Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  Michiko and Chichiko, Japan. Target: Chichiko or Michiko.

  Either Michiko or Chichiko had been disappointed in love, but nobody knew which. “Let’s just hope Dr. O knows,” said the Major. They spoke very little English, ate very big dinners, wore very elegant shoes. Once, in Exposition, one of them rose, keening, and skittered out of the room. Mr. Nickel unslung his prosthesis and dropped it in my lap. “Hold my ball and chain. We’ve got a runner!” He rushed after her. Roosevelt blinked up at me, working his rubber lips as if trying to speak. He was disgustingly warm. I shuddered and scooted him onto Jirtka’s lap. She lifted him with one hand. “Alas, poor Yorick,” I said. Both faces remained blank.

  Jirtka and Lenka, formerly Czech, currently pursuing Canadian citizenship. Target: Lenka.

  Jirtka was a bodybuilder. Her massive traps crowded little Lenka, who had fine sparse hair growing low on her forehead and a walleye. Jirtka prepared for a workout by strapping down Lenka’s head with Ace bandages. (“You don’t want that flopping around when you’re deadlifting three hundred pounds.”) You could almost mistake it for another muscle. “It was my wonderful trainer Deb who finally convinced me it was time to let her go. We pursue total physical perfection, and let’s face it, Lenka is a flaw, from a competitive standpoint.” Mr. Graham was visibly afraid of Jirtka, who knocked off blocks with such zest she had dented Reg’s athletic cup.

  Reg and Cliff, USA. Target: Cliff.

  Reg was a salesman from Santa Barbara with a little, stiff, fawn-colored brush of hair, a red face, and thick rounded shoulders. He was always trying to get a look under the post-ops’ bandages, and had been told off for it more than once. Everyone agreed it was a shame about gentle, confused Cliff, who had the look of an animal bound for slaughter. “Della and Donna have him on heavy rotation for pity fuck. Reg is getting the old third wheel serviced regu—”

  “That’s enough,” I said.

  I thought I might have better luck with the post-ops, but the minute I got up the nerve to approach a group of them, something always happened. They simultaneously remembered a sudden errand, or Mr. Nickel chirped “Ting-a-ling-a-ling! Person class is starting!” or the Major oozed up, snuffling adenoidally, and scared them away with an almost inaudible comment: “Your stump, madam, drives me simply wild.” Sometimes he let fall these utterances on purpose, I think, and then affected confusion if the addressee took offense; other times I was sure they were involuntary. Once I saw him accost an attractive older woman in the Post-Op Lounge. To prevent staining her blouse, she had augmented her bandages with an adhesive sanitary pad. Softly and clearly, he said, “Wet nappy.” Then, I am sad to say, he took possession of the lady’s pad and went on a tear, clutching it to his crotch with both hands and leaping with surprising agility over the communal couch and its small side tables, dodging left around M’mselles Foucault, and escaping down the hall, where a group of moist towel-kilted post-ops emerging from the steam room at the end of the hall sized up the situation and cornered him against the drinks machine. He slid to the floor and attempted to put the pad up the change slot.

  When I next passed the Post-Op Lounge a sign had gone up: a silhouette of a twofer, red slash across it. It was just making explicit what I had already figured out: pre-ops and post-ops did not mix. I no longer cared. The dream of finding my own kind: wasn’t that just the old herd instinct? If my herd would be composed of solipsists, that only made me more pathetic. Was I a lost sheep, or a lone wolf ? Wolf, I told myself. Singular or plural, I do not like my fellow man. When offered the famous optical illusion, “urn or faces,” I opt for the urn, which I take to contain the ashes of a general cremation.

  Mildew advanced across my wall, a slow white wave. Luis and Porky disappeared. Jirtka and Lenka disappeared. Mr. Nickel asked me to call him Oral (“It’s not my name, I just like to hear you say it”), and I conceived a profound dislike for the Expositor.

  Mr. Graham: “Twofers virtually control American government at this point.”

  Nora: “Excuse me? There isn’t a single elected official in Washington who’s a twofer. The constitution doesn’t even acknowledge our existence.”

  “Listen to what you just said. Con-sti-TWO-tion.”

  “Yankee TWOdle!” Mr. Nickel said, whether in mockery or agreement I couldn’t tell. “Yankee Doodle keep it up,” Roosevelt sang.

  “The self is not a toy. If you fool around with it, someone’s going to get hurt,” Mr. Graham said, laying a cool eye on Mr. Nickel.

  My punishment for fomenting non-unity: Thirty reps of “There Ain’t Room in This Town for the Both of Us.”

  There was something that separated pre- and post-ops besides rules, and the natural desire for the post-ops to disassociate themselves from the anatomies they had left behind. The newly single went through a certain ritual that, it was agreed, was “something else” and “more genuinely spiritual than I had really expected,” and this too set them apart, since they were not supposed to talk about it, though at times it seemed like they did nothing but talk about it: the surprisingly lightweight chalice (aluminum?), the repetitious chants (“One times one divided by one to the power of one equals one”), the corny “wand” or “scepter” or “club” the doctor wielded, the fur of some nameless animal draped over the squatting initiate and then pulled off to the slow thunder effect of a big piece of sheet metal shaken by those who had undergone the ceremony before, the “rain” of red wine invoking the bloody spurts of the operating room in an exquisitely gauged ritual repetition, honoring the violence of the event but elevating it into the realm of symbol. We heard all about this ostensibly secret ceremony. Nonetheless we felt that its essence remained genuinely hidden from us no matter how much we heard, perhaps more hidden the more we heard, and that therefore the post-ops were not wrong to ignore the prohibitions against gossip and tell all, because in fact they told us nothing at all in telling us so much about the ritual.

  Dr. Ozka kept to herself. Probably if she had not, we would have shunned her anyway, like the village executioner. She ate alone, and sometimes pulled a black hood over her head. At other times she wore a lady’s suit with heavy jewelry or a white coat dappled with faint stains. She was predatory and implacable, like a colossal beak. There was something of the death’s-head in her wedge-shaped bony visage and something of the sickle in the staff she carried, with its crooked head. No, she was not lame. The staff was an affectation, a sign of office. Because of it we heard her before we saw her: tap, tap, tap, like a deathwatch beetle. So in the end we did not see her at all; at least, I know I dropped my eyes and edged by her as if the corridors were not wide enough for two to pass, and I had seen others do the same. So none of us knew exactly what she looked like. We were discouraged from speaking to her, but we would not have done so in any event; she was set apart by invisible plumes and epaulets. She was a totem, a kachina doll. One does not speak to a god or to the representative of a god when it is filled with the spirit. Nor does one besmirch it with representations or opinions drafted by a mortal congress; nonetheless we had our ideas about her, and we would not have liked to have them contravened by an unseemly action on her part. A girlish laugh would not have been well received. Nor would it have delighted us to see her yellow teeth bared in a grin. So we held her, secretly, to a kind of code, and in this sense she was our creation. She was right to employ an Expositor to draw our hatred and scorn.

  Mr. Graham: “Personhood is an expert practice. It can be taught. Frankly it’s appalling that rank amateurs are allowed to go around saying ‘I’ with no more idea what that means than a dog does. They ought to be laughed out of the business. Say you want a piece of art appraised. Is it authentic. Is it a forgery. What do you do, you go to a qualified professional. You want to know who you are? Come to me. I’ll tell you who you are.”

  One day I skipped out of Binary Logic and went looking for another way out. I had noticed that the Post-Op Lounge was nearly empty after lunch, and the memory of seeing them cocooned in rugs o
n the lawn came back to me.

  There was one door in the hall I’d never seen open, and I tried it. A flight of stairs led down. Though down was almost certainly the wrong direction, I went to see what I could find. A single door led to a cavernous room traversed by dripping undulant pipes and lit only by the glow from the closed hatch of an enormous furnace. The air was hot and steamy and rank. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that I was not alone. Warming himself in front of the furnace was a post-op in a wheelchair, nodding his head. He was mumbling to himself. I crept closer. “I, I, I,” he was saying. He was petting something he held in his lap.

  Suddenly, his chair spun to face me. “I,” he remarked, and began wheeling slowly toward me. I backed up. What was that in his lap? Something I did not want to examine too closely. “I, I, I,” he said, growing agitated. “I, I!”

  I turned, slipped in what I hoped was water, scrambled to my feet, and ran. The door I had come through was now locked. The wheelchair squeaked closer. I fumbled around the door, seeking some sort of catch. I am not sure, but it might have been Blanche who found the key, dangling out of wheelchair reach in the shadows beside the door. At times, we can still agree on a course of action. I dropped the key on the other side of the door and took the stairs in huge leaps, as if I were still being followed.

  I considered giving up after that distasteful event, but on the way back to my room I peeked in a door labelled MECHANICAL. It was a utilities closet, but below the circuit box a louvered metal panel stood partway open, and the space behind it appeared too large for a mere air vent. As I drew close, I kicked something metal—an old dinner knife—that rang sharply against a water heater, and thought I heard something from behind the panel. I fled back to my room.

  I waited until the quiet half hour before the evening assembly to go back. The panel was closed now, and flush to the wall. I stuck my fingertips in the louvers and pulled. Wished I had something flat, a coat hanger or—a dinner knife! From the scars on it, I saw it had been used that way many times before. The hinges squawked as if they might break. I stepped through into a short, sloping tunnel. After I let the panel close behind me, the only light came through the louvers, but that was enough to see me to the hatch at the other end, a round metal shield with a wheel instead of a knob. I spun it, and the door sprung open on its own, with a hiss of hydraulics—fortunate, because it was over a foot thick. Grass grew on its outside. I stepped out and gave the door an experimental nudge. It sealed behind me, and I could no longer even find any seam. The hill might have been a fairy knoll in a story: feasts and dancing on the inside, but outside, just the blue-shadowed grass shivering in the sooty evening breeze.

  I was on the steep back slope of the hill, under the naked sky, tinged with salmon and apricot to the west, gibbous moon rising over the apartment buildings to the east. For the ground-floor tenants it was already night, but a cat still slept in the sun on a top-floor balcony. The hilltop too must be in sunlight. I broke into a run, slipping on the grass, Blanche knocking against my ear. For one moment at least I would have my idyll.

  The sun beset me like a fever, cold and hot at once. Shivering and red-blind, I wrestled with one of the lawn chairs I had admired in the brochure, a complicated and unwelcoming construction that yielded to overtures with cries of outrage. When I had finally subdued it, as I thought, it spilled me on the lawn. Judging by the brochure, that lawn should have been a luxuriant pelt, practically purring with health, but it was shorn, scratchy, and foxed with the piss-burns of the dogs that got in through the many broken spurs of the fence. The chair lay beside me looking impossibly broken and wrong, like an umbrella turned inside out, yet smug at the same time. I closed my eyes. Still. Still.

  Someone wiggled expertly into the chair on the other side of me. “How nice to share a contemplative moment!” Mr. Nickel purred. “How did you persuade Nurse Dirndle to let you out?”

  “What do you mean?” I sat up.

  “Mr. Graham would prefer that all pre-ops remain in their quarters.”

  My lip curled delicately at his name. “I’ve gathered that.”

  “How shall I put this? I’m afraid Mr. Graham insists.”

  “Are you saying I’m a prisoner?”

  “Prisoner. That’s such a strong word. But Mr. Graham does consider every pre-op a security risk. There’s always the chance that the target twin will cut and run. Of course post-ops are allowed to leave, after a period of debriefing of course. They’ve shown their colors, paid their dues, kicked their bucket. You too will be allowed to come and go after surgery.”

  “In other words, only one of us gets out of here alive.”

  “You have such a dramatic way with words! I could listen to you for hours. But it’s time for the Exposition. Shall we?”

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  DIRTY WORDS

  Ra-di-o-ac-tive!” Circles formed around us on the playground. We ducked our heads and stared at the ground, praying for the bell.

  “What are you?” someone would ask. “I’m not messing with you, I really want to know.” They waited until we attempted an answer. Then they shrieked with laughter.

  “Why do you have so many cooties?”

  We had one secret defense: Donkey-skin’s bad words. When we were being teased, I said them over to myself like a charm. What we were being called was nothing compared to the words in my mind.

  Sometimes one of them slipped out. “Oooh,” moaned our tormentors, as if in ecstasy, and everyone would step back as if they feared contamination. Sometimes one of the girls would run to the teacher and whisper the word into her ear. Then the teacher would tell the principal, and the principal would call Mama.

  “Where on earth did you learn that word? The woman actually dared to imply that we used that kind of language at home! As if I didn’t have enough trouble keeping my name clean in that town.” Mama threatened to wash our mouths out with soap. “Once I figure out which of you said it. Nora?”

  She always asked me first. “Not me!”

  “Blanche?”

  Wise Blanche kept mum.

  Could you really wash away words with soap?

  Gradually, something changed. The other kids decided that we were not one, but two girls. One had cooties, but the other was all right. They shared their lunch with Blanche—bartered chocolate pudding cup for fruit leather, peanut butter crackers for devil-dog—while I ate chopped olives. Once I tried to swap for a bag of raisins.

  “Gross. Nobody wants to touch your food, Nora. Get a clue.” Blanche rolled her eyes apologetically at me and took another bite of Twinkie.

  The others discovered that Blanche could draw, unlike me. “Why are you erasing that? That was good! Do one for me?” they wheedled. Blanche discovered she could draw, something I had been keeping from her, and that drawing was currency. She made sketches on command. One girl wanted a kitten with huge eyes and a bow around its neck, then all the girls wanted one, and for the teacher she did sensitive watercolor landscapes that were pinned up on the burlap-covered walls.

  She waxed conversant. She learned the secrets of Secret and Stri-Dex and Nair. One day she amazed me by discussing the relative merits of two TV shows we’d never watched—Three’s Company, about a sexy twofer and her male roommate, and Mork & Mindy: a dark comedy, in which one half of a two-headed alien falls under the delusion that he is a simple American girl. “We don’t even have a TV, Blanche,” I said cruelly. Whereupon they teased me about that. Blanche, somehow, was exempt. I hadn’t even known there were twofers on TV.

  I grew sullen. Studied never. Cheated on tests by ignoring them: Blanche did them for me, out of pity, the sucker. I was no good at math: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, that was counting to me. Division was confusing: does the atom split in half or in two? Grammar: plurals take an s, unless they don’t; then they still seem like one thing, but a thing with a secret. I learned to never split the infinitive. I learned about the double negative, and that two wrongs don’t make a right. At Christmas
we made paper snowflakes and stencils, and I learned that things are shaped by what has been taken from them.

  We went to the school play and saw a pantomime horse. It sagged in the middle, and when at last its two halves staggered apart Blanche screamed. But I was the one they teased about it afterward.

  “Blanche, draw me a kitty-cat. Can you do a polka dot bow?”

  “I can do any kind of bow.” The bow was customized, but the cat was always the same. I knew its mad blank eyes, triangle nose, double fishhook mouth, and six whiskers like I knew the squeak of the marker and its chemical perfume. I had unriddled the sequence of tiny tugs and tightenings in her hand. But I still couldn’t draw it myself. I couldn’t match its almost abstract scallops and S-curves, the thick even outlines. My cats were sketchy specters, elongated or aslant. El Greco cats, not Garfields. The outline wavered, failed to close; it looked emptied, a cat skin with no cat in it.

  “What color polka dots?”

  “Pink. No, red. No, pink.”

  Dots I understood, dots I could do. I took over. Dot. Dot. Then the pen slipped in my hand and scored a pink slash down the page.

  Some mistakes you can’t erase. Blanche blew a puff of air through her nose and kept her head bent for a minute. Then she turned the pages of her notebook, one, two, past the freckles of bled-through marker ink, and started over.

  The girl tsk’d. “Nora. I know that was you,” she said. “Just stay out of it. Nobody wants you.”

  I couldn’t wait to get back to Donkey-skin.