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 unexplained 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."