HALF LIFE
A Novel
Shelley Jackson
For Pamela, of course
Contents
Part One: Boolean Operator: NOT
Unity Foundation Release & Waiver
Personal Statement
Misconceptions
The House of Voices
Cell Division
Seeing Double
Mirrors & Lenses
Too Bad
Half Time
Genesis
Sister Double Happiness
The Rose Towel
Devil’s Food
Lithobolia
Shady Ladies
Self-Help
Amazon
Venn
The Dollhouse
Uranium Daughters
Accident-Prone
Blink Twice
Missing Something
O
Part Two: Boolean Operator: XOR
Transitional Objects
Time Camera
On Murder
Sadness
Mushy Peas
Dr. Goat
Appointment
Dead Animal Zoo
One and a Half
Hohokam Elementary School
Museum of Childhood
Library
Myself My Own Fever
House Divided
The Dollhouse Redux
Doom Town
So you’re wondering about National Penitence?
The Death & Burial of Cock Robin
Beasts of Bodmin Moor
A Funeral
We Are All Twofers
The Erasing Game
R & R
Box Girl
Non Compos Mentis
The White Snake
The Divorce
Cunt-Ass Cock-Pig
Urn or Faces?
Dirty Words
Exposition
The Librarian’s Assistant
Pre-Op
My Twinn
Double Agent
Reasonable Advice
White as a Ghost
Part Three: Boolean Operator: OR
Dear Diary
Cow
Part Four: Boolean Operator: AND
Going Home
Donkey-Skin
Ordinary Things
Vanishing Twin Syndrome
The Land of Thin Air
Half Life
Author’s Note
About the Author
Other Books by Shelley Jackson
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
Boolean Operator: NOT
UNITY FOUNDATION RELEASE & WAIVER
You should have received two copies. Each twin should fill out his or her own copy. If, as in the special case of an insensible or “vegetable” twin, only one copy is submitted, the Non Compos Mentis box must be checked. Please consider your answers carefully and append a personal statement in which you explain your decision at greater length. If you require more space you may attach another page or pages with a paper clip, NOT a staple. Your cooperation will help us meet the needs of future clients.
I, , a ___ male / female twofer, age , being of sound mind and body, request the surgical removal of ___ myself / my conjoined twin for the following reasons(s) [please check all that apply]:
___ euthanasia (___my twin is / ___I am suffering or moribund)
___ mental health (my twin is crazy or I am crazy)
___ self-defense (I have reason to believe my twin will harm me)
___ self-sacrifice (I have reason to believe I will harm my twin)
___ sexual thrill (___ for me / ___ my twin)
___ religious beliefs (___ mine / ___ my twin’s)
___ philosophical convictions (___ mine / ___ my twin’s)
___ determination to quit this vale of tears (___ mine / ___ my twin’s)
irreconcileable differences
I am / ___ am not acquainted with the philosophy of the Unity Foundation. I am / ___ am not prepared for the censure of society in general and the Togetherness Group in particular. I am / ___ am not prepared to sign an oath of secrecy regarding the existence and identities of doctors and fellow patients, the location of the clinic, and anything else I may know or suspect about the Unity Foundation, including its rules, philosophy, patient profile, physical plant, waste-disposal practises, medical equipment, funding, legal status, etc. I am / ___ am not prepared to sign a statement absolving the Unity Foundation of any responsibility whatsoever, whether for the failure or success of surgery, later complications, or any change of heart that I or my twin may have during or after surgery. I understand / ___ do not understand that this operation is irreversible and that the removed twin will be in a condition nonconducive to life.
My twin is ___ compos mentis / non compos mentis.
I am the recto / ___ verso twin. The twin to be removed is the verso / ___ recto.
Signed
PERSONAL STATEMENT
Blanche, white night of my dark day. My sister, my self. Blanche: a cry building behind sealed lips, then blowing through. First the pout, then the plosive; the meow of the vowel; then the fricative sound of silence.
Shhhh.
Blanche is sleeping. She has been sleeping for fifteen years.
I can tell you the exact moment I knew she was waking up. But allow me a day’s grace. Let me remember that last afternoon, unimportant in itself, wonderfully unimportant, when I was still Nora, just Nora, Nora Olney, Nora alone.
The flags lining Market Street from Church to Castro flexed and snapped, showing sometimes one, sometimes two linked rings. The stop signs shuddered on their spines. The wind had picked up in the late afternoon, as usual, and now the whole sky seemed to be toppling sideways over the Twin Peaks, carrying with it whorls of smoke from the incinerators and pure white spooks of fog. I was meandering home from the movie theater without the tickets I’d gone there for, joggling two oranges in a plastic bag and going over my excuses. Blanche was sleeping. Of course she was. I dropped into the gutter to skirt some crowd-control fences ganged in readiness against a streetlight, and our heads collided. A distant, confused echo of her pain overtook and lost itself in mine, but her breathing stayed steady and deep.
I was threading my way along the curb. The sidewalk was already thronged with out-of-towners, already dressed for Pride in brand-new T-shirts with rubbery silk-screened slogans, “One’s Company” and “22” and “YESIAMESE.” They were strolling in twos and threes and fours of varying molecular structure, exchanging glances of appraisal and nervous pleasure. The singletons anxious to understand, to be seen understanding. The twofers beaming, indecently grateful for one weekend of sanctioned self-satisfaction. Tomorrow they’d all be here: Siamese and Siamystics, conjoined and joiners, doppelgängers and gruesome twosomes, double-talkers, double-dealers, twice-told tale tellers. An odious prospect. Already I was getting looks of curiosity and sympathy, like the birthday child in a leukemia ward.
The twin amplifiers flanking the temporary stage back at Eighteenth Street retched, rid themselves of five beats of that ubiquitous “We-R-2-R-1-4-Ever,” went dead. No we’re not, I thought, reflexively. I pulled one hood of my hoodie farther over Blanche, but her blond hair spilled out, catching a rogue ray of sun, and the tourists gave each other quick digs with their elbows. It’s Sleeping Beauty! As for the hag with the two-faced apple in her pocket, everyone knows how the story goes. Sooner or later she’ll have to turn the other cheek.
“Repent,” advised the wizened lady in the plastic visor who protested every day at Market and Sixteenth. Today her hand-lettered sign read “GO BACK TO SIAM.”
“Oh, I do,” I said, fervently, hand on hearts. She slit h
er eyes at me, suspicious.
Let me be clear, while I still can. I am a twofer—what they used to call a Siamese twin, though I prefer “conjoined,” with its faint echo of the alchemists’ conjunctio and those copulatives copulating in grammar books. I’m the one on the left, your right. Blanche is on my right, your left. I—oh, say it: we—have strong cheekbones, long earlobes, hazel eyes, and dirty-blond hair, which is also usually dirty blond hair. Glamour is not very important to me, and it seems goofy to groom Blanche, like trimming my pubes into a heart. But I’m not really a hag. I am stern, though, and wear the marks of habitual sternness, while Blanche is smooth as soap. I never used to need a mirror to see what I looked like, I just turned my head. But we have grown apart, Blanche in her beauty sleep and I.
Dicephalus dipus dibrachius. That’s two heads, two legs, and two arms: standard-issue twofer. Aside from that pair of face cards we hold an average hand, not much different from yours. Novelties include the short third collarbone we share between us; a spinal column that begins to divide in two around the sixth thoracic vertebra, flaring the upper chest; two windpipes, two and a half lungs, and a deuce of hearts. Audrey says vampires also have two hearts, one good, one bad. While the good heart beats, the vampire is as capable of kindness as any human soul, but when the good heart stops, the beat of the bad heart strengthens in the dying breast, and makes a decent woman rise from her coffin to prey on everyone she once loved best. The blood of kinfolk wets her chin.
If this is true of twofers too, I know which heart is mine.
I cut around the flower stall at the corner, vaulting a white bucket in which a single sunflower was privately flaunting itself, filling the whole bucket with a secret glow. My shadow eclipsed it for the duration of a blink. Blanche’s head jerked when I landed, but this time, my hand was there to steady it. In the lee of the stall, I suddenly felt the lingering warmth of the June day. My temples prickled. The smell of smoke and roses rose around me. The light strengthened, the streetcar tracks shone like new scars, and I thought of the young woman recently killed by a streetcar on Church—“Decapitated,” Trey had reported with relish, though you couldn’t believe everything he said—and let go of Blanche’s neck.
“Nora!”
Across the street, a duplex figure in a festival T-shirt waved a fluttering pink flyer. Cindi and Mindi? I could not remember their names, but I had a feeling they rhymed. Twofer names so often do. Jane and Elaine, then, or Mitzi and Fritzi, were passing out flyers with both hands next to a leaning cutout of RubiaMorena, this year’s Pride queen. Knowing it was futile, I kept my face lowered as I crossed, as if trying to read something in the shadow that glided along with me, symmetrical and terrible as a Rorschach blot.
“Nora! Blanche!” A flyer sailed past me and plastered itself on the trunk of one of the palm trees on the meridian.
Grimacing, I raised my head. These activist twofers always seemed to make a point of saluting both of us. Both of her chugged up, twin chins doubling as they beamed with the bliss of outreach. (Kelly and Shelley?) We did the tongue and groove kiss, the one where you dock your heads together, kiss the air between. Left. The first time a San Francisco hipster tried this on me, I thought he was trying to tongue my saddle. An honest mistake, but he never forgave me that snap kick. And right.
Over their shoulder, I watched RubiaMorena stagger, spin, and fall. Some Togetherists attempted to right her, then gave up when the wind felled her a second time. I’d been seeing their orange T-shirts all month. The open secret that most of their members were singletons had become an embarrassment to them; they’d be recruiting aggressively this weekend.
“Everytwo’s so looking forward to Audrey’s film. Tyou must be so proud! Tyou’ll be at the premiere, of course?” The second person plural a local twofer rights group had tried to introduce a couple years ago had not caught on, but a few devotees still used it with enthusiasm.
“Blanche might go, but I don’t think I can make it,” I drawled.
Technically, they laughed—a simultaneous nasal huff—but only out of nervousness. A subordinated twin was not funny. “Well, we’d all be delighted to see tyou. And I’m sure it would mean a lot to Audrey.” They reached out and hooked a strand of hair out of Blanche’s mouth. I wondered if one of them had a crush on Blanche. Talk about pathetic fallacy! Might as well have a crush on a freckle or a polyp.
“Don’t go by the listings in the paper, we’ve made some last-minute changes. The latest times are on the flyers.” Pressing a couple into my hand, they turned. “Oh no!” They hurried toward their fallen queen, whose blank back was already paisley with footprints.
“I think I can make do with just one,” I said, lunging after them. “Thank tyou anyway.”
Ugh! Departing, I made an involuntary warding-off gesture. The oranges, flung out and jerked back, bounced together, reminding me of a toy from our childhood, two Plexiglas balls on cords knotted to a ring. You raised and lowered your hand, letting the balls bang together harder and harder until they met at the top as well as the bottom of their arc, completing a circle to which each contributed half. Granny had always said (with, I think, a morbid pleasure) it was an accident waiting to happen. She said this about a lot of things, and had proved to be right about some of them.
“Excuse me, are you radioactive?” said a bald girl with a clipboard. I shouldered past her and turned toward home, zipping up my hoodie. It was getting cold; the fog was closing over the handsome narrow houses with their rainbow beach umbrellas, their twofer beach umbrellas, their rainbow twofer beach umbrellas. I looked up, and farther up, straining to see the rocky top of the hill whose name I still don’t know, though I’ve lived in its late-afternoon shadow for almost ten years. The sky was one mute shriek of white. I dropped my gaze, shot through with sheen and comets, and located the sun I hadn’t seen in its violet afterimage. Then I looked up again and found the sun proper by following its ghost. My eyes watered, the sun wobbled and slid apart into twin suns, abominably, and I thought, I have to get rid of Blanche.
This is going well, I think. The greenish, narrow-lined pages of the notebook I acquired from an old-fashioned stationery store out on Judah (National Brand Chemistry Notebook: Blue Cover, 120 Numbered Pages, Item No. 43-581) are steadily filling with small, black, left-leaning script. My hand moves slowly down each page, darkening it, as if I were pulling down shade after shade in a long, windowed hall. I’m writing with my left hand, though my penmanship is better with the right, because I trust it more, though even my left, while it never succumbed to that Lithobolia business, is not entirely clear of suspicion. It hovers, fidgets, dips down to tease out another phrase. Are these my words? I read them over. “Rid of Blanche.” Funny. At the time I would have been justified in thinking I already was.
One day, Blanche shut up. When I looked right, she no longer looked left, neither to see what I was plotting nor to give me a chill of similitude. (Fear of mirrors: there’s probably a name for that. Look it up if you like.) Her eyes closed, and she fell into a long, long sleep.
Sometimes, stirred by a dream she was dreaming, my finger twitched, my toe tapped. Sometimes while checking the date on a yogurt container or knotting a shoelace, I felt an incongruous rush of adrenaline. Aside from these tiny reminders, our body was mine. It grew up. I grew up, and Blanche was left behind, like a vacation puppy too dumb to bark after the shrinking license plate and the desperate faces tinged with aquamarine behind the glass.
My life really began then. I don’t remember much of what came before, and what I do remember lacks heft. My memories are a clutch of images as unconvincing as those faux-antique photographic portraits ($15, $25 with gilt frame) tourists could pose for back in my hometown of Too Bad, NV, their flip-flops hidden under the hoop skirt, sunglasses and souvenir visors waiting just out of view on a plastic chair. I don’t mind, I prefer the present tense.
But it turns out that what you don’t know can hurt you.
In disentangling two pieces of st
ring, one looks for the ends. If I am having trouble, at this late date, telling the two of us apart, the obvious solution is to go back to the beginning.
MISCONCEPTIONS
She should have thought twice. Mama wanted to give a baby to her girlfriend, Max, as a tribute to Max’s almost perfect masculinity. A surprise. It is possible that this explanation was conceived after the fact.
The fact was conceived on the bus from Hollywood, where Mama’s big break had just fallen through. She had fired her agent in a fit of pique and was going back to New York, where they loved her. They being the regulars at a bohemian nightclub where she did a theatrical number that combined song and dance with dramatic monologue. Men wet their hankies when she did the sad song, and ladies in top hats licked their lips and sent her flowers. Mama peevishly plucked greasy bits out of a bag of doughnuts. Across the aisle sat my father, with sandwiches and soda and a dollhouse on his lap.