Because I’m guaranteed pure. I can’t commit the three most heinous crimes, what the law and the Bible consider the three most heinous crimes—murder, theft, adultery. Shit, I can’t even jerk off. No, that’s crap, the thought is nowhere near as bad as the deed. Figure it out.
I’m not saying that Samuel has committed any crime, big or small. Not yet. Never even played with himself unless he did it when I was sleeping. What I’m saying is that even if he doesn’t murder me (which he will), the potential to murder me or to commit any other crime is in him because he’s got a body to commit those crimes with.
The body is a weapon. Samuel, and everyone else, is carrying a weapon, or how I think of it, they’re carrying the seeds of crime.
Whereas I’m seedless. No potential, guaranteed pure. The goddamn Virgin Mary.
Give me a cigarette. What do you know about Zen Buddhists? I heard how they think that if you contemplate something long enough, some stupid, simple thing, it doesn’t matter what, but the stupider and simpler the better, if you just look at it and contemplate it, you eventually reach a state of holiness.
Say that’s true. Then it’s more proof that I’m the holiest son-of-a-bitch in the universe. Thirty-nine years I’ve been staring into his ear. I know every hair, every pore. Sure, I can twist my neck around, but straight ahead is facing his ear. I wake up, first thing I see is his ear. And there’s nothing stupider than an ear. Nothing as callous, either. An eye, a mouth, a nose, they do things—wink, pucker up, sneeze. They communicate. But an ear only listens. Takes it all in, gives nothing back.
I dream I’m living in his ear. I’m small. The whole world is his ear. There’s the tunnel into his head, but I steer clear of it.
My shoulder is suppurating, and what scabs there are, are swelling into lumps as big as plums. Healing nicely, the day nurse said.
Is she mad? I demanded to talk to the surgeon.
“We’ll see,” she said in that infuriatingly sunny voice with which nurses humiliate and punish.
Goddamn bitch. The words erupted like bile in my throat,
but I did not speak them. I clung for strength to my pain. There is nothing else. Imagine a molten spike forever screwing into your flesh. No relief, not even in sleep.
As if I have not suffered enough. All my life I strove to carry my exceptional burden with grace and even with gratitude that I was so chosen. When at last I cast it out, my fury was the fury of Jesus casting devils through Beelzebub. Why is God punishing me for my act of ascension? Ascend! the scriptures command us. Ascend to the realm of purity!
Were it not for the letters I receive from strangers all over the world, I don’t know how I would go on. Without exception the writers are sympathetic. They cannot understand the charge of manslaughter. A law student wrote, “It isn’t as if the law requires a precedent against which all future self-decapitations will be judged.” Many people have pointed out that it is the possession of a soul, not a brain, that defines the human being.
I have received seven offers to sell my life story. One of these came from a man who interviewed me years ago. He was a script doctor for
The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant,
a film that hurt me to the quick for its depiction of the host head as a fat, pathetic dimwit. At least it correctly portrayed the parasitic head as malevolent. I have not seen the other two-headed movies, but I have heard that the parasitic heads in all of them are likewise malevolent, and this has led me to wonder whether the filmmakers knew of my situation, or whether it is simply understood that any parasitic intelligence must be a devil.
It was certainly not our poor mother’s understanding. She called Simon the opposite, in fact—the angel on my shoulder, my guardian angel. I am sure that these endearments disturbed Simon as much as they did me. Toward the end, when she was hospitalized and of no further use to him, he told her, and I quote, to “cut the fucking crap.” Tormenting our mother. I’m writing that down on the list.
My hand shakes. God Almighty, the pain, even to move my
arm! The injections are no longer effective. I realize now that the nurses are drug addicts, injecting my veins with a sugar solution so that they can inject themselves with my morphine. That’s why they won’t let me speak to the surgeon, they’re afraid I will blow the whistle on them. Although telling the psychiatrist who was here yesterday has done precious little good. “Is that what you think?” he asked, implying that I suffer paranoid delusions. A court-appointed psychiatrist, intent on proving that I am insane.
“I sought to rid myself of a monstrosity,” I told him. “Surely you must applaud that. Surely there is no saner act.”
“But was Simon yours to get rid of?” he asked.
“Who else’s, if not mine?”
“Had he no right to existence?”
“Does evil have a right to existence?”
The psychiatrist’s eyes shone. He is young, excited by polemics. “Suppose I grant you that Simon was evil,” he said. “Suppose I grant you that he was yours to kill. Do you believe that by killing evil you rid yourself of evil? Is not the act of killing a thing, however evil that thing is, and however much it is yours alone, in itself evil?”
“No,” I said. I said it uncertainly, for although I have no doubts that killing an evil thing is imperative and good, I have serious doubts that it is possible. I cannot help but connect the agony in my shoulder with the remnants of his nature. Indeed, as the wound swells and foams like a witch’s brew, I find myself more and more persuaded that he is growing back. Not even God could destroy Lucifer, and physics informs us that nothing in the world is lost, no element or energy.
I’ve been thinking of saying to Samuel, You want to waste me, I’ll make it easy for you—hire a whore, sit her on my face and have her fuck me to death.
I give him a couple of more days, a week tops. He’s got the idea in his head, I’ve read it there. Now, it’s a question of provocation. The ball’s in my court.
There’s something else going on, though. He wants me out of the way, but at the same time he’s worried about not being this big stoic any more, this big fucking deal, the one and only two-headed man. He wastes me, and he turns into a regular one-headed Joe, and maybe she won’t be so interested in him then. Maybe, underneath, she’s just another freak groupie.
Sure, I’ve told you about her. Karen, his fiancée. Ugly as sin, dumb, pushing thirty and still a virgin. Always trying to get on my good side. Take a couple of days ago. She insists on buying me a book. “Okay,” I say. “Go to Core”—you know, that bookstore that sells porn—”and pick up a copy of
Hard on the Saddle.”
“Oh!” she squeals. “A western!”
Samuel knows what I’m up to, but he can’t get it across to her, that’s how dumb she is. So she runs right out and buys the book and comes back and starts reading out loud about jism and hot stiff pricks before she twigs.
Then she turns beet red, but fuck me if she doesn’t keep reading! And the whole time Samuel’s trying to get her to stop. And trying to hide the fact that he’s got the hard-on of his life.
We met her at Folios, that café that sells books. We never used to go out all that much, Samuel was afraid of what I’d say. But, still, we went out quite a bit, considering. He gets a righteous kick, having people witness his suffering. Since the old lady died, though, he’s been gagging me. It turns out that a gagged parasitic head still earns you a lot of sympathy, especially if you tell people that you have to control the head for its own good because it’s prone to fits.
That’s the line he used on Karen. Hooked her right in. Five minutes later he had her wanting to dedicate her life to him.
Christ, he really thinks she’ll be happy married to him. He
thinks that as long as he keeps me gagged, the two of them will be a happy, normal couple. Why the hell doesn’t he just fuck her once in a while and leave it at that? The poor dumb broad has no idea what she’s walking into.
Sure, I’ve warned her. The minute the gag is off, I say, “Hit the road.” She just smiles, thinks she can handle it. She hasn’t got a bad-looking mouth. You know Jill St. John’s mouth? Like that. Tongue-kiss me, I tell her. She pecks me on the cheek. I tell her to let me eat her pussy. She keeps on smiling. You’ve got to hand it to her.
I have fired my lawyer for incompetency and betrayal of trust. All along she intended for me to plead temporary insanity. “But we agreed,” she protested, as if the deception was mine, and such was my ensuing rage that I confess I rained invectives upon her.
I will act as my own defence counsel. I will confront my oppressors alone. Which is as it should be.
Where my strength comes from I cannot imagine. My prayers go unanswered, and the letters I now receive are either from hustlers or lunatics. My pain is past bearing. The wound has swollen up into one huge hideous boil, which everyone in this hospital pretends not to see, let alone be troubled by. Yesterday morning, at long last, the surgeon paid a visit.
“This is coming along fine,” he said. “You shouldn’t be feeling all that much discomfort.”
I was flabbergasted. “Idiot!” I cried. “Open your eyes!” And then I saw that he had the cold, evasive eyes of the drug-addicted nurses, and I understood that he was in cahoots with them.
“Prepare my papers,” I said. “I am going to check myself out.”
“I’m afraid you are under house arrest,” he said. “You leave here, you go straight into a cell.”
The price of purity is abandonment. When Simon was on my shoulder I had moments of longing to be like other men. But I am not like other men. Less than ever, now that I bear resemblance to other men, am I like other men. How can men judge me? How can there be a jury of my peers? I foresee flagrant injustice. In spite of which I have been working on my case—by force of will alone pulling myself out of the fires of agony to write notes and make telephone calls.
At first I was surprised to find my phone connected, but then I realized, of course! They want to eavesdrop! When I pick up the receiver, before I dial, I extend greetings to the interlopers. “Hello, voyeurs,” I say cordially. “Good afternoon, Satan’s cohorts.”
I try every hour to reach Karen, but she has bought herself an answering machine. “I will do my best to get back to you,” she promises in the voice of a soliciting whore. Obviously she has already filled the gap left by me.
To think I almost married her! It is clear to me now that what I took for saintly patience was depravity. I chose to believe that she suffered in silence Simon’s lewd remarks, whereas the truth is she welcomed them. Encouraged them! That is why she objected to him being gagged. I want nothing more to do with her, but unfortunately I must speak with her in order to prepare my defence.
Regardless of her version of the events of that night, I do not plan to exonerate myself on the basis that I was provoked by any particular action of Simon’s. Granted, I acted in rage, but the realization that I must get rid of him had been growing in me for months. My defence will simply be that he was, and always has been, a devil embedded in my flesh, that he was an incarnation of what the scriptures enjoin every man to expunge from his being. My defence will be that it was my right—as it is the right and obligation of every man—to expunge my own evil.
A defence, by the way, for which Karen might thank her lucky stars. If I was provoked by Simon, then surely Karen was his accessory. On the night in question she called my gagging of him cruel, she fled in tears. I was so distraught that I bought a bottle of whiskey and drank most of it, and as I drank, Simon managed to chew off his gag. He then proceeded to rave with unprecedented sadism, blaspheming everything I have ever held dear—our mother and Karen, certainly, but also every fond memory, every hope and dream. It was horrible, unearthly for its thoroughness and intimacy.
He must have known what I was about to do, yet he persisted. Even as I picked up the saw, even as I held it to his neck. God in heaven, even as the blood sprayed.
I crave whiskey for its sedative effect. I cannot believe that anyone has ever suffered more pain than this. Clearly this growth on my shoulder must be lanced. It is pulsing with poison. If no surgeon will attend to it, I will do the job myself.
We’re at a restaurant. It’s two years ago. I swear I see Miss St. John, just as she’s leaving. I tell the waitress, “Put a shot in that coffee, I thought I saw Jill.”
The waitress says no way. “Your brother’s reading the Bible,” is her excuse.
I’ve got two options. I decide on the cool one. The pressure above my left ear turns into burning while I wrap myself in mystery and dignity.
A dream comes back to me, the one about being a tree. Sap for blood. Limbs, so to speak. Nightmares about axes … tremors up and down my trunk. Autumn, on the other hand, doesn’t worry me. I’ve gone through enough seasons to know that the dead feeling is temporary.
If you enjoyed “The Two-Headed Man” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection
We So Seldom Look on Love
.
E-book:
9781443402484
Print:
9780006475231
B
ARBARA
G
OWDY
was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.
Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.
Her first book,
Through the Green Valley
(a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published
Falling Angels
to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection,
We So Seldom Look on Love,
was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into
Kissed,
a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich.
Falling Angels
was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.