Date: Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:14:22 -0600
From: Karla Schulz <liketheroad@gmail.com>
Subject: Carrots and Celery Series: Damage Deposit (Chapter 13)

Thanks as always to everyone who wrote me with feedback about the story!  I
hope you enjoy this latest chapter.

Chapter Thirteen; the bible didn't mention us (Braden)

Everyone is saying things are going remarkably well, considering.  It's
true actually, but it's also a bit like the "seriously" following that fan
club woman's rave after Steve Zizzo's movie screening in the Life Aquatic.
You would be a lot happier if it didn't require one.  Things are and aren't
complicated.  They're even good in some places.  Moments and afternoons.

When Kyle called me, and told me what happened, and that he thought the
twins might need me, I wondered for a minute, before the other realities
set in, if Kyle had actually ever, you know, met his brothers, and where,
since I knew for a fact that he had, he got the idea that they ever in
their lives needed anybody but each other.  Even so, I knew they'd be
hurting in a way that might cause them to do some stuff they'd regret
later, or at least feel they should regret, so I went over there and camped
out in front of their door and talked to them about how I understood, how I
knew there was no letting other people in on this pain, and that I would
let them do whatever they had to, protect them anyway I could while they
did it, and promised that I would still be there after, if they wanted to
come out.  I stayed there, leaving only to get food and slip it through the
door and to go home for a few hours to sleep, for a week, and then two,
following their parents death, and in that time they only left the room
beyond short co bathroom breaks to attend the funeral and then disappear
again.  But still I stayed, and talked, and maybe it made Kyle and the
others feel better, anyway, like the twins were being taken care of
somehow, and that was something, at least.  And finally, one morning nearly
three weeks into the summer, they opened their door a crack, and let it
stay open, and I knew it meant they were ready to let me in, even if they
weren't ready to come out.  I found them better than I expected, curled up
in a ball together, heads tucked into shoulders, arms wrapped around each
other, just staring at each other, not even looking up when I closed the
door behind me.  But when I came and sat down at the edge of the bed with
them, Jon croaked out something that sounded like my name, and they looked
up at me, pleading for something they didn't even know how to name, and I
slid in between them, the three of us crammed onto that tiny twin bed, and
we lay there together, eyes open, listening to the reassuring sound of each
others steady breathing, the beating of our hearts.

Slowly, slowly, after that, things began to get better.  They started
leaving their room, with me and sometimes alone, to sit with their brothers
and their sister and be angry and afraid together, to cry and to try and
smile.  They went outside and moved their bodies again, and when I brought
a ball into the yard and kicked it to Jon, they moved automatically with
me, kicking it back and forth, back and forth.  Leaving the cocoon they had
built for their pain helped them fight and mourn and sweat it out of
themselves, to share it and make it less.  And having them finally out of
their room and suffering with them helped the rest of the Vasskez's deal,
stopped some of the panic and fury in Kyle's eyes.

As time went on, they let themselves trust their brothers again, and they
allowed the love and security they all felt when they were together
surround them, getting stronger and stronger, keeping them in and everyone
else out.  Maybe if it had just been what happened with their parents, this
move inside themselves, all of them together, might not have been so total,
but Jonas's betrayal set them irrevocably against the outside world,
filling them with anger and suspicion for anything other unlike even what
had come before.  I worried, briefly, about what this would mean for them,
and for me, but soon had to accept that this was simply the way it was
going to be, the way it had to be, the way maybe it always was going to be,
after all.

So we moved with a new rhythm together, closer and closer, and slowly the
light and strength came back into their faces, and they laughed and smiled
again.  We began to build, all of us together, a new way of living, of
being, and it was good.

But life has a way of complicating things, no matter how carefully
constructed and protected, and the world will find its way of impinging on
one's private existence, no matter how hard one tries to prevent it. With
the reintroduction of school, some of the bubble burst, and the old
complications and problems life before the accident had offered returned
with a vengeance.  The dilemma that had confronted them prior came with no
new solutions in the new order, and seriously stressed them out.

Girls, they had come to realize that previous fall, were better than video
games.  Better than sports.  Sex was definitely the new thing, and for the
first time in their lives they had found something they loved to do that
they couldn't do together.  If you're having trouble understanding how
traumatic that was and is for them they you obviously didn't listen to
anything Carrots or Jonas said, like, ever.  The shit was pretty much
already hitting the fan in that department before the boys went on their
mission to Calgary, before their parents, but it went into high gear while
they were gone and basically hasn't calmed down ever since.  Before the
crash, the twins were well on their way to being next of the famous
international playboys, or at least the guys with the most one night stands
in their belts, but since the crash, in the new regime of us vs them, them
being anyone who doesn't live in their house or isn't me, their options
have been serious limited.  And for the first time, possibly ever, everyone
else is paying enough attention that they're actually noticing, which
actually might be the part that's throwing Jon and Dave most seriously for
a loop.

The Vasskez's are not a subtle family.  They're loud and emotional and they
don't often say what they mean, but the message is usually pretty damn
clear.  They don't really do understated, or rational, or calm.  Except
maybe Kyle sometimes.  They do freak outs and outlandish declarations of
feeling.  When something's happening in their lives, you'd usually have to
be blind or half dead to miss it.  Or, as has been the running system
internally since pretty much day one, you've just got to be another
Vasskez.  Then you can miss almost anything.

The twins, being in no way an exception to this rule, lack certain things.
Discretion being one.  A basic self awareness about how damn creepy they
are to the outside observer being another.  I've always got it.  I mean
even when we were eight, for a second, at first, I had no idea how two
guys, even if they were brothers, were as comfortable and nonchalant with
each other's body's and feelings as Jon and Dave, but then they invited me
home, and I understood.  Pretty much instantly.  No one ever took notice of
any of the things I thought were strange.  They were setting off all kinds
of alarm bells in me but their parents, their brothers, were looking at
them, speaking to them, all like that fact that they held hands when they
walked and sprawled on top of each other to watch TV was completely normal.
And the fact of the matter is you can't become good at hiding something you
were never taught you shouldn't do.  And while my gentle prodding and a few
unfortunate run ins with teammates and classmates along the way taught them
enough to survive in public, Jon and Dave have never really learned how to
shield themselves at home.  They still walk around, pinkies linked, they
still sleep curled up in the same twin bed more often than not, and they
still treat the concept of personal space like it applies only to other
people in relation to THEM, not each other.

Which is basically where the sex thing and the me thing both come in.
Although not entirely for the same reason, Jon and Dave and Sex and Jon and
Dave and Me both became a problem about the same time.  For them, it came
when they realized a girl wasn't going to let them share her like a video
game consul or a favourite shirt, and for me, it came when I was watching
TV.

Members of the Vasskez family relate to each other and the outside world
for the most part not by way of real life experiences but through the
viewing and subsequent quoting of movies, books and television.  And since
I spent the majority of my formative years with the incestuous fuckers, not
meant to be taken literally of course, so do I.  For me, the defining
moment of my life was realized not through the happening of a deep and
spiritual event, or a dramatic and challenging experience, but the viewing
of The Royal Tennenbaums.  There I was, sitting down to a potentially great
movie with my two wacky best friends, calm, innocent, unsuspecting and then
WHAM!  Like a kick in the back of the neck – clarity, enlightenment.  I
sat there, watching the story unfold and I realized with growing horror and
certainty that without much effort or exertion, if I simply allowed my life
to unfold as it currently had been, in a few years time there was a very
real and definite possibility that I would be Eli Cash.  Nothing had ever
made more sense to me than the simple utterance of the words, "I always
wanted to be a Tennenbaum" and I recognized it clearly as my hearts deepest
truest desire.  Knowing this, I understood that If I simply stayed the
course, almost certainly I would by the time she was 17 have myself
convinced I loved Kara, and would also probably, knowing her to be so
different from her brothers especially in her expectations of what love
should be, have her equally convinced that she loved me, and that would be
it for us, probably.  A life together, certainly less painful and
mean-spirited than the one initiated by Margot, but no less false.  I
turned my head at that juncture, to my companions on the left and watched
them, my mouth hanging open slightly as the life altering and yet
undeniable truth reverberated in my skull that it was not nor would it ever
be Kara Vasskez whom I loved but that it was and likely always would be her
brothers for whom I lived and breathed.  Not the girl, the natural choice,
not even another one of the brothers, one single comparatively simple
entity, but instead, I knew, with increasing certainty as I observed them
slouched casually against each other, watching the screen intently and
eating lazily out of the same bowl of peanut butter M&Ms, that it was Jon
and Dave, those two halves of the same whole, who held my heart, no matter
how unwanting or unknowingly.

However personally altering this revelation proved, I instantly resolved to
never allow myself to act on or air these feelings.  At the time, rather
conveniently, Jonas, for whom I once felt so much admiration and
solidarity, was quietly going through a similar period of realization
regarding Kyle, another straight member of the Vasskez family unit.
Observing dark, spazzy Jonas, an outsider like myself, apparently readying
himself to gracefully and stoically love Kyle, tending to him, watching
over him, but never telling him his own feelings, gave me strength and
inspiration.  We would be brothers, I decided, bound by our doomed love for
those we knew to be impossible to resist.  Just when I was really getting
into the tragic romance of it all, Kyle went and got drunk, kissed Jonas,
and then a few weeks later they were walking around with their heads in the
clouds, gayer than balloons.

Once I got over feeling vaguely annoyed and betrayed, I foolishly settled
on hope.  Kyle had always been my idol, a person I loved and looked up to I
suppose the way any boy would look up to his older brother, and would all
the more so if he happened to be kind, brave, strong, loyal and good.  More
than that, Kyle was always, well, I guess cool is really the only word for
it.  Imagine, okay, this guy, about 6 years older than you, who never
treated you like a child, who always listened to you, made time for you,
laughed with you, and fought for you.  Add to that the fact that as soon as
I was old enough to be in school with him I realized he was considered to
be unassailably cool, by not just me but pretty much everyone else,
followed and loved by nearly every member of his grade and the most of the
ones above and below it.  Kyle at home is a complete nerd most of the time,
a mother hen even when he's happy and relaxed, but even then he's managing
to be cool about it.  Always generous, always looking to make sure
everyone's having as good a time as he is.  Feeling all that about Kyle,
looking up to him the way I always had, and then suddenly seeing him
willing to take the plunge for Jonas, as well as totally doubling my
admiration for him, filled me with hope.  I thought, somehow that if Kyle
could do it, maybe somehow I could get Jon and Dave to do it too.

Of course, I miscalculated.  Disregarding the obvious fact that there are
two of them, more fundamentally I failed to understand or remember that
Kyle had been alone before Jonas, not alone in the traditional sense but
very much alone in the Vasskez sense, in that he had no mate, no partner of
heart and soul to live and die for, or so I assumed at the time, but we'll
get to that later.  So he was ready, willing.  With the twins, and somehow
despite knowing them their whole lives, in my delirium I managed to forget
this, the obvious fact that they already had EACH OTHER.  I mean, for the
love of god – oh course they did!  I knew that, I based my whole life up
until that point around protecting that – and still!  Still somehow I
thought there might be room for me, a place for me.  And so I got drunk,
and did a little confessing of my own, and instead of embracing me, their
faces crumbled and they folded deeper into each other, not knowing or maybe
wanting to talk or be near me.  This was the darkest, loneliest time in my
life since the year my dad had died.  I tried to pretend it was a joke
while they pretended that I would get over it, while all along we all knew
it wasn't, and I wouldn't.  Eventually, somehow, because I did still know
them best, and I still came the closest to something outside themselves
they understood and loved, they took me back, and being so desperate for
them, I allowed it.

In the time that followed, life returned to something closely resembling
normal, with a few noticeable and sweetly painful alterations.  It seemed
clear they couldn't love me the way I wanted them to, that I couldn't have
the kind of love, that in love kind I so desperately craved, but they
allowed me a greater involvement with their own love for each other.  It
was a brutal kind of closeness, so near to being everything I wanted and
needed, too enormous and seductive to ever give up, but still and always
missing, never quite what it could be.  Being more a part of that, I
realized it was exactly how they lived every second of their lives, sharing
the deepest and most fundamental love their lives would ever know, not with
someone they could share it with in body and in heart, but with their
brother, a fact that made the love no less deep, but certainly shaped it in
a way I began to believe meant they would never fall in love, neither of
them.  That they loved me enough to show me that, to ask in all their
silent ways to help me make that bearable for them every way I could, meant
and means the world to me.  More than ever and for the rest of my life, I
wanted to protect them.  I swore to myself to help them love each other,
and facilitate their necessary form of life while still living in the
world.

Mostly, crudely, before the crash, anyway, that meant I was kind of their
pimp.  In a way.  That's not as creepy as it sounds, except maybe it is.
Basically, they would reply on me, in public especially, to do what I could
to take the edge of their intense creepy twin bond enough that girls would
get hopeful, interested, and from there we would work on weeding out the
girls who might want something more than casual friendship with sexual
benefits, and we'd go from there.  They were happy, the girls were mostly
happy, and sometimes they'd encourage me to try the same thing with
whatever gender I chose, and I thought that someday I probably would, but
right then I was still too lost loving them.  When I saw girls touching
them, flirting with them, it didn't hurt me like I thought it might.  In a
way, it should have, and I can't say that it didn't, exactly, because they
got to be where I so desperately longed to be, they got the heat, but I
saw, also, through watching them with their pulls, why they fought so hard
against ever letting me take that role.  There was no love in it, no
feeling except the raw physical, and while they were as careful as they
could be about picking girls that that wouldn't matter to, wouldn't hurt,
they knew it would hurt me.  And I wanted to believe it wouldn't, pretty
much because I was 15 and I was a guy and they're hot as hell, but just
when I would be thinking that hard enough to want to push them again,
they'd come to me after being with a couple girls, and we'd sit together on
their little couch in their room, these the only times back then when
they'd let me be in the middle, heads on my shoulders, hands on my knees,
listening to music or sitting in silence, and I'd redouble my vow to
dedicate my life to protecting this thing between us, keeping it for myself
and for them.  Even though it was never really enough for any of us.

Because you know, just so we're clear, the twins hold hands (sometimes with
pinkies, sometimes palm to palm) and kiss sometimes, but it's always messy
rough comfort, nothing more.  No matter what the story books say (and by
the story books, I mean internet porn and Six Feet Under) siblings don't
often go around falling in love with each other and having lots of morally
grey sex.  And Jon and Dave, for all that they are rather exceptionable,
are in this case, no exception.  They love each other, and consider the
others body nothing more than an extension of their own, but it's not about
that for them.  The longing.  Imagine... imagine that instead of looking in
the mirror and seeing yourself, there was actually another physical you,
exact copy head to toe, feelings and all, looking back at you.  Imagine
looking at that person, at yourself standing there, separated from you,
with every fear and sad feeling, every joy and sorrow, all the tiny moments
and details, feeling everything you've felt all your life.  That's what its
like to be Jon and Dave.  Constant longing, constant chaos.  It shouldn't
be like that, I mean, it's not NORMAL (say it in a British accent like
Daniel Radcliff circa movie three).  It's fucking weird, and it's like that
for them every second of their lives.

It's frankly a miracle they haven't done a suicide pact by now, if you ask
me.

But that was all B.C, before the crash, and everything that came with it.
Before Jonas left and Shelly returned, before the walls went up higher and
stronger they had ever been before.  And now, in this the time in which
we're upon, things are slowly shifting, changing into something without
anyone's conscious control, into something new and dangerous I'm not sure
any of us are ready for.  They've needed me, since their parents deaths, in
a way they hadn't before, and that has made it all the more difficult to
find the old lines, to measure the distance between me and them.  I was
sure my whole life that they would only ever want or need each other, and
they were sure of that too, it was the one truth upon which they built
their lives.  But they found, I think, in the days and weeks after their
parents death, that it was a pain they couldn't simply absorb into each
other and then be free, it only lessened, only became bearable and then
something approaching okay when they started to open up, to let it out not
just to each other, but to their brothers, and to me.  And being there
first, waiting for them, being the one they finally let in, has changed our
dynamic in ways I never expected, never hoped.  Because now, when we're out
in the world I walk between them, hands on their shoulders and like a
conduit I keep them connected, keep them focused on getting through what
they need to do so they can get another day over with, get back to the
safety and familiarity of home.

More than that, there are no more girls, no more parties where they
disappear for an hour or two, coming back to grin sheepishly at each other
and guiltily at me.  No more joking around with the other guys at school
and practices, just punches when people say something stupid as they
inevitably do and desperate looks at me, to deflect, to deal, whenever
people come too close.  There's only us, me and them, and I'm slowly
beginning to realize that that's the way it's going to be, one way or
another, for the rest of our lives.  And sometimes, at night, when we're
lying together, as we find ourselves doing, more and more, I'm beginning to
understand that the direction that this life takes might actually have a
lot more do to with me than I ever thought possible.  And that maybe, just
maybe, when they look at me between them in the dark, and keep their eyes
on me instead of looking past me back to each other, it might actually be
me they're wanting exactly where I am.

In the mean time we play soccer together, goof around together, talk and
laugh and study together.  We help their brothers, and believe me they need
it, we be a family.  I know now that it doesn't take blood or even a
marriage to be a Vasskez, it just takes understanding them, being willing
to put up with them, and although that basically includes giving up the
world for them, somehow they make it worth it.  And loving them is too
close to perfection to give up, even when they sometimes don't.