The air is dry. The mirrors are glass. I need your gaze to show me who I am.

  Eric and I reassured each other that we weren’t being replaced. He made it clear that none of the women he’d been with compared to me. And since Elena was a woman and he was a man, the comparison was inherently more difficult.

  We tried to shift our discussions away from the things we were doing with other people to the things we wanted to do to each other when he got home. He told me a story about a group of women taking turns biting one of the men on his birthday, and said it was incredibly hot.

  I was surprised, because I remembered biting him once before, and being told I was too rough. It turned out the painter had bitten him too, and he’d liked it. I want you to bite my arms and shoulders, he said. I want a mark there. Or two.

  Despite our talk of mark making, I worried that once we were face-to-face, we would fall back into a pattern of being careful with each other. An infinity mirror of delicacy. We tried to preempt it with dialogue.

  Me: I want you to be a little less careful with me. That’s all.

  Eric: I can be firm. This experience has opened me up to that.

  He said with the women at camp he’d felt more wild, and we agreed that we wanted that for us, a more dangerous kind of passion.

  Eric: I felt like it was coming from me letting go and taking control.

  Letting go and taking control seemed at odds with each other, but it somehow made sense, that by letting go of control, you would be able to grab it.

  On Elena’s last night, I didn’t want to sleep over at her cousin’s because I had to be at work early. She asked to spend the night at my house and I obliged. I hadn’t wanted to have sex with her in the bed I shared with Eric, but I figured sleeping was okay, even though for me it almost felt more intimate than sex. But Eric had slept with the painter, I reasoned, even if it had been on a yoga mat.

  We didn’t actually sleep; we stayed up all night talking. In the morning, I asked to photograph her with a film camera and she posed at my dining room table. She put her elbows on it and rested her chin in one hand. Her face was three-quarters to the camera, but her eyes looked directly into the lens. I took a long time focusing, but she didn’t mind. She was calm and still, her eyes black and narrow.

  The taxi arrived and we kissed goodbye, knowing it could be the last time. Our tongues moved slowly. The driver waited. The morning sunlight streamed down my street, magnified by the haze. She opened the door to the taxi and closed it, waving. I remained in the street until it was out of sight.

  I walked back into the living room and it looked as it did on any morning, everything neat, all the chairs pushed into the table, except the one Elena had sat in. It was askew, open and casual, like uncrossed legs. Evidence of her absence.

  I wanted to place myself in that absence, so I put the camera on a tripod and tried to remember exactly where I’d stood to take her photo. I’d been in the doorway of the bedroom, looking out into the living room, and I’d steadied myself against the doorjamb. I pressed the shutter and took a picture of the empty chair. I set up a tripod, wound the film, set the timer, and ran to the chair, posing as close as I could remember to how Elena had posed.

  I dressed for work, and on my way there dropped off the film at the lab where I frequently took Eric’s. Maribel was working, the stylish Mexican tomboy I often chatted with when I brought in Eric’s film. She always had on colorful high-tops and wore her belt so the buckle rested over one hip, instead of over the fly. Now I realized how much she reminded me of Elena, or how much Elena reminded me of her. All three of us were the same height and weight—I could tell just by looking. I hoped she would be there when I returned later that day, but someone else was working when I picked up the negatives.

 
I’d been able to replicate the angle of the camera almost perfectly, so it looked as though Elena and I had sat for the portrait just minutes apart. Instead of both elbows, I only had one on the table, my other hand hanging at my side. The angle of my head was slightly different too. I’d cocked mine a bit more to the side, like a sad little dog tied up outside a store. The two photos were separated by a third of the empty chair. I emailed all three to her.

  I also sent her something concrete: a book of my unfinished short stories. Some were first drafts, some only a first paragraph, some trailed off midsentence. Earlier that year, I’d had the idea to turn my inability to finish any of my writing into a conceptual art project. I’d printed a few copies and called it Incomplet.

  A few days later, she emailed me a file: incomplete.mov. I didn’t know if it was a reference to my project or not, whether she’d added the e on purpose or by accident. It turned out to be neither; the book hadn’t yet made it to her in London.

  The film started on black, with the sound of percussion. Light grew from the bottom left corner, filling the frame and revealing the picture I’d taken of the empty chair. It was hazier than the actual image—she had put a filter on it, which gave it the appearance of being on an old television. After a few beats of music, Elena’s image materialized on the chair, like she was blood blooming through a bandage that had become saturated.

  Elena’s image disappeared and mine replaced it. Our legs were in the same place, and so were our torsos. The tiny shadow of an airplane arced across the wall behind me in the image, something she’d added in After Effects. My image disappeared from the chair, gone up in an invisible flame, leaving the empty space behind. I played it again and again, marveling at how the empty chair was no longer keeping us apart. Now it was a stage where we could perform our magic trick.

  Elena and I sent each other selfies every day. Hers always looked badass and boyish. She wore a baseball cap with the hood of her sweatshirt pulled over it, peering out from under the protective awning of her garments. I mimicked these photos and felt the same low twinge when I took them as when I received them. “I like you chico,” she said when she saw the photos. I loved that she could see me that way. A fellow tomboy.

  Despite this symmetry, I felt off-balance. The deeper I went into my new relationship with her, the more I worried about losing my old one with Eric. I took different selfies and sent them to him. I played up my femininity, conjuring the aloof poutiness of a model. The photos he sent back were similar, but of course they were not the same. His blue eyes stared back at me, his blond hair, his maleness. The twinge I felt was higher. It was my heart.

  I thought if Eric and I were clear like glass, we would not lose sight of each other. I strived for total transparency, total honesty, but it can be difficult to know if you are being totally honest. I gave him the closest thing I knew: the blow-by-blow, as they call it. It sounds like sex and war.

  I’m feeling a little obsessed with her, I told him.

  I know, he said. I have to say I’m a little concerned.

  Don’t worry, I said. It doesn’t change how I feel about you.

  I just don’t want you to leave me, he said.

  I don’t want to leave you, either.

  The residency was nearly over and Eric was surprised that almost no one had made any art. He’d thought it would be so productive, he said. While he hadn’t made anything that involved code, he’d experimented with painting and video, and had been productive in other ways, we agreed.

  Even if they weren’t making art, I figured I would. I wanted to make a video art piece, mainly so I could watch it, the way I’d studied the tapes of my ballet performances over and over.

  Watching myself on film was different from looking in a mirror. My mirror self was ever and always now, whereas the filmic me was caught in time. My filmic image seemed to have more autonomy; its movements on-screen were its own, unlike my mirror image, whose movements were just copies of mine.

  Perhaps this is what it’s like for a twin to see her sister from across the room at a party. To watch as she pours herself a glass of wine from a table of half-empty bottles and talks to a guy wearing a jean jacket with a hole in one elbow. She picks the skin on her thumb with her index finger, and then, finding that insufficient, pulls at the dry and ragged skin with her front teeth the way a dog pulls meat from a bone.

  I put on a lacy pink bra with a rigid underwire and a matching thong I’d received for my bridal shower. They’d sat at the bottom of my lingerie drawer for the last four years, too obvious to wear under clothing and too obvious to wear without. I felt less sexy in things I was supposed to feel sexy in. I felt most sexy in anything that was the opposite: my father’s old white undershirt, armpits yellowed from years of antiperspirant, and a pair of loose white pants I’d bought on sale that were two sizes too big. These clothes allowed me to focus on the way I felt in the world rather than how my body felt in the clothes.

  Inspired by Elena’s androgyny, I put on a pair of Eric’s jeans and one of his white collared shirts over the bra and thong. I set the camera up and stood in front of the shiny white folding doors of our bedroom closet. I unbuttoned the collared shirt, taking care not to be seductive. I did this by devoting the perfect amount of time to each button. I did not linger; I did not tease. I removed the shirt and dropped it to the floor. I did the same thing with the pants, and then I turned around to remove the bra and underwear, standing naked, with my back to the camera.

  I loaded the footage onto my computer, copied the clip, and reversed it. The movements seemed to happen of their own volition. Instead of my taking off the dress shirt and dropping it onto the floor, the shirt looked windblown as it leapt up from the ground and into my hand.

  I recorded my voice speaking a mantra from The Power of Now, which both Eric and I had begun reading, and reversed that too. In reverse it became another language, something I knew had meaning but was unintelligible to my ear.

  Taht ma I ro, siht ma I erofeb, ma I.

  In the final video, I laid the reverse audio on top of the normal video. The gibberish mantra over the gender-bending nonstriptease striptease. I went from masculine to feminine to just human. Once I was naked, the video played in reverse, and the audio in the proper direction.

  I am, before I am this, or I am that.

  It looped endlessly, the image and language in opposition.

  After meeting Elena, I spent a lot of time looking at Tumblr sites that collected photos of sexy androgynous people. Male models with long hair and high cheekbones. Short-haired girls with pretty faces and flat chests. It excited me to see the roles they had available to themselves, and the roles available to me in their presence.

  Back in the day, if they suspected you were dead, they’d put a mirror in front of your mouth, and if you fogged it up, they knew you were still alive.

  When I cut my hair short like Elena’s and dressed in boyish clothes, it was like seeing her when I looked in the mirror. I felt alive.

  “I like you chico,” I said to the mirror, giving voice to a part of myself that had long been silent.

  Ballerinas are silent. And they aren’t tomboys. The ballerina is the archetype of femininity: beautiful and controlled. Long hair coiled on top of the head, a tutu whose bodice is boned like a corset and whose skirt shows the legs, unblemished beneath pale pink tights, accented with satin shoes and ribbons. I was finally free of all that.

  In high school, Mr. Chang taught the ballet class called Partnering. His teaching style reminded me of the gymnastics coaches I saw on the Olympics. It was firm and physical, but somehow playful—a push here, a swat there—and rougher than Americans are comfortable with. Mr. Chang’s accent made him difficult for me to understand. The commands he barked sounded like proverbs. “Don’t be door. Be window.” He’d lightly slap our chins away if we looked at our reflections. “Don’t see mirror!” He wanted us to look at our partners, the boys who manipulated and spun us like tops. It
was almost impossible to avoid looking at the mirror, since it extended the length of the studio, from floor to ceiling. Nonetheless we were expected to ignore ourselves.

  Once we were onstage, we wouldn’t be able to peek at the mirror, so we might as well learn how these moves felt instead of how they looked. Later, feeling was all we would have. And I did know that onstage, when you weren’t looking at yourself, dancing could be truly transcendent. That was when the emotion happened. It was difficult to emote while watching yourself emoting.

  That summer, I logged countless hours in front of my computer, emailing, instant messaging, and video chatting with both Eric and Elena. During these video chats, I tried not to look at myself in the small square at the bottom corner of the video chat window. I tried to look into the face of the person I was talking to, but I often ended up directing my conversation at myself. Instead of seeing them, I saw my reflection. I tipped the screen back and forth, trying to find a flattering angle. There wasn’t one.

  When Eric returned from the wilds of the summer, I picked him up at the airport. It was strange to be in a car again, he said, as we sat in traffic for nearly twenty minutes just trying to exit the terminals at LAX. He hadn’t been behind the wheel for the entire summer, and had only been in a car once or twice.

  I’d warned him that I’d cut my hair, so he wouldn’t be surprised that it was the same length as his. Even though I’d been reveling in the ability to inhabit my more masculine self, I’d sent him pictures of me in lip gloss and a nautical striped shirt, my head tilted at pretty angles, styling myself into a Godardian gamine.

  It was clear that we were no longer the same two people who had driven to the airport three months earlier, and yet here we were, side by side, sharing the same air. Later, he’d tell me he couldn’t breathe that air. He was having a panic attack—his first, so he didn’t know what was happening. He kept it hidden so I had no idea. He was a good performer, my twin. Like a beautiful dancer, he didn’t let the audience know he was in pain.