Comorbidity
A short story
The twins hadn’t always hated each other. No one comes out of the womb hating his brother. There had been a time, there must have been, back when they were children, surely, when the boys had gotten along. Been friends, even. Loved one another, perhaps.
Like many wars, it was difficult to say how exactly it began, who really fired the first shot. At what exact moment had peace been rendered impossible? Whatever it was, the fact remained that by their eighteenth birthday, the brothers were at war. Paul and Noah were not estranged — that was not the word for it. They were simply enemies.
Paul left home on a motorcycle intending not to return. He went south, made a point to call his mother from a payphone in Kansas City, then Little Rock, then Baton Rouge. Somehow, he never quite made it to New Orleans, as if the city had erected an invisible barrier that warped spacetime so that however much closer Paul got, time took that much longer. He didn’t have specific dreams about the place. It’s not as if he was into jazz or anything like that. It had seemed like a good destination, nothing more, and once it had been chosen Paul could never shake the feeling that being anywhere else meant he had unfinished business.
Noah left home on a football scholarship and promised his mother he’d be home for Christmas. He went west, dropped out…
