Corpus Callosum
any manner to speak of. He told his living daughter he wanted closure. That they both needed a ceremony, and a burial.
“Just come,” she said. “When you talk to her, you’ll get it. Don’t make us wait till next Christmas.”
So their father took a day off work and drove to the city. Jeanette led him to the kitchen and poured a cup of herbal tea that made his mouth pucker. She had just gotten her hair relaxed, and was adamant that she needed a lot of fluids to keep it from drying out. His other daughter was, as best he could understand, trapped in a clock radio on the corner of the table.
“Was the drive alright?” Joey said.
The father clinked his glass on the saucer Jeanette had given him. “It was fine. Snowy, people scootin’ around on the ice like jackasses.”
He stared out the kitchen window, though the only view it afforded was of the neighboring building’s brick wall.
Jeanette turned from the sink, looking worried. “Dad, something wrong?”
“Jose,” he began, “what did you do for the science fair in second grade?”
“Buffalo.”
“Nah, you did medieval castles.”
“I did castles,” Jeanette said, wrapping her hair in a dishtowel. Both girls had inherited their father’s dark skin and tight, curly hair. Joey had always gone natural while Jeanette had dabbled in a variety of colors, textures, and cuts, all of which she ultimately loathed.
Their father rubbed his chin and looked back and forth from one daughter to the other. His face was a minefield of ingrown stubble. “Jose, what happened to that boy you used to see?”
Jeanette picked the tea kettle up and slammed it on the range. “Um. Dad.”
“It’s fine. I found him eating a girl out in the stairwell of our building.”
He pushed away from the table.
“Do you know what that means?” Jeanette asked. “It’s slang for-“
“I got it!” He raised his hands as if warding off a blow. ”I just…always wondered. Shit. He was a nice fella, I thought.”
“He wanted litters and litters of kids,” Joey said flatly. “It wasn’t going to work anyway.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s a moot point.”
He rose, and paced between the kitchen and the living room. He slapped his hands together contemplatively. Jeanette looked at Joey and could only assume that Joey was gazing back. She was probably looking at everything, actually.
He stood then, on the precipice between the two rooms. “You’ll never have kids now,” he said, as if clarification was needed.
“Yeah, Dad. I’m dead.”
He threw his hands up again and craned his head back so far Jeanette thought she’d have to run up and catch him.
“She’s dead! What did I tell you Jean-bean! She said it herself!”
He still wanted a funeral. Jeanette pulled him back to the table, refilled his teacup, and fiddled in the silverware drawer noisily. Joey watched him approach her from behind and squeeze her shoulders, making her jump and tense up; it was an old trick he’d used to get them off the computer when they were younger. Jeanette slumped, then turned.
“I’m sorry,” he mouthed.
She shook her head. “It’s fine. I mean it’s not fine, but yeah. Just try to understand.”
They spent the rest of the night conversing in the kitchen, their father firing questions at Joey in an attempt to demonstrate she wasn’t really herself. He asked her about memories old and new. He pried, in detail, into her old job, past boyfriends, her friends, her habits. He even asked if the fire had been an accident. He asked for her appraisals of films and songs, and her opinions on political matters they hadn’t candidly discussed since Joey had shaved her head and claimed to be a Black Nationalist Muslima-agnostic Marxist in eighth grade, whatever that was. Jeanette watched them talk, her lips pressed shut.
He listened while Joey delivered her answers, an implacable expression on his face. He didn’t pick up the box. He just leaned forward and stared deeply into its glowing white abyss.
“There is no way to know for sure,” he said, with resolve after his fourth cup.
“Know what?” said Jeanette.
He was sweaty and exasperated. “If she’s really in there, or if this is just a speaker playing transcripts, pulling stuff from her memory. With no life in it, I mean.”
“I can respond to the environment and produce novel responses,” Joey said. “Ones that would be indistinguishable from responses I would have made when I was alive. But only you can determine your own threshold of proof, here.”
“What do you mean?” He looked at Jeanette when he asked it. Talking to the box and treating it like a person was still tripping him up.
Joey began to explain the Turing Test to him, but after a few sentences Jeanette nudged her and said she wasn’t doing herself any favors. The father rubbed at his eyes and asked for something stronger to drink, but all the girls had on hand was Joey’s old weed. Jeanette welcomed the change.
They smoked and played UNO. Then played Trivial Pursuit. Joey shut off her wi-fi to make the competition fair. Their father slumped in his chair and gave gruff answers in a low voice; he was always correct. It was an old deck of questions, and only he understood all the historical and pop cultural references. Winning seemed to provide him a small comfort, and as the game wore on he became more gracious, moving Joey’s piece for her and rolling the dice.
Jeanette read from the cards and passed the joint pack and forth. She got thirstier and thirstier as the night wore on; when she couldn’t take it any longer she bounced up from her seat and ran to the sink to make Kool-Aid, which she sipped from the pitcher’s spout until red water ran down her chin and Joey began to snicker.
“You girls have always been the best of friends,” the father said.
The liquid was trickling down Jeanette’s chin as she listened and fumbled with the cards.
“It’s my proudest accomplishment. I figured, hell, even if there were skills I didn’t give you, confidence I didn’t give you, even if I didn’t raise you right all the time, I gave each of you a companion for life.”
He stared meaningfully at Jeanette, eyes dewy. “Most people don’t have that,” he finished.
Their mother had left when they were still mall. Their father hadn’t dated, not ever, as far as they knew, and he certainly didn’t have a habit of bringing friends around when they were little girls. He hadn’t known how to handle their friends either.
Jeanette picked Joey up; the pitcher of Kool-Aid still dangling from one hand. “I’m so glad I didn’t lose you.”
Both the father and the living daughter’s eyes were streaked with red, their irises taking on the watery jewel-toned hues of the baked. Joey watched them, one camera fixed on her sister’s slobbering mouth, another studying the intricacies in the folds of their father’s eyes. The arrangement of the folds suggested tears. Normally, the father didn’t cry, unless he was watching a film where a loyal animal companion was harmed in the process of being noble.
“I owe you,” Joey said to her sister. “I can’t pay it back, what you did. Literally, figuratively, monetarily, whatever.”
That was when their father’s eyes narrowed and he asked how much the procedure cost. All the regrettable questions came after that. Soon Jeanette was explaining how Joey’s body had ignited, the exact extent of the damage to Joey’s face, torso, lungs, and other internal organs; the intricacies of the operations, the infections and sepsis that had set in, the blood poisoning, the agonizing moment when she flat-lined, the telescoping bleak eternity Jeanette spent curled up in a waiting room chair digging her nails into her palms to keep from fainting. The bills, they debt—she said it was nothing. The relief she’d found as soon as that boy had told her about the procedure—it was worth any price. It was worth two lives, or three.
Their father rose and rubbed at his temples as if he was close to fainting.
“Dad, are you okay?” Jeanette said, but her mouth was sticky w
ith marijuana-infused saliva and the words came out clumsily.
He didn’t respond. He just layed palms-down on the cool tile of the kitchen floor. Joey watched his pulse in his neck and took relief in its normalcy. After a while, he moaned that he was going to be sick.
“I need to be plugged in,” Joey said suddenly. So Jeanette put them both to bed and did the dishes.
The next day, they went to the zoo. Jeanette carried Joey in a clear plastic tote bag to keep the rain off her hardware, and was careful not to swing the bag too vociferously as they strolled the grounds. They watched the tropical fish and felt the previous night’s high radiate through them and grant a fresh calm. The father pulled two quarters from his pockets and bought duck food from a machine with a crank. He dropped half the crumbs in Jeanette’s hand and took the rest in his own.
They leaned on a bridge above the duck pond and threw crumbs one-by-one to the swans, ducks, and geese, and were careful to make the rations last. Each crumb of bread floated a moment on the icy water before dissipating or getting sucked into a bird’s mouth. It was an expense the father had never afforded them as children. It was better to let the animals fend for themselves, he’d said. If you fed them, they would grow torpid and pollute the water. They’d be lazy and depressed. Human food wasn’t healthy for them, he persisted when they begged him, and he said it was hard enough to keep the two girls fed without throwing meals away on wild animals. Now that they’d moved out, he kept his poverty