I had a twin brother back in Iowa. We were identical twins, but he didn’t look anything like me. The doctors said they’d never seen anything like it, but if you ask me, they were a couple of quacks. They looked just alike, even though one claimed to be Indian and the other was Scottish. They both had coal-black skin and yellow teeth and they talked with accents that wobbled back and forth between Italian and Russian. “Now, you-a mother, she-a give birth to the tweens and they no lookalike. It ees a scientific meeracle,” one of them said. Of course, this was years later. If he had said it at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to understand him, as I had just been born, or so they tell me. One takes these things on faith, just as I take it on faith that my unresembling brother is my identical twin. It’s science. One does well not to deny science. It is what holds airplanes up, and I like the idea of airplanes staying up, especially when I’m in them. My brother and I often used to travel together, flying to remote parts of the world where we attended conferences devoted to the science of twinship. All the world famous twinologists were always there. My brother and I attended as exhibits, not as scientists. My brother is too stupid to be a scientist, which is the one way we are alike. I could not get past seventh grade biology where they told us about simple things like photosynthesis and Mendel with his peas and why twins look alike. Since I knew that twins don’t look alike, I didn’t believe any of it, so I always failed the tests. But then I started to fly in airplanes and decided that I would start taking things on faith. I still failed the tests, though. I haven’t seen my brother in about ten years. We had a fight and quit speaking, and I moved away from Davenport, where we had always lived, and began an itinerant sort of existence that hasn’t always worked out very well. I am now in jail in some nondescript county, awaiting trial for the murder of a convenience store clerk. My defense will be that my evil twin brother committed the crime. I’m not sure that’s going to be the best defense, but it’s about all I’ve got at this point. I did kill the clerk. He made me angry. I was trying to buy a six-pack and he asked me for my ID, and when I showed it to him, he said, “This doesn’t look like you.” For some reason, that sent me over the edge. I wrote to my brother to ask him to come to my trial. He doesn’t know about my defense strategy. Maybe he’ll come. Since I haven’t seen him in ten years, I don’t know what he looks like any more. Maybe he looks like me.
If full document not visible, there is a scroll bar to the right of the text.