Big Giant Floating Head

by Christopher Boucher

  That very afternoon we were given new student IDs, plus a new textbook, Being Your Best Edgar, by Edgar O’Malley, and a new course roster. And it soon became clear why O’Malley’s schools were so popular: the curriculum was thorough, rigorous, and nearly foolproof. For us, it revealed the subtle but insistent flaws we’d fostered as Christopher Bouchers: the hidden sorrows at their core, the persisting anxieties that remained for even the best and brightest of them. O’Malley’s courses—“Life Is a Kitchen”; “Every Moment Is a Performance”; “Be a Fucking MAN Already”—left no room for such faults. To assure lifelong self-confidence, for example, we began each morning with Mirror Drills, during which we’d stand tall in the Confidence Studio and face our reflections. Then we’d say, “I’m Edgar O’Malley—it’s so nice to meet you,” and extend our hand for a handshake.

  “Louder!” boomed Provost O’Malley.

  “I’M EDGAR O’MALLEY—IT’S SO NICE TO MEET YOU!” we shouted.

  We did two hundred of these each day, and soon we were Edgar O’Malleys and it was so nice to meet you. After three more years of this, I’m sure we would have emerged not as less-anxious, slightly-taller Bouchers, but as handsome chef-author-athletes. And just two months into that spring semester, the school was thriving again—registration was up, and two new O’Malleys were hired: Edgar O’Malley, Esquire, who taught our Sue or Be Sued course, and Edgar O’Malley, M.D., to teach Sickness Is a Myth.

  But I didn’t care if the O’Malley Method was perfect—I missed being Christopher Boucher. And sometime that spring, a few of us—myself and two other O’Malleys—started meeting outside the new state-of-the-art luge track to smoke cigarettes and eat chips. And it turned out that they hated the new program as much as I did. “That fuckin’ O’Malley, man?” said Pensacola O’Malley. “The way he talks to me?”

  “Which one?” said Utica O’Malley.

  “Gym O’Malley,” said Pensacola. “He acts like he invented sit-ups. It’s like, I work out too, OK? I was working out as Boucher.”

  “Fucking jerks,” Utica O’Malley said.

  A few weeks before the end of the semester, the three of us dropped out. Our hearts just weren’t in it. For better or worse, we went back to being Christopher Bouchers. From then on the drop-out O’Malleys met once every few weeks in a bar or at one of our houses, where we really Bouchered it up: we’d drink a bunch of beers, eat a few bags of chips while watching a bad movie, fall asleep on the couch. We weren’t impressive and no one loved us. We were fat, anxious, divorced. We weren’t even nice to each other; once, we locked Christopher Boucher out of Christopher Boucher’s apartment for no good reason. “Guys?” he said, knocking at the door. “It’s Chris. Christopher Boucher.” But we just ignored him until he went away. Sure, we talked about changing—going back to school, enrolling to be someone else—but I doubt any of us thought that was really going to happen. Deep in his heart, I think every Christopher Boucher out there knew it was all downhill from here.

  Once everything became slippery. Suddenly I couldn’t hold my wife’s hand, couldn’t grasp the chess pieces when we played. I couldn’t tie my shoes, couldn’t grip the handle of my office door at work. The entire world turned wet and slick. At first it was a physical slipping, then a mental one as well. I forgot my wife’s birthday. I was suspended from work at the Department of Fiction for two weeks and I had no idea why. I came home from the supermarket and my wife had a duffel bag packed. “Fuck you,” she said, and she brushed past me, closed herself into her Honda and pulled out of the driveway. I ran after her. “Liz, what? Liz? Liz!”

  I went to the doctor and he took the top of my head off and looked around. “Hm,” he said. “Hm what?” I said. His pliers felt cold inside my mind. “Well,” he said, “I can adjust the wire that controls your relationship to the external—” “OK,” I said. “There’s a but,” he said. “OK,” I said. “The but is,” he said, “your mind may overcompensate.” “Meaning what,” I said. “Meaning,” he said, “that you might have the opposite problem.” I tried to deduce what he was saying without actually saying it. “That things won’t be slippery enough?” I said. “Exactly,” he said. “That things will stick.”

  Which is exactly what happened. I experienced one very good day, the best day of my life, maybe, during which I could hold the things I wanted to and let go of them when I was ready to. When I woke up the next morning, though, the bed sheets stuck to me. I didn’t think too much of it, but then I tried to eat a piece of toast and it stuck to my chin. An old girlfriend called me and said she was coming over, and by two p.m. we were married. She clung to me as we walked toward the subway so we could catch a plane and begin our honeymoon. As we were crossing the street, though, a car screamed toward us. Its brakes squealed but it slammed right into my rib. It was a Honda—Liz’s Honda. The car stuck to me. Inside it, Liz screamed, “Honey! Let go of that woman!”

  I called the doctor and told him I needed to see him immediately. I arrived at his office with a piece of toast stuck to my face, my arm around my new wife, my old wife’s Honda attached to my abdomen. It was a struggle to fit into the examination room!

  The doctor came in with his chart. He wrote down the make and model of the car. Then he interviewed Liz and took my new wife’s name. “Hm,” he said. “Hm what?” I said. “Hm as in, I think your brain is overcompensating. My diagnosis is, things are now sticking to you.” “I agree with your diagnosis,” I told him. “So what now?” “Well,” he said, “you may have to choose.” I asked him, “Why can’t you just scale it back a smidge?” “That’s what I tried to do last time,” he said. “I can adjust it again, but I think you may have to choose which you’d prefer. Do you want your life to be too sticky or too slippery?”

  I didn’t really even have to think about it. “Slippery,” I said. “Honey, no!” both wives said in unison. “Honeys, it has to be this way,” I told them. “I’d rather be nothing in this world than go through it attaching myself to everything.” I turned back to the doctor. “Do it,” I said. “Change me back.”

  The doctor opened my head and made the adjustment. It only took five minutes. As soon as he’d finished, the car dislodged itself from me and the new wife divorced me. Liz gave me the finger, pulled a U-turn, and sped the Honda out of the doctor’s office.

  The piece of toast fell off my face and onto the floor of the office. I tried to pick it up, but I could not—it was too slippery. The doctor took pity on me, picked up the toast and held it for me. I was so hungry—I felt like I hadn’t eaten in months.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Eat.”

  He held the toast to my lips. I took a bite from it.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Hey,” he said. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  I met the Lady with the Invisible Dog about a year after my uncle’s death, at the same exact time that I was rustle-tussling with a man called “the Narrator.” This was back in 1999, years before I met Liz. I’d taken the money that my uncle had left me and opened up a bookstore, and this Narrator—a blond-haired, moustache-and-muscle fellow from Blix—started harassing me and making all of these threats. At first I didn’t take them seriously, but then my co-worker Boris Sarah clarified for me exactly how troublesome this Narrator character might become for us. I asked Boris Sarah what to do.

  “Make friends with him!” Boris Sarah replied. “Tell him you see his point! Apologize for your rude behavior!”

  “Apologize!” I said. “Formally?”

  “I don’t think you appreciate the severity of this situation,” Boris Sarah said.

  So the next day I walked across the street to the Coolidge Department of Apologies (CDA) to fill out the form. I’d filed apologies before (lots of them, in fact), so I knew how to do it. I walked up to the second floor of City Hall, found the table of blank forms located outside the CDA office, and filled out the form that said “Submission for Formal Apology.” In the space where it asked what I was apologizing for, I wrote down exactly what
the Narrator had told me, in the same exact words he’d spat at me during our tiff in my store a few days earlier: From a certain perspective, my business could be seen as disrespectful to his enterprise—as a threat to his livelihood, even. I wrote that maybe we could sit down over a beer and talk about our differences, maybe even find a way to work together.

  I completed the form and brought it up to the window, but the lady behind the glass—a woman in her twenties, with short, straight blond hair, a red-and-white-checkered shirt, smooth sunrise skin, and a face like a television tuned to just the right channel—said, “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “This isn’t the wrong form,” she said.

  “Isn’t the wrong form?” I said.

  “I mean, it is the wrong form,” she said, smiling. “Is the wrong form.” That’s how she spoke, like a crumbly sidewalk.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I must have grabbed the wrong one—”

  “Actually, we don’t accept printed forms anymore.”

  “So how do I apologize?”

  “The new form is online,” she said.

  “Online?” I asked.

  “Yeah. On the web.”

  “I’m sorry? What web?”

  She squinted (so she could see my face better, I assumed). “The internet,” she said.

  “What’s—the—”

  “You just go to the CDA home page and the form’s available as a PDF file.”

  I shook my head—I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “You just print it out,” she said.

  I was still confused, and so I did that thing that I sometimes do—that I’d been doing a lot since my uncle’s death, actually—which is, I just left; I just turned around in the middle of her sentence and walked back through the hallway, down the stairs and out into the cold, cold, cold, cold, cold.

  * * *

  I went back to the store, which was called Tomorrow Books. That’s what we sold—books you’d never seen before. Some of them were made of paper, and resembled traditional books, but most were completely new—they were made of wood, or wire, or cloud, or light, or suggestions. We even sold books made of missing, like this one. Some of the books told stories and some didn’t—sometimes the book was the story. At that point, though, we were hardly selling any books—maybe two or three on a good week. During our first few months in business almost all of our funding came from the money my uncle Sun—the only person in the world who’d ever cared about me—left me when he died.

  Sunny had known that he was dying—he was getting lighter and lighter—so during his last weeks he made sure to put all his affairs in order. He put my inheritance in a bank account, and in that same bank he left some valuables in a safe-deposit box along with a note that said, Winner (that’s what he called me): This is a lot of money. Don’t waste it on something stupid. I mean it. Love, Sunny.

  It wasn’t long after that—after his death—that I tried writing my first story. The story was dead and deformed, but I told myself I’d continue writing. I promised myself I’d find a way to capture all that missing—an unloveable father, a mother who never loved me, an uncle who I would have given anything to see again—and put it on the page.

  Anyhoo, it was me and Boris Sarah at the store, and between the two of us we made most of the books that we sold (save for an occasional tomorrowish book written by one of our favorites—Reichle, Toom, etc.).

  When I got back to the store, Boris Sarah was building a steel book. I walked in and asked, “Have you ever heard of something called the internet?”

  “The who?” said Boris Sarah.

  * * *

  But who did I see later that afternoon? While working in the store?

  The Lady from the CDA! She was walking by the store and she saw me working—I was building a book made from bread. The Lady knocked on the window and waved, and a minute or so later she came inside, where she waved at me again. She was all bundled up in a red coat and a red hat.

  I pushed my bookmaking goggles up onto my forehead. “Hey,” I said. I held out my arms. “Welcome to Tomorrow Books!”

  “You work here?”

  “This is my store,” I said. “Me and Boris Sarah back there.”

  Boris Sarah waved, and the Lady from the CDA waved back.

  “I’m sorry about before,” she said. “With the form.”

  “Not your fault,” I said.

  “But I can show it to you, how to fill it out, if you want.”

  “Oh—yeah,” I said. “Great. Right now?”

  She nodded.

  I told Boris Sarah that I was going out again, and I stood up from my worktable.

  “I’m Molly, by the way,” said the Lady from the CDA.

  “Christopher,” I told her.

  She nodded and smiled. “Cool,” she said. Then she turned and walked outside, and I followed.

  And that’s when I noticed the leash.

  * * *

  She’d tied the leash up to a parking meter, but there was nothing at the end of it. It was just an empty leash!

  * * *

  Molly untied the leash and we started walking. The leash floated out in front of her, zipping to the left and to the right. I heard the tiny clanging of a bell. I didn’t know what to make of what I was seeing, but I didn’t want to be rude so I didn’t say anything.

  Molly walked me down to a storefront that read “JavaNet Café.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, “I’ve heard about this place. They have magazines, right?”

  She asked, “Have you ever been inside?”

  “I haven’t,” I said. She tied the empty leash to a bike rack and led me through the heavy glass doors of the café.

  The inside of the JavaNet had hardwood floors and brick walls and counters made of copper. Molly led me past a rack of magazines on the left and a coffee bar on the right. Toward the back of the café, a grouping of tables held big monitors and keyboards. “These are computers,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said, “I know what a computer is.”

  “But not the internet?”

  “I remember you mentioning that,” I said. “I don’t know what that is.”

  She sat down at the chair and typed some information on the keyboard. Within a minute or two, the printer in the corner of the café hummed to life and gave birth to a single sheet of paper. The Lady grabbed the newborn paper and placed it in my arms. “Here you go,” she said.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Christ. It’s like a home printing press!”

  “Are you really not familiar with this stuff?”

  I shook my head. I might have known about it at some point, but if so that information had disappeared on me. This was happening to me more and more these days: My memories burrowed and hid in my mind; basic information was somehow blocked from me; my thoughts wandered far away where I couldn’t reach them. “I don’t know about any of this stuff,” I said.

  “Because people sometimes kid me, and I don’t know that they’re doing it.”

  “I’m really not kidding you,” I said.

  Then there was a moment of silence, during which I studied Molly’s face while she studied mine. Her eyes, I discovered, were tunnels, and those tunnels led to other eyes further back in her skull—which, I could tell, was where the thinking happened.

  “I really appreciate your help,” I said. “How can I thank you?”

  “No problem,” Molly said.

  “The least I could do is write a story about you.”

  “A story?” she asked.

  “A tomorrow story,” I said.

  * * *

  This is that story.

  Or at least, one revision of it. When I write the final version, I’m going to begin it like this:

  Her name was Molly, and she worked at the CDA.

  Isn’t that a good first line?

  * * *

  I thanked Molly and told her that I’d fill out the form and bring it by the next day. And I
did—the next morning I walked into the CDA office and Molly was sitting behind the glass. Her hair was like a crisscross quilt of corn.

  “Hey—good morning,” she said.

  “I came by with the form,” I said, and handed it over the counter.

  She read it over. “Wow,” she said. “You threatened to close down this guy’s business?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

  “Does he own a bookstore?”

  “No,” I said, “but he’s in the story business.”

  Molly stared at me. Then she said, “I’m just about to go on break and take Bon Jovi for a walk. Do you want to come?”

  I didn’t completely follow what she was saying—who was Bon Jovi?—but I said, “Sure.”

  She slid the glass window closed, and a minute later stepped out of the office and into the hallway. She was holding the same empty leash. This time, though, she let the leash go, and I saw it move, on its own, toward me. Then I felt something warm against my leg. Molly said, “Have I introduced you two?”

  * * *

  And it was then that I realized that her dog was invisible. She never said as much, but I deduced it. I bent down to pet the dog, and I said, “Nice to meet you—”

  “Bon Jovi,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you, Bon Jovi.”

  * * *

  And everything started making sense in my mind.

  We walked over to Coolidge College, past the library and toward the greenhouse and the man-made pond. Molly didn’t say much at first, but then she said, “So you write the books at Tomorrow Books?”

  “I build them—some of them.”

  “How do you know how to do that?”