John's Land

I am sitting on a black, cushioned chair in an airport. The airport does not matter, nor does my gate, nor does my flight, nor my destination. Nor my name, nor my number of years on this earth. Just know that a middle-schooler would consider me old, and a man who graduated from high school prior to 911 would consider me young. There is a Hispanic woman sitting across from me with a white surgical mask covering the bottom half of her face. I happen to lock eyes with her when I try to spy on her, attempting to understand her expression. She sits with crossed arms and crossed legs. Her husband sits beside her also with crossed legs. He is on a call and he uses the speakerphone. He does not speak loudly or obnoxiously, as other people who handle phones calls on speakerphone are inclined to do. He speaks so lowly that I do not understand the matter of the phone call other than there was a mistake made for some affair and the husband is speaking with someone to correct it. He says to his wife the plane will start boarding in thirty minutes.

I look to my left and watch the conveyor belt of people walking this way and that. There is a little boy in a white shirt that runs with a grin ahead of his parents and twin. His brother stands beside his mother, clinging to her leg. The running boy makes me recall the same delight, running on a conveyor belt so that you cover a long distance in a short time. My grin matches his.

A father walks holding his little girl in his arms. He is wearing a tight gray tee and a blue baseball hat with red letters on its face. I don’t catch the team. His toddler is wearing a soft, lavender dress. She is upset. I wish that she could see the running boy but the boy is already getting off the conveyor belt with a hop and she does not look his way. She looks straight ahead, crying lightly.

There is a Caucasian man walking behind them and there is an Indian boy small enough to sit on his roller luggage. The boy’s thin legs hang through and over the luggage, covered in gray sweats. This is the first time I’ve seen a child do that. A child’s ingenuity is unparalleled.

There is an Asian woman with auburn hair pulled into a bun. She wears glasses, a denim jacket, denim pants the same shade as the jacket, and an off-white turtleneck underneath the jacket. I only see her side-profile. Combined with the slouch and slow pace, I wonder her age. I believe her number could lie somewhere between twenty-five and forty-five. Some people are like that. Ambiguously aged.

There is a family of four. The two brothers are almost identical, with maybe two or three years between them at most. The younger’s hair is golden brown, while the older’s is bright blonde, almost platinum. They eat matching hot dogs. The older drinks a Pepsi while the younger drinks an orange Crush. It reminds me of the same distance and closeness between my own brother and I. In my mind, I tell them to enjoy the closeness, because one day the closeness will be an eroded dream and the distance will be a thorn in the pad of your finger—or a mind-splitting migraine, at the worst of times. My own brother is dead. I found him—my identical twin—hanging from his bedroom fan one morning last year. After I pulled him down, there were two questions on my mind. One: why? Two: How did the fan support his weight without snapping from the ceiling?

I won’t tell you my name but I will you his: John.

As in John Smith. Or John Doe.

An unremarkable name for such a remarkable person. The cruelty of it. The black irony. If he lived, he would’ve saved the world in time. He would have cured cancer or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or HIV or AIDS. He had a brilliant brain and it was another cruelty that he cut off the oxygen to that brilliant brain. I suppose it was a better end than blowing his brain out with our father’s Smith & Wesson.

Better for me, the selfish brother. I was not the brother given lighter hair nor was I the brother that would run while he stood still. No, the difference between he and I was that I am selfish and he was selfless. He was eager and I am unmotivated.

I am unmotivated even when a man sits beside me. I don’t even need to look at him to know he is beautiful. I can see all I need to know in my peripheral. His sharp jawline, his broad shoulders, his biceps bulging through the long sleeves of his gray linen polo. When I finally turn my face an inch, what immediately stands out to me are his long eyelashes, his big nose, and his voluminous lips. I begin to shake at the thought of them wrapped around me. He looks at me, and I hope that he finds no doubt in what I am imagining. I hope he can see my enamor.

He introduces himself. His name is John. I have two thoughts. One: why? Two: it has been more than thirty minutes and the plane has yet to board. I suppose the husband across from me was wrong. I also suppose most husbands usually are.

John asks my name. I tell him and he compliments it, saying he grew up Catholic, too. I ask him how he knows I grew up Catholic, telling him my parents could have just been fond of the name. He of course asks me if they were just fond of the name. I tell him no. I was baptized, I had my first communion, I was confirmed, and I confessed my sins to a man of the cloth exactly once.

He tells me he would hate to be the priest that I confess my sins to next. How many years, how many sins he must receive.

I wouldn’t want to do that to any priest, I say. I rather remain unclean than to burden anyone. But of course I don’t feel very religious anymore, so I don’t think I’m going to Hell. Heaven, either. I don’t tell him that last part.

Shame, he says. Religion was a light to him while he’d been trapped in a very dark place.

To be polite to his beliefs, I ask him where he attends his mass. Where does he get down on his knees, close his eyes, and speak of something he’s grateful for while begging forgiveness for something he’s guilty of?

John smirks just now, and there’s something so uncanny that it makes me break into goosebumps. Such is the duality of man, because that smirk also is poignant enough to put me into heat.

It is in the grin that I understand how a woman could choose to live deliciously. Through those lips, upturned more so on one side than the other, I understand how men could choose the devil over God and his army of angels.

With eyes as black as coal but as smooth as buttons, he tells me the church he goes to nowadays does not have four walls and a roof over its head. No, he’s found the divine somewhere else entirely, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a frequent attendee.

I tell him it’s a shame I’m only here on a layover. I would’ve liked to see what his church is like. Maybe that’s the kind of place that could heal this grieving twin.

I think to myself, A woman who’s lost her partner is a widow, while a man who’s lost his is a widower. A child who’s lost their parents is an orphan. How come they don’t have a name for someone who’s lost their sibling? Let alone a twin losing a twin.

I’d argue losing your twin is a greater example of losing your other half than romantic partners losing each other. I say the only real soulmate you could have is someone who shares the same exact DNA as you. Someone who was once you, when you were still one and then became two.

I think about how I am just one once again when John asks if I would really like to have gone. Truthfully.

I nod my head. Yes, I would have. That would have been nice. Maybe that kind of community with that kind of healing would’ve done me good.

Now we’ll never know.

He shakes his head. If you’re serious, he says, then you can know. Because it’s not here. It’s where we’re going.

My face lights up like a Christmas tree, no shame in it. I’m elated. I’m a schoolboy with twenty dollars in a candy store. I assumed he lives here and it is here where his church is found.

My mistake.

I share my excitement with him, without bounds, without shame, without humility. It is only fair, because it’s what he’s given me thus far: Words without restriction, emotion without limit. He is earnest, without disguise. His eyes darkened like stormclouds just a moment ago and his grin felt so wicked I could’ve sworn I smelled burnt ozone when his lips moved, and he has my understanding and adoration in witnessing it. He’s no pretender. He’s exactly what he’s beginning to share with me. I like the beginning of his story.

I can’t wait to hear how it ends.

The boarding process begins, with their maddening lines and segregated groups. John is in the first group to be called, so I know he is filthy rich, perhaps. I don’t tell him my group, so he won’t know I am poor and filthy on the worst of days. He says he’ll see me in there, and that is that.

But that is not the last I see of John. I don’t expect it to be, because I assume I will catch him on my way through first class to the budget seats. But he is not there where I expect him to be.

No, he is in my seat. 13D.

I don’t know what to say at first, and it’s quite embarrassing the way I trip over my words like I used to trip over my shoelaces in elementary. A fumbling, tumbling idiot for all to see and I just want this moment to be over with.

John smiles and it is in the darkness of his eyes that I find warmth, the way a dead fire that has recently blackened is still warm. The wood is spent and the kindling is crumbling, but you could still burn yourself if you want to. I think I want to.

I saw your seat on your ticket, he says. I’m supposed to be the window seat. Would you mind switching? I think you’ll prefer the view outside over the view of the aisle.

I don’t tell him I wouldn’t mind anywhere on the entire row as long as it’s this row, right here, right now, because the only view that will preoccupy me will be his visage and his corporeal form. What I do tell him is that I don’t mind at all.

When I sit in 13F, my eyes go to 13E, an empty seat. John is almost frighteningly intuitive, because he looks at the seat and he looks me in the eyes, smiling some more. He knows the gap between us, to me, is vast. He knows it is the Grand Canyon to me. He knows I wish this space would fold in on itself so that I could feel the flesh of his thigh pressing against mine, if I was lucky. I suspect he also knows I want him close enough to smell him again, as I had in the airport.

He smelled something like pine. A foresty, wooden aroma that suggested he was an outdoorsy creature, though his looks would fool you. He looks like he belongs on the face of every magazine.

When I nap on this flight, as I know I will—for some or most of the four hours until our destination—I know John will be there on the face of every dream.

Reading my mind, in the direct and honest way he’s been with me, he says I can scoot over if I want. He doesn’t bite, unless I want him to.

The skin of my face feels like it will ignite, and it is not the last of what ails me at his impudence. My stomach, too, suffers, feeling like there is an anvil in it that will tear a hole right through the seat of it. I laugh at his words, wishing I was as brazen as the one who offered to be brazen enough to accept.

No, this is the closest I will get to him, I fear.

At least, until we are kneeling atop the pews within his church. I know the place not to be brick or mortar, wood or wool, so maybe the pews will be grass knolls, or dirt stripped of foliage, or leaf litter that will crunch under our knees. I imagine I will be able to reach down and clutch handfuls of orange and red leaves, thin twigs, and waxy cladodes.

That must be his scent, the one I caught in the airport but struggle to find now—his church, where he must spend most of his waking moments.

Wherever that place is, I want to go there with him. I don’t care the cost or consequence.

Since I found my brother hanging, the world has become so bleak, somewhere between Purgatory and Hell. Whatever church—whatever consecrated earth he wanders in moments of need—sounds like Eden to me.

Again, as I find my eyelids sitting heavier and heavier by the minute, John asks me if I would really like to see his church, his divine space.

Yes, God yes, I say. It must be because I am tired, I have lost what remained of my filter.

And just before I nod off, I swear I hear him say, Good, but there’s no God there.

I am gone and waking up again before these words can sink in. They flee like insects from a rainstorm.

I open my eyes groggily, taking a moment to remember where I am and who I am with: John, the devil, instead of John, the angel that had been my twin brother.

It turns out, I am alone with John. The seats do not seat the passengers that were there only moments ago, it feels like. How did I miss the entirety of the off-boarding? How come no one woke me when my row was up?

I ask John that very question: why didn’t you wake me? Follow-up question: everyone already got off?

He smiles that same smile that might give a child nightmares but gives me some strange excitement. It makes me feel halfway delirious. He says that he did not have the heart to wake me, I’d been sleeping so soundly. And yes, everyone has come and went, onto whatever destinations await them. Ours still await us, he says. His thick lips smile, without baring his teeth. It is not a warm smile. It is sweltering.

It makes me break into a light sweat. Two drops bead at my hairline; I whisk them away alongside the back of my right hand. I look down at the points of my knuckles and I discern how they gleam. It reminds me of the moment I finally brought my brother down from his rope. He tied it so securely, it took me far too long to get him down from the last knot he ever looped together. We’d both been in the Boy Scouts growing up, so we had seen our fair share of knots. The overhand, the blackwall hitch, the cat’s paw, the fisherman’s bend, the sheepshank, and on and on. So many different ways to twist a rope and the configuration that broke my brother’s neck had been a slip knot. 

He was, after all, an Eagle Scout, and knew his way around a rope. I’d only reached the rank of Tenderfoot. Maybe he’d been counting on that, in case I came home sooner than he expected. He was counting on my failure to ensure he would be long dead before I could get him down. Truth was, the coroner said he was dead the moment he kicked the chair from out underneath him. His commitment was in vain, because I would not have been able to save him even if I’d been outside his bedroom when he dropped from the top of his five-legged rolling chair.

This sweat on my hand now looks the same way it did after I got him down, exhausted and in denial of his crooked neck and blue lips. I remember wiping my forehead once before I called the police and paramedics.

Come on, John the devil says now, I’ve been dying to show you since we landed. You missed it flying in. It looks pretty damn mesmerizing from above, but nothing compares to standing in it.

He takes my hand and begins leading me away down the aisle. I barely have time to grab my backpack from underneath the seat in front of me. If I’d had a carry-on, I may have left it in John’s excitement. Cheaper to fly without one, though, so it is of no concern. The place must be wonderful, I think, if John is this excited even with all the rest of the airport to walk through before we can even begin to plan heading in the direction of his divine place. Immigration and customs, baggage claim, and hailing a taxi or ordering an Uber. I almost think to ask him if he remembers we still have all of that left to go. Fifteen minutes at the swiftest, over an hour at its worst. I don’t want to sour his elation, though, so I go on and let his bubble continue to float without sticking a needle in it.

I’m glad I kept my mouth shut, because I was wrong. So wrong, in fact, that I cannot form words. My mouth fails me because it seems that my eyes are failing me first. Is this delirium? Is this dream?

There is no airport. John continues on but my feet are screwed into the rubberized, composite panel beneath my shoes. My hand rips out of his but I barely notice it and he seems not to mind. John hops forward and slides feet-first down the yellow emergency slide the exact color of the rubber ducky my brother and I used to share when we were still young enough to bathe together.

Have we crashed? I wonder. Did something go wrong?

Looking out ahead of me, surveying the land John begins to trek across, I think: Something has gone right.

The Eden I imagined in my head is not a garden after all. It is a forest so tall and so vibrant, to describe it only one word comes to mind: mythical. Wander to any forest of your liking in the autumn, take a picture, heighten the saturation a hundred fold, and then you may understand a quarter of the beauty that consumes John’s Land.

At its center, a lake so large a child could confuse it for the sea. It is the same shade as sapphire and shines a thousand times brighter. I wonder if John has two fishing rods. I remember one time, in the Scouts, my brother John caught the biggest trout I’d ever seen. He asked me if I wanted it. When I said no, it was his catch, he threw it back before it choked on air. If it was my catch, I would’ve showed it off to the rest of the troops, letting it die.

The distance between he and I was vast, even when he was still alive.

I join John by the waterfront, where a large deciduous tree leans over, dropping those very orange and red leaves I imagined his place would have on the face of the water. They float lazily away from the muddy shore, fallen talismans that still retain their power even as they drift away.

John pulls a shining apple off a low-hanging branch, a more powerful talisman than the leaves that fall and still hang from this tree. While the lake is a titanic sapphire, he hands me this round ruby that fits perfectly in the palm of my hand.

He asks me, What is your favorite food?

I have to think about it for a moment, but then the memory of sharing a massive reverse-seared tomahawk steak with my brother at the restaurant around the corner comes to mind. A brother owned the restaurant while the other owned the slaughterhouse that operated out back. Our father was an IRS auditor who turned a partial blind eye to the brothers on more than one occasion. He’d taken a liking to them, and they to him. They always gave us meat at a good deal, but the tomahawk had been for our ninth birthday. It was the best thing we ever had.

Before I can open my mouth, John put his hands up, here by the lakeside, and says, Don’t tell me what it is. Hold that memory tightly in your head.

He makes a fist to emphasize this point.

He goes on, saying, And don’t let it go.

I nod.

Now bite, he says.

What game is this, I think, but bite the apple.

The first bite is crisp and watery, but then the second bite is something else entirely. Savory, juicy, tender, rich. Unlike an apple. Unlike any fruit I’ve ever bitten into.

It is the taste and texture of that tomahawk steak so long ago. It vanished into my stomach then but is here in my mouth now, being pulverized by my adult molars and disbelieved by my adult taste buds.

I raise my eyebrow at him, stopping my chewing, but continue on because I cannot keep myself from its flavor. Yes, it is the very same thing. When I swallow the bite, I think it to be a fluke, a trick, a prank. I take a second bite out of the apple, feeling that first familiar crunch, thinking I only imagined the tomahawk.

John grins wickedly at me, knowing I am afraid to chew the apple further. I hold that first bite in my mouth, admitting my fear, my surprise, my refusal.

I cannot refuse it any longer when I chew and the tomahawk is there once again, swapping places with this gorgeous apple and banishing it who knows where. I chew the delicious tomahawk until it is gone, and I consume the rest of the apple, tasting that ancient tomahawk for ninety-five percent of its ingestion.

How, I ask him. What did you do to me? What is this?

Eden, he says, just like you thought.

I never told you that, I say.

There is nothing more that this handsome man does than grin and smirk and charm and bewitch. He does so now, grinning at me like we’ve already shared a kiss or a bed.

You didn’t have to, he says, and leaves it at that. I could probe him further, but that is not what I desire.

What I desire is another apple.

He tells me they could be anything I want. If I wanted to, they could just be apples, and they’d the best tasting apples I’ve ever had. But they could be so much more. Any meat, fish, vegetable, fruit, or grains I want. Any assembly, combination, or preparation of them, too.

Meatloaf?

Yes, he says.

Stuffed peppers?

Yes.

Chicken-fried steak?

Also yes.

Baked salmon, white rice with furikake seasoning, and a blueberry muffin for dessert.

Yes, yes, and yes. Anything you could think of, he says.

What about liquids?

Any soup you may crave, you fill find still within these apples, he says. Your bite will dissolve into broth and solids. If it is water you seek, you will find it in the freshwater lake. If it is something else, whether it is apple juice, chocolate milk, or a strong, aged brandy, you will find it in the creeks that cut between these trees. All you have to do is cup your hands, think hard about what you want, grab your fill, and it will be so by the time it touches your lips.

I shake my head, wondering if this is magic or myth. I grab another apple, to be sure. He encourages it. I grab this one myself, thinking maybe because he offered me the first apple he was able to deceive me.

There is no deceit in this second apple, which becomes fried tilapia after the initial bite. It tastes just the way my father used to cook it on Fridays during Lent. He always went to the 99 Ranch Market for the fish.

How is this possible, I ask John.

He shakes his head, still smiling. It just is.

I ask John if he is human.

He says, Like the apple, I can be whatever you want me to be.

For the second time, I ask him what this place is.

Whatever you want it to be, he says. Home, if you want it to be. With me.

I have two questions here: Why me? What made it me?

Because I could see you were lonely and it was like looking into a mirror, he says. Now we can be less lonely, together, in this perfect place.

What’s the catch?

No catch, he says.

I think he is lying, either directly or by omission, so I ask him how he maintains this entire place by himself.

I don’t, he says. It maintains itself. Whether this flora is highly intelligent and sustainable or if is simply a pocket paradise, is yet to be seen.

I ask him if he cuts the grass and he says no. When I ask him if he waters the grass or the trees, he says no again.

Does it rain?

Only if you want it to, he says, cheery and calm.

How does this place survive then?

He says with a disquieting gaze and grin, I figured it out. You just have to kill every living thing that you may find wandering in these woods. You will be walking, you will blink, and there it will come from behind a distant tree, as if they’d been hiding behind it the whole time—which, of course, you know it has not. They manifest, plucked from the world as if with a great claw machine and dropped here. When they die and fall where they stand, their decomposition provides all that is needed to the soil. No more, no less. You just have to kill whatever you see. Whether it be a rabbit, a squirrel, a skunk, or bigger game. All you need is a steady hand guided by indifference. All the tools you may need will be in that cabin. That is also where we will sleep.

I look across the lake and spot a lovely log cabin.

I ask him how he knows this.

Here is the first instance of any part of him faltering. His stormcloud eyes darken while his face pales for the first time. He says he once hesitated, causing the trees to begin to wither, the apples to rot, and the grass to thin.

The lake began to boil, too.

Ah, so there’s the catch. I don’t need to ask him to know: he only hesitated because when he expected another rabbit or doe, there was a person.

He is honest when I ask him if the people that occasionally manifest are bad people: he does not know but he hopes.

I nod.

For disclosure’s sake, he admits that once you come here, you can never leave. 

I am not angry, because I was the one who wanted to see his church.

I was the one who wanted to see John’s Land, so he is not in the wrong. I do ask him how was it that he visited me in the airport. This is the last question I will ever ask him. I look behind me, remembering the airport and the airplane, but the airplane is gone. 

Once a year, he says, he wakes up in that world. And when he falls asleep at the end of that single day, he wakes up back here. He wanted to find a companion this time, and it seems he has.

He has. Maybe this place is a hell dressed up to look like a heaven, but that is okay with me. My brother, John the angel, despite killing himself, is in Heaven. I know it. The distance between us was always so vast, and it’s never been greater than it is now. One twin in Heaven while the other is in Hell. That’s okay with me. I—the selfish twin—don’t mind spilling blood. It was because of the people in that world and all the horrible things they’d ever done and were going to do that cost my brother his life.

I could be wrong. Maybe this isn’t a hell at all. Maybe it is exactly what it looks like, paradise. A facsimile of the best place on Earth. A place to enjoy, to make a life with this man in front of me. Not my soulmate, but I can take him as my lover until I leave John’s Land.

And when I leave, in death, I hope to reunite with my true soulmate. Two parts become whole again, for the first time since our mother’s uterus.