Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  We slithered down the slope into the arroyo behind their house and ran into a problem. She couldn’t climb out again. She sank to the ground, cursing dispassionately. She looked like a bundle of trash chucked out of a truck.

  “You can’t stay here,” Blanche said.

  “Whatever.” She got out a cigarette.

  “Come on!” She flinched when I grabbed her arm, but she got up and came with us. We practically had to carry her up the slope, though it wasn’t steep.

  At the top of the hill she shook us off and twirled slowly. “What’s that,” she said. “A yucca.” “Fucka. What’s that.” “A shotgun shell, from—from a hunter.” “What’s that.” “Teddy bear cactus. Don’t touch it, the fur is…” “What’s that.” “Our lookout rock.” “What’s that.” “Our roof. Why it’s shining is ’cause the smoke pipe’s catching the sun.” “What’s that.” “The highway.” “Where’s the gas station.” “Behind that hill.” “Which way’s Thin Air.” “Uh…” “The Land of Thin Air, where is it?” “Out there.” “What’s that white crap.” “That’s the playa. It’s white because it’s gypsum. It’s part of the National Penitence—” “What’s that.” “Your house.” “No. That’s not my house,” she said.

  We watched her go. I can’t find the right word for her movement, which was scarcely walking. Nor was it staggering or limping. It was like walking in every respect except it lacked some essential engine of plausibility. It had a myriad small stages of stoppage, yet she went on, like an animated figure. We didn’t even go with her, show her the way to the road. She probably knew what she was doing, is what we thought. She was practically grown up. A woman, practically.

  “She walks funny,” one of us said. It didn’t occur to us that this was because she had lived in a cage. Against the blue-black sky, she looked phosphorescent.

  PART THREE

  Boolean Operator: OR

  DEAR DIARY

  The reader will notice that my narrative has begun to loop the loop: 336 pages ago you read, “white night of my dark day”; 6 pages ago, I wrote, “Dark day of my bright night.” (I’m still not sure which version was better.) But I still have not caught up with myself. A lot can happen in the time it takes to write 336 pages. I am writing this, now, from the desk of the Twilite Inn, in—but that can wait until I get there, some pages from now.

  During the 336, while my narrative cautiously rolled forward across the backward spikes of my ls (Louche almost punctured a tire), I also kept a diary. A little pink book with a key? Alas, nothing so orderly. I jotted my thoughts on whatever came to hand—a napkin, a takeout menu, endpapers of a novel. Those I was able to find now quilt the bed behind me, trembling in the refrigerated air. I have resolved to insert them here, in their proper temporal location, giving them whatever commentary they seem to require, while allowing the forward progress of my narrative to continue.

  Uncap thy glue stick, Mnemosyne.

  Monday

  I am writing this account for three* reasons. To find out what Blanche wants. To find out what Blanche knows. To supply the evidence that will exonerate me, should this information incriminate us. To leave a true and faithful account, in the event of my death.

  Tuesday

  I confided the whole story in Trey, finally. “Whoa,” he said. “Bad balloon almost won.”

  I have looked at it from every angle, and there is no doubt that my wild first thought was right: Blanche planned to murder me. Systematically; consciously. A merely somnambulant Blanche could not have filled out her own copy of the form, let alone switched it for mine, resealed the envelope, etc. That this could be viewed as self-defense does not greatly reassure me—especially since, looking back, I see some evidence* that she conceived her plan well in advance, possibly even before† we flew to England.

  When all this began, back in June, I was alone, more or less. But I burned for the pure, the integral solitude. I wanted, in mathematical terms, to round down. Now I would gladly settle for that “more or less.” But it is no longer up to me, if it ever was. It’s only a matter of time before she tries again.

  “Life is a matter of time,” said Trey. “Hang in there, as the executioner told the condemned man.”

  A gap of some days follows. I was holed up in my room, writing at an awful pace, and had already darkened more than half of the first notebook by the date of this next entry, torn from the warped yellow legal pad we used for housemate communiques:

  Saturday

  Who drank my Poten-C Powersip?†

  I chucked it. Was it supposed to be that color?‡

  Blanche is still. My right hand is quieter than it has been in months. Sometimes on a dark night I think I am in the desert, but by day I am confident I was wrong. Desert peaks don’t overlook such lapis and oyster expanses.

  Maybe Audrey is right: maybe it is not too late to be an ordinary person, doing ordinary things. I have finally explored the yard.* Unbelievably, there are three giant carp in that pondlet. (Audrey: “Venn only knows how old they are! Think what they must have seen.” Trey: “They’re goldfish. They haven’t seen anything.”) Farther down are the barely detectable relicts of a vegetable garden, in which a few rambunctious artichokes still riot. There is a plum tree, serenaded by tipsy wasps: it crossed my mind that someday I might make jam. I won’t share that wholesome thought with Audrey. Her proprietary enthusiasm for my healing process is hard to bear. The only company I can stand for long is the Mooncalf’s.

  Wednesday

  It’s good to have projects: weeds to pull, orgasms to incite. Perdita has given me back my old shifts. I take pleasure in the repetition, the constraints, the petit mort that does no one any harm. I have a newfound appreciation for stories in which all surprises are to be expected. On this model train track no ancestors will return,† the explosion at the end‡ is an effect repeated many times a night, the engine flies apart in numbered sections, and the boxcar crumples where the hinge is. On our way, we wave to the familiar scenery: the cow, the wishing well, the house on the hill.§

  Thursday

  Haunted? I have a cure: poison oak. The itching concentrates the mind wonderfully. Despite Trey’s yellow dishwashing gloves, my forearms are on fire. I pull up the glossy sheaves for an hour, then switch to mowing. This is what people do, I say to myself. It’s a little boring, but I’ll learn to like it. One day I will worry about my weight. I’ll grill a burger and buy fridge magnets. Inflamed by this vision, I load the wheelbarrow much too full, then chase the teetering load down the slope, while tufts of grass lift off the levitating crest and dash me in the face. The Mooncalf canters after me, grinning. The barrow hits a rock, keels over. I leave the load where it tipped out and trundle back for more. Fantastic!

  It is a relief to think about something besides my selves. Goldfish, for instance. I’m sitting on the edge of their pond right now, writing on a paper bag. They have very little water left, and what is there is black as tea, though being goldfish, maybe they don’t mind. Are they provided for, happy?

  Strange, in that instant of solicitude there was a small opening feeling between my legs. I poked my finger between my labia and it came out red. Now, having taken off my panties not to stain them, and squatting in the grass by the pond, I am painting my heel and wondering what the odds are that there was poison oak on that finger.*

  Fly on my thigh. Do I smell dead? I go reaffirm civilized mores with a female sanitary product. Later, I find pollen clinging to Blanche’s brows and lashes, and comb grass seeds out of her hair. I am half inclined to leave it there and see what will take root. I am my own Chia Pet!

  Friday

  I had been dumping my weeds and grass cuttings over the cliff, but the neighbors below have complained to Audrey, which gave me the impetus I needed to start a compost pile. Today, I was stamping down some greasewood to see if the ground underneath was flat enough to support the wood-and-chicken-wire structure I had in mind, when I saw the twinned glint of binoculars up on the hill and became convinc
ed that someone was watching me.

  Specifically, I became convinced that Mr. Nickel was watching me.

  This is, of course, absurd. Still, I could not shake the feeling all day, and tonight I walked up the hill to the spot, taking the Mooncalf with me. Lights scribbled their reflections on the wet tennis courts. A flag clucked against its pole, an almost anatomical sound, like a throat clearing before a speech.

  I showed the Mooncalf the patch of flattened grass where I thought Mr. Nickel had been standing. Too enthusiastic, she sniffed a grass seed right up her nose, then sneezed all the way home.

  A gap of several days follows. The next entry reflects a falling off of the perhaps somewhat frenzied optimism evident in the “yard work” entries.

  Saturday

  Moony’s fuzzy toy is stuck in the neighbor’s juniper, where it landed after a wild throw. I bat it down with a stick, and she jumps on it, an almost natural scene. I don’t hear any funny noises, there are no hobgoblins grinning from the guttering. The yard is all right. But as soon as I go inside, the house starts to change. It shifts and scrunches* like a woman wiggling into a tight dress. Beams creak, and plaster dust spills from the cracks in the ceiling. When it settles, I see that the lines of the room, even the color of the walls and certain furnishings, have changed. I recognize the dollhouse by the peculiar coarseness of the materials, the oversized knobs and hinges.

  It’s not just my room. Café Flore, Sunshine Market, Tacqueria Cancun: they all eventually turn into the dollhouse. When I can’t see it, I can feel it: some objects are too heavy, other things too light; windows do not always work, and certain items are permanently stuck to tables. Food is hardly edible, though other people eat with plausible demonstrations of pleasure. My grande burrito looks the same as theirs, but it tastes like sawdust or clay.

  There is only one possible explanation for this: Blanche’s dream world is merging with my waking one.

  Well, two explanations. The second is I’m going crazy.

  On the bright side, I built the whole compost pile with no interference from Blanche, though I used my right hand to hammer in the stakes and staple down the chicken wire. Lithobolia seems to be gone.

  Sunday

  Wrong.

  This morning I found something in my notebook I did not remember writing.

  Poltergeists are supposed to be nonverbal types. They have trouble communicating. (That’s why they throw things.) They’re frontier ghosts, galoots in boots, hooting, lighting their farts, doing tricks with knives and cards. That kind of spook might lasso you with a hangman’s noose, or run you down with a herd of red-eyed cattle,* but not compose a sonnet. Or even a limerick†:

  Some two-headed partners in crime

  Went to Reno to make a quick dime‡;

  They had two poker faces,

  And two sleeves full of aces,

  But they lost to themselves every time.§

  I never thought she would turn up here, on the page. In my private place.

  From the last entry dates a new self-consciousness. Did Blanche wake up every night and pore over what I’d written about her? If so, I did not want her to know I knew. I began to hide those diary entries that concerned these suspicions, while leaving those I deemed more neutral in plain view, so as not to arouse her suspicions by a too-sudden change of habits. The following, scrawled on the back of an empty envelope, was tucked into a Basque phrasebook (see J for jarraiki, “follow”).

  Thursday

  I can’t shake the feeling that someone’s reading over my shoulder. One solution would be to write in a language she doesn’t know. Lithuanian, Basque. !Kung. But first I would have to learn it myself, and do it in such an offhand manner that it escaped her notice, lest she undertake a parallel course of study, and even if I accomplished that, there is always a dictionary willing to spill its secrets. Even a secret code has a key, a key that for privacy would have to be in code, a code that would itself have a key…. The only private language is a language no one knows. For perfect privacy, a language even I don’t know. But if nobody can read it, why write in the first place?

  Like a squid, to make my escape behind a screen of ink?

  Tuesday

  “Come on,” said Audrey, “Trey and I are taking you out on the town. I admire your writerly zeal, but you need to spend some time around human beings.”

  “Either of you care to join me in a relational garment?” said Trey, holding up something red, slinky, and sequined that had at least five too many arms. “Or both? No? Neither of you? Well, maybe I’ll meet someone at Trannyshack who appreciates transformative couture.”

  Trey and Audrey’s heads emerging from a sequined octopus was not an obvious balm for my troubled chakras, but it soothed me. I watched with equanimity from the back seat of the Volvo as they struggled to tuck themselves behind the wheel. Their joint body sparkled like water under the streetlights.

  “Ben and Ignacio go on second, and it’s already nine-thirty,” said Audrey. “If we don’t figure this out soon, I’m changing back into jeans.”

  “Heaven forfend!”

  “Ben and Ignacio?” I said. “Is that who you’re calling human?”

  “Audrey has a boyfriend,” sang the other part of the octopus. “Look, I’ll just straddle the gearshift. If you stay in reverse, my manhood will be hardly compromised at all.”

  “Audrey! Ben? You didn’t tell me.” Suddenly I wished I had not come.

  “You were busy,” she said. “Let’s rumble!”

  Ben and Ignacio’s subsequent lip-synched rendition, in drag (“Mary N. Haste” and “Ivana N. Ullman”), of the Carpenters’ “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” is amply documented on Trannyshack’s website, to which I refer the curious. In a photograph taken quite late that evening (No. 31 of 35) you can see a smeared Mary N. Haste and Audrey enacting a fair imitation of Hokusai’s “Awabi Fisher and Octopus” (c. 1814), while Ignacio covers his eyes. Trey swears it isn’t so, but I am sure at least one of Trey’s limbs is implicated.

  Now please direct your attention to shot No. 19. You will see Blanche’s grave profile and the very tip of my nose. Behind us, in the harsh shadow of the flashbulb, is Mr. Nickel, in a babydoll dress and blond wig. I have looked at it repeatedly. I am quite sure it is he. Can a dream show up in a photograph? Or is the photograph itself part of the dream? And if he is no dream, then what is he doing here?

  Friday

  Sometimes, when my left hand dots an i or dashes off a dash, my right hand twitches, as if with an invisible pen, in invisible ink, to do the same. When I look, it stops. I look away. After a moment it starts to tap the table: Morse?

  - — - - — — - — — — - - - - - — - — — -*

  I should not look. I look. It stops.

  I try entrapment. I set a pen down near it. At the little click of Bic† on wood it seemed to start. But now it lies quiet.

  I resume writing, but I glance at my right hand from time to time. The wrist emerges from the cuff with a bony, purposeful air. I think of the sinister and inexplicable phrase, “to shoot one’s cuffs.” That wrist means business. But the hand is still. Sleeping? I can’t escape the impression that it’s, rather, lurking.

  Ah!

  No. For a moment just now I thought I saw my knuckles whiten. But it was just the light.

  Sudden whiff of creosote, as on the desert after a rain.

  Sometimes I slinked a single hair over the hiding place, so I would know if it had been disturbed. Far from calming, this multiplied my doubts. The hairs moved even when I was awake. They seemed alive. Air currents, I told myself, but could not keep myself from changing a note’s hiding place once I saw its delicate bodyguard troubled. It was not impossible, I thought, that Blanche could follow or even anticipate the steps I would take in devising hiding places. Every mind has its thruways, and she knew mine. I would have to walk jay. Hedge-jump. Get myself lost.

  I knew I had succeeded when I was unable to find one of my own recent notes, locating
it at last only when a stray sunbeam thrown off a passing car’s mirror kindled the floating hair I had placed as a bookmark. After a few upsetting incidents of this kind, I began leaving notes for myself detailing where my diary entries were hidden.

  These notes too had to be concealed. Or what would have been the point in hiding the first ones?

  I soon discovered I needed further notes to remind myself where these notes were to be found. The termites of infinite regress were gnawing the floor under my feet. These—I hoped final—notes I decided to hide with only moderate cunning, but give them a different kind of protection in the form of a modest homophonic code generated by Trey’s computer. A single example will suffice.

  Fume, astra—I listen, Gwendolyn.*

  Monday

  POSSIBLE STRATEGIES SUMMARIZED:

  To write in a language she doesn’t know.

  To write in a language only I know.

  To write in a language I don’t know, either.

  To write in a language nobody knows.

  To not write.

  To write in code.

  To write in a code to which only I possess the key.

  To write in a code to which I do not possess the key.

  To write in a code that has no key.

  To not write.

  To hide what I write.

  To hide what I write in a place I cannot find.

  To hide what I write in a place nobody can find.

  To not write.

  To erase what I write, leaving only traces.

  To write in invisible ink.

  To write in no ink, but firmly, leaving faint impressions legible under a strong angled light.

  To do any of the preceding three, then write a second text on top.

  To partially erase that text, making it appear to be the concealed text.

  To tear that in pieces.