It started at the end of our first date. In the bedroom, trying to get things going. For one reason or another, there wasn’t any heat. Someone suggested (it’s hard to remember who said what, especially now) swapping outfits. It was funny, it sounded fun, our brains were gently sledding down a snow hill of ketamine from the party earlier. We needed somewhere safe to melt. Ideally, into each other.
‘Think of how good you’ll be at taking off your own clothes,’ someone said.
And it worked. Heat, heat, heat.
‘I could eat you up,’ someone said.
‘I came so hard I forgot my own name.’
‘You make me want to empty my bank account.’
This is not entirely without precedent. When my mother died, it was easier to impersonate her on the phone to close her accounts than face the bureaucratic trauma of providing notarised death certificates to glazed-over customer service representatives. Sometimes, to get what you want, the path of least resistance is being someone else.
And so, in the beginning, that’s all it was: two people pretending, every now and then. Little things, here and there, in the dark, to bring us closer. Drift is the natural movement of being in love. Points in space, meeting in the middle.
*
‘I heard you’re seeing someone new,’ a co-worker says, because there is nowhere to hide in an open-plan office. ‘Going well?’
How to describe it? I love it so deeply I begin to resent the time in between. All day, I think about my body as knock-off luggage, hungry to shed this useless outer shell and slip into something more comfortable, more authentic.
‘You know me and dating,’ I say, and do a thing with my shoulders, like oh boy, oh brother, because I am the funny one at work.
‘Hey, look,’ another co-worker says. ‘We’re wearing the same shoes. Twinning!’
This happens at least twice a week. Some say this is an example of our office’s synergy (why our company is on the way up). Others, a symptom of the fast fashion industry (why our planet is on the way down).
‘Blame it on the algorithm,’ I say, stirring the word into my coffee cup reflection.
‘Ditto,’ they say.
On the commute home, at a stoplight, there’s a driver in the passing lane with the same car, same make and model. What else is there to do but nod and blink like, you’re a human, I’m a human. A thumping house beat worms its way from my phone to my stereo to my brain, and I want to know every ear the algorithm is pushing this song to at this exact moment in space-time. We stay here until the city grid does whatever it does to flick the lights and send everybody home.
*
I still get calls and emails on my mother’s behalf from time to time. Salespeople, no doubt forced by middle management to check in on cancelled accounts, seeing if there’s something, anything that can be done. I can practically taste the colour-coded spreadsheet.
Getting back into character, I raise my voice half an octave, push imaginary glasses up the bridge of my nose and say, ‘Sorry, I’ve moved internationally.’ This is the fastest way to kill a lead, I’ve learned.
‘Oh,’ they say. ‘How are you liking it?’
I’ve never felt so alive.
*
So it’s like this: sparks of heat, interrupted by bouts of shivering depression, until one night, tangled in the sheets, in a stroke of genius, someone says, ‘What if we did this all the time?’
‘Is that too far?’
‘See, that’s the thing. I don’t think we’re taking this far enough.’
In this way, perhaps it really started with the nose job. The eyeliner and extensions were fine, but really it’s child’s play, make-believe. We joke about our noses: one of us looks like an Olympian and one of us looks like we listen to a lot of podcasts. Small details like this take us out of what actors sometimes call the deep reality of the moment and what I call being dissociated enough to come.
‘I want to look at you constantly, even in my own mirror,’ someone says. ‘Is that so wrong?’
We’re not delusional. Already, we can imagine this getting out of hand. So, in the waiting room of the plastic surgeon, we set up some rules, like adults.
Nothing will be removed from our bodies, only added. All appointments must be made in tandem, so we can spend the downtime healing together. If there are any disagreements, vast discrepancies or irreconcilable differences in taste, we will meet in the middle.
*
‘Beauty matching is quite common these days,’ the plastic surgeon says, drawing a series of dotted lines and Xs across our noses with a thick felt-tip pen, as if plotting a treasure map. ‘It’s about helping couples grow closer, not older.’
‘Closer, not older,’ I repeat.
‘Did you know married couples have fifty per cent less variation in their immune systems?’ the surgeon asks. ‘Two becoming one is the most natural maths there is.’
Another rule. From now on, we would call each other by a common name: Charlie.
‘That’s my mother’s name,’ someone says, and we hold hands under the knife.
*
Life really improves as Charlie. Our sex life unfurls and steeps like a flower in tea. I feel more self-assured at work, moving my body in front of slideshows and webcams with vigour, cherishing how my new silhouette falls over bar graphs, how my avatar bops in its box, even on mute. I go to the gym more often, not out of vanity, but to keep this shared vessel strong. Drugs taste better. I can fuck for hours. I run for miles with nothing in my head. It’s as though I’m breathing with someone else’s lungs and there isn’t enough air to drink. At the end of a long day apart—and really, any time apart is too long—I yearn for the moment where our chests, each heaving with ecstasy at their own delirious rhythm, begin to rise and fall in concert, slowly, slowly, until we’re a single wave ebbing towards sleep. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. It’s so delicious it nearly jolts me awake.
*
We get invited over for dinner at our friends’ house outside the city. It’s the first time they’re hosting people since having a baby and they’ve resolved not to discuss anything kid-related. But before anyone can reach the bottom of their first stemless glass of wine, we’re talking about perineum massage, vacuum extraction, the intricate and ever-changing colour of shit and what it means.
‘And that’s when I lost my mucus plug,’ someone says. ‘Right before my bloody show.’
‘None of these words are in the Bible,’ Charlie says, because they are the funny one in the relationship.
Language is happening around me, but I’m staring at the baby, thinking about how perfectly it looks like each of our friends, and like, yes, of course, hello, it’s me, genetics. But still: the soft slope of the button nose, the precise middle gradation of its parents’; the attached earlobes, pinched into the cheek like the crimp of a sealed dumpling; the sparkling eyes, a tidepool of seaweed greens and bubbling blues. There are no other two people on Earth who could have made this child. It’s half of them and completely its own thing. It’s theirs and it isn’t.
‘Seeded mustard,’ someone says. ‘What the poop looks like recently, I mean.’
Charlie and I spin up an excuse, leave early, get burgers, eat them in the parking lot, drive to the ocean and kiss in the car. As we’re making out, I swipe my tongue across Charlie’s teeth and make a mental note of all the differences in our dentistry.
‘Maybe I want a baby,’ someone says. ‘Or maybe I just want you to tell me you love me.’
‘I’m going to tell you I love you because I love you,’ someone says.
‘I love you to the moon and back.’
‘I love you to the edge of the edge of the edge.’
It goes on like this.
*
Some say reading improves empathy, but those people are, of course, not getting laid. If empathy is the capacity to truly get what another person is experiencing, what could inspire more understanding than literally bringing someone into your frame of reference?
This is my pronounced cheekbone. These are my bovine eyes. This is the way my armpits itch from deodorant with too much alcohol. How much confidence would you hold in your body if you didn’t have to take full ownership of it?
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ the plastic surgeon says during our dermal filler injections, our chin implants.
*
We spend the week inside, working from home with our cameras off. To put it mildly, we look like crustaceans mid-search for new shells: red-faced, puffy, vulnerable to predators. And yet it feels like we’re stepping into who we’ve always been. We pop painkillers like mints and take turns peeling thin strips of translucent surgical tape off each other.
‘Is this a bad way to spend an inheritance?’ someone asks.
‘Well, your face is a depreciating asset, but so is a Tesla.’
We balance frozen bags of peas on our tender chins and blindly play with each other’s feet until the melting ice drips down our necks.
*
At a party, everyone keeps mistaking us for each other. This makes sense because I can now unlock Charlie’s phone with my face.
‘Eighteen million,’ someone says. ‘We exchange eighteen million bacteria when we kiss.’
‘It’s like I was saying,’ someone says. ‘There’s a mouse decomposing in the guts of my fridge, but the only advice online is to wait it out because the smell of death isn’t supposed to be that bad for you, medically.’
‘Love isn’t hunger. Love isn’t desire,’ someone says. ‘The most fundamental definition of love is: I could hurt you—but I won’t. It’s like, you don’t have to protect yourself from me anymore. I will protect you from the worst in me.’
I can’t find Charlie anywhere so I sneak away to the bathroom to do drugs off my phone but make the mistake of opening up an app where the top headlines are Rainwater is no longer safe to drink anywhere on Earth, scientists say and Lady Gaga got hit in the head by something while performing, and this needs to stop, so with my brand new nose I snort two lines of coke, one short and one terrifyingly long, but pretend they are one and the same.
*
Something my mother used to say: you marry one parent and become the other.
‘Do yourself a favour,’ she said, oversalting her eggs. ‘Don’t become me.’
‘I should be so lucky.’
‘You’d be luckier to marry me.’
*
Starving in line at my local cafe, I order the regular: an everything bagel with cream cheese, rosemary oil, heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers and capers, a double espresso with a small bottle of sparkling water, and a Portuguese tart, heated up, for take away, please.
‘That’s funny,’ the cashier says, even though they neither smile nor laugh. ‘That person over there ordered the same thing.’
I turn to look but catch only a blur of their coat-tail, the bottom left corner of their tote bag as they exit the shop door, and subsequently, my life, forever. Something strange in me wants to chase after them, thinking we might embrace like long-lost twins reunited on daytime reality television. I resist.
*
Charlie hasn’t been feeling so hot lately, even if they won’t admit it. The other night, while we were brushing our teeth side-by-side in front of the mirror before bed, enjoying the feeling of four faces in sync, one of Charlie’s teeth fell out, rattling down the basin like a kernel of unpopped corn. They had to wrestle the pliers out of my hand to stop me from dislodging my own molar in solidarity.
‘Remember: nothing removed, only added.’
It’s not an isolated incident. Little traces, impossible to ignore: bunches of stray hairs, if not left sleeping on the pillowcase in the morning then damming the shower drain at night; dead fingernails scattered here and there, crescent moons on the dark tile; a cut that heals slow; a rash that spreads fast. Charlie doesn’t seem worried, but they’re never worried. I pick up my phone and type the symptoms in the gentlest, most generous way possible: leaving out some details, reducing the frequency of events by half. Even still, the algorithm can smell it on me. I hit search and it generates what I’m thinking, what I’m always thinking: cancer, cancer, cancer.
This is the problem with loving someone: an anchor keeps you still, an anchor drags you down. I go for a walk around the park, waiting for the moment where the lake turns into a mirror for the sky. I put on a podcast and watch ducks ripple through clouds until I’m brave enough to be alone with my thoughts.
*
‘We’re always going out of date,’ the dentist says, sizing a gold tooth for Charlie and a matching cap for me. ‘This is the humiliating technology of the human body.’
‘We only have a body to move the brain around,’ Charlie says.
‘Don’t worry, that turns to mush, too.’
We’ve come to love doctors and specialists. We love the niche magazines for adults and prehistoric toys for children. Where else in the world can you flip through Total Carp while pushing a wooden bead along loopy, twisty wires? Most of all, we love the unshakeable confidence of men—and it’s almost always men—with their symmetrical faces like newsreaders, and broken handwriting like a seismograph, who make ten times what everyone else in the room makes and pretend to listen before prescribing what they were always going to prescribe.
‘But gold lasts forever,’ the dentist says. ‘Even after you die, your smile will still remain intact.’
*
In the living room, on a rug in front of the fireplace, I’m taking photos of Charlie’s body to send to a popular tattoo artist we found on Instagram. Dark, amorphous blotches have been appearing on Charlie’s back and I’m curious if it could be replicated in ink on me. At the very least, reproducing their birthmarks—beautiful blobs that look a bit like Matisse cut-outs, a bit like melanoma.
‘I can’t bear to lose you,’ someone says. ‘This is the first time I’ve felt comfortable in my skin’.
‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
‘You know everything, that’s what makes you so unbearable.’
‘I know.’
*
Something they don’t know: my mother died alone in a room. The apartment manager found her body fifteen days later, when the rent was overdue. By that point, we hadn’t spoken in five years, maybe more. I don’t know and that’s the problem. It wasn’t a singular fight that broke us. Every conversation just became harder and harder until it was easier not to speak for a few days, a month. Drift is the natural movement of being in love, yes, and this includes apart. You fight like dogs because you’re the same breed, something my father used to say. Her politics were atrocious. She denied the existence of people I loved. But she also birthed me, rocked me, wiped my arse and my face and every inch of this measly body. She drank like a drain. She had an arm like a cannon. She invented phrases and then looked at you like you were the idiot for not understanding.
‘I feel like a rabbit in a Coke can,’ she’d say. Is that good? Bad? Do these details count for anything? Does it matter that I can still recall her smell from the ether of memory, like pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, as vanilla and syrupy as if I were burrowing my nose into her flaky scalp right now?
She was here and now she’s not. She broke all her ties, had no anchors. In the beginning, after her death, I told myself I was pretending to be her because it made for easier admin. It’s what I told Charlie, too, but it isn’t the whole truth.
‘I’m cancelling my internet because the only reason I got the stupid thing was to read emails from my child and they never bother to contact me anymore anyway,’ I tell the customer service representative in my best beleaguered whine. ‘They mean well, but they’re killing me. They’re doing their best, but it isn’t worth the cost.’
I don’t know how much longer I can carry her around. I know I’m not strong enough to carry two people, let alone three. I’m trying to cut a door in my grief so the dead have somewhere to exit.
*
On a walk to get some air, Charlie and I take the long way home so we can pass through the dog park. We stumble upon an event where everyone in the city with a whippet has brought them here to play, for some delightful reason. Hundreds of identical dogs, their slender bodies arching like lower-case h’s, vibrating in their silly sweater vests.
‘Do they know they’re all the same?’ someone asks. ‘Like, is this more about them or about us?’
‘Oh, it’s always about us.’
The dog owners yell names from the sidelines, but above the joyous din of yipping and howling, we can’t make anything out. It’s just tongue, teeth, speed, heat.
‘Tell me you’re going to be okay’.
‘I’m going to tell you I’m okay because I’m okay.’
‘I love you like pure gold.’
‘I love you like a river on fire.’
‘I love you like I love you.’
It goes on like this until it doesn’t.
