The Experiment

by John Darnton

  Jude stepped closer.

  There was a hint of movement in the darkness, more rustling, and then suddenly and all at once, a person materialized and stepped forward into the glare of the light from a dangling cord.

  Jude was transfixed, struck dumb.

  Before him stood a quivering tramp in rags, his long hair matted and falling to his shoulders. But there was no question—take away all that and it looked like Jude himself, almost exactly like him. It was his double, though oddly youthful despite the grime upon the face.

  Then it spoke.

  "Don't hurt me. Please don't hurt me."

  The voice was shaking, scared. It carried an odd accent, slow and Southern-sounding, but unlike any Jude had heard before. And what really struck Jude was the timbre of the voice—it sounded just like the tapes he had heard of his own interviews. It sounded just like himself.

  Chapter 13

  "What's your name?"

  It was such a basic question that Jude felt stupid for not asking it earlier. Certainly he was not thinking clearly. He was still reeling from the first sight of Skyler, this apparition that seemed like a nightmarish version of himself, all bony and straggly-haired like some Old Testament prophet come to preach Armageddon.

  Nothing had fully prepared him for the shock of standing face to face with someone who looked so much like him—not the rumors and talk, not even the brief sighting outside the bookstore. Yes, he had been perplexed and intrigued by all that, but he hadn't seriously contemplated the reality that he had a double and that the double would one day step out of the shadows of the stairwell and sit down in his living room.

  He kept staring at the mouth, the chin, the nose, the eyes. They looked just like his own. How can this be?

  It was impossible. Yet it was real.

  "Your name. What's your name?"

  Jude repeated the question to the pathetic-looking figure perched on the edge of his couch, as he had had to repeat various other questions over the past twenty minutes. So far the double had done little to shed light on the enigma of his appearance.

  "Skyler."

  "Skyler? Is that your first or your last name?"

  A look of bewilderment.

  "Do you have parents? Brothers or sisters? Do they have the same name?"

  Jude was feeling exasperated, and his interrogation was taking on a hard tone—probably not a good idea, he thought.

  "No."

  "Then let's assume it's your first name. How about a second name? Do you have any other name?"

  Skyler hesitated, but only a moment. He was thinking.

  "I guess you could say. Jimminy. We were all called Jimminies."

  "Who is we?"

  "All of us in the Age Group. On the island."

  "What island? Is that where you come from? What's the name of the island?"

  Again came that look of bewilderment, descending like a curtain.

  "We didn't call it anything. We just lived there."

  "What state was it in? What country? Is it America? Are you American?"

  Skyler shrugged.

  "I think so."

  "Think so! Jesus Christ. How is it possible to grow up and not even know what the hell country you're in?"

  The truth was, Skyler was wondering the same thing himself. He was also feeling wary. With good reason, for all he knew. He was not as shocked as Jude was to see a double of himself—the thought of finding Jude had been the sole purpose for coming to New York, and he had been searching for him for almost two weeks. Still, he recalled the jolt when he'd first set eyes on him in person as he was hiding behind a stoop across the street. Jude had stepped out of the door and there he was—someone who looked virtually identical and even had the same way of walking.

  Skyler had every reason to proceed cautiously. He knew as little about Jude as Jude seemed to about him. Who was to say what role Jude had played in the terrible events on the island? Did Jude have any connection to the Lab or to Dr. Rincon? And what if he was in some way responsible for the death of Julia—the memory of which cut into Skyler afresh every time he thought of it, like the knife cutting into Rincon's portrait.

  Skyler had contemplated the unknown Jude during the bus trip north, as he'd stared out the window at the converging roads and railroad tracks. It had been a harrowing trip. The names of the cities and towns had come and gone in a mindless profusion. He'd sat glued to the window; there'd been a flow of frigid air from the vents around it, which made him shiver nonstop. Next to him had sat a succession of outsiders and rejects, some garrulous and others frighteningly taciturn, lost souls all. Late one night, when the overhead lights were extinguished, a man with tobacco on his breath had reached over and touched his leg, and Skyler had pushed him away and had to change seats.

  He had had no idea what he would discover in Jude, provided he succeeded in finding him—whether he would be a friend or an enemy. Then had come more than a week of hellish days and nights in the city, scrounging for food and sleeping in Central Park. He'd tracked Jude down when a bum on a park bench had told him he could look him up in the phone book. Other than that, no one had spoken to him; he was an alien. It would not have surprised him if people had begun to stone him. He became desperate. He saw an ad for the book signing, but had gotten frightened when he saw Jude close up. He'd waited outside the building on East Seventy-fifth Street and slipped inside behind another resident and hid in the stairwell. Throwing himself on Jude's mercy had been a branch grasped by a drowning man.

  There was, too, something else. Skyler had seen Jude being followed by the Orderlies. He was thunderstruck with fear when he saw them—and he rapidly deduced that they must be looking for him—but it was at least somewhat reassuring to see them on the trail of his double. They would hardly be doing that if they were all in league together. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, Skyler reasoned, and so he decided for the moment to trust Jude—but only up to a point.

  Jude tried to pry out more information. "How did you find me?"

  "I tracked you down."

  "But I mean: how did you know about me?"

  "I saw an ad in the newspaper. For your book."

  "Where did you see the newspaper?"

  "In a place called Valdosta."

  "Hallelujah. At last, a name."

  Jude fixed his uninvited guest a meal of leftovers from the refrigerator, some chicken wrapped in tin foil, rice in a plastic bowl and salad. Skyler ate ravenously, chewing with his mouth open and hunched over the plate with his elbows on either side, as if protecting it. Jude recoiled from the sight at first and then became fascinated, watching wordlessly and examining him closely from top to bottom. He took in the dirt tracing the wrinkle lines, the leather skin, the foul-smelling oversized pants, the hair on the back of his head encrusted with mud.

  He had to admit, he was fascinated. His guest did look an awful lot like him—except younger perhaps, definitely younger. It was hard to tell under all that dirt. And there were a number of little gesticulations and mannerisms that they had in common, tics almost, which he had already noticed. When Skyler had looked at him searchingly a few moments back, he had tilted his head ever so slightly to one side, the way Jude was wont to do. And standing in front of the kitchen table, before sitting down to eat, Skyler had rested with his weight on one leg, the left leg, which was a stance that Jude often adopted—he had even had that pointed out to him once by a woman who had found it sexy.

  But did Skyler look enough like him—to what?... be a relative, a brother perhaps or even something closer? Jude knew that in the back of his mind, he was toying with one outlandish possibility—that this person stuffing his face at the kitchen table was nothing other than a long-lost twin. That was, he had to concede, one conceivable explanation, and it had the virtue of providing a rational explanation for what he saw with his own eyes. Occam's razor, they called it in science, the principle that the simplest hypothesis is the best to account for an unexplained phenomenon. And this was certainly an une
xplained phenomenon.

  But was it really possible? On the one hand, Jude thought, such things happened. In fact, coincidentally—almost too coincidentally—he had just written an entire article on the subject. And, after all, Jude knew almost nothing about his own childhood or his parents; they had been members in that cult. It was not altogether inconceivable to imagine that his mother had given birth to twins and that the infants had been torn apart by happenstance—perhaps even by the command of the cult leader. If ever there was a candidate for this kind of stupefying twist of fate, it was Jude. Vanishing twins—that was the catchphrase Tizzie had used. How strange it was that he had just learned it.

  On the other hand, maybe the whole thing was just an amazing accident, some bizarre confluence of chance that defied the laws of probability. Maybe they weren't related. Maybe they just happened to look an awful lot like one another. Was that out of the realm of possibility? What were the odds that two people born of different parents in different parts of the world could end up looking the same? Jude was not ready to dismiss that hypothesis, but he had to admit that the more he examined Skyler, the more he inclined to the proposition that they were, in fact, twins. Strangely enough, he seemed to feel the truth of that inside him, a subliminal knowledge that had always been there, the same way he'd felt a shock of recognition when Tizzie had suggested his left-handedness could mean that he had shared the womb with someone else.

  The dawning possibility made Jude feel guilty for thinking bad thoughts about Skyler. He did look repulsive, the way he ate. And he appeared hopelessly clueless, way out of his depth. Even accepting that somehow they were separated twins, Jude couldn't help wondering where Skyler had been raised, that he had grown into such an ignorant creature. That mystery, Jude told himself, was well worth solving, and he suspected that if he could just find the key, it would also open the door to his own lost childhood.

  Jude went to a cupboard, pulled out a bottle of scotch and poured himself a full glass. He took a gulp, then sipped it reflectively while waiting for Skyler to finish.

  "Let's take it from the top," he said finally, handing Skyler a napkin to wipe his face. "How old are you?"

  Skyler looked him directly in the eye—for the first time. He seemed calmer and better disposed after eating.

  "Twenty-five or so."

  "Or so?"

  "It's a difficult question, because we didn't have birthdays. We tried to keep track on our own, us Jimminies. But I can't be exact. I know I'm about twenty-five."

  "But you could be older?"

  "I could be, but I don't think so."

  "You didn't count the years?"

  "We counted the years, but not from the beginning. And as I said, we didn't mark birthdays. We were told that aging was not a natural process to be celebrated—on the contrary, it was something to struggle against, to overcome with the help of science."

  "Who told you that? Your parents?"

  "No. None of us knew our parents. We were told that we belonged to the Lab, and in particular to Dr. Rincon and to his servant, Baptiste."

  "Can you tell me everything you know about these people?"

  And so, with a scarcely audible sigh that amounted to a figurative toss of the dice, Skyler began the lengthy narrative of his life. He told of his earliest memories on the island, of growing up with only a dim, half-formed idea of life on "the other side," of taking the goats to pasture and running through the woods with Raisin, and going to the lecture hall on campus for science lessons. He told of Baptiste's lectures and Dr. Rincon's law, and how the Lab detested religion and believed in extended life and a new age, the dawning of rational, scientific living. He also told about the Orderlies and about Kuta and his own special education in his shack and his growing doubts and fears. And finally, he told of his escape.

  He mentioned Raisin's death and Patrick's death, but he did not go into detail, and he spoke not a word about Julia. She was his and his alone; the love that had defined his life for so long was private, and that loss was not for the sharing.

  Jude was far from satisfied. Too many questions were bouncing around in his brain, and he had been at pains to hold himself quiet until Skyler finished his story, loath to break the spell now that he was finally learning some basic facts. Then he forgot some of the questions. He had refilled his glass three times and found that his initial shock at seeing Skyler was now padded with numbness. He was not thinking altogether cogently.

  "This Rincon—what was he like?"

  "He was a demi-god." He had heard that expression on television once. It seemed to fit.

  "Did you ever see him?"

  "No. He came to the island once, but we were kept away."

  Jude took another gulp of scotch, a big one.

  "So you've never been to Arizona?"

  "Arizona?"

  Skyler's blank look supplied the answer.

  "How about some early memories—anything about going underground, playing in mines?"

  "No. Nothing."

  "Anything about a desert, a place where it's hot by day and cold at night?"

  "No. Nothing except the island. My first memories are all of the island. I'm sure that's where I grew up."

  "Did anyone ever tell you had a brother?"

  "No." Skyler paused. "Is that what you think we are?"

  Jude ignored the question and came back with one of his own.

  "How could you not know your parents? Didn't you know anything about them? Didn't you hear anything? Didn't you miss anything?"

  "You don't miss what you never know. The way we were raised, all of us—it's hard to explain—we felt all the older people on the island were like our parents. They all looked out for us."

  "But why did they have all those strange titles—physicians and things like that?"

  "That's just what they were called."

  "It sounds like some big hospital. Was it some kind of medical place?"

  "I don't know what you mean. It was just the way we were raised. We were looked after carefully, and anytime anything was wrong, it was fixed right up."

  "But they didn't love you."

  "I used to think so—or else, why would they have done it? I don't think so anymore."

  Jude was stumped. He drained his glass and set it down.

  "Tell me again about these Orderlies, the guys who did the enforcing."

  "You've already met them," replied Skyler, and Jude knew instantly who he was talking about. He felt a certain relief, but not all that much, in realizing that his paranoia had a foundation in reality.

  "The guy with the streak of white in his hair?"

  Skyler nodded.

  "You said them. There's more than one?"

  "There's three."

  "Three?"

  "Yes, and they all look a lot alike, except you learn to tell the difference. The white patch isn't quite identical."

  So that explained it, thought Jude—how the thug had managed to outflank him in the subway. There had been two of them. But three? He looked at Skyler. "Three guys who all look the same? Identical triplets—I've never heard of such a thing."

  "I don't know if they're identical. They look a lot alike, but like I said, you can learn to tell them apart." Skyler shrugged, a gesture to end the discussion.

  "Jesus Christ."

  Skyler looked at him. "Why do you keep saying 'Jesus Christ' like that?" he asked.

  "What do you mean? What kind of question is that?"

  "I was just wondering. You say it all the time."

  "I say it whenever I need to say it. Which right now happens to be a lot."

  "I see."

  Jude got up, walked into the living room and poked around his bookcase. He returned a few minutes later carrying under his left arm a large blue book, which he laid upon the kitchen table. It was an atlas.

  "Okay, you say you were raised on an island. Let's locate the sucker. You say you ended up in Valdosta. That's in Georgia."

  He flipped through the index, found
"southern United States" and turned to pages 178-179. His finger traced the outline of the coast. He was distressed to see how many islands there were. Scores and scores of them. And lots of little ones that weren't even named, at least not in this book.

  "Let's see... Valdosta, Valdosta. There it is."

  He was surprised that it was so far inland.

  "What kind of plane were you in?"

  Skyler conjured up the memory—the cabin with its four seats, the baseball cap on the pilot's head, the dials with needles fluctuating and lighted numbers.

  "A small one. Red and white."

  Jude's face showed his exasperation. "Propeller or jet?"

  Skyler looked blank. "I know what you're going to say now," he said.

  "What?"

  "Jesus Christ."

  "Very funny. You've been here an hour, and you think you already got me down pat."

  Fifteen minutes later, Jude was prepared to concede defeat, at least for the time being. He figured that the island had to be off the coast of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina or, stretching it, maybe North Carolina. The number of islands along that expanse of shoreline was staggering. Furthermore, he knew that his atlas was incomplete and omitted hundreds of small islands. He had once been to Pawley's Island off South Carolina, and a local had taken him out crabbing in a rickety rowboat; he remembered being amazed at how many uninhabited bits of land there were tucked away in the marshes.

  For his part, Skyler was hopeless in providing clues. All he could say was that the aircraft had put down in that one town in Georgia. He couldn't even estimate how long the plane ride was that had brought him there, since he had slept through some and perhaps most of it—a statement so patently ridiculous that Jude was inclined to believe it. Maybe later Jude could get some data on the fuel tank capacities of various planes and estimated flying times in order to try to plot a radius of likely distance traveled. This would at least narrow the search for likely candidates to an area of... what?—maybe five hundred miles. But he would need some more information to do that. In the meantime, he had to figure out what to do with Skyler, who seemed to fear for his life.