THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL
The London Observer
“Heads Identified”
All severed heads found last Tuesday have now been identified by relatives. It is confirmed that while all were twins, no two matched, further supporting speculations that they are the work of the doctor who issued a statement five weeks ago when the first head was found, claiming responsibility and announcing a moral crusade to “surgically correct” what he dubbed “this disease of duplicity, this fornication of solitudes, this cancer metastasizing in the first person pronoun.” In a weird wrinkle, officials of the Medical Ethics Board have now confessed that they believe the statement issued by their own offices offering tentative support for “doctor-assisted individuality” under certain unnamed circumstances, which up to three days ago they still insisted reflected their consensus opinion, was drafted by Dr. Decapitate himself, who may have an ally on the board, or, shockingly, may himself be a member. Photos and brief bios of all seventy-one distinguished board members follow.
Three of the severed heads have been buried in family plots. One has been cremated and the ashes scattered in an undisclosed location, his family stating on record that they strongly believed him to have taken his own life and that his “tortured soul” will burn in hell beside that of his twin, like “two tongues of one flame.” This has set off considerable speculation as to whether it is technically possible to cut off one’s own head without assistance from one’s twin; whether, if one’s twin assists, it should be classed as suicide or murder; whether it is even possible to determine if such assistance was given. “A difficult problem, in which the legal profession might well seek counsel from philosophy or religion,” mused retired judge Rutherford Shaves.
HOHOKAM ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
Until we were eight we were homeschooled by committee. Mama taught us to read, to accompany lines of poetry with appropriate gestures, and to curtsey. Papa instructed us in geology and natural history, Max in carpentry and politics, and Granny in music and moonshine. One day, however, not long after the incident with the kitchen knife, Mama told us that she had enrolled us in the Hohokam Elementary School in Grady. We were to start at once. The next morning two sharpened No. 2 pencils, a used eraser, and a chopped olive sandwich were waiting by our plate.
Max drove us to school. I understood that she was chosen for this job as the least likely to be swayed by our despair. It was by design, too, that we arrived after classes had begun, when the halls were empty. Our new teacher moved her mouth with dreadful care as she formed words of greeting, as if her real face had longer, sharper teeth. She put her hand on our shoulder and turned us to face the class. We had had little experience of children but had noticed on several occasions that they did not follow adult custom and avert their eyes from us. We now felt the general truth of this observation. Twisting out from under Miss Gale’s hand, we broke for the door and screamed, “Max!” She gave us a thumbs-up from the end of the hall and abandoned us.
Miss Gale steered us back. “Class, this is—these are your new classmates, Blanche and Nora. They are Siamese twins! That means that they’re two people with one body. We’ve never had a Siamese twin in Hohokam Elementary School before, so this is an opportunity for us all to learn something about this very special bond, and later I’ll pass out some stories about the other Siamese twins that are being born all over the world. I want you all to make Blanche and Nora feel welcome by introducing yourselves and sharing what makes you special.”
“I’m Chris Marchpane, and I’m mildly retarded,” stated the big boy at the back of the class. The others hooted.
“Thank you, Chris, that was very polite. The rest of you can save your introductions for recess.”
School was a refrigerated Hades where demons offered fraudulent temptations, each with its giveaway flaw (round-tipped scissors that did not cut, fat pencils with no erasers, chairs soldered to their desks). I was temporarily deceived by a pencil sharpener, but when I turned the handle, the hollow body jumped off the drill bit and burped its whole cache of gilt-edged shavings onto the floor. The demons laughed. Blanche, too, laughed, I slapped her face, and we were frog-marched to the principal’s office.
At recess, we were called “mutant” and “freak” and “radioactive” and slapped with a black banana skin. Chris Marchpane butted someone in the stomach, and we all went to the principal’s office. “Tattletales are dead,” a girl hissed on the way. “I’m just mentioning.” “The teacher told us to be nice to the Chinese twins,” Chris Marchpane said. The rest of us said nothing.
At lunch, our sandwich was derided.
During dodgeball we gopped, and got the ball right in the stomach. We tasted again the sandwich of shame.
By the end of the day Chris Marchpane had asked the teacher for permission to move his desk next to ours. I had learned to keep my head down and had made many observations about our eraser: That it was half pink, half grey. That there was a sour smell to the grey half, which was stained with blue ink. That the pink half appealed to my mouth. That eraser crumbs were really little grey scrolls, like furled words. Chris Marchpane watched with interest as I pinned one down with the tip of my pencil and attempted to unroll it.
Something struck me on the back of my head, and I puffed. Words skittered across my desk, floated to the floor.
“Ohhh,” sighed Chris Marchpane. “I’ll pick them up for you.”
“Get lost, freak,” I said.
Home, I blundered before the Time Camera, crying. “Please, take us back to before,” I wished. “Back to before, back to before, back to before!” In the photograph my eyes are tightly closed, Blanche’s open and a little puzzled, and beside us a spindly-legged table is atilt like a parasol, delicately balanced, while behind us a rose is just tilting off the gloved fingers of the man, and the woman is hiking her skirts up (to reveal terry-cloth shorts and tennis shoes) and tilting away in the other direction. I am centered and perfectly balanced, though a little too close to the lens.
MUSEUM OF CHILDHOOD
LOOK RIGHT. It said it right there in the gutter in white block letters. All the same I looked left. Tires squealed, and a cabbie shouted something that sounded like something else said backward. I scuttled across, feeling the hostile gaze of the proprietor of the Anything Left-Handed on my back. The counterclockwise corkscrew had barely scratched the counterclockwise clock, but I would have happily paid for them both if he had let me finish shopping. Now that my right hand was wayward, I was having trouble with scissors.
The Hunterian had not been the only place I had to leave quickly, that afternoon. After each apologetic exit, I walked on through the narrow, crooked streets, pausing occasionally to shave off with the side of my hand the raindrops that clung to me all over. Once, under a clump of red blossoms phosphorescing against a dark wall. Once under the sole of a giant shoe creaking softly from a rusted brace outside a cobbler’s. The rain did not so much fall as materialize in the air close to my skin. No use for an umbrella. Brolly. Bumbershoot?
I could not stop instructing myself, with stupid insistence, This is England. Cobblestones with the sullen luster of pigeons. Pigeons pecking among the cobblestones. When I saw something surprising (the backward clock) I would ask myself, Is this a particularly English surprise? As one might say a ten-year-old with a gun in his lunch box is a particularly American surprise—a surprise still, but the kind of surprise one almost comes to expect. I had the impression the English thought a twofer was also a particularly American surprise. They looked at me censoriously, as if I had grown another head on purpose, to get attention. Where did they think their own mushies came from? Did they think we recruited?
I’d found part of London that actually looked like London, with the result that it seemed counterfeit. How disappointing! Tired of toy cars and toy phone booths and toy coppers beetling cartoon brows at vagrant twofers, I sat down in a fluorescent-lit coffee shop that had molded plastic seats and nothing much to break, and order
ed a Ploughman’s Lunch, which sounded hearty. The sole other customer, an old woman wearing pants pulled up to her breasts and giant white running shoes, sat for a full hour while I forced down a sandwich of orange cheese and jam, looking cunningly at a fly on her plate.
OBJECTS THROWN BY LITHOBOLIA, UK EDITION
Jar of marmite
Tube of marmite
Pewter beer tankard with insignia of Biddenden Junior Football Club
Magnet depicting the Tower of London
Biography of Henry VIII
Scone (rhymes with “gone”)
Jelly babies
Counterclockwise corkscrew
Bottle of “brown sauce”
Toast, with marmite
It was nearly dusk when I got back to the apartment in Shepherd’s Bush, and a streaky pink glow was just fading on the kitchen wall above the sink. Louche was sitting at the table playing with three small silhouette heads cut out of black construction paper. She dealt them out in a row like a hand of solitaire, planted her index fingers on the two flanking heads, and slid them in neat, synchronized arcs around the circumference of an imaginary circle until, at the point her wrists X’d, each reached the point the other formerly occupied. First the outside heads swapped positions, then the right-hand couple would become the two leftmost, then the right-hand couple would swap positions, and so on, so that they remained always in line, like the shells in a shell game, or the winning row in a game of tic-tac-toe.
“How did your appointment go?” she said.
“Oh, fine…What are those?”
Slide. Slide. “Have you gone to the Museum of Childhood yet?”
“No.”
“I would have thought you’d go there first. It’s absolutely stuffed with dollhouses.”
“I’m…saving it up.” Stupid Nora had no idea there was a museum of childhood, actually. The notion rattled me, as if my whole past might be displayed there, with pornographic candor and a bronze plaque: The North American Child, 20th Century, Desert Habitat. (A bleached-blond twofer in flip-flops is prodding a skull with a stick below a painterly mushroom cloud. “In the sand can be seen footprints of a rich variety of desert wildlife, including the cottontail rabbit’s sloppy exclamation points, the twin teardrops of the javalina, the sidewinder’s slanted tildes, the ovoid waffle-print of the hunter’s Gore-Tex™ boots.”)
“Why are you here, really? Not to see me, obviously—no, don’t apologize, I am much more comfortable with muted hostility than affection—and I’m starting to doubt the dollhouse story too. You’re not interested in dollhouses. I don’t believe you know a thing about them.”
I thought it best to concede that point and ignore the larger issues. “I don’t,” I said. “Yet, anyway. I’m just poking around. Hoping some sort of pattern will emerge.”
Slide. Slide. “Why did you tell me you were going to the National Gallery?”
I swallowed, appalled and impressed. How expertly she percussed my weak spots. It made me want to fuck her, and afraid to. “What do you mean?”
Louche reached for her tobacco pouch. One head clung to her finger for a moment before floating down to a position slightly out of line with the others. She folded a piece of rolling paper and sprinkled tobacco in the crease, then drew out a knob of hash and thumbed off a few crumbs.
At 2:00 PM at the National Gallery a “winking bomb” had been spotted by a visitor under a bench near The Virgin of the Sands, the Leonardo painting that under infrared reflectography had revealed the shadowy lines of a face in profile hovering over the Virgin’s artfully draped shoulders. An alternate pose discarded in favor of the present one—or, as some argued, a second head? (With one finger, Louche lightly tamped down the tobacco and hash in the paper V, and began rolling it between her fingertips.) In the ensuing stampede a guard had been hurt. The entire National Gallery had been evacuated to Trafalgar Square by 2:20.
My face grew hot. Louche ran the tip of her tongue along the free edge of the paper.
At 2:25 an orderly group of Togetherists had begun threading through the crowd, bearing aloft five white coffins the approximate size of human heads. Police were unable to reach them due to the crowd, which the curious were joining in droves despite attempts to disperse them. When the funeral procession attained Nelson’s Column, the Togetherists opened the coffins and shook them violently. Thousands of tiny black heads whirled up in a cloud. Panicked pigeons swirled through them, scattering them further. Most of the heads slowly drifted down into the crowd, where some people pinned them to their collars. Others, reaching a higher altitude, had been carried out in a northeasterly direction, falling like black snowflakes on Covent Garden, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and even Bethnal Green. “Where the Museum of Childhood is located, as I’m sure you know,” Louche added drily. Some had bobbed on the Thames as far as the Isle of Dogs before disintegrating. A student of Louche’s had brought one to class to show her; two had already alighted on her windowsill.
Louche’s lighter coughed fire. I suddenly realized it was almost dark. When the flame shrank, she raised the joint to it, puffed, took the joint out and looked at the wet end, nibbled off the tip, puffed again. At last she looked up, eyes two holes in a red mask.
I picked up the misaligned head, which had been bothering me the whole time she was talking. I already knew what I was going to say, but I wanted to make sure I hit the right note, casual but not unconcerned. “Well,” I said, “I didn’t end up going to the National Gallery, though I didn’t think it was worth mentioning. I went to the Hunterian Museum instead. Nothing to do with dollhouses,” I added, as she opened her mouth. It was true, but it sounded like a lie. Spontaneous detail was called for. My mind swiveled, holding up a map. The Hunterian was not all that far from Trafalgar Square. Was it to the north? From the steps you saw…Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The sun had glanced out, daubing the lawn with light. Or, one could just as well say, with shadows—“Oh!” I said, genuinely startled. “I did see the heads, but I mistook them for flakes of soot. From mammoth, Dickensian chimneys.”
She grunted around the joint, abruptly losing all interest. She was watching my hands, no doubt sensing a Transitional Object in use. I was tearing thin strips off one of the heads and methodically rolling these into tiny balls. “What do you think of these Togetherists, anyway?” she said, as if idly.
I employed my fingernails in carefully peeling off the face, leaving a benign oval. “They’re a cult. They might seem like they’re preaching compassion, but if you look at the larger context…. They regard being ‘split’ as a sort of, sort of…sacred wound that twofers are given to bear for the good of the commonweal. Like leprosy once: part warning, part…expiation.”
She wrinkled her brow, scraping a bit of tobacco off her tongue with a fingernail. “It’s a bit different, isn’t it? Nobody can argue with treating leprosy. Killing a virus isn’t murder. But killing a person—snuffing out a human mind—”
Ooh, this was dangerous territory. “I’m not saying they’re wrong, just that their reasons are bad. I don’t think they know or care how twofers really feel.”
“How do they feel?” Joint lodged between two fingers, she flipped over one of the two remaining heads. Now they were facing each other. Corrupted, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Infiltrated. Dispossessed. “How do you feel?” she piped dreamily, jiggling one with her forefinger. An ember dropped, and a bright ring widened and went out, leaving a perfect round hole through the temples.
“I feel like going out,” I said, abruptly switching on the light. “Do you know a club called Too Bad?” Blinking, I smoothed out the crumpled pass on the table.
“You met 2-Ply! I’ve known them since university.” She squinted at me. “Hey, are your clothes wet? Don’t you know you’re not supposed to walk around in the rain? You’re going to sprout some hideous growth.”
“Didn’t you notice? I already have.”
“There’s a wire brush by the tub. I’m not going out until you scrub down. And don’
t forget to wash your hair.”
The very mildness of her tone alarmed me. Tomorrow I’ll leave town, I thought, as I climbed the stairs. It was time to see what the Potter Museum had in store for me. Louche was getting too close to the truth.
“And Blanche’s!” she yelled after me.
THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL
LIBRARY
We had been taught that we were extraordinary. We had not been taught that we were disgusting or ridiculous. Mama, Papa, Max, and Granny had colluded to keep this important information from us. As I saw it, we’d been lied to. We would have to go somewhere else for the truth. We went to the library.
Once a week we made our ritual visit. I held the leathery, damp card tight in my hand over the tooth-loosening ruts of the dirt road, the slithering escape from dirt onto asphalt, the smooth gathering hum of the highway.
The library was a low concrete bldg (it earns this terse denotation by an equally terse assortment of books), on a rectangle of densely knit, springy turf that ended ruthlessly at the fence. Skeletal baby trees grew, or at any rate subsisted, in neat tonsures in the lawn. The library was well carpeted and silent as a grave, if there are graves with twenty-year-old, malfunctioning AC. The books, a nervous and ill-chosen lot, like road-weary adults waiting for a driving test, huddled all together to one side of every half-empty shelf. I always imagined the library as a sinking ship, listing toward the A’s.
T for Twins, for Truth! The file cabinet extruded its long tongue, but did not answer our questions. Twins there were a handful, Bobbsey, Sweet Valley: not like us. Not conjoined, except old Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins—but it was plain to see that they were regular men, hitched by a bitty band of flesh. They had their own arms, legs, wives! Where were the books about us? There were a great many books about “he,” and a good number about “I,” and “she” and “they” were also well represented, but “we” was almost never mentioned.
Half Life Page 20
