Twin Souls, Barry Rachin [read ebook pdf txt] 📗

According to Mahatma Gandhi,” Mavis Calhoun spoke breathlessly, “society’s coming apart at the seams, collapsing under the weight of technology gone berserk.”

Mavis and Harry Wong Smith were on ten-minute break, sipping tepid coffee in the Shop Rite Supermarket employee lounge. Twenty-nine year-old Mavis had relocated to Brandenburg, Massachusetts almost a year earlier to the day. She landed the cashier’s job in February. In his senior year of high school, Harry bagged groceries and stocked shelves.

Mavis grew up in Knoxville, on the Tennessee River. Her father worked for a lumber firm, harvesting tulip-poplar, hickory, yellow pine, red and white oak. The summer before she moved East, Mavis and her new husband, Travis, traveled to the Blue Ridge Mountains and climbed Clingman’s Dome, at 6643 feet the highest peak in the state. Mountain laurel, redbud and irises rimmed the trail. Mavis saw five wild turkeys and a brood of mottled, brownish ruffed grouse in the bush. The adult male kept up an unearthly drumming sound with its wings trying to frighten the newlyweds away. These were the sort of things Mavis told Harry when he wasn’t running price checks on kiwi fruit or chasing down abandoned shopping carts in the supermarket parking lot.

Mavis took a quick sip of coffee “Personal computers, quad speed CD-Roms, faxes, supersonic jets - ”

“There were no personal computers with quad speed CD-Rom in Gandhi’s time,” Harry corrected. “No faxes either.”

“That’s not the point,” Mavis blustered. “Personal happiness can’t be reduced to fat bank accounts or income property.”

Harry shook his head up and down as if on cue. A bogus gesture. But then, Mavis’ thinking was so outmoded and unfashionable—like something out of the psychedelic sixties, his parent’s whacked-out generation. A culture built on tie-dyed T-shirts, flower power, twenty year-olds chanting secret mantras and waiting for the millennium or Armageddon - whichever came first.

“If I owned income property,” Harry countered, “I certainly wouldn’t be busting my rump in a supermarket for minimum wage.” Harry didn’t know or particularly care if any of what Mavis was telling him was true. He could listen to her lilting voice for hours - for the better part of eternity. Stare into her cocoa-brown eyes, while watching the pouty bottom lip form syrupy phrases like ‘dervish whirling’, ‘right livelihood’, and ‘transmigration of souls’. Content was irrelevant. A lecture from Mavis on the intricacies of backyard composting would have left Harry equally spellbound.

Mavis smiled displaying a set of perfectly white, even teeth. Her shoulder length hair was straight and black, the nose compact. Except for the pearly teeth, there was nothing particularly remarkable about Mavis Calhoun. Still, the ditsy woman got under Harry’s skin like an itch. Not so much an itch as an irresistible craving.

Harry had his own theory about the woman. Mavis Calhoun was 'covertly' beautiful. The woman possessed an untapped potential for hidden loveliness - a confused landscape of precious imperfections. Hers was not the fragile beauty of classic line and unblemished texture but, rather, a quality resembling the unpredictable exuberance of wild flowers - of catchfly and purple coneflower; the eagerness and zeal of chicory and yarrow; the scruffy, unassuming ardor of scarlet phlox and Queen Anne's lace.

In a rash moment of over exuberance, Harry once told Mavis something of the sort, but the guileless woman balked, didn’t know what to make of the odd remark.

Back hand compliment or sincere flattery? Mavis simply rolled her chestnut-colored eyes and spoke of something else. Harry never broached the issue again. In recent weeks, when Mavis tried to snare him with the metaphysical mumbo jumbo, Harry focused on her teeth. The two, sturdy slabs, top front - so durable and immaculate - were symbolic of the woman’s spiritual perfection. Twin alabaster tiles, unblemished by nicotine or periodontal complications.


“Five thousand six-hundred, fifty three people of Chinese origin presently live in Tennessee,” Mavis said. “I looked it up in the state census report.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Thought you might want to know.”

“Total population?”

Mavis leaned forward with a dreamy smile. “A tad under five million.”

Harry wondered if the Chinese community of Knoxville didn’t feel a bit lonely at times. “What’s your husband’s take on Eastern philosophy?”

Mavis scowled. “I showed Travis a picture of Gandhi in his white robe; he said the mahatma looked like ‘a flea-bitten faggot.’”

Travis Calhoun dropped his wife off at work two or three nights a week. A heavyset man, most days he was unshaven and wore torn jeans with a rebel flag sewn on the back of his dungaree jacket. Married at eighteen, they were high school sweethearts. One pregnancy early in the marriage ended in a miscarriage. Mavis never became pregnant again. When Harry mentioned the stillbirth, Mavis swallowed hard and looked away. For the remainder of the day, outside of an occasional price check, there was no carefree banter, and Harry had the presence of mind to leave the woman alone. “No, I wouldn’t think your husband would be overly interested in Eastern philosophy.”

Mavis splayed the fingers of her left hand and studied the wedding ring. The tiny diamond, more like a chip than a bona fide, precious gem, glinted weakly. “That’s why,” Mavis confided breathlessly, “It’s such a blessing to find a spiritual twin soul.”

Another of Mavis’ cockamamie notions held that Harry Wong and Mavis Calhoun were twin souls. She shared this intimation recently in a mad gush of esoterica and Harry, too smitten with her infuriating loveliness, couldn’t disagree. “We really should be getting back,” he said and gulped the last of his coffee.


In the late seventies, Harry’s parents traveled to Guilin in southern China to adopt a baby girl. The orphanage, which sat at the base of an outcropping of limestone pinnacles rising six hundred feet in the air, offered the Americans a package deal. Six months earlier a boy with a wandering eye was born in a nearby province. The distraught parents brought the child to the baby home. One eye gazed curiously about the lobby while the other eye flitted indiscriminately in space. “Our child has a wicked demon,” the mother said and, with her husband, hurried quickly away.

Strabismus: an imbalance of the eye muscle in which one eye cannot focus. A simple operation at Children’s Hospital in Boston rid Harry Wong Smith of the ancestral curse. An act of gratitude, the Smiths included the biological parents’ last name on the birth certificate. East meets west. Harry Wong Smith - a semantic absurdity. Harry never used his middle name - not on signatures, certainly not in public.


One afternoon in early April, Harry visited the Brandenburg library. “I need information on Bernoulli’s principle.”

“Could you be a bit more specific?” The reference librarian was completely bald but sported a thick black beard as though his facial hair had been relocated from the naked skull.
“Bernoulli studied planes,… aerodynamics.”

The librarian came out from behind the desk and led Harry up a flight of stairs to the rear of the building. “You should find what you're looking here.” He pointed to a row of books at chest height and went back to his post. Harry selected three volumes and took them into the reading room. Daniel Bernoulli. He found a lengthy reference in the appendices of the second book.

The bulge in the upper surface of an airplane wing makes this surface longer than the lower portion. Because the air above moves faster, it exerts less pressure creating an upward imbalance.

Harry began making notes. At the photocopier, he reproduced several diagrams, went back to the table where he had left the other books and began putting together a bibliography of sources and quotes.

Less pressure is exerted by a fluid that is flowing faster than ...

“Fancy meeting you here!” Mavis Calhoun was standing on the far side of the table clutching a sheet of paper in her hand. She wore a summery cotton dress and a string of pearl. The impish smile tore his heart out, churned his mind to mush. She raised the sheet up over her head like a trophy. “You’re looking at the happiest woman in the world! That man,” she gestured in the direction of the reference librarian, “gave me this list of the one hundred favorite novels recommended by the American Library Guild.”

“And you’re going to read everyone.”

“A to Z!” Mavis grinned. “Problem is, I don’t recognize much of any of the authors. My reading to this point has been somewhat …erotic ”

“Erratic,” Harry corrected.

“Yah, that too.” Mavis bent over the table and positioned the sheet under his nose. “How’s this one?”

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

- Harry’s English literature class read the novel in his junior year. “I think you’d like it. It’s about this girl growing up -”

Mavis leaned forward across the reading table and impetuously thrust a hand over his mouth. “No, for God’s sake, don’t say a word! Don’t reveal a solitary thing that happens, because I’m going to read it cover to cover. Tonight!”

She ran off in the general direction of the fiction shelves. For a solid minute after Mavis was gone, Harry could feel the pressure of her soft fingers against his lips. He should have kissed them - thrown her down on the reading room floor and made mad debauched love to the young woman with the American Library Guild list. Instead, Harry collected his notes and quietly left the Brandenburg Public Library.

When he reached home, Harry took the three library books into his bedroom and laid them on a desk next to the study guide. The assignment was due in a week. Tomorrow after finishing his shift at the supermarket, he would copy out the rest of the material. Friday he would cobble together the artwork - drawings, graphs and scientific formulas. The science project would be finished with time to spare.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

- it was a masterpiece to be sure. Mavis was probably already lying in bed next to her Neanderthal, redneck husband scanning the dust jacket. Maybe she would slog through the first fifty pages, at best, and then lose interest. Forget fifty! Harry doubted Mavis Calhoun would survive much past the first twenty. Everything with Mavis was slap dash, close enough for jazz. She was a sprinter not an intellectual, long distance runner. The other day at the supermarket, Mavis had gone off on a rant about some newfangled metaphysical theory. Harry couldn’t even recall the half of it. He couldn’t remember because, when Mavis held court, Harry zoned out. The verbiage fell away and, in its place was a pristine, immaculate silence, a communion that transcended the spoken word.

Harry showered and brushed his teeth. After blow-drying his hair, he cross-referenced what he had learned about Bernoulli’s principle in the first book with the other two. Yes, everything was under control. When air was put in motion, the turbulent fluid created an imbalance in pressure above and below generating thrust, a forceful shove.

Mavis Calhoun entered the Brandenburg Public library reading room, causing Harry Wong Smith’s feet to imperceptibly levitate an infinitesimal fraction of an inch off the ground. It didn’t fall under the rubric of aerodynamics and certainly wasn’t the sort of thing he could use in a science project, but the phenomenon