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If Ford really stops and lets himself think about it, he’s convinced that he’s never been any good on his own. Maybe that’s just what it means to have been born someone’s identical twin, though. Where your skull is meant to be closed off, instead one side of it is open, grooves worn in where someone else is meant to be pressed against it. Complete the picture. Two halves of a friendship necklace. Maybe all twins are conjoined in a certain way.
Maybe it’s just him.
Maybe he was never meant to be singular. Whatever god formed him only did half the job, gave up partway through—lost focus, or realized he wasn’t worth it.
There is a part of him that aches for contact, and it didn’t become known to him until Stanley was gone. He’s seen pictures of houses with one side sheared away by environmental calamity, bombings—his skull feels like one of those houses. A great emptiness exposed, coming with the same embarrassment one might feel at having been caught half-dressed through the crack of a door. Raw, unprotected, frayed.
That first summer, between high school and college—he didn’t know if he would make it. Imagine. You go 18 years thinking you’re whole and discrete only to be exposed as a fraud. Incomplete. He would wonder late in the night if Stanley was feeling the same way, but then he’d always seemed to be fine on his own—to be able to seek out other people, to not mind their company. Ford wasn’t built like that. Neither could he escape this emptiness, nor could he seek out companionship to fill the void. He didn’t know how to connect with others. He didn’t know how to want to.
Why would you want to, why would you need to, when you’d always been built-in with another person from before you were born? When the world does its due best to prove to you that you can’t rely on anyone else, at a certain point you stop thinking to look outwards. You lose the urge, maybe. You don’t know how to pull things towards yourself in any way that sticks.
Or, again, maybe it’s just him.
For awhile Fidds was there, slotting in against his rough edges in a way that Ford didn’t expect when he first showed up at the man’s door. He’d needed something to get lost in. Fidds needed someone to find. He filled the gap almost perfectly, not to belabor a metaphor, but then when graduation came around and they each pretended they hadn’t been secretly hoping the other would drop all his plans and tag along, there came the detachment. Ford had been ready for it this time, at least. Had known there would be a return to feeling as if half of his skull was open to the elements, though some foolish part of him had hoped he’d find the mettle to wall it off himself.
No. Time and distance, it turned out, had not granted him the wherewithal to figure out how to be singular. It crushed him, when he really thought about it, when he woke in the middle of the night with a dream on the tip of his tongue, only to turn towards the space where another bed should be and find it empty. If he closed his eyes he could imagine he was on the top bunk again, swimming in the upper third of the bedroom, stuffy with New Jersey summer, and that if he only spoke out loud then Stanley would rustle on the mattress below and ask him, half-asleep, what Ford was waking him up for.
He didn’t close his eyes. He got up, usually, no matter how dark the night outside, and throw himself into whatever had held his focus the last time he’d been awake. For long days he’d go on like this, jerking awake into the overwhelm again and again, charging back into the fray, until he’d crash for eighteen, twenty hours at a time. How to sleep alone, eat alone, think alone? Nobody ever thought to tell him.
Then there was Bill, and he didn’t have to wonder. Bill felt like forever. Like Stanley had once felt. Entrenched, barely noticeable, like a limb he’d always had.
He forgot. Damn him, he forgot. Or Bill forgot for him—he somehow lost track of the fact that he was incomplete, that he had never quite found a way to seal that caved-in wall, and when things went sideways and Bill was still clinging on—parasitic, rooted in a way that would tear at the substrate of Ford himself were he pulled out—for the first time Ford missed it.
Give him that emptiness any day, creeping at the edges of his awareness until it sent him running—anything but this forced occupation, this invasion.
Anything. What a loaded word. Kind of like “forever.” Often hyperboles, turns of phrase, and yet if you’re negotiating with a demon, language matters deeply. Anything, he’d said, except for this, and some great monkey’s paw somewhere furled inwards by one finger, he’s sure. Whoever’s keeping track out there must be having a field day with him. “Anything” looks like a mountaintop at the edge of the world—not his world, but someone else’s. “Anything” looks like a woman with too many eyes and a strange sense of time and a sharp knife. “Anything” is the deep, dark pit of twilight sedation, plagued by the knowledge that somewhere close by, an oracle is drilling bolts into his skull. Sealing the hole—which he’s lately thinking is more metaphysical than metaphorical—once and for all.
Being connected so deeply to someone, he’s starting to think, is just a very drawn-out way of going insane.
It’s not that he trusts Jheselbraum. He doesn’t think there’s much of him left that’s capable of trust; rather, it’s the fact he doesn’t entirely trust her that made him say yes to this insane plan. He’d been on the edge of delirium at her doorstep, fighting the waves of bone-deep exhaustion that threatened to drag him into unconsciousness at any second, and she’d known, somehow, that he was running from Bill. You get to a point, out in the multiverse, where shared hatred matters more than camaraderie.
It could kill him, sure. Sometimes he wishes the many things that could’ve killed him had succeeded. Dark as oblivion, his thoughts, these days.
All of this, and more, runs through his head in that first hour of consciousness after the procedure. Pain has a way of setting in deep beyond the bone, seeming to cut you through and still keep going, dragging you behind it. He knows this well: five years past exile from his home dimension and Ford still feels the residual ache between his metacarpals where the nails went in. This rivals that by a long shot.
He’s dimly aware of the Oracle’s occasional presence, coming in and out, adjusting dials on some otherwordly readout, and then gradually the pain starts to clear, eased by whatever’s pumping through the respirator attached to his face. Maybe he ought to ask what’s up with that, but he’s too exhausted by the ordeal, in a way that transcends sleepiness. That, he’s used to. After days without sleep it’s like you’re drifting in fatigue so big it swallows up the world.
For years, he’s lived in that interstice, his life like one long panic-filled dream. All at once, with the pain no longer gnawing at him, he’s starting to understand that this part of his life may be over. He might fall asleep, and fear only the night, rather than the fact that Bill might let him wake on the ledge of a building or with a gun to some alien child’s head, the cops at the door. (That had been hell. Or maybe he’d only dreamt it.)
He doesn’t want to sleep yet. Maybe habit. Maybe some part of him fears the lucidity that will follow, the state of his mind well-rested, after so long without it. But the drugs are impossible to argue with; at a certain point reality flips off like a lightswitch, and he sleeps dark and dreamless and untouched by time in a way usually reserved for death.
*
Losing Bill—
Rephrase; he lost Bill a long time ago. Bill lost himself to Ford. Or his idea of Bill was lost, came out in the wash. Or Bill was never something he really had, the way he wanted to have him. Bill lost his luster. Ford lost everything. His sense of the world, his place in it, himself. Losing not Bill, but the chance to be the person Bill made him feel like he could be. He’s not losing Bill, he’s losing the wide-open door through which he used to love seeing Bill come and go as he pleased. Not losing Bill, but the last parasitic vestige of a world where Bill matters to him. If anything it’s Bill who’s lost Ford. Lost access to Ford, lost a way of asserting control over him, of making him afraid—
It’s not that he ever hoped things would be better. It’s not that he even wants them to be. Bill is dead to him, has been since his betrayal. It’s that sometimes you can be so horribly lonely that someone wanting to be close enough to hurt you feels like the better option. And sometimes when you burn the bridge and maybe the land beyond it, once you finally have the fuel, and you know for a fact and they know for a fact that it’s done—there is a moment where you stand across from the smoldering landscape you left behind and the last little bit of you that remembers being in love screams across the gap. It was there and now it’s gone. Gone, burnt, done with, no longer something you can look over your shoulder and almost see.
Anyway—losing Bill (let’s call it shorthand and leave it at that)—in this moment, with his head welded shut and ringing with an emptiness as alien as any intruder—illogically, nonsensically, losing Bill feels an awful, terrible lot like losing Stanley.
They never had what Ford would call the more fantastical type of “twin telepathy.” To outsiders, it probably looked it at times, with how quick Ford was at reading Stan and vice versa (helped, probably, by the fact they never seemed to click with anyone else but each other). When Pa threw Stanley out, Ford half-expected it to kick in, like a long life of proximity had been hiding the fact that it went a little beyond the explainable. He’d maybe even hoped for it, he can admit that now. He’d felt their once-shared bedroom was dead as a crypt without Stan there to fill the space, and as the summer went on without so much as a call or a distant sighting of his brother, let alone some astral connection making itself known, Ford started to get the hysterical sense that he was a little dead, too. As far as his life went, Stanley had dropped off the face of the earth. If he didn’t look at the photos—and by the middle of the summer he couldn’t bear to, and by the end, Ma couldn’t either, because some time right before Ford left, they disappeared—Ford could almost fool himself into believing Stanley had been some vivid hallucination his mind had cooked up to cope with the isolation.
See, because people talked, but they never talked to him. Ma’s phone was off the hook when she wasn’t working, avoiding the gossip, the gentle probing from her friends who’d heard Stanley had “took off.” And nobody would look at Ford whenever friends of his parents did come around, like doing so would invoke the Stanley Problem, and by the time Ford left for Backupsmore he almost wondered if whether he would also cease to exist. If, to the microcosm of Glass Shard Beach, he would functionally stop being real. If his parents would pack him away into an unmarked attic box, solemn as the grave, and forget him, too.
If maybe he hoped they would.
He didn’t disappear. He didn’t, and he didn’t, and he didn’t. He collapsed in on himself, became more dense and volatile. Anytime he wasn’t with someone, anytime there wasn’t a Fiddleford or a Bill to brace himself against, it was like he could walk into a room and find himself already there. He was, he is, so horribly aware of his solitary state that for the first time in five years on the run, he cries.
Stanford Pines. One of one.
It’s not voluntary, just reflex: his mind reaches out desperately to that corner of itself where Bill would always land, or where Ford could, with a little concentration, accelerate their connection if he was performing a summoning. With practice, he used to be able to skip straight past dreaming into conference with Bill as he fell asleep. It’s not unlike meditation, or the kind of falsely-casual focus a lucid dreamer or astral projector undertakes.
And he would prod at the same edges of awareness after leaving home, searching for Stanley in the last moments of twilight consciousness before sleep. Even if he’d put Stan entirely from his mind throughout the day, even if he’d been angry: whatever base code runs behind his conscious awareness still casts itself out across the void, like the green flash that charges across the water right before the sun is fully gone.
No matter how dark he tries to make it in his mind, light insists on shining. He hoped to disappear from memory, and he didn’t. Hoped Bill would just stop messing around and kill him already, or that something else would—and still, he picked himself up the next morning and kept evading death, by choice.
Whatever’s in him, whatever drive, whatever potential—that was there before Bill, and will be there after. Some part of him, one that sounds an awful lot like Stanley, knows this deep down.
God, he thinks, someplace beyond thinking, the beginning of a thought he’s been running too fast to have to think for five years. His tears are dry, cold on the pillow under his cheek; the reality of a lifetime, however much longer his lasts, with his mind the only one inside his skull is finally dawning on him. He’s alone. He’ll stay alone. He’ll be all right alone, he thinks, even though his soul aches with the wrongness of it. He’ll keep running, after this brief reprieve, because Bill certainly won’t take this well, but if he must run from the rest of the universe, and if he must do it alone, he can at least try to stop running from himself. He’s all he’s got now.
So he lets himself think the thought. Five words he hasn’t uttered except in whispers to nighttime ceilings, or under his breath in crowded rooms: god, I miss my brother.