Noggin

by John Corey Whaley

  “You have no idea.”

  “I was there, you know.”

  “Where?”

  “Here, I mean.” She sat down in the chair by the window and looked over toward me. “When you were here before.”

  “You can say it,” I said. “Go on. You were here when they took my head off.”

  “Yes. You had this little smile. It was the most surprising thing. There we were, the entire staff, watching this surgery that none of us could believe was happening. And you were so young. It was different with the other ones. You were just so young that I held my breath the whole time.”

  “Did you think it would work? Did you really think it was even a possibility?”

  “I stayed,” she said, standing up. “Some of the others transferred out after that, after what we did to you.”

  “Why’d you stay?”

  “I needed to see it,” she said. “I didn’t know if it would work, but I knew if it did, then I had to be here for it, if I could.”

  “Ta-da.” I raised my new arms slowly into the air.

  “I know you’re sad. Confused and probably in shock. But you don’t get to come back for no reason.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You’ve just been handed the keys to the kingdom, Travis. Don’t waste a second of it feeling sorry for yourself.”

  The next day I asked to see the nurse again, and they told me she’d quit a few weeks before, that she’d resigned and moved away somewhere. Then I wondered if I’d just dreamed the whole thing up. They say you can only dream about people you’ve seen—either in real life or on television—that we don’t have the power to create new faces in our minds, but that we recycle the thousands and thousands of faces subconsciously stored in our memories. So maybe I’d seen her five years before, in that operating room, just as they’d put me under. Maybe I’d seen her and seen her kindness, and that was all my brain had needed from her. Maybe I was remembering her now to bridge the gap. Maybe the past me and present me could find a way to coexist, keys to the kingdom in hand.

  • • •

  Kansas City looked pretty much the same overall, save for these strange electronic billboards all over and a new gigantic building downtown that looked like two side-by-side shiny metallic spaceships half submerged into the earth and slanted upward.

  “Kaufman Center for the Performing Arts,” Dad explained on our drive home from the airport. “They have concerts, plays, you know, that sort of thing.”

  “It looks so strange there.”

  “A few people got all in an uproar about it looking so modern, but they eventually settled down.”

  “It looks like it came from outer space.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It is pretty alien, I guess. But I love it. I think it’s interesting.”

  Our house was the same in all the obvious ways, same curtains in the living room, same couch, same dining table, though it had a new centerpiece. The television was much larger and flatter than the one I remembered, no doubt something my dad had waited in a ridiculously long line for on some Thanksgiving weekend since I’d left. My first thought upon seeing it was the hope that maybe they’d put the old, still rather large TV in my bedroom.

  I couldn’t help noticing how walking up the stairs felt different. All the same family photos still hung on the wall, ascending up to the top. But it used to be that I couldn’t see my whole face in the frames. They were just high enough so I’d see the top of my head. Now, with Jeremy Pratt’s body holding me up, I was taller and I could see all the way down to the scar on my neck in every single reflection. It’d been a while since I’d taken this walk. I’d been carried up a few times after I got sick, until they decided that moving me down to the guest room made more sense, right around the time we all concluded that this thing wasn’t going to go away. The hallway bathroom was terribly white and shiny clean, like it had always been, but with new towels and an automatic hand soap dispenser by the sink. I immediately stopped to use it, my parents looking on from the doorway.

  “Is this a common thing now?” I asked, pulling my hand back and then placing it underneath again, and then doing that again until green soap was almost pouring over the sides, completely covering my entire palm.

  “It’s catching on,” Mom said. “It’s better for germs, I think.”

  “I can get behind that,” I said, rinsing off my hands and wondering if this was it. Was this the furthest we’d come in five years? Where were the jetpacks? The hoverboards? If they could bring me back from the dead, why wasn’t a robot greeting me at every door and asking what I needed?

  Then we got to my bedroom and nothing was the same. I should say that the old TV from the living room was there, but nothing else looked familiar at all. There was a bed I’d never slept in, there was a dresser that hadn’t held my clothes, and there was a desk where I’d never done my homework. Even the walls were different, not the green-and-white-and-maroon plaid wallpaper that had always made my friends so jealous. No, this was a light gray–colored IKEA nightmare, and I was expected to live with it.

  “What happened?” I was barely able to ask.

  “Travis, it’s been so long,” Mom said.

  “Did you throw everything away?”

  “It was just too hard to look at it every day. You understand?”

  “We’ll go shopping this week,” Dad said. “We’ll get you whatever you want to make it feel like home again. Okay?”

  “I’m so sorry, Travis.” Mom turned to walk down the hallway and into their bedroom, closing the door.

  “Sorry,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “This is weird for all of us,” Dad said. “So weird but so amazing, too. She’s just sensitive. I know you haven’t forgotten that.” He chuckled a bit.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “The room, I mean. I guess I understand.”

  “We can make this work, huh?” he asked, looking around us at the empty, unwelcoming space.

  “When did you guys know I was coming back?” I asked him.

  “About two weeks before they did it,” he said. “Didn’t have too much time to prepare.”

  “She gonna be okay?”

  “She’ll be fine,” he said. “Let’s get you some dinner. You hungry?”

  • • •

  The kitchen smelled the same as always, like clean clothes and vanilla with just a little touch of something else—citrus, maybe—like someone was always standing around the corner peeling an orange and doing laundry.

  “Eggs okay?” Dad opened the fridge.

  “Sure. No cheese, though, please.”

  “I remember.”

  My dad’s hair had started to gray on the sides and around his temples, but his face didn’t look all that much older. He wore new glasses, black plastic frames, that looked surprisingly modern for him, I thought. I was taller than him now too, which was weird. Still is weird.

  “How’s work?”

  “Good. You wouldn’t believe how much stuff has happened since you’ve been away.”

  My dad was an executive at the largest arcade chain in the country, Arnie’s Arcade, Inc. Which meant two things: 1) My dad had a job that is much cooler than all other dads’ and 2) I got to hang out at the arcade all the time, even on school nights. If you’ve never been to Arnie’s, then you’re missing out. The whole idea of Arnie’s is for kids to feel like they’ve stepped back into what Dad calls the “golden age” of video arcades. Each Arnie’s looks like it’s been there since before anyone inside the place was ever born. And they’re full of all these classic games that can’t be found in any other arcades in the country. My dad’s boss, Arnold “Arnie” Tedeski, won a bunch of video game competitions back in the ’80s. He was pretty famous, or so my dad tells me. Kyle and I practically lived at the Arnie’s in Springside up until I got sick.

  Ah, Springside. I should tell you about Springside. Springside is a neighborhood in the Country Club District of Kansas City. This district is the largest contiguous pl
anned community in the United States, and if you’re black or Jewish, you weren’t allowed to live there until 1948. Also, you probably still don’t live there because you’re pissed off about it. Needless to say, there’s a lot of snobby white people in Springside. My mom refused to send me to private school not because we couldn’t afford it, but because she hated the one she’d attended as a child. It was fine, though. What my school lacked in snobbery and tacky striped ties, it more than made up for in people like Kyle and Cate. And neither of them would’ve ever survived in a place like Springside. But we’ve got shopping! Lots of shopping and parks and an Arnie’s Arcade right here in Whiteside. Sorry, Springside. Mostly, though, I spent my time with Kyle or Cate, and it didn’t really matter what neighborhood we were in or what any of the people there thought about anything or anyone.

  “Do you remember anything about being gone?” Dad slid a plate of scrambled eggs across the counter toward me.

  “Not a thing. I remember closing my eyes and I remember opening them. And now this.”

  “Your mother used to ask me if I thought you were dreaming.”

  My dad started to cry as soon as he’d gotten that last sentence out. He gripped the sides of the counter with both hands and held his head down, shaking it. It looked like he was about to apologize, you know, for showing emotion, but he stopped himself and it was quiet for a while longer.

  “We’re so happy you’re home, Travis.”

  “Me too.”

  Before bed I walked up to my parents’ room and knocked on the door. My mom said to come in, and I found her lying there with puffy eyes. She’d already put on her pajamas, black ones with little red hearts all over. She sat up and smiled a little as I walked to the other side of the bed and sat down next to her.

  “Well, Sharon Coates.” I held an invisible microphone up in front of her. “Your only son’s just come back from the dead—what do you have to say?”

  She paused, looked over at me the way she used to in church when I’d try to make her laugh during the sermon, and smiled, shaking her head.

  “Go on, Sharon. Tell us what you’re thinking about.”

  “I’m thinking about how I must be the only mother in the world who has ever gotten to have this conversation.”

  “Maybe Lawrence Ramsey’s mom did,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Mom said. “And what about you, Travis Coates? You’ve just been brought back to life, what are you thinking about?”

  “I’m thinking about how long it’s gonna take me to remember that everything’s so different. I can’t quite understand it yet, I guess.”

  She leaned over and hugged me, set her head down on my shoulder, and patted my back a little.

  “I think we’ll have to get used to a lot of things we don’t understand.”

  She was right about that one. I didn’t understand a damn thing that was going on. So how come it felt so familiar, every motion and breath and sound? How could it feel like nothing had changed at all when I wasn’t me from the neck down?

  CHAPTER THREE

  FROM THE NECK DOWN

  Healthy or sick, Jeremy Pratt’s body was better than mine. I knew this because the only thing separating me from him was a straight, pink line that circumnavigated my neck. There were no stitches, though—I was told this was a thing of the past. Connecting us together, Jeremy’s body and me, was a spinal cord, blood vessels, nerve endings, and this swollen scar right in the middle of my neck about halfway between my clavicle and my chin. In time it would fade to a dull, more permanent purple.

  This kid was an athlete, though—I can tell you that much. He did sit-ups and push-ups and other things that I suddenly felt pressured to try to do, just to maintain this impossible physique. But not just yet. I was still getting used to standing without help and to breathing without coughing up a lung. It was like this body was taking care of me until I was ready to take care of it. There was a six-pack, a real one, and arms that looked like real man arms, like they could actually lift something without too much effort, and a chest that was much more than the almost concave skin board I’d always known.

  That first night back at home, I stood in front of the mirror that now hung on the backside of my bedroom door and just stared at myself. My hair was mostly gone, but the rest of my face looked exactly the same. Green eyes, dimples, that one little brown mole on the top of my right cheek. It was sort of like my head had been photoshopped onto someone else. I took my shirt and jeans off, stood there in only a pair of boxer briefs, and looked over every inch of my new self.

  Just so you know: yeah, shit got weird. Imagine most of you is suddenly someone else, and this is the first moment of privacy you’ve gotten. The weirdest part, I guess, wasn’t seeing my new chest or stomach or legs. It wasn’t turning around to see that someone else’s ass was there below someone else’s back. And, surprisingly, it wasn’t the moment I dared to just go for it and take a good, long look at my new dick. Sure, it was weird, but it wasn’t disappointing at all, to be quite honest. The weirdest part, truly, was realizing I’d been doing all this undressing and examining and making sure the door was locked with hands that were different from my hands, with hands that had never touched Cate or knuckle-bumped with Kyle or opened my locker at school. These were Jeremy Pratt’s clever hands, and they’d fooled me into thinking they were mine.

  That night in bed I couldn’t stop staring at them. The palms, the fingernails, the knuckles and backsides. The skin tone was nearly the same as the rest of me, maybe a little more tan, but not so different that I thought anyone but me would notice. The nails were longer than I liked to keep mine, so I went into the bathroom and clipped them down to the skin, like the ones I’d seen every day of my life.

  “You’ll get used to it faster than you think, I bet,” Dad said the next morning at breakfast.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. And I didn’t. Again, I had someone else’s package.

  “You’re taller now, you know?” Mom said.

  “Taller than Dad,” I said, nodding his way. “It’s weird.”

  “Six foot one,” Mom said. “You always wanted to be six feet. Well, mission accomplished.”

  “There has to be a better way,” I said.

  “You made the news this morning,” Dad said.

  “Second miracle patient comes back to life!” Mom added, coming up behind me and squeezing my shoulders.

  “I saw.”

  I’d stayed up the whole night before, pretty much every night since I’d been back, flipping to different twenty-four-hour news channels to try to catch stories about me. They always said something about my return being a “miracle,” and every time I heard that word or saw it spelled out on the little scroll at the bottom of the screen, I had to close my eyes and breathe in deeply. I was back, yeah. And it was ridiculous and impossible all in one. I just wasn’t all that ready to call it a miracle.

  “School’s gonna be pretty weird,” I said.

  “There are lots of things that’ll make it pretty weird for a while,” Dad said. “But you’ll manage. I know you will.”

  “Has anyone called for me?”

  “Your grandmother. She wants to see you as soon as possible. Your aunt Cindy may drive her down next week.”

  “Great. Anyone else?”

  “You’ll have to give them some more time, Travis.”

  “Time. More time,” I said, a bit frustrated.

  “They’ll show up. Wait and see.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d been awake for nearly three weeks and hadn’t heard a single thing out of Cate or Kyle. Mom and Dad kept telling me to try to understand what it must be like for them, to just try to be patient. And that only got me thinking that maybe my parents were just faking their way through all of this, that they were actually freaking out inside, their brains quietly exploding. Maybe they’d been carefully coached by Dr. Saranson and his staff. Maybe they were told to be as calm and collected as possible, at all times, for fear that too much excitemen
t could throw me over the edge.

  But I had to talk to someone. Maybe it would have to be Lawrence Ramsey. He’d be the one person on earth who could relate to what I was feeling. We were two people unstuck in time, and as much as I wanted to forget what happened to me, I knew I’d need some help. It’s pretty sad when you feel like a complete stranger is the only person you can turn to.

  Sure, I was trying to be hopeful and not waste this opportunity like the nurse said or didn’t say that night at the hospital. But wasn’t I always going to be Travis, who died to these people? No matter what I did, wouldn’t they always remember the way they had to let me go? I guess it turns out you don’t have to be all that dead to be a dead guy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A DEAD GUY

  Before we had left Denver, Dr. Saranson had given me his card and told me to call him any time I needed anything. He had said this while firmly shaking my hand and looking me right in the eyes.

  “Travis,” he said, picking up the phone. “I’m so glad you called.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How are things going? You adjusting okay? Everything back to normal for you yet?”

  Was he kidding me with this? Did he really think anything would ever be even close to normal for me?

  “Things are okay, I guess.”

  “That bad, huh?” he asked, his tone changing from a higher-pitched fake professional to a “Let’s cut the shit” serious.

  “It’s just weird, you know. Everything’s pretty different.”

  “And everyone’s different too, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Did you ever hear from your friends?” he asked.

  “Not a word. It’s really hard to understand.”

  “I know it is, Travis. But if you can, try putting yourself in their shoes. They lost someone very close to them, and it took a long time to move past it, I’m sure. For you, it’s been a few weeks, but for them, it’s been a lifetime since seeing you, since hearing your voice.”

  “I guess I thought they’d be excited I was back,” I said.