Auden Triller (Is A Killer) - Brian Prousky

Auden Triller (Is A Killer) by Brian Prousky

Book excerpt

Simon, my twin, and I were different beginning in the womb. He met all his in-utero milestones and flourished, taking up most of the space. I barely survived on the few nutrients he hadn’t already scarfed down. If you could have seen us inside our mother’s uterus, you would have seen a very healthy fetus and something half its size that looked like its pet.

***

At birth, Simon weighed a whopping nine pounds and went home with my mother two days later. I weighed two pounds, two ounces, and lived in an incubator for three weeks until I tipped the scale at four pounds and was allowed to leave the hospital. Given my precarious existence, I had to be fed a super-enriched formula every two hours by increasingly irritable, sleepless parents. Simon, who was breast-fed, quickly packed on an excess of baby fat and after five weeks was able to sleep six hours at a stretch and awake to appreciative cooing sounds.

***

It’s always been like that. Simon began life with every conceivable advantage, and rather than developing any arrogance or entitlement, or coasting on his considerable laurels, which would have been perfectly understandable, he turned into a child and then a man who, with a determined smile on his face, squeezed every drop of goodness out of every day.

And me? I can’t seem to take advantage of what the world offers me on a silver platter.

***

Growing up, the room we shared was like the womb all over again. Simon’s possessions spilled out of his drawers and shelves like an urban sprawl until my bed and the few things I owned were overrun. He had more athletic trophies, ribbons and medals than I had socks and underwear. His clothes overfilled his drawers and were piled high on our dressers and the floor, while in my undeserving mind, the few pairs of jeans and two or three t-shirts and sweatshirts I owned were more than sufficient. And that was just the beginning of the clutter. He also had dozens of toys and books and records and cassettes. And athletic equipment: pads and helmets and bats and sticks and mouthguards and balls and pucks. And exercise equipment: pull-up bars and weights and jump-ropes. And musical instruments: two guitars and a saxophone and five harmonicas and bongo drums and an electric keyboard. And paraphernalia that went with the instruments: songbooks and reeds and picks and music stands and amplifiers and tuners.

It’s a wonder only my autonomy, and not my body, was swallowed up.

***

My parents knew what was going on, but could hardly make sense of it. Faced with a phenomenon of unexplainable inequality under their roof, they did their best to cultivate my interests. Or, rather, what they interpreted as my interests. And it wasn’t for lack of trying that they were unable to do so.

One day, at age ten, a dog followed me home from school and my mother and father assumed I had a yearning for a pet and surprised me with a puppy, a small cocker spaniel. I pretended to be excited and took to my new responsibilities with a satisfactory sense of duty, but really, I had no interest in playing with the dog or petting it or tickling its stomach. And I especially had no interest in walking it. The whole thing struck me, even at a young age, as a needless dependency sapping way too much energy and attention from my otherwise unencumbered life. So, when Simon began wrestling with it and rolling around on the floor with it, it had little interest in me unless I was waving the leash in front of its face. And even then, it would run to Simon if he was anywhere in the house.

***

Three days after the dog arrived, I still hadn’t given it a name. I didn’t like it and didn’t want to develop an attachment to it. I was hoping my parents would send it away.

“What are you going to call it?” my father asked me. He had just walked through the door after working all day and I could tell he had no patience for me, which I understood. I mean, what sort of kid doesn’t name his new pet the minute it arrives?

“I was thinking about naming it Simon.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. It could get confusing around here,” my father said. Though he probably wanted to say, “Are you stupid? Is that the best you could come up with after three days?”

“What about Spot?” Simon asked.

We were sitting at the kitchen table, doing homework. Simon’s books were spread all over the place like they had dropped from the ceiling. My workbook was clinging to the last bit of uncovered table-top and hanging over the edge where I sat.

My father thought Simon’s suggestion was funny. “I like it. It’s old-fashioned. What do you think, Auden?”

“Sounds ok to me,” I said. I didn’t care.

***

A month later no one remembered Spot was my dog. I gave up paying attention to it. Simon and my mother did the lion’s share of walking it, and Simon and my father wrestled with it, played fetch with it, and pet it while watching television.

***

The Spot story was played out dozens of times with different misinterpreted interests or hobbies foisted on me. I’ll list some of them to save time: hockey, soccer, baseball, swimming, tennis, ping-pong, snooker, karate, painting, goldfish (tragically), gerbils (tragically), stamp collecting, astronomy and photography.

If you looked in our bedroom closet, under Simon’s things, you’d find broken telescope parts, a camera, an empty fishbowl and gerbil cage, broken easel parts, paints, skates, a tennis racquet, and all the other associated relics of my assumed hobbies.

***

But I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me. There are plenty of things I like. There are even things I like with something akin to passion. I like reading books and will more than occasionally read a novel. By age eleven, I had read every Roald Dahl book I could get my hands on and, after that, whenever I found an author I liked, I read everything he or she wrote. Because why not? And I like television—the uncomplicated one-sided relationship with television that lets me take as much as I want and give nothing in return. And I like music. Especially Bob Dylan (I’ll explain later). And I like women. In my twenties I was lucky enough to have sex with two of them. That neither of them returned for a second time never really bothered me.