How Does It Feel? + Cough Syrup Defense

How Does It Feel?

My twin brother Ennis has the same nose, jawline, and eyes, but we’re identical in appearance only. I graduated high school with honors and he dropped out. I own a home in a decent neighborhood, he rents a single room. I went to culinary school, he went to prison for manslaughter. “I still think about him,” he says.

‘Him’ meaning his lawyer, not the bicyclist he hit. Ennis thinks the case should’ve been a mistrial. The public defender, it turned out, was a petty thief. He stole the bailiff’s wallet.

We sit on the cold, uneven porch of Ennis’s rooming house, as Ennis goes down his usual rabbit hole of self-pity. Gruff tenants come and go into the building without making eye contact. I imagine this is where he sits, day after day, week after week.

“How much?” I finally ask, because I know why he’s called me here.

“I don’t want your money,” he says, and shuffles across the patchy lawn to his piece-of-shit Chevy, opens the trunk, and takes out a cardboard box. He sits back on the porch beside me.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“My life,” he says.

He takes things from the box, one by one. A belt buckle he made in prison. A deck of playing cards. His mugshot, divorce papers, a bankruptcy statement. Then further back. Pictures of girlfriends I’d long since forgotten. Little league photos, D-minus report cards, crumpled grade school drawings.

I grow impatient, waiting for the Rosebud Moment. There are no pictures of me in the box, or our dead mother. Never mind that he was her favorite, or that each of my life achievements was tempered by his fuckups.

Finally, he comes to the bottom of the box—our birth certificates, printed on faded, waxy paper.

When we were born, Ennis barely weighed half as much as me. But he points out that on the birth certificates, our weights are switched. It says Ennis is eight-pounds eleven-ounces and I’m barely four.

“It’s just a mistake,” I say.

“It isn’t, though,” Ennis says. “I’m you, and you’re me.”

“That’s stupid.”

“It’s true. Your name is Ennis. You’re the piece of shit. You did all of those things. You hit the cyclist. You let everyone down.”

“You didn’t let everyone down.” I take my birth certificate, rip it in half.

“I made copies,” he says.

Of course he did. I look at the torn paper in my hands, then up at his face—my face. Sometimes, I’d do anything to make him happy. He could take my name, drive my car, park in my spot. He could sleep with my wife and play with my children. He could have my home and the culinary degree, if it meant he’d finally stop drowning.

“You’re Ennis, now,” he says. “How does it feel?”

Cough Syrup Defense

Five years ago, there was a murder on board the Sunset. It was made into a true crime best-seller—my girlfriend read the book—but I don’t want to know the grisly details. I can only think of figures. This is our dream boat at a fraction of the price.

We’ll quit our jobs. Quit our lives.

We stand on deck. Battered pontoons and utilitarian fishing trawlers. Water laps against the hull. At the trial, the defense blamed the murders on dextromethorphan—a primary ingredient in over-the-counter cold medicines. It became known as the cough syrup defense, but it didn’t hold water.

The murderer was given two life sentences, no possibility of parole. She claimed to have no memory of her actions.

When the salesperson shows us down to the cabin, I can’t tell a blood stain from a burl in the wood, but he assures us everything is in tip-top shape.

“You could eat a steak off this countertop,” he says.

But the cabin is small and cramped. The ceiling is too low. “Barely enough room for a single homicide, much less a double,” I whisper to my girlfriend. She glares at me. This will turn into one of our many talks. I’m always saying the wrong thing, making people uncomfortable.

“So it all took place in here?” My girlfriend asks. She’s the true crime aficionado. She can’t fall asleep without someone being buried alive, shot, or stabbed in the background. But the salesperson doesn’t want to discuss it.

“We have three other interested buyers,” he says, picking something from his teeth.

On dock, there’s already a group waiting to look, an old man with white hair, a young couple like us. This boat isn’t perfect, but we won’t get another chance like this. I try to smile at my girlfriend. Soon, she’s on the phone with the loan officer at our bank.

In the Lifetime Movie about the murders, the family of three were on a sailing trip from San Pedro to Baja Mexico, when everyone got sick. Coughing, runny noses, low fevers.

While the man adjusted the mainsail, the child took a nap, and the woman cut watermelon in the galley.  The sun was shining and the water was perfectly calm.