Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  I remember spotting one in a mug on the far side of the table, near the plate of cupcakes, and reaching for it. The exhausted pen was sweating in my left hand, and my right was hovering, descending, fastening upon the thin, curved shaft. Curved? Something long, soft, and sand-colored flew past my head. Startled, I looked up from something that had just caught my eye on the table, an empty crumb-ringed circle where a plate had been. I had time to track down a vague resemblance to—what was it?—a photograph of an eclipse, but as you’d see it on the negative, a white disk ringed with black fire.

  I laughed when I saw the cupcakes, in midair. What were they doing up there? I saw them as clearly as if time had slowed down for them: perfect little planets, their loose sprinkles like tiny moons keeping pace with them. Someone screamed. The plate careened off the back of a girl’s head, hit the floor, and traced circles on the linoleum with its rim for a long time, droning.

  “Where the fuck did that come from?” someone said. There were smashed cupcakes everywhere. The girl who’d been hit was crouching, holding her head with both hands. Then she sank sideways against the refrigerator. The GIRL boy sat down beside her and gently removed a fridge magnet from her hair.

  “Who did that?” said a girl in pigtails, glaring from face to face. “That was so not cool.”

  “That plate almost took your head off!” someone said to me. “Or—I mean—”

  “If I find one molecule of frosting, and I mean one molecule, on my new suede jacket, which happens to be Dolce and Gabbana, I am going to go ballistic,” an elegant young man announced to the whole room. “I’m just saying.”

  Audrey was looking at me strangely.

  “What?” I said. I became aware of my right hand, empty. Where had I put that pen?

  “We’re going,” she said.

  “Audrey, wait!”

  “Now.” I plunged after her through a crowd of new arrivals. In the coatroom the girl with the sprained ankle appeared to be giving a blow job to a man in fake fur who was leaning back on the pile of coats. Someone in the hall said, “Every single time I get in an elevator I make my peace with death.” “The abject is my favorite,” someone else said excitedly. I stepped on the foot of a woman with sparkles on her cheeks and braces on her teeth, and for a moment I cupped her chilly elbows in my hands. Over her shoulder I saw the girl in the coatroom roll over on the fur. It flattened under her, and I saw that it was empty. I had concocted a whole story out of a few folds of fur. (I should think more about this. We construct worlds this way, not piecemeal, but in one demiurgic surge. How many of them go uncorrected?)

  “Ick,” said the sparkly one, feeling her left elbow. Together, we regarded the dark smear on her hand. “Ugh.” She heaved past me into the bathroom. I dropped my eyes to my own hand. There was frosting on my finger.

  “Let me know when you’re ready to talk about your demonstration back there.” We were circling the block, looking for parking.

  “That wasn’t me, it was Blanche,” I said. Immediately I felt ridiculous.

  “Uh-huh.” Audrey was calm and unforgiving. “Is that a parking place?”

  I craned my neck. “Handicapped zone.”

  She drove on. “I’m waiting,” Audrey said. “I’m listening with an open mind.”

  I explained.

  She expressed doubt.

  I explained some more. When I brought up her film, her hands tightened on the wheel, but she heard me out.

  She took a deep breath. “OK, I’m not calling you a liar,” she said carefully, “because I can see that you believe what you’re telling me. But I can’t help thinking that you might be deceiving yourself somehow. I can imagine that it would be a big temptation to blame everything that you can’t, you know, own”—she dropped the wheel to claw quotation marks in the air—“on Blanche. She’s like a permanent alibi. Straw man. Clay pigeon. Decoy duck, or do I mean sitting duck. Maybe she is waking up, I’m not ruling that out, but I can think of so many reasons you might want to think she is that I have to ask myself whether it might not be wishful thinking on your part.”

  “Wishful!” I said. “I feel horror at the very idea. I feel aghast.” A boy wearing a headcloth and riding a bike too small for him wove toward us. We swerved.

  “I’m just thinking that that horror might play a more complicated role than you’re imagining. You might need that horror.”

  “Need it for what?”

  “Don’t ask me. Maybe she’s your conscience.” She braked suddenly at what turned out to be a driveway, lurched forward again. “God, I should really just rent a space in a garage.”

  “Why would you say that?” I felt a pulse of something pass through me. It felt like being frightened, a sort of momentary tilt and plunge that left a dizziness around my heart, but no thought came with it, only the feeling, and then that was past.

  “It’s gotten way too difficult to park around here. I mean, the other day it took me forty-five minutes to find a parking place and I needed to pee so badly I was seriously considering leaving the car in the middle of the street.”

  “No, I meant—”

  “Oh. Well, it seems to me that your relationship to Blanche is unnecessarily witchy-poo. I mean I see that there are some interesting issues around identity—”

  “Interesting to you, maybe.”

  “Point. Sorry. But it’s not like you’re the first person in creation to wonder where you stop and everyone else starts. The permeable membrane thing. You’re not that special. Fuck, I’m just going to go around the block again. Do you want to get out?”

  “I never said I was special. I don’t want to be special.”

  “I’m expressing myself badly. But I feel like you’re using Blanche to stand for something instead of just letting her be her own person. I mean, she isn’t just the anti-Nora, presumably. In positing her as your not or your”—she did the finger thing again—“dark side or your demon double, aren’t you doing exactly what you’re always complaining about in other people? Falling into a cartoonishly binary thinking about twofers?”

  “I don’t see what’s so binary about Blanche chucking a plate of cupcakes across the room.”

  “Now you’re being deliberately obtuse. I just think this story about Blanche is a bit too Jekyll and Hyde. Or do I mean not Jekyll and Hyde enough? Whatever. My point is, trust me, you have your own dark side. You don’t need her to provide it.”

  We stopped at a light. A boxy two-door with the interior light on was stopped at the curb outside the ATM machine to which a smooth brown stocky man in a tank top and gold chain and baseball cap was making delicate overtures. A drag queen in a blond wig and a blue sequined gown sat in the passenger seat, fixing her makeup in the mirror. She looked too big for the car, a giantess, as if at any moment she might stand up through the roof, hike up the car like the hoop skirts of a great ball gown, and glide away. Sealed from the blue evening, in a capsule of golden light, she looked wonderfully lonely and sufficient, a tiny jeweled wonder inside an enameled egg. I had never known solitude like that. I wanted to be her. I ached with wanting it.

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  LITHOBOLIA

  I named the phenomenon after Lithobolia, the stone-throwing demon: a beige blur would whisper past my head, and somewhere, something would smash. I’d look up in mild, disinterested surprise. It took Audrey’s accusing eyes, Trey’s amused ones, to tell me that long tan animal had been my own right arm. Awareness would ease back into my hand just fast enough to catch the quick-expiring sense-memory of the just-released object, its temperature and shape and heft. Sometimes I looked up soon enough to glimpse the objects still in flight. They looked different in midair, transfigured by the special destiny on which they were embarked. They were withdrawn from service, for the time being, at no one’s beck and call. They were heavenly messengers: solemn but joyful, massy but weightless. No longer just a pen, a slice of frittata, a cell phone, but harbingers.

  Then something somewhere would
crash, or splash, or splinter, or squash, and I’d get ready to start lying.

  “It’s a little unfair of Blanche to leave me to clean up her messes,” I said to Audrey.

  “Right,” she said, studying me. Then she pulled a video out of a yellow envelope and stripped the bubble wrap off it. “Cane toads’ mating habits,” she said with satisfaction. “You know, a blurry identity isn’t as rare in nature as you seem to think. In fact, it’s practically the norm.”

  “The norm.”

  “Well, common anyway. Don’t you remember the lantern fish?”

  “I do not remember the lantern fish.”

  “Maybe I never played it for you, it wasn’t a great success. No, I embarrassed myself there,” she said gloomily. “I should stick to animals fucking au naturel. Au naturel? Ral? Rel? Does that mean what I want it to mean?”

  “I think it just means naked.”

  “Claymation is just not sufficiently…numinous. But what experimental filmmaker can afford to shoot full fathoms five? Also I’m not sure it makes any sense to use a visual medium to depict events that are happening in almost total darkness. Though there is the little glowing thingie.”

  “Oh, is this the fish that, like, fishes?”

  “It attracts both prey and mates with a luminous lure dangling in front of its mouth.” She stretched a strand of hair out in front of her eyes. “The prey tries to eat the lure and is itself eaten.”

  “Wait, the mate gets eaten?”

  “No. It’s much, much more sinister than that. The man lantern fish is small and basically helpless. He starves to death if he doesn’t run into a woman lantern fish. When he does, he gloms onto her and doesn’t let go. He sinks his teeth into her side. But what is amazing is that over the course of time his teeth begin to dissolve. His jaw begins to dissolve. Her skin starts to grow over him, covering his eyes, his gills—”

  “Gross!”

  “—until finally her bloodstream breaks into his and her blood starts circulating in his veins.” We were both silent. “He is no better than an appendage,” she added unnecessarily.

  “That is the most terrible story I’ve ever heard.”

  She nodded soberly. “It’s hardly love between equals. Though the merging…that part’s kind of beautiful. To me.” She popped a few bubbles in the bubble wrap. “There’s also a sea worm, I forget the Latin name—”

  “Please stop!”

  “But it’s really interesting, compared to the female the male is tiny, and I mean tiny, like a Chihuahua to a Great Dane, or really a Chihuahua to, say, a submarine. And he just swims right up inside the female and takes up permanent residence in her uterus.”

  “I’m not listening.”

  “The coolest part is that if the male doesn’t find a female, he grows up to become—hey! That’s my only copy!” She ran to the window. “You are so lucky it landed on the fire escape. Fuck, Nora.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said. “It wasn’t me.”

  OBJECTS THROWN BY LITHOBOLIA

  A container of tiny naked baby dolls, plastic

  Beef tongue (freezer-wrapped)

  A panhandler’s money hat

  Two-headed nickel

  Three black and white bath beads (cow shaped)

  A flocked plastic Jackalope piggy bank

  Audiobook of Pudd’nhead Wilson, one tape missing

  Blue transparent soap encasing the dapper figure of Mark Twain

  Two left shoes, women’s comfy-casual loafers, from a sidewalk sale rack

  Magic 8 Ball

  Dirty Band-Aids around an absence the shape of a finger

  Warped “brushstroke” textured print of a painting of American revolutionary soldiers; behind them, vignettes of war, expressionistically rendered with dabs and swoops of red and blue and smoke-grey

  Clear plastic bag full of crumpled bubble wrap, taller than me

  Handful of unwholesomely pale coffee beans from the first cubby of an informational display demonstrating the stages of roasting

  Jumper cables, the two ends clamped together, like a two-headed rattlesnake locked in a death grip

  Two snakeskin-patterned cowboy hats, one pink, one mustard-colored

  Soiled and broken pair of child-sized angel wings, pale blue gauze stretched over wire and sprinkled with glitter, with a medical-looking elastic harness

  Two unmatched athletic shoes, laces knotted together

  Sunglasses, one mirrored lens popped out

  Sandwich boards for a party store depicting King Clown Available for Parties

  Stack of plastic pop-together champagne glasses

  Ace Double pulp paperback: Death House Doll bound back to back with Mourning After

  Comic Halloween strap-on rubber breastplate featuring cow udders with prominent teats

  Six wind-up amputated hands hopping on little red feet

  Puzzle box (“pieces missing” written in ballpoint pen on the masking tape holding its lid on) with a picture of three altar boys, two with black eyes, one with a bloody bandage on his forehead, all holding hymnals, soft lips open in song. Title: “All Is Forgiven”

  Phrenology head inkstand

  Clicking metal toy: two baby birds in a nest, mother ratchets back and forth between them

  “Executive decision maker” ashtray with spinning arrow

  Incomplete antique salt and pepper set, in the shape of a nude sunbather with detachable, perforated breasts, one of them missing

  Rubber-banded pile of floppy disks

  Unfinished Paint by Numbers, either a naval battle or a pastoral scene, it was difficult to tell, as the executor had botched or deliberately abused (in a play for freedom that accomplished nothing) the delicate shadings required to differentiate the minuscule nation-states that if handled with precision would notch together to render two gratifyingly realistic man o’ wars (men o’ war?) with cannons blazing or, as the case might be, a handsome pair of Guernseys. The simpler, undulating landscapes/seascapes and cloudscapes around that poor carwreck in the center were big ovals and boomerangs of white, with only a number in fine print in the center to allow the lucky possessor of the key to place these warships or cows in their appropriate setting

  SHADY LADIES

  The babies learned to walk, and talk, and not to play with scorpions, or attempt to scissor up a hated shirt with a single, stranglesome collar (Garanimals had not yet launched their Kanga-Two line). We were grave and urgent and investigative, when we could agree on a course of action. Even then our movement was halting and interrogatory. When we disagreed, we couldn’t move at all. “Gopping,” we called it, or “a gop”: go + stop. We had a reputation as quiet children who rarely fought. Our fights were invisible, that’s all. We could sit so still a brigade of quails would file from under a nearby shrub and start sifting the pebbles around our feet for edibles, while inside, a pitched battle was going on. Chapped knee, skinned anklebone, sunburnt trapezius, damp cleft in which our baggy panties bunched, were territories seized and lost, lost and seized, in a grim, silent, unremitting war. The winner led—for a while—and the loser followed, with the preoccupied, dreamy pliancy of a somnambulist. Occasionally, she looked down to see what she was doing. Often, what she discovered astonished her.

  As with sleepwalkers, a too-sudden awakening had its perils. Once, I was sitting on the side of the bed, daydreaming, when Blanche got up and went to look for the dog. I was still sitting, as far as I knew, so what was to stop me from crossing my legs? We fell hard. Fritzi, dodging, stepped on a segment of a cholla cactus and sat down to chew her pads, amazed. Papa pulled out sixteen thorns from between her toes, and that night I wrote this poem:

  Mama called from the bed

  Papa called from the shed.

  Blanche and Nora

  could not choose either/ora.

  They fell down and hit their head,

  And soon the poor girl was dead.

  It should be “heads,” and there is a puzzling ambiguity in the last line (who is th
e “poor girl”? One of the two? Both? A third little girl, hitherto unmentioned?) but otherwise I think it describes the situation quite well.

  Gradually, I learned to keep track of Blanche’s doings as if they were mine, and a new problem arose. I started thinking they were mine. An instant after I registered that strangely disinterested tug in the motor part of my mind, I found myself waving the pink slip. I trumped up reasons in retrospect for doing things that were her idea all along. I took the credit and the blame, imagining that I wanted what she tried for, or feared what she ran away from. I caught myself becoming Blanche.