He Still Ain't Heavy

He Still Ain’t Heavy

“Oh, hi! Wow you’re here! Thank you so much.”

“Hey, I haven’t moved from yesterday.”

“Cute. At least you ordered fresh coffee and somebody brought you a change of clothes?”

“Yeah, and a sponge bath. I have a great valet. You like this outfit? Can I get you a coffee or something?”

“No, I’m good. I’m glad you got your bath and look, your jeans are clean.”

“Are you saying I was wearing dirty clothes yesterday?  Anyway, truth?”

“Yes, truth.”

“Yeah, I confess, I had gone through the entire day yesterday, without a woman bursting in here, in a coffee shop, and with surprise and shock, telling me I’m somebody else, some guy she’s treating at a hospital. Not just telling me, insisting upon it.”

“So, you did think I wouldn’t be here. ‘Cause I wasn’t sure that you’d show up.”

“Well, in my amazement at how you were yesterday, I might have seemed weird or threatened or even threatening. Whatever. I must have come on strong. Not your everyday normal.”

“Did I insist? Wasn’t I asking – inquiring? Did I seem to be in shock?”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think I could call it anything else. But I also have to admit, it was quite a pick up line.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, I get it, now, sort of, but we do agree, the whole thing is, . . .  well it’s weird.”

“Yes, I guess it must seem otherworldly.”

“So did you check my bed in the hospital to see if I’d left to go downtown and have some eggs without telling anyone at the nurses’ station. You never told me which hospital and . . .. “

“Spencer-Fisher Memorial.”

“Spence-Fish? You work at Spence-Fish?“

“You obviously know more than you’ve told me.“

“No, it’s no big deal. During college I had a part-time job in there. Well, in the hospital system. And one of the places I’d be assigned to clean, not always, sometimes, was Spencer Fisher Memorial.”

“Of course! Wow! That explains why Alvin, our janitor, said you had worked there, but we couldn’t find you in the employment records. ‘Janitorial’ is a separate company. How stupid.”

“Al? ‘Keys’ we used to call him, with that big key ring he always wears. He said your patient was me?”

“Not was, is! Your identical twin is now a patient there. And Alvin recognized you and we didn’t follow up.”

“So yesterday you came in, practically screaming about my having escaped from my room at Spence. And even Al thought it was me. Whoa!

But at least I’m no longer some sort of escaped or transported comatose patient, just because we look alike.”

“You don’t just look alike. And I hope you don’t take this badly, but I had a test run, and it turns out you and he are identical twins.”

“Oh! OK, yeah! I saw you take my plastic water cup last night. DNA strikes again! Very cops-and-robbers of you.”

“And you didn’t say anything?”

“Why would I want to embarrass you? It was clear you believed me, if not to be your patient, at least enough like him to be, maybe a sibling – even a twin. You obviously felt a strong need to know if I bear any relationship to him, and you say he’s not talking. So what-the-hell. Do our DNA.”

“Thanks, I did. And I’m relieved that you’re not outraged or anything”

“I am a lawyer. I get court appointed cases – criminal cases. I routinely deal with DNA.”

“Oh, of course you’re a lawyer. I should’ve realized that from your wearing clean jeans today. How dumb of me.”

“Ba da boom.”

“You’re a Public Defender?”

“Conflicts. I get appointed, case-by-case.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I’m in private practice, but I’m on a list the judges use to appoint lawyers to defend people when there’s a conflict of interest that prevents the PD, the Public Defender, from handling the case. When two people are charged, either one could say the other did it, so they have a conflict of interest. That requires them to have separate counsel. Very often they have to go outside the PD’s office.”

“And your brother, what does he do?”

“Oh, O.K., My brother. So you checked my DNA, and his, and . . .?”

“Yes, he is your identical twin brother.”

“OK then.”

“OK then? Just, OK then? You knew you’re a twin, right? And I get it. A woman walks in and thinks you’re your brother, and for whatever reason you didn’t want to tell me you’re a twin. It seems to me it should be simple.”

“Well, no, . . .”

“No, you’re not a twin, or no, it’s not that simple.”

“Well . . . the truth is it’s not simple. I just don’t know.”

“I’m sorry I shouldn’t have been so presumptuous. Are you adopted? I mean were you adopted?”

“Sort of. No. I don’t go around talking about this much. Particularly to someone I hardly know – hardly even met.”

“Look, I’m not trying to pry. I just need to find out who our unidentified comatose patient really is. And you’re clearly a relative. I mean, ‘identical twins’ is as close as it gets. So can’t you just fill me in. What’s the problem?”

“I mean, come on, I’m sitting here yesterday and you come in like you did, and all of a sudden I am your patient from your day job. Or I’m a doppelganger, and what am I doing here? And how did I get out of there? And, of course I was kidding about it being a pick up line, but still none of that makes it a simple, clear story.”

“What do you mean? Are you saying I don’t know what I’m asking? What am I asking?”

“Yes, now I can answer, sort of. But that’s not to say the explanation is any easier. OK, OK. I look like your patient. Whoever he is. I get that.”

“No, not just ‘look like.’ You are him. He is your identical twin. You have to . . .  it’s . . . it’s I am with you – him – on duty all day, every day. I see your numbers on the screen at your bed and at my station, all day long. And I’ve been doing that for weeks now. I wash you. I wipe you. I clean you and I change your bed, day in day out. You, or, I mean ‘he,’ has not spoken. You . . . you see, you – or he – is comatose and has been so since you came into the hospital. And all of a sudden I see you sitting here at this table, and it’s . . . you. There may or may not be two of you, and now I get that there are, but there’s really only one of you I need to know about. I mean, is that possible? I mean you must know that your mother had twin babies, don’t you?”

“No, she didn’t. It’s not possible that she did. Wait. Before you jump in with more insisting! Just hold on a sec! Catch your breath. Let me catch mine. Can you do that? Hold on!”

“O.K., O.K. . . . go on.”

“It’s . . ., it’s not something I talk about, because people just fill me up with all the same routine questions. But the truth is I was an IVF transplant baby. In Vitro Fertilization.”

“IVF! Oh my God! You and he were IVF twins? Do you know any of the details?”

“Well, you seem to know something about it. Do you know something about it? I’m not used to people even knowing what I’m talking about, so I don’t bring it up.”

“I know, yeah, I know something, maybe a little more about it. I worked about six months in IVF. Do you happen to know your birth order. I mean in relation to the others. And how old were the embryos and the number of hours after ovulation your mother’s implant took place? Do you know any of that? Can we find out?”

“What I learned as I got so-called ‘old enough to understand,’ I was the second one born of our entire batch. The people, husband and wife, who first set up our IVF, they implanted the first embryo. All was good. Their daughter was born and has survived. I know her. She’s a couple of years older than me. One child was all they wanted. They got one. When she had survived a year, they passed the remaining embryos on to my parents. I was born maybe a year or so later and my kid sister was next, about two years after me. During the time my mother and father were implanting, all the embryos were under their control. So my twin must have been waiting with all the rest.”

“And you’re certain your mother had you in a single birth?”

“Certain! Yes. Family photos and records. My parents aren’t anywhere near inclined or interested enough to have reconstructed ordinary family records and pictures to eliminate an entire baby. Plus, he’d have to have records. I don’t know how to prove something that didn’t happen. There simply wasn’t any other born with me.”

“O.K. And after your sister was born . . .?”

“After my sister was born my parents waited to make sure she was ‘live and standing’ as the horse people call it. So it was about another year until the embryos got passed along to the next couple. They had two successful implants over another four or five years. I’ve met those kids, too. They’re not ‘kids’ anymore, of course. And they’re not my twin. He must have still been in the last four embryos. They’re the ones I know so little about.”

“And they  . . . ? Who got those remaining four?”

“Well according to what I was told, the paperwork got shuffled in the mail or shipping back to the lawyers or something, and in straightening that part of it out, nobody bothered to share the information with us. I’m sure the last four had paperwork. They just didn’t connect with our paperwork.”

“OK, you’re about eight years old when family three passes the embryos to the next. We can call them family four. So even if the very next baby is your twin, he’s at least nine years younger than you. But you have no records.”

“Oh, I’m sure someone does. We can get those.”

“Will you?”

“Yes. Now it’s something we have to solve. Yeah, sure. So, did I touch on everything you asked? What else do you want to know?”

“How old were the embryos when they were implanted? Do you know how long your mother had to wait after she ovulated. Did they ever tell you that?”

“Yes. Oh yes she was always glad the embryos were five days old. She had to wait five days after ovulation for the implants, so her hormones would match my sister’s and my chemistry. We were five-day embryos.”

“That is so big-a-deal! It makes everything work out. You know the difference, right? A three-day embryo might be thirty-two cells, but even can be only sixteen cells. After five days there can be as many as one-hundred-twenty cells. If you and your brother divided in the first three days, by day five you both would have caught up with the rest.”  

“Oh yeah, also, the dad whose kids came right after me and my sister said he’d read the records and they had started with eight embryos, but a recount after the initial implant was born showed that there were still eight. So they clearly had started with nine.”

“Oh my God, that’s our evidence. For five days they thought they had eight then they took one and implanted her!  Then there were still eight. When they weren’t looking, one of the embryos must have divided. That’s got to be what happened.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Oh, wait. Have you ever been in touch with the egg donor?”

“I don’t really know her but . . . Yes. When I was a teenager and mom and dad told me about how I came to be born, it was interesting, but a little bit weird and hard to really get my head around. Then I actually got in touch with the egg donor. They said I had to wait till I was 18, but I waited till I was 19, and then I did the paperwork.”

“How did that go? Did you see her more than once?”  

“No, she wasn’t real excited about, “Hi ‘Mommy,’ here I am!”

“Yeah, I can understand her conflict.”

“Her story was typical. I mean, I know that now. She was a student and by selling her eggs she could limit her student debt and she figured she had plenty to have babies of her own later. So she sold her eggs . . . no, she contributed her eggs. She was paid a fee for cooperating. Either way, here I am.”

“What about your sisters and brothers, have they met her?”

“I don’t know. But we don’t call ourselves sisters and brothers, and I was kidding about calling our egg-donor ‘mommy.’ I have my sister, two years younger than me, and she and I have the same birth mother and father. Neither of us relates to our egg donor as ‘mother,’ or a sperm donor as ‘father.’ So we don’t consider ourselves siblings to the other kids. Obviously we’ll follow the rules – the genetic restrictions – and not marry one another, but family terminology is not the same.”

“And what about meeting your identical twin?”

“I hate to have to say this, I am curious, but it’s spooky. He is this guy and I am this guy, and even if we had a random cellular connection, since then, we have had zero effect on one another. No influence; nothing in common. Yet everyone, likely including us, will weigh everything on the effect of that split egg and then identical-twins-eight-or-ten-years-apart, becomes the story!

Is that a ‘yes’?

Of course it is.