Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  Solo S/M for the Single Twofer

  Are you a bottom? Are you a top? Or are you both—at the same time? The most agile “switch” can’t do that, but you can. And why not? Why should a twofer be limited to what a singleton can do and feel?

  Now let’s take it a step further. Ever thought about topping or bottoming…yourself ? I’m not just talking about tweaking your twin’s nose, or turning the other cheek. I’m talking about an intricate topping and bottoming taking place all over your body simultaneously. Your ass tops your elbow. Your left breast bottoms to your right, your spleen tops your kidney, a freckle bottoms to a hair. An advanced SubDom can dominate and submit simultaneously, in the same body part. (Where there are two wills, there are two ways!) As Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” and guess what? They’re fucking. And let’s face it, where there’s fucking, there is dominance and submission. You don’t like vanilla intercourse, why settle for vanilla onanism?

  Some practical advice. If you’re using bondage, remember: if s/he can’t move, you can’t either. Extreme physical pain? OK, but one of you had better stay conscious. Confine corporal punishment to your ass, thighs, and shoulders. Avoid your heads, necks, and hands—you will need these parts if something goes wrong.

  A word about “twincest.” The moral majority won’t let twofers forget that masturbation is incest. OK, sure. So is wiping your ass. Singleton, guess who’s your closest relative? You are. Dr. Marie, please keep your hands outside the blankets.

  ONE AND A HALF

  When I woke up, I had no idea where I was. I was standing in darkness. Only a slightly diminished darkness outlined the lowered shades on my right, twin parallelograms that disappeared when I looked their way. Someone was breathing nearby, not Blanche. There was something small, hard, and slippery in my right hand. I ran my thumb lightly over it and it beeped, opening a green eye: a phone. I raised it to my ear. There was the attent hush of a live line. “Hello?” I whispered.

  “Nora?” Louche said sharply. There was a caw of bedsprings, and I was blinking in the eyebeam of the bedside lamp. “What the bloody hell are you doing?”

  I lowered the phone to my side. What could I say? I was sleepwalking, I needed to use the phone, I’m not myself, it wasn’t me? I stepped back against the table and slid the phone onto it.

  “This,” I said, surging onto the bed, one knee on either side of her. I put my hand on her throat and felt her swallow. Her skin was hot, a little sweaty. Her pulse touched me secretly. She waited, not moving. After a moment I pressed my hand slowly down over her collarbones to her hard breastbone, dragging her collar down to where a mythological beast purred and preened with more than one head—more than two—“Cerberus?”

  “Hydra.”

  I leaned in with all my weight and gave her louche gift back to her. Her sticky lips resisted, then yielded to my tongue, and I tasted stale smoke and sleep and salty butter and sardines and peppermint and her breath like a thought passing back and forth between us. Then her hard, dry hand closed around my damp descending one and pulled it farther down into a nest of springy convolutions that opened onto silk and syrup, and it was no longer at all clear who was in charge of the situation. We were two Transitional Objects negotiating some sort of parlay between machine parts designed with something else in mind, and either of us could fly apart at any moment.

  I was on my back, arching to crush a still hot ember against Louche’s knuckles with a pleasure I thought might come back later as pain, when my eyes slipped off her shining blue-green torso to the table where the phone was. I had the distinct feeling someone was listening. A tardy ball of lightning gasped down my spine, and Louche laughed, and flipped onto her back beside me, and stretched out her cramped hand, and then laid it over her nose and mouth and breathed, and laughed some more.

  I woke up with my legs coiled in Louche’s damp sheets and a heavy feeling in my chest. There was a nasty trickling sound in the eaves. Evidently it was raining again. The blue shoulder an inch from my face was thick as a knee. Practically deformed, I thought, though it was not true, and those tattooed scales make the skin around them look, I don’t know, peeled. That was true, and I wanted to lick the naked places. Vexed, I sat up, treading down the sheets. I had to e-mail the Foundation!

  Louche rolled over and slid a heavy, warm arm across my lap. It felt as if I might let it stay there. So I stood up, letting her arm bang down against the bed frame. She woke up fully then. I thought it was possible that she would hit me. I would not have minded, it would have clarified things, but she only watched, stroking her arm with her fingertips, while I put on the T-shirt I had been wearing last night. I couldn’t find my underwear, so I went back to my room without it. By the time I was downstairs, fully dressed, she was at the kitchen table in her pajamas, drinking tea. Her computer was on but sleeping, its cool light pulsing. Didn’t she want to take a shower? I went to the counter, started fixing tea, and stuck, staring at a dry tea bag in a mug. I felt sawed from a single slab of wood. Louche opened the paper with a sound like beating wings. Finally I dragged my jacket off the back of the chair she was sitting in and said sullenly, “I’m going to go get some yogurt.” I had spotted an Internet café–slash–macrobiotic kitchen near the subway station.

  “I do have yogurt,” I heard her say softly as I closed the door. A block away I slowed to a jog, my chest heaving. With luck Louche would think I had intimacy issues.

  In fact, I did have intimacy issues.

  The dreadlocked twofer was sitting in the café window with a brown-haired girl in polka dots, their heads bent over a page with a bright repeating pattern she was scissoring into small matching rectangles. I bought a brick made of seeds and took it to the computer stationed nearest the wall, where the high back of the stained green armchair facing it would hide my screen from anyone who wasn’t right beside me.

  The Unity Foundation had already e-mailed me.

  Your interview of 17 September was positive. You will be admitted for treatment at your earliest convenience. For security reasons this address is no longer active as of 18 September. Please contact a representative if you have further questions.

  Oneness,

  The Unity Foundation

  I typed a hasty reply on the sticky keys. It bounced back immediately:

  Mail Delivery Subsystem

  Returned mail: see transcript for details

  ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----

 

  550 5.1.1 …User unknown

  Action: failed

  * * *

  There has beeen some mistake, as I missed my appointmeent due to circumstances of which I believe you are awaree.. What do I do now? I do not have the address of your eeestablishment or contact information for any reepreeseentativee.

  Ms. O

  I tried to bring up the Web site, to see if a new address was listed. 404 File Not Found.

  I threw myself back in my chair. The bubble of unease that had been building in my chest since yesterday now burst, splattering my organs with fire. What was I going to do? After weeks of beating steadily toward one end, to stop now was unthinkable.

  The dreadlocked twofer was staring at me. I and I, their shirt said. Could they be the Unity “representative”? Absurd. They were a healthy, happy, macrobiotic twofer, now smiling, getting up, coming this way—I shut down my browser.

  “I-rey, sistren,” one said, placing a show announcement on the edge of my table. “Mushy dread a go t’row down some crucial dub at Too Bad tonight. Come by ef uno get a bly. Even an’ odd mashin up together.”

  “Twofers and singletons,” his twin clarified, in crisp BBC English.

  “Too Bad?” I said, incredulous.

  “It’s on Uxbridge Row, under the Oxfam. Knock on the door with the Underground symbol on it.”

  “One love, sistren.” They went back to their seat.

  One love. Hadn’t
the Unity Foundation used that phrase? And the Underground symbol was a red circle, barred. I looked at the shiny slip of paper. There it was, in fact, above the words “Free Pass, admit 11/2,” the crossbar bearing the boldface “2Ply/2Bad/2Night!” But if I took every fucking circle for a personal summons, I’d be chasing nickels and dimes down drains, underlining Os in the Observer and Post, staring at the sun. Dotty, in a word.

  Still, it was a reminder. I couldn’t rule out the possibility of a hidden message. Calmer now, I got out the brochure I had picked up in the office and inspected it minutely, even tilting it to catch the window glare, in case a name or number scrawled on an overlay had left an inkless impression—a detective’s trick that yielded nothing. But maybe the clue lay in the attraction itself. The Hunterian, repository of medical marvels: Where else did a freak belong?

  I rang Louche, who did not pick up, and left a message that I had an appointment at the London Gallery at two and would see her that evening.

  “Royal College of Surgeons,” said the cabbie, pulling to the curb outside a long spear-topped fence. Behind it, square in the middle of the facade, six two-story Ionic columns guarded the small entrance. I had to walk the length of the fence to find a way around it. Inside the door, a receptionist waved me on into a creamy marble hall where antique notables in gold frames ruminated over a fire extinguisher. Someone passed me and went down a hall toward a marble statue. It took a moment to spot the small sign for the Hunterian Museum, on the side of some stairs leading up. More notables watched me ascend.

  The museum had grown up around a core collection of medical specimens assembled by the illustrious surgeon John Hunter, b. 1728, who had treated the young Byron for clubfoot, owned such exotic animals as porcupines and bats, and acquired, through dubious channels, the skeletons of both the largest and the littlest persons of his day, the Irish Giant and the Sicilian Fairy. Hunter was a speculative fellow, who once transplanted a human tooth into a cock’s comb, and injected himself with infected pus from a syphilitic whore, both experiments proving fatal to the subject.

  The Hunterian was lushly carpeted in institutional grey, and its glass cases were widely spaced and orderly. Within, forlorn widgets the yellowish hue of old vellum coiled in glass jars. On close inspection many of these proved parts of people: a diseased colon, an elephantine thumb. I browsed them with a frank and systematic attitude. I admired the nose made for a woman who had lost hers to syphilis, a pink-painted silver shell soldered to wire glasses-frames, to hook over the ears. Her new husband liked her better without the nose, so she had donated it to the museum: altogether a happy story. An array of fetal skeletons of graduated sizes, arranged against black velvet, seemed a sort of evolutionary chart for changelings: how a pixie may become a human child. A series of slant-topped vitrines were covered with thick velvet drapes to protect their fragile contents from the light. I lifted one to see a page of handwritten laboratory notes accompanying a sepia line drawing of a Y-shaped tubule wreathed with delicate filaments, and peppered all over with lowercase letters tethered to scrawled Latin names. I raised the next curtain, and a postcard that had been sandwiched between the velvet and the glass skated out and tapped me in the chest.

  It bore a disagreeable photograph of a monkey with a riding crop astride a bridled goat. Both had the glassy stare of the dead. I turned it over. The yellowing reverse was blank except for the legend, in tiny print: “Monkey Riding Goat, c. 1870s, Potter’s Museum of Curiosities, Arundel, W. Sussex.” I pocketed it, then on an afterthought bent over the vitrine. The dainty volume inside lay open to a page explicating Hunter’s discovery that the freemartin, a sterile cow that mounts other cows, always has a male twin. Frowning, I dropped the curtain and turned away.

  And saw it. One bizarrely stretched skull—no, two skulls fused together, like calcified soap bubbles. Not a twofer, then, and what’s more, the second head was up-ended on the crown of the first, and a stump of a neck jutted upward, where a whole second body should have been. There was a glint of light in one eye socket. It almost looked like an eye—moist, shiny—regarding me from inside the skull. My heart lurched. I stared back, I hardly know how long.

  Finally, I dared to step forward. As I did, the pale point of light grew, slid and rippled and split in two around a flaw in the glass. I recognized my own reflection, and laughed, relief warming my cheeks. I was the scariest monster there.

  I bent to read the plaque. The creature had been born in 1783 in Mundul Gait, Bengal, to poor parents. There should have been a second body; it was speculated that it had received insufficient nourishment in the womb, and never developed. Or perhaps it had been destroyed afterward, since the appalled midwife had thrown the newborn in the fire. Who could blame her? I thought. His mother had dragged him out, treated his burns, and exhibited him to great acclaim. He was killed by a cobra at five.

  I was turning away when I heard a hiss behind me. I turned. “I remember a shelf wedged across the window,” the lower skull said, moving its teeth out of sync. I dropped back a pace, and the vitrine caught me in the small of my back. “The window was an irregular rectangle cut in the corrugated wall,” said the upper, “with two pieces of bottle glass wedged in it, one emerald green, one milky and swirled as a shell, or a blind eye. I thought they were divinely beautiful. I begged for the blanket to be lifted, to afford us a glimpse of them.” “Sometimes she did. But sometimes she’d give us the stick,” they whispered. It was actually the handle of a spade, occasionally used for poking the fire, hence the charred end, but more often for poking him through the bars, “I mean the blanket,” they rasped. “Sorry. Our only friends were the roaches,” the lower skull went on. I could hear his breath whistle through the jaw, see the twist of wire that held it in place. The roaches crawled under the blanket when he was very still, and lay confidingly along his side, dry little lozenges. Sometimes he would catch one by feel, he had quick hard fingers like little bones, and make a pet of it. “My darling, my dandy,” he would whisper to it, petting its stiff back with a splinter, and make up reasons why this roach was the prettiest of them all. “I will make you a little saddle out of red felt,” he’d whisper. “I’ll hang a tiny golden bell around your neck, my pretty.” And the roach would prance, nearly. He would tempt it, with soft bits of food dredged up from between his teeth, to step onto his lips, duck its head inside his mouth and take the food from his tongue. He was very good at keeping still.

  “I named him Count Backwards,” the upper confided, and someone cleared her throat behind me. “Ma’am? Ma’ams? I’ll have to ask you not to disturb the exhibits?” I looked around and saw the docent, her mouth working, her reading glasses dancing on her uneasy chest. “If you have a complaint about one of the exhibits, you’ll have to take it up with the museum director. Of course, I appreciate that—” I turned to face her, and her voice rose in pitch. “Please stay calm—we all appreciate that there are delicate issues at stake and we certainly want to be sensitive to the, to the concerns of all our visitors, but of course sensibilities have changed, and things that were once acceptable may not now, of course this is a historical museum preserved pretty much as it—”

  “What exactly did I do?” My hearts were beating much too fast. I took a deep breath and tried to hold it, but it seeped out from between Blanche’s lips.

  “Well, I hardly need—I saw you quite clearly. You were trying to pry open that case!”

  “What would I want to do that for?” I heard myself say.

  She worked her mouth some more. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know,” she said with peculiar emphasis.

  “Why would I want to, to accost, as you seem to be implying, your moldy old specimens? I might be a freak, but that doesn’t make me a pervert.”

  “I certainly wasn’t suggesting—”

  “I wonder what put that idea in your head. Does it get lonesome working here? Have you been seeking solace in—oh, go fuck yourself with a wax model.” I walked out. Then turned and stuck my head b
ack through the door. “Of a pendulous abdominal growth!” I added in a yell.

  I felt some gloomy satisfaction as I closed the door again, but already, as I stepped smartly down the marble stairs, waiting for the slam and not hearing it, a gloomy feeling came over me, and my back tingled, and when the sarcastic click of the latch finally sounded, I started just as if I had not been waiting for it and banged the back of my hand painfully against the brass handrail. On the bright side, I was no longer talking to a skull. Things could have been worse. I had the feeling I had just strolled out of a trap, like an ant that skitters into a predatory ant lion’s sand trap and then skitters out again on an opportune grass blade—with the difference that the ant wonders neither why the grass blade appeared, nor why the treacherous funnel before it. I had the feeling that if I turned, I might see some fanged nonesuch emerge blinking from its den.

  I do not mean the docent. She was not the monster. She might even have been the provident blade of grass.

  In the placid turbine of the revolving door I felt briefly trapped, and pushed heartily on the glass. I was flung out and had to trot to keep my balance. What was happening to me? Lithobolia, yes, but something even more frightening, something affecting my mind. The mongoose I could blame on jet lag and lamb vindaloo, but this was harder to dismiss. Had I taken up a dream that Blanche was dreaming, tinting its phantoms with the colors of my own real life? And how did I know what my real life was? How did I know that the part of me that distinguished reality from dream wasn’t dreaming too?

  “What an ass. If you can’t decide whether a talking skull is real or not, you need your head examined. Both heads. All the same,” I decided, skirting a planter containing a handsome saguaro (someone was doing a good job keeping it alive in that climate), “I had better find that clinic quick.”