By Carol van Strum and Jordan Merrell
As famous and at times as notorious as I have been my whole life long, I am the great unknown. And these are the times when mankind thinks there are no secrets. “Technologies have seen to that,” they say. For the common folk, perhaps. But me? When I want to be known, I am the Talk of the Town. When I want to feed my ego in the eyes of those who “love” me, I go that route. I’m only human.
Secrets? I’ve got plenty. That’s why I laugh at everyone but myself. Nearly everyone “knows who I am” or thinks they know. The fools! They know nothing, I tell you, nothing at all.
Do they know where I come from? Do they know the burdens and scars a soul can bear from knowing you were to be taken out under a desert moon to be murdered at birth? A sacrifice!
Yes, a sacrifice. My parents were in a new cult and “god spoke to the followers.” That’s one of my secrets. I don’t speak of my “birth” family, or of the fact that I’m a mirror twin.
“You must pick only one.” Their God commanded them to send some old man out into the night with me, “the different one,” to spill my blood to please God. Christ on a crutch! How am I supposed to feel about that? I had to go to therapy!
Were it today, would I have been left in one of the plastic bins, shoved into the warmth of one of the “Baby Drop Slots” we see everywhere? I doubt it. And with my emerald green eyes, milky skin, hair in curls the color of cornsilk, I’d be chosen now over my brother – his eyes black as olives, skin the color of a walnut roasted next to the hearth. More the pity, I have my “curses,” my own Cross to Bear.
Maybe it was just the shock to see the two of us. God knows people tend to fear what they don’t know, what they have never seen, what they do not understand. I know it’s true, unfortunately. I reveal to you one of the curses cast upon me: total recall of every sleeping and waking moment of my existence. I’m an anomaly, no question about that. There I go again, getting ahead of myself. But it is how I know what happened, this curse of not one moment lost from my memory.
The old man, he and no other took me quickly. And my mother? She never even knew I’d been born to her, for it was a long and difficult birth. Why wouldn’t it be? No midwife was called. Men are far from the most sensitive of creatures on the planet. I know. I am one. I will never believe she would have allowed me to be taken from her.
What if she had known, had held me, not let them take me? What then? Would they have killed the both of us and raised the boy themselves? No. They needed Our Mother to do what they could not for my brother, the Chosen One. So I was wrapped in felt cloth and sheep’s wool. Perhaps were my bones found they were to look like that of a lamb. How does one explain the horrors done to the innocent and savvy alike “in God’s Name?”
The old man took me what must have been miles into the desert. He muttered that I was as pale as the milk of a goat. He didn’t want to stop walking, for where he stopped was to be the place he would have to set me on the earth beneath his feet and slash my throat like a newborn lamb. But I was not a lamb. I was a human child and it unnerved him greatly.
When he could not take another step, he laid me down and his breath came in a shallow rattle. He took his knife and began to pray to God. Then he fell at my feet, able only to moan and utter sounds of what I know now to be the sounds of a man dying in the midst of a great battle. He was only a man, and as such, they say, he died as a man. There I was, helpless, face to the stars.
Lucky for me, the old man died near the place where half a dozen sheep had strayed from a flock being watched over by a Shepherd and his sons. He was said to have the best dogs known in the desert lands this moon hung over, in that time on the earth. That may be giving too much praise, but the mother dog sniffed me out. She picked me up like a lamb too tiny to walk, picked me up by my bunting and carried and dragged me to the shepherd man. I must have been a sight, a squirming bundle dangling from the mouth of a herd dog.
As dusty as I was, one peek under the tatters of cloth and puffs of sheep’s wool, and the man was taken aback. My skin, he saw, was the color of the Moon. Now this shepherd had many wives and a strong flock, but his first wife, Myrna, was barren and bitterly resented the number of sons his other four wives had borne him. Myrna, his wife of many years and the girl he married for sheer love, was in a state of perpetual sorrow. She had prayed to the gods, goddesses, trees, earth and water and the heavens and the Moon to let her bear a son.
“Just one,” she prayed. “Just one.”
And that is how I came from a stranger’s womb, out of the mouth of a brown-eyed dog, into my father’s strong arms, and then to Myrna, my beautiful, tearful, loving mother. She had lain sick with grief for many months. Father entered our tent of saffron yellow, carrying me to her, and he told her – told Myrna, now my mother – that I had fallen from the sky and he had caught me. No one could know, he said.
No one, ever, could know. The superstitions in third world countries can be – and are – the swift end to many. A child, born of the Moon, who fell from the sky – such a child might be feared, and to be born the color of a high cloud in a pale sky, in a remote land where people were the color of the earth, was enough to bring a whole tribe’s wrath upon a tiny babe.
Myrna could not take her arms from me. My new mother’s eyes met mine and I pulled her deep into my spirit where what love I had was kept, and we were in that instant Mother and Son. Father brought bloody rags and they carried out the act perfectly, the charade of birth. My father was the herder of sheep and the trainer of dogs. He was very smart and as calculating as the wild dogs he killed with stones and spears and arrows. He slaughtered a goat and brought my mother sheep’s wool dipped in its blood. This was more than convincing.
“There has been a great miracle!” my mother cried out. She pinched me softly and we cried together. And miracle of miracles, her breasts swelled with milk. Who would take the strange pale baby with eyes of emeralds from this mother’s arms? No one. No one dared even think it! For one thing, my father was too important. If he moved and took away with him the sheep and lambs and dogs, the rest of the tribe would hardly survive. Besides, women were drawn to me, the strange pale baby. They would reach out and touch my sun-bleached hair in wonder. Mother carefully browned up my skin in the sun until I was as earthen as the others.
Our tribe was nomadic, and we traveled far from the place I was found. My early years were good to me, especially since barren women who touched my cornsilk hair in wonder then bore their husbands children. Word spread, and soon those desperate to have babies came bearing gifts. They brought gifts before and after the births. My parents became wealthy.
In time I grew to be a man, and my many travels began. Who would not want to escape a place like that? Wealthy, in a third world country, usually means living far away from it. I am wealthy beyond measure. Today I’ve got it all, and if I don’t have it, it’s because I have no want of it in the first place.
Before I made my way to Europe, I learned that my birth parents were still alive. The cult that ordered my death was still their life, and my brother’s. They adored him. And I felt a sadness when a different cult murdered him. When your twin is hurt or lost or dies, you know, you feel it as if it’s happening to you. It’s scientifically proven: the Other Twin, like me, feels and knows these events to the core of their being. Even if it is a hated thing, feeling it is all you have ever known. And you feel that Other Part of you when it is torn from you, making the sound a cloth makes as it is abruptly pulled in two directions at once. Yes. It was quite like that, only it’s the duality of the Soul that is torn away.
I worked a lot of this through when I moved to California in the United States of America. God, I love this place. America, I mean. America land of therapists. My therapist, a great guy by the way, was on the cutting edge of things. Techniques to deal with grief and stress management were all the rage back at the turn of what people called The New Millennium.
Maybe you are old enough to remember all the fear a new century brought about. Between the New Millennium and the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012 the human race lived in fear and famine. The polar caps disappeared but the Earth has not flipped over upside down. It keeps turning. But you’d’ve thought it was the end of the world. Fairy tales, I tell you.
“Armageddon?” In the realm of anything-is-possible, some sort of Armageddon could be occurring; Armageddons have always happened. “Holocaust? Which one?” my therapist used to say. Indeed, the one that matters most is the one that affects you and yours.
We are self-centered things, aren’t we. I can at least admit to my feelings. I’m entitled to them. Do people care that I, too, feel sorrow? My clothes are fine; I hide my wealth for the most part. I have made a shrine to my mothers: to Myrna and a brown-eyed dog. I had parents who loved me enough to lie, to keep me their son. And here I am now, my life so truthfully a lie. All is carefully crafted to meet my needs and hide my curses. This is why I have to move to a new place every seven to 10 years, sometimes less. But never more.
When my brother was murdered by a mob of religious freaks and the unseen fabric between us became a memory of the sound of a rag torn in half, something happened to me. When I cut myself, I did not bleed. And from that time to this I have not changed, have not aged. So I have become a changeling. I shall not forget the way my journey across the earth began and that it has not ended. I have often wondered, what were the gods thinking, and are they laughing? What is the point of my life? What good are these miracles and magic, and why have I been left behind?
Do you fools believe I know everything? I do not! Am I to blame for all the wrongs and horrors on this planet? Hardly! Few need my help in those realms. Indeed, humanity does just fine in the horror department without my assistance. Yes, I’ve planted seeds along the way. That’s all it takes to grow discord, distrust and great grief and sorrows. Division is one of my personal favorites.
My brother’s life story is full of fairy tales and contradictions that only add fuel to my fire! But again I’m thought to be to blame for every damn thing that goes wrong. Well, I’m not in this gig alone, and I think you and I know that. Is it my fault I ever was born? No. Who on earth picks their parents or chooses their own genetics? I just wish you people could understand: none of us had a choice. So why am I held to a higher standard?
A snake crawls on its belly because it has no legs or arms. Is it cursed? Is it the snake’s own fault to be born as it is? No! Yet it is often misunderstood and feared.
People make me laugh. Hey, you know the greatest salesmen are children? They want something – a toy or a candy or a ripe pomegranate from a tree in the grove – and the child does not try just one thing. Ask, it does not work. So cry. It does not work. So try a whine, a temper fit, a pathetic droop – so many ways to go at an issue. Sometimes I like to beat people down like that, especially when I feel relentless and bored. I’m not so bad as I once was. My therapist, he helped me be a little better to myself, to understand that that’s okay.
I’ve pretty much retired now, and travel to places I’ve never been or haven’t seen for ages. Perhaps to places my brother would have enjoyed. That cult kept him in that one small area of the world his whole life. They believed it was the whole world.
From that to this? Remember when girls would just say, “Whatever!” and put their little hands out at you? And they wouldn’t let the other person talk? I almost enjoyed that concept of total rejection. But I quit messing in other people’s shit. Lesson: you should watch a few episodes of the Maury Show from the “Turn of the Millennium Archives.” It’s a lot of trashy, flashy people being people. And there it was, right in front of my face. “Fuck it!” (That will be the bleeping sounds. It’s how they did television back then.) Right there I thought, that’s it! I’m done! I’m out of this picture!
So I quit. And since then – without me adding fuel to the fire — what have you done? Is your world all better now? No. Of course not. You can’t just stop and say “whatever” or “oh, fuck this negativity.” You carry on and on with things and you don’t even know how any of it started. I started some of it, okay? Maybe sometimes most of it. So I was suffering from depression. What, you think I’ve always been a happy-go-lucky spirit? But it’s not my fault you won’t stop.
Most people are, in fact, not as smart as I am. Maybe not even as smart as yourself. Expect people to be stupid and rude and you will not be disappointed. “Low Expectations Bring High Results.” Remember it? I wrote that best seller. Have you read it? It was some while ago. But it was nearly as popular as “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” in the smoke-weed-free-love era. You still didn’t get it, did you?
Things were going pretty well then – a couple years of thinking about Peace, because you all didn’t want to get blown up in Vietnam. I did like the Owlsley Acid, had a little “keep on truckin’” furry freak brother on this little piece of paper. I got tired of seeing the same old world, and I was trippin’ on acid at my beach house in Malibu and I had this incredible breakthrough. That’s when I started thinking about quitting work. God knows money was never the issue. It was pure ego. I was a power-tripper Type-A personality, that’s what my therapist told me. So I didn’t have to fit other people’s stereotypes of me. I had to believe that.
Did I make a mess of things along the way? Yes.
Do I regret it? I regret nothing.
My life was thrust upon me, just as my twin’s life was thrust upon him. I’m not the one who wrote the Rules here. It’s lonely at the top, people. Get it through your heads, it really IS all about me. Jesus – did he die for your sins? Well, he absolutely died because you were sinners, I would say the facts speak for themselves. Greed? Power? I have so much power I don’t need greed, so what do you think of that?
Maybe I would rather have had a different fate – anybody ever think of that? Anybody ever think of me? How I feel, being the “different one”? You don’t ever get it, you turn the truth into what you want it to be.
Well, think what you want. My brother was murdered for your sins? Hell, no. He died so I could have everlasting life, whether I wanted it or not. I don’t care about your souls’ eternal life – so why do you live your lives wondering about mine?
Like, whatever, I’m only human.
(from MySpace entry: Lucifer)