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"Don't worry. Most people who choose the dream-sleep only recall happy circumstances," Dr. Marjeen Roof assures us.
The surgery has been scheduled for three weeks, but he waits until the big day to have a serious discussion about traditional anesthesia versus kiimitri, what the Sondroki call "dream-sleep." He waits until my mother is in the room, stiff on the edge of her seat, body language broadcasting her fear and tension.
"But what if she has bad memories or nightmares or insomnia?" Mom knots her hands on the edge of Dr. Roof's short desk. "Would that be dangerous? Would that cause the operation to fail or something?"
She's talking so fast I can hardly understand her. Dr. Roof smiles and pats her clenched hands with his strong, smooth surgeon's fingers. His bloody eye seems to be staring at my cleavage, but his other hundred eyes are looking in all directions, which is disconcerting.
"No worries," he promises. "Your daughter will be safe under my care. The dream-sleep is simply an enhanced state of 'REM,' as your Earth doctors call it. She will also be immobilized for her own safety, and our instruments will alert us if she begins to wake."
"Mom, I already decided to do dream-sleep. It's more natural than general anesthesia."
Anyway, I haven't been fond of general anesthesia since Lori died. I keep that part to myself, so as not to set mom off again.
Dr. Roof nods his wide pink head. The Sondroki also think it is more natural. "Lisa, have you chosen your trigger?"
I hand him the movieframe, which stopped working many years ago when an earthquake knocked it off a table. "Me and my sister at the zoo." It's frozen on the frame where Lori and I are sticking our tongues through the holes from our missing front teeth.
"This is a captivating photo," Dr. Roof says, but the photo only captivates two of his eyes. The rest roam the room, looking for something more interesting. "Are you sure this is a happy memory? I would not want unduly stress your body." He knows Lori died two years ago right after her last heart surgery, so it's a fair question.
"Sure. That's the only time we ever got to go to the zoo with mom," I say.
It's only a small lie, but mom beams and takes my hand. Actually, it was probably the worst zoo trip ever, with mom dragging us along at top speed so she could get to work faster. But it's also the day that Lori and I started our tradition, the one we carried on until the day she died.
"Alright, then, my assistant will help prepare you for your operation," says Dr. Roof.
Mom stretches up to kiss my forehead like I'm 10 years old.
"I'll see you on the other side," she says.
It feels like goodbye to me.
***
Ciao
Cheerio
Ya'll come back now
So long
Bon voyage
Mom stretches into a crazy position on the guardrail as Lori and I squeeze our heads together and poke our tongues out the holes left by our two front teeth. Mom's orange bag is dangling out in the danger zone where people get their arms ripped off, but she wants to get the black bear in the frame behind us. For contrast, I guess. His mouth is full of teeth.
We dress alike. We wear our hair alike. We both fall off our bikes at the same time. That's what twins are supposed to do. If my tooth hadn't come loose at practically the same moment at Lori's, I would have wiggled it loose myself. I know the whole tooth thing is going to be memorialized in a movieframe on mom's wall, but that's okay as long as Lori and I are both in it.
Mom rushes us through the zoo, which is just fine, because we come here with dad at least once a week all summer and we know the animals by smell now. Every kind of poop leaves a different smell. That's what you learn when you grow up at the zoo. We humor mom through the lions and elephants, even though we'd rather be anywhere else. Dad's apartment is roaring with movieframes, but mom doesn't have any videos of us at all. Gee, I wonder why.
But this is one of those days that go down in our life's history to be remembered forever. Some days you forget, and lots of days just blend together, but today is a singularity.
"I'm sorry, sweeties, but my boss called and I have to go."
She's wearing that fake worried smile that she always has when she's trying to convince us that she's going to miss us. She thinks we don't know, but she obviously doesn't count on the fact that twins are smarter than regular kids.
"That's fine. I have homework to do." I say it like I don't even care. If her work is more important than us, our work can be more important than her, too.
"Yeah, me, too," says Lori.
Mom actually looks relieved. I guess moms of twins are dumber than average, because she never gets it. "Well, then, 'later 'gators."
"What?" We have no idea what she's talking about.
"It's an expression we used when I was a kid. I say 'See you later, alligator.' Then you say, 'After while, crocodile.'"
We smile at mom and then give each other that secret "what a weirdo" look that only twins can do properly.
After mom leaves, Lori and I drag our feet up to the manager's office together, where dad is waiting to sequester us in one of the cubbies with a single battered computer and a pile of junk food.
"There sure are a lot of weird ways to say goodbye," Lori says, stuffing popcorn into her mouth.
I'm polishing off a plasticized brownie. "Yeah, I wonder how many."
"I bet there's at least... a thousand."
So we start counting.
***
It's like one of those dreams where I'm not completely asleep, but I'm not really awake either. It's way too bright for my eyes to focus on anything, like I'm in a room made out of aluminum foil with a dozen sunlamps turned on high. My arms are made of cement. I try to lift them, but they're too heavy. I try to run, but my feet are glued to the ground. I can't even turn my head.
If you scream in one of these dreams, people don't hear you. And you can scream as loud as you want, but you can't wake yourself up, either. The fact is, you're not really making any noise in the waking world or you would wake yourself up.
That's the great thing about having a twin. Your twin can tell that you're having a bad dream and bring you out of it at the first whimper.
I wish Lori would wake me up. I wish it so hard that I'm sure she must be able to hear me wishing. I dream-scream as loud as I can, knowing that my little grunts will wake her and she'll come to my rescue.
A wide pink head blots out the light above me, a hundred eyes staring down. One eye is bloody, like it's hurt. A hand appears beside the face, and some of the eyes look a different direction for a minute. Long slender fingers wave in the air. They look smooth and delicate.
I'm not scared, but I want to wake up.
***
We've only run one warm-up lap when Lori grabs my arm.
"I have to — sit — down," she gasps.
Her lips shouldn't be white like that, so I put my arm around her and lead her to the bench to rest. I'm not really worried yet. I'm a better runner than Lori, so it makes sense she might need to rest. We're almost at the bench, when she collapses at my feet.
There's an ambulance at every game, but this is the first year I've seen anyone get into it. Dad's nowhere in sight, and I don't even bother looking for mom. I follow the paramedics carrying Lori away, but they won't let me get in the ambulance. My heart is beating so fast, I know I'm going to faint at any minute.
"You'll have to ride with your daddy." A cute, but totally fake, guy firmly grabs my shoulders and moves me aside.
"I'm in fifth grade, stupid," I say, with as much scorn as I can muster.
"It doesn't matter how old you are, honey, you can't ride in the ambulance. It's for sick people only." He starts to shut the door.
"I'm her twin. I-den-ti-cal." I emphasize that, just in case he doesn't quite get the meaning of 'twin.' "If she's sick, so am I."
He gives me a weird look, but lets me ride in the ambulance. It feels strange that I don't pass out. I mean, I should be lying there beside Lori on the stretcher. But we ride all the way to the hospital and I don't feel sick at all.
A thousand tests and two days later, Lori gets to come home. Mom and dad are having a serious discussion in dad's messy bedroom, and later we're all going out to dinner together for the first time in two years. It's been one strange week.
Lori and I are supposed to be doing our hair, but I know we have time to goof off. Mom's been crying a lot today, so she's going to need time to put on her makeup. Back in our room, Lori and I rig a tent out of blankets, belts and hair clips, and we hide inside.
"Do you think a funeral is a way to say goodbye? I mean, should we write that one down?" She has our journal out, ready to chronicle the next of the thousand ways.
Why is she thinking about funerals? The idea makes me angry. "I don't want to talk about goodbyes tonight."
"We talk about goodbyes every night. It's a tradition, and we probably almost have a thousand." She starts counting, turning the pages.
Trying to change the subject, I go around behind her to brush her hair. "Here, I'll do your braid and then you can do mine. Should we wear pink or white ponytail holders?"
"No!" She whips around with the hairbrush still dangling in her hair. "I don't want to be the same. We have to make a promise. A contract."
I already know what she's going to say, because I thought of it first. The idea makes me miserable, but somehow relieved at the same time. "Okay."
"You can never be like me again, never. I don't want you to have surgery. I don't want you to die. Do you promise?"
"I promise."
***
Lori is marvelously heartbroken to find a tiny note tucked into the cover of her handheld the day after the exchange students go back to Germany.
We're sitting at the food court in dad's apartment building sucking down a couple of shakes: chocolate for me, vanilla for Lori. The note is signed, "Marcus," the tall blond student we've both been completely infatuated with all summer. Of course, Lori doesn't know I loved him, too. It's not like I'm breaking my promise. You can't help who you love.
"He wrote it on actual paper. Do you realize how few guys actually use paper any more?" She can hardly hold still long enough to pull up her BabelFish translator.
She'll probably frame it when we get home. I roll my eyes. "Who cares? It's just a piece of paper. You don't even know what it says."
"You're just jealous because he didn't leave you a note." She sticks her tongue out at me. "German," she tells the BabelFish. "Abscheid ist ein bisschen wie sterben."
I took German, but Lori studied Italian, so she says "wie" like "we." I snicker, but the BabelFish has no problem with her American ignorance.
"Saying goodbye is little like dying," the fish answers.
Tears form in Lori's eyes. "That's so romantic. Secret love. If only I had known..."
***
I look down at the figure in the casket, touch its cheek. The skin is cold and rubbery. The fingers are stiff. It's wearing the sky-blue dress I bought Lori for our birthday last year.
Lori loves dresses and makeup and all things feminine. I love soccer and poker and everything she doesn't. But when I look into the casket, I see myself anyway.
Mika waddles over to me, shakes my hand. Half of her eyes are looking at me, and the other half down at the casket. Sondroki can't cry — their eyes don't have tear ducts — but I can tell she's sad by the extra wrinkle below her nose flap.
"Your sister had beautiful toes," she tells me. Her voice sounds strained, choked almost.
My brain reacts so slowly to the weird comment that I swear I can feel the individual synapses firing. I have no idea what she's talking about, or how she knows what Lori's toes look like, but it's a compliment. Probably a Sondroki funeral rite or something. I try to thank her, but my mouth is reluctant to open.
My eyes drag my attention back to the casket. Inside the lid, someone has hung a movieframe playing highlights of her life. My life. Lori and me on the roller coaster. Lori and me in Girl Scout uniforms. Lori and me cooking breakfast on Father's Day. Lori and me flying our first hover.
Every scene, every rite of passage, there I am beside her. I feel like I should be beside her now.
Then one more scene scrolls by: Lori after her fourth operation, recovering in the hospital. Looking triumphant, she smiles and waves, an enormous bouquet of flowers resting in her lap. There are so many flowers around her, there's no room for other people in the frame.
It's the only one without me.
I watch the movie all the way through. There's an important one missing: Lori and me at the zoo, the day we started counting.
"But we're not finished with our journal," I whisper to the movieframe.
***
I open my eyes. I'm still in the too-bright room, still unable to move.
It's not Mika, I realize, squinting up at all the eyes above me. This face is broader, and that bloody eye is a dead giveaway. It might be an injury, but I'm guessing it's the gouge. This Sondroki certainly looks old enough to be developing the gouge. Its wrinkles are wider and deeper than Mika's, and Earth gravity has loosened its nose flap at the edges.
Slender fingers wave in the air again, some kind of hand signal. My eyes follow them.
Delicate hands, surgeon's hands.
***
"Why don't you want to add 'funeral'? Dad says that's how people say goodbye to someone who dies," Lori asks.
Our battered journal is open in front of her. It's survived a house fire, a collapsed ceiling and six moves. We've been doing it for eight years, one line per goodbye, except for that German phrase, which took up two lines.
"That's a stupid thing to say. Would you talk to someone who's dead?" I've had one surgery already and I'm due for another. Lori's had two. We've never been to a funeral, but talking about death bothers me.
"When I die, are you going to stop talking to me?"
I try to laugh. "We're twins. We're going to die at the same time, remember?"
"We're different now," she reminds me. "What if I die first?
"That's not the way we're going to say goodbye," I tell her, turning to the mirror. I concentrate on getting every last hair into my ponytail holder.
"How are we going to say goodbye?" she asks.
"Bon voyagee!" I yell, racing across the room and flopping on top of her.
***
Thanksgiving food is all the same color, I realize, looking down at my plate. If I stir it together, no one will be able to distinguish one bit of food from another. It's probably because I don't eat cranberry sauce. That would add a little color to my plate.
"Lori loved cranberry sauce," I say, and the room freezes.
Finally, mom says in a super-cheerful voice, "Maybe we should go around the table and each say one thing we're thankful for."
"There are only three people here, mom. This hardly counts as a family gathering worthy of an organized activity," I say. Mom's face looks hurt, and I don't know if it's because I forgot to count her boyfriend, John, or because she doesn't like what I said.
"Lisa, this is a time for celebration and giving thanks." John talks to me like I'm five years old. He takes mom's hand and smiles. "I'll start. I'm thankful that God allowed me to meet your mother and her lovely family."
Lovely family? Who is he kidding? There's just mom, Roy, and me. I only see mom on holidays, and I've only been dating Roy for a month.
"Well, I'm not really thankful for anything," I say.
"Not even for me?" That's Roy, always making jokes.
I stab my turkey and plow around in the potatoes. Gravy spills off the side onto mom's fancy tablecloth, but who cares about a little gravy?
"Honey," says mom. "I know this is hard for you, your first Thanksgiving without your sister, but the rest of your family is alive. Can't you be happy for that?"
"Easy for you to say," I retort, flinging down my fork. I get up to leave. "You never even got to know Lori. How could you miss her?"
I head for the guest bedroom Roy and I are sharing while we're visiting mom. Why did I have to be born a twin? Every morning when I look in the mirror, I see Lori. Not the six-year-old with missing front teeth, but Lori, pale and lifeless in the casket. At night, I dream about myself in an identical casket, wearing an identical blue dress. No matter how much we tried to be different, we were made of the same stuff.
Roy sinks onto the bed beside me and takes my hand.
"You have to let her go. Move on with your life," he says, caressing my cheek with his other hand.
"I can't. I don't know how to say goodbye," I tell him.
I just don't know the words.
***
Adeus
Hasta luego
Babay
I open my eyes to see only two eyes staring down at me out of a large pink head. Not a surgeon, this one. Nurses don't need a lot of eyes, they need deft hands and a gentle voice. My arms feel tired, but I can lift them. I shift my feet under the blanket.
"You should have chosen regular anesthesia," Dr. Roof says. I hadn't noticed him beside me, and my heart skips a beat.
"What do you mean?"
"The kiimitri was not very effective on you. You kept coming out of it during the operation." He's looking at the screens and buttons on the big silver machine beside me, marking notes on his handheld. A couple of eyes glance my way. The bloody one stares straight ahead at nothing.
"Does everything look alright?"
"I think you will be able to go home in the morning already. Your parents were here earlier, and your boyfriend. They'll be back after their dinner. It's mealtime for you, too, if you can eat. This one is really good. Tastes like chicken, as you Americans say."
He motions toward a tray of Sondroki food beside me. His fingers are deceptively slender, I remember from his strong handshake. All the food looks the same, and I can't tell for sure which one is chicken-flavored. Maybe all of them.
I smile. I'm alive. "Is there a television?"
"Sondroki hospitals do not provide such forms of entertainment," he says. "However, we have quite a non-fictional library. The computer will read you anything you like, or you may read it yourself."
When he leaves, I pick up the movieframe on the bedside stand, the zoo picture. Beside the frame is our ratty old journal. It's been buried in my underwear drawer since Lori's funeral. I haven't even looked at it since we made our last entry, "Q'onk t’pena" which translates as "strength to you." It's from a language called Mam.
There are actually more than a thousand ways to say goodbye. Lori and I catalogued them over 12 years. That's more than 4,000 days. Toward the end, it was getting kind of hard even to find a language we hadn't already researched.
Not all goodbyes were created equal.
Some of them are hopeful, like "Hasta sa masunod atong pagkita" in Aklanon — "See you later" in English. Others sound more final, like "Abar dyakha habe," which means "So long" in Bengali. There are goodbyes for intimate friends, and goodbyes for formal occasions. There are pairs of goodbyes — one for the person going, and a different one for the person staying. There are goodbyes that wish people well. In Japanese, there are at least 18 different ways to say goodbye.
Lori had a favorite: the French "Bon voyage," which means "happy voyage." You have to say it right, though, like that old 2D animated cartoon character: Bon voyageee!
It's a hopeful goodbye. In the cartoon, the rabbit is sailing off into the sunset on a rescue boat, and the villain is jumping up and down in excitement, wishing him a happy voyage.
Then the villain is confounded to realize that he's stuck on a dessert island watching the rescue boat sail away. So it's a final goodbye, too.
I never found the right way to let Lori go. I pick up our journal. Maybe I'll find it in here.
Chris Africa is a veteran writer and editor, with years of experience in Web site development as well. In November 2003, she founded Ultraverse e-zine of science fiction and fantasy. For more information about Chris Africa, browse her personal web site, Parola Scritta. Feel free to contact her at either of her e-mail addresses: baiewola@yahoo.com or editor@ultraverse.us
© Chris Africa
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