In April, he rang my doorbell, and by June, he had disappeared.
But I didn’t know that then, as I sat in my apartment during a worthless Tuesday, like many other days, where you bide time until all is over and you begin to forget so that you can make room for new, hypothetical, fond memories.
I think I was watching a movie, not sure which one, or maybe I simply stared into nothingness—one of those two.
All of a sudden, the doorbell rang; I got up, not expecting anyone.
And absolutely not him.
But it was him.
On that day in April, that was worthless.
Before I continue, I must tell you that I have an identical twin, John. We seldom speak, save for my birthday, even though he’s always with me somehow.
Well, anyway.
I opened the door, to my surprise, it was my identical twin, John!
I said:
“Hey, freak.”
To which he retorted:
“Hey, anus dweller.”
Thus, I invited him in.
Growing up, we tried that “identical twins wear the same clothes”-thing—we hated it. We’d always sought to be our own, and to be honest (and I’ve told this to John), I didn’t always like him. He was so much more…gloomy than I ever was.
“Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Yeah, crazy, right?”
I nodded; it was.
He seized the sofa in my living room, putting his feet on the table in his own sad, off-putting manner.
“So, how’s…things?”
It took a while before he answered, gazing out the window until I turned my head, hoping to see whatever he saw.
“Well, things are not great. Can I crash here for a while?”
“For sure. May I ask why?”
“Not really in the mood to put together a PowerPoint to be able to explain the fucked upness of being alive right now.”
“Okay, yeah, I gotta update my computer anyway.”
He smirked, exposing my brother beneath the whole surface of everything.
So he slept there.
My brother.
Even though we were identical twins, we weren’t the same in terms of character. Physically, he also bore a scar after a car crash when he was 8 (I wasn’t in the car)—a small thing on his cheek. When he got it, I joked about it finally being possible to tell us apart, something that hadn’t been an issue, really. Me in my preppy clothes, he in his “hey, I’m inches away from my own suicide”-rags.
I didn’t need a cause for him to stay with me.
And it didn’t feel right to ask for one, or necessary is perhaps the word I seek.
We lived together during those last months, sharing things. Everything from shampoo to clothes, at least he borrowed mine as he didn’t have an interest in doing any laundry. He adored the night, and I craved an early start in the morning. So, as I woke up, I tiptoed around the apartment to avoid waking him up. He used headphones as he watched TV during the night, not eating anything with a crunch, so I wasn’t disturbed.
Quite nice, if you summarize it like that.
In retrospect, this period was solid, consistent, and comforting in a way—not optimal for a proper life; I can see that now.
We didn’t talk about how he was doing; instead, I sometimes snuck up to the bathroom door, eavesdropping as he cried inside, hoping that my presence might soothe him.
I was supposed to have my internship at some media agency, but I lacked the energy to go, even before John. And as he moved in, I found it strenuous even to lift a comb.
Because to be fair, that’s what he did: move in. He might’ve not had stuff, clothes, furniture, or money to pay rent, but this wasn’t him crashing on the sofa.
I had gotten a roommate. A deformed roommate and I made sure to call him Quasimodo, Phantom of the Opera, Elephant Man, or whatever I could come up with. He reciprocated by calling me “a white-collar nothingness who held tedium and dullness inside, with only death to look forward to as a kind of blackness at the end of a drudging tunnel filled with echoes of rotting dreams and mutilated happiness.”
We had fun like that.
Our Dad is somewhat of a mystery. A short fling that our Mom found somewhere on the floor of a bar where the poor managed to make themselves even poorer. Including Mom. They made us on the same sofa that John, during those months, slept on.
Weeks later, our Dad left.
During our childhood, he swung by from time to time.
Popping in with gifts that we were either too old for or bought at the nearby gas station, with price tags in bright colors. We could hear them upstairs as we tried to play as loud as possible. Usually, he took us out for steaks. He drank, Mom drove us home, and then he left the next day. Nothing wrong, actually. We’d been given great food we couldn’t afford otherwise, gifts without any apparent reason.
A few years later, Dad died and John became different.
I don’t know why, and if I summoned the courage to ask him, he called me an “idiot,” explaining that “I wouldn’t understand,” then punched me on my arm or flicked my nuts.
“I’m bored,” he said one day, “how bout a walk?”
Being indoorsy people, this was a big step, so I hesitantly agreed.
Outside my apartment building was a road going left to a bus stop and a small convenience store where I often went when I couldn’t afford a whole pack of cigarettes as the owner sold singles.
I had never gone right as it led up to a cul-de-sac bordering a pointless collection of trees one might call a forest if you were generous with the definition.
So we turned right.
“Where does this go?” John asked as we reached the end of the street, pointing to a small path flowing into this forest of sorts. I shrugged and took the lead, with John right behind me.
We walked in silence for a while until he said, “I fucking love this adulting stuff” which made me laugh, and we listed things we considered “adulting.”
I remember that as peaceful. Me and him, existing somewhere, somehow together, where things hadn’t begun to go sour—us, ever so different nevertheless the same.
After a while, we saw a house with an odd-looking roof.
Then more houses, having reached a neighborhood.
“Did you know about this?” he asked.
“Naw, man, should we call the police?”
“Moron.”
Surrounded by trees, only one road granted access to this secluded neighborhood. Where we stood, on a small hill, we could see quite far, cracking jokes as we spotted an IKEA in the far distance, agreeing that missionary in an IKEA bed is the ultimate adulting one could accomplish.
John continued downwards, with me behind him.
It seemed to be roughly fifty houses. Very picturesque, quaint and serene. People might’ve been at work because we didn’t see a soul. The houses seemed to be photocopied, coming in different colors, mostly pastel—nothing that’ll hurt the eye. We began reading names on mailboxes, coming up with lives these people were living.
Larson, Kerry, Joergensen.
Even though our opinions about their jobs differed, we were in sync with the belief that everyone in this neighborhood was part of a satanic cult, with underground tunnels where they met up, performing rituals.
They also probably drank the blood of infants, because that’s a given.
That first visit to the neighborhood felt like hours.
Maybe it was only thirty minutes or so.
The night was rising; I was hungry. John called me “fatso,” and I said that “not all could survive on heroin that one had acquired by blowing dealers like he did,” and he argued that he was a prominent blow-jobber and that any dealer would be lucky to be blown by him.
Finally, we headed home.
That’s also a thing.
In hindsight, I recall that John wasn’t the one who wanted to head back home. Ever. He always urged me to stay a tad longer, but I often grew weary as soon as we entered the neighborhood.
During our walk back, the path felt shorter.
That same evening we treated ourselves to takeaway.
We watched a movie, or I fell asleep, he finished it, telling me how it ended during breakfast the next day.
At this point, I thought things were going alright and that, soon, he would move out.
I surely hadn’t missed anything about John or his issues; still, with him in the house, someone was there to hear my footsteps.
He seemed to lose weight even though he despised exercise and ate like an animal. His clothes, or my clothes that I lent him, came off as sails as his decaying body perished inside the polyester.
Like many other things, I didn’t ask why.
“He’s my brother,” I thought to myself, together with all other cliche crap I could come up with—a way of procrastinating questions that should’ve been asked.
Mom called sometimes. I told her we were fine, even though she didn’t ask about him, so I assumed something had happened.
One night, sitting in front of the TV, watching a show about how postmodernism affected the financial climate in the 21st century, I asked John if he ever thought about Dad. He told me to shut up. I called him an asshole and proclaimed that neither of us understood this shit anyways and that we were nothing but lazy bastards who didn’t have the grit to fetch the remote. He smiled: “you’re right.”
After a week or so, he wanted to go back to the neighborhood.
I laughed, as he was dead serious.
When I asked why he gave me a fib about exercise and when that didn’t take, he said that “it was just us then.”
I had to clear my throat a bit and drink some water.
“Well?” he asked.
He could’ve ventured on his own.
Or couldn’t he?
Perhaps he didn’t find his way?
After a small snack, we left.
Back at the cul-de-sac, it felt like I could already see the roof of that first house. I had no idea how long that walk took the first time—now it felt even shorter. I asked John about it, but he called me “a purposeless sociopath with no emotional core whose opinions and questions slowly drained the world’s accumulated joy from every living being,” so I assumed it was just me. Maybe it was how the light fell, altering the planet’s curvature, or possibly, that we walked faster.
Once there, we more or less continued where we left off, mocking fictitious people, living in those empty houses, laughing at ridiculous names on mailboxes: Glasscock and Nutter. Now, the residents weren’t part of a cult. Instead, they were aliens who’d taken over the bodies of those who used to live there.
The alien master plan was, of course, to anal probe the hell out of everyone.
It began to rain, and truthfully, it wasn’t that much fun going in circles. John didn’t want to leave. I pointed out the obviousness of the rain, but he meant that we’d dry up sooner or later, so I had to nag until he caved.
As I wondered why he couldn’t go by himself to the neighborhood, I still haven’t figured out exactly why I couldn’t go home without him.
That evening I sat down to write, for once.
Not sure if John even knew I wrote, as he one day came into the living room, looming over me, asking:
“What are you doing?”
“Writing.”
“Why?”
“Why I write or what I write?”
“No, why do you write?”
“You don’t wanna know what I’m writing?”
“Naw.”
“You just wanna know why I’m writing?”
“Yeah. Don’t you know why you’re writing?”
“Yes. Or, well, yes, kinda, not sure how to explain it.”
“Okay…is it about me?”
“What I write?”
“Yeah.”
“No…no, it’s not.”
“Okay, cool.”
Then, he smacked my balding spot before he hit the sofa. It was such a meaningless dialogue in a sense, not re-enacted verbatim, but similar. I loop it in my head, and can't understand why. I hadn’t written about him or me before he vanished—didn’t dare to. I’m not even sure what I wrote before he went missing. Did he want me to write about him? Acknowledge him or something like that. He cried in the shower that same day and came out all red-eyed. I asked him if he got some soap in his eyes, providing him with an exit. He nodded.
I think it was that next Friday that I looked out my window, seeing that rooftop between the trees. I hadn’t lived there long—like a year or so—though I’m sure that roof wasn’t there before.
I told John, who asked:
“How often do you stand staring out the window like a fucktard?”
That was the end of that discussion.
That day we biked to IKEA, hoping to see some middle classers humping and eating cheap meatballs. We only had my bike, so John sat behind me, holding on with a blasé grip. We bought a vase that we dropped on our way home and some batteries because John held a speech about the importance of always having batteries at home “if you’re a real man.”
Those weeks and months, they all get jumbled together.
I’m unsure, exactly, how we spent each day.
I know I wrote more and more.
Probably mediocre stuff.
But I had a focus I previously missed.
As I wrote, he was on the sofa watching some show or sleeping, not interrupting or imploring me to stop. Instead, he asked during dinner how my writing had been. The only thing was that I began to gain weight as he kept losing. We both ate the most trans-fatty, sugar-packed, carbo-loaded poison we could find. John insisted on it.
So, after a while, my clothes began to yield value for both of us.
John wanted to go to the neighborhood again, as I grew bored with it. He vexed me, calling me a “lardo” and pointed out that my pants couldn’t stretch much further. I called him a “skinny abomination” and explained that there was a genuine risk that his brittle bones wouldn’t survive such a tedious adventure as a simple stroll. I’m not sure he even heard me as he was out in the hall, already putting on shoes.
This trip, I could see the rooftop and the house, even before we reached the cul-de-sac.
So I said:
“That house is way closer than before.”
John didn’t answer, as if he didn’t hear me.
I often get stuck here as I ponder what happened.
If he heard me, does that alter the meaning of the outcome?
After he disappeared, I questioned everything, but time is, in a way, flushing memories through a strainer until only a few rememberings are left, making it hard to piece history together.
I keep going over it, twisting and turning, until it’s all skewed.
Did he notice the house coming closer?
Because that feels paramount.
At least I tell myself that.
If he did hear me, was everything a conscious decision then?
He shushed me when we got there. I disregarded it and joked crudely about all the drunken fathers and cheating wives that so stereotypically lived in such neighborhoods.
He didn’t listen; he was in awe.
Something had changed.
Not inside the neighborhood—within John.
We still didn’t see any actual people, making it feel like a movie set. As if it all would come crumbling down if we were to knock on a wall, ever so softly. It took three hours before we left. I was cold, hungry, pissed and jealous of the neighborhood who’d managed to nab my brother’s attention.
For a few days, he was not himself. I did my best, hoping that I could reach where he had reached when it came to creative insults and name-calling, aiming to lighten the mood—I failed. Name-calling was John’s thing. One night, he woke me up, casually asking if we shouldn’t go to the neighborhood again. My alarm clock showed that even bakers were sleeping, so I rolled over, telling him that he was insane.
The next day we headed back there. The house with the roof was now even closer. Enough so that we passed it before we even reached the cul-de-sac.
I can’t explain it. I didn’t point it out to John as he treaded on with determination. That time, we saw shimmer from a TV, hopefully proving that someone was occupying at least that particular house. I tried to joke about it a bit, but my voice went from speaking to whispering—losing its force.
Everything got eerie, and I became angry with John, for real this time. Not for choosing the neighborhood over me, more because he wasn’t predictable anymore. Our stagnation had resulted in a bizarrely suffocating routine that helped our days float on by. The only thing jolting our bubble of reality were those forced visits to the neighborhood, and change is horrible.
That night I couldn’t sleep.
Outside my window, the house with the roof seemed even nearer. At that point, I thought it to be the night playing tricks on me.
As John was in the shower one morning, I called Mom.
“John is weird,” I stated, but she just asked about me. If I’d met a girl, how my life was going, stuff like that. So I asked again, and she simply meant that “John is gonna be fine.”
I hung up.
“Can we go after breakfast?”
I tried stalling, hoping for him to skip it.
Partly, I wished to lock him up, going full Josef Fritzl on him.
“Where?”
He smiled as if I was the kooky one.
“The neighborhood.”
“Sure. Why not.”
That house with the roof was close enough to semi-block the front door when we tried leaving the building so that it couldn’t open properly. John slunk out through the narrow opening as I had to suck in my tummy and squeeze through.
It was all very perplexing.
Something felt broken.
Possibly, gravity had gone haywire over the last couple of weeks, altering life itself as a construct.
It was enervating how calm John was about it.
He continued, past the house, towards the forest.
“We’re not gonna talk about this?”
“What?”
“The house” and I pointed to make it as clear as humanly possible.
“You’re fucking paranoid. It’s always been there. Come on, I don’t wanna be late.”
“Late? Late for what?”
Again, it was like he didn’t hear me.
Finally, in the neighborhood, we did our tour.
John was somewhat more excited.
Eager.
I kept telling myself that he needed this, and what kind of brother were I if I didn’t support him?
“Do you see any Satanists?”
“Only you”, his usually snappy quips, now missing.
Instead, I kept quiet, letting him have his thing.
This place.
A make-belief place.
Kind of a dollhouse.
The scene was all set, complete with props: cars, bikes, lawnmowers and parasols; all missing were dolls.
A mailbox stood in front of a meticulous garden, packed with pruned bushes next to erect roses.
I wasn’t sure then, or now, if we’d seen that house before. There were so many of them. Like the others, this too had a shiny car appearing to be hand-washed by a Dad each Sunday with skateboards scattered about in a chaotic yet idyllic way.
“Hey, look,” I said, causing John to come over.
“What?”
“The mailbox.”
It was a cute mailbox in the shape of a log, with a twig sticking out of it.
On it, it said: “Butts”—I scoffed.
“Don’t mock!”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s my name.”
I was sure he hazed me, pulling some gag on me, so I said “yeah, whatever” and started walking, but John remained.
“Are you coming?”
He checked his watch, which I hadn’t noticed before.
“Naw, it’s dinner soon. I think it’s meatloaf tonight.”
“Funny John, you can do better.”
He began walking, steering for the porch, and before I’d managed to react in some way at all, he had opened the door and shouted, “I’m home.”
I ran after him, a bit pleased as I felt like the better brother who hadn’t turned out completely apeshit crazy.
He almost faded into the house, and I couldn’t see him; instead, an older man came down a staircase and blocked me as I was about to go inside.
“Hi, I’m George. Are you John’s friend?”
“What? No, I’m his brother”—and I remember that the word “brother” felt weird to say aloud.
“Brother? John doesn’t have a brother. Are you a little jokester perhaps?”
I wanted to punch him. Smash his face with his cute little mailbox.
“You wanna come in? We’re having meatloaf.”
I screamed “John” but got shushed by “George” this time.
“Calm down, young man. We’re about to have dinner. Maybe it’s better if you head home?”
I tried again: “John!”
That George guy pushed me, grabbed my arm and led me outside. He didn’t say anything or so, just left me there like a misbehaved dog.
I could see John, George, some woman, and a young girl through the window, all eating their dinner.
After a while, I walked home—lost as to what to do.
The next day I went back there.
That house with the roof wasn’t blocking the front door anymore, and the walk to the neighborhood felt longer again.
As I reached the house of the Butts, I knocked on the door, rang the doorbell, screamed “John” like a maniac.
The place felt empty, deserted.
Over the next few days, I tried again.
I called him on his phone but got told that the number was disconnected.
Mom didn’t know anything; she asked about my day and told me that John always survives in “his way.”
The police didn’t buy my story, and I was too poor to hire a sleuth, so I was limited to printing flyers.
I wrote: “HAVE YOU SEEN ME?” with a picture of me as I didn’t manage to find a photo of him—we looked the same, so it didn’t matter.
Then my number.
At the neighborhood, I stapled some on trees and telephone poles.
One afternoon I spent outside IKEA, handing out flyers. Some got irritated with me as they thought it was a prank. Some laughed and pointed at me, shouting, “I found you.”
Most didn’t care.
So after a while, I followed—also not caring.
A few weeks later, I was still writing and had begun to lose weight.
I returned to the neighborhood once or twice, and each time, it felt further away.
Eventually, I stopped going there.
And I stopped missing him.
Maybe I began grieving him instead?
John started to become something else.
I granted myself all of those expected thoughts one thinks as someone is gone: that they’re somewhere better, that their memory lives on and whatnot.
I had never really lost anyone before, except our father.
Still, Dad’s passing was utterly plain; his absence had always been a fact in our lives—so as he died, it was almost as if nothing changed—the next step in evolution.
Nowadays, my memories of us two growing up are with me, of course.
However, those few months of intenseness are what I treasure the most, weirdly enough. They provide me with substance, even though I’m glad they’re over.
I’m still writing.
A few days ago, I phoned Mom. We talked about our jobs and her hip that was acting up.
I casually mentioned John at the end of the call.
She cut me off, saying that I need to accept things and “let that ‘John thing’ rest.”
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