Will & I (2 page)

There was much I didn't know about Bubba, and still don't. One day, for instance, a man came to my property to cut firewood. He'd advertised the service, and I'd called him. The wood was up on a hillside, and no sooner had he started cutting than Bubba observed him at work. Reckoning justifiably that he himself had dibs on the job (I hadn't even known he owned a chain saw), he came over and engaged the man in some kind of dialogue. I saw it all on mute through the window. There didn't appear to be any violence. When Bubba had gone, the other man, whose name was Stacey, came to the door and told me he didn't want to cause any problems, and thanks a lot but he'd be moving along. I stood and watched him walk back toward his truck. Halfway there he stopped and turned, and came striding quickly back toward me. He stopped again a few feet from my door. He looked at me intensely. “I'm not from around here,” he said, “but I grew up in the country … Stay away from that guy.”

It turned out the whole part of the county I lived in was known for its lawlessness. I learned this only after I'd moved in, and immediately realized why the land and house had been relatively cheap. The farms were isolated, on a floodplain. Cops dreaded answering calls out here. But because of Bubba, who'd grown up in Shelby, I never had an uneasy night's sleep. Once, when I wasn't at home, the pest control man showed up. I'd known him for a while and asked him to come see about a field-mice problem. I gave him my alarm code, so he could get inside the house—I wasn't worried about his taking anything. Apparently, he forgot the code and tripped the alarm. When Bubba heard it and saw an unknown truck in my driveway, he didn't even bother to dress. In minutes he was at my door in his underwear with a loaded .30-30.

I turned off the highway halfway to my house and crossed over the first set of railroad tracks. A sense of decompression came over me. I had started to live for this feeling. It was as if the concept of time had become negotiable. Sometimes I would find reasons to go into town just so I could drive back.

The dogs hadn't heard my car in the driveway. They weren't waiting for me at the door, but were back in my room in their beds. When they saw me, the foxlike one, Daisy, jumped up and started barking as if I'd purposely tricked her. The bigger one, Jay, whimpered at the excitement.

Throughout the drive home I'd been eager for my postlesson ritual, to sit down and listen to the CD that Dewin had made of that day's work. I studied my enunciation. It was still a shock to hear my recorded voice. When I wrote or thought to myself, I heard my old voice in my head, and really I'd never talked that much anyway. I put the CD into my computer and forwarded until I found the part I was looking for, an exercise that required me to say “Texas toast” over and over again, repeating the phrase along with a little sequence of notes. I was disappointed that my performance was weaker than I'd thought at the time. Afterward, Dewin explained, as he always did, what we were doing and its purpose. I listened to myself asking a question.

Before starting those lessons, I'd heard a recording of my new voice only once, in the years since it had changed. Through a connection with my mother, a local news station had interviewed me before a fund-raiser. That time, watching the tape, I'd concentrated less on the sounds and more on how strange I looked. This was from before I started going to the gym. I resembled an angular and unsteady hospital patient. My eyes were wide open and had an astonished look about them, and the corner of my mouth sagged. When I did focus on what I was saying on-screen, I was startled by the unfamiliar sound of gummy straining. To myself I sounded miles away and underwater.

Sometimes I have flashes of worry that I have forgotten what my old voice sounded like, the voice I was born with or first grew into. I fear that my memory of it has grown untrustworthy, that as a result it is lost. But there is a remedy, of a kind. I can call my brother, Will. We're identical twins, and Will sounds pretty much exactly like I used to. In fact, our voices were always the most identical part of us, since we usually didn't weigh the same, and we've always carried ourselves differently. In elementary school we even began to look more like older and younger brothers than twins, but people could rarely tell us apart on the phone. If you were to hear Will speak today, you would hear a crisp and effortless, somewhat hollow baritone. He sounds the same whether he's taking a business call or telling a crude joke. Someone not from the South would say he has a Southern accent, but it's not exaggerated—nothing like our mother's (we used to make her repeat words and phrases, “theya” for
there
, “sa-po-it” for
support
). His voice is sonically deep. He's a businessman, and he knows how to make it assume a tone of authority. That's how I sounded, a younger version of Will, for twenty years of my life.

*   *   *

Will and I went to the same college, a small school in the mid-South, in an isolated, mountainous section. A little more than a month and a half into our sophomore year, the university hosted a “Parents' Weekend.” My mother decided to throw one of her “pahties.” She saw it as an opportunity to invite our friends and their parents, most of whom she still hadn't met. She and my father had rented a house way back in the woods, in a kind of forest resort/retirement community a mile or so from campus. She planned to host the get-together there. I was stuck helping her. Will had a test coming the following Monday, and he'd gone back to Birmingham to be free of distractions. I had to pick up the tent she'd ordered—though rain wasn't in the forecast—and stand at the guard gate to give directions.

The party was a fairly typical WASP collegiate party, supposedly casual but almost formal in its progression, and boring. My older sister was there. She'd ridden up with my parents to help. But when I finally got to the party, from my duty at the gate, I didn't see her, or many of our friends. Seconds later she and two classmates came out on the deck looking sheepish and reeking of smoke. We were standing around, and someone suggested we go to a bar on campus, the only bar, to hear bluegrass.

“I have to go there anyway,” said my tall, thin, dark-headed roommate, Peter. “My shift started thirty minutes ago.”

“C'mon,” my sister told me, “I promise I won't embarrass you.”

On our way out I spotted an old friend, Amanda, who'd grown up with Will and me in Birmingham and was here in school with us now. She said that if everyone else was headed to campus, she wanted to go, too. The only question was who would drive. A boy I'd met the previous year and who lived above me in the dorm, named Drayton, from Charleston, who'd come to the party with Amanda, agreed to take us in her car. My sister left with Peter in his. My parents said they might just throw caution to the wind and join us in a while.

Autumn was in its initial swing. It was the season of brochure pictures, and the school looked exactly the way I had pictured it before I ever got there. Fat yellow and red leaves. Clear skies and chilly temperatures. For me it brought a sense of opening outward, of possibilities expanding. The others felt it as well. When Amanda began laughing for no reason, apart from excitement, no one commented.

I remember the singer on the stereo maniacally repeating the line, “Laughing, laughing, fall apart.”

*   *   *

When we were out on the road, less than a mile from the gate, a car coming the other way veered into our lane. It was right after a bend in the road. The other driver, a girl in her twenties, had apparently been reaching down for something on the floor of the passenger side. As soon as Drayton saw her, he swerved into her lane to avoid her. At the last second she swerved back as well.

I used to try to connect the dots to see if I could pinpoint exactly where my life took what was the beginning of this detour—earlier that day, I'd felt the dreamy detachment that usually signaled I was getting sick, I shouldn't have gone to the party; or further back, I could have gone to a different college than Will (we'd talked about it and in fact never told each other where we'd applied yet wound up applying to the same school).

The impact of the cars colliding caused me to be shot forward from the middle of the backseat into the dashboard. A piece of my lower jaw broke off and became lodged down my throat. I was instantly knocked unconscious.

One of the first people to drive up on the scene was the father of a student, not someone I saw regularly, a freshman that year. The man wasn't a doctor but he'd apparently had some medical training, in the army, I think. Amid the growing noise and chaos, he somehow realized what had happened to me and pulled out the piece that was obstructing my airway, allowing me to breathe. I used to have to try not to think about this much. The seeming randomness of it, of my having been saved, made me shudderingly uncomfortable. I'm okay with it now. But I know that if the order of cars on the highway had been slightly different that night, I would have lain there and silently suffocated.

We were on the only road that led from campus to the interstate, and cars quickly began to pile up in both directions. My parents, who'd decided to join us, got stopped by the blocked traffic. A guy I'd gone to high school with ran back to their car and told them (mistakenly) that my sister and I had been in a wreck, but that he thought we were okay. Before my mother had time to become hysterical, she and my father were out of their car and running.

My sister and Peter had saved a table and were waiting for us at the bar. It had just begun to get crowded. She barely heard the phone ringing above the noise. When the bartender yelled her name, she thought the guy was joking, and that Peter must somehow be involved. But it was the dean of students. At first, she said, she thought he was joking, too. He told her I'd been in a serious wreck and was at the hospital with our parents, waiting to be flown to the closest city. My mother got on the phone and sobbingly told her to hurry.

When my sister and Peter reached the hospital, the paramedics were wheeling me and the girl who'd been driving the other car out to the helicopter. I was still gagging and coughing up blood. In a panic, my father grabbed my mother's arm as I went by and, so he told me, shouted, “We're gonna lose him!”

Will was asleep in Birmingham at the time. He'd planned on getting up early to study. But just before midnight, he threw back the covers and jumped out of bed with a throbbing pain in his jaw. He said it felt as if he'd just been punched. He doesn't know why but he then called up my room at school. When there was no answer, he took some aspirin and tried to go back to sleep. Not long after, my father called him with the news. This will sound made up to non–identical twins, but he and I have had incidents like that throughout our lives, and other identicals we've known have corroborated the phenomenon—when his first daughter was born I felt an unexpected, biological euphoria beyond any kind of happiness, that was like waking up stoned but fully alert. When we were children and physically fighting, if someone tried to break us up, we would both turn on that person, like a symbiotic organism.

By the time he got to Chattanooga, the city I'd been flown to, they had stabilized me somewhat. I have a fuzzy image of my father standing beside me holding my arm and telling me I'd been in a car accident. I remember being scared because I knew time had passed that I couldn't account for. But that may be the result of stories I heard later. After studying me for a minute—I probably reacted somehow—Will told the rest of the family not to worry, I was going to be fine. (I don't know whether anyone believed him, but I know he didn't care.)

Amanda's femur and ankle on one side had been crushed by the station wagon's engine, which was pushed back into the car. Several of her toes were broken on the other foot. Nothing permanent. Drayton's injuries were minor.

The other driver, a local girl, died on the flight with me. I know her name but I don't want to write it, I didn't know her. She was the daughter or niece of local mechanics. I was told she wasn't wearing a shirt when the wreck occurred. That may have been what she was reaching for. She was alone in the car. She must have been changing.

Implausible as it may seem, my voice was not affected by the impact. And over the next few weeks and months, all of my injuries—broken jaw, concussion, fistula (tear) in my carotid artery, optic nerve damage—healed on their own or were healed with surgery, with the exception of an injury to my brachial plexus, the bundle of nerves inside my right shoulder. This happened when my body, en route to the dashboard, got bashed by the passenger seat. I could no longer bend my elbow. The doctors said there wasn't any way to know for sure the extent of the damage, short of going in and having a look. But they wanted to give the nerve a chance to heal on its own. Nine months, they told my parents, was the cutoff time. If it hadn't recuperated by then, they'd do surgery.

I remember very little from that first hospitalization. A dream of safari hunting in Africa. And certain images. A male nurse, with hairy forearms, standing beside my gurney waiting for elevator doors to open. Sucking mashed green peas through a straw. But I can't place the flow of any one moment vis-à-vis the others.

The test they'd done to pinpoint the fistula involves the injection of a contrast dye, and some of it had leaked into my brain. The headaches I started having rose to the top of the list of what hurt the most. They seemed to be taking place in the core of my person. In addition to a diverse low-intensity ache, every once in a while a sharp splash of pain would hit and just linger, like a brain freeze that kept on freezing. These sensations were of a strength I'd never experienced. The only things that seemed to soothe them were morphine and sleep, and morphine required the least participation on my part. I wouldn't have guessed it could be pleasurable to feel absolutely nothing, but it was as if every feeling of pleasure and relief I'd ever experienced had been distilled to its essence, an undifferentiated spectrum, so that it seemed I'd both expanded and disappeared.