Big Giant Floating Head

by Christopher Boucher

  Halfway through these paragraphs, the Ear got very hot on my head and smoke started pouring out of the canal. I unstrapped it and let it cool on the page, but the Ear 9000 was finished—I’d burst the drum. Flummoxed, I walked back to my van. When I turned the key, though, nothing happened. I checked under the hood and saw that every part in the engine had been replaced with its word: “engine,” “alternator,” “battery,” “spark plugs,” et cetera. This, of course, was the work of the Lipolian.

  “Goddammit!” I shouted to no one.

  What could I do at that point, though, but press on? So I packed up some essential tools—my reading goggles, some edible words—boarded the subway, and rode it as far as it would take me. I’d been riding for about an hour, though, when suddenly—smack-dab in the middle of “DivorceLand”—the train stopped. I looked out onto the page and saw the end of the track. This was as far as Boucher had written; the pages ahead were discarded drafts, forlorn paragraphs, dead ideas. I pushed open the doors of the train, stepped onto the empty page, and started walking.

  Did I understand, by that point, that the Lipolian was drawing me farther in? Of course I did. I knew it was a game, but I had to keep playing. So I trudged through the white space, past strange characters and occasional stories: a person who appeared to be all hair; a cancer; a crashed plane in the distance. Soon I lost track of my whereabouts—I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. Later that day—or the next, who knows?—I heard an approaching engine in the distance and I turned to see Boucher’s old black truck approaching. He drove across the page and pulled up right beside me. “Get in!” he shouted.

  I ignored him. I was hungry, thirsty, half-blind from the pageglare.

  “_______!” he shouted.

  “No thank you,” I said, marching on.

  Boucher kept pace with me. “What happened to your van?”

  “Gar’s van,” I said. “Broke down.”

  Boucher nodded. “_________,” he said, “have you made any progress at all? Have you even seen the Lipian yet?”

  “Lip-O-lian,” I said. “And yes, I’ve seen her several times.”

  Boucher’s truck coughed along in fits and spurts. “Listen,” he said. “This has gone far enough. I think we should cut our losses and go home.”

  I huffed. “It’s too late for that,” I said.

  “Look, _______,” Boucher said. “I’m still the author here, and I am ordering you to call this off.”

  I stopped walking and leaned over the window so my face was inches from Boucher’s. “Leave me alone,” I told him. “Turn your car around and drive away.”

  “Not unless you come with me,” Boucher said.

  I looked down to the ground and scanned the page—this paragraph—until I found the next sentence: It was “Boucher kept following me.” I picked up the clause, snapped it in the middle, and started bending the letters.

  “What are you doing?” Boucher said.

  Then I put the sentence back on the page. Now it read, “Boucher turned around and drove home, and he never bothered _________ again.” As soon as I placed it on the ground, the pickup turned around.

  “Wait,” Boucher said.

  The truck sped back across the paper.

  “No—stop. Wait, ________!” he said. But the truck carried him away, and soon I was alone again.

  I trudged on for another full day, past the end of “Parade” and into the space beyond it. By that point I couldn’t see a story at all—just random excerpts and tumbles of words here and there.

  Was I in the subtext?

  In a word desert?

  Was I still the main character, even? Or had I wandered

  into another story,

  another book?

  as another character, maybe

  not

  myself

  Sometime after that—I can’t say how long—I heard another engine, this one in front of me. Then, in the distance, I saw a moving figure: someone riding a motorcycle.

  Before it reached me, though, I heard a loud clang. Then I bumped my face on something. It was a sentence: a vertical sentence.

  Then another appeared next to it—clang—and another.

  I moved to my left: two more sentences. I turned to my right. Clang. Clang. Clang. Sentences lined up around me, behind me, above me. I was in a cage of sentences.

  * * *

  Then I saw the Lipolian, crossing over the page in the strangest vehicle I’d ever seen—it was a motorcycle made entirely of verbs: an engine of go and handlebars of veer. She rode up to the cage, dropped the kickstand, and climbed off her bike. I put my hands on the bars—the sentences. “Let me out of here!” I said.

  She smiled. “Ce n’est pas ma cage,” she said. “C’est le tienne.”

  “Do you know why I’m here?” I shouted. “To exterminate you.”

  The Lipolian looked genuinely hurt. “You don’t remember me?” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “Ou my mother?” said the Lipolian. “Brigitte Remillard?”

  Of course—she wrote

  Cube.

  u

  b

  e

  I suddenly remembered scaling paragraphs with this girl, and painting letters different colors. We were probably seven or eight.

  “Your father?” she said, sitting down on the page. “Would have wanted you ici.” She pointed down to the page. “Et là—there.” She pointed to the blank page beyond her.

  “My father’s dead,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “But you were born on the page.”

  “I’m here now,” I said.

  “I mean for good,” she said. “I mean, be here.”

  I looked ahead, at all the unwritten fiction. “I don’t work in stories anymore,” I said.

  “No?” She gestured to the words all around me.

  “This is Boucher’s story,” I said. “I’m working for him.”

  She made a face. Then she said, “Leave Boucher behind. You can go wherever you want to.”

  “I see my father everywhere in here,” I said, my voice trembling.

  “I know,” she said. “I see my mother, too.” Then she stood up.

  Don’t go, I thought. “Wait,” I said.

  The Lipolian smiled softly. “I’ll find you in the next book.” She swung her leg over the vehicle. “Or the one after that.” Then she started up the vehicle and drove way.

  All at once, the vertical sentences fell to the page. I looked back at the pages I’d read thus far—at my life up to this point. I felt recharged. Reborn. Free. And I didn’t want to go back—back to Gar’s, back to Coolidge, back to my angry, lonely life. So I stepped over the broken bars and ran forward into the white space.

  Four months had gone by without an offer, so I was delighted to get a call from our realtor, Wanda, saying she had a potential buyer. “But there’s a catch,” she said.

  “How much is the offer?” I said.

  Wanda told me the amount.

  “Not bad!” I said.

  “But listen,” Wanda said. “They want your experiences as part of the sale.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Your and your wife’s experiences in the home.”

  “Of—they—wow,” I said. “I’ve never heard of a buyer asking for that. Is that common?”

  “No, but it happens,” Wanda said. “Not all clients are comfortable with it, but some are.”

  As it happened, I was standing in the kitchen, right next to the place where my cousin Lucien bumped his head on a low ceiling.

  “Which ones do they want?” I asked Wanda.

  Wanda coughed. “The offer asks for all of them.”

  “All of them?”

  “But again,” Wanda said, “you should feel free to make a counteroffer, or decline altogether.”

  We had to bring Lucien to the hospital for stitches. He kept saying how embarrassed he was.

  I asked Wanda, “Do you think it’s a reasonable o
ffer?”

  “In this market? I think it’s worth considering.”

  I breathed heavily into the phone.

  “Talk with your wife and let me know,” Wanda said.

  I walked into the kitchen. “We’ve got an offer on the house,” I said.

  Liz held out her hands as if she’d just caught an invisible beach ball. “That’s great!” she said. “How much!”

  I told her. “But there’s a catch,” I said.

  “A catch,” she said.

  “They want our experiences in the house, too,” I said.

  “OK,” she said. “So?”

  “That’s six years.”

  “Frankly?” she said. “I think it’s a blessing in disguise. All the shit we went through in this house? Who needs it?”

  “We’ve had some wonderful times in this old house,” I said.

  “Which times, Chris?” my wife said. “The leaky ceiling? The truck on blocks in the yard?”

  “What about—”

  “The shouting match in the driveway? The mouse infestation?”

  “How about after your surgery, when I made you breakfast? The sticky notes you’d leave for me every day? All of the intimacy?”

  “Hey, they can have it,” said my wife.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “These are our lives we’re giving away here.”

  “Out with the old, in with the new,” Liz said.

  That night after dinner I went down to the basement. It was filled to the brim with moments—so many that you could hardly walk around. There was my stint as a glass blower; the day I woke up and everything was slippery; my first-ever competitive failure. There was Liz, strumming her guitar, and her again, studying for the GRE at the kitchen table. There were the two of us talking late into the night on the deck. I sat down on the cold basement floor and studied one memory after another.

  The following day I called Wanda with a counteroffer: a slightly higher price and all of our memories except twenty or so that I could not part with. Wanda called back later that day with the buyers’ response: they didn’t care about my fortieth birthday party or the Christmases, but they wouldn’t buy the house without mine and Liz’s intimacy and our arguments. “Seriously?” I asked Wanda. “Why would they event want those experiences?”

  “A lot of buyers want a house that’s really been lived in,” she said.

  Finally I conceded—we accepted the offer, bought a condo and hired a moving company. Then the movers broke two experiences—that time everything was slippery, and the last conversation I had with my father—moving them into a van. “Insurance will cover this,” one of the movers assured me, as I knelt down in the driveway and sifted through shards of conversation.

  But I don’t remember if we ever did hear from the insurance company, or what happened to those broken memories, or anything else about the day we moved. I sold it all with the house, which I couldn’t find now if my life depended on it. It’s like I never even owned it. All I know for sure is that, before we lived here, we lived somewhere else.

  That summer my heart told me that it was taking a vacation. “Not forever,” it told me. “Just a few weeks of R and R.”

  I was driving through downtown Coolidge at the time, on my way to meet a Suicide in South Blix, and I forced a laugh—I thought the heart was kidding. “Right,” I said.

  “And I’ll get a substitute while I’m gone, of course,” said the heart.

  “Wait a second—you’re serious?” I said.

  “Chris, I need a break,” said the heart. “And it’ll give us a chance to get perspective on our, shall we say, communication problems.”

  I was confused. “But you obviously can’t take a vacation,” I said. “I need you to breathe, and think, and live. Don’t I?”

  “Not necessarily. But I just told you, I’ll get you a sub. I know just who to hire.”

  “A substitute heart?”

  “Real freelance hearts charge a lot of money,” said the heart. “But I know a trout who subs for hearts all the time.”

  My truck ambled down Route 11. “A literal trout? An actual fish?”

  “Yes, a fish,” said the heart. “An experienced trout heart substitute. You’ll get along great—he’s a good fish.”

  “If you do take a vacation—”

  “When I take the vacation.”

  “—where would you go?”

  “I was thinking about going to the Cape,” said the heart. “Renting a place in Truro. Eat some lobster, walk the beach.”

  “That sounds really nice,” I said. “Why can’t we both go?”

  “Do you have the money for a trip like that?” said the heart.

  “No,” I said.

  “Anyways, you’re not invited. I’m going alone.”

  I took a left on Stress Ave. “I think it’s a nice idea in theory?” I said. “But I need you here, working for me. So unfortunately I’m going to have to say no.”

  Now my heart forced a laugh. “Chris,” he said. “Look back at the first sentence.”

  I looked into my rearview mirror, at the paragraphs behind me and the first sentence.

  “Did you read it?” said the heart.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What’s it say?”

  “ ‘That summer my heart,’” I said, “ ‘told me that it was taking a vacation.’”

  “Right,” said the heart. “I’m not asking you; I’m informing you that I will be unavailable the week of June 21. Capiche?”

  By that point we’d reached the concrete factory where I said I’d meet the Suicide. I parked and saw him sitting on some steps by a trailer. He had his tackle box and fishing pole at his feet, and he was reading a book. When he saw me, he stood up and stuffed the book into the front pocket of his overalls.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said. “I was arguing with my heart.”

  The Suicide gave me a little shove. “Having a heart-to-heart?”

  “Good one,” said the heart to the Suicide.

  We walked past giant concrete forms on the way to the river bank. This was the Coolidge River, a notorious story source. “Goddamn good spot, no?” said the Suicide.

  I stood on the edge and peered into the water. Sure enough, I could see the stories swimming by in the murky brown among fish, stones, anonymous faces, and underwater vegetation. We baited our lines with conflict and cast them out into the water.

  * * *

  That was way back in 2004, about two years before I met Liz. I was engaged to a woman named Melody at the time, and writing every day. On the page, the whole world was smiling at me; I believed Coolidge—my Coolidge, and the Christopher Boucher(s) that moved through it—could be anything I wanted them to be. So when Melody sat me down to tell me that she’d been diagnosed with cancer and wanted to call off the wedding, I couldn’t hear the words; I needed to revise them. “I’m so, so sorry,” Melody said, leaning forward on our futon and holding my hands in hers. “For me, but also for you.”

  “No no no no no,” said my thoughts. “No.”

  “I want to know who this guy Cancer is, and where he lives,” I said.

  Melody smiled sadly.

  “Honey,” I said. “We can beat this.”

  “No,” she said, staring at my knuckles as if she was reading them. “We can’t.”

  “This is our Coolidge, Melody. We decide what happens—”

  “And it’s better if we just say goodbye now. I don’t want you to worry about me, or what’s next for me—I’d rather go through it alone.” She looked up at me with tears in her eyes. “It would make me happy to know that you’re out there in the world, being your good weird self.” Then she kissed me—her breath tasted like paint—told me she loved me, stood up from the futon, and walked out of the apartment.

  In the lonely hours afterward, my thoughts revised and revised until I decided that she was kidding. She’ll walk in any second, I told myself, and rib me for being gullible. But she didn’t come home that nigh
t or the next. After three days without her, I drove out to her parents’ home in Geryk Heights. When I walked up to the front door it squared its shoulders. “Leave, Christopher,” the door said.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m here to see—”

  “She doesn’t want to see you,” said the door. “Go. Now.”

  “Can you at least let her know I’m here?” I said.

  “She’s not to be disturbed under any circumstances,” said the door.

  “I’ll just,” I said, and I lifted my hand to knock, but the door said, “Don’t. Don’t you touch me, Christopher.”

  I knocked on the door’s face.

  “What did I just say?”

  I slapped the door. “Melody!” I shouted.

  “Do that again?” said the door. “And I’m calling the police.”

  I punched the door with my fist.

  The door sighed and fished a cell phone from its pocket. As soon as he started dialing, I yanked my hands off the door as if it was a million degrees hot. Then I whirled around, stormed down the steps, got into my car, and drove away.

  * * *

  But that wasn’t the end of The Story of Melody. In fact, it wasn’t even the end of this part of the story, where I am trying desperately to see her. Other characters might have just given up at that point, moved on, turned the page, but my heart wouldn’t let me. Melody promised me that she’d love me forever. And I knew I could save her if she gave me the chance. All I had to do, I told myself, was put the right words in the right order.

  So the next day, I called in to the bookstore and said I was sick. “I’m not going to be able to come in—I’m really sorry,” I told my boss, a Marsha.

  “You don’t sound sick,” said a Marsha.

  “I’m not congested,” I said. “But I have other symptoms.”

  “Dammit, Christopher,” a Marsha said, “we’re running low on mysteries—I was counting on you to go catch some.”