Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  COW

  Donkey-skin was gone, and we were walking back home along the road to Too Bad when we heard someone coming and got behind a bush. It was Dr. Goat. The pickup was slithering up the road almost crabwise, spitting rocks from its tires. The driver was riding the gas too hard for the traction he had, so I knew he was not thinking straight. Blanche took off running, like an idiot. He saw us right away, or saw the bushes thrashing. Behind us we heard the car door open.

  “Hey! Get back here!” We looked back and saw him jump out. He had his gun. He swung it up and fired up into the air. The sound came back from the bluff.

  “Get your ass back here, you sick little monster. Come on, you freak motherfucker, I want to talk to you.”

  Dense thornbushes surrounded us. I heard rocks crunching under Dr. Goat’s feet. We dropped to our hands and knees and crawled into the bushes. We scared up a rabbit close by, and it took off with a burst of kicked-back pebbles, running intricately with many dodging maneuvers, and left us behind. A thorn hooked our shoulder right through our T-shirt, but we kept going, and it tore free. On the other side of the bush we got to our feet and ran.

  From behind came a bellow. “Ow! You shit-sucking whore!”

  We slithered sideways down into an arroyo, riding a small landslide, and scurried up the smooth sand bottom under the low-hanging milky green palo verde fronds until our way was blocked by a tangle of sticks and blackened cactus limbs deposited there by a flash flood. We could hear the rocks cascading down the slope behind us. We scrambled up the other side. Dr. Goat saw us at the crest of the hill and hollered.

  On the desert if you want to go fast it helps if you know the way. It seemed as if our feet decided on their own which way to run, or maybe Blanche was leading and I did not notice, because I did not intend to take Dr. Goat to the Dead Animal Zoo. The small bodies had been rearranged by carrion eaters since the last time we had been there, but the cow was still there, though almost hairless now, and a little flatter than before. The hole torn in her belly had almost closed as her body collapsed slowly in on itself, and the dry hide shrank over her skeleton.

  The rabbit is most likely to be shot as it runs. After it goes to earth only a dog’s nose will find it out, and Dr. Goat did not like dogs. We hesitated for only a moment, panting, then we heard footsteps again, coming fast. We got on our belly and squirmed through the hole into the stomach of the cow as beetles fled in all directions.

  We pulled in our feet and curled up where the ribcage made a little cave. The almost hairless hide was translucent, and the hollow glowed with an amber light. Up the shriveled neck passage I could see a dot of light that I thought might come from an eye socket. The cow lay on her side, one eye looking at the sky, one into the ground.

  We hugged our knees and made ourselves very small. My breath sounded very loud in the close space. We sucked in two huge breaths, both together, and then we heard Dr. Goat come into the clearing. We let the air out very slowly. We were trembling. I felt like water, simmering.

  The footsteps stopped.

  “What the fuck? Now this is sick. Tru-ly sick,” Dr. Goat said, but not to us. Through a tiny puncture in the hide I thought I could see a fleck of red, moving. I closed my eyes so that he could not see me. In the silence, I could hear Blanche’s nose whistling softly every time she exhaled. What was Dr. Goat doing? Could he see our dark shape curled inside the cow like we could see the light of the sky?

  Steps came toward us. My scalp prickled. I closed my eyes and silently prayed—to God, Lithobolia, Coyote, Granny, anyone—Come save us. Please, somebody, come.

  There was a clank inches away, and something struck the hide right above my shoulder. Particles rained down on my arm. A narrow shadow fell across the roof. Dr. Goat had leaned his gun against the cow.

  His footsteps crunched away. “Hey there kids—I’m not going to eat you! Don’t be silly, I know you’re there. Look, damn it, I know I scared you with that gun, but see, I’ve put it down. I’m holding up my hands now and you can see they’re empty. I’m not going to hurt you, I just want to talk to you, like one grown-up to another.”

  We heard him take another couple of steps away.

  Slowly, stealthily, I slid my hand out from under the fringe of skin. I felt warm metal. The barrel slid sideways, and we froze.

  “You think you’re hiding, but I can see you plain as day! If you don’t come out, I’ll have to come in and get you. My patience is running out.” We heard him beating the bushes. “Say something, you little freak, or I might stop being so nice. What do you think about that, cocksuckers? OK, I’m going to count to ten. One…two…” He was getting farther away. My hand closed around the butt of the rifle.

  “Five…”

  We stuck our feet back out of the hole and dug our toes into the ground. Slowly, leaning on the rifle, we pressed ourselves back and up into a crouch. The neck of the cow creaked as it lifted off the ground. Some bones fell out of a hole somewhere and tocked dryly on the stones, and we stopped and listened. I could hear a myriad sifting sounds as sand and insects and particles of all kinds sought new paths down through the shifting carcass. I ducked my head and closed my eyes as I felt grains trickle down over my face.

  “Seven…”

  Suddenly, I could not move. My throat was so dry I probably could not have spoken and I did not dare in any case, but I thought as hard as I could: Donkey-skin. Maybe Blanche understood, or was thinking the same thing; in any case she was helping me suddenly, and it was a little easier. Half the ribs had stayed behind, in a heap at our feet, which lightened our load. The head hung down in front and almost unbalanced us. There was a rip in the neck we could see through. Once standing, we drew the warm length of the gun up along our body and stuck it out that hole.

  “Nine…”

  Then Dr. Goat came back out of the bushes and saw us.

  “Holy Mother!” he said, and staggered back. He fell on one knee and snagged his shirt in the thorns. The bush held him fast. His fingers worked frantically to free his shirt. “What the—”

  Then I saw him see the gun.

  “Now I really think—” he said, and then the cow shot him.

  The gun jumped back and kicked me in the side of the head and everything went dark red. We wheeled around in a confusion of creaking bone and skin and a shower of crawling particles. My teeth were vibrating and my tongue had gone numb. But someone held onto the gun and righted herself and tugged the hide straight so we could see again.

  Dr. Goat was lying down. There was a red mess in his lap I did not want to look at too closely. His fingers were still working on his shirt.

  The cow looked at him with her empty holes and shook her head at him. Some neck bones fell out of her mouth: one, two, three. One of her hooves clattered on the ground with a rattlesnake sort of sound.

  Dr. Goat was moving his red mouth. His voice sounded wet, and it was hard to understand. All of a sudden I knew he was speaking another language, the one he used with Donkey-skin. He was talking to us in the language of the animals.

  The cow walked up to him. Her other front leg, which was shriveled and hard, was stuck up by her neck as if someone wanted to be polite about coughing. The cow hung her head and smiled like Flossy in the picture book, and the gun barrel found its way back out of the hole in her neck.

  Dr. Goat’s hand fell onto the ground and picked among the stones, and out of them he selected a twig and as the bullet left the barrel he threw that in its path. Then he fell back hard and didn’t cause us any more trouble.

  The cowboy poets lie. Tumbleweeds rolling emptily in the winds of dusk, dessicated ruins, weathered crosses stuck in heaps of stone: these things aren’t sad. I have survived a thousand sunsets without a tear. The melancholy of the desert is somewhere else, in the indifference of high noon.

  At noon the sun stops. Birds shut up, animals hide. The huge surge of morning, when the sun rears up out of the night, is over; day is achieved. The flat round of the earth stares up at
the sun. The sun stares down. Neither moves. If human beings move, they look small and misinformed and out of place.

  There are no shadows at midday. They’ll appear later, when the desert has acquired some manners, and lost some honesty. There is a kind of blindness of visibility. When everything is spotlit equally, distinctions disappear. Figure and ground are soldered together. You can’t tell what is close from what is far, far away.

  That was the light that shone on the Dead Animal Zoo when it acquired its first human specimen.

  A hunched figure dragged itself into Too Bad. It appeared first at the uphill end of Too Bad’s main street and teetered there. Then it started down along the row of false fronts. The head had a funny sideways cant to it as it shook, which gave it an ironic, almost flirtatious air. The skirts of this cow-gown dragged on the stones and caught at times and slowed and leaned and lurched forward again, leaving little shreds behind. A cactus pad rode along on the train. Black beetles lost their hold and seethed into shiny living pools in the ruts.

  Somewhere a dog was barking, tail wagging like crazy, planting its hind feet and hopping up and down stiffly on its front feet with every bark, then bucking backward in jumps, all the way down the street, to where Mama was sitting on a bench in the shade, drinking iced tea. The cow stopped. Mama dropped her glass. She made a little sound, a little word, maybe no more than “Oh,” but it didn’t sound like it meant “Oh” at all, but something much longer and harder to say.

  Then Mama screamed, and Papa and Max came running. After a quick exchange I could not hear, Max took off up the road the way we had come. Papa soothed Mama. We stood, swayed.

  Finally Mama straightened and turned to us. She put out her hand and then took it back. “All right, girls,” she said sternly, “get out of that filthy thing.”

  The cow staggered toward the house.

  “Not in my house!”

  We veered into the ruins next door.

  The cow’s legs already trailed on the ground, so it could hardly be said to kneel, but somehow it kneeled inside itself, crumpling in the center, admittedly in a place a live cow would never fold, but then dead cows are not as constrained as live ones, they are agile and fantastical. Also, as we have seen, quick to wroth, vengeful and proud. The cow sank down, and deflated as it sank, until it no longer looked much like a cow, or anything that had ever been alive.

  I didn’t want to come out. Almost all the beetles had left, and I had just about sorted out how to fit around the remaining bones, and though the hide was heavy, the weight steadied me, and I liked its thick, sour, beery smell. There was a lot to think about in that smell.

  A vulture passed overhead. The belly of the dead cow heaved, and after a mercifully brief term, she calved, unorthodoxly, through the stomach wall.

  A couple of days later, we went for a walk. We struck off across country, going wherever way opened up, following the winding arroyos whenever the thornbushes stood far enough apart to leave a clear path up the soft pale sand, and found ourselves at the zoo. The exhibits were stirred around, animals were mixed up with other animals. Dr. Goat had pulverized a half-dozen specimens, including our best squirrel, the one that looked like he was snarling with one paw raised like a heraldic lion. But otherwise it was nearly complete.

  But Dr. Goat was not there.

  Someone who didn’t know the desert like we did might not even notice that some of the rocks where he had been were dusted with yellow-ocher, not licked clean on top like the untroubled ones near it.

  “The funny thing,” said Blanche, “is how big he was, even after.”

  “Shut up!”

  “You feel like people are going to get little when they die. Thinner and little. Like they’re going away. But he was practically as big as ever.”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up!”

  PART FOUR

  Boolean Operator: AND

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  Venn and You

  Venn healing employs Boolean logic and the simplest form of the Venn diagram, the double cell, to counsel the marriage of self and other in the single “individual.” The literalization of this model is the conjoined twin or twofer, but every singleton also contains a phantom twin. The first person is the second person. As we will study to understand, it is also the third, and though we have no grammar yet to give these persons voice, it is the fourth, fifth, sixth: Around our single-cell self cluster quads, quints, and other sibling selves. In time we will learn to count these petals without plucking them, and thus reducing sheer multiplicity to that all-too-familiar XOR, she loves me, she loves me not. Instead we will stick our noses into the intersection set and breathe in a heady new perfume: the AND. She loves me and she loves me not, I love her and I love her not, we love them and we love them not, I love me and I love me not. In time, we will all be such flowers.

  The Operators

  The Boolean operators NOT, XOR, OR and AND govern our relations with the other—the other in the world, and the other in ourselves. Most people will find they can identify their ascendant operator, but in the course of any given day one or more of the others may come into play. Though Western culture has been governed by NOT since the ancient Greeks, a close look at any apparent homogeneity will reveal XOR, OR, and AND at play within it. It is effectively impossible to seal out the other. The single cell splits, othering itself: out of this “same diff” we are born.

  The process of healing is a shifting of emphasis from static NOT to dynamic AND, from the self-centered single cell to the intersection set. However, it is important to note that NOT also has its function. As any librarian can tell you, there is a time to broaden the search, and a time to limit it.

  NOT

  I, not you.

  I win, you lose. For me, glut. For you, famine. But a glut of light is blinding, a glut of sound deafening. In the seeming silence, the seeming dark, the other looks and listens and waits her chance. Every dog has its day, every worm will turn: NOT can never forget XOR.

  XOR

  “Exclusive or”: Either of us, but not both.

  Agon. La Lucha. War of the worlds. Black and white, night and day, Montagues and Capulets. XOR comes from NOT, strains back toward NOT. It does not acknowledge the OR that makes it possible.

  OR

  Either or both of us.

  You could be right. I could be wrong. Let’s agree to disagree: good fences make good neighbors. OR admits to AND, but schemes to inherit the earth.

  AND

  The intersection set.

  AND is the copulative conjunction—the vaginal cock, the phallic cunt. It is the hearing mouth, the speaking ear. It is the wound that cures, and the cure that wounds. I am an other: within black, the germ of white. Within white, an inkling of black. AND is the pain that causes NOT, the flaw in NOT that permits XOR, the compassion that brokers XOR’s truce in OR, the love of OR for OR that ends in AND.

  GOING HOME

  I woke up to the wallowing motion of a car with a sprung suspension. A hot wind was ruffling my hair and the backs of my knees were sweating cold, my thighs swimming together under a warm weight in my lap. My left elbow was on hot chrome and my right hand was on the wheel. Therefore, I was driving.

  My eyes jumped open. Yellow dash, dash, dash: dotted line of a divided highway, curving between shallow buff cutbanks and scrub. The metal bars of a cattle guard flashed under the wheels—burst of machine gun fire—and a road sign hove up against the urgent sky. Black cow on goldenrod diamond, turning, turned, gone: no plain-Jane California cow, but a lively, wayward beast with a humped tail and a look of surprise because this was Nevada and Blanche had brought us home.

  The car? Audrey’s. The dress I had worn to the beach filthy now, my lap so wet it felt like I had peed myself, but no, it was just sweat and drool from the Mooncalf asleep with her head draped over my thigh, blowing raspberries through her flews. Chocolate milk turning curdy in the cup holder. My notebooks were scattered on the back seat, their pa
ges briskly ruffled, kerfuffle, and a candy bar wrapper caught in a vortex was whipping around, around. My jacket and the bag of loose notes—my diary—were crammed into the right rear foot well, along with some half-empty soda bottles and my shoes.

  We were rolling down the bajada from the western range. That canker sore in the middle of the basin was Grady, and the dim minatory silhouettes on the other side were the mountains over Too Bad. They were the blue-grey of gasoline smoke, but they seemed no-colored, a little strip of nothing showing through where the sky had peeled up.

  Gas? Half tank. Blanche pumping gas! And paying for it; how? Well, with my credit cards.

  I braked hard for a curve where others had not, and small crooked crosses hung with garlands swam past the windows. The sun had beat the colors out of the plastic petals and turned them all the same bleached orange. Then the cutbanks melted away and I was on the flat and could speed into the quicksilver dissolve of the sky-reflecting road. A single approaching car oozed in and out of existence. Then we too rolled through a series of sandy dips, the chassis flouncing at the low points. The car flashed past with a whoop that went suddenly out of tune.

  Dust was slithering and sidewinding along the road. To the right rain was falling, but not as far as the ground. The soft skeins, fine as baby hair, evaporated in midair.

  The first signs of habitation were rusted pickups and refrigerators, scattered in the vast emptiness like space junk. We passed a school bus painted blue, a slide sticking out of one window, parked in a yard of stripped dirt that swirled into a cloud when the wind picked up. Then the first trailers, parked on parched lawns or squares of Astroturf. We passed two girls airborne above a trampoline stamped with two shadows into which, stopped in memory forever, they will never fall.