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The night was many things to Andrew Joseph Doe.
For many of his formative years, they were a solace. The night was a welcome distraction, especially when the families that took him in never locked their doors and lived right near the edge of civilization. Tiny Andrew would crawl out of second story windows and backdoors, sit in the backyard or just beyond the fence where the guard dog wouldn't see him. He would look up the sky and forget that he was left there.
There were constellations on his skin this early on, stories from pasts he could have had. He bruised like a fruit, and his freckles were all accounted for. At night, he would look up at the sky, see countless of stars, find accomplices in the constellations he made, ignorant of the constellations already made.
The universe was his, and he was the universe's. One and the same.
Anything past age seven, nights were merely hours of survival.
Door knobs bumping walls, hands copping around walls, his head hitting walls. His bedrooms began feeling like prisons he was banished to nightly. He could not sneak out, could not lock himself in. Hands pulled him down, shut him up, jerked him off, invaded him. He was a gullible child, thinking favors might make his assaulters pliant.
At thirteen, he met the Spears and it was funny because a spear could stab him at that exact moment and he would still be classified as dead.
He liked them.
He was allowed to see the moon again. But when he did, he was already gone. The stars had grown old without him, and the constellations had shifted. Once, he had read that the Earth's rotational axis was accounted for, depending on where the Earth was in its revolution around the Sun.
Maybe that’s it, a little voice told him, maybe I’m not gone, just shifted out of view. It sounded a lot like tiny Andrew, and he almost had hope that he wasn't dead yet.
Almost.
The spring of Drake's occupation of his nights, a letter arrived when Drake was out with a few friends. Andrew had gotten up late, that day. He was still sore from the previous night, and so were his arms from just that morning. There was a letter addressed to him, and it had a Berkeley address. Cass told him that Drake had opened it for him that morning.
Apparently, he had a brother.
In his formative years, Aaron thrived in the sunlight.
When the summer skies were blue and stretched on in the horizon, he would set out to explore. He would lay down on fields of grass and trace shapes into the clouds. He would make up stories, build families, imagine his father. He would track the moon whenever he saw it, and he would come back inside and clean himself up, maybe make a sandwich.
Happy days in San Jose were few and far between, so he had to cherish them as much as he could. Aaron could only catch so many breaks when his mother was hard to please.
On regular days, he would study to keep his grades up. He'd heard from other kids that that was what pleased most parents: when their children got good grades.
On holidays, he would help around the house. He'd learned to clean up, cook, do some minor jobs to get some cash. He'd heard from other kids that that was also what pleased most parents: when their kids helped the most that they could.
On happy days, Aaron felt the love he had wanted. On happy days, Tilda would bring him to the pool and if he was lucky, maybe even to the beach. She would sit at one side with the bag Aaron had packed for clothes, and he would strip down to his swimming trunks. By the end of most happy days, he was as tan as he could be, sometimes even burned enough to warrant aloe vera. But he did not complain. He heard from some kids that that was also what pleased most parents: when their children did not complain.
When they moved to Berkeley when he was thirteen, to account for Tilda’s new boyfriend, Benny, Aaron was still a model child. He did not complain, he helped around the house as much as he could and sometimes even provided money, and he got good grades. He got into sports, Exy, and ran around under the midday sun as much as he could, never mind what kind of day it was, sometimes even electing to stay out until the sun had set.
The nights were often reserved to locking himself inside a room, after many incidents he'd repressed in his childhood, from nights when his mother and her many boyfriends held vigils and some of their friends barged into Aaron’s room in search of more than a toilet.
At thirteen, Aaron was on his way home from school, and it was like any other regular day until a sheriff tapped him on the shoulder and called him Andrew.
Definitively, Aaron and Andrew hated themselves.
This was a fact, like day and night was a fact, like the supernovas and earthquakes and tsunamis were a fact.
Aaron hated himself, hated that he was missing pieces of himself, and hated the fact of it. He hated that Tilda was a barrage of rocks on a path, and he could never avoid her, would never avoid her. He hated the bruises made by her, hated that he bruised easily enough that her grip was forever by his side, his arm, his heart. He would tell himself that he hated Andrew because Tilda beat him up for his twin’s existence, repressing the feeling that he only hated Andrew because he hasn’t been beaten up by Tilda the moment he got to Columbia.
Andrew hated himself enough that he wanted to die. He hated that he could never forget, hated that always remembering made him feel like he would implode any day now, that a year was the longest one could wait. He would tell himself that he hated Aaron on a personal level, never mind the hollow thing buried deep inside him, telling him that he envied that someone had hurt Aaron while Andrew hurt himself.
Given the many givens, this should mean that they hated each other as well.
But when Aaron saw Andrew, he saw a stranger. He didn't know what a father felt like, much less a brother. What he wanted more than most was a mother, and any compromise should be nothing but pale comparison. But compromise was better than nothing, and what he had with Tilda was nothing, and here Andrew was helping him with social sciences like they were friends.
And when Andrew saw Aaron, he hated that he saw Drake and all the things Drake said he would do to Aaron, right in front of Andrew. He could never escape Drake, but he could always protect Aaron. Andrew had made himself a promise he was going to keep, a promise to keep himself going, and Tilda was going to get it the moment Andrew had the appropriate amount of proof that she had been hurting Aaron, because Aaron looked exactly like him but wasn't him at all, and if he were some upshot psychiatrist, he’d tell himself that this was some sick way to compensate for all the hurt he put himself through.
And so, the world turned, around and around. Should hate, won’t hate, here’s proof that you should hate, here’s proof that you don’t.
There is an age-old saying that you will find yourself in your young adult years, and Andrew hates it.
Most things that Andrew hate, though, are right.
Like the fact of Neil stopping the moment he says no. Like the fact of Andrew standing on the edge of a rooftop, the wind blowing him backwards on the landing. Like the fact of the Moon sitting smack-dab in the middle of the sky, stars interspersed around it in a wide frame, a view Andrew had grown up yearning and loving, all pale next to the shock of auburn hair sitting next to him.
No, most things that Andrew hate, they are predictable, and Andrew hated predictability like hated himself.
In Andrew’s young adult years, the Sun and the Moon went their separate ways after six years of an eclipse. It had hurt, as most pickup lines would want to know, when Andrew had fallen from the heavens and into the hands of man. He could say that Neil Josten had pushed him off, but as good as a Criminal Justice major he was, even he couldn’t find an angle to make that work.
Sitting in the middle of their shared living space, dusting cat hair off his pajama pants as he held his cup of coffee in one hand and looked at their taxes in the other, Andrew could finally exhale and say, “Look how far the mighty have fallen.”
Taken out of context, it was hilarious.
Andrew was not laughing.
Andrew never forgot. It was a petty thing to remind himself this every day. His adolescence and young adult years were a black hole he came out of, and everything that came after blinded him.
At the moment, he was in New York, sharing an apartment with his partner Neil Josten. They have two cats with ridiculous names and share a national team. At the moment, Aaron was in North Carolina with Katelyn, happily married and finishing their PhDs. They have a dog with an equally ridiculous name and share the same medical university. At the moment, everything was real, everything was linear, everything was expanding. Andrew and Aaron were strangers, acquaintances, and brothers. They had hated each other and had loved each other.
Andrew remembered a time when Aaron would have pushed him off a cliff, though Andrew knew now that if Aaron had seen him on the verge of falling, he would pull Andrew back and somehow, it took Andrew until that very moment, on his and Neil’s sofa, to realize that both versions were true.
The universe was theirs and they were the universe’s. One and the same. He had read once that energy was converted, not changed, and that was right. Nothing changed since the beginning, just their positions, their points in time. Around and around, not gone just shifted out of view.
Andrew never forgot. Somehow, everything piled over the fact that the universe began before they did.
“Andrew?”
Andrew put his mug down on his lap. He craned his head to see Neil sitting by the arm of the sofa.
“You okay?”
Andrew took a breath. He grabbed his phone.
“I need to make a call.”