Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  The splitting of the pronomial atom is a solecism of a very different stripe. What has happened to the jackrabbits and quails of our earlier example? The irradiated rabbit bears a litter of four-eyed young. The irradiated cactus bears radioactive fruit, eaten by birds; the seeds are expelled, sprout, and grow into strange, new cacti that harbor their spines on the inside, whose fruit in turn will be eaten by birds, some of which seem to glow in the dark. The quail is snatched up by an eagle, who soars, pulsing with gamma rays, to a distant mountain range, where he fathers some very unusual eaglets.

  What has happened? The rules of grammar are not broken, but transformed. More exactly, they are self-transforming. The divided pronoun has released agency from grammar’s lock-hold and set free the principle of change. Many of our new sentences will be hopeless cripples, like a poor acephalous lamb, but others will give rise to new forms of beauty, that those of you locked in the rules of an earlier age cannot imagine. What will these differently abled sentences say? What will they allow us to think? What new nouns will verb one another, adverbially, and what adjectival age will dawn?

  Government forces and no-nuke activists alike have misconstrued the purpose of nuclear testing, which was neither to attone nor prepare for war but to prevent it by engendering a mutant strain of homo sapiens with the capacity to see both sides of an issue at one time. The National Penitence Ground is the birthplace of a new age. We demand that this sacred ground, having served its purpose, be turned over to its children. We will make it a Jerusalem for the Twofer Nation.

  Mutatis Mutandis: Changing what needs changing.

  ACCIDENT-PRONE

  I am so sorry,” I’d lie, getting out my wallet. “Granny always said I was accident-prone.”

  She did, but she was wrong. Those were not accidents, they were experiments. How long would Blanche hold a burning match she was instructed not to drop? How long could I make her hold it, when it hurt me too? If we stood on the double line of the skinny highway twenty feet past a blind curve, while a semi going fifty plunged down a thirty-percent grade toward us, would Blanche jump right or left?

  Sentiment is a watery element. The willow is its tree, the lily its flower, and these are thirsty familiars. The funeral urn and the reflecting pond, instigators of sweet sadness, are also monuments to the puddle inside us. But the desert dries our tears. I learned to crush scorpions, poison ants. I watched my own blood blob on my skin with cool fascination. I squatted over animal corpses, amazed at the activity under the hide’s sagging canopy. I was fascinated with destruction and death.

  Once, I plunged my right hand wrist-deep in a red ant den. Blanche did not move or cry, though a sun boiled at the end of that arm. I was the one who yanked out the swollen pentapod, brushed off the myrmidons sleeving our forearm in fire. Blanche trusted me, admired me even. If I wanted to throw myself onto a prickly pear or jump down the well, she would study to approve.

  The well was capped with a heavy iron disc, impossible to lift, but easy to push aside. I worshipped the cavity underneath. The dank draft that spooled out of it was almost a voice. It said things like, How terrible it would be to watch somebody fall. How long you would have to wait to hear the splash.

  Actually, I knew exactly how long. I had timed the interval with stones and dried dog turds. Once, too, with a wriggling lizard. I had held it cupped between our palms over the dark void, watched the tiny ancient face squeeze out from between our fingers. Then the whole smooth body poured through the chink into nothingness. After that tiny, distant splash I went hot all over and ran into the brush to scrub my face with sand. Blanche did cry, that time. “I didn’t mean to drop it!” I said. “You shouldn’t have let it get away!”

  “I know!” she wailed. Her sobs enraged me all the more because there was no blame in them. I could have pushed her in then, just to silence her. I was preserved from that temptation and others by sharing every fate I consigned her to.

  Well, almost every fate. In “backward” parts of the world they still considered us monsters, and corrected us at birth if they could, and prayed over the body if they couldn’t. There were mercy killings and exorcisms, but also surgical interventions, to suit the baby for a normal life. I’d have a 50/50 chance of making the cut. Sometimes as I lay in bed I saw a pair of hands, disciplined and culinary, feeling for the spot with the knife. Rocking the blade on the bones, finding a niche. Crunch. Hands in streaked latex.

  “Mama,” I said. My mother was chopping carrots.

  “What is it. What.” Crunch.

  “Can we cut Blanche’s head off?”

  Crunch.

  The knife was hard to lift with one hand, but I knew better than to use both; Blanche always had a little more sway over our right hand. The weight made my little wrist ache. The blade was a strong, serious shape, a long triangle, very thick at the top edge and the base, welded into a cylindrical metal handle. We had lifted it from the kitchen drawer days before, stuck it under the elastic waistband of our shorts (pink, with embroidered ladybugs), stomach clenched against the cold, and buried it by a century plant, whose fifteen-foot stalk would make it easy to find again. Every day we brushed off the thin layer of sand and looked at it, running our hands over the metal, which was sometimes warm, sometimes cool, depending on the time of day. Our fingers left iridescent prints on the blade.

  One day I thrust it into a barrel cactus for practice. Then I squatted, wiped the blade on my shirt, and watched the cut dribble, bead, and seal itself over the course of a hot day. I say I, because I was keeping Blanche down, more out of habit than any fear of intervention. She did not struggle, just waited to see what we would do.

  Another day, I laid the blade against her cheek. I can see her eyelashes against her cheek as she looked down and sideways at it, her head perfectly still. “Do you think I can take your head off with one stroke,” I said, “or do you think I will have to saw?” Blanche didn’t answer. “I will have to cauterize the wound, or I might lose too much blood. Vultures will come. Do you think it will hurt?”

  She nodded emphatically, then let out a little cry when the point nicked her cheek.

  I tsk’d. “That was dumb.” I put the knife away and examined her miniature cut. “We won’t have to cauterize that unless it festers. I meant hurt me, not you,” I added.

  I was falling asleep that night when she whispered, “Nora! I think it’s festering.”

  I turned on the light. The cut was red with a thin dark line down the center, like a miniature mouth. “Don’t be stupid. I can’t even see it.” I turned the light back off.

  One day I went for a walk. I brought a plastic bag, some matches, a towel with roses on it, and a small shovel.

  Her neck was very thin.

  I held the knife so that the blade rested on the saddle between our heads. I had held it there so long that it was our body temperature and I could hardly feel it. The edge was just touching the skin of her neck, right where tan gave way to pallor under her hair. A fine muscle in her neck was standing out. I could sever it easily. The sun was steady and benevolent overhead. I felt peaceful and not inclined to move. When an ant ran up my leg I stood on one foot and knocked the ant off with the other. I pressed the knife a little harder against her neck and looked at the way her flesh dented. It went white near the blade. I kept looking back and forth between her eyes and the knife.

  “Nora!” Max was thrashing through the bushes toward us, face bright red. “What in freaking hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I laughed, frightened, and pulled the knife away. I felt the cut before I saw it. For a second there was no blood at all. Then a neat red line appeared at the base of Blanche’s neck.

  Blanche let out a terrified wail as Max swept us roughly up. I let the knife fall; it stuck point down with a satisfying chunk. “We were just playing,” I said.

  I repeated this claim at the kitchen table tribunal a short time later. “We were, weren’t we, Blanche?”

  Blanche nodded. “We always play
like that.”

  “With a knife?” Mama said. She touched the back of her hand to her brow.

  “Knives aren’t toys,” Papa said. “If you want a knife of your own, we’ll pick one out together, and I’ll show you how to use it.”

  “My own knife?” I breathed. “For keeps?” I could see it. No corkscrew or awl or Swiss scissor piffle, just an elkhorn handle and one long, sullen blade.

  “Yours and Blanche’s, Nora. And you’ll both have to promise to handle it carefully. Never forget that you could really hurt yourself or someone else with—”

  “Blanche, what were the plastic bag and the shovel for?” Max broke in. Blanche looked at me. Max shook her head at me. “I’m asking Blanche.”

  “I don’t know!” Blanche said.

  “The matches?”

  “I don’t know,” Blanche said. “Oh! To cauterize the wound.”

  “What have I spawned?” cried Mama. “What? What?”

  After that I often saw Max watching me. But I can state that I did not at this time have any real wish to be rid of Blanche. I wanted only to know the precise extent of my considerable power over her. How much of me was mine. For keeps.

  BLINK TWICE

  I hope you’re not under the impression that decapitation is a humane way to administer euthanasia to reptiles,” I said. Trey, holding his breath, shook his head vigorously. Two wisps of smoke slid out of his nostrils. When other people were drinking their morning coffee, Trey was lighting a joint.

  “The director said the twofer actors didn’t have, quote-unquote, a feel for the role!” said Audrey. She flapped the paper, indignant. The first mainstream movie about twofers, Two If by Sea, and the romantic leads were going to be played by singletons! They’d be wearing fake second heads animated by expensive special effects, when there were perfectly qualified two-headed actors dying to get the part of suave Tyler and his endearingly neurotic twin Toby, or that beautiful but apparently unattainable twofer, whose left side has taken holy orders while her right moonlights as a stripper in a downtown bar, wearing a velvet hood over her better half, and swaps one-liners with that funny fuck Cliff, a regular, who conceals his love for her behind his cynical manner.

  “Actually, the snake or lizard head can live as much as an hour in considerable agony. And, one imagines, surprise. ‘Where did my body go? It was here a minute ago.’”

  “An hour?” said Audrey, momentarily distracted.

  “Compared to thirteen seconds. That’s how long a human head can remain conscious after decapitation. Supposedly.”

  “Really? Hm.” She turned back to her paper. “Oh, this is good. The director said, quote, the twofer actors didn’t capture that combination of tenderness, angst, quixotic humor, ancient wisdom teachings, and borderline-psychotic personality profiles that we think of as quintessentially twofer. We felt the singleton actors had a better feel for the director’s vision.”

  “The cytochromes in the brain have thirteen seconds worth of phosphates stored up. In those thirteen seconds you could conceivably blink twice for yes and once for no.”

  “Why on earth would you want to do that?” Audrey said.

  “Well, then you could answer questions.”

  “What kind of question would you ask a severed head?”

  “I don’t know. What’s it like to be alone?”

  “That’s not a yes or no question,” she said. “That’s more like a mu question.”

  “Eh?”

  “Mu. Means ‘nothing’ in Chinese. It’s the answer to a famous zen riddle. Or rather it’s the non-answer that questions the question.”

  Trey let out his breath. “How about, ‘Where does it hurt?’” He giggled, then coughed.

  “When they chopped people’s heads off they would hold up the head so it could look at its decapitated body and feel remorse.” I stopped, trying to imagine a body from the perspective of a head, dizzily swinging from the executioner’s gloved hand. How confused your body would look, shaken in its confidence that it was you. Surprised, disappointed. “That clinched the execution. You had to be shown what you’d lost through your wickedness. But nobody could determine whether the heads were still conscious. One condemned man promised, for the good of science, to blink two times if he was still conscious after the guillotine had done its work. He didn’t blink, but who knows if he couldn’t or just didn’t; maybe his commitment to science didn’t go very deep.” I mused. “There was a story about two rivals whose heads were thrown in a burlap bag together. When they dumped them out one of them had bitten the other one’s ear off.”

  “What?” said Audrey. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening. I am so burned about this.”

  It will be obvious that I had been doing some research. I had learned:

  The head of Bran the Blessed kept giving good advice for several years after it was cut off.

  Cuchulain’s too.

  Do not play ball with Mayans. If you have the misfortune to coach the losing team, you will have your head cut off. Or is it the winning team? Accounts differ.

  Decapitation is a good way to kill vampires.

  Be careful with scythes, especially if Irish. (“A man decapitating himself by mistake is indeed a blunder of true Hibernian character.”)

  I had cheerfully printed out the best of these stories and pasted them into the Manual.

  Researching body modification, I then stumbled into a private message board with seductive postings from one- and no-legged ladies, one earnest fellow who wanted to have all his teeth pulled, and a number of twofers whose sexual fantasies centered around decapitation. I had read the latter closely, stirred in ways I thought I could possibly interpret sexually but would prefer not to. I found no hint that the writers were aware of the doctor’s existence.

  Next I had found a gallery of snapshots of severe head injuries. The page was very long and the jocular captions loaded first. The images arrived in an irregular distribution, like lights in a skyscraper after hours. There was a face with a bouquet of roses for a mouth. A white grin on a meatball. One head had been almost completely ripped away. Only flaps of the cheek and chin remained, opening and flaring from the perfectly intact neck—an orchid with beard stubble.

  Something heavy settled slowly in my chest. These clownish horrors (whoopie cushions for morticians, plastic vomit on the pillow of a terminally ill patient) were disguising something cool and secret, formal and ancient and dignified: the cessation of a soul. I was surprised at this thought of mine, because I considered myself a hardened character, someone who could examine the curled feet of dead baby birds or wash the crud out of a rabbit skull with skill and curiosity. Someone who would blink twice for science. But I closed the page and told myself I wouldn’t go back.

  Afterward, though, I found these images in my memory in perfect resolution. The orchid head watched me without eyes, and without a mouth it complained daily. It became ordinary. I could look at it. That it marked the cessation of a soul ceased to be the important thing about it. Soul fled, the body had a new story now. Dead now, it posed a daily challenge to the living. One day I had once again found myself typing “severed head” into the wee coffin on the search page.

  “You should make a movie about Mike the headless chicken,” I told Audrey. “Mike was great. He lived for four and a half years after his head was cut off and didn’t seem to notice that anything was missing. He attempted to peck for seed and tucked his stump under his wing to sleep. They fed him by dropping grain and water down his neck-hole. ‘A fine specimen of a chicken, except for not having a head,’ said Farmer Olsen.”

  “You should come with me to the protest,” Audrey said, a little testily, as she rose. “We need warm bodies.” I stayed where I was. She shrugged and left.

  Trey and I looked at each other.

  “Neck-hole,” he said. “Sweet.”

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  Fetish Information Exchange

  Topic: radical cephalic mods

 
“I have begun tying off my head for periods every day. My theory is that my bodily functions will transfer themselves entirely to my twin over time, without the shock and loss of blood that he would undeniably suffer upon my sudden demise. I am hoping I will simply shrink, blacken, and fall off.”

  “My ambition is unusual. I would like to be reabsorbed into my twin. Vanishing twin syndrome takes up all my thoughts. If it can happen before birth, why not after? I suspect the adult skeletal structure is too massive for ready reabsorption, even though small chips or bone spurs have been known to disappear or work themselves out years later. With this in mind I am planning to surgically remove all major bones from my head piecemeal, through small and easily closed incisions, so that I become a loose bag of matter, which I am confident will be swiftly absorbed into the body of my larger and spiritually stronger twin, Cyril.”

  “I used to make dolls of myselves and cut ‘my’ head off. Boy was I surprised once when I cut the wrong head off and it gave me a killer orgasm. This set me thinking. I can’t make love anymore without imagining the cut-off head of my twin propped up on the pillow to watch, like a curious puppy. This gives me a lot of private pain, since I love my twin and do not wish her ‘grievous bodily harm.’”

  “It is now my only method of masturbation to tie a cord tightly around my neck and pretend it is cut off. I have voluntarily withdrawn all participation from our mutual body. This was hard on my brother but he has adjusted and now used ‘our’ arms and legs as if they were entirely his own. This gives me infinite joy. Many of us are concerned with the body left behind and the stump protruding from the shoulders. I am rare, I believe, in confining my interest to the other stump, that is the stump pointing down from the head. I am also curious how much consciousness the head has of its severed condition before the brain suffocates. If at all possible I would like to bring these two interests together and have my decapitation take place in front of a mirror, so that my brother can hold my head up—like Theseus and Medusa!—and let me see my stump in the mirror. That will be the last thing I see and the fulfilment of my wildest dreams. Of course there is no question of sexual climax under these circumstances as I would no longer be connected to the part in question. In any case I have long ceased to attribute any personal significance to the sensations that reach me from those quarters as these, like all my brother’s operations, are not really my concern. No, while I would certainly say eros smiles on my stump fixation, my motivation is somewhere far beyond a mere physical release.”