Chapters:

Chapter One

SPLIT

ADVANCED WARNING: THIS STORY CONTAINS SLIGHTLY-ODD SEX SCENES AND VIOLENCE. SO IF YOU DON’T FANCY READING THAT, STOP NOW.

NOTHING TOO WEIRD. AT LEAST NOT FOR THE FIRST CHAPTER.

CHAPTER ONE

        Across the bank of a clear cut lake I drag my half-dead corpse in tow. The sand and rocks are digging into the back of his suit. Small things chirp in the distance with the lull of the countryside air drowning in now. The sedan is still in ignition, I expect this to be quick. I drag myself to the chosen spot and move in a circle around. My trekking coat feels bulky and there’s a twitch in my left hand where my thumb used to be. It’s a pale afternoon and the lake is clear as glass. I peer into the waters to catch my reflection sneering back at me. A coiled purple bruise of a face, adorned with reddened lip and rugged beard.

        Jacob begins to squirm in agony as he finally comes to his dazed senses. The bludgeon pulp of his head is pulsing with squeaks of blood still. He turns his head around and lifts it, a shattered visage half-covered in sand, to stare up at his maker. I peer down at him with the shotgun in the inside of my elbow, letting him look across the barrel and into my eyes. Our eyes. He groans a little under the weight of pain.

        Allowing a few coughs, I lightly nudge him with the tip of my right boot. His face is clean shaven but riddled with insult. Like every look at him is a spit in my own face. My face.

        I hear wildlife in the distance groan against the whispering breeze. Spring has come and the buds covered with frost will be blooming soon. Spring washes away all sins.

        ‘You didn’t think you could get away with it, right?’ I say, ‘theft of the highest order. You break all the laws of nature and yet you still… you still just…’

        My words aren’t flowing out so easily and my throat is raw from shouting. There’s a tiredness too, like stretching a rubber band past its natural state. I am all but gone to the world. With little sleep for weeks I’ve concentrated on delivering him to me again, to bring us face to face.

        He’s groaning to life as he picks himself up by the props of his elbow. The sand is still dripping from his face now and his chest is still heaving from the hell I’ve put him through. A part of me is in pity and pain, another in pleasure. Seeing this nothing return to nothing. Snuffed out of existence. It’s an act of kindness, really.

        ‘Jacob.’

        That’s the only word he manages out before I kick him clean across the face. Half of him splashes into the edge of the water, drenching him in the clarity. You don’t get to use that name.

        ‘You didn’t need to take it from me.’ I begin, ‘You really didn’t.’

        Quicker this time, he pulls himself out of the water and tries to wipe himself off. His suit is torn to shreds and his tie is swaying in front of him from side to side. Like a clock hand ready to tick to the final tock.

        ‘When I brought you into my world I hadn’t the slightest mind for you to have the audacity to steal it away from me. Interesting to think that a pinch of my blood could spawn a demon like you.’

        I scatter this accusation into him without a blink about me.

        ‘You know... though,’ He finally starts, looking from behind his bruises, ‘that you’re wrong.’

        There’s almost a laughter inside my rib cage.

        ‘No. I’m not even wrong or right. I’m objectively clear. There is no dispute for this, no argument. Just this.’ I show him the shotgun. ‘There’s just justice to be dispensed now.’

        He clenches hold of his left arm with whatever’s left of his right.

        ‘After the accident though… can you be sure about this? We both lost too much. We can’t even remember our own faces… can you be sure who you even are?’ He starts.

        ‘Can you?’

        He groans as he takes another step towards me, as if we’re about to shake hands for the first time. Like a stranger out of a memory, he expects an ounce of affection. I return it by smacking him across the face with the tip of the barrel. He falls to his knees and yelps a bit.

        ‘You disgust me... I have had better shits come out of my body.’ I kneel towards him.

        ‘What I’m telling you, Jacob, is that neither of us is sure of who we exactly are. You made me, or I made you,’ he strains his back just to get a good look at me, ‘it doesn’t matter in the end.’

        There’s a second.

‘Oh but it does. You came into my life, I brought you here.’

        ‘And you loved me.’

        There’s a burst of rage in my jugular as I bring the butt of the shotgun against the back of his neck. Making him crash against the waters. I crash it again with a little yelp from my lungs.

        ‘I gave you everything.’ There’s a bubbling sensation in my mouth. ‘Now here you are. Having took everything. Her. The wealth. You scooped up my passport and birth certificate and committed blasphemy. They’re not yours to have, Jacob.’ I bring myself to his level and look him in his sodden eyes, bringing our faces close enough to kiss, ‘they were mine to begin with, and I’m just returning things to their... natural order. I don’t need you. You don’t define who I am.’

        He takes a while to move his tongue around his mouth, picking the shapes of sounds to spit back at me.

        ‘I’m the real Jacob Spiegel. Whoever you think are you. You’re wrong.’

        Does he jest? I don’t even humour him with violence. I stand up again, pace twice away and point the barrel straight at him. He’s still looking at me with those eyes of mine.

        ‘Do you think just by looking like me, by being me, that you can usurp my identity? Well, you’re wrong. I came into this world through a birth canal and you through a test tube-‘

        ‘Even if I did.’ He grits his teeth towards me. ‘I’m a better version of you than you ever could be-’

        I kick him again, an uppercut from my left foot. I’m scarred across the left of my body. Half an arm, same as him. Yet we’re so different now. Two hemispheres. Colliding. And I’m holding the twelve-gauge.

It hurts to hurt him but it puts a smile inside me.

        My eyes are dry from the lids to the pupils. I try blinking some sweat into them, hoping a bit of moisture will help me see clearer. But I still see him clearer than anything else. Maybe more than anything else in my entire life. This perversion of me, this absolute opposite.

We held hands once. Took a journey across the spine of our memories. I remember sitting in front of a campfire with a beer in my good hand and a laughter at one of his, or should that be our, anecdotes. He was a bit better at telling them than I was, I’ll give him that. But I lived through what he was telling. I’m more than sure of it.

        ‘You would’ve sandpapered off my birth mark if it gave you the false crown you have on your head.’ He start to regain his posture, standing on his two feet.

        Twelve months ago I was a billionaire surfing the Caribbean. My girl was waiting for me. My board meetings were drying up into me nodding with a smile. Life was genuinely good. Out of whim and boredom I wandered into some lab, brought some blood out of my veins and in a little while he wandered out of it. It was all in fashion really.

He came out. Dressed in a suit. It was odd at first, glimpsing at myself. There’s a weird sensation some of us wonder when staring into a mirror, watching all movements with a keen obsessive eye. My dad caught me watching my reflection when I was very young, watching if any little movement might be the tiniest bit different. If, when I wasn’t looking, he was looking. That’s how it was, the introduction. An unnerving bout of laughter and awkward movements.

        There was some psychological evaluation. Some stories from both of us. But after a few days at a nice retreat it was clear he was me multiplied. For so often, cloning was the fodder of awful pulp fiction or the dreams of mad scientists. Now, though, it’s a preserve of the rich and wealthy. Some day they found out how to double us instantly. Some day they lifted all those ‘law’ things and let the mad science finally flow out. Billionaires appeared on magazines, arm and arm with their clones. There’s no name for them. It’s technically human cloning but we don’t have any names. It saved lives really; organ transplants, blood transfusions and a chance to finally talk with yourself and unlock the stuff that you carelessly forgot.

        By now though, pointing this weapon at this piece of myself, I can’t help but feel robbed of my real life.

        ‘I didn’t do it out of malice, Jacob. You know why exactly why I did it. I believe I am all that Jacob Spiegel was. After that accident, the original ceased to exist. Do you understand? I’m all that remains.’ He coughs out.

        He thinks me the pale imitation?

        ‘I am Jacob Spiegel.’ I say.

        ‘Have you become one of those people who thinks he has to tell himself who he is in order to be sure of himself? I’m telling you now,’ he lunges slightly toward me and I bring the end of the shotgun level with his head, ‘clone or not, you are the one who’s hardly human.’

        We stare at each other for what seems a longer time. The aches in the small of my back seem deeper now. I’m looking at him, covered with a strange sensation that he might be right. That question bubbles up the top of my mind, like the skin on a soup. I am Jacob Spiegel. I am Jacob Spiegel.

        I lower the shotgun a little before sipping in the cold air, shaking ever so slightly.

        Cold memories rain inside my mind. Trickle across the surface and pool down at the bottom of my skull. It was this cold back in the first few weeks. See, it was odd, unveiling him. It was odd every day looking at him. I put him up in the guest bedroom but every morning was still odd, seeing a piece of myself walk about the house and laugh at Mycah’s jokes just like he was me. You ever cringe at hearing yourself aloud? I’m one of those odd people who kinda likes it. Little sounds. I think I do the vowels very well, it’s the consonants that don’t sound sexy coming out of my mouth.

        Those first few weeks of discovering this version of myself were some of the greatest of my life, truthfully. It’s probably why I cloned myself. The opportunity to shake my own hand and look myself in the eye, to judge myself from the exterior. Like admiring an artwork from a whole other perspective. Everyone else’s perspective.

Never did I realize that a version of myself could walk so far from the truth. I’m not sure exactly what the truth is anymore, or who I was to begin with, but I know that the man standing in front of me is holding my identity ransom. Perhaps a few pieces of shrapnel in his chest might answer the burning question of the self in both our heads.

        We took a trip to a restaurant in our first week. Mycah, a few friends, myself and myself. Bit of a public outing, admittedly, and some photographers had followed us in. Some of the couples from the other tables kept looking at us weirdly as we tapped each other on the shoulder and stared for a few seconds into each other’s eyes. It’s one of life’s greatest pleasures, really. But it has a structure to it, let me lay it down. Mycah started discussing free-range chicken and I cracked wise about battery hens. Laughter all round, vague morbid observation to follow it up. Chuckles again all around the table and, as the chats split, I looked up from my food to hold a wine glass in my hand. There were a few seconds, you see, as I stared into my own eyes. It wouldn’t have been sweet without the first act, of public display, but here, held in the middle of it all, peering deep into the canyons of my own eyes. There were a few seconds, a few vague seconds, in which you could read every thought on that face. It happens to us sometime when we discover a connection with someone. Caught in the middle of a cacophony of conversation, fishing for something special in one another’s faces.

        That’s what I found. An honest and frank presentation of myself. All my traits, flaws, memories, ticks, tantrums and little likes and hates. At first there was nothing discernible between us. A public Q&A at a big tech conference, moderated by some tabloid son of a bitch, attempted to pull us apart like pork but couldn’t find anything save a few scraps of humour. We were identical. I was told that it was pretty much like growing an identical twin brother except he was exactly like you.

        It was special though, at first. It took a while for the strains to appear, the stretch marks finally showing their reddened faces. Between the laughter and the nostalgia trips, there was those few brief seconds. That sensation of looking into someone else and seeing their own thoughts cascading down their face in a glory of honesty. Sometimes that happens and it scares you. Frightens you. I was kept awake for a few nights after seeing a flicker of murder in my own face.

        We would stay up until the stupid hours counting the memories we could finish from each other. The alcohol would flow and so would the tears. It was so nice to have someone not just finish my sentences but start them to begin with. To see my own thoughts dance before me, to bask in myself. I won’t be pretentious about it, it was pure indulgence for a good while. Yes, the darkness settled in soon. Yes, we explored the forbidden corners of this connection but that’s not really relevant. Soon though, Mycah and I stopped sharing those honest looks. We met at some cocktail party half a decade ago but now, five years hence, we had slowly slid into silence. All thanks to Jacob.

        See they never told me about the practical considerations. Social security numbers, life insurance, nutritional stuff, or even clothes. See it was nice sharing a wardrobe at first, seeing exactly how I’d look to people with what I had on. It was like playing dress-up with a mannequin of myself. A few weeks into the relationship, though, I found he’d just take a quarter of my wardrobe to himself. Picked out his own little shirts and ties, all of which I thought didn’t suit me in the slightest. But they suited him. They never told me to think of him as a separate human being. The pamphlet they gave me was so vague with the psychological side of all this. Perhaps I should blame them for giving me him; if they’d just mixed the mixture a little bit more, just one more shake of a half-empty vial, this version of myself wouldn’t be put on this bloody path.

         ‘She loved me more than she could ever possibly love you.’ He acts with a belief in his words, as if that will save him now.

        I’m woken up by them at the very least. Woken up from my dazed recollection, peering away from my scrapbook of the soul and settling back in my own two boots. Looking dead in the eyes at this part of myself. I brought him into the world without all the pain of birth, which I’m certain isn’t as traumatic as they say it is. Yet here he is, kicking and screaming against my fate. Even now, spitting in my face. Spitting into my heart and letting the acid rest in my gut, hoping I’ll agree and walk away.

        ‘She wasn’t yours to love in the first place.’ I say.

        ‘She wasn’t anyone’s, Jacob. Do you not see that?’ He says back.

        ‘You don’t understand though. Everything you loved in her, you saw in me. All of her little jokes and tricks. Even the way she dresses and looks at you across the table, she got that from me.’

        ‘We’ve been through this, Jacob,’ he raises his eyes towards the dead clouds above, ‘I’m not in love with you.’

        ‘I’d hazard a guess that you’re still infatuated. That doggish look in your eyes.’ I smirk. ‘I know it. I’ve seen that so many times before and you know I’m right. You only love her because she acts like me.’

        ‘She has some of you, I’ll take that... but I’m the one she’s fallen for.’

        ‘This is all getting terribly confusing.’ The weight of the gun is pulling on my arms now.

        He considers speaking for a moment. A flicker of thought. I’m trying to read his face but without the first act, without that structure, it’s hard to locate the waterfall of cognition across his face. Running in streams. Little memories playing out, melding with the tears and stains of sweat blood that are peppered across his face. It’s beautiful really. Honestly. Looking at all of my handiwork.

        ‘I was better for her, and that’s what you don’t understand, you only really wanted her after I took her from you.’

        ‘You just said that there was nothing to take in the first place.’ I almost guffaw. ‘She’s not

your object to have and abuse.’

        ‘Well neither am I!’ He finally shouts.

        Legally speaking? People aren’t quite sure. Probably not the best thing to do, introduce cloning with such ambiguous legality. In all technicality, Jacob and Jacob are the same person. We have the same blood. We wear the same clothes. We like the same pumpkin spice coffee. We’re both trying to get rid of gluten in our diet. I was halfway through Plato’s Republic when I brought him into the world. He picked up where I left my bookmark. Every little memory of mine belongs to him as much as it does me, so long as he kept to the model of myself. So long as he knew his place. He was there to mimic, not to usurp.

When he touched my Mycah for the first time, it was nice. I was in the room with a glass of champagne and a heavy mental burden. I just watched it and took it in. Ate it up like a hearty supper. The moon burning white alongside the sprinkling of stars, a deep blue dark right out of a fairytale. A whole gift of the universe seen through the glass-panelled walls.

See, yes, it did get weird. Yes, it did get really odd mixing sex into the relationship. But I was curious. And I always satisfy my curiosity.

A small lamp in the corner of the room giving the only little spark into the twilight bedroom. Myself, hunched low in the plush white armchair in my ruined suit, sipping some mid-range champagne and watching myself make love to her. Hearing those sounds and seeing those movements, and finally the look on my own face towards the glorious ending. It was magical, really, watching it all play out from a different point of view.

Watching myself on top of her. Watching those moves that I’d choreographed, that I held as a blueprint in my mind, there was a magic to it all. Beyond arousal. As if there was a switch deep inside reality that allowed me to finally zoom out and take in the wonderful scale of it all. Myself with heavy breaths, mingling mouths with this treasure of a human being beneath the linen sheets. Huddled together under light-years of stars, rocks and nothingness. A spec within a spec nested within the Milky Way, with the whole of the universe wobbling in tow with our movements.

        The second time was when I joined in. It was more than before, with a whole new emotional spice added to the equation. There was a web of three heartbeats, knitted from similar cloth, all soaking in the same experience. Having the same senses pulsate. The same moments explode in our chests. I looked into my own eyes and there was a smile beyond anything I’d ever seen, as if diving into a mirror of pure lust. Except then, for the first time, I noticed something. As I moved myself to touch Mycah once more, he came towards her and did something new. A variation on something I had. All in the hips. As if he was building upon my patents to make something for himself.

And she screamed with pleasure.

One of those notes of hers, a little squeak in-between it all, when her eyes lit up like New Year’s Eve, it spoke to me. Reminded me of one of my purest thoughts. Looking into those eyes as we shyly kissed on a Boston dock. I caught that look again, in which connection became concrete, and I saw it from the third-person. Gazed upon this self-portrait, painted by my hand. Now witnessing it lurch out of the frame and grab a brush. Brushing paint across… me.

Watched as a version of myself took her from me.

        With her face in my mind’s eye I take a step towards the devil of my dreams. The trigger is still frost underneath my fingers and with the cold white sky I aim to paint this place red. He takes a few steps back, both of us now knee deep in the water. I’m still stirred with the thoughts of Mycah and sex and the tang of sweat that I once tasted in that bedroom so long ago.

But it’s calming really, all of it. The smooth pebbles and the chunks of forest throughout. A landscape of hills and washed out colours. A whole rhythm of nature playing out against this ending.

        ‘Do you really think killing me will fix everything?’ He asks.

        ‘Of course. I’ll slot back into my life. Take her back. Get back to business. Everything will be fine when I get home.’

        ‘But we’re different now. We both ruptured after that crash and, really, look at you. You’re hardly similar to how I look.’

        He was right on that. His face was a bit more pristine than mine following the crash. A few bouts of plastic surgery couldn’t change the giant lump taken out of mine, and the hunk of flesh off my left arm that also left me with half a hand. Like God himself had reached down to peel off my birth mark and leave me alone. Jacob lost his whole hand in the incident and that’s where all this began. Out of blind arrogance. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid not to put a safety measure in place. A contingency plan in case something like this happened. It was the only way to tell us apart, the birth mark on my left wrist. The accident tore into us, dipped its teeth into our souls and ripped us into uncertainty. We woke up with both our left arms in tatters, and looking at each other as if like a mirror. Waiting for that moment when the other changed his movement and ran into Jacob Spiegel’s life to take it for their own.

        ‘Besides Jacob, it’s not like you’ll do it anyway.’ He smiles lightly.

        ‘What are you talking about?’ I lower the shotgun.

        ‘We both know that you love me too much to let me go. Whether you think of me as a brother or a child or as yourself, you could never do harm to your own flesh.’

        There’s hummingbirds dancing together in the distant waters. Little couples of beating wings. Against the hell I am to commit.

        ‘Then clearly you don’t know me at all.’ I raise it again, pointed right at his blasphemy of a face.

        He puts his hands in the air and sighs. There’s a quick panic beneath his eyes and I wonder exactly when I’ll pick my moment to deliver him to the other side. We talked a lot, him and me, about consciousness. About how we were identical in every way. They took a picture of my brain and, in theory, he had the exact set of memories and experiences held in that snapshot. After the picture was taken I went and had a bacon sandwich, which he doesn’t remember. Perhaps that’s where we really split. He told me though, just once, that we split all the time, Jacob. And that moment to moment, there’s infinite possibilities as to who we could be. There was some horse shit about quantum physics and intangibility, which I had never thought to read before, but he reckoned that the act of consciousness was remembering one’s self. If our brains truly do process everything on a half-second delay then we’re all living in the past. Only through memory are we truly ourselves.

        Wasn’t a fan of hearing myself be all pseudo-intellectual.

        ‘I think it’s time, Jacob. You’ve said enough. I’ve thought about this enough.’ I’m almost solemn.

        ‘I don’t think you or I ever had it in us. I know you’ve changed and your life went weird, but you just have to accept the fact that you’re not who you say you are. I’m comfortable with that fact. You just have... no right to my life. If you go now, I can furnish a good thing for you.’ Is he trying to negotiate?

        My life?’ I look up from the ground and into him, ‘you fucking liar. Look at you, wanting to grin even now right at the end! My life was not yours to have. It was mine and now I’m taking it back! What would you have me do, roam the woods and find some normal life? No. I’m taking back the money. I’m taking back Mycah. I’m taking back everything.’

        He finally lowers his arms and looks at me as if I’m his child. Even furrowing his brow like I did back in my college days. Huddled over a calculator.

        Across the lake I hear a skylark hark. Into the darker distance beyond there’s a collection of wildlife on the edge of the far side of the lake. Chewing bits of grass on the edge. The pale sky appears a canvas against the destruction I will reckon. I make the life, I take away the life. It’s my right. My property.

        I tighten my grip and finally tease the trigger.

        There’s a noise from his gullet of pure terror. His whole face sparks up with a real rush of colour. A moment ticks and then another before he clues in to it all. He’s going to die. The anger flows again and I recount our times. Him and Mycah struggling with pleasure. Holding his hand in the middle of an English field, bawling my eyes out at something. Laughing at a joke of his. Shaking his hand for the first time. A conversation between friends. A joke from myself and then, as the sea of talk parted, the final lingering look of honesty we shared. Peering deep in. Another flash of childhood. Holding a kite. Had he been inside me the whole time? That look again. Piercing into me. Clawing deep. Inwards. And those many nights when it was just us, the brandy, and the forbidden things we did together.

        ‘I don’t believe you can do this, Jacob. This is beyond even you and I.’ He moves his shaking hands to me. ‘This is murder.’

        ‘No. No.’ I hover the barrel at his chest, holding against the lump in my throat and the rocking mental chorus in my head. ‘Legally, this is suicide.’

        His body goes limp almost instantly. There’s a bloom of red out of his rib cage, a flurry of rose petals into the breeze. The sound of the blast hits my eyes and the recoil of the gun bashes my elbow straight into my face. A shallow pain hits me instantly but there’s a numbness to it all. I breathe it all in with difficult, like there’s a few ingots now taped to my chest. Shock waves in. A beating thump. Drums running between my heads. A searing white noise clouding my ears.

I drop the shotgun into the waters and almost heave up my insides. Struggling still, I close my sight and hear my eyeballs pulsate inside my skull. They’re about to pop out from the heck of it. My mouth goes dry as I look upon my creation. A skin of ripples disturbs the lake. The disturbed wildlife goes in all direction, the birds rushing from the trees and the deer on the far side now running for their lives.

        I don’t notice the shaking so much but it’s uncontrollable. Holding my right hand across my face, I heave away the burning sensation underneath my skin. Taking steps towards him, I look upon the death I’ve brought. There’s a pang of some kind of unfamiliar emotion deep in me but I take no notice.

        Putting my feet square in front of him, I look upon my works. His eyes are still wide but the great tragedy of the bullet blast covers all of him in blood. There’s a whole host of holes in him, yet his face is untouched. Preserved, even. Completely untouched from my disaster. There’s a raucous of death in my ears and a scream bounding inside my lungs.

        I watch my own reflection, covered in ribbons of bruises, wobble inches above his face, my face, as if I were a ghostly head on his bloodied body. My eyes do not want to turn away as I look deeper into this work of art. Watching for his lips to twist different or for his eyes to twitch. But he just lays there. Frozen. There’s finally a wetness in my eyes as the pale sky croaks above me.

        My ankles ache and the swelling all across my body is giving me little shivers. Yet here I am, transfixed by the sight of myself. My own face superimposed on top of itself. A vision of perfection and another of perversion. I don’t know which is which.

Breath finally catches up to me by the time the cloud of blood from his chest finally settles, and I notice a red addition. It takes a while for the numbness to fade and finally realize it. The wide-eyed horror of it all hits me a few seconds later. I’ll be in a fit of dread a few minutes from this, holding my knees on the edge of nothing.

There’s droplets of blood hitting the surface of the water, puncturing it and joining in the cloud of Jacob’s.

        I wonder where it’s coming from for a second, before taking my right hand to my face and feeling a rush of moisture beneath my nose. I look at my reflection again and notice a rapturous nosebleed running full force across my lips and dripping in cloves on to the waters below. I’m frozen in watching the droplets run out, with the whole thought of it all finally crashing into me like a tsunami.

Goodbye Jacob.