"Coats?" asked Hand.
"No," I said. "Layers."
The cold in Chicago that January was three-dimensional, alive, predatory, so we'd head to the airport in everything we were bringing. We'd pack cheap disposable clothes so if we ever made it to Madagascar we could just dump the heavier stuff there. Then up to Cairo in T-shirts and empty bags.
"Okay," said Hand. "You sure you want to pay for all this?"
"Yes. I need it gone."
"You're sure."
"I am."
"Because I don't want you doing this because of some weird purging bullshit thing. This doesn't have anything to do with anything -"
"No."
"Good."
"See you tomorrow."
I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I'm very happy.
On Saturday I had to babysit my cousin Jerry's twins, Mo and Thor, eight-year-old girls. Jerry was the only relative I had in Chicago. My mom had left Colorado to marry my father, leaving her parents, now dead, and three sisters and four brothers, all of whom stayed in or around Fort Collins. And now that Tommy – my six-years-older brother, with his own garage and mustache – was grown, my mom had moved to Memphis, to be near some old friends and take classes in anthropology. Jerry, my Aunt Terry's son, the third of five, was the family's first lawyer, with his picture in the yellow pages, and had married Melora, whose severity – she spoke only in hisses – was confounded by her small frame, that of a fourteen-year-old boy.
Jerry and Melora knew I was pretty much always around and available, so I got the nod and Hand and I brought Mo and Thor with us to get clothes and sundries. Jerry's delicate wife hated my names for her girls but I wasn't about to call two eight year-olds, hyper kids who talked a lot, who liked to run ahead on the sidewalks and didn't mind being thrown around, goddamned Persephone and Penelope.
They were dropped off, with a honk from Melora. We met them at the door to my building. They'd met Hand three times before but didn't remember him.
"You don't look as bad," Mo said to me, her puffy pink coat swallowing her. I pulled the zipper down a few inches and she exhaled.
"It's getting better," I said.
"Now your eyes are blue," Thor added, though my eyes were always brown and were still brown. She stepped toward me and I knelt before her. "And this is new," she said, touching my nose, the red crooked stripe running down the bone.
"That was already there, idiot!" Mo said.
"Was not," Thor said.
"It was there," I said, trying to settle things, "but it's darker now. You're both right."
We walked to a nouveau-outdoors store humid with nylon and velcro, energy bars and carabiners and a climbing wall no one used. Hand and I needed pants, pants to end all pants – warm and cool, breathing and trapping in, full of pockets. I got a standard pair of khakis, though with multiple pockets – the safari-photographer kind with the big rectangular compartments with zippers and velcro, two on each leg. Hand burst from the dressing room loudly swishing – his pants were wide, shiny and synthetic, in a grey that looked silver.
"You look like a jogger," I said.
"They're comfortable," he said.
"Like a jogger with a dump in his pants!" Mo said.
"Yeah," Hand said, soaking his thumb in saliva and jamming it in Mo's ear, "but I feel fast."
The twins ran free and everything in the store looked essential. A tiny lightweight flashlight to attach to a keychain. Beef jerky. A first-aid kit. Secret pouches for money and passports. Bandannas. Mini-fans. Insect repellent. I avoided eyes, tried to save everyone the trouble of seeing me. My face wasn't as bad as it had been a few weeks ago, but it was still busted in places, and the bridge of my nose dropped blue shadows into my eye sockets, lending me a crosseyed or cycloptic look. I appeared as I was: a guy who'd been given an ass whipping by three guys in a steel box.
"You're limping still," Hand said.
"Yes," I said.
"It's not that bad," he said. "Just a little creepy is all."
Hand had ten bandannas, five for each of us. Bandannas, he said, were what every traveler came back wishing they'd had more of. "You'll thank me," he said. He said this a lot, You'll thank me. I don't remember actually needing to thank him all that much, ever.
Mo and Thor returned from their explorations, hair matted, sweaters tied around their waists. They wanted to leave.
"Who wants to leave?" I asked Thor. "You, Mo?"
"I'm Thor," Thor said.
"Who's Thor?" I asked.
"I am!" she said.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I can't tell you people apart."
"But we're fraternal twins!" she said.
"You're what?"
Mo rolled her eyes. "Fraternal twins! You know that, stupid."
I stroked my chin, thinking. "Well, I guess I had heard something about this, but I didn't think it was true. I guess I didn't want to believe it."
"What are you talking about?" said Mo. She was so easily annoyed, her face pinched like the tip of a tomato.
"Listen," I said, crouching down in front of them both. "Do me a favor. Don't let anyone tell you there's something wrong with you. Don't let any scientists or government researchers pull you aside and make you feel like freaks just because you're twins and you don't look alike. God made a mistake, and yes it was a very big one, because what kinds of twins don't look alike? And worse, what kind of twins look like you two, like monkeys dunked in acid -"
Thor slapped me square in the forehead.
"You were talking too fast," she said.
We took them to Walgreen's. We needed provisions for the trip. The truth is, they were easily the least identical twins I'd ever seen, and only Thor looked like the product of their parents, who were both blond and fair. Thor was Aryan and thin-boned, but Mo looked more like me, with dark straight hair, dark eyes, long black lashes. I have the sort of eyelashes, black and shaped like bats' wings, that imply I'm wearing eyeliner, and the good fortune this has occasionally wrought is nothing compared to the grief, the stares, the constant Robert Smith comparisons. Mo has been mistaken for my own kid and hates this.
I bought travel-sized toothpaste and a collapsible cup, sunglasses and two $7 sweatshirts, maroon and black. Hand had a large column of deodorant and we were at the cash register, waiting for the girls and watching the woman ahead of us assemble a small stack of coupons on the counter. Each coupon had been cut with care and the woman, tiny but with a wide purple burn scar on her thin fragile neck, had them all bundled within a wide plastic clip intended to keep chips fresh.
I hated coupons. The need for coupons. I wanted to pay this woman's difference. Two dollars she'd save and I wanted to give it to her so she could spend her time some other better way. What better way? I have no idea. Maybe she likes cutting coupons? She does not. Since I got a little money, this was a constant struggle, the frustration with people and their coupons, people and their dirty clothes, families from El Salvador living in the basement of the church around the corner – I passed them every morning, waiting at the bus stop with their daughter, on her way to school, in her white shirt, plaid skirt – and my urge to buy things for them, even just their food, and my inability, due to the imagined and impossible barrier between myself and these strangers with fumbling hands, to engage them and fix things. I never wanted a balance in a bank account, felt so much more comfortable living on the equator just above and below a zero balance, and I thought I could get rid of it some way, some way involving the coupon woman here at the Walgreen's, and the coupons, but the distance seemed limitless and deadly, I was not outgoing in this way, could bridge nothing like this, and the situation just about killed me.