David Eddings - Regina’s Song

Moby Dick has been plowed and planted over and over by generations of scholars much better than I, though, and I didn’t really feel like chewing old soup for my paper in the course. Dr. Conrad was our instructor, naturally, and I was fairly certain that he’d take a rehash of previous examinations of the book as a personal insult.

Then I came across an interesting bit of information. It seems that when Melville was writing Billy Budd, he kept borrowing Milton’s Paradise Regained from the New York Public Library, and I began to see certain parallels.

Dr. Conrad found that kind of interesting. “I wouldn’t hang your doctoral dissertation on it, Mr. Austin,” he advised, “but you might squeeze an MA thesis out of it.”

“Am I going for an MA, boss?” I asked him.

“You bet your bippie you are,” he told me bluntly.

“Bippie?”

“Isn’t it time for you to get back to Everett and make more doors?” he asked irritably.

I considered the notion of graduate school while I was trimming door stock that evening. It was more or less inevitable—an English major without an advanced degree was still only about two steps away from the green chain. With an MA, I could probably get a teaching job at a community college—a distinct advantage, since the idea of teaching high school didn’t wind my watch very tight.

I had a sometime girlfriend back then, and she went ballistic when I told her about my decision to stay in school. I guess she’d been listening to the ghostly sound of wedding bells in her mind, which proves that she didn’t understand certain ugly truths. Her father was a businessman in Seattle, and mine was a working stiff in Everett. I don’t want to sound Marxist here, but old Karl was right about one thing. There are real differences between the classes. A rich kid doesn’t have to take his education too seriously, because there are all kinds of other options open for him. A working-class kid usually only has one shot at education, and he doesn’t dare let anything get in his way, and that includes girlfriends and marriage. The birth of the first child almost always means that he’ll spend the rest of his life pulling chain. Reality can be very ugly, sometimes.

This is very painful for me, so I’ll keep it short. In the spring of 1995, the twins attended one of those “kegger parties” on a beach near Mukilteo, just south of Everett. I’m not sure who bought the kegs of beer for them, but that’s not really important. The kids built the customary bonfire on the beach and proceeded to get red-eyed and rowdy. There were probably forty or fifty of them, and they were celebrating their upcoming graduation for all they were worth. Along toward midnight, things started to get physical. There were a few drunken fights, and a fair number of boys and girls were slipping off into the darkness for assorted boy-girl entertainments. At that point Regina and Renata decided that it was time to leave. They slipped away from the party, hopped into their new Pontiac—a graduation present from their folks—and started back to Everett.

Regina, the dominant twin, probably drove. Renata had her driver’s license, but she almost never took the wheel. They took the usual shortcut that winds up through Forest Park. It was in the vicinity of the petting zoo where they had a flat tire.

As best the authorities were able to reconstruct what happened, Regina left the car and walked to the zoo to find a phone. Renata stayed with the Pontiac for a while, then went looking for her sister.

The next morning the twins were discovered near the zoo. One was dead, raped and then hacked to death with something that wasn’t very sharp. The other twin was sitting beside the body with a look of total incomprehension on her face. When the authorities tried to question her, she replied in a language that nobody could understand.

The authorities—assorted cops, detectives, the coroner, and so on—questioned Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf extensively, but they didn’t learn much: the boss and the missus were shattered and even in the best of times, they couldn’t translate the girls’ private language—they couldn’t even tell the girls apart. So after the cops discovered that Regina was the dominant twin, they assumed that it’d been Regina who’d been murdered and Renata who’d gone bonkers.

But nobody could prove it. The footprints routinely taken of all newborns turned out to be missing from the records at Everett General Hospital, and identical twins have identical DNA. Logic said that the dead girl was most likely Regina, but logic wasn’t good enough for filling out forms.

Les Greenleaf nearly flipped when he saw his daughter listed as an “unidentified female” in official reports.

The surviving twin continued to answer all questions in twin-speak, and so the Greenleafs had no choice but to put her in a private sanitarium in the hope that the headshrinkers could wake up her mind. They had to fill out papers, of course, and they arbitrarily listed their surviving daughter as Renata—but they couldn’t prove it either.

The murder remained unsolved.

My folks and I attended the funeral, of course, but there was no sense of that “closure” social workers babble about, because we couldn’t be certain which girl we were burying.

We didn’t see very much of the boss at the door factory that summer. Before he’d lost his daughters, he’d usually come strolling through the yard a couple of times a day. After the funeral, he stayed pretty much holed up in his office.

In August of that year that I had an even more personal tragedy. My folks had visited the Greenleafs one Friday evening, and as they were on their way home, they encountered what the cops refer to as a “high-speed chase.” A local drunk who’d had his driver’s license revoked after repeated arrests for “driving while intoxicated” got himself all liquored up in a downtown bar, and the cops spotted his car wandering around on both sides of Colby Avenue, one of the main streets in Everett. When the lush heard the siren and saw the red light flashing behind him, he evidently remembered the judge’s warning when his license had been lifted. The prospect of twenty years in the slammer evidently scared the hell out of him, so he stomped on his gas pedal. The cops gave chase, of course, and it was estimated that the drunk was going about ninety when he ran a red light and plowed into my folks. All three of them died in the crash.

I was completely out of it for a week or so, and Les Greenleaf took over making the funeral arrangements, attending to legal matters, and dealing with a couple of insurance companies.

I’d already enrolled for my first quarter of grad school that fall, but I called Dr. Conrad and asked him to put me on hold until winter quarter. My dad had been shrewd enough to buy mortgage insurance, so our modest home in north Everett was now mine, free and clear, and the life insurance policies covering both of my parents gave me a chunk of cash. Les Greenleaf suggested some investments, and I suddenly became a capitalist. I don’t imagine that I made Bill Gates very nervous, but at least I’d be able to get through graduate school without working for a living at the same time.

I’d have really preferred different circumstances, though.

I kept my job at the door factory—not so much for the wages as for something to keep me busy. Sitting at home wallowing in grief wouldn’t have been a very good idea. I’ve noticed that guys who do that are liable to start hitting the bottle. After what’d happened in August, I wasn’t too fond of drunks, or eager to join the ranks of the perpetually sauced-up.

I made fairly frequent trips to Seattle that fall. I didn’t want the university to slip into past tense in my mind, so I kept it right in front of me. As long as I was there anyway, I did a bit of preliminary work on my Melville-Milton theory. The more I dug into Paradise Regained, the more convinced I became that Billy Budd was derivative.