Big Giant Floating Head

by Christopher Boucher

  I turned and walked in the other direction, toward Mal’s room. On the way, I passed my cousin Andre—who was paralyzed in a construction accident when I was nineteen—walking with his wife Lynn. I stopped and watched him strut. When he stepped into an elevator I knocked on Mal’s door; she appeared with her hair wet and curly. “Hey,” she said.

  “Holy shit,” I said, looking over her shoulder.

  “What?” she said.

  “This room. This is my old room!”

  It was: there was my single bed with the Superman bed sheets, my dresser with my Roger Clemens rookie card on top, my black and gold R.E.M. shirt lumped in the corner near the window. “That’s my desk!” I said. “Where I started writing! And holy shit, my old tube amp!”

  “You seriously lived here?”

  “For about ten years,” I said.

  “Maybe you know what this is, then,” Mal said, tossing me a small plastic box.

  I recognized it before I even caught it: it was a Tic-Tac box with a drawing of a number pad stuffed inside. “This was my pretend remote,” I said. “I haven’t seen this thing in twenty-five years. See the numbers?”

  “What’s the point of it, though? It doesn’t do anything.”

  “All of my friends had TVs with remotes in their room,” I said, “and I just had this black-and-white. So I made my own remote.”

  She shook her head.

  I opened up the dresser: There were my clothes—stone-washed jeans and high tube socks and Izod shirts—all of them reeking of my mother’s cigarettes.

  Mal sat down at my desk with the presentation packet. “Want to go over this?” she said.

  “Give me just a second.” I went over to my bookshelf and thumbed through the rows of tag sale paperbacks: old coughed copies of The Boy No One Could Hear, A Very Bad Smell, You Will Always Be Alone. “These books were my friends,” I said.

  Eventually, Mal stood up from my desk and announced that she was going out to see the city. I stayed behind; I spent the whole evening in that room, going through the old drawers of my life. I’d saved so much junk over the years: souvenirs from trips to New York City and D.C.; old floppy disks; every comic book and magazine I’d ever owned. I read old letters from girlfriends and pen pals, and remembered the friends I’d had and lost: a kid I’d met in D.C. who turned out to be a kleptomaniac; the girlfriend I’d had in Maine, whose father let us drink. Here was a book I’d made by stapling each dot-matrix-printed page into a composition notebook; here was the journal I’d kept during a semester in Europe. Inside that journal, I found a drawing of St. Paul’s cathedral. (God, if I could actually find that journal now. Not in one of my novels, I mean, but in real life. I’d give anything for it.) Those drawers seemed to hold everything. As I dug deeper I found sand from a beach in Nice; a still-living sunfish from Lake Congamond; my grandfather’s BB gun. I pulled them all out onto the carpet and reached my arm in farther.

  What was I looking for? It wasn’t just the past. I was looking for me—the me that had lived here in this house, in this life, and grown up to become the guy ██ fell in love with. I’d lost that person somewhere, traded him for a traveling word salesman, a writer of stories and nothing else. I think that was why I found the Tetherly when I did. If that hotel still held my past, I thought it might know my future, too.

  Mal came back around one in the morning, tipsy and smelling of sweat. She brushed her teeth, put on her pajamas, and hinted that she was tired. I was showing her a ribbon that I’d won at a swim meet when she clapped her hands and said, “OK Chris. Out.”

  Just then, though, I pulled an old yellowed rope bracelet from the back of the drawer. “God,” I said. “My mom would buy us these every year when we went to Cape Cod. I probably got this when I was ten or eleven—”

  “Chris? I have to get to sleep.” Mal pointed to the door. “Out. Right now.”

  I gathered up what I could—the Europe journal, the baseball card, a few letters, the sand—and took it back to the hospital room. When I opened the door my father stirred. “Maman?” he said.

  “It’s OK, Dad,” I said.

  I was up most of the night reading the letters and the journal. Nurses came in every hour to check on my father, and once, around four a.m., they wheeled him out for tests. In the morning, I opened my eyes to find my mother circa 1981 sitting by my father’s bed and reading a thick hardcover library book.

  “Mom?” I said.

  She looked over at me, smiled, and continued reading.

  “██ and I are getting divorced,” I said.

  She didn’t respond—it was, true to my childhood, as if I’d said nothing at all.

  “She’s not sure she loves me anymore,” I said.

  My mother flipped the page in her book.

  When I met Mal downstairs the next morning, she snorted and said, “Christ—you look awful. Didn’t you sleep?”

  We drove a rental car to the fiction factory—Pittsburgh Fiction—where we were supposed to meet with the acquisitions guy, Roland Ferris, and present him with the most robust, expensive package of adjectives sold by my company, Descriptor, Inc. A one-year lease on these adjectives would pay out upwards of a million dollars—that was the whole reason for this junket.

  But when I shook Ferris’s hand, I saw clouds in his eyes and I could tell that something was wrong. He led us into a meeting room and we began our pitch. We’d actually taken some of his factory’s products—excerpts from their novels Manatee and Alabama Mort—and revised them, just to illustrate how spry they’d read with our adjectives. Not five minutes in, though, Ferris held up his hands and said, “Let me stop you for a second here. This package is impressive, but the board held a meeting last week and they decided—” he took a breath, “—against description.”

  Mal and I looked at each other. “I’m sorry?” she said.

  “You’re staying with your current description package, you mean,” I said.

  Ferris shook his head. “Our new line of novels? No description, period.”

  I was totally thrown. “But how—”

  “The trustees think adjectives are—expendable. Unnecessary. ‘Useless bloat,’ one of them said.”

  Mal stood up. “Now wait a second,” she said. “Adjectives are not useless—”

  “Why didn’t anyone tell us this?” I said. “Before we came all this way!”

  “I was hoping I could change their minds! I thought maybe if they saw the new adjectives at work—”

  “Because readers and writers agree,” I said, gesturing toward Mal and then myself, “that this is one of the most exciting collections of adjectives in the modern description era.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ferris, “but I just can’t move the needle at these prices.”

  As the cab carried us back to our hotel, I called Cheryl on my cell. “What do you mean, no description?” she shouted.

  “That’s what Ferris said,” I told her.

  “You’re fucking with me,” she said.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “I mean, he told me they were restructuring, but nothing about this! How are they going to write a single scene?”

  “I know—it’s insane,” I said.

  Cheryl took a breath. “Let me just take a second, figure out what to do here.”

  The cab turned into the lot for the Tetherly. I was anxious to get back to the artifacts in my room.

  “Chris?” said Cheryl.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Listen. I’m going to change the itinerary, send you on—” I heard the clicking of keys. “—to Phoenix.”

  “Right from here?”

  “You’ll fly out today, meet with—”

  “Today,” I repeated.

  “There’s a flight that leaves this afternoon at—”

  “Any chance it can be tomorrow instead?” I said.

  “I need you to meet with the Bersons first thing tomorrow, see if we can’t move some of these adjectives after all.”r />
  My heart sank. “I’ll tell Mal,” I said.

  “Actually, I’m keeping her there to meet with our Pittsburgh distributor—they’ve got an office in Squirrel Hill. Tell her I’ll text her the deets.”

  “Oh,” Mal said when I told her. “Huh.” We walked into the hotel and rode the elevator up to the fifth floor. Back in my room, I found my father writhing in pain. I sat down in the chair next to him and adjusted his pillow. Then I sent a text to Cheryl: Any chance I could take a few days’ vacation?

  Now!? she replied. Please, C. Lets get thru this clusterfuck and then well find a time to give u a break. OK?

  I had less than half an hour to pack; I stuffed the journal and a few letters into my suitcase and left everything else behind. When I got down to the lobby, my mother circa 1993 was standing on a stepladder and fixing a light bulb. “Mom?”

  She looked down at me.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  “Welche?” she said.

  This mother, I realized, was another version altogether. “I’ll come back, OK?” I said.

  She stared at me blankly.

  I murdled past her and over to the front desk. A friend of mine from childhood—a kid named Del, who walked with a limp and always smelled like cats—was standing at one of the terminals. “Can I help you?” he said.

  “Is my father available, by any chance?” I asked.

  “Your—I’m sorry?” he said.

  “My dad?” I said. “He delivered my dinner last night, to room—”

  I will always love you

  “Let me see if I can find out who was working in the kitchen last night.” He typed some information into the computer, and then scrunched up his face. “I’m sorry—I don’t know who you’re referring to.”

  I had to get going if I was going to catch my flight. I took one last look around—there, in a dark corner, was my cassette shelf on the wall! The Jethro Tull tapes I never returned to the library!—and I lifted the handle of my suitcase and walked out through the glass doors.

  It wasn’t until later—on the plane, in fact, flying west over the middle pages—that I realized what had happened. That Mal wasn’t just any character, but one from my distant past. That name, Mal, lived way back in my mind; it was short for Malvina, the name of my father’s grandmother. “Mal” belonged there. But why didn’t I?

  I went on to live other lives: lives in Arizona, Anchorage, Buffalo, Stein, Montreal, Ann Arbor. I sold adjectives—newfangled adjectives, antique adjectives—all over the world. I made a lot of money.

  All the while, though, Mal remained in my past. Shortly after our stay at the Tetherly, she became Descriptor’s chief liaison to the Pittsburgh distributor. When the distributor bought a portion of the company, she relocated. And she stayed at the Tetherly so often during those transitional months that she became part of the place; everyone knew her there. She lived my life: She swam on the swim team and graduated from Coolidge High School; she worked at the Coolidge Summer Theater and studied in Norwich, England.

  Sometimes, late at night, I’d call Mal from the road. She wouldn’t usually answer, but one time she did. “Hello?” she said.

  “Hey.”

  “Oh, hey,” she said.

  “What’s happening there?”

  “Your brother’s watching television and eating cucumbers and salad dressing,” she said.

  “That’s what he ate every night for years,” I said.

  There was a moment of awkward silence. Then she said, “This life is still here for you, Chris. OK? Trust me—these stories aren’t going anywhere.”

  But that wasn’t true. Seven months later, Cheryl finally gave me a long-overdue vacation and I flew back to Pittsburgh. When I called the Tetherly, though, there weren’t any vacancies—not for the week of my vacation nor the week before or after. I decided to go there anyways to see if there might be a cancellation. This was right after my divorce, one of the loneliest and most difficult times I’ve known so far, and I needed the Tetherly—my friends and family, in whatever version they were available—more than ever.

  When I checked at the front desk, though, my grandmother read the screen and said, “I’m sorry, sir. We’re all booked.”

  “How about for tomorrow night?”

  “Sheesh,” she said, mock-wincing. “We don’t have a vacancy all this week.”

  I thanked her and sat down in the lobby; the chairs were the puffy corduroy recliners from my parents’ living room. I stayed there for about half an hour. At one point, our dead chihuahua came over, sniffed my foot—“Herman!” I said—growled at me and moved on. As I watched the people from my life brisk to and from the front desk, I started studying their patterns. Twice, my grandmother walked into a door right behind the desk. When the door opened, I caught a glimpse inside that back room: I saw a man with glasses—my old friend Neal! We took guitar lessons from the same teacher—looking at a computer monitor, and behind him, a giant illuminated picture of my father’s old orange leather coat—the one he let me borrow once for a high school dance.

  After about ten minutes, an influx of visitors—my friend Drew, who died on my nineteenth birthday; a woman I recognized but couldn’t place; the wife of the pastor of my church—all lined up to check in at the same time. While my grandmother and the bully scrambled to accommodate them, I leapt up from the chair, walked around the front desk, and tried the door to the back room. The knob turned; I slipped into the room and quietly closed the door behind me.

  Inside that room, four or five people—Neal, my father’s friend Murphy, others I didn’t recognize—sat at screens with their backs turned to me. Each wall, meanwhile, was covered with projections of images from my life—experiences and memories layered one over the other. There was the night I met ██; the green bicycle hat, covered with pins, that I wore when I was ten; my high school drama teacher. On the other wall I saw my ex-girlfriend Molly; the leather Eastman shoes I wore in the fifth grade; the moment when Melody and I were sitting in Coolidge Grinders and she asked me to marry her.

  I stood there silently for a minute or two, watching the images change. What was this? How did they get all this information?

  Next to me, I noticed now, was a food-service cart with a full loaf of bread—my grandmother’s bread, which would crumble when you picked it up—with a jar of cretons from my Aunt Jeannine’s kitchen table.

  I couldn’t help myself—I reached for a slice of bread. But it was fresh out of the oven, and too hot—I hissed and put it down. When I did, Neal turned around. His eyes went wide and he shouted “Hey!” The woman next to him picked up a phone. My grandmother stormed into the room and put a strong hand on my shoulder. “Sir,” she said. “You’re not supposed to be in here. Let’s go. Now.”

  “Please,” I said. “Tell me what all of this is supposed to be.”

  Then two security guards—my mother and father, dressed in blue uniforms—rushed in and took hold of my arms. “This is private property, sir, and you are trespassing,” said my father through gritted teeth. They pulled me out of the control room and through the lobby.

  “Mom,” I said, weeping. “Mommy.”

  My parents walked me past the elevator and the front desk and out through the front door. Then they shoved me onto the semi-circle driveway. When I turned around to protest, my mother unclipped a taser from her belt. “Vacate the premises immediately,” she said, “or we’ll restrain you and call the police.”

  “OK,” I said, “OK.” I stumbled over to my rental car by the side of the building. By then it was dark. When I sat down in the driver’s seat I could see, through the giant glass windows, the hotel’s dining room—which was identical, of course, to the one in my parents’ house. Everyone in the hotel—my parents, my grandparents, the bully, my pastor, my ex-wife and ex-girlfriends—was sitting down around a giant table that held endless plates of food: turkeys and hams and roasts and salads and cheeses and breads and cakes and pies. Mal was there, too—she saw me
through the glass and waved at me contritely. To her right, my father said something to my brother, and my brother threw his head back and laughed. What was so funny? I’d never know.

  That place. Those people. I sat there for a minute or two watching them. Then I drove out of my life and I never went back.

  Halfway through the divorce proceedings we heard a noise outside—marching, shouting, clapping—and we ran to the window to investigate. People lined the sidewalks—a father carried his son on his shoulders and a few elderly people sat in lawn chairs and pointed toward the intersection.

  My lawyer peered down the street. “Is it a protest?”

  Then we all saw what it was.

  “It’s a parade,” ██ said.

  The four of us went outside. Soon, the procession started passing by. It was led by our parents—██’s mother, my deceased father—who carried a banner that displayed my name and ██’s. It read, “Married: July 10, 2010. Divorced:,” and today’s date. My dead father shot me a look of disapproval as he marched by.

  They were followed by a marching band—fifteen or twenty musicians in red uniforms. “Who are these people?” I yelled to ██.

  She pointed to the bass drum, which read “The Lonely Morning Marching Band.”

  “The Lonely Morning Marching Band!” she shouted.

  Then ██’s grandfather came by in an antique Ford. The onlookers clapped for him. “Grandpa!” yelled ██. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Your mother’s idea!” he said.

  ██’s brother Leo and his wife followed in a horse ’n’ buggy—Leo gave me the finger before his wife pulled his arm down.

  The I Don’t Love You Players were next, followed by a series of floats depicting scenes from our marriage. The first showed a miniature, sagging version of our house made of chicken wire and cardboard. Then came the Full of Regret Orchestra and a float carrying a woman that looked like my new girlfriend, Ingrid. She stood outside a papier-mâché motel in lingerie and waved regally to the crowd. A guy across the street put his fingers to his mouth and whistled at her.

  Then the parade was over. As soon as the last float passed by the crowd dispersed. Our lawyers walked back inside and we turned to follow. I held the door open for ██ and she smiled coyly as she passed by. “We were more than just a bunch of floats, Chris,” she said.