Half

by Sharon Harrigan

  29

  In psychology class, our professor stood in front of the large classroom in a shift printed with bold geometric shapes and lectured on delusions. She had an Eastern European accent we couldn’t place, which she seemed to compensate for by shouting into the microphone. Some of us have delusions of control—she said, and we wrote—like the belief that our thoughts can be heard by others, the belief that others are inserting thoughts into our heads, or the belief that people are stealing thoughts from our brains.

  Some of us believe we are already dead. This is called Cotard delusion.

  Some of us become stalkers, convinced a celebrity is in love with us.

  Some of us believe different people are all just a single person who changes shape. This delusion is associated with brain lesions or damage.

  Some of us believe we are immortal. Up to half of us with Cotard delusion believe we can’t die.

  Some of us have delusions of jealousy and collect “evidence” of nonexistent infidelities.

  Some of us have delusions of persecution. We may believe the government is tapping our phone lines, that we have been wrongfully identified as a terrorist, or attacked, cheated, conspired against, followed, harassed, obstructed, poisoned, or spied upon.

  Some of us have religious delusions. Though shared beliefs considered normal for a particular religion or culture are not regarded as delusions.

  Some of us believe that random events have significant meaning. This is called a delusion of reference.

  Some of us believe we are a deity, or that we have special powers, rare abilities, or hidden talents. This is called delusions of grandeur. (Some of us name our twins after Apollo and Artemis.)

  Some of us believe another person can read our minds. (Did we say that aloud to each other or just think it?)

  Some of us had delusions? How about all?

  The professor didn’t really say “some of us.” She said “some patients.” But we always implicated ourselves. Maybe that’s a mental illness, too, the “delusion of inclusion.”

  Some of us were deluded. Some in this classroom, most likely. Not only some of them. Some of us.

  Maybe it was a question of degree. Some of us had it bad.

  Like Dad.

  Heroes and Monsters was our favorite class, the stories as familiar as the hair on our necks. Heroes and Monsters was also our least favorite class, for the same reason. The day the professor lectured on Zeus, we squeezed the bunched strands of our hair so tight in their elastic bands our heads hurt.

  Maybe it was fated that we would take this class and psychology and piece together Dad’s condition. His fiction. His alternate reality. Those of us who believed in fate suffered from a delusion of reference. Hadn’t our professor just said that?

  Maybe we chose these classes because we needed someone to point out the obvious. Maybe we already knew more than we would admit.

  We hid in our hoodies. We wore them backward in our rooms, erasing our faces. When we took the hoods off, the patterns from the cotton left mottles on our sensitive skin.

  We texted Mom. We imagined her carrying the babies while she typed on her phone, their spit-up drooling down the screen, their tantrums bubbling up over knocked-down blocks. We sat on the library steps in the sun while Colson and Sebastian played Frisbee with Staver and a guy from chemistry lab.

  “Does Dad have delusions of grandeur?” we asked her.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” came her swift reply.

  “Did you take him to the doctor?”

  “You know your Dad. He doesn’t believe in doctors. Why?”

  “He thinks he’s some kind of god,” we said.

  “You don’t think he is?”

  We had never known Mom had a sense of humor. She had to be joking, though she didn’t use the right emojis to say so.

  We remembered the stories Ya-Ya used to tell to distract us on boring walks or rides in the car. Stories from the Old Country: Jason capturing the Golden Fleece, Theseus slaying the Minotaur, Daedalus flying on his feathery wings. As children, we had believed in them as much as we had believed in Santa Claus and unicorns. Maybe Mom still did.

  We talked on Snapchat so our words would evaporate. So Dad wouldn’t see and think we were out to get him. He might also have delusions of persecution.

  Then we asked the question we had asked ourselves for years. The kind of question we didn’t want to ask in email or in person, either. We would tremble too much, and our voices would fray. This way, all traces of conversation would disappear as soon as they were read.

  We typed, “Did Dad kill Papu?”

  Nothing but a blank screen in response. We didn’t hear back from her at all for a long, long time.

  Which we took as a bad sign.

  We finally told Sebastian and Colson about Dad and Papu, about death and delusions. Zeus killed Cronus, his dad, we said. So if Dad thought he was Zeus, he might have thought he had to kill his dad. That it was even the heroic thing to do.

  This was our definition of intimacy: trusting people enough to tell them our secrets. This was our true loss of virginity: telling the first time. All those high school hookups were nothing in comparison. We had not been ready to reveal anything yet. Even to ourselves.

  We wanted to change our names to reflect what we now knew, but we just changed the name of our band.

  Now we were the Twin Delusions. We pressed our heads into our hands, then our fingernails—all twenty sharp claws—into our tender knees.

  30

  Colson and Sebastian had the car. Sebastian had the conveniently located friend. “Bring sleeping bags,” the friend said. Staver came along for the ride, making us five.

  We had always wanted to crash on someone’s floor for spring break. We had always wanted to visit New York City, though we had never left Michigan.

  None of us knew how to parallel park, so we left the car at a friend’s parents’ house in Queens and took the train to Sebastian’s friend’s place in Sunset Park, the Chinatown of Brooklyn. It was a closetless fourth-floor walk-up over a bowling alley. A clanky pot rack dominated the kitchen, a keyboard and drum set the living room. The heat blasted so high we had to open the windows, letting in squeaking and singing: rice pots, mattress springs, and lullabies in other languages.

  We wore thick boots and army surplus down, even though the sidewalks here no longer slogged with slush, as in Ann Arbor. The air was warm enough to smell the trash, rotting fish heads and a fecund trace of bean paste.

  We—girls, boyfriends, and Staver—took the R train and got off at Ninth Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. We flashed our new IDs in tiny music clubs, drinking milky-bottled beer and listening to a chorus of accordions.

  We retrieved the car and drove to a club in Fort Greene almost smaller than the elfin apartment we stayed in. We looked so long for a parking spot, we almost missed the first act.

  We took the R train and changed to the L train to Williamsburg. We drank black ale and heard bagpipes, electric cellos, and miniature marching bands.

  We took the train the other way, to Coney Island. We dipped our toes in the ocean, for the first time. We looked out into the blue, and we spotted Greece. Almost. We sucked mangoes on sticks hawked by vendors on bicycles and listened for the bats to crack at the far end of the beach, but it wasn’t baseball season yet.

  Finally we ventured into Manhattan, arriving hours early to add our name to the list for open mic night at the Catacombs. Sebastian’s friend assured us that this dark basement space on the edge of the West Side Highway was the “it” club for live music. We wore one of our girl-band costumes, a hodgepodge of thrift shop mismatch. Ruby slippers, silver sequined tank tops, skinny black cigarette pants. Hair in high slicked-back ponytails, Super Girl–style. Lipstick as red as our shoes, applied a minute before we performed and wiped off a minute after.

  Tables filled. We scarfed the still-warm tamales we had smuggled inside in our pockets from the bodega near wher
e we were staying.

  We swallowed the idea that our talent was a delusion. We were Paula and Artis. Not Apollo and Artemis, no matter how much Dad pretended. Maybe our YouTube fame had all been in our heads.

  We had signed up so early we were the first to play. Alone on the stage, we breathed in the room.

  “Marco,” we whispered, so soft no one could have heard us.

  “Polo” came the reply, perhaps a thought or a nod.

  We tapped on thighs. Tapped again. Twisted the single diamond earring we each wore.

  Then came guitar, electric bass, and voice. Song gushed out like water from a hose. Strong long lines. Trembling vibrato. The liquid melodies haunted us, as if we weren’t the ones playing them.

  All talking hushed. All clinking of glasses and shuffling of feet. Beer bottles hovered in midair, between tables and mouths. Servers sat. First dates dropped their poses. Friends forgot the punchline to their in-jokes. Couples leaned on tables, their forearms in sphinx pose.

  We stopped time. We could have led them back to ancient Greece if we had wanted to.

  We sang about first blood between our legs. About cheating to lose the spelling bee. About falling in love with a gun and hating ourselves for it. We sang about pixies and trying on shoes. Getting lost in the woods. Bathing nude and pointing a gun at a peeping boy with yellow hair. A gun that turned him into the animal he really was. Changing ourselves into weapons. And back.

  We were children again. We were children of gods. We had never heard of delusions. We were full of belief. We were fresh. We forgot. We were lost. We tripped and flipped and wriggled our hips and were back in our garage at our fifteenth birthday party when the thunder boomed as our rhythm section, the sky our backup band.

  Were we deluded? Maybe. But our delusion was so potent the whole club was in on it. Or part of it. We felt like gods. Maybe we were. Who knew? Maybe not our psychology professor.

  After we floated back to our seats for the break between acts, a man twice our age, wiry and small, with double-pierced ears and a scarf around his neck, scooted his chair between us at our table. His thumbs were as callused as ours. On second look, we saw that his scarf concealed a dark tattoo against his pink skin. Of what, we couldn’t tell. He asked, “Are you the Slutty Twins?”

  Sebastian and Colson raised their fists, but we clamped them down. They didn’t know who we were. Who we had been.

  We said nothing. We had been followed back then. We had been stalked. That name was trouble.

  “I’m a fan,” the man said. He opened his mouth, and we smelled milk stout. Never a good combination. “I watched your videos a hundred times. But then they disappeared. What happened?”

  “What’s it to you?” our boyfriends asked. They leaned into us, becoming human shields.

  “I’m a record producer,” he said. “Name’s Django. I always come for talent night, but I never score this big.”

  “Nobody’s scoring with anybody,” Sebastian said.

  “Get your hand off her knee,” Colson told Django. But his hands dug deep into his pockets.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” Django asked.

  Still no answer.

  “Can I buy you dinner? I’ve heard enough, let’s get out of here.”

  His eyes never left Paula. But he wasn’t peering down her shirt. He wasn’t acting like men his age often did. He was looking at her throat, mesmerized by her instrument.

  Django took us to a nearby restaurant. We all insisted Colson and Sebastian and Staver had to come. We didn’t know this man, and he promised too much to be for real.

  But he was. For Paula, at least. “I only want the singer,” he said, after paying the check.

  We couldn’t have foreseen he would say that, could we? As soon as he did, though, it was like déjà vu. We had imagined this moment. We had always known that someone would try to separate us. We intertwined our fingers. We didn’t mean to squeeze so hard our rings bore holes in our skin. But we didn’t mind hurting each other. All that mattered, at the moment, was feeling the same thing.

  One of us switched her heels for the flats in her bag. One of us threw on a sweater. One of us pulled out the rubber band and let her hair waterfall over her eyes. The other one didn’t.

  At graduation, when we were twenty-two, we opened the time capsule that held the letter we had written to our future selves when we were twelve.

  In that letter we had predicted we would always live in the same town, play in the same band. One of us would never win if that meant the other had to lose. We would never compete twin against twin, and this pact would guarantee that we would never have to part. If one was about to win, the other would try to lose. No question: two for one, or none for none, the only choices. Dad hadn’t known how right we were to “cheat” at the spelling bee, but we knew how wrong he had been. Or thought we did.

  Because Django had said, “I only want the singer,” and only one of us could really sing.

  The letter in our twelve-year-old loopy handwriting read, “All we know now is that we’ll always be together.” The one thing we thought we knew, back then, was wrong.

  31

  We remembered little from the years we lived apart, from twenty-three to twenty-nine.

  How could we live, apart? We could and we couldn’t. We did. And we didn’t.

  All we recall are a few scattered events. They’re thin and faint, like music streamed from a single earbud.

  After college, we tried to email or text every day. “You alive?” or “Good night.” At least that. So we lived those years together, even when our jobs flung us all over the world. Whatever happened to one of us seemed to happen to the other. Whenever one of us touched her single diamond stud, the other touched its mate.

  When Artis entered Army Ranger training, with Sebastian, in southern Georgia, both of us twins sweated in our swampy boots. When Paula moved into the same Sunset Park walk-up over a bowling alley where we had crashed for spring break, when she played dim-lit clubs and waited dim sum tables while Colson enrolled at Teacher’s College, both of us could smell the bean paste and hear the jangle of woks from Brooklyn Chinatown. When Artis learned computer code to control drones, both of us felt our fingers cramp from so much tapping at the keyboard. When Paula pierced her nose and inked her arm, we both could feel the flesh sting.

  When one of us cut her hair (military rules), the other did, too, the same day. (Easier to spike and add neon color that way.)

  “Hey Artis,” Paula wrote. “Send me a whole body selfie. If I use it for my album cover, people will think I’m ripped. I’m going for the waif look. Either that or I’m an actual starving artist.”

  “Hey Paula,” Artis wrote. “Shipping out soon. Good news is spousal death benefits for Rangers are phenomenal. Wouldn’t want mine to go to waste. How about you and Colson make it a double wedding? XO, Artis”

  We had never imagined getting married any other way.

  We eloped, if you can use such a sexy word for a military-dress wedding at an army base, flanked by recent Ranger graduates, plus Staver and their partner, in a bright suit and cowboy boots, an antidote to the sober uniforms some other guests wore. No time for a regular ceremony before entering the combat zone, we told our families and imminent in-laws. We didn’t say we wanted to keep Dad away.

  We flew Mom out to Martha’s Vineyard that summer. She stayed with us in Colson’s family’s summer house, closing her daycare for a week. Whenever she mentioned Dad, we turned away. We took the cards he had asked her to pass on to us and tossed them in the trash.

  Our friends asked us why we had married so young. We didn’t say what we knew. That living without a twin was waking up each morning with only one arm, one leg, one eye, one ear, one thought: More. Give us more. We told each other: If I can’t live with you, a husband will have to do.

  We wore our single diamond studs to the wedding. We were girly and not. Simple and fancy. Half and half. The hole in one earlobe empty, the other full.

&n
bsp; We changed. We (Artis and Sebastian) deployed to Afghanistan. Pakistan. Environmental science experts, predicting the effects of weather on land mines. We had close calls. We both lost friends. Others lost legs or arm or eyes. One friend OD’d on the way to a gig. We lost track.

  We (Paula and the band; Colson in the audience) played in coffee shops and storefront bars, in galleries and at festivals. At house parties and in church basements. We collected fives and tens from the hat passed around to pay our electricity bill so we could continue to play our amped-up violin. We released an album, Weather Woman, and hoped for just a little bit of fame, nothing viral like the Slutty Twins. We glanced over our shoulders for stalking lechers or amphetamined paparazzi. Django, our manager, said, “You’re too young to always be looking back.”

  The Rangers were sent on a peacekeeping mission to Palestine. As if there were peace to keep. Next year, they said, we’ll send drones instead.

  Robots could drive and fold clothes, but they couldn’t yet make art. The video for the single “Weather Woman” became a meme. That didn’t translate into royalties.

  We thought being married meant we would never have to be lonely. Our husbands cooked us roasted eggplant with smoked mozzarella over fettucine, scrubbed pots and cupped our bellies and massaged our soles. And yet.

  We wondered if adopting a dog would help. Or having an affair.

  Maybe if we had more fans. More sales. A higher rank. More gun power. We ate dinner, our husbands scooping chili and rice into their mouths across the table from us, smiling and clinking their beer bottles against ours. We smiled back, but inside, we crumpled into our bowls. We didn’t tell our men what was wrong. It was nothing they could fix. Hadn’t we warned them they were marrying only half a bride?

  We wanted more. More feet. More hands. More mouths to feed. More cells. More us. We patted the concave gap in our bellies, then felt it, month by month, fill up.

  Hey A,

  I wrote you a song about your pregnancy. It’s called Expecting and it starts like this: