Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  “Why did you say that?”

  “It’s just a thing to say. For good luck. Like ‘break a leg,’” she said.

  “‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t wake up if the bedbugs bite,’” sang Trey.

  At first all I saw was a strange, bifurcated shape. Then I realized I was looking at myself. I was lying on my bed, half undressed, asleep, my arms flung out with palms turned up as if to say, “What?”

  Audrey had not shown me this footage. I looked at her. Her hair had fallen forward and hid her face.

  The film was black and white and grainy. All the details were bleached out. The camera swung slowly around me. Audrey had been standing over me on the bed; once her bare toe nicked the bottom corner of the frame.

  For a minute I looked beautiful, basking in light. I even thought, Nice breasts, as the camera moved in, forgetting for a moment everything that was not onscreen: the top-heavy yaw of those quarterback’s shoulders, not to mention my crowning glory, my peculiar surplus. The camera slid up my white side, my bristly armpit, my raised arm.

  I could have been dead; I could not tell if I was breathing, not even when the camera moved in until my head almost filled the screen. I looked like a white rock.

  The camera slid off the side of my face into the shadow area between us, then Blanche hove into view. She was washed out, unrecognizable, lunar. Her features were shallow thumbprints in a ball of clay.

  The camera steadied, focused, homed in on the hollow of the eye. It moved close to the fat, shining lids, under which the invisible eyeball uncannily moved.

  The eye opened.

  Blanche’s eye.

  A Tale of Two Faces

  TRAD. ARR. MCLO

  I was born to a family of fortune

  I arrived on a four-poster bed

  With a fine coat of arms and myriad charms

  And a face on the back of my head.

  I had an exemplary boyhood

  I was tutored in every grace

  Played the cello with style, read Lamb and Carlyle

  And combed my hair over the face.

  An elegant wig shows refinement

  What a pleasure it is to look well!

  At the Duchess’s ball I was envied by all

  When I took a seat next to Cybele.

  From under my wig came a whisper

  Such loathsome desires it confessed

  What it hissed in her ear made me tremble with fear

  But the worst was the lady said yes.

  I settled my wig and forsook her

  As my other mouth giggled and raved

  Throughout the long night I listened in fright

  To the terrible things that I craved.

  I called Drs. Manly and Treadwell

  They parted the lips of my sin

  The sensation was sweet, I fell at their feet

  And the voice whispered Do it again!

  They hastily quit my apartment

  They said, a young man needs a wife

  Find somebody nice and abandon this vice

  You must marry and save your own life!

  I went to Cybele the same evening

  Some suitable commerce took place

  I awoke before long to a pleasure so strong

  I knew she was kissing the face.

  My hidden lips softened and opened

  Her tongue slid inside like a sword

  Until I gave tongue with two mouths and I sung

  Both parts of a terrible chord.

  The pharmacist filled my prescription

  I lifted the cork to my nose,

  I was dead long before the jar smashed on the floor

  And the sweet smell of almonds arose.

  The coffin was lined with black velvet

  And sunk eight feet under the ground

  A spade chimed on rock, I heard the church clock

  And a closer, more secretive sound.

  At the crossroad’s a grave with no marker

  Put your ear to the ground if you dare

  For under the hill someone’s whispering still

  To the bones of the boy lying there.

  MIRRORS & LENSES

  Blanche, awake?

  Unthinkable. Unspeakable.

  I plunged through the lobby, breaking the clasp of two handholding Japanese twofers in matching Hello Kitties shirts with the cheerful legend “LET’S TWICE!” Leering mayoral candidate “Two heads are better than one” Hy Hal Nguyen offered me his own cardboard face on a stick, like a questionable lollipop. I sent it spinning.

  As I played Pushmi-Pullyu with the swinging door, I replayed the opening sequence in my mind: the approach, the two faces, the descent into the shadowed cleft between, the curve of the ear, whose ear?—hope looked for confusion, didn’t find it: Blanche’s ear, no question—the swell of the cheek, the shut eye; whose eye? Blanche’s eye. Rewind, repeat, rewind. At last the door relented. Outside, another RubiaMorena cutout reposed against posters of coming attractions. Or, no—heads turned—it was RubiaMorena herself, talking to that rare thing, a Togetherist twofer. Her sudden transformation from two to three dimensions gave me a sickening, familiar wooze. RubiaMorena bugged her eyes to let me know I was staring, and with a toss of coiffure, turned her back. It was as three-dimensional as her front, if not more so. The Togetherist tilted one head, ginger hair a sour half-note off from the orange of his shirt, and raised his eyebrows at me.

  Out of the shade of the marquee, among the throng that packed Castro Street from wall to wall, it was stingingly bright and hot. I smelled patchouli, pizza, pot. Someone’s sticky arm smooched mine. Someone’s breath raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Shuddering, I escaped, as I thought, through a gap, and found myself trapped behind a row of gimcrack tarp-topped booths.

  Things made out of spoons. Free skin cancer screening; two-for-one cell phone service options; lead apronwear in ruffles or black leather; package deals on twofer-friendly cruises (extra-wide bunks, sensitivity-trained crew and tour guides). Soft-focus photos of loving pinkish pairs—Your faces here!—available on clock, T-shirt, mouse pad, or mug. “Thyroid Health and You” FREE informational pamphlet from holistic herbologist Dr. Sundeep Vijay Harnath Munindar Singh-Cohen. RadioActivists hawking pitchblende amulets and T-shirts: “I’m radioactive—and I vote.” Free promotional CD single from “My Double Life,” the new album from folk songstresses Winnea and Dulcea McLo, posing in denim with a guitar, two harmonicas, and a lunatic-eyed goat.

  Panicking, I pushed a twofer kid in beanies out of my way and ducked under a pole into the Twofers for Animal Rights booth. Mom (“I my twofer son”) straightened one beanie and glared at me. “Sign a petition to free Spotty, the Steinhart Aquarium’s two-headed snake?” said the peppy twofer working the booth. “Give Rodney the two-headed calf, currently hanging from the roof of Tommy’s Joint in a fez and fedora, a dignified burial?”

  That black pupil for so many years unseen now dead center like a hole in the screen. Blindness visible. I couldn’t look, despite the merciful apparatus between us: the lens, the filmmaker, the seething dissolve of light.

  A clipboard and a ballpoint pen floated into my field of vision. Click-click went the pen, retracting and extending its wee proboscis. I shook my head distractedly and kept going, out the other side of the booth.

  An orange shirt fluoresced in my path. “Hi, are you Together?”

  “No, thank you,” I said, foolishly. When he did not budge, I grabbed the flyer poked at me and shouldered past. On the other side of the street I found room to walk if I stayed close to the wall.

  From the opposite corner, I looked back. Over the heads of the crowd I saw Audrey—red bob, sheer black bed-jacket, pink sequined dress—come out into the sunlight angling under the marquee and look up and down the street, hand shading her eyes. I ducked down the stairs into the BART station and came up across Market, near the temporary stage, where a punk band, Hung Jury, was tuning up. I couldn’t see Audrey across the crowd, but that didn’t
mean she wasn’t following me, though I hoped—with a throb of awful remorse—that she would just go back inside and accept her prize. But I couldn’t risk going home yet.

  I was still holding the Togetherist flyer. The letterhead was the same as the design on their shirts: the twin rings of Pride, reworked into two links of a chain. I put it in my pocket to evaluate later for inclusion in the Manual, and started up the other side of Castro, away from the crowd. Behind me, I heard Hung Jury start up. At the short, breathtakingly steep street that led up to the hilltop park, I turned left. A neat oblong of masking tape was affixed to the sidewalk, with what remained of a festival flyer, a few pink scraps, still attached, like shards of a broken mirror still stuck in the frame.

  A mirror! Was that it? For a wild, happy second I thought I had it. The lens had flipped the image; it was my eye that opened.

  But no, Nora, no. A lens doesn’t work like a mirror.

  I hurled myself up the sidewalk. I was breathing with all my strength, a muscular lunge and collapse, lunge and collapse. The houses stepped back with blank faces and made room for the raw knob of the hill. Sparsely tufted with dry grass, it rose out of a pubic tangle of greasewood and weeds. A narrow path up to the gate wound through green clouds of wild fennel. Usually I loved to yank off handfuls of the sticky fronds, which emitted, when crushed, the sweet, potent smell of licorice. Not today. The metal gate lowed when I dragged it open. Plastic bags for dog poo were knotted to the chain-link fence that surrounded the two tragic tennis courts with their drooping nets, a puddle of sky at each baseline.

  I kept going, up the crumbling ridge. There was a feeling like crying in my chest, but let’s say it was only my labored breath. Blanche puffed peacefully beside me. Behind and below me, the Castro still steeped in sunlight so bright I seemed to feel its reflected warmth against my back, but a towering mass of fog was building over the Sunset district, filling the Haight and most of downtown with a diffuse dream light that sharpened only here and there to pick out a detail: a bicycle and a hibachi on a balcony, a saggy balloon snagged in a palm tree.

  My heart was banging. I had run out of clean underwear so I wasn’t wearing any, and sweat stung the cognate chafed spots on my inner thighs. I scrambled up the last rise to the base of the boulders at the top of the hill, pebbles rolling backward under my feet. There, I caught a whiff of pot and saw a pair of untied oxblood Docs sticking out from behind a rock, so I went around the outcropping to climb up from the other side. As soon as I forsook the shelter of the hill, Blanche’s hair streamed back, swirled up in a stinging cloud, then whipped across my eyes. Tears brimming, I attained the top. Look, in the crevices: fairy lights of red and green! Then I blinked and they were bottle-glass.

  I stood up. The wind fell against me like a body. I gasped, and tasted the cold in the back of my throat. The wind tugged my shirt, searched my pockets, lifted my skirt. White vapors whipped past me. Here is what I love about San Francisco: its motility, its ceaseless change. That snowy mountain ahead would melt and tumble inland, finally winking out in the warm air over Orinda. Tomorrow it would invent itself afresh, along with a good percentage of the population, and nobody would hold yesterday against it. You could turn over a new leaf every day, let the old leaves just blow away. Pick up a pen, start a new story. Start it like this: “Today—”

  Today, I held a blank page to the light, and found a watermark. The figure was faint, but I recognized it. Her.

  My ears had begun to sing with cold. My orbital bones ached.

  Blanche had opened her eyes. A reflex? Maybe. In sleep, while trying to get a better look at a dream? Possibly. Hadn’t that naked eye seemed (in the instant before a practically mathematical sense of paradox made me unable to look) hazy, glazed, unaware? Not an organ of sight but a memorial to it? Maybe. But if not?

  In the history of medical science, there was a time when the sick had a reasonable concern that they might be pronounced dead prematurely and wake up underground. Some went so far as to install a bell-pull in the coffin, connected to a bell above.

  My head was ringing.

  “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t ask if I could use that nude footage,” Audrey said. “It was really amateurish of me. If you were anyone else, I would have had you sign a release, but I honestly didn’t think you would care, I mean, you hardly come across as a prude.” She paused, then said, “For example.” She pointed at my crotch, still underwearless under my short skirt.

  I crossed my legs and rearranged the damp washcloth on my forehead.

  “Now you’re pissed that I called you a prude. I shouldn’t have used the word. OK, modest. Private. I totally respect that. If you want me to, I’ll edit out part of the sequence. It’ll be a little jumpy, but I can make it work.”

  “That isn’t it.”

  “Then what. What.” She coughed, banged herself in the chest.

  Hadn’t she seen it too? I cleared my throat. An obscene revelation shivered in the offing, a banshee panting to pop out of the cake. “I don’t like looking at myself,” I said instead.

  Not a lie. I disliked mirrors. Kept no snapshots. Ducked when the flash went off.

  “Yeah. Well, we knew that.” She waited. “Is that all?” I shrugged.

  She went out, slamming the door.

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  San Francisco, you’re TOGETHER!

  On the joyous occasion of the 6th Annual Twofer Pride March and Festival, take a moment to reflect on the pain of the singleton, who cannot experience this joy, or even understand it.

  His is the legacy of hundreds of thousands of years of solitary confinement. He is cleft from the world, from his brethren, and from himself.

  This pain is not his alone. It is yours as well, for it is not enough to be born conjoined. Indeed, your painfully partial merger is the most visible outward sign we have been given of the Rift in the heart of things.

  Downer? Nay. Say rather, a sign that we are finally on the move toward wholeness. The conjoined twin is a traffic sign on the highway of life. What does that sign say? It says MERGE.

  Twofers, yours is a sacred wound: you have been deprived of the picayune, atomic integrity of the singleton, in order to achieve a new, higher integrity. The truly Together will undergo a convulsive change or Focus and reemerge as a new One, who is to an ordinary singleton as condensed soup to a clear broth. These will become the Husbandmen of our divided world, guiding the factious singleton gently but firmly toward union.

  To get Together, the superficial boundaries of the self must be broken down. Twofers, you have the glorious privilege of hosting, in one body, two souls, yet all too often these souls parcel up their joint experience, impoverishing both. Our Western notion of self, and the language it has given rise to, is to blame; every time you open one mouth to say I, you thrust a lance in the heart of your twin. Understand that your “identity” is only the scar tissue left by the ancient wound of being severed from the Whole. From I, we get to we, from we to that plenary in which self and world are united in bliss: I2.

  Only then may you truthfully say you are Together.

  How do I get involved?

  1. Volunteer!

  We need help on all levels: outreach (leafletting, cold calls, door-to-door), planning, events coordination, secretarial. We are particularly in need of a database engineer and a plumber (Russian River area).

  2. Take a class!

  Just a few of our course offerings: Conflict Resolution; Getting to One; Syncretic Speech; Paneurythmy, the sacred Bulgarian Dance; Togetherness Is Fun! (children’s sing-along class).

  3. Donate!

  Do you have an extra room we could use for meetings or classes? A computer or phone you no longer need? Would you like to sponsor a needy child or adult seeking Togetherness? Cash donations gratefully received.

  TOO BAD

  Mama bought a map of Nevada at a truck stop on the interstate before she turned off on the road to Grady. She drove the last leg of her journey with the ma
p on the seat beside her. She stopped occasionally to consult it. She didn’t bother to pull over, just parked in the middle of the road. There were no other cars this far off the interstate. Then she clicked off the interior light and went on. The night seemed like a solid mass. She was boring a small, poorly lit tunnel through it. In the huge banks of unblemished dark on each side she occasionally saw two eyes like shiny dimes, blank as Orphan Annie’s. Or a pair of ears, vegetal and veined, stood up out of a tuft of sick grass. Or something raced out into the slipstream of light just ahead of the car, froze, and was snatched away behind.

  She knew he lived in a small town. She knew the name of the town: Too Bad. She knew he was a geologist working for the government, something to do with strategic minerals. She had sized him up right away: a good man, simple, and hers if she needed him; she needed him.

  In the last half hour that cake of ink had dissolved. The still-suspended sediment settled calmly, draining toward the west. Miraculously, the block of sky resting on the windshield had become a blue space, the car ran forward unimpeded, and there was the sign for Too Bad, Pop. 1.

  One?

  There were shiny pockmarks in the sign. Vandals had shot off the zeros, she supposed. She slowed to make the turn, not enough; the car spun in a slow rattling curve on the gravel and wound up facing back up the road again, an evil sign, but she steered it laboriously round and started toward town. As the car jounced up the road, its bald tires skating alarmingly on the loose rocks, the night was just quickening toward morning. The sky was luminous. Birds shrieked.

  Something that had been crouching like a person on a rock by the side of the road flung itself despairingly into the air and Mama saw it, sharply, as a body—what birds rarely seem—and caught her breath, thinking it would dash itself on the road, but then it hugely shrugged and caught the air with enormous wings, fought a few feet up, wheeled, and then planed sharply down along the face of the hill, only a little above the surface, close enough that it could stretch its neck if it wanted and plow the earth with its beak. It looked prehistoric. A vulture, an eagle, a condor?