Big Giant Floating Head

by Christopher Boucher

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wrote ‘They drew an outline of his body on the page.’ But someone changed it.”

  “Who changed it?” I said.

  “I have no idea,” Boucher said.

  I knelt down and studied the sentence, and something inside me sighed. Then I pulled the sentence off the page and picked it up.

  “What are you doing?” said Boucher.

  I threw the phrase over my shoulder. “I’m taking it back to the shop,” I said.

  “What for?” said Boucher.

  “To see what it knows,” I said. But even then I knew—I already knew what this was, where it had come from. I just needed to be sure.

  * * *

  Back at Gar’s, I ran the sentence through the SCANson, by far the most advanced and expensive machine in our office. The SCANson’s close readings were beyond compare; the machine could take one look at a sentence or phrase and give you its entire backstory—its origin, lineage, ink breakdown, et cetera, all listed on a dot-matrix printout.

  Like I said, though, I pretty much knew what the SCANson would tell me. I anticipated a mid-twentieth-century signature, and that’s what I saw. I suspected French origins, and I was correct. I anticipated constraints, and I saw them. While I didn’t yet know how, I already thought this would lead back to my father in some way—that whatever was happening here had something to do with him.

  The next morning, I drove over to Boucher’s book and found him in the Table of Contents. I handed the sentence over to him and said, “You’ve got a Lipolian.”

  “A what?” he said.

  “Lipolian,” I said.

  “What is that? A kind of poem?”

  “Remember—the Lipolou? We discussed them in school. That French school of writers and mathematicians? Repec, Nequeu, all of them?”

  Boucher stared at me dumbly.

  “We spent a whole month on them. They’re these writers who use all sorts of constraints. They’ll only let themselves use certain letters, or write using words that lack a letter. Palindromes, anagrams, that sort of thing. They’ll write a poem made up of lines from other poems, or one that spells a word out through its letters’ absence—that’s called a belle absente. This really doesn’t ring a bell?”

  * * *

  —

  Boucher stared at the dead sentence on the page. Standing there beside him, I tried to remember more about the Lipolou: how they worked, which books of theirs I’d read. My dad and I had worked with Lipolians a few times; once, when I was a kid, he designed the sets for a book by Brigitte Remillard, whose novel

  Cube

  u

  b

  e

  kept unfolding and unfolding—my dad always said that it was one of the most difficult sets he ever built.

  Then it came to me. “I just remembered,” I told Boucher. “This is called an ‘S plus seven.’ The Lipolian swapped every noun for another one seven words down in the dictionary.”

  Boucher knelt down. “Why here? Why this book?”

  I shrugged off the question. In Coolidge, after all, authorship problems were common. Working with my dad, I’d encountered bookhackers, revisionists, demonstrative villains, bullying narrators, minor characters who wanted bigger roles, you name it. What did Boucher expect? These books were worlds, with families of characters that went back generations. They had a stake in the story and what happened next!

  “How’s your security?” I said.

  Boucher’s eyes were dead leaves. “What security?”

  “I’d start there,” I said. “Give Zell Hollister a call, tell her I sent you.” Then I turned and started walking back across the page.

  “Where are you going?” Boucher said.

  “Back to work,” I said. “I have a job, remember?”

  “Wait a second,” he stammered. “You’ve got to help me with this!”

  “I said one hour,” I said. “I’ve already put in way more than that. And I just told you what the problem was!”

  “You haven’t caught the Lipian yet, though.”

  “Lip-o-lian,” I said, jumping the spine and walking toward the subway stop.

  “_______!” shouted Boucher.

  I didn’t turn back. I left Big Giant Floating Head and made it back to Gar’s by noon. Less than half an hour later I was on my way out to Blix to empty some traps. And they were full, too: I found four winged poems, all of them cold and dead.

  * * *

  In a corner of my mind I can still see my father falling: swinging his arms helplessly in the air, and then ceasing to swing them, just letting himself fall (Did he close his eyes? Did he think of me, or my sister, or my mother?) and landing on the page. He fell so far and so fast that his body made a divot in the fiber. They needed the story of a crane to remove him, plus stories about ambulances, paramedicones, Jaws of Life, the whole nine yards.

  My mother arrived about thirty minutes later, and after sitting with me for an hour or so she tried to convince me to come home. But I wouldn’t leave the scene—not even after they removed my father’s body from the book and the ambulances and conecars sped away. I spent the night out there, on the dark page, with the bookwolves and wild poems, crying and shivering and praying to no one.

  Three days later, we held a party—a French-Canadian wake—for my dad at the Denouement. If you’ve never been to a French-Canadian wake, it’s a simple affair: everyone takes off their head and soaks it in a common vat of alcohol. Then you put your head back on, raise your fists and start swinging in honor of the dead. My mother fought her cousin. I fought my brother. My uncle fought a popcorn machine. You end up crying on the shoulder of the person you’re trying to punch in the stomach.

  * * *

  I honestly never planned to return to Big Giant Floating Head. I went back to work at Gar’s and I tried to forget all about sets and fiction and Bouchers. Which isn’t to say I didn’t miss it—miss being back in the book, wandering through the subtext, orchestrating behind the scenes, listening to the mysteries of the page. If I’m being honest, seeing my dad’s last sets really affected me; he was more alive for me in those moments than he had been since the day he died. And the page was my true home. I mean that literally; my mother went into labor with me when she and my dad were living on location in a novel called Winnebago. I was born right there on page seven.

  Later that fall, though, there was a fire in Boucher’s book. Gar has a police scanner in the shop, and he heard the call go out; he radioed me in the van and I drove out to Big Giant Floating Head and right into the pages. I could see the fire—a golden glow over the spine, smoke rising past the page numbers—from as far off as page two. Luckily, the fire wasn’t too bad; only five pages had burned before the fire department arrived to extinguish the blaze. But it could have been a disaster. When I got to the scene, the Narrative Inspector—Tony Lung, I knew him, good guy—was standing with his arms crossed while Boucher sat on the bumper of a fire truck breathing into an oxygen mask. Apparently Boucher had been trying to build sets himself. The pages behind him were a hissing mess, half of them browned from the fire, whole paragraphs ruined by water. Lung pointed over his shoulder. “My deputy says you had an electric reviser plugged into the spine of the book?”

  Boucher took off the mask so he could speak. “I was just trying to—”

  “Trying to what?” said Lung.

  “—just fix one sentence,” he said.

  “Who’s your electrician?”

  “I was doing the work myself,” said Boucher.

  “Without a permit,” said Lung.

  I stepped up to Tony. “Ey, ______,” he said.

  “I just wanted to finish the story,” said Boucher.

  “You can’t do any of this without permits.”

  “I didn’t even know I needed one,” Boucher said.

  I suddenly understood. Back when my father was alive, he oversaw all of this stuff for Boucher: permits, narrative inspections, the approval of outl
ines, everything.

  “What happened to Nehali?” I asked Boucher.

  “Quit,” Boucher said, and then held the oxygen to his face.

  I put my hand on Lung’s shoulder, walked him a few steps away from the page, and leaned in close to him. “What if I help here?” I said.

  “I ought to shut him right down,” Lung said. I could smell cigarettes on his breath. “He could have destroyed the whole book!”

  “Just, what if I see it through?” I said.

  Tony put his hands on his waist and spat into the page. Then he nodded once and we walked back to the fire truck. “OK, Bowcher,” he said. “_______ here’s going to get you back on track.”

  Boucher jumped to his feet.

  “He’ll pull the permits and oversee the project. You don’t write a fuckin’ word without him. Understood?”

  Boucher’s face was bright. “Absolutely,” he said.

  “And if I have to come back here? I’m shutting you down for good.”

  * * *

  Boucher met me at Gar’s the next morning and we got to work. First, I sent him to Readers’ Tool and Supply. “Pick up a few good bookmarks,” I said, “and some plotted tires. Some paper clips and a stapler. And where are your maps?”

  He stared dumbly at me. “What maps?” he said.

  “I’m going to need topographic and narrative, with character arcs included, and plot maps, too.”

  “I don’t have any of that,” he said.

  I winced and shook my head. Then I hoisted my toolbox onto the workbench and started loading it up. I threw in some reading goggles, a thesaurus, and the folded-up Big Ear 9000.

  “What’s that?” Boucher said.

  “The Big Ear 9000,” I said. Then I unfolded the ear and strapped it to my head.

  Boucher smirked.

  “What?” I said.

  “That’s a really big ear,” Boucher said.

  Embarrassed, I unstrapped the ear. “You got a better way to scan the page?”

  Boucher left for Readers’ and came back with everything I’d asked for, and by that afternoon we had the van all packed up. When we’d finished loading the last box, I slammed the van’s back doors closed and said, “I’ll go in tomorrow, and I’ll call you when I’ve got something. Until then, don’t do anything dumb.”

  “Ten-four,” Boucher said.

  “I mean it,” I said. “Write smart.”

  Boucher nodded. “I promise.”

  The following morning I woke up early, grabbed a coffee from Sorrow Roastery, and drove Gar’s van back into the book.

  * * *

  Those first few days in Big Giant Floating Head were some of the toughest I’d had since my dad died. It was more difficult than I’d anticipated to be back in fiction, which I so closely associated with my father. Everywhere I looked I expected to see him: not only in the fragments of sets he built—the river in “DivorceLand,” the office building in “Parade”—but in the sets he might have built, the scenes he could have constructed better or rendered more vividly.

  Plus, it was soon clear that the Lipolian problem was bigger than I’d understood it to be. Everywhere I went—at least once every three or four pages—I found signs of it: equations written in the margin, random passages in French (Le processus est le produit,” “L’histoire est une fenêtre ouverte”). Then, I was walking past the beginning of “Slippery” when I saw the letter “Y” discarded in a trash bin—which changed the title to “Slipper.” Out of the kindness of my heart, I took out the letter and restored it. The next day, I was combing through an early draft of “Beautiful Outlaw” when I realized that some of the sentences were written in iambic tetrameter. I stood surprised among the words. I could not believe I’d been so duped! I found a phone booth in the story and dialed Boucher. “Big Giant Floating Head,” someone answered.

  “Is Chris there?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said. “He went out.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “He’s working in the Language Zoo this morning, I think,” said the someone.

  I dialed the Language Zoo. “Language Zoo.”

  “Chris Boucher, please,” I said.

  “Um, hold on a second. Can I ask who’s calling?”

  “It’s _________,” I said.

  I heard the phone clunk down, and I waited a minute or two. Then Boucher picked up. “_____________?” he answered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Listen—”

  “Did you catch him?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Let me ask you something. Did you write any sentences in tetrameter?”

  “What’s tetrameter?” said Boucher.

  So it must have been the Lipolian.

  I chased that outlaw for over a month, driving my poetry truck from one chapter to the next with no sign of the culprit. Eventually I started to think I was tracking more than one Lipolian—that maybe I was tracking all of them, even!—or that it was just the words themselves, respawning and multiplying, that I was after.

  Then, after five weeks in the book, I was hiking through the woods off the margin of “Trout Heart”—maybe three pages from the edge of what was written—when I saw, in the distance, a shadow in a paragraph. I tiptoed toward it, hid behind a tree, ran behind a page number, and then shuffled behind the post of an old rotted fence. When I got a page closer, I could see a person—a woman—standing in the language. She wore painter’s overalls and there was ink all over her knees and shins. She had long, brown, braided hair, and she was kneeling in the words, smelling them like flowers. She was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.

  I didn’t think the woman had heard me approaching, but suddenly she turned and stared at me and curtsied. “Enchanté,” she said.

  I stopped in my tracks. She looked familiar. “What?” I said, dumbly.

  “Ça fait longtemps,” she said.

  She was speaking French—my father’s language, which I didn’t understand. But I knew its sounds—they were the sounds of home.

  As I tried to figure out where I’d seen her before, she leaned over again and breathed deeply. Then she gestured to me, that I should do the same. So I did; I leaned down and inhaled. And the words smelled wonderful—rich and inky, with a mild, fruity aftertaste.

  “C’est bon, non?” said the woman.

  I didn’t answer—I had my eyes closed, and I was taking deep gulps. It had been so long since I’d done that—decades, maybe. When had the page lost that sense of mystery for me? Finally, I opened my eyes; when I did I found that the Lipolian was gone, as if she’d never been there in the first place. I ran right over to where she’d been standing, but I could find no trace of her—no footprints in the ink, no wrinkles in the page.

  I didn’t tell Boucher about this—not then, and not afterward. After that first sighting, though, I doubled my efforts, immersed myself in the search. Instead of driving back out of the book every day, like I’d been doing those first weeks, I started sleeping right there in the story: first in hotels—I spent several nights at a place called The Tetherly—and if no hotel was nearby, in Gar’s van or camped out in a tent wherever I could find a clearing on the page. Sometimes, if I was staked out, I slept right in that spot: I passed one whole night lying under a paragraph, and another crouched up behind a page number, shivering in the pagewind and waiting for the Lipolian to appear.

  And she did appear, but never where I expected. When I was looking for her—in the middle of some weird syntax; at the story’s climax—I never found her. But once, I was shopping for supplies at the Food Ellipsis and I saw her at the far end of the aisle. Another time, I was going down a mall escalator in “Success Story” and she was going up it. I jumped over the divider, of course, but by the time I got to the top of the stairs she was gone.

  I should have realized earlier, though, that the Lipolian was fucking with me—sabotaging me, playing jokes at my expense. One morning, for example, she S + 7ed my breakfast—suddenly my oatmeal became Obadiah, a Hebrew
minor prophet. She’d leave me notes, too. “Isn’t it fun?” Or, “Just like the graveyard in The Curtain!” And now and again, I’d be scanning a page when, all of a sudden, the story became about me: “I know _________ misses his father. We ALL miss Bellis.” Othertimes, she’d write the readers into the work, let them decide what happened to me:

  If you want _______ to trip over a sentence and twist his ankle, keep reading this page.

  If you want _______ to get lost in the subtext, stop reading here and turn to this page.

  If you want this story to be over, turn to this page.

  Suddenly I tripped over a sentence. “Ah!” I shouted. “My ankle!”

  The farther out in the book I went, the more I struggled. Way out on page 120, for example, I was listening to the page with the Ear when I suddenly looked up and saw the exact sentence in reverse farther down the page, and and page the down farther reverse in sentence exact the saw and up looked suddenly I when glass magnifying my with page the reading and ear the wearing was I example for 021 page on out way. So that everything I wrote became a reflection of itself, like some sort of palindrome prose prose palindrome of sort some like itself of reflection a became wrote I everything that so.

  Then, a few days later, I was scanning the page with the Ear 9000 when I came across a particularly thorny passage:

  It’s just a curiously inky question from a motionless, dead azalea mixing into the vapid, brown, soily ground.

  “Where and why?” says the bearded, kilted azalea that night, quietly gritting its teeth. “Why can’t I at least shuffle? Am I just—truly, verifiably dead? Me? Never exist again? As I speak, I’ve never been this sad!”

  “But death is everywhere,” said the callous tulip. “It’s just that not one of us quite knows when they exist and when they don’t—when they’re standing in the hazy sun, or when they’ve been buried under ground.”

  “But I know that I’m living,” said a pansy to our tulip. “I know if I’m in hazy sun, on Xanax, or just in clouds. And I’m not dying—not quitting, not now.”