Stories: All-New Tales

phantom embrace. He is alive, I can feel him Edward thought with a shiver of anticipation. He is alive, I can feel him Edgar thought with a shiver of revulsion.

3.

THERE CAME A JANUARY 26 that marked the brothers’ fortieth birthday. And a few days later there came to an exhibit of E.W.’s new exhibit Fossil-Figures in a storefront gallery in the warehouse district near the Hudson River at West and Canal streets, New York City, U.S. Congressman Edgar Waldman, who’d given a political speech that afternoon in midtown, alone now, a limousine with U.S. federal plates waiting at the curb. Noting with satisfaction that the exhibit rooms were nearly deserted. Noting with disgust how the old, cracked linoleum stuck against the bottom of his expensive shoes. The handsome congressman wore very dark glasses, he looked at no one, in dread of being recognized in this sordid place. Especially he was in dread of seeing the crippled brother-“E.W”-whom he had not seen in nearly twenty years but believed that he would recognize immediately though by this time the twins-“fraternal twins”-looked nothing alike. Edgar anticipated the stunted broken figure in a wheelchair, yearning teary eyes and wistful smile that maddened, made you want to strike with your fists, that offer of forgiveness where forgiveness was not wanted. I am your brother, I am in you. Love me! But there was no one.

Only E.W.’s work, pretentiously called by the gallery “collage paintings.” These Fossil- Figures lacked all beauty, even the canvases upon which they were painted looked soiled and battered and the walls upon which they were (unevenly) hung were streaked as if the hammered-tin ceiling leaked rust. What were these artworks covered in dream/nightmare shapes, geometrical, yet humanoid, shifting into and out of one another like translucent guts, deeply offensive to the congressman who sensed “subterfuge”-“perversion”-“subversion” in such obscure art, and what was obscure was certain to be “soulless”- even “traitorous.” Most upsetting, the Fossil-Figures seemed to be taunting the viewer, anyway this viewer, like riddles, and he had no time for Goddamned riddles, the rich man’s daughter he’d married to advance his career was awaiting him at the St. Regis, this visit to West and Canal streets was an (unmarked) stop in Congressman Waldman’s itinerary for the day. Wiping his eyes to better see an artwork depicting the night sky, distant galaxies, and constellations, almost there was beauty here, suns like bursting egg yolks swallowing up smaller suns, comets shaped like-was it male sperm? — blazing male sperm? — colliding with luminous bluish- watery planets; and, protruding from the rough surface of the canvas, a thing so unexpected, so ugly, the congressman stepped back in astonishment: was it a nestlike growth of some kind? a tumor? composed of plasticine flesh and dark crinkly hairs and-could it be baby teeth? arranged in a smile? — and a scattering of baby bones?

A fossil, it was. A thing removed from the human body. Something very ugly discovered a cavity of a surviving twin’s body. The fossil-soul of the other, which had never breathed life.

Stunned, quivering with disgust, the congressman turned away.

Walked on, in a haze of denunciations, denials. Seeing that some of the canvases were beautiful-were they? — or were they all ugly, obscene, if you knew how to decode them? — he was made to think that he was endangered, something was going to happen to him, there was a blunt statistical fact that in the last election he’d been reelected to his seat in Congress by a smaller majority than in any of the preceding elections, in such victory there is the presentiment of defeat. Through the maze of rooms circling back to the start of the exhibit and at a glass-topped counter there was a bored-looking girl with dead-white skin and a face glittering with piercings who seemed to be working for the gallery and he asked of her in a voice that quavered with indignation if these ridiculous “fossil-figures” were considered “art” and she told him politely yes of course, everything the gallery exhibited was art and he asked if the exhibit was supported by public funds and seemed but partly mollified to learn that it was not. He asked who the “so-called artist” E.W. was and the girl spoke vaguely saying nobody knew E.W. personally, only the proprietor of the gallery had ever seen him, he lived by himself outside the city and never came into the city, not even to oversee the exhibit, didn’t seem to care if his artworks sold, or what prices they were sold for.

“He’s got some ‘wasting-away’ disease, like muscular dystrophy, or Parkinson’s, but last we knew, E.W. is alive. He’s alive.”

AND I WON’T GO away. You will come to me instead.

EACH YEAR: JANUARY 26. One year, one insomniac night, Edward is flicking restlessly though TV channels and is surprised to see a sudden close-up of-is it Edgar? The demon brother Edgar? TV news footage from earlier in the day, rerun now in the early hours of the morning, suddenly this magnification of a man’s head, thick-jawed face, an aging face obscured by dark glasses, skin gleaming with oily sweat, an arm lifted to shield the disgraced congressman from a pack of pursuing reporters, photographers and TV camera crews, there’s Congressman Edgar Waldman being briskly walked into a building by plainclothes police officers. Indicted on multiple charges of bribe-taking, violations of federal campaign laws, perjury before a federal grand jury. Already the rich man’s daughter has filed for divorce, there’s a quick smile, a suggestion of bared teeth. In the brothers’ childhood house in which Edward lives in a few downstairs rooms Edward stares at the TV screen from which his lost brother has faded, uncertain if the thumping sensation in his head is a profound shock, a pang of hurt that must beat within the brother, or his own excitement, eagerness. He will come to me now. He will not deny me, now.

Epilogue

IT WAS SO. THE demon brother would return home, to his twin who awaited him.

For he knew himself now Not one but two. In the larger world he’d gambled his life and lost his life and would retreat now, to the other. In retreat a man sets aside pride, disgraced, divorced, bankrupt and a glisten of madness in the washed-out blue eyes. His heavy jaws were silvery-dark with stubble, a tremor in his right hand that had been lifted in a federal court to swear that Edgar Waldman would tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth Yes I swear and in that heartbeat it was all over for him, a taste like bile rising at the back of his mouth.

Still the wonder. Disbelief. The corroded ruin of a face like clay that has been worn down by rivulets of water, wind. And that glisten of madness in the eyes: Me?

In retreat now returning to his childhood home he had shunned for years. The left-behind, broke-backed younger brother who’d been living alone since their mother’s death, now many years ago. As a young man he’d never considered time as anything other than a current to bear him aloft, propel him into his future, now he understood that time is a rising tide, implacable inexorable unstoppable rising tide, now at the ankles, now the knees, rising to the thighs, to the groin and the torso and to the chin, ever rising, a dark water of utter mystery propelling us forward not into the future but into infinity, which is oblivion.

Returning to the suburban town of his birth and to the house he’s shunned for decades, seeing now with a pang of loss how the residential neighborhood had changed, many of the large houses converted to apartment buildings and commercial sites, and most of the plane trees lining the street severely trimmed or removed altogether. And there was the old Waldman home that had once been their mother’s pride, once so splendidly white, now a weatherworn gray with sagging shutters and a rotting roof and a lush junglelike front lawn awash in litter as if no one had lived there for a long time. Edgar had been unable to contact Edward by phone, there was no directory listing for a phone under the name Edward Waldman, now his heart pounded in his chest, he felt a wave of dread He has died, it is too late. Hesitantly knocking at the front door and listening for a response from within and knocking again, more loudly, hurting his knuckles, and at last there came from within a faint bleating sound, a voice asking who it was and he called out It’s me.

Slowly as if with effort the door opened. And there, in his wheelchair, as Edgar had imagined him, but not so ravaged as Edgar has imagined him, was his brother Edward whom he hadn’t seen in more than two decades: a shrunken individual of no obvious age with a narrow, pale, pinched yet unlined face, a boy’s face, and his hair threaded with gray like Edgar’s, and one bony shoulder higher than the other. Pale blue eyes filling with moisture he swiped at with the edges of both hands and in a scratchy voice that sounded as if it hadn’t been used in some time he said Eddie. Come in.

…WHEN IT HAPPENED COULD never be determined precisely since the bodies were frozen and preserved from decay found together on a leather sofa made up as a bed pulled up to within a foot of a fireplace heaped with ashes in a downstairs room of the old clapboard colonial crowded with furniture and what appeared to