How much time went by like that? There I was, trudging on and on through unending silence. When I finished work and went home, I'd drink the twin's delicious coffee, and read the Critique of Pure Reason for the umpteenth time.
Every once in a while, things that happened just the day before would seem as far off as the year before, or things from the previous year might come to me like only yesterday. When things got really out of hand, the next year would come to me like yesterday. Either that, or I'd be translating a Kenneth Tynan article on Polanski from the September 1971 issue of Esquire, the whole time thinking about ball bearings.
For months, for years, I was sitting there all by myself in the depths of a fathomless pool. In warm water, soft, filtered light, and silence. Silence...
* * *
There was only one way I could tell the twins apart, and that was by their sweatshirts. Faded navy blue sweatshirts with white numerals emblazoned across the chest. One read "208," the other "209." The 2s were over the right nipple, and the 8 or 9 over the left nipple. The Os were sandwiched smack in the middle.
The very first day, I asked the twins what the numbers meant. They told me they didn't mean anything.
"They look like manufacturer's serial numbers."
"What's that supposed to mean?" asked one of them.
"Well, it makes it look as if there were a whole batch of people just like you, and you were number 208 and number 209."
"The ideas you get!" scoffed 209.
"Only been two of us every since we were born," said 208. "We were given the shirts."
"Where?" I was incredulous.
"At a supermarket opening. They were giving them away to the first customers."
"I was the two-hundred-and-ninth customer," said 209.
"And I was the two-hundred-and-eighth," said 208.
"The two of us bought three boxes of tissues."
"Okay, I'll tell you what we'll do," I said. "We'll call you 208. And you, we'll call 209. That way I can distinguish between you," pointing to each in turn.
"No good," said one of them.
"Why's that?"
Without so much as a word, they both stripped off their sweatshirts, exchanged them, and pulled them down over their heads.
"I'm 208," said 209.
"And I'm 209," said 208.
I let out a sigh.
Even so, when I was desperate to distinguish the two of them, I had no recourse but to rely on the numbers. I just couldn't come up with any other way to tell them apart.
The twins hardly had any other clothes besides those sweatshirts. It almost seemed as if they'd stepped out for a walk, happened into someone's apartment, and simply decided to stay. Which really wasn't so far from the truth. At the start of each week I'd always give them a little money so they could buy whatever they needed, but other than meals, in fact, they never spent money on anything but an occasional box of coffee-cream cookies.
"Doesn't it bother you, not having clothes?" I asked.
"Not in the least," replied 208.
"Why should we be so interested in clothes?" said 209.
Once a week, with tender loving care, the two of them would wash their sweatshirts in the bath. I'd be in bed perusing my Critique of Pure Reason only to look up and see the two of them, naked on the bathroom tiles, washing their sweatshirts in tandem. At times like that, I'd get this really far-away feeling. I don't know why. Ever since the summer before, when I'd lost a tooth-cap under the diving board at the pool, these would come over me from time to time.
Often when I came home from work, I'd encounter the numbers 208 and 209 swaying in the window's southern exposure. Times like that, it was enough to bring tears to my eyes.
* * *
Just why did you choose to descend on my apartment, how long do you both intend to stay, and above all, who do you girls think you are? Your age? Background? Somehow I never saw fit to ask.
And you two, for your part, never volunteered a word.
Our days were spent, the three of us, drinking coffee, walking the golf course looking for lost balls, joking around in bed. Going through the newspapers was the highlight of each day, when I'd spend one solid hour explaining what was going on in the news. The two of them were frightfully ignorant about things. They didn't know Burma from Australia. It took three days to get them to accept that Vietnam was divided in two, and that the two halves were at war. It took another four days to explain why Nixon was bombing Hanoi.
"And which side do you support?" asked 208.
"Which side?"
"You know, North or South?" pressed 209.
"Hmm, it's hard to say."
"What do you mean?" returned 208.
"I mean, it's not like I was living in Vietnam."
Neither of them would accept that explanation.
Hell, I couldn't even accept it.
"They're fighting because they think different, right?" 208 pursued the question.
"You could say that."
"So there's two opposite ways of thinking, am I correct?" 208 continued.
"Yes, but… there's got to be a million opposing schools of thought in the world. No, probably even more than that."
"So hardly anybody's friends with anybody?" puzzled 209.
"I guess not," said I. "Almost no one's friends with anyone else."
Dostoyevsky had prophesied it; I lived it out.
That was my lifestyle in the 1970s.
2
The autumn of 1973, it seemed, deep down, held something spiteful. It was painfully clear to the Rat, plain as a pebble in his shoe.
Even after that year's all-too-brief summer had vanished, as if sucked up into thin air along with early September uncertainties, some small reminder of summer lingered on in the Rat's heart.
There he was, still in his old T-shirt, cut-offs, beach sandals. Back again to J's Bar, where he'd sit at the bar facing J, downing overchilled beers. He'd begun smoking again after five years, and every fifteen minutes or so he'd glance at his wristwatch.
The Rat could almost see the passage of time cleaving away-slice-at intervals somewhere down the line. Why it had to be like that, the Rat could never understand. He couldn't find the severed end. And so he wandered through the dimming autumn twilight holding the limp cord. He cut across grassy knolls, crossed rivers, forced open any number of doors – but the limp cord didn't lead him anywhere. Like a fly that winter has robbed of wings, like an estuary confronted by the open sea, the Rat was powerless, alone. An ill wind had blown in from somewhere, and to the Rat it felt as if his protective blanket of air had been sent sailing clear around to the other side of the globe.