I stared at the table, my heart racing. "I don’t know. That was a really fucked-up day."
"How many people were in that room after the detective left?" Goldston asked.
I looked up from the table. "You won’t believe me," I said. "It’ll seem like I’m crazy, like I’m grasping to save my life, and I’m not. I know they won’t ever let me out of this place."
"How many?"
"Two."
"One physical person walked into that police station, Andy. There’s a videotape of it."
"I know."
"Who’s Orson?" he said, but I shook my head. "You don’t know?"
"I don’t know what he is anymore."
"Is he in your head?"
"No."
"Then you actually see him?"
"Not since Choteau."
"What does he look like?"
"Like me. He’s my twin."
I felt a cool breath on the back of my neck. "Hey, big boy," he whispered, and I shivered.
"What?" Goldston said. "What'd you say?"
Orson walked around the table behind the guards. He stepped over the mass of cords that linked the microphones and cameras to the outlets and leaned against the wall. He smiled, wearing jeans and a dirty tee-shirt. His hair was buzzed like mine, and he had a two-day beard.
"What’s wrong?" Goldston asked. "Andy, you’re trembling."
"I’m staring at Orson right now," I said, watching my brother walk to the table.
"Andy, you’re looking at me," Goldston said. "You’re looking directly into my eyes."
"No, I’m looking at you," Orson said, standing beside me, his dirty hands on the table.
"Orson," I said, "listen to me…"
"Dr. Goldston, I’m Orson Thomas."
"It’s nice to meet you, Orson," Goldston said hesitantly. "Where’s Andy?"
"Right here," I said. "Watching you talk to Orson. He's beside me. I'm looking at him."
"No," Goldston said, "you’re looking at me."
"Who the fuck cares?" Orson said. "You wanna talk? Talk."
Goldston gathered himself and cleared his throat. Beads of sweat had formed on his forehead, and he wiped them away on the sleeve of his black jacket.
"What makes you come out, Orson?" Goldston asked.
"What do you mean?"
"What makes your personality come out?"
"I’m not a fucking split personality, Doctor. I’m always here. I run the show, not Andy."
"You’re always aware of him?"
"Yes."
"Is he always aware of you?"
"When I want him to be. He’s in la-la land most of the time."
"La-la land?"
"I send him away when I have things to do. Europe, Aruba. That’s his La-la land."
"But sometimes he physically sees you…"
"Because I make him see me."
"Does he know we’re talking now?"
I was speechless, walls of false reality tumbling down. Everything I'd lived for became a transparent curtain behind which Orson had lived and murdered. He'd given me a glimpse of it in Choteau, but I'd tucked that hideous knowledge away. I'd denied and forgotten it, letting my brother remain an enigma as I'd done before.
"Yes," I said, tears trickling down my cheeks.
"Shut your fucking mouth," Orson said, wiping the tears away.
"So you sent him away when you went to kill?" Goldston said. "How?"
"I don’t know how I did it. It’s like he lived in a fantasy world when I used him. But it was strange, because sometimes he wrote books about what I did. It was like some part of him knew what was happening even though I sent him away."
"Can you read Andy’s mind?"
"He’s as much a person to me as you are."
"Oh, man," Goldston muttered. He glanced back at Laura, her face white. Everyone’s face had blanched, even the cameraman and the two guards. Goldston turned back to Orson. "Who was born into this body, Orson? You or Andy?"
"We both were," Orson said.
"Andy, I want to talk to Orson for..."
"You don’t have to ask his permission."
"Okay," Goldston said. "When did Andy became aware of you and you of him?"
I wanted to speak, but I didn’t. I let Orson talk, though I feared what he might say.
"I don’t know how old we were," Orson began. "I lived behind his eyes. I could hear him talk, I saw what he saw, but I had my own, separate consciousness. When we were seven, I started talking to him. I don’t know how, but when I spoke to him, he saw me. I told him I was his twin, that no one else could see me. I told him not to tell anyone or I’d go away.
"Well, he told his mother, and she went right along with it. Just like I was his fucking imaginary friend or something. She’d set a place for me at dinner. She’d buy presents for me at Christmas. Jeanette was always a little weird."
"But you still didn’t have control over Andy’s body?" Goldston asked.
"No. Not until he was twelve. I can’t explain to you how I did it, but he was sleeping one night, and I moved his arm. I just thought about doing it, and it happened. I realized that when he was unconscious or asleep I could use his body. So I started going out when he fell asleep, and he never knew it. I did this for several years.
"As Andy got older, through high school and college, I think he started to realize I shouldn’t be there. Started feeling weird about me. We were close, and then in college he tried to ignore me. Tried to pretend I didn’t exist."
"Did that make you mad?"
"Don’t fuck with me." Orson glared at Goldston. "Anyhow, you gotta remember I’m telling this from my point of view. I knew what the fuck was going on. I knew I was inside of him. He didn’t know that. I'm not sure how, but he saw me. He physically saw me. Only thing I can guess is his mind created these hallucinations to compensate for what it heard. I don’t know. I’ve looked at psychology texts and there isn’t a damn thing on this sort of condition."
"I’ve never heard of anything like it," Goldston said. "What happened in college?"
"I was twenty-one. I didn’t like the prospect of spending my life sharing someone else’s body, watching them live. So I turned Andy off."
"What do you mean?"
"How can I explain it to you? I had an edge on him. I just turned him off. I could suggest things to him, by thinking into him. It’s impossible to explain. I told him to sleep, to dream. Told him he was in paradise, and he slept for seven years. He vividly dreamed that part of his life so when he woke up, he had a past that wasn’t mine."
"What do you remember, Andy?" Goldston asked.
"Why do you wanna talk to him?" Orson said.
"I’d like to hear what he dreamed, what he remembers."
"I remember the Caribbean," I said. "A long time ago. It’s very vague, like childhood."
"You didn’t think that was strange?" Goldston asked. "That your memory was fuzzy?"
"What did I have to compare it to?" I said. I wanted to cry but I didn’t.
"What’d you do during that time, Orson?" Goldston asked. "While he was asleep."
"I left Appalachian. Went to New York and was homeless there for awhile. Practically lived in the library. I read constantly, gave myself the best education you could imagine. Then I went to a school in Vermont called Middlebury. I made up this flawless resume. It said I got my Ph.D. in history at this college in Arizona which didn’t even exist. I made up all the credentials. It was ingenious. I taught in Vermont for a year until this prick named David Parker, a professor in the history department, too, found out that Baxter College didn’t exist. I was fired."
"Is this when you started killing?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I could. And there were people who deserved it. But I'm not saying anything else about it. I won't sit here and let you put me in one of your categories. I killed. End of story."
"When did Andy come back?"
"When I started killing. I'd bought this cabin in Wyoming. I could feel Andy starting to move again, especially when I’d wake up in the morning. Sometimes he’d have control of his body. He didn’t know where the fuck he was. I told him he was in the Bahamas. I talked to him constantly without him knowing it was me. Still do. It's really just subtle suggestion. Sort of like hypnosis. That’s when I found out how much control I really had. He thinks he only killed once, but he killed whenever I told him to. He was pretty good at it. He thought it was a game."