in fact drawing bizarre figures—geometrical, humanoid—that seemed to spring from the end of his black felt-tip pen.
In the spring of his junior year, stricken with bronchitis, Edward didn’t complete his courses and never returned to school: his formal education had ended. In that year, Eddie Waldman was recruited by a dozen universities offering sports scholarships and, shrewdly, he chose the most academically prestigious of the universities, for his goal beyond the university was law school.
Resembling each other as a shadow can be said to resemble its object. Edward was the shadow.
By this time the brothers no longer shared a room. The brothers never longer shared—even!—the old, cruel childish custom of the demon brother’s wish to harm his smaller twin; the demon brother’s wish to suck all the oxygen out of the air, to swallow up his smaller twin entirely. Why be this other here—this thing! Why this, when there is me!
Here was the strange thing: the smaller brother was the one to miss the bond between them. For he had no other so deeply imprinted in his soul as his brother, no bond so fierce and intimate. I am in you, I am your brother, you must love me.
But Eddie laughed, backing away. Shook hands with his sickly brother for whom he felt only a mild repugnance, the mildest pang of guilt, and he said good-bye to his parents, allowed himself to be embraced and kissed and went away, smiling in anticipation of his life he went away with no plan to return to his hometown and to his boyhood house except for expediency’s sake as a temporary visitor who would be, within hours of his return, restless, bored, eager to escape again to his “real” life elsewhere.
2.
NOW IN THEIR TWENTIES the brothers rarely saw each other. Never spoke on the phone.
Eddie Waldman graduated from law school. Edward Waldman continued to live at home.
Eddie excelled, recruited by a prominent New York City law firm. Edward suffered a succession of “health crises.”
The father divorced the mother, abruptly and mysteriously it seemed for the father, too, had a “real” life elsewhere.
Eddie entered politics, under the tutelage of a prominent conservative politician. Edward, suffering spinal pain, spent most days in a wheelchair. Inside his head calculating numbers, imagining equations in which the numerical, the symbolic, and the organic were combined, inventing music, rapidly filling large sheets of construction paper with bizarre yet meticulously detailed geometrical and humanoid figures in settings resembling those of the surrealist painter de Chirico and the visionary artist M. C. Escher. Our lives are Möbius strips, misery and wonder simultaneously. Our destinies are infinite, and infinitely recurring.
In the affluent suburb of the great American city, on a residential street of large, expensive houses, the Waldman house, a clapboard colonial on a two-acre lot, began by degrees to fall into disrepair, decline. The front lawn was unmowed and spiky, moss grew on the rotting shingle boards of the roof and newspapers and flyers accumulated on the front walk. The mother, once a sociable woman, began to be embittered, suspicious of neighbors. The mother began to complain of ill health. Mysterious “hexes.” The mother understood that the father had divorced her as a way of divorcing himself from the misshapen broke-backed son with the teary yearning eyes who would never grow up, would never marry, would spend the rest of his life in the fevered execution of eccentric and worthless “art.”
Frequently the mother called the other son, the son of whom she was so proud, whom she adored. But Eddie seemed always to be traveling, and rarely returned his mother’s messages.
In time, within a decade, the mother would die. In the now derelict house (visited, infrequently, by a few concerned relatives) Edward would live as a recluse in two or three downstairs rooms, one of which he’d converted into a makeshift studio. The embittered mother had left him enough money to enable him to continue to live alone and to devote himself to his work; he hired help to come to the house from time to time to clean it, or to attempt to clean it; to shop for him, and to prepare meals. Freedom! Misery and wonder! On large canvases Edward transcribed his bizarre dream-images, among galaxies of hieroglyphic shapes in a sequence titled Fossil-Figures. For it was Edward’s belief, which had come to him in a paroxysm of spinal pain, that misery and wonder are interchangeable and that one must not predominate. In this way time passed in a