Dominance (36 page)

But the media's narrative was different. In fact it was an outright lie.

A constellation of blood undid him. The way her blood streaked and slashed, how it had dried in odd places near the eighteen-foot-high ceiling of the couple's campus mansion. Places where no blood should have been. There was a question about her fall, the plausibility of the killing wounds. The fatal crack in her skull was inconsistent with the shape of the steps. Before this discovery, my brother was merely a person of interest; now he became the prime suspect. Piers Morgan interviewed a colleague who said that Henry had never shown any emotion about Laura's death, Anderson Cooper ominously suggested that Henry had been a member of a secret society (“Yes,” I remember shouting at my television screen, “yes, there, focus on
that
!”), and my brother became a villain almost overnight. Ivy League educated, too handsome, too elusive—he embodied everything the rest of us distrusted.

And yet there was no forensic evidence to link Henry to the murder. No physical clues. No sign of a struggle, no bloody clothes, and of course no murder weapon. (On
60 Minutes
I watched blue-jacketed, goggled investigators test objects in a lab: a fire poker, a pool cue, the claw of one of our father's old hammers that was found in the basement of the murder house. But in the end nothing fit, that scribble-like fissure in Laura's skull being too wide or too narrow, and the missing weapon became Henry's greatest coup.) There was even an eyewitness from the college who saw Laura with
another man
on the evening she was murdered. A different man.

Henry remained free. He staged a press conference, stood before a makeshift podium, our father and stepmother flanking him. He pleaded with the media to leave him alone so that he could get back to his students. My father spoke, choking back tears, his beefy hand clenched into a fist. He pointed at his son, his favorite son, and said, “Henry Malcolm loved Laura, and she loved him. Why would he want to ruin something so perfect?”—and at that he lifted the photo of them, the famous one, the stunning shot of the couple standing on a cliff overlooking the sea on their honeymoon, Laura's sunglasses pushed up into unruly hair, freckles sprayed across her bare and peeling shoulders, Henry smiling wickedly, the Mediterranean black as glass behind them.

We waited, then, for the other shoe to drop. For Henry to be charged with the murder of his wife, for the puzzle of the evidence to reveal something new, or for the shadowy man with whom she had been seen on her last day to come forward.

Instead, something else happened.

My brother disappeared.

I am often asked if I felt anything. If I could somehow have seen my brother in my mind, could have used the sixth sense that twins sometimes have to find Henry out in the ether during the time he was missing. I always lie, say that I felt a current of pain, that at night a cold sweat overtook me and I awoke saying his name. But really I felt nothing. I never have. Henry and I are absolutely identical on the outside. Inside, we might as well be strangers.

He was gone for seven days—what the media began to call his “lost week.” During those endless days, two schools of thought emerged. There were those who believed Henry had slipped away to elude his inevitable arrest. During the investigation he had remained a fixture at the grieving college, even though his course load had been lightened. And it was at Oldham that he disappeared. Henry was seen walking across campus one moment by a literature professor and then, just like that, he vanished into thin air.

There were also those few allies of my brother, most of them pernicious academics who appeared shocked and disheveled on MSNBC asking, “Where are the forensics? If Professor Malcolm is a murderer, where is the evidence to prove it?”

The search for Henry Malcolm began. It was unlike anything New
York State had ever seen. An unmarked car sat outside my front door that week; they thought I had harbored him, I suppose. But I had only seen Henry a few times since Laura died. In the media I was the Identical Twin, the brother who was a constant in Henry's life, but the reality was that I didn't care about Henry. I couldn't. He had done too much, burned too many bridges, for me to come to his defense now. If I thought of him I thought of poor, sweet Laura, who didn't deserve any of this, who once told me she loved Henry despite his problems, and when I pushed her, asking, “Laura, what problems? What do you—” she slipped away into a crowded party.

I grieved for her, not Henry. Henry would come out of this unscathed. He always did.

*   *   *

A hiker found him four miles from campus. He was lashed to an oak tree, drenched in his own blood, beaten and bruised. Henry was alive, barely, and mumbling incoherently when they brought him back to St. Mark's Hospital in Oldham Town.

Police urged him to tell them what happened, but he gave them nothing. He was in shock, and for a month he has remained in the trauma ward, silently recovering, unable to remember—or, perhaps,
unwilling
to remember—what happened to him in those woods.

When he finally gave his statement, he talked about being taken to a cabin. Being held in a drab, empty room with only a stained mattress and a slot for food. He spoke of a solitary man holding him prisoner. Did he see this man's face? No, he did not. Did he hear a voice? No. Henry had been drugged; toxicology proved this. He had been out of it. Nearly comatose. The only thing that woke him was the man torturing him, the hot prick of a knife digging into his arms, his chest. The copper smell of welling blood.

That was all. Everything else was lost in the fog.

Only one thing about Henry's ordeal was indisputable: his wounds were real. On NBC, he lifted his shirt for Brian Williams to see the twisted, serrated mouth of a gash running from his clavicle to his ribs. His face was bruise-black, his arms dotted with cigarette burns, his ankles and wrists red as flame where he had writhed against the ropes.
Even his eyes were different, somehow not-Henry: dimmed, hollow, lacking their previous fury.

Just like that, my brother went from suspect to victim. The suggestion of foul play, the missing murder weapon, the faceless man Laura was seen with on her last day—all of it suggested something too horrible to contemplate. The headlines changed, morphed almost overnight: IS THERE A KILLER LOOSE AT OLDHAM COLLEGE?

Henry Malcolm, it seemed, had been exonerated.

The day after the phone message from the detective, I drive the forty miles to Oldham Town and sit outside my brother's estate. I keep my car idling and watch the morbid tourists who have come here on Henry's homecoming day—a few students, a townie or two dressed in rumpled orange slickers, passersby who stare at the windows for any sign of the man. Since he was cleared, Henry hasn't said anything new about the lost week or the man in the cabin, nor will he; I know this as well as I know my own face in the mirror. He will tease them, play with them, punish them for their suspicion of him after Laura's death. And in the end he will reveal something, something only he knows, and the puzzle will fall wickedly into place.

I've seen it all before.

It's raining, one of those cold, bending squalls that central New York is famous for. My windshield is fogged, and I smear a space away with my palm and stare into the distance, where a photographer stands beside a tree, camera slung around his neck, screwing a kerchief across the lenses of his eyeglasses. Just up the street from me is a long dark sedan, two cops inside craning their necks to see if anyone suspicious is watching from a safe distance. Anyone like me.

I have my notebook with me, as I always do, and I sit in the
cramped front seat making notes. I've been working on the New Book for months now, and it still isn't clear to me. Just fragments, disparate shards, meaningless pieces of a narrative that has thus far escaped me.

To write is like a hit of morphine, and a relaxing feeling settles over me as soon as I hear the pen's nibble against the paper. I write,
Are you a good person, Jonathan Malcolm?

I think about that, turn it over in my mind, finally responding, my hand shaking a little,
I am a good person most of the time.

Is your twin brother a good person?

I look out the windshield again. The onlookers are leaving, ducking into the scrub behind the garden Laura once kept, which is now choked with black snaking weeds.

No,
I write, my hand quavering more, the ink smearing on the soft padding of my palm.
Henry Malcolm is not a good person.

Why do you say that?

His moods.

What do you mean, “his moods”?

I mean

Something catches my attention, and I look up. There is someone at a second-floor window. A man, fuzzy at first and then coming into focus between the slats of rain—Henry. My twin. My heart quickens, my palms begin to sweat, to shake. I watch him, and from this distance it appears that he turns his head toward me. Looks right at me. Impossible. My car is parked too far away for him to see. And yet he appears to be looking in my direction, waiting for me to make up my mind, to explain why I've come to spy on him this morning.

Something moves at my lap, and I look down. I have written:
What happened to her? What happened to Laura?

But when I look back up, search that window for some kind of an answer, Henry has vanished.

I loved her before he did.

Laura was the daughter of my father's publisher. Eighteen years old, shy and quiet, she had come with him on an afternoon visit one spring day before the end of the semester. I was home from Yale, without Henry. I left due to a disciplinary action that never went away, a misunderstanding at an off-campus party, and even though I promised my parents it was just a short-term thing, I never went back.

Henry remained, eroded slowly out of my life, went on to grad school in New Haven and earned a full professorship at Oldham at twenty-six. I wanted to tell them what had really happened at Yale, but they would never believe me. And besides, I liked the absence of him, the way my father looked me in the eye when he spoke, Henry's presence nothing but a muffled voice on the telephone. I slept in his bed, the bottom bunk, his heavy metal posters from high school still adorning the dusty walls. I read his philosophy books—Hume, Locke, and of course Descartes—and purged his closet. I never wanted it to end.

On the afternoon I met Laura, we ate dinner together on a picnic table overlooking the Hudson. It was my father and hers, a mutton-chopped man who smelled of cigar smoke and old paper, and Laura and I, stragglers brought along on a hesitant date. The talk was of
books, specifically my father's next project. Thomas Malcolm had already achieved tenure, had written a bestselling book on Derrida, was always gone off to this campus or that, demanding steep lecture fees that allowed the Malcolm family to travel the world. He was the William H. and Martha Barer Professor of Philosophy at Oldham College, a tiny insulated fortress of a school on the banks of the Hudson near Albany. It had always been our home, Henry and I playing hide-and-seek in the campus buildings, getting lost in the basement of the old administration wing one winter and found shivering, clutching one another beside the dead boiler. And later, as high schoolers, auditing classes in obscure topics at our father's discretion—Literature of Modern Israel, Water and War, the Old Testament. I remember Henry in a class once raising his hand, scrawny Tom Malcolm's son, standing up and challenging the adjunct professor. “And why is it that when LeClaire writes about solipsism in the twentieth century, he fails to mention anything after 1970? What about Stoddard? What about Ellis, for fuck's sake?” And the young professor, mortified, staring at the kid and his black eyes, noticing the aggression that always—always—wafted off Henry, at the way his fists were clenched at his sides as if this academic conversation in the Gray Brick Building were some kind of pitched battle.

It was the only thing Henry and I shared: our love of that college.

At first I was annoyed by Laura, this teenager, this intruder. On the day we met she carried a dog-eared paperback copy of Eco's
Foucault's Pendulum,
a pretentious book, I thought, although it (of course) impressed the hell out of my father. But as the afternoon went on the more I found myself staring at her: at the feminine manner in which she sat, the way she read the book during every spare minute, the way she picked carefully at her food, and how she laughed, her head tossed back, a purple-nailed finger to her lips.

She was at Burnbridge Prep now, bound for Sarah Lawrence in the fall. My father told me this, probably as a way to entice me into going back to Yale; I only nodded and yawned. Her own father was oblivious; there was money in his eyes. When she excused herself after dessert, I followed.

We walked down the little footpath behind our house to the river,
the one Henry and I had worn flat as boys. The river was quick, darting and restless. The wind roiled and buffeted us against one another as we walked. My stepmother had planted rhododendron and holly along the path, and the air was thick and full and sweet. For the longest time we stood together, the fading sun warming our necks, Laura saying nothing, me making frantic notes in the notebook I'd brought along.

“Inspiration hit you or something?” she asked, still not looking at me. Looking down at the river, where a tug slipped lazily out of view.

“No,” I said. “I do this. Take notes. On everything. The river. The trees. You.”

Finally she glanced up. “Like graphomania?”

“It's called different things. Scribomania, graphorrhea. It all refers to the same disease—the obsession to write, to just put words on the page. Always.”

“Disease,” she said. “So you're sick? Is that why you dropped out of Yale?”