Bicamerality

Darby Larson

Homework was killing me. Calculus. Where were these problems going? I couldn't see the big picture. I couldn't concentrate. I was tired of the limitations of logic. I wanted all the symbols to just fly up off the page and float around in different colors. Materializing in dreams where summation sigmas and integral notations stand a hundred feet tall and walk around like people and have interesting conversations with each other about Van Gogh, or sports.

The door bell rang. It was a Direct TV salesman.

"Hello there sir how would you like to try a free trial offer only..." blah blah blah.

"No Thanks," I said and before I could shut the door, he pulled out a five foot machete and sliced my body in half, lengthwise. He gave a snicker, sheathed his weapon, and walked away. My left and right halves, completely separated now, watched him.

My left half shut the door.

Both my halves turned and looked at each other. I was looking at a stranger, except it was me. I ought to shake my hand or something, only it wouldn't work because one hand was left and the other was right.

Eventually, my right half hopped away on my one leg towards the garage and found some paint and started painting a big mural across the entire garage floor. It was amazing. My head was so clear. It was beautiful. As it turns out, I'm a Brilliant Painter. I can draw and paint every idea I have with abstract fluidity.

Eventually, and likewise, my left half hopped away on my one leg towards the den. I finished doing my homework with a breeze. I picked up a multi-variable calculus book and read it in one sitting. I understood everything. As it turns out, I'm a Mathematical Genius. And I'll let you in on a little secret: there actually ARE an infinite number of pairs of prime numbers whose difference is two.

"Hey lefty," BP said, "We need to have a talk."

"Don't call me lefty. What do you want?" MG said.

"Look ever since we split, I've been getting this funny feeling, like I don't" -BP looked at the ground- "belong... or something. Don't you feel a little weird?"

"I guess so, so what? Look, everything has an explanation. I've got this psychology book I read last night. I think you should read it. It explains this whole thing. It has to do with you breaking from the id that was the two of us and creating your own id, thus developing your own superego, in which you'll have to adapt to your... look man, I shouldn't have to explain all this to you." MG handed him the book. "Just read it."

"Okay." BP didn't understand anything he had said. He took the book and went to the living room to read. But the only thing he learned was that he doesn't know how to read.

"I don't know how to read," BP said.

"What? Are you serious? What the hell are you good for then? I swear I'd be better off without you."

"Yeah. Maybe I should leave."

"..."

"Yeah. Okay then."

"..."

"So long."

BP drove. He thought about a lot of things while he drove. He saw all kinds of things too, out on the road. Cows grazing in fields with some other animals that looked like cows but somehow weren't. He saw a big tow-truck towing another tow-truck towing a car, like a grandmother that takes care of a mother that takes care of a child. He saw big telephone wire towers that held long sagging wires between them like little girls at the ends of a jump rope. He could just picture all those telephone wire towers twirling those jump ropes and himself, BP, jumping in on his one leg, rattling off illogical nursery rhymes.

Meanwhile, MG read. He sat in his big recliner chair and immersed himself in book after book after book, not really knowing what he was reading or spending any time to ponder ideas or consider the meanings of things. He just read words. Words in sentences in paragraphs in chapters in books. Memorization. Filling his head with cold facts. Cold science.