The hotel room was a temporary solution that Walter had stumbled upon but a few miles from the apartment. He checked in, deciding to stay one night. And then a second. Then days into weeks before the weeks threatened months.
A few days after Walter had initially settled in, Wallace began coming by every morning. He always brought with him a light breakfast of some sort: a danish or bagels or muffins and coffee. The two brothers would sit and eat at the small round table in the corner of the modest, unimpressive room.
Most mornings they would say nothing at all.
Other mornings they would discuss small, inconsequential things.
A few weeks in, Walter could not help but reassure Wallace that he was still committed to their business school agreement.
“With the added expense of your current living situation, we would need to amend your budget a not insignificant amount,” Wallace explained. “This would, of course, impact the time horizons for the projections.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Walter replied.
This made Wallace smile.
Which made Walter regret bringing up the topic just a little bit. But it also made him happy for the little freak.
Wallace had also started to become a more regular presence at Sheprick Consolidated. Every few days his stabbing footsteps would sound their way across the hangar and into Mr. Sheprick’s office. Wallace was always clutching an ever-expanding file, balanced tenuously against his side.
Wallace would wave as he went by, but nothing more.
Walter appreciated this.
At first, Walter puzzled over what Wallace and Mr. Sheprick might be talking about during these meetings, worrying that perhaps the topics might include the Wells-Bergamot contract. But Walter reassured himself with the fact that he had the Wells-Bergamot file, which he was confident represented the sum total of intelligence regarding the account. Mr. Sheprick was nothing if not an entirely analog businessman. Sheprick Consolidated had undoubtedly suffered greatly over the years due to the man’s technophobia, keeping up with not a single modern advance or innovation.
Hours later Wallace would resurface with a smiling or laughing Mr. Sheprick walking him out. Again he would wave, but nothing more.
Walter appreciated this as well.
“Don’t you wonder what they’re talking about in there?” Beau would ask Walter at least once a week.
“No,” Walter would fire back. “Just work on the names.”
And that was all it took now to get Beau off Walter’s back.
At some point during one of the many sleepless nights he spent alone with his thoughts in his hotel room, Walter had stumbled upon the insatiable urge to put on headphones and to lie on the floor listening to music again, just like he had done when he was younger, just like he had done the last time he could remember really feeling like himself. But Walter had not packed headphones. So he went out in search of the biggest pair he could find. He wanted one just like the pair he had bought when he was sixteen. They were heavy and pressed both sides of his head in a firm embrace, dampening all extraneous noise down to a mere low ocean hum setting the uninterrupted stage for the layers of sound about to surge through them. He remembered putting them on and closing his eyes and listening. At first, he heard the whole song. Then he started pulling apart the sounds. Starting with whatever he found most interesting. Listening to just the rhythm guitar maybe. Then he’d start the same song over but focus on something else. The singer’s voice. Then the drums. Then the bass. Then the bass and the drums and how they worked together and separately. Then the guitar and bass. And on and on until he couldn’t even hear the song anymore, he could only hear a bunch of noises. He remembered starting with bands he felt he really should know. Surprisingly, they were rarely all that interesting to him. Only a few really blew him away. From there he would find the bands that blew away the bands that blew him away. And then the bands that blew those bands away. He remembered thinking about what must have made each of these people want to make music in the first place. And what kept them at it for years. And whether or not those two things were actually the same. He also thought about how and why their music came out sounding just like it did. How they all played the same instruments, but everything sounded so distinct from one band to the next. He remembered wondering if maybe there was something unique that came through the guitar, something that could only sound just like that one person who had lived that one life playing it. He wanted to listen to songs like that again. Right then. But he needed headphones to do it. And it was 3:00 a.m. So he walked the streets as if he did not know them all too well, as if he did not already know that nothing was open. Especially no store selling giant, vintage headphones. And any headphones he might still own were likely in one of the boxes that had been in the storage room that was supposed to be an office but now was a bedroom. And he had no clue where Veronica would have placed those boxes. Nor did he have any intention of going back to that apartment ever again, let alone tonight. So Walter swore to himself, right then and there on a dark and calm and all-too-familiar sidewalk in the city where he had lived his entire life, that tomorrow he would buy himself a giant pair of headphones so that he could listen to music whenever it was late at night and he needed to feel like himself again. And the very next morning, which was really only a few hours later, he did exactly that. He stopped in at Shoop Shoop Records on his way to work. He arrived just as the owner was lethargically unlocking the front door and before he had even selected the day’s first album to play in the store. Walter headed right to the back of the store, past the rows and rows of records and CDs, to the secondhand instruments and gear and record players. There were only a few pairs of headphones that were big enough to befit the pair in his memory, but he only had to try on the first pair to know he had found the right one.
He carried them in a plastic Shoop Shoop bag to work.
Just having them in his hand made him walk lighter, sharper. Life suddenly felt a little less like only all of its heavy parts. Life suddenly felt like it had light parts, too. Open and uncertain and spontaneous. Parts that might unfurl just like a song. And Walter found himself wondering what his guitar might sound like. If he played one. Or his drums. Or even just his voice. He wondered if it would sound distinct. Or if his life sounded just like anyone else’s might.
So when Beau, of course, nosily asked Walter what was in the bag, Walter found himself doing something most unexpected and pitching his work-friend and fellow salesman to form a band.
“You and me. It will be an ongoing project that will require significant contemplation and planning before any actionable steps are taken,” Walter had qualified, “but eventually and when we are ready, we perform.”
Granted, Beau also did not know how to play an instrument. Nor did either man know how to sing. But Walter decided that these were just details that had to be worked out in the broader scope of the project. Every band started somewhere. And for at least some of them, Walter reasoned, that somewhere could very well have been desire alone. And maybe this time would prove to be one of those sometimes.
Beau fell immediately and wildly in love with the idea of working so intimately with his good friend Walter on such an important and personal project. He also liked the idea of fame, adulation, and groupie sex, which he assumed must come with the territory.
In their first band meeting, which took place covertly at Beau’s desk in one of those always long half-hours before lunch break hit, Beau and Walter decided that a few details needed to be sorted out before they could really start things moving. They started a list:
—We need a sound.
—We need to determine the ideal number of band members.
—Each member needs a prescribed instrumental and/or vocal role.
—We need to find those prescribed members (once number and roles are set).
—We need a look.
—We need a vision for our first album.
—We need a band identity (which is not the same as our look, although these two things should definitely be related).
—The identity includes things like how we will tour and where we will tour and if we will tour at all.
—It will define recording strategies.
—It will define parameters for album art.
—It will inform whether we will endeavor to release our work in traditional media formats or focus our efforts exclusively on digital platforms.
—It will include subsequent digital or analog marketing strategies.
—This is a broad and hugely important category.
—We will also, eventually, need a rehearsal space and a music tutor and a music coach.
—And, most immediately pressing, we need a name. (Walter suggests Work-Friends but Beau thinks that is silly gibberish.)
All of this would require countless conversations, which Beau had dubbed “strategy sessions” and proposed they schedule at least one daily.
Walter suggested that twice weekly might be a more sensible timeframe, allowing for adequate reflection in between meetings. “We shouldn’t rush this,” Walter explained.
Beau conceded.
But he could not decide whether he wanted to be the drummer or the lead guitarist.
Walter wanted to be the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist.
Beau loved this idea.
Beau loved more or less everything about the band.
“I can’t remember ever having this much fun,” Beau would say at some point during each strategy session. And they weren’t even really doing anything yet, other than just talking.
When Walter found himself feeling unexpectedly and relatively better about life, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was the band that was making him surprisingly less sad and numb. The hotel room was feeling slightly less somber. The nights were feeling slightly less interminable. The days even had, in their scattered best moments, a little bit of a drive to them, teetering on the slightest tinge of a purpose.
Then, in another night’s middle, Walter woke up with a nagging thought unrelentingly yanking at his mind: why had Veronica still not even once tried to get in touch with him?
Not a single message through Wallace.
Not a letter seeking closure.
This simply wasn’t her way.
Walter simply could not accept that this was incidental. This meant something.
He asked Wallace about it during the following morning’s breakfast.
Wallace looked up from his apple fritter, thought a moment. And then he said…
“What?”
This monosyllabic implication of ignorance belied the eloquent little mutant.
“Why hasn’t she sought closure?” Walter pressed. “Or a way to work things out.”
“You want to work things out?” Wallace repositioned the point of inquiry.
“Not at all. I want to know why she doesn’t seem to want to,” Walter held firm.
“Well, I can’t speak for her,” Wallace uncharacteristically demurred before doing just that, “but you did break her heart, Walter.”
“When?” Walter could not help but take the bait. “At the end? Or over the years? Or both?”
“I think,” Wallace snipped, “the fact that you ask it like that…”
Wallace let his sentence trail off so that Walter could finish it on his own.
And Walter did just that, as he tore a corner from his danish and put it in his mouth. Instead of focusing on what Wallace hadn’t said, however, Walter puzzled over what he had said. Not so much the words, even, as the way in which the words had been spoken. As Walter chewed on the danish and the words, he honed in on something unusual about Wallace’s tone. Something unfamiliar about it. Something a bit defensive. A touch juvenile, even. And this was not at all Wallace’s way.
“Wait… You?” Walter said before he had even fully processed the thought he was thinking.
Wallace immediately feigned a lack of comprehension…
“Me what?”
Walter did not reply, though, as the thought he was about to think had reached a tipping point and was currently dawning on him. It was a horrifically unthinkable thought, indeed. From not only a purely physical standpoint but also from a biological one. There weren’t actual genetic deterrents per se, but it seemed there might as well be. Not to mention the cultural mores being hatefully ignored by such a taboo act. But beyond all of this, it was the violation of trust that he was most focused upon right now, how irrelevant a non-consideration his very existence and feelings must be to them.
Then it dawned on Walter that the only thing keeping this just-barely-thought thought from taking root and thoroughly poisoning the entire landscape of his being was the fact that he did not yet have absolute confirmation of what was becoming to him an increasingly apparent truth. Walter reasoned quickly, though, that maybe if he could avoid confirmation, then maybe he could just go on with his life, for now anyway, as though nothing was really any different. It was perhaps the only victory possible anymore, small and temporary though it may be, in this horribly evolving sequence of suspected events.
So Walter did what any man in his situation might do…
“I’m late for work,” he stated, getting up from the small table in the corner of the modest room and expediting his morning preparations.
Wallace did not even bother to check his watch. Or to insist that Walter had plenty of time to get to work, which he would know to be true had he checked his watch. Instead, Wallace just sat there, poorly masking his complicity in Walter’s attempt at delusion and thereby further supporting what Walter all but knew at this point to be true. An innocent man in this circumstance would undoubtedly voice some lack of understanding as to the sudden change in behavior and mood.
“You should go,” Walter insisted.
Wallace, again, said nothing. Which spoke volumes.
He started gathering his sweatshirt and his leftover apple fritter. Then he started for the door.
Walter had been staring blankly at the top of his desk for nearly forty-five minutes when Beau Chalmers placed a burned CD atop the desk and within Walter’s narrowed plane of vision.
“You gotta hear these guys,” Beau exclaimed. “They’re geniuses. I think they should be big influences on our sound.”
“They’re not geniuses,” Walter replied, unable to pull his mind away from straining not to think the thought it had honestly already thought.
“You haven’t even heard it yet,” Beau deflated.
“Genius comes along maybe once in your lifetime. It’s not some loose term to liberally apply to anything and everything that you simply like.”
“Genius means brilliant.”
“No,” Walter shot back. “Genius means someone whose thought or actions transcend all that has preceded him or her and whose abilities expand or fundamentally reshape what heretofore had been known as possible.”
“No one does that.”
“No one in your lifetime. Because there will likely only be one. But people do it. Mozart did it. Einstein did it. Gandhi did it.”
“Our band is not going to be Gandhi.”
“Then why are we doing it?” Walter spat, further attempting to keep his mind distracted from the one thing it was already laser-focused on. “The world has enough derivative music.”
“How can you call us derivative?”
“Point well taken. I can’t call us anything because we don’t really exist.”
“Yes, we do! We exist! We’re emerging!”
Walter couldn’t bear this conversation any longer, so he simply stopped talking. But this just sent his brain right back to the one place he did not want it. So he started talking again.
“Maybe we should just start lessons,” Walter spat.
“Now?” Beau nearly blew a gasket. “We don’t even have a name yet! And we agreed that defining the sound was first and foremost. Without an identity we won’t know who we are.”
“Maybe we just need to start, though.”
“I haven’t even researched the best tutors.”
“Maybe we should just try to play. Or buy a book on playing.”
“Walter! This isn’t a toy we’re playing with here. This is the band!”
Walter took a breath and then offered…
“Maybe it’s not the band.”
“What’s not the band?” Beau asked, anxiety now fluttering rampantly throughout his insides.
“Nothing,” Walter said as he got up from his desk, picked up Beau’s CD, and headed across the hangar and out the door.
“Everything’s the band,” Beau called after him.
Out on Mission Street, Walter spotted Wallace making his asymmetrical way toward the hangar with his ever-thickening file tucked semi-under his arm.
As the two approached and passed one another, Wallace did not wave.
He did not even look up.
He just kept walking, in silence. But for his loud, herky-jerky breath.
This, in and of itself, said pretty much everything that Walter pretty much already knew to be true at this point and before he could stop himself, Walter turned back and caught up with Wallace, which wasn’t particularly difficult given Wallace’s erratic gait.
“How the hell could you start…” Walter began, but just as quickly came to a halt when he realized that he wasn’t really sure what, exactly, to call it. He didn’t imagine they were actually dating, per se. And who knows if it was even physical. Or if it even could be physical. Whatever the scenario specifics, there was clearly some sort of bond or connection that surpassed the threshold of appropriateness. “…an emotional affair with Veronica?” Walter clunkily finished his thought.
Wallace stopped walking.
He turned to face Walter.
He took in a deep, unsmooth breath.
“You’re my brother,” Walter refused to wait for what surely would be some useless pap of an excuse. “I carried you inside of me for thirty-five years.”
Walter honed all of his attention in on Wallace’s face, waiting to soak up every tiny twitch and nuance of whatever bullshit the little goblin decided to offer up as smokescreen.
Not surprisingly, Wallace began crying.
The tears arced their spurting semi-circles from his eyelids before reconnecting with his cheeks. This was less of a spastic cry than Walter had previously witnessed, more of a controlled one, which made Walter confident that he had adequately made his point even in lieu of a clear category for whatever was transpiring between Wallace and Veronica. These tears, however, conjured no sympathy at all from Walter, simply stirring instead what was beginning to feel like a bottomless cauldron of his resentment.
“This isn’t about you,” Walter demanded. “This is about me.”
Wallace nodded through his tears.
But not the type of nod that demonstrates agreement as much as it simply acknowledges that words have been received.
“Maybe you don’t know this,” Walter continued, “but brothers don’t take up with their brother’s ex-girlfriends.”
Wallace put up his hand, searching now for words as he continued to cry.
“We,” Wallace finally mustered before pausing yet again under the erratic weight of his tears…
“We,” he tried again, able to add only one word there
after, “are…”
He took a few more breaths and stymied his tears.
Walter suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to be anywhere else in the entire universe by the time that Wallace finished his sentence.
“We…are…in…love,” Wallace sputtered before going right back to crying.
While Walter technically heard each of these words clearly and immediately, and while none of the words were any different from what he already more or less knew to be true, he still required another solid ten to fifteen seconds to really take them in.
He did not process them in that time. Instead, this now-confirmed truth just sort of hovered in reality, somehow outside and in front of Walter’s cognition. He could see it as one might see a cloud or a bird, but still he could not quite process it.
“No!” Walter eventually found himself replying pointedly. “You are not!”
He turned then and walked away from Wallace and away from Sheprick Consolidated.
Wallace turned with him and struggled through his tears to explain, “It…just…happened. No one…meant…anything…by…it.”
Walter turned right back, just as suddenly as he had left, and returned to Wallace before spouting one last thing he desperately wanted to say…
“And you had better believe I’m not paying for your fucking business school!” he shouted.
His words lifted a great and unexpected weight from his shoulders.
He then found himself walking away again, but this time back toward Sheprick Consolidated. He could see nothing but the hangar in front of him as he approached. A singular, clean tunnel. He knew exactly what he needed to do next, to keep his head from exploding and his intestines from turning themselves inside out. But also to make certain that he would no longer have the means, should his resolve later weaken, to make good on Wallace’s business school arrangement.
He walked through the door and stopped smack dab in the center of the hangar’s workspace.
He took in a deep breath and conjured the words…
“Walter, I just heard!” Mr. Sheprick exclaimed, bursting from his office.
“What?” Walter replied, suddenly panicked numb by the thought that the world at large somehow knew of his humiliating-but-not-quite incestuous situation.
“A Harvard man! I’m so excited!”
Walter looked about. All eyes were now squarely upon him.
“What?” Walter repeated, undeterred in his resolve even by what sounded like an admittedly remarkable accomplishment, assuming of course that it was indeed correct. Nevertheless, Walter took in a breath and began again to say what he had come back to say…
“A full scholarship!” Mr. Sheprick cut Walter off, again. “He got a full ride!”
Had a heart been left inside of Walter’s chest, it would have sunk and Walter would have reeled. Instead, Walter just stood there, rendered inert, incapable of feeling anything for sake of a helpless numbness that engulfed him head to toe.
They say that sometimes twins have extra-sensory connections that link and bind them. Walter did not believe that. But at this moment he knew with absolute certainty, and without even looking, that Wallace was standing in the doorway behind him. He did not know why he even bothered to look over his shoulder to verify, but he did. And there was Wallace. His eyes were red and swollen from crying. But only Walter noticed such a detail against the standard severity, atypicality, and unexpectedness of the little freak’s features.
Cueing off of Walter’s glance, everyone else in the hangar turned to find Wallace as well.
“There he is!” yelled Mr. Sheprick.
And then Mr. Sheprick did two things that Walter had never seen him do.
First, he ran across the hangar. Walter had never before seen this man move any faster than a bored drunkard might.
Second, he grabbed Wallace in his arms and hugged him as deeply as a father might hug his son in the proudest of moments.
Had Walter even a shred of a desire left to connect with even a single human being on this entire planet, he surely would have been seethingly jealous of this display of unabashed acceptance and approval from his employer and maybe kind of de facto mentor of many years.
As it was, however, still he could feel nothing, even as he watched Mr. Sheprick and Wallace’s embrace, their figures silhouetted by the bright light burning through the open hangar doors behind them.
From behind Walter, a spattering of applause began.
At first it sounded like just a person or two before swelling to include all five employees of Sheprick Consolidated, other than Walter of course.
Walter knew what he knew, but just to verify, he turned around to find everyone, even Beau Chalmers, standing and applauding with gusto.
The only thing Walter could think to do now was, yet again, precisely what he had come back into the hangar to do in the first place before being twice interrupted.
Walter took in a breath, all the more convinced now of this path of action, even if it had lost some, if not most, of its resonance.
“I quit!” he yelled out, echoing broadly throughout the hangar.
But the words and their echoes were nevertheless lost in the applause and the whistles and the exclamatory rejoices.
So Walter tried again…
“I fucking quit!” he bellowed.
But still no one heard.
So he did the only thing he could think to do, the only thing by his estimation befitting his current circumstance. He left.
And just as no one had heard his voice, no one noticed his departure.
No one except for Wallace. His sad, ruddy eyes peered just over Mr. Sheprick’s shoulder as the older man clutched Wallace’s little body tightly to his chest. Wallace’s tiny, misshapen stare followed his twin brother all the way to the hangar doors before it was finally forced away when Mr. Sheprick started to spin the uneven little mutant around in circles as though they were in the ending of a highly unusual eighties romantic comedy.
As Walter walked away from the hangar for the second time that day, cheers and whistles sounded bitterly behind him.
The streets were filled with people who could not understand Walter Braum’s incomprehensible mess of a life. Their oblivion was a caustic dagger stabbed into the empty space that had once housed his heart. The streets they travelled were filled with spite. The cars filling those streets, too.
Nothing, animate or otherwise, so much as batted a sympathetic eye at Walter’s misfortune. The buildings didn’t care. They were happy with the pure utility of their existence. And the planes overhead, they couldn’t even see Walter from way up there.
Walter found himself arriving at Eleanor’s apartment building.
He climbed the stairs to the third floor.
He walked a sharp vector down the hallway to her door.
He knocked.
There was silence.
Until the door clicked, turned, opened.
And there was Eleanor, dressed in a black, silk robe with God only knows what, if anything, on underneath.
“Hey, Wally,” she said, so glycerin and porcelain and soothing that finally he could at least begin to feel the breath in his lungs again.
Words spilled from Walter’s mouth.
He wasn’t sure what those words were, exactly.
But he watched as they turned Eleanor’s eyes wide, pushed her a step and a half back from the door, and prompted her to pull, ever so slightly, the top of her robe further closed.
She nevertheless begrudgingly let Walter in.
But she sat further down the couch than she normally did.
And her “services” were much more…procedural…than they had been before, moving immediately past foreplay right into orgasmic pursuit. And even then she stuck to only one position. He was accustomed, by now, to more like maybe five or six. But she just straddled him and grinded consistent as a freight-train.
And then it was over. She climbed off. She sat in a chair he had never even noticed before in the corner of the bedroom. She said, “I’ve got other things, Walter. You should go.”
So Walter got up.
He pulled on his pants.
He only now realized that he hadn’t even taken off his shirt. Or, more accurately, that she had never taken off his shirt.
She pulled on her same silk robe.
She walked to the door.
He followed.
She opened the door and he stepped out.
He turned back to say goodbye just as she said, “Thank you for your patronage these past months, but I think we should terminate our professional partnership.”
Then she closed the door.
It was quiet again.
Quiet enough to think.
So Walter thought.
And only now did he uncover the words.
The words that he had spoken fifteen-ish minutes ago when last he was standing right in this exact same spot in the universe.
She had said, “Hey, Wally.”
And he had said, “I love you, Eleanor. I’m in love with you.”