I said nothing, so with humorously fearful backward glances he rose and tiptoed away. At the door, rising to his toes, he called back, “Don’t forget the Old Operating Theatre! You’ll freak out!” He thumped himself on the forehead. “Jeepers, I’ve done it again. Somebody pry my foot out of my mouth!”
He was still cheerfully scolding himself as he went out of earshot.
When had I told him her name?
As I was leaving, I saw the little girl climbing into a car with a large couple in sweats. “I need to pee!” she said. “You can pee when we stop for gas,” said the female. They bounced out over the cobblestones.
A FUNERAL
A funeral is going on.
A memory floats up, loosed from some underwater snag. It is unrecognizable at first, then I begin to make out its features.
Whose was it? There were many funerals in Grady, a town gung-ho for dying, but our family was seldom invited. I am still a child in this fragment, but old enough to watch the grown-ups with a critical eye, surprised and embarrassed by their display of emotion.
Looking back I am, momentarily, ashamed of my spooky fantasia, the mushroom clouds sprouting all over the landscape, the zombies singing dirges and roundelays. How gaudy, how frivolous.
Compared to this real thing: the blankness on my father’s face, his raw cheeks and tired eyes and my own inability to rise above a nagging preoccupation with his hairline. There is not much room for loss in a world crammed with details and ready, officious judgments. In the midst of desolation, that one notices the hang of a cheap suit!
Max looked a bit like Papa in hers, though broader and softer, the corners bumped off. Her chin crumpled and her mouth opened in a little unconscious shape of distress, then closed.
The intolerably high sky with its tiny slow-moving clouds.
Whenever something terrible happens the mind is often somewhere else; mine was following a beetle hurrying across the disturbed earth. A plane droned far away. If you looked hard you could see that the sheen on the bug’s back was minutely striated, demonstrating the attention to detail that pleased me about nature. If you got a magnifying glass, the striations would prove to have striations of their own, or maybe bizarre little horns. Watching the bug I seemed to be happy, happier than I had been for a long time, while nearby people worked away senselessly with handkerchiefs, bent their heads to the industrious molding motions of their hankie-swathed hands. Later I saw the contrails spelled something I couldn’t read.
I remember the next grave was Grampa’s. It was easy to recognize because of the Geiger counter carved on the headstone. So the funeral might have been Granny’s, and yet I don’t remember that, though there are other things, less important things, that I remember clearly: the textures of the dirt, the round pebbles from the stratum that Papa had taught me was called the Grady Conglomerate, against which the spade rang with a sound like money. Papa’s eyes examined the walls of the grave, narrowing at a trace of mineral color, parsing it automatically, unconsciously.
I credit these memories precisely because they seem unimportant. Could I have made up such minutiae: the spot of fluff in somebody’s lowered eyelids, a pocket turned inside out and sticking out like something from a cartoon? But of course I could. In phone sex, for example, I pride myself on the authenticating detail—the soiled price-sticker on the scuffed sole of a cheap pump (how cheap, you can see for yourself). And here, even as I scratch in the dirt for confirmation, the scene shrinks and I am peering into a diorama, a school project. The figures are filched from the dollhouse and got up in paper costumes to suit the occasion; they are acting out the funeral of Telluride May, the first and last whore of Too Bad, shot in a gunfight between two miners over claim-jumping, or else (it is variously reported) over a crooked bet on a two-headed nickel. I had mixed sand with glue and formed it into realistic mounds topped with little wooden crosses and a shallow grave in which I had pressed the mama doll (I never got all the gluey dirt out of the grooves of her plastic hair). You could see her snub nostril-less nose and the painted pupils staring up, a little out of position. I was sent to the principal for employing the word whore in my presentation, and got an unfairly bad grade for this loving re-creation.
Though my memories are fragments, these fragments have their logic. Surely something of the whole picture is encoded in them. An upthrust chunk of an older geological sequence might seem like an anomaly in a broad basin of silt deposited by successive floods. But if you can read the layers, you can pick up the story a hundred miles away, at the bottom of a canyon, where a river cut down through the same layers, and construct then in your mind the hundred-mile-plus formation that joined them both, though all the intervening rock has washed away.
That is one way of looking at it. But sometimes I think otherwise. The details of the past float up and adhere to one another, forming little tumors of plausibility and consequence. This happens as if by some automated process; stories take shape, they thicken and grow tougher. That they are plausible and detailed does not mean that they are true. I can think up someone who never existed and tell you I met him today and you would believe me, if you had no reason to think I was lying. Of course, by this time you might well doubt my word. Believe this if nothing else, though: I am trying mortally hard to remember my life.
The cemetery exists. I could visit, solicit the gravestones for gossip. Old cemeteries are plotty. (Sorry.) The stones tell stories: yellow jaundice, overdose of morphine, liver complaint, heart failure, pneumonia, shot by outlaws, burned to death, mine accident, consumption, spinal meningitis, life became a burden to her. But it is no longer de rigueur to name the agent of death; modern gravestones keep their secrets. I don’t think I’d find an easy answer there.
Was there a funeral at all? I remember the light on the hill, the white light of midday that drives out shadows and color and life. But then I look closely at the sun and I read, “25 W,” and in smaller curving letters, “General Electric.” I remember how I felt, but I cried harder when I dropped the lizard down the well. Blanche, I’m asking. If it was a funeral, whose funeral was it? Who died, and who’s to blame? Who killed Cock Robin?
THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL
TPR’s Twinspeak
“Today in Theirstory”
“Professor Rankin, I don’t know if you’ve heard the theory that Shakespeare was a Siamese twin.”
“I’m afraid I have.”
“Well, allow me to introduce the man who first advanced that theory, Dr. Theodore Gupta.”
“Oh! I’m surprised. I confess I assumed you were yourself a conjoined twin, Professor.”
“Indeed! That’s typical of the ad hominem responses my theories have received. What happened to textual analysis, if I may ask?”
“One might counter, what happened to historical evidence?”
“Our knowledge of the life of the historical Shakespeare is sketchy, as you must know.”
“Not so sketchy that we are free to postulate any absurdity that supports a pet theory.”
“Surely scholars must arrogate to themselves the intellectual freedom to postulate anything not explicitly contradicted by the evidence. And there is some evidence supporting the notion. Shakespeare’s own work demonstrates a fascination with twins and doubles amounting almost to an obsession. As we cannot penetrate the murk of history, we may never know for sure, but for the same reason, do we not have the right—nay, the responsibility—to at least consider whether Shakespeare was twins?”
Here the moderator broke in. “But Dr. Gupta, despite the murk of history, surely we do know certain facts.”
“Facts! Facts! Facts!”
“Don’t you believe in facts, Dr. Gupta?”
“Does Beethoven believe in notes? I make facts sing: glissandos, melismas, arpeggios, trills!”
“But—”
“For footnotes, I substitute grace notes!”
“But Shakespeare was not a Siamese—”
“Excuse me, I must reall
y—‘conjoined’?”
“Conjoined twin, then.”
“I admit the theory is bold.”
“Far-fetched.”
“I admit the theory is far-fetched, but—”
“Actually, it’s simply not true.”
“Possibly the theory is not true, though I submit the case is far from closed, but is it uninteresting?”
WE ARE ALL TWOFERS
On the way back to London, I kept seeing tumbleweeds bouncing through the heather past surprised sheep. I clamped my restless hands between my knees and concentrated on staying awake. I couldn’t face Louche in that condition. I opted instead for the rather gloomy embrace of the Walpole Arms, a seedy place on the outskirts of town. The velvet curtains were drawn, revealing the lacework of moths, and the lobby was dark. Only the incongruous blue glow of an Internet kiosk illuminated the ormolu, a pert bird under a glass dome from which I averted my eyes, and a clerk in a green blazer who was beaming at me with peculiar warmth. I might have fled the dark, and the lark, and the clerk, had the latter not lunged across the counter to pump my hand. “Greetings, husband!” he seemed to be saying. Seeking some explanation, my eyes fell to a button pinned on his collar, bearing a silhouette head I recognized, ringed by the slogan, WE ARE ALL TWOFERS.
“Or, not,” I muttered pettishly, retrieving my hand. Lately I was finding the Boolean operators a succinct way of expressing degrees of refusal.
“Pardon?”
I found a day-old paper abandoned on a settee and took it up to my dingy little room. In my brief absence London had gone Togetherist-crazy. A famous model had been photographed in an orange Togetherist T-shirt made for a twofer, its second collar daringly adroop over one pygmy breast, and “We-R-2-R-1-4-Ever” was climbing the charts for the second time. Hawkers were selling bushels of pins like the clerk’s, and the Togetherists, in a move editorialists considered niggardly, had threatened legal action.
But despite outraged demands for progress, little had been made. Scotland Yard had turned up a few new leads, but they had proved to be dead ends. A head had been found on the beach near Dover, which had roused a brief flurry of speculation, but the dental records showed it belonged to a fisherman who had gone missing some weeks past, and though his body had not been found, it was agreed that as he had never had more than the one head, his loss was probably not the doctor’s work. It was thought that he had fallen overboard and been decapitated by the propeller. Then the police stormed an apartment in Leeds, where neighbors claimed to have seen a two-headed man enter late one night and a one-headed man emerge the next day. He turned out to be an amateur ventriloquist who liked to put on a second head at night and walk the streets making lewd propositions to women while manipulating the jaw of his false head. Then he would smack the head and make his apologies to the lady.
The bathroom could only be entered sideways. To close the door one would have to stand on tiptoe as it scraped past, so I left it open and, maneuvering around the protruding corner of the sink, sank thankfully onto the toilet. It was time to think.
When I extricated myself, I placed a call to the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. “Can you tell me if there are any ballads in your collection that mention someone called One and a Half ?” I could hear her putting on her glasses. “A two-headed person,” I added.
“That doesn’t sound—” she said. “I don’t—let me make sure. No, there are not. Not by that title. But of course there were many ballads written about prodigies and, ah, monsters, or what were then considered monsters. You might have a look in one of the other ballad collections, for example Sir Anthony Wood’s, at the Bodleian. Wood was more fond than Pepys of this particular sort of ballad. Giant fish, murderous women, users of profane language who were snatched up by hairy devils, and so on. Of course I don’t mean to say that a two-headed person is akin to a murderer or…”
“Quite,” I said, and hung up.
On the way out, I stopped at the kiosk and checked my e-mail. I deleted a message from the Siamists: “Refuse consolidation under the banner of the phallus! We are not one, we are 2!” and twenty invitations to buy a Cunning Collectibles crystal sculpture called Togetherness. Either the Siamists had sold their e-mail list or someone was playing a joke on me.
That left just one e-mail from Audrey, headed “The Lady Came Back.” That was the name of the silent film we had watched together, “Remember?” at an Evelyn North mini-festival screened by the Castro Theater. In her movies, the star was always winking and turning away, or slipping sideways into a fin of darkness, from which her eyes and sequins glinted faintly and then blinked out, or she was pausing in a doorway, then gone forever. Her narrow feet kicked up the heavy lustrous cloth of her pajamas or tapped the floors of dimly lit offices while a shadow passed across the foreground. Her pale face swam up to the cigarette she raised in impossibly slender fingers. You never saw the whole of her, you could never size her up: big or little, thick or thin, real or a will-o’-the-wisp. She was more of a rumor than a fact. She was herself once removed. She was barely there, until one day she wasn’t. “She was one of those silent film stars who didn’t make the transition to sound,” Audrey wrote. “And speaking of silent, you haven’t said a word about where you’re going or what you’re doing on this trip. What are you plotting? Your mother called. Is there a phone number where she can reach you? Trey’s being very evasive, so I know something’s up. Whatever you’re doing, stop it.”
I hit delete and went to the British Library. It was time to do some research. I had a lot of questions. For example:
Who was One and a Half ?
Was the “trail” I had been following actually left by the Unity Foundation?
Why?
Where had the Manor gone?
Where had the clinic gone?
Did tumbleweeds grow in England?
Why were dead things talking to me?
I had more, but that would do for starters.
It turned out that none of the big ballad collections, Pepys or Child or the funky Pack of Autolycus, cited anyone named One and a Half. Neither did Gould & Pyle’s Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine or the sole other pre-Boom teratological study still in print. However, a biography of Hunter cited as a highlight of his collection the skull of “The Two-Headed Boy of Bengal,” and there was a photograph. I recognized it. The account confirmed the kittens’ story on most points: there had been two brains, separated by a tough membrane; the eyes moved independently; his second mouth had a tongue, albeit somewhat stunted. His mother had kept him alive in a wooden box under a sheet she would lift for a rupee or two. Her death of snakebite was wishful embellishment, however. She had lived to bury him.
I turned the page and found a watercolor of the boy in life, front and side view. He was wearing only a double strand of beads. From the front he was a sweet-faced child with a strange hairdo. From the side, though, the second head was plainly visible, jutting up at an angle, and looking straight at the viewer. I turned the book around. The other face was bonier, more adult, and had a wry, knowing look. Or was it the song that made me see it that way? The Two-Headed Boy of Bengal appeared in a number of other books (including Gould & Pyle), but all told more or less the same story, one adding the toothsome detail that the neck stump resembled “a small peach.” None of the books gave the boy’s name, or referred to him as One and a Half.
I began to open books at random and, in the index of an art history book, was rewarded by the following item: “One and a Half,” Hans Arp, pp. 222–25. Flipping to the page reference, I read about dada doyenne Anna-Anna (the footnote cited revisionist historian C. C. Metzger’s claim that she was a conjoined twin) who modeled for Man Ray and was the lover (or lovers) of Ball, Tanguy, Huelsenbeck, and Arp. Arp had sculpted her (or their) portrait, the semi-abstract Ein-Ein-Halb mentioned in Huelsenbeck’s memoirs. It was smashed in a jealous fracas, but could be glimpsed intact, a pale, two-humped form, in the background of a group portrait in which the model d
id not appear. Nothing remained of her own work but a speech transcribed phonetically in the minutes of the Fifth and Only Business Meeting of the Society for the Investigation of Dada Phenomena and Macadam (Open to the Public; Please Bring Your Umbrella, and Ready Cash). This read, in its entirety:
TEE-OO PAKA PAKATA RRRRR
PAKA PAKATA BRRRR
SMMU SMU SMUUU
DOKTOR GOAT
GIBTS NOCH BIER?
I froze, lifted my head to look around me. Mahogany shelves, morocco bindings made a dark tartan, threaded with gold. I replaced the book on the shelf, completing the pattern. It was a coincidence, no more.
My next discovery, in the last of a seven-volume Historie of Wit and Pleasantrye, was an item in the index of first lines: “One plus One is but One and a Half…” I took down the fourth volume. The poem read in full:
One plus One is but One and a Half in th’Arithmetick of the Heart We infer this from the Fact we’re short a Quarter when we part.
It was attributed to two ladies of rare wit, twins, who had shone in the court of Louis XIV, flirting with the more daring rakes, winning a great deal of money at cards, and reciting cutting couplets of their own spontaneous composition, of which one delivered the first, the other the clinching line. Though the ladies’ pedigree, like their accent, was so smudged from handling and the dust of travel that it was impossible to make out, they were called the Maltese Ladies.
The problem was, we had made them up.
We must have run across a reference somewhere (though I would be very surprised to find the Historie on the shelves of the Grady library). Still, to read their names in a book written two hundred years before I was born made me feel very odd.
I put the volume back among the others, and only then noticed the ornament at the base of each spine: an embossed gilt ring between two half rings. Together, they formed a chain. The Togetherist totem, or a bookbinder’s bubble? The Togetherists existed now, all too obviously, but I was skeptical of their claims of antiquity. The chain was too ubiquitous. Or was that because the Togetherists really were everywhere, had always been everywhere, a chain binding the globe, one end stapled to the Rock of Ages? The logic was circular, and speaking of circles, it was easy, too, to claim the circle as your insignia, and appropriate for yourself even more ubiquity than the Togetherists. Anyone could invent a history, and find the evidence afterward.
Half Life Page 25
