Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  The dolls were arranged in realistic tableaux: woman looking out the window, man in the armchair. Kids at the kitchen table, playing a game. One of the Penitence workers had snuck back and put the man and the woman in bed together, naked. Later he told Grampa he was glad of it, but that he wished he had not given the children names.

  “Where is it?” tore out of us. We were hot with excitement. We would make Mama take us there.

  “Thin air,” said Granny. “The wild blue yonder.”

  A mannequin family sat around a dinner table. Then they leaned back in their chairs, as if amazed. The light tore at their faces and clothes.

  The foot returned to the back of our chair.

  Granny had seen some of the dolls afterward in a JC Penney shop window in Las Vegas. They were burned and pitted and missing parts. There was a sign saying, “These mannequins could have been real people. In fact, they could have been you.” The dolls were just practice, she said.

  “Mother,” Papa said warningly.

  Pigs. They put pigs in army slacks and jackets and rubbed them with sunscreen, then tied them to stakes in the path of the blast. They trained them to stand still in their cages, waiting. Mice. Cats. Cages of cats, burning.

  “Mother, that’s not fit for a child’s ears.”

  “It’s not fit for anyone’s ears,” she said. On the Penitence Ground they used the word translation to describe an animal thrown through the air, as if death were a foreign language. “No spika da language. Well, those pigs got the message all right. My titty got the message.”

  “Mother.”

  We had heard that people who died in Hiroshima were turned instantaneously into their own shadows, silhouettes burned on a wall, but we were not to think death was that clean. Some mice, for example, were crushed by a flying dog. “Blood and shit splattered the walls,” Granny said.

  “For pity’s sake, be quiet.”

  “In my opinion pity should never be quiet,” said Granny.

  A house stood foursquare and isolated upon a flat plane devoid of civilizing ornament: driveway, hedge, lawn, or flagstone. It was a salt crystal on a mirror. It was hard to say how big it was; it might have been tiny, or huge. It was illuminated by a clear light that threw a long shadow. The light came from somewhere other than the sky, which was a black bar like a mourning band. That it was the bomb’s early light became evident.

  The house caught on fire. So we were told; we would not have recognized this for ourselves. The fire was darker than the light upon it, blackened the house like sudden ivy.

  In the fading of the light, the shock wave hit, the fire was blown out, and the house blurred. It held its shape, but only just. It was already an imperfect memory of itself. Then the memory, too, was gone. Scattered like eraser crumbs, or like seeds. The class cheered. “Play it backward!” someone yelled. Chris Marchpane’s foot jabbed passionately, painfully into our tailbone. And Blanche burst into tears.

  “Shhh!” I hissed, trying to suppress the heaving of our chest, the sympathetic catch in my throat. The movie clacked to a stop, the lights came on. Everyone was looking at us in grateful amazement.

  A fine line of saliva spilled from Blanche’s distorted mouth. Jennifer screamed and pointed. “They’re foaming at the mouth!” she said.

  “That’s enough, Jennifer. Class, you can go to recess early,” the teacher said. The class ran out the door, whooping.

  “Thanks, freaks!” muttered Jennifer as she passed.

  “Blanche,” the teacher said, not unkindly, “can you stop crying long enough to tell me what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t—it was—why—” She was interrupted by two hiccuping sobs.

  “Take your time,” said the teacher.

  Blanche swallowed hard and took a deep shuddering breath. She bawled out, “The dogs!” Or possibly, “The dolls!” Then she burst into noisy tears and could not be consoled.

  Chris Marchpane reappeared with a paper cone full of water from the teacher’s lounge. He thrust it at us, a little too quickly. Some water blooped over the top and wet my feet. “Would you please go away?” I snapped.

  “Thank you Chris, but why don’t you go play with the others?” said the teacher. Then, as he loitered, unsure, solicitous: “Please excuse yourself, Chris Marchpane.” He hurried out, holding the damp paper cone. She turned back to us. “Now, can you tell me why you’re making such a fuss?”

  Blanche kept crying. “Nora, can you speak for Blanche?”

  “I have no idea what is wrong with her,” I said. Why did Blanche have to make such a spectacle of herself ? “Maybe she thought the house looked like our dollhouse,” I offered, then added hastily, “But we don’t play with dolls anymore.”

  “Blanche, do you have anything to say?”

  Blanche shook her head.

  The teacher sighed. “All right. Then go to the bathroom and wash your face. You may put your head down on your desk during quiet reading. Try not to disrupt the class again.”

  SO YOU’RE WONDERING ABOUT NATIONAL PENITENCE?

  The Nevada Test Site, Proving Ground of American Sadness

  In 1951, saddened by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and recognizing the need for a national activity of penance, a despondent American government commenced organized hostilities against itself. For three years, they hammered a sparsely populated part of the Nevada desert with the most powerful bombs in existence. The cratered sands turned to glass. In it Uncle Sam could see his own, still grief-stricken face. Stronger measures were called for.

  In 1954, a hastily constructed house was obliterated by a bomb named Doubt, and officers in attendance reported a slight lightening of the heart. For the next four years of Operation Dollhouse, bombs were dropped upon ever more perfect semblances of American houses, built on roads that went nowhere, across bridges over no water.

  “A house is not a home,” was the word from above, and in 1955 the Nuclear Penitence Committee called in a home decorator, who decorated the target houses in the style then fashionable and stocked their kitchens with American products. No one who was there that day will forget the “Ritz Cracker” test, 1956, at which a high-ranking officer broke down and wept healing tears under the radiant cloud. The decorator was decorated, but hopes faded as this early success was followed by a string of melancholy failures: “Breakfast of Champions,” 1957. “JC Penney,” 1958. “Jiffy,” 1959. “Tang,” 1960.

  In 1961, life-sized manikins were introduced into the houses. The female dolls were named Lisa and Patricia and given beehive hairdos and bouffant dresses, and before the bombing, were feted in parties where their partners danced the Twist. To assist the generals in identifying with them, the male dolls’ proportions represented a perfect mathematical average of American male body types. Their body parts were numbered, so that their dispersal could be mapped. The generals were encouraged to number their own body parts with their wives’ eyeliner and meditate in the nude upon the maps, so that they could understand, in their own bodies, how it might feel to be taken apart and scattered like seed.

  It was no use, the naked generals felt nothing.

  Hoping to feel pity, the penitents bombed mice, cats, dogs, but as the smoke rose from the cages where they smouldered, the officers felt nothing but a faint, inappropriate hunger. Substitutes, symbols. Why not bomb a map, or a postcard, or a dictionary?

  Why not indeed? These experiments were duly performed. Bombs were given the names of people, then exploded; scientists now proposed systematically eradicating every American name, but it was found that seditious elements could not be hindered from giving their children names no one had ever heard of, like Zolandra, or Chantique. Nonetheless names deemed particularly important were destroyed; it is for this reason there are few Americans today with the once-common name of Gladys. Ordinary objects were given new names before being demolished (veterans tell stories of the funny mix-ups that occurred, when a “vacuum cleaner” was mistaken for a “diaphragm,” or body part #21, “ankle,” was mistakenly exc
hanged for body part #3, “neck”). Regions of the site were given unusual names that were liable to change without warning, e.g. “Scriptorium” and “Memento Mori” and “Strategic Negativity Reversal Module.” The bombs, of course, were only to be spoken of in special coded terms, as for example “Amigo” or “Forgetfulness” or “The Straight Answer” or “When you see me coming you better run,” or “Summers, it gets so hot here. I stay indoors, and grow fat. I am developing some kind of rash where my love handles lap over my hips. What has become of that feeling I used to get when I climbed to the top of a tall tree and rain blew through the clashing foliage and pecked my stinging skin and a single icy leaf glued itself passionately to the side of my neck, and I thought, not only that I would live forever, but that I would want to?”

  These experiments were protected by a no-speakum zone many miles across. Those penitence workers who lived outside it were instructed to take this silence home with them. They were told that words represented nothing but the loss of the thing named, and when they went home, they often found this to be true.

  THE DEATH & BURIAL OF COCK ROBIN

  Jamaica Inn,” said the very disagreeable cabbie I had engaged in Plymouth. His tone managed to suggest that I would be sorry I’d come. The moon chewed its way through the clouds to lick the wet slates on the roof of a squat, rambling building. I paid the sum we had agreed on—I had persuaded him to drive me an hour across the moor only by promising him a fortune—and clattered over the cobblestones, tweaking my ankle, toward the only lit door. What if they had no vacancies? But they would, there were only a couple of cars parked outside.

  The foyer was bright, and there was nobody at the office window. I could hear a television somewhere. I rapped on the counter and waited. Beside me a metal table held a rack with maps, a lamp; a stapled booklet decorated with a pen and ink drawing of a hunched shape with claws, entitled The Beast of Bodmin Moor; and a block of slick brochures, advertising a health club and spiritual retreat with a vague, portentous name, that when I touched it opened like a fan across the table. Somewhere nearby someone shrieked with laughter. One brochure slid off and planed to the floor, slid noiselessly across the room, and passed under a closed door. I picked the rest up, squared the deck, ruffled it, set it firmly down. It rose elastically as I released it, keeping a lingering contact with my fingertips.

  “Can I help you?” A woman’s pink, crazily grinning face bobbed up behind the window. From the open door behind her came a blue glow and the choral roar of a laugh track.

  She took my credit card, with a residual chuckle, and forced it through an old-fashioned device that impressed its raised figures on a sheaf of carbons. Then I followed the apron string ticking on her wide rump up a flight of narrow stairs to my room—tiny, with a giant four-poster bed, and the slanting floor and low ceiling of nightmares.

  A funeral was going on. Four stuffed birds in black tie bore a little blue coffin through the graveyard of a painted church toward a boxy open grave with dirt heaped on the flocked grass beside it, and a dainty, translucent skull. A rook opened a book. An owl got busy with a trowel. A tiny, fuzzy cow—no, no, not a cow but a bull—was standing by to toll the bell. A bull the size of a guinea pig? Impossible, but the fur was real. Was it cat? The thought was disturbing.

  One of the docents had lingered behind me at the door, watching us, but now she seemed to satisfy herself that I was not a thief or a vandal, and turned back to the warmth and light of the gift shop, leaving me alone with the pride of the Potter Museum, the giant gabled case that housed, as gilt script on the wood frame proudly proclaimed, “The Original Life & Death of Cock Robin. Exhibit 1.”

  Tied to the bull’s nose ring was a cord that arced up to the painted bell tower of the painted church and disappeared through a small square hole cut in the backdrop. No bell was visible in the painting. Was there a real bell behind it? I thought there probably was. There was a bell in the rhyme, and Potter was a literal-minded man.

  I opened the guidebook. Walter Potter was born (1835) and died (1918) in the same small town in Sussex, the son of an innkeeper. He had taught himself taxidermy, stuffing every animal he could lay his hands on, and as anyone could see from the pictures, he sucked at it. (Or, in the guidebook’s weak apologia, “He was not a very skilled taxidermist by today’s standards, but he was certainly prolific.”) His animals bulged where they should hollow. Their faces were squashed and sunken and wore a look of accusatory sadness. They struck poses no animal would take in nature. But perhaps they should not be judged by the standards of realism, for Walter Potter was a dreamer, whose rats sprung traps, kittens exchanged vows before a kitten congregation, and squirrels quarreled over cards. You could say he was ancient, animist Britain, burbling up in the age of industry. Or a loon, putting sockses on foxes.

  I rose on tiptoe. Above, in the gabled sky, ninety-six species of British birds had gathered, “some,” said the guidebook, “with tears in their eyes.” They looked real, but real dead. Live birds would never keep so still. Real dead birds, representing live birds, mourning a dead bird, representing a dead bird in a rhyme a child read long ago, in a book his sister owned, both of them dead now, too, dead and buried.

  For a fleeting moment I glimpsed the trouble of a man for whom toying with dead animals was an odd form of mourning. For whom glass beads might be as heartfelt as tears.

  At that, one fell. Light streaked a blackbird’s cheek. Glass chimed on glass at the very limits of hearing.

  Had it really happened? I moved away, afraid I might see the yellow beak open, another tear fall from the glass eye.

  The long, narrow room was crowded with glass cases, through the angled surfaces of which the grey light from a few small high windows made its way as delicately as a safecracker. When objects coalesced out of the umber shadows, they seemed like apparitions. A church made of white feathers was Exhibit 2. A slender, mummified hand, feeling for something just out of reach, Exhibit 5. Two giant thumbprints on a canvas, each whorl composed of motes, each mote a moth with a pin through its back, 8. Everything seemed like something I was remembering wrong. I had the feeling I was in the prop room of a fever dream.

  Some objects seemed to establish covert relations with one another: over a calabash pipe, Exhibit 6, and a collection of walking sticks, 11, the shadow of a deerstalker hat seemed to pass. A Burroughs adding machine, 13, might have helped calculate the achievement of “Duplicate,” the world champion hen (462 eggs in one year!). Exhibit 9, the terrible, twisted mummy of a cat that had stuck in a chimney, starved to death, and been “kippered,” as the book puts it, by decades of smoky fires, had some gruesome kinship to Exhibit 7, of which the book exclaims: “Observe this child’s shoe, encrusted with lime after falling into a petrifying well!” (No word on how the child was doing.)

  Babes in the Wood.

  The Happy Family.

  I saw nothing that might be a message, though from a distance the interlocking swirls of Exhibit 8 did resemble a Venn diagram.

  Upstairs, eighteen Athletic Toads were rolling hoops, their feet stapled to painted turf, and posing with weights, their bodies stiff as dried gourds. Gentleman squirrels of The Upper Five fanned miniature hands of cards, enjoyed port, packed pipes before painted fires. A plebe rat of The Lower Five limped away from his brawling brothers on tiny crutches. Bunnies studied sums; kittens poured tea; guinea pigs mouthed miniature French horns at a cricket match. Rows of kittens with stitched-up mouths (each in its own little frock, with a string of beads around its neck) watched another kitten in a veil be married to a kitten in a suit by a kitten in robes with a book sewn to its paw. All the animals had the same look of ghastly gaiety. They raised their teacups or their guns as if desperately hoping it was the right thing to do, while increasingly sure it was not. Any minute, I thought, they’ll notice that they’re dead, and then they will have to kill themselves.

  Two squirrels crossed swords: The Dual [sic].

  The Death.

  And here,
at last, come the clowns: Exhibit 22, a two-headed lamb. Exhibit 23, a two-headed pig. Exhibit 24, an able-bodied, four-legged duck, who had lived sixteen years until a hailstone took her out. (“Freaks like this are not uncommon, but what do they see and think about?” mused the guidebook. Indeed.)

  Exhibit 25 was several scrambled kittens. Some had two bodies, some two heads. Whole jet rosaries of eyes. Twin tails. Some had legs thrust straight up out of the small of their back. Dusty frights, straw poking out of their cracked flanks, they crouched alone under glass bells; no tea parties for them. They weren’t invited to the wedding, and anyway, they had nothing to wear. Potter knows best! But couldn’t they have played the evil stepsisters, or the fairy godmothers, or the three heads in the well?

  Exhibit 26, Two-Headed Pig, was not stuffed but preserved in formaldehyde, the frill of cacky wax around the lid a disturbing reminder of pickles and potted plums, as if someone were going to make a Ploughman’s Lunch of it. It was plump as Hansel, its fat hind legs comfortably curled up, its front trotters touching, as if in prayer. The pallid skin was smooth as a baby’s and clove to the glass. I had a sudden image of Blanche and myself in the womb, but cold, cold.

  Exhibit 27. A trio of malformed chicks. Beaked knots of feather and bone, bent ornaments for a Bedlam Easter hat. Only one had found its footing, standing square on its four legs, four wings sticking straight out like a biplane’s. It possessed three eyes, like a symbol from mathematical logic: Therefore. Something had been demonstrated, but what?

  I stopped, my heart hammering. I thought one of the stuffed things ahead had made a sudden, furtive movement. Then I saw it was just another tourist, reaching up to pat the front half of a gigantic, gaping Tunny Fish, Exhibit 29, that projected from the wall as if it had stuck there, partway through. To touch it he had to rise to the toes of his white rubber-soled loafers, which looked too small for his body. Seeing me, he dropped back onto his heels and wiggled his fingers sheepishly. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t think why. He wore a stained windbreaker, a striped shirt, khaki shorts, and was entirely undistinguished.