The Impersonation of Walden Wynne

The The Impersonation Impersonation Of Walden Of Walden Wynne Wynne

WYATT SHEPPARD

Ashby Wynne had never met his half-brother, and only sometimes remembered that he had one. Though 28, Ashby had never quite outgrown his childish nature or his preoccupation with the small corners of the world with which he was acquainted. That which existed outside his immediate vision was acknowledged only circumstantially and was often promptly forgotten about.

Seeing him now, with the moisture in the air stimulating the untamed curls of his hair, Ashby found his half-brother to be at once both familiar and unfamiliar, as he had found the refl ection of his own face when he was a child out fi shing with his father, peering over the side of the boat into the green, unsettled water. His name was Charles, Ashby was surprised to remember. He was performing a eulogy at the poorly attended funeral of their father, and he had green eyes and a gaunt face and looked just like Ashby except for his head-turning height and the long slender bridge of his nose. Charles dug a wooden cane into the ground, which was moist and easily broken into. “Thank you all for coming,” he said. Ashby’s stomach grumbled and he wondered about lunch, though maybe he was only doing so to avoid thinking too hard about his father.

Walden Wynne had been a quiet man and not one who was very easy to know. Ashby had lived with him all his life and could count the things he knew about him on one hand—He was a veteran, a guarder of his own secrets, and he enjoyed activities that mandated solitude and silence. Like fi shing. Ashby had never especially taken to fi shing, hunting, or shooting guns at little targets. But at least when he was young, and his father still had hope for him growing into a man and not the scrawny faggot he turned out to be, they had those quiet, silent days on the lake. Ashby bitterly felt about them, but also precious, as if he knew even back then that they would be his only lasting memories.

For that reason, it had been a relief for Ashby not to be asked to give the eulogy. There was only so much he could think to say about it all, the guns and the trout and the nothingness. What a horrible son that made him, the cool rush of relief when the burden was lifted. Ashby was, of course, devastated to lose his father. It’s just that his grief was more for what could’ve been than what was; it hit him when he saw fathers take the hands of their children before crossing the street.

The service was happening in the sizable backyard, perhaps more accurately called a fi eld, behind the house Ashby had grown up in and that Walden Wynne had died in, days earlier, frowning in his sleep. It was not raining but showed evidence of having done so that morning so that the grass was bowing and the dress shirts of the attendants were sticking slightly to their

chests. Charles Wynne was standing in front of the rows of pale blond heads, holding a curled bundle of paper in front of his chest like a bread loaf. Ashby studied him, the long nose, the slender hands, the thin lips, and the brown lashes. A pair of wireframed glasses sat in front of his eyes that made him look old, but he dressed like he was young, in a dress shirt that pinched at the shoulders because it was too small and a crooked tie. He was beautiful, Ashby decided.

“We’re gathered here today to celebrate the life of Walden Christopher Wynne. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Charles Wynne, and I am Walden’s eldest son, conceived before he was deployed in 1986, and well before he would meet his wife, Bessy, in Detroit in 92. By the time Walden came to know of my birth, I was growing into an adolescent under the immaculate care of my mother, Genevive, and my stepfather, and as time and luck would have it, well enough was left alone.

I don’t blame anyone for this sequence of events or the order in which they happened, and my childhood was one full of love, but as adolescents are, I was obsessed with the idea of knowing who my father was, and with the idea of myself as an acrobat, swinging from a trapeze into the open air and just barely missing the hand that was reaching out to catch me.

I began writing letters to Walden in my twenties at the behest of my mother. He responded to the third one, and many after. In honor of him now, I would like to read to you the fi nal words that he wrote to me, last year when I turned 33.”

Charles looked to be reciting from memory until that point, then he turned his attention to the bundle of paper. Ashby realized then that his father had written it all. The long, slender fi ngers began to grapple with the string that held the bundle together.

How strange! How magnifi cent! Even Ashby’s familiar corners were not what they seemed. He thought of a dollhouse his grandmother had owned which he had coveted for years before her passing. It was a huge, heavy thing with a glossy dark wood fi nish and an endless number of little compartments and secret rooms; it always reminded him that nothing could ever be completely exhausted of its mystery.

That was Ashby’s greatest sin if he were to pick one: his tendency to covet, in the biblical sense. He has never seen a beautiful thing that he did not become immediately obsessed with possessing for himself. Envy was not quite the word, as this feeling didn’t stem from a place of cruelty or embellishment. It was a deep, all-encompassing desire; almost lust.

Charles began reading, then, and his voice took on a lower, more somber tone, one that he possibly imagined his father has.

It made Ashby want to cry. “Even when we feel the furthest apart, take solace in that you are constructed of shards of my being. There are times that I felt from a great distance that I could sense those shards, pulsing with emotion and with life, like a phantom limb. It is the nature of things, of the world, that you will always be a piece of me.”

He slowly lowered the paper then, punctuating his reading with a bashful “Thank you,” and moving to return to his seat. Ashby tangled himself in the metal collapsible chairs in his rush to get to Charles and sit beside him. Charles looked at him once, looked away, and then back again as if he had just seen a funny mirror.

“You’re Ashby!” he said.

#

For days afterward he did not look away again. Ashby had a lot of questions about the letters, and Charles had a lot of questions about Ashby’s childhood, so they went back and forth over lunches, dinners, brunches, wines, and assortments of cheese.

Charles’s mother Genevive did not come with him to Detroit because her health was in decline. He had been of two minds about it, but she was a tough woman, and knowing how important this trip was to him, she wouldn’t have allowed him to stay. Genevive was, as far as Charles was concerned, a magical woman who had always possessed the innate maternal power to see straight into his mind.

In regards to Ashby Wynne, she had claimed to have heard “some strange things about that boy.” Charles, not knowing his half-brother but being oddly protective regardless, had pointed out that Ashby was only a handful of years younger than he was, and not a “boy.” Genevive told him he’d be surprised. He was, a little.

He did sense immediately a difference in age, maturity, and something like innocence. Ashby reminded him of a determined doe, refusing to be put off by failure. He had the flighty mind of a toddler and the body language of a teenager, his head whipping around at butterflies and his feet stuttering over small rocks or untied shoes. It softened something in Charles; he found himself quickly easing into the hypothetical position of the older brother. Being around Ashby seemed to draw out his controlled, more stoic side, which was the shard of himself that he most liked to show off.

Charles had always felt—quietly, because it was not the sort of thing you admit out loud—that he was meant for a great love story. He had waited patiently for it. He wasn’t desperate, or at least he tried not to be; he fancied himself to be the sort of quiet, eccentric gentleman that belonged in a Jane Austen novel. Aesthetics were important to him—hence, the cane. Inside the sarcophagus of his ribs, his heart was running like a car being warmed in the winter, hot to the touch and empty. Ready to go.

“Read it to me again,” Ashby asked, his hand hovering above a powdered donut. “The one you read at the funeral. It is the nature of things…” he began, helpfully.

“That line is at the end,” Charles pointed out.

“I like it, though,” Ashby replied. “I can’t believe I never knew that Dad liked to write. I’ve never seen him write. Not once. Hey, what were your replies like? Do you have them?”

“Well, no. I sent them to him.”

“I bet they’re in his desk somewhere. We can go and look for them.”

Charles’s eyes traced the familiar letters, thin and tall and delicate. It is the nature of things, of the world, that you will always be a piece of me. He came to Detroit with a mostly intact image of Walden Wynne in his mind. The final blind spot, like a smudge on his glasses he just couldn’t rub away, was something Charles had expected this trip to rectify. He would attend the funeral and finally be in physical proximity of the man that he had spent all his life trying to compose from scraps of information, and the fog would lift away and he would see it all: Walden Wynne. A man. His father. The incompleteness of the image would stop probing endlessly at his brain, denying him peace. He would go back home to take care of Genevive, and he would tell her “I have finally gotten my answers.”

The reality was that the longer Charles stayed in Detroit, the more distorted the image of his father became. Things he’d once thought himself to be certain of were fading away into obscurity. He had imagined, for instance, that Walden must have a big, heavy writing desk in a crowded office, covered in piles of books and scraps of paper. Really, the desk was quite small—a pale, thin-legged thing with a single drawer sitting under the tabletop— and there wasn’t an “office” at all. Instead, the desk sat against a pine-green wall in a large master bedroom. There was a kingsize bed, dressed like the rest of the room in dark green tones, and a sizable television sitting on a massive entertainment unit whose drawers were filled with clothes. There wasn’t a book or a journal in sight. The unfamiliarity of it all made Charles feel slightly uncomfortable. Something loomed at the back of his mind that he was afraid to turn around and face.

Ashby set to his search, his limbs jutting out as he crouched, but he found the sliding desk drawer to be vacant except for a couple of takeout menus and pamphlets. He lifted them to reveal nothing but a pocket-sized spiral notebook beneath and scrunched his face unfavorably. “He must’ve put them up somewhere secret. I wonder where…”

“Can I see that?” Charles asked, with a gesture towards the small notebook. Ashby handed it to him. It had a dark blue cardboard cover that was curling at one edge. His tongue soured. He was several versions of himself, then: The one who didn’t know what to expect inside, and the one who already knew what he would see and was urging him to savor the final moments before the realization smacked him full force like a wave.

Had he always known? At that moment it seemed feasible that he had. The version of him that knew looked solemnly, pitifully at the other, breathless and shaking with the notebook in his hand. He fingered through it. FISCHERS FOOD SHOP (313) 262 6533. APPOINTMENT 4/17 AT 3:45, DR. WINKLER. PICK UP: LIVE BAIT, DOUBLE A BATTERIES FOR REMOTE. All written in a tiny, stout print, the letters packed closely together. It was not at all familiar to Charles.

He sucked in a breath, his face burning with what must’ve been a noticeable blush. It was… Well, it was many different things. “Humiliating” was the first one to come to him. How many

of those blond heads in the crowd listened to him with skepticism and disbelief? How many of them knew—or thought he made it up himself? And Genevive—He couldn’t even let himself think of Genevive yet, of her role in this horror. He tried to register the fact that he was standing in the bedroom of a complete stranger; someone he had never once spoken to.

The heat and anger of humiliation were urgently replaced with the cold, bitter feelings of grief. “Charles?” Ashby said beside him, and his tone of voice implied that he had already said it several times before now. Charles took a few uncertain steps backward and sat on the edge of the made bed. “Are you okay?” Ashby asked.

Charles gave voice to the awful thing. “I don’t think Walden wrote those letters. I think my mom lied to me.” It made sense, out loud. It brought sordid concrete detail to a new image all together, one that felt, to his horror, so much more real than the one he was attempting to construct before. Without noticing, Charles was gripping at his sides. What Ashby was doing, he wasn’t sure. He was inside himself, distant from the room. He felt Ashby’s arms settle around him.

“I want to show you something,” Ashby said. He led Charles down a hallway which he noticed even in his state of mental absence to be lacking in the childhood photos and memorabilia that existed in Genevieve’s home, into another room that appeared to be used for storage—it might’ve been Ashby’s bedroom once. There was an empty bed frame, chairs, empty packaging, and a dresser missing its drawers. In front of it, all was a huge and admittedly magnificent dollhouse.

Ashby spread the two halves apart like wings and the inside was even more awe-inspiring than the outside was. The closer he looked, the more there was to see in the intricate carvings and details. Ashby held his hand.

“My grandmother used to own this when I was little. I was obsessed with it; it was the reason that I would get so excited to go and see her. Well, other than being away from my dad, who liked to berate me for anything I got excited about. I used to think the dollhouse was magic, because every time I thought I knew everything there was to know about it, I would find something new I had never seen before.” Ashby reached his free hand forward, and with two fingers parted the velvet curtains covering a window in the house’s dining room. He pushed the window pane open with the tip of his finger, a swift and gentle action he must have done countless times before.

“When I got older,” he continued, “I realized that a lot of things in my life were like this dollhouse. No matter how familiar I thought I was with something…” His hand swept to the other wing, drawing Charles’s eyes along with it. He opened a small closet door in a hallway, hardly touching it. It seemed to draw towards him on its own. “... I could come back to it later and discover something completely new. Even my own self.

Your perception changes everything. The idea of nothing, nothing in the whole world, being certain, or completely knowable… That can be scary, or it can be magic. I like the way that things change when you aren’t looking. It means that there is always, always something new.”

Charles found his voice. “What if you preferred it the way it was before?”

Ashby smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “There is always more to love if you know how to look for it. I don’t think it matters whether he wrote them or not. That person who wrote the letters, your dad, existed to you. That makes him just as real as the person I knew. Who’s to say he didn’t think all of that, even if he never wrote it down?”

Charles looked at his brother, who only a few days ago he had hardly known existed, and he wondered if it was possible that the exchange was equivalent: was the loss of Walden, or of who he thought Walden was, made up for by the existence of Ashby?

Inside his chest, his running heart shifted gears and began to purr.

“Walden missed out,” Charles said. “Not knowing you, I mean. Never getting to know who you really were. You deserved to be known, as much as you can be known at any given moment, and loved for all of you.”

Ashby froze for a fraction of a second. “Your dad missed out too, not having you. So did I. I wish I could’ve grown up with a brother like you.”

Charles pushed shut the door to the dollhouse closet with his middle finger, softly, softly.

#

In their father’s bedroom once more, they inspected the musty articles of clothing that sat in his drawers: Overalls and button downs, stained shirts, and torn pants. They pulled them out one by one; dressed one another in them. They were all a bit small on Charles, a bit large on Ashby. Ashby positioned a navy bucket hat on Charles’s head, one that Walden had worn on fishing trips, and Charles studied his reflection in the mirror. There were two of him again, but this time, the other one was Ashby.

They went fishing. Ashby gave directions, and Charles drove. When they arrived, Charles instinctively took Ashby’s hand before they crossed the road. Neither could paddle properly. They rowed in circles and circles and circles and did not fish, laughing and sitting close. Ashby looked over the side of the boat to see his face in the water once more, familiar and funny, though less funny now—the water, and with it, all of the world was stiller than it was before.

“It is the nature of things that you will always be a piece of me,” Charles said to Ashby. Ashby smiled and sat upright again, leaning his head on the shoulder of his brother. You are something greater than a piece of me, he thought but did not say. You are all of me.

All at once, they were two men, three men, and one man on a boat, they were father and son, father and father, son and son, brother and brother. They held hands tight enough to become one another, and scattered through the stiller water the pale grey ashes of Walden Wynne.

Wyatt Sheppard is a nonbinary author, comic artist, and all-around strange person. They graduated from Webster University in 2020. They live in Washington, Missouri with their cat, Miku.