Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  The Two Times Editorial

  “Justice Undone”

  As a glance over today’s headlines confirms, the problem of justice burlesqued by Mark Twain is still a problem today. (Pudd’nhead Wilson: “‘Are you sure—and please remember you are on oath—are you perfectly sure you saw both of them kick him, or only one? Now be careful.’ A bewildered look began to spread itself over the witness’s face.”) His judge’s statement, “We cannot convict both, for only one is guilty. We cannot acquit both, for only one is innocent,” remains the most succinct formulation of the problem. Everyone remembers the laconic testimony of the cop who fingered the Laidhole brothers for the “Miniature Golf Murders” back in the seventies, but threw up his hands at picking the culprit: “Same fingerprints, judge.” Neither confessed, both were set free. What else could a just state do?

  Even when the state knows whodunnit, it is difficult to come up with a punishment that targets only the guilty party. Early in the twofer boom, many states had enthusiastic recourse to the notorious MSCC or “mobile solitary confinement cell” (known to prisoners as “The Iron Mask”) that locks over the guilty one of a pair, but these are not much used anymore, since the prisoner, terrified and half-deranged from suffering long deprivation of the use of those senses as have their seat in the head, often seizes control of their body, and runs amok, as in the famous case in Basket, Utah.

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  EXPOSITION

  Porky reappeared, in bandages. We watched him strut up to the post-op row. “He won’t be calling for the Sad Sack now,” said the Major, envious. “He’s won the jackpot. You watch, he won’t give us the time of day.”

  Jirtka, too, came back, still big, but softer now. She looked more like a real singleton than any of the other post-ops, but something was wrong. She moved like a cloud, not a giant. Her eyes were often red; her hands trembled. “In the idiom of those who pump iron,” Mr. Graham said, “‘no pain, no gain!’”

  Shortly thereafter, the Major disappeared. When he rejoined us, paler and thinner, the turbaned goiter was conspicuously absent. He now affected a succession of filmy scarves (a color for each day of the week: pistachio, raspberry, cream, blueberry, lemon, lavender, cherry) knotted over his stump, which by very particular request, as I happened to know, had not been cut flush but jutted several inches from his dashing open collars, in such a way that its contours could be faintly made out through the sheer fabric.

  “Just look at that gorgeous pink thing. Would you squuzzle that puppy on the back of my hand, just once?” “Shh, the Expositor’s coming.” Louder: “Oh, darling, you’re so self-identical, you’re positively monadic! Way to activate your full human potential! Life sure is an extraordinary gift, and each of us has a unique and special destiny!”

  One morning at breakfast Mr. Nickel was reading an English paper, several days old and grease-stained from other breakfasts. On the front page was a prominent photo captioned, “Activist straps self to head slated for removal.” The activist was an older woman, bare-shouldered under a vest covered with political buttons. She was roped to a pretty pair of blondes, their eyes hidden behind two black rectangles. Without the rope and the rectangles she would have looked like a mother with her daughters. In fact, she would have looked like…Mama?

  Mr. Nickel was eyeing me over the paper. He folded it deliberately, front page in, and tucked it under his arm, smiling fondly and, I thought, reprovingly at me. Mr. Nickel wore a ring bearing a knob of amber with an insect inside it. I felt like that insect.

  Mr. Graham, exhortatory: “The first person pronoun is your birthright. You’ve been robbed! Who robbed you?”

  Dramatic pause. Some muttering.

  “Nurse Hrdle!” yelled Sparky. Laughter.

  Mr. Graham quelled the crowd with his cold blue eye. “You might say your parents’ bad genes, or your various government’s reckless tampering with the deep structures of matter, but the real culprit is bad grammar. What is a twofer but a run-on sentence? The word ‘and’ has destroyed more lives than VD. Actually, it is a venereal disease, a disease of improper sharing.” Mr. Graham produced a handkerchief and dabbed his wet lips. “I…hate… indefinition—personal, moral, philosophical, or grammatical. The true individual is solitary, unique, and pure. I am solitary, unique, and pure”—he tensed his pecs before he pounded them—“and you can be too. Every day the scalpel does not flash is a day of victory for the swarm. My dream”—his eyes swept the assembly—“and of course Dr. O’s: we line up all those mushies living in Sin Francisco and other hives of the puerile plural and purify them. Right down to the neck bone!”

  I found myself on my feet. “That’s completely inappropriate!”

  “Oo-ops, I smell tolerance! Are you feeling divided, my dears?” He zuzzed the plural, and everyone laughed. “Now, let them speak.” More laughter.

  “I personally have chosen the first person, but I certainly don’t think that choice should have been dictated to me. It might not be right for everyone.”

  “Ah, a relativist. The yin and the yang, eh? Let’s all do the Venn mudra.” He tilted his head in mockery as with the thumb and index fingers of both hands he formed two overlapping circles, baby fingers crooked.

  “Do you really think you can make an army of monadists? Cut off the dissident half, get the remainder to think and talk exactly alike? How is that solitary, unique, and pure? Isn’t that ‘subsuming differences in a larger whole’? I smell Togetherist.” Donna was tugging at my shirt. I slapped her hand away, and my voice rose. “Besides, you’re fucking crazy if you think this place is a monastery of your pure grammar. Monastery of lip service, maybe. Look around you! Half the twofers in this room are stump worshippers or extreme sadomasochists! The rest just fucking hate their other half and are ready to salute any flag that sanctions murder!”

  “And which are you?” he said, his face ugly.

  “Who are you anyway? Who made you Expositor? What is an Expositor? How do we know you speak for Dr. Ozka? We don’t know a thing about her! Maybe she’s a psychopath. Maybe some twofer hurt her feelings and she’s on a personal vendetta! What difference does it make? Cut the crap and give us what we’re here for!”

  Donna finally yanked so hard I fell back into my chair.

  After Exposition, I apologized to Mr. Graham. Then I went to my room, collected my bag, and walked straight to the utilities closet. When I approached the gate at the bottom of the knoll, I half expected to bloody my nose on a glass wall, but I passed right through. I turned two corners and wondered if I would ever find my way back to the clinic. I wondered if I would even try.

  The city was uniformly grey. The air had a taint. Even the trees were dirty. There was none of the comfortable din of ribaldry, illegal commerce, and madness I knew from home. People forced into proximity to one another stared at the ground. I sat for a while in a chilly, barren park, reading a local paper I found on the bench. It didn’t feel real. The paper was too thin, too smooth, too limp; the pages did not rustle when they were turned, but weakly subsided, perhaps because they were damp with some medium in the ink with which they were impregnated, and which came off in greasy engine-oil streaks on our hands and smelled like chemistry. The money too was wrong, the bills the wrong size; the coins weighed too little and shaken together made a dull rattle, not a jingle. It was toy money. It was a toy city, but not a very fun toy. Everything kept still, in a frozen, resentful way, as if trying not to breathe the blue air. Those objects that creaked into motion—a baby carriage with tiny metal wheels, an old bike, a battered metal dustpan at the end of a stick, scraping along the cobblestones behind a broom that had lost so many straws it was more like a club—called out in pain to one another across the empty streets.

  I spotted an Internet café and looked around quickly before I went in. Amid a slew of junk mail were two bona fide letters.

  How’s my favorite southpaw? I b
et you didn’t think “Relational Couture” would ever amount to anything. Guess again, sucker!!! I started out making conjoined coats for dogs and their owners, but the cleaning bills fucked me. Plus when you went into stores you had to leave your designer coat tied to a parking meter. But now, I’m knitting these sweaters with extra sleeves and necks, they accommodate two to four people. I’m selling these two-party T-shirts…Community Development just awarded me a grant to design a lightweight but warm windbreaker for a crowd of 15 to 35 people. Audrey actually called me a “qualified success”!!! I made her a sweater she wears even when she’s by herself, the extra sleeves just hanging, which is fine. I’m calling the line NB, which everyone thinks is for Nota Bene, but it’s really because, you know, it was you and Blanche who first started me wondering what it was like to have company all the time. Even under your clothes.

  Later gator, Trey

  No

  After you left a Hysteria Harness switched on all by itself and started whizzing around the living room. I had to throw a blanket over it to stop it.

  Lo

  That was all? Was that supposed to have a double meaning? Did I want it to? My throat ached, and I squeaked my thanks to the man who took my couple of coins. I strode fast and pretended I was going somewhere. I had put on a bulky coat, and with the hood up I felt anonymous—an odd figure still, but not the odd figure I really was. Once I had the feeling I was being followed, and I turned and walked the other way for a block, looking closely at everyone I passed: an American boy with a beard and a backpack, a silver-haired man with an unnaturally even tan and a gold watch, and one or two others I have forgotten, but no one seemed to pay me any special attention, and the feeling did not return. Not, at least, until I looked up at the sound of a whistle and saw my taxi driver jouncing along beside me over the cobblestones, elbow poking out of the window of the cab, one hand lazily draped over the wheel.

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  Introducing a new line of romantic fiction for the conjoined twin:

  à Deux

  Romance for the two of you.

  Double Dare

  Bronwyn and Gennifer Thorne

  Joyce and Regina were as different as night and day. Joyce was fragile as a lily, Regina a luscious cactus rose. They fought like wildcats over most things, but on one point they agreed: they both desired Jude Rainfeather, the handsome half-Apache horse-wrangler whose pride was fiercer than the Nevada sun. Jude never threw a glance in their direction, but underneath his flinty exterior raged a torrent of desire for the contrary beauties. When outlaws set fire to their uncle’s ranch, he pulled the pampered pair onto his stallion and swept them away to his own rough bed. After a night of unbridled passion, he felt an unfamiliar sensation stirring in his breast. Could it be love? And with a dark secret smoldering in his past, could he risk letting a woman—or women—into his heart?

  THE LIBRARIAN’S ASSISTANT

  Blanche’s new friends avoided Chris Marchpane, so she did too, averting her eyes with her new see-no-evil. So I sought him out to spite her. “Let’s sit with Rebecca,” said Blanche, so I took our lunch to the bench where Chris sat by himself, and he and I swapped cookies that looked and tasted just like cookies but were the coin of Sadness, dark and foully sweet. I bumped her into him by the lockers, forcing her forehead against his chest in front of everyone, as she went white with decency. If I could not be cured of cooties, I would spread them, suck them, soak them up.

  Now I had another reason to go to the library. I would sleek in slow enough to raise Chris Marchpane’s eyes. He’d push his shelving cart around after us. Around and around, until I got bored with what didn’t happen and left.

  One day, waiting for Max to pick us up, we wandered around the back of the library and sat down on a scalding metal step. I picked up a stubbed-out cigarette and pretended to smoke it, squinting at my hand as I knocked off a nonexistent ash. The door shrieked, the stairs shook, and we jumped up. Chris Marchpane thumped past us with a metal trashcan and shook a flurry of dancing pages into the Dumpster. On the way back he stopped, put down the trashcan, fumbled in his shorts, and brought out a pink cigarette lighter. He thumbed it a few times before it sparked. I noticed his torn cuticles.

  I couldn’t get the cigarette to light. I had never actually smoked one. He took it from me and lit it in his own mouth.

  He held out the cigarette. “You don’t smoke,” said worried Blanche.

  I backed up against the wall and pulled aside the crotch of my stretchy shorts, exposing the blue flowerets on my underwear. Chris Marchpane dropped the cigarette and squatted. He slid a finger under the elastic. Surprise arced through my stomach. I felt his fingernail jab me and thought about his ragged cuticles and watched his eyes. The pupil would wander slightly and then twitch back, always to the same spot: what Tiffany would call “my oyster, my shyster, my cloister, my fever blister” in an expansive mood, “my cut peach” in an arcadian, “my loophole” in a cryptic, “my hellhole” in a sacrilegious one, but most often “my cunt” or “my tight cunt,” because nothing gets the job done like the direct approach. Donkey-skin had taught me that word, and that’s what I thought now: Cunt, as he moved his head and the sun fell directly on it. I felt myself shrink, then loosen. I felt Chris Marchpane’s finger part fold from fold and locate a passage I hadn’t found for myself yet and come smoothly up it. His mouth was a little open. His hand moved, and we swayed with it. I was a finger puppet. Then the librarian called and he unplugged, breaking the vacuum with a sudden suck, and ran inside, carrying the trashcan in front of him. I found the cigarette and stubbed it out, then pocketed it for Donkey-skin.

  We passed an ordinary week. Blanche and I did not talk about Chris Marchpane. Next time I walked straight to the shelf of new arrivals, grabbed one at random, and brought it up to the desk. (It was a slim book from a regional press with a droll sketch on the cover—a strangely proportioned burro cocking its head at a sunflower.) The book was stamped, smacked shut, and slid back fast enough for me to catch, from the glass box between the two sets of doors, the back of our departing car swinging out around the turn. We pushed open the front door and went out. The heat socked me in the stomach.

  I walked quickly toward the rear of the building. Blanche was dragging her feet, and I tripped over the curb at the end of the parking lot and landed hard on one hand. I picked a thorn out of the base of my thumb and coaxed from the puncture a single red tear I licked up. Then I clanked up the metal stairs and pressed myself against the door, peering through the grid in the reinforced glass. The door scorched my knees, hips, elbows. I saw a shadow swimming up to the glass, turned away, and started down the stairs, trailing my hand along the rail. I heard the door open.

  I led him behind the Dumpster without looking back. There I turned, backed up, stumbled on a clump of weeds, sat down. Then I lay back on the asphalt and spread my legs, pulling my panties aside. Chris got down on his knees and grappled with his zipper.

  Then he fell on top of me. His hands were fumbling between us, arranging things. I felt something dry and smooth poking against my thigh, sliding off, and poking again. Blanche made a fierce attempt to roll out from under him. I laughed spitefully and raised my knees up, against her resistance, and pulled Chris Marchpane into a better place.

  His neck reddened and strained above me. Then he dropped his head between ours and collapsed. I lay under him, staring up at the sky, which was swarming everywhere with luminous specks, like pond water under a microscope, absolutely fabulous with cooties. There was a slithering and collapsing somewhere below. It felt like I had wet my pants. After a while, Chris heaved himself up on one elbow. I craned my neck to look at him, and got an unpleasant surprise: he was kissing Blanche, puckering his mouth like a kid. And she was letting him.

  I threw him off me with a heave of my hips, and he struck the Dumpster with his head, kaboom. He sat up, knees bent, and hiccupped with sobs, the wet pinkie wrinkling out of his fly pulsing with his breaths. “S
top it, please stop it,” said Blanche. “Nora, make him stop!”

  I hissed at her. “Shut up, you stupid clut—slut—whore!”

  “What? What did I do?” She shuddered into tears.

  “What a couple of crybabies!”

  “Why are you so awful?”

  Because I had hoped to humiliate her, and had failed. And because humiliating her was only a front. I had wanted him—sad Chris, angel Chris—for myself.

  “You made me fuck the mutant. Do you think I wanted to do that? That’s…abuse, Blanche. That’s practically rape.”

  Her dismay was gratifying, but when she apologized, I was angry again. What did it mean to say sorry? It meant, I have the power to hurt you. No!

  I couldn’t look at the library book we finally took home. It was a collection of cowboy songs, and Blanche got Granny to pick out the melodies on the piano so she could learn them. Every time she wailed, “Ghost riders in the sky,” I felt warm asphalt against my ass, saw Chris Marchpane’s face frowning down.

  PRE-OP

  Reader, I fucked him.

  So the evidence would suggest, anyway. I was in an unfamiliar bed, naked except for something torqued around my waist that turned out to be my bra, and with an unclutched feeling between my legs. I did not know where I was. I did not remember getting out of the taxi, though I remembered getting in. I looked sideways at Blanche, who wore what appeared to be a smile.

  I hit her, using her own right hand. It was clumsily done and lacked power, like a blow struck in a dream. Her head knocked against me with almost as much force as my blow. I felt the impact from both sides. My nose prickled and my eyes filled.