Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  “Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of the hard choice but, if I may, the good, necessary choice we have to make here. In a world of trying to have it all and getting more than you bargained for, isn’t it great that God has given us the strength and the courage to say: Enough or rather slightly too much of a good thing?

  “Ideally we like the heads to talk to each other and come to their own agreement as to which is the inferior copy and superfluous, but if one party is obviously insane, violent, or moribund we will make our own judgments. God’s instrument is an extremely sharp scalpel that despite our primitive facilities here we keep sterile and in good working nick. Our spiritual sickle is of course always honed and ready. The spirit does not dull, and metal fatigue is not a problem.”

  The Major was looking at my lap. I looked down. I was gripping the manila envelope so tightly I had crumpled it. I smoothed it out on my knee. It would not do to let my fellow patients think I was conflicted.

  “We try not to look at it in the light of murder or an execution. It’s not healthy for our self-nurture to harbor images of the black hood and the rusty axe dribbling gore or gobbets of flesh spattering the faces of the Mord-lust-crazed onlookers. Mengele references, for example, are the opposite of healing. We must ask you to expunge from your vocabulary those terms so overused by the gutter press, ‘Nazi doctor,’ ‘bloodthirsty madman.’ We don’t look favorably on the words ‘fanatic’ or ‘crackpot,’ though we respect your right to formulate any opinions you like in the hallowed space of your own skulls. We understand that while a physical cleavage of a personal situation muddled in the extreme may not eliminate all traces of spiritual wrong-headedness, that nonetheless the body is the matrix of the soul, maternal connotations intended, and its purification and cruel-to-be-kind downsizing or surgically mediated simplification do have repercussions in cosmic terms, not to mention the powerful symbology of the monster welcomed back into the human fold having been relieved of the burden of unrighteousness, at one whack, excuse the expression, by the benevolence of god-mandate-waving doctor and ecstatic judge empowered by heavenly ukase and accredited by human authority in the form of a respectable medical school (though the legality of our innovative approach remains, lamentably, iffy), to cut through your spiritual confusion and set you free from yin-yang dualism and creeping Manicheanism, not to mention it’s easier than meditation and the Way of Poverty, plus more modern. It’s very eloquent of where we are right now as a society, looking for answers, headstrong and questing and itching for this and that. We very specifically felt the need for a clinic that was a clinic, if you like, of death, rather than slavish mollycoddling to life, of permanent surgical solutions rather than tedious preventive measures and cart-before-horse, symptom-not-cause approaches. Tolerance? No thanks. One way! New friends: we’d encourage you to call yourselves pre-operative singletons or pre-ops from now on, rather than twofers or ‘mushies’ or what have you.

  “Now, there’s coffee and cakes in the club room. Let’s get acquainted!”

  Amid the applause and the cries of the metal chairs, the post-ops filed out. They held their heads very high. I was not the only one who watched them go.

  “Why don’t we go grab a cuppa, and I’ll fill you in on how we do things around here?” said the Major. “Oh, here’s Mr. Nickel. He’ll be willing to take your forms to Nurse Hrdle, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Thank you very much, my dear,” said Mr. Nickel. “I would be happy to play the go-between, the Hermes, the light-footed messenger.”

  “Thanks a mil,” croaked Roosevelt.

  That night, I lay awake a long time, while the building clucked and sobbed and gobbled around me. It was very dark, and I listened to her heart beating almost in time with mine and wondered if it had always been out of synch. Once a cry rang through the pipes and rent the insubstantial webbing that had begun to spin itself around me, and I sat up from what I thought was a reverie but must have been sleep, because the room was changed, striped with violet light, and the gibbous moon goggled in the little window like a voyeur, and my hearts were pistoning in perfect synchrony.

  CUNT-ASS COCK-PIG

  When I told Blanche she could speak the language of the animals, she believed me. From then on she was their interpreter. When she told me what the vultures had said, I looked at her with irritated amazement. I could not tell her she was lying, as she was only lying my lie. I would never have admitted it, but I envied Blanche her passkey to my imagined worlds. Although I had made them up, she was the one to whom they revealed their rich vegetable life, their profusion of curious detail. I invented the ground in front of us, but Blanche walked on it.

  I was careful, still, to let her think I led the way. “Let’s go talk to Donkey-skin,” I said. “You can translate.” We settled ourselves carefully in the stinking yellow hay, avoiding wet bits. When she did her mumbling routine, Blanche would listen with her head cocked, very serious, and then tell me what Donkey-skin had said—gnomic fragments that did not sound like anything Blanche had made up on purpose.

  But Donkey-skin still didn’t say much. Mostly we did the talking, at these times not even looking up at her, but at a chink in the door, so bright it seemed like a fresh-poured rod of molten steel. My stories floated up on the warm air toward the cage creaking in the rafters. Occasionally a soft polysyllable responded: “Bitchdykecuntwhore…” It wasn’t clear how much of them she understood. Sometimes Blanche undertook to translate them into chirps and trills.

  Her skinny butt poked through the bars of the cage in little rolls like pin curls, yellow-white where the bars dug in, purple in between. When she changed position, the old lines lasted long enough to make a sort of fading, changing plaid. We watched closely, because we were hoping to catch a glimpse of her nasty bits, and we often did: a warped little mouth bunched between two crossbars. We looked at the precise line where the two lips pressed snugly together. We looked hard, as if our eyes were hungry. Unsatisfied, we kept on looking, in a sort of regretful hunt for what had made us imagine we might find satisfaction in that slit, or even for a clearer understanding of the species of hunger it was meant to satisfy, and plainly never could. You know when someone is trying to find the right word, and you think you know what it is, and you’re burning to say it for them? It was like that, only without any of us knowing the word. “Cunt,” said Donkey-skin, but the burning and the impatience remained.

  She was pitiable, but we did not pity her. Princesses were always mistreated. We were scornful of her, even. One, she was kept like a rabbit in a hutch. Two, she peed and pooed herself. We were allowed to run free and knew enough to wipe ourselves from front to back with neatly folded squares of TP, so we were her betters. When she crossed my mind at school, my skin burned cold. Princess? Princess Cooties, maybe. But in the shed we called her “Your Highness,” and when we looked up, the BB holes in the metal roof burned purple-green comets into our retinas, forming a darkling constellation that jigged around her, so she was something like a goddess. With an iota less civilization, we would have rolled in her poo. As it was, we pushed it with sticks and shuddered, uncovering its freight of husks and bundled fibers.

  Once we saw a little stained sneaker near the door and pocketed it. When we pulled it out later, it seemed to vibrate in our fingers. It was deceptively ordinary, except that for all its obvious antiquity its soles were not scuffed even a little. It even had a brand name stamped on a little square of blue rubber at the heel. We could have bought identical ones at the Dupeworths in Grady, where we did our shopping, but we were not deceived. It was a totem. We hid it under a rock at our favorite lookout point, on the high bluffs behind Too Bad, and now and then we made a pilgrimage to look at it.

  Our own real lives must have seemed as strange to her as the Maltese Ladies and Hi Jo. She sat very still when we talked about the dollhouse, the ghost keys, the Dead Animal Zoo. We learned not to mention Mama and Papa, or she would shake the cage until the beam creaked and howl imprecations, but Granny an
d Max were acceptable topics.

  When we told her that Granny’s gas station could blow half the county sky-high, she said, for the first time, something I could understand. “Even the piano?”

  Blanche and I did not look at each other. “Yes,” we said.

  “And the Coke machine?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the pumps?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the sign?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the road?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your house?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Fuckin’ shit. And my house?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I know a cunt-ass cock-pig I’d like to blow to kingdom-fucking-come. Kingdom…fucking…come! Gimme a cigarette.”

  “What?”

  “Smokes.”

  “We don’t have any.” We were breathless with incredulity.

  “Get some, rim job.” She started swinging her cage, and we ran, banging our hip on the door as we shot through.

  We stole two cigarettes from a pack Granny had left on her dresser and rolled them into one of our socks. Greatly daring, we slid a whole book of matches into the other. When we poked these things through the bars, she made noises of animal joy and lit a cigarette at once. She smoked one, then the other. The ember made a new red star among the white ones.

  “Gimme another.”

  “That’s all we got.”

  “Gimme another. Gimme another. Gimme another.”

  “We don’t have any!” Blanche cried. “Stop asking!”

  A match flared and dropped burning into the straw below her cage. It fizzled and smoked. Even as we stamped it out, another match fell. “Cut it out!”

  Fire dropped silently around us like falling stars, and we whirled and stamped.

  Blanche burbled something: doe-talk, fox-talk, squirrel-talk.

  Fire hit the back of my hand, fluttered down. “Cunt-ass bitch!” I hissed.

  The fire stopped falling. I could see her dark eyes looking at me. Then the nearly empty matchbook flipped through the bars at me.

  We brought more cigarettes and buried them in the straw with another book of matches. From then on when she asked for a cigarette, we put it in her mouth, and she stuck it through the bars, where we held the match to it. We performed these tasks reverently because cigarettes were another of the mysteries, like dirty words, that she understood and we did not.

  It was night. Mrs. Goat’s silhouette was fixed in the frame of the window. She was standing over the kitchen sink. She didn’t move.

  There was a light in the shed. Stars in the shed roof shone up at the stars shining down. Moths clubbed up around the bright holes and tried to force themselves in. Bats hurtled. The shed door was open in a blazing capital I.

  Inside, the doctor clicked his tongue over his only patient. He was a rather ordinary man who ought to eat more root vegetables and leave the rabbits alone, who should compliment his wife more often and ask her the latest barometer readings.

  “Say ahhh,” said Dr. Goat. See the coarse fur, the bony leg.

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  Person Workout with Coach Graham

  What are my workout goals for today?

  1.

  2.

  3.

  10:00 AM Head Crunch

  10:30 AM Pronoun Practise

  11:00 AM Progressive Dwindle Unilats

  11:15 AM “Good Balloon, Bad Balloon” Target Practise

  11:30 AM Personality Reduction Exercises

  12:00 PM Lunch

  1:00 PM Guest Lecture: Post-op Ruiz on “Estrategias para evitar ‘y,’” “Strategies for avoiding ‘and’” (Bilingual)

  2:00 PM Counting to One

  2:30 PM Conversational Solipsism

  3:00 PM Fortress of Solitude (advanced students only)

  3:15 PM Sad Sack

  3:30 PM Chanting

  Today’s chant:

  one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way, one way

  Did I achieve my workout goal?

  What have I learned today?

  URN OR FACES?

  I was disappointed. Our hill made a princely bomb shelter, but no luxury spa. It was not only frog-green but frog-cold and frog-wet. The Manual mildewed. My socks effloresced. I watched the clock for those few minutes (between 2:02 and 2:22) in which the sun entered my tiny skylight, and then raced to my room to hold my hand up to its faint, almost imaginary warmth. We had been taught a sequence of beats we could rap on the pipes below the hatch when we wanted to go out, but when I tried it, there was never any response. Theoretically, that meant Nurse Hrdle was in surgery, or in the powder room, or in consultation with one of the occasional legitimate patients, mostly tourists, who visited the clinic for pinkeye or diarrhea, but I suspected she was just ignoring me. In any case our schedule was much too full for sightseeing. Morning and afternoon we had Person Workout—solemn exercises performed mostly in silence. Sometimes we spoke into our Sad Sack. Sometimes we practiced Subject Positions. “I, I,” we chanted, like seamen. “I came, I saw, I sawed.” Wearing a hood over my “shortcoming,” I knocked blocks off what they had been on. If I knocked the wrong block off, I had to put on the hood. On the first day of Progressive Dwindle we were each given a loaf of white bread to squeeze into the shape of a head. Every day we were to take a bite of it until it was gone, a poetic idea, but by the third day the heads were blue with mildew, and had to be thrown out. Evenings, we had Exposition. Mr. Nickel was not always present, but when he was, he generally wore his second head and sat among the twofers. Too often, next to me.

  Nights, I fell asleep as if hit on the head by something soft but enormously heavy. Waking was like struggling out of a pismire. Often I gave up the attempt, sank back, and slept more, slept like a fossil. I was in bed with the bog lady, that old stick-in-the-mud.

  Someone pounded on my door. “Nora! Cookies in the clubroom!” I kept still. A quieter knock followed. Then footsteps, receding.

  I had thought I might find like-minded people here, if anywhere, but my hopes had died the first night, when I did the rounds with the Major.

  Luis and Porky, USA. Target: Luis.

  “Luis, left, was his father’s golden boy. Porky, right, the pariah. Father convinced Porky wasn’t his. Couldn’t be persuaded otherwise despite scientific evidence. ‘Single egg, single schmegg. God damn Triple-A man and his God damn jumper cables.’ Left all his rhino to Luis, left Porky destitute. Luis, very oppressed by guilt over this, insisted on the Divorce. When Luis gets the chop, Porky inherits after all.” Though they were third generation and purest So-Cal, Mr. Graham always greeted them with a hearty: “Que pasa, amigos?” “Uh, no entiendo, dude.” “Mexican-American,” Mr. Graham scoffed. “Add the hyphen to my list of abominations.”

  Evangeline and Bernadette, France. Target: God knows.

  The French jumeaux siamois were long and narrow, with long black hair and long bony hands generally glued together in prayer. They had long eyes with long lashes, often in disarray. Evangeline: “We want the Divorce for reasons spiritual. We are taking the veil, and”—shy whisper—“we do not wish to make of Christ un bigame.” Bernadette: “Mais, we prefer not to call it The Divorce but rather a temporary séparation, for we will be together again in eternity. We have prayed for guidance as to which of us is let go. We believe she will sprout wings from her stump and fly directly to heaven.”

  Della and Donna (familiarly, DeeDee or Double D), USA. Target: Heads or tails.

&
nbsp; DeeDee were baccarat dealers in a Reno casino and were going to flip a coin. They wore cowboy boots and cowboy hats with the brims cut off on facing sides and a huge teal T-shirt that hung from their big breasts and spandex leggings with turquoise and salmon geometric patterns. They had big turquoise rings and long orange fingernails and they were the only twofers I met who were there for philosophical reasons. D: “I’m my own person. I say, my money, my honey, my life. I gotta express my unique inner nature.” D: “I feel exactly the same.”

  Jorge y Jorge, Argentina. Target: Jorge.

  The Argentines, one a Poultry and Rabbit Inspector, one a librarian, often got into fights. They bore scars at the same spot on opposite cheeks, which Mr. Nickel told me were cigarette burns, self-inflicted. They seemed to be completely wrapped up in each other, though they bowed to the doctor when she walked by; they respected her as one respects a gun with a bullet in one chamber. “They have asked not to be told which one the doctor has chosen,” said the Major.