The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller Page 14

  “I visited on a couple occasions with my family as a kid. Then once as a college student, when a small group of us came over for Oktoberfest. Honestly, that week is a blur. If you’re looking for directions somewhere, better to consult a map. I do remember I had to be persuaded to join my friends. My parents took me to the Dachau concentration camp when I was around fifteen, and it left me pretty disturbed. I must have written a dozen poems trying to expel the demons after returning to Salzburg. Now, fifteen years later, they seem to have come back.”

  I felt the hairs on my arms stir with this potential introduction to other than small talk. But the timing for such relevancies apparently wasn’t right as before I could get the “How do you mean?” out, the waiter appeared, tossing his unkempt blond hair and lavishing humor on the ladies as he set menus before us and took our unsophisticated drink order of beer, beer, and beer again.

  “Pils oder Export?” he said to me, testing my Deutsch with a smile.

  “Pils, bitte,” I said, not bothering to point out that we both knew a beer was a pilsner unless otherwise specified.

  “Gross oder klein?”

  “Gross . . . natürlisch.”

  “Natürlisch!” he repeated, and winked at me. He turned to Dianna and Maya. “Will that be large beers for the ladies as well? Ja? Good girls. Good girls.”

  When he was gone, Maya lamented German men in general, commenting on how for all of their charm, they were deficient in the area of affection and any woman not of the homeland would be wise to watch her step or find herself slaving away in the kitchen for a man who’d little beyond sex to give in return.

  “Now don’t you think that picture is a bit out of date?” said Dianna. “I’ll grant you that once upon a time there might have been issues—”

  “Once upon a time! You mean like, the other day? Come on, Dianna. What about that self-serving bastard, Rudy?”

  “That wasn’t the other day.”

  “Other day, other month, other year. The point is, their feelings for you are measured in how far you can spread your legs. When is the last time a German lover, or an Austrian one for that matter, gave you a back massage? Oh, I’m sure you’ll say that what is lacking is not affection but the ability to show it, but what’s the difference! A woman doesn’t need that kind of ego in her life. Wouldn’t you agree, Barry?”

  “Um . . . well, I’m not a woman,” I said.

  “Oh, I see. It’s going to be like that, is it? You’d rather play the I-wouldn’t-presume game. I wouldn’t presume to know what it feels like to be a woman, with all her burdens. Menstrual cycle, child bearing, Eden, all that. Well, that’s just great.”

  The three of us looked at each other for a sustained moment and then, when all parties were certain we’d simply been playing, broke into laughter. As it died down, I understood what Maya had been doing was steering us from the topic of Nazi Germany until the timing was right. While this impressed me, particularly since she wasn’t concerned with whether we saw it as a transparent endeavor, it still struck me as deferment. And whether she thought Friday night at a Biergarten in Munich was the wrong milieu or she simply wanted to allow us time to get some alcohol in us first, any postponement was going to be short-lived with tomorrow right in front of us.

  The beers arrived to three simultaneous gasps. Considering where we were, I should have known better than to expect the normal .5 liter ‘large’ glass (the small was .33). These Hun-like vessels must have held a liter each, which made me wonder what we were going to find on the menus we still hadn’t looked at—leg of swine? The waiter of course laughed at us for our touristy behavior, but it wasn’t him setting out on a two-week mountain excursion tomorrow afternoon. Still, he was to be forgiven his little omission. A last taste of life was a worthy detour.

  We ate light, no doubt because we didn’t get around to placing our order until we were almost finished with our first round of frothy beasts. Specialty salads for Maya and me, tomato soup with a dollop of sour cream and a basket of fresh Brötchen for Dianna. My salad came with a healthy supply of mild Greek peppers, which I shared with the ladies. Dianna in turn passed around her bread, and Maya let us each have a deliciously in-season shoot of her Weißspargel—white asparagus—by far the best thing on the table. The restaurant filled up, both inside and out, as dusk settled, but we weren’t ready to give up our spot just yet. Instead, when we finished our plates, we pulled our jackets around us a little tighter and sat back, getting cozy with an after coffee before pursuing the next round of beasts.

  Halfway through our second beers, the time for putting off the necessary came to an end. Interestingly, it was Maya who, having apparently decided we were sufficiently primed, led us back to where she had lured us from at the start of the evening’s dialogue. As she set out across ground I was already familiar with, I realized when it came to this subject, a Biergarten in Munich had never been an inappropriate milieu, Friday night or not.

  She looked mostly at me as she spoke, the topic presumably having been discussed previously by the two of them. “I’m anticipating seeing Berchtesgaden tomorrow. Until the obligatory Google search, I hadn’t been aware just how steeped in Nazi history the area was. I knew about Hitler’s mountaintop retreat, the Eagle’s Nest, of course. And Berghof, his Bavarian home. But I hadn’t realized the whole Obersalzberg complex was a remote base of operations for the Nazi Party during the war. Considering the circumstances, the fact that our excursion begins near there is telling, to say the least.”

  Dianna—very uncharacteristically, I thought—snickered.

  I raised my brow, looking at her.

  She waved her hand. “It’s just weird hearing this la-la talk from Maya’s mouth when she and I have for the most part avoided the subject for months now, almost since the day the magazine arrived, when we knew immediately we would be going on the excursion.” She looked at her friend. “And telling? There’s nothing telling about any of this business.”

  Maya sipped her beer, looking slightly hurt. “I haven’t discussed the subject with you, Dianna, because you’ve been tormented enough with your dreams.”

  “I know. I know,” Dianna said, softening. “I just want to cut through all the shit and get to the core of it. No pussyfooting. No picking our words. No manipulating the discussion. I understood the need to deaden the anxiety before embarking on the subject, but we’re to the critical point and if the thing’s going to be addressed, let’s address it directly like we did on the plane. We were all in something of a state of shock, but Barry didn’t blink when I told him I communicated with my dead sister through dreams. He’s one of us and deserves plain speak. So let’s to it. Tell him, Maya, about Honduras.”

  Maya nodded. Okay, the gesture and accompanying expression seemed to say. Okay. Now I don’t have to pussyfoot. We’re all on the same page. “I think we should hear Barry’s story first. As ignorant as you and I are of what’s truly going on, he seems even less knowledgeable, but his experience has obviously been greater than ours. With everything laid out, we can look at the content of the document better armed.”

  Document? While the word or its idea conformed naturally with future memory, it made my person tremble. I looked around at the other tables of the buzzing terrace and came to a decision. “May I suggest,” I said to my companions, “that we relocate to a quieter place? My hotel has a piano bar that I seriously doubt is hopping with business. It’s only a ten or fifteen minute walk from here.”

  Though we filled the void productively, the wait for the bill was the longest ever.

  12

  As we sat back for the first time in at least an hour, the ladies on their couch, I in my cushioned armchair, I’d left out nothing. No detail that I could readily recall, no impression, however fanciful it seemed. And not once had their suspension of disbelief seemed strained. Equipped with at least Dianna’s longstanding relationship with the paranormal, they’d apparently made the decision somewhere along the way to quit resisting what lay outsi
de known bounds and to proceed as though the supernatural was as legitimate a player as anything that could be converted to formula. Which effectively rendered ‘suspension of disbelief’ an obsolete term unless proven otherwise, and somehow I didn’t see any of us reserving hope that the land-based and scientifically logical explanations would suddenly pop up out of the puzzle’s assembly. The soberness with which Dianna and Maya absorbed my story spoke volumes as to the validity of the experiences, and by extension, my sanity. Any lingering doubts on those fronts had been squashed since I’d come into their company, and I suspected the same was true of the two of them.

  They’d naturally been horrorstruck by the violence and terror perpetrated against my family; saddened, to surfacing tears in Dianna’s case, by the losses I’d suffered. Maya had been responsible for most of the interruptions, revealing how deeply disturbing she found parts of my account by displaying a morbid curiosity that drew narrow looks from Dianna. For my part I maintained the distance that allowed me to unshelve the experiences as needed rather than to relive them, which in turn enabled me to present my information contextually, and without losing myself in emotion. Dianna, astutely, called me on this, suggesting that events seemed to have left me cold. I’d no answer for this, unsure myself of my deeper psychological health. As far as I was concerned, as long as I retained the ability to think circumspectively, to see things from above, to act and react of my own will and instinct, then I was worthy of the mission with which I’d tasked myself.

  With the piano’s music trickling unobtrusively in the background, Dianna was the first to react to my story as a whole. As she’d established with her occasional questions and input during the account, she was unwilling to trade one millimeter of penetration for delicateness, no matter how deep her sympathies went. Several beers in, a side of me, shamefully, wondered if she was that way in bed.

  “I am at such a loss for words, Barry, so sorrowful for what you have endured, so disillusioned by this world of ours with all its false promises, I wish I could just go to sleep tonight and never wake up. Truly, where is there room for hope when the world is so bloated with pain and suffering? But I won’t surrender to despair. I can’t. Why? Because even as your story kills the spirit, even as it saps what sunlight still finds its way in, it also resurrects the will and determination, provides the needed fuel to see the business through. As terrible as your journey to this point has been, its experiences bring something else with them. When combined with the contents of the document, which are cast in a whole new light now, they amount to knowledge. And with knowledge comes not only power, some feeble measure of it anyway, but also responsibility. Responsibility not just to ourselves. Not even to ourselves and our daughters, but to the whole lot of us, for what little goodness can be found in our midst. I carry no flame. I don’t know that I believe in a God. But I do believe in goodness. And what lies in front of us, my every sense tells me, is the total absence of it. I have dreamed savage, apocalyptic dreams. I’ve seen ruined landscapes, wandering hordes of the lost, the nameless, the confused, the insane. People who bleed but can’t die. Who inflict but can’t kill. What value does existence have in such a future?”

  As her winter-blue eyes scanned those landscapes, I scanned them with her. I knew them with her, through both future and primal memory, as stretches I had trod before. My own dreams had not provided such a far-reaching view, but the primordial instinct had, in less realistic but no less real terms. Behind every thought that entertained the elephant man was this sense of an evolution out of what cohesion we had attained as a species, and into some fragmentary condition bearing scarce resemblance to anything envisioned for mankind by philosophy, religion, or evolutionary anthropology. So powerful was the desolation it inspired that the self-existing in the now dared draw upon it only for reference. Given rein, it threatened to overcome and swallow. Indeed, I might have become one of the lost, the nameless, the insane had Dianna, who’d led me there, not demonstrated the ability to withdraw at will.

  “The inevitability factor,” she continued, “is what scares me the most. That your elephant man is only taking advantage of an existing situation. That whatever we do, we do to a cause that is unconcerned with our individual or racial wants and desires. That nature is running its course, and we’re no more able to stop the process than the dinosaurs. That the design, as you have so aptly referred to it, is inscribed in titanium, a constant of the universe, inalterable. But where is the elephant man hitching a ride to? He seems to act in the name of scientific pursuit—and the document will shed more light on that—but his methods are cruel, his motivations questionable. Science seems almost an excuse. Having said that, the conditions that serve his objective must be achieved through a process, an evolution of some sort. Do any of us believe though that this evolution, of itself, is his objective? Not I, said the fly. I suspect it’s more depraved than that.”

  Maya came in, but not by way of continuing the specific line of thought. “I’m curious about something,” she said. “Why do we say he when referring to the perpetrator?”

  Though I wasn’t altogether sure whether she was asking why we said ‘he’ as opposed to ‘she’ or ‘he’ as opposed to ‘they’, I took the question, using the Dianna approach and cutting through the superfluous matter. “Are you a feminist, Maya?”

  She smiled. An odd smile, I thought. “I wouldn’t call myself exactly that, but yes, I’m talking about gender. What makes us think the one behind this is a male? Mightn’t it just as well be a female moving among host bodies?”

  “Cunhedo, herself, referred to him as a he,” I said.

  “Yes, but she also said he was her brother. And the taxi driver knew of no brother.”

  Dianna said, “I’m not sure where you’re going with this, Maya. Do you have someone in mind?”

  “No, just thinking. There are an awful lot of females involved. All of the victims we know of—excluding those acting as hosts—are female. But that’s a separate question, I suppose.”

  “Females bear children,” I said.

  They both looked at me. Maya said, “But then those children are taken away . . . ”

  “No,” I said. “Some are taken away. My daughter was taken away. My other daughter took her own daughters away. The Cunhedo sister . . . Bruna . . . one of hers was taken, one apparently died after the fact, and one lived.”

  “Not to imply that she’s our elephant man, but I’d be very interested to know what became of the one that survived,” Maya said. “I’d have thought she would be left with Uiara, but the taxi driver made no mention of that, right? Yes, where do these children go . . . ?”

  The chill draft spawned by those words prompted me to rise. “Must take a bathroom break, ladies. When I return I want to hear about Honduras. It’s killing me.”

  “I need to go, too,” said Maya. “You, Di?”

  Dianna didn’t answer at first. When she did, it was with a deeply troubled look on her face. “Yeah, I suppose we still have the call of nature.”

  It occurred to me as I walked to the men’s room that the carefree ladies I’d met on the plane had been robbed by me. Robbed of their last moments, their last pretenses, the last semblances of themselves. It didn’t matter that the appreciation for life I’d perceived in them was a form of witting denial; I’d still stolen precious time by revealing myself to them. I was glad, by way of consolation, that I’d known them for that little time.

  As I relieved myself in the urinal, my body remembered the detachment it had known as I stood over the toilet in a hotel bathroom not so long ago, when elephant shadows crept across drapes and walls. I didn’t wait to let the feeling take firm hold, but addressed it then and there, with an emphatic shake tucking myself in and zipping it away. The face that greeted me in the mirror as I washed my hands was another matter. It was the same face that had judged me earlier, all swollen with misplaced responsibility, its every flaw exposed. Fuck you too, I told it silently. Fuck him and fuck you. In response, a st
range thing happened. My hand, of its own volition, rose to my throat, drawing a neat line across it with its forefinger. I stood there for several seconds, eyes shifting between my laden face and the mark that had been exposed when a tricky lake wind had infiltrated the coffin, blowing the scarf up under Kathy’s chin to expose the sutured gash. Then someone came into the bathroom, and I left myself contemplating in the glass.

  As I walked across the lobby I noticed the pianist was packing up, finished with his icicle melodies for the evening. I stopped by the white baby grand to drop him a tip—as much for being light on the ears as anything else. When I returned to our cozy corner, Dianna and Maya were already back in their seats. Before sinking into the faux leather furniture, I asked them if they wanted another round.

  “What time is it?” Dianna said.

  Maya checked her watch. “Damn. Eleven-thirty. What time are we catching the train again?”

  “The nine-thirty would be optimal,” Dianna said. “The absolute latest, the ten-twenty. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour journey, and we meet the rest of the party for lunch at one-thirty.”

  “We’ll be all right,” Maya said. “Ritter said it will be light hiking tomorrow afternoon. Less than three hours to our first destination. We can sleep on the train if we feel we need to.”

  I placed my hands on my hips, peering under my brow at them. “For the love of all that is holy, you two, say whether you want a beer or not and let’s hear about fucking Honduras.”

  “I’m good,” said Dianna.

  “I think what’s left in my glass will do me,” Maya said. “I’ve gained thirteen pounds tonight.”

  ***

  “How Dianna and I happened to find ourselves, on the same hot afternoon, at that ramshackle house in that shabby village at the edge of the Honduran jungle is something we’ve both wondered about over the two plus years we’ve known each other, but rarely discussed, particularly after the magazine and its ad appeared. She was in La Mosquitia—the rain forest region of the Honduran northeast along the Mosquito Coast—with a team of zoologists and botanists, recording biological data at the Rio Plátano Biosphere Reserve. I was there with a separate team on an environmental mission. I’d only arrived in San Viegro a day before, my group readying for its excursion into the jungle. Dianna had been based there for two weeks and had the weekend off. I can’t remember how I learned about the boys—some bar, I think—but Viegro is a small place and you’re looking for anything to do during downtime. When I heard about the local sideshow, and that they were twins, I was curious and went to the house. Dianna was already there when I arrived and happy to have someone present who could speak relatively good Spanish, which I studied in college. I’ll not bore you with the details, but the gig these twelve-year-olds had going was essentially this: One held a deck of shuffled cards, which he turned one by one looking at their faces while the other, wearing a blindfold and earplugs and sitting well apart from the card holder, received his brother’s conveyed impressions. The receiver, when ready, touched either a red or a black square of cloth positioned on a table in front of him. He wasn’t to lift the pieces of cloth because that was a distraction to the card holder, interfering with his ability to focus on the color in front of him. We watched the twins go through the deck three times, we ourselves shuffling the cards between rounds, and without fail the blindfolded brother was able to get the color right at least fifty out of fifty-two times. It was remarkable.