The Voices in Our Heads Read online

  Not empty.

  I have jury-rigged the inside to keep cold for three days without electricity; I got the idea from some dude on the Internet who called it a bowl-within-a-bowl technique. Under the cloth there is a piece of canvas tied over like a huge duffel bag, sewn shut at the flaps with fishing line. I have packed sand in between the inner steel walls and the canvas, and the drenched top cloth literally pulls the heat out the container. The bowl-within-a-bowl guy claims that fruit normally rotted in two days would last three weeks in this makeshift fridge.

  I only need a night.

  I also have a bit of a safeguard, since cracking and peeling could present monumental setbacks. I have her surrounded by thirty Igloo ice-max cold bars, and I have oiled her so we don’t have that sticking phenomenon, like the little guy who tongues the frosty pole at school on a dare in that Christmas movie I somehow see bits and pieces of, yet never grant a full viewing even though I vow to each year.

  I move onto the apron, turn right, walk the lip, jump the edge, and make my way to the employee parking area. Moments later, I am thankful that the security camera doesn’t have sound, because the dock plate I left outside makes a sharp clanging when I drop it down between the dock bumpers and the rear side of the truck I just backed in. It’s dark inside my rig, and the sounds are pronounced because they are echoless. I undo the straps in the dark, feel my way to the back of her, and give a push. There is a scraping, sluggish progress, a moment when the wheels catch and then clatter over the plate, a slight decline, we pull right, I adjust, and I walk her back across the dock lip. At the corner, I lean down even with the rim of the box and use my weight so I don’t scuff the wall on the wide turn.

  I’m in.

  I pull down the bay door and shut the padlock. I bend down and push her past the receiving shack, past the dairy walk-in box with the soy and the non-fat, and the extra cases of two percent, and the frozen box where we keep the Turkey Hill, Breyer’s, Klondike Bars, and Blue Bunny. I have to squeeze a bit between a few stacks of milk crates and a rack roller filled with cardboard for the baler, and I push through the red swinging doors of the meat room. It’s cold and that’s good. It feels like work, like good work, like solid work, the type that grounds you. I put on a smock. I put on my goggles.

  It’s time to make a new doll.

  Stainless steel work tables and cutting boards five inches thick. Sharpeners and scales and the auto feed mixer/grinder, and the poultry cutter and the patty former and the packaging unit that’s always running out of plastic.

  And of course, there’s the industrial meat saw. I love the hulking, off-silver thing. Looks like something that came from a collector’s basement, and I love the nostalgia of it, and the way that every time I see it, that song in every grandmother’s favorite musical comes to mind: “Let’s start at the very beginning. A very fine place to start.” Yeah . . . that and an image of Dorothy tapping that dainty little red slipper on the point of that first twirl that becomes the yellow brick road.

  Industrial meat saw.

  To the eye of the amateur it could go in any metal shop and stand in as a stationary band saw. And while I certainly do appreciate the throwback look, the ripping blade scrolled onto it and the songs in my head, I am just as thankful for the floor beneath it, all smooth red brick with a drain twenty feet long down center, rectangular grates, seven-inch cork inlay surrounding it. After the work is done tonight, after I wipe my brow with a sterile cloth and soak the trade materials in my triple sink arrangement (clean, rinse, sanitize), after I fill the gun reservoir with concentrated industrial acid cleanser so strong it dissolves hair build-up in zoo animal cages, and after I blast the machines and blitz that smooth floor brick with the wall-mounted, gooseneck pressure sprayer, finally to squeegee the waste to the floor drains, I will have long removed any traces of DNA that might have been hanging around. Board of Health wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Meat saw.

  I adjust the upper guard to accept stock up to nine inches. Overkill, I admit. Her throat is barely six inches in diameter, poor skinny thing, but I wouldn’t want her to catch and snag. It is a real pain in the ass to have her by the waist and the hair and get stuck in this preliminary, crude pass. Once it bucked the blade and caught up on her cheek. Yes. Number three, my only miscarriage.

  I lean down and peel off the wet cloth. It smells like musk, wet canvas, Boy Scouts, camping. I get the bone shears and cut through the fishing line. Open the package.

  Her name is Melissa. Lucky number thirteen. I haul her out and she almost slips through my arms. I adjust and walk her over to the saw, King Lear carrying Cordelia.

  After I remove her head, I am going to eat her eyes. It is ritual. I don’t particularly enjoy it, but certain obligations must be fulfilled; windows to the soul preserved. Feels right, like a hard lesson. Like morals. For the removal of these precious orbs I am going to try using the three-and-a-quarter-inch boning blade tonight, even though it will be like surgery under a rock. The serrated spoon doesn’t really cut worth a damn, and it sucks to get the remains of the extra ocular muscles caught between your teeth with no chance to floss right away.

  Yeah, there’s a pop and burst, like a cherry tomato. No, it doesn’t taste like chicken. Yes, I am careful when I do this, because it’s really gross if it flies out of your mouth and you have to eat it off the floor.

  Now, with the preliminaries done, it is time for creation. It was a clean cut, no danglers, and the headpiece is on the table next to the cutting board. There is a thick pool of blood by the body that I am going to need to attend to, but not now. I arrange my cutting tools biggest to smallest, and in three groups, Breaking and Skinning, Lance and Fillet, and Carving and Slicing. I bring her head before me and move the damp hair off her lovely face. I tie it back in a ponytail for her, this long, loose, curly, redwood perm with gold sunset highlights. The cavities where her eyes were seated stare out in pure, childlike wonder. She has straight teeth. Sharp cheekbones, and featherings of pink blush to accent them. Beautiful.

  I reach for my first instruments and hold them over her for a moment, poised, ready, teetering on the brink of it. In my right hand I have the ten-inch breaking knife curved up like the weapon of some oily thief in a third-world desert marketplace, and in my left I hold the five-inch skinning blade, angled slightly, picking up gleam. A conductor ready to start his symphony. The painter standing ready with two brushes instead of just one.

  I lean in and set to work.

  And the colors are glorious.

  I attended the University of the Arts back in the seventies, and studied pointillism: small distinct dots applied in patterns that form images best seen from varied distances. Georges Seurat developed the technique in 1886, a branch-off of Impressionism, and it was quite popular until computer animation made it all rather obsolete. I suppose the most practical example of the thing nowadays is newspaper print, the dinosaur that can’t be killed, but what has been lost in modern artistic relevance has been revived through metaphor.

  We are too close up to our world nowadays to really “see” anything. Existence has become so ultimately accessible through virtual search engines that we have become a generation addicted to freeze-frames and short climaxes. We are egotistical self-hunters, obsessed with admiring the heads on the wall, our lives no more than the blur we ignore between texts, and Facebook postings, and shock-clips on YouTube. We have become background to our own theatrical presentations. Lifetime scrapbookers.

  Time for some distance. Some breath. Some perspective.

  Some awareness throughout the routine between poses.

  Some wow down in the trenches.

  There are gulls in a V formation, flying toward the promise of morning sun still hiding behind the horizon, the mountain tunnel, and the power station.

  If I was pulled over and the trailer was searched right now, the given officer would find a very dead girl named Melissa Baumgardener lying rigidly in my used cold box, her face rearranged
in what would seem random cuts, gouges, and ribbons, head clearly removed then sewn crudely back on, a kitchen broomstick shoved so far up her tight little ass he would be able to see the business end of it in the back of her throat if he took the time to force open her jaws.

  Actually, it is not a broomstick. It is thicker and about three feet longer: one of those window poles janitors at my local elementary school found in the basement and threw out last month. And the cuts, gouges, and ribbons, the lacerations and the gradations I could only get right by wheeling in a deli meat slicer and making five passes, the second set of eye craters, the backup nose hole and twin mouth-orifice I dug out of her left temple, cheek, and jawbone, all of that would seem the grisly work of a madman.

  But I am not interested in the view of the officer, nor the report of some criminal psychologist. I know very well what I am.

  I am an educated man who holds menial jobs like the rest of us caught up in this nightmare of an economy, a creator, a messenger aiming his craft at your transitions, the times between movie shorts, the dead minutes that are the real moments of your lives: the trips to the bathroom, the times you make breakfast and fill out the Post-it notes to stick on the fridge, the moments at work when you look at the clock, those stretches in the car when you drive between “meaningful” destinations.

  I have mastered pointillism, an art that can only be properly registered from a distance, and the cuts and gouges on Melissa’s face are anything but random.

  Today, I am going to use this small abandoned jobsite here on 95 a mile before Exit 6 and three miles after the last rest stop. It is a common jobsite, one that has a dozer, a pile of Ponderosa pine, a walk behind saw, and a slew of fifty-gallon drums ringed with reflective tape. I am going to park my rig as if I belong here, walk around the truck wearing my hard hat and safety vest like a veteran, haul out my masterpiece, and mount the end of the smooth stake I impaled her with into the flagpole base I stole from the ROTC storage garage back at school. Another Wizard of Oz moment, but it’s a haunted one, because Melissa isn’t a scarecrow with hay sticking out of her neck and a goofy smile cut through the burlap, but rather a blurry, bloody form under plastic.

  I untie the bottom. I look both ways the way my mother taught me to, and I see that the highway is momentarily clear. I reach up and unveil her.

  I don’t hesitate even for that last hungry, parting glance reserved for maestros and masterpieces. I put my head down, get back in my truck, and haul ass out of there. The sun is about to break over the horizon.

  According to the traffic patterns I studied, most vehicles frequent this stretch of road between 5:28 and 7:40 a.m. Early risers. Go-getters. My work will have left its mark long before this. I drive off at 4:55 a.m., and just as I round the curve that changes the sightline three hundred yards up, I look in my rearview and see headlights.

  I smile.

  My first customer!

  According to what I have heard on the news, there will be an average of two hundred witnesses before rush hour, and around a hundred and fifty more before the police can make it out to the crime scene and take her down. The latter observers will just see a horribly scarred victim hanging limp on a pole, yet they are not my concern. It is the former, the virgins, the ones who speed by before traffic comes to a standstill, the early birds listening to their favorite radio stations, caught in the soundtracks of their lives, not thinking, not living, not really looking at the road before them because it has been memorized and placed into some fuzzy, collective background, zoning into the comfortable fabric of their respective transitions.

  At a pass of fifty-five miles per hour, Melissa will offer a coy smile and mouth the words “Love you,” her image in the rearview a scarlet seductress fluttering off a series of winks, puckers, and kisses. At sixty-three miles per hour, she will crease her forehead, and then air-whisper the phrase “To arms!,” the receding image in the side-mirror, a crimson Indian princess, striped with war paint, shouting after you in a wide-mouthed cry of betrayal. And at anything over seventy-two, she becomes the red mask of terror, face rippling with G-forces, head slowly turning with you as you fly by, black eyes going from half-lidded semi-slumber to widened awareness, lips forming the words “mine forever,” the image dwindling in the glass, a petrified witch-queen laughing, lips raised up and curdling.

  Rest assured that each time I have left a doll, I have hit the next exit, circled back, and tried to film her on my cell phone in passing. No go. Thankfully, there is something about the craft that makes it camera shy. Even the steadiest hand yields nothing but muddy blurs of gore. Know that my art is pure, and that on some level religion is probably involved.

  My girls were fashioned for bald observation, to form ghosts in the mind, phantoms guaranteed to wander through your dreams and appear sporadically in the fabric of your everyday routine as empirical memory. The real stuff. No instant replay, no secondary sources. Transitions become important again, and there is something to talk about. The scrapbooking, at least for a moment, takes second fiddle to a reality played out in real time.

  Fear.

  Live.

  It is really a simple equation.

  A cluster of pigeons flaps into the air and then settles back down around the green monument modeled after some Age of Enlightenment guy with a powdered wig, stern eyes, flaring nostrils, and a long furling coat.

  There is a brook and a walking bridge. There is a war memorial surrounded by decorator spruces and a garden with a fountain. Across the park due north, a larger cobblestone avenue stretches uphill to the law library, the amphitheater, and the bell tower. To the right, the park is bordered by 5th Avenue, which features a number of red brick buildings making up the University Health Center and a line of light poles, each bearing the school flag. Beyond this, the freshman dorms rise up to the gray autumn sky, and to the left through thicker foliage stands the huge stone chapel covered in ivy. Behind this there is a gymnasium and parking complex, and beyond that stands the cluster of towers that makes up the business school. This is a huge urban university, population more than thirty thousand, and their football team actually played a bowl game on ESPN last year.

  It is my day off, and I am sitting on a park bench at the edge of the walkway. A male jogger goes by, and three janitors cross from the other direction, one of them pushing a gray cart with a bunch of spray bottles and an eighteen-inch floor broom sticking up out of the deep corner well. I see a security guard drive by on a ten-speed, and I note that like all the officers on foot I have observed, he wears a gray button-down jersey made by the same company that manufactures the three hanging in my closet at home. Of course, the circular shoulder patch is different, but I can buy a duplicate in their university bookstore’s sports and decal section, then simply sew “SECURITY” in silver stitching along the bottom curve below the icon. The bike rider is the thirty-first security guard that I’ve noticed on campus, and I walked it for a mere twenty minutes before sitting on this bench and watching the pigeons. Clearly the philosophy here is to flood the territory, create a uniformed presence, and it is likely that most don’t know one another, especially the ones working the different eight-hour shifts. Finding the seam in those shifts and walking the shadows as “one of them” will be child’s play, striding cap-brim down with casual fatigue beside my ten-speed, unmounted, as if my shift just recently ended. No questions, no worries.

  And beneath the brim of my cap I’ll be watching.

  This is a perfect hunting ground: lots of trees and alleys and side streets and lots, construction areas with dark walkways bordered with tarps and scaffolding, and subway tunnels connected by poorly lit entrance stairways. This is a teeming labyrinth of lecture halls, and cafeterias, and auditoriums, and apartments, all with easy access if you’re smart enough to know where to find the service entrances. It is as easy as walking your ten-speed, identifying the blind spots between cameras, choosing your mark, and learning her come-and-go.

  It is the top of the hour, and th
e park fills up with students. There is an Asian girl walking next to a tall nerdy guy with wild curly hair, a long neck, uneven horn-rimmed glasses, and spooned-out monkey ears. He is a disaster and she appears not to notice, nodding in quiet support of his exaggerated exclamations and yielding shy smiles when he clearly jokes poorly. She has straight black hair tied back with a thin green ribbon that matches her eye shadow, and she wears a black skirt. Slim hips. No backpack; she hugs her books in front of her chest. She has on black tights, and her legs are thin, toned, and strong. She walks like a dancer. They are five feet from me now, and he hits a home run, blurts something relatively clever, and she leans in toward him, she turns up her face, she surrenders a genuine smile that reaches her eyes, then the sun, the moon.

  I die a little inside and fall head over heels in love with the girl. I want to know her and comfort her, and find out her dreams and how she feels about her father. I want to caress her cheek with the back of my knuckle and hold her in front of a hearth fire.

  I want to make her immortal.

  Often when I am in Target looking for cheap sweaters, or on the third floor of Macy’s checking out coffeemakers, or at Staples trying to find the right printer cartridge, people stop me and ask if I work there. I smile and gently admit I do not. Then they forget me. I am someone and I am everyone. I am the clerk at the service desk, the guy in the blue jumpsuit checking under the hood, the one who cuts your spare key at the hardware store, the dude stocking shelves at Home Depot. You give me access to the pipes down the basement and always let me in to read the water meter. I run your credit card at the rental place, check your coat in the lobby, and bring up room service.