I might have felt an earthquake, but there weren’t many ways of knowing. Only hours later was it confirmed by the radio, harping from the nightstand. I laid under the weight of my bedsheets and body pillows, still and listening to the background noise. A flock of pigeons fluttered over the faint crackling of the radio. A man narrated the happenings uptown as though the damages that had unfolded was a late night program.

Skyscrapers and bureaus were evacuated. Scaffoldings toppled onto the streets. An infinity pool had spewed chlorine and glass and piss down to the drove of pedestrians. I could picture them — the nine-to-fives calling an Uber before calling Uber for why they weren’t able to Uber out of town, the execs hopping into their shiny little cars, piling onto the already jammed streets where ambulance sirens trilled on with the gust of an alarm clock. Students televise the event through their phones. The eco-conscious might have taken their bikes, but could they with the cracks in the asphalt?

I could have been amongst them, alarmed with a lukewarm coffee in my hand, squirreling around the urban structures, thinking whether this would factor into my leave days. But I was above that now. Mrs Drabik, the old bat from a few houses down, had once referred to me in one of her numerous community meetings as a ‘shut-in’, or so I’ve heard (an anonymous neighbor had left a note on the front porch). I never liked the word, but one doesn’t need to like something to agree with it.

The earthquake measured to a 6.2 Richter, the man reported. The government had yet to announce any further proceedings besides a vague declaration that the source of the earthquake will be investigated and mitigated. With science, of course, as usual. The man then went on about tectonic plates. A while went by. The trees rustled softly. My hair like bristles against the pillow. I might have slept or I might have not.

Then, a live call. A girl was calling from a corner, near a high-rise project. A foreman was still on a tower crane. “He’s closer to the sky than down here,” she yelled. “There was a crash just a few moments ago.”

“Tell us more,” the radio host instructed. He sounded almost excited. “Paint the picture for us.”

A nervous squeal. A bed-wetting squeal. “I think it’s going to fall…”

“Bitch, call 911. The fuck?” Screamed another pedestrian. “Give me the damn…”

A muddled altercation.

“Miss, stay on the line,” the radio host blurted. “We can’t hear you if you disconnect.” A metallic roar. The volume was expressed through the chintzy radio I bought for ‘brown noise’ as grating static. I could only make out the cluttering of debris. The heels laying its clacks on the concrete. Someone shouted run. I reached out from the bounds of my blanket, flinging my arms around where the nightstand was, trying to find the damn volume knob. A takeout box of orange chicken from yesterday was, instead, slapped down to a Persian rug. Then, the radio paused. A chorus of claps and whistles and cheers and general ovation erupted from the other end of the line. “Miss?”

“It’s him! It’s Inframan! He has the foreman!”

I pulled myself out from the warmth into the cloistered air of my bedroom and let out a sigh. I assessed the damage of my soft rug. The sight of the three balls of chicken scattered across it broke my heart. I picked it, one by one, and shoved them in my mouth, sucking my fingers clean. It still tasted good. There was light behind the curtains so it must have been midday or so.

“I don’t know… if I’d be able to repay you for…,” I heard a sulking voice that spoke in stutters. The foreman. A southern man, perhaps.

“It is my duty,” a booming voice dismissed the foreman’s offer. The words spoken in a dramatic lilt. Inframan. “Everyone,” he declared, “we must start making our way to the park where we’re clear of buildings. As for now, the government is locating the origin of the earthquake. Until then, we must remain vigilant —” The preachings went on.

I shut the radio off and sat stupidly for a while. Air rose and fell in my bowels before I made a swift move to stand, to march out the bedroom door, down the stairs to the fridge. Nursing a jug of milk and a pack of mozzarella balls, I checked the front porch. The daylight was softer than I anticipated. Some passerby waved at me out of recognition. I made a face, clutched onto my satin robe, and waved back meagerly. She paced away.

There, exposed on the porch of my own home which looked like a shrine, I let the newly delivered bouquet of flowers wilt out amongst a pile of other bouquets and kicked in a few cardboard inside — gift deliveries for an ‘Inframan’ who, in reality, lived elsewhere, high up in a subsidized penthouse for all his samaritan-ness, far away from the quaint, rotting suburban home a few blocks away from Mrs Drabik. He was simply too good for that. He had always been. The influx of gifts was, however, perhaps the only perk of having a twin in such a vain occupation.

Food delivery had gone down along with television. And so, I drove out to a nearby Whole Foods to pick out whatever I pleased. Five pints of salted caramel ice cream, a Japanese wheat gummy with zero calories, and ten boxes of an assortment of sashimi, sushi, et cetera. A wine with the heftiest price tag. I didn’t know what it was. I wanted to last until the delivery services were back, that was all.

“You look so familiar,” the woman at the checkout counter remarked. “I couldn’t quite place you.”

I adjusted my robe so as to not expose myself. She glared at the contours of my soft, round belly then my head. “Card.”

She gasped. “My daughter has a poster of you. You looked a lot fitter there, if you don’t mind me saying. It’s not music, is it? Are you a musician?”

“I wish, but I’m a civil servant,” I lilted. “It is my duty.”

She didn’t register.

“I saved a foreman. And like probably a lot of other people in need. I’m on the news.”

“This is my lucky day.”

“Ma’am. There was an earthquake today. Can you put them in plastic bags?”

“Oh, we all felt it here as well and I thought I had a stroke. Dreadful, just dreadful what the things underneath can do. Is that why you’re panic buying as well?” She smiled politely at my purchases, then at me.

“It’s for dinner. And I’m buying this very calmly.”

On the drive back, the roads were off. The scrawny, manicured elms by the streets were now dilapidated. Some laid supine over the pavement, some pointed at odd angles. Neighbors were now piled outside their front yards. They stood around, ajar. Helicopters pulled away from the periphery of my windshield. I watched the dark, branching gashes that laid on the road surface as I drove towards home. I parked in the driveway, thinking to myself: Why are the lights on inside? And why are all the blinds raised?

Marching past the overgrown yard and through the parade of bouquets out front with my purchases, I made my way in. The front door was already unlocked.

“Where have you been? Are you alright?”

The sight of him disappointed me. It was my twin brother, standing in the walkway towards the kitchen, still donning his ridiculous Inframan spandex bodysuit. From afar, it made him look like a chiseled tampon with lacquered hair — an Asian Elvis Presley or some perverted, diasporic pilates instructor stylistically arrested in the 70s. Up close, he could have passed as a mascot for a detergent product or something of a similar vein. I shuffled past him to the fridge. “I’m good. Please leave.”

“We need to talk.”

“Try calling the landline next time. You didn’t have to fly all the way out here.”

“Gorva,” he said my name pointedly. “This is bigger than us both.”

“This is bigger than us both,” I lilted as I shoved the pints of ice cream into the teeming freezer.

“There was an earthquake just now. When you were at Whole Foods.”

A detail struck me. “How’d you know I was at Whole Foods?”

He casted me the same earnest glare he’d done in a toothpaste commercial. “Gorva. The earthquakes are coming from this house.”

I balanced the boxes of sashimi in my arms and made my way to the couch. “I can’t take you seriously when you do saviour-speak. Like everything has to sound so dramatic.”

He sat down on the smaller sofa across from me. “Did you feel an earthquake yesterday?”

“Um. No.”

“No as in?”

“No as in no. I thought we shared a womb. Why are you so slow?”

He unzipped his bodysuit so that it loosened around the chest. “We’ve triangulated the area to identify the focus of the earthquake, the epicenter, the strongest point. I thought it was a joke when they told me this house, your house, was directly above it.”

“Nope. Nothing happened here.”

“They’re right,” he rubbed his chin — a mannerism he’d taken up by himself at an early age. It was around the time I developed a belief that those who rubbed their chins actually had no real thoughts firing up in their skull. “Did you know that when you were out, a 7.8 Richter earthquake happened here?”

“No. Nothing happened at Whole Foods.” I drank a glug of wine which tasted like any wine I had ever had.

“The second earthquake’s epicenter is at Whole Foods.”

“Oooh. Can you leave now? I have a night to catch up on.”

“Gorva, I’m serious —”

“Gorva. Gorva. Gorva. Gorva. Ahhhhhh.” I ate a piece of tuna. “Googoogaga.”

He raised his voice over me. “The government and their dispatch unit had posited that you’re somehow causing these earthquakes.”

“What happened to science?” I chuckled before I choked and coughed and wheezed. “Just because I wasn’t shot up with some experimental government-sanctioned steroid when I was like fifteen doesn’t mean I’m fat enough to cause an earthquake, you twat.”

“So that’s what this is. You’re hung on my physique and the fact that I actually help people. What have you done, huh? Look around this place.”

“I was with mom. Remember? When she had to be let down with morphine and fentanyl and whatnot for her plugs to be pulled out. Do you even know what cancer she had?” I ate another piece of tuna.

“That’s not fair,” he said, earnest this time. The light behind his eyes had been blown out as though the invisible cameras around him had turned off. I knew I pinched the right spot. “It’s not fair.”

“That shouldn’t be a surprise now would it. You’re Inframan. You can fly for god’s sake. You have kids. Bla bla. And you’re still complaining?”

He looked at me now in disbelief. “Why do you hate me so much?”

I laughed with my teeth. The wine puckered my cheeks. “I don’t hate you. I just don’t… I don’t think I respect you as a person. You’re so greedy to be good. You would’ve eaten me in the womb if it meant you were getting a certificate. Like you were such a teacher’s pet and dad leaving gave you such a complex to be this — figure. And I had to disappear for you to be that. Remember soccer? When you told everyone I’d rape them if they weren’t careful. Don’t drop the soap? Very original. Out of everyone, you really had to tell Adam — the only one who talked to me like I wasn’t the worst at kicking a plastic ball. But that’s okay. I inherited the house and you’re leading pride marches in the sky now, doing summersaults mid-air and shit. When people think of Asians now, they think of you and not the weird kid with the thick glasses and a limp dick. So, kudos for the brownie points, but don’t you think it’s a bit funny they had to call you inframan and not supraman or something? Right, they called you sushiman for a while until the stats came out. You know, seventy five percent of casualties rescued are caucasians. But whatever. I digress. You’re the military’s vanity project because you jumped over a dummy grenade once at a tryout and you’re beloved. You’re that figure now. So why bother with the earthquakes when it keeps you employed?”

An immeasurable richter of emotions surged across his face. I rushed more wine. Without a word, he got up and left. A large, gaseous eruption sounded out front as he took off into the night sky. I checked the food delivery app to see that the services were still down. Weeks later, flowers and letters and trinkets in cardboard boxes stopped showing up at my porch.

It was nine or so when the doorbell rang. It must have been the wontons.

I darted down the stairs, towards the door where a shadow loomed behind its glass pane. I opened and froze.

“Hey,” Adam greeted. He looked like how I’d imagined him to be, sharper around his edges with age, but forever kind and contemplative in the eyes. I was in nothing but an oversized tee shirt and a striped boxer, fresh out of sleep. I must have looked like I was expecting and the house was in no shape for visitors.

“Adam?”

“You still remember me. Ha.”

We stood there for a while. I prayed for my grotesque form to scare him off my porch and back to wherever he came from, but he just looked around in an awkward silence. “What are you doing here? On Faultline Drive?” I finally asked.

“Your brother called a few days ago,” he scratched the back of his head. “He’s worried sick about you and suggested I should check in.”

I scoffed. “How long are you checking in for?” I watched as he fiddled around with the luggage handle.

He looked at me and laughed as though he was being silly. “This is so silly. I’m being so silly. Coming here with baggage in the middle of the night. Sorry,” he turned around to what I assumed was his car. “I don’t want to be an imposition.”

“No.”

“No as in?”

“No. You’re not an imposition. The house is just a bit messy, but come in.”

I led him to the couch where things were most in order. Excusing myself to get him water, I retrieved a trouser that was laying around and quickly put it on. Then, I returned with pints of ice cream and wine from the fridge; and the boxes of wontons and raw fish that were just delivered. “Eat,” I told him and deposited myself at the lesser chair across from him. He obliged.

The conversations eased up after a while. Living alone for so long within these walls, orientation became something flexible, but seated with Adam after what felt like years; time, for the first time, felt uncollapsed. He told me he lived alone uptown in a shoebox apartment. He was trying to make it as an actor.

“How’d you know salted caramel was my favorite?”

“I didn’t.”

“You used to tell people you were psychic. Back in school.”

“Really?” I let out a heavy laugh which made me wince.

“Yeah. We’d be on the bleachers between matches and you’d walk down to the grass, pluck out a handful, and tell the boys you knew their future. You gave us readings,” he scooped a mound into his mouth.

“I don’t remember.”

“I do.”

“What was your reading?” I watched as he looked at me suspiciously. I watched a silver necklace dangle over the shadow of his clavicle. The ornate mole at the corner of his left eye, overlaying a bed of orange freckles that draped over the rest of his face. His brown hair. When he turned, a birthmark the shape of an arrow was still at the back of his head. He always assumed I withheld things, which was often true, but it was none of his business.

“That if we met again after graduation, I would be doing better than you in life.”

A flash. “And you told me that you’d never want to meet me again if that was so.”

“So you remember.”

“Guess I am psychic. I mean look at us.”

I could tell when he withheld judgment. He had a tell: A quick raise in his brows and a lick at the corner of his lips. Despite being remarkably bad at dancing around eggshells, he did it again. “You own real estate and I’m trying to book a role with self-tapes. Who’s really winning here?”

The night went on. It was the most I had spoken in a year. He told me the earthquakes terrified him as does the fact that people have stopped by my home to fling cartons of eggs. Mrs. Drabik stoked the flames at her community meetings, calling me a ‘cancer of the community’ and that I should be made to attend a meeting for further questioning. This was resultant of some minister announcing the exact location of the epicenter which trickled down to strange eruptions of unrest and speculation: Who was the strange immigrant recluse who lived on Faultline Drive? Why was he causing these earthquakes? What could be done? Adam thought it was bullshit — after all, how could a person cause an earthquake?

“An Asian role had to be switched to a midwestern one after the visas began getting revoked,” Adam said. “I’m waiting for a callback.”

“Adam!” I ate out of his pint. “You’re booking it. I’m psychic.”

When he’d grown sick of salted caramel and alcohol, I began to lumber back and forth, cleaning the place for the first time. He began helping which I told him wasn’t necessary and that he should relax. He insisted, manning the kitchen sink and shooing me away. I let him.

When we made our way upstairs, he asked where he could stay for the night.

“It’s my mother’s bedroom,” I showed him a door opposite my bedroom. “Just — yeah.”

“The couch is fine.”

“Don’t be silly. You have a herniated disc.”

He stood by the doorway with his luggage and said nothing out of politeness. “Can we have a date tomorrow?” He asked. “We don’t even have to leave. We’d just be downstairs, all dressed up and everything.”

“That sounds insane.”

“Yes or no.”

“Yes. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

I slept, thinking I was the ugliest I had ever been. It was late when I heard the door creak. Some time closer to morning than night, a figure climbed into the bed next to me. His body tussled against the bed, sending everything into a quiver. I pretended I was more asleep than awake.

I reached for the radio, but clatters were coming from downstairs. So, in a curious fit, I clambered down to a clean living room. The dining table — once buried in cardboard and junk — now stood cleared, as if expecting guests. “Sit,” Adam said. He was dressed up in a suit at 8 AM. Crisp and starched. The windows were open, letting in the breeze and the chorus of chirps. Egg stains still clung to one of the windows.

“You packed a suit with you?” I asked.

“I’m an actor. It is my duty.”

I laughed maniacally.

“But I do have something to ask. It’s stupid, but would you consider moving in with me?”

Something fell in the air. We were practically strangers and what good was it to cohabitate with a recluse? “Why?” I asked.

“It can’t be good here. I can just feel it. This place. And won’t you be so much happier living with someone?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you’d only just try. I live right in the middle of town so you’d never be bored.”

“What if there’s an earthquake?”

“Then we’d be in an earthquake together at least.”

I couldn’t help myself but smile like a stupid, spoiled child. I could feel my skin brim all over. I said yes. Shortly, Adam rushed upstairs for a shower. I closed my eyes and felt the day. The pipes in the house croaked with life, rid of the man from the radio, rid of my own voices inside my head. I felt good.

A rattle. The ceramic plates clattered against each other from the sink like nervous teeth. Books began to fall off its shelf. A kettle flew from the cupboard. An earthquake. Before I could register its entirety, it stopped and all resumed. And they thought I was causing the earthquakes, I thought, what idiots.

Upstairs, the shower head was still running. Thoughtlessly, I entered my mother’s bedroom which I have kept sealed all this time. The room was how I remembered it, her scent still hung low in the air — a powdery, teary scent. Dust had somehow found its way in. Adam’s luggage rested where she used to dry my hair. She’d sneak a kiss on my forehead before she dried my brother’s hair. My father thought that was what made me soft, he used to say. I walked closer to his luggage which had toppled, spewing its contents. I looked at his clothes, his briefs, his lack of paraphernalia, and a thick brown envelope lodged between two jeans. Inside, was a cheque of 100,000 USD, adorned with my brother’s signature. His rehearsed sprawl was drawn over it with the same hand that saved the foreman, signed comic book deals, and fingered some unassuming fan.

A click. I put it back and paced towards my bed. I buried myself, again, under my blankets. Footsteps inched towards where I was and a weight. An arm wrapped around me in a mispositioned embrace. Then, a hand removed the blanket to reveal my face, sweaty and stony.

“What are you doing under there?” Adam asked in a cooing whisper.

I started crying.

“Gorva. Are you alright?”

My breath stuttered. “Leave.”

He looked at me before a quick lip at the corner of his lips. Then he kissed me. Sweltering and long. I felt nauseous. I tasted all the sugars I have eaten from days, weeks, months before, regurgitating. It all tasted so sour. Nothing had been digested.

“We’re still leaving tomorrow, yeah?” Adam asked. I watched his kind, kind eyes shape into a crescent as he smiled. I saw myself in the corner of his sclera — a well of lard smeared on a bed, all teary-eyed and desperate. I tried to smile at it.

“Yes, Adam. Tomorrow.”

“Promise?”

I kissed him again and felt nothing. “Yes. Do you want to take a nap?”

“With you, yes.”

It took a while before he drifted into sleep. I might have slept or I might have not. I sat up, watching his ribs flare and settle under his shirt. I kissed him on the forehead. Evening came close given how blue it became outside. I got in my car, wearing my mother’s robe, and drove down Faultline Drive. The man from the radio opined.

“It is a priority to place the epicenter in town. Scientists have confirmed that being within a 15 kilometer radius of the Faultline epicenter strangely provides a safe zone from its earthquakes and this just in, we’re registering an 8.9 Richter earthquake. Our biggest one yet —”

I turned it off and drove on to nowhere in particular. Somewhere far away. Moving the proximity of safeness elsewhere.

I pictured it now. Uptown, the cracks sent down the walls. Buildings coming apart like paper mâché. Sewage flooding the streets as people ran around, thinking to themselves: What have we done to deserve this? The answer would be nothing. You’ve done nothing so you deserve nothing. I opened the car window and breathed.

I pictured the elms on Faultline Drive plummeting into the houses like sledgehammers to miniatures. I wondered if Mrs. Drabik would have died from a stroke or would it be her aesthetic disagreement with having a hole in her roof. I wondered what immigrant construction worker would take up the task of fixing it with the bottom barrel wage she’d pay.

I pictured my brother, flying around town in a frenzy. If twin telepathy is real, I wondered if he knew his cheque was no longer the only item in the envelope. That I had written a small note for Adam, my sweet sweet Adam: And you were scared I’d rape you.

I pictured the last of my mother reducing to rubble.

I pictured it all as the tectonic plates moved into an embrace beneath me.