Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  And so we went on. The sun was admonitory and unmoved. The wind came with a dry swipe, licking up grit. Suddenly a dust devil stood beside me, fox-colored and shifty. Within its swirl was a denser core. I could make out four little hooves, and then two little noses. The two-headed lamb had a frayed velvet saddle strapped around its ungainly, sausage-like midriff, and One and a Half was in the saddle. Mmm, mom, moo, moon, mummy, he said. Sand scoured the panes of the dollhouse and seethed around the eaves. My body hid in the skirts of the devil, and no doubt from outside the house looked like it was carried on the wind, right past the sign that said:

  NO TRESPASSING

  NATIONAL PENITENCE GROUND

  SILENCE PLEASE

  HALF LIFE

  SECURITY BREACH. SECURITY BREACH. SECURITY…” droned One and a Half. The two-headed lamb he rode trotted close to me, and as the heads took turns leading, it veered left and right and left again, bumping me repeatedly, as if herding me. The Mooncalf stuck close to my other side. I could see only dust beyond my windowpanes, but between the two of them, there was only one way I could go. Blind, I went.

  The dust devil seethed and whistled in my eaves, but I could hear One and a Half as clearly as if he were seated on the piano bench at my ear. “Penitence monitors identify a heavy concentration of perimeter-violating green blips exhibiting purposeful behavior vis-a-vis the front gates,” he reported, “evocative of a ravening horde of Oxymorons boosting one another over the fence. Best est. 780-935, more coming, note some blips may represent two or more personages, recent studies employing twofers have revealed that old-fashioned imaging sensors count two heads twice or not at all. The computer has understandable difficulty with the concept 2=1, thinks Officer Pangborn.”

  Bump. “How do you even know what a computer is?” I said, irritated. “Weren’t you born in 1783?” Even within the dollhouse, I could taste the salty dust.

  “Twenty-seven solitary green blips in other border areas exhibit erratic behavior. Officer Pangborn’s experience is that ninety-seven percent of erratically-behaving blips are bunny rabbits. The remaining three percent are other desert fauna. Request imaging? asks the computer. Request infrared scan, lite language-strafe, probability analysis, satellite photo? Request interpretation? Imaging confirmed. Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, deer, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, deer, coyote, vulture, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, tiny house with legs.”

  “Ha, ha,” I mouthed. His voice sounded different now, and I thought in a minute I might recognize it.

  “Fucking great. Fucking Baba Yaga, thinks Pangborn, who is a Soviet spy. The computer is going insane. Happens to all of them sooner or later, here. Language gets to them. They start hedging: 1 plus 1 is two, usually. Babbling about sunflowers and such. Citing dissenting views. Fucking yeshiva students, fucking poets, these Penitence computers.”

  The dust devil slowed, drifted sideways, wound what remained of itself onto a spindle of sky and withdrew. I saw One and a Half’s upper jaw part, letting dust spill down the lower head. “Blip #27, AKA Agent Black (disguised as a small house) creeps on a pixilated diagonal into the no-speakum zone. She is carrying the—”

  What was that?

  Wobbling behind the heat-warped air, the bobbing green and purple retinal bursts, the old impurities and new scratches in the glass windows of the dollhouse, was something unlike all these. I had the funny idea it was a city. The dollhouse lurched as I broke into a shuffle. A tiny book dinged me in the lip, a sofa champed against my chin, and after a while I saw there really was a city, standing upside down on a fault in the sky. Thin Air! The inverted houses flexed and flared and then steadied and stood firm, depending from a flake of land that was stuck in the sky like a sliver of mirror glass in an eye.

  A mirage is no phantom, Papa had told us, but the reflection of some real thing on the ground below, glancing off the plane where two different densities of air meet. It could be miles away, though, and already my breath was tearing at my throat. I slowed.

  Even at a walk, moving forward had become difficult. I had to plan each step before I took it. Sometimes I confused the intention for the deed. Then Moony would blunder into the back of my leg, and I would remember and move on. Each time I set my foot down, the thin crust crunched and gave way to powder as fine as talc and terrifically hot. One of the problems that preoccupied me was how to step so lightly I did not break through the crust into it. I did not discover a way. My shoes were ovens. The Mooncalf was now so white with dust she looked like her own ghost. Her tongue emerging from that sameness that matched the sameness around her was a shocking color, almost lilac.

  “She is carrying the Device,” repeated One and a Half, whom I had almost forgotten. I looked back. “Computer retrieves an ancient phrase from the Penitence archives: Recommend Dollhouse Manouver?” His voice altered. “No, snarls Pangborn, and for good measure, Override, in case no leaves room for interpretation. We’ve got a situation on our hands. All men to the front gate.”

  “Well, that explains why nobody’s shot us yet,” I rasped. I could see our tracks through his ribcage: the zigzag path of the lamb, Moonie’s neat line of divots, my twin trenches. But beyond them, a storm blued the southwestern range. I felt a tiny prickle of hope, not for myself, but for the Mooncalf, who would need water soon. Was it heading this way? As if in answer, a gust of wind banged the front door, carrying the warm spicy smell of wet creosote and sage. Moonie flopped down on my feet, heavily, and I took a step back to catch my balance. A patch of horizon yawed in the window frame. Something interrupted the view. I lost it, found it again.

  One and a Half cleared his throat—which was strange, since he did not have one. “Explanation of the Device,” he said. “Its intricate wiring, cleverly disguised as ordinary ink, has been laboriously handwritten by Agent Black, under the constant guidance of the mysterious Agent White. Actually, Agent Black is Agent White, but both are unaware of this fact. The deception is necessary, since the Device has been created through the exchange of coded messages between Black and White, an exchange so cunningly orchestrated by HQ that neither is aware of the larger purpose of her personal and at times, apparently pointless ramblings. Collapse the difference between Agent White and Agent Black and boom, no Device. Further explanation of the Device—”

  “Shh!” I said. Whatever it was, it was coming toward us, drumming up consecutive puffs of white dust like smoke signals. These hung in the air, peculiarly shapely and cohesive, like thought clouds in a comic strip. I could trace the path of the pursuer I still could not make out in the advancement and multiplication of them. I could hear a rhythmic thumping coming from it, oddly offset from the puffs of dust. The light was schismatic and deceitful and so it took me a long time to determine, from its luminosity and the shape-describing shine glancing off it as it rose and fell, that what I saw was a glass jar full of a cloudy liquid. I had last seen it in the Potter Museum, at which time it had been sealed with a thick cord of callous-colored wax encircling the lid. The lid had been jettisoned since then. In this jar the two-headed pig fetus that had been its quiescent inhabitant for more than a century was hopping across the gypsum like a contestant in a sock race. The fetus was splitting its sides, literally: bits of its intestines were wandering out of the crack and flailing in the splashing formaldehyde, so more and more it was swimming around in her own innards, and occasional shreds popped out of the top of the jar and sprung away across the desert. The jar came to a halt before me. The fused faces rose up from within it, their ivory snouts pointing left and right, like a cartoon of a pig shaking its head. “We we we!” they squealed, in two-part harmony.

  I yanked my foot out from under The Mooncalf’s heavy haunch and took a step back. The Mooncalf scrambled to her feet.

  “Want to hear a poem?” said the pig. Receiving no answer, it cleared two throats, closed four eyes, and opened the pale clefts of its mouths. “After you,” said the mout
h to the right.

  “No, after you,” said he to the left.

  “If you insist,” said the one to the right, and cleared its throat again. “A Siamese twin had two cunts—” he said.

  “Which performed some astonishing stunts!” said the other.

  “What found its way in—”

  “To the right-handed twin’s—”

  “Would come out of the left-handed one’s!” they chorused.

  “Isn’t that juvenile?” crowed one. The other, in a hushed voice: “You know, I never got to grow up. I’ve been a baby in a bottle my whole life. Or do I mean, my whole death?”

  “I’m sorry,” I rasped. My voice sounded strange.

  “Not your fault! Want to hear another joke? Knock knock—”

  “The Device,” insisted One and a Half. But it was Blanche’s voice. I turned and ran until my sweat darkened the carpet and my breath clouded the windows of the room. It didn’t matter, there was nothing to run into here. I could hear Moonie behind me, panting raggedly.

  When I slowed at last, the thumps of the pig jar slowed commensurately. In the intervals between, I heard something else.

  I swung around, plucking open the front door. Through it I saw something tattered and stained sneezed out of the dust cloud that had boiled up behind us. It was a dead pigeon, flattened to a discus. I turned to keep it in view as it rolled like a plate on its rim up to and past me and right in the doorway of a low enclosure of crumbling concrete from which rusted iron rods reached skyward, twisting. In the middle of what had once been a floor, it wobbled and spun and sang, “I saw another self behind the glass and I flew to challenge her and broke myself against her. I lie between the sky and the reflected sky, and only in my shadow can I see any depth to this world.” Then it tipped over, and silence fell on the ruins.

  I had arrived. Erewhon. Never-Neverland. The Erased Place, the Silent Planet; the Land of Thin Air. Doom Town.

  Under shoals of dust I saw the crumbling relict of a paved road leading into the ruins. I went down it.

  There was no city. Just sheer sky, white dust, and the broken remains of a fiction. The buildings, what was left of them, were pitted and gnawed, as if by a teething infant of colossal proportions. They were concrete bunkers, nothing like the Manor; most were roofless. Doors and windows were absent altogether, or clung in a few charred fragments to hinge and sash. The desert within the walls was no different from the desert without, except that the wind eddying around the corners had swept the gypsum into tent curves as regular as computer models.

  I passed a steel octagon bolted to a post—a stop sign, paint-stripped. I passed a blistered, excoriated school bus and a clutch of cages whose bars had rusted thin as thread, snakeweed growing up through them. Their doors hung open, swaying slightly. Out of one strolled a turbaned mongoose, piping a sad tune. “Here’s where the animals were caged, to be turned to smoke and rumors,” he said.

  I fumbled blindly for the Mooncalf, folding her sleek ear around my finger. “I know,” I said.

  “Are you Sad?” It was my voice, this time. I didn’t reply. The mongoose resumed his melancholy tune, and from around the charred stump of a telephone pole appeared the scrambled kittens.

  “Is there a part for a monster in this musical?” they chorused. “Can I do my audition piece?” They struck a pose.

  “How comes it that thou art out of hell?” one head inquired.

  “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,” said the other. Then they broke into song, cabaret-style.

  I was born the same day as my body

  Our folks gave us both the same name

  They scolded me when she was naughty

  She broke my toys,

  She played with boys,

  I got the blame.

  My body gets all the attention

  My body is everyone’s pet

  On my birthday, I barely rate a mention

  She takes the cake,

  I lie awake,

  That’s what I get.

  She wears my clothes, she borrows my umbrella

  Fishes for change in my purse

  She gives away all the secrets I tell her

  Sleeps with my lovers,

  Hogs all the covers,

  Rewrote this verse.

  Other voices joined on the last verse—One and a Half, the pigs, the two-headed lamb.

  I know one day my body’s going to kill me

  We’ll be buried beneath the same stone.

  She’ll never know how it will fulfill me

  When worms and decay

  Bear her away

  And I’m alone.

  Finally alone.

  Leave me alone.

  Leave me alone.

  Thus serenaded, I walked straight through Doom Town and out the other side, then turned and followed its perimeter until I met my own tracks going in, accompanied by Moonie’s and other, stranger ones. Those first ruins were different from the others, I saw now. The walls were a warmer color and had worn down into softer, rounder forms, closely interlocked. They were obviously the foundations of a single large house, not many small ones. A portion of the front steps still led up into the sky. They were faced with stone, lovingly laid: you didn’t put that kind of effort into something you meant to destroy. I might have found the Manor after all. It wouldn’t hurt to think so.

  I stepped inside, and turned. If that’s the front stoop then the living room would be…I took a few paces to my left. Now I was in the dollhouse, and I was in the dollhouse. Doubly home: a good place to wind up. I pulled off my dress—the wrong way, because of the dollhouse on my head—tearing the collar as I worked it down over my hips, and laid it out by feel on the ground. The animals congregated around me as I took off my shoes and socks and placed them side-by-side under the dress where feet should go. Then I unlatched the house and cracked it open. My notebooks fell out in a shambles and something slapped onto the sand: my passport, the fake one with only one name in it. I stacked the books and laid the passport on the dress, something like a memorial stone. The congregation applauded, those with paws, or rocked their jars on the gypsum. Then I closed the house again and latched it.

  I sat down naked beside my flat, paper-doll self, in the shade of my house-hat. Moony flopped down between my legs. The wind was picking up. My dress fluttered on the ground and skirmishes of gypsum passed over it. Some dust remained, caught in its folds, and as these deposits grew heavier and spread out over the flimsy fabric the pattern faded, the colors paled, and my dress began to disappear. The light grew strangely yellow. A cloud-shadow raced over us, and then a shadow stayed. I waited.

  And nothing happened.

  The two-headed kitten nudged my hand. The two-headed chick scratched lines in the dirt, looking at me meaningly. One and a Half tapped me on the shoulder. “What?” I said.

  In the pompous voice Blanche used for class presentations, One and a Half said, “Explanation of the Device: The National Penitence activity has not destroyed sadness, but split it from its source. Sadness survives but cannot be understood, except by animals, ghosts, and the body, where it takes the form of disease. What cannot be understood, cannot be cured. The Device refigures sadness by painstakingly crocheting together the knowledge that Penitence has erased and dispersed.”

  I sighed and picked up my notebook from the pile. What had Blanche wanted from me, all along? A story. And this one was not finished.

  After that day on the mountain, Blanche shut up. She slept the rest of the day and all that night; the next morning, she was still sleeping. My parents and Max did not seem, at first, overly concerned. “Shock,” they said wisely. “Let her sleep.” They did not ask me what had happened on our walk and of course I did not tell them. As for Dr. Goat, Donkey-skin, and Granny, nobody spoke of them, and their bodies were, as far as I know, never found. And so I was free to believe that Granny was not dead, but in Oaxaca. She had blown up her own gas station to dispose of Dr. Goat and prevent a witch-hunt against our
kind—Siamesas Diabolicas! Then she’d high-tailed it across the border with her sidekick Donkey-skin. When Mama and Papa said we were going to Mexico, not long afterward, I was sure we were going to meet them, though the ostensible reason was to take Blanche away from the scene of her trauma. I sizzled all the way with secret excitement, and when we crossed the border I was bouncing on the seat. Everywhere we stopped I scanned every face, peeked into every alley. I played along, not mentioning Granny once. It wasn’t until we were in the long line to reenter the States that I said, “When do we get to Oaxaca?”

  Mama rumpled my hair, then, as an afterthought, Blanche’s. “Our little world-traveler wants to know when we get to Oaxaca! We’re not going to Oaxaca, funny, you have to take a plane to get there.”

  “Are we taking a plane, then?” I persisted.

  “Not on this trip, hon’.”

  I burst into tears—of rage, not of grief. I still believed Granny was waiting there, eating pastries with her feet up on a metal chair, while Donkey-skin played Shady Ladies on a xylophone.