“But… what… are you…” I managed, my voice trailing off to a whisper. Khalika’s manner of speaking veered from contemporary language to something ancient, almost archaic. It was so disconcerting, it made me dizzy. I had never noticed it before now. Had she always spoken this way?

“I don’t know what I am. That is the truth, Violet. I am that I am. That assertion might sound a bit god-like, but what else are we in our own minds after all? How we come to believe we are in control of ourselves and everything around us, all that we deem beneath us, what we slaughter for sport or consume without remorse? Think of our late stepparents. Whatever I am is something that might have always existed. But how can I be certain? JeanLuc has been unable to enlighten me beyond bits and pieces. Whatever it is, is beyond my kenning, perhaps I am a mere idea, and a spin of the cosmic roulette wheel chose only one of us to be fleshed out, the other half of the oeuvre, yours truly, doomed to exist vicariously. Yet even that is not exactly true. But I am in the dark as much as you are as to whether my existence will be snuffed out along with yours, or whether I might one day experience the joy and agony of another corporeal existence somewhere else, or even if I will retain any memory of this… sojourn. I certainly have no memory of anything beyond us. Meanwhile, I love you dearly. I can’t help it. I love as deeply as I hate. And that is a lot. We are a symbiosis of the highest order—one that contains love, rather than mere survival.”

How much more… before something gives way, the crumbling dam bursts?

Khalika’s voice, the information it imparted so matter of factly, reached me as if from the other end of a tunnel to some netherworld beyond even the one I had been navigating for twenty years. She kept talking, her voice the echo of something that had long since passed through that tunnel, eons ago.

“At that point, I can only assume, it was too late to change its mind, if ‘mind’ is the right word, unless it is the universal over mind, the demiurge—whether I might be a chunk of it, an extension of it. I don’t know if I exist as a singularity, or even if there is such a thing. Perhaps this ring should be set more appropriately with an Abraxas stone.”

At some point, you expect a person to clear their throat, sneeze, cough, or blow their nose. I realized, with a start, that Khalika never, ever did these things. I don’t think it occurred to her to bother with those voluntary or involuntary functions, to cause me to see and hear them. She was good with props, though—jewelry, wigs, cigarettes, a cocktail. Which of us saw to the details, or neglected them? Now that I knew, I saw it all clearly—how I’d only seen what was necessary, and ignored the gaping plot holes that were now being closed up by her as easily as pulling a curtain across a shower rod. The answer is, there aren’t any answers. There are only the undeniable, cold facts. Everything—water on a hot frying pan, fizzing off into oblivion, like the ending of one of her poems. She had done it all. Through me.

Which of us holds the bag?

“You must understand now why it has always been a quid pro quo with us, why each of us needs the other to survive. As I said, if you were to meet an untimely end, I don’t know what my fate would be. Just know that I don’t act only on my own behalf, but out of a genuine concern for you—my twin, who might have been the mirror image of myself, after all, even if that image has become warped by circumstance, and by… whatever I am. I have done my best by you while fulfilling my own… compulsions? I am sorry, in a way, about our disseverance. I would have perhaps chosen a corporeal existence, even with all the disgusting body functions, the fluids, the heartbreak, illness, the farewell to youth and the horrors of aging. But who’s to say I won’t suffer all of this as well, through you? I’ve often wished you’d quit the smoking. It seems to be harder to kick than heroin. By the way, only you had the benefit of getting it on with Mark. I know—hard to hear, but absolutely true. He did not betray you, and neither did I. I’m just a master of mechanics.”

I was shutting down. I ran from the room, one hand clapped over my mouth, past weeping, past further questions. I began to plead, silently.

Please Khalika, I still don’t understand. You are here. You have always been here. Even when you’ve gone missing, I could always feel you. You are what allowed me to stay alive in this morass, in this living nightmare. You and my Mercutio. And now, Mark.

“Violet, it is something so mysterious that, were you to try to tell anybody about it, you would be confined as insane. When those in power have labeled you, you will stay that way until they label you as something else or pronounce you ‘cured.’ That day is usually when the money runs out. In vulgar parlance, I am what is termed a ‘free rider.’ There are other banal designations: a vanishing twin, a parasitic twin. I despise these terms; it makes one feel like some sort of leech, another configuration of a Bianca. It is what they call the twin that has been absorbed into the body of the other—unless it is excised after birth. But that is usually an ill-advised procedure. It is almost like conjoined twins, except the free rider exists as a lump of inert tissue somewhere inside the one who has prevailed in the crap shoot of life, or in this instance… something else.”

My pointless and impotent weeping began again, just when I thought a lifetime’s supply had been exhausted, that I had depleted the earthly storehouse of grief and shock.

“Please don’t cry, Violet. It has its benefits. My so-called ride has hardly been free, however. Wouldn’t you agree? Even the most esteemed cosmologists spend their days pondering and arguing about whether the universe in which we find ourselves floundering is, perhaps, the ultimate free lunch—an eternity of one that gives not a rat’s ass about the offspring it mindlessly spit out. A perfect universe? Ha! And still no concurrence on the so-called ‘big questions.’ No resolution to the creation riddle, or even what consciousness actually is, why or how it is. I am, I suppose, just another form of it, whatever it turns out to be. I cannot speculate about where I came from, for then we get into the conundrum of turtles all the way down, infinite regression and other such excruciating mental gymnastics. Maybe it’s deliberate that I cannot remember my origins.”

My reeling brain somehow processed that my sister was still trying to calm me down, to lull me with her explications, her fancy footwork. She needed to keep me in the moment, keep me from spinning out of her orbit, into psychotic deep space. It was her form of enlightened self-interest. Call it love.

“These questions are no longer important to me, because I can never be anything but what I am. It is like asking why there is something rather than nothing, whether it has all been in service to the twin illusions of good and evil, when neither can trump the other. It’s the repetitious argument that frightened, overgrown children have with death until, as Emily put it, ‘the moss covers their lips.’ Humans are incapable of imagining a world without them, so they hang on far past their expiration date.”

“So,” I managed, “you don’t know if you exist because I do, or if you will transfer yourself to somebody, something else, if I am killed, or when I die?”

“How can I know this when there is nobody to tell me besides JeanLuc’s spirit? And even his has trouble breaking through all the human static. I’ve been waiting twenty years for an answer. Anyway, to simplify matters, I am a small lump of conscious tissue that wouldn’t even know what it looks like, would have looked like, if you never looked in a mirror. I can’t even, like a blind person, feel your features, the warmth of skin, the weather, except for those times when I inhabit you, when you do not so much hallucinate me, as act for me. That night, in the alley, the line got blurred.

“At those times, you—and I—conjure all my physical reactions, the ones I might have had, reflections of my natural impulsiveness. That’s the best I can do by way of explanation. I don’t know if I would feel agony if they tried to remove me or not. I don’t know if you would, or if you would be carried off, kicking and screaming, to an institution. I am that twitch, the little electric current you feel when there is danger about—existential or potential. That is all I am. It is quite taxing for me too, let me tell you. As I said, no free lunch. But what else do I have to do but wait and plan, to act without harming you.”

No! It can’t be. You died somewhere, without my knowing, and now you are a vengeful ghost, intent only on taking over my life! Oh Khalika, did I kill you?

Khalika read my mind: “No, Violet, of course you didn’t kill me. You have loved me all your life, as I have loved you. And now, you love Mark. The Jack of Hearts stole my sister. Believe me, Violet, in spite of everything, I am glad of it.”