The Janus Coin

          We’re fraternal twins, but she looks just like me. Everyone says so. It was different when we were younger; some things take their time. June’s place is too small for us both, but I have nowhere else to go. I think she wishes I’d move out, so I try to stay quiet until she’s asleep. We used to be better at being together. When we were 13, sometimes she’d come into my room and lie on the floor with me while we listened to David Bowie and didn’t talk.

          I am older by three minutes. Some people think those nuances mean something. All it ever meant to me is that there was a time when I was on my own, however fleeting it turned out to be. I wish I remembered it. We slept in the same crib when we were babies, and even then, Harvey used to hold my hand. I’ve been told it was precious. It was a phase he never seemed to outgrow. Eventually, his hand felt like an anchor chain around my wrist. I made other friends, went on dates, and joined the drama club. Sometimes, when I came home late, I found Harvey asleep on my bedroom floor. When we were 18, I went to school on the other side of the country. Harvey stayed home. I think that was the beginning of it.

          June works by grading essays for a standardized testing company. She spends her days in front of a laptop reading the on-the-spot responses of would-be lawyers, journalists, and engineers. She works at home but still gets up early, like she has a job that she could be late for. She wears expensive skirts and pins up her hair as though someone might see her in passing and fleetingly think she looks nice. When we were young, we wanted to be astronauts. We made pillow-fort space shuttles and used metal colanders as helmets. We orbited for hours, just the two of us in our silent, fictional galaxy. We ate fruit roll-ups and pretended they were astronaut ice cream. We read each other Superman comics and talked about what we’d do when we reached our destination.

          I used to be a junior high English teacher. It was not a job I loved but one I liked enough. It offered a degree of stability, a convincing illusion of control. It didn’t demand that I think too deeply about my place in the world. One night, I went to sleep in my apartment and woke up in a Florida hotel room nine days later, wearing clothes I didn’t recognize. The room was strewn with travel debris, and a ticket stub from the Kennedy Space Center was on the night table next to my bed. When I looked in the mirror, I realized that half of my head had been shaved. By the time I got back, I had lost my job and Harvey had arrived with his luggage.

          Every year on our birthday, we camped in the backyard, watching old movies projected against the house with an ancient contraption from my father’s college years. We ate Twizzlers and drank Moxie and fell asleep in beach chairs while the light played across our faces. The year we turned 15, June didn’t come home after school. She didn’t show up until breakfast the next morning, and we didn’t talk about it. It was the beginning of something that happened so slowly that, at first, I could almost pretend it wasn’t happening at all.

          I hadn’t seen Harvey since my college graduation three weeks earlier. He had been leaving me messages, and I had not been calling him back. The messages got gradually more involved, like one-sided conversations that sometimes ran the length of three or four voicemails. One day, I came home and heard Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud playing on the other side of the door before I even turned the key in the lock. I’d just moved to take my first teaching job, and the rooms were a labyrinth of boxes. Harvey was curled on his side on my bedroom floor, like he often was when we were in high school and I came home late at night. Waves of rage and love hit me simultaneously. I prodded his leg with my foot to wake him up. Then, I saw the blood on the floor in front of his chest, where he’d crossed his slashed wrists like a praying mantis.

          June and I used to have annual passes to the planetarium. I liked the interplanetary expeditions; she loved the constellations. I was always amazed at how a windowless auditorium could become something infinite, even though I knew it would all disappear when the lights came up. She used to hold my hand as she pointed out her favorites: the lion, the archer, the twins. In the end, she worked so hard to forget that any of it had happened. Her mistake was believing that we were anything other than a double-faced coin. I came back because she needed me. Now, I build her pillow forts in the living room. I watch our favorite movies. I write maps of galaxies on the insides of our eyelids while she sleeps because she has forgotten that she ever knew how to get there.

          In his obituary, it said that he was “survived by his parents and twin sister.” I had never thought of myself as a survivor of anything before. I didn’t know what survival looked like. I scrubbed his blood off my bedroom floor.  It stained and I left it uncovered.  I went to work at my new job wearing teacher’s clothes, and at night I ate dinner and watched bad TV.  Independent and alone are very different states of being. I don’t think I understood that very well at first. Maybe Harvey didn’t, either. It all held together for a couple of years–until I woke up in a Florida motel room with half of my head shaved. I adapted. I got a job that allowed me to make my own hours. I avoided making plans in advance. Dating, of course, is out of the question. Sometimes, I wake up wearing his clothes, and I find his souvenirs: a half-empty carton of fried rice, a ticket stub from the silent film theater, Space Oddity at rest on the turntable. It’s not really him nor really me.

          At some point, June began to define herself in opposition to me. She became the heads to my tails. Maybe she thought that different could only ever mean separate. Maybe she believed that our duality was an illness to be cured. Sometimes, I wonder how much of her personality has been contrived by those desires.

          Last week, I bought a cheap telescope. I’ve started picking out the constellations on nights when sleep is slow to come. They come back to me like sense memory, like writing in second-grade cursive: Cassiopeia, Draco, Dorado; Virgo, Taurus. Gemini.