Close Encounters (3 page)

“We mean there is more than one. There are, as our father says, Julia and Julie-Ann.”

“Well, Julia, since I'm fairly well acquainted with you, why don't you tell me about Julie-Ann?”

“But you've been talking with me the whole time. Wouldn't you rather talk to Julia for awhile?”

It irritated us that no one could tell the clear differences that existed between us. Julie-Ann, obviously, was good at the arts and writing, whereas Julia excelled in math and science. We even spoke differently, felt different, and had crushes on difference classmates.

“To whom am I talking now?” Ms. James peered at us over her glasses, a slight frown stretched across her face. Clearly, we had given the wrong answer. “Julia or Julie-Ann?”

“Julie-Ann.”

“How will I know, dear, to whom I'm speaking?”

And yet it seemed simple enough to point out that she knew the difference between Allan and Gerard, and Patricia and Leah, even if they were just ones, not twos. Like us, they were as different as night and day. Julie-Ann doodled on our paper again..

“Who is drawing?”

“I am.”

“And who are you?”

“I'm Julie-Ann. How many times do I have to tell you, you horrible cow!”

The tests were psychological at first, with different psychiatrists; our dreams, our nightmares, whether father touched us inappropriately, how mother disciplined us. We became increasingly disinclined to talk, whether as the result of the monotony in this line of questioning or the knowing fear that something was wrong with us, and if they could put a name to it, they would aspire to eliminate it.

Julie-Ann felt it was in our best interests to mount a full disclosure of our twoness.

Maybe they will be able to help us
, she pleaded.
Maybe they can cure us
.

And how do you suppose they cure us?
Julia demanded.
One cannot live without the other
.

I don't know
, Julie-Ann pouted.
I'm just so tired of the questions, the probing. Why don't they just let us be!

Julie-Ann's plan won out by the nature of her perseverance, but it was not the relief we expected. Our parents were devastated, confused, angered, that there were two.

“How can there be
two
of you?” Our mother held our arms and stared deeply into our eyes as if to isolate the both of us, as if we were two flies crawling around the edges of our eyeballs. “There's no mental illness in our family!”

We understood, from eavesdropping on our parents, that if the medicine didn't take effect and make us “one” again, we would be sent away.
But where?
We wondered.
And for what?

Oddly, despite her stubbornness, it was Julie-Ann who was affected the most by the medication. She began to fall asleep during school. I tried the best I could to keep up in subjects that were deemed Julie-Ann's forte, but I soon fell behind. Our parents didn't care so much; they were elated by our “progress” and suddenly the visits to the doctors became less frequent.

And I, I began to like being just
Julia
, the quiet of only my own thoughts or lack of them, my own interests pursued at school (like the science fair and not some silly drawing competition), my own relationship with our parents. They would kid that Julie-Ann had “gone to sleep” and that I should be careful not to wake her up. Apparently this meant no running and dancing, eating sugary and spicy foods, or other seemingly normal activities my parents felt might agitate awake the sleeping beast that was Julie-Ann. I wasn't much interested in physical activity, but I did pinch the occasional chocolate bar from the cupboard.

It was true, as I said, that Julie-Ann slept during the day. However, she began waking at night, when I was tired and my defenses lowered. My thoughts would blur as I began to yawn, and I would hear her, distantly at first, indecipherable, then louder and clearer until she was right beside me as always. For a few hours we were two, just as we always were, and I did look forward to it, as we were sisters, and being without her for so long could be unbearable at times. But then, as I drifted off to sleep, she did not.

I was initially upset that Julia got all the attention, but mostly I liked it. I didn't have to attend that stuffy school and deal with those crotchety old teachers. I didn't have to do homework. I could write and draw in my bed in the darkness of night with only a flashlight to guide me; I could sneak out in the yard and do cartwheels on the dew-covered grass; I could eat all the ice cream and pizza I wanted and watch late-night television. Best of all, I could do all these things without Julia at my side, warning that we shouldn't do that, do that. Bullocks, Julia—you never did know how to live.

Mom and Dad soon became aware of my nocturnal hours and wanted the doctor to curb what they viewed as my “mania.” However, they were equally intrigued by my creative output after nine o'clock at night and began to pretend they did not notice my “full day at the office.” In their eyes, I was too much girl for one body. I don't think they ever realized the truth of it.

I began to get bored, being alone like that in the night. I was always the more social one, Julia with her nose in the books. I needed to be out in the sunshine—I needed to feel the light on my face, touch the skin of others, laugh, hear my voice aloud, feel my vocal chords vibrate with laughter, with sorrow, my ears ring, my limbs tire from a long day of activity. I began to sleep at night too.

She began to invade me—Julie-Ann, I mean. What began as a few hours in the evening before bed, extended into early morning, when I awoke, and then through second period and beyond. Her incessant chattering continued in my ears while I tried to listen to our instructor. Her excitement was over the changes that had occurred at school, around town, with our classmates while she had hibernated that refreshing year, which was our fourteenth together. Was she becoming acclimated to the medicine? Did she need a higher dose to stay repressed in the folds of quiet while I worked through the day, made a good name for us at school? And it was my name on the papers, on the term cards, on the honor roll, wasn't it?

I begged her to go back to sleep, but she was bored, she said. She was lonely. She needed stimulation. She suggested we trade off days, but I was skeptical. We would be out of sync, too tired. It would be too difficult to catch up. Besides, I was firmly entrenched in the school hierarchy: debate team, science club, math club, swim club. And my friends, Sissy and Carol and Janice—Julie-Ann thought they were terrible bores. It would be like her to hang out with the loose girls, the smokers, the art room malcontents and ruin our reputation forever. I had to stand my ground.

Julia was totally against us switching off days at school, but what right was it of hers to decide? We were both here, sharing this body. Just because her name was on everything was, well, chance. I could just as easily have been Julia (not that I would want to). I decided on an ultimatum. It was true Julia was good at school and, to be honest, it quite bored me. My proposal was thus:

I would sleep for a little while.

A few years, maybe. Enough so that Julia could get us through high school, college, medical school, established, whatever. And then I would awake for good and Julia would go to sleep. We could each live our own lives: Julia our life's morning, and myself, our life's afternoon. It was perfect, right? And it would keep us out of the damn loony bin, that's for sure. If the psychiatrists weren't diagnosing us with multiple personality disorder or strapping electrodes to our head, they were feeding us pills, black and pink, green and yellow, white and chalky. I could dream a decade or so of delicious dreams, and Julia could tinker out the details of waking life.

I couldn't believe that Julie-Ann was so generous. I missed her terribly, to be sure, and would often spend the afternoons in tears, calling to her, wanting to know her opinion on my new boyfriend Jared (although I can tell you without hesitation that she would have been able to stand him) or the pantsuit I got at Wellston's (although I can tell you she would hate it). Gradually, over time, however, it wasn't so bad. I began, in my ways, to understand the appeal of oneness even as I mourned my loss of twoness. Although I was still a big stickler for cooperation and teamwork in my outward life, I savored the ability to make the only and final decision on everything,

Julie-Ann became a memory as the years folded quietly into one another and, like pages in a scrapbook, my vivid photographs of her became tempered and faded the further along I got in the book. I began to wonder whether I had made her up, if in fact she weren't something I'd created entirely to overcome loneliness, or boredom, or mother's suffocation, or father's sexual advances. My fiancé Michael, whom I had met in a psychology class at the university (where we were both studying child psychiatry), tended to agree. Only there was the sticky proposition that Mother or Father had abused me in some horrible, unspeakable way—mundane, normal old Mother and Father, who read the paper and warmed up the sticky buns when Michael and I stopped by. Quite impossible, I'd have to think.

I began my practice in ripe anticipation of finding another child like myself. I ran across a few cases of multiple personality disorders, but the children were severely abused and, as a result, severely disassociated. In addition, their personalities never existed simultaneously—in fact, they didn't even know of each other. The imaginary friends of my cases similarly lived outside of their bodies, separate entities. Despite my research and my experience at the clinic, I never ran into a case of twoness.

“Let's face it, Jul, you're an extremely bright girl who probably had an extremely overactive imagination,” Michael coaxed me as we sat in bed, massaging my shoulders as I flipped despondently through another medical journal. “And so will our kids, I suppose.”

“I told you, Michael, I'm a little leery about our having any children. I don't want to pass any mental illness onto them.”

“You're being silly, Jul.” He put his hands across his chest. “You are the most sane person I know.”

“It's just so odd that I cannot put my finger on it.” I dropped the journal to the side of the bed alongside the others. “Julia-Ann was as real as you are to me. She had her own voice, her own talents—she was good at things at which I am absolutely not gifted and haven't been since she went away.”

“It's all guilt.” He patted my shoulder. “I've seen it hundreds of times in overachieving children. They feel guilty—they're too gifted. In your case, you attributed some of your ‘talents' to another person. The gifts are just repressed deep in you. I keep telling you, Jul, take a painting class or something. You'll see that you're just as talented as ‘Julia' than Julie-Ann ever was.”

He did not know that I was afraid of such a proposition. In fact, I avoided all activities that might serve to awaken Julie-Ann. Perhaps I was being paranoid; Julie-Ann had been gone for more than fifteen years. However, whenever Michael suggested the theater, an art exhibition, a concert, I pleaded disinterest and didn't accompany him. I began to worry that I bored him, that he would think I was rather stodgy, never wanting to have any fun.

But nothing seemed to bother him more than my fear of pregnancy. He ran battery after battery of tests on me, in his own fashion, over meals, in bed, on the commute, on vacations. All served to remind me that I was a perfectly normal woman in her early thirties, if a bit dull. I decided to chance it.

When the doctor informed us we were expecting I could not have been happier. Although I worried that hormonal changes might affect my emotional state, Michael assured me that everything would be fine. And everything was, for the most part, until the sonograms showed what appeared to be twins.

Only one twin was inside the other.

“It's a fairly rare condition,” the doctor explained, tracing his pen along a radiograph of my abdomen. “Fetus in fetu—
child inside child
.”

“Well, what are we going to do?” I asked. “Surely the one child will kill the other, growing inside it like that.”

“Usually the inner child is parasitic, yes, but not a viable human entity,” the doctor agreed. “The child is more like a tumor—a tumor with a spine, perhaps some malformed appendages—but in no way a fully living, conscious entity. Usually the mother is able to carry it to term. And then we extract the teratoma from the healthy child.”

“Are you certain that I will be able to carry this child full-term?” I questioned, touching my stomach. Would the turmoil awaken her? What if she were the turmoil?

“We'll closely monitor your progress,” he assured. “We don't catch most cases of this particular oddity until after childbirth usually, so we're ahead of the curve here.”

The first few months came and went without incident. Gradually, however, I began to feel stirrings.

It was hard to describe them. It was too early for the baby to be moving, and yet I felt a specific movement, someone turning over in bed, shaking off sleep. And I began to feel more aware of things, like the color of the sky behind the swaying trees, the sounds of the breeze through their leaves, the smell of sycamore and pine, of wet grass. I began to doodle at work, to hum along with the songs on the radio. It was so much like her, these things, but she was not here, not that I could tell. And yet, I didn't feel quite myself. It seemed that there were hours of the day that I couldn't account for—the time between university and home, arriving at our doorstep hours after dinnertime, Michael opening the door with a flourish, his sleeves rolled up and his hair falling in long wisps across his creased forehead.

“Where're you been, Julia? I've been worried sick.”

“I felt a little nauseous, so I took a nap in the office. It came on so suddenly…I couldn't get to the phone to call.”