Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  “What are we doing, Blanche?” I said. She had not taken over for years. I hadn’t thought she was capable of it.

  “Busting her out.” She was apprehensive but determined.

  “Are you crazy? A grown-up put her in there. She’s supposed to be there. Do you want to get in trouble?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “All that about the princess, you know we made it up, right? She’s not a princess, she’s a dirty weird little creep. We don’t know why she has to be in a cage! Maybe she’s dangerous. Maybe she’s crazy. Maybe she bites people and gives them rabies.”

  “I don’t care. I’m going to let her out.” Blanche’s jaw was set.

  Where had this Blanche come from? “No, I’m not!” I said. “I mean, you’re not. We’re not. Why are we carrying this stupid doll?” I raised my hand to pinch her ear.

  She pulled her head away. “Please let me, Nora. I’ll say it was my idea. I’ll tell them you told me not to.”

  “They won’t believe you. They’ll blame me. They always blame me.”

  “Nobody will even know it was us,” she said.

  “You mean you.” We walked along in silence for a minute. “What is in my panties?” I asked.

  “Wire cutters.”

  “Whose wire cutters?”

  “Max’s,” she said.

  “You went in Max’s toolbox? Are you insane?” Blanche said nothing.

  Donkey-skin had her face turned away, smashed against the bars. “Excuse me,” said Blanche. There was no reaction.

  “Excuse me, will you bite me if I let you out?”

  Donkey-skin turned her head and sneered. “You sorry-ass cunt.”

  Blanche waited.

  Donkey-skin sighed. “No, I won’t bite you.”

  “OK, then I’m going to do it.”

  My Twinn smirked from a heap of hay, one leg jutting up. The lock was too thick to cut. Donkey-skin swore. Blanche ran her fingers over the hinges. They were curled strips of sheet metal, and I could feel them give. They were thin enough to clip easily.

  The door opened and dangled, jangling, from the lock, and we took a step back. Nothing happened. “You can come out now,” Blanche said.

  A bone-white, bone-narrow leg slowly extended from the swinging cage. I was breathing deeply and unevenly through my nose. It was like the time Papa had called us to the shed to see a damp moth unbunch and twitch itself open from its jiggling cocoon. Unseemly, somehow. Disgusting, even.

  Everything was going to be different now. But everything was already different. Donkey-skin was already retreating into the distance, like the pale backside of a bunny. “You’re a woman.” She had already left us behind. I saw the shuddering white meats of her butt. She wore a little girl’s dress, its yoke tight under her arms. If she were not so thin, it would have split across the back where it strained and the ruffle stood up stiff and incongruous, like the fan of a lizard. She slid farther and farther out of the cage, slowly, like someone letting herself down into deep water, and hung there for a moment with her head and arms still inside the cage, by themselves nearly enough to fill it. Already it seemed impossible that she had ever fit inside it.

  DOUBLE AGENT

  After a while, I squirmed out through one nostril and wiggled up until I was hovering just under the acoustic tiles. I turned to regard my body. I noted the dotted line like a choker around Blanche’s neck. Something about this scene bothered me, but I steeled myself against feeling anything but pleasure. I wanted to enjoy my temporary ghosthood. I felt giddy, aflutter. My winding cloths would have ribbons and furbelows. I flicked my tail and slipped through the grille of an air vent, between the furry vanes of a stopped fan, up a corrugated metal pipe, and out from under the conical cap.

  The hill fell away below me, dotted with bushes that I understood to be people in some complicated sense I did not need to work out in my current condition. I flicked and twirled under the polished brass knob of the sun, getting to know my new body: a little twist of egg white and spooled light, with an exhilarating tickle somewhere along the length of it. I swam toward the blue zenith, but the tickle was a nagging reminder of something like a body, so I slid back. Then for a moment I was squatting on the crest of a ridge in Nevada watching two hawks, mating or fighting, reel and tumble down the sky. I raised my hand to brush a fly off my neck.

  With this I felt more strongly than before that something was wrong with the scene down there: the neck, the dotted line, the disposition of the sheets, and as, drawn by this thought, I began sliding down through the pristine air toward the pipe, I noticed with some unconcerned part of me that the human bushes had scaled the hill and ganged up on the lawn and were closing in on the clinic.

  But never mind that. I had figured out what was wrong: it was my old mirror problem. What was that tickle?

  Down the chimney came the Grinch.

  I pulled on my body like a sock and opened my eyes.

  Blurshine.

  I thought for a moment, Oh, I see, I’m swimming! The light in my eyes was the sun swinging on the broken surface of the water, and the pinkish blur was Granny in her funny flowered swim cap. I rose, blowing bubbles. I broke the surface into the familiar smell of an indoor pool: chlorine, mildew, and decay.

  “Granny?” I said, or meant to say, and blinked the water out of my eyes. The chlorine made my vision blurry, the lights were ringed by great fuzzy haloes, and there was a swinging shine that was either very large or very close. I set myself to the task of focusing on the shine, and eventually it resolved itself into a blade.

  I looked over at Blanche. She was a swathed mound under sheets. Why was she draped? I should be draped. She was the one who was undergoing surgery, not me. Wasn’t she? I began to scream, at least I understood myself to be screaming, except that I knew I could not be screaming, because I heard nothing and nobody moved. The scalpel divided the air above my throat, showing how she would cut there and then there and then there.

  Had I screamed yet?

  Then the Togetherists stormed the clinic. There was a bang that I only afterward associated with the suddenly open door. There was a face, its mouth open amusingly wide. After a minute, it was gone. The door seemed to be closed again. There was a woodpecker hammering inside the walls. I understood belatedly that this was happening somewhere else in the building.

  I was alone in the room. It was time to leave.

  After some time I realized I had not left yet. I tried to climb off the table. In this I was unsuccessful. I could not move my legs. I could move my arms, however. So I grabbed a leg and pushed until it slid over the side. The other followed suit, more willingly. I was a tarantula locked in a wrestling match with my own limbs.

  Some time later, I was still trying to get off the table. Or I had already done so, in which case I was in the corridor.

  I turned the corner. In this hallway there were a lot of people running to and fro. Some of them had one head, some had two, some three or four. I leaned on the wall for a while. How had I failed to notice what an excellent wall it was?

  The corridors were strewn with hay. I was not surprised to see the interrupting cow clopping down the hall. She would be going to my room. I followed her there. She waited outside while I got my bag. Then she led the way back to the main hall.

  My animals walked with me, and together we passed unharmed through the melee. It was the Happy Kingdom. All of a sudden I understood everything. Where did the lion lie down with the lamb? In the grave. So I was dead. This made sense, and I relaxed somewhat.

  A struggle was going on in the stairwell. I saw the Major, squirming his way up like a salmon. I staggered past. Mr. Graham popped up and threw his arm dramatically across the utility room door.

  “I’m afraid that I can’t allow you to leave in this condition,” he said.

  “I think I prefer to leave in this confusion. Concussion. Perdition.” I saw Louche down at the other end. “Louche!” I shouted. No, I remembered, Louche’s face was not blu
e.

  “I see that you’re upset. You’re confused. Maybe you’re angry, and it’s making you behave in a way that is maybe a little childish? Maybe a little unworthy of you? Not to mention that you are reneging on your signed agreement to accept the surgeon’s decision, which as you see was to remove Blanche’s extraneous head.”

  “My head. The heads, is my head, is mine.”

  “Yes and no. We have papers signed by your hand that cede all rights to the disputed property—”

  “Proverty!”

  “—viz., your head, both before and after it parts company with the body known colloquially but not in a legally binding sense as yours.”

  “Is a mistake, this a mistake. There’s seem to has been a mistake.”

  At that moment my eyes blurred and I thought I saw tufts of straw poking out of the neck of his shirt, sawdust spilling out of the corner of his beak. “Peep peep,” said Mr. Graham. “Our policy is that Dr. Ozka does not make mistakes. As her representative I am here to effectuate her decisions, not to engage in fruitless banter with organs slated for removal. From our point of view I am talking to a malignant tumor.”

  The door burst open, felling him, and some girls in war paint stormed in. Mr. Graham zoomed after the interlopers with a highly artificial whacking of his dead wings. I went in, crawled through the vent, and outside.

  I found myself in a sort of labyrinth of odd-looking bushes. Funny, those hadn’t been there before. I began twisting and turning. Finally a path opened, and I reeled out onto the lawn. There was Mr. Nickel sitting gingerly on a lawn chair, his small feet propped up side by side with an annoyingly exact symmetry. He was wincing and shaking his head, the natural one, and his face was a strange flat beige.

  “I am very shaken. Very shaken,” he said, seeing me. “Boy oh boy. What a blow. What kind of person would lash out at someone like Roosevelt?” I saw that his prosthetic head was much dented about the hairline, and its jaw was chewing cud. “This hits me hard. Boy do I feel this as a blow at me.”

  “Who did it?” I said.

  There was a sound coming from Roosevelt, a mutter that would not quite resolve itself into words. I thought I made out something like “Doublebinddoublebind,” but that is just the sort of thing I would hear if I were hearing things.

  “That bag of odoriferous wind. That stuffed shirt. That skank in skank’s clothing.”

  “The Major?”

  “Mr. Graham.”

  That’s strange, I thought, but my thought was scotched by a distant jingle, more insistent than that doublebinddoublebind that troubled the hollowness that had replaced my head.

  Mr. Nickel rolled up one of his pants legs in a series of neat folds, and I saw it had been folded this way before. The last turn bared the rubber and chrome haberdashery of his knee. He seized the lower portion of the leg with one hand just above his brown silk sock, the other just below the knee, and exerted his hands in different directions around the vertical axis, or what would have been the vertical axis, had he been standing. Doublebinddoublebind. The lower portion of the leg seemed to squeak and then turn out on its axis beyond what a leg is ordinarily adapted to do, and a hitherto invisible seam opened enough to show the threads. At approximately 270 degrees from its original position the lower portion, foot inclusive, came off entirely. Out of its end, which was hollow, slid a red bandanna and then a cell phone, which he flipped open.

  “I am so shaken,” he said into it. “Now listen, I am not an action hero, I was supposed to be protected from any direct personal attack, I am really teed off about this. Yes, the strike went off beautifully. Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece, as somebody once said. Of course I’m upset, talk to Roosevelt.” He held the phone to Roosevelt’s mouth, from which issued a grating noise that sounded like a blender mulling over some ice cubes.

  “Now what do you think of that? Well, I should think you certainly would!”

  I started to move away. He followed me with his eyes.

  “Got to go, I have another call to make,” he said. “Later, gator.” To me: “Yes, old Mr. Nickel was a double agent. You guessed? You knew? You didn’t know. What a kick, huh? Oh my cloak and dagger.”

  “But you were the one who gave me the clyer to the flinic,” I protested.

  He nodded eagerly.

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “Both. Neither. Either. All. I’m the instigator, the facilitator, the go-between,” he said, spreading his hands. “There has to be a go-between.”

  “I came this close to getting my head cut off!”

  “We got here just in time,” he agreed. “Boy, was I on tenterhooks! The skin of my teeth got goosebumps. But the worm turns is the name of the game. Those of us who try to help the underdog”—he lowered his lashes—“if we’re lucky enough to see our efforts rewarded”—and fluttered them—“have to be able to turn on a dime, get it, a Disme, D-i-s-m-e, to stay on the losing side. Always losing, never lost, that’s my motto!”

  “It’s not a game. Blanche would have killed me!”

  “You would have killed her, sweetheart, to be quite fair. Wait, don’t go away mad. While I’ve got you, there’s a certain someone who wants very badly to talk to you.” As he said this, he was poking at the keys of the phone. Then, nodding energetically, with a merry-old-elf sort of giggle, he set the phone to his ear, lifting his forefinger. “Ah. It’s Mr. Nickel. I have someone here for you.”

  He held the phone out to me, grinning. I thought, nonsensically, that it might be Blanche.

  “Nora? It’s your mother.”

  I drop the phone. Mr. Nickel tsks irritably at me. I pick it up again.

  “Young lady, you are busted. I’ve had just about enough of this. You are not going to cut your sister’s head off. Now I want you to get on home, and no back talk. Bzzz. Bzzz. Viss. Sstraw in my mouse.”

  “Whuz?” I say. “You’re breaking up. I think.”

  “Phsst. Phsst. I tawt I tawt I taw I taw a puddy puddy phtt phtt.”

  I disconnect. “You are a fignut. Pigment. Figment,” I say to Mr. Nickel. He simpers at me.

  “Quite a woman, your mother,” he says.

  I would like to say that he rippled and melted quite away. But it was not true. I left him there, on the bench, screwing his leg back on. I could still hear Roosevelt muttering some time later, when I was back among the to piary.

  There was a couple fucking under one of the bushes. Only now I saw it was not a couple but one person with two heads, one of which was bleeding. The bush moved, and I saw it was a phony bush, and I understood that I was in a diorama. I caught up one of the abandoned bushes, which had a hollow space inside, and lowered it over my head. I felt better at once. I began creeping down the hill.

  Near the foot of the hill, I looked back. The diorama had been sharply shaken up by some catastrophe, probably an earthquake or movers, because things were not quite as they should be; the dusty water had popped out of its bed and was leaning sideways (fish and all) against the leg of Mr. Nickel, who did look something like a squirrel, with his orange suntan (out of a bottle, I think, though it could also be paint) and his rust-colored hair, also out of a bottle.

  Clang. I had run into the gate. Suddenly, I was sobbing. Blanche had wanted to kill me. She had tried to kill me. She had nearly succeeded!

  I threw off my camouflage bush and staggered out into the street. Nobody seemed to be following. Behind me, perhaps, Dr. Ozka, that outrageous cutthroat, that fiend, was being airlifted out of the rubble, operating kit strapped to her thigh. The scalpel I had meant for Blanche was lying across an operating table, pinked with my blood instead—not that even a doctor could have told the difference between her corpuscles and mine, mine, mine!

  I took a turn and was running down a cobblestone lane between close, stained walls. A pigeon flapped across the narrow corridor, making a shockingly loud noise. I saw the Major ahead, pink legs flashing under the towel, which fluttered up from time to time to reveal the agile, dancing genit
als, like hairy spooks. They were less obscene than the shiny disc of scar tissue on his shoulders, from which a lilac scarf was trailing—a veil worn by a nymph in a baroque painting.

  I passed a covered alley, a dark hole smelling of cooked cabbage, and heard shouts. At the next intersection I turned the other way, parting ways with the Major.

  Something was burning somewhere in the city. The air smelled of wood smoke. In the distance fire trucks were raising their voices in ritualized distress, like paid mourners. A police car rolled slowly across a distant intersection, lights flashing, and I slowed to a walk.

  Then it was quiet. I heard the rush of my breath, the rattle as a shop’s grille guillotined down in its tracks, a faraway radio playing “American Woman.” I passed one of the few stores that were open, and the scene inside was startlingly bright and clear and still—the ranked packages of cigarettes, sachets of tobacco and rolling papers, the greenish yellow light, the flickering blue neon sign in the window, the proprietrix at her counter, fixed in a tense watchful posture, the blue neon lighting her far side at uncertain intervals so that her face, too, blinked. I passed in the beam of light from the door like a deep-sea fish surprised by a submarine. I thought she was staring at me, and when I had gained the opposite corner and looked back from the dark under an awning, she had placed her hand on the phone beside her, so I hurried on.

  A taxi turned a corner behind me, pulled up beside me, paced me. “Where are you going?” said the driver. I recognized his voice.

  I didn’t reply.

  “You had better get in the car.”

  I kept walking.

  “Please?” he said.

  “Are you still there? Please go away,” I said, looking straight ahead.

  “I don’t think I should. You do not look A-OK. You’re not even dressed!”

  I looked down, saw my white legs flashing under my hospital gown, my bare feet on the cobblestones. I had stubbed my toe, and there was a dark ring of blood around my toenail. The taxi driver stopped the car, got out, and opened the door for me. I got in.