On the thirteenth day following fertilization, “we” found “ourselves” with three X’s and a Y to work with, so it didn’t take brain surgeons, or even budding geneticists, for the excessive zygote we were to figure out how best to assemble ourselves. We were the thwarted hermaphrodite splitting defiantly down the middle, reconciled to sharing intestines, a bit of pelvis, perhaps a spleen, but not everything. We knew enough each to claim an X, and then I said Girl and yanked the other X out of the communal stewpot. He (to be) looked on and blinked, so in burgeoning disgust I finally punted the crippled X, amputee, that hobbling, one-legged Y, over to It, deciding his Himness. I could see that He né It, future brow in a phantom crimp, would have pondered ontological mind-benders all day had I not taken decisive action. Where would we be now had I been as equivocal as we seemed fated to be? Perhaps swapping sex like shoes—today the yob, testicles descending, Florsheims polished and reflecting redundant chins as we bent to tie them; tomorrow a filly, donning a frock, legs crossed tightly as the clasp of a coin purse, retracting the truncheon, passing it under the table like a secret, internal relay, Mary Janes kicking the curious dog as he wags by sniff-sniffing. You can imagine what fatiguing work it would be to cobble together an identity out of such fleshy ambivalence. So I drew a line in the genetic sand and it has divided us (zippered together though we are like conjoined sleeping bags) ever since.
The biological impossibility of our zygosity proved no deterrent to my sister.
XXOO, she signed our postcards from summer camp (where we were the envy of all sack racers). This valediction was not meant to signify affectionate gestures, vouchers for kisses and hugs that could be cashed in upon our return (she occasionally drew half arrows shooting northeast out of the O’s to make this unmistakably clear). It was she on the left and I on the right. To her, I was absence from the start. The space harnessed, circumscribed by Her.
She told me once she’d dreamt boys were small as beetles, and she caught them and put them in killing jars, prodding them with a pencil when they got too lippy, feeding them blades of grass through the holes in the lid when they pleaded for rations.
We performed theater in the summer, on a stage of rickety orange crates covered in burlap. She wrote soliloquies for me that invariably ended: HIM: (spoken plaintively) Y, y me?
She made my circulation quicken, her desperation for sovereign contours.
Some nights I stroke his face as he sleeps, feel a tingle in my own. I will him not to stir and he doesn’t. He heeds the messages I send him through the beats of our hearts, palpitations we’ve learned to compose and decipher like Morse code—thum-thump thumpity-thump: Don’t Move. And I know he does the same to me, caresses me in sleep as intimately as congenital disease. A residue of sensation sometimes pinks my throat as I wake in the morning.
Naturally, we do everything together. Even if we weren’t soldered along the torso, I don’t think he would ever have left my side (though he dreamed of little else). When we were children, our parents always told us they were doubly blessed, as they grinned at us tragically. And so are you, they’d insist, having as we did the peculiar honor of sharing skin and bone, internal organs bridging that gulf of Otherness that renders the rest of humanity small and cheerless, discrete, forsaken (honor schmonor, anima and animus warring under one tent, launching missiles in a relentless covert land grab, thought I petulantly in those moments when I yearned for autonomy. “Beat it!” I’d sometimes bleat aloud instead of think, and my brother just clasped his hands and endured, the saucer-eyed supplicant). “That’s what we all really hanker for,” my mother once whispered to me, and she did frequently look upon us with eyes moist at the corners and narrowed with envy.
Her cool fingers against my cheek made me well up uncomfortably with tender feeling, and I’d begin to gulp air. It was as though I’d been knocked on my back and was struggling to recover lost breath. I did not think of her in these moments. It was my mouth I imagined kissing.
I never ache to leave her, though I do occasionally dream of receiving postcards sent from places with brightly plumed tropical birds or slick-haired dictators on the stamps. XX, she signs them simply so I know it’s her.
Most days, we took our blessing seriously. At my brother’s urging, we practiced saintly behavior, gave nickels to the humpbacked, dirt-scabbed, addicted, and street-diseased people along the Paseo, people who slept in rusting, wobbly-wheeled shopping carts and donned a full wardrobe even in August, people with palm-sized army knives, packages of crumbled crackers, slim, green New Testaments, Tiparillos, and quarters cadged from blood-bank volunteers in their pockets. The people other people took circuitous routes to avoid pressed themselves against walls as we passed. We parted crowds, crowds of those who usually made others hasten their step. We were a freak’s freak.
I could sometimes feel her willfully hogging our organs, like a fitful sleeper tugging the blanket to her side of the bed. I felt her trying to digest me, me, little more than tough protein to her. She always stopped with only the faintest morsel of me remaining, and, somehow, against both our wills, I rallied, persisted. I think she feared how she might be transformed if I became more fuel than aimless appendage. I imagined myself impertinent blood washing through her veins, moving her arms and mouth and feet in discord with the neurotransmission of her wishes. I was never as harmless as she convinced herself I was. It wasn’t subversion. I was reserved long before I understood it to be an asset, fundamentally laconic.
One day, on a visit to our maternal grandparents in Michigan, walking along the shore of Asylum Lake, my brother became fascinated with the Jesus bugs, those splay-legged insects that skate across water, sleek as geometry and weightlessly optimized to take advantage of surface tension. He was certain we were somehow equipped to do the same, on our archless feet, large for our size, flat as platypuses, so we stepped off the dock and onto the water, and for a second we hovered there, the water heavy as ballast that kept us, grown sheer with divinity, from floating up into the sun, kept the thinning wax of being from melting off our bones. But I couldn’t sustain the insubstantiality and I dropped into the drink, pulling my brother with me.
I had originally been one of two boys. We were Romulus and Remus floating down the Tiber of the fallopian tube in search of the appropriate site for the founding of an empire. My sister turned out to be the she-wolf waiting at the other end. When we came tumbling into her encampment, she pressed against her amnion and saw our chorion give, hold the shape of her hand. She gnawed an opening in her sac and then began working on ours, until she parted the curtains of membrane and stepped inside. As we would soon be bulging at the placental seams, she snipped the line at my brother’s umbilicus and hooked me up to the potent generator of herself. Her hunger was not easily sated, though, and there were times when I saw her eyeing the cord, which coiled near my crown. I knew she was imagining it noosed round my neck and was willing the womb’s trapdoor to drop so she’d be rid of me for good and could suck the choicest drops of marrow from that rope of life.
My brother has all the Jesus on his side. It was always me who ran after the kids who hurled chestnuts and hedge apples at us (in place of clever invectives, the snot-nosed galoots) as I schlepped my pacifist brother beside me like a lame appendage, so forgiving, civil, so disobedient to the genes flanking him scrappily to his right.
Sometimes we lie in the hammock, sunk deep in its belly, an inverse pregnancy. I move my mouth to his, kiss him, and it becomes confusing, whose lips are whose, whose chapped, whose sticky, whose molar is aching at that moment, but then I taste the bitter balm of godthefather on his lips, and I remember which mouth is mine and pull it back. When we take communion on Christmas and Easter, my brother (our soul’s emissary) laps the grape juice, tries discreetly to dislodge the host from his tooth with his tongue, and, try as I might, I can never stifle the belch that rises up within me from that hub of sutured selves, that centrifugal nucleus that seems to blow us out and blow us out from the inside and haunts us both with a feeling of excess. I can see the vapor of Jesus slip out of my mouth like soap bubbles, pop pop … pop, see him float toward the pastor’s clasped hands. The pastor gazes past us with an aspect of forbearance that seems pasted to his face with thin glue, a look that appears as though it will curl forward at any moment like improperly hung wallpaper and will reveal the hole in the wall, the bottomless despair beneath faith that makes his soul gape. An un-dressable wound—that’s how I’ve always thought of faith.
I strove to be pure, transparent as water, but I was vaguely aware that the very struggle to remain innocent made me regretfully wise. If there is anything I wanted never to be it is knowing. At our baptism, after the reverend sprinkled water on our foreheads with the dainty covertness of a person on a sodium-restricted diet salting an egg, I awoke to find the organist pressing athletically against my chest and water dribbling down my chin. I turned to see my sister glaring at me. I recalled looking up through gentle waves, without ambition, toward the water’s surface.
The rich repast of body and blood are best taken with food or milk lest you risk an ulceration of the spirit.
When we turned thirteen, my brother became suddenly modest. Though he showed a predilection for this at an early age, fig-leafing himself with his hands, averting his eyes from the exposed charm of his other half, he quickly recognized the impracticality of such behavior and distracted himself by looking through our body like a Viewmaster to gaze upon the silvery soul, unhampered by a bodily hedging of bets; he was buoyed by how it swam free of genitalia, floated inside us cleanly and purely with never the need to unzipper its trousers. Finally acquiescing to physical imperatives, he slumped on the toilet and occupied himself with chaste and hygienic thoughts, while I, happy to reclaim scatology from the stifling ether in which eschatology hung (it was lost on neither of us that the subtraction of the bodily from the heavenly left only a flip-flopped and befuddled “he”), always marveled at the insider information I collected at such moments.
Honestly, it wasn’t the body—even our body—that anguished me so much as the fluids it produced. They were so unpredictable and abundant, new eruptions daily. I longed to be arid as desert, desiccated. At night, in an attempt to subdue all geysers burbling within, I imagined thirstless pack animals and sand-blown sultans bent against hot siroccos. My sister, on the other hand, was perfectly at ease frolicking in any effluvium.
I have always loved my body, loved running my hands across hill and dale, loved the discovery of soft puckerings of flesh hidden in uncharted fissures. At night, as my brother withdrew, my hands roamed the merged continents of our body, noting the shifting topography of Pangaea’s hemispheres, parched steppe to fertile grasslands. Though my brother’s half seemed to respond pleasurably, seemed to enjoy being mapped, in the morning he would be quieter hunched over his oatmeal, seem more pale, nearly translucent, the white of a cooked turnip.
At school, junior high, the administration was stumped as to which compulsory class to place us in: home ec or shop. The answer seemed to be found in our dexterity, whether sewing machine or band saw posed less of a threat to our fingers, to our overlapped physiognomy. (I knew well the picture classmates’ minds conjured as their thoughts moved from the spinning jagged teeth of the saw to my brother and me, though our grain went arm to arm, not head to toe, so they’d never be able to sever us neatly. Better stick to spice racks, I radioed back to them with my glare.) Actually, we were quite graceful, having had to thoughtfully choreograph every move. Harmony of gesture was a matter of bald well-being; injury lurked in every step, every impulsive swipe of the hand. If we were all joined at the hip, there’d be no war.
My body is the very shape of betrayal. It rises and stiffens and purrs against all my considered remonstrations, wicked. My sister, my puppeteer. I have always been thin, thinner than my sister, hoarder of flesh, and so any new cleft or ripple is immediately visible, and my sister fingers the putty of me at night, tries to conjure her own likeness out of my spare clay.
Standing in the principal’s office, surrounded by administrators, secretaries, PTA officers, the school nurse, my brother became angry and pushed me. This was the first sign of antipathy toward me my brother had ever shown, and it thrilled me. Before this show of aggression, I think we both feared he was only an appended afterthought of yin to my anchoring yang, a perfunctory gentility that merely lent a rough-hewn dignity to my intemperance. When my brother took the slingshot and pebble from my pocket and aimed it at me, our hearts clapped loudly inside us, and I understood—in this similarity of impulse—we were mete of discrete spirits, hinged, hyphenated, but fully forged.
The economy of my disposition was partly owing to the understanding that when I did speak, it was with my sister’s voice, the propulsion of her breath. She was curator of the lungs, you see. This became clear to me in junior high when we stood before the principal, waiting for him to administrate some decision with regard to our curriculum, which was gender specific and involved machinery that made them fear litigation should we injure ourselves, which seemed to those dreamless bureaucrats likely. Watching my sister sneer at the principal’s shriveled fig-faced secretary (what she was thinking as she looked at her), I suddenly realized that anything I might interject in the matter would be so thoroughly in relation to the wishes of my sister as to be moot where my own interests were concerned, and it further occurred to me that, when you got right down to it, I had no interests; if I ever had, they had long ago been so skillfully colonized as to have virtually disappeared from both mind and memory. This realization left me momentarily fractious, until I understood, in all the erosion of self—the horror and relief such recognition brings—that, like a boomerang, no matter where I aimed my loathing, it somehow always bent its trajectory and dropped at my own feet.
You can imagine how the heart sank when he shot his own foot.
He was good to the root! In this moment I began to understand my own insufficiency, my lopsided wickedness, and I growled, causing Mr. Pelofsky, the principal, to drop his monogrammed fountain pen. Before, I had always quite enjoyed being a discipline problem, enjoyed hearing my brother yelp as the paddle met my backside; I held my ankles and grinned defiantly as the disciplinarian scratched his chin and pondered the shiftiness of justice, the social contract, considered, vaguely, sacrifice, the greater good, imagined how we—that is, my brother and I—might one day complicate not only corporal but capital punishment, saw one of us hanging from a noose, the other flailing about and gasping, begging for clemency not for himself but humankind, and pleading for acknowledgment of our interdependency, the executioner himself beginning to feel the prickle and burn of taut hemp against his throat, vertebrae cracking beneath the hood.
It was decided that too many liability quandaries were posed by our working with any sort of machinery and so Mrs. Ridgeway would instruct us in deportment during seventh period. Deported is just what we, aliens accidentally washed ashore the cloying nation of the other, each secretly longed to be.
A throng of memories always throbbed inside my brother and me as isolated moments trying to assemble themselves into a parliament that could agree on a shared history, but, frequently bellicose, or at the very least churlish, competing versions of significant events often tried to muscle one another out, filibustering until the others slumped beneath their powdered wigs and gave in, wearied into submission. I could see as far back as synkaryon, which my brother and I still remain, a fusing never meant to be/never meant to be sundered. Sin carrion, I sometimes thought, the decaying roadside remains of our parents’ original sin, the sin of ill-fated genes recklessly colliding. And sin carry-on, fateful luggage that went with us everywhere.
Were they my feet? I could no longer distinguish.
The blood my body let, internal leech of menses sucking the poison of fertility out, was the final betrayal, and my brother refused to eat or sing at choir (though his voice, unlike my own, had yet to drop, and so remained dulcet during hymns) or sleep much after that. He was affronted by this exclusion, the fumbling mess it created, the desecration of clean sheets, despite the fact that it was he who had traced his fingers along an imaginary perforation at night, wishing we might be severed like stamps, like soon-to-be distinct continents giving grudgingly, eagerly, in to the whims of plate tectonics. I felt the tug in the other direction when he dreamt of lying languorously on his side, leaning with disaffected panache against a wall, when he dreamt of swimming side-stroke, imagined walking with a blank peripheral prairie spreading out to either side. He squeezed his eyes closed and forced his thoughts to stack themselves vertically, pretended lateral dominion, tried to imagine what it would be like to be utterly alone. I had been stung by the vigor of his jerking when he was in the throes of such traitorous fantasies, but I yanked him back toward my side and held his nose until his mouth popped open like a split fruit and his eyes quit their seismographic twitching beneath the lids. He always looked regretful in the morning, knowing even the shadowy terrain of his unconscious mind was hardly too formidable a frontier for a pioneer such as myself. What he desired most was secrecy, the thing he could never have stapled to a spy like me.
It’s true that I wasn’t at all prepared for menstruation, despite that “You’re Becoming a Woman” lecture at school I was made to sit in on. The sheer gooeyness of it was certainly objectionable, not to mention the backache and light-headedness I’d not anticipated, but what was most distressing was really the questions it raised for me regarding transubstantiation. Uncannily, the onset of the bleeding coincided with Easter communion. The heresy of this! It was clear my sister bled to prove a point. Ingesting His resurrected flesh and blood had more abiding significance for her, the grape juice transformed, flowing undeniably from her loins. My sister claimed, with more one-upped smugness than conviction, that women bled to remind us of the wounds suffered for the piggishness of mankind. I concealed my revulsion lest she oink at me.
In eleventh grade, it came as a genuine revelation to us both (our premier epiphany—which was itself a revelation—the first uncovering of something concealed from the both of us) that my brother and I both fancied the same classmate, Arno Unruh. Arno was lean and gawky, with birdlike limbs, wore drooping corduroy pants and neatly pressed oxford shirts rolled up at the sleeves. His hair, sandy blond, seemed to aspire to straightness but lost its resolve and kinked on the ends. He had a friendly manner well-suited to his freckled, fair skin, and he was inclined equally toward chemistry and Unitarianism. His lips were eternally chapped, but behind them he had very straight teeth and the faintest lisp. I found him thoroughly fetching and drew pictures in my notebook of the Möbius strip of our intestines linked in infinity. I asked Arno if he’d be my lab partner, which made my brother sulk, though he tried to look cheerful as he steadied the alembic for the alchemy of Rhonda Oben-chain, school sorceress, his partner. Rhonda wore black clothing that occasionally shimmered and kohled circles around her eyes; an amulet fashioned of amber (which she claimed her great grandmother had smuggled from Poland, clutched tightly in her vagina as she dodged the penetrating stares of border dragoons) dangled around her neck, and the beat of my brother’s heart grew faint in her presence. Though she referred to us as Frick and Frack or Chang and Eng, these were endearments coming from Rhonda, and I espied appetite in her smudged eyes when she batted them at my brother.
Arno Unruh—those winsome good looks and ready sermons about selflessness and moral rectitude, how he’d segue easily into a discussion of unstable isotopes—he was an unwitting heartbreaker, “Bible-thumping lothario,” to use Rhonda Obenchain’s epithet for him. She could not fathom the attraction. I looked into Arno’s watery eyes and I could see him puzzling over the logistics of my sister and me coordinating our selflessness. My sister’s XX-ray eyes burned through my jersey, through to my gnarled heart murmuring its ruined hunger.
Neither she nor I could be sure of the originating locus of our desire, but the skin below my navel pulsed and smoldered when I stole glances of Arno turning on the Bunsen burner, recording data in his college-ruled notebook. This, just when I thought I’d all but shed this shambly and unpredictable skin, bequeathing all its urges to my sister. I knew any hint of my being smitten would seem mutinous to her, so I balled up my fist and held it fast to my abdomen, willed my stomach to ache.
I pictured her years hence at a midtown ashram performing self-trepanation, drilling a hole in her skull that she imagined would lead her to the altar at which God Himself worshipped, the heart of the heart of divinity.
Arno made corny, clean jokes as we performed our experiments, and I imagined him in the basement of his church at a youth group social performing the same shtick, hair disheveled, lopsided grin, girls in long skirts and flat shoes smiling yearningly at him with each predictable punch line, dog-eared copies of the Living Bible clutched to their chests. I longed to corrupt him.
One day Rhonda, who it was clear found Arno insufferable, said, “How do you make a dead baby float?”
“That’s disgusting,” said Arno. Rhonda looked to my brother for counterpoint. I could have told her he would not look up from the scarred, black table.
“Two scoops of ice cream, root beer, and a dead baby,” she said, grinning, her braces glinting tauntingly. I could see she had practiced being spellbinding. At that moment, my brother straightened in his seat and glanced up at Arno, and I saw a meaningful look pass between them. There was a brief pause, then Arno shook his head, and my brother looked again at the table, slumped. Rhonda arched her eyebrows at me. I couldn’t decode all of this swiftly enough to come to any satisfying conclusion and spent the rest of the class period trying not to think about it, staring at the periodic chart on the wall. I cursed 39, yttrium, Y, named for a town in Sweden, Ytterby, a cold place with Y’s to spare, a melting point of i523°C. I pictured my brother in a bubbling cauldron. He began to kick his feet.
I could feel Rhonda Oben-chain gazing at me sometimes across the table. When I finally dared to look up, I’d catch her licking her red, candied lips. She’d cock her head suggestively, reminding me of a famished wolverine that has stumbled upon a wayward lamb grazing obliviously, far from the flock. Watching Wild Kingdom every Sunday night, I died a thousand deaths as those pronghorn deer, snowshoe rabbits, kangaroo rats misstepped and were snapped in the jaws or talons of cunning predators. I learned at a young age the futility of cheering on the defenseless, and I understood now that one false hop and I’d be helpless and wriggling in Rhonda’s bangled clutches.
Several experiments later, I confronted my brother about the knowing glances he kept shamelessly lobbing at Arno, and he said, in a tone that indicated he was smiling smugly, though he wasn’t, Benedict Cheshire Cat Arnold, double-agent quisling, “I am offspring of your rib. What did you expect?”
I had the lion’s share of our internal apparatus, it was true, which was why we were eternally wedded, our intimacy inoperable, though he’d always had custody of the soul, docile lamb, bleating softly until the bequest of the earth was officially his, and this had seemed to me a reasonable division of labor. I’d sin, he’d feel penitent, each to her own vocation.
Later, when I noticed Arno’s hand on my brother’s knee under the lunch table, I felt suddenly and irreversibly annulled. My brother sat there innocently, unflinching, and I wondered when it was he had seceded, when he’d left me, expatriated, to form desires of his own. Perhaps, I wondered, my body throbbing with inviolate contours, it had been his appetites all along that had nudged us this way and that. Perhaps I had always been more spirit gusting beneath the shared dermis.
When my sister sniffed the pheromones wafting in the air between Arno and me, I was filled with shame and regret but also, I confess, with a certain buried satisfaction that my body, heap of rusting scrap, creaky and reticent, might be stirred to impulses not entirely honorable.
When we were born it was unclear how much of the body my brother would ever be able to claim and he was termed “parasitic.” Though he has always been subtle, he confounded all prognostications, even my own, by forging an undeniable shape for himself, and talk of excision, as if he were little more than an ingrown toenail, ceased. It occurred to me now that he’d been helmsman all along. It was I who had been indulged, spared. He suffered me.
* * *
It is the winter we have always feared, bitter and wet. We are no fans of intemperate weather, my brother and I. There is never enough warmth to go around when temperatures dip below forty degrees. The blood races from limb to organ, trying to keep up with the demand.
Outside, turkey buzzards perch in the leafless trees, looking like strange, black fruit, oversized ornaments. They blink their eyes at me, small heads nestled in the fluffed pillows of their backs. I threw a ham bone out between the trees, but the buzzards, whom I’ve never known to be dissuaded from such effortless spoils by any sort of inclement conditions, were apparently too cold to stir, and it strikes me, as I watch the wind ruffle their black feathers, that they are right not to move. Eating is an obsolete gesture, their lethargy seems to say, survival something we’ve evolved beyond. Eating only keeps you going for another day, holds you at arm’s length from God, exactly where I’ve always wanted to be, but my resolve is thinning.
Rutherford B. Hayes, nineteenth president of the United States, was referred to in the press and by resentful partisans as Rutherfraud because he’d won a narrow and contested electoral majority but had lost the popular vote, and this is suddenly how I feel: fraudulent, in command only by way of biological fiat. I managed to corral more cells than my brother, more fleet than he even in gestation, but now I feel a revolution percolating inside me, the fundamental goo of self quarrelling with itself, a cellular uprising, and I understand that no matter what bone anyone throws me, I will lay my head on my brother’s shoulder and think, “It is too cold to stir.” I imagine cartoon vultures falling dead from the trees, tongues hanging out of the sides of their beaks, XX for eyes, other vultures, eyes wide and clear—the black, empty OO of a rifle muzzle—crowded round, comically picking at the remains.
One morning as we were getting ready for school, my sister touched my creamed chin and said to me that there is no such thing as the ordinary. “The more you look at a common thing,” she said, “the more refined your understanding of it becomes and, somehow, the less familiar it seems—in knowing something intimately, you defamiliarize it, grant it its due complexity. But the converse is also true,” she said dreamily, eyes blank as portals, seeming to teeter on the brink of understanding something essential. I bristled at the philosophical cant of her head. “The more you look at an uncommon thing,” she said, looking at me, then at herself, in the mirror, “the more you see how common it is. You reduce it in such a way as to make it nearly universal.”
Flummoxed by this sudden combination of depth of thought and attentiveness to my ablutions, I tried to defuse the solemnity of this moment, as well as that of the grimly garbed phalanx of future moments I saw marching toward us: “Philosophers must be querulous by nature,” I feebly quipped. “Must be a sleepless lot.”
She laid her head on my shoulder. Oh, no, no: levity and capitulation! I knew the jig was up.
My sister has stopped eating. Like an irradiated tumor, she is shrinking. That’s how she once would have thought of me, but that’s not how I think of her. I think of her as ballast. She has kept us from lifting off, fleeing the planet, which we’d have done long ago had I once had my druthers. As the ballast lessens, I have to curl my toes in the carpeting, cling to banisters, so as not to rise and hover. I have no intention of increasing our notoriety.
She will not let me feed her, and she sags at my side, like a raincoat draped over my arm. As I watch her skin grow slack, see bones emerge, feel the border between us lose its elasticity, I sense that it is, after all, in the body that one knows whatever one can claim to know about God; redemption occurs, courageously, at this site of pain and decay. Where would the challenge be otherwise? Would we be so stirred, for millennia, would we still be talking about it, if it were only the spirit of Christ whose wispy wrists and billowing feet had been staked to the cross? It’s the thought of torn tendon and cracking bone that makes us swoon.
I find this optimistic and try to prop my sister up with the news. After the resurrection, Jesus couldn’t eat cabbage without expelling gas, I say. He wasn’t recognizable at first, even to disciples, appeared haggard, if beatific, and a dark shimmer followed him everywhere, the body stuttering. His footprints always left behind a sticky, sweet residue, like honey, a postscript of the protoplasm of survival. And when he walked on water, he sank down to his ankles, nearly lost heart. It’s no walk in the park being incorruptible, I tell her. Resurrection takes a toll. The body changes, I say, touching her cheek, but it’s still necessary, if only to register the shifty spirit! She grins at me weakly, beyond revelation.
* * *
The wan changeling, my sister, erodes from girl to appendage to tumor, hurtling in the direction of idea. “XX, XX, XX!” I whisper fiercely in her ear, the code meant to gather and stitch her cells together, shape her back into girlchild.
But, even in deliquescence, it is her will that presides. I feel my heart shrinking with her, puckering, growing green, a forgotten potato. Another tack: I plant a plaintive kiss on her waxen lips. Y, I breathe into her, Y you? I think this will rouse her, and she does lift her head. Outside, birds drop from branches like black bombs, swoop toward a gristly salvation. I imagine the wafer of my sister’s body placed on my tongue, imagine the salty flavor of shared organ, shared illness, disputed border, divided desire. My own body tick-ticks, the pinging of a heated engine tired of idling, awakened, animates the loosening spirit spread thin between us.