Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  Extraordinary difficulties with ordinary things always make me want to laugh with joy. I heard of a man who got wound up in a piece of wallpaper he was putting up and died. When there are so many portentous struggles, how profound to wind up stuck in glue. A moth struggled up and battered softly against my neck, beat on a window of the dollhouse, then reeled down to flatten itself against the door frame.

  Suddenly there was no resistance behind me, and I lurched back and turned. There was Max, holding the door for me.

  I blushed to the roots of Blanche’s hair. “Hi. I’m just in town for—I was getting the—” I hoisted up the dollhouse, by way of explanation.

  “Oh, thank Godfrey. Your mother has been making me move that thing from one closet to another for the last fifteen years.” Max’s hair was completely grey now, and dashingly brushed back, and she was wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a turquoise bolo over her black western shirt. “Holy cow, it’s good to see you, Nora. And Blanche too, hi Blanche. Haven’t seen you in donkey’s ears. I would give you a hug, but I see your hands are full.”

  I chuckled dolefully.

  “You’ve picked a fine time to visit. Your mother’s down at the Mutatis Mutandis tent camp, and your father’s just leaving to join the Abolitionists at HQ,” Max said.

  “Mama’s back?”

  “I’ve hardly seen her, but yes. She’s been organizing for the Oxymoron ever since. You know, she and your father were instrumental in planning the whole agree-to-disagreement. It’s the first thing they’ve done together in years. Quite sweet, really. If you’re here for the action, you’d better get down there. It starts at twelve hundred hours. I reckon I’ll be playing Shoot-Out at Noon to an audience of ghosts.”

  “I’ll probably head down there soon.”

  “Well, I hope you have time to stop by later on. After the shoot-out I’m more or less free. You’ll find me at the office in the Chinese laundry. Have you seen the Chinese laundry? It’s new. I had to give up running the Time Camera myself after we got so much tourism, and now I’m just a damn executive, not to mention running for mayor, which takes me down to Grady more often than I’d really like.”

  “Max, I have a question.”

  “Mm?”

  “You remember our neighbor, the one we called Dr. Goat?”

  She looked at me strangely, I thought, but said only, “Dr. Goat? Suits him, somehow.”

  “What happened to him?”

  She frowned. “What do you mean? He moved away. One of our employees lives in the house now, Badman Bill.”

  “I thought I killed him.” It sounded ridiculous. “I want to know what happened to his body.” I saw again the scuffed place in the desert pavement. I would always see it, because it was mine now, a tiny lesion in my memory, where something noxious had been removed. The trauma had been erased. But you can’t erase the erasure itself, not without causing another trauma, and so on.

  “Killed him!” she laughed. “He probably deserved it. I never liked that man, ever since he kicked poor old Fritzi. But I’m afraid your imagination has run away with you. He’s alive and well in Pahrump.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Look, here comes your father,” she said. Did she sound relieved? “Hey Lenny, look who I caught skulking around! She’s digging up a little ancient history. But I say, let dead dogs lie. Though if you ever want to write a history of Too Bad, I can tell you I’ve learned a lot figuring out how to fake it. Techniques of adobe architecture, mining—in fact your father and I have filed a small silver claim, and we’re making money from that too, not big money, but enough to bring in a little year round. Haven’t we, Lenny?”

  “Hi, Nora. Let me…” He put his arms awkwardly around me.

  “Hi, Papa.”

  “What’s this about ancient history? You showing some interest in the old homestead at last? Going to write us up?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I was just wondering if you remembered when Donkey-skin came to the house. The—she was the daughter of our neighbors down the road.”

  “Donkey-skin? As far as I know they didn’t have a daughter. You girls always had a fantastic imagination.”

  “You found her. She was hiding in the dollhouse.” I watched his face closely.

  “You didn’t often have friends over, although maybe once or—in the dollhouse? No, that’s—” He stopped. “It’s strange you should remember it that way,” he said gently. “That was you in the dollhouse. After all the…when Granny died, you hid there. I mean you tried, because of course you didn’t really fit. The dollhouse has never been the same, you can see where it was broken and reglued if you take a close look. You wouldn’t come out.”

  “Until I made those hats,” said Max.

  “Max had a stroke of genius and made little house-shaped hats out of construction paper and balsa wood. Do you remember those? Wearing them, you were willing to come back out into the world. We let you wear them as long as you wanted. One day you just showed up for breakfast without yours, and none of us said anything, and that was that, you seemed to be fine, though you had zero interest in the dollhouse after that. But Blanche never really—well, eventually the hat just fell apart. But I guess she just never really came out of it.”

  VANISHING TWIN SYNDROME

  I put down the pencil parallel to the edge of the blank piece of paper and stood up. “I think I’ll go lie down in my room for a while,” I said.

  “Good idea,” Papa said, with evident relief.

  I sat cross-legged in front of the dollhouse and began rearranging the furniture. Blanche, trying to contain sobs, was making the awful strangled noises of a vomiting dog. I breathed slowly and carefully through the fracas in my chest, and eventually it quieted and I took my hand out of the fainting room and allowed her to wipe her nose on the back of it. Then I turned my head.

  “Do you think it was Donkey-skin?” Blanche said. “Do you think the princess blew up the gas station?”

  “Shut up.”

  “But do you?”

  “I said, shut up.” I could feel I was going to do something. Blanche would push me to. I waited for the push with what was almost a vengeful pleasure. It became as though I were not to blame for what was about to happen but she was, for not knowing what I would do if she kept talking.

  The push came. “Was it because of our stories?”

  “What stories?” I said lightly.

  “The stories we told, about how a cloud was going to lift us all up to the Land of Thin Air, how all it took was one match.” Her voice was high and strained, but she toiled on. “We even gave her the matches!”

  I moved a piano from the parlor to the bedroom and back to the parlor.

  “Nora? Was it our fault?”

  I opened the secret attic room and picked a tiny book from the bookcase, flipped its blank pages, and put it back. I picked up the miniature dollhouse we’d carved out of soap.

  “Nora?”

  I sniffed the dollhouse thoughtfully. Smell of clean mothering. “Whose fault?” I said. “Our fault?”

  She tensed. “You—we both—”

  “Tss! Who let her out, Blanche?”

  She dimmed.

  There are brine shrimp that lie dormant in the playa for years of dry weather, and then one good rain will leave some puddles, and suddenly they are rippling everywhere like tiny albino eyelashes and breeding with exemplary enthusiasm. They are alive as can be. When the puddle dries up the brine shrimp dry with it. They’re little ciphers, flakes of code. Promises, promises. They sleep, but they’ll wake. At the moment Blanche had no thought of telling on us, I knew. But she would do it all the same. She would start whining about something, and Max would get it out of her. Or she would decide it was her duty to tell, this new, stubborn Blanche.

  I went into the kitchen. “We’re going for a walk,” I told Mama.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s a good thing to do.” She frowned, and her chin crumpled into ugly red and white creases. She thought
we wanted to be alone to say our good-byes to Granny. I felt bad for fooling her, but also scornful of her for being so easily fooled.

  “Do you have a canteen?” said Papa. “Don’t be gone too long.”

  We climbed fast without talking all the way to the lookout rock. I was still clutching the dollhouse made of soap, and it grew slippery in my sweaty hand. The dry air was harsh in my throat, and Blanche’s panting very loud in the closer ear. At the top we lay down on the hot stone, lungs working, thighs trembling. The sky went black around the edges and then cleared to blue.

  When we sat up we saw the crater. A few cars were parked where the road ended at the Grady edge of the pit, and one cop car idled on the other side, lights flashing. We watched a car approach from the top of the range. It appeared and disappeared as it wound its way down through the switchbacks. Then it pulled up behind the cop car. The cop got out and went back and stood at the driver’s window. Then the cop went back to his car and the other car backed up and turned around. We watched it appear and disappear going back the way it came.

  Blanche was looking at me. She wanted me to look back so she could say something. Ignoring her, I unstuck my fingers from the smeary house and stood it on a rock, unslung the canteen from around my neck and poured lukewarm water into my cupped hand. I bothered my hands together and summoned up a little cloud of lather. Scuds of it dropped on the sand, where it shrunk and tightened.

  Finally she said, “It’s not really my fault, is it?”

  I sighed. I felt excited, but I spoke slowly and ticked off each point on my slick fingers. “Who kept going back, over and over? Who ate the snake, who insisted on eating it all herself ? Who played interpreter? Who let her out, against my advice, and even went back for the smokes that dropped the fatal spark? Who killed Dr. Goat?”

  At this last item she shuddered. “We did. You did!”

  “Did I? Can you prove it?”

  Her face expressed puzzlement, then comprehension, then fear. “You mean someone’s going to get in trouble,” she said. “You mean it’s not going to be you.”

  “Did I say that?”

  She ducked her head and fidgeted at a patch of lichen on a rock. The lichen was blood-red. The rock was fist-sized. I imagined hitting her on the side of the head with it. Then I imagined her hitting me with it. The two of us staggering back and forth on the bluff: the climax of a Western.

  But there was no need for anything so physical. I looked at the finger that had been scratching, red now with powdered lichen. “Hmm. Your trigger finger is bloody. I wonder what that means.” She said nothing. “OK,” I said briskly. “We both know what happened. Now what are we going to do about it?”

  “Do?”

  “They’ll probably give you the iron mask. It wouldn’t be fair to lock me up for something that wasn’t even my idea. Think. Your head. In a cage. For life. Of course, you’re a juvenile. They might let you out after a few decades.” A few tears dropped on my right leg. “See, now you’re crying,” I said, disgusted. “God, you’re just a—an open book. Are you going to do that when they cross-examine you? You can’t cry. You’d better not even open your mouth. Let me do the talking.” I paused. “But why should I? Maybe I should turn you in.”

  “What?”

  “You killed three people, including Donkey-skin. At least three. That’s practically a killing spree. What if you can’t stop now that you’ve tasted blood?”

  “I don’t want to kill anybody!”

  “Well you should have thought of that a little sooner,” I said. “Then I wouldn’t have had to send you to the Land of Thin Air.”

  Her fear swept up the back of my neck, a hot wind. “What do you mean?”

  I did not know whether it was possible to do what I was considering: pry Blanche so far out of her orbit that she could no longer find her way back. Archimedes reputedly said, “With a lever long enough, and a place to stand, I could move the earth.” I thought I had the lever. But a place to stand, well. If I had that, I would already have won.

  “We need to put you somewhere you can’t hurt anyone else. Somewhere quiet.”

  “I know why you really want to send me there,” she said. “I’m not stupid. But you don’t have to. I can keep my mouth shut.”

  “You will,” I promised. “From now on, you’re going to be silent as—as the grave.” I looked out across the bajada. Blanche looked too. The cop car’s lights were tiny beside the great crater.

  “I—” she said in a small voice.

  “Do you want the iron mask?”

  “No, but—”

  “Are you Sad?”

  “Yes!” she cried, mistaking this for sympathy, and burst into tears, tilting her head against mine. I shook it off.

  “Then you should repent.” I was confident now. I could feel the present changing into the future, and Blanche right beside me, helping.

  “I do!” she choked.

  “Do you really? Really, Blanche?”

  “Yes!”

  “Good.” I unscrewed the cap of the canteen and wound the little chain it was tethered to around my forefinger, so it didn’t swing forward into the stream, and directed a shining, wobbling cord of water over the tiny white house. The house started to glide down the rock. I curled a dreamy hand around it. One squeeze from Blanche, and it would scoot out over the escarpment, an architectural meteor to astonish ants and beetles. But I coaxed it safe into the hollow of my hand. It was already slightly tacky, and as it lost its shine it looked more like tooth or bone, something belonging here, or like a satellite of the playa below, that as the day dimmed was beginning to glow with its own light, as was the dollhouse, which threw a faint glow on my thumb as I rubbed it over the gables and cornices, smoothing them down to knuckles. I decanted a little more water over it, in which it bobbled around, and lathered it up. When I parted my hands the dollhouse stood on its own cloud. “You know what this is?”

  She shook her head, slinging tears.

  “Penitence.”

  She started to speak. So I washed her mouth out with soap.

  Emptiness is next to godliness. We don’t really want the heavenly host to turn up for a photo op. We’d rather not see their satin skirts cinched around the thick waists, flouncing around thighs ill-accustomed to them, we’d rather not see the archangel dressed like a pantomime dame for a Christmas gala. The paintings that depict them are embarrassing: all that shine, the lacquered cheeks and powdered noses and quaint gestures, the dopily oversized wings wagging, the dopily undersized ones vibrating unconsciously, like a puppy dog’s tail. You could see right up their skirts when they come stepping down the clouds, but would you really want to inspect those well-turned thighs, symmetrical as piano legs, or solve the silly problem of the crotch and whether angels wear underwear or have anything to hide in the first place? No, what’s divine is disappearance, and I don’t mean a running take-off or a big flap-flap. I mean a spasm of absence, absolute. Almost atomic. Only take away the mushroom clouds and shadows, too, and the spectator’s silly sunglasses. Leave nothing. Really nothing.

  Vanishing twin syndrome usually occurs in the womb. In our case it came about considerably later in the developmental process.

  The strangest thing I’d ever felt was my own right hand.

  The second strangest thing was my left hand.

  So these are fingers! I tightened them.

  The soap squirted out, described a tiny parabolic arc, glanced off my knee, and hit the sand.

  I was on my knees, sitting on my feet. Those are my knees, the third and fourth strangest things. That sting, a stone, under my left kneecap.

  The fifth and sixth strangest things: feet. My toes jammed together in the hot hollow of my shoes, the knuckle of my big toes stubbed against the roof. Nettle-burn of the crushed baby toes.

  The froth of suds on the sand had shrunk and dried to a brittle lace. The dollhouse was much smaller, and several ants were stuck to it and were waving their free appendages in unhurried compla
int.

  Soap removes dirt: No more filthy girls in cages. No more filthy men twitching and burbling up cellophane red words I could forget now. No fragrant, bluebottle-bothered zoo. No Chris Marchpane slobber and poke. No kinship with mutant lambs and severed breasts. No kinship, period. No ghost town, no dollhouse, no Sadness, no stories, no greasy smear of me on her, and her on me, and both of us all over the poor poisoned landscape. No we. Witness the American dream: a self-made self. I was alone.

  There was a dot of cold on my cheek. Not my tear, hers.

  All the apparitions that stuff diaries and occasional books, those solicitous and mute or minatory and moaning spooks and goblins, hobs and hants, were piffle compared to this. As if to exist were anything special! The world always has room for one more thing. The walls will stretch, the floor will bear the weight. In this vale of stuff it’s not presence that’s a mystery. If we could call down angels and aliens and make them citizens, we’d treat them like all the other immigrants! No, what we like about the things that go bump in the night is that we never stub our toes on them. We love our missing persons. A lost child milks the heart from the back of the carton, but the kid slurping her Grape-Nuts is just a brat.

  I was not haunted by her. There wasn’t a wisp or a whisper left. There was nothing there but the unremitting presence of everything that was not her. The world seemed intolerably full. The air ruffled my hair, tugged at my sleeve.

  That was the dreadful thing: how complete the world was without her. There was no sudden shortage, no gap. Everything pressed forward as it had always done, with no commemorative diffidence. The world is too much with us, but with me especially. I had gotten used to splitting it with someone else. Funny, I had always padded my portion. I didn’t know the whole shebang would be more than I could stand.

  Twain, re Those Extraordinary Twins: “It was not one story, but two stories tangled together, and they obstructed and interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and annoyance. I could not offer the book for publication, for I was afraid it would unseat the reader’s reason. I did not know what was the matter with it, for I had not noticed, as yet, that it was two stories in one…a farce and a tragedy. So I pulled the farce out and left the tragedy.”