Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  For a long time, our old enemy the Pushmi-Pullyu was our sole companion.

  Then (F is for Freaks), we found a faded photograph of a sideshow poster. Strange Girls. Alive! Why? A lovely two-headed lady! But who was she, and where did she get those snakes, and did she ever fight, and did they ever bite? We craved stories. We tried science fiction (M is for Mutants). Webbed fingers reaching, fanged maws slavering. Irradiated ants, bigger than buses! Mandibles snapping: they had mouths, why didn’t they say something? The librarian, intruding unforgiveably on our private search, offered the Las Vegas Sun’s latest report on the still climbing birthrate of conjoined twins, but we did not think truth was to be found in a newspaper. Truth was in books. But hidden.

  Sometimes we glimpsed a flicker of a double figure resembling ours—Snow White, Rose Red. Invisible Aswell. Jekyll and Hyde. But under scrutiny it dissolved, like those faint stars you can only see when you’re not looking—a phenomenon Papa said had to do with “rods” and “cones.” We resisted the idea that our clear eyes were cluttered with geometry, but we had learned to look with the sides of our eyes, and now we taught ourselves to read this way too. We grew practiced at reading for what we could not then name metaphor, until metaphor itself began to seem Siamese—this coupled to that—and its mere presence a reference to us. Where did we first read “blanche et noir” and learn that Mama and Papa too had a taste for metaphor?

  “Oh!” we must have said, a two-note chord, because “Shhh!” the librarian hissed. We crept up the long, long slope to the desk under her accusing gaze. Her hard bosom, planted on the very place designated for books to be checked out, held its ground for as long as was decently possible against the items we nervously extended. Chris Marchpane beamed, frozen in the act of lifting a pile of books from a shelving cart as if they had turned to stone. Just before our books nudged her front she would rear up and back—a moment in which we could not help catching our breath—and stare down at the books through her glasses.

  The Double. The Terrible Two. Genetic Basis of Morphological Variation in Monozygotic Twins. Would she let us check them out? In a moment with all the suppressed drama of a stickup we produced the potent card. With a bitter contraction of her orange-painted lips she yielded, performed various spiteful, impotent gestures against our trophies, and let us go.

  Someone must have noticed something about the books we were bringing home. “Your mother asked us to order this,” said the librarian, with a terrifying smile, handing us Heather Has Two Heads—a book for babies. Too little, too late!

  MYSELF MY OWN FEVER

  It’s idiotic, but the one thing I can’t get used to is the backward traffic,” I told Louche, squinting into the spangled dark. “I keep looking left when I should look right, and when I think twice, it just brings me full circle to the wrong way again.” I stepped off the traffic island. Louche yanked me back, and a double-decker bus roared by, inches away.

  A sort of ripple passed through me, like a flaw in a mirror I was reflected in. “You’d think looking both ways before crossing the street would be a twofer’s one evolutionary advantage.”

  “The worst thing is, I’m not even shaken. I have the feeling that bus would’ve passed right through me without encountering anything of any substance. I’ve become pure image. I fundamentally don’t believe I can hurt myself here, because I’m essentially still on the other side of the Atlantic.”

  “I see,” said Louche. “And do you believe you can hurt other people?”

  We proceeded in thoughtful silence to the Oxfam, a pokey thrift shop with a stained awning, whose darkened door lay behind a locked steel grating to the right of a recessed stairwell. Louche led me down the narrow tiled stairs and knocked on the blue door. “I’m glad I’ve got you with me,” she said. “Two-Ply has invited me a zillion times, but I’m too uncomfortable with the way the mainstream swallows up every new subculture.”

  “You’re not the mainstream, Louche. You’re more like acid runoff.”

  “Darling.” The door opened.

  “IDs, please.” A flashlight clicked, and a tiny Louche bobbed in the void. I slid my hand into my safe inside pocket and felt for my passport. There it was.

  And there it was again. I had kept both passports with me, rather than leave them in my bags, where Louche might find them; the other night I’d thought I noticed a zipper out of place. Sweat stung my raw scalp. It would take Louche one second to guess why I had a singleton passport. One backward second.

  A luminous hand was already reaching. Louche was already turning back, wondering what the hitch was. And somewhere in the shadowy depths of a mirror a tiny Nora was saying a prayer—to the gods, to Blanche, to the invisible author of her destiny—and closing her fingers on one of two passports, pulling it out, and putting it in the hand of fate.

  “Mind the shelves.” The flashlight beam sketched out a plastic pop-together shelving unit and then wandered toward a door in the back, passing over an alligator purse, a child’s stuffed elephant, some tattered books, a bicycle helmet, an umbrella handle fashioned out of a deer’s hoof.

  “What is this place?” I asked Louche.

  “In the day, it’s the Underground charity. It sells the stuff people leave on the subway.”

  “How intolerably melancholy. Let’s go home.”

  The doorman chuckled and opened the door—onto a tiled wall. “In you go, then,” he said. “Good job you’re neither of you too broad in the beam.” He angled the beam to the right. Now I could see that there was actually a gap of a couple feet between the tiles and the rear wall of the store. From the right came a muffled beat and the sound of voices.

  Louche took a deep breath. “Now I know why I’ve never been. You first.” Behind us came a knock, and the flashlight bobbed away.

  After several false tries, I went in sideways. I could hear Louche’s leather jacket scraping against the tiles behind me. The corridor seemed to end, and I had a moment of panic before the wall behind me suddenly fell smoothly away, revealing itself to be a door, and I stumbled backward onto a textured metal floor that boomed underfoot. A rail caught me painfully in the small of the back. Louche stumbled out after me, moaning, “Oh-h-h, I didn’t like that one bit.”

  We were on a small raised platform overlooking a disused subway station. A jerry-rigged plywood floor covered the tracks. On a stage at the far end I could see 2-Ply behind a turntable, adjusting a standing mike. The brown-haired girl, still in her polka dot dress, was on bass, and another twofer sat behind a pair of laptops, tops of two heads only just visible. Both twofers and singletons—evens and odds—made up the crowd, though the former outnumbered the latter.

  “Welcome to the dubway transit system,” intoned 2-Ply’s Rasta side.

  “Mind the gap,” said his twin. They checked their watch.

  “Which accent is real?” I whispered to Louche.

  “Both, neither,” she shrugged. “They grew up between worlds. At Cambridge they had a sort of potpourri thing going. They were heavy into fusion, musically and personally. They were looking for some kind of synthetic resting place, you might say. Then another mushy—twofer—got them into Venn. They got interested in the Dynamic Gap”—you could hear the initial capitals—“and sort of…polarized. It’s been great for their music.”

  “One, two, two, one!”

  Venn? Then I was wasting my time.

  The bass clouted the backbeat. After a few bars some invisible drums complicated the rhythm, joined by a plaintive horn sample that seemed to seep in from the black arches; maybe they had put an amp out there? There were some very biological sounds burbling and whistling underneath, like the intestinal trouble of some oversized organism. Plus pages rustling, or were those tiny voices?

  “I attempt from love’s sickness,” sang one part of 2-Ply, in an operatic falsetto, “to fly in vain.” “Fly” lilted, rising and falling, over a whole paragraph of notes. The other head, in headphones, bent over the turntable, nodding in time.


  “It’s The Indian Queen! That’s kind of brilliant.” Louche wagged her head.

  “Since I am myself my own fever—”

  “What’s The Indian Queen?”

  “Since I am myself my own fever and pain.”

  Two-Ply’s hitherto still hand began frotting the disk on the turntable, and a Jamaican voice entered. “Meet me at the double track—I and I a coming back—”

  “It’s a Purcell opera from around 1700. We studied it in a class on the literature of imperialism. Dryden and someone else wrote the libretto. It’s a sort of overheated fantasy—”

  “No more now, fond heart, with pride no more swell…”

  “—from England’s teen crush on The Other. The Indian queen ‘Zem-poalla’ assumes the throne of Mexico, and Montezuma leads an army against her, then switches sides. I think he falls in love with her. Then everyone dies or I can’t remember, the usual tragic outcome. It’s goofy but fantastic.”

  “thou canst not raise forces, thou canst not raise forces—”

  “I’m not really ‘hostile’ toward you, Louche,” I said.

  “enough to rebel.”

  “Of course you are,” she said. “It’s quite all right. I take it as a compliment.”

  “Meet me at the double track—I and I a coming back—”

  The room began to throb. The sample and the vocals drew precariously far apart from each other, but the beat stubbornly continued, now synchronized with neither. The whole concoction came loose from the people onstage and seemed to emanate from the walls and now, actually, from my stomach, a disagreeable sensation. I wondered if I was going to be sick. I was, in fact, trembling. I edged closer to one of the holes in the wall, just in case, and so I saw a premonitory flicker illuminate distant columns in the suddenly hollow dark. “I attempt from love’s sickness…” Then twin headlights and all at once the train itself, in a staccato roar. Two-Ply matched its beat: “To fly-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y in vain.” A long strip of cels flashed by, showing one head in incremental change, and now the voices converged, riding the rattle of the train up to perilous heights. “I meet me at attempt from love’s track with the double sickness attack to meet me fly to meet me in vain to meet me since I am to meet me myself to meet me at my own track with the double fever since I am myself with the double fever and attack pain and attack pain my own fever and pain….” It peaked with a shout—“Since I am myself my own fever!”—and then skated down the train’s quick diminuendo with a now almost whispered, “Since I am myself my own fever and pain.”

  “I’m hostile toward you, too,” Louche said. It was almost a declaration of love.

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  The Indian Queen

  Semi-Opera by John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard

  Music by Henry Purcell

  ACT III SOPRANO SOLO

  I attempt from love’s sickness to fly in vain,

  Since I am myself my own fever and pain.

  No more now, fond heart, with pride no more swell;

  Thou canst not raise forces enough to rebel.

  I attempt from love’s sickness to fly in vain,

  Since I am myself my own fever and pain.

  For love has more power and less mercy than fate,

  To make us seek ruin and love those that hate.

  I attempt from love’s sickness to fly in vain,

  Since I am myself my own fever and pain.

  HOUSE DIVIDED

  Occasionally, Mama had a fit of godliness and tried the Grady church. “It lacks pomp, and the choir robes are tacky, but at least they try.” Now there was another reason to go: to promote the Time Camera.

  “Let’s all go,” said Mama.

  “You won’t catch me dead in that place,” said Granny. “There’s no love lost.”

  Papa looked at Max. Surprisingly, Max approved. She said it was a friendly way to make sure the Tourist Board and the Chamber of Commerce and Mayor Dody knew there was a new attraction up at Too Bad.

  “I draw the line,” said Granny. She shook her finger at Max. “Don’t give me that look, you heartbreaker, I’m not falling for it.”

  So Papa, Mama, and Max took us to church. We went on a special day when there was a potluck. “Strategic timing,” said Max.

  “You’re selling your souls for Hamburger Helper,” said Granny.

  The church was full of kids who hated me and Blanche. Some of them were made to shake hands with us by their parents, and I knew we would be made to pay for it later. They said, “How do you do?” and stared right in our eyes while they wiped off our cooties on their clothes. Mama smiled at the mothers of our enemies and invited them to visit the Time Camera—“And bring the kids; Nora and Blanche don’t often get visitors their own age!”

  Then everyone sat down, and a red-haired man in a tight collar bounded up to what I then confusedly believed was called the cockpit. He had the measured buoyancy of a reserve player coming on to save a game gone wrong. I saw that he was wearing sneakers. He was grinning. It didn’t look like he had it in his power not to grin, he had so many teeth. His forehead shone through his hair. Secretly I had been hoping to be saved, to be lifted off my feet like a doll by an invisible hand and then fall back in a faint. But he did not look like he knew any secrets about the Divine.

  “Is that the pope?” whispered Blanche.

  “No, stupid, the pope lives in Rome, in the Coliseum.”

  “Not that pope, stupid. I meant the pope of this church.”

  “Oh. I guess.”

  “Minister,” whispered Papa. “In a Protestant church it’s a minister.”

  The church made me antsy. I stared at the big boys in polyester suits, with inflamed necks and damp crotches, hair so short and thin you could see scalp. I pinched my hands between my knees.

  Then the minister said our names. I looked around. Everyone in the church was looking at us.

  He leaned forward with pursed lips as if stretching for a kiss, and pressed his words into the air. Whenever he paused he grinned again. “We’re blessed to have a lesson set before us by God of how a divided people can live in harmony, or on the other hand not. ‘If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. Matthew 3:25.’ Consider Nora and Blanche Olney. They carry on almost normal lives, under conditions that would try all of our patience, because they have learned to live in harmony. We who chafe against our neighbors because of petty differences, let us aspire to the example set by Nora and Blanche, who are here with us and with God for the first time.” Gentle applause. “I humbly hope they will learn from us, but I confidently predict that we will learn from them. When God tells us to love our neighbors, He really means it.

  “What holds for a human being holds for a nation, and even a humble but up-and-coming town like Grady. We all know there is dissent about the activity at the Penitence Ground. There has been talk about leakage, and there has been talk about people getting sick. People in this town have set themselves against the government of the United States and made public remarks to the effect that Uncle Sam is a liar.”

  There was a murmur. Max stirred in her seat. “Now, I am not here to debate whether these are grains of truth or flagrant falsehoods tossed in the faces of honest working men and women. I say again, a house divided against itself cannot stand. A nation cannot stand if its people do not pull together, as Blanche and Nora must. If certain activities are secret, it is perhaps because information about those activities should be kept from people who might use them against our American way of life. Let us weigh the importance of our individual fears in the face of the mighty power unleashed by atomic energy. Let us weigh our ignorant fear of the word ‘radioactive’ and the word ‘fallout’ against the needs of our country and indeed of Grady. Let us not let our tongues flap in fear and self-interest. Let us not be divided by dissent.”

  Max caught my eye and pulled a face. I snorted and clapped my hands over my mouth. Papa frowned at me. His lips were pressed together. On the other side o
f him Mama was nodding earnestly.

  Then the speech seemed to be over. There was the smell of old ladies, and damp cats, and then we passed outside for potluck and ate of the wide noodle and the slender one. Someone passed me a little animal made of lavender pompons with goggle eyes stuck on with chips of glue, and stiff cutout feet. The tablecloth was vinyl, with a fuzzy underside, and it sagged between the boards of the table, making thin parallel grooves, and that’s where Blanche’s spilled pink lemonade collected. A wasp found it. Drops fell off the table and landed in the soft dust and formed little dusty cushions. Cold water slid over our thumb from the button on the water cooler. We ignored the trucks throwing themselves down the highway behind the chain-link fence that protected the scruffy, ketchup-bloodied lawn from hungry deer, though we felt the seismic rumble in our spines.

  “Don’t go near the squirrels,” said a lady in a powder blue jogging suit. “Bill heard there was a case of bubonic plague in Agua Sucio.” Mama nodded earnestly.

  “Are your girls saved?” another lady asked. We sidled away.

  The holy kept an eye on us to observe how well we got along and marvel at God’s nonstandard design choices. We sorted our salad. I didn’t like tomatoes, so Blanche ate all the tomatoes, and Blanche didn’t like onions, so I ate all the onions. We both liked artichoke hearts, so we divided those scrupulously.

  The minister’s son leaned over. “Can I have your olives?”

  Neither of us liked olives. “OK,” we said. In school, he would have ignored us. He always kept his head down and hunched his shoulders under the navy blue sweater he wore even in summer. Godly people seemed to wear a lot of clothes. Maybe there was a chill in the air when God was nearby, as with ghosts.

  “Who is the Holy Ghost the ghost of ?” I asked him.