“You don’t even have a twin,” he said. “You and Sievert are the same.” Sievert had liked Victor because Sievert was Albert. Sievert had posted that letter to himself, locked himself indoors, gained weight and lost it.
“Oh, come on. Don’t be stupid, Micah. You watched us play ball. We saw you every day, sticking those pliers up your nose.”
“I did no such thing,” said Victor, astonished to recall renaming himself after all those years. It hardly seemed real. I am Micah, he’d said over and over into the mirror, yearning to swap names with a man who had died of AIDS.
A line came into focus: the one he’d drawn to cleave the present from the past. It wasn’t a line of aesthetic pleasure; it was a line of shame. Horrified by his words, his deeds, his very nature, he’d drawn a line to sequester himself from the people who loved him. Until today, it had seemed structurally viable, because no one had breached it. No one had bothered trying. He imagined a stronger one, the one Albert must have drawn across his own world. That was what people did: they drew lines across their worlds. But Albert’s was a line of capability — a circle, it seemed, with Victor and Sievert trapped inside, and Albert peering across at them.
How wrong the old Yazoo City shrink turned out to have been. The swapping of names had been a metaphor all along. It was all metaphor. What was the shrink called? He let Albert’s speech blur into a droning din. He exhaled. By the time the name of Dr. Dolf Pappadopolous came bursting forth, he had only to conjure his favorite gin label—Bombay Sapphire, words more honeyed to him sober than he’d ever noted drunk — and the spell subsided.
“Please go,” he said, taking his list out of his wallet. He scanned over the ugly words, waiting for a concerned query. If Albert read the card, he might refuse to leave, well up with tears, declare his abiding love.
Here it comes, Victor was thinking, when his friend stood up and offered a hand.
“Sorry for your loss,” said Albert, arm extended, reaching into the space between them until Victor laid his list down to receive a farewell shake.
BLOOD BROTHERS
I FOUND RAY UP IN the mountains at the I-40 rest stop, where I used to cruise sometimes. He was leaning against a wall, albino-pale, with these watery fish eyes. We messed around in a stall for a bit, and then he said to meet him at the red truck by the ravine.
In his truck cab he produced an uncapped light bulb. The Pigeon River roared below us. “Keeps you up,” he said, “as in hard,” and I yelped when it burned my fingers. He barked a joyless heh. We got to talking: his wife was Sheila and mine was Lisa, and his kids were Ray Junior and Angel and I don’t have kids. After we were too high to talk, I guess I told him to start driving. Two days and we were in Lubbock. Now it didn’t matter anymore if the bulb was hot; the burn felt good. Sometimes he’d smack me upside the head, which we both liked.
He asked what I’d do if he broke my arm.
“Go to the E.R.”
“But to me.”
“Break yours back?”
He nodded like it was the right answer. He knew this stuff; so did his wife, who had more sense than to do what Lisa does, which is report me missing. Six days after I’d met him we rolled back into Pigeon Forge to find the cops at my place. “Drive,” Ray growled, so I did. Halfway up the mountain he held a sheath knife to my throat. “You’ve been filming me,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s your wife that called; they’ve seen the film.”
He was giving off this ugly leaden smell, and I could feel blood draining down through me, through my neck. “Thought it was you filming me, Ray.”
Ray looked behind us as if back toward Texas, lowered the knife, and said, “Makes you jumpy.”
“Lisa, she was the one.”
“If you’re a cop, you’re a brave cop.”
He motioned for me to face him. When I did, he put the knife to my wrist and cut it open. My yell came out as a heh like his laugh. He did the same to his wrist and pressed them together. He said it was a bowie knife from the Indian Wars and we were blood brothers. I said, “But what about,” and the loons hollered and he said if you catch it, you get the flu, is how you know.
At his house, a log cabin, a girl was jumping rope. “Call if you get the flu,” he said, but then I left without his number. Back home Lisa ran barefoot into the mud and beat her fists on my chest. “I don’t know,” I told her as she carried on, “I woke up an hour ago outside the hospital.” Next thing I knew I was in the paper, which upset my ma. When I was twelve, she’d had a heart attack, and from that day on she went to church and never smoked. Lisa always told me “You’re lucky your ma’s so young,” but truth is she wasted it on that heart attack. Anyhow she arranged for tests, my ma, and I set off meaning to have them, but on a billboard I saw a girl with black teeth under the words Meth Destroys. Something gunned in me like a jake brake and I decided to go find that girl, get her high. I went to Ray’s and he walked out in his boxers followed by his wife. “You slept?” he said.
“That was a week ago.”
“So you slept.”
“Can I come in?”
There was this Indian in their house, and the four of us messed around while a pit bull watched from a cage. Next thing, the Indian was leading Sheila and her kids away. “I’ll never see those kids again,” Ray wept.
I wondered if I’d missed something. “Is there more?”
“You want to be my bitch?”
“What do you mean?”
He reached over, stuffed my balls between my legs, and said, “My bitch.” We drove across to Cherokee and played slots until we had cash to start cooking again. He had me wear Sheila’s panties when I went out for Sudafed. Law makes you buy just a little at each store, but it adds up. So does the money, and we were broke when AT&T offered ten thousand dollars to let them put a tower on Ray’s land. They disguised it like a pine and birds nested in it like it was any other tree. Ray would come upstairs with these water bottles full of lithium and xylene and lye and say, Go for a bike ride. In my bottle cages it all sloshed around and mixed up while I climbed to Davenport Gap. Up there one day, I entered a cloud that hit me with a spray of mist and then I was opening a bottle, offering my mix to the cloud. Just then, a car sped by. I chased it down the slope and caught it, flipped it off, sped home to Ray.
“Where’s the other bottle?” he said.
I seized up: I’d left it at the gap.
“You drink it?”
“Can you drink it?”
“Well, you’ll die.”
At first I believed I had. “Guess that’s your punishment,” he said.
“Don’t you care if I die?”
“There’s more of you where you came from.”
That kind of emptied me out. “Just kidding,” he said after a while.
“So you think there’s more of me.”
“Well, just fetch that bottle.”
Folks would come at all hours. There was a deputy who bought five hundred at a time and we would listen to his cop radio. One day a dude filed a complaint that his wife had pissed in his mug of coffee. “Call and say we’ll report to the scene,” said Ray.
We piled in, Ray and the cop in front, me behind the grid. The siren screamed as we sped across town. At the man’s house Ray told me, “Stay.” I tried to get out anyhow but I was locked up. Whole hours passed before they came out, chuckling.
“What happened?” I said when they were in the car.
“Filed a report,” said the cop, and then a look passed between him and Ray.
“Did he think you were both cops?” I asked as we drove off.
“Maybe you should beat him with your stick.”