CHAPTER 1
“Ambidextrous” means “to have two right hands”
THEY AWAKE ON the table, in the dark, breathing in the meaty scent of death soaked in formaldehyde. The unpleasant knowledge of this smell is their first thought. Their second thought is that it is the smell of their own bodies wafting out of their open cavities. What was, moments ago, a human cadaver bisected to display a cross-section, has become two men with half a body, lit suddenly by the heat of consciousness, newborn in their decrepitude. Their exposed cavities face each other, forming a V where they were cleaved apart, edges ragged with tissue that rumples like lace trim. Their exposed organs pulse gently with new life, close enough for each of them to feel the warmth radiating from the other.
What comes next is the burning sensation of air brushing against the raw wound that covers each man from crown to crotch. A body recovering from hypothermia will gradually come to understand how much pain it is in as it thaws, and there is no shock colder than death where the flesh is concerned. As the pain builds, they are aware of it mostly as a curiosity, another fact among many that they struggle to reconcile with the impossibility of their awakening.
Their bodies would form mirror images of one another, but for the asymmetry of the conventional human corpse. The biggest difference is that only one of them feels a heart beating behind his ribs. This one—the left side—runs his finger along the ridge of his cranium, careful not to touch the soft gray matter inside. He tries to vocalize, but the sounds he produces are malformed by his half-mouth, his half-tongue.
The other one can hear the sounds only distantly. His ear faces down at the table, away from his brother, but he recognizes the source immediately. This is his first deduction: that there must be another half of him, somewhere nearby. He pushes a response from his throat, clumsy as it is. “Ah woo a’hwake?”
His brother tries, again, to speak. “Yeh,” he manages. “Uh I cuh . . . I cuh . . . I cah nah hfee woo.”
What would be gibberish to any other ear is given meaning by their parallel experience. Who better to understand than the only other creature on Earth who can?
“I cah nah shee woo eefah. Buh I wuh wike if I cuh . . . if I could.”
The man with the heart obliges, gripping the edge of the table to lever himself upright, twisting to drop his leg over the side. Formaldehyde pours from his cavity, cascading over bare organs, puddling beneath the edge of the table. His foot lands in the puddle when he hops down. He slips and nearly falls, catching himself with his elbow, then staggers more carefully and straightens on the leg.
His brother hears the sharp clang of the elbow on the stainless steel surface. “You ohay?”
“Yeh.”
“Dih a’yfing faw ouch?”
The man with the heart pats the soft edges of his share of the organs. “Nuh. Nu’hing feh. Fell. Nu’hing fell.” He pivots, bit by bit, hand on the table to steady himself, until he faces across it. And there, looking back at him, is his other half. This is the true moment of his birth, as it is anyone’s: the first confirmation that he has not come into the world to find himself alone.
They see each other, now, in a reflection that no two people have gazed upon before. Not a mirror image, or a photo, or a copy; each one looking at a body much like his own, and yet an entire separate person. Not a twin, but a kind of equal-opposite, naked and raw at the moment of their birth, with the dawning knowledge that the man across the table, looking back at him with a single eye, is having exactly the same thoughts. They are so transfixed that, for a brief moment, they cease to feel the burning of the air against their organs, or the terror of standing upright with their body cavities open. All each man has is the other, and maybe this is all each man needs, for now.
Eventually, the mere sight of each other is no longer answer enough for all their questions.
“Ah you wha’ I wook wike?” says the heartless one, shame pushing his voice into a lower register.
They are two halves of what was once a middle-aged man, and not a conventionally attractive one by most measures. Their skin has drained of the color it once had, and their movements are stiff and slow, heavy with the ghost of rigor mortis.
“I’m sowwy,” says the heart, even as he tries to find beauty in their sagging flesh, their wiry body hair, their toenails the color of pus. He wipes away a half-formed tear and, seeing no echo of this gesture in his brother, reflects that this is the first significant difference he has seen between them. He wonders if perhaps feelings are born in the heart after all. “You’a da white side.”
“And you’a da weft.”
And so they have put names to each other. The second connection of their relationship: first recognition, now identification. Right and Left.
So named, they converse, as much to compare thoughts as to practice articulating their consonants. They establish that neither of them remembers dying, or who they were before they died, or how it was that they came to live again. Neither of them remembers a family, a profession, a language other than English, a faith. Neither of them knows if their skin will heal over their open cavities, or if they will be like this forever. They know very little besides each other.
“I don’t think we can stay here,” says Right, when the conversation lulls. His eye sweeps over this workshop of the body, full of tables like the one they were on a minute ago. This is a school, he realizes, a school of anatomy. All the tables are empty, but the same embalmed odor pervades the entire facility. “This is a place for the dead, not the living.”
“Living.” Left hold his hand before his face.
“Like us,” says Right. “We’re alive, aren’t we?”
“But where would we go?” asks Left, still staring at his hand. He is fascinated by the creases of his palm, the whorls of his fingerprints; terrified of what it means to live inside such complexity while simultaneously in awe of it. He wonders if it’s correct to think that these fingerprints once belonged to a different person, and if so, whether anyone else has ever passed on their fingerprints to another like this.
Right considers the question. Where do I want to go, he asks himself, imagining rooms more pleasant than this one. Places with generous chairs and tables meant for dining, lights that are soft and warm, windows that show a world more beautiful than this human cutting room. “How about a cottage?”
“A cottage,” Left says flatly.
Right nods, cautious not to do it too vigorously as he holds his posture. “You know, a little house in the woods, away from this. No stainless steel, no smell of decay. A place with a garden, maybe even some animals. A porch where we could sit and carve little figures out of wood. You could hold the block steady while I work with the knife.”
“I meant, where can we go now,” says Left. “I’m thinking more along the lines of one of those motels with weekly rates.”
“Oh. Well. Yeah,” says Right. “I guess that makes more sense in the short term. The cottage can come later. We’ll just have to find one, and some woods.”
“It does sound nice,” says Left. “Maybe one day.”
They experiment more with moving around. By themselves, they can only hop, which poses problems given the delicate, unsteady towers of their bodies. One hand is not enough to hold everything in place. ...
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