by John Darnton
The path was crossed by another one, slightly wider, that veered off at an angle. He took it and followed it for a half hour or so, until he came to the meadow. He stood at the edge and stared—it looked unearthly and serene. The moon was out and it hung low in the sky, casting a ghostly glow upon the long yellow grass that waved in the breeze. Skyler stepped into the meadow and heard it rustling around him. As he walked, the straw brushed against his legs and he felt like a ship pushing through a golden sea. Except that his passage was hardly smooth—he stepped upon clumps of knotted earth and grass that made his ankles wobble and slowed his stride. Above his head, there was movement—angular forms zigzagging through the night air. Bats, swooping and dive bombing. He suddenly felt vulnerable, walking in the open in the moonlight, but gradually the fear melted away and he felt strangely disconnected, out of time. The feeling was opposite to the panic that had gripped him in the swamp. And he realized that some primal core where fear is born had been eviscerated, and that he no longer cared what happened to him.
On the far end of the meadow, he stepped into the woods and melted back into the shadows. He saw off in the distance the gleaming lights of the barracks. The windows appeared bright yellow in the darkness and, looking so warm and cozy, they beckoned him. He turned and moved in the other direction, stopping behind a tree to pick his route carefully, ten steps at a time, to the next tree, and listening intently. There was a cascade of noises, of buzzings and chirpings and croakings, but nothing more than that.
Soon he was on the path he knew well and that he could negotiate with his eyes closed—the path to Kuta's. Ahead was the darkened outline of the shack, and the window was lighted. He slipped around it and approached the water, shining in the moonlight. He saw something glimmer, a flash of metal. It was the outboard engine, still resting on the stump. But when Skyler walked over to the dock, he saw something that stopped him in his tracks. The boat was submerged a half foot under water, its rope emerging and still tied to the rail. He could see to the bottom of the boat, where there was a gaping hole near the stern, and near it a large rock.
He turned quietly and stared behind him. Now he saw that the front door of the shack was smashed inward, hanging by the upper hinge. Cautiously, he crept over, bent under the window and straightened up to look inside.
An Orderly was there! He was sitting on the bed, his back to Skyler. Even from behind, his thick neck and hunched back gave him a thuggish appearance. He sat there motionless, apparently waiting for someone—for me, Skyler realized.
He looked quickly around. Kuta was not there or at least not in sight. And everything seemed in place, except for the door and a rug that was crumpled in a corner.
He backed away quietly, then turned and ran. When he reached the woods, he kept running. So they've come. Someone did see me here earlier—Tyrone. But what did they do with Kuta? Did they hurt him? He feared the answer to the question. These people, whom he had known his whole life, whom he had trusted and even loved—they were monsters. They were capable of anything. But why? What are they after? And why would they kill Julia—what was it that she had discovered in the computer?
Self-preservation told him one thing—to flee. He heeded it, racing steadily along the path, like a hunted animal. He retraced his steps and came again to the lights of the barracks and then to the meadow, stopping on the edge to spy for signs of movement. His eyes crisscrossed the waving field, studying all the dark spots in the grass until he was satisfied it was empty. Then he examined the night shadows in the border of the woods on the other side, peering with his head slightly cocked to improve his vision. It looked safe and he took a stride forward.
Again, he felt a sudden rush of vulnerability once he was in the open, only this time it combined with a palpable fear and the sense that danger was close. He stopped for a moment to stare around and saw nothing and continued, rebuking himself for not skirting the meadow through the woods. His heart quickened and the alarm within sounded more urgently, so much so that he dropped to the ground and then slowly raised his head and looked in all directions. Still nothing—only the soft whispering of the long grass. The straw dug into his arms and stomach. The bats were gone, and the stars winked against black velvet.
He stood up and resumed his trek, now staring straight ahead and relying upon his ears to cover the rear. The fear rose again instantly and it turned to panic, and he found himself quickening his pace and then running flat out, though it was difficult to find footing through the clumps of earth. The more he ran, the more frightened he felt and the more he tried to shut out everything around him and concentrate upon a narrow tunnel straight ahead.
Then suddenly something rose on his right side, a shadow coming out of the grass. A flash of movement and then a sound, a low growling. He turned as he was running, just in time to see a furry body thrusting at him, teeth bared and glistening in the moonlight. It was a dog, swiveling in fury as it twisted in the air, coming at his throat. Instinctively, he turned his shoulder to it, hearing the growl turn deep and feeling a rip across his upper arm. He raised his hand, without thinking. From a distance, he watched as the hand moved up, bearing the knife, and the blade sank deeply into the fur. It went in right at the neck. The power of the animal's lunge carried it onward as the blade sliced the jugular, so that the dog continued to fly through the air and to bleed and lose life as it flew. When it landed in a heap in the grass, it was a dead weight. Its back legs twitched, its lungs heaved, and it gave out a thin groan. Blood gushed upon the grass.
Skyler stood back and stared in shock. He felt his shoulder—his shirt was ripped and his upper arm bleeding, but it looked like a scratch. He had been unbelievably lucky. He looked around, then turned again and ran as fast as he could, out of the meadow and into the woods.
He ran and ran until his lungs ached. He had recognized the dog, having seen the pack of them behind a chain-link fence in a kennel near the Orderlies' compound. It had been so quiet in its approach, it must have been stalking him. He wondered if there were others out there looking for him. If so, he had made their job easy; he had left his scent in a clear trail. He found a path and headed north, toward the forest, and slowed to a walk.
After fifteen minutes he came to another open field, this one long and narrow with the grass cut short. There was a large metal shed at the far end. He recognized it instantly—the air strip. But how had he come here? He must have been going the wrong way. Now he was totally confused, and he was too exhausted to figure out the right direction and make good his mistake by putting distance between him and his pursuers. He approached the shed. There was a small door in one side. He turned the handle, and was surprised when it opened.
Inside it was dark, but he felt a light switch and flicked it on. The long, sleek machine, the airplane, looked powerful and ready for flight, even at rest, its wheels lodged against wooden blocks and its nose pointing upward. The propellers were strapped to one side. He opened the metal door in the side of the craft, went back to turn off the light, and in the darkness felt his way. He climbed inside, closed the door behind him and felt a metal enclosure at the rear that had two small bags in it. He crawled inside and found a tarpaulin, which he pulled over himself like a blanket.
There, he collapsed, listening to his heavy breathing in the darkness. From time to time he felt sleepy, but he couldn't drift off—he would stiffen and raise his head with a snap because he thought he heard the sound of hounds baying. But he couldn't be sure. Was the baying real and, if so, was it getting closer or farther away? Or perhaps his fatigue was playing tricks on him and his mind was echoing the sound that had pursued him earlier in the day.
Chapter 8
"So where were we?" asked Tizzie, balancing the glass of chardonnay by the stem and peering into Jude's eyes.
"Well, let's see," said Jude, sipping a scotch and trying to sound business-like. "You were telling me about the Minnesota studies. After our meeting yesterday, I went to the library and read up on some of them."
"And?"
"And I see what you mean. They're addictive. I see why you scientists are attracted to them."
"Not just scientists—writers and poets, too. Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, for openers."
"I understand why. The stories are gripping—they're like tales from the Arabian nights. The one about the two separated Japanese brothers who both got tuberculosis and developed a stammer—"
"Kazuo and Takua."
"That's it. And one becomes a Christian minister and the other becomes a thief and goes to prison."
"And yet despite that, underneath they're both the same. Both were vacillating, weak-willed men who needed to submit to something that could impose discipline. They both gave themselves over to institutions that took over their lives."
"And Tony and Roger, the two who found each other after twenty-four years and moved in together and began dressing the same and acting the same, so that they practically merged into a single person."
"Talk about being weak. Neither felt complete without the other, and each of them tried to become the other."
This time, Jude was not using the tape recorder, only the notebook. He had wanted a more informal atmosphere—better for this kind of interview—and had suggested a drink after work. She had agreed. And so they found themselves sitting at an outdoor table at Lumi, a café restaurant on Lexington Avenue, on a balmy June evening. A breeze rustled the leaves of a maidenhair tree, which grew from a sidewalk plot of earth covered in posies and protected by iron wickets. A dachshund, tethered to a man wearing a blue suit and a red bow tie, sniffed it.
Tizzie was wearing a dark blue, double-breasted pinstripe suit. She did not have on a blouse as far as Jude could tell, which afforded him a perfect view of her collarbones and the pearl necklace. He had to admit, she looked good.
But he was here for work, he reminded himself.
"How do you explain the findings when it comes to personality?" he asked. "The fact that twins who are reared apart can turn out to be so similar."
"It's complicated. The literature's confusing. There was a seminal article by Bouchard in 1988, which set the groundwork. Basically, it compared identical twins raised separately and identical twins raised together, and concluded there were no substantial differences—they share more or less the same cluster of personality traits."
"There you go again—defying common sense."
"It gets worse. There are some studies that suggest that twins raised apart are actually more alike than twins raised together."
"More? How's that possible?"
She chuckled, took a deep sip and put her glass down.
"The best guess is that twins raised together sometimes go to great lengths to be distinctive, to appear more different than they are. They want to carve out their own identities, which is only natural. The emotional dynamic between twins growing up together is more complicated than we can ever imagine."
"But it's paradoxical. How can twins who haven't even laid eyes on each other until middle age be more alike than ones growing up in the same household? That contradicts what common sense tells us—that character is forged by experience, by family and upbringing."
"I admit it's a lot to swallow. Can it be that all that stuff—families, home life, schooling—doesn't really carry much weight in the final analysis? Doesn't it matter whether we have parents who love us uncritically or freeze us out, siblings who support us or undermine us, grandparents who pass on traditions and values or who are in the grave? Doesn't any of that shape us irrevocably?"
"It has to. I have to think two people in the same environment have a better chance of turning out similar. Think of all the influences—going to the same kindergarten, hearing the same Sunday sermons, being subjected to the same mother hugs and the same whacks of the belt from dad. Doesn't all that count?"
"So you'd think," she said. "The alternative is that all that is minimal in terms of forming our character. In a determinative sense, who we are depends upon other variables."
"Such as?"
She sipped her wine. "There are two possibilities. One is that personality is much more genetically determined than we give it credit for, that it unfolds more or less on its own, like film pouring off a spool. That's a kind of frightening hypothesis, because it doesn't allow much room for change or variation—what we like to think of as free will."
"And the other?"
"Simply that we haven't identified the formative variables. Maybe they are experiences so profound and basic to early childhood that they supersede the influences we usually point to. Maybe different ways of delineating the self. Or coping with loss or coming to terms with death. Or maybe something in the mind and the way it interacts with the outside world, something in how we process experience. Outwardly, things could appear very much the same for any two people. But inwardly, internally, the two might be living in two completely separate and disengaged universes. For them, life could never be remotely comparable."
Tizzie raised a finger and poked an ice cube.
"I don't know if you've known identical twins. Most people have. And the remarkable thing is that, though they do look the same, once you know them you can always tell them apart. They are truly very different as people. And of course there's one bit of good evidence to back that up."
"Which is...?"
"Which is that while it's clearly possible to fall in love with one twin, I don't know of anyone who's fallen in love with both. Spouses of identical twins make for a good talk show—how do you fight down your attraction to the other one, that sort of thing. But it doesn't happen much in real life. The more interesting question—from the point of view of what we can learn from research—is to look at it from the twins' point of view. Are identical twins, those raised apart, attracted to the same type of person?
"When it comes to their love lives, there are a lot of coincidences. They'll start dating about the same time, have the same sexual hang-ups and dysfunctions, get divorced a comparable number of times, even—if they're women—start their periods at the same time. But the choice of a mate is still elusive. The jury's out on that one. One study done at Minnesota seems to suggest that the spouses end up being wildly different. On the other hand, you hear some interesting stories of mental swapping—maybe it just means that love is still a mystery after all."
Jude looked at her glass, which was empty. She followed his gaze, gave him a quizzical nod, then caught the eye of the waiter and ordered another wine and another scotch.
"There's so much that's unexplained in this field," she continued. "I suppose that's why I like it. We're still at the stage of asking basic questions. Fraternal twins, for example—we all know that they happen when two separate eggs get fertilized at the same time. But did you know that even they share a number of physical traits, more than ordinary siblings—that their teeth are more symmetrical, for one thing. Why in God's name should that be true?
"In some cases, maybe they come from a single egg that splits before fertilization. We don't know. We don't even really know why twins occur to begin with—what is it that causes two eggs to drop or one egg to break apart. But we do know—now, at least—that it occurs much more often than anyone suspects."
"What do you mean?"
"Now that we have ultrasound to record early pregnancies, we've learned that double pregnancies happen many, many more times than the results suggest. About one in ninety live births produces twins. But, believe it or not, about one in eight of all pregnancies start out with twins."
"That's amazing."
"It is. You talk to gynecologists these days, and you hear some interesting tales. One day a woman comes in, he examines her with ultrasound, and she's bearing two tiny embryos. A month later, she's back and there's only one."
"The other one died."
"Right."
"So a few of us had brothers or sisters in the womb we never even knew about."
"More than just a few. Estimates are that between ten to fifteen percent o
f us so-called singletons began life in utero with a sibling snuggling up to us or fighting with us or kissing us—all of which goes on there, by the way."
"We're just the ones who won out."
"Yes. The great Darwinian struggle. It begins with the sperm swimming up to the ovum, but it doesn't end there. It goes on during pregnancy."
"Incredible."
"But true. It's been happening since time in memoriam, but of course no one ever realized. One week the mother-to-be has a little extra blood, doesn't think much of it, and that's it—it's over before it's even had a chance to start, so to speak. There's a word for the phenomenon."
"What?"
"Vanishing twins."
Jude wrote it down.
"Vanishing twins. I like that. Talk about drama."
She looked at him intently and continued. "An awful lot of people have a vague notion that they might have had a twin somewhere along the line. Nothing they can pin down—just this sense that somewhere out there is—or was—someone they were incredibly close to. In a few cases, they turn out to be right—unbeknownst to them, a twin was separated out and reared somewhere else. In the other cases... who knows? Maybe a prenatal memory. There's no reason your brain can't register something inside the womb as well as outside.
"Incidentally," she went on, "I can't help noticing, you take notes with your left hand. You are, obviously, left-handed."
"Yes, so what?"
"Interesting."
"What's interesting about it?"
"Not to put too fine a point on it," she replied, "but I was just thinking—there is, you know, a higher incidence of left-handedness among twins. In fact, it may be only a matter of time until someone comes along and claims that every left-handed person is the mirror image of a vanished twin."
