She slid past a bush—juniper?—full of small birds all shouting, more birds than leaves. They all rose at once, hung in the air, swung round, and fell back on the bush. The arcane silhouettes of saguaros along the crest made her want to laugh. Maybe she was a little light-headed.
It was hard to tell where the road was. She bumped over a smooth grade of loose stones, shining greyly in the cold light. Mama thought she saw the town off in the distance to the left, towering indistinct forms. It was more impressive than she had expected, a biggish place, and right away she started thinking the first thing she would do, when the shops opened, was go buy some baby oil—for her legs, already getting a bit scaly in the dry heat—and some sandal-foot stockings. She gunned the motor, spinning the wheels noisily. To the right the sky was turning a bleached yellow. She braked. On the close, cambered horizon two rabbits crouched facing one another, crisply outlined in light. Their ears were flame-colored. One flung itself straight upward, landed again in the same attitude of tense readiness. Beat. Then the other shot up, landed.
Then, as though a seal had broken, the sun spilled across the land. The high tips of things suddenly stiffened against the light that slid down them quickly, clothing them in firmness and splendorous reality. Mama turned to take in her new home. What she had taken to be tall buildings were red-rock buttes. They met the sun squarely, a red blow to the eye, their foundations still immersed in blue shadows. The bunnies, when she turned back, had hopped together under a bush and looked unconcerned. The light came down over everything and slowed, and the world seemed normal again.
“Bunnies,” said Mama. She saw them as little bouncing saints, clothed in light. They were there to welcome her, the Madonna from Brooklyn. The sunstruck sky: cathedral! The bluffs: pews and pulpit. She ate a pretzel, thinking of the host, and started the car again. She refused to be discouraged. Everything would be OK, the cows would not attack the car, the vultures would bow their obscene heads, the baby would be born perfect-limbed and, like the bunnies, clothed in light. “Clothed in light,” she repeated to herself, and rolled over the crest into the town of Too Bad.
There was no town.
There had been a town once, that was evident, despite the bushes that grew everywhere, on and up through the ruins, because ruins were almost all that was left. There was a yellow dog, alternately barking and sitting to kick at a stick tangled in its ruff. Big black birds with red turkey faces got up slowly from the wreckage of some small mammal, staring at her as she opened the door and got out. They were not afraid of her or the dog, only a little respectful of the car, but crowding in now that it was stopped. She chucked her purse at them, then had to go get it, while they stared indecently and bridled but did not fly away. The air was fresh and cool, but the sun on her forehead already stung.
The one street swept dogmatically straight uphill. Mama started up it, toward a white and blue house, the only house that was not a ruin, though it was not really a house at all, just a trailer.
The door opened, and Too Bad’s entire population stepped out. He stood on an Astroturf doormat in his bare feet and watched her come.
HALF TIME
Say you’re an only child. You sleep in your own room, snug in your own bed. One day, Mom says, “I don’t know how to break this to you, dear, but you have a twin sister. We thought she had died, but it turns out there was a mix-up at the hospital. She’s coming home, and I expect you to make her feel welcome. It seems you’re Siamese!”
How would you take this news?
When Blanche fell asleep I thought, The mirror cracked. That’s seven years bad luck! But for more than twice that long, nothing bad had happened at all. Nothing I couldn’t ignore, anyway: Mama’s bewildered looks, my classmates’ whispers (but they’d never liked me), the half-baked suggestions of a sweaty school psychologist who slurped cold Sanka from a “Freudian Sips” mug and plucked at his shirt. I graduated high school early and left home. I was one of only three twofers at my college, well under the national average, but then it was a small school, in a barren state, in the middle of a no-man’s-land. Some of our more regular attendees were dust devils and hallucinations. We twofers were all lodged in the same dorm freshman year. (It came to be known as the Ark. Two by two, you see.) We got the only single rooms, which did not endear us to the others, but the university had decided after some debate that we could be considered our own roommates.
I was not ostracized. I even had a certain cachet; I was part of the fastest-growing voting minority, much discussed in public forums at the time, and back then when our numbers were still small the dirty allure of the midway still hung about us. It helped that I was pretty, though Blanche, somehow, was prettier.
After graduation I moved to San Francisco, where twofers had their own paper, the Two Times; their own radio show, Twinspeak; support groups; political candidates; dance clubs (2, Dos y Dos, the Twostep); and Pride. I was no longer a novelty. In a moment of uncharacteristic enthusiasm I got Audrey to take my picture in front of the Twin Peaks and sent it home.
Like any girl with a beautiful sister, I had never been sure my boyfriends were all mine. In this citadel of the sex-positive, where even the gay men could locate a G-spot if they had to, and even the straight men were savvy about anal health, and brunching pals of all gender descriptions talked dildos knowledgeably over crêpes, the girls I had by then begun dating would freely propose strange formations involving Blanche. They would bed me just to see if they could catch a glimmer of complicity from under her lowered lids. They hovered over signs: a bead of spittle in the corner of her mouth, a haze of sweat. They moaned moist words into her hair. To watch them watch her plucked some base note in me. I throbbed with a sickening sweetness, then purged my bed of the bewildered betrayer. One, just one, before she closed the door, charged me with entrapment. “You wanted it. You’re a third wheel,” she shrugged. I had never heard the term used that way, but I understood the foul implication well enough. “Here’s a little something for later.” Taking hold of Blanche’s chin, she slid her tongue between the speechless lips, then sauntered out, leisurely buttoning her shirt. She had gone home to London shortly thereafter, and I had not seen her since. Still, we kept up an intermittent correspondence. Her name in my in-box always gave me a slightly unpleasant thrill, like the items in my Manual, perhaps because it seemed to mockingly recall that good-bye kiss. (Hm? Louche Gift.)
If I was a third wheel, Louche was the boot. I curbed my appetite, discovered an appetite for curbing itself, and curbed that too. This went on not going. It was a relief when strawberry blond, jiffy-lubed Tiffany Bells frisked into my life, along with her pseudonymous partners in pubescence (Ginger, Cherry, Consolata), and her docile suitors mooing down the phone lines. After that, my sex life became almost entirely fictional. Well, I had always liked telling stories.
This was the kind of job most people did to fund something else: a sweet tooth for crystal or X, a class in Beat poetics at the New College. I didn’t have anything else. Except Blanche. Maybe I mean the absence of Blanche: being Nora was very largely concerned with, almost synonymous with, not being Blanche. I wasn’t aware of working at it, exactly. Under hypnosis you can be convinced that the stage is empty, and still, if sent for a stroll, avoid the piano. By the swerves, though, I fancy you might in time be able to deduce the shape of what you cannot see, even if you couldn’t put it into words.
In experiments, a person with split cerebral hemispheres is shown two different images, one for each eye—a cow on one side, say, and a goat on the other. When asked what he sees, he answers from the side where language lies: cow. But at the same time shakes his head. No, no. Not a cow but…but…Something nameless, something unspeakable. It could be that this book is just another way of saying no. “That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence”: motto of the National Penitence Ground. I’d made it mine. Lately, though, I’ve had second thoughts, for to say, “that of which we cannot speak,” is already to speak, and “silence�
�� is a word, and “no” is a way of saying something is wrong, something is missing, is lost.
The door flew open, punched the crater in the wall. Audrey, hands on hips: “Apparently you grabbed Charmaine’s breast on your way out of the theater? What was that about?”
“What? Did not.”
“She thinks you did.”
“She’s crazy. Why would I?”
“Something happened. She’s upset.”
“Things happen. Maybe I brushed against her. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Talk to her. Make some gesture.”
“I’ll buy her something. A nice dream catcher. A pocket pendulum.”
“First assault her, then insult her.”
“Actually, I was being sincere. Don’t you think she’d like a copper healing bracelet?”
“How about I just talk to you later.” But she didn’t move.
Had I grabbed Charmaine? I didn’t actually remember, but the notion was absurd. If it were anyone else—but I’d never been attracted to Charmaine: that raw pink chin that trembled too easily, crumbs of mascara like blue dander powdering her cheeks, the malign mole like a jet bead snug in the wing of her nose.
A thought flashed through me: Blanche did it. But why? (Leaving aside how.) I was the lesbian, not Blanche. To throw blame on me, then?
Surely a sane person does not view acting like herself as grounds for suspicion that she is someone else.
The phone rang. It was my boss, Perdita, with a client for me, a regular. I found myself relieved.
“Give me a second to find the file. OK, put him through—Hi, sugar! How’s my pony?”
Audrey rolled her eyes and exited.
Those files were recipes for worlds. “Likes to be called ‘stupid boy,’ piano teacher, lingerie, rose violently pinned to lapel, lemon smell of furniture wax, The Well-Tempered Clavier.” I was at home in these worlds; nothing surprising ever happened there. My dream girls fluttered up like shapes scissored out of old magazines, smelling of ink and oxidized paper. They were biddable and a little old-hat. Like maps, they cracked in the used places. The hand-puppet hobgoblins flapped: the outraged husband, the anguished wife, the appalled keyhole-peeper in pigtails, the coach, policeman, maiden aunt. The consequences unfolded like the simplification of a mathematical equation, with solemn logic, and then x and y slipped out of their clothes and took their familiar poses by the equals sign. “Say ‘Thank you, Miss Tiffany.’ Now be a good pony and call again soon!”
Before I hung up, I turned my head (in my stories, I had only one) and looked out the window at the painted scene. I had always wished I could take a walk there, where I was someone else. But for the first time I pictured myself losing my way. I’d turn a corner and find myself in an older part of town, where the dollhouse loomed like the mansion in a gothic novel, the shadow of a woman on its drawn blinds. If I met her there, would she recognize me, in my strawberry blond wig, with my cartoon bosom, my long, long legs? Would I recognize her? How did I know, then, that I had not already met her, pretending to be someone else, the way I was pretending?
The phone rang again.
“Hello? Oh.” I sighed. “How many times have I told you not to use this number?”
When Mama was into alchemy she had talked about nothing but the lapis philosophorum and the green lion. Now she had a whole new vocabulary. “The self-other dualism is a motivated construction—an obviously false dichotomy. Of course we can’t endorse the reverse construction that there is no difference between the two—rather, we have difference within identity, marriage and divorce in one, or rather, for the verb is active, a continuous merging and simultaneous separating, give and take—”
“Mama, you sound like a translation from the French.”
“No, listen. The split is the primal wound. In Freudian-slash-Lacanian terms we would call it lack, castration anxiety, but also our sense of having been severed from an original mythical repleteness. Though there is also the view that it is a modern phenomenon associated with the splitting of the atom. Which reminds me that the whole nuclear waste thing is really galvanizing Grady right now. About thirty years too late, if you ask me. Though…”
“Wait, back up, back up. What boondoggle have you subscribed to now?”
“Oh, didn’t I say? I’ve joined the Siamists, or Siamystics, if you like. It is no boondoggle, Nora. I really think you’d be interested, since it pertains to you. According to our teachings the world is ‘Siamese,’ or conjoined with a twin world with which it is at war. This split generates the life force in that it motivates us to yearn toward images of wholeness, whether it be in a loved one—that’s the ancient myth of Hermaphrodite—or in the fully integrated self, as in the modern myth of psychotherapy and self-help. Our anxiety about separation is matched by a secret anxiety about merging which expresses itself as fear of stagnation and death. The two anxieties work us like a bellows, yearning and fleeing, yearning and fleeing. This isn’t necessarily bad, but our feeling is that our lack of let’s say dialogue with this other world puts us in the situation of the Pushmi-Pullyu, whose two parts are pulling in opposite directions; we need to put our heads together, so to speak, while still acknowledging our differences. To make peace with our twin is the spiritual task of the next millennium. We’ve been given twofers as our spiritual guides in this process. You’re like crossing guards: you can look both ways.”
“This sounds like Togetherism, and you know how I—”
“No, our thinking is a little more—oops, I have to go. But think about what I said. I’m going to sign you up for the mailing list. You don’t have to thank me, ha ha. Bye! I love my girls!”
I sank back onto the bed, staring up at the plaster medallion in the center of my ceiling, on which I sometimes imagined I could make out two blurred figures struggling. Between Blanche’s lips a glossy elastic film bellied out and in, without breaking. Only a little ghost of a breath rattled its chains around her tonsils. The motley books on my shelves, tiers of tiny onlookers, offered their familiar commentary sotto voce. Richard III, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Stars and Bars, Early Light. The Excavations at Araq el-Emur, Derrida Reader. Hyde’s Theorem, Ember’d Dawn. Ki Girl: Everyday Self-Defense. Were any out of place? The titles strung together to form a sentence? Why was Learn Zemblan! next to Che: A Life? Only a madwoman would play such tricks.
Only a madwoman would anticipate them.
Still, I dedicated the next forty minutes to alphabetizing my books, by author. In the future, if any had been moved, I would know.
THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL
The San Francisco Chronicle: “One Twofer’s View” Weekly Column
“Histories and Theirstories”
It is generally believed that the dramatic growth in the conjoined twin population worldwide was caused by radioactive fallout. The assertion is supported statistically by the distribution, both temporal (mid 20th century) and geographical (advanced industrial nations), of the first wave of births. However, it is not supported by lab results. Researchers, abusing pig ovaries as if on a personal vendetta, have produced many porcine prodigies. Eyeless, brainless, legless meatloaves; “popcorn” pigs, their organs on the outside, whose naked hearts give one drumroll of terror before bursting; the high-IQ strain employed at airports to sniff out drug mules; and the celebrated Big Pig of Pahrump, size of a juvenile hippo, whom pork interests were hoping to breed for meat, and who was tragically assassinated, despite the vigilance of an armed guard, by a junta of cattlemen. But scientists have produced no mutation so common, so consistent, so successful, as Homo sapiens dicephalus.
Consequently, some groups, like the Siamists, Togetherists, and so-called fusion theologists, aver that radiation has nothing to do with twinning. It was a deeper, more metaphysical split that took place when the first nuclear bomb was exploded at the Trinity site on July 16, 1945. Many consider this split no accident, but the essential next stage in the spiritual evolution of a species finally advancing beyond
self-interest. To others, it is just the latest fissure in that ever-widening crack in the relation of Self to World whose warning signs first appeared in ancient Greece. Revisionist scholars, on the other hand, claim that a sizeable population of twofers has existed throughout history (“theirstory”), many more than were sung in ballads and broadsides. Indeed, the Togetherists, the most radical of the “fusion” groups, lay claim to an antiquity that rivals the Masons’. Twofer artisans controlled the smithies of Roman Britain, they believe; not only that, anyone using a chain for any purpose had to pay an annual tax to the Togetherists. This tax, an early form of copyright (for the twofers were generally believed to have “invented” the chain, though this remains to be proved), was collected throughout Europe during the reign of the Holy Roman Empire, and played a part in preserving twofers—then considered monsters—against poverty, persecution, and the indignity of public display. In Egypt and the Middle East, twofers were traditionally associated with the priesthood rather than the artisan classes, but again, their emblem is the linked rings of a chain. In fact, according to Togetherists, any representation of a chain, whether in poetry or art, heraldry or history, is a coded reference to a secret society—which, if they are correct, is vast indeed.
Whether inducts to a secret society or no, these often high-functioning twofers led productive lives, concealing their condition from all but intimates. Just a few of the historical figures alleged to have had conjoined twins are Copernicus, Shakespeare, Emperor Rudolf II, Meister Eckart, Eric Gill, Joseph Venn, Robert Louis Stevenson, Victoria Woodhull, and Mark Twain. Galileo has only lately been removed from this list; a recently unearthed tailor’s bill for a shirt showed an insufficiency of linen and only one collar button. The debate on Leonardo da Vinci rages on.
Half Life Page 5
