Mr. X

but we were separated in the womb, or on the night we were born, I don't know, it happened anyhow, and I couldn't harm you in any way, Ican't. I need you. Besides that, ordinary human life makes me want to puke. How could I want to settle down with Laurie Hatch?'

    'You haven't needed me so far,' I said, though Robert's assertion had moved me.

    'Why do you think I came to Star in Naperville and told her you should leave college? When you insisted on going back, why did I make sure someone would look out for you? Or meet Star in front of Nettie's house and tell her you were in danger?'

    'Maybe you do need me,' I said. “I need you, too, Robert. But I am not going to marry Laurie Hatch so you can buy Armani suits and gold Rolexes. Even if she would agree to marry me, I have no idea who she really is.'

    'Are you going to let a small-town Daddy Warbucks like Stewart Hatch poison your mind? You don't give a shit about her background.

    Look at ours! It only means you have more in common with her than you thought.'

     This notion had already occurred to me.

    Robert leaned toward me again. 'Ned, you're already half in love with Laurie Hatch. It's karma.'

    “If I don't know what to think about Laurie, I really don't know what to make of you.'

    “Imagine how I feel about you. Yet in some way we are the same person, after all. And you might stop to consider that my life has been much more difficult than yours.'

    'How would you know anything about my difficulties?'

    'That's a fair question, but you are more or less human, and I'm scarcely human at all. Do you think that's been easy for me?'

    “I have no idea,' I said.

    'But aren't you grateful for what you've learned in the past two days? And that we came together like this?'

    I wanted to say, No,all of this sickens me, but the truth spoke itself. 'Yes.'

    Robert smiled. 'At the right moment, you always say 'Yes.' '

    This unexpected allusion to my recurring dream gave me the beginning of an idea. 'You must have paid a visit to New Providence Road.'

    I had taken him unawares. 'Where?'

    'Howard Dunstan's old house. The one Sylvan reconstructed with the original stones from Providence.'

    'That place is bad luck. It's like black magic, it'll eat you alive.'

    “It's where you always wanted me to go,' I said.

    Robert gathered himself before once more regarding me with what appeared to be absolute sincerity. 'You're talking about the dreams you used to have. They weredreams. I wasn't in charge. You were. That's how dreams work—you're saying something toyourself.'

    'How do you know what my dreams were about?'

    'We were supposed to be the same person,' he said. “It's not surprising that we should have the same dreams now and then.'

    I wondered what would have happened if Robert and I had been born into the same body and felt a disorienting rush of emotions, a kind of swoon made equally of attraction and repulsion. I heard Howard Dunstan say,We flew from the crack in the golden howl. We are smoke from the cannon's mouth. We had flown through the flaw in the bowl and been ripped from the pockets of fallen soldiers—it was as good as any other explanation for the joy, equal to but more powerful than the fear that accompanied it, flooding through me.

    'Whatever you are, you're my brother,' I said. “It's even more than that. You're half of me.'

    “I fought this.' Robert shivered in his chair. 'You have no idea.' He turned his head away before looking back with a quantity of feeling that equaled mine. “I despised you. You can't imagine my resentment. I hardlyknew our mother. You got tolive with her, at least off and on, and when you couldn't, she visited you. She sent you birthday cards. I didn't have any of that. Robert was stuck away in the shadows. Star had to protect her little Ned. We only met once.'

    A recognition with the force of a locomotive moved into me.

    'Yes?' Robert said.

    “It was our ninth birthday. Something happened. I got sick the day before.'

    'No kidding,' Robert said.

    “I didn't get there in time. Wherever it was.'

    'You almost got me killed,' Robert said.

    “I had a fever, and I couldn't get out of bed. Star came into our room. I thought I was safe, because my seizures usually hit me in the middle of the afternoon. She was standing next to my cot. . . . Where were you? Where did I go?'

    'That year, it was the Anscombes,' Robert said. 'Or so they called themselves. They took me in because their own kid died.'

    'Oh, my God,' I said. 'You were in Boulder.'

    'Until then, I could always feel him sniffing me out in time to get away. That year, you picked the wrong day to get sick, and I didn't feel anything.'

    Inside my head, Frank Sinatra sang the wordFight at the top of a beat and hung back for a long, stretched-out moment before coming in with:

    fight,

                fight it with aaall of your might...

 and on the downward curve of the phrase, everything I had chosen to forget came flooding back to me. “I was you,' I said.

 •79

 •By 10:00 P.M. of their mutual birthday in 1967, Ned Dunstan and the boy known as 'Bobby Anscombe' imagined themselves safe from the annual trial. Ned had spent the previous day and most of this one in a fever that spun him between dehydrated exhaustion and episodes of cinematic delirium. The fever had peaked before sundown, leaving him soaked in sweat, thirsty, and rational enough to think that he had deflected his annual seizure. 'Bobby Anscombe' had received none of the signals—a sense of electricity in the air, an intermittent tingle running along both of his arms, sudden glimpses of a scatter of bright blue dots floating at the corners of his vision—that came to him two or three days before his birthday and announced that it was time to surrender again, until his next release into the human world and the care of a couple who would take him in because they would recognize him as family, to the formless void in which most of his ravenous childhood had been spent. 'Bobby' was kneeling on the attic floor, wondering how much money would not be missed if he removed it from the leather trunk he had discovered behind an unfinished wall. Another cache of bills was secreted in the kitchen, but 'Michael Anscombe' kept his eye on that one. Ned Dunstan lay on Star's bed, the sweaty sheet thrust aside, while his mother stroked his forehead.

 •In the bedroom on Cherry Street, Ned felt a great pressure settling down upon his body, as if the air had doubled in weight. A buzzing sensation he knew too well moved into his chest and traveled along his nerves. When his mother leaned over him, the deep green of her blouse and the black at the center of her eyes blazed and shimmered.

 •Something had happened within the house, Robert could not tell what. An unexpected noise, a shift in the air currents, an opened door, a footstep on the attic stairs? If 'Mike Anscombe' had checked his bedroom, he would have to invent an excuse for his disobedience, fast. 'Mike Anscombe' had no tolerance for disobedience. Robert scuttled toward the attic door, and blue flames shot through the gaps in the floorboards.