chimera

Study for Cache-Cache: Head of Autumn. Pavel Tchelitchew, 1941

One evening around the middle of September ‘20, I was on the phone with my mum. We were calling a little more frequently then, in one of the few pleasant side effects of the COVID pandemic. Coming off the back of an entire summer absent from British shores and the embrace of my Ma made me more appreciative of the four or five simple clicks it takes to at least have her voice in my ear. The conversation had all the regular features of one of our chats. I asked her how my sister was doing, she would tell me that she’s fine and that she’s getting really good at making curry. She’d asked me about how my course was going – I’d just started the first semester of my Science Communication classes – I told her that the classes were going well, probably saying some cheesy phrase like, “I think I’ve found my calling”, but in that exaggerated voice that British people do when they want to say something sincere but know that it sounds cringy. We were right on track to cruise out of the conversation with the usual heartening sensation of connection, and very little in the way of new knowledge. And then - oh so casually, like a bombshell covered in Christmas wrapping paper - she said the following sentence, “It’d be like if your twin was around.” A collection of trivial words clustered around one word which I had no seeming need to identify with during my 26 years of life, but was suddenly thundering on my eardrum with an energy that pulsed through to a now pounding heart… Twin.

For a few seconds the cognitive dissonance was overwhelming. My responses to her story continued as if she was still talking about my sister’s curry. But the alarm bells were blaring in a part of my brain that I assume continually monitors an identity checklist. At that moment, a box had been unticked and it could not be ignored for long. “Yeah, but Mum…” I stuttered, “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know I had a twin.” “You didn’t? I’m sure I must have told you.”, she said with a tone of surprise that carried an understanding of how strange it must be for me to hear this. “Yeah, I was pregnant with twins.” She went on to explain that my twin stopped developing after about eleven weeks, leaving me suspended alone in the amniotic fluid, destined to remain unaware of the strange and sad goings-on for some twenty-six years. What happened to me, my mum and my unborn twin is called ‘Vanishing Twin Syndrome” and it’s actually quite common.

Vanishing twin is defined as a miscarriage of a fetus from a multifetal pregnancy (i.e. twins, triplets or more). One in five mothers of multifetal pregnancies is likely to experience what my mum did back in 1995. The biological explanation for vanishing twin is unsurprisingly difficult to elucidate, given that it happens inside of a person carrying another organism that could do without any poking around from a doctor or scientist. It may have been an abnormality in chromosomes that vanished my twin - we were fraternal not identical, which would explain why I survived. It could also be as simple as the umbilical cord not implanting properly into the womb lining, and the nutrients required for growth running dry. Of course, the death of a fetus at eleven weeks is not like a typical death out in the world. The fetus is an accretion of cells scaffolding themselves into structures like organs and bones, but at 11 weeks it is not yet conscious. It’s a sort of unfolding reaction, a system that is innately connected to the mother and the environment inside the womb. Stem cells gather and transform to create all the wonderous biomechanical machines that make the versatile brilliance of humans. But when the fetus’ development fails, these tissues are absorbed back into the mother or possibly into another lifeform that grows beside it (assuming that it happens relatively early in the pregnancy). As strange as it is to hear, I may have absorbed some of my twin.

Following on from the initial shock, the emotion sweeping in to replace it was curiosity. For the remainder of the conversation, I perceived and expressed only interest in the details of this bizarre chapter in my existence. My logical brain was telling me that nothing had changed, this news makes no amendments to my current situation. All is well, I thought. But as we hung up, the age-old human instinct to gossip came over me. I ran downstairs to my housemate and told him of the strangeness. He’s a pretty cooky fellow with an undaunting sense of humour. “Whoa! You ate your twin!”, he said. “And you didn’t know ‘til now?! Weird.” Weird indeed. Most of the close friends I told towed the same comedic line, that I was a twin eater! It was all done out of love, of course. Blatant attempts to deescalate the jarring perception shift I was clearly experiencing. And it was a perception shift. Though it is from an era of my development that I am unable to recall, I couldn’t shake the feeling that some hearty chunk of my identity had been displaced. It’s like we all have this ethereal autobiography about ourselves that sits on a shelf, right in the back of some dusty utility room in the house of our consciousness. A record of reference that explains how and why we are where and what we are. The delivery of this new information meant that line 1, chapter 1 of the book of Callum was incorrect.

It’s hard to say whether what happened next was influenced by this news. The next day, I was sat at my desk for an online class in informal science education. At the open request of the lecturer, I offered an answer to a question. As I started to talk I felt my heart begin to pound with an unruly vigour, my palms began to leak, and my breath quickened in tempo. Amazingly I was able to cobble together an excuse about the doorbell ringing, and I shot out of screenview and onto the landing. In an attempt to demonstrate some kind of medical competence, I placed my fingers on my neck artery and felt the thumping rhythm of my pulse. I was having what I would later diagnose as a panic attack. I was reluctant to call it that at first, I had no reason to be experiencing any anxiety. My course was going well, if not a little intensely, and I’d gained an enigmatic twin. No big deal. However, the rest of the week held more unprompted manifestations of a deep and lingering anxiety, culminating in me dashing out of a cinema theatre with my breath doing a number on me once again. Running away from a Zoom call is one thing, but missing the last 30 minutes of Tenet is not ideal when you want to pretend that you understood what it was about.

Whether the news of my vanished twin was to blame for all of this, or if it was in fact a combination of reasons, it certainly played a role. Through the days and weeks that led on, I faced my anxieties aggressively. Eventually I was able to remain calm in Zoom calls and movies, and I was able to think about the peculiarities of my pre-natal situation in a more whimsical way. I started to have the kind of cheesy thoughts that you hear people talking about at family dinners, where obscure traits in children are assigned to a loosely connected, but very beloved, family member. You know, that type of thing where your mum says, “You got your love of trains from your great uncle”… Whom you’ve never met. I started to think that maybe the coalescence of me and my twin’s primordial cells might account for some of the dichotomies in my personality. The logical scientist and the creative writer, the social butterfly and the creature of insecurities. Of course, I know that is too fantastical to be true. I think I made these connections, attempting to colour the shades of my personality with the remnants of my twin, so that I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about their lack of existence. After all, what separates me from them is nothing but luck.

Though my dabbling in the astrology-esque assigning of personality traits was a little scientifically promiscuous, the idea that there remains some of my twin in me turns out not to be silly. On the internet you can find many instances of vanished twins re-emerging in differently coloured patches of skin on the survivor. There are even some wild stories about men spawning the children of their vanished twin by carrying the twin’s DNA in their sperm. Alongside the novelty of these stories are more sobering medical cases where the duplicity of DNA in the cells confuses the immune system and leads to auto-immune diseases. These people, these organisms with more than one set of DNA living inside them are called chimeras. And I may well be one of them. Fortunately, I am not living with any of these troubling ailments that I just described. I’m just me, it seems. Though, I have yet to procreate, so we’ll hold the verdict for now.

This idea can feel extremely strange - almost alien - on the surface: two organisms in one. But when you really think about it, when you think about what you are and what all complex organisms are, it’s not that weird at all. Whether you know it or not, your body is made up of a cornucopia of microorganisms that construct the microbiome. The human body contains around 37 trillion human cells, but it is home to around 100 trillion microbes of 500-1000 different species. A ratio of nearly 1:3. By that measure, you’re more other living things than you are homo sapiens. But you can take it even further. All those cells are made up of combinations of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and other elements; the same materials you find in the floor beneath you and the stars above. The dividing line between you and the vast, swirling chaos of the material Universe is a brief period of order within the long stretches of universal disorder and a definition that you create yourself. But I suppose you could redraw those dividing lines however you choose.

I am me, and I am my twin, and I am the cells we call human and the cells we call bacteria, I am the molecules inside cells and the atoms inside them, I am the air I breathe, I am the water that falls as rain, I am the dinosaurs that roamed, I am the Earth on which they stood, I am all that has ever happened on this pale blue dot, I am all the collisions of this ancient pocket of existence known as the Universe, I am – and you are – chimera.