Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  DR. GOAT

  I kept a sort of gallery in my head where images of terrible potency were shut up. Here are some of them: A still living grasshopper gyrating slowly in the grip of a hundred ants. A tick as fat as a pomegranate seed, stuck snugly behind Granny’s ear (a clip-on rhinestone-covered quail perched immaculately on her earlobe, beside it). Papa pooing behind a bush, a ruby rim rising out of the hairs to clasp the knuckled, glistening turd. But the most terrible of all was Dr. Goat.

  Dr. Goat appeared in a picture book Granny gave us. On his hind legs, in his white coat, he was taking the pulse of Flossie the sheep. I could not flip casually through the book, in case I touched this page; I counted the pages before it, so I knew when it was coming, then held the book almost shut, and peeked sideways at the evil scene. Oh Flossie, beware. Don’t you see the cloven hoof under the lab coat, the curly horns behind the headlamp?

  When our new neighbors visited the Time Camera, I recognized them at once. Flossie’s long, docile, foolish face, her pink nose and yellowish curls, gave her away, despite her pink and purple housedress. Dr. Goat was better disguised, as befitted a villain, for he had shaved off the wispy beard and horns, and his hunting boots concealed his hooves, and his squint hid his yellow eyes, his oblong pupils. But his manner of treacherous, phony solicitude gave him away. When he bent over to greet us, he put one big, hot, damp hand on the small of our back, and I smelled his goatish armpits and his rank breath and screamed up into his smiling face. Red-faced, Mama hustled us outside, but I ran back in behind her to loiter, staring, in the back of the room.

  “Why did you scream?” Blanche had whispered, wondering.

  “Don’t you recognize him?”

  She became intent.

  Her eyes flicked over to me. “Is it…” I nodded encouragement. “Count Backwards?”

  “Are you crazy? It’s Dr. Goat!”

  She let out a little mew. I shushed her. “It was a mistake to let him know I recognized him. From now on, we have to pretend we’re not watching him.”

  “But we will be.”

  “We’ll be watching him like hawks.”

  Dr. Goat was not built for the desert, which was made for bony folks like Granny—mere skeletons in a sheath of hide—or for small subtle bodies like our own. He was corpulent and almost tropical in his complexion: think of a flamingo-colored hippo. In fact, the tropics would have rotted him in an afternoon. The dry air checked his phlegm at his lips, though occasionally coming stealthily after him we would come upon his spittle on a rock, drying and tightening into a rubbery doily.

  Tailing him took patience. We could make our way through the brush much faster than he could. There would have been some danger of stumbling over him if he had not made so much noise. He made his way from snag to snag, muttering long strings of imprecations we could never quite make out. I think he would have used a golf cart for his hunting trips, if he could have reconciled it with macho aspirations he had probably borrowed from Hemingway, maybe by decking it out with a camouflage canopy and machine-gun sights.

  Once, we came over the crest of a ridge and saw him in the arroyo almost directly below us. He had stopped in the shade under an acacia tree and was taking off his shirt and folding it. Then he pulled down his pants and underwear together and we saw his butt, yellowish white like chicken fat and hairless except for the damp dun-colored tufts in his butt crack. From the waist up, though, he was dark red, not so much tanned as seared all over like a roast given a quick turn under the broiler, so he looked like two half people stuck together. His back was perfectly rectangular, with a gutter in the middle like a book, and a smattering of blackheads like periods.

  His pants got stuck on his shoes, and he stood up, turning, so that we could see his little fat dick, and kicked; the inside-out pants flapped from his feet with a whacking sound so loud it sounded closer than it was and we flattened ourselves on the hot stones like a horned toad, trying to be the color of nothing. One can be sinister and ridiculous at the same time. He was as absurd as Grandma’s inflatable dinosaur, and yet he terrified us. When we lifted our heads up to look, he was on his knees half turned away. His pants were still stuck on his shoes, but he had bunched them up under his knees for padding and he had smoothed out a little pink napkin or something on the sand in front of him and was hunched over pulling on his dick. His butt went tight and flabby, tight and flabby, and then he pressed his dick down at the napkin, and to our righteous disgust a skein of a viscous substance slung out right over it. In apparent annoyance he pressed the end of his dick into the rag, poking it into the sand, and then lowered himself onto his belly and started flopping around, but this was enough for us and we ran.

  Later we came back to that spot and made investigations, but there was nothing there but a hole with blurred tracks around it in the sand, maybe coyote, and a dirty scrap of pink flowered cotton stuck on a catclaw halfway up the cutbank.

  We too went naked sometimes, we spent whole days on the desert in nothing but socks and sneakers. We went to a certain mesquite bush, took off our clothes, bunched them up, and left them suspended in the branches, so no scorpions could take refuge in them. We moved with particular care on naked days, and with a ritual solemnity. The thornbushes reached out to us. Sometimes we kept almost perfectly still in their grasp and watched as they delicately clawed us. One thorn drawn across our chest like a phonograph needle inked the score a beat later in tiny red notes. We never cried when we were naked. Pain was a necessary part of the skinned world we had entered. The sun stung and we relished it. When we were sweaty we crouched in the pale shade under a mesquite tree to feel our sweat turn cold. We felt like part of the desert. Rabbits turned to look and then went back to tearing at the grass. We were invisible.

  One of our naked days, the bushes on a nearby hilltop thrashed and disgorged Dr. Goat, his rabbit gun gleaming. The desert contracted and thrust us out. Distances measured themselves, light fell in quanta, gravity confirmed its rule, and suddenly we were exposed and ridiculous. Had he seen us? We shrank down slowly behind a yucca, and like the rabbits, we kept perfectly still (our buttocks clenched, our toes working under the hot canvas uppers of our sneakers) until he went away.

  Another day Dr. Goat shot a cottontail and couldn’t find it. We saw him stumping off home, shooting at cactus. We crept through the bushes until we found it. The rabbit was lying on its side with its eyes half closed as if exhausted, and the breeze was moving in its fur. It was still soft and warm. We stroked it and pretended it was alive for a while. Then I lifted up the hem of our shirt to make a cradle, and we started toward home.

  “Are we going to bury him?” asked Blanche.

  “No,” I said. “We’re going to keep him.” I had just had a brilliant idea.

  APPOINTMENT

  I opened my eyes before dawn feeling cool, quavery, and wide awake. Blanche’s nose was whistling: the dry air on the plane. I pinched it closed for a few seconds and it stopped. In the submarine light I could make out my open suitcase, my towel draped over the wardrobe door, my wash bag sagging over the edge of the ironing board. Everything was so still it hurt my head. I flapped my comforter just to see it move, then sat up.

  Barefoot, I crept past Louche’s closed door to the dark hole of the stairwell. Gripping the banister, I started down the oddly steep stairs, finding each step with my toes before I let my weight down onto it. From the landing I could see a little light seeping in from below, and I took the next few steps quickly before I noticed a young girl in a white dress standing at the foot of the stairs.

  She was staring at me, as startled as I was. We regarded each other for a long time, neither moving, until I realized I could see Louche’s bicycle through her. I took a quick step back, rammed my heel painfully into the riser, and bumped down several stairs on my coccyx before I could grab one of the uprights of the banister and stop myself. The girl was directly in front of me now, swaying and undulating, emitting an odd light clicking, and I remembered where I had see
n her before: on the way up to bed. I staggered out through the slithering tickle of a bamboo curtain, dissolving the mocking spectre.

  Groaning quietly, I knelt in front of the television and ran my fingers over its face. The screen crackled, swooned, and braced itself for the news: race riots in Oldham, tropical fish caught off Southend pier, elderly particularly vulnerable to identity theft, authorities satisfied that the two severed heads found this week near York are the work of the same man as the one found in Shropshire two months ago.

  I huddled closer. The screen sizzled, my arm hairs rose.

  “Acquaintances confirm that these were the heads of Siamese twins or, as they are known in the States, twofers. Er, not, uh”—the announcer stumbled—“two heads of one twin but rather…two of one of each of two of—er, heads from two different twins.” One, found by a jogger, had a note clamped in its jaws that read “Alone at last.” One had a circle drawn in ink on its brow. “Police believe that whoever left them there intended them to be found. No fresh clues have surfaced as to the killer’s identity, but police have confirmed that the forensic evidence suggests considerable medical skill on the part of the man the tabloids have dubbed Doctor Decapitate. In the face of fierce protests from interest groups, the Medical Ethics Board has backed down from earlier statements that so-called doctor-assisted individuality surgery may in some cases be justified. Catholic priests have called upon the Vatican to make a formal statement declaring conjoined twins to be two individuals possessing equal right to life, while condemning the extreme tactics of the group calling themselves the Togetherists, which has become a household name in recent weeks after a series of controversial actions made headline news, most recently the bomb scare at the East Grinstead Animal Shelter.

  “In the latest on that story, the police safely evacuated the animal shelter the Togetherists apparently believed to be serving as a temporary front for the mysterious doctor after an anonymous tipper alerted police to a bomb hidden inside a dog toy. In an odd twist, police have revealed that the suspect toy took the shape of”—the announcer permitted himself a smile—“this winking cartoon bomb.” Announcer holds up bomb and squeezes it. Squeak. “Police carried out controlled explosion of the toy. Yes, all the puppies are safe.” Shot of frolicking Shelty pups.

  I pulled the armchair closer and curled up in it, dragging Louche’s jacket off the arm and over me. It had her smell. “Due to an unprecedented volume of calls, the East Grinstead Animal Shelter has requested that we let viewers know that all the bomb-scare-surviving pups have been adopted. However, other at-risk pups are being shipped in from shelters all over the…” My eyelids drooped, as puppies poured out of trucks and trains, flowed together into a shining, flouncing horde. One stopped and looked at me, curling its lip to bare needle-sharp teeth. I saw that it was not a puppy at all, but the mongoose. “I hope you are not under the impression that decapitation is a humane way to administer euthanasia to reptiles,” it said, in a mocking lilt that sounded like an imitation of Peter Sellers imitating an Indian accent.

  “Morning,” said Louche, clicking off the TV.

  I groaned. “Your pajamas are staring at me.” The heavy, shiny silk was figured with peacock eyes. I hobbled to the front window—why did my ass hurt? Oh, yeah—and saw it had rained in the night. A Rastafarian twofer was carrying a bag of groceries up the wet stairs opposite, his dreads intricately twisted into a single Gordian knot. It struck me that he was the first twofer I’d seen outside the airport. Maybe this was their—our—neighborhood. I didn’t think much of it. Where were the cobblestones and chimneysweeps? It was also short on climbing roses and crumbling cottages, despite its name, which was something rustic and vaguely ribald—Milkmaid’s Stool? No, Shepherd’s Bush. The brick houses were boxy and modern. The white trim looked British, but fake British, like that house on Noe whose new owners had given it a name: Wee Like It. (“They’re into water sports,” Trey had said, “without a doubt.”)

  “Drink up!” Louche was tipping a spoon into a hole in the shoulder of the cuirass. She had volunteered to call off her class to show me around, but I had told her I had an appointment at the British Museum, so after breakfast she walked me to the subway and pointed out my route before going through the turnstile herself. I bought a map at the kiosk. Holloway Road was very long! I might end up having to walk some distance, I realized, and decided to leave at once, though I was still early. It was what I wanted to do anyway; until I found the office, I wouldn’t really believe it existed. I had printed out the e-mail with the address, and I kept patting the pocket where I’d put it. Though I knew it by heart, I thought that if I lost the proof, I would forget it, as if it had never been.

  After slightly longer than was strictly necessary—I had commenced my trip by zooming off in the wrong direction—I emerged onto a long straight road between fused storefronts, only fifteen minutes early for my appointment. The buildings were short and modern and pastel colored; I could have been in southern California, if not for the insipid sunlight and the toy cars zipping wrongwise around the roundabouts. There were no trees, though the occasional plastic simulacrum of a shrub was stuck upright in a cement-filled flowerpot. The neighborhood appeared void of life except for the nondescript birds that blew around and snagged momentarily in fences and cornices like tufts of dirty insulation. But behind its banal facade was savagery: Louche had told me about a plague of urban foxes that slaughtered pet cats, a landlady who had slow-cooked her gentle elderly tenant in her Aga and freezer-wrapped him in meal-sized portions.

  I walked quickly as if I knew where I was going, though it would have made more sense, now, to slow down and look closely at the house numbers. But I couldn’t, I felt too visible. It was an obscene, practically sexual visibility. I have read that men will sometimes get a hard-on running to help someone in an overturned car or even driving by some horrible sight, and if this is true, I think it is probably for the same reason that I got wet as I walked down that street toward my doctor’s appointment.

  There was some kind of rumpus going on down the block. A small group was poking the air with signs, letting out faint cries. There is always something pathetic about a protest. It is always out of the way of the world, like a funeral going on with due gravity while nearby a dog bounds through the headstones after a tennis ball.

  Though actually this one seemed very much in my way.

  In the same moment that I saw that several of the protesters, in fact almost all, all but a couple, were twofers, one of them saw me, threw up his arm, and shouted something. Those near him turned, and the rest followed suit. All the signs turned to face me. It was as if they were protesting me.

  Who, me? The only other audience were some dispirited posies in a window box, and a supercilious cat defying the foxes from behind glazing. Sometimes paranoia gets it right: Yes, you.

  Isn’t there something comical about revelation? The little pause beforehand, that’s what they call comic timing. Or is it that we like to stop and listen for the click of the barrels turning in the lock? I seemed to read all the signs at once, though in actual fact I must have read them in order, maybe the largest first (KEEP IT TOGETHER) or the best designed (TOGETHER WE STAND, with 3D lettering, and drop shadows, and very conscientious letter-spacing), or even the small, unprofessional sign (DON’T CUT OFF YOUR OTHER HEAD, FOR GOODNESS SAKE) that my eyes sought out in unaccountable preference to the TWOFEREVER dot-matrix banner beside it. I could have read left to right, in which case I would have seen first ONE IS NO FUN in upbeat orange over two happy faces, or right to left, which would have yielded an uncaptioned cartoon doctor holding up a severed head, followed by IT’S MURDER DON’T DO IT in dripping red paint with a red handprint.

  There was really no time to turn around. They were coming toward me, and in a moment they surrounded me. They were braying and whinnying and clopping me on the shoulder. Someone was shaking a tambourine.

  “Glad you could find us!”

  “It’s so important that w
e all turn out for these actions because even if it seems like nobody’s watching or hearing us, we are making an impression!”

  Belatedly, it dawned on me that these attentions were friendly.

  “Right everyone, let’s greet the newcomer, I’d like to introduce…?”

  “Uh—Audrey.” I started to laugh.

  “Audrey, from where? Tupelo, and this is? This is Amelia, from Bangladesh! Just kidding. She’s from Tupelo too. How do we know, guys?”

  Chorus: “Because they’re TOGETHER!”

  Cheers. Among the laughing crowd was a twofer I recognized. His hats were pulled low, but a tuft of red showed over one ear, and that was enough. It was the ginger-haired twofer from San Francisco, this time I was sure, though his face was singularly average, a beige smear, like a reflection in a dirty spoon. Faces, I should say, though one of them was so expressionless, its owner might as well have been asleep.

  Just then a police van rolled around the corner, lights flashing.

  A short girl with bangs and spots spun around, accidentally clobbered me in the head with her sign, and apologized hastily to Blanche. The redheaded twofer dove through the confusion, took my left arm in a tight, unpleasant grip, put his right arm around my shoulders, and began walking me briskly away. Behind us there was commotion, a clatter of feet and yelling and a garbled utterance through a bullhorn, but I was held fast and could not turn to look.

  I sought to free my arm, encountering as I did so some strappy concoctions under his clothes such as I imagine old men wear to flatten their bellies and prop up their flagging tits, a distressingly intimate experience that gave me the idea that this might be a weird kind of pickup. I redoubled my efforts to escape.

  Redoubled: a strange word. As if doubling were not quite enough.