They Had Goat Heads (4 page)

Alternate (Happy) Ending

The algae-eaters threaded through the skulls. They seemed to multiply before our eyes as they devoured crumbs of excrement . . .
   “I’m hungry,” said my daughter.
   We went home and grilled hamburgers. Big ones. I grilled them and then we sat on a blanket in the back yard and grinned deliriously at one another as we ate.

CAPE CRUSADE

A man wanted to be a caped crusader. He put on a cape, stuck out his chest, and called his alter ego “The Cape.” But the cape itched, especially around the collar. He adjusted the collar. He scratched his neck. Nothing worked. And so the cape became his arch nemesis. Like a dog chasing its tail, he pursued the cape, running in circles, trying to grasp its Fabric of Evil . . . He grew dizzy. He stumbled onto a bridge and fell over the railing.
   “The Cape!” said a man from below, pointing . . .

TURNS

They took turns using the scalpel. By dawn, they had successfully severed my feet from my ankles, my hands from my wrists. I stopped screaming. I started screaming again as they began to sew my hands to my ankles, my feet to my wrists with a crewel needle. As always, they took turns. When the operation was over, I cleared my throat, did a handstand, and gestured at the clock with my toes. They frowned at each other, then yawned and turned off the lights.

THE WOMB

A child’s mother wouldn’t allow him to crawl back into her womb. He cried an ocean of tears.
   “The world hurts,” the child had said.
   “I’m on my period,” the mother had replied.
   And so he began to cry. He cried for years, bobbing like a cork in the surf of his misery.
   Finally the mother rowed out to him in a boat. “My period’s over,” she explained. “But the answer is still no.”
   Somewhere a daydream possessed a hummingbird. Flying at top speed, it exploded onto a windowpane . . .

HENCE THE DRAMA

I was shopping for Hawaiian shirts in the clearance section when a clerk appeared with a red phone on a platter. A bird’s nest of bobby pins held her hair in place. I looked back and forth between the hair and the phone.
   The phone rang.
   “It is for you,” said the clerk in an eastern European accent.
   The ring was loud. Shoppers glanced in our direction. I wasn’t entirely sure the clerk was talking to me, even though she had addressed me squarely, even though she was looking right at me, holding the phone out to me, and I was looking at her, and looking at the phone, but still, I couldn’t be sure . . .
   She smiled. Long crow’s feet sprung to attention, redefining the arch of her cheeks. “It is for you,” she repeated.
   There was no cord.
   I hung up the shirt I had been inspecting and picked up the phone.
   “Hello?” said a voice. “Hello? Is this you?”
   “Who is this?” I said.
   “There’s no time for that,” the voice replied. “I’m just glad it’s you.”
   “Who are you?”
   “In five seconds you’re going to hang up the phone. Then something bad will happen.” Five seconds passed. “Ok, hang up the phone now.”
   I listened . . .
   The line went dead. I hung up the phone. The clerk thanked me and walked away, trying too hard to swing her hips.
   She came back as I was slipping into a shirt covered with bruised, wilted flowers. This time she wheeled out an old television set on a metal cart. She had let her hair down; it spilled over her shoulders in kinked tendrils. “This will happen now,” she said, turning a knob on the TV. I glanced over my shoulders to see if anybody was watching me. They weren’t.
   Nothing but silent peppersalt on the TV. I buttoned the shirt and waved my arms in circles to test its flexibility. Too tight. I unbuttoned it.
   The clerk eyeballed me. She had lost all of her color. I thought she might pass out.
   The peppersalt dissolved into a commercial and the sound came on. I couldn’t be sure what the commercial was attempting to sell. In it, a thin man in a white hospital uniform demonstrated how to yank a tooth out of a stranger’s mouth using household tongs. He spoke gibberish but somehow I knew what he meant. He stood on a busy street corner. Strangers passed by and at calculated intervals he tackled one and put him or her in a sleeper hold. After they passed out, he pried open their mouths and, as promised, yanked out a tooth, usually an incisor, but sometimes the front teeth, and once, amazingly, a molar. Blood surged from the resultant wounds and the strangers woke up screaming and ran away holding their mouths. The man stood, smoked a cigarette, gibbered at the camera. Then it happened all over again.
   The clerk turned the TV off after the sixth attack. “Mind you, he is an amateur dentist. But one can’t deny the virtue of his product.”
   I listened . . .
   “Violence happens every day,” she croaked in a forcibly possessed tone. “Nobody knows why. People live and die and are forgotten. Nobody cares. And yet people want answers. Hence the drama of human existence.”
   Ignoring her, I said, “Do you have this shirt in a larger size. The shoulders are constricting. The larges in this brand are like mediums, I think. Can you check on that for me?”
   “Let me check on that for you,” she said. Her tone was normal now. She took the shirt and draped it over the TV and wheeled it into the changing room.
   I spent twenty minutes looking at shoes. I needed a new pair of sandals. They had been arranged on a narrow set of shelves that rose to the ceiling of the store. I had to use a ladder to look at them all. Several pairs caught my attention, but whenever I reached for them, someone shook the ladder from below. It was a different person every time. Nobody looked familiar. I climbed down the ladder again and again to confront them, but I was far too slow, and by the time I reached the bottom, they were gone.
   I wandered up and down the aisles searching for the clerk. I couldn’t find her. I asked another clerk where she was. He asked me to describe her. I said she was a woman and that’s all I remembered. The clerk nodded and excused himself.
   Tentatively, I crept into the changing room.
   It was bright. I had to shield my eyes.
   I moved forward, hunched over, squinting, struggling to bring things into focus. I acclimatized slowly. I heard voices. Panicked voices. Breathing. A few cheers.
   The lights went out. The changing room fell silent.
   I listened . . .
   I moved forward . . . down a dark hallway, feeling the walls. They were cold, like ice, but not quite like ice . . .
   I passed through a door into a vast amphitheater.
   I could see well enough. There were at least 100 people sitting in the audience, including the glitterati in the balconies.
   A circle of light fell onto the empty stage.
   Nothing happened for awhile. Then an SUV rumbled onto the stage, spun out of control, and crashed into a support column. A man exploded through the windshield and tumbled, with a certain lumbering grace, onto one knee, arms outstretched, blood coursing from his gored forehead. He wore a disheveled brown suit and struck an eerie polyphonous high note. He paused, and struck another note. And another one, and another one. No microphone—his voice was powerful and carried across the amphitheater like rolling thunder. At first I thought the notes were letters, and I thought the letters might be spelling out my surname, but like so many things, I couldn’t be sure . . . I concluded that the notes didn’t mean or say anything; they merely went up and down and up and down with no apparent purpose or direction or
dénouement
 . . . In time the man passed out. He fell forward and his chest and face hit the floor of the stage with a crack of bones and wood. Nobody clapped. The circle of light expanded until the entire stage was in view and a movie screen descended from the ceiling, slowly and mechanically.
   An old 35 mm projector sputtered to life.
   There was an advertisement for coffee.
   There was an advertisement for lard.
   Then the main attraction: a pornographic film called
Makeshift
.
   The clerk stood awkwardly in an empty park, naked except for glossy black boots and gloves. Blonde wig. Her breasts heaved above a stomach of stretch marks. Birds chirped in the treetops. She looked into the camera with glazed eyes and her mouth half open. A man with an erection entered the scene. It was the amateur dentist. The hair on his chest and stomach was long and feathery and looked fake. He carried bloody household tongs. I listened. The clerk turned sideways, placed hands on knees and spread her legs. Concerned whispers from the audience. The amateur dentist positioned himself behind the clerk. He pinched the flesh of her thigh with the tongs. She bit her lip. He spanked her . . . and entered her. Clapping. I listened. The actors didn’t make any noises. Minimal facial contortions. The amateur dentist repeated the same mantra, sometimes in German, mostly in English, at calculated intervals:
   “Hence the drama . . . Hence the drama . . .
Foglich das Drama
 . . . Hence the drama . . . ”
   Stiff breeze. The leaves of autumn fell all around them. Beneath the movie screen, the singer bled to death, his rich substance expanding across the stage. I listened, I listened . . . Rupture of eardrums. The amateur dentist reached climax. The clerk grinned, thanked him. He pushed her aside. He threw himself on her, forced open her mouth and yanked out her teeth, one at a time. She screamed until her larynx burst. Then died. The amateur dentist stood and stared at the camera and finally walked off screen . . . Credits. The lights came on. The audience left the amphitheater. They ambled through the changing room and into the department store, exchanging polite comments and talking about clothes they might buy. Behind them, a teenager in a red striped shirt swept the aisles with a straw broom.

THE STORYTELLER

“Based on a True Story”

When he finished telling the story, he left my office.
   He came back, told me the same story, and left again.
   He came back again and told the story over, pausing to emphasize the importance of attention-grabbing introductions.
   He left.
   He came back a fourth time and told the story over, twice, back to back.
   He left. He came back.
   Halfway through the sixth elocution I said, “I think I’ve heard this story before.” He continued to the end as if there had been no interruption.
   He did a clumsy pirouette and reiterated the story.
   He left. He didn’t come back . . .
   I looked at my computer. New email. He had sent me the story as .doc, .rtf, .pdf, and .wpd documents. He had also embedded it in the body of the email. “I hope you enjoy this story,” read the subject box. I deleted it. My phone rang. I answered it.
   “I just sent you an email,” he said. “In case you didn’t receive it, I wanted to tell you something.” He told me the story.
   He hung up and sprinted to my office . . .
   “Hello?” I said into the phone. “Hello? Hello?”
   “Hello,” he said, standing in my doorway, and told me the story . . .
   I nodded.
   I made understanding faces.
   I smiled.
   I made surprised faces.
   I pushed out my lips.
   I nodded again.
    . . . He finished the story, turned to leave, came back and told the story, turned to leave, came back and told the story and told the story and told the story, turned to leave, and left.
   I looked at my desk.
   A hole formed in my office wall. A drill bit leapt through the hole. “Psst,” he said, then told me the story. Afterwards he slipped two small rolls of paper through the hole that, unfolded, revealed the story—one in shorthand, one in Sanskrit.
   I put a square of duct tape over the hole. I turned off my computer. I closed and locked my office door.
   There was a knock at the door.
   I didn’t say anything.
   There was another knock.
   I said, “Nobody’s in here.”
   He said, “But the sound of your voice indicates a source, i.e., voices don’t come from nowhere, or, in this case, nobody.”
   I agreed with him.
   “Open up,” he reminded me.
   I unlocked and opened the door.
   He told me the story. He was about to repeat the story when I said, “Yes, yes. It begins like this, then that happens, then it ends.”
   Confused, he told me the story. I fell asleep during the climax. He woke me up and asked if I needed him to repeat the climax.
   “I can tell you what happens in the climax,” I said, prompting him to repeat the climax. Then he backtracked and told the story from beginning to end. He shouted the words of the
dénouement
. I put in a pair of earplugs. He slapped me across the face and the earplugs flew out. I stood defiantly. He implored me to calm down and take a seat. He apologized.
   He told me the story.
   I told him my wife and daughter were expecting me at home.
   He told me the story.
   I told him I was hungry and had to go.
   He told me the story. He told me the story.
   I told him he had told me that very story, like, twenty-one times today, not including written accounts, and not to mention how many times he had told the story to me the day before, and the day before, and the day before . . .
   He replied, “At the end of Time, in the anus of Entropy, when the universe burns out and all the stars turn into black holes, the only thing left will be my story.”
   I told him I disagreed; other people told stories, too. I also wondered how his story might survive in the wake of human oblivion.
   He said it was my right to disagree. He said it was human nature to wonder about things. Then he said, “Now listen to this.” And told the story. And told it again. And again, and again. Over and over. And over again . . .
   Eventually he grew tired.
   His neck gave and his head tipped to one side, to the other side.
   His shoulders slouched.
   His voice cracked and got raspy.
   He fought the urge to fall to his knees.
   On his knees, he fought the urge to fall to his stomach.
   On his stomach, he whispered the story, with resolve at first, but his voice gradually petered out as his eyelids weakened, flickered, closed . . . He continued to mouth the story in silence for a few minutes before slipping into a deep, catatonic sleep, at which point the story may or may not have played out in his dreams, rerun after rerun, like a doorbell that goes on forever, like a curtain that perpetually rises and falls, daring the audience to set it on fire . . .
   Before leaving, I called my wife and told her about my day. “He kept telling me this story,” I said. And in the calmest voice she could muster, she replied, “I know that story, darling. We’re waiting for you.”