Entanglement (3 page)

Alma rushed up and put her arm around him. “Hey, sweetie, you okay?”

With her long, braided hair and large eyes, Alma had an innocent, almost childlike demeanor that Jack found alluring. They had lived together, off and on, in his small room, but at the moment they had rooms of their own. Alma wore a pearl ring he'd bought for her during a euphoric early weekend that they'd spent together traveling the coast. She wore it on her ring finger; it was unclear what she believed it symbolized. Jack had thought only that the ring was pretty and had wanted to buy her a gift. He cared for Alma, but had yet to have the experience of wanting to spend his life with one woman. He'd never had the heart to tell her this, however.

They stood in a tight hallway, her fingers interlaced with his. He stood against the brick wall, and she kissed his cheek.

“What's wrong? You don't seem like yourself,” she whispered.

Jack buried his face in her hair but pulled away as she began kissing his neck. His eyes were closed, and he was unresponsive.

“Not in the mood?”

Jack wrapped his arms around her waist. “It doesn't have anything to do with you.”

Alma pulled back and looked closely at his face. “Who does it have to do with?”

“I just need to be alone right now. I'm having a rough time.”

Alma blanched. “I've never heard you say
that
before.”

“I've never
felt
like this before,” Jack said. “It's about my brother—I'll tell you about it later.”

Alma still looked almost tearful. Seeing her face, he gathered her closer to him. “Everything's cool with us. It'll be okay.”

“You sure?”

Jack kissed her lightly. “Yes, I'm sure. I'll see you later.”

He headed toward his room and parted the batik curtain that served as his door. Inside was a mattress, a video-editing dock, a computer, and a pile of clothes. He pulled off his shirt, kicked off his combat boots, and threw himself down on the mattress, putting his hand on his head.

Jack had lived in this room for almost two years, ever since he and Charlie, his twin brother, had gone their separate ways. A part-time art student, Jack had received a short-term scholarship that had recently ended. Now, in order to make ends meet, he had to work three different odd jobs and share a floor of the warehouse with a group of friends.

Decorating the walls were photocopies of his digital creations—vines, tentacles, and futuristic landscapes, somewhere between cyber and organic. Beside the bed was a stack of books by a variety of authors, philosophers, and theorists: Albert Camus, Buckminster Fuller, Khalil Gibran, Aldous Huxley.

He grabbed one from the top of the stack and tried to read, but he couldn't concentrate. He finally tossed the book down and turned off the light.

The ceiling above his bed was decorated with glow-in-the-dark stickers of the solar system—hundreds of stars, moons, and planets.

Jack stared at the sky above him, his breathing heavy. Something was very wrong. His chest felt constricted, as if something were sitting on it. As he shut his eyes, he was overcome by a dreamlike vision, a series of disjointed images, all set in the desert. There were hands on a Humvee steering wheel, a flash of a khaki uniform, the sound of an engine grinding its gears.

Sunglasses reflected the white-hot sun and miles of desert. The sweating face of his twin brother, Charlie, suddenly looked up at a hilltop ridge to the left of the Humvee, where there stood a strange creature. A coyote or a wolf? Then, a male scream, a sudden flash of light, and a loud ringing in his ears.

Jack jumped up, covered in sweat. “Charlie!” he cried, just as the coyote's face also appeared at the foot of his bed with a great snarl. Jack was breathing fast, his eyes wild as he looked around.

“Oh, God—oh, God!”

He stood up and rooted around frantically in the clothes on the floor until he found his cell phone. He flipped it open and pushed buttons until he came to his senses. Charlie was in Afghanistan. He couldn't be reached on a cell phone.

He moved over to his desk. The screen on his laptop lit up, reflecting his own panicked face. When he tried to get online, a message popped up as he opened the browser: “No connection available.” He tried to log on to Skype, but still the same message appeared. He looked out the window to see a crack of lightning flash across the sky, followed by a low roar of thunder.

“Come on, come on.”

He reached down and checked whether the ethernet cable was plugged in and saw that it was. He checked the screen again; still no service. He pounded on his keyboard.

He followed the ethernet cable out of his room, down the hallway, to a high ledge where it ended. Climbing onto the ledge, Jack found that the modem was blinking red.

“Damn it!”

Shirtless, he moved into the large open space where Alma was sitting with a few of her friends on the floor.

“How long's the Internet been down?” he asked her.

“Hi, sweetie! How're you feeling?”

“Why's the Internet down?” he asked.

“I don't know. What's going on?”

He stormed past her into an alcove where Sam sat reading.

Sam gazed at his friend's face. “Dude, what's the matter?”

Jack said, “I need to talk to my brother, and the Internet's down.”

“So can't you call him?”

Jack gave him a withering look. “He's in the service—in Afghanistan. How many times have I mentioned that?”

Sam's face turned red. “Sorry, I forgot. But in my defense, you don't actually bring it up much.”

“Whatever,” Jack said, annoyed. “Can you think of what might be wrong with it?”

Sam shrugged as he stood up. “Maybe Martin didn't pay the bill on time. We'll fix it in the morning, if you can just chill out.”

“I can't just chill out,” Jack said. “Don't you get it?”

Sam shrugged again. “It's no big deal.”

Jack shoved him against the wall. “Don't say it's no big deal. This is my
brother
we're talking about. And the morning's too late—I have to talk to him now.”

“Whatever, man. Back off.”

Jack removed his hands and stomped to his room again, grabbing a shirt as he dug around for his keys. Then he stuffed his laptop in a messenger bag and headed out into the rainy night.

His Camaro was parked haphazardly on the street, unlocked. He jumped in, turned on the lights, and screeched off.

Or
tried
to screech off. Two blocks later, Jack was stopped by a traffic jam that snaked ahead for what looked like miles. He turned on the radio and heard that a tractor trailer had gotten stuck in the overpass ahead and would remain there until it could be dislodged with special equipment. This happened every few months, and there was no recourse but to shut down his engine and wait it out; it would be at least 20 minutes.

California traffic
—he thought as he opened the window and rubbed his eyes. Not that he remembered any other kind. Or did he?

He closed his eyes, and he was back in Ohio. At six years old, he and Charlie sat at the house of their maternal grandmother, Nelly, playing with Legos on the living room floor. It was a late summer day, dry and airless; a rotating fan sat on the floral rug throwing a lazy arc of air.

Jack and Charlie were born on a hot summer night in late July, Jack a few minutes before his brother. Their mother had been hugely pregnant for so long that people had begun thinking she might have triplets. But it had only been the two of them—who, at seven pounds each, had caused her a protracted, difficult labor.

People were forever getting the two of them mixed up, which alternately irked and amused them. Just like in the movies, they played jokes on teachers and girlfriends, who mistook one of them for the other. Even Nelly had to study them long and hard, especially as they emerged from swimming or the shower, when they looked particularly alike.

The boys received nearly the same grades, even when they took a class with a different teacher. They chose the same color and style of clothing from separate catalogs when their mother asked them what they wanted for Christmas. They gravitated toward the same kind of friends—who were loyal and smart—and loved spicy Mexican food, which was difficult to locate in their part of Ohio.

What they shared was endless, so vast and deep that it could not be measured. They both found it comforting to be so close to one another, to feel as if they had a true and constant second self who mirrored them. Who else had that?

They were the only offspring of parents who had once been considered the most successful and good-looking of couples—their mother an intense, high-strung professor with a sharp wit; their father a handsome, towheaded bass player and perpetual hippie. It was commonly said, especially by their grandmother, that the boys had inherited the best qualities of both sides—that they'd combined their mother's brains and competitiveness with their father's cool good looks and effortless charm. They were born in the late '80s, into otherwise childless families, and so were the recipients of double doses of love. But this adoration wasn't enough to keep their parents together for long. Their mother was too cool and aloof, according to their father, while their mother claimed that he was too immature, with an incessantly wandering eye.

The constant in the boys' lives was their grandmother. Nelly often babysat for them and taught them how to play hearts, appreciate country cooking, and sit through Sunday-school lessons, even when they didn't understand the point. She was a longtime widow and remained perpetually thrilled to have them living so close to her—that is, until the afternoon when her daughter announced that they were moving away.

“Elaine, you're not really taking these boys all the way to California?” Nelly asked as they all sat in the living room. She was still wearing the kind of housedress and sensible heels that she'd worn to her job as church secretary every day until her retirement.

Elaine turned on her mother with a look that the boys knew well.

“California is where I found a job, Mother. What else do you want me to do with them? It's the best teaching offer I got anywhere.”

“This whole big country, and you're telling me the only place you can find work is fifteen hundred miles away?”

“Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.”

Their grandmother sniffed in disbelief. “And what does Tom say?”

“Tom needs me to work—he's not saying anything. It's not like he's making any money.”

Nelly shook her head. “It's no good, I'm telling you. California is no place for these children to grow up.”

“And why not? It's warm and beautiful there!”

Before Nelly could answer, the phone rang, and Elaine left to answer it.

The boys looked at each other when their mother was gone, as if conveying some silent message.

Nelly leaned forward. “You listen to me, boys. I want you to remember two things. You ever have any trouble or need anything, you call me collect; I don't care what time.”

“What do you mean,
trouble
?” Jack asked.

“You've never lived out west; it's different there. People do whatever they want. Anything goes. It's not like Ohio.”

The boys took this in silently.

“And another thing I want you to remember: education. It's what will save you. Make sure you keep on studying, that you go to college. When I'm gone, there'll be money to help you out.”

“You act like we're not ever going to see you again,” Charlie said.

“Well, you never know. But you won't be living near me anymore, and letters and phone calls are different.”

Their father walked into the room, and they immediately fell silent. With his long, pale hair, jeans, and laconic, laid-back manner, he hardly seemed fatherly—he was simply the musician he claimed to be.

“What's happening?” he asked.

“We're talking about California,” Nelly told him.

Tom rolled his eyes. “I'm not looking forward to that move. I'm not even sure I can make it. The band's auditioning for a gig …”

Elaine reentered and stood with her hands on her hips. “What are you talking about? I haven't heard a word about this.”

“Well, it just happened.” He lit a cigarette. “We got a call about playing a couple of concerts outside of Pittsburgh. We've been trying to get in there for years now, and we finally got a break. You don't hit it big overnight with my kind of work.”

Elaine rolled her eyes.

“What? You're saying I'll never make it, aren't you?”

She raised her hands, palms out. “I didn't say a word.”

Listening to their parents, the boys began disassembling their Lego constructions. They had been building a fort, with a reinforced wall and a number of sturdy buildings inside. Now they methodically took them apart. Jack didn't know how it was possible to feel sorry for both of his parents at the same time, but he did, and he knew Charlie felt the same. They nearly always felt the same. They were identical twins, after all, formed when a single fertilized egg had split in two—as close as two humans could ever be.