Gathering One's Self Together - Guest Post: Teri
Tenses may be whacked, will take yet another look later.
The radiance of the newly reborn sun refracts through the crystal; the spectrum it disperses casts itself across my surfaces and planes.
I pick up the small prism and roll it in my palm, tracing its hard surfaces and clean edges, remembering.
Ren gave this to me on our sixth birthday. I admire the splay of the colors as the rising sun and my random motions mutate the spectrum’s dance across the walls and windows.
Our “discussion” did not go well. For him. I let my fingers caress the leather lanyard a final time.
We’d made them in our twelfth year, each for the other, sitting under the extended dock at Winnipesaukee, cool lake breezes caressing us, lake waves lapping at our feet.
“Here,” he’d said as he tied the tricolored braid around my wrist. “Now you do me.” I’d wrapped the roughly corded strands around his wrist, so identical to my own. A final tug and a grunt. “Good. Now.” He thrust our entwined hands into the cools waters and held them beneath the surface, soaking the leathers, letting them engorge. Suddenly, our hands resurfaced and Ren laid them just outside the shadow of the old wood we sprawled beneath.
“Sun,” he said. “When they dry, they’ll tighten. Fit.” He rolled over, chest to chest, face to face, serious eyes. “You and me, brother. Us. Them. Always.”
I’d believed it then, believed it always. Until truth had intervened. The time roughened cords had been cut away from me long ago, but I’d kept them with me. Until now.
It should have been more difficult to say goodbye. To amputate half of myself. Which should sorrow me more - the loss of my twin or the loss of the ability to feel loss?
He’d not returned to the Chelsea flat Kim and I had used as a refuge. There was no surprise in that. He was now at the Capri and the lobby staff knew to expect me. I was ushered to the lifts and coded to his floor.
“Ren!” he exclaimed as the doors parted and he rushed to embrace me. I allowed it, feeling for a final time the familiarity of my brother’s warmth. “I’ve been fucking crazy trying to find you! But you’re okay, right?” He held me at arms length, examining me he always did, checking for scrapes, bruises, any signs of the external world’s disapproval.
“Fine.” I gently disengaged myself and wander over to the ceiling to floor windows with their highly coveted views of the East River.
“You were wrong,” I said to my reflection. Smiled at the dual reality. I turned to face him, resolved to do what must be done, say what must be said. “You were wrong to do what you did to Kim. To me.” Raine rises in protest but my expression stops him. “To you and I. To all of us.”
“Us?”
“You’d no right to meddle. No right to impersonate me. No right to play god.” He started to speak but I stopped him with a gesture. “No right.”
His anger took control.
“No right? Maybe not, bro, but look what that whack job turned into! Look what he did to me right before your eyes!” He slammed a fist down on the stack of files resting on his cobalt desk. I idly note the Kinnetic logo on the top few. “I knew he was dangerous! I knew he would hurt you in the end! He wasn’t worth it - not worthy of you! He proved it! Fuck knows what he’s done since he left town all those years ago!”
I shook my head and thought that I should be sad, that this should mean more than a task to be completed. It didn’t. Perhaps I’d cauterized the wound in anticipation and the scarring now distanced me. No matter.
“I do know what he’s done all these years. I was instrumental in his destiny - perhaps to a greater extent than you. But know this. You live as a result of my intervention.” Raine snorted and filled a tumbler with Cristall vodka.
“As if. Ren, you’re an artist, just like me only not. You’re not a thug.” He tossed back the clear liquid and slouched against the pale marble of the sideboard.
I crossed the space and leaned forward, bracing myself on its cool surface, hands rested on either side of his slim hips, so like mine. “I am an artist,” I hissed into his ear. “But in ways you could not begin to understand.” I met his wary gaze. “I design sex. I design power.” I paused to allow him time to absorb what I next said. “I design death.”
He recognized the truth of what I said in my eyes. He was frightened. He was right to be.
With that accomplished, I left.
The soft whistle of my electric kettle brings my attention back into the now. I pause to brew a pot of silver needle tea and return to my lacquered desk. A sidebar to my surveillance discovered that Kinney has been watched. Well done by their standards, inexcusably sloppy by mine. I save those files as a precaution. His problem, not mine.
Strong arms wrap around me from behind. He loves me, I know, but the flat panel monitor is dark and I hear his low grumble of a laugh in my ear.
“Keeping secrets, Princess?”
I smile and rest my hand atop his. “Always, Robert. Always.”
I toss the leather strands into the trash.