by Nicky Singer
Then I know I want to claim this desk after all.
8
But I still don’t put anything in the desk. Not until the morning my mother is to deliver the babies. This is going to be a long day, a difficult day. “We’ll need to keep busy,” Gran says, “you and me.”
Gran has agreed to stay in the house with me so that Si can be in the operating room with Mom.
“It’s an elective Cesarean, Jess,” says Si. “The surgery itself is quite safe.”
They have to go in the night before, as Mom is first on the list. Si stands in the hall holding Mom’s suitcase.
“Don’t worry, Jess,” Mom says, and stretches out her arms for me. But I can’t get close, because of the babies. “I’ll bring them home safe,” she whispers into my hair. “I will.”
“Time to go,” says Si.
I lie awake a long time that night. Keeping vigil. Watching. I imagine Mom being awake. And Si. And probably the babies too, waiting.
In the morning I skip breakfast.
“You’re growing,” says Gran. “You have to eat.”
But I can’t.
I go to my room and start on the desk. I have decided that I will put in some homework stuff, but also some private things. In one of the cubbyholes I lodge my English dictionary, my French dictionary, my class reader. I pay attention to the height of the books, their color, shuffling them about until I am sure that I have the correct book (the stubby French dictionary), in the middle. In the inkwell space, I put pens, pencils, glue, sticky tape, and my panda eraser with the eyes fallen off.
Then I move on to more precious things. Behind the little arched door, I put ScatCat. He’s a threadbare gray, his fur worn thin from having slept in my arms every night for the first four years of my life. His jet-black eyes are deep and full of memories. I think I’d still be sleeping with him if Spike hadn’t arrived. More about Spike later.
To keep Scat company, I add the family of green glass cats made, as I watched, by a glassmaker one summer vacation. Then I add a bracelet that Zoe made for me (braided strands of pink and purple thread) and also one made by another good friend—Em—(purple and green) when we were in fourth grade. I once suggested we make a friendship bracelet for the three of us, winding Zoe’s colors and Em’s and mine (purple and blue) all together. Zoe laughed at me. She said friendship bracelets could only be exchanged one-to-one. That’s what Best Friends meant, Zoe said. Didn’t I understand about Best Friends? I close the little arched door.
Next I select my father’s ivory slide rule. Not Si’s slide rule, but one that belonged to my real father. Gran thrust it into my hand one day.
“Here,” she said, quite roughly. “Your father had this when he was about your age. You should have it now.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A slide rule, of course.”
I must have looked puzzled.
“It was how people did math,” said Gran. “Before calculators.”
Before calculators sounded a bit like Before the Ark. It made my father seem further away, not nearer. Or it did until I held the slide rule. Carefully crafted in wood, overlaid with ivory (“I know we shouldn’t really trade ivory,” said Gran, “but this elephant has been dead a long, long while”), it’s bigger and deeper than a normal ruler, with a closely fitting sliding section in the middle slightly broader than a pencil. Along all its edges, carved numbers are inked in black.
“It originally belonged to your grandfather. Passed down,” Gran said. She paused. “Useless now, I suppose. It’s useless, isn’t it?”
Gran talks to me quite often about my father, although only when we are alone. Normally it makes me uncomfortable, not because I’m not interested, but because she always seems to require a response from me and I’m never quite sure what that response should be. And the more she looks at me, the more she wants, the less I seem to be able to give. Though I think she believes that, if she talks about him enough, I’ll remember him. It will unlock memories of my own. But I was only nine months old when he died and I remember nothing.
But the slide rule is different. It’s the first thing I’ve ever held in my hands that he held in his.
“It’s not useless,” I say. “I like it. Thank you.”
And all the roughness falls away from her.
I’m thinking all this as I select a drawer for my father’s ivory slide rule. Right or left? I choose the right, slip it in. Then I change my mind.
I just change my mind.
I open the left drawer and transfer the slide rule. But it won’t go, it won’t fit. I push at it, feel the weight of its resistance. I push harder; the drawers are an equal pair, so what fits in one has to fit in the other.
Only it doesn’t.
I pull out the right-hand drawer. It runs the full depth of the desk, plenty long enough for the slide rule. I pull out the left-hand drawer. It is less than half the length of its twin. Yet it isn’t broken. It is as perfectly formed as on the day it was made.
Which is why I put my hand into the dark, secret space that lies behind that drawer.
And find the flask.
9
My heart gives a little thump. I’ve no idea, this first time, what I’m touching, except that it is cold and rounded and about the size of my hand. As I draw it out into the light, I feel how neatly its hard, shallow curves fit into my palm.
I call it a flask, but perhaps it is really a bottle, a flattish, rounded glass bottle with a cork. It is very plain, very ordinary, and yet it is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The glass is clear—and not clear. There are bubbles in it, like seeds, or tiny silver fish, swimming. And the surface has strange whorls, like fingerprints or the shapes of contour lines on a map where there are mountains. I think I should be able to see inside, but I can’t, quite, because the glass seems to shift and change depending on how the light falls on it: now milky as a pearl; now flashing a million iridescent colors.
I sit and gaze at it for a long while, turning it over and over in my hands, watching its restless colors and patterns. It is a beautiful thing. I wonder how it came into being and who made it. It can’t have been made by machine; it is too special, too individual. I remember the glassmaker who made my green cats and I imagine a similar man in a leather apron blowing life down a long tube into this glass, putting his own breath into it, lung to lung, pleased when the little vessel expanded. And then, as I keep looking, the contours don’t look like contours anymore but ribs, and the bowl of glass a tiny rib cage.
I have these thoughts because of the babies. Everything in the last nine months has been about the babies. They get into and under everything. They aren’t even born and they can make you frightened, they can make Mom cry, they can make me see things that aren’t there under shifting glass. Because, all of a sudden, I think I can see something beneath the surface of the glass after all.
Something and nothing.
I do make things up. Si says, “You are certainly not a scientist, Jessica. Scientists look at the evidence and then they come to a view.” But it’s not just Si, it’s Gran and even Mom. They say I make things up. I see things that aren’t there. And hear them sometimes, too. Like now, beneath the glass, through the glass.
Some movement, a blink, a sigh. A song. Some sadness.
The sensation of life, of a rib cage, breathing.
“Jessica!” That’s a shout, a real-world shout. Gran is shouting. “Jessica, Jess!”
I jolt out of myself. “What?”
“The phone, Jess.”
Gran is standing at the bottom of the stairs, the phone in her hand.
It has come. The message. She knows. She knows about the babies.
I abandon everything, fly down the stairs, rip the phone from her.
“Yes?”
It is Si.
“Jess,” he says. “Jess.”
“Yes!”
“They’re alive. They’re alive, Jess.” His voice doesn’t sound like his normal voice, it sou
nds floating. I conjure his face. His eyes are full of stars.
I know I’m supposed to say something, but I don’t know what.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” says Gran.
“And they both have a heart,” says Si. “Two hearts, Jess. One heart each.”
Then I find something to say.
“Omphalopagus,” I say.
10
Omphalopagus is the technical term for babies joined at the lower chest. These type of babies never share a heart, so I don’t know why Si is so surprised. After all, it was Si who did the research, hours and hours of it online. Si who taught me the word, made me pronounce it back to him. Omphalo—umbilicus. Pagus—fastened, fixed. Fixed at the navel. The twins umbilically joined to each other and to Mom and right back through history to the Greeks who coined the word in the first place.
Me and the joins.
Si and the statistics.
Si’s endless statistics. Seventy percent of conjoined twins are girls. Thirty-nine percent are stillborn. Thirty-four percent don’t make it through the first day of life.
Si’s eyes, shining.
“Can you give me back to Gran now, Jess?” says Si.
As I hand over the phone, I remember the night of Mom’s nineteen-week scan. I’d come down for a raid on the cereal cupboard. Si and Mom were talking in the sitting room, hushed, serious talk.
“They’re gifts of God,” I heard Mom say.
I stood at the door of the kitchen, waiting for Si to put Mom right about that. I waited for him to tell Mom what he’d told me earlier that afternoon that, despite a great deal of mystical mumbo jumbo talked about conjoined twins down the ages, they are actually just biological lapses, slips of nature. Embryos that begin to divide into identical twins, but never complete the process, or split embryos that somehow fuse back together again. A small error, a malfunction, nothing to be surprised about, considering the cellular complexity of a human being.
I wait for him to say this. But he doesn’t.
“They’re miracles,” Mom says. “Our miracles. And I don’t care what anyone says. They’re here to stay.”
And Si doesn’t go on to mention the thirty-nine percent of conjoined twins who don’t make it through the birth canal, or the thirty-four percent who die on day one.
He just takes her in his arms and lets her bury her head in his chest. I see them joined there. Head to chest.
11
I’ve only been gone from my bedroom a matter of minutes, but it feels like a lifetime. Even the room doesn’t look the way it did before. It’s bigger, brighter, there is sunlight splashing through the window.
“The babies,” I shout. “They’re alive!” I jump on the bed and throw myself into a wild version of a tribal dance Zoe once taught me. Then I catch sight of myself in the mirror and stop. Immediately.
I also see, in the mirror, the flask. It has fallen over, it’s lying on its side on the desk.
No. No!
I scoot off the bed.
Please don’t be cracked, please don’t be broken.
The flask has only just entered my life and yet, I realize suddenly, I feel very powerfully about it. Connected, even. I find myself lurching forward, grabbing for it. But it isn’t my beautiful, breathing flask; it is just a bottle. Something you might dig up in any old backyard. It isn’t broken, but it might as well be, because the colors are gone and so are the patterns. No, that’s not true; there are whorls on the surface of the glass still, but they aren’t moving anymore, and the bubbles, my little seed fish, they aren’t swimming. And there is nothing—nothing—inside.
I feel a kind of fury, as though somebody has given me something very precious and then just snatched it away again. I realize I already had plans for that flask. I was going to remove the cork and . . .
The cork—where is the cork?
It isn’t in the bottle. I scan the desk. It isn’t on the desk. But how can it be anywhere but in the bottle or on the desk? Did I imagine a cork? No, I saw it: a hard, discolored thing, lodged in the throat of the flask. I look into the empty bottle, as if the cork might just miraculously appear. But it doesn’t. The smell of the bottle is of cold and dust. There can’t have been anything in that bottle.
And yet there was.
There was something crouched inside that glass, waiting.
No, not crouched; that makes it sound like an animal. And the thing didn’t have that sort of form, it was just something moving, stirring. Then I see it, the cork. Look! There on the floor. It’s not close to the flask, not just fallen out and lying on the desk, but a full yard away. Maybe more. To carry the cork that far, something big, something powerful, must have come out of the flask, burst from it.
So where is that thing now?
12
It’s on the windowsill.
What I thought was a patch of sunlight isn’t sunlight at all. It’s bright like sunlight, but it doesn’t fall right, doesn’t cast the right shadows. Light coming through a window-pane starts at the sun and travels for millions of miles in dead straight lines. You learn that in fifth grade. Light from the sun is not curved, or lit from inside, or suddenly iridescent as a soap bubble or milky as a pearl. It doesn’t expand and pulse and move. It doesn’t breathe. Whatever is on the windowsill, it isn’t light from the sun.
I go toward it. It would be a lie to say I’m not frightened. I am frightened, terrified even, but I’m also drawn. I can’t help myself. I remember my old math teacher, Mr. Brand, breaking off from equations one day and going to stand at the window where there was a slanted sunbeam. He cupped his hands in the beam and looked at the light he held—and didn’t hold.
“You can’t have it,” he said. “You can’t ever have it.”
And all of the class laughed at him. Except me. I knew what he meant because I’ve tried to capture sunbeams, too.
And now I want the thing on the windowsill, because it is strange and beautiful and I don’t want to lose it again. I don’t want to feel what I felt when I saw that the flask was empty, which is sick and hollow, my stomach clutching just like in the moment when Mom told me Aunt Edie was dead.
So I move very slowly and quietly, as though the thing is an animal after all and might flee in fear. And it does seem to be vibrating—or trembling, I can’t tell which—as though it is aware of me, watching me, though something without eyes cannot watch.
“It’s all right,” I find myself saying. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”
I won’t hurt it! What about it hurting me?
My room’s not big, as I’ve said, but it takes an age to cross. I am just a hand-stretch away from the pearly, pulsing light when there is a sudden whoosh, like a wind got up from nowhere, and I feel a rush and panic, but I don’t know if it is my rush and panic or that of the thing that seems to whip and curl past my head and pour itself back into the flask.
Back into the flask!
Quick as a flash, I put my thumb over the opening and I hold it down tight as I scrabble in the desk for my sticky tape. I pull at the tape, bite some off, jam it over the open throat of the flask, and then wind it again and again around the neck so the thing cannot escape.
I have it captured.
Captured!
Then I feel like one of those boys you read about in books who pull the wings off flies: violent, cruel. But here’s the question: If you had something in your bedroom that flew and breathed and didn’t obey the laws of science, would you want it at liberty?
That’s what I thought.
13
When my heart calms down, I feel I owe the flask (or the thing inside it) an explanation. I think I should tell the truth, about the fear as well as the excitement. But I don’t know who or what I’m dealing with, so I also feel I shouldn’t give too much away. I should be cautious. Si’s always saying that A man of science proceeds with care. Or, If you’re going to mix chemicals, Jess, put your goggles on.
I’m not sure what sort of goggles I need to deal with th
e thing in the flask, but I think the least I can try is an apology.
“I’m sorry about the sticky tape,” I say.
I’m not really expecting a reply and I don’t get one, but the movement inside the flask does seem to become a little less frantic, so I have the feeling the thing is listening.
“I guess you must have been in that flask a long time,” I say next.
Where does that remark come from? From the cold and the dust I smelled in the bottle? Or from some storybook knowledge of things in bottles, genies in lamps? What am I imagining, that the thing is some trapped spirit cursed to remain in the flask for a thousand years until—until what? Until Jessica Walton arrives with her father’s ill-fitting slide rule? They say (correction: Si says) if you put a sane person in a lunatic asylum for any length of time they become as mad as the inmates. Me? I’m talking to a thing in a flask.
I’m calling it you.
The word you implies that the thing I’m talking to is alive. I mean, you don’t say you to a box of tissues, do you? Or to a hairbrush or a necklace or a cell phone. So I am making a definite assumption about the thing being alive. Mr. Pug, our biology teacher, says that only things that carry out all seven of the life processes can be said to be alive. Pug calls all seven life processes Mrs. Nerg.
M—for movement
N—for nutrition
R—for reproduction
E—for excretion
S—for sensitivity
R—for respiration
G—for growth
I look at the thing in the flask. Movement—no doubt about that. Reproduction—I’m not sure I want to think about that right now. Sensitivity—definitely. It’s sensitive to me, I’m sensitive to it. Nutrition—does the thing eat? Unlikely. It doesn’t have a mouth. But then plants eat and they don’t have mouths. Excretion—not important. If you don’t eat you don’t need to excrete. Respiration—yes, it breathes, doesn’t it? And it has to get energy from somewhere or it couldn’t move—and it certainly moves. Growth—yes again; I think I can imagine it growing.