Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  I never shook that idea, I just forgot it, like everything else we didn’t talk about. But what I did not remember remembered me. Right after the gas station exploded, there was a big rain. Talkers said the dust cloud from the explosion might have seeded the clouds. The lake had water in it for the first time in months, like a mirage taking itself really seriously, and a boy from my high school passed out face down with a bottle in his hand and drowned in an inch of salt water, brine shrimp kissing his pickled lips, while his friends played “Jesus walked on water” fifteen feet away. Drowned, in Grady! Gloria Barnes said you could hear the toads groaning in the ditches down in the basin from as far away as Ryder Peak. Then the rainy season commenced, and it too was heavier than usual. Some of the barrel cacti got so fat with water that their accordion folds smoothed out, then burst.

  And another strange thing happened. Especially around the gas station (where the gas station had been, that is, not where they were bulldozing for the new road), but in Too Bad too and even in Grady, though not on the playa because of the salt, an unfamiliar crop started coming up: two tiny, soft green leaves on a pale stem. Nobody could figure out what they were. Some said they came from outer space, that some Martian Johnny Appleseed had laid his green thumb on us. The sprouts grew uncommonly fast, and put out more leaves, then divulged a heavy spiky bud. Sunflowers! The local paper did a story about it, mentioning Charles Fort and rains of fishes. The pastor wrote a sermon around it. A Rocke Shoppe printed up postcards.

  The knowledge took shape before it found words. A sunflower burst open behind my eyes, scattering seeds that sprouted and bloomed too, so that all my mind seemed brightly lit, no shadows left. In its blaze, a snapshot of Oaxaca faded, curled and blew away. Sunflowers, sunflowers, sunflowers! Granny’s fake titty, scattered for miles, was blooming.

  I unclipped my pen from the spiral binding and started writing. For the second time, I walked up the highway to Too Bad and slipped through the seam into my old home, where the dollhouse gave me a knowing look. Granny blew sky-high again, I washed Blanche’s mouth out with soap, and Max held the door for me. For the second, third, hundredth time, I hid in the dollhouse for protection, and walked out onto a dry lakebed as blank as a page, my shadow inked beside me. “Silence Please,” I wrote. “Explanation of the Device.” “Are you Sad?” “Sunflowers!”

  Everything happens twice, first in the fact, and then in the telling. At least twice: the telling, too, is doubled by the hearing of it. A cleft passes through the center of things, things that do not exist except in this twinship. That cleft is what we sometimes call I. It has no more substance than the slash between either and or.

  I have spent my whole life trying to make one story out of two: my word against Blanche’s. But we are only as antithetical as this ink and this page. Do these letters have meaning, or the space around them? Neither. It’s their difference we read. There are two kinds of blindness, that of darkness and that of light. But in the cat’s eye of our intersection I can make something out: a faint, awkward figure in a frilly dress, like a child’s drawing of a princess. This is her story, which is ours.

  I could have told this story better. I could have tried to invent a new grammar with room for both of us. Wedged in a second person, you, between the first and the third. But it is too late for that. The storm is close now. Thousands of Oxymorons are throwing blankets over the barbed wire and swarming onto the Penitence Ground. Hundreds of guards are backing up slowly, waiting for instructions. Officer Pangborn is arguing with the computer. A lone police car, lights silently flashing, is turning off the highway onto the road to Too Bad where Marshal Max is pacing slowly away from the place where Badman Bill would be if he were not currently practicing nonviolent resistance techniques. In San Francisco, Trey pulls on a sequinned dress with 20 sleeves, and twirls, a one man Busby Berkeley routine. Seen from above, he’s a spiral nebula in which new worlds are born every minute. Audrey consults a baby name book. She has just had word that her tissue has accepted the plastic form, and she should start thinking about choosing a name for her new head. Or should she take a new name too? She considers Lula and Sula, then hears my spectral voice: “My last request—don’t do it!” Louche invents a Bilateral Spanky-Panky. “This hurts me as much as it hurts you,” she says, and for the first time in history, this statement is true.

  The two it takes to tango, tango. The sound of one hand clapping is heard by a Mr. Clive Henman of Arundell, England, who will never be the same again. Others, who did not hear it, will never be the same either. A two-hundred-and-twenty-year-old house, divided against itself, stands a little bit longer. Max fires a blank at nobody, growling, “There ain’t room in this town for the both of us.” And I am closing in on myself on twin tracks. I have made a Venn diagram after all: this book.

  Here, I’ll draw it.

  One and a Half leaned over to look and nodded approvingly. “When the two coils of its bifurcated structure are joined, and Agent White and Agent Black meet in a single point bearing every resemblance to a period or full stop, the Device will, not ex- or implode, but un- or anti- or deplode, restoring the lost sadness to our riven world.”

  Look at the diagram. Imagine this: each ring is a clock face. One runs clockwise, the other, counterclockwise. Now fold the left one onto the right. You will observe that they now turn the same way, clockwise. Spread them again. Fold the right one onto the left. What direction are they rotating now?

  You can turn back the clock, and without even trying. Every clock runs backwards and forwards at the same time. It just depends what side you’re looking from. So I hold out my arms to the dead. Come One and a Half, come all. Dead Animal Zoo, come. Even Dr. Goat, even old Nickel-and-Disme, if you’re really dead. Come back, Granny. Come back, Princess Donkey-skin.

  Come back, Blanche.

  Five, four, three, two, one—

  Contaminant lifts from throats and thyroids, milk cans and feed bins, orchards and sheepfolds.

  The infant lambs receive their own hearts like valentines delayed in the post.

  Fallen hair swims up to the scalp, lost teeth root themselves in the gum.

  From creosote and honey mesquite and yucca and jojoba and saguaro and barrel cactus and cottontail and mule deer and rattlesnake and roadrunner and phainopepla and canyon wren and bush tit and quail, wasp and stink beetle and praying mantis and scorpion and centipede and tarantula, a silvery ash flurries up. It spools into the middle air, augmenting the pink cloud that is already withdrawing, homesick and heading home, posting southwest fast as the wind and then faster than any ordinary wind and arriving already brawling upon the scene of a colossal donnybrook, joining a collocation of spectral fists contesting with one another rampageous and unaimed at first but discovering, now, a shared disposition for downward and inward.

  A towering white body sucks in its stomach, hunches. It is concentrating, concentrating.

  The Hilton Twins are singing “Me, Too.” I see the Biddenden Maids passing out cakes two at a time to a shuffling line of two-headed lambs. Lines of decapitated ants march out of a crack, holding their heads like clutch purses. The ground splits and biform skulls rise up through the grit, scaring up binary bunnies (white tufts held high) and bifurcated rattlers, tails a blur (there’s danger they will bite themselves in the confusion). A rabbit’s tail that should have disintegrated twenty years ago hops by in the company of Mike the Headless Chicken. The Interrupting Cow sweeps up, leaving a trail of black beetles across the white. Something flame-colored crosses the window pane in triplicate. It’s Molloy, Malone, and the Unnamable, swimming in air.

  The mushroom cloud remembers what it had forgotten: the bomb. Things unhappen quickly now. A sphere of influence as delicate as a soap bubble detaches itself from the edges of the universe and begins to move inward, acquiring emphasis. With a declaration composed of the synchronized seizures of a myriad eardrums it shrinks to a point. A hurricane hurries home. A fire-ball draws itself inward, pulling trees and buildings ere
ct behind it. Cinders become birds, shadows bulk up, fur and flesh glove the bones of a terrified dog that is calming quickly. A light as bright as a second sun shows him settling to chew his mangy tail. Then the light goes out. The split—

  “Mu!’’ says the Interrupting Cow, and the storm arrives. The first raindrops strike the gypsum around me and come up Braille. Each bead of water landing in dust clothes itself in dust and rests on dust without wetting it. Landing on my powdered leg it makes a skin-colored circle with a frilled edge. On my page, a shiny blister plump with inky slur. Rain taps on the roof. There is an answering ruction from my upstairs inmate, waking from a reptilian reverie, alive after all. The Mooncalf plunges her muzzle into her plump haunch, then assaults her foreleg, mistaking the sting for an insect’s. The storm is a towering blue-greyness with definite edges that does not resemble a passing event or a state so much as a material thing. In its upper reaches horizontal lightning joins something to something else with sudden scripture, and converts a mass of cobbles and smoke into a cathedral vault. Then thunder throats the news, and the Mooncalf bolts wide-eyed under the stairs, spraying my book with grit.

  Turn the page.

  I am writing without looking, watching the storm-front whelm the distance still between us.

  Yards away. It gains the laggards of my recrudescent friends, slicks skulls, disarticulates scapulas and clavicles, plashes in the pigs’ vessel.

  I look down and see that my ballpoint has been sponged clean by the wet paper. The page is blank, except for the occasional ding where I bore down on a comma or a dash. But I can read it perfectly.

  I scribble until the ink comes. I want to go back and fill in the gaps. But somewhere in the house, someone is speaking.

  “Nora?” I say.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Half Life could hardly be mistaken for nonfiction, but it brushes lightly against fact in a few places. Fallout from nuclear testing does cause genetic mutations, though conjoined twins are by no means common downwind. The National Penitence Ground is very loosely based on the Nevada Test Site, though I have freely rearranged the local geography, flora, and fauna. Neither Grady nor Too Bad exists, but Doom Town does, though not exactly as I have described it. Until a few years ago, when its collection went to auction, so did Walter Potter’s museum. One and a Half was a real person, and his skull still resides in the real, and marvellous, Hunterian museum. Other historical conjoined twins who haunt this book are Mary and Elisa Chulkhurst, Millie-Christine McKoy, and Violet and Daisy Hilton. Mike the Headless Chicken also existed, demonstrating that one can learn to live without almost anything.

  Thanks to Rocky “Hard Rock” Miller, who told me stories about prospecting for uranium in the ’40s and ’50s, and showed me some ore. Thanks also to Allucquere Rosanne Stone, whose account of a class she taught inspired Louche’s Transitional Objects workshop, and to Scott Larner, a former student, for turning in a piece consisting of three electrifying pages, entirely blank except for punctuation marks. Avital Ronell and Judith Butler both helped shape my Venn theory, though they may be surprised to hear it. The unattributed quote about Millie-Christine in the Manual is by a nineteeth-century French journalist whose nom de plume was Touchatout; I found it in the excellent Millie-Christine: Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, by Joanne Martell. Martell, not Audrey (as Nora claims), was the translator. Countless other books helped me, but especially Carol Gallagher’s magnificent American Ground Zero.

  Finally, most particular thanks to Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Caroline Janiak, Wesley Stace, Coates Bateman, the Howard Foundation, Ira Silverberg, Jill Schwartzman, Sean Meyer, and my sister, Pamela Jackson, who is nothing like either Blanche or Nora—fortunately for both of us.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Shelley Jackson is the author of the shortstory collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, the author of the hyp ertext novel Patchwork Girl, several children’s books, and “Skin,” a story published in tattoos on the skin of nearly three thousand volunteers. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  www.ineradicablesstain.com

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  ALSO BY SHELLEY JACKSON

  The Melancholy of Anatomy (short stories)

  Patchwork Girl (hypertext novel)

  “Skin” (a story in tattoos)

  CREDITS

  Jacket design and illustruation by Roberto de Vicq Cumptich

  COPYRIGHT

  HALF LIFE. Copyright © 2006 by Shelley Jackson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition July 2006 ISBN 9780061744815

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jackson, Shelley.

  Half life : a novel / Shelley Jackson.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-06-088235-8

  ISBN-10: 0-06-088235-2 (alk. paper)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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