The Cult of Rohesia: Michael (1/3)

I don't fucking believe this.

I mean, it's been one thing after another since I got here. Rohesia, Quebec. Canada. I'd never been to Canada before, but that turned out to be where the twin I always thought I had but never had any evidence for had been living all this time.

He found me. He had the same surname as me, even. Were our parents engaged when they separated us? Married? We'll never know, I suppose. He told me our mother died years ago. Our dad certainly isn't going to tell us anything. I guess I could ask our grandparents.

They seemed shockingly normal, at first. Except for the way they were expecting me even though Mark insisted he hadn't told them I was coming. He wanted to see how they reacted to the sight of the two of us, with no warning.

"I have a friend you can stay with if they won't let you stay," he told me on the way out of Ottawa, where my bus dropped me off.

"Is he cute?" I asked. I don't know why I assumed Emilie was a guy.

"He's a she," he told me, with a confused frown.

"Okay. Is she cute?"

"How should I know?" It was a genuine question, as far as I could tell.

Our grandparents were just putting dinner on the table when we got there. They'd set a place for me. They knew my name. Of course I could stay, they said. No other mention was made of my showing up with no warning. I could tell Mark was baffled, but neither of us said a thing. Why look a gift horse in the mouth?

Then the next day, we ate supper early. And they gently insisted that neither me nor Mark could eat anything else for the next twenty-four hours. We had to wait until dinner tomorrow, at his friend Emilie's house. Six o'clock. Mark was only surprised that this included me.

“I don't know much about it. And what I do know is difficult to explain,” he said when I asked him what was going on later that night. “So—uh—most of Emilie's biological family is dead. Well, all, I guess. That we know of. Her mom was the last one to die. That happened over a year ago. Almost two years, actually.”

I wasn't sure what this had to do with us fasting, but I figured he'd get to it.

“She was raised by her mom, and a bunch of her mom's friends. They all died in the past few years, too. Except for one. So him and Emilie are two of the people we'll be eating with tomorrow. I don't know who the other two are.”

He paused, but I knew he wasn't done. In fact, he was only just beginning.

“The thing about Emilie's mom and her friends, they, uh—they were all really old. Like, ridiculously old. Over a hundred, but they didn't look like it. They've looked the same as long as my grandparents can remember. I mean, not the same, they don't dress like it's the Victorian period or whatever. They haven't aged. That's what I mean.”

I had to laugh at that. “Okay, then.” I treated it like an urban legend. Or rather, a small town myth. Rohesia is anything but urban.

“And me and Emilie always grew up being told we'd be like them after they died.”

I played along. “Okay. What's so special about you two?”

Mark shrugged. “They never said. But they knew. And they must have known about you, too. Otherwise, why would Grandma and Grandpa be acting like this?”

Had they known and not told our grandparents where I was until recently? Had our grandparents known all along and simply neglected to inform Mark of my existence? He found my birth certificate when he was looking for documents for his college applications. That was how he knew my name. But it wasn't like he'd know why they hadn't told him. So I didn't ask.

The next day, we went to Emilie's house for dinner. Like Mark said, Emilie and Nicolas were there, and there were two other girls that came. Plus another older lady who made our food but wouldn't sit down with us. No one seemed entirely comfortable. Dora and Michelle were at least as in the dark as I was.

Then Mark slumped over dead in his seat at the beginning of the meal.

They told us not to call an ambulance. Nicolas wouldn't even let me talk to our grandparents. And we let Mark stay dead. It all happened too fast for it to really sink in. Easy come, easy go, I tried to tell myself, all while sleeping and generally existing on the living room floor next to the couch where his corpse was. I told myself I was dreaming. I waited to wake up.

And now Mark is waking up. He's trying to stretch but looks like he's having a rough time of it. He's still blue around the lips, too, but not as much as before.

"How do you feel?" I breathe.

He jumps (not literally, you know what I mean) and looks at me like he forgot I existed. "Kind of cold," he says. "A little stiff."

I hand him one of the blankets Emilie gave me to sleep with, even though now I'm cold. This house isn't exactly well-heated. "How much do you remember?"

“Dora got here for dinner and they were arguing,” Mark says, hesitantly. “That was when I passed out, right?”

I nod. He's not wrong, but does he realize what happened to him? If I tell him, will he believe me? Nicolas's here, but he isn't helping. Just hovering silently in the background. Oh, now he's heading downstairs. Cool. Thanks. What are you even here for?

I call the one person from Friday who seemed sane. "Michelle, you're not gonna believe this. Mark's up."

"Uh. Great."

And here I thought she was reasonable. "Uh, more like fucking amazing? Or mindblowing?"

"Michael. It's five in the morning." Goddamnit, Michelle—

Mark takes my phone away. "Sorry about him," he mutters.

Michelle doesn't respond for a few seconds. Then I hear a "Mark?" and it's so damn good to feel slightly less crazy. She says she's coming over.

Nicolas comes back upstairs with coffee for me and Mark. How helpful.

Mere minutes later, Michelle texts me to come answer the door. I can only assume she broke the speed limit all the way here from the timing. When I say she's here, Nicolas raises his eyebrows at me. It's not distracting me from his widened eyes at all.

“You know, she's probably more scared of you than you are of her,” I say. Like Michelle's a spider or something. She practically made him cry on Friday. It was super impressive.

“I don't know what you mean,” he murmurs, staring at the curtains on the front windows. Probably to avoid my eyes. He stays behind while Mark follows me down the steps.

As soon as Michelle lays eyes on him, she hugs him. I thought they didn't know each other so well? Mark definitely took a few seconds to remember her name on Friday. Whatever. Who cares? I ship it.

They're perfect for each other. Quiet, thoughtful, both of them pale and black-haired like they came out of the same Tim Burton movie. They even have a shared anomalous experience between them, now. If I don't find something else to do fast I'll start coming up with names for their future children. Breakfast. I can get us breakfast.

Michelle eats her cereal dry, with her hands. It's adorable. "So you stayed all of yesterday, Michael?" she asks.

"Uh, yeah. Kind of had to?" I suppose I could have walked back to my grandparents' house? Possibly to a locked door? I could have taken Mark's keys, I guess.

"What do you mean, all of yesterday?" Mark asks.

"Saturday. It's Sunday now," I tell him. If I say it like it's nothing, maybe he'll take it that way, too.

"I've been unconscious all weekend?"

"The day is young. Nicolas told Grandma we'd both be at church today, though." That's going to be interesting for sure. I've never been to church. Which hasn't been a big loss since I'm an atheist? But I'll try anything once.

"So he told her where we were?"

"Yeah, and she hasn't called since, so that's all. Like. Fine."

"By 'fine,' he means when he tried to call your grandparents, Nicolas snatched the phone out of his hand before he could say anything, said as little as he could get away with, then hung up," Michelle says.

"I mean, he gave it back."

Mark looks from Michelle, to me, to his bowl of cereal, then takes a bite. While he thinks, the stairs creak, and we all go silent. A minute later, and my suspicions are confirmed: Emilie, followed by Nicolas.

"Michelle. Good. You can come to church with us," he says before turning to dig a bag of English muffins out of the fridge. Oh, and a bottle of wine. I'm pretty sure he wasn't day-drinking yesterday. Is it because of Michelle? Or maybe it's church. Or maybe yesterday I just didn't catch him at it. "You don't like milk?" he asks her.

"I'm lactose intolerant," she says.

He makes her an English muffin. I can't believe this. It's all I can do not to laugh. I'm tempted to ask why he didn't make me anything yesterday, just to be annoying, but I hold back. No one here knows me yet. I might want to become someone other than who I've been for most of my life. We'll see.

Michelle keeps making these saucer eyes and looking back and forth between me and Nicolas's wine, like she needs me to confirm what she's seeing before she'll believe it. I can't help her or I'll laugh.

"Michael and I should go home and change, if we're going to church," Mark finally says.

"We probably have something you could borrow," Nicolas tells him. "That way you'll have time to take a shower before we leave." The toaster oven chimes. Nicolas gets Michelle a jar of jelly to go with her English muffin. Michelle sprinkles the rest of her cereal on top of the jelly once she's spread it. Adorable. Mark is so lucky.

No one is saying anything now. It's not because we're eating. We were talking and eating just fine before.

Nicolas caves and breaks the awkward silence. “So you're a morning person, Michelle.”

Michelle shuts him down immediately. “Not really.”

“Michael, did you wake her up?”

I smile in acknowledgement but say nothing. Nicolas and I already made plenty of small talk yesterday. Watching him and Michelle circle around each other like barely-acquainted cats will be much more fun.

“You know, if you reward behavior like that, Michelle, he'll probably do it again,” Nicolas says.

She's not having it. "So why exactly did Mark have to die for the stuff you were talking about on Friday to kick in?" she finally asks. Here we go. This is the entertainment I deserve.

"As you can see, Michelle," Nicolas puts down his English muffin to elegantly twist his hand in Mark's general direction, "Mark's not dead." Then he picks it back up and takes a big bite.

Michelle blinks and doesn't say anything. Is that it? How anticlimactic. "I didn't say he was dead. I said he died."

Emilie wrinkles her nose and watches Michelle unblinkingly. I think it's her tone. She's starting to sound like she did on Friday.

"Hmm. You admit there's a difference, then," Nicolas says, mouth half full.

They go back and forth. Michelle presses Nicolas for more information. He dangles the possibility of understanding through experience and trips Michelle's oh-so-sensitive bullshit detector. She questions his motives.

Then Nicolas says something interesting. “You have friends, Michelle, yes? Parents who care about you and encourage you to pursue your own interests? A bright future, all planned out already, no room for any—” he trails off theatrically, “—disruptions to what you thought was real?”

Michelle doesn't have a response to that.

“I didn't. That was why. Don't worry about eighteen-year-old me. He was nothing like you.”

He sounds an awful lot like me, though. I'd like to hear more, but Michelle re-routes them to the present.

Did he just say he'd die if we didn't keep going along with whatever these dinners even are?

That certainly shut Michelle up. Nicolas won't look at us, either. He's looking out the window instead. Then, when he's finished eating, he tops off his wine and takes it back upstairs with him.

“You need to be more careful with him, Michelle,” Emilie says. She almost sounds disinterested, but you can tell she's not from her frown.

Michelle's face pinkens. She stares at the last of her English muffin but doesn't say anything.

I look out the window to see what Nicolas was looking at. In the distance, almost out of sight, I see a cluster of grey spots in the field behind the house. "Are those...?"

"Yes," Emilie tells me.

Headstones.

<<>>

I can't sleep. It's still Sunday—technically, Monday now. What happened since Friday is hitting me like how one of my shelves hit the floor when I was seven because the pitiful plastic lip holding it against the wall gave out under the weight of my rock collection.

My aunt had given me an unbroken geode for Christmas and a hammer. One of the halves broke into quarters when it landed on another rock on its way down. I didn't mind. For one, because they were still sparkly, and for another, because everything in my life always breaks. It was nothing compared to when my dad stopped going to work.

At first, I thought he was sick. But after a week or so, I noticed he didn't have any symptoms. And he could still get off the couch for food just fine. Yet he wouldn't sleep in his bed. When he got fired, my aunt and one of my cousins showed up and told him she was taking him out for lunch. He said he didn't want to go. Then she started yelling at him about how we could lose our house and he had a kid to feed and blah blah blah, and eventually he left with her. The cousin stayed behind to babysit me.

Dad's girlfriend had broken up with him a few months before that. She'd been like a mother to me. At the time, I thought she was going to "become" my mom by getting married to my dad, but in hindsight, she basically already was. I think that might have been part of why she left. Then again, Dad was kind of a pill to her in those last months. By the time I started high school, he was basically an oversized toddler.

So obviously, when Mark messaged me out of nowhere, I made travel plans as soon as I could. Reading over our old messages, he even warned me he'd be busy on Friday, but I didn't care. It still took me a month or so to scrape the money together for bus tickets. And by “scrape money together” I mean pawn things from around the house, which I had to do slowly to make sure my aunt didn't notice.

I'm not even sure she noticed I was gone after I left. She didn't try to contact me. Then again, she's used to not knowing where I am. Dad's enough of a handful by himself, and then there are her actual (now adult) kids and husband.

I still haven't told Mark about any of that. He had questions, way back when we were only messaging, but beyond confirming that I lived with him, I didn't really give any answers. He took the hint, but he must expect me to tell him more eventually. I can't say how long he'll stay this patient.

I don't want this to end, though. I've never felt so free in my life. And I don't want to tell Mark, either. I wouldn't wish the fear I've lived with—the knowledge that Dad's particular kind of dementia is heritable—on anyone, let alone my own brother.

But if Nicolas isn't lying, maybe he'll never have that fear, even if I tell him. Maybe whatever's protecting Nicolas from aging will protect us from our father's nightmare genes, too. I could ask him, but I think I already have a pretty good idea what he'd say. And even if I didn't, it would be beside the point. It's too soon to tell whether I can trust him. But as they say: “I want to believe.”

<<>>

“Are you free?”

Emilie always texts me before inviting me anywhere. I'm always free. Unlike Mark, she has plenty of time for me because she graduated last year and hasn't started college. The hour's notice she gives me is plenty of time to wrap up any chores I might be helping Grandma with.

The only real downside is she always wants to go outside, even though it's still fucking cold out. Mark has enough cold weather gear that I can borrow his, but Emilie always gives me this look like she's laughing at me on the inside when I wear it. To her, a sweater is all you need if the weather is over forty degrees. I've been wearing the puffer coat Mark apparently only wears when it's snowing out, a fleece pullover, and a hat. And even then, I'm still cold.

It looks like she came here on foot, even though she technically owns a car (inherited from her mother, like the house and the property it sits on). Grandma invites her in for cocoa, which she always accepts. When she's here, she's still quiet, but not standoffish like she was when Michelle and Dora were around last month. I don't know if it's because she didn't know them well or because of the way they acted. Probably the latter, 'cause she was nice to me more or less from the beginning. Maybe that was just because I look like Mark. I don't think she'd like it if I asked.

Anyway, she knows my grandparents pretty well, too. Apparently when she and Mark were little Jeanne approached them about doing a kind of language exchange: whenever Mark was at their house, he'd be expected to speak French, and so would everyone else (the non-French speakers from Jeanne's group did their best). At our grandparents' house, Emilie would have to speak English because no one but Mark understood French, and even then not as much as Emilie. When she's not here, Grandpa likes to tell me about the temper tantrums she used to throw as a toddler.

Grandma asks her about her studies and sewing projects around the kitchen table. Emilie gives short but warm answers. Generally, if you want her to talk much, you have to blindly stab at her general interests until you land on something she's excited about. Then she'll ramble about it for a few minutes. Then it's back to flowery (if she likes you) one-word answers until we finish our cocoa and leave.

Maybe that's why she keeps taking me on walks. Telling me where we are provides all the conversation we need for it to not be awkward. The knowledge is useful, too.

<<>>

Boy oh boy, Michelle's done it this time.

"Nicolas, this boy is dead! Look at him!" That's Michelle's mom. Michelle. Invited her mom in. Right after dinner. After Mark died again.

"Mrs. Simard, I need you to look at this logically." Nicolas's only pretending to be calm. "The only reason Michelle called you to come see this now is because she knows Mark will be fine on Sunday, and then there won't be any sign he was ever like this. His current condition is temporary—"

"There's nothing temporary about death, Nicolas, and this boy is dead." Her hair is more dark brown than black, but it's thick and sleek like Michelle's. And she's got the same facial features, but a shorter face and pointier chin.

"And since he is dead, there is nothing paramedics can do for him at this point. Take a photo if you'd like. Report me to the police for murder if Mark isn't up again on Sunday. I guarantee you he will be."

"How can you be so calm with a corpse on your couch?"

"Technically, it's not really his couch," I say, because I can.

Mrs. Simard widens her eyes at me, and I gotta say, I did not get the full impact of that crazed look on her face until she turned it on me. Hats off to Nicolas for keeping it as together as he has been.

"Your brother is lying dead on this couch," she hisses. "How can you talk to me like that right now?"

I shrug. "I admit it was pretty upsetting last month? But I'm kind of used to it by now."

"I know this must be hard to accept, Mrs. Simard, but you must trust me when I tell you there's nothing to fear—"

Mrs. Simard looks back at Nicolas unbelievingly. "No. Come on, Michelle."

Michelle's been standing off to the side with her face carefully blank. Dora's a couple feet away from her. Emilie stayed in the dining room as far as I know. I think Louise is in the kitchen. She cooked dinner for us again, but still won't eat with us. Maybe it's some kind of ritual thing or whatever. The fasting and bread and wine definitely have a ritualistic smack to them.

"Mrs. Simard, I have something to show you, too," Dora whispers from right behind Michelle and her mom as they all head down the stairs. I don't bother following them, so that's all I hear.

When they're gone, Nicolas turns to me. "Did you know she was going to do that?" He doesn't sound mad. Not at me, anyway.

What might he say if he knew I was the one to suggest it in the first place? I didn't think she'd do it. She seems like such a rule-follower. Hell, Michelle basically makes up rules where they aren't explicitly stated, and she's been complaining about the ones around these dinners all month. I thought that was all she'd do. That, or stop coming. I kind of tried to steer her away from that one.

"She didn't like not being able to talk about what happened last month to people who weren't there,” I tell him. “Said it was like being in a cult."

He sits down on the arm of the couch and crosses his arms. "I don't know what to do about that. There's only more of it coming. Why would the house choose her if she wasn't suited to this kind of life?"

He seems more talkative than usual. Maybe he's looking for reassurance. What can I say to get him to spill some real information? This definitely feels like an opportunity. “What makes a person more suited to it?”

“Oh, I don't know. Difference, maybe. Or a willingness to be different. A certain lack of investment in whatever you've been told about the way life is.”

I've got those things in spades.

“Or at least open-mindedness,” Nicolas continues. “Curiosity.”

Actually, this feels suspiciously like how Michelle says people get sucked into cults. Is that what's happening right now?

“Are you familiar with the ballad of Tam Lin?” he asks.

I'm not.

“You have to be like Janet,” he tells me anyway.