Big Giant Floating Head

by Christopher Boucher

  We buried my dad on his favorite page, in a spot where he used to like to watch the sun set. The next day, I hired the sharkiest suits I could find to go after Boucher. I wanted to stare that booker down in a courtroom, have a gavel take writing from him forever.

  When he heard about the suits, Boucher wrote me a letter. Please, ______, he wrote. Writing is ALL I HAVE. I know you’re pissed at me but I am working on something now that I think could really break it open—about fear, and love, and LOSS. Remember we even sketched out the sets? I want to incorporate those, in honor of your dad.

  I don’t know if you heard, but Liz and I broke up again. She says it’s for good this time. It’s a really tough time for me——for you too, I know—so I’m asking you, out of the goodness of your heart—

  And so on. Two days before the scheduled start of the trial, we settled: Boucher agreed to give up writing for one year if I called off the suits. Boucher’s laptop, notebooks, and pens were confiscated—he couldn’t even write checks. If he was found with so much as a shopping list, we agreed, the suits would reopen the case. In fact, I heard Boucher gave up books altogether—that he took a job fixing gutters with Bill Sunflower.

  I remember my ex-fiancée asking me, weeks before we separated, if all of this made me feel better. And it did! Boucher had hurt people. Every time he had an idea or wished he could write a story, I wanted him to think of my father, remember how his blood spilled across the white paper.

  In the months following the settlement, I tried to put my life back together. I couldn’t go back to working in sets—I rejected stories altogether, in fact—so I took on some renovation jobs: a barn in Williamsburg, a demo in Goshen, some others. Then I heard that Gar Bell, an exterminator I knew in Florence, was looking for a part-time poemcatcher. I stopped by the shop to tell him I was interested and he hired me on the spot. It was a pretty straightforward transition: After all those years in stories, I knew where poems hid, the places they liked to burrow—I’d caught hundreds of them over the years. Sonnets in your belfry? No problem. Haiku chewing your wires? I’m your man.

  I worked at Gar’s for two years. His shop was a grimy shrug that smelled of words and solvents, but it was good, honest work—and there was plenty of it. We handled our share of outbreaks and infestations, but I spent most of my time driving Gar’s orange van from page to page to visit our regular clients and spray for poems. By my second year at Gar’s, I was actually pulling in a fair amount of money. I started to think I might start my own verse-extermination shop someday, maybe even a series of them.

  Like I said, though: This was before the Lipolian—before the day that fall when I walked into the shop with two dead poems over my shoulder and saw a customer standing at the front desk. I knew who he was before he even turned around—I would have recognized his pitiful bald spot anywhere.

  It was Chris Boucher.

  I was so stunned to see him that I stopped in my tracks. The door clanged loudly behind me and Boucher turned around. He’d gotten fat and lost more hair.

  “______,” said Gar, “this is an author, and he—”

  “Out,” I said. “Get out of my shop right now.”

  “Just wait a second,” said Boucher cautiously. “Can I just—”

  “Mr. Bowcher stopped by to see if—”

  “It’s boo-shay,” said Boucher quietly.

  “Did you hear what I said?” I stormed up to him. “Out. Right now.”

  “Will you just hear what I have to say?” Boucher said. “I need your help.”

  “Help!” I squawked. “What kind of help?”

  * * *

  See, I’d known Boucher my whole life—we’d once been good friends. In high school, I was one of his only friends—everyone else pitied him. Chris was raised by televisions, with no real family to speak of, and he was dumb and fragile. How many times did I look across the room to see Boucher crying at his desk? Whenever the teacher asked what was wrong, he’d say something strange—that the chalk had Alzheimer’s, or that one of his thoughts was lost.

  “Lost where?” Mr. Kirval asked.

  “Starving in the wilderness,” said Boucher.

  “What wilderness?”

  “In my mind,” Boucher said.

  Then Boucher started telling stories, rearranging his life on the page. He was always the shortest kid in the class, for example, but one day he arrived to school standing seven feet tall. Ms. McChair, the English teacher, gave him detention and scolded him until he shrunk back down to normal size. That same spring, we were playing baseball at Calvin Field when Corn Douglas hit a fly ball into right field; Boucher revised the mid-air ball into a hamburger, caught it, and took a bite. Coach Depression leapt off the bench and ran out to the field. “What the crap was that?” he said.

  “I’m learning revision,” said Boucher.

  “Not here you aren’t,” said the coach. “Sit your ass down on that bench.”

  It was like that everywhere for Chris: he was a sorry, a whatfor. And when he wouldn’t stop telling stories—changing the classroom into a junkyard, or the chalkboard into a crystal-clear window—the assistant principal put him in a room by himself. There wasn’t even a teacher in there—it was just Chris and some wild, troublemaking paragraphs.

  Eventually, Chris wrestled some of those paragraphs into a book. And for one reason or another—pity, I suppose—my father always rooted for Boucher; he wanted to help him out. When Boucher needed a set or props, my Dad always gave him the family discount. “He’s not exactly the next Maude Crowne,” dad told me once—meaning, he’s not going to make us any real money—“but his heart’s in the right place.”

  All this took place in my hometown of Coolidge, Massachusetts, a writers’ town if there ever was one. Coolidge was probably the second- or third-most popular place in New England for letterbuilders and storytenants to live. Because it wasn’t really close to anything, Coolidge was affordable enough for writers to rent out space for their novels or stories. You’d see these stories everywhere in Coolidge, just begging to be told. Walking into Attitude or the JavaNet, you’d often find yourself sitting next to a trope, a theme, or a character. Sometimes two verbs would be making out in the margin, or a novel would be playing saxophone on the stage. God, what I wouldn’t give to get back there now.

  For the seven or eight years that we were all working together, Boucher would write strange, elaborate sets for us to build—one featuring a talking Colorado; another about a man with a car attached to his abdomen—and we’d do our best to realize them. Most nights, when we all threw in the towel, the three of us would lock up the front cover of the book-in-progress and drive down to the Denouement—the best, cheapest bar on the page—where my father would regale Boucher with his best stories:

  “And we had no time, and no meaning—”

  “Shit,” Boucher would say.

  “So we took an old war that someone had in the back—”

  “No,” Boucher asked.

  My father leaned forward on his stool. “And made that war into a bridge.”

  “Wow!” said Boucher.

  Or:

  “We can all see that the apology isn’t there. And that it needs to be there for the next scene.”

  “You must have been freaking out.”

  “So Leo,” my Dad said. “You know Leo Dueron?”

  “Sure—sure.”

  “Leo jumps into a harness, drops down from the rafter, places the apology on the divan—”

  “You are kidding me,” said Boucher.

  “And then we pull him up. Ten seconds before the scene starts.”

  I’d heard these stories a hundred times; I could have heard them a hundred more.

  The Denouement was a character bar, so most of the people in the place were trying to drink away that day’s plot. It wasn’t strange for things to get out of hand—for a flag to start a fight with a metaphor, or a television and an octopus to suddenly grapple. When that happened, my dad would often step in an
d settle them down. Sometimes Boucher and I got involved as well. Once, a thriller caught Boucher staring at her and she knocked his drink out of his hand, and I stepped in to protect him. Another time, I fell into a dystopia by mistake coming back from the bathroom, and Boucher leapt between us.

  Boucher had gone ahead and published Golden Delicious, the novel that killed my father, but it was halfhearted and clouded in controversy. After the settlement and all that bad press, I figured he’d never write again.

  But now here he stood, his eyes late-night supermarkets. He seemed honestly afraid of me, and he should have been; I was nothing but anger those days. Other than Gar, I was all alone in the world. A year earlier, my fiancée had left me at the altar. I had a pet dog who, in the weeks before this, decided I was too depressing to be around and filed for a legal separation. These days I hardly went home—I spent most of my nights at Gar’s, on a poem-infested cot. Which was maybe why I refrained from punching Boucher out or dragging him out the door. Instead I said, “Fine. You’ve got thirty seconds. Talk.”

  “OK,” he stammered. “Here’s the—it’s—”

  “Twenty-nine,” I said. “Twenty-eight.”

  Boucher huffed. “I’m working on a new book.”

  “A novel?” I could barely say the word.

  “There’s nothing about you in there,” he said, his voice quivering. “Just chapters about the floating heads, the language zoo, my bodywall, some other sorrows.”

  “Sounds like a hoot,” I said.

  “But I’ve got an infestation of some sort.”

  “Poems?” said Gar.

  The author shook his head. “I don’t know—I’m seeing some strange words on the page.”

  “Are there line breaks?” I said. “Is there any form to it?”

  Boucher shook his head. “I don’t think so. Your dad helped me with something like this once. There was some vegetation in the language—”

  “It was a fungus,” I said.

  “—which he treated with something,” said the author.

  “It was basic verbal bacteria,” I told Gar. “We just scrubbed the words with solvent.”

  “This is something else, then. I wouldn’t bother you with it, but I don’t have anyone else I can call. And I’ve got a whole crew waiting on this. At least twenty characters. An editor! A narrator. Sixteen different settings.”

  “Who’s doing the sets?”

  “Nehali,” said the author.

  “Christ,” I spat.

  “I’ve already called two other exterminators, but they were both too expensive.”

  “Does Joe know what you did? That you killed someone in your last book?”

  “Of course he does,” said Boucher. “Everyone knows.”

  I could feel Gar staring at me.

  “Please, _______. I don’t have anyone else I can ask.”

  I tried to find the words to make him leave—Get out, or Fuck off—but I couldn’t say them. I just kept thinking of my father, who would want me to help Boucher.

  “Please,” said Boucher.

  I crossed my arms. “I’ll give you one hour,” I said. “Just to take a look around and tell you what I see. And then I’m gone. OK?”

  “That’s great, _______,” said Boucher. “Thanks. Thank you so much.”

  * * *

  I tried not to think back on my days in novels, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. I was born in a book, after all, and I spent my childhood in words: hiding under them, hopping from one to the next, stealing one now and again for fun. Books were my playground, and they still are. Most of my childhood friends were characters, or children of the bookers who worked with my father. Remember the talking star in Finish Your Breakfast? That star lived on the next page over from us for a year—I went to the Page 31 Middle School with her kids. Then my dad moved to another novel called Cartilage!, and I switched schools and became friends with new characters. I had friends in every style: In high school I hung out mainly with Ixentialists. In college I dated a Physicata.

  I can’t remember a time, either, when I wasn’t working with my dad. I could route a page at twelve, paint a backdrop at fourteen, manage an entire scene by sixteen. I majored in set design in college and went to work with my dad soon afterward. From then on he and I were essentially partners.

  Try as I might not to think about those days now, I’d occasionally catch myself going back to the sets we were most proud of—the Montreal facade in Catapult, the Mars scene in The Living Room. Or I’d go back to those moments after the stories, when our workday was done, all the characters gone home, the entire novel quiet. Like the night when, after six months of work, we finally finished the set for Annabel Trivulex’s Moon-tree. My dad went out and brought back grinders and beers to the empty set, and we sat on the edge of the fake eddy, swigging beer and talking as the sun fell over the back of the page. “Look at that sunset,” I said.

  “And you built that sun,” my dad said.

  “Only the facade,” I said. “You wired it.”

  “Still,” he said. “That’s good work. Great work, in fact.” Then we finished our food, swept up the crumbs, turned off the novel’s lights and closed the cover behind us.

  * * *

  The next morning I stepped into the book and walked out to the copyright page. Boucher was late as usual; by the time he arrived I’d checked the binding and tested the font and I was taking fiber and ink samples. “It’s almost seven,” I told him.

  “Sorry,” he said, tucking in his shirt.

  I looked off into the distance. “Where we going?” I urred.

  “Chapter Five,” he said. “We’ll take a train.” He pointed across the page, to a staircase leading into the fiber.

  “Listen,” I said, planting my feet on the paper. “I don’t want to go too far into the book.”

  “I know,” Boucher said.

  “Fifty pages max.”

  Boucher snapped his gum.

  “I’m serious,” I said. I knew Boucher—he was unorganized, easily distracted, terrible at planning. Back when we were friends, he was always running late, lost, a step behind. When we were growing up, how many times did Boucher lock himself out of his own house by mistake? And I could think of at least two incidents when we’d broken down because his car ran out of gas. “No problem,” he said now. “Seriously. These are pretty short chapters, most of them.”

  I followed him down into the subtext, where we caught an inbound train. As I held the railing and we catapulted through the fictions, I looked around at the other characters on the train: a man wearing a tie-dyed shirt and a Quiet Riot bandana; an old rolltop desk muttering to itself; a woman with a leash tied around her own foot; a harp reading a book, and about a dozen others. Between stations, I saw bits of words—“ka,” “ish”—flash by the windows, followed by scenes: a woman trudging down a country highway; a novel working in a field. “How much farther?” I hollered.

  “Two more stops,” Boucher shouted.

  I gripped the overhead railing tighter. The subtext always made me anxious. My dad had warned me repeatedly to avoid it—had told me story after story about people getting lost under the page, in some sort of inference, and never making it back up to the surface. Once, he and I had to drop down into the page to fasten a set to the footer with screws, and I pretended I was falling—“Whoa! Whoa!”—until my Dad boomed at me to stop it. “Don’t fuck around! People get killed down here like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.

  “Killed by what?” I asked, dumbly.

  “By whim! Readers’ thoughts! Or whatever strange, half-conceived characters live down here.”

  As I got older, I heard more rumors about the endless mysteries of the subtext—talk of four-dimensional spiders, falsepeople, pure themes, alligator halves, headless characters, dead symbols, wandering coffins, moaning mouths with no faces, nots, knots (and knotted nots!), raw ifs, the souls of sounds, suicides, corianders, plaxes, obs and do’s, versionifications, wrongdeaths, half
deaths, metadeaths, essences, signifiers without signs, signs without signifiers, lost symbols, dead motifs, the ghost of porta-potties, murdered themes, socksouls, origami that had come unfolded, lost rain, old notions, wandering cancers, ticks of storage, eddas and sturms, etceteras, et cetera.

  “This is our stop,” Boucher said, as the train slowed. We stepped out of the train and walked onto the platform, up the stairs and onto the page. I immediately recognized myself: I saw a storefront my father had designed, a happiness hydrant I’d helped build, a bookstore sign—“Tomorrow Books,” it read—I’d painted myself. “You fucker,” I said.

  “What?” said Boucher.

  These sets were my father’s, preliminary construction for a third novel that Boucher was in the early stages of when my father fell. I’d assumed Boucher had thrown these sets away. “This scenery,” I said, pointing to the facades, “is not yours to use.”

  “OK—OK,” Boucher stammered. “I thought Bellis would have wanted me to use it.”

  “You have Nehali pull these down or I walk right now.”

  “I will, OK? If that’s what you want. Tomorrow morning, first thing.”

  I spat onto the page. “Show me the poems,” I said.

  Boucher led me across the street to the opposite page, where he stood me in the middle of the paragraph—a paragraph, as it were, about the death of the book’s narrator. “I don’t see any verse here at all,” I said.

  “OK, but take a look at this sentence,” Boucher said, and he pointed to one that read “They drew an outpatient of his bodycheck on the pagoda.”

  “What about it?”

  “Does that sentence look weird to you?”

  I stared at it.

  “Because it’s not the sentence I wrote,” said Boucher.