Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  He opened a door—“Whoops, sorry!”—then the door opposite. “Here you are, my dear. Home sweet home.”

  My room was painted the same institutional green as the halls, and contained a cot, a table, and a lamp. Faded tennis ball in one corner. There was a print of a painting of poppies tacked to the left wall at the head of the bed. The rear wall was, strictly speaking, the ceiling, an irregular curve, also green, that sloped down to meet the floor. In it was a tiny sloping window at the end of a deep recess, through which a little greenish sun shone—filtered through grass, I realized. I was inside the hill.

  “The potty’s right across the hall, and you saw our Bob”—he gave it an exaggerated French pronunciation, something between boob and bub—“coming out of the men’s shower room on our way in. The women’s is right next to it, please note that it’s reserved for post-ops in the peak hours of six AM to ten PM, so if you want to splash a little water on your temples before the evening session at five, please use the sink in the little girls’ room. Someone will come by to escort you to Exposition at quarter to. Dinner après. Before then, could you cast a preliminary eye upon the contents of the manila envelope you’ll find on your pillow? Besides required paperwork, the packet includes examples of personal statements from previous…clients…to get the juices flowing. Take all the time you need; you can drop off the paperwork with Nurse Girdle if you’re eager to get things moving, but if you need more time, just ask. As a matter of course the packet contains two copies of the form, one for each of you. Normally”—he gave Blanche a fond glance—“we ask you to respect each other’s privacy and look away while your twin is filling in her copy, but in this case I don’t believe that applies, am I right? Please note that if you are only returning one copy, you need to check the fruitcake box, sorry, I mean the Non Compos Mentis box.” He beamed at me, then shook himself all over, at which Roosevelt mumbled what sounded like “Nurse Fertile.”

  “Tsk! Naughty boy!” said Mr. Nickel, and bopped him lightly.

  “Non compos mentis,” Roosevelt said, and was quiet.

  “Brrr! What a feeling, what a day. Dear Nora, what can I say. I’m so awfully, what is it the kids say, I’m so awfully stoked to see you here. I feel personally responsible for you, and, call me silly, I was beginning to worry. But in my heart I knew we’d see each other again, somewhere, somehow.” He winked and backed out the door.

  I sat for a long time, listening to a sullen, barely audible rumble, with intermittent gulping sounds, that was coming from somewhere below me. The traffic sounds could not be heard from here. I felt swallowed. Gradually my trembling subsided. A tiny rhomboid of sunlight moved slowly up the side of the windowsill, then slid swiftly off it onto the embrasure, where it flickered out. The minute it vanished, I missed it.

  I turned on the lamp. Then I opened the manila envelope and removed a copy of the form.

  Please refer now to the first page of this memoir.

  I did not allow myself to hesitate. I filled out the form. I checked “Non Compos Mentis,” aka the fruitcake box, and I signed my name. At the bottom of the page there was a space for a personal statement.

  Statement? I would have to write a book. So I left it blank.

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  Sample Testimonials

  “I am the recto of a heterosexual twofer male in good health. It has long been a fantasy of mine to cut my own head off. My twin was reluctant but has finally consented to fulfill my deep and earnest wishes. When I was a boy we were sequestered for our protection from singleton society. Our parents felt we would be mocked and wanted to protect us as long as possible from a cruel awakening. We had a twofer nurse, Abby and Bella. Our parents pushed our meals through little windows. We saw only their reaching hands and kindly faces. When we were permitted out they wore rough handmade second heads Velcro’d onto their shoulders. My mother had sewn them from gunny sacks and my father had painted happy faces on them. We were convinced by them and found their smiles even warmer and more comforting than our parents’ own smiles. In short we were happy in our country home with its deep plush lawns so green it hurt your teeth to look at them. The blades of grass squeaked together when you trod on them. We were fortunate and wanted for nothing. The tire swing hung so low it brushed the erect tips of the grass. We felt heavy and somnolent. Once I saw a snake, but it disappeared into the grass. One day a car blew a tire outside our estate and ran off the road. We looked down at it from an eminence. It was an inferior make of car. A man emerged. He had only one head on his shoulders and we believed that his second head had been cut off by the accident. We ejaculated spontaneously! The sudden emptiness of the man’s shoulder carriage was electrifying. Since then I have only been able to reach orgasm by picturing in detail a surgical decapitation, a neck stump, the empty place above such a stump, or other variations on this theme. It has become an obsession. I am not sick; my brother Eugene knows I am sincere and though his religious convictions prevent his sharing this passion he is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, or rather the penultimate sacrifice, mine being the ultimate: my head! I do not see it as a sacrifice, however. It would fulfill my wildest dreams—and, I hope, someone else’s as well, for I have confided to my twin my dream that there may be some Lady out there who is excited by the idea of decapitation and would like to see and, only with Eugene’s full consent, touch my stump after I am removed. I have advised Eugene as well that while this is not my personal cup of tea, I would be very pleased if anyone would like to buy my remains to make a shrunken head or other keepsake, for a reasonable fee that would help defray the costs of surgery.”

  “I am healthy, sane, sober, and in anguish. I have considered suicide, but would not drag my twin into my own hell. I view this operation, in which I shall leave my sister in sole possession of our mortal frame, as the only solution. It will be a blessed release.

  I think I was just three when I first realized I had a “self.” I had just picked up a piece of blue beach glass that I found extraordinarily beautiful. As I turned it over in my hands, I became aware of myself looking. What was myself ? It seemed to be a tiny, but extremely sensitive point, almost a wound. At the same time, I became aware that there was another self somehow adjoined to, almost inside me—a self that, at that moment, was pitching the beach glass into the sea.

  I do not mean to imply that this innocent deed turned me against my twin. It was the discovery of her existence that so baffled and alarmed me. I felt very keenly that I was one, and yet my own senses informed me I was two.

  As I grew older, my misery deepened. At school and on the street we drew our share of abuse for being different, but kindness hurt me just as much, since it issued from the false assumption that I was one part of a we. There was nobody who recognized my true nature. Even my twin, who feared solitude as much as I craved it, could not understand my need to be alone.

  I recognize that even this self that cries “I am” was forged in a double fire. When I looked at myself, that vivid point of awareness, who was that looking? To separate I from myself is already to twin myself again. There is for me no surgical solution: without my twin, I would be a twin still. The same holds for my sister. Happy girl, she can keep herself company, while I can only split and split and split again, seeking a self so infinitesimal it cannot be divided. I believe my dream of one is an idea only two can have—a fiction. Deprived of hope, I ask only for an end to despair.”

  THE WHITE SNAKE

  We kept going back to the shed. It soothed a part of us that chafed. What did school mean, compared to that universe in there? It was enough just to stand inside the door and hear the creak of the chain to feel that stories could come true, at least the terrible ones. Sometimes Blanche tried to make conversation, bringing up things I had told her about Donkey-skin, as casually as if they were fact—“That time you almost got away while your father was kidnapped by Calamity Jane and left for dead in Doom Town.” Donkey-skin would seem to listen, then drown us out with c
usses.

  We didn’t always get to see her. Sometimes the shed door was padlocked. Once Dr. Goat’s car was pulled up right in front of it, instead of behind the house in the turn-around, and we were afraid to go near it. A couple of times the door was cracked open, but we heard the baaa of a goat inside or saw a light or even just imagined we saw one, and took off and ran to the Dead Animal Zoo that was another home to us. Donkey-skin didn’t say much that we could understand, just the swear words and a rhythmic monotonous mumbling that was like a kind of singing without words. Unless it was a different language, a language nobody knew but her.

  “And Dr. Goat,” said Blanche. “He talks to her.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “Let’s find out his secret.”

  We peeped in windows. Mrs. Goat puttered around, right under our noses, but she didn’t notice us, she kept her eyes on her potholders.

  Parakeet silently opened its beak to show the little eraser of its tongue.

  One day we took a flashlight along and stayed to dinner, their dinner. Dr.Goat sat at the table. Mrs. Goat wouldn’t eat with him, we knew; we’d seen. If she even looked at him, he started up from his chair at her. He was joking, but she didn’t think it was funny. There was the domed dish on the table. He lifted the lid off, frowning, and steam came out.

  The white snake lay like a heavy hank of soft rope on his plate, glistening, pearly. Dr. Goat pressed the tines of his fork into the skin until they popped through. Three tiny squirts, and the snake deflated, fractionally. With a small serrated knife he sawed off the nub and pushed it aside. The cut end was a flat round of marbled pink. He unscrewed a jar of mustard. I imagined I could hear the tinny ringing of the metal lid on the glass jar. He sawed off a coin and speared it, and with the pointed tip of the knife dipped it into the jar, brought out a precise neat triangular mound of yellow, and painted the coin gold with it. He placed it in his mouth mustard side down, and as he chewed, he raised his eyes mildly toward the window.

  We scrambled away, our hearts hammering.

  “Did he see us?”

  “He looked right at us!”

  We ran in the blue almost-dark as far as the road, unmindful of rattlesnakes, but when we got to the road we clicked on the flashlight and shone it in a neat circle on the road before our feet.

  “Do you know why he looked up?” I said after a minute. “The bird told him we were watching.”

  “How did the bird know?”

  “Animals know! That’s not the question, anyway.”

  We crunched on. A bat flashed through our beam of light, twisting inches from the ground, and following its path we saw its black shape skirl up into the indigo sky, reel, and fall away.

  “What is the question, then?” she said.

  “The question is, how did he understand what the bird told him?”

  “OK, how?”

  “I’ll tell you how: he ate the white snake. Don’t you remember that story? If you eat the white snake, you can understand the language of the animals. And I’ll tell you something else, that’s how he talks to Donkey-skin. She only speaks animal language. That’s why Mrs. Goat doesn’t talk to her. She wouldn’t understand.”

  Blanche thought for a minute. “So if we ate the snake, we could talk to Donkey-skin too?”

  The next day, after making sure Dr. Goat’s truck was gone, we went up to the front door. Blanche was afraid to knock, and I had to force our hand against the door.

  Mrs. Goat opened the door.

  I said, “Ma’am, do you have an aspirin?” while at the same moment Blanche said, “Do you have a Band-Aid?”

  I frowned. “She has a headache,” I said, as “She hurt herself,” said Blanche.

  Mrs. Goat’s face moved strangely, and the sheep’s eyes goggled for a second behind her glasses.

  “Oh, dear. Are you sure?”

  We nodded. I was already looking past her at the kitchen counter, because there, unceremoniously swathed in plastic wrap, which clung to it here and there, was what was left of the white snake.

  Mrs. Goat’s big shirtfront shook, but without saying another thing she shuffled off. I noticed how her heels slid off the bare deflocked flats of her scuffs onto the linoleum, and it gave me an unpleasant cold shock in my own heels.

  We went straight to the snake. I stuck my hand in the bag. The snake was cold, and a weird juice seeped from it and some of this ran out of a fold of the bag and onto my feet and seethed between my toes. Hurry, said Blanche. I stuck the tip of the snake in her mouth, and she nipped off the end, and we ran.

  We looked back from the crest of the hill. Mrs. Goat was standing in the doorway, a glass in her hand, watching us run.

  We made it to the zoo.

  “Hand it over then.” We were squatting next to the cow, breathing.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “We’ll split it, dummy,” I said. “Give it.”

  “I swallowed it,” she said.

  “Blanche!”

  “I couldn’t help it!”

  I glared at her.

  “I’m sorry! I could—what if I translate for you? I’ll be the interpreter. Nora?”

  If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

  THE DIVORCE

  I was awakened by a knock. It was the Major who came to fetch me. Of course I had not met him yet. He waggled his unnaturally orange mustachios at me with a practiced move of his upper lip. He wore a vaguely military cap. His other half was turbaned to below the cheekbones, so that only the tip of his nose and below could be seen, and did not speak, though the glistening red mouth (no mustachios there) was moving, mumbling something rhythmic I could not make out, mantras possibly. Readying himself, then, for the axe. Or he was gaga.

  “Welcome!” said the Major, in fruitiest Brit. “Oh no, don’t give that to me, I’m just a fellow sufferer. Those go to Head Nurse Hrdle. You can bring them along. She rarely attends the talks, but Mr. Nickel can take them to her.” He held the door for me, then strode down the hall.

  I hurried after him. “Is Dr. Ozka speaking?” I ventured.

  “Good lord, no! You won’t see much of her until your number comes up. Until then it’s strictly Mr. Graham. Mr. Graham is her—what is it?—Expositor. He gives the evening address.” He paused outside a double door, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s a lot of hooey, by and large. I’m aligning myself with these clowns for purely strategic reasons. Their commitment is twenty-four/seven and whole-hog. Mine’s strictly on the clock, not that I’m paid for this, but I will be insofar as if I do x, they do y, namely fulfil my dream for me, which by my reckoning they will eventually if not sooner. Sure they’re a screw loose, off the record of course, but I think I can use them to, as they say, ‘actuate my self-potential,’ and that’s what matters, eh?” He winked excessively.

  I followed him through the door into a large room. Twenty or thirty twofers occupied several rows of folding chairs facing a podium. In the front row were a few singletons, including French Bob, some of them heavily bandaged. Those who were not seemed to thrust the still red and sore remainders up and out like bold new genitalia. My eyes flew to the emptied air above them, and my knees melted. I oozed onto a seat. An even number of heads swiveled to look at me. (The post-ops did not look.) Some of them nodded and smiled knowingly. I did not see Mr. Nickel. To fill space I asked the Major, “How long is it before we actually go into surgery?”

  “Bite your tongue!” he hissed, glaring. “We call it the Divorce.” I made a conciliatory gesture. He relented. “Well, it depends. They won’t do it until they know we’re ready. It happens sometimes that somebody chickens out when they get into the operating room, or the twin bound for the bin decides to make a break for it, and for this reason as well as doctrinal reasons they require the candidates to sit in assembly and suffer the exhortations of our friend up there until they’re sure of them.”

  “Shh!” said the twofer in front of us, turning around. “It’s starting.”


  A blond singleton in a snug turtleneck that revealed no sign of a stump or indeed any other cavil in his sleek symmetry had appeared at the podium. “Hello, old friends and new,” he said, solemnly inclining his head in our direction. There was a chorus of greetings, and once again the paired heads turned and the singletons did not. I noticed, belatedly, that among the latter some were offset right, some left, and once again I felt my face burn and my bones flux and slide. “I would ask you to extend your usual warm welcome to the newest members of our community. Nora and Blanche, I think you will find that we are all ready to help and answer questions. Aren’t we, friends? We are. We ask only that you do not disturb Madame Ozka, whose work understandably demands a high level of concentration and necessary downtime. Come instead to me or to one of your comrades on the journey, all of whom will be more than happy to share their wisdom. Please extend yourselves in your turn to those still newer guests who come after you.” His accent was closer to mine than the Major’s, but his dental consonants betrayed a different native tongue, maybe Dutch.

  “Meals are at regular hours, as posted. Regrettably we cannot adjust to dietary requirements of a non-life-threatening nature. There is a lounge with some limited reading materials, also a phone and a computer, although we ask that you do not communicate with outside friends and family. In emergencies special arrangements may be made, but we do ask that you go through us first, since with the best intentions in the world you may inadvertently jeopardize our privacy and thereby our continued existence. For this reason you should know that all e-mails sent from the office computer are read by myself before being forwarded to their destinations and that the phone has no outside line and is intended solely for communicating amongst yourselves. Please feel free to enjoy what we like to call our social club, where you are invited to partake of alcohol, dancing, or whatever impromptu performances gifted members of our group may be moved to stage for the enjoyment of others. Karaoke is Thursday nights, and a sign-up sheet is posted. We have a small gym and a sauna. We do ask you to be considerate, as facilities are limited. Please give priority to our post-operative patients, and you will be grateful when your turn comes, as it will, thanks to Dr. Ozka’s generosity and vision and the generosity and vision, also, of the evolved persons unnamed that have made this so wonderfully possible with their sponsorship and protection.