Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  Trey came into the room and leaned on the back of my chair. Onscreen was a photograph of the cuirass, a piece of lettuce discernible behind the left nipple. “That is stunning. Galliano?”

  “This is not fashion,” I said. “This is a Transitional Object.”

  Turned out Trey knew the term. It was from Winnicott, and designated those often fuzzy objects kids latched onto at a certain age, such as—he scooped up his stuffed bunny and nuzzled it. “Did the mean thewapist call Fuwwy Person a twansitional object?” Twansitional meant that (1.) the object was an intermediary in the self/world rencontre, but also (2.) you should probably get over it. Trey was electrified by Louche’s claim that everyone was transitioning and every object was transitional, though some suited one’s purposes more than others. Her students made objects custom-designed for specific individuals, such as the prime minister. “They’re the bespoke suits of transitional objects!” Trey said, impressed.

  “Trey?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you get me a fake passport? Fast?”

  “Can I? I’m transfigured with joy! Finally a job suited to my abilities!”

  A civic body neither singular nor plural presents a number of problems for the state. Do the math: Each twofer has full possession of only about a fifth of what ordinarily makes up a human (the head), and roughly half of the remaining 4/5. Each, then, is 3/5 of a person. Together, they are 6/5—more than one, but a lot less than two. These calculations are the basis of the political thought of one Charlie “Chuck” Buckram, making his case for cutting the twofer vote in half. Wiser minds have prevailed, pointing out that a double amputee, also approximately 3/5 of a person, is not denied the vote, and (when Chuck pressed on, observing that 6/5 rounds down) that a human head, if it could be kept alive on the way to the ballot, would probably be allowed to vote, though it might have trouble wielding the stylus.

  Despite Chuck, then, we would ordinarily have had two votes, two social security numbers, and two driver’s licenses. But because Blanche had fallen asleep when we were still underage, she had never worked, voted, passed a driving test (though she did know how to drive, as it happened), or deposited a check; she didn’t pay taxes or rent or carry a credit card, and no phone service or utilities had ever been in her name. Besides our birth certificate, there was very little record she existed at all. This would make things easier.

  We did have a joint passport, however, or rather two passports, stapled together; the state department had not yet worked out the protocol for establishing the identity of someone with two. It was dated mere months after Blanche fell asleep, when Mama and Papa had suddenly decided that we should all go to Mexico. Max, to my surprise, had been left behind. We had made our way slowly by car down the coast of the gulf, where I glimpsed the lacquered backs of dolphins off a scorching, scathingly white beach, then across the arid width of Baja to the Pacific coast. On those long, empty, windy beaches I collected sand dollars, built sand castles, pretended to be much younger than I was (I was twelve), and one day, a long way from the bright oblongs of our towels, tried to drown Blanche. I knew very well that the same lungs served us both, but I had the theory, partly derived from some of Mama’s questionable reading material, that I could store up brain oxygen through yogic breathing and enable myself to submerge for hitherto unheard-of periods. Six to eight minutes would suffice, I thought. I blacked out and would have drowned us both if by some reflex the sleeping Blanche had not started dog-paddling. Coughing and shivering, I woke, crawled out of a lukewarm, greenish hurly-burly of water and sand on hands and knees, and vomited a lot of seawater and a few raisins, swollen nearly into grapes again. Nobody had even noticed.

  I found the expired passports smashed into the bottom of the little tin box made of recycled cans of something called Pep! (Papa had bought it for me in Mexico) that held a few keepsakes: a key, a chunk of pitchblende, half a sunflower seed, a piece of yellow construction paper folded and refolded into a hard little oblong with a crease in the center. In my photograph I looked shockingly tentative around the mouth, nothing like the hardened character I felt. Blanche was a blond anybody with flushed cheeks, lowered lashes. Who would not have thought, looking at her, that she had such a terrific will to live?

  I took new photos at a booth in the back of the Castro Film and Camera shop. The camera had two settings, Regular or Twin. Someone had X’d out the word Regular and scrawled above it, “this usage insulting to the twofer community!” It was not until I had the warm coil of photographs in my hand (Nora alert, unsmiling, dirty hair scraped back, Blanche dormant, unkempt, slightly blurry) that my own stupidity struck me. I couldn’t show a twofer passport coming home solo.

  I punched the button marked “Regular,” and went back through the velvet curtain. I smiled this time.

  While I was waiting for the second strip of prints to drop down into the catchment, something unlucky happened: Audrey walked in. I took a few quick steps away from the booth toward a display of frames and photo albums with hideous, puffy covers.

  “Nora! What are you doing here?”

  “Just looking.”

  “At this cheeseball stuff ? Do you even own a camera?” she persisted, amused. I felt a surge of annoyance.

  “What about you? Why are you here?” I said. I heard the flutter of my prints dropping, and took another step away, Audrey following. An old woman with a cast on one foot clomped past us into the booth, leaned her crutches by the door, and drew the curtain. In a moment she would come out and look in the slot.

  “Wanted to see if they carried Super-8. My normal store is out.”

  I walked her to the counter. Leave the photos here, I thought, come back later. I snuck a look back at the old woman’s feet, the single blue lace-up pump set primly beside a white elephant foot. Just then, the curtain was yanked back. I turned away.

  The woman took her time getting up. Crutches clattered. I saw Audrey look back, wanting to offer help, but the clerk was still talking, saying a lengthy no, I thought, and she was too polite to interrupt. Finally she was up, had seen the photos, was pinching one crutch under her armpit and carefully stretching out one arm. I yanked my hair out of its ponytail and shook it loose as she tweaked the photos out of the slot and brought them under her bifocals. Good, the old bat was half blind. She adjusted her crutches and hobbled toward us, and I nudged Audrey. “Let’s go!”

  Then the old woman’s photos fell down into the slot. She turned back.

  I nudged Audrey harder. “Coming? I have a call at four,” I said. At last, she came.

  Outside, she paused. “You don’t really have a call at four, do you?”

  My heart stuttered. “What do you mean?”

  “Thanks for saving me from that clerk. He was about to pitch me his movie idea! Who does he think I am, Warner Brothers? Let’s go get a latte.”

  Afterward, I went back to the store. I didn’t expect such luck, but the photos were back in the slot. I stuck them in my pocket with the others; the clerk didn’t even look up. Just for fun, I stole a purple picture frame decorated with two stuffed balloons with their strings knotted together, and threw it away in the garbage can right outside. I would cleanse the whole world of ugliness!

  Walking home, I saw the old lady again, perched on a low wall, talking to a burly man with a prancing purple teddy bear tattooed on his neck and a fat silver ring through his septum. She turned her head to watch me approach. She jabbed her crutch in my path. “Pardon me, may I ask—” she began, and I panicked. I cracked my ankle deliberately against her crutch and faked a fall. I heard or felt that she had fallen too.

  I sat up, massaging the scuffed meatus of my thumb. The old woman had fallen on one hip. The care bear was stooping over her. “Oh, no!” I said, “I’m so sorry!”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” he said, with an effort. “It was an accident, I’m sure.”

  “I’ll go phone for help.” Shaken, I ran all the way home. I listened at Trey’s door, opened it softly. He wa
s lying on his bed, ankles crossed, smoking and whimpering softly into the phone. He winked at me. I laid the two strips side by side on the bed beside him. He looked at them, then back at me, wide-eyed. Nodding, he took a long, long drag on the joint.

  That evening, he disappeared for a few hours. He came back with two passports. The second had only one head shot in it, and only one name. Seeing myself alone, my stomach turned over. I felt like I was looking at an object from the future. “Talk about a Transitional Object,” I said.

  “I’ve always wanted to try this,” said Trey. He produced a large jar of pears in syrup and fished out a pear. He began hollowing it out with a pocket knife.

  I said, “Don’t you think it might be better to put it with my other papers and take my chances?”

  “No, man, this will work.”

  “A passport is not going to fit inside a pear.”

  “I’ll curl it up. Uh-oh, pear accident. Mmm. Hey, these are pretty good. OK, take two, as Director DeMoss would say. Can you grab me a rubber band out of that cuppy thing by the phone?”

  “Why don’t we just forget this pear business. Why would I take a pear in syrup to England? Do I look like a pear in syrup kind of person? What if they have some kind of regulation against bringing wildlife into England?”

  “A pear isn’t wildlife, dude.”

  I groaned.

  “Do you want to do this or don’t you? Don’t tell me you’re having moral qualms. You’re not thinking it’s”—he adopted a stage whisper—“murder, are you?” I shrugged. “Blanche is a parsnip, babe. An energetic parsnip, I grant you. But a parsnip.”

  I knew better. Parsnips do not dream.

  “I know you, Nora. You are truly, deeply selfish. No, I think it’s admirable. Most people can’t acknowledge the deep sea fish inside. You’re watchful, cold, implacable, patient, intelligent, and hungry. Becoming an I is, like, totally you.”

  “Maybe I’m too nice to go through with it.”

  “I sincerely doubt it.”

  nora darling,

  mi sofabed es tu sofabed. i’ll even pick you up at the airport if you’ll stand me a lamb vindaloo. what are you doing in london. an attitude dredge is just one of many things i will have to show you in person.

  lo

  Lo,

  Apparently I have to produce some actual work for the fellowship I got 8 years ago or they will ask for their money back. I’m killing two birds with one stone and researching the history of a family heirloom, a dollhouse. They’re transitional objects, don’t you think? Dollhouses, I mean. Consider that vindaloo yours. Itinerary attached.

  No

  TIME CAMERA

  Max came back from a trip with a new idea. She had seen ghost towns that were raking it in. We were sitting on a gold mine, she said.

  “Fool’s gold,” said Granny tartly. “And if you think you can fob it off on some poor rube, I wish you luck.”

  “People love ghost towns. They pay to see ghost towns.”

  “You can’t make a ghost town out of a sow’s ear,” Granny said. Max laughed. Granny repeated it several times. Each time, she and Max laughed.

  Granny liked the idea right off, but she always liked Max’s ideas. In retrospect I’d say she misunderstood it slightly, got hung up on the ghost part. She consulted her Ouija board and came up with what she said was the go-ahead from Too Bad’s old-timers, as well as the new town name they gave her, Lario6p. “The spirits definitely indicated the six,” she said, glaring around at our uncertain expressions. “Definitely.”

  Max eventually managed to persuade her that authenticity was what the tourists were looking for, and Too Bad had been Too Bad since boomtown days. “Well, if that’s what the tourists want,” Granny said dubiously.

  In fact, Too Bad had never boomed. Maybe a soft thump was heard when that first rancher wiggled a fence post and saw gold, but what little gold was there was scratched out by prospectors in less than a year. It wasn’t the tail of the fat golden serpent after all, just a few scales scraped off as it passed through. Turquoise chunks of copper ore lay all around, but no big company could be tempted to build a smelter on the spot, and hauling the heavy ore to the nearest copper mill ate up any profit. The next flash in the pan was silver; just southeast of us was a rich vein. But the geological layers were warped and tilted thereabouts, turning almost upside down in some places, so that “you might think history ran backward around here,” Papa said, and that silver-bearing seam dove straight down into the mountain. The last miner had followed it imprudently far and died when the shaft collapsed on him. According to Granny his body was never dug out.

  The miners weren’t the only ghosts in Too Bad. Before them, the Navajo had lived there. Before them, a people the Pima Indians called the Hohokam. It’s a two-headed word; in Piman, you make a noun plural by doubling its first syllable. “It means, those who are gone,” Granny said. “Of course, they didn’t call themselves that!” What they did call themselves, nobody knew.

  It took some work to turn the real ghost town into the much more popular fake ghost town it is today. Papa and Max built new ruins; the old ones weren’t picturesque enough. They bought a used trailer for an office, and sided it with weathered planks; in places you could see silver through the chinks. Granny had her picture taken—squinting into the sun and sucking a corncob pipe—as the Last Inhabitant. Mama wrote skits to perform for the tourists at scheduled times in the street, the saloon, the whorehouse, and Papa and Granny wrote a new history for the town and published it in a stapled booklet with a few old-timey line drawings as The Story of Too Bad.

  A local saloonkeeper, hoping to bring in new customers, a Chinese laundry and some fresh faces in the brothel, not to mention new fruit for the hanging tree, offered travellers a good dinner and some firewater in exchange for a promise to spread glittering tales of “the El Dorado of eastern Nevada” in every watering hole east and west. Some of ’em must have kept that promise, because the customers came, eyes glittering with gold fever, and by the time they realized Too Bad was too good to be true, they’d lost their shirts. They stayed anyway, out of pure cussedness, and dedicated the rest of their short lives to out-fightin’, out-drinkin’, and out-cheatin’ any traveller foolish enough to join them in a hand of Seven Card Stud. Purty soon, everyone west of ol’ Missipp’ knew Too Bad was the baddest town east of Bodie.

  We’d sell that in the gift shop along with bolo ties, lonesome cowboy copper ashtrays, gold-panning kits complete with tiny sachets of gold dust, woodpeckers on springs that pecked their way down a pole, and postcards of barrel cacti in cowboy hats and cartoon burros braying “HOWDY from the middle of nowhere!” and “I lost my A__ in Nevada!” “Do we have a jackalope? We gotta get a jackalope,” said Max. We got a jackalope, which proved to be a stuffed jackrabbit with antlers glued to its head.

  But the best attraction was the Time Camera.

  Ever imagine that you were an outlaw, a sheriff, a Red Man, a lady of dubious virtue? Travel into the past! Let our magic lens take you back to the time when the West was wild, beards were bushy, and justice was done at the end of a rope. If your friends don’t believe you, you can show them the picture! Black and white: $10. Sepia-toned: $15. Gold Frame adds $10. Extra copies $5.

  “It’s an art, making up the past,” said Max, humping a big cardboard box into the dressing room. We followed her in. “It’s like science fiction, only backward. Do you think you could do it, Nora? You’re good at telling stories.”

  “Do what?” We opened one of the cartons. It was full of dull purple velvets, frayed satin, unlined coats with big gold buttons.

  “Dress them, pose them, make them look good. They need to be told what to do, they don’t have your imagination.”

  “Who don’t?”

  “The tourists!” She banged down a box. We pulled out a sword as light as aluminum foil, made of plastic with a thin metallic coating that peeled off like manzanita bark.

  “Does the camera really send you back
in time?”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  I knew she didn’t really mean it, but I thought it might be true anyway. You could tell it was the past from the pictures. Under the lens, pleather was leather, pop beads were pearls, and the shitty shine of the peeling chrome on the prop sword was the solemn gleam of polished steel. (Oddly, the one real sword, a dress sword we had got from the Grady junk shop, never looked as good in photos.)

  We plundered the costume box for our games of pretend, which became real when we were successful in cajoling Max to take our picture. Our tastes were Olde Worlde crossed with Old West, Lord This in the shoot-out at the Circle-8, Lady That of the Loco Solo Saloon. Certain props and certain characters always went together: the purple flared coat and white wig belonged to the lazy, elegant Count Backwards, whose second head whispered bad council from its hiding place in the ruffles around his thin, white neck. The lovely Maltese Ladies always wore a tattered ball gown (shredded in a dangerous flirtation with a cactus) of flowered gauze over thick silvery satin, or what we called satin, anyway, and a rhinestone diadem we declared “exquisite” and quarreled over, with the result that in the photographs it appears now on one head, now another. Count Backwards’ regular proposals of marriage to the Maltese Ladies were the cause of a series of fiendish plots against them on the part of his second head, who, fearing disinheritance, led them into intricate traps, from which, just as the tin can containing dynamite was dropping from the trained vulture’s claws toward the tent where the Maltese Ladies were just lighting up the ceremonial cigar that opened festivities at the sharpshooter’s competition they’d been asked to judge, they escaped with the help of their friend, the dashing Calamity Jane, who after diverting the explosive vessel with a volley of precisely aimed shots, always took the opportunity to perform some gun tricks for the dumbfounded villain, then waved away the grand prize, asking only a grateful kiss from the Ladies before she rode off into the purple sage.