the separation

My brother is sleeping and I am beyond angry. I am resigned to my overdue termination and if I could shut down the mechanisms he needs to live, I would. He is my brother, my twin, my Siamese twin. Not just two ordinary princes of Persia, we are the world’s first non-identical Siamese twins, a medical phenomenon. He is Samuel, I am Solomon. We are co-joined at the chest, glued by bio-fire, freshly melted like hot cheese on toast. I look like a shiny plastic rail crash victim; my face is taut and expressionless save for a few anal creases around my pale thin mouth. Samuel has been luckier, if people like us are due any. He is curiously handsome, his hair dark and mop headed, his eyes alert and mischievous. His only true detraction is an appendage called Solomon. Once we were truly unwanted and unwashed but soon came the time when butchery advanced to the point where each and every qualified Sweeney Todd wanted a piece of us, the trophy between us. Samuel of course is as smitten with the idea of celebrity as the doctors who push past each other to get between us, smug in their shameless purity of unerring duty and unquestioned professionalism.


He, Samuel has been blessed with the luxuries of speech and partial movement. I am dumb, atrophied and limp to the touch, an anathema to the squeamish. All hope began and continues to rest with Samuel. I am merely dead flesh, a cyst or hump to be hacked off, pickled and dusted. Cosmetic surgery at its finest. To give Sammy boy some credit he has, through his engaging smile and quirky sense of morbid fun in the face of, well, me, managed to secure first-class medical care for us both and so the inevitable carnie shuffle down the midway has been postponed indefinitely. Samuel has told the doctors that to be separated is what we both wish for more than any other thing. How could anyone disbelieve him, how could anyone deny an individual his birthright to his separate identity? As individuals, we can love and be loved, earn and spend, come and go. Personal space is a basic human right and we have been denied by the highest of all courts. Samuel has convinced the medical authorities and anyone who will listen that we share an intimate communication system. That somehow I squeeze a muscle in my stomach once for yes and twice for no. No one has questioned his methodology since it is assumed that since we share the same blood, we must share the same feelings. Nothing could be more wrong. It is true there are certain sensations, reactions to stimuli, and exact instances when we convince ourselves that our thoughts are mutual and simultaneous but in no greater measure than I imagine two best friends or intimate lovers. In Samuel’s case, the end begets the means. His parallel trick, his only good trick I might add, is using the index finger of his good hand to prod me unnoticed in the arsehole at press conferences as well as perfunctory meet and greets. Amongst other things, this rectal ventriloquism causes an involuntary smile on my palsied death mask amplifying the assembled pity and more importantly the donations. All things considered, it is probably my best trick too. I have tried unsuccessfully to shit myself in response but I am sure he has an as yet undiscovered control over my bowel.


Thirty-two years of living in each other’s back pockets. Thirty-two years of never having said hello or goodbye. Thirty-two years without a please or thank you. Marriage will never be as testing. Perennially bad breath at close quarters (at least I have an excuse), an itch you just cannot scratch, the ultimate hanger-on. This is what it is like. No other human condition, stage managed or otherwise that can reproduce the chained hostility of simply being. It is not until you spend literally an entire lifetime with another person that you realise how much we repeat ourselves. Stories that were once pure remembered fact are altered, and hyperbolised with our personal propaganda. A mechanism to re-grade our lives so that they seem neither wasted nor trivial. Samuel has come to impress on the world that his reworked fate is a truly Christian undertaking to keep me alive. According to Samuel, everything he does is for my benefit, everything but quite often nothing. If you had done your homework properly people, you would have realised that Samuel and Solomon have never truly communicated, we are merely attached. A stubborn scab that refuses to come off no matter how many times you pick it. Do you know what it is to have had to listen to the ramblings of an imbecile for three decades? Forgive me, I do not decry his stupidity, no other person in a similar circumstance could have fared much better, but the fact is Solomon is a someone whom I dislike intensely and is also a man who occasionally deems it necessary to thrust his index finger in my anus.


The truth as you may have guessed is that Samuel is eating himself alive with guilt. He feels guilt because he has never treated me as a brother and I have never been able to adequately redress the balance. By separating myself from him he would deny both of us that rare luxury of discovering true brotherhood. You will have also have guessed that while my brother sleeps heavy from the pre-med, I have gained access to a device that lets me type using a straw with which I can suck and blow and form sentences on a computer screen beside me. My intelligence should now speak for itself rather than my brother. I am no longer just along for the ride.


To you my brother Samuel, I apologise but I hate you. Hate in most circumstances causes people to part but in our extreme circumstance, I fear that separation will drive us farther apart than each of us knows to be possible. Brother, I cannot deny you your freedom any more than you cannot continue to grant me life. We are the jailed and the jailor amalgam. Now I have the device and a lifetime of bile to blow down this tube, I feel the effect of the drugs bearing down hard and my eyes have begun to roll back in my head like a sharks as its teeth tear into its prey.