—What was that all about? he asks.
Nothing, responds Half of Rumpelstiltskin.
—No fraternization with the customers. You should know better than that.
Okay, says Half of Rumpelstiltskin.
His boss shakes his head disapprovingly and, turning to leave, mutters under his breath.
—Fool, he whispers. Meathead. Hayseed. Half-wit.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin checks his wristwatch. It’s quitting time.
12:15 p.m. He eats lunch in the park.
Beside the wooden bench on which he sits is a tree stump, its hollow banked with wood pulp and a few faded soda cans. Half of Rumpelstiltskin can’t help but wonder what has become of the tree itself. A year ago it rose within the park, housing the sky, a thousand tatters of blue, within its overspread branches. Now it is gone, and this bench is here in its place. Possibly the bench itself was once a part of the tree—hewn, perhaps, from its thickset trunk—but if so, what has become of the rest? The only certainty is that it fell, releasing from its branches a host of harried birds and vagrant squirrels, galaxies and planets and the sure and vaulting sky. With so much restless weight between its leaves, it could just as well have burst like a balloon. When you’re trying to hold the sky inside you, thinks Half of Rumpelstiltskin, something is bound to fail. The sky is inevitable. The sky is a foregone conclusion. Overhead, the sun pulses behind swells of heat, wobbling like an egg yolk. The jet trail has dispersed, blown ragged by the winds of early March.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin watches as, in the distance, a kite mounts its way into the air. Beneath it, a man stands in a meadow of dry yellow grass, unspooling a length of string. He tugs at the kite and the kite tugs back, yanking the man in fits and starts through the field and toward a playground. Half of Rumpelstiltskin sees children loosed from the plate of a restless, wheeling merry-go-round, holding to its metal bars with both arms, their bodies like streamers in the air. He sees swings arcing up and down and supine parents reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes. Beside the playground, a sandwich stand sprouts from the ground like a toadstool. Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s stomach churns at the sight of it, rumbling like sneakers caught in a spin cycle. He places his hand against its interior lining, finds it dry and clean and webbed like ceiling insulation. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is hungry.
At the sandwich stand, he asks for peanut butter and jelly on wheat. Eating and hopping, he unwittingly lights on an anthill. It goes scattering ahead of him in a fine particulate brume. Half of Rumpelstiltskin lowers himself to the ground and sits with his haunch on his heel. He watches as ants swarm from the razed hill: they broadcast themselves in all directions, like bursting fireworks or ink on water. Within a matter of minutes, the tiny, volatile creatures have built a protective ring of dirt around the bore above their home. Half of Rumpelstiltskin finds the sight of creatures working as a collective a strange and unfamiliar one. It’s spooky and—for some reason—a little bit sad. Half of Rumpelstiltskin has trouble enough comprehending the nature of individuality without throwing inter-subjectivity into the pot. Although he has unmade anthills on many, many occasions, Half of Rumpelstiltskin has never stayed to watch the ants rebuild. As a gesture of good will, he leaves them that portion of his sandwich he has not yet swallowed. If they can’t eat it, he thinks, perhaps they can build with it.
An abundance of drugstores line the walk between the park and Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s home, and he stops at one along the way. There he purchases a chocolate bar, a bottle of apple-green mouthwash, and a newspaper from the metroplex across the river, the headlines of which affirm what he has long held to be true—that the world tumbles its way through political conventions, economic treaties, televised sporting events, and invasive military tactics in starving third-world nations with utter indifference to the inglorious fact of his half-existence. The stock market columns report that gold is down— straw way, way down.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin has poor depth perception. Hopping home, he trips over a concrete parking block.
1:25 p.m. He receives a Mad-Libs letter from his other Half.
3 March — (y—ear—)
Half of Rumpelstiltskin:
Not much new here in .The Queen has decided once again to levy a whole new batch of taxes— and guess who the victims are this time around: homunculi. That’s right. Miss has decided that the time is ripe to tax and homunculi. And who’s the only homunculus on this whole ? Me! Rumpel stiltskin ... Sorry. Just need to vent some of my and frustration. I should learn to control my temper—if there’s a moral to this whole affair, that must be it—but you know how it gets. at least we’re not as bad as
Life on the personal front is no than on the political. I’m still out of work— the position fell through—and I’m on the outs with . Sometimes I wonder when and how it all turned so .
hen you get the chance, your half of this to me, so I can find out what I’ve written. When the words won’t come to me, I figure they must be yours. I miss you and . . .
All Right:
Half of Rumpelstiltskin
2:30 p.m. He delivers a speech to a local women’s auxiliary organization.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin stands at a lectern fashioned of fluted, burnished cherry wood and speaks on “The Birthrights of First-Born Children,” a topic in which he claims no small degree of expertise. Half of Rumpelstiltskin has had his fair share of ill-favored dealings with first-born children, particularly those of millers’ daughters. As he speaks, the cheery, preoccupied faces before him exchange knowing glances and subtle pointed smiles. Half of Rumpelstiltskin, when asked to address this meeting, was not informed as to whether the auxiliary was for or against first-born children and their concomitant birthrights— and so he has taken what he considers to be a nonpartisan slant on the topic. Listening to the raspy coughs of the women in the audience and regarding their nodding, oblate heads, he can’t decide whether he is offending or boring them. Half of Rumpelstiltskin concludes his speech to a smattering of polite applause that sounds like the last few popping kernels in a bag of prebuttered popcorn. When he steps out from behind the lectern and joins the women in the audience for a question-and -answer session, nobody has a thing to say about first-born children, birthrights, red pottage, or the nation of Israel. Instead, as he might have suspected, it’s all straw-to-gold this and fairy tale that.
—What, the women ask, happened to your other half ?
I split myself in two, says Half of Rumpelstiltskin, when the Queen guessed my name. However, he says, that’s a story that demands a discussion of first-born children. So then—
—But, the women ask, how did you split yourself in two?
In a fit of anger, says Half of Rumpelstiltskin. When the Queen guessed my name, I stamped explosively, burying my right leg to the waist beneath the floorboards. In trying to unearth myself, I took hold of my left foot, wrenching it so hard that I split down the center. My other half lives overseas. I myself emigrated.
—I thought, say the women, that upon stamping the ground you fell to the center of the earth. Or that you merely bruised your heel and wandered off in a fit of malaise.
No, says Half of Rumpelstiltskin, those are just myths.
—Is it true, ask the women, that you wish to huff and puff and blow our houses down?
No, says Half of Rumpelstiltskin. You’re thinking of the Big Bad Wolf.
—Is it true what we hear about you and the girl with the grandmother?
No. That, too, is the Big Bad Wolf.
—Is it true that you’d like to cook our children in your large, cast-iron stewpot?
Half of Rumpelstiltskin sighs. No, he says, I am in fact a strict vegetarian.
—Do you believe in the interdependence of name and identity? ask the women.
Yes, I do.
—Why don’t you change your name?
Because I’m still Rumpelstiltskin, says Half of Rumpelstiltskin. I’m just not all of him.
—You’re still
Rumpelstiltskin? Even after having lived as Half, and only half, of Rumpelstiltskin for oh-so-many years?
Yes.
—Is there a moral to all of this?
No. Half of Rumpelstiltskin checks his watch. No, there isn’t. I have time for one more question.
—If you were granted only one wish, ask the women, what would you wish for?
Half of Rumpelstiltskin doesn’t miss a beat. Bilateral symmetry, he says.
4:10 p.m. He shops for dinner at the grocery store.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin is standing in line at the checkout counter of a supermarket, reading the cover of a tabloid newspaper upon which is pictured a pair of Siamese twins and an infant the size of a walnut—who is actually curled, in the photograph, next to a walnut. The infant looks like the protean, half-formed bird Half of Rumpelstiltskin once saw when he split open a nested egg, and through his gelate, translucent skin is visible the kernel of a heart. The caption above the child claims that he was born without a brain. Half of Rumpelstiltskin, inching forward in line, finds himself thinking about the responsibilities delegated to either hemisphere of the brain. If, as they say, the right half of the brain controls the left half of the body—and the left half the right—Half of Rumpelstiltskin moves and talks, yawns and dances, under the edicts of the other Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s portion of Rumpelstiltskin’s brain. Is it possible, Half of Rumpelstiltskin wonders, that he is somewhere across the ocean, sitting in front of a fireplace or reading a magazine, operating under the delusion that he is standing here in the supermarket, buying ingredients for his evening’s meal and looking at the tabloids? That through half a world’s measure of Rumpelstiltskin-lessness, he sends directives, receives impressions, down a sequence of nodes and fibers concealed within the dense, gordian anatomy of the earth—and his other half the same? That he is never where he thinks he is or heading where he hopes to be?
Half of Rumpelstiltskin sometimes feels absolutely and undeniably alienated from everyone and everything around him.
Asleep in the shopping cart in front of him, her head resting upon the pocked rind of a firm green cantaloupe, a baby lies beside a bag of crinkle-cut potato wedges. She is breathing softly through her nose, and her dark, wavy hair frames the pudge of her face. As the Halves of Rumpelstiltskin told the Queen when she offered the treasures of the kingdom in exchange for her first-born child, something living is more important to him than all the treasures in the world. The baby gurgles, her legs poking through the bars of the shopping cart, and pulls to her stomach a round of Gouda cheese the size of her hand. He would never have imagined, not for a heartbeat, that children were so easily come by. Had he known you could buy them at the supermarket, his life might not have become the mess it is today.
He watches as the woman in front of him purchases her groceries—potatoes and cheese, leafy vegetables and globose, pulpous fruits, several green plastic bottles of soda, a wedge of ham garnished with pineapple, and the baby—and wheels them to the parking lot. As the woman at the register of the checkout lane scans his groceries above a brilliant red scattering of light, Half of Rumpelstiltskin leafs through his wallet looking for a form of photo identification and a major credit card. On his license he is pictured before a screen of powder blue. His head is tilted by a slim margin to the left, and looking closely he can just begin to see the white edge of his upper incisor and a sliver of cortical sponge. Half of Rumpelstiltskin was pleased to find that he was not grinning in his license photo. People who grin, he has always thought, look squirrelly and eccentric, sometimes barking mad, and, on occasion, dangerous and inconsonant—as if they’re trying to hide something from the world, something virulent and bitter on the surface of their tongues. People whose teeth show in license photos are most often just the eccentric sort—but never completely harmless. Half of Rumpelstiltskin had half a mind to return his own when he found that he could spot the edge of his upper incisor.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin pays the checkout attendant. He grasps his grocery sacks by their cutting plastic grips, hefts them over his shoulder, and hops through a set of yawning, automatic doors.
5:50 p.m. He cooks supper and dances a jig.
In his kitchen sits an outsize black cauldron, like a bubble blown by the mouth of the scullery floor. It is a few heads taller than Half of Rumpelstiltskin himself, and to see over its lip he must climb to the top tread of a stepladder propped against its side. From the brim of the cauldron spumes a thick, pallid yeast, and across its pitchy interior are layers of burnt and crusted food. Half of Rumpelstiltskin stands at the cutting board with a finely edged knife, dicing onions, potatoes, and peppers into small, palmate segments. He scrapes these into a tin basin, adds spices and a queer lumpish mass that he pulls from his freezer, and hops up the stepladder to dump them into the cauldron. The vegetables, pitched into the stew, churn beneath its surface, interrupting the reddish brown paste that thickens there into a skin.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin hops down to the kitchen floor. He washes his hand in the sink, then dries it on his slacks. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is pleased by the prospect of supper. He considers himself a true gourmand.
As is his custom prior to eating, Half of Rumpelstiltskin crooks himself from toe to palm and reels around his cauldron. Sometimes he holds his ankle in his hand and hoops his way through the kitchen; sometimes he cambers at the waist, bucking from head to toe like a seesaw. Half of Rumpelstiltskin dances, and hungers, and sings his dancing and hungering song—his voice ululating like that of a hound crying for its master:
Dancing dances, brewing feasts,
Won’t restore me in the least.
Brewing feasts and singing songs,
Nights are slow and days are long.
Lamentation! Drudgery!
Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s me.
10:35 p.m. He falls asleep watching The Dating Game.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin grows listless after heavy meals. In the bathroom, he rasps his mossy teeth with a fibrillar plastic brush until they feel smooth against his tongue. He gargles with his apple-green mouthwash, tilting his head there-side down so as not to dribble into the cavity of his body. Half of Rumpelstiltskin urinates, watching as a pale yellow fluid courses the length of his urethra into the toilet. Afterward he leaves the seat up.
On his way to the couch, Half of Rumpelstiltskin presses his palm against the pane of a window. It’s growing chilly outside. He retrieves an eiderdown quilt from the linen closet and settles in beneath it.
A man with brown hair—hair that rises above his forehead like a wave collapsing toward his crown—grins on the television. He speaks in sunny, urgent tones to a woman who looks to be about a half-bubble off-level. The woman is charged with the task of choosing a date from among three dapper men who introduce themselves as if there’s something inside them gone empty without her. She asks the men a question, and they answer to a swell of applause from the studio audience. Name one word that describes the sky, says the woman. It’s high, says one man. It’s wide, says another. It’s inevitable, says the third. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is rooting for the third.
The people on the television seem lost. Somewhere, at some point, they forgot who they were or how to be happy. They found themselves wandering around behind the haze of their fear and desire. They stumbled into his television. The lucky ones will walk off with one another, out of his television set and onto some beach beneath a soft and falling sun, heady with the confidence that they’ve found someone—another voice, a pair of arms—to be happy with. Half of Rumpelstiltskin wishes them the best, but he knows something they don’t—which perhaps they never will—something that may not even be true for them. He knows that it happens in this world that you can change in such a way as to never again be complete, that you can lose parts of who you once were—and sometimes you’ll get better, but sometimes you’ll never be anything more than fractional: than who you once were, a few parts hollow. He knows that sometimes what’s missing isn’t somebody else.
>
Half of Rumpelstiltskin sinks into sleep like a leaf subsiding to the floor of the moon. When next he opens his eye, the television will whisper behind a face of lambent snow.
The Ceiling
There was a sky that day, sun-rich and open and blue. A raft of silver clouds was floating along the horizon, and robins and sparrows were calling from the trees. It was my son Joshua’s seventh birthday and we were celebrating in our back yard. He and the children were playing on the swing set, and Melissa and I were sitting on the deck with the parents. Earlier that afternoon, a balloon and gondola had risen from the field at the end of our block, sailing past us with an exhalation of fire. Joshua told his friends that he knew the pilot. “His name is Mister Clifton,” he said, as they tilted their heads back and slowly revolved in place. “I met him at the park last year. He took me into the air with him and let me drop a soccer ball into a swimming pool. We almost hit a helicopter. He told me he’d come by on my birthday.” Joshua shielded his eyes against the sun. “Did you see him wave?” he asked. “He just waved at me.”
This was a story.
The balloon drifted lazily away, turning to expose each delta and crease of its fabric, and we listened to the children resuming their play. Mitch Nauman slipped his sunglasses into his shirt pocket. “Ever notice how kids their age will handle a toy?” he said. Mitch was our next-door neighbor. He was the single father of Bobby Nauman, Joshua’s strange best friend. His other best friend, Chris Boschetti, came from a family of cosmetics executives. My wife had taken to calling them “Rich and Strange.”