The Twin

To say: everything in me simple. To say: and by that simplicity, you can see, as in a still pool, the face of him I really am, and with whom I have nothing in common. But who is he that speaks from nowhere? Who is he for whom my life is only a way of bootstrapping himself into existence, and who lets me write only to indicate the ‘to say’, the ‘to write’, a writing without definite article? I will not know him. I cannot draw close to him. But he knows me by what I cannot know of him, and he is close to me by way of his distance.

Many pregnancies see one twin miscarry. Sometimes, the dead twin will simply vanish, absorbed into the body of the mother, or into the surviving twin. Occasionally, one twin fetus will not develop, and becomes parasitical on the other. Even more rarely, that parasite – almost always brainless and lacking internal organs – will grow in the body of the other, conjoined by an umbilical cord.

It is he who dies in me, vanished twin, parasitical twin. He draws death to himself, so that I can live. Or is it I who is his parasite, and he is the one who lives and acts in a world realer than the one in which I find myself? My body is borrowed, my body is missing, that’s what he says of me who has always survived inside him.

Elvis Presley had a stillborn twin brother. How to imagine a twin who brings death continually to birth, who says: everything that is possible is impossible? Philip Dick’s twin died at six weeks, but he imagined much later she became his protectress, and it was her soft, feminine voice he heard as he began to fall asleep. But he does not protect me; if he watches, it is not from concern.

There are many cases of ‘mirror’ identical twins, one being right handed, the other left handed; the hair of one will curl one way and the other, the other. In this condition, there is a risk the organs will be found on the wrong side of the body, a condition called situs invertus.

To say: tonight, you will dream of a dead man. To say: you will dream of one who never lived. To say: what kind of thoughts does he have, the one who has limbs and half-formed digits, but who doesn’t have a brain? His hair and teeth are growing. He says: you are the tumour who prevents me from living.