Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  The driver pulled up right outside a small wrought-iron gate in this fence. To insist upon my deception now seemed pointless. I paid him and climbed out. The taxi driver got back into the car, but did not immediately pull away. I felt him watching as I pushed open the small, heavy gate and went in.

  The gate swung shut behind me and bit my heel. I limped up the stairs. They seemed wrong somehow—too steep, too narrow, as if made for people with tiny feet. At the crest of the hill, I found myself walking into the brochure. There was the chilly lawn, the little bushes. There were the patients, though today they were wrapped in blankets against the cold, a row of neat parcels propped up on flimsy aluminum-and-plastic recliners, holding up stoic off-center faces toward the thin, white sunlight.

  Beheadings don’t leave many survivors. Here they were, the lucky few.

  The front door swung open, and a twofer stepped out. “Pleased to meet you again, join with you, come together, after our too-long separation!” said Mr. Nickel.

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  Cunning Collectibles’ Togetherness

  You’ll love this full-lead crystal sculpture of lovely conjoined twins on the verge of passing from carefree childhood to the wonders of womanhood. Caught in a moment of stillness between restraint and abandon, these young, spirited and beautiful Siamese Twins pause at the verge of the unknown. Their delicately sculpted faces reveal their serene wonder as they contemplate the mysteries that lie ahead. A sensitive work of art, dealing with an unusual subject, and captured in the fluid forms of full-lead crystal. Cunning Collectibles hallmark and Certificate of Authenticity prove this is an authentic limited edition. May be purchased in low monthly instalments.

  BOX GIRL

  One day, our explorations took us to Dr. Goat’s house, a yellow bungalow with aluminum siding and a neat square of shorn lawn. We circled it slowly, keeping low. There were some giant panties bagging on a line in the yard, and a parakeet in a cage hanging in a window with checkered curtains. Against the back of the house was a wooden shed with a tin roof. Its door was open a chink. So we went in.

  It was not quite that easy. We were excited and scared. It felt as though we had to push our way in against some invisible substance that filled the shed to capacity; so, no room for us. We could feel the pressure on our chest, forcing us to breathe quick and shallow.

  The air inside was hot, sluggish, material. You bit off chips of it, melted them in your nostrils. Mouth-breathing was to be recommended. The smell was a rectangular solid, more or less the dimensions of the shed, but ambitious, straining against the walls. The light was golden, and tiny needles of hay stood in it, suspended, only reluctantly swaying in the wake of our passage.

  There was a stirring, creaking sound from overhead, a sound a boat or a cart might make. I pictured chickens, made a crooning sound to let them know we weren’t dangerous. We weren’t going to steal or wreck anything. It was enough for me just to stand in the material heat of Dr. Goat’s shed, where we did not belong, and feel my own daring burning in my stomach like a lump of primary ore. I knew exactly who I was. Lay a strip of film against my skin right then, and I’d have burned my signature across it.

  Something flicked past, smacked the ground beside us with a liquid sound.

  We bent over it. A little brown star. Some kind of muck.

  Something hot and clinging slapped me on the neck. Above us there was a hectic animal scramble. With my still light-struck eyes I peered at the cage hanging from a thick beam in the high shadows. It was rocking wildly, clashing against the beam.

  We ran a long way before we stopped, each step jolting up the spine. Finally I said, “Animals don’t wear dresses.” A frilled dress with puffed sleeves.

  “Animals don’t have knees,” Blanche agreed.

  “Camels have knees.”

  “She was pretty,” said Blanche.

  I was unsure.

  “Pretty as a princess,” she nodded.

  I scrubbed the shit off my neck with a handful of sand, and by the time we got home we had established that a princess was what she was. Who but a princess got treated so badly? A new character appeared in my stories. Donkey-skin, I called her, after the old fairy tale about the princess with the weirdo dad, but I was thinking of the girl Dr. Goat kept in a cage.

  We did not go back to the shed for weeks, maybe months. Sometimes we saw its battered metal roof sending us sun-signs when we climbed the bluff behind Too Bad. The light leapt into my eyes as if the interval were nothing. It was hard to shut out. I’d go quiet. The beam was like a pipette, dripping some drug that excited and shamed me.

  Then one day Blanche said, “Remember the girl in the shed?”

  I was startled. I had nearly convinced myself that I had made her up.

  “I thought you would be too chicken to go back,” I lied.

  We pulled open the heavy door, lifting it so it didn’t scrape on the concrete and make a noise, and edged through. We squatted just inside it. A bar of sun lay across our laps like a burden, a burning stripe singeing the bottom edge of our field of vision. We couldn’t see anything at first but the star-punctures in the roof and our own knees with the hairs on them standing up golden and electrified against the dark. We had made her up after all, I thought, and my face went hot with annoyance and shame. I was already thinking how I would explain this to Blanche when I heard a mumbling from the darkness under the roof. Again I flushed. But I held my spot. A wasp swung outside the door, disappeared, came back, hoisted itself up, and soared away.

  When she began to talk, it was to let out a string of swear words and others I had never heard, though I knew they were filthy from the sound of them. I started laughing, having no idea what else to do. The shed buzzed with my laughter, and afterward it was quiet for a minute before the shit started flying at us in little hot globs and we left. The sun had shifted in the sky, and it was as if someone had butted it loose and reset it farther down. The bluffs were deep red, like slabs of steak.

  We scrambled over the rise and hit the road farther up, and at a distance we saw Dr. Goat coming home with a dead rabbit and his gun. So we angled off the road and hid in what was left of an old adobe hut. We were squatting in there picking through jewel-shards of glass and tufts of fur from a rabbit a hawk had nabbed when we heard his feet crunching on the stones outside, and our stomach tightened like a fist.

  “Where did you come from?” boomed Dr. Goat, in the doorway. He did not look at me, only at Blanche, and I thought he was pretending to himself I wasn’t there. He jounced his gun in the crook of his arm, gently, enjoying the weight of it.

  “From over there,” I said, promptly and vaguely, forcing his eyes to turn to me, and flapping my hand behind us.

  “You weren’t on my property, were you? You’re not little trespassers, are you?”

  “No!” said Blanche.

  “I hope you’re not lying,” he said. “I don’t like liars.”

  “Can I touch your gun?” I said. I took a step toward him and stretched out my fingers, brushed hot metal. He jerked it out of reach.

  “Not for little girls!” he said. “Hurry on home. Does your mother know you’re way out here?” He didn’t move out of the door. We edged past him and hurried off.

  “Hey!” he yelled after us. “Watch this!” We turned. A silver line slid up along his cheek, he tensed, and an arm jumped off a saguaro downslope of us. Crack answered the bluffs, and birds fell into the sky all around. We ran.

  NON COMPOS MENTIS

  But it was a twofer: not Mr. Nickel after all, but the Togetherist from San Francisco. He had been shadowing me, I was right.

  And yet it was Mr. Nickel too.

  “Confused?” said the twofer. “I’ll give you a hint, you’ve met Roosevelt here before, under different circumstances. What better disguise for a proponent of elective identity surgery than”—he pulled his collar open, and I saw the straps of a complicated harness—“a second head?”

  The mount was m
olded closely to his collar, and even simulated in the contours of its base the different bone structure of a twofer. It was an expensive model. “Recognize me now?” He laughed merrily, bouncing a little on his toes. “Mr. Disme! Get it? Nickels and dimes? Did I surprise you? Did I? I’ve been looking forward to this moment so long, I pictured it happening a hundred ways, and now it’s happened in just this way and no other, and it’s perfect! But you’re shocked. You don’t know me as a double-headed Nickel, excuse the pun. You were never properly introduced to Roosevelt. Allow me to remedy that.” Mr. Nickel unsnapped something and raised the prosthetic head from his shoulders like someone doffing a cap. “Pleased to meetcha, pardner-er-er-er!” said the head in a metallic chirp that ended with an abrupt click.

  “American manufacture,” Mr. Nickel said with a grimace. “Very sensitive to little blips and glitches.” He popped a mini CD out of a slot in the base of the head and wiped it with a handkerchief, then slid it back in.

  “Howdy!” said the head, in a tone of astonishment.

  “Look at your face!” guffawed Mr. Nickel. “Your sister’s a cool customer, but yours is a study. I was starting to think I was too subtle with the brochure. Was I too subtle? Boy, am I glad to see you here. But I’m being selfish, I bet you can’t wait to meet the others. Let’s get this show on the road.” He snuggled the head back into its mount, and it snapped in place. “Dr. O doesn’t like me to wear old Rosie around the farm,” he whispered, “says it trivializes the burden. But hey, I’m a kidder. I like to get a rise out of folks. And Rosie has his uses, she can’t deny that.”

  The front door opened on a sour note into a small dank foyer with a peeling ceiling and the tang of mildew in the air. The big wooden door to our left was surprised by our entry, and through its gape I glimpsed a waiting room full of indistinct objects and greenish light, like an aquarium. Someone standing at the window—a twofer—spun round and through the chink, seemed to see me, then turned identically swollen faces aside, and Mr. Nickel bumped the door shut, and in the rear of the foyer beside a jumble of mops and coats what I had taken for a closet door opened and a woman in a lab coat ducked under the lintel and came through.

  So this is Dr. Ozka.

  “You’re thinking, so this is Dr. Ozka,” said Mr. Nickel. “High cheekbones. Greying strawberry blond hair, pulled back in a bun. Tomato-red lipstick bleeding into the fine lines in her thin lips. Tiny gold earrings, and a matching charm under her white coat. Shape of charm to be determined. Shape of body under white coat, to be determined. Calves bold, instep bolder. Conclusion: attractive older woman, not obviously bloodthirsty.”

  “Velcome,” she said, and I almost laughed as I shook her cool, dry hand.

  “It is not Dr. Ozka, however, but her invaluable ‘woman Friday,’ who alas, does not know I exist.”

  “Nurse—” She gurgled her name. I divined it from her name tag: Bolima V. Hrdle.

  “Allow me to introduce Nora and Blanche Olney, who will be staying with us until…Who will be staying with us. Go with Nurse Gargle, girls, and settle up, and when you’re done give us a yoick and I’ll show you your digs.” Nurse Hrdle, however, had already turned on the high heel of one red pump and was leading us back through the door she’d come out of.

  “Vatch your heads,” she said. “And mind the step.”

  The sunken room was tiny—maybe it had been a closet once—and crammed. I stepped down onto a stained olive carpet, far from new, but apparently newer than the writing desk at my right, and in fact all the other furnishings, as it had been cut to fit around them, probably to save moving those ancient shelves, on which shoeboxes of floppy disks and manila folders were heaped as high as the sagging ceiling. There, at eye level, on a string taped to a low beam, a tiny straw bird spun in the wind of a fan balanced precariously on a bale of manila envelopes that almost filled the deep embrasure of a small cracked window. Below it, against the back wall, an ancient computer occupied the entire surface of a small desk with its beige outbuildings. A golden prompt throbbed on its black screen. Nurse Hrdle went to it. She spun the single desk chair that served both desks and sat, clattered briefly on the keyboard. I perched on the metal folding chair by the desk and waited. The smell of mildew was keen. After one whiff I had let Blanche breathe.

  Nurse Hrdle spun her chair and scooted back to the writing desk. She got out a yellowed receipt, began totting up neat blue figures. I could not quite read them upside down, though I observed the European seven with its extra dash. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that I might not have enough money. An operation of this kind—I had figured less than a bypass, more than a tit job. But that left room. She slid the receipt across the table. I looked at it—and laughed. “You do know this vould be considerably more expensive at a major hospital,” she said stiffly. “But if necessary ve can vork out a payment plan. Our doctor vill not turn anyone avay for want of funds. She is committed to service, one hundred fifty percent. It is her life vork.”

  “No, no, it’s—it’s very reasonable.” It was cheap, actually. I could pay in cash. “Can I use dollars?”

  She enlisted a calculator and showed me a revised figure. My fingers felt foolish, counting out the bills. Not Lithobolia, just self-consciousness. I asked a question just to shift her eyes.

  For a moment I thought she’d refuse to answer. “I guess I’m from the European Union,” she finally answered, with a slight curl of the lips.

  “I’m from Nevada,” I offered, apologetically. Maybe where we called home was private here.

  “I’m from Slovakia, really,” she said grudgingly. “Ve were part of the Magyar Empire, part of the Hapsburg Empire, part of Czechoslovakia. Ve didn’t get our own flag until Hitler made us a commonvealth. Then we were part of Czechoslovakia again. Now ve are part of the EU. Ve have a flag again,” she shrugged, “but it is the Hitler flag.” She squared the bills and flipped through them with amazing speed, pinching each between her lacquered fingernails. “Thank you. You may keep this copy of the receipt, though ve vould prefer that you did not. Ve leave no stone turned. Mum is the vord. One vay!” She showed her teeth in what might have been a smile. The charm had worked its way out from under her collar. It was a single gold ring, of course.

  “One way,” I agreed weakly.

  Mr. Nickel popped one head through the door. “Do I hear the cheerful sound of sloganeering?”

  He and Dr. Hrdle seized the computer desk by its edge and, with a turn and wiggle that bespoke considerable practice, fit it into a narrow space between a file cabinet and a small refrigerator. The power cords had snagged on the fridge, and Mr. Nickel gathered them up under Nurse Hrdle’s pale stare and laid them neatly on its top before he stepped back to my side. Nurse Hrdle stooped—Mr. Nickel spread his hands in wordless admiration of her hindquarters—plucked up the carpet where it met the wall, and peeled it back. The green wave rose, scraping the shelves on each side, until Nurse Hrdle had backed all the way to the front desk, holding it curled over her head. A Post-It fluttered down. Paper clips pinged. Mr. Nickel edged around the coil and sprang lightly through the gap. I wrestled my bags through and followed. In the bare concrete floor was a metal hatch with a recessed handle that Mr. Nickel was already raising to reveal a flight of narrow stairs.

  “Welcome,” said Mr. Nickel, “to the heart of the matter.”

  The hatch came down behind us with a clang and a whoosh of escaping air.

  I found myself in a dank echoing hall, its pocked cement walls sealed with a thick rubbery skin of green paint. It was cheerless in an institutional way that reminded me of Cold War government facilities, like the legendary miles of tunnels deep under the surface of the Restricted Area, where hairless, phosphorescent squirrels rooted through leaky waste canisters for edibles. The floor slanted down, or maybe up—in any case it was not quite level, though very nearly, and that slight angle off true put me on edge. The water fountain set in the wall near me was pre-Boom, with a niche too narrow to admit a person with two hea
ds, and a single bubbler on the right.

  Mr. Nickel answered my unspoken question. “Former bomb shelter. The entire hill is honeycombed with tunnels, like a, well, like a honeycomb. Built by a very very rich, very very private personage, our patron, whose name I cannot tell you, not even in a whisper. Mainly because”—he giggled—“I don’t know what it is.”

  A door opened, and a pudgy man emerged with a towel tied around his waist. My eye climbed the parallel creases in his big, hard stomach, his soft drooping breasts in their furze of blond hair, to the pink shiny stump. My skin swarmed all over. The remaining head nodded a greeting, and I pitched forward.

  “Oops-a-daisy!” Mr. Nickel said, grabbing my arm.

  I had tripped on a stair, that’s all. “Thanks,” I said, and disengaged myself. I felt again the peculiar armature I had encountered under Mr. Disme’s shirt when he hustled me away from the cops. If I had given it more thought at the time, I could have saved both of us a lot of trouble. “Why did you lead me on such a treasure hunt? The brochure, the postcard…”

  Mr. Nickel wagged his head, chuckling. “Wasn’t it fun?”

  “Fun!” The vile little elf was practically prancing.

  Roosevelt chuckled identically, a phrase or phase behind, and agreed, in Mr. Nickel’s own accents, “Wasn’t it fun?” This repeated. A recording, evidently. It echoed unpleasantly in the hall. Thump something to make it stop, I thought. But the button would be in some private fold you’d have to peel back, and would have, oh, a ginger hair stuck to a gummy something on it. I swallowed back bile. Blanche’s breathing roughened as if she tasted it too. We went up a short flight, not a full story, to a new level, then made a right turn and went down more stairs, then turned again and stopped. The laughter stopped mid-ha. I had to put a hand on the wall to keep from running into my guide, then wished I hadn’t; the walls were slippery, and left a soapy residue on my fingertips. “It’s confusing at first, with no windows to give you your bearings, but soon you’ll know it like I know the palm of my hand.” He winked.