Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  Operation Game Thief.

  The Indian Holiness Mission.

  The Red D Mart. (Only it was and had always been a blue D.)

  Keep M Running Knife Sale!

  Midget Motel.

  Used Car Giant.

  Kwik Kup. Pastrami is Back!

  The old Atomic Drive-In sign, its lot full of tents and trailers appertaining to some kind of revival meeting: “Oxymoron JOIN US!”

  The Hohokam Elementary School, with the same lonely tetherball poles, cords swinging free from the poles, and the same terrible jungle gym, an infernal device wrought from hot pokers.

  A patrol car pulled out from behind the school and slinked after us. We rolled slowly past the drugstore where you could always get your horoscope on a slip of colored paper—yellow, pink, or pistachio—rolled up and stuck in a plastic vial, and miniature license plates with your name on them, if your name was Jill or Walter, swung insolently from the prongs of a rotating display. Past the supermarket where four cucumbers, a cabbage, and two green peppers were repeatedly wet by incontinent nozzles. Past the pink concrete curves of Dinosaur Taco, its outdoor tables still thickly draped with fat teens in children’s play clothes, thin teens in black nipple-frotting T-shirts emblazoned with band and brand names, who gawked as we passed.

  We passed the old pink Fiesta Motel, which was doing good business for this time of year. Could we stop? I wanted a shower, a cold clean bed, time to think. “You brought us here,” I said experimentally. “Now what?” Nothing happened, except the Mooncalf rolled one eye up at me and started panting hugely. I felt no resistance from Blanche when I turned in at the next motel, the Twilite Inn. When I opened the door, Moony started up and struggled across my lap and out the door, hurting me. She made for a patch of grass and squatted, looking back at me over her shoulder. The patrol car rolled slowly by, and then sped out of sight with a roar.

  My wallet was in my jacket pocket along with a wad of receipts—for gas, but also Pixy Stix, Cheezy Dips, strawberry shakes. Kid food.

  There was an old, ragged flyer taped to the lobby door announcing a petition to halt DOE plans to store nuclear waste in Grady’s backyard, and I put my hand on it to quell its fluttering and saw that Max and Papa were both listed under Eminent Signatories. Mama was not. Moonie sat down outside the door and watched me through the glass as I rang the bell. It was odd to think she knew Blanche better than I did now.

  There was a sign up behind the desk: “No 2 party Checks—none—0—not any.” The desk clerk came out from the back. I didn’t recognize her. I considered her eyebrows, which were hairless abstractions drawn in unnatural arcs not quite matching. The rest of her face belied their artfulness. She had simple dark hair and her smile was a shy pulling-away of the lips, often repeated, as if she was trying but failing to keep her mouth closed.

  “Pro or con?” she said.

  I puzzled over this question and could make nothing of it. “Pro or con what?”

  “Oh! I thought—sorry. Most of our other guests are here for the Oxymoron. Just passing through?”

  “I—we—grew up around here.”

  “Oh, welcome home!” she said, with such warmth I blushed. “Here’s your key. The ice machine is right outside, you can’t miss it. Is there anything else you need?”

  “Could I check my e-mail?”

  “Of course.” She took me into the back office. “Just click here. And if you need to print anything…”

  There were three items of interest.

  Where are you? Where’s my dog? And my car? Please, PLEASE get in touch. If you are not dead, you will be once I get my hands on you. Kidding. I am calling the police NOW.

  —Audrey

  Siamystic Meanderings

  Those members jailed in England last month in connection with Togetherist protests have been released and all charges dropped.

  Joint actions with the Togetherists have been suspended pending investigation of the recent allegations of their secret link to the Unity Foundation.

  Siamystics interested in taking part in the “Oxymoron,” please contact your local group leader for directions, schedule, accommodations, etc.

  Time to let go of the balloon strings? Be safe, and if you can’t be safe, be sorry—

  Trey

  PS Check this out. Poppkiss says he had nothing to do with it.

  Fwd: Head a Fake

  Widespread speculations that the UK’s notorious Dr. Decapitate had moved his operations stateside were proved hasty when close inspection of the human head found by fishermen floating beneath the Golden Gate Bridge revealed that it was a prosthetic. The head contains a sophisticated recording and playback device, and the SFPD initially harbored hopes that data retrieval specialists would be able to extract identifying information from its hard drive, but salt water had corroded the disk and all restoration attempts proved futile. Deformation of the head suggests that it fell from a great height. Nobody has come forward to claim ownership of the head, strengthening speculations that it was in use at the time of the accident; however, no body has been found. Foul play cannot be ruled out. If you have information concerning the ownership of the head, please contact Detective O’nan of the SFPD.

  “Excuse me,” the desk clerk said, poking her head in. She handed me a flyer. “Since you grew up here, you might be interested. If you’re still here tomorrow afternoon—well, I’m going!”

  OXYMORON!

  PRO Nuke? NO Nuke? Join us!

  Historic Self-Contradictory Action at the NTS

  Pro-nuke and No-nuke activists join together in demanding that Nevada’s National Penitence Ground be turned over to the people effective immediately.

  The Nuclear Abolitionists, Parents for a Radiation-Free Tomorrow, and the Western Shoshone, long opponents of nuclear testing and waste storage, have forged a historic agreement with pro-nuke forces including the RadioActivists, Mutatis Mutandis, and the LMV or League of Mutant Voters. The Oxymoron is supported by the Grady City Council, hitherto reluctant to take a stand on nuclear issues. “We see in the Oxymoron the opportunity to find common ground on an issue that has bitterly divided our community. Declassifying the NPG will put Grady on the map as a destination for tourists and pilgrims alike, creating abundant jobs for locals, while putting an end to the Sadness that is poisoning the state of Nevada.”

  Scheduled for 12 noon at the front gates of the National Penitence Ground. Local accommodations are limited; buses will transport Oxymorons from Las Vegas starting at 6 am, leaving from the Pretty Princess Casino parking lot, fourth level.

  PENITENCE TO THE PEOPLE!

  When I reemerged, with these documents and a stolen glue stick, I couldn’t see the Mooncalf. I left the door of my room open while I washed my face and took off my shoes. Then I made tea with a bag wedged in a Styrofoam cup beside the coffeemaker, ignoring the shiny pillowlet that was the vacuum-sealed packet of coffee. There was nothing to read but the Bible and the phone book. I chose the phone book. I took it and the cup outside and let myself in to a rectangle of Astroturf with a chain-link fence around it, containing some white plastic chairs, a picnic table, a bird feeder swaying from a metal arm, a barometer, a birdbath at which some quail were doing a fussy formal dance. The wind grabbed the door and banged it into its catch behind me, and the quail ran neatly through the chain-link fence without pausing and across the parking lot into the bushes. I sat down in one of the chairs. The sky was darkening and the faded Astroturf was an impossible green, the white lawn furniture almost fluorescent. A storm was cooking up blue-black over the Moroccan orange hills.

  I felt amazingly calm. I had finally had enough sleep. Ants ran over my feet. I let them. The phone book was a warm weight relaxing into my lap, like a sleeping child. I set my cup down on the Astroturf by the chair leg and flopped open the tome, which was a tome only because Grady, not big enough to earn its own phone book, was lumped in with Reno and Sparks and half a dozen other smaller towns.

  Look up the Olneys. There
they were, a Too Bad listing. The wind worried the page. Turn to the business listings, look up Olney, nothing; look up Too Bad. Shouldn’t a ghost town be unlisted? But there it was, full-page ad:

  Too Bad the Living Ghost Town!

  *Character Actors Depict Real Historical Personages

  *Strike It Rich! Prospect for Silver

  *Shoot-Out Every Day at Noon and Four

  *Famous Time Camera Takes You Back

  *Fun and Educational for Young and Old

  Look up Goat. No Goat. Goard abutted Gobbel. Check the business listings. Go Away Travel. God Loves Giving Hands Thrift Emporium. No Goat. What did I expect?

  Look up Chris Marchpane. March Marco Marcus. Nothing. Check the business listings, Marathon Communications, March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation. I started to flop the book closed, it slewed, and I slapped my hand down on it. In a little boxed ad I had just spotted something. Marchpane Motor Makeovers ( Expert Color Matching and Detailing, Kool Kustomizing, Mod Murals).

  Well.

  The wind thrashed the bushes. The ants that had been all around a moment before had disappeared, except one big sluggish ant who was carrying his oversized head around like a penance. Now he had stopped with his face to the Astroturf and was making tiny investigations. I was shielding my tea with my hand from the grit flying everywhere. Thunder broke. The roof of the bird feeder was clapping, and pinpricks of rain hit my shoulders. I retreated under the eaves.

  The rain came down in white lines like hard scratches in varnish. Instantly there were mud puddles, and brown water leaped down the road and into a culvert. The lightning flashed, and an old habit sprung up out of nowhere in me and I counted off the seconds until the thunder cracked. One, two: less than a mile.

  Ten minutes later the storm had passed and winged ants sucked in by its departure were wheeling down from the clouds and staggering up again and it was dark and fragrant and the puddles in the parking lot held ridiculously beautiful blue and orange and pink fragments of the sunstruck clouds above.

  I walked up the hill back of the motel to watch the light finish its changes. Some kids straddling outgrown bikes in the steaming parking lot watched me go. I knew their kind, the soft slow-moving kids, paler than you would expect, who hung around the gas station convenience store and played video games there and gabbed and ate jerky and Atomic Fireballs, chips and sodas, or silently gathered in broods around their large mothers at church socials and ate macaroni salad and hot dogs and chips and sodas and cupcakes. And the brown little boys with bleached crew cuts who rode in the back of red pickups and at five or six knew everything about guns and had tried cigarettes and performed dangerous stunts to get attention and jumped up bloody and said they didn’t feel anything. I looked back from the hill, and they were tearing away pedaling like mad down the shoulder of the highway toward the setting sun, their T-shirts raised like hydrofoils behind them.

  The warm wet spicy smell of sage affected me like catnip, and I had trouble not skipping. But the desert punishes spontaneity. I detached a spiny branch from my arm and went on soberly until the neon lights of the motel were over the crest of the rise from me. Around here you only had to walk fifty feet, and you were out of town.

  I thought about Chris Marchpane, about all the right turns and left turns and delays and reverses it must have taken to get that painting on that car to that street in San Francisco on that day, a combination lock a genius couldn’t crack. Then I thought about what it meant that he had painted me, or rather us, or rather that he had not not painted me, not painted me out—do you follow? After all this time thinking he wanted Blanche, not me, how odd to consider that he might have liked both of us all along.

  On the far side of the valley in the shadow of the western range it was getting dark. I could see a few trailer roofs shining dull like pewter, and the thin scar of the road heading north; one pair of taillights, far away and dwindling. The sun still touched down on this side of the valley, raking sideways, throwing up long blue shadows from the smallest shrub. Blue shadows, grey-gold brush: rabbitbrush, sage, and Mormon tea. Each small tuffet had its train of blue, so they all seemed to be creeping west. The hills too, because of their back-tilt, were sweeping westward, dragging their finery behind them.

  The sun went down until there were dwindling stripes of gold stretching across the shadow area to the golden east of the basin. As the shadow moved up, the light turned red on the peaks. When all the land was dark, then for a while it seemed lighter again, and the air was balmy, and we moved with ease, in pleasure at the sweet air brushing softly past us, and the rabbits all stepped out, and the rattlesnakes crawled onto the verge of the road and lay there with their heads down in a swoon of pleasure. To the east the blue earth-shadow rose, and above it the pink and the dirty orange, and above that the still light blue, and to the west a tangerine glow behind the dark blue mountains. The basin seemed to hold a shallow lake of warm dirty water from which we looked up at the great clean untouchable sky.

  Near an old dead car I found a newly dead dog. For a horrible moment I thought it might be the Mooncalf, but it was the wrong color, black and tan. Nor was it as fresh as I had thought at first glance, but already partway gone toward the lampshade, the saddle, the handbag, and blackening the stones around it with fur and particles that had been borne away by bugs or scattered by the tearing and plucking of carrion birds. But it was not much torn apart, except that one front paw had broken or been ripped off and carried away.

  Where was the Mooncalf ? I stepped over the paw, not after all very far away, with its pads turned up, and white bones gleaming in the sleeve of fur. “Mooncalf! Mooner,” I called. I heard a far-off squeal or scream and quieted my steps and heard a coyote from the hills very clear, yip yip yipeee, and suddenly my heart hurt with pleasure to be home. And then the Mooncalf came dancing up over the ridge, tail low and guilty and a smirk on her face.

  The last thing I remembered doing before I woke up in the desert was giving up. I imagined it as a kind of suicide. But Blanche hadn’t let me go. She had driven seven hundred miles to put me where she wanted me, and then she had brought me back. You could call that a strong hint: there was something I was supposed to do. But what?

  Well, there was one thing I could do: finish my story. I got the bag of diary entries out of the car and laid them out on the bed, a fragile patchwork, fluttering in the cold breath of the Genie. When they seemed in order, I began to paste them into my notebook, adding notes as needed. Outside, the night was loud with crickets I could hear even through the sound of the fan motor. When I opened the door, it was like the chant of a mob. Cree cree cree cree. The blue air was warm and still reeked of wood smoke from the fires started in the hills near the mines by dry lightning earlier today, as the hotel lady had told me. The black column of smoke was leaning out over Grady as if looking for something on the other side. There could not be much to burn unless the mines themselves went up. But there was the fire, a candy-red shower and glow. A few tiny planes circled it. Their winking lights stood in the smoke. Nearby, the sprinklers were working by themselves in the dark playing field across the street, wetting the road in sudden, reckless, but quickly withdrawn gestures. In the pink light of the motel sign, I saw a praying mantis, its tiny human head turned to watch me.

  I peeled off my sticky dress and took a bath in the glossy, pink, too shallow bathtub, under the heavy breathing of the fan. When I got out, my skin was hot enough to melt wax. I dried off and was wet again at once, this time with sweat. A drop of light hung from one nipple, and then I moved and it was slung off somewhere. There was a slow churning under my skin. I flopped down on my back on the bed. My heart galumphed in my stomach like some clumsy animal protesting against its incorporation. I heard something steady and secretive like sand grains trickling through invisible capillaries in the air. There were black crowdings pierced with tiny stinging lights all around me, an optical charivari that probably said damaging things about my state of health, but I liked it, and the
tingling chill that now lay on my skin.

  I had long slow intricate dreams like biological processes unfolding in their own time. The bed jiggled me in its palm like a coin. I let the Mooncalf out to pee sometime toward morning and fell back into bed and slept until the light woke me.

  When I opened the door the Mooncalf fell in. She was sprawled comfortably on a copy of the Grady Gazette, in the blinding light of the sun, and lifted her paw to let me scratch her chest, her eyes rolling up at me.

  I stacked my notebooks neatly, clipped a pen to the uppermost, and hung the Do Not Disturb sign from the door with a small internal click of officious pleasure. My ankles burned in the sun angling under the low awning, but the air was still cool and moist and made me feel loose-limbed and slightly drunk. Crossing the parking lot toward the office, I passed an old man with a huge speckled head who seemed to be under the impression he was walking. “Nice dog,” he croaked. “Dalmation, right?” He moved his foot a centimeter and beamed.

  Audrey,

  Regret I am alive. Moonie is fine. I will leave her with family in Too Bad, with instructions to call you. Car is at Twilite Inn, Grady Nevada. Keys left in Room 32. Please call off the cops.

  —Nora/Blanche

  PS Tell Trey it’s looking like sorry.

  After sending the preceding I went east, uphill, walking on the shoulder of the highway. The desert had been taking me back for a long time now. It wasn’t hard to guess where it was drawing me: Thin Air. But there was something I needed to get first.

  The last house fell behind me. The Mooncalf trotted after me at a short distance, making short forays off the road to sniff at the bushes, and then cantering for a bit to catch up. I passed a sign for Too Bad. The sky was lifting up like a huge sail, and in the space it made the birds chased one another from bush to bush like children, clamoring happily. When a truck passed with a sucking whoosh they all paused, checked themselves, and then took off again.