Probably hard to make out. Here's a better one. Look familiar?
It's been 12 years since I've last been able to confront this haunting specter that has weighed heavily on my conscience and sanity. It's still hard to talk about, but I'm just gonna say it and admit it.
I had a twin brother.
That guy in the picture is not me. That's Space Matt. He had a real name, but I've called him Space Matt out of respect after the tragedy. See, this was the last picture ever taken of Space Matt. Cover boy for the book Space Camp: The Great Adventure for NASA Hopefuls. A promotional shot for NASA's space camp in Alabama.
Space Matt beat me out of the ol' cervical suite by 11 minutes. I have no clue how that happened, because in my experience, I always come first. Always. But, I assume I was making sure I came out of that uterine cave sexy as all get out. And it definitely paid off, because I was by far the sexier twin between the two of us. That book would've been a best seller had I been on the cover, leaving only my final frontiers to the imagination of the lady readers.
But it isn't me on the cover of that book. And it wasn't me who went to space camp. But, it's also not me who is no longer alive. And in a way, I still feel like Space Matt's accident was somehow my fault.
See, for our 11th birthday—which happened to be our double golden birthday—Space Matt and I both wanted to go to space camp more than anything. Seeing that kid float around in a simulated zero-gravity room as the grand prize for being the first to scale the Aggro Crag in Guts or picking the impossible booger flag out of the giant nose at obstacle 6 on Double Dare was the flippin' sweetest prize possible. That, or a 10 speed Huffy bike.
But...as is family tradition, he who breached first, opened first. So Space Matt opened his first birthday present. A ticket to Space Camp. He was ecstatic. I was something less than that. Call it an inferiority complex. That somehow, by being 11 minutes slower, I wasn't as good as my twin brother. It drove me to always want to be different and not follow in his footsteps no matter how recently he had just made them.
So as soon as I saw he was going to space camp, I no longer wanted to. Who would want to always be 2nd? Never the first at anything, but always just a repetition. A mimetic echo of an event already stitched into the fabric of time. Simply tracing the lines that had already been drawn. A clone stuck just minutes in the past, reliving events that had just happened.
I mean, how long do you think Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin argued about who would be the first one to set foot on the moon? Did they flip a coin? Play rock, paper, scissors?
It was my turn to open a present now. And guess what? A fairly similar shaped gift was given to me to open. Hmm...wonder what this could be? A Digi-Pet since I accidentally jumped into our neighbor's swimming pool with my Tamagotchi in my pocket and ruined it? Of course not!
I knew if I went to space camp with Space Matt it would be the same old thing. He'd get to sit in the front seat on the way there. He'd get to pick what fast food place we stopped at. He'd get to check into the camp 11 minutes before me while I would have to sit and wait in the car. So, I said the first thing I could think of.
"I don't want to go to space camp. I want to go to scuba camp."
It was the most distant and different thing I could think of. Who cares if something like that actually existed, I just wanted to get to do something by myself. To have my own unique identity. It was more of a bluff than an actual request. I didn't want to go to some camp where I learned how to suck air through a tube. That's what being Terry Schaivo was like. I wanted my parents to guilt Space Matt out of going to space camp, so I could go by myself.
But my parents looked into it for me, and a few weeks later, I was signed up for an actual scuba camp in Florida.
So while Space Matt prepared to shoot for the stars, I was going to disappear beneath the water.
We were signed up for our camps during the same week since it was easier to drive down to Alabama (space) and Florida (sea) and pick us up at the same time rather than having to make two separate trips. And it was going to be the first time in our lives that we would be apart from each other for more than a day or two.
It was that separation that I believe cost Space Matt his life. Even though all along I had wanted to create my own special experience, I wonder what might have been had I just gone to space camp with Space Matt.
Maybe we both would have been on the cover of that book. Maybe we both would have lost our virginity at age 11 to that chubby 6 from Iowa in zero gravity (not at the same time though, obviously). And maybe we both would have still been alive after camp.
Space Matt had excelled in all the space camp activities throughout the week. He was one of the few kids that didn't have autism, so he was much better at following directions and remembering things he was taught. I don't know what it is with autistic kids and space camp.
He got first place in the freeze dried food eating contest. He had the best Michael Jackson moonwalk impression too.
And he was the only student that didn't poop on an instructor when they practiced voiding your bowels in zero gravity.
Then came the whirlybird. That twisted contraption that spins you around at high speeds to experience the extreme g-forces you would encounter during launch and reentry. They don't ever let the kids do more than 4 gs at space camp, but everybody thought Space Matt could handle more. So they cranked it up to 8 gs.
It would be those gs that killed him. Crushed his little chest and sternum in on his heart after draining all the blood from his brain. I like to think he lost consciousness before his ribs compound fractured and the broken, jagged edge javelined through his heart—that his death was painless.
They said he rag dolled around on the last few revolutions before the whirlygig finally came to a stop. They didn't necessarily think anything was wrong, as it is quite common for people to lose consciousness from the tilt-a-whirl, but the worst had happened.
Space Matt had died.
NASA gave him the highest honor. A burial in space. For several months after they launched his coffin into space I worried that some alien civilization would obtain his corpse and be able to clone and reproduce him from his genetics. My genetics. Not just one twin 11 minutes my senior, but hundreds, maybe thousands.
Fortunately, they mistimed the space funeral launch and his body pod got caught in the Moon's gravitational pull and was slingshotted back around towards Earth with enough speed to reenter Earth's atmosphere. The coffin was reported to have landed in the Atlantic Ocean, the same ocean where I had my scuba training. Space Matt disappeared beneath the surface and became just another secret of the seas.
Maybe Space Matt wasn't meant to be among the stars. Maybe it was I who was destined for the stars all along, and it was Space Matt's fate to sink beneath the tides and be forgotten.
It's funny how even amongst the weightlessness of sea and space, that heavy burdens can weigh you down for so long.
But now, 12 years later, I can finally be weightless again. Because Space Matt's death wasn't my fault. And just as the brightest stars burn out faster, the best of us die young. Space Matt may be dead, but he was a better Matt than I'll ever be.
