Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  Click.

  “And he carried a stethoscope in his cloven hoof,” I said to the dead receiver. Tiffany had changed genres. She was telling ghost stories.

  Perdita has fired me, of course.

  Today

  In my personal statement, which has become a book, I have almost reached the point I started writing*—a dark time, but brighter than this. A paler shade of grey, or gray. My memories, the ones I haven’t reached yet, are darker still, I can tell. Their shadows have already reached me.

  I want to stop. I want to destroy my writing, every scrap.

  Twoday

  I finally went to Trey about Mr. Nickel. “Baby, I’m not the man of the house!” he said, astonished. “Get Audrey to give him his walking papers.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “He might say something to her. Please, Trey.”

  “I loathe conflict!” Pause. “You’re killing me!” Pause. “OK. Tell you what, I’ll ask Poppkiss to send a few friends over. He owes me. Do we have carte blanche?” he added impishly.

  Eternitá, Infinitá, and Immensitá. “They won’t kill him, will they?” I didn’t want that. Or did I?

  “No, no, that costs extra.” I couldn’t tell if he was kidding.

  “Just scare him away.” I went back to my room.

  After a minute he appeared at my door. “Did you hear me say, do I have carte blanche?” I nodded. “I can’t believe you didn’t bitch-slap me,” he said. “Please bitch-slap me, Nora. I miss your foul self.”

  So I bitch-slapped him. He shook his head. “It isn’t the same,” he said dolefully.

  But today Mr. Nickel is gone.

  Whenday

  I think I have found all but a few of the writings I hid. I have put them in a bag with the first two notebooks, but I have not destroyed them yet. And see, I have not stopped writing.

  What’s black and white and read all over? Both the figure and the (hallowed) ground, I stitch up the page, “sewing at once, with a double thread/a Shroud as well as a Shirt.”* The situation is grave. The plot quickens.

  Someday

  I’m in the lower Mission bent over in the pale lemon shade of a paloverde, looking at a speckled seedpod, rolling it back and forth under one sole. It seems as real as my scuffed army boot, as real as the fluted paper cuplet from which the blue syrup of a Mexican ice has dribbled, as real as the smashed Nukalert key chain and the dusty dental dam.

  The problem with looking is you see things. The store window before me advertises only sky, except where my lightless reflection jigsaws a hole in it. In that hole hangs a rigid white communion dress swaddled in plastic. Faded plastic flowers hang around it, funereal rather than festive. I am a hole cut from the moving world. Inside me, the ghost of a little girl.

  Turn your back on her. List evidence for the real world.

  The Lucky Pork Store. Doc’s Clock Cocktail Time. The _ _ _ ER THEATER (the TWO is missing, I mean the TOW, steady, just keep going). Envios de Dinero, Matrimonios Civiles, Price Slashers.

  An old man with no feet is crossing the street in a wheelchair, deftly avoiding the cow pies and prickly pears, and periodically beeping like Road Runner. The cows in turn avoid him, I mean the cars, emitting long sad bovine honks.

  Describe him further.

  Dirty tube socks are pulled over his stumps, with plastic bags rubber-banded over them. A twofer in one blond, one black wig hurries after him, giving him an occasional shove that seems more spiteful than helpful.

  Good. Describe the wigs.

  The blond is a perfect, glossy dome, the black a scramble of skutched goat resembling roadkill. Her clothes, a baggy floral smock and slippers.

  She slip-slaps up to me and I re* cognize Mr. Nickel.

  “Go away,” I say.

  “Que bueno to see you too! We’re connected. I know you feel it too. We’re alike. No compromise for us. The cruel beauty of the will, the wedge driven deep into every steady state, every scale tipped. We’re all about teeter, right? The edge, right?

  “Oh, I almost forgot. I have a message for you. It’s from Blanche.” He tipped the blond wig and inserted his fingers into the back of Roosevelt, who rolled his eyes and opened his mouth.

  Road Runner beeped, and I ran, ran, ran.

  Unday

  The solipsist errs.†

  Noneday

  I will resist erasure.‡

  Doneday

  I’m a sort of amputee-at-arms. Waving my phantom limbs, my purloined letters.§

  Vennday

  Consider possibility that Blanche is writing my experiences into existence.

  Explain.

  I observe my hand tracing the words “I saw a vulture circling over Mission Dolores,” picture a vulture as any reader would, retrospectively “remember” it.

  In that case what use is any of this?

  Including that question?

  Consider possibility that I am now anticipating Blanche’s interventions so strongly I generate them myself—that I am haunting myself.

  Consider possibility that I have been doing this all along, i.e. Blanche is my invention.

  Consider possibility that I am Blanche.

  Absurd. Offensive to logic and decency. Explain.

  Projecting myself into Nora’s experience so strongly that I experience myself as another. In which case I am being haunted by my own rejected experience.

  So the current situation could be described as Blanche thinking she is Nora thinking she is Blanche thinking she is Nora?

  Or Nora thinking she is Blanche thinking she is Nora thinking she is Blanche thinking she is Nora?

  Stop it.

  A while ago I wrote, “If I can write an imitation Blanche, what makes me think she can’t write an imitation Nora?” But that’s not the real question. The real question is, if I can write a fake Blanche, then what makes me think I am not writing the real Blanche? And its corollary: If she can write a fake Nora, what makes me think this one is real?

  Who’s writing this book,* anyway?

  I am.

  Not good enough.

  Nora, Nora, Nora, Nora, Nora†‡§!

  Att’n: Two Times Editorial Departmentc.c. The Siamystics Mailing List

  An Open Letter to the Togetherists and The Unity Foundation

  Be advised that your seeming ally Mr. Nickel, AKA Disme—who no doubt has other aliases, and can be seen wearing a prosthetic head (look closely at the corners of the mouth and eyes, listen for canned laughter and the faint grind of gears)—is a double agent. This scoundrel toys with human longing for his own entertainment, but he has provided us one service. His simultaneous membership in two supposedly rival clubs demonstrates what should have been obvious from the start: the Togetherists and the vivisectionists are two sides of the same counterfeit coin (a wooden nickel, I imagine), that has rolled out of the coffers of history and received a fresh coat of metallic paint: the spurious currency of the One. But remember, fission and fusion both have explosive consequences.

  Respectfully,

  N.O.

  I borrowed Audrey’s car and drove the Mooncalf out to Fort Funston Beach, taking with me the bag of writings and the letter. I thought I might burn one of them, maybe both.

  Near Stern Grove, I pulled over and dropped the letter in a mailbox.

  At the beach, I dug a small pit with my hands. I put the bag in it, and found I had no matches. I picked up the bag again, put my shoes in it, and walked barefoot along the high-water mark, among bleached bottle tops and tiny pink crab legs like the ripped-off arms of fairies. My dress whipped around. Goose bumps rose on my arms, and my legs stung in the salt air. Up ahead, the Mooncalf’s tail stopped waving, and she went still and rapt.

  She had found a dead deer in the surf, in a garnish of stinking broken seaweed, intermittently afloat. It was entirely white, and free of the flies that were in a frenzy over the rotting seaweed, because the surf kept washing casually over it, bubbling into the chest cavity through a hole. It was smooth except for a
toupee-like flap of matted hair that still clung to one flank. The skin was stretched tight over the ribcage, which was a beautiful shape like a coracle’s.

  The mouth gaped. The skin was pulled smooth over the jawbone. It no longer had the sharp lines of a deer’s jaw, and looked both more pathetic and more frightening, like some of Picasso’s women, that smooth and predatory and anguished. The eyes were simple holes.

  It is no doubt because of my erstwhile curatorship in the Dead Animal Zoo that I thrill to a corpse with urges that have no obvious outlet. I hovered over the relic like an angel with a specimen box hidden in her robes.

  The deer was nothing but what it seemed, an unfortunate creature whose life had ended. It did not lift up its head and speak to me. Though the sand on which it lay shivered when the water drew back and seemed as dry as if no water had touched it since the rainy season, the deer was real. It was what I needed.

  “I’m through,” I said out loud. The Mooncalf looked at me, surmise in her eyes. “I’ve had my run. All right, Blanche, I’m all yours.”

  *I count four. Any thoughtful reader could probably add a few more.

  *The telephone call from Louche’s bedroom was of course to Blanche’s crony Mr. Nickel, who had slipped her his number earlier that day, nearly removing my pocket in the process.

  †Trey’s handwriting.

  †Trey’s handwriting.

  ‡Audrey’s.

  *The house we lived in, a shabby Victorian, slouched at the top of a crumbling knob of raw hill, sparsely furred with spiky, tawny grass. The yard dropped off more sharply than it looked, because the top leaves of the eucalyptus growing at the base of the cliff, where they caught the runoff, clattered and shone at eye level when one ventured to the bottom of the yard. Eucalyptus pods and loose pebbles and long toboggan strips of smooth bark littered the slope, making the footing precarious; in dreams sometimes I picked my way interminably along the verge, skating and sliding, on my way to some urgent appointment. Every rainy season, when houses sledded down hills all down the coast, Audrey issued gloomy predictions, but the house tilted and strained and stayed.

  †The reference, I believe, is to the first Ghost Dance held by the Paiutes in Nevada in 1870, about the time the cross-continental railroad was finished. It was inspired by the prophet Wodziwob, who announced that the ancestors were coming home, and would be taking the train. When they arrived, there would be a great explosion that would annihilate the white men but spare their homes and chattel. The tribe would live the good life with their ghosts in this abandoned city.

  ‡See previous note, of course.

  §I may have had in mind that old train set we found in Granny’s garage. “Your daddy’s,” she said, to our silent disbelief.

  * There wasn’t. Thank you for your concern.

  *I made the mistake of asking Audrey if she had noticed the house moving. She went into a predictable panic about unstable soil and seismic tremors that culminated in a visit from an earthquake and mudslide risk analyst. Now there is a rubber tube like a catheter sticking out of the hillside below the house to drain off excess water.

  *See the Stan Jones song “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” a gloomy favorite of Granny’s.

  †Pasted below is the original page torn from the notebook, folded in half below the last line and carefully torn along the crease. Above the limerick is a line of my own, which I recopied onto the subsequent page: “We were just playing.” See page 116 in the first notebook. Is it coincidental that the subsequent rhyme concerns a game?

  ‡Disme?

  §If you did check page 116, as instructed, you will have found that what we were “playing” at was murder. Does this line suggest, then, that the game must end in a mutual destruction?

  *Without gaps between the letters or perhaps words, this could spell any number of things beside AUKTTHR. (Author?) Cryptographers’ assistance requested.

  †Which subsequently became the hiding place for this entry (tightly rolled and inserted in place of the ink cartridge).

  * “Viewmaster, Alice in Wonderland.” I had a box of assorted disks for this toy dating from my childhood, which I had found in an antique shop. The note in question (“see OED, ‘hiding place’”) was slipped into the paper sleeve for the Alice disk. Its address I wrote in tiny letters on one of those toothy paper strips that collect in the spiral binding of a notebook—which is where I left it. It should be noted that in this particular instance, my system failed: I didn’t remember the hiding place of either note until I, quite by chance, had the sudden impulse once again to see plasticine Alice (so 3D I wanted to test her firmness between my teeth), suspended in free fall, legs together, skirt a blue parachute. When I saw the note, “Listen, Gwendolyn, the stars are angry,” came unbidden to my mind. In the OED was the following entry, neatly printed in tiny letters on the back of a long receipt from Cliff’s Hardware (Audrey was prop-shopping, judging by the odd melange of items: spirit gum, pipe cleaners, Goop).

  *On a yellow Post-It, affixed below this line, and further secured with tape.

  †Conjectural. The vigorous action of a coarse eraser has flayed the page here, leaving a few blue threads strung across a scar. My joke? I don’t remember.

  * This entry is on a page torn from the middle of the second notebook containing pages 120–240 of the preceding. I have tried to make out the words I erased, and can see only the shadows of hooks and nooses. I have abandoned these efforts, which do not feel wholesome.

  *Could it be because I kept erasing it?

  *The above represents a full paragraph from The Confidence-Man, Melville, in which, meticulously, only the blank spaces have been underlined.

  †Experimental surgical procedure recently reported in the San Francisco Chronicle; Symbiotic Solutions is researching the creation of artificial second heads for patients who believe they are twofers locked in a singleton body. “My patients are not loonies or novelty-seekers,” said a spokesman. “They have all the attributes of a conjoined twin except a second head, and they are suffering in a body that feels wrong to them—that feels, in fact, amputated. Some report phantom sensations in the nonexistent body part. Most have lived for some time in the twofer community, wearing expensive, cumbersome, and unrealistic strap-on surrogate heads. This unsatisfactory solution does ease their psychic pains to some extent, but theirs is a marginal existence, neither singleton nor double. They crave the real thing. That, of course, we cannot provide; science cannot breathe a human soul into a prosthetic head. But we can do the next best thing. With a handsome, natural looking head covered with their own living skin and hair, these unfortunates can correct the error of nature and live a relatively normal life.”

  see below.

  Symbiotic Solutions is researching the creation of artificial second heads for patients who believe they are twofers locked in a singleton body. “My patients are not loonies or novelty-seekers,” said a spokesman. “They have all the attributes of a conjoined twin except a second head, and they are suffering in a body that feels wrong to them—that feels, in fact, amputated. Some report phantom sensations in the nonexistent body part. Most have lived for some time in the twofer community, wearing expensive, cumbersome, and unrealistic strap-on surrogate heads. This unsatisfactory solution does ease their psychic pains to some extent, but theirs is a marginal existence, neither singleton nor double. They crave the real thing. That, of course, we cannot provide; science cannot breathe a human soul into a prosthetic head. But we can do the next best thing. With a handsome, natural looking head covered with their own living skin and hair, these unfortunates can correct the error of nature and live a relatively normal life.”

  *Perdita is not a reader, or she would not have paid me this misplaced compliment. Better comparisons might be Poe, Shelley (Mary, I mean), or the anonymous author of that classic that starts out, “Great green gobs…”

  * We might entitle this phase of my inquiry, “I think ‘I think twice, I think twice’ twice.”

  *A (he
avily underlined) page from Richard III (Arden edition).

  * I.e. the beginning of this section.

  * “The Song of the Shirt”, Thomas Hood (1799–1845), in which a poor seamstress sews and sings,

  But why do I talk of Death! That Phantom of grisly bone, I hardly fear his terrible shape, It seems so like my own— It seems so like my own

  *Ink changes from blue to black at this point in the word, suggesting the account was taken up later.

  †My handwriting?

  ‡In the gaps between words, other words form.

  § This is certainly Blanche—though see the curious suggestion below.

  *One might add, who is writing these footnotes?

  †This seems unequivocal.

  ‡And yet, “Since [†, the obelisk or dagger] also represents the Christian cross, in certain predominantly Christian regions, the mark is used in a text after the name of a deceased person or the date of death, as in Christian graves.” Wikipedia.

  §While this disagreeable symbol (‡) is called the double dagger. Is it important that in the reference volume Generic Names of the Moths of the World, this symbol indicates an unavailable name? Or that Her Majesty’s Nautical Almanac Office (NAO) uses the double dagger to indicate regions that do not have a standard time, such as Greenland’s ice sheet? Or that a double dagger is one of twelve areas of combat in Kali, a martial art of the Philippines, which for full mastery requires “the independent use of the hands, or hands and feet, to do two different things at the same time”?

  I could go on, but I will not, for § is the section symbol, and it is time, oh, more than time for a new one.