Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  And then there was a long, long silence.

  THE LAND OF THIN AIR

  I started down the slope of the bajada with the dollhouse in my arms. The juniper thinned out and was replaced by a quantity of catclaw and mesquite and whitethorn bushes through whose tiny leaves the light poured like water through a sieve. The sun could find hardly a single point of purchase on the land from which to throw a shadow. I did pass one group of cottonwoods that must have struck their roots into an invisible spring. I thought I remembered them from my childhood, though they had been much smaller then. They were squared off below at cow height and the desert pavement beneath them was spackled with dung. One cow stood under the trees, as black and featureless as the cow on the road sign. Every other thing I saw was bleached by the almost-noonday sun to a uniform dun color like that of institutional carpeting.

  The dollhouse made it hard to see where I was going, and my dress seemed to fling itself at every thorny bush and swoon there, and each time it happened I had to set down the dollhouse and disentangle myself, though after three or four such episodes I lost my patience and from then on just tore myself away, to the permanent detriment of my garment. Once, this labyrinth had no secrets from me; the honey mesquite with the oriole nest in it or the ocotillo that had grown up through a tangle of rusty barbed wire were as good as street signs, but new bushes had sprouted, and the arroyos had grubbed out other paths through the earth. For a short stretch my feet seemed to find a clear path of their own accord, and I sped up, thinking I had found my way, but then I stepped right into a sprawling prickly pear, tried to change direction while my whole weight was still leaning into the step, and fell. Luckily I landed on top of the dollhouse, not in the cactus. As it was my ankles were pretty well chewed up, and a bit of the railing around the widow’s walk made a row of tiny regularly spaced puncture wounds over my hipbone.

  I had been making my way along a hogback between two deep and nearly parallel arroyos. I had been keeping to the spine, more or less, but now I veered to the right and considered the strip of red sand at the bottom of the cleft. The periodic flash floods that scoured the arroyos kept them relatively free of cactus and small scrub, though the bigger bushes that thrived on what moisture lingered there sometimes closed over them entirely and made them impassable to anything larger than a jackrabbit. Still, the sand might be easier footing for a while. I rode a slide of pebbles down, the dollhouse in my lap, my shoes filling with grit. I half-fell, half jumped down the damp cutbank at the bottom and landed on my knees in the hot sand. A caucus of quail burst out of a bush with a heart-rattling racket of wingbeats, and the late-coming pebbles disturbed by my slide clattered down and bounded off the cutbank and were silenced in the sand.

  Then it was quiet. It was also much hotter, or rather the real heat of the day could now be felt; my face, chest, arms were suddenly wet with the sweat that, above, the constant wind rising up off the valley had dried. The wind was only intermittent down here. When it passed through, the snake grass on the banks sighed, just audible under the crunch of my footsteps, the rattle of insect invisibles in the mesquite bushes, and the grasshoppers that popped up clicking and careened in a short arc, making a ratcheting sound or a soft brrr depending on what kind they were, and then froze where they landed.

  The arroyo proved a good road, broad enough for me and my burden to pass freely between the bushes on the sides of the V. A flood had preceded me not long ago; the cutbanks were raw and still damp, and there were dark sickles of moist sand in the shadowed curves of the flood bed. Out of old instinct, I turned to look at the sky behind me; Papa had taught me that rain falling miles away in the mountains could cause a flash flood here below under a sunny sky. But the eastern sky was clear and blue.

  I became aware of a new sound, a hum at the lower limit of hearing, and noticed a number of bees swinging slowly around me, though without signs of excitement. I stopped, lowering the dollhouse for a better look, and saw the swarm clinging to a bent, leaf-stripped sapling, like a wad of snagged flood-cargo. The bees crawled slowly in mesmerized implosion, knitting, infolding, and droning steadily. Individual bees would lift off and circle lazily around and then cement themselves to the clump again. I watched for a time. The ball of bees was about the size of a head, and I had the sensation that it knew I was there. Well, of course it did know I was there, collectively. But it seemed about to speak. Slowly, so as not to alarm the bees, I toiled back up the side of the arroyo. The bee wardens kept pace with me without seeming to exert themselves until as if by agreement they all fell away.

  When I gained the ridge I set down the dollhouse and bundled my skirts up and pulled down my underwear and squatted to pee. The warm wind came up-slope balmy and cool on my labia. My pee brightened the colors of the pebbles and sank steaming into the sand between them and disappeared. I stayed squatting longer than I had to, gazing out at the expanse below. The playa was blank white and lost the clarity of its edges in its shimmer. It was much bigger than it looked from my vantage point, extending to the south well beyond the point at which it was cut off from view by the lower slopes of the mountain to the left of us, which although part of the same range as the one I now descended, advanced farther into the basin. It was taller, too, and from it I had been told one could make out some sort of construction upon the playa, deep in the restricted area. But from here the playa was of an uninterrupted whiteness. It had an illusory softness that made it look like a piece of cloud set in the earth. The highway, which passed in a straight line across the valley as if to demonstrate there was nothing there worth stopping for, cut across the northern end of it. It cut across the town as well: a sparse botheration of low buildings, lawns as rectangular as accent rugs, and a clump of messy cottonwoods plundering the spring from which the town drew its water. Trailer roofs and sprinkler jets shone. A little way out of town the drive-in movie screen was showing bone-white to a host of tents, and beyond it, stranded in the middle of the basin like a cow pie, a pile of tailings from the mine bore a white G.

  I bobbed a little to shake myself off and patted myself dry with quick touches of a hot clean rock that gave me little shocks of pleasure, and then I set down the rock, which was already dry, and pulled off my underwear over my shoes and left it on a rock and went on with the air blowing soft and clean up between my legs. When the slope had gentled enough that the arroyos began smoothing themselves out into wide stone washes I ceased to follow their westward trend and angled leftward, to the southwest. Soon the scrub was lower than knee high and comprised mostly of creosote and snake grass, and I could move more quickly. My arms were sore from carrying the dollhouse in front of me and my lower back ached from leaning back to compensate. After a while I hit upon the idea of balancing the dollhouse on my head, where it seemed lighter and also provided a little shade, and I went on in this way and came at last to the first barbed wire fence.

  I turned left, following it, until I found a section where erosion had enlarged the gap under the bottom wire and left one post hanging from the wires instead of supporting them, so it seemed to be standing, slightly aslant, on air, and at that point I slid the dollhouse under, and then followed it. Something sharp dug into my groin: the knife in my pocket.

  When I got up, brushing pebbles off my hands, there were little lights flashing and zinging around me and the sky pursed and flared in spots like an old balloon, and so I sat on my heels in the thin shade of a mesquite and with my hands shading my eyes I took stock of a scatter of rabbit droppings among which ants moved like burros among boulders. I listened to a fly droning nearer, and when the sound cut out, I joggled my leg and heard it again and then it stopped and again I joggled my leg. I pulled out the knife and held it suspended over the ants but they took no notice and doing it gave me none of the slightly sick pleasure I had felt when I was practicing decapitations in what felt like another life.

  That was you in the dollhouse.

  Memory, itself a kind of dollhouse in which I replay in miniature th
e story of my life, swung on concealed hinges and opened a new wing. Tables twirled on tiny turned legs, chairs played musical chairs, freezing in new positions, and now I did seem to remember the quiet creaking of the papered balsa walls pressed coolly against one ear; the miniature light fixture above me, too close for focus, so it divided into two partially overlapping, diaphanous images; the feeling of safety that infused my whole body with warmth and lassitude.

  I pulled the dollhouse toward me and rolled it over till it stuck in the sand at an angle. All the furniture hit the ceiling, and some small object on the ground floor found the stairs and rolled up them, which was down, until it came to a resting point under the roof.

  I drove the knife into the base of the dollhouse. The thin wood split easily, and cracks radiated from the hole. I sawed two rough half-circles in each half of the house. When I closed the dollhouse and latched it, they made two complete circles.

  I laid the house on its back on the ground and unlatched it and folded out the two front halves. It felt like spreading a woman’s thighs. Then I slowly lowered myself down backward. When my neck and Blanche’s found the sawed half-circles in the center, I reached out to the hinged wings on either side. I tried to lift them and found I wasn’t strong enough.

  I sat up again and propped the wings up with stones so that they were no longer flush with the ground but rose up aslant on either side of me when I again lay down with my neck in the cutaway, and with some of the lifting already done in this way I was able to pull the two sides up, Blanche’s first, then mine, and lower them carefully over us so that the two halves of the holes met around our necks.

  I lay for a moment staring out the front window at the sky. The blood was pounding hard in my head. Then I reached up and touched the front of the house and saw my hands climb, like pink King Kongs, past the windows. I sought and found the latch on the front of the house by feel and fastened it. Then I tried to sit up. Of course I could not. For a moment I panicked. Then I unfastened the latch, opened the dollhouse for the third time, folded open the front halves, sat up, propped up the whole dollhouse at an angle, and then performed the whole operation over again. This time when I moved to sit up the house came with me. Unsteadily, I got to my feet. The floor rested on my shoulders.

  I was alone in the room. That’s a sentence I could never form before and tell the truth. I was in the library, once the scullery. A toppled chair rolled from one side of the room to the other. A darkness weltered up to bemuse me and tiny lights swarmed through this domestic scene. Maybe I staggered: outside the window, the desert tilted and veered, but I was safe indoors. I waited. The dizziness passed, and I went on. I was protected. If far below me someone’s legs were in difficulties with a succession of fanged monsters, it was no concern of mine. In any case there was scant danger of snakes now, in the heat of midday, and on the playa no cactus grew.

  Stepping out onto the pure white I felt a moment’s vertigo, as if I were performing some impossible act, walking on light itself. The sun seemed to shine from all sides at once. My shadow anywhere else would have seemed a figure made of light. My kneecaps and the underside of my arms burned with the light of the sun turned back up on itself.

  Here because of the salt there was no sagebrush or creosote or even rabbit brush or snakegrass. There were no lizards or quail and almost no living things at all, though I saw that in the crisp bright shadow of a Keep Out sign, a corpse-still grasshopper kept its council. There was no shade otherwise, except the stiff memorial band of shadow around each rock, and my own shadow with its precise contours, like a keyhole into which only I would fit. Rocks were few and looked incongruous there, as if some purpose of which they had once formed a part had moved on and left them there. They had a truculent, self-conscious air. I imagined they were a sort of untranslated message, as if they might have liked to be arranged into words like the rocks by the road, but had far too much to say.

  That was you in the dollhouse. Did Donkey-skin ever exist at all? Or was Dr. Goat just an ugly man who had kicked a dog once? Something passed between me and the light, and I tilted back my house head, bracing it with my hands, and looked up through the smeared window. Overhead, a jet fell silently sideways. Late came the sound of it, which was also a feeling in my stomach like something rupturing. The plane was turning and catching the light so as to dissolve into it, momentarily, then pivoting like a pen spun in fingers, silhouetted, wings spread, and for a second seeming stopped and therefore falling, slipping sideways toward the earth, then curving up with an impression of strain that sympathetically affected the back of my neck. Trailing two dirty pipe cleaners of exhaust, it swung silently out over the mountains against a beatific cloud mass and disappeared until thunder broke again overhead and I looked up to see it close above, turning on its wing almost upside down, and so repeat.

  Then it seemed to be gone. It left behind a tense expectancy, like an opening in a conversation in which something violent might be said.

  Something hurtled into my legs. I inclined my house. It was the Mooncalf, who did not like loud noises. She stood trembling and panting between my legs, her head wedged into my crotch. I bent over, and she bucked up and daubed the front window with her nose. I found the hard spot between her eyes, where she liked to be rubbed. I had completely forgotten about her! “Clever Moony,” I grieved. I should have tied her up, asked Max to take care of her.

  Now that she had my attention, she came out from between my legs and began skipping and flouncing. She carried a shank of teddy-bear cactus aslant on her back like a hair curler, and another entoiled in her tail. She carried these extras buoyantly, however, wagging her tail with outrageous self-satisfaction. She had dust all over her muzzle and a fat lip on one side from a bug bite. She did not seem surprised by my house-hat, as some dogs might have been. I wished I had another one to keep her safe.

  “Blown to smithereens,” I said. She wagged her tail. I said it again, liking the sound of it. “Blown to smithereens.” What exactly were smithereens?

  A sort of smithereen ran at me and crouched beside my shoe, imagining itself to be in hiding. I bent over it. I could see its blue throat quaking under the stiff raised bill. A smithereen was a lizard, in this case. One might have thought I meant a bird. What was it doing so far from shelter? Perhaps a hawk had fumbled it. It would not last long out here.

  I have always felt sorriest for these incidental characters. You can persuade yourselves that people deserve what they get. It is possible to muster up a little venom for almost anybody, in my experience, including yourself. (Especially yourself.) But not for smithereens. One minute they are skittering over the hot stones, free and ferocious, in their own eyes at least. The next, whomp. A giant hand plucks them up—it did in this exceptional case at least—and feeds them in through the little front door of an airborne house just the right size for them….

  Suddenly I was in a Max Ernst collage! The eerily ordinary drawing room, slightly old-fashioned. The lizard reclining on the settee, sinuous and elongated, its tail a barbaric surprise on the accent rug. The confusion of scale: a giant ear visible through the drawing room door. Of course the lizard would not pose, but hurled itself against the window, slid down, and ran around the room, knocking the furniture awry. Its tail wound itself through the rungs of a chair, slung it around. I was poked in the nose by the miniature clawed foot of a miniature chair leg. The lizard found the stairs, ran up them. I heard it rattling things upstairs and thought of poltergeists.

  I had never been so far out on the playa. Between the white planar surface below me and the sun above, I felt weightless, suspended in a thin but buoyant medium made of heat and light. The knowledge my feet had of the press of the earth beneath them seemed some kind of delusion or a petty thing unworthy of consideration. My head seemed very far away from my grounded sneakers. I was the tallest thing for miles. Given my size, I did not see how I could move forward at all because the hot sky pressed down against the hot earth pressing up with the hopeless deter
mination of lovers who have fought and will do it again, and it did not seem as though there could be room for a third party in that clinch. The further I went, the more I seemed to be prying apart layers of some incandescent material.

  A black beetle flew slowly careening and shrieking out its fluxing buzz like something grieving, and soon it was struck to earth as if by an unseen blow and its cry cut off. It continued crawling on the white with black pieces of its wings dragging behind like rags until it grew dusty with white powder and began to disappear. The sky was going paisley with little flares and detonations, and my mouth was exceedingly dry. It occurred to me that I might have some water with me. I felt for an upstairs window, pried open the casement like a housebreaker, and felt inside all around, touching in turn the rocking horse, the high chair, the crib. That the hand was in the nursery will be obvious, a dusty behemoth crouching and flouncing above the tender mite.

  Except that as I recall we had lost baby years ago. I remember a pink blur disappearing into a citadel of thorns and cactus pads, in the gentle jaws of a pack rat. Now she lives there, joined at intervals by waves of cognate siblings, pink and bald. She lies among them at the sweet maternal harbor while they grow fur and sharp tooth and toe and play rough games with her and then at last they leave her behind, the changeling in the cradle, an eternal worry to her adoptive mother, but a lasting joy as well.

  Back to the nursery, to these objects the hand addressed, greeted, then passed by, until it found the cistern, detachable, belonging to the bassinet. And unclipped this from the wall, ascertaining from its weight and slosh that it was still full, after all these years. Or perhaps Blanche had filled it at the kitchen sink before I left, but I think not. And so, clutching its booty, out the window flew the hand, like Peter Pan. It opened the front door and entered the foyer, where the cistern slipped out of our fingers, but that didn’t matter, because by tilting my head I could roll it this way and that, and I entertained myself for a little while with the sound it made rolling, and then I caused it with appropriate tilts and countertilts to roll into my room, carrying a chair before it, and bumble against my mouth, where with judicious touches of the tongue and lips I disposed of the chair and brought the cistern around into position. You can imagine it took me some time to open the cock, but I had time, and so at last by dint of holding one bit between my teeth and rotating the rest with my lips and tongue I caused the cistern to release a thin stream of sour water into my mouth.