Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  To destroy certain of the pieces, leaving gaps.

  To piece together what remains in a false order.

  To destroy this surrogate text.

  To hide all evidence that it ever existed.

  To not write.

  To write what I do not believe.

  To write what I do not understand.

  To not write.

  To not write.

  MAXIMUM SECURITY STRATEGIES DERIVED FROM THE PRECEDING:

  To write what I do not understand in a language I do not know, applying a code that has no key, then erase, overwrite, again erase, tear up, selectively perforate, rearrange, and burn the result, then hide the ashes in a place I cannot find.

  To not write.

  Frankly, I am discouraged.

  Every morning I wrote for several hours. When the walls seemed to come too close, I went down to the yard to work, the Mooncalf at my heels. It was Indian summer, which is traditionally warmer than foggy August. That might explain the spiny fingers of saguaro sprouts coming up all over the hill.

  Thursday

  It is getting hotter. Every day the goldfish have less water. I read in the paper that the jellyfish population is exploding. At breakfast (Trey had lox and bagels delivered), Audrey announced that the total mass of giant squid on earth now exceeds that of human beings. She considers this good news. “If biology supplies consciousness with its basic structures, I can’t help thinking that a tentacle-based consciousness will shake things up in an interesting way. Think of the philosophy, the literature, the films…”

  “Whoa Nelly,” said Trey. “You told me the squid uses the same hole for breathing, eating, and fucking. I do not want to read that love sonnet.”

  “That was the octopus.”

  “Though erectile tissue on the tentacle is def.”

  “That was the octopus.”

  “I got eight hard ones for you, baby.”

  “I’m not sure how many tentacles a giant squid—I need to do some research.” Audrey’s eyes were shining. She was going to get in on the ground floor of squid porn.

  Saturday

  Smell of creosote quite strong at times.

  Sunday

  Are turkey vultures common in an urban setting?

  Tuesday

  The desert, the dollhouse: at least I know what Blanche is dreaming of: our past. How inconvenient that I don’t remember it! One more reason to write: if the past is coming back, then the future is the past, and Audrey was right. Maybe I can get a hint of what’s to come by reconstructing what once was.

  Wednesday

  Some devil made me wonder if I could write a limerick, and after much chewing of my pen, I found that I could. Why, it sounds like something Blanche would write, I thought, and copied it down:*

  A two-headed genius did stunts

  That amazed a one-headed dunce:

  “What makes you so wise?”

  “I think twice, I think twice,

  And you one-headed think only once!”

  This has led me into a hall of mirrors. If I can produce an imitation Blanche, with my right hand, then what makes me think she can’t produce an imitation Nora, with her left? I will have to go over all my previous work for amendments, additions, [erasures]†—anything I don’t recognize.

  Thursday

  Is there even any point in hiding these notes? If she can wake up when I’m conscious (as a trail of broken objects shows), couldn’t she read along? Sure, her eyes are closed, but with practice, couldn’t she tell what words I was writing by the movements of my hands, which are also hers?

  Saturday

  POSSIBLE STRATEGIES, PART 2:

  To write what I do not believe, implying I believe the opposite.

  To write what I believe, in such a context of suspicion that it appears to be what I do not believe.

  To write what I believe, but leave gaps.

  The former, but with extra, decoy gaps.

  To mix what I believe and do not believe, so that no unilateral reading will yield a complete confession.

  To write in no code, implying I am using one.

  To write only the unimportant material in code, so the important material is encoded by any decoding operation.

  To write in two codes simultaneously, one screening the other.

  To hide only the important writing, making the unimportant seem to be all there is.

  To hide only the unimportant writing, so the important seems beneath notice.

  To hide nothing, so everything seems beneath notice.

  MAXIMUM SECURITY STRATEGIES:

  To write both what I believe and what I do not believe, leaving gaps where key elements have been omitted, as well as extra decoy gaps, using two codes simultaneously, except where I use no code at all, and hide important and unimportant portions in alternation.

  To write what I believe, in no code, hiding nothing.

  Monday

  Audrey urged me to think it through, let it out, write it down. “Dialogue with yourself,” she said. “Get the juices flowing. Don’t second-guess everything, just relax, open up, have a little faith in the process. And don’t be so morbid.”

  My laugh was weak. “Writing is morbid,” I said.

  It is. I am raising the dead. A dead language, anyway: the dead may not walk, but boy do they talk. Blanche’s zombie words are staggering among my own, passing themselves off as living.

  I know, all our words are resurrected, though some are whiffier than others (whiffy, for example). I patch together a living language out of reanimated parts, like Frankenstein, and feel no disgust at scrabbling in the charnel house. Each of us makes her own monster, who earns a cozy co-tenancy of our tomb. We’re all the last native speakers of a language that dies with us. Am I so special for tasting the rot on my tongue? For knowing whose remains I’m kitted out in?

  Wednesday

  Today, walking down Market Street, I remembered something I had forgotten, turned around suddenly, and thought I saw Mr. Nickel dodge into Medium Rare Music. I went back and looked in the door but did not see him. Is he just another tumbleweed, like the one I saw rolling down Market Street this morning? If he is really here, what does he want from me?

  Friday

  Could she intervene? Take advantage of a moment’s distraction to slip into my skin, possess my pen, dip her words in my ink, and tell my story for me?

  After every day’s work, I go over my own words for fingerprints. When I don’t find any, I keep writing. Sooner or later she’ll slip up.

  But then I wonder if I’m the one being watched, and I get out my eraser. I don’t even know what I’m hiding, but in this mood everything seems damning. I rub and rub. I try writing a little. Then I take it back. I’ve written pages on this line alone.* See how thin the paper is. It’s scuffed to felt and worn right through in spots. See the scars. The blank spaces aren’t just empty. They’re stained with words I’ve taken back. Sometimes the same word is reinstated, then revoked again. This book has been so much erased that its larger part, like an iceberg’s, is invisible. I begin to feel that that is the real book. The words you are actually reading are just a sort of erased erasing, a cautiously omitted omission.

  Saturday

  I am forgetting what cannot be erased: the spaces. An eraser wielded against a blank page does not further whiten whiteness, but leave a mark. These too are writing utensils:

  1. The marshmallow-pink rubber bar.

  2. The silver wand with the hard white tip that leaves a scar, and a stiff brush at the other end to sweep away the dust.

  3. The art cube, crumbly as hash.

  4. The two-toned pencil/ink eraser, lean and angled.

  Monday

  My writing goes very slowly now.* The memories, when I draw them forth, are vivid, but so, I reflect, are Tiffany’s stories, to those ears in the ether. Am I being fed a line, or feeding myself one?

  I have slacked off the gardening. Probably a mistake.

  Toenails skirl: he
re comes the Mooncalf. “Someone wants out,” I say. She wags her tail. I will take her up the hill, I think. But when we get out, I think I see Mr. Nickel down the block, perched on a fire hydrant, tossing rocks into a planter made from a toilet. I go right back in. The Mooncalf is confused. I take her out back to the quondam vegetable garden. We wrestle up a huge thistle, exposing a dense porridge of round river stones and mud that looks a lot like the Grady Conglomerate, though that is not possible.

  It is very hot. Goldfish in crisis. Dry grass the color our hair was once. I smell smoke, ozone, sage, creosote.

  Is the creosote in my mind, or in the world?

  For that matter, is the world in my mind, or in the world?

  Tuesday

  *

  Friday

  The yard is still safer than the house, despite my unpleasant discovery under the thistle. It is too minutely detailed to be a fraud. The scene painter does not daub the underside of the fiberglass boulder, or bring live ants to the picnic. There is a teething animal (rat or squirrel) living in the crawl space under the house that is gradually reducing a plastic bottle to chips. Nearby, untouched, is an old bucket with a dry cat turd in it, through which a red thread coils. These are the fragments I shore up against mirages. Without them, I’m a taxidermy girl in a wind-up world. The lightning-struck madrone topples down the bluff to the grind of gears. At night they winch it up to fall again tomorrow. The coyotes howl from concealed speakers, the bald eagle catches the same fiberglass rabbit twenty-four/seven, and the mushroom cloud is done with dry ice and mirrors.

  The goldfish, though. I still think the goldfish are real.

  Monday

  Something awful has happened. Audrey has volunteered for the Symbiotic Solution.†

  I asked Trey if he would help me set up an intervention.

  “This is not a good balloon bad balloon situation,” he said. “This is more like good balloon, acceptable balloon. Or maybe good balloon, balloon that’s none of our beeswax. Good balloon, balloon of the impenetrable mystery of—”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  “—the human heart. She’s going to need new clothes!” he realized, clapping.

  Wednesday

  Today I decided to save the goldfish.

  First, I probed the pool with a spade. The sludge I brought up cascaded back into the pool. I thought of the bucket in the crawl space and went after it on my stomach. I tipped out the cat turd and set to work dredging up buckets full of muck and old leaves from the pond and emptying them into the wheelbarrow. After turning almost upside down to fill the first bucket, I climbed right in with the fish. My feet sank into cold, velvety squish. An invisible tail flicked my shin.

  When the wheelbarrow was full, I slowly wheeled it down to the moribund vegetable garden. It was hard going; whenever I went over a bump, the black muck lunged for the edge and slopped heavily into the grass. My arms ached. “Honest work,” I said to myself, planning my conversation with Audrey. I worked for hours, in the end straining the water with my fingers, feeling for leaves in water opaque with the muck I had stirred up. Then I ran some clean water into it. The pool was now even shallower than it had been.

  My fish were swimming in nervous flurries near the surface, well away from the mud-storm churned up by the hose. Maybe they couldn’t breathe. So I turned off the hose to let the muck settle. My fish, I called them. I even gave them names: Molloy, Malone, and the Unnamable. I’d been reading Beckett. Then I went back upstairs and made myself a cup of coffee. I wanted to let the water clear before I went out again. I wanted to see my friends frisking in their new pool. At dusk I went out. “Let’s go see my little guys,” I said to Moony.

  The pool was still and impenetrable. On the flocking of muck that coated the floor evenly from end to end, bugs had inscribed curly paths, slightly browner than the pulpy green of the blanket to either side. The thought that the fish must be under that blanket, dead or dying, horrified me. I splashed some water in the pool to rouse them, but there was no reply, only the slow boiling up of the muck, brown cauliflower-clouds rising and breaking against the surface. I waded from end to end, feeling for them, but they were not there.

  “No,” I said. I ran to the vegetable garden. Absurd thought: I had somehow scooped them up in my bucket without noticing it, and dumped them out with the mud. But they were not there either. They were just gone: absent, abducted, plucked. I ran back to the pond. The Mooncalf bounced along beside me, wagging her tail. I hated her good humor. I tried to kick her, and slipped on the still-wet grass by the pond.

  I could hear myself making strange noises.

  The fog flew past. The smoke flew past. The saguaros raised their arms in dismay.

  There was someone on the hill, watching me.

  The stars are angry, Gwendolyn.

  Friday

  Of course some animal caught the goldfish as they flurried too near the surface, made nervous by my dredging and the hose. A heron, a raccoon, even a cat could have done it. But I know who the real killer is.

  If only, etc.

  So a few goldfish died. Am I really taking it to heart? Well, well, I am an exemplary human, after all. We elect these small consolers, knowing they don’t give a damn about us, and we don’t know a thing about them. We mock up an interlocutor in whatever flurry of molecules can keep a mask on. We’re ventriloquists in love with our dummies. Then burying them with pomp and heartache. Who killed Cock Robin? You did, baby.

  It had seemed a harmless enough delusion, though. All I wanted was somebody to say hello to. Target practice for love; or if not love, cordiality; if not cordiality, at least tolerance. AND, not OR: live and let live. What went wrong? All I wanted was to make their lives better, their mysterious, real lives. I didn’t want to prop them behind a desk with an inkwell and three quills. I wanted them to be different from me.

  How grotesque that I killed them with good intentions, I who have so many bad ones. I’m a mad nurse spritzing the ward with cyanide from a pair of oversized hypos; my huge dugs moisten my dress with a superabundance of maternal feelings; I sensed that the little guys needed me, I heard their pathetic bleats, goldfish don’t bleat, nonetheless I came running, my still-unsuckled teats throbbing with yield. Alas, I’m badmother: I coax a black sap from my nipple and paint baby’s lips with it, watch her stiffen and turn blue. The resin sizzles at my nipples, and when I touch a match to it two flames leap up. I take my teats in my hands and squirt a burning rain, little flames falling, and I burn down a forest. The dappled eggs cook in their nests, like the fawns too afraid to move.

  Finally, I am crying.

  Sunday

  Perdita called. “What’s this I hear from the customers about goldfish? Girl, I appreciate a vivid imagination, but you have definitely lost the plot. You were supposed to be doing phone sex here. Emphasis on sex? Nobody is going to pay three bucks a minute for Virginia-fucking-Woolf.”*

  “What’s this I hear from Perdita about goldfish?” Audrey said, taking my arm and guiding me downstairs. “I have to shop for ‘Tortoise Takes All Comers.’ Walk with me.”

  “I killed the goldfish,” I said.

  She looked startled, then rallied. “Well, go easy on yourself. Goldfish are practically for dying. They exist to teach children about mortality. Have you quit writing?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Don’t.” She locked the door behind us.

  I turned, and saw Mr. Nickel. He was standing on the other side of the street, shading his eyes in my direction. He beamed. “Nora!” He took a few quick steps toward me. Then he saw Audrey behind me and stepped back onto the sidewalk, holding up his hands apologetically.

  “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He seems to know you.”

  I searched for a response. “He’s a Togetherist. He’s trying to convert me.” Mr. Nickel was mincing away, making a joke of his retreat.

  “Oh, in that case…” Audrey started after him. She would engage any doo
r-to-door believer in parley.

  “No!” I spoke more vehemently than I had intended.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s schadenfreudlich, he’s XOR, he’s—” I gaped. How could I impress upon her that she must never, ever talk to him? The very idea made me shudder. What if he said something about the clinic? But it was not just that. “He’s radioactive.”

  “So you do know him.”

  “Ish.” I started walking, hoping she would follow. “What are you going to conjure turtle pussy from?”

  “Tortoise. A finger cot, a scrunchie, marzipan…mint jelly…”

  “And is this a heterosexual tortoise?”

  “I’m considering a bisexual four-way with a turkey, an oyster, and either a mosquito or a golden retriever.”

  We sailed into the safe harbor of terrapin pudenda, leaving Mr. Nickel behind.

  Tuesday

  I went back and compared my limerick to Blanche’s. It took me two hours to find them, in adjacent books (Saramago and Soares). I do not intend to put them back. In fact I am beginning to think I should assemble all my writings before I have completely forgotten where I hid them.

  I was hoping to detect some difference between them, however tiny. There is no difference.*

  Wednesday

  In fact there is: Blanche’s sounds more like something I would write. “They lost to themselves every time”: that has my flavor, wormwood. While the optimistic rhyme of wise and twice is something my vanilla twin might like, not I.

  Have I misunderstood her? Myself? Dollhouse closed, seam showing.

  Thursday

  I keep thinking the goldfish must have died for a reason. But that’s just gilding the cat turd. You can’t use the lives of other creatures to teach yourself a lesson, however needed. By symbolic logic they should have lived. Horrors might come in twos, but it’s wonders that come in threes: Atlanta’s three golden balls, Saint Nicholas’s three golden balls, Donkey-skin’s three walnut shells. But they were not symbols, nor wonders; they were simply what I asked them to be: real. Not part of my story. Their own fish.

  And as fish sometimes do, they died.