mutatis mutandis

I find way too much weird stuff on the internet. I wrote this for my thesis, in response to Shelley Jackson’s Half Life:

Mutatis Mutandis

In my memories, the glass separating me from the Two-Headed Boy was not actually glass, but rather a sort of lucent film. The hairs on the two heads waved slowly in the murky liquid as the boy floated, his motionless form occasionally knocking against the glass as though he was attempting to nose his way out of his amniotic pouch. In my memories, it is when the glass begins to stretch and bend under his force that I remember this scene probably is not from my memory at all. It probably never happened, was just seeped into my head by the floating Braille foam of imagination.
I used to ask my mother if we’d ever visited a museum that held a two-headed boy, but she always balked at the idea of such an oddity. I don’t know where the memory comes from, but those two heads with their black hair and closed eyes are as clear in my mind as my own reflection.

~

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING ARE TRUE OF YOU? (CIRCLE ALL THAT APPLY):

•I sometimes have the feeling that someone is looking over my shoulder.
•I sometimes have the feeling that someone is looking through my eyes.
•I sometimes have the feeling that I am looking through my own eyes, i.e. that my self and my eyes are not identical but keep a certain distance.
•I'm butting my head against a wall, and the wall is myself.

“Remind me, why do I have to fill this thing out?” I asked Petra.
Petra set her notepad on the side table and leaned forward in her chair, giving me a hard look over her thick, plastic-framed glasses.
“I told you, Blanche. It’s just a little experiment. Something new I’m trying with all my patients who exhibit your symptoms.”
“What symptoms?”
“Well, your paranoia, for example. Your sense of a haunted past. We weren’t able to dredge up anything with hypnosis, so I’m trying something new.”
I sighed and read on.

•It sometimes strikes me as preposterous that so many different people feel entitled to call themselves “I”.
•When I say “I,” I have the feeling there are several people involved: the one talking, the one talked about, the one listening, the one observing all the others.
•When I catch sight of myself in a shop window, or hear a recording of my voice, it takes a moment to recognize myself.
I circled all three.
•Parts of my body are mysterious to me.
“My eyelid sometimes twitches involuntarily. Doesn’t that happen to everyone?” I said, smirking. Petra simply raised her eyebrows.
•When my reflexes are tested with a rubber hammer, I often wonder whether I am pretending to kick or just kicking.
•I sometimes feel that part of me is devoted to some activity in which I have little say.

Circle.

•I have eyes on the back of my head.
•I am invisible.
•Nobody knows me.
•I sometimes have a feeling of déjà vu.
•I sometimes feel like I see the world backwards and upside down.
•I sometimes feel like I'm the wrong size and shape, that my real self is much bigger, smaller, or simply different.

Circle.

A small drawing on the next page depicted a boy putting his pants on backwards, each foot inserted into the bottom cuff.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
•The pants are on backwards.
•The boy is on backwards.
•Where is the floor?
•There is nothing wrong with this picture.

I passed a glass paperweight from Petra’s desk between my hands as she wrote down the name and address of the new doctor she wanted me to see, Dr. Shelley. The sphere was heavy in my palms, and cold. Ghosts of my chilled fingerprints lingered on the glass.

~

Sometimes in my memories, I have a sister. I know she looked like me, but her features are blurred and infantile. When I used to sit on the floor of my mother’s closet, my nostrils full of the leather smell of her shoes, my twin was there. Her small hand rested in mine as we whispered to each other. She used to point out the patterns in the woodgrain on my old oak dresser—the arches and curves of the lines looked like a cave to her—and create stories for me, stories of blind cave creatures. Her hand looked like a white star as she placed her palm on the wooden drawers. This memory is unlike my memory of the Two-Headed Boy, because from the beginning of this memory, there is not doubt in my mind that it is not true. I don’t have a sister. But then where do these memories come from?

~

I assumed the baby was a boy, but there was no way to tell from the black and white drawing. The furrow between its legs sprouted not sex, but another torso, two more arms and another head. The head was smiling, raised slightly to glance upwards over the bridge of skin and organs that separated it from its counterpart. One leg projected from the wrinkle of the baby’s hip, ending in a fan of mismatched, spatulate toes. A long crease replaced a belly button, leading into buttocks and two more bowed, fat baby legs. The baby’s skeleton must look like a chalky, spindly starfish, I thought as I traced each limb with my finger, wondering why Dr. Shelley would hang this in her waiting room.
“Blanche Adams?” A squat nurse poked her head from behind the oak door. “We’re ready for you now.”
I followed the nurse—Peggy, her nametag said—down a long corridor. No doors had been left open, but I could hear murmurs behind them. I thought Peggy would lead me into a room to wait for Dr. Shelley, but we instead walked through the doors at the end of the corridor, where several large white machines waited, hollowed out like insect husks. The drone and whir of the nearest machine filled my ears.
“If you could remove your clothes and put this on, we’ll get the tests started as soon as possible,” Peggy said, handing me a hospital gown.
“What tests?” I asked.
Peggy consulted her clipboard. “Looks like we’ve got you down for a CAT scan, MRI, and thoracic X ray,” she said.
“Why?” I asked, bewildered.
“Your doctor faxed over the results of your questionnaire. This is just standard procedure for someone with your results.”
“My results?” I asked. “It was just some mind-trick test.”
“Dr. Shelley thought it’d be best to take a look at your brain and other organs, just to make sure,” said Peggy, smoothing down the tissue paper on the vinyl-covered pillow of the nearest machine.
My ears rang with the word tumor, and every medical textbook picture I’d ever seen ran through my head—the glossy blue clusters corded with thick veins, clumps of tissue tucked between folds of the cerebral cortex like the miniature hearts that belong to mice and other small mammals.
“Do I have a tumor?” I asked. I was outside myself.
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Peggy said before she left the room to allow me to change.
Malignant cells hanging from ribs like moss, crawling up my spine like ivy.

~

Dr. Shelley examined the CAT scan of my braincase on the computer screen. I searched through the rings of red and purple glowing lines that denoted my brain tissue, but I found nothing. When I tried to envision it, my skull always held cavernous, unchartable depths; however, on the cathode rays of the screen, it looked small and insignificant.
“Well, I don’t think it’s a craniopagus parasite,” said Dr. Shelley, circling the crown of my head with her pen. “We’d see a lot less epiphyseal closure in this area.”
“Wait, I’m sorry. So it’s not a tumor?” I asked. My head felt light and hot, as though it was filled with cotton. “I thought the MRI showed a tumor.”
“There’s a tumor in your chest. I’m saying you don’t have a craniopagus parasite in your head. A type of duplicata incompleta. It’s what would have been your twin, attached to you,” said Dr. Shelley.
“I’m sorry, what would have been?” I asked.
“Yes. It would have been your twin, if its development hadn’t been stunted in the womb.” She handed me a packet of papers. “Didn’t Petra tell you anything about this?” Dr. Shelley asked.
“No.” I looked at the papers Dr. Shelley had given me.
The explanation is relatively simple. Conjoined twins are divided into groups from the area of conjunction, one of the groups being craniopagus twins, i.e. joined at the skull. In rare instances, the body of one craniopagus twin atrophies in utero due to deficient placental blood supply, and the result is craniopagus parasiticus conjoined twins, where the ‘normal’ twin has a parasitic head and rudimentary body attached to the crown of the head. The second head normally grows quicker than the lower one, probably due to hydrocephalus caused by defective venous drainage.
A picture showed a two bawling infant heads fused together. The upper head did not reach further than a neck-like stump, vegetal and shrunken, a small peach. Its skin was veiny and lucent like the ears of a rabbit.
“Oh my god,” I said.
“I have video,” said Dr. Shelley. “If you’re interested, I can show it to you. There’s a really great part when its mother gives it her breast and the lips attempt to suck.”
Individuals with buried craniopagus parasites often have the feeling that they are not alone. Moreover, they feel they possess a sort of guardian or alter ego, someone who watches over them, but who sees things they do not see, or sees the same things, but from an inverse perspective. They are occasionally stirred by sensations that have no identifiable source within conscious experience, and occasionally perform unintended actions, e.g. putting away the milk in the freezer, that seem to reflect some sort of logic, but a logic that is back to front. Usually, though, this is a source of secret satisfaction, as it may be the case that what seems to them their worse mistake may be in fact their salvation.
I ignored Dr. Shelley’s offer to watch the video. The peach pit neck and O-shaped lips disappeared and I saw only the Two-Headed Boy. “I used to have one of these?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think so. But I do think,” she said, sliding the X-ray of my chest under a metal clip, fastening it to a glowing screen, “that you have a duplicata incompleta. You contain your incomplete, undeveloped twin in the form of a tumor right here.” She circled a smudge of white below my left ribs.
It sometimes strikes me as preposterous that so many different people feel entitled to call themselves “I.”
“I’m surprised you’ve never heard of this before,” said Dr. Shelley. “The twofers are getting pretty popular nowadays.”
“Twofer?”
“Dicephalus dipus dibrachius. Conjoined twins who share a body. Two-headed people,” she said.
“I’ve heard of it,” I said. “The Two-Headed Boy of Bengal. I’ve heard of him. And I think,” I paused. “I think I’ve seen it before.”
“On TV?” asked Dr. Shelley.
“No, I don’t watch the news,” I said.
“Oh, these guys aren’t on the news. They’re usually on the talk shows.”
“I thought those were fake,” I said.
“Most people do.” Dr. Shelley sighed. “I’ve been on Oprah twice. I think the Farber twins were on last month, actually.”
I didn’t know who the Farber twins were, but I had seen the Two-Headed Boy, floating behind his glass. I didn’t mention this to Dr. Shelley. I simply continued shaking my head, no, no.
“How can you be certain?” I asked.
“I’ve spoken with your psychiatrist, and Petra felt your paranoia, the haunting impression that your life could have been entirely different and something has gone wrong, made you a prime candidate for duplicata incompleta.”
“It could just be a tumor. Lots of people are paranoid.”
“Yes, but if you look here,” said Dr. Shelley, pointing to small white speckles on the X ray, “you can see that your tumor is growing teeth.
I looked at the string of white dots hanging from my ribs, illuminated on the screen like Christmas lights, and promptly vomited at my feet.

~

Twofers, I learned from the material Dr. Shelley sent me home with, have two hearts. I remembered from my books that vampires also have two hearts. One heart beats with goodness, the other with evil. While the good heart beats, the vampire is harmless, but there is always the risk of the second heart taking over, wetting its chin with blood. I wondered which heart I’d inherited.
Dr. Shelley said the twin buried in my chest likely did not have a heart, and if it did, it wasn’t functioning. But despite Dr. Shelley’s reassurances, I still felt it thrumming—a low, quiet vibration, like a leaky valve. Motionless, the sullen blimp of my twin hung in the empty space. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there, fattening.
When I thought about myself—myself, was I still myself? Or was I now myselves? When I thought about myself, I sounded like a bad riddle, (What has teeth but is not human? A comb!). What if my twin wasn’t even a girl—what was I then? I often turned to the pamphlets Dr. Shelley had given me. I realized I had the telltale sense that there was another life buried within my own, but that I have choked or stifled it. Or maybe it has, of its own accord, turned on itself? I could not tell.
I could feel the pulpy mass growing heavier and knottier in my chest. I imagined it was growing fibrous veins of its own, tendrils snaked through the valves of my heart, leeching away my blood. This could not be the same twin from my childhood, that benevolent sister of my youth. The picture of the undeveloped twin in the pamphlets resembled a stuffed turkey, limbs folded back in on themselves, spine curved over tucked knees. All that remained of the head was a shriveled, radish-shaped peninsula jutting from the neck.
You tend to be suspicious, to suspect others of carrying a secret, when you are the one with the secret—a secret that you do not know and will never know. Unable to determine what is wrong, you scrutinize yourself for signs of a contrary will, but in every respect you resemble yourself: you are normal. This strikes you as an almost unbearable deceit; if only you could let yourself express... express... what?

~

Dr. Shelley said I needed to decide whether or not I wanted to keep my twin. “The labs show it’s not malignant,” she told me over the phone, “but there’s not telling how much longer it will continue to grow.”
“Grow?”
“Yes,” she said, static singing across the phone lines with her voice. “As long as it—the entity—is connected to your blood supply, it won’t diminish. Some twins grow until they’re almost as big as newborn babies. I once extracted a skeleton the size of a pigeon from a woman’s abdomen.”

~

Dr. Shelley arranged for me to meet with a surrogate twofer I could relate with, someone who could help me make a decision. There were no twofers living in my town, so my assigned mentor had to travel an hour to get to me. I met her—them—I met Willow and Diane in a coffee shop down the street from my apartment. I didn’t actually meet Willow, as she slept the entire time.
“Narcoleptic,” Diane said before even shaking my hand, crooking her head to point across the cradle of neck to her sister’s slumped head. “She once fell asleep for an entire year. But she’s only been sleeping for eight days this time.” Diane shrugged their shoulders—I imagined she must have nearly full reign of the body while Willow slept. “She’s had chronic narcolepsy since we were twelve,” Diane said.
“My doctor says I have chronic suicide,” I said before I could stop myself. Something compelled me to divulge this personal information to Diane and Willow: perhaps it was the way everyone in the coffee shop was staring at them—I wanted to make the scene more intimate. Or perhaps it wasn’t me at all, I thought, considering the clump of cells in my chest.
“What’s that?” Diane asked politely. She rested her chin in her right hand, brushing her dark hair out of Willow’s face. Willow’s hair was cropped much shorter than her sister’s.
“It just means I subconsciously make my life bad, but never actually end it all.”
Diane nodded. “So, you have a foetus-in-foetu?” she asked.
“Is that the same thing as a duplicata incompleta?”
“Yes.”
“Then yes, I have one of those,” I said.
“How do you feel about that?” she asked.
“How do you feel about having two heads?” I asked, then immediately clapped my hand over my mouth. “Oh, that was rude,” I said.
Diane threw her head back and laughed, as Willow’s head jolted slightly from the vibrations of laughter in their chest. A small drop of saliva fell from Willow’s lips, hitting the collar of their shirt. Diane didn’t seem to notice. “We’re used to it,” she said.
“What I meant to ask was, how do you feel about sharing your identity with someone else? I said. “Don’t you feel that there should be something that is intrinsically yours?”
“No,” said Diane. “I think people like us—myselves, yourselves—I think we who share our identities are a better example of true humans. We all share pieces of ourselves with other people. And sometimes other people get under our skin so thoroughly they never leave us.”
“Hm.” I mumbled. Are my innards riddled with other people? Is nothing purely mine?
“When you think about yourself, there are already two of you—you and the you who is thinking.” Diane said, pulling a napkin from the dispenser. She drew something with black pen, then pushed the napkin at me. I saw a bracketed I:
[I]
“When you think about that, there are three of you—you, the you who is thinking, and the you who is thinking about the two of them.” Diane drew:
I[I[I]]
“Look at that,” she said. “Now there are four of you:
I[I[I[I]]]
I put my hand over the hollow below my ribs where my twin rested. Was it listening?
“Isn’t that neat?” Diane asked. “You’re an example that infinity is not far away, not in the voids of outer space or the grains of sand on a beach or all the raindrops collected in the ocean.” Willow gave a satisfied, sleepy grunt, and her eyelids quivered.
Any human being is big enough to get lost in, no matter how small we look pressed against the glowing hospital screens.
“I think I saw a twofer when I was little,” I addressed Diane, although I was still watching Willow’s eyelids. “He was in a glass case, floating.”
“We’ve seen him too,” Diane said. “The Two-Headed Boy.”
“Where did you see him?” I asked.
Diane shrugged their shoulders again. “No place real.”
She must have noticed my face fall, because she reached their left hand across the table, placed it on mine and said, “It could be worse. We could be microcephiles.”

~
In my memories, the glass begins to stretch and bend under the Two-Headed Boy’s force. Glass bulges forward until it deflates like a plastic bag and rips. Green water issues slowly from the case, like water from a faucet. I take a step backward as the loamy-smelling water gathers around my ankles. The Two-Headed Boy unfurls himself slowly like a scroll and wraps his two arms around us, careful to cradle our head in the gulf of neck between his two heads.

area: no measure of depth

When I was 15, I was obsessed with — surprise! — Emily Dickinson. If you're a teenaged girl, I think it's required that you go through a phase of either Emily or Sylvia Plath. My Plath phase didn't come till I was 18 (man, and I was a total downer then). Anyway, I read all her anthologies, all the biographies. As she described herself: "I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves." How could I not love that? I used to grow heliotropes in my garden, because I once read that she requested she be buried with a handful of heliotropes "to bring to my (...)." George? Shit, I forget his name. Some guy she supposedly loved who died before her. In fact, this summer I had some heliotropes in a pot on the porch until my mom let them die when I was out of town a few weekends ago (for a woman who saves people's lives, she's a horribly unskilled gardener).

Anyway, I thought of Emily Dickinson the other day. The first time I've really thought of her in nine years. I thought of her because I've been mulling over the idea of location. I've been here since February, and soon I'll be back in Boulder. And I want to go to school in Seattle. San Francisco. New York. Austin. Chicago. Portland. Prague. Santa Fe. Oxford. Middlebury. I don't know. Sometimes I miss living in Paris so badly that it feels like I have a big, baguette-shaped piece missing from my life. I want to move to Brazil. Actually, I want to move to New Zealand. Or both. Maybe Russia.

I was at my desk looking up how to obtain a work visa to live in Reykjavik, and I found a quote: "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." How appropriate, I thought to myself. How fitting. (I later looked up this quote on Wikiquote and learned that "this quote has gained popularity among Facebook users as of April 2008." Blurg). 

And then suddenly, I thought of Emily Dickinson, who never travelled more than 60 miles from her hometown. Okay, I don't remember how many miles exactly. But not very far. And I suddenly felt so suffocated at my desk, and so, so sorry for Emily Dickinson. And, you know, I did the normal freak out: I calculated how much money it would cost me to live in Paris again, looked up plane tickets, searched hostels, browsed ebay for kickin' old luggage. 

But then I remembered another quote I once read. After Emily died, her sister, Lavinia, found the 1,800 poems that Emily never had published. And on a scrap piece of paper, she found something that Emily had scrawled out hastily:

"Area: no measure of depth."

And I felt like an asshole for feeling sorry for her, and for feeling sorry for myself.

"There's an awful lot we miss"

Usually my job is pretty entertaining. Karl, my editor, and I like to make fun of the pictures of babies, weddings, and other randoms people send in to be published in the paper ("I wonder if she realizes she birthed a potato?" "Oh, I see Ichabod Crane there secured himself a lovely bride."). However, reporting in this town has been getting me down lately. I get pretty sick of trying to organize the messy sphere of human affairs in print. Sure, I meet a lot of interesting people and nutters (like the woman who believes she is periodically impregnated by the Council of Twelve, a group of otherworldly beings who use her body to produce the Children of the Violet Ray of Wisdom. No joke). But lately I've been trudging through the banal: school board meetings, kiddie fishing tournaments, town council votes. This weekend I had to go to the local production of "Oliver!" the musical. As much as I love watching kids dressed as scrappy Dickensian orphans sing and dance and celebrate child abuse and poverty in Victorian London, I really wasn't feeling it. Plus an old man yelled at me for taking pictures: "You knock it off and get out right now!" I was so furious and humiliated it made me cry.


That being said, I wasn't thrilled that I was slated to write a quick piece about the local worm farm this week. Oh my god. Worm farm. I was positive I was going to be murdered and turned into mulch. I imagined some horrible, eyeless, hook-mouthed monster rearing out of the soil and crashing down on me while the fanged farmer cackled in the background. Luckily, our local worm farmer — Jody, I believe, is her name — called and cancelled our appointment Monday morning. She told me the influx of tourists fishing over the Fourth of July weekend had completely wiped out her stock. I was off the hook (oooh, bad pun!). So instead, Karl sent me to interview an old man who had called the office and told us he had just met up with a childhood friend he had not seen or talked to since 1943. "Go write something to tug on the withered old heartstrings of this community," Karl told me.

So, I met the old friends, Jim and Glenn, at Jim's home, where they were sitting on the couch talking when I knocked on the door. Jim wore the hugest plastic-framed glasses I've ever seen — you know, the type that would look totally hip on someone in The Downer, but on an old guy, just look necessary and utilitarian. They introduced me to their wives, Elizabeth and Fern, respectively, and offered me a seat. Before I could even start asking them questions, they wanted to know everything about me. Jim and Glenn grew up together in small town Illinois, so they were absolutely fascinated by my Irish and Russian origins in Chicago (I left out the part about my grandmother losing her thumb in a factory when she was eight years old; I guess "Oliver!" was still too fresh in my mind.) They acted like the fact that I was born in Arizona and grew up in The Valley was a great achievement on my part (old people love Phoenix). When I told them I'd studied creative writing and French in school, Elizabeth wistfully murmured, "Oooh my, French," to herself.

I finally got them to start talking about themselves, and ended up listening for two hours. Glenn and Jim used to double-date with a pair of twins (haaaawt, right?), before Jim graduated and moved to Springfield and Glenn dropped out to work on his mother's farm. That was the last time they saw each other before their reunion Sunday. Glenn and Fern just happen to go to church in Illinois with Magel, "the gal Jim used to go with," and out of the blue, she asked Glenn if he'd talked to Jim. This prompted Glenn to look Jim up and contact him. They told me all sorts of sad stories and funny stories, a few of which I put in my article. When I asked Glenn how he and Fern met, he couldn't remember, until Fern said, "Well, you used to come watch me roller skate, then one day you asked me for a date." This, of course, melted my cold and surly heart, as I imagined a young Fern with curled hair and lipstick, red polka-dot dress swishing in time with the movement of her skates, and Glenn nervously folding and refolding his handkerchief as he gathered his courage to ask Fern for a date.

I really like talking to old people (when they're not yelling at me in musical productions, that is). But the entire time Glenn and Jim were talking, the only thing I could think about was how easily the people we love and care about slip away from us. Even today, with cell phones, email, facebook — blogs — it's so easy for people to disappear. When someone's been out of your life for long enough, it can feel like they're dead. Sometimes, if you really never speak to them again, they might as well be. And people we've only just met can leave as quickly as they came into our lives. It made me think about the friends, and others, I once loved who I haven't spoken to in years. I don't even know where some of them are. Reilly? Casey? Scarlett? Ron? They could be anywhere. Or the people I barely get to see or speak to because they're across the state, or the country, or the world. Or the people whose location I know, whose phone number I know, but I still can't talk to them, or see them. How do we make it so easy to lose track of each other? There are so many people on the peripheral I've lost, and quite a few on the center stage I've lost and miss, too, and I don't want 65 years to pass before I find them again. Because I might look cute and ironic in giant glasses now, but when I'm 88 years old, I'm sure I'll just look utilitarian, too.

When I asked Jim and Glenn what one talks about after 65 years of no contact, Glenn said, "Oh lord, everything." And Jim said, "You wouldn't believe it, we haven't stopped talking...except to go bed. There's an awful lot we miss."

I'm not just some chick

I didn't tell anyone about this blog when I started over two years ago, then I deleted most of it. Secret blog? Dumb idea, Sarah. I get paid to sit at my desk and fiddle around on the interwebs anyway. A blog seems perfectly in order. How else am I gonna keep up with the cool kids? My Wayfarers are knock-offs, and I fell on my polaroid camera and smashed it, so I'm way behind the times. So let the blogging (re)commence.