Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  The Sadness was supposed to be a secret, but when the wind was blowing northeast, as it generally was, it told stories. (“The king has donkey’s ears,” it whispered. “America is sad. Iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90.”) Invisible ink wrote coded notes on mute tongues, throats. Invisible horoscopes scrolled in the thyroid, to be read by doctors later on.

  Some farmers inquired of the Atomic Energy Commission why, please, their lambs were born with their hearts on the outside of their bodies? “Malnutrition,” said the Atomic Energy Commission.

  Hair fell out. “Nerves.”

  Also teeth. “Don’t forget to floss.”

  Skin lesions. “Sunburn.”

  Breast cancer, bone cancer, thyroid, liver, lung cancer. “It’s worrying about fallout that makes you sick, not fallout itself.”

  Tongue cancer. “Shoulda kept your mouth shut.”

  Most people did. “Loose lips sink ships,” they said, though most of them had never seen a ship, and almost all had seen the bomb’s early light, so bright you could see the bones in your hands, and start to get to know your skeleton. Those who kept quiet rebuked those who did not. Un-American, they said, and I saw a tadpole’s sad eye, but Granny kept talking.

  “I wrote letters. Not one reply did I get for months, except a ‘thank you for sharing your thoughts’ from my congressman, signed by a secretary. Maybe a year later I got a letter from the AEC saying one, there had been no test that day, two, doctors had determined that the risk was minimal even to workers at the Penitence Ground, three, Buddy had no business being where he was, and four, I was lucky they didn’t come down on me for a breach of national security. By then I wasn’t feeling too well myself, but the doctor said it was grief. When I kept coming, because I knew the way I was feeling wasn’t right, he said I had ‘nervous housewife syndrome’ and I should take an interest in something and probably go to church more often. He kept saying that until he felt the lump. By then it was a little late. That’s how I lost my titty,” she said.

  Granny was still trying to get compensation. Or at least an apology, because how do you compensate for a life, or even a single breast? She got out her “titty files”: Buddy’s Geiger counter readings, wind charts, doctor’s reports, copies of her letters to congressmen and Atomic Energy Commissioners and their letters back, clippings of letters to the editor (Grady Gazette, but far-flung papers too: papers from Phoenix, Big Bend, Flagstaff, Globe, San Francisco, even Minneapolis) all signed Elizabeth Olney, statements from other townspeople and even one from someone who had worked at Penitence. “I’m lucky I got to him before he kicked the bucket,” said Granny. “One day the G-men came to my house to confiscate all Buddy’s records. Luckily I’d hid them, said I had burned them when he died. ‘A woman’s grief, officer,’ I said, and they patted me on the shoulder and left.”

  I began to see that a precise inattention was aimed at the place where Granny’s breast was not. In the Natatorium, the work it took to not see the scar, or the half-full bra draped over a locker door, must have been considerable. It taught me that a missing thing can make a mighty showing of its absence, and further, that not seeing and not speaking can be a kind of advertisement. Granny’s missing breast haunted the Grady Temperance Club, swimming with slow-rippling edges in the Natatorium, consorting with the cockroach under a locker, blooping up from a floor drain to spook someone stooping to retrieve a bobby pin.

  Blanche and I were like that breast. I remember one town council meeting at which Granny had announced she intended to raise “holy hell.” Blanche and I perched on a molded plastic seat with an obscene central ridge, swinging our shoes. All around us was the din of human notice, but not one glance fell on us. We occupied a hole in the air made expressly for us. Yet the wind of swerved attention curried our small hairs, like a black belt’s magisterial kicks and punches, warning me that nothing we did would ever go unnoticed, for the space around us enjoyed a scrutiny interstices rarely get, and as anyone who has used a stencil knows, a shape is as precisely defined by what it is not as by what it is.

  We’re a restricted area, I realized, booting the seat in front of us. (A man with long, red, leathery earlobes swung round, glared at the empty space between our heads.) This comparison did not go far enough. To the town, we were part of the Proving Ground. Everyone knew, though they did not say, that like Chris Marchpane and the rest of the angel row, we were children of National Sadness.

  The bombing had gone underground the year we were born. But one day Papa came home cursing. He slung his chattering Geiger counter on the sofa. It bounced. We stared, because he was normally so careful with it. “It’s no damn use to me now,” he said. “Either that machine is crazy or I am. The whole damn desert is radioactive from Tank Rock to Grady. But I’ll be darned if there’s a single piece of ore in my pack.” He pulled out a smooth red stone. “What’s this, girls?”

  “Sandstone.”

  “Right. What’s this?” He pulled out a crumbly pink rock.

  “Umm—granite?”

  “Right. What’s this?”

  “A piece of asphalt off the road!”

  “Right!” He threw it down in disgust. “Now what would you like to bet there’s a key on every darn piece of film I’ve got?”

  Granny said, “The boy marked the treasure with a red handkerchief, but he took his eyes off the leprechaun. When he looked up, every thistle in the field had a red hanky on it.”

  That was Bossy, the underground test that busted its containment chamber and blew fallout like a geyser from a hole in the ground. That one made the news, and there were protests, even in Grady. (It was 1970. Times were changing.) We knew they were still testing, but we didn’t know how often, or when. But once in a while we felt something, a hitch in the peristalsis of time, a split-second syncope. It was as if the world had split open and clapped soundly together again. It was as if God’s eyes had gone, for one instant, out of focus.

  MUSHY PEAS

  The contamination meter chirped, but the gate attendant waved us negligently through, yawning fiercely at the dial. In the dim, echoic immigration hall, I took my place in line behind a suncured, cider-colored man in khaki shorts and a pink shirt. He had slender, wrinkled arms and smelled powerfully of deodorant. There were no other twofers among the bodies shuffling in switchbacks, but on a chair in a bright bare glass-walled cubicle to one side sat a twofer Sikh, eyes closed, turbans radiant. In an adjoining office two uniformed men bent over something on a desk. I tightened my left hand on my passport. This would be a bad time for Lithobolia to turn up.

  “He always has to be five feet ahead of everyone else,” said the woman behind us. She raised her voice. “Why don’t you come back here and keep Bunny and I company?” The cider-colored man threw a lofty look back. Then he noticed Blanche and me. His eyes flicked back and forth, back and forth, down one neck and (yes, joined) up the other. I looked down. His rubber sandals revealed long cracked yellow toenails that curved around to dimple the tips of his toes.

  My passport was wet as a newt! I wiped it firmly across my thigh. I scanned the row of intent, underlit faces in the booths ahead; did any look friendly? I picked a young man whose tight black curls were already receding from his smooth brown dome. Just beyond his booth, looking back, I glimpsed a round, smiling face fringed with reddish hair, and thought I recognized that Togetherist from San Francisco. I felt an unpleasant chilly slither pass through me, as if I had just swallowed an ice cube. But I was mistaken, the figure I now saw silhouetted against the entrance to Customs had only one head.

  As I approached the booth, the balding official half stood up as if to object, then sank back and waved us forward. He cracked my passport with his fingertips as if it were pornography. “Touriss?” he said, slurring the plural. Unsure of his usage, I thought, and afraid of giving offense. Good. “Are you carrying illegal drugs, weapons, or more than ten thousand dollars in cash?” I shook my head. This was easy. “Has anyone handled your luggage besides yourself?” He
was looking at Blanche.

  “Well, I did,” I said, finally. My hands were trembling slightly. I clasped them behind my back.

  “Do I understand that she’s unable to speak for herself?” I assented. “Do you have a doctor’s statement to that effect?”

  “Nobody told me I needed one.”

  He slowly caressed his shining scalp, regarding me thoughtfully. We both looked over at the bright cubicle, where the turbans had not moved. He sighed. “All right.” The glossy blue cover squeaked when he spread it for the dry kiss of the stamp.

  A small steel door opened to the right of the Customs sign as I approached it, and a uniformed woman came through with a pig on a leash. A sign attached to its collar said, “Please do not pet me. I am a working Smart-pig.” The pig joined the customs officials quarrying in the cider-colored man’s suitcase. “I knew you shouldn’t have packed the potassium iodide. It’s potassium iodide, officer. Tell them it’s potassium iodide,” said the wife. “They know it’s potassium iodide,” the man said. “Christ, it says so right on the label.” The pig truffled eagerly among boxer shorts and laxatives as I walked by unchallenged with my bags, my fake ID, my untold lies. I was in England!

  Past the velvet ropes a phalanx of sweaty, swarthy gentlemen held up signs, “Dr. Gegenhalten u. Frau,” “Capgras Hotel,” “Excluded Middle Phil. Soc,” peering worriedly into every face. I sought the gaze of the sideburned Phil. Soc. greeter, and a smile began to tremble on his lips. If I went up to him, would I be handed a new life, just like that?

  Then I heard my name. It was pronounced in such an offhand manner that it seemed overheard, a fragment of a conversation addressed to someone else entirely. I had to look behind me to find Louche. She was leaning on the display case I had just passed, arms folded.

  The blood rushed to my head. Louche looked amused and older and formidable in a loose men’s suit of almost black burgundy wool. An unfamiliar tattoo lost an indigo feather in rasping past her open collar, and another dropped a scaled coil below her cuff on the hand she finally extended—unless the latter was the other end of the selfsame animal, twining the whole length of her arm. Knowing Louche it would be a chimera or a cockatrice, something splendid, capricious, and cruel, and I had been crazy to bring her into this.

  I snatched her hand and pumped it with rather panicky enthusiasm. “Great to see you, Louche! Thanks for helping me out.”

  Louche picked up one of my bags and led me toward the exit. In my own brisk tone, she said, “So, Nora, have you ever been to England before?”

  “No, but I’ve always—”

  “And Blanche, has she?” she asked brightly.

  I opened my mouth, then snapped it shut. Louche wheezed softly, showing her canines. She was baiting me.

  Could I tell her I had decided to go to a hotel after all? Absurd. I had given nothing away; there was no reason I should give anything away, if I kept my head. We whirled away widdershins in a cab so roomy I had to grab Louche’s knee to keep from falling at every unexpected turn, and every turn was unexpected in the looking-glass traffic. I wondered if I was touching, through the neutral wool, some invisible beast.

  We stopped at a pub, the Cud and Udder, low-ceilinged and overheated and hazy with smoke, and sat down under a curved sabre and a faded sepia-toned photograph of a woman in white crossing thick ankles aboard an elephant. Heads turned. “Mushy!” someone called, and was shushed amid giggles. I looked at Louche. “Mushy peas, Siamese,” she said. “Cockney rhyming slang.” In a dusty case opposite a toothy mongoose in a turban played the flute for a tiny cobra.

  Had that vindaloo. Waitress meaty, mean. Spangled krakens kept worming through the thick sauce, and the pale ale turned tiger in my stomach, and soon I felt so queasy that I lost all impulse to try and fast-talk myself into a hotel bed and concentrated on keeping track of my limbs. Louche must not find out about Lithobolia, I felt.

  Was I even tired? It was night, but it was also morning. I had flown straight from one night to another, skipping the day like the inch of white space between two facing pages. “My ears are stopped up,” I said, pulling them. Sounds were coming strangely to me, like that music, a high-pitched piping, which needled through the muffled uproar without diminution. The meandering melody, possibly Indian, almost sounded like one of Blanche’s not quite circular roundelays. I looked up and smiled weakly. By some accident of light, the mongoose appeared to be moving its fingers in time to the music on his little painted pipe.

  The mongoose turned its head and snarled. Sawdust spilled through its sharp yellow teeth, and something flashed past my head and thunked heavily into the floor.

  “Bloody hell!” The barmaid was bending over me. Her pendant freed itself from her fat, powdered cleavage and swung forward on its chain to ding against one of my front teeth. “Are you all right, loves?” Gusts of lavender and beer breath beat against my brow. “That does it, I’m telling Sam all this Paki clobber has to go.”

  I followed her gaze left. Standing as high as my waist, the sabre was vibrating in the floorboards, point down. The barmaid gripped the handle, yanked, set her feet more firmly. “Hail Arthur King of England,” called a liver-spotted comedian standing at the bar. The sabre came out and was borne at arm’s length into the back. It left a sizeable gash in the floor.

  “Bloody hell,” echoed Louche, regarding me with interest. “It looked like you did that on purpose.”

  I had no idea what to say. I could still see the sabre, vibrant with intent. I swallowed hard, and with a muffled cluck my ear finally cleared. The world jumped closer. “I think the flight threw off my balance,” I said, blessedly inspired. “My ear only just popped. I went all wah for a minute there and grabbed whatever I could reach.”

  On the way out, I stooped to peer in at the mongoose. It was in the same position it had been in for a hundred and fifty years at least, though the tiny conical mound of sawdust between the awkwardly crossed legs troubled me a little.

  Despite my determination to do nothing else revealing, I gave a terrible start in Louche’s little kitchen later on when I heard the word “decapitate” emanate from the other room, where the television was conducting a light show for the benefit of two solemn, attentive armchairs, a gigantic, leaning bookcase, and the bellows and flumes of some Transitional Objects, among them the cuirass. “Brrr!” I said, by way of explanation, and rubbed my arms—absurdly, because it was a warm evening. I had to sip my PG Tips in the straitjacket of a lobster-colored boiled wool cardigan Louche pressed on me with, I thought, not entirely benevolent insistence. She had unfolded a cot in her laundry room in lieu of the promised sofa. As soon as I could, I retreated to it. I wanted to be well rested for my interview.

  Once installed in the fantastically uncomfortable bed, I turned off the reading light: a child’s bedside lamp, its stem covered with painted plaster bark, its green base supporting a happy lamb with a chipped ear. As the room shuddered and strained upward and then settled again around me, I went over my arguments:

  Blanche has been asleep for approximately fifteen years.

  I am seeking a center, a sense of self, not perpetually thrown off balance by this unanswerable question, this remainder, this unpaid debt, this counterweight, this dark unwholesome planet.

  I am not even what you would really call gregarious.

  I have a chronic ache in my right shoulder.

  I feel that I could get the knack of happiness, if only.

  There is something trying to claw through the ceiling to get to me.

  What? I opened my eyes to a phalanx of dark repeated shapes, like a congress of black beetles, and flailed my arm out toward the bedside lamp, by luck struck against it, and found the switch. The beetle fortification fell. The darkness slid sullenly under the bed and waited there, making its insect calculations.

  I left the light on, masturbated grimly and efficiently, passed out, and slept fitfully, in a luminous fog that kept thickening into indistinct shapes. They melted away completely w
hen I tried to see them clearly, and when at last I braced myself to surpass my previous efforts, and sensed that success was near, I forced my eyes open and saw… a four-legged animal in a pastoral landscape, under a towering, luminous cloud…. It was the lamp, of course. I turned it off.

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  Close Focus Family Programming

  “Close Focus on Twincest”

  “We have Dr. Marie with us in the studio today to warn our listeners of a troubling new trend. Like us, you all probably tell yourselves every day that the legislation permitting twofers to wed amounts to nothing less than a state sanction for sin—”

  Dr. Marie: “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Adam and Eve and Eve.”

  “A free love orgy going on right now in your community. But have you thought about a little thing called self-abuse? When that self is a pair of conjoined twins, self-abuse is not only weak, not only repulsive and unhealthy, it is incestuous. Dr. Marie?”

  “That’s right, Ron. I’m here to talk about the growing problem of twincest. Let me tell you a story about a poor young God-fearing woman of my acquaintance who happens to be conjoined. Believing that marriage is between one man and one woman, she has taken a lifelong vow of chastity. But her twin is an unrepentant sinner who nightly taunts her with twincestuous acts. As my friend’s body burns with unwelcome pleasure, her soul burns in foreknowledge of the fires of hell. This is sexual abuse and soul-assassination, as I’ve explained to the sinner. What do you think she said to me? ‘It’s division of labor. I sin, she repents’!”