“Can I ask a question?” he said.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I leaned my head against the window. The light was making me dizzy.
“Then can I say something?”
“No.”
“I know this is not exactly the time to bring this up, but at some point you might want to apologize to my brother,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I have to be at the dispatchers by seven AM,” he said. “That was my brother you met in the kitchen that day. Poor bloke!” He started laughing. I waited for him to stop. Eventually he did.
My head was spinning. “I don’t understand,” I said stiffly. “And if I did, I wouldn’t believe you.”
“Do you think you’re the only person in the world with a twin?”
“It seems to me you are trying to wax symbolical, and I hate a man who waxes symbolical. Your brother, what does he do?”
“He is a postman.”
“That may be,” I say. “But I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care. Don’t believe me. It doesn’t matter. You’re wrong, but it doesn’t matter. Why are you so angry, anyway? You liked me well enough before,” he said, with a wink.
“That was my sister,” I took some pleasure in saying.
I woke up on his couch in the middle of the night. The two-headed chicks were staggering around on my blanket, bits of lint catching on their claws. They were dry and inanimate as tumbleweeds, but also as lively. It took a while for them to work up to speech, or for me to understand their wheeze. They cleared their throats with a shriek like a needle skidding on a record. “Hey Nora.”
“Nora,” the other hissed in near unison.
“Is she listening?”
“Is she?”
“She isn’t very civil.”
“She’s quite uncivil!”
“Has she heard the sad tale—”
“You mean the one—?”
“Yes, the tale of—”
(Together) “One, two, three…”
And they burst into song. They sounded like field recordings come alive, all seethe and crackle. It was a weedy, thready sound at first, not much better than a wheeze, but it strengthened.
The Two-Headed Chicks Perform “The Song of the Two-Headed Lady”
Alas for the two-headed lady
and alas for the lady with one
Broken hearts, they have two parts
but the two-headed lady has none
With two heads I was born accursed
and by my mother never nursed
The midwife snatched me from the coals
and in one body saved two souls
God set this gossip next to me
to vex my ear continuously
She carped and wheedled all day long
an angel’s face, a harpie’s song
Then I simplified my life
with an unpremeditated knife
The parrot on my shoulder cried
“Murder!” and then “Suicide!”
With a coping saw I docked her portion
of our mother’s failed abortion
No church bell ever rang so bold
as her golden silence tolled
I took her absence on my arm
and moved to town and sold the farm.
I hung her picture on the wall
and bowed my head and dressed in pall
I kept her head in a wooden box
every day I loosed the locks
I sponged her face and combed her hair
and by my art I made her fair
But then you came and I could see
you loved her picture more than me
I set her head up in my place
and with a shawl I hid my face
The beautiful head would not grow older
I was the parrot on her shoulder
I spoke for her and eased your fears
and loved you well these many years
You lit a candle by the bed
and loosed the scarf that bound her head
I woke and saw I was undone
the dawn was come, my love was gone
The blade flew down and kissed my neck
I saw the earth shrink to a speck
They held my head up to look back
at my twice repeated lack
And that is how I came to be
the only woman in history
by a judgment most precise
sentenced and beheaded twice
They buried us beneath one stone
I dreamed a mourner came alone
You placed a rose upon the mound
and paused, and laid another down
On judgment day she’ll be my bride
and I will never leave her side
content to hold a middle ground
between going up and going down
REASONABLE ADVICE
I spent my last hours in England shivering, sniffling, and half deaf on a bench in Heathrow. I was confused and defeated and, more trivially, I had the flu. There was an incessant rustling and chirping inside my head, though whether this was ghosts or phlegm I did not know and barely cared. I just wanted to go home. When I handed over my passport I remembered that I had two passports on me and did not know which one I had given him, but he handed it back to me without remark. I did not look at it before putting it away. Later I wished I had, because I became convinced that it meant I had been beheaded after all. We were over glaciers then. I could not stop shivering.
The Mooncalf greeted me with the gentle speech of her tail. I opened the door of my room, and together we considered what I had failed to leave behind. My bed was a different size, or farther away. Everything was in the wrong place without having moved. I pulled my futon onto the floor and achieved sleep.
Trey raised his eyebrows when he passed me in the hall the next morning, but did not ask questions. He was subdued. Actual success seemed to offend him, though he was warming to it, mainly because it came with money. I sneered at the grubby, warped whatsits he was teaching himself to knit. He perked up slightly at that. “They come after me,” he said with gloomy pride, “in dreams, I mean. They spread their flapping sleeves.”
Audrey I contrived to avoid by staying out late, then shutting myself in my room until she had left in the morning. In between, my pockets stuffed with Kleenex, I walked. I walked to the upper Haight and from the Haight to the top of Twin Peaks and back down. I walked to Bernal Heights, to Chinatown, to North Beach. On occasion I dared to enter an international newsstand and devise some pretext to part the limp sheets of a week-old Observer under the unimpressed eye of the vendor. No news of Dr. Ozka. Evidently she had not been captured. “Hm,” I’d say, though I knew explaining only made me odder, “I could have sworn this edition covered the civic elections in Coxwold.” My mouth twitched savagely. Growing desperate, I widened my search, and did finally find—in India Abroad—one terse reference: “After riot, Togetherist protesters and alleged patient of ‘Doctor Decapitate’ are held pending trial.” At least I knew the whole thing had really happened. I ate in cheap, deserted restaurants, thinking about nothing, my head thrumming with flu and MSG. Then I walked some more.
After three days of this, waking to an empty apartment, I had ventured from my room to the kitchen to make tea when I heard the thump and jingle of Audrey’s boots on the stairs. I made an undignified dash for my room and ran right into her.
“Arm’s length has its limits,” she said. “Come talk to me while I pee.” She led me into the bathroom and pointed at the side of the bathtub in a manner that brooked no opposition. I sat. The cold enamel made me feel melancholy and reminded me I needed to pee too. Audrey peeled down the linty red tights and underwear and sat heavily, bunching her woolly skirt in her lap and fixing her eyes on the floor in front of her. After a pause came the vigorous stream. She sighed and turned her eyes to me.
“So. What’s going on.”
“Nothing. What do
you mean?” I said peevishly.
“Oh, please. Look at you.”
I lowered my eyes.
“Is it a drug thing? Has Trey gotten you into some fucked-up scene? Because I will kick his skinny ass to the curb so fast—”
“No.”
“Uh-huh,” she said noncommittally. She finished peeing in a few hard squirts.
“It’s nothing like that.”
“Well, at least you acknowledge there is something going on.” She took the pack of Camels she kept on the windowsill and extracted one. She had to flick the lighter a few times before it flared. She lit her cigarette, sucked hard, snaked the hand with the cigarette out the chinked window into the airshaft.
“Ffffwell,” she said, blowing smoke. “Whatever it is, you need to stop. You’ve been going and going and going and you’ve been acting like nobody could tell you anything and you didn’t need help from anybody. Now you’ve hit a wall. Look at you, you can hardly even stand to be a person, you wince if someone steps on your shadow. Don’t look at me like that, you know I’m right. So you don’t want to get help, OK, fine. Then go off by yourself, but for fuck’s sake sit down for a while and figure out what’s going on. This internalized freakophobia or whatever it is has gone on way too long, Nora. I mean it.”
I hunched up my shoulders and scowled at the floor. “I need to pee.”
“Pee in the bathtub.” She let out another little trickle and brought in her hand to take another drag.
I pulled down my pants and did just that, teetering on the high, sharp edge of the tub. My feet dangled. To my dismay I was crying. I, with my refrigerated blood, my upper-lip-stiffy.
Audrey hiked herself up on one haunch and wiped awkwardly with her left hand, stubbing out the cigarette on the windowsill with the other. She stood up, pulled up her tights, and stamped her skirt down. Then she moved up against my knees and drew my head against her stomach. I buried my contorted face in the scratchy pleats of her skirt. I was still peeing, trying to do it quietly. How strange that we try not to be ridiculous even when we are in extremis.
After a minute I felt awkward. My bare butt was cold. A lanyard of shiny phlegm joined me to Audrey’s skirt when I pulled away. I kept my head down and waved my hand at the toilet paper until she got me some. I blew my nose and then wiped myself with the damp wad.
While I was wondering what to do with it, Audrey said, “I have a job for you. The old lady downstairs is visiting her daughter who has some kind of thyroid thing, and she asked Trey if he would maintain the yard while she was away. He said yes because he digs old ladies, but you know Trey, he’s just a big indoorsman, and he doesn’t need the rent break now that he’s Mister Up and Coming. And I’m too busy. I think you should do it. Free rent, and it would be good for you to take care of someone or something else for a change. You can just weed and dig holes and talk to yourself and just revamp your brain with no distractions until she gets back. OK?”
“OK,” I said meekly.
“Now, I know you would rather think about practically anything else, but I really think you need to try to figure out what Blanche is trying to tell you or what you are trying to tell yourself about your relationship with Blanche.” She stepped away, swiping at the wet spot on her skirt, looking at me hard. “There’s obviously some heavy stuff between you that you’re not going to solve by just willing it to go away.”
“I know.” I wondered what Trey had told her.
She propped her hands on her hips. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You won’t talk to a therapist.” I made the face of not listening. “Or Vyv.” I shook my head. “Well, if you won’t talk to anyone about it, then I think you should write about it. Even if nobody ever reads it but you. What’s that story about telling your secret to a hole in the ground if you have to? The king has no clothes?”
“The king has donkey’s ears.”
“Ears! In other words, talk to yourself, but don’t forget to listen. You might learn something. Didn’t you tell me your whole childhood is a haze?” She paused. “Actually I believe what you told me is that Blanche is in charge of the past and you’re in charge of the future, but that’s NOT talking. The past is part of the future, you know, which is why you have more in common with Blanche than you want to think, and it might behoove you to get to know her. That’s not charity, that’s self-preservation. Cutting off your past is like cutting off, I don’t know, your own head. What’s left, for Venn’s sake? The future? What’s that? The future doesn’t exist! You’ve cut yourself a pretty bad deal, Nora.”
“I’ve actually been trying to do that,” I lied. “Write, I mean.”
“Really? That’s great, Nora. Have you really?” She opened the door.
I felt softened, even pulpy. I shuffled after her, zipping up my pants. “Yep.”
“Then keep on doing it, and I’ll stop telling you what to do. Maybe you’ll invent some whole new kind of language! Vyv is always talking about finding the give in our syntactical bonds and reconfiguring them. I just need you to promise that you will not psych yourself out with obsessing on yourself to the point of deciding you can live on air or turn yourself into some kind of philosopher saint. Try being a person instead, in other words not perfect. Everyone is some kind of freak. Stop trying to turn yourself into a new kind of freak and deal with the freak you are.”
“OK.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.” It sounded like reasonable advice, but I did not think I would follow it. This made me feel so sorry for myself that my eyes filled up with tears again.
Later, I pulled the Manual out of my never-unpacked bag. A piece of paper fell out of it and performed a graceful backbend to show its other side, then slid along the floor for an improbable distance. I picked it up. It was the form I had filled out at the clinic. With my signature on it. The one I thought I had given to Mr. Nickel.
“Nicely done, Blanche,” I said. I looked at it a long time.
Then I turned the page over and smoothed it out.
“Blanche,” I wrote. “Dark day of my bright night.” Then I crossed that out and started over.
I was writing this book.
WHITE AS A GHOST
Her feet touched the ground, but she kept falling. Blanche put out our hands, too late. Donkey-skin lay at our feet, wheezing softly.
We bent over My Twinn and started rubbing her dress and hair with handfuls of the dirty straw.
“What are we doing, Blanche?” I said.
“I’m getting My Twinn dirty so she looks more like Donkey-skin.” She picked up the doll and poked her into the cage headfirst. Her legs stuck out the door.
“We have to bend her legs back,” I said. We pulled My Twinn back out of the cage and bent her double and pushed her through again. Her hair caught in the door and one foot stuck outside, so we pulled her back out and turned her around and put her through butt-first, and this time it worked.
“There,” said Blanche. “That will give us time to make our getaway.”
The princess lay on the straw. She rocked, she flexed a knee, she was testing herself. She had to rest after every movement. To straighten her skirt could take a lifetime. The light concentrated and shone like a tiny eye in her drool. She pulled herself into a crouch. The drool got longer and whipped dizzily around, until the end stuck on the dress and it grew tense and linear and beautiful and then snapped.
This slow work seemed too fast to me. I could feel the future flipping by like pages. I could barely catch a phrase here and there. Already I was lost, new characters were introduced and then slipped away again, they sat around tables discussing other characters I didn’t recognize, one of whom shuffled to the door, a funny tucked figure like an old woman, and white as salt.
“Pale as a ghost,” I said; it was a phrase from stories. Her hair was thin, clingy, pale orange, the color of locoweed. She didn’t remember how to walk at first. She moved in jerks, uncoordinat
ed, like a puppet. We led her out across the lawn.
“Stop,” she said. “Get my motherfucking smokes.”
“That’s stupid. Come on, let’s go.”
“I want my smokes. Going to have a motherfucking celebration. Get me my fucking smokes!” she said, her voice rising with each word.
“All right! All right! Fuck!” I said. We ran back and scooped up the whole cache of dingy cigarettes and matchbooks along with a bunch of damp straw. She stuck the mess in her pocket.
Her stiff skirt showed dirty white lines where the caked shit, stretched, cracked and the fabric showed through. Once it had been a party dress, cheap and frilly and synthetic. It was the sort of dress that Granny called “fire-retarded”—it would kindle all at once with a fwhomp, set your hair on fire, then disappear and leave you naked, except for sticky black plastic boogers that would sink into your flesh as easily as needles. It was the kind of dress little girls wore at beauty pageants and Mexican weddings, the kind you found hanging in plastic bags in cheap stores in the Mission. It was fancy and toxic, like a wedding cake frosted with petroleum jelly. It had so many pleats and ruffles that its surface area was incalculably large, like a brain’s. I read an interview once with an artist who made drawings about child abuse. He said the most volatile words in the English language were “little girl.” When a prosecutor pronounces those words, the courtroom goes crazy. This was the dress that went with those words: a language dress, a hallucinated dress, from a grown-up’s dream of little girls.
I didn’t want to touch her, but she was moving too slowly. I took her by the arm and pulled her out, across the lawn, to the fence. When we reached it, I looked back. There on the other side of the lawn was Mrs. Goat. Was she always checking the barometer? I thought she must have seen us, but she didn’t move. I folded Donkey-skin over the fence, lifted her legs, and over she went with a sighed, “Whore.”
Half Life Page 34
