Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Ray felt movement nearby, saw three men sitting a few feet away, listening intently. They must have arrived after him, but he hadn’t seen them come in.

  “We have the story of Martha, who stopped going into grocery stores because not once in six years had a clerk answered any of her questions.”

  A nodding to Ray’s immediate left. More late arrivals, but he hadn’t felt or heard them sit down.

  “And what are we to make of Lisa, a gorgeous woman from all accounts, who hasn’t been asked out on a date since she was sixteen?”

  A stirring in seats all around him, as if the air was charging with emotion.

  “These are active, living people, who through no fault of their own have found themselves sadly, spontaneously invisible, often at the very moment they needed to be seen the most. Missed by their children, ignored by their spouses, underappreciated in the arenas of commerce, I contend these are members of the most persecuted of minorities, in part because it is a minority whose existence has gone for the most part unperceived.”

  These remarks were greeted with thunderous applause. Ray glanced around: every pew, every seat was filled. He stared at some of the faces and saw nothing remarkable about any of them. Nondescript. Forgettable. The lady who’d led him here got up and headed briskly toward the door. He scrambled to follow her.

  He passed close to one of the dark overflow areas. The faces staring out at him were grey, with even greyer eyes. They filled every inch of space, a wallpaper of monotone swatches.

  When Ray got outside he discovered to his dismay that the woman was already more than a block ahead of him. Her shadow hinged like a stick insect as she made the corner.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey!” And ran after her.

  He followed her for several blocks, never making much progress. He shouted and screamed until his lungs were on fire, at first thinking the local residents would be disturbed. Infuriated, they would call the police.

  No, he thought. No, they won’t.

  And so he shouted and screamed some more. He yelled at the top of his lungs. There were no words in what he was screaming, only fragmented syllables his anguished mouth abused.

  At the end of the street the sky had lightened, yellow rays spreading through lines of perspective, stringing the distant houses together with trails of fire. He could see the woman had stopped: a charred spot in his retina, the edges of his vision in flames.

  He arrived breathless and on the verge of fainting, awed by the observation that the sun had arrived with him. All around him the world lightened, then bleached, became day, and then became something beyond. White and borderless and a pain in his heart. He was amazed to find she was looking directly into his face.

  “You see me,” he whispered. Then, “But am I still alone?”

  It seemed as if he’d never seen pity until he’d seen it in her face. Looking at him, looking at him, she nodded sadly for him and everyone else waking up in solitary beds at the edge of nonexistence.

  And the world was silver. Then pewter as it cooled. He waited, and waited, then, finding enough shadow to make a road, he followed it to his house and the rest of his days there. Alone.

  And to any eyes that might pry on that place, occasionally, and only occasionally, visible.

  HEAD

  EXPLOSIONS

  Last week a downtown gallery paid twenty of us five hundred dollars each to sit quietly in chairs while high paying customers walked among us and stared. The customers weren’t supposed to touch, there was plenty of security on hand, but there are always a few idiots in any fair-sized crowd. While most are appalled or awed enough by the transformation in our appearance to keep a respectful distance, there are always a few who cannot resist putting their hands in, feeling the surfaces, interfering with the equipment. For us it can mean varying degrees of traumatic sensory confusion, an outrageous violation of our person. But I suspect it’s somehow worse for the curious few who dare.

  After the show was over I went back to my apartment to eat. I don’t eat in public anymore—I don’t know any of us who does. I cook entirely with a microwave and a blender. Sauces, juice blends, and smoothies mostly, but my appetite’s pretty much the way it’s always been—I crave good, solid food. Nothing else will fill me. So sometimes I chop a little cooked fish and meat up separately to add to the liquid diet.

  I was exhausted, but I still forced myself to examine each piece of meat, prodding with my finger, taking the measure of it, trying to decide if it was small enough. It’s a delicate balance—you want the pieces big enough that you feel as if you’re eating a filling amount, but small enough that you won’t choke on them. Few of us have teeth, you see. I have one, displaced to the outside of the base of what’s left of my neck, like a broach or a miniature Christmas tree ornament. So every bite is like teasing asphyxiation.

  Our bodies have compensated by creating a great deal more stomach acid. Every one of us suffers from nightmarish heartburn, which requires a constant wiping down of tender exterior anatomy to avoid deterioration.

  When I finally got a mixture that seemed the proper balance between risk and reward, I pulled back the sore flap of skin covering the stubby opening that leads down into my stomach and poured it in, splashing it into the fleshy filaments surrounding my throat stalk. I hate that—they’re so difficult to clean.

  There are rumours that a few of us have videotaped our meals and sold the tapes. Apparently for some there is a sexual appeal in this act. We live in interesting times, but I’m willing to concede that perhaps we’ve always lived in interesting times.

  I wouldn’t care to watch such a thing—I’ve finally permitted myself to look into a mirror but I certainly wouldn’t eat near one. I’m not going to judge those who want to make money off their own eating habits, however. Most of us have trouble holding down a regular job.

  All over the country the terrorists are blowing up heads. The explosive is a liquid or gel, consumed in the form of a fast food drink, a popular brand of shampoo rubbed into the hair, a flavoured toothpaste brushed across the teeth. The fuse, according to our government, is a “dangerous thought.”

  My memories of the moment of my own transformation are somewhat vague, full of colour and thunder, and I suspect mostly fantasized. My life before this was no one’s fantasy. I loved my wife and children, but without much passion. I thought work was okay, a way to put food on the table, but a thousand other jobs would have served just as well. I can’t honestly say I was interested much in anything, and I can’t honestly say that realizing that bothered me in the least. But I was content. I was content just to breathe and taste and see whatever it was that passed before my eyes.

  I believe it was a Saturday. As I did most weekends I watched TV a few hours, took a nap, then stared out our bedroom window at the sprinkler, and the way the falling beads of water made the car on the other side break apart into distorted little bits of shape and colour. I had some conversation with my wife and daughter. I don’t believe my son and I spoke, but I’m not sure. It was an ordinary day, just like the days of most people in the world. Most people have ordinary days I think, nothing remotely special. Later I went into the bathroom to wash. I have always liked washing my hair—call me strange, I don’t care. Then I was shampooing my hair from a new container I’d bought that very afternoon on sale. The day-glow-orange containers filled several shelves. Additional shampoo was available in the dumps at the front of the store. Pictures of happy-go-lucky shampooers hung from the ceiling. I bought four bottles and rushed home, unaccountably eager to clean my hair.

  I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror. I remember that image of myself: smiling goofily. I lathered my head vigourously, with what seemed manic desperation, my hands a blur. The flash was so bright—I remember thinking it was the late afternoon sun through the window, reflecting. But such a memory is impossible, I think now, for my head was already gone. I have no memory of having had dangerous thoughts. I’m not sure I could even identify a dan
gerous thought from among all its less dangerous brethren.

  The government will not reveal the brand names of the products involved, fearing the effect such information would have on the economy. (Actually, the exact expression the President used in his speech was “our economy,” but how many people truly feel that kind of ownership? Instead they have bills to pay, families with needs, and paycheques which will not stretch. Even the names of the retail outlets which sold the booby-trapped liquids and gels are suppressed.

  As a result, very few brush their teeth or shampoo their hair anymore, and they consume their fast food meals (for to give them up entirely would be out of the question) without anything to wash them down. In consequence, approximately point-oh!-five percent of the population died last year choking on said meals. Most of those incidents occurred during lunchtime rush hour, drivers eating in their cars as they hurried back to work following the mandated truncation of lunch breaks passed during the last session of Congress. Another point-oh!-oh!-eight percent of the populace died in traffic accidents caused by drivers in the throes of asphyxiation. The government is looking into the problem; corrective legislation is being contemplated.

  Personally, I do not drive anymore. My very presence in an automobile would be a distraction, a potential cause of more accidents. I try to imagine that I am lucky just to be alive.

  Among those whose heads have exploded, fatalities, in fact, are rare. And most of these have been due to the inevitable distractions—it is hard to drive one’s car safely, for example, when one’s head is in mid-explosion.

  The actual explosion of the head, while disturbing, shocking, and/or disruptive, is completely survivable when it’s a result of this kind of terrorism, as we now know.

  I allowed myself to watch an internet broadcast of one such incident. I don’t believe I could watch it again, but the one time was instructive, and it illuminated a great deal about my own situation. In this surveillance film a man in a department store dressing room is brushing his hair. He takes a small bottle out of a shopping bag, opens it, and proceeds to rub the yellow cream into his hair. Suddenly a bright white light fills the screen. When the image clears, the man is holding his arms up to the sides of his head, fluttering his hands. There is no head, really. The parts of his head, at least we must assume these are parts of his head, are floating in the air above his slightly burnt, truncated neck, apparently in a kind of stasis imposed by agents and methods unknown. After a couple of minutes the bits of floating head and bone, flesh, blood, and grey matter settle down, arranging themselves into an aesthetically-pleasing object resembling an exotic plant or abstract sculpture. After this event, we are told, the brain and sensory apparati, although profoundly altered, continue to function, albeit differently.

  Personally, I have no useful recollection of the moment of explosion. It doesn’t really hurt. As I said before: colour and thunder. This has led to a certain amount of paranoia which I’ve done my best to control. How do I know there was an explosion at all? Perhaps I was drugged, anesthetized, taken to some clinic where highly experimental plastic surgery was performed. If there was an explosion, even with their advanced methods of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again (incorrectly, of course, but I suppose that was their intent), why didn’t I die from the shock? None of the doctors the media have interviewed has provided a decent answer. There are too many unanswered questions.

  But then, there have always been too many unanswered questions.

  And do my “apparati” function much the same as they did before? I’m not sure exactly how to answer this. I forget people’s names, but I was starting to forget people’s names before the incident. It’s a natural part of aging, I’m told. I’ve retained most, although certainly not all, of my previous memories. But I’m hardly the same person. I certainly live a different life. Ask my wife and children, if you can find them. I live in a small apartment, I work only sporadically, I have no friends. It’s all been blown away.

  As one commentator has explained, “If you sculpt chicken-flavoured cat food into the shape of a rose, it’s still chicken-flavoured cat food.”

  There are huge problems with such a metaphor. I would hope that for most of us, our brains function entirely differently than cat food.

  On the other hand, the rose metaphor is an apt one in that the brains in these redesigns-by-explosion appear to be peeled away into a variety of layers and swirls reminiscent of petals, sepals, stamen, stigma, and filaments. And each flower is different. Each “head” is of its own, individual species. They resemble no earthly flower, but perhaps flowers native to some other world.

  I had not seen many of my fellow victims together in one place, just two or three at the specialist’s office many of us now go to. Of course I’ve seen them on the news, but never a great many of us together. I never even thought much about it—it was a natural reluctance. Then I walked into that gallery last week, and encountered nineteen of my own. I have to say, it was one of the few times I’ve ever felt a part of anything.

  I was late. The others were already seated in chairs arranged throughout the gallery. But I took the time to go around and shake the hand of each one. Although I could not tell where most of them were looking, I got the distinct impression they were paying as much attention to me as I was to them.

  They tended to wear unisex clothing, making it difficult in some cases to tell the women from the men. Did this experience make you feel sexless somehow? I suddenly realized that I hadn’t thought about sex, at least in any personal way, since my change. And I was wearing a baggy shirt and pants, so loose in fact they might have been used to drape furniture.

  In several of them the eyes remained intact, but with altered attachment. One eye might perch on a stalk, while its partner lurked on the underside of a faux leaf. For the majority (myself included) no eyes were evident at all. But we aren’t blind; our visual functionality has shifted to other elements of the reconfigured head. I have no actual eyes that I can see in the mirror, yet sight does occur. As far as I can tell, vision comes from six or eight overlapping points of view, and somehow this is coordinated into more or less a single image in the perceptual frame.

  More or less. Sometimes I see behind people. Sometimes I see the secondary facial expressions they attempt to hide, which contradict the emotions they’re presented to the world.

  But no one tells the truth, not completely. Hasn’t that always been so?

  I’m told that the hearing functionality in these cases shifts from the ears to any available orifice. In the weeks following my change I tried to pinpoint the sense of hearing in my own equipment, playing music then touching, holding, covering various bits to see if there was some diminution of sound. My findings were inconclusive—the point of perception appeared to change each time, as if running away from my attempts to suppress it. Finally last week I was carefully washing down the various stems, shafts, flutings, and fibres now making up my countenance—a toilet I must do almost daily—when my forefinger strayed upon a series of tiny flute-like holes along the central shaft rising out of one side of what used to be my esophagus. As I closed each one the ambient sounds of my apartment diminished a little more, until with my fingers splayed all along the shaft the voice of the world silenced completely. I had found my new ears.

  Noses are apparently considered superfluous by the terrorists and in all reported cases of head explosion the victims lose their sense of smell. I would miss the aroma of freshly baked Dutch apple pie if pie weren’t so difficult to eat.

  Mouths are recreated depending on the needs of the new configuration: sometimes they reside at the junction of two flapping “leaves,” sometimes they are placed at the centre of a neck stem, and sometimes they appear to take over every part of the exploded head, a voice issuing when all parts vibrate in unison to form a word.

  I would not care much for the latter. Something feels a bit too supernatural about its methodology. In my case the eating functionality and the vocal functionality hav
e separated. Nourishment is taken through that inarticulate, sewer-like ruin my throat has become. But I’ve traced my voice to a freshly sprouted bulb near the top of a tall, gently waving structure approximately where my right ear used to be.

  Sometimes the exploded heads are remarkably beautiful and sometimes the exploded heads resemble, as would be expected, exploded heads. The terrorists face the same problems as the aesthetic pioneers of any era—at first no one knows exactly how to interpret what it is they have produced. But over time theories evolve, academics in need of some specialized area for their vitae become self-appointed experts, a few books and papers are written, a conference is called, and a new movement is born.

  The phone is ringing again. Although I have no more friends and no more family the calls pour in every day. The idea of holding that plastic appliance up to my delicate new parts fills me with revulsion. I walk to the phone and rip the cord out of the wall, tossing the phone itself behind the couch. If it isn’t the government’s remarkably unhelpful doctors, it’s the hordes of desperate academics.

  There is no real comfort for the victims. I try not to let it get me down, but I wish they’d just leave us to the air and sunlight. I do appreciate the sunlight now, far beyond anything I felt

  before.

  As the darkness rises out of the streets I steel myself. I sense the vermin rise with the dark, the roaches and the rats still trying to figure out what they can do with me and my altered head. Am I now more edible? I do not wish to know.

  Our government has condemned these acts of terrorism, pledged to use troops as needed, and curtailed the rights of all its citizens for their own protection.

  I see that one of my kind is on the television screen. I keep the television on all the time now, not because I’m anxious about the terrorists (what more could they do to me?), but for moments like this, when one of us appears before the cameras. I’m amused by the way the networks have placed their microphones, hanging at all angles around him? her? I turn up the volume.