Gerlach, Twin Studies 1

Twin Studies

Alex was born backwards and upside down in Why, Arizona’s country hospital after thirty two hours of labor, twenty seconds before Shannon, who slid out just right. The mother, Dr. Kathleen Balter, a botanist, and Herb Matthews, an insurance consultant, studied their identical girls with the growing anxiety that they or the hospital would accidentally switch the babies in the over-crowded nursery. But once they brought the girls home, their personalities split so clearly that there was no mistaking the screaming, uneasy Alex for her quiet and smiling sister. Still, sixteen years later Kathleen had the uneasy feeling she had mistaken Alex for the child who, from the moment she was born, was uncomfortable being so crowded by her twin. They grew up sharing a small room with pale yellow wallpaper in a newly developed and bleakly sunny suburban complex full of identical buildings that looked like they had been assembled overnight. They developed long brown hair, olive skin and freckles, and their father’s warm brown eyes. The weekly family schedule hung on the fridge. Mom: assay on Monday, guest lecturer at ASU on Thursday; Herb: finish paperwork, lunch with Greg on Tuesday; Shannon: Cross-country practice, trombone lessons; Alex: Latin club, Robotics, student-mentoring (get up early Wednesday), National Honors society, ASU College tour Friday. Alex had not been happy about applying in-state. Alex spent as much time as she could disassociating herself from twin-dom as possible. Kathleen and Herb never admitted to each other, not even in the confidence of their bedroom, that one of the twins was easier, maybe more loveable than the other, but they both worried about Alex’s natural state of stress and the self-loathing that must come from hating someone identical to yourself.

After a stressful summer trip to Greece where half their luggage was mistakenly sent to Cairo, Kathleen had yelled at a bronzed man in his thirties for staring at Shannon’s legs, Herb had sprained his ankle and Alex had held up a family dinner when she lost her hat to the Aegean sea, they came back to the states less rested than when they left. A day later, Alex and Shannon broke out in hives that looked like a vicious strain of psoriasis. The girls examined themselves, Alex in the upstairs bathroom, crying, and Shannon with the help of her mother. Their identical DNA seemed to channel the marks in perfectly coordination down their backs, around their knees and elbows, circled their necks and arms, and freckled around their hairline. Shannon cared for the rashes with liberal amounts of aloe and wore long-sleeved clothing to school, but Alex refused to get out of bed, scratching at her skin. She was too stressed to do her school work and she had convinced herself that Shannon’s marks were already less angry and red than hers where. Herb called the local dermatologist to set up an appointment.

There was nothing the dermatologist could do. She examined Shannon’s hives twice; Alex refused to roll up her sleeves. The hives had worsened and even to the highly-recommended dermatologist’s trained eye, the condition looked like it came from more than just travel-stress. With a bemused apology she wrote them a generic prescription, suggested the twins answer a few skin treatment studies and hope for the best. Alex took to the assignment and by dinnertime she had found a twin study that treated various skin conditions and examined the reactions of fraternal, identical, reared-apart, and reared-together twins. Herb drove the girls to the clinic the next day.

The muted-pattern padded chairs were filled with doubled DNA. There were two tiny Asian boys playing with their mother’s cell phone, Indian women arguing in whispers, teenage boys on either side of their eye-patched father, and a pair of sisters, one of whom looked homeless and at least ten years older than her twin sister. Alex cringed at all the irritated skin. The girls were called into the room with their father. They were met by a Dr. Banin, a stout blonde man with an ambiguous European accent and rubbery burn marks that blurred the left side of his face, disappeared under a pristine lab coat and then reappeared on his left hand. He smiled at the girls, shaking hands with everyone in the room. He detailed the experiment and what the medicine would do, using lots of medical suffixes that Herb could barely catch onto.

“I can’t say I’ve ever seen this particular condition before. Were it not on both of you, I would say maybe even unique.” The trial medicine was a progressive substance that copied healthy skin DNA and reproduced it to eradicate the affected blemishes as well as strengthening the skin from further attack. Herb nodded along, it sounded fairly basic. It was safe but the product would work very quickly and shouldn’t be consumed internally.

“Okay now Mr. Matthews, Herb, read over the fine print, sign and initial at the bottom for your two minors.” Herb squinted at the tiny blank ink. The pages went on forever, and the words ran together. Kathleen was better at the logistics, and used to clicking “accept” to every agreement that ever passed his screen or desk, he signed his name with a few extra loops to give a professional impression, reminded of his community college education when he took in Dr. Banin’s lab coat. The medicine was a clear gel in a tiny metallic tube.

“Why are you examining twins?” Alex asked. “What’s the point of using two people if they’re exactly the same? Can’t you just use one?”

“I was an identical twin as well.” The un-burnt side of his face curved up into a smile. “Your mind makes you completely your own. From what I’ve seen, the right mindset always speeds along the healing process.”

Hot and cold currents ran together that night. There was a special electricity in the air when the tornado warning siren blared from the family’s television screen and through the house. Herb banged on the twins’ doors and found the girls linked by a pair of ear buds to their shared blue iPod. They all ducked into the basement, taking warm-up dinners and extra blankets with them. The warning would continue through the night so the family set up to stay the night in the musty basement. There was a single old mattress, pin-striped and yellowing. Kathleen and Herb laid out blankets on the cold floor while the girls sat up on the mattress, glossing themselves with a third layer of medicine and letting it dry before climbing under their blanket.

Kathleen laid her head on the spare pillow and stopped to look at their toes, twenty, identical little things peeking out from the blanket. For a moment she didn’t guess which ones belonged to whom, she was only grateful they had all twenty, regardless of which ten came out of her kicking.

The warning ended in the morning. A few neighborhoods in the area had been hit, but the family’s complex was untouched. All county schools were cancelled due to debris. Kathleen went down the basement steps to tell Shannon and Alex in time to see the twins fall face first out of bed. They groaned and rubbed their knees from the fall. Alex was the first to notice. The medicine had congealed into a thin shiny membrane over their marks, more pink than red now. They examined their arms and legs, down their long thin shins to their feet, where Alex’s left and Shannon’s right pinky toe were completely conjoined.

The girls panicked, their yelling and alarm drew Herb away from the sizzling bacon pan and back down to the basement. Alex picked up a pair of scissors and opened them, but Shannon swatted them away and yelled at her. Alex calmed down but couldn’t take her eyes off their toes. Kathleen skipped work that day and she and Herb sped back into town, swerving around slower vehicles until they screeched into the parking lot of the clinic. Alex and Shannon sat in the back, feet together, but by the time their parents found out from the defensive secretary with dark lip liner and plastic nails that Dr. Banin was at his Tuscon office; their feet were starting to stick together. The family made the two hour drive to Tuscon to an identical clinic, the same white letters spelling Dr. Banin on the window, but the secretary there insisted he was in the Why, Arizona clinic and that she couldn’t fit them into the appointment list. Neither office would help them and it became clear that Dr. Banin had all but vanished. Kathleen drove while Herb created a mock-up on a map of all the highest-rated hospitals in the tri-state area. The Ford Escape was emanating phone signals and the GPS steered them around for hours, looking for a doctor that had heard of twins conjoining sixteen years after birth. They were pulled over twice and ran over a box-turtle on the highway. Shannon and Alex’s kneecaps bumped back and forth.

The doctor they found, only after thorough research, colleague approval and hospital assurance that the surgeon could be reached at any time, presented a Venn diagram of Alex and Shannon’s bodies. X-rays scans illuminated their bones, and showed that even in the short hours Alex and Shannon were connected, the DNA copying medicine had taken root in each other and had become much more than skin-deep. The doctor hadn’t heard of twins converging after birth, but had successfully separated two baby boys who shared a pair of legs. The doctor drew a dotted line down the diagram, dividing Alex and Shannon in the safest way possible. By now their calves were blending into a large webbed mass, a stretched, thirteen toed foot between them. The surgeon told the family to go home and think over the surgery before they committed.

Shannon and Alex struggled up the stairs to their bedroom, Shannon’s arm around Alex’s waist. Kathleen watched them practice their three legged pace, rubbing at her knuckles and looking at the clock. She and Herb made a scatter-brained dinner, too-main grains and no vegetables, each imagining how the food would go down two throats and the nutrients would divide up. Shannon wanted to eat in bed rather than strain the connection between her and Alex. Alex pulled them out of bed, wanting to walk around and flex the fusing leg muscles. Herb brought the floral dinner trays to them and watched them walk in circles around their room. The room was divided in two, Alex’s books and molecule sets sorted on her desk. Shannon’s clothes were strewn on the floor, leaking onto Alex’s side. They waddled and groaned in pain. Alex seemed to have more control over their foot than Shannon.

“You’re...you’re moving better...” Herb offered after a few silent minutes.

“Mind over matter,” muttered Alex, eyes fixed on their deformed leg. “Speed the healing process.”

The girls stayed home from school the next day, situated on the living room loveseat. Shannon’s arm curved around a bowl of popcorn, Alex held the remote control, flicking through channels.

“Go back, I want to watch Bride Wars,” said Shannon. Alex ignored this and settled on Animal Planet. Shannon wriggled in discomfort. She missed her cross country practices, being able to fully stretch out her body as she ran through the silent pines, dipping into her full range of breathing capacity, a full minute ahead of the person behind her.

“You do realize we’re never going to get married right?” said Alex. They looked down at their meshed hips. Shannon tucked a blanket around their waist and fanned it out like a skirt.

“So our legs might look a little weird. They make great prosthetics nowadays. People move on,” Shannon said, picturing a long silver leg attached to her hip.

“You’ll probably never run again,” Alex pointed out. A gazelle raced onto the television screen, its perfect limbs full of kinetic energy.

“You know Al, I really wouldn’t mind being attached to you if it came down to it. If, if the surgery didn’t work...I think I could get over it eventually.” A lion tore from the left side of the screen in pursuit of the gazelle. Alex was focused intently on the screen. She didn’t want to picture her life glued to the beautiful person who made her feel so trivial, so redundant. The lion was advancing, turning through the yellow grass. Alex fixated on Shannon’s right hand, which was laying palm up on the couch. It lifted, parallel at first, trembling in the air. Shannon’s eyes snapped to her hand. The arm swung around and flopped into the popcorn bowl. Her fingers twitched, the fine muscles and bones in conflict. The hand scooped up the popcorn, and dropping a few, pushed the handful right into Alex’s mouth. It flopped back down in their lap. Alex chewed. The lion leaped in midair and came down on the gazelle, tearing into its flank. The gazelle struggled, its black marble eyes wide and then expressionless. The program went to commercial.

At work Herb took his lunch break early. He had spent the last hour in jitters, searching for ‘conjoined twins,’ ‘Vanishing Twin Syndrome’ and ‘twin-studies,’ minimizing tabs whenever Mr. Park from the desk behind him returned to his seat. He sorted through reviews of “The Shining” and stared at a picture of a two-headed snake, each end trying to eat the other. An article on a local museum that featured a special exhibit on reptiles and amphibians with genetic mutations kept showing up. He scooped up his bagged lunch and quick-walked to his car. He punched the address of the museum in his GPS.

There was a lot of wriggling in the tanks. He passed delicate larvae and shrunken dragons but he only just gotten to the prized cobra when Kathleen called with news that the surgery was set for 9:30 a.m. on Friday. The cobra’s heads swayed. Herb ran from the building clutching his stomach covering his mouth. The surgery would work. On the other end, in greenhouse seven, Kathleen clicked her cell closed and concentrated on extracting an aggressive parasitic vine from strangling the beautiful Japanese willow she had been tending. The vine knotted around the blonde flowers. She had to sacrifice two limbs. She winced has the thick shears cut and the flowery heads fell to the linoleum floor.

Alex was starving by dinner time. Kathleen was relieved at hearing this, concluding that the twin’s organs had not, or had not yet, converged. All phone calls were ignored that night. Why Public High School had called twice, inquiring if the girls had caught something. Both their teachers had sent makeup homework. Will they have to take the same classes? Herb thought. Ms. Flannagan was in 2001, Mr. Darren in 1014, their lockers were on opposite sides of the building...Shannon had begun to cry at dinner, her head bent over her plate in stifled panic. Alex coaxed her into going to bed early. They maneuvered into bed while Kathleen shut out the light. Alex was snoring by the time Kathleen shut the door.

Herb rose early Friday morning, scavenging the refrigerator and cleaning. He started vacuuming violently at five in the morning until Kathleen, half asleep in her long peach robe, unplugged it and wrapped her arms around her husband, the carpet touched with the cool morning light that Herb couldn’t vacuum out of the polyester blend.

Miles away at the hospital, a surgical team was prepping for the procedure. The silver surfaces were wiped down, needles and tools sterilized. IV drips were prepared. The head doctor looked passed the spinning and blinking machinery at the newly updated venn diagram of his patient’s bodies. Like two gingerbread cookies connected in the oven, he had drawn with a fine blue pen down and around the proper organs. Prosthetics were in place and ready. His pen scored the page methodically, his perfect engine of a fist gripped the pen. Start at the shoulders, room for the arm sockets, careful of the organs in the torso. The pen exploded at the kidneys, bleeding onto the paper and ruining the diagram. He called for a new one.