At the pre-op appointment, a projector is in rolled in on a small cart. My brother tries to whisper something into my ear but is stopped by my mother cupping her palms in a tight circle around his mouth. The same instructional video plays in loops, the blue latex gloves entering the shot first, followed by thin pale slices of visible wrist. The rubber patient is just face, chest, and hands. The narration covers scar maintenance. How direct of an angle a faucet head should point in relation to the wound, massaging techniques, creams. Its intention is to prepare the patient for the maintenance the patient must practice when healing from the removal of benign cysts. In the video, the gloves quietly pull things found inside the practice patient outside of itself. The surgeon’s table is the shade of muddied lip gloss. By the end, there is a bowl the size of a coffee mug full of insides. Since the video, I have always been prepared.
For Christmas one year, my brother and I receive a disposable camera we keep stuck between our mattress pad and the bed frame. It captures evidence of us attending county fairs, farmer’s markets, and city aquarium shows. There are only a handful of photos with both of us entirely in frame. Us in baseball hats, in swim trunks, on top of jungle gyms. Us standing so close you can’t quite tell which set of arms belongs to whom. Despite a two-year age gap, we share the same teeth, shoe size, and face.
Throughout elementary school, our teachers confuse us constantly. There is rarely a sentence spoken to one of us in which we aren’t both the implied subject. We eat our lunches behind the gym, push into each other’s shoulders, and at night, we keep our gums neat and tidy with a bit of floss.
In physical therapy, I am asked to make different shapes out of Play-Doh using only my bad hand. A crown, a blue whale breaching, a four-leaf clover, I manage nothing but crumpled heaps. Every winter post-operation, I picture my index finger as a hollow rod, all exterior. The center is the hardest part to teach to reheat itself after being out in the cold for too long. Mittens fit better than gloves because they don’t try to divide my hand into functioning pieces.When visiting the aquarium, we take turns comparing the other to different species of ugly fish. I am an eel, and he is an enormous catfish. We live in separate tanks on opposing ends of the ground floor.
I think of the video and how the doll is taken off-screen to “recover”—anecdotes about cartilage growth flash across the screen in various shades of bile.
My mother, a substitute teacher for kindergarteners, is the first to suggest finger painting, thinking I might regain some sensory feeling if I rub the acrylic against the paper long enough.
My brother’s first word was “hot” because before I was born, my mother and brother lived in a house with a furnace at the center, and whenever he would try to bring his hand to it, they would say “No. Hot.” The narration follows me into the shower. It tells me to scrub. I start with the knees, working upwards in slow circles. Harder. Steam swells. Like you mean it
Parallel to the bathroom mirror, we set an egg timer. Brush our teeth in long rhythmic strokes until it dings. Naturally, we are both left-handed, but with the cast, I have to use my right. Everything is out of sync. At the petting zoo, there are signs telling us to lay our palms flat so the animals don’t mistake us for food. The goats are particularly grabby; their tongues are like rope. They pull us closer and closer to their stomachs, stopping only when we scratch. There is never enough skin in my fingers to maintain heat. I can still construct a snowman, but only if someone else does the rolling. We move often. Each new house with a bunk bed waiting for us. Our mother doesn’t help the twin rumors. She wraps us in matching sweaters, has us share a birthday cake each year, allows us to speak in coded whispers. Our laundry is always mixed up in the wash; we sort what belongs to whom methodically, arguing over color and size. It is all we ever fight about, our skin covered in suds.
In our most recent move to Miami we live in an apartment complex not so far from the water between a laundromat and a CVS. I am in early high school, my brother in late high school, we share a lunch period. We bring baloney and cheese sandwiches with too much mayo and not enough lettuce for lunch. We ride a yellow tandem bike to school. Everyone finds us disgusting. Eventually, we begin to find each other disgusting. Our mother, who has gone back to substitute teaching, announces that we will soon have another sibling. We don’t ask who the father might be; we don’t want to know. We have decided we will do something about this.
We have decided that as much as we are sick of each other and of our baloney sandwiches, we must stick together in this time of great rupture.
My hand begins to feel better, but no one believes me. I tell my brother one day when we are making our sandwiches to bring to school, and he tells me that I’m only pretending to be better so I will stop getting so much attention from our mother and my teachers. I want to tell him that he’s wrong, but the only way to do so would be to admit that I actually like the attention and never want it to stop despite my recovery, which would be unthinkable. My hospital room was small, my twin cot like a shelf. The morning after the initial operation, I stood alone in the body-length mirror propped against IV chords. I pressed my thumb against the glass like I was at the aquarium. I thought about catfish. I pushed harder.
Our mother is due in June, and by the time May comes around, we have devised several plans, but none have stuck. What if we took the baby to the water and tricked a group of manatees into thinking it was their own? I had to ask my brother what a manatee looked like since they didn’t have one at the aquarium, and he told me they looked like heifers crossed with mermaids. I asked him what we should do if the baby wasn’t born ugly like us, and he didn’t have an answer, so we reevaluated. We decided that if the baby were born ugly, we would give it to the sea cows, and if the baby were born pretty, we would offer to hold it and then drop it on the ground until it was made ugly.
One day in late May, I was washing my wound when our mother yelled from the kitchen that the baby was coming. We were sent away to my brother’s classmate’s house for the next couple of days so she could be alone at the hospital. It was raining, and in the basement of the house, lit only by a single lightbulb with a string to turn it on and off, which dangled in front of our faces like a pendulum, we waited. Remember the tornado when we lived in South Carolina, one of us said, and the other replied: in Charleston? We both thought about the sirens and sitting in the bathtub with our hands over our heads with our mother between us, the dog barking outside the bathroom door. Yeah, I remember.
Once in Atlanta, our mother was taking the dog outside to piss in the middle of the night while we were sleeping, and she swears she saw a bright green light cut through the thick air. When she looked up, she saw an alien spaceship about to beam her into the sky. For the next several months, she would have us watch UFO documentaries with her that blamed the government for not protecting us from the aliens, or hiding the aliens from us, or that the government members themselves actually were aliens. It was unclear what our mother wanted us to do about the aliens other than be aware that they could disrupt our lives at any given moment.
When our mother asked us to help name our new sibling, we suggested she ask the aliens, and she flew into a fit of rage that lasted weeks. That was around the time I started to dream about the doll from the instructional video. It would speak to me, using the voice of different people I knew: teachers, classmates, my mother, my brother, myself. But when I woke up, I could never remember what it had said to me.
Once our mother was cleaned up but still in the hospital, we were finally invited in to see the baby. She was beautiful. I had never seen a baby so young and pink. Before we could even think to ask to hold her, we were sent back to the basement of my brother’s classmate. That night, I had another dream about the doll, but it was speaking in a voice I didn’t recognize. The only word I can remember it saying was: prepare.
In the following weeks, my brother and I moved back in with our mother into the apartment between the laundromat and the CVS, but she told us she wanted to move into a house in the Pinecrest neighborhood so there was room for the four of us. My brother told me that we would have to wait for the moment to “mistakenly” drop the baby. Our mother had yet to name her because she couldn’t think of something beautiful enough. My brother said we couldn’t be too obvious, fearing our mother’s rage. I didn’t tell my brother about my dream with the doll or the voice I didn’t recognize; I especially didn’t tell him that I had even become fond of our unnamed sibling.
Later, one morning, when my mother was looking through a book on baby names, I told her I was going to walk to the water alone. Our mother had just signed a lease to a house, just like she said she would, and everything was bubble-wrapped or in a box. It was now late July, and we were set to move in on the first of August. She told me that my brother and I should take the yellow tandem bike and be back for lunch, but I repeated to her that I wanted to go alone. She asked me where my brother was, and I told her she was asleep on the bottom bunk. So she told me to take the dog.
When the dog and I reached the shore, I tied the dog’s leash around a thin palm tree so it wouldn’t run away, then entered the water. I practiced holding my breath, then diving as deep as I could over and over again and again. My whole body pruned, my mouth tasted like sweat, I could hear the dog bark from the beach, but I kept going. Finally, towards the late afternoon, my hand ached. I followed the ache by placing my hand in different levels of the water, then swam in the direction that was the most painful. That’s when I found what I was looking for: the Manatee. It spoke to me in the same voice as my dream, telling me to prepare. I asked for what? And it disappeared. On the walk home the dog barked incessantly at nothing at all, he was empathic but I had no idea about what. I asked the dog: what is wrong with you. But he did not answer. He is a dog, that would be silly.
When I came back to the apartment, our mother was wailing. She was holding the baby in her arms, but it looked different, more pink. I realized all its hair had fallen out. My hand ached every step I took near them. My brother was sitting on the edge of one of the packed boxes. I took another step inside. My hand tore open; out stepped the owner of all of the voices from my dreams—the voice of my brother, my mother, myself, all speaking in unison: Name me. Name me. Name me.