Tremors
The man Abel could have been loomed to the left of his sprawl, looking upon him as at the hour of death, hair haloed by the sun, face long and bronze with the eyes frosted over, Novembrish. “Here,” he said, and stretched a hand, a second chance, to Abel, and Abel raised both his hands to claim it, squinting in tears of exhaustion. But short of contact, Cain yowled and sprang around and stamped right on—squish squish squish—deeper in the grove, tearing leaves loose with his haste. Abel sat in fits (spoke, walked, ran, made love), as if he’d loaned his parts from different people and would account for each at day’s end. He bolted to his feet, then bowed, still wheezing, silence astir on his skin like silk, felt Cain gust through a cloud, cross the finish line, and ground his teeth against tears. It would be his last attempt to soar. He’d tried alone, in a bend where the sun winked ghostly spots on everything: arms falcon-wide, chest puffed; to spring from the brink of life and bliss into oblivion. But each time he rattled to a stop over the treetops, spiraled down green, bouncing from branch to branch, knocking fruit asunder, and banged—splat—in the mud, leaving a mask of his face in it. The first time they went at it together, Cain’s whoops and yoo-hoos burned, flickered against his twin’s heart and almost blackened it. Still, Cain always braced Abel’s limp back home, past the veined walls of red clay on either side of the deep trail, twisted roots jerking out of place and flinging rot as they passed.
Abel, twenty-eight and still unused to his parts, moving borrowed limbs and breathing on borrowed lungs, recalls the shock of falling, a long frenzy of wind, as he is laid off from his second job in six months. Eyes spaced out below the bill of his baseball cap, he shifts in the bad-news-that’s-actually-good-news chair, now slick with his sweat, across from the freshly coiffed HR Rep. He reaches in his jeans pocket. She stiffens. “Of course this is no reflection on your competence or prospects,” she says into the chill in the small office. The phone beeps again. She lowers her glasses on her nose and stares Abel down, then glances knowingly at the other faces in the room. By the door: Abel’s mute, graying manager, who’s worked thankless decades in an even smaller office on the ground floor, for clients whose demands travel miles and stick to him, whose needs flutter like bats over his desk and crowd out the light, whose orders swarm after him when he leaves the office and tussle in the back seat of his old sedan and flock in the shower with him and buzz under the covers when he sleeps, or tries to. Behind Abel: a gargoyle, armored and knee-padded, ready to rumble. “It’s my brother,” Abel says.
“And now he’s looking,” Maureen of HR announces, and sits forward, peeking herself over the edge of the desk, nearly meeting her reflection in its polished wood.
Abel huffs at the screen of his phone and then guides it, shuddering, to his right cheek. He rakes his scalp and tries to swallow but the walls of his throat stick. The line cracks open. Cain’s voice punches the speakers, jabs words at Abel’s eardrum between fast breaths. “Hey, hey, hey, listen,” Abel cups his other hand to his mouth. “Can I call you back?” A wail spangled with static loops his neck and tightens. Abel sits rigid, his eyes ping-ponging in their sockets, then holds the phone away and gags.
“What is it?” Maureen shoots up from her chair. “What is it? Undo your top button, you’re getting lightheaded.”
Abel slurs, “I would know if I was a headlight.” More white notes of panic froth out of the speakers. He takes a deep, steadying breath, holds it, and huffs it out at once. “Call you back,” he snips at the phone in his grip, and clicks it off.
“Being let go will be amazing for you, you just don’t know it yet,” Maureen says, and Abel pictures her clicking onstage, shoulders poised, facing an audience. “You will always be a part of this family, our cabin is just too small to accommodate you at the moment.”
Abel snorts. “It’s a twelve-story house. With a basement.”
Maureen darts a glance at the gargoyle. Abel stands before the dreaded shoulder tap and gives two-thirds of a wave to an imagined friend. Maureen raises the blinds as he is led away. She calls after him, “I can’t wait to see your genius solutions to the world’s problems!”
Glances splat thick as spittle on the glass walls of the corridor down which Abel trudges, face down, blinking tears, a scant folder wedged against his hip. This tunnel, worn away in its middle by the heels of numberless wage slaves, exhausted hikers on a slope with no end, a hill without a peak, so similar in its grayness to the last, and, he feared, the next one. By the time he bumbles through security and faces the other towers of plated steel and grim-blue glass in the commercial district, dusk hovers, widening from the cracks of a shattered sky. A clear moon guides his journey downtown.
Back to the swamp, Abel thinks.
>>>
The phone buzzes long, two seconds after it boots. Abel’s fingers hurry across the bands of text. He pinches wide open the all-caps glare of Cain’s message—We’re at General Medic. She hasn’t said a word. Please call.—and squirms as if a hand has reached in his shirt and grazed his chest. He pockets the phone and continues the march into uncertainty, past blinking neon lights from see-through eateries and boutiques, the eye-watering tang from roadside grills, drifts of oboe above the chatter of a cymbal in an underwater cathedral, its pews awash with warlocks and mermaids, its altar claimed by jumpers from the white man’s boat, so the locals say; motors toward the bus station, unblinking. A swarm of faces charred by years of sun floats around his, waves of townspeople rush at him but then recede, as if sensing his ill-fortune and wary of any proximity to it. He anchors, slack all over, at a traffic light, resolve leaking from his pores, and checks his phone. i did rip her ear off.the bitch wouldn’t listen. Cain has forwarded this line from Pa, alongside a blurred image. And just like that, Abel is hung out to dry by a hook in his back, all these years later, drained from cuts in his chest, teasing slashes in his lungs and throat, while Cain flees. He gasps out of the bind, stands his full length and presses on, but the night is lead on his stride, and he bows, latches his free hand to his face and draws hard, soul-shaking breaths through the vise. Flops, finally, on the curb, the folder loose-lipped in his lap, its many tongues flickering. Clicks on the picture blurred by a downward arrow.
A pearled ear, star-dusted from the vase he flung it in, still pulsing in her palm, wisps of grey hair clinging to its curve.
A thing in the night makes to claim his face, thumb his lips into a soulless grin, sneak in his nostrils if he dares inhale, tickle out of his gullet a sound between a wail and laughter. He beats it off and runs apishly across traffic. The folder flutters where he once sat. He bumps into the trunk of an old Volvo and stares its driver down, stumbles just clear of the beep-beep from a sewage truck onto pavement. From the other side of the road, the moon is a yolk, washing the night a tinge of yellow that puts to shame that of the sun in autumn, though the light falls . . . inside out? In reverse? Abel squints, the illusion stays: pale shadows slant from dark objects. Streetlamps shed scabs on silver tar. Fine coal sprinkled along a snowy dome, the stars tease the reach of slender boughs, between soot clouds. Every face X-rays out in the light, all cheekbone and teeth and void eyes—and reforms outside it.
Don’t have a college degree? someone croaks into a megaphone at the bus terminal. Stop and select the one you like.
Buy your ticket to heaven, three for the price of one, calls another. We leave next week Tuesday.
Have only girls? Drink this tea together, twice a day, for one week, to conceive a boy, yet another.
The phone pings.
Abel seeps stunted breaths around the ache in his chest.
>>>
Done by unpractised hands in a dim ward, he thinks of this image. The cross-stitch throws off the flash of Cain’s camera. Still he sees Ma’s wince, an anguished grin rumpling her cheek. The reattached bit of ear looks cowed, like it knows it has to reach through the stitching and leech onto the nub left on Ma’s head for nutrients. I got too worried. Don’t be like me, Cain sends below this, by which he might mean I have solved yet another crisis in your absence and wonder why I ever reach out.
Abel types, Great C, and deletes it. I was all of seven the first time, he tries again, and I never called for help. I just threw myself between them and yelled for Pa to stop and yelled for Ma to hide. That’s how it was, while you spent all those days in the sun. This, too, he deletes.
The bus coasts down a stream of radiance, anchors before him. His reflection warps around dents in its side, echoes brightly in its black windows, in the doors that part with a suction sound. The sole bulb inside blinks a UFO cone on a sleeping horde. Abel trips in an aisle seat as the bus lurches on. He beats off the engulfing leather and slides to the window, presses his face on the glass, counts the human shadows on the sidewalks and in the parks, behind faint curtains and around avenues, the sturdy and the frail, towering and timorous, intent and loitering, the spry, the drink-laden, a polyphony of emptied bodies.
I’m coming over, he replies.
>>>
That summer, the trail voiced sage and mildew in its cracks. Cain skipped farther and farther along it, at a pace that trembled droplets free and scattered feasting flies and swayed the flimsier branches, and Abel was stuck with himself—but for what beasts grazed or mated in the shadows; looking up now and again, snouts twitching, limbs working through gaps, prowling closer to his scent. Abel was in love, against his will, burdened with feelings towards a boy his age that he couldn’t shirk, but all he thought as the beasts neared him: It will return, Cain’s gift of flight, as strong as in the days before.
It never returned.
Cain sprinted, arms splayed, day in and out, and only ever landed in a ball of dirt. He crossed marshes and farms and fields and concrete, covered treeless neighborhoods, even edged towards the next town, to no avail. He cycled his limbs into a blur. Still earthbound. He started having problems at school, spitting at teachers who tried to calm him and shoving classmates, stomping objects in the old house to smithereens (table lamps, Abel’s shelf of robocops). On his tenth day confined to earth, Pa sent Ma hurtling through a swivel mirror for serving his supper late, and as Abel dutifully cleared the splatters and swept up the shards, Cain climbed a silo, the tallest one in the county, and jumped.
They got the news as Abel debated telling Pa that he was sick and wanted nothing more than to be normal, like Cain. Pa and Ma grabbed each other. The informant winced at their howling. Pa shook Abel off, then Ma, left him adrift without a raft on the news. Abel washed into a secret corner of his room and chuckled, hard: Cain could not bear to live as he did for even one week. Ha ha ha. “Oh, he’s not dead,” added the informant. His arms worked for three seconds during the fall. Panic must have overcome whatever fault or curse wasted them, Cain maintained to this day. Those arms parachuted him into a clump of sagebrush, three seconds from parched earth. Ma and Pa quilted him upstairs and begged him not to do such a crazy thing again. “Will you stop hitting her, then?” Cain stared daggers at Pa.
Pa hesitated.
“Will you? Dad . . . .”
“If she behaves—why not?”
“Okay. I’ll stop.” Cain exhaled.
“My boy,” Pa murmured over him, as greyly as if he’d passed, “you can soar without wings. Did you know that? Let me show you how.”
Wilted at the threshold, Abel turned away, his throat tight.
>>>
Tonight, for some reason, downtown is a giant skull, broken dreams tattooed on it. Even here, the pulse of the city rises through his soles, in this outgrowth crammed with unwashed rubes and cackling prostitutes, near the end of a dizzying sequence of alleys, where Ma and Pa now live.
Mist pours from Abel’s mouth and shrouds his face as he climbs the hatch in the side of the tenement and gathers himself at the top.
“Four hundred and fifty-six,” he counts, when come through the front door with his key and down the grimy corridor, he glimpses Cain’s shadow. Rats scoot around Cain’s careful slicing of an onion and point to their mouths. Cain clucks at them, waves off their slimy hide and frenzied squeaking that dimples the pan of water and snaps against the tin roof. They flee into shadow, from the drumming in Abel’s chest. “Where’s he?”
“Ma is in her room.” Cain lays down the knife and wipes his hands on his shirt. “Pa must’ve heard you raging towards us. He’s probably in a bunker somewhere.” Cain’s teeth gleam like pigeon claws. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Abel marches on.
“Jamie’s in remission,” Cain calls after him. “The kids are doing great!”
Abel shoots him the middle finger as he shrinks down the corridor.
Ma lies frozen on her back, waiting for an unseen presence to climb her chest and grind its heel in her tired heart. The grimy mattress appears to open around her, her sad splay sunken in its foam.
Abel mouths, “Four hundred and fifty-seven.”
“Every time I swear off cooking I remember it takes you a lifetime to turn on the stove,” Ma says. “Just toss something on our plates. Thorns, live worms, flipping pebbles for all I care.” She sits up holding the candle to her false eye.
Abel reaches for his voice, the only thing that will ever differentiate him from Cain in low light. “How’s the ear, Ma?”
Ma gapes as if she’s seen a mermaid. She flops again on her pillow, reaches the candle back on her drawer. “It’s His Remote Highness.” She arches a bald brow at him. “You still work in an office? It’s unnatural to work in an office, unless you live by nature. But you don’t have a single leaf on your street,” she says. “Don’t you feel depleted? How do you recharge?”
“You’re coming with me,” Abel says.
“It’s our fault, your ending up in one of those glass tombs.” For the defeated way she admits this, eyes welling, Abel may as well be hunched behind bars, awaiting execution. “Abel, you have no idea how terminal is the bond between aging spouses. If your father upped one morning for hell I would chase after him, crying. This is our home . . . such as it is.” She slackens into a nightly erasure like sleep.
One year after the fall, seething ambition drove Cain to the city, on a scholarship, and Abel had his chance to be normal. At first, when he did swing by the house, Cain was amused by the impersonation: Abel’s twinning his every move, down to the way he breathed, so that Cain often felt he was in a mirror, staring out at his owner, watching him slide through a series of poses and turn around and leave. Abel nicking his cadences, the gravel in his voice, the splay of his feet, his air of thorny innocence, his stammer. His sole disguise Cain’s helmet haircut, Abel stumbled into strange parties and stranger bedrooms, accepted favours and socked away gifts from friends and orbiters of Cain’s. For Cain, Abel justified the deceit to himself, at first. Except he never told Cain any of it, the things he’d done in his name, the best man speech he gave while locked in Cain’s slick-as-a-seal tuxedo, still woozy with altitude from the window seat Cain’s friend paid for. That he resumed at a college in Iowa as Cain. That when Cain opted to attend Marymount Seminary on Staten Island, Abel wheeled his things into the dorm and by his third day there had convinced Pedro, the roommate, a scrawny Jesuit from Uruguay, to mount him. So complete was Abel’s performance that Pedro snuggled up against Cain on his first night there and stroked his penis and breathed in his ear, “I missed you.”
Abel dropped the act for how sharply it reminded him of the growing emptiness that was his life. Also, he’d proposed to Jamie while doped to the gills and sweating ethanol, as they traced stars on the roof of Cain’s truck, and she’d said yes, yes, midway through his laugh, and even disguised as Cain he dreaded commitment. Then there was Cain’s slow exile from all he knew, his moping at this loss, which might have been tolerable if Abel had a life worth trading, one that Cain could inhabit.
No one had warned Abel of the bruising and mental rifts that attend pretense, of the body’s need to break down and reform in order to sustain any performance; of cracks in heart and soul for the weight of mimicry. Changes Abel still could not pinpoint, except that each time he’d stepped down from being Cain, he’d had to rehearse himself, relearn control of his thoughts, his mind, his body.
>>>
Although Cain quit trying to fly after the fall, his arms surprised him now and then. Once, strolling to church with his brother, he rolled them to avoid slipping in a puddle and buzzed into the air, as briefly and tipsily as a dragonfly. When Jamie’s poodle sniffed its way out of the porch and down the driveway to a rushing car, he cut the mower and swooped low across the lawn and snatched it up. Once, the twins spread their arms to a wind like they could ever be kids again, and Cain was kited several feet back, over a neighbor’s roof.
Ma perks up as he ladles dinner. Her breath flutters the candle stood in its wax on the scarred wood, shifts the shadows of their heads on the walls, the ceiling lashed with damp.
Abel stirs the slop on his plate, his eyes space into thought. He refocuses and points his fork at Cain. “I was fired today because of you.”
Ma blinks. “Oh, that’s wonderful! Thank him for the favour. Now, go live in nature.”
Abel laughs, brokenly. “What I mean is, I would have kept my job if I did it as you, enjoyed life a lot better, if I lived it as you.”
Cain recovers from his look of shock, quavers, “Not this again.”
Cain never lost his affection for the woods, for wildlife, and these days he “brings about conditions needed for vegetal strains to mutate” in a shed named for him at the state conservatory.
Ma clunks her cutlery down. “Can you not?”
“But it’s true!” Abel cries. “I stood no chance at being normal, except when I was him.”
“That’s not true, you never even tried,” Cain says.
“You still gay?” Ma quips. “Ain’t nothing normal about that.”
“You could’ve just been yourself,” Cain insists.
“How?” Abel holds his breath for the answer.
“It’s not too late,” Cain adds.
Abel chuckles, long, squinting in tears. “Fuck me. You still water plants at the conservatory?”
“He was promoted today,” Ma says; “to the board.”
Cain chides her with a look.
Ma resumes eating, each scrape of her fork across ceramic a fine, pimply trail down Abel’s spine.
>>>
The cavalry of time has drawn its reins for Cain to cross, yet tramples Abel, stamping ravines in his face and the gloss from his hair. This wreck awaits Cain on the stoop after dinner, drawing on a cigar and spouting smoke hoops, thin lids squeezed shut over a memory. But Cain does not come. “Tell me how you got over it,” Abel whispers, at the space Cain should have occupied by now. “How you can love Pa after everything. Why I can’t forget. Why I’m . . . well . . . ” He stands, adjusts his pants. “Good night, Ma.”
As he recedes from the borough, skirts brick walls brailed with bullets, boarded up windows, weary strays and drifts of trash, he debates tousling his hair into a pale imitation of Cain’s and asking the night, “How do I look?” He demurs, zips up his coat and trudges on.
T.N. Peter has explored moral conflict, climate change, world politics, and the legacies of colonialism from a position of otherness, online and in print.