(Note: This was originally a songfic to OK Go's "Here It Goes Again", but as songfics are against the TOS, I removed the lyrics.
(Also, this is Senioritis-verse, which means that anything stated in Senioritis is still fact. To summarize: Ashley is Muraki and the teenager reads minds.
(And what the frick happened to my equals sign?)
When he left for college at sixteen, he never imagined that his mother's prophecies of falling by the wayside would ever come true. Really; sure, there had been that encounter with the potassium in high school, but that was just a cruel prank. He believed what his father said instead, that he was destined for great things. His father was a good man, but he doesn't believe that his list of "great things" would ever include homosexuality. Especially not the kinky sort.
Well, if you call this kinky. In retrospect, you could call it narcissism taken to its extreme, "twincest", voyeurism, or just sodomy. Pick any one you like. So by normal-people standards, fairly kinky; well, compared to missonary-position, man-on-top-woman-on-bottom sex, it's pretty kinky. Of course, all this comes later.
He is twenty-two when Adolph walks into his life. At the time, the only thing attached to the thought of Adolph Pelligrino is "test subject". To be charitable, this is a purely scientific thought, and not of the cruel variety -- Adolph is offered a fairly good sum of money to participate in the trial.
They meet at a Mexican food place. Adolph is sitting alone at his table; he decides that, given a week of no takers for the trial, he should at least ask this guy. Of course, his answer is yes, and the rest is history of a semi-personal sort.
At forty-three, he meets his other half. Which is almost entirely literal; had he a DNA test to perform, doubtless they would turn out nonidentical, but all the physical features are almost eerily the same. And their personalities do the exact same thing. Mirroring, sort of. They're each like the other's missing parts; he's sane, calm, and the other one's... well, he's not. It's like one of Anna's catchphrases: You should hook up. Which they do, although depending on which definition you use, it doesn't happen until they meet in Hawaii, or until right now. Tonight.
When they meet up in Hawaii (it being halfway between their respective locations and thus a good meeting place), he has a lot riding on it. For instance, if this turns out to be an elaborate Mafia hit or something similar, then Adolph, Anna, and Shane are going to be stuck back in Colorado, up the proverbial Shit Creek minus the proverbial paddle. However, since the other man has absolutely nothing riding on it (being that he's been presumed dead for quite some time), he figures, crazily, that whatever he finds in Hawaii won't be all that bad.
Of course, Hawaii goes off like a charm. The weather's fantastic, the hotel not too bad, and no one looks twice at two men checking in to a hotel together. If they said it was just an extended discussion, no one would believe them. Well, look at them -- they have to be identical twins.
They exchange glasses -- same prescription, more or less, except the right lens of the other man's glasses is plain glass. He explains that he wears a prosthetic eye and isn't "in to" monocles. More boring conversation occurs, of the male-bonding and eerie twin-like relationship kind. It's all absolutely thrilling at the time, but later it all just seems to slip his mind. They get on a plane out of Hawaii, to Colorado. But they never get there; they wake up on the floor of an anonymous coffee shop in the middle of a whole lot of nothing.
He has always had a very bad time telling if someone is hitting on him, and a worse time trying to hit on someone back. Nevertheless, looking back, it's scarily easy to tell that from the beginning, the other man -- Ashley -- had a raging crush on him. He had supposed Ashley to simply be a "touchy" person, as Anna puts it. Someone who needs physical touch.
Well, he wasn't. And it's incredibly obvious in retrospect that what was going on was a simple case of... well, don't they usually call it love? Well, sex usually involves love, so let's leave it at that.
Of course, like any relationship of the sex-involving kind, it takes a while to get to that point. The issue of never being able to get away from each other doesn't help a bit. Neither does being in the presence of a smartass teenage boy who seems to be able to read both of their minds. It just makes the situation worse.
So when it finally happens, it's like the first drops of rain from a dark and cloudy sky. Perfectly inevitable, and everyone knows it's coming, just not when. And looking back, it's perfectly possible to see all the signs that predicted its happening.
Once it does happen, it's certainly a... unique experience. Because of what he is, and who they are, it's like some fantasy from the imaginings of a deranged pervert. Because everything is reflected back and forth between the two of them. You'd expect the reflections to die out, but all they do is get stronger.
And while words are Harry's craft, because of the curious things the coffeeshop is and does, the memories are infused with an artful arrangement of metaphors. As if they're prepared to be recorded, posing for their closeups before the scripts are written.
Going back over the memories before, it seems like the air is electrically charged, throughout the building. Because the two of them are always together, with never a chance to be apart and cool off. And because, also, they're all working on that novel together. God curse its name, he thinks poetically, because the novel might be half the reason everything goes so desperately wrong.
But the novel is the only chronicle they really have, and it will someday be their ticket away from here, and so that's where the memories are charged, and where the electricity goes to earth. It has to pass through them first, yes, but the typewriter is where the electricity makes its mark on the world. I was here, it says. I'm still here. Look around.
It's all got to come to an end eventually, and so it does. But because it is recorded -- and branded on three memories -- it could be said that it will never end, that the experience will continue forever, in an echo chamber of memory. Harry, the more poetic one of the four, would say that it echoes, also, in the chambers of the heart.
But he and Ashley are the doctors, and they know that the only thing that echoes in the chambers of the heart is the sound of blood being pumped out and rushing in. The endless sounds; that's all the heart hears until it stops. And where does memory go? Because certainly sounds are not trapped inside the skull. Perhaps it's somewhere outside everything. Perhaps the coffeeshop is the storehouse of memory. It really could be anything.
When he was sixteen, he went to college, with his mother's promises of failure and his father's promises of success ringing in the air. He supposes that that should have guaranteed a mediocre ending, but of course it didn't. Mostly, one could say he's been generally successful, although he has had his moments of failure. It all depends on the given value of "success".
One could say that his entire life has been a string of successes, one following another. Or you could say they're all failures to be normal. Or about half of each. Life is whatever you think it is, he believes, and he thinks it's pretty good.