The Experiment Page 8

  She walked to her desk and rummaged through a drawer. "Here, look at this," she said, handing him a yellowed clipping. "An old article from one of your competitors."

  It was a story from the New York Post, dated May 9, 1979, about identical twin boys born in Piqua, Ohio, to an unwed mother in 1939. They had been adopted by different families, raised forty-five miles apart and had met up again nearly forty years later. The article enumerated astounding similarities. It quoted one of the twins, and Jude copied it down: "When I went to meet my brother the first time, it was like looking in a mirror."

  "Watch out," said Dr. Tierney. "This stuff can become habit forming. A Danish shrink, Juel-Nielsen, came up with a name for it—'monozygotic monomania. "

  She smiled, sat back down, and noticed that he was still copying.

  "I don't mean to say anything," she said, "but is that allowed?" Jude looked up. He saw that she was looking at his moving pen.

  "Oh, you mean writing all this down from the Post. You know what they say: 'Good writers borrow, great writers steal.'

  She did not seem to be amused, and so he added, "No, it's perfectly all right, as long as you attribute it."

  Nodding, she continued.

  "A lot of the twins-reared-apart studies were done at the University of Minnesota—the Twin Cities, naturally. There's a man there I had the honor to work with, though only briefly, Professor Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. He founded something called the Center for Twin and Adoptive Research. He got hooked in 1979 and—you'll be happy to know—it was a newspaper story on that same set of twins you just read about that did it.

  "Jim Lewis and Jim Springer. By coincidence, they had both been given the same first name. They looked almost exactly alike in every way—lanky, six feet tall, about a hundred and eighty pounds, dark hair, brown eyes. Not all monozygotic twins retain the physical resemblance to such a high degree. But the real surprise came when they started comparing the narratives of their lives: each had married a woman named Linda, then gotten a divorce, then remarried a woman named Betty. Jim Lewis had named his firstborn child James Alan, spelled A-l-a-n. Jim Springer named his first James Allen, which he spelled A-l-l-e-n. What's really intriguing is the similarity in all the little details, the fabric of their daily lives. When they were kids, they both had dogs named Toy. Their families went to the same beach in Florida for vacations. Each of them worked in law enforcement. They liked the same hobbies—blueprinting, drafting, carpentry. They even liked the same beer, Miller Lite, and smoked the same brand of cigarettes, Salem. Their results on various tests were carbon copies—so much alike that it looked as if the same person had taken them twice."

  Jude was writing it all down. This was good stuff. It had been printed before—some of it going back two decades—but still, maybe he could recycle it into the body of the story.

  "You don't have to take notes," she said. "I don't mean to discourage you, but most of it appeared in a magazine article just a few years ago."

  Jude's heart sank. She rose, thumbed through a stack of papers on her bookshelf, and sat down with a copy of The New Yorker. He glanced over at the date and jotted it down: August 7, 1995.

  "Let me find a passage about Bouchard's early work." She flipped to a page marked by a paper clip, skimmed the article, and summarized it:

  "Among the first pairs he studied were two women, Daphne Goodship and Barbara Herbert. They had both been adopted and lived apart near London for thirty-nine years. They met at a railroad station in May 1979. Each of them was wearing a beige dress and brown velvet jacket. They had dozens of little similarities—both had identical crooked little fingers, for example, which had kept them both from typing or learning to play the piano. Both had weak ankles from tumbling down stairs at the same age, fifteen. At sixteen each of them had gone to a local dance, where she met the man she later married. Each had suffered miscarriages during her first pregnancies; each then had two boys followed by a girl. They had little tics and gestures in common, giggling and this habit of pushing up their noses when they laughed—which they called 'squidging.' And so on. It goes on and on, twin after twin."

  Jude jumped in with a question:

  "But given all the possible variables in a lifetime, all the people out there and all the twins, wouldn't you expect some crazy coincidences? I mean, if you and I compared our lives in minute detail, wouldn't we come up with some details that seemed eerie because they were the same?: we went to the same rock show in 1976, we use the same toothpaste, we have uncles with the same first names. Especially if we were looking for the similarities. And we'd naturally discard all the dissimilarities that didn't fit in."

  She smiled and nodded. "I applaud your skepticism—I imagine when you're a reporter, it comes with the territory. And to be truthful, I share it to a large extent—or I did."

  She crossed her legs, and Jude saw that disturbing band of white thigh again. It was hard not to look at it.

  "But the universe of people we're talking about here is small. The number of monozygotic twins is growing, thanks to fertility pills, but it's still not all that large. A little under four births out of every thousand. And of those, the number who end up being raised apart for various reasons is minuscule. Back when Bouchard began, there were only nineteen recorded cases of twins who separated and reunited. Now there's more. The literature contains references to a hundred and twenty-one, and there have been more than thirty books and articles written about them. Still, that's not a lot, and the remarkable feature is the high coincidence of similarities among such a small sample.

  "Yes, any two people of roughly the same age—you and me, say—we could sit down to compare notes and pore over our lives and our habits and our tastes until we came up with a whole array of things in common."

  She smiled at him here, and he smiled back. He wondered: Was she saying especially you and me?

  "In fact, I've done that—I mean, I've set up control groups using two strangers chosen at random to see what they'd come up with. You lock them in a room together, and they're usually able to establish some pretty amazing congruities. But not as many as separated twins, and not in so many different aspects of life. What's interesting about these studies is how the congruities keep occurring over and over in the same areas, as if there were certain categories in which they are allowed to operate. It's almost as if the similarities were preordained. A predispositon to alcoholism or smoking or suicide or insomnia—if you find it in one twin, chances are you'll find it in the other. Why should they end up having the same number of marriages and divorces? Or the same careers and hobbies? Even a lot of their social and political attitudes are alike. Why should twins end up with the same feeling about the death penalty or working mothers or apartheid? Why should their tastes run the same in coffee? But not—and try and figure this one out—in tea?"

  She glanced at his empty cup.

  "Speaking of which... would you like some more?"

  He shook his head no. He didn't want her to stop.

  "What will really blow your mind is the parallel tracks of physical development. Twins often get the same diseases at exactly the same ages—okay, you might expect that. But the parallels are so finely tuned. There are cases in which they each grow a blackhead in the exact same spot on the nose at the exact same time. How do you explain that? Is there some vicious little gene lying around whose whole goal is to inject a little spot of misery into the life of an adolescent? Is our whole makeup nothing more than a giant time-release capsule?"

  Her eyes were blazing now.

  "What's the causative factor—how does this happen? What's the explanation? There are similarities between any two of us, granted. But in monozygotic twins they go beyond the law of averages, and they keep happening in the same spheres. Coffee and not tea—what is that all about?"

  The secretary knocked; Dr. Tierney was needed down the hall.

  "I'll only be a few minutes," she told Jude. She tossed him The New Yorker.

  The article by Lawrence
Wright was titled "Double Mystery." It began with a description of identical twin girls, Amy and Beth, born in New York City in the 1960s and placed for adoption in separate homes. They sounded cute: "fair-skinned blondes with small oval faces, blue-gray eyes, and slightly snub noses." By chance, the two families were outwardly similar Jewish, with stay-at-home mothers and an older son as a sibling. But Beth seemed to have drawn the lucky card. Her family was more prosperous and more solid. More important, Beth's mother was loving and accepting; she doted on her new daughter, drew her into the bosom of the family, and provided her with everything she could possibly want. The father was attentive and supportive.

  Amy's mother, on the other hand, was overweight and insecure and began to feel competitive with her daughter and regard her as a threat. The family—mother, father and son—closed ranks against the adopted child and excluded her as an outsider. As might be expected, Amy developed problems. She bit her nails, cried when left alone, wet her bed, and had nightmares. By ten she showed the signs of a rejected child—she was shy and insecure, made up illnesses, had an artificial quality that came out in role playing, was confused over her sexual identity and suffered from a serious learning disorder. What would you expect, given her home life?

  But how about Beth, with all her advantages?

  That was the part of the story that astonished Jude. For she, too, displayed the same signs of inner turmoil as an infant—thumb sucking, nail biting, blanket clenching and bed wetting. She, too, became a hypochondriac and fearful, and as she grew older she, too, fell into an artificial dimension of role playing and had problems with friends and in school. There were some differences, of course. But fundamentally, the secure and loving family, all the advantages, the step up in life—they didn't count for very much when it came to conquering the inner demons.

  Jude was fascinated. Why should Beth turn out to be as troubled as Amy? That contradicted common sense and reason. Was there such a thing as total biological destiny? Did it override everything else in determining character—family life, education, inculcated values, chance? And where was free will in all of this? The conviction that comes from the marrow of our bones that we are actually making choices and that we can change ourselves if we try hard enough? All his life, Jude had thought—when he thought about it at all—that he would have been a different person if he had been raised by his parents instead of foster parents—less lonely somehow, more secure, more giving, as Betsy would have put it. Was that wrong?

  Dr. Tierney returned, and he closed the magazine. She had changed her doctor's coat for a tweed jacket, worn over a white silk blouse, and he could see one side of a strand of pearls hanging close to her neck and disappearing past the unbuttoned collar. She was clearly getting ready to leave. He was disappointed—he had assumed that they would have more time for the interview, and he was reluctant to break it off.

  "I'm afraid—if it's not an imposition—I need a bit more of your time."

  "Of course." She smiled faintly. "I'm sorry I have to go now—something's come up. But we can meet again."

  "Would tomorrow be okay? I've got to finish this story by the next day at the latest."

  "That'll be fine."

  "I can meet you somewhere else if it's more convenient. I'll give you a call."

  She nodded.

  "Thank you, Dr. Tierney. This is a great help."

  "Please—Tizzie. That's what most people call me."

  "Tizzie, then."

  They shook hands.

  He took a final look around her office. He saw with a new eye that the framed photographs were mostly of an elderly couple, presumably her parents. There was another one of a beautiful Irish setter and still others of groups—what looked to be friends on a rafting trip and posing by a convertible. He did not, however, see a photo of her alone with a man.

  On the street outside later, he wondered why it seemed to matter.

  Chapter 7

  Skyler ran through the rain, drunk with grief, his clothes soaked through and sticking to his chest and the front of his thighs like weights. He did not know where he was going—he had no plan, other than to get away, to leave them all behind, to find a refuge where he could stop and take his time and formulate a life plan centered on this new thing growing inside his gut like a beast—the need for vengeance. They would pay for her death, he would see to that. Nothing else mattered.

  He was aware that his feet were carrying him northward toward the forest, and he dimly thought that the escape route made sense. He knew the paths and the rivers, the ways of snakes and deer and boar. He knew how to live there and he felt at home there; he would hide out and dedicate himself to cultivating and appeasing the beast. He remembered the Shell Ring where he and Raisin had played, a vast circular mound of ancient clam shells and mussel shells and other mollusks built hundreds of years ago, it was said, by the Indians for defense; no one could sneak up on you there. That was the place to be.

  Then he heard the dogs.

  At first, it was an indistinct sound, rising and falling like the wind. Then came a clap of thunder, and it was as if it cleared the air and made way for the baying, the excited, bloodcurdling cry of animals on the spoor. Suddenly, the sound seemed much closer. Skyler could visualize them, the Orderlies holding thick leather leashes, and the hounds straining and sniffing the ground ahead. If the Orderlies found him, he would be done for. They might kill him on the spot, without a moment's thought. Or maybe they would tie him up and carry him back to the Big House and cut him open the same way they had cut open Julia, for whatever it was she had discovered. He ran faster, but he knew he could not keep it up much longer.

  He left the path and found himself knee-deep in swamp water. He plunged ahead, with water now on all sides, above and below, and promptly lost his footing and fell into the murky water up to his chest. He struggled up and moved on slowly, taking the drag weight in his thighs. He felt something cold in his right hand and looked down and was surprised to see that he was still clasping the knife.

  The swamp slowed him to a crawl. He tripped over a submerged log and fell again, face forward. When he raised his head, he saw the surface bouncing around him with rain pelts as if it were boiling. He came to a tiny island of a single tree and pulled himself up, leaning his shoulder against the trunk, his chest heaving. A rope of Spanish moss hung across his shoulder, and he flung it to the ground. The rain was coming down in a thick blanket now. Turning and staring into it, he could see only ten feet or so into the grayness, but he could still hear the hounds. They sounded higher-pitched, frustrated and whining, as if they were being held from pursuit of their prey. A good sign perhaps. Maybe they'd reached the swamp's edge and the Orderlies wouldn't let them go on. Maybe they would lose the scent and be unable to follow him through the water. The thought gave him hope and pushed him onward. He jumped into the water and moved through it by swiveling his upper body and taking long strides. He kept at it and soon he fell into a rhythm, which made the going easier. Despite the rain and the cold, he was sweltering with heat; sweat was pouring down his temples and the back of his neck.

  From time to time, the image of Julia's body, immobile and shrunken and ripped open, flashed through his brain, and it filled him with anger, and deepened his resolve to fight the storm and elude his pursuers. Minutes went by, long minutes, then tens of minutes, then a half hour. He had stopped thinking, had slipped into a fevered daydream as he slogged ahead.

  Abruptly, he came to. He noticed that the rain seemed to be lightening, and as he walked, he had the sensation that the water was receding—it was down to his knees now and the bottom felt more secure. He kept walking until he looked down and saw that he was on solid ground. He had passed through the swamp. Then he collapsed and lay there for a long time, not thinking at all.

  He sat bolt upright. His head had cleared. How long had he been there? He had no idea. His muscles were aching. He listened—he could no longer hear the baying of the hounds. Looking up through the canopy of branch
es, he saw that the storm clouds had dissipated. Dusk was coming on. He would need a safe place to spend the night.

  He took stock of his situation, which was not good. They would not stop looking for him—that he knew. They would never stop. They would hunt him down, no matter how far into the northern forest he ventured. And sooner or later they would find him. There would be a slip-up—a bit of telltale smoke from a fire or he would run into them as he went tearing down a path after some animal. Or perhaps the dogs would comb the woods and pick up his scent. He couldn't hold out forever. His only chance was to leave the island. But how? Raisin had tried it and he had died, pulled down by the treacherous backwater currents of the marshes. How could he succeed where Raisin had failed?

  The answer came to him instantly, so clear he felt he must have been close to it all along. Kuta's boat. It was not running, because the engine was out of commission, but Kuta could fix it, and he could negotiate the shoals to reach the mainland. He was the only one Skyler could turn to—surely, he would not refuse him, not when it was a matter of life and death. Once on the mainland, Skyler could bide his time and plot revenge. Somehow, he would survive to do that. But the prospect of going "to the other side" filled him with fear. He had no idea of what he would encounter there or what it would be like.

  And first he had to get to Kuta's shack. That would be tricky. He would have to wait until dark and then double back and walk around the swamp to the meadow. From there, he would slip behind the Campus and reach the thin strip of shore peopled by the Gullah.

  Evening came quickly and was eerily quiet. Skyler moved stealthily through the woods, using the knife from time to time to cut his way through the undergrowth. Finally, he found a path that went roughly in the direction he wanted. All around he heard the deep croaking of bullfrogs. Every so often a bush or clump of marsh grass on either side of the path would twitch suddenly, the flight of a panicked creature, and each time he startled at the sound. The sky above was clear, but darkening, and through the branches he could already see stars coming out.