Big Giant Floating Head

by Christopher Boucher

  “Yes,” I say.

  “And you have no misgivings about doing so?”

  “None,” I say.

  “Sign here,” he says.

  I sign.

  Then, before I even realize what’s happening, the claw of the Heart Attacker shoots out and snatches my heart from my chest. It doesn’t hurt, but I suddenly feel colder. Also, my vision gets a bit dimmer and my mind flattens. Meanwhile, the machine grinds and burps. Then it goes quiet.

  “What happens to the hearts?” I ask the Unloveable.

  “Oh, you’ll see,” he says, smirking. “Next!”

  I’m ushered through the warehouse, out the door, and onto a bus. I don’t see my house again—I trade it for a bunk bed in a colony of Unloveables, where I’m soon sent on my first assignment: recording testimony and stories from those who have lost their homes to recent fires in the Pacific Northwest. I’m flown out to the high desert where, one by one, the victims of the fires show me what they’ve lost. “This was my father’s home,” one woman tells me as we stand in the ruins. “Everything I had left of him was in there. His ashes, even.”

  “I am sorry,” I say, as instructed.

  “And, where did it go? Someone tell me where my house went.”

  “I apologize,” I say.

  She starts to cry.

  “Do not cry,” I suggest.

  One guy, in his early thirties, is in the midst of telling me about his missing dog when he looks down at the hole in my chest and says, “Does it hurt?”

  “What?”

  “When they take it out,” he says.

  I shake my head. “You don’t feel a thing,” I say. Which is true—I don’t.

  “Because no one loves me either,” he says.

  “No?” I say. “How about your parents?”

  He shakes his head. “Not even my girlfriend. Just Stewart, and I’m pretty sure he’s dead.”

  “Stewart?” I say.

  “My lhasa apso,” he says.

  “I have a brochure if you’d like one,” I say.

  “I would.”

  So I give him two brochures—the one they gave me, and another one called What Will Happen to My Heart?

  It’s a common misperception that Unloveables thoughtlessly discard their hearts. This couldn’t be further from the truth! In fact, one might say that each colony is powered by hearts. All extracted hearts are brought to the Heartgroves™, where they’re respectfully buried in the ground—and where their natural decomposition can fuel the soil with nutrients and new life.

  About the Heartgroves™

  The name says it all! The Heartgroves™ are dedicated farms that store Unloveables’ extracted, buried hearts. Unloveables take responsibility for the management and upkeep of these fields, including heart burials, heartree removal, and blood irrigation.

  All of which is true: each of us is required to work ten hours a week in the Heartgroves™. Most of the time I’m assigned to the Burial team, digging trenches in the blood-red ground, but once or twice I help pull down the heartrees—the trees with tiny hearts hanging from the branches that grow when the buried hearts pollinate. Then we all get back on the bus, drive back to our dorms, and scrub the blood off our shoes.

  As the weeks pass, I believe I’m making progress—I’m good at collecting testimony, it turns out, and I hardly ever think about being unloved anymore. Plus, my monthly checkups show an improvement in my scores: my loneliness drops to 44 and my sorrow to 51, while my compassion rockets to 62.

  One day that fall, though, Master Elvin holds a special meeting in the auditorium for all of the new recruits. It’s clear from his expression that he’s not pleased. “I look around here,” he says, standing at the edge of the stage, “and I don’t see proud, stable Unloveables. I see rookies—deluded, self-congratulatory, hardly unloveable at all. You think you’ve accomplished something, right? You’re living in the colony, working a steady job, helping others. You think you see the lie, am I right?”

  Some of the older Unloveables in the back chuckle.

  “But the truth is, you haven’t really done anything yet—not really. You’re a first-level Unloveable. Meaning, you’re only working at not being loved. Fine. But the true work here? Is not only to accept that you are not loved, but to realize that you don’t love anyone. That you never have. That you never will. How could you,” Master Elvin says, smiling wryly, “if love itself is a lie?”

  I feel an echo in my chest—the memory of a pang.

  Then Elvin studies his shoes, paces across the stage, and looks back up at the crowd. “Today, I’d like to talk to you about an advanced Unloveables’ practice called ‘Non-loving Kindness.’ Its essence is, you can be kind to someone without even liking them. Watch.” Then he calls on an Unloveable—it’s Garvey, I know him—and Garvey stands up in his chair. “How are you today, Garvey?” says Master Elvin.

  “Fine,” says Garvey.

  “Great, that’s really great,” says Master Elvin, smiling brightly. Then he turns to us. “See, I don’t really care at all how Garvey’s doing. I could give a shit. But does he know that?”

  “I do now,” says Garvey, and everyone laughs.

  I try to internalize this—to resist loving anything—but I’m not sure how to do it. So I go see Master Elvin during his office hours. “What you were talking about a few days ago,” I ask him, “Non-loving—”

  “Non-loving Kindness,” he says. “What about it?”

  “I want to know how to do that. Is it the same as hating everything, or…?”

  Master Elvin smiles. “Consider the premise of your question, Christopher. You don’t do it and get it done. Non-loving Kindness is a practice. It takes constant vigilance.” As he’s talking, I notice something: I can tell from the shape of his robe that there’s no hole in his chest. It must have closed—which I’ve heard can happen to the extremely devout. “For example,” he says, “what do you love about this room you’re in right now?”

  I look around his office. “Not anything, I don’t think.”

  “Do you love the idea of attention? Attention from me?”

  “Oh.” I think about that.

  “What about the idea of improvement—do you love that?”

  “That’s a good question,” I say.

  “Non-loving Kindness is like—like wearing a special pair of glasses. When you look through them, everything is different. The practice should inform every single moment of your life.”

  In the weeks that follow, I do my best to cultivate a Non-loving Kindness practice. When I’m promoted from Story Collector to Assistant Editor in the Office of Brochures soon afterward, for example, I try not to be too proud of myself—to love, or even like, myself. I make a few new friends at the Brochure Office—my editor, Koyalee; a designer named Stan—but I make sure they’re not good friends. If they try to strike up a conversation, I stifle it. When they invite me to eat lunch with them, I decline.

  Soon I am on the path to Non-loving Kindness, which is to say: I no longer regard anything as beautiful. Nothing is awful, though, either. Everything just is. The Heartgroves™, the checkups, the scrubbing of blood off of my shoes—it’s all basically the same unremarkable, unspecial, unloveable moment. In fact, I could use any word to describe it: “garden,” “rope,” “odyssey,” “driveway.” My friends are driveway. My dorm is driveway. Our brochures are driveway. Eventually the walls of my hearthole harden and the hole starts to reduce in size. I still miss my heart from time to time—“ghost pangs,” Master Elvin calls those—but by Thanksgiving my hearthole is a pinhole; it barely lets the light through.

  That winter, though, disaster strikes close to home when a terrible worrying plague hits western Massachusetts. People are struck, quite suddenly, by such crippling worries that they can’t leave their homes. The Unloveables mobilize and go door-to-door, trying to assuage the worries of anyone reporting sudden anxiety. I’m called out of the Brochure Office to help in the field—to go door-to-door in Bl
ix. Late in my third day of canvasing, I knock on a door and, to my complete surprise, my ex-wife ██ answers. “Chris?” she says.

  I search my list. All it shows is the last name: it’s █████. “██?” I say.

  She slams the door closed.

  “Wait!” I knock on the door. “I’m here to help, ██! Please. Just to help with the anxiety.”

  She opens the door and lets me in. Her house smells like urine. “Tell me about your anxiety, ██,” I say.

  “What are you doing here?” she says.

  “I’m an Unloveable,” I say, cheerfully. “My list says that someone named █████ lives here.”

  “That’s my husband, ███ █████,” she says, her face a dark sky. Then I can see her looking me over. “Is this my fault, Chris? Did you join this cult because of me?”

  “It’s not a cult, ██,” I say. “And it’s no one’s fault.”

  Her eyes start to shimmer. Then she says, “Remember the green house, Chris?”

  “Not really,” I say.

  “Where we’d sit out on the back deck? And remember that flat we lived in—the coffin?”

  “Sort of,” I admit.

  “What—” I can see her mind twisting. “What happens to those moments?”

  “We sold most of them,” I point out.

  “No, I mean, everything. Our lives. What do we do with it?”

  “My teacher says we turn it all into stories,” I say. “That helps us detach from it, move forward.”

  “███ is a good man,” she says. “But we fight. And we’re both so anxious.”

  As she’s talking, I feel something in my chest: a new, piercing chill. I know what it is; my hearthole is opening. I try to focus. “Everyone’s anxious right now, because of the plague,” I say.

  Liz shakes her head and starts to weep.

  “Where’s ███, ██?”

  “I said some awful things to him, and he got very upset and—I’m so stupid, stupid!” She slaps herself in the face. “He won’t answer his phone and no one has seen him. What if something happened to him?”

  My chest opens wider, then wider still. “It’s going to be OK.”

  “Nothing is OK,” she weeps. “Nothing is ever going to be OK.”

  I think, This is my wife, a person I once lived with. We traveled halfway across the world together. I loved her, I did—her, and my poor fiancée Melody, and the Lady with the Invisible Dog. I’d once loved my mother, and my father too. And ______. And Coolidge. At times, I’d even loved myself. And where did that love go? Did it die?

  If Master Elvin were here, he’d say that the love was a lie to begin with. But ██ and I had a life together. How could I not love my own life—every single driveway moment of it?

  Suddenly I stand up, embarrassed and panicked, and I stumble through ██’s living room, out the door and across the street. My chest is cold as ice.

  “Chris!” ██ says. But I don’t turn back—I start speed-walking down the street. I know in my hearthole that I’m having a relapse. My brain just thinks I still love ██, and _______, and myself. This will pass, I tell myself—it’ll pass.

  But soon I’m running. Then I see red clouds in the distance; I’m not far from the west side of the colony—from the Heartgroves™. I run toward them, and within minutes my feet are splurging through the red fields. Then, in the distance, I see workers digging holes for hearts. I jump over a trench and keep moving until I am stopped in my tracks by a line of heartrees. My hearthole suddenly feels as wide as my chest.

  “Hey! Unloveable!” shouts a foreman in the distance. He waves at me.

  I don’t respond. I stare at the tree—at the hearts hanging from the branches.

  “What are you doing, Unloveable?” shouts the foreman.

  Without thinking about it, I reach up and pluck a heart off the branch. I hold the heart in my hand. It’s heavy. It’s beating. Then I pull down the neck of my shirt and stuff the heart into my chest.

  Love is real.

  “Stop! Breach! Breach!” shouts the foreman.

  I pull another heart down, and then another; I stuff three hearts in my chest—four hearts, five. I can feel those hearts connecting to my veins and arteries, flooding my brain with light and filling my lungs with air. Finally, I can breathe. My brain is the sea. My thoughts are the stars. My legs are pistons. I turn and run back the way I came, toward the edge of the HeartGroves™ and the city beyond. The Unloveables run after me—a whole group of them now, shouting “Freeze!” and “Stop right there, Boucher!”—but I am new and free and I know they’ll never catch me.

  CHRISTOPHER BOUCHER is the author of the widely praised novels Golden Delicious and How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. He teaches literature and writing at Boston College, and is editor of the literary magazine Post Road. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

  Also by Christopher Boucher

  978-1-935554-63-9

  $15.00 U.S./$17.00 Can.

  This title is also available as an eBook

  mhpbooks.com

  Also by Christopher Boucher

  978-1-61219-510-0

  $16.95 U.S./$21.95 Can.

  This title is also available as an eBook

  mhpbooks.com