Free The Two-Headed Man: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy Page B

to the list: “Drinking in excess, damaging my liver.” Having spent most of my life ignoring Simon’s incitements, I find it hard to call every one of them to mind. I am often distracted by pain. And by the silence. The silence is very strange, very foreign to me. I must confess that, blessed as his absence is, it will take some getting used to. Imagine my life. Imagine a head two inches away from your own, a head that, at its natural angle, faced into your right ear. Imagine feeling the heat of every breath the head took, smelling the odours of the mouth, suffering a permanent rash on your shoulder as a consequence of the mouth’s drooling. Imagine the weight of the head, the strain to your neck and spine. Imagine not a moment’s solitude.
    And then, suddenly, solitude by the hour. In thirteen days Ihave seen my lawyer twice and the surgeon once, nobody else. I see nurses, of course, but they come and go quickly, they can scarcely be counted as visitors. For the most part, and for the first time in my life, I am alone. In this amazingly quiet room. The phone seems to be disconnected. Yesterday I held it to my deaf ear, purely for the sensation of being able to hold a phone up to that side of my head. When my shoulder has healed, I will see how it is to sleep on that side.
    I wonder why the policeman outside my door never comes in. Perhaps he’s afraid of appearing like one of the thrill-seekers he’s been charged with keeping away. He has a smoker’s cough. As do I, and there’s something else for the list: “Chain smoking. Blackening my lungs and raising my blood pressure.”
    Occasionally the policeman whistles. I must have one of the nurses ask him to stop, for under the influence of painkillers I have imagined it to be Simon. Simon was a remarkably accomplished whistler, and as a rule I am partial to tuneful whistling, but when I hear the policeman I am overcome with an irrational terror that it is Simon growing back. He hated life, and you’d think he’d be glad to be gone from it, but he loved himself.
    To my surprise I have been reflecting rather calmly upon love these past few days. I have been approaching the subject from an intellectual angle, asking myself such questions as, What is love? What does the Bible mean by love? What kind of love is sanctified? I called our mother a true martyr because she loved Simon unreservedly, and yet I cannot help but think that loving anything so evil must be wrong. Love fosters and sustains its subject. Love is dangerously blind, pathetically vulnerable.
    Simon knew all about that. For his own selfish purposes he courted love. In my case he was caught between wanting me to love him so that I would be ignorant of his machinations, and wanting me to love him so that he might hurt me all the more deeply. By the time we were teenagers I was onto his games, and in any event he was tired of playing them. Before then,however, I occasionally succumbed to his charms. He had a knack in those days of divining my thoughts and expressing them with a beautiful simplicity that moved me to tears.
    I remember one occasion, one night when I was nine, ten. I woke up from a dream that our mother had given me a leather jacket like Elvis Presley’s. I was an ardent fan of Elvis’s. Seems odd to me now.
    The jacket in my dream was marvellous. It was decorated with two flowers on each shoulder. I woke up terribly depressed, because much as my mother doted on me, she would never be able to afford such a treasure.
    I lay in bed for quite a while, expecting any minute to hear Simon complain that he wanted breakfast. But he said nothing until I was getting dressed, and then he said in a voice so wistful, a voice absolutely devoid of ridicule, “A leather jacket with four tulips was mine.’’
    He can’t even look me in the eye any more. He’s shaving me, brushing my teeth, and our eyes meet in the mirror, he looks away.
    Sure, it’s guilt. The guilt of a Christian, nothing like it,