Andy Nowicki has published the first part of his new fictional work,The Invisible Twins, which now may be purchased via Kindle. The Invisible Twins —a sequel to Nowicki's 2012 novel Heart Killer—will be published in serialized form. An exclusive new excerpt from Part One follows below:
What then should I tell you about myself? When does my story
really begin?
I will skip the “David Copperfield crap,” as another
narrator has put it. All of that period of my existence has, in any case,
ceased to mean anything whatsoever to me. Of course I did for a time suffer a
quite profound degree of debilitating dislocation. I could scarcely buy into
the idea that even existed at all, much less that I existed in duplicate
(which, of course, I don’t). I believed instead that I didn’t exist, because I thought I simply couldn’t exist.
Indeed, I was never supposed to have come into being in the
first place. But how can I explain this to you, my dear brother (who is in fact
neither dear nor a brother… except in my dreams, to which I happily cling in my
joyful delusory illusion)? It will surely sound grandiose: silly and overblown;
still, I happen to know for a fact that it is actual. It is an actual fact,
that is, that I shouldn’t be here; and yet, here I am. In relating this actual
fact, I am not expressing any sort of effete, insufferable pseudo-angst; it is
not my wish to make you feel sorry for me, O twin-not! No, don’t pity me; only
know that I ought not ever to come into existence.
Indeed, in spite of my prior exuberance (which was all along
a ruse, as surely you must ever have known, meaning that the joke was never
really on anyone but me), you are not
my twin, dear jailer, dear questioner, dear man of my dreams. You are not my
brother, nor is anyone else my brother, because in truth I am the sole,
solitary hinge opening the tiny door which connects one earth to another. I am
he who provides that inscrutable key into a world which is like ours in nearly
every way, yet is just as surely foreign to us, no matter how alike it may
prove to be… It is a world as alien to our world (no matter how seemingly
alike) as each man is in truth to every other man, regardless of the extent to
which one may consider himself to be on intimate relations with another. We are
all strangers, deep down, and so are our two worlds: twin strangers!
In fact, these two worlds—ours and its twin—only know each
other in an exceedingly vague, inchoate sense. They are like siblings separated
at birth… although not exactly. Rather, they are a once unified entity which at
some point became separated from itself. Yet in this separation, each retained
itself whole, exactly the same as before… almost! Almost, but not quite. This
unprecedented bifurcation happened unexpectedly, and I am at the very heart of
this happening. I, the lone link between the hidden twins.
In fact, it quite seems likely that these two worlds have
always stood at a parallel, side by side, yet aloof, neither encumbered with
the concerns of its counterpart, both resolutely self-entranced; alike in
substance, but distinct in being…. In any case, when I first burst into
existence, the shock waves of my plainly impossible inception knocked one of
those worlds sideways.
Actually, no. On second thought, I really wouldn’t put it quite
like that.
Rather, it was my father! He, not I, was the one who flung our earth onto such a radically
divergent course. My birth was merely a byproduct of his bold and reckless act;
it was he, not me, who disrupted the currents of history, which in turn led to me,
an entirely new and utterly unplanned being, bleeding forth into tragic
conception….
Yes! It was all, indeed, my father’s doing. He, awash in
pride, feeling discontented with the dubious accomplishments of his present,
practiced a dark brand of witchcraft to fling himself backwards in time, in
order that he might be enabled to conquer the humiliations of his past, and in
altering the events of his formative years, he wound up shifting the entire
broad course of general events… He thought he’d be able to contain his own
strain of self-indulgence within a smaller sphere, but it was not to be; it could not be. Causes, after all, have
effects, and effects can’t be curtailed within “reasonable” circumscribed
means; instead, they range mightily outside of their impact point, setting up a
ripple effect that produces an all-out demolition job upon the strictures of
time and space.
Again, my dear brother-not, just ponder those twin
structures, pushing themselves heavenward with such unconscionable effrontery,
like Babel in duplicate. “Two households, both alike in dignity,” one could
well say. In just such fearful symmetry stand our two worlds in relation to one
another. Yet… a schism has occurred, and the symmetry has so been flung into
disarray. The progenitor of this schism was the sinister serpentine course
charted by my wayward father, and I am but his bastard seed, the lone anomaly
of our once harmonious, once perfectly symmetrical duality.
I relate all of these things to you, dear sir, only to provide
you with helpful, contextual information. As for me, the details of my
conception, birth, and upbringing mean little to me now. It is as if my
personal history never happened, or rather, it is as if they happened to
someone else, not me: someone quite apart from myself, some other man, whose
entire consciousness is as remote from my memory as a character in a book.
I have, that is to say, transformed into my own twin, and in the process, I have
let my past burn, crash, and fall, leaving the corpse of my old self in the
dust of my dissipated former self. All the same, I am well enough aware that in
having taken this step of self-renewal through self-slaughter, I haven’t in so
doing escaped destruction. I have become my own twin, but in fact no twin can
survive alone; it is instead axiomatic that twins stand and fall together.
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