Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and slumped there, half-enjoying the fullness and the brimming. Then I heard kitchen sounds close at hand. I got up to look for my clothes. They were strewn around the room, and I put them on one piece at a time as I found them, hopping and hunched, uncomfortably aware of my swinging breasts and the chill between my legs.

  I straightened and glimpsed in the mirror the red handprint on Blanche’s cheek. I felt—why not?—guilty. People are not logical, we can sprinkle poison in our garden, and still step over the snail we meet on the path. But guilt did not temper my anger. If anything, it stoked it. I went into the kitchen. When I saw him, though, I forgot what I was going to say. His shoulder blades moving under a thin T-shirt to which a few flakes of an ancient logo clung, the freckles on his bent neck, made me feel something like shyness. But then I felt myself unseal and seep.

  Donkey-skin’s words were still, sometimes, the only words I needed.

  He whipped round and gaped.

  “How dare you!” I said. “I had blacked out. I wasn’t myself. How could you sleep with someone in that state? That’s practically necrophilia. And you just stand there making coffee, as if—you probably only fixed one cup!”

  He started to say something, but I checked him with a look. I pulled my coat on with a whirling and flapping that went on a bit too long when my hand got lost in the soft labyrinth of the sleeve, and then I backhanded the cup he now held out toward me as if to offer me precisely this opportunity. The coffee leapt like a liquid animal across the table, and I left.

  Nurse Hrdle met me with a stern face, and made a phone call before raising the carpet for me. Mr. Nickel was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. I readied some apologetic phrases, but instead of the diatribe I expected, he handed me an envelope. I opened it, wondering greatly.

  I was invited to see Dr. Ozka.

  Mr. Nickel had been jiggling with excitement while I read, and now he yanked at my arm. “Come on, come on! You’ve just got time to get cleaned up. Put on a nice blouse, she’s a little old-fashioned.”

  “What…What should I say?” I was bewildered. Why was this happening now?

  “Tell her you seek spiritual unity. Say you feel ripped in half by irreconcilable urges, say you believe you were born one but your original unity has had the proverbial monkey wrench stuck in it. Say you dream of a single, pulsating sphere humming in harmony with other, nearby spheres and an inexpressible feeling of well-being fills your soul. Then a jagged stroke of lightning splits the original sphere and the universe fills with discord and the sad cheeping of birds and children and all the neighboring spheres hurtle away in all directions and everything is loss, loss, anguish and loss!”

  Twenty minutes later Mr. Nickel sped me up the stairs with a gratuitous pat on the bottom and Nurse Hrdle directed me through the big wooden door off the foyer into a low-ceilinged waiting room with peeling walls and the inevitable tang of mildew on the air. I took note of an origami swan composed of hundreds of pieces of paper. Moose antlers mounted on plastic. Terminologia Medica Polyglotta. The Merck Index, seventh edition. Abdominal and Genito-Urinary Injuries, 1971. (Troubling that the reference books were all decades old.) Ein Jagerparadis. Titles in Cyrillic. A little geisha in a glass box. A papier-mâché model of St. Petersburg’s onion-domed Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood. A bulletin board on which a profusion of flyers gently billowed in mysterious air currents.

  The door opened, and Dr. Ozka came in, carrying a manila folder. “Am I speaking to Blanche or Nora?” she said.

  “Nora,” I said. Hadn’t she even read my file?

  The door of her office crunched shut behind me, and I stood in the waiting room beside the origami swan. I was in a state of high confusion. I scratched an itch on the saddle between our necks with the defanged tip of a ballpoint pen. Then I pulled a pink page off its pin, turned it over against the windowsill, and wrote down everything I could remember about Dr. Ozka: the out-of-date glasses, the up-to-date lipstick, the tiny rhinestone brooch in the shape of a camera that she wore in her slightly too frilly blouse. I wrote, Dr. Goat is a bony, lanky woman with a narrow forehead and strange, almost yellow eyes. There is something wrong with the pupils. She stands on her hind legs and adjusts her glasses with a weird two-fingered gesture while she holds an X-ray up to the light. Then she lets the glasses drop on their beaded string. They bounce on her narrow, protuberant chest, over which her lab coat is buttoned tight.

  Then I crossed everything out, making each word unreadable by writing a succession of other words on top of it. Then, for good measure, I threw the page away.

  That night I went to the club room for the first time. The post-ops strutted around, heads high, stumps jutting. I saw the Major. Today he wore a raspberry-colored scarf around his stump. He had hooked up with a vaguely attractive post-op with a limp.

  I caught a glimpse of Mr. Nickel coming toward me. I ducked into the post-op ladies’ room. A post-op was leaning into the mirror, platinum hair sweeping smooth sepia shoulders, applying a coat of cherry lip gloss, first to her already painted lips, then to the top of her stump.

  “Want some?” she said, then saw me. “Oh.” Paying no more attention to me, she took out a small compact and a brush and began to accent the rise of the stump with shading.

  “Rubia?”

  Her brush stopped for a moment. Then she went on daubing. “Morena. I dyed my hair.”

  “But I thought you were so—”

  “Together?” she drawled. “Well, surprise, surprise.” She drew her lips back, scraped a chip of red off a canine with a long nail. “Rubia wanted to be a scenester, I wanted the absolute. A seizure of brunette, without reference to its negative. Brunette not because blonde, but just brunette, and then, if possible, brunetter. I drew the short straw. Any suggestion that I peeked will be referred to my cousin, Chuco Charlie. Questions?”

  “But you’re blond.”

  An older woman came out of the stall adjusting a frilly cap over her stump. “Honey, there’s a twofer bathroom down the hall. You might feel more comfortable there,” she said firmly, looking at Blanche. I got out of there.

  “There you are!” said the Major. “Want a drink?” He leaned toward me, his arm draped heavily over his lady’s shoulders, drumming his fingers possessively on her stump.

  Della and Donna had brought a book that determined what animal you were, spiritually. Confusingly, it turned out everyone was a combination. “Della is a shrew weasel zebra,” Donna said enthusiastically. “What’s crazy is, I’m a beaver spider antelope!”

  I burrowed toward the snack table. “There’s some shrimp cocktail and crudités left,” Mr. Nickel said, putting his arm through mine. “Also some of these English munchables that taste like musty balls. Pardon my French. Oh for some Pringles!”

  “What kind of a pickup line is ‘Are you a boy or a girl or both’?” I heard.

  “I don’t mean to be crude, but since I came here my doody is more buoyant. Has anyone had a similar experience?”

  Someone pushed past me. “I need to feed my insatiable prairie dog lizard monkey appetite.”

  “I listened obsessively to this Burl Ives record growing up. One song asked the question, ‘What kind of an animal are you?’”

  “Of course I said ‘D, none of the above.’”

  “It just spins around and around and won’t go down.”

  “The Major is a hyena turtle owl.”

  “Can I be three cocktail shrimps and a baby carrot?”

  “I mean, do we really have the option of not believing in the self ?”

  “And it triumphantly ends, ‘I’m your shadow I’m no animal at all!’ Which I think kind of dodges the issue.”

  “Va-va-voom!” declared Mr. Nickel. A woman with an undistinguished body had begun an above-the-neck striptease, baring an extraordinarily beautiful face, and finally, with many taunting twitches, gathered away the veil from an unusually long stump, around which a garter was fastened. There was a collect
ive intake of breath as she slid one finger under the garter and plucked it off. The provoking ellipsoid swung for a second from her finger. Then she fired it like a rubber band into the crowd. It skimmed the dingy ceiling, shape-changing. Unconsciously I raised my hands with all the others. Sooee! Mr. Nickel was making pig calls to the garter to summon it to him. Little Misses Fuss and Bother behind me were already crowing victory when I reached up and took it out of the air.

  “Here now, why don’t you let me have that,” said Mr. Nickel, and for a second we tussled, as he tried to force my fingers open, and I bumped against his chest and smelled his breath. Then the lady was there. I looked at Mr. Nickel. He winked and mimed waltzing with his arms bracketing air, then gave me the thumbs-up.

  I remembered waltzing, swinging around the oil-blackened dance floor of Granny’s garage in her arms, feeling the bones moving under the loose dry skin, my face pressed against, was it the real bosom or the fake one, enveloped in the good smell of sweat and birdseed. I was no good at following, I thought too hard about it, and took steps to keep my balance that nearly knocked us over. It was better to let Blanche take over; following came naturally to her, for obvious reasons. These were dreamy times, waltzed by others through the shade of the garage, dreamily felt up by the soft wind sweeping up hot off the valley. When Granny’s part-time mechanic was there, she played the piano and made him waltz with us. We hung on, embedded in his stomach, soberly turning and counting. The smell of sage and gasoline was strong. Outside, every object was burning from within with the borrowed heat of the sun or turning into a small substitute sun itself, cactus sun, blue towel dispenser sun, lawn chair sun, Coke can sun, saguaro sun. Inside we were orbited by the purple ghosts of all these suns, our own dim galaxy wheeling around us, burning tracks over the sagging spark-plug boxes, the fan belts hooked on nails, the keys to the tow truck hung by the door on their dirty loop of yarn, the empty oil jugs and grey rags jammed between wall supports, the heroically battered hubcap shields, skanky air filters like soiled ruffs, the jimmied Coke machine from which the quarter that lived in the change slot would sometimes elicit a can of soda.

  We kept our eyes on that Coke machine, because sometimes Granny would let us have one after waltzing. We competed for the crack of the ring and the icy fizz up the nose, the first swarming gulp, almost painful. Afterward, our heads ringing with sugar and cold, we would go and stare out at the desert as if at church, sobered by what had passed through us, like we didn’t know if we could measure up to the miracle of soda. It wasn’t so much a drink as an event, magical from the potent cold cylinder shuddering in our hands, feeling like it might burst, to the last painful burp forcing its way back out, bringing me back to the room, people clapping, the lady who was looking not at me but at Blanche, though that was not surprising because Blanche faced her while I faced the glossy stump, to which one of her long hairs had adhered and flexed and straightened as we moved. At the end of the dance she closed her eyes and readied her lips to be kissed, in the direction of Blanche. I leaned in and claimed the kiss instead.

  That night, something came tap-tapping down the hall and stopped outside my door. There was a moment of silence. Then came a scritch scritch on the door. I knew who it was. I opened the door and let him in.

  One and a Half kept vigil with me, fingers clattering in mine like a handful of nuts. I was reminded of Miss Hickory, who lost her nut to a greedy squirrel and became one with nature. How comforting! As bedtime reading for those to be beheaded in the morning, I recommend Miss Hickory.

  When I woke up, he was gone. Had he ever been there?

  At twenty to eleven the next morning I was in pre-op, which bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the dollhouse scullery, and by eleven I was lying down and looking up at Mr. Graham, who was saying something about oneness and brandishing a manila folder that I supposed contained my file.

  It is easy to think that something had to be done, and to feel fiercely and clearly what that is, when it is impossible. It is easy to imagine impossible things. I had joked, “Spare the scalpel, spoil the child.” I had said, “There is nothing more bracing than murder.” Lying in my hospital nappies, I felt less sure. My heart hurt. My hearts hurt! How had I become this person? Through infinitesimal steps, unimportant decisions, each reversible. I never heard the slip of tiny latches behind me, the click of locking pins. And now I was here, on this table. Half my stock of memories were about to be subtracted from me.

  Half-life: the time it takes for half the atoms in a radioactive substance to decay. The shorter the half-life, the more radioactive the substance. The half-life of uranium-235 is four hundred and fifty million years. I figure ours at twenty-nine.

  The anaesthetist approached.

  Dear Mademoiselle Guillotine, choose carefully. The tiger or the lady? Good balloon, bad balloon. Eenie meenie miney mo, catch a tiger by the toe, my mother said to pick the very best one and you are not it. Woodsman, spare that tree!

  There was a bucket of mean aspect by the cart I was lying on, and I wondered what it was for. Spots of rust around the rim.

  It got very quiet.

  Was it rust?

  MY TWINN

  Chris Marchpane had kept us from visiting Donkey-skin for over a week. Now I wanted badly to see her again. As we were walking there, we saw storm clouds gathering over the basin. Flat-bottomed and high-crowned and dark on the underside, they skated in fast on a layer of blue that lightning turned an odd pink at intervals, making something thrill mechanically in my chest, like a pinwheel catching a wind and whirring briefly into a blur.

  The sky bulked up over us. The thunder seemed incongruous in the dry air. We scrambled down to the Goats’ place as the rain broke over us, ran brazenly across the already soaked lawn past a lit window, and threw ourselves into the shed.

  It was like being in the bell of a trumpet. The clamor was shocking. The rain hammered on the roof, and drops squeezed through and hit us from odd angles. Donkey-skin was swearing with magnificent fluency. I felt my own voice in my throat but could not hear myself. A lightning flash made every rust- and shothole in the shed a searchlight and lit Donkey-skin, striped and grinning in her cage. The thundercrack came almost immediately, like the word now, the bolt had struck so close. The afterimage of stripes and teeth danced in the air before my eyes. I twirled, laughing through my own chattering teeth. I almost wanted lightning to strike and split us like an atom. “Now!” Lithobolia yelled, and I with him.

  Then sunlight fell in the door like a drunk. The rain was still coming down, though in slower, fatter drops. Weirdly, it still drummed fast and hard on the roof, like a sound track out of whack. Water from the roof must be running off the eaves onto the shed. Raindrops were falling inside as well, forming on the underside of the roof where the punctures were, making a big production of detaching themselves, then plopping into the hay.

  A drop fell into the angled stripe of sun. It was blood-red.

  Actually, it was blood.

  I looked up. “You’re bleeding!”

  “Fucking dipshit whore,” said Donkey-skin quietly, accepting this information. A second, almost black red, drop stood next to the first. It was so thick it stood up in the dust, a little button.

  “It’s like when Fritzi went in heat,” said Blanche, who had seen something I had not.

  Fritzi, clasped by the coyote, came into my mind, to be replaced by Donkey-skin, a thought I carefully set aside for later, in my gallery of hellish sights.

  “You’ll need some sanitary napkins,” said Blanche, who must have been talking to her new girlfriends. “It means you can have babies. You’re a woman,” she added, with emotion I felt was put-on.

  The cacophony overhead resolved itself into a steady tin drumbeat from the eaves. The rain had stopped.

  “He’s making a new box,” Donkey-skin said.

  Lithobolia grumbled in the distance.

  “For me, a new box to put me in. Dirty little slut. Raggedy-ass scum-sucking white trash asswip
e. Bust me out,” she added, almost inaudibly.

  “What?”

  “Bust me out of here. Bust me out, you shitface whore tramp cum-buckets. You weak-ass shit-sticks, bust me the fuck out of here, you fucks!” She started picking hardened bits of crap off the bars and chucking them at us. “Rancid jizz fart-licking bitch dyke rim-job! Hole! Hole! Piece of shit! Hole!” We ran. “What about my motherfuckin’ cigarette?” she yelled after us.

  We burst out of the shed and across the grass, which almost squeaked as our shoes sank into it. On the side of the house we passed Mrs. Goat, who was standing looking at the rainfall meter mounted on the fence, a sun-darkened plastic receptacle with raised graduations from which the red paint was mostly worn away.

  We did not acknowledge her, just jumped the fence and ran.

  I forced us up the hill toward our best lookout rock. Blanche didn’t want to go. I pulled out the shoe, which was a little damp. A pill bug rolled out of the toe, hit the heel, rolled back. The shoe was little. I hurled it over the edge. It stuck on a wait-a-bit bush a short way down. I reached over with a stick and tried to dislodge it, but it was just out of reach.

  “You can see it,” said Blanche on the way home.

  “Shut up.” I looked back. She was right. It was a little white shape like a face with no features, and yet it seemed to be looking at me.

  I dreamed her cage was the walnut shell out of which Donkey-skin pulls the most beautiful dress of all, the one spun out of moonlight. It unfolds and unfolds and unfolds, its damp folds unsticking. How big is it? There is a brooch pinned to the collar. She touches it, and it becomes a black beetle, which runs up her leg and fastens itself between her thighs.

  I didn’t want to see her ever again. She was ruined for me.

  I woke up walking. The morning sun was hot on the back of my neck, sweat cold on my forehead. Pebbles crunched underfoot. There was something heavy in my underwear, a weight that almost pulled my pants down, and banged on my thighs at every step, and I was carrying something bulky (I opened my eyes): My Twinn.