Halves
The first thing was the cheesecake.
I’d bought a whole one from the Polish bakery on Fourth Street for my birthday, because I live alone and I’m thirty-one and nobody was going to stop me. I ate one slice standing at the counter and put the rest in the fridge. The next morning, half of it was gone. Not eaten messily, not scooped. Cut. A clean straight line down the middle, through the hole where my slice had been, as if someone had laid a ruler across it. The left half was missing. The right half sat on the plate exactly where I’d left it.
I live alone in a one-bedroom on the third floor of an old brick building in Duluth, near the lake. One door, a deadbolt and a chain. Windows painted shut. I checked the chain. It was on.
I told myself I’d done it. Sleepwalking, stress eating. I was in the last year of a PhD in hydrology and I’d been sleeping four hours a night. That seemed reasonable. I threw out the rest of the cheesecake and didn’t think about it again for almost a week.
The second thing was the milk.
I poured a glass before bed and drank about a third of it and left it on the nightstand. In the morning it was exactly half of what I’d left. I know because the glass I’d used has a line printed on it, a little measuring line, and the milk had been well above it when I went to sleep, and now the top of the milk sat on the line as precisely as if it had been poured there.
After that I started paying attention, and once I was paying attention, I saw it everywhere.
Half the bread in the bag. Not six of twelve slices: each slice had been cut in half, the left half of every slice gone and the right halves left, stacked neatly back in the bag. Half the coffee in the can. Half a banana, cut crosswise, the cut end not even browned. Half of my toothpaste, squeezed out of the tube and gone, the tube flattened precisely to its midpoint.
Half my bed was made one morning. I woke up and the left side of the bed, the side I don’t sleep on, was made. Sheet tucked, blanket smoothed, pillow plumped and set square against the headboard. My side was a tangle, the way it always is. I lay there looking at the neat white left half of my bed for a long time.
I’m a scientist, or I’m supposed to be one. So I did what I know how to do. I ran an experiment.
I bought a kitchen scale accurate to a tenth of a gram. Every night for two weeks I weighed and photographed everything in my kitchen before bed, and again in the morning. I kept a spreadsheet. I still have it.
The results were very consistent. Every morning, exactly one item had been halved. The halving was accurate to within the precision of my scale. A 212.4-gram apple became a 106.2-gram apple, cut vertically through the core, the seeds in the remaining half sliced clean through, as if by a blade. A 50.0-gram bar of chocolate became a 25.0-gram bar, split lengthwise across the squares. The removed halves were never anywhere in the apartment. Not in the trash. Not in the drains.
On the fifteenth night I put out one grape. A single green seedless grape, 6.8 grams, in the middle of a white saucer, under the kitchen light, and I set my phone up to record it.
In the morning there was half a grape on the saucer. 3.4 grams. The cut face was wet and flat and perfect.
The video showed the saucer and the grape under the light for six hours and eleven minutes. At 3:09 a.m. the video went black. Not the screen; the image. Like something had been put over the lens. At 3:14 it came back, and the grape on the saucer was half a grape.
What I keep going back to, on the video, is the sound. Right before the image goes black, you can hear, very faintly, something sit down in the kitchen chair across the table. The chair creaks. That’s the chair I don’t use. And then, in the dark, you can hear something chewing, very slowly and carefully, the way a child chews when it’s been told to make its food last.
My mother lives in Ely, about two hours north. I drove up on a Saturday because I didn’t want to say it on the phone.
I didn’t tell her everything. I told her I’d been stressed, that I’d been sleepwalking, that I’d been having strange dreams about sharing my food. I said it as a joke. I said, “Isn’t that funny?”
My mother didn’t laugh. She put her coffee down and looked at it for a long time.
Then she told me something I didn’t know. When she was pregnant with me, at her first ultrasound, at nine weeks, there were two of us. Two heartbeats. Two little shapes side by side. At the next ultrasound, at fourteen weeks, there was one. The doctor called it vanishing twin syndrome. It’s common, she said. More common than people think. The other baby just stops developing and gets absorbed, by the mother, or by the other twin. There’s nothing to bury. There’s nothing at all.
“We didn’t tell you,” she said. “There didn’t seem to be any point. You weren’t sick. You were perfect. You ate like you were eating for two.” She tried to smile. “You’d always cut your sandwiches down the middle and leave half on the plate. Every time. Even when you were tiny. We’d say, Who’s that for, honey? And you’d say, It’s for the other one. We thought it was an imaginary friend.”
I don’t remember that. I don’t remember any of that.
“You stopped when you were about six,” my mother said. “We were relieved.”
I drove home in the dark thinking about it. Thirty-one years. Whatever it was, it had waited thirty-one years, and then I’d stopped leaving it half without even knowing I’d ever started, and it had gotten hungry, and come to take what was owed.
That night I made two sandwiches. I cut one in half and put it on my plate, and I put the other on a plate across the table, in front of the chair I don’t use. Whole. I poured two glasses of milk. I sat down and ate my half sandwich, and I said, out loud, to the empty chair, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You can have that one. It’s all yours.”
In the morning, the plate across the table was clean. The milk was gone. My kitchen was untouched. Nothing halved. I cried a little, I think from relief.
I kept it up. Every meal, two plates. It ate whatever I gave it. Nothing in the kitchen was halved anymore. I thought that was the end.
That was six weeks ago.
I’ve noticed, since then, that I’m losing time. Not much. It started with a few minutes here and there. I’d look at the clock at 2:00 and look again and it would be 2:30 and I’d have no idea what I did. Then it was hours. I’d wake up and it would be noon and my running shoes would be wet by the door, and I don’t run. My advisor emailed me last week to say thank you for the chapter draft, it was really strong work, very different from my usual style. I haven’t written a chapter draft since August. I opened it. It’s good. It’s better than anything I’ve ever written.
I’ve started to track it on the spreadsheet. I’m losing almost exactly twelve hours a day now. Half.
Three nights ago I woke up on the left side of the bed. I’ve slept on the right side my whole life. I lay there in the dark, very still, and I could feel the mattress dipping on the right side, where I usually sleep, under the weight of someone. The sheet was pulled up over a shape. I couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to. I could hear it breathing, slow and even, exactly in time with me.
I’ve decided I don’t mind. I really have. It’s only fair. It was there first, maybe. It was there from the beginning, beside me, in the dark, and I took everything, and it got nothing, and it’s been patient for thirty-one years.
But this morning I looked in the bathroom mirror and only the right half of my face was there. The left half was just the tile behind me, white and clean, like the cut face of the grape. I touched my left cheek and I could feel it, warm and real, under my fingers. It’s still there. I just can’t see it anymore.
I think it’s done with the food.
I think it’s started on the other things now. The things that come in halves.