Duplicity

Chapter 9

3. QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT

A gifted student of mine once began a story with the following eloquent and, in their way, prophetic words: “Dear Reader, f**k You.” A fine opening, I thought, as good in its way as Call me Ishmael or They threw me off the hay truck about noon.

“Dear Reader, f**k You.” Was ever an opening more piquant or to the point?

• •

The news report ended. The next program featured classical music, Von Suppé’s Poet and Peasant overture mixed with more static. I switched the radio off. And the headlights. I took the keys from the ignition. Then I sat there, holding the keys, still unwilling to enter the house.

I’ve switched back to the first-person singular. Sorry to exclude you, Dear Reader, but this story must be told that way. It’s a confession, after all, as all first-person narratives are confessions. We’re getting something off our chests, unburdening ourselves of an experience or experiences that have moved us to where we can no longer bear to keep them to ourselves. We must share them, and in sharing them we hope to make you, our reader, understand what we’ve been through, and in the process make you complicit in our actions.

To make you my twin: that’s the point of this and all confessions. No longer will you be able to say, “Under the same circumstances, I’d have done differently.” On the contrary. Under the same circumstances, you would have done exactly as I did since you would have been me.

Then again, it’s all a conceit. Having read the first paragraph of this testimony, you know perfectly well that I’m not really sitting in a car in front of my former father’s former lake house at six thirty (6:45 now) a.m. Furthermore you know — or anyway you suspect — that this chapter will end with my seeing my twin hanging from a ceiling beam.

Still, you’re in suspense, as if you hadn’t read that first paragraph, or you’ve conveniently forgotten it. Coleridge calls it the willful suspension of disbelief. Maybe that opening was just a dream, like the nightmare my mother had about Greg drowning. These days especially, given all the postmodern shenanigans, with respect to narratives, anything’s possible, including my being simultaneously in this car hesitating to enter my former father’s former lake house, and — having already entered and seen the awful thing inside it — sitting with my back to the loft railing writing these words in one of a series of black marbled composition notebooks.

There’s a scientific term for it. Quantum Entanglement (“Spooky Action,” Einstein called it), the theory that two objects existing in completely different places may be “entangled,” so that whatever happens to one happens to the other. Apart from being in different places they are, for all intents and purposes, identical. The term applies to atoms. But — theoretically, as I see it — what’s true of atoms must also be true of things that are made of atoms. Of everything, in other words.

Is it not the case that I, your narrator, sitting in this parked car avoiding what awaits me in that house, am quantumly entangled with the narrator who wrote that opening paragraph, while he in turn is — or was — quantumly entangled with the owner of the corpse who is its object? As I will soon be, though presumably I don’t yet know it?

If that’s not complicated enough, there’s also this entity known as “the author” who isn’t any of those narrators, but who is, nonetheless, quantumly entangled with each of them — as you, Dear Reader, are quantumly entangled with me.

Notwithstanding which I’m still sitting here, in my car, in the driveway of the lakeside A-frame to which, according to our mother, my twin has retreated: a claim backed by the late-model BMW R1200C Phoenix Cruiser motorcycle parked under the same declining carport under which my father kept the Alfa Romeo. The Alfa is still there. My eyes trace its contours underneath the tarp that, along with the carport’s metal roof, is covered with leathery brown magnolia leaves, like a mantle of discarded wallets.

With a deep breath I got out of the car (note sly switch to past tense). Having grabbed my gym bag from the rear seat (I hadn’t packed much), I made my way to the front door, on the right side of the house. I knocked. Seconds later I knocked again, louder. I tried the door. It was locked. I circumnavigated the deck to the first set of French doors to find them likewise locked. I tried the second set. Though it stuck hard to the frame, the door opened.

A smell that I’ll try but fail to describe greeted me: a blend of ashes, mildew, mold, damp carpet, and something else, ripe and repugnant in equal measure. A repulsive, awful, abominable … Adjectives aren’t descriptions, they’re opinions. I’d never smelled anything so hideous.

“Greg?” I spoke to the darkness. “Greg?”

Then, realizing my mistake:

“Brock?”

Though by then the sun had come up, inside the house was still in darkness. The blinds and curtains were drawn. I found a light switch and switched it on. Nothing. I tried more switches with the same result. Had Greg — I’m sorry — had Brock been living there with no electricity? Without lights, heat, or ventilation? In a house that stank of, among other things, a history that included our father’s gristly suicide? If so, he really had gone over some sort of edge.

I remembered that my father kept a box of matches on the mantelpiece. I groped for and found them. By the light of a burning match I searched in drawers for a flashlight or a candle. In a lower drawer I found a flashlight, but the battery was dead. I found some candles. I lit three and positioned them at points along the kitchen counter. Their light revealed to me the inside of my father’s house much as I recalled it from thirty-seven years before. A bookshelf moved, an unfamiliar sofa, a different-colored oil cloth on the dining table. Otherwise apart from the smell and the spiderwebs that I kept wiping off my face it was just as I had last seen it.

I called my brother’s name again, his new name. I shouted it. I opened the basement door and shouted again. Taking one of the candles, I walked to the end of the short corridor leading to the downstairs bedroom, where my father had slept during my visits, and shouted it into there. The bed was made. A colorful spread covered it. If Brock had slept there, he left no sign. He must be sleeping upstairs, I thought, in the loft. Or maybe that’s not his motorcycle out there. Maybe my father had taken up motorcycling near the end of his life, unbeknownst to me.

I was about to make my way up the stairs when I saw something else, something I hadn’t seen before, a dark oblong shape hanging there, above me, a few feet from the balcony railing. My father’s boat, I thought. Yes, that must be what I’m seeing.

But it wasn’t a boat. It was too small to be a boat, too small, and — unless the hoisting rope had come off one of its pulleys — oblong in the wrong direction. The oblong boat hypothesis made no sense, but neither did an obscure, human-shaped chandelier. Or was it just a shadow? I thought of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as relayed to me by my father, wherein a group of POWs chained inside a cave imagine the fire-cast shadows on the wall to be men, women, horses … The point, my father explained, lecturing me as usual, is that human beings tend to mistake the conclusions offered to them by their limited perspectives for reality. Plato’s Cave had become my father’s A-frame, and I its solitary prisoner watching the shadow-play performed by the sepulchral light that had just started seeping in from outdoors, the oblong shadow becoming increasingly human.

Oh God, I thought, Oh dear God … please … please … no …

Then I did what I had resisted doing until then. I pulled aside the curtains over the French doors. I opened the blinds on the triangular windows.

The fog had lifted; the skies were a dim, pale, cloudless, colorless color. Shadowy light streamed in. With the house flooded with daylight, I turned around and looked up. And saw.

And screamed my twin brother’s name.