You’ve probably seen it on
Evening Entertainment
or read about in
People
. How the Vale Brothers were running an elaborate ruse, pretending to be each other, in preparation for a documentary that never really got off the ground.
After the business with Bobby Parker, we were forced to “admit” our mistaken-identity game and apologize. Turns out, when you’re mired in an explosive international scandal, people ask questions. And there were repercussions: like both of us had to take last year’s final exams all over again, just to prove we didn’t tag-team the first time.
Never mind that reporter who found no birth records for Seth Vale. I mean, you could stand us side by side and see we were twins, you could do genetic testing to prove it scientifically, so what difference does some missing paperwork make?
Yeah, you’ve heard our story, but not everything you read on BuzzFeed is true, except maybe a few of the nutty trolls speculating in the comments section: “prolly got a Dyad Institute cloning lab in their basement, yo” or “this some syfy shiznit gowin on here.” That dude with the Caillou avatar wasn’t too far off the mark, after all.
You can fool your public, but you can’t pull one over on the woman who vividly recalls giving birth to just one kid. Madeline Belmont-Vale had to learn our secret after the fact, and it was a delicate procedure, much like snipping the right colored wires in the right order to avoid detonation.
Mom’s Big Surprise went down sooner than we hoped. She got tipped off to the Pastime Theater crisis and actually showed up amid all the cop cars and cordoning tape. Seated in the back of an ambulance, I heard the
clack clack
of her high heels a few seconds before she rounded the corner and grabbed both sides of my face, demanding to know if I was okay, and what happened to my hand, and why was I wearing stage makeup over a black eye
?
“Madeline?” Dad said, Virgin standing next to him. Oops.
Congratulations, Maddy, it’s twins!
Mom looked back at me, then yanked her hands away. She got a little non-verbal for a few seconds—mostly
wha
noises. Then she pressed her fingers to her forehead, found her cool, and said to my Dad, “Kasper, what did you do?”
Because this kind of M.C. Escher upside-down logic? The only man who could make a working beta test of something like this was my father. Later, he sat her down and laid out the equations that got us into this mess. Or what he could figure, at least, because this universe’s Kasper Vale had not yet actually cracked the time-travel code. Took about a dozen hours of talking to make her believe.
I don’t want to pretend Mom was easily convinced, but she’s a woman who needs to compartmentalize things in her life. Something like an extra, identical son? She can’t let that kind of puzzle go unsolved for too long.
Ultimately, after she thought she understood enough of what happened, Mom gave Dad an ultimatum: erase every file and burn every notebook with the slightest scribble about the Pastime Project. It was either that or divorce. Dad had already dealt with the nasty repercussions of time-space tinkering, and he knew it wasn’t nearly as bad as Mom could make his life. He moped and stalled for a while, and I knew his agony, having to ditch your dream for the reality of other people.
But it’s like giving up sugary soda or social media. You feel alive and full of promise again soon enough. You feel cut loose from your own tight knots. Within a week he was plotting other, equally secretive projects. Some people you can nudge in the right direction, but you can’t change them.
We had a nice backyard campfire, all four of us Vales, tossing notebooks to the flames. Burning every bridge that might’ve one day led me astray, into another universe again.
S
KIP AHEAD
to six months after that day, the longest day.
The hoopla eased off long enough that our town could appreciate something else besides the salacious details of the Bobby Parker tragedy for five minutes.
So the local state university branch did a screening of an award-winning film called
Shelter,
directed by a homegrown ingénue who spent close to a year documenting the trials and triumphs of a few women living at a local halfway house. Raw and moving, the film won spots at more than a dozen festivals around the country and earned its director a statewide grant.
Not to mention the Young Auteurs award at Silver Screen Studios. Paige Davis’s was the only entry submitted from Port City Academy, and an obvious shoe-in for the win. I mean, if the doc was destined for HBO or Netfilms, it could certainly beat out a bunch of jumpy, blurry, horror flicks from the Cape Fear local public school kids.
Paige never told me she was submitting an entry. Never even let on she was making a movie, not seriously. But in the end, watching for the first time in the UNC-Cape Fear auditorium, I realized her doc would’ve kicked my movie’s ass if I actually managed to submit it.
I won’t lie—a little pride swelled in my chest, for my friend’s sake. After the post-screening ovation and the Q&A, Paige needed some air, so together we slipped out through a back exit and strolled the campus. For once we didn’t talk about “that day.”
Just off the university quad there’s a pond with a spewing fountain, bobbing lily pads on the perimeter, arched pedestrian bridges running across the narrow points. We leaned on a wooden bridge rail and watched the sun glint on the water, and then our eyes met and obviously I tried to kiss her.
I’d been waiting and wondering for six months, while Virgin Russ went hounding stupidly after Savannah. She and Virgin even went out a few times before those flowers went limp, Savannah jetted off the California, and Virgin remained a virgin. It made sense: she was sizzling and they’d been through the wringer together, but not the way I had with Paige.
So what did Paige do about my kiss attempt? Our lips never even touched. She turned and laughed quietly, politely, against her shoulder, and I just about melted into a pool of shame.
“I take it back?” I said.
“I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea,” she said.
“No—I mean,
you
kissed
me
once, in another life. Shocked the hell out of me, to be honest, but after a while it didn’t seem so strange. It seemed, I don’t know,
natural
, for us. But you were right.”
“About what?”
“Just before you kissed me you said I didn’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“I don’t know. I still don’t get it, but I
know
I don’t.”
“I have a girlfriend,” she blurted. “You don’t know her. She’s not from our school.”
“Oh, wow,” I said.
“Is that so strange?”
“No—I mean—yes—I mean—”
“Whatever I did or said, I don’t know what I meant,” she said. “That was another me, and I wasn’t there, even if I, well,
was
. I’m complicated, just like you. That’s the way people are, Scorsese. You can’t pin them down, you know?”
I nodded. Considering I’d run into a dozen possible takes on Horace Vale while I voyaged through time-space, I knew Paige was right, as always. Nobody was predictable. Maybe there was a Paige somewhere who would’ve kissed me back, there on the bridge with the croaking frogs—but that’s my fantasy, and I can’t rewrite the world.
In this life, I’m content to be her friend, and to potentially kick her butt someday when we both go up for the same film award, preferably an Oscar, or at least a Golden Globe.
T
HE OFFICIAL
story goes, I killed Bobby Keene-Parker. Took the rap, at least. Nobody could claim Bobby shot himself, though it would’ve been a cleaner story, and the truth.
A lengthy investigation determined that I acted out of self-defense, because he was threatening to burn the whole theater down, my friends and family inside it. My story was corroborated by the others on the scene—Paige and Conrad and Russ and Dad. Not to mention the clear evidence that Bobby (or someone) doused the theater with gasoline some hours before our arrival, proving premeditation.
More likely Wrong Russ poured the gas, but he was never part of our story. Several dozen good folks down at Silver Screen Studios also attested to Bobby Parker’s berserker turn: how he threatened his father and crew members with his gun, vowed to hunt down the Vale brothers and kill them, stole the prop cop car. Case closed, even if the door wouldn’t exactly latch tight.
Granted, we took some heat for leaving the theater before the police showed up. But I caught the blame for that one, too. Claimed I was so freaked after I shot Bobby that I ran, and my people had to go find me, talk me down from the radio tower, bring me back to the scene of the crime.
Our various interpretations of what went down got rather convoluted. We didn’t always give the sanest answers. Savannah claimed she saw
two
Bobby Parkers, but let’s face it, the girl was under tons of stress—witnessing a shooting, getting kidnapped. Eventually, the district attorney had to shake his head and admit our story was destined for the Greatest Unsolved Celebrity Freakouts of All Time.
It didn’t hurt that Marv Parker and his team of lawyers was there to help with the smoke-and-mirror special effects. Movie Marv didn’t have a clear memory of what happened, distracted as he was by a near-fatal heart attack, but the one fact he was sure about was who pulled the gun on him. In the interest of sullying his son’s memory as much as possible, Marv gave us all the legal help we needed.
Still, unanswered questions kept the news outlets buzzing for way too long: What made Bobby snap? Why’d he target these local nobodies? Why’d he bring them to the theater? Imagine a world where I made the real story public.
Vale Brothers Concoct Sci-Fi Fantasy for Publicity! Seth Vale, Star-Killer, Exploits Tragedy!
Right, nobody would believe me, which is why I’m telling this story to myself, mainly. To understand why I didn’t make that last critical leap back to my own quiet, anonymous life. Sometimes I forget what I was thinking. Sometimes I want to go back and decide differently, and then I remember that final decision on the radio tower was all about removing the temptation. I couldn’t trust myself not to turn out like Wrong Russ. He was living proof of how easy it would be to slip into that kind of character, just by tapping an icon too many times.
Whenever I second-guess myself, I consider that there is a Russ Vale somewhere who actually
did
take the final leap, who woke up that Friday morning again with a foreknowledge of almost everything that would happen for the next twelve hours. I’m sure he couldn’t help himself, playing the puppeteer. And I’m sure he’s miserable now.
Somewhere there are other Wrong Russes whose horrible schemes worked out, Wrong Russes who twisted up a bundle of realities so bad they’re just thick knots in the fabric of the multiverse.
I just have to hope he never finds his way back to this reality again. The chances are in my favor. I don’t like to dwell on the
almost-was
or the
could-possibly-be
, although those worlds do prod the back of my mind every now and then. A sense of some elsewhere nudging at me, disguised as a memory, though it never actually happened.
It’s what other people call déjà
vu.
Conrad felt it, that original Friday morning on the sidewalk, when he looked back at his bedroom window, even though I wasn’t there. A feeling slips through the thin space between worlds, just for a second.
I’ve done this before.
My friend Conrad Bower never made the leap like me, but he got a glimpse of another life—his father, alive and well, greeting him at the airport after a long flight from Afghanistan. We’ve talked about that moment on the theater screen so many times since then. The welcome on his father’s face, it lives inside him now. Connie can access the memory of that video whenever he needs it most. He might’ve lost a better life, but he got his strength back.
Wrong Russ did one thing right after all.
That video of spliced-together alternate realities was never recovered from the Pastime Playhouse projector, by the way. My best guess was that Wrong Russ uploaded it from a source in another reality, just like he’d done with the videos he sent. The bastard learned some clever tricks in all that extra time he spent surfing through the universe’s endless channels.
There
was
another video, though. Eighty million YouView hits, so I guess you’ve viewed it, too. It went
viral
, as they say, though I’m not as fond of that word as everybody else seems to be.
The final footage of Bobby Keene-Parker, a dialog with a young actress named Savannah Lark, recorded by an amateur filmmaker. I just
love
when they say
amateur
and forget to mention my name. Well, Russ’s name.
Police recovered the busted camera from the Aston Martin. They found the memory stick intact and pored through it a hundred times for evidence. Finally, they gave the video back to us, but not before somebody leaked it online.
People assume it was me, desperate for publicity, but if attention was my game I would’ve sold it to the highest bidder. Really, after a while Virgin Russ and I were sick of the scrutiny.
Celebrity Scoop
, VH-1, even the CW was eager to recoup their Cape Twilight losses with a made-for-TV biopic:
Bobby Keene-Parker, Unhinged
.