Stanzi—Thursday Night—Livers

As I walk, I feel the rift in my cells. I don’t know if everyone can feel their cells. I can feel every one of mine.

China says she can feel her cells. China is my best friend. China is inside out, so I bet she knows more about her cells than anyone.

Gustav doesn’t care about cells. Gustav understands physics. He likes electrical engineering. He’s building a helicopter.

Halfway to Gustav’s house, a man steps out from behind a bush and asks me if I want to buy an H. I say I do not. “I don’t need an H,” I say.

“How about a K?” he asks.

I keep walking. When he yells something and I look back, he has his trench coat open and it’s almost dark, but I can see the details that tell me he is an animal.

There is very little room in the suburbs to build a helicopter, but Gustav does it anyway. There is very little room in my heart for Gustav, but I let him in all the same. We watch the movie Amadeus together sometimes, and I know he feels like the main character, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and I know I feel like Mozart’s wife, Stanzi. Those nights when we watch Amadeus I don’t get a lot of sleep. I always dream biology operas in my head. The dead frogs dance. The dead cats sing. The fetal pigs play a perfect show on tiny fetal violins. They curtsy when the emperor acknowledges them.

I wonder if Gustav dreams operas of helicopters. Rotors and motors and stick shifts and altitude meters.

I’m not even sure if Gustav sleeps.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey.”

“What’re you doing tonight?” I ask.

“Building my helicopter. Can’t you see it?”

I can’t see it. It’s Thursday.

Sometimes when I look at Gustav, I can picture him twenty years from now with a wife and kids—all of them flying around in his helicopter. I write them letters. The whole family. I write them postcards from my parents’ creepy trips.

Hi, Gustav and family! Hope you get this okay! I still think about you every time I see a helicopter. I saw one today as I stood in front of the WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS sign. Do you know that line from season one, episode fourteen of M*A*S*H where Hawkeye said “Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents. Eighty-nine cents’ worth of chemicals walking around lonely”? It’s my favorite line. I always wanted to know if that was true. Are we really only eighty-nine cents’ worth of chemicals? Can you tell me that one day? I miss you. Love, Stanzi.

I never send the postcards. I keep them in a box.

They make me mad sometimes.

Maybe had we not joined as mere cells, my twin would have the guts to send them. Maybe she’d have the guts to see Gustav’s helicopter the other six days of the week. Maybe she’d have the mettle to just kiss him on his chapped lips.

For now, she seems to only know how to cut apart cats and fetal pigs.

“Livers regenerate themselves,” I say to Gustav, who is still standing there looking at me with a monkey wrench in his hand.

“Do you mind if I go back to work?” he asks. “I have to get under the chassis, and I can’t hear you from there. Tell me more about livers tomorrow.”

“Sure,” I say.

I walk home again.

The man jumps out from the bush and asks me if I want to buy a letter F and I jump behind the bush with him and kiss him like I mean it. He tastes like sawdust.

I ask him for a letter.

“You have to pay me,” he says.

“I just did.”

I begin to walk away and he grabs me by the back of my collar and yanks me back into the bush. I fight him, but then he hands me a finely sculpted letter S and thanks me.

“No one has kissed me like that since I moved back here,” he says. “You’re very good at it.”

I walk home smiling, pretending like I kissed Gustav, and I hang the S on my bedroom wall. I think it’s some sort of high-tech papier-mâché; it’s blue like limestone, but not heavy enough to be a real rock. I look at it and say, “Stanzi, you are a good kisser.” Fact is, the S reminds me that I didn’t kiss Gustav because I’m too scared to kiss Gustav. I don’t know what I’m scared of. I know I’m scared of everything.

I open a random spiral-bound notebook and I draw a human body and I chop it up with lines. Hands. Feet. Head. Heart. Nose. Eyes. Lips. I draw an arrow to each and label it. Me for me. Her for her.

She gets hands, lips, and nose. I get the rest.