Free Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips

about their lost shipmates, a strange creature ambles up to the camera while they’re making dinner in the spaceship. This creature is kind of like—well, it’s like two people back to back but with one torso and one head. The head has a face on either side, and two pairs of ears. Four arms and four legs. A single pair of buoyant breasts above the pearly little cunt, a tranquil dick on the opposite side. The creature’s skin is tan and luminous.
    We recognize the face of the pretty astronaut.
    This is the face the creature turns toward the camera. She does not seem aware that the entire world can see her nipples, which are as exquisite as we’d all imagined.
    â€œYou have been lonely,” she says. Her voice is deep and grand. We who have seen the TV specials recall the clips from her parents’ home videos, in which she has a chirpy, if not squeaky, Midwestern voice. “You have existed as half of what you are. Please, come here. Be happy. Twe am.”
    â€œTwe?” we say, cocking our heads.
    Willingly, the creature that was once the pretty astronaut allows its former shipmates to strap it into the Emergency Escape Capsule, which reaches Earth in a single week. When the creature arrives, it maintains its infinite calm while subjected to a battery of tests by doctors, psychologists, and NASA scientists. Countless images of the two smiling faces, the serene sexual organs, the thick legs and glowing skin, are delivered to our living room.
    The face that used to belong to the pretty astronaut does all the talking, but a different brain seems to be at work. When her parents are brought into the room, the creature embraces them warmly. However, the creature warmly embraces everyone with whom it comes into contact. When the pretty astronaut’s full Christian name is repeated time and time again, the creature emits a low melodious laugh, but it is not the laugh of recognition. When asked to describe its feelings, the creature simply claims, “Twe am happy.”
    â€œWell screw you,” we say, throwing popcorn at the screen and wrapping the blanket tighter around ourselves.
    *   *   *
    A conference is held in Vienna, a gathering of our preeminent scientists and scholars. The creature attends; there are photos of it sitting in a chair especially crafted by an Austrian carpenter to accommodate its unusual shape.
    After the conference, a distinguished professor comes on primetime television to announce that humankind has discovered the planet to which our split hermaphrodite ancestors were deported by Zeus several thousand years ago. The professor, gesturing at an oversimplified graphic consisting of two globes connected by many multicolored lines, explains that if the theories and equations resulting from the conference are correct, every single person on Earth has a corresponding being on the new planet to whom s/he can be joined, thus returning to the original hermaphroditic state and achieving perfect happiness.
    â€œFuck,” we say, looking at each other.
    *   *   *
    The hermaphrodite craze consumes our globe. The creature is all over the TV: ecstasy delight splendor glory harmony.
    We want to tear our hair out.
    The other hermaphrodites are delivered to Earth in the second Emergency Escape Capsule. We begin to refer to these creatures as the Joined. The new ones appear on TV. Whenever a word like “loneliness” or “dissatisfaction” or “boredom” comes up, they offer only kind, puzzled smiles. The Joined describe their experience of the world as clean, bright, fresh, fragrant. Can this possibly be the same place where we live?
    We happen to be watching—as we so often are—during a glitch. The middle-aged female astronaut, the same lady who’d run off into the woods, is on a show in her Joined form, talking relentlessly about joy, when a guy with crazy gray hair bursts onto the set and starts yelling,