12
WHOLE
The biometric scanner at the co-working space does not know. It has been told, in the way
machines are told things, that the face belonging to Lewis is the face that has paid this month’s
membership. So when Ted forgets to pay and walks up to the same scanner, wearing essentially
the same face, the door opens. “It’s like having a VIP pass to my own life,” Ted says, with the grin
of a man who has gotten away with passing for his identical twin more than once.
The scanner is in good company. Everyone in the family except their sister has, at some point,
mixed them up. Even their parents slip these days, especially after a long stretch without seeing
them. Teachers fared no better. Once, memorably, a teacher caned Lewis at school, and when Ted
came up next in line, the teacher waved him off, convinced Lewis had simply come back for
seconds. Ted walked free. The twins first noticed something amusingly unique about themselves
in pre-nursery school, when other kids and teachers couldn’t stop staring. The staring has never
stopped, and neither have the questions — are you telepathic, can you feel each other's pain,
which of you is older — the same handful asked almost weekly. "You often have to pretend that
it's your first time being asked," Lewis says. Then he adds, deadpan, “People think we have
telekinesis. I can neither confirm nor deny that.”
The world keeps trying to compress Ted and Lewis into one person, but their subtle differences
keep quietly refusing. The twins were once the face of the Kenyan launch of Coke Zero Sugar,
under the tagline "Same great taste, but with subtle differences", which turns out to be a fairly
precise description of their personalities. Both got into computers through the same machine:
their father's laptop, in the years when broadband was just landing in Kenya. They found Cartoon
Network's browser games, drained his data bundles at a rate he did not enjoy, and taught
themselves hacky workarounds, such as finding and installing the right Adobe Flash plugin to run
a game or sneakily download music. But the same father’s laptop opened two different doors.
LEWIS AND
TED
Same Great Taste, Subtle Differences
By Mark Tanui
By Mark Tanui
Lewis
Ted