BUCKET
(Used as the basis for a film project in P-berg, Berlin. It was never completed due to a road accident during filming.)
He had read that a German scientist was performing head transplants on monkeys with 'some success' and planned to have a go on human volunteers in the next year. He thought about this, and a number of other things, until he was hooked. It took him a further minute to decide which way around things ought to be: then went to the kitchen to fetch the fridge. Back in his room he disconnected the pipes and wires which linked the motor to the freezer compartment. He then fed the freezer elements with make-shift extensions into a tin bucket which he had emptied of coals and filled with water. He turned off the heating and put on all his winter clothing but for two hats, before opening every window to the chill morning and telephoning for an ambulance. He kneeled in front of the bucket and, after a moment of reflection, put his head into it.
It took far longer than he had calculated before his head and the bucket became one frozen mass. Still, all he had to do now was bide the time until the ambulance medics arrived.
He was a little surprised to be conscious at this stage. But he decided that it wouldn't be a bad thing at all to be able to follow events and let the doctors know, by writing notes, just what he expected of them. His back ached terribly so he sat up erect. The movement severed the frozen, now brittle, cables from the bucket in a little burst of gunfire - which he did not hear. He stretched his limbs and jiggled his bones in an effort to get comfortable, which was impossible, so he put on some reggae. The volume he turned up fully until he imagined he could hear it; then, feeling chill, he trundled to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. Unable to find the milk, he slapped the bucket where his forehead might have been and attempted to say - without success - but I cannot drink! In a pondering mood he wandered about the apartment until he crashed into the rocking-chair, upon which he heavily sat. Having lost all sense of time, he was now convinced that the ambulance was very late. He tried to remember whether the address he had given had been precise enough, but the usual straightforwardness of his mind had apparently come under seige from a case of 'the bends'. Clearly there was nothing further to do other than attempt to relax and patiently wait. Meditation he considered the key, so he moved to the carpet, where he struck the immortal pose.
With immeasurable time on his hands to think, he did indeed re-think his plan. He had actually hoped to keep hold of his head, if at all possible, and lose the body which had only ever been an alarming hindrance to him. Eventually deciding (under the influence of a crushing migraine) that it made better sense the other way around, he set out to lose the head completely, bucket and all.
Being American, he knew where the gun was kept. When he finally found it he emptied two whole cartridges into the bucket. The bullets didn't even reach his ear. Drastic tactics were now required. He went to the balcony and dropped from it, head first onto the sidewalk, cracking the pavement but not his skull. He dizzily found his feet and followed them instinctively to the High Street, where he knelt, placing his bucket in the first tram rail which tripped him over. He soon felt rather than heard the tram approaching, but never knew the satisfaction of impact. This is because the driver of the tram could see very well in the broad daylight and halted some twenty yards short of the target. The driver telephoned for the police, who arrived and in turn called for an ambulance. The ambulance arrived within two and three quarter minutes, by which time a large crowd of shoppers and a radio news crew had gathered. The patient was firmly loaded into the back, where he fussed and groped about, signaling for paper and something to write with. He wished to explain that his brain had become extremely overheated, notwithstanding the ice, and that he had suddenly grown deaf: and was very, very thirsty. After an intolerable, seemingly endless journey, he at last received relief when he was pricked in the bottom with a hammer-like needle and thoroughly sedated. Indeed, he slept a careless sleep, drifting into it for the first time in an age with his brain in harmony with itself, its weightless body, and with all the prettily coloured elements which decorated the universe.
He awoke fourteen months and nine days later. The migraine had almost passed. A bald doctor, three other doctors, sixteen students, five camera teams and a pregnant nurse stood around his bed in a formal semi-circle, smiling down at him. It was some time before he was able to move his eyeballs enough to survey the bodily parts spread out beneath him. These parts at once twitched and lounged, being strapped with unusual metallic bandages to the bed. He was then able to roll those eyeballs back up into his head and faintly gurgle a remark worthy of his old tongue. Though eight million old ladies blushed, the party on the whole appeared very well pleased. The pregnant nurse especially exhibited compassion, placing a beaker of cold water, with a slice of lemon and an ice cube, to his yet senseless lips. Each and every feature of his face down to his Adam's-apple - in fact especially his Adam's-apple - fizzed and jumped beneath barrages of pins-and-needles. Indeed, so did his brain, which shook within its skull as if it had been rudely awoken from a drunken night's slumber on an snow-blanketted park bench.
With a nod from a tall man in a brown suit, the friendly nurse loosened some straps. This was truly a merciful act. He was thus able - thank the Heavens - to scratch, using a rubbery black index finger, a terrific itch which emanated from deep within the hairs of an otherwise naked thigh.
The bucket suffered a nobler fate. Too crumpled and potted for further use as a bucket, it was packed off to Africa on a rubbish container as part of an historic convoy of aid. In fact, the rubbish container was the convoy's flagship, and the first to dock at its exotic destination. The bucket, tied with ribbons and filled with flowers, was the first item unloaded, amid song from a thousand shiny black throats. Together with surrendered weapons, it was ceremoniously melted down by limbless women and children to become medals of victory for the heroes of opposing guerrilla armies.
THE LAUGHING TORSO
They told him: "The civilised way to proceed is not to proceed; rather, to call a halt to the whole thing. The only victory is in surrender." They added: "The cure is to retire to the bed of your childhood, to remain there until the darkness comes, and later (finger's crossed and angels willing) the Special Light."
He asked about the Special Light and they said that he would know it. They said he should now remove his shoes, throw them out with the mouldy trash, and utterly relax for the last time. He should disconnect the telephone and all other electric devices except for the fridge. Close the windows, pull down the blinds, draw the curtains and let the animal loose, bolting the door for once and for all, behind it.
"Wash yourself," they advised before they drifted away, "then go to your bed."
Laying on my back in rushing darkness, naked between thin sheets and the Star Wars blanket, sweating cold and then hot, I stare at the fox head which is nailed to the wall above my own. His teeth are bared as mine are, but with other reason. His throat is white and smooth like mine, but mine meets a torso which, until now, has always been to my advantage. Now it simply sucks wet air, shunts slow blood, digests, expels, deflates. Its pores are wide and expel very well, as the sopping sheets do witness. An insect drinks acid through a vein in my arm. My fists are stoney and my eyes screwed inwards; they press with all the force of their visions upon my brain.
The guts are tight, the toes cramped: I am expelling myself from this body.
In total darkness I feel the Give. The pain dissolves into butterfly song; the pressure is released. It is over and I am gone.
They found him two days later and flattered the remains of his body with kind treatments, the likes of which it had never known. Airless and limp (the blood was gone), they lifted it easily with careful hands and set it upon a trolley. With numerous words of compassion, all foreign and far, they wheeled it through bright and bustling streets. The journey took an age, for scrutiny was acute and privacy stone dead; but at last the shadow of his being was placed upon a clean bed, beneath crisp clean sheets, in a room newly painted, high-ceilinged and strange. But familiar too. The windows tall and wide open to birdsong in Spring, foliage rustling in the breeze, children's cries, distinct, not distant; and music, endless music, endless music! Some days soothing, some days maddening...
They massaged his parts; all of them. They pumped them alive; all of them:
...pump! pump! pump! pump! pump..!
I walk, walk, walk upon this street again - where else should I walk? Mindful not to collide with its furnishings, I watch from a high place my naked feet, hear them slap, slap, slap, slap the tarmac: one, then the other - this cold-again tarmac.
Restored, channeled, condensed; I stop to cast a wiser glance. The sky is flat blue (what else should it be?); the clouds are nicer than before. I see through space, passed an eternity of suns, passed all my scattered company, my family, my loves; to the end of space. I find out there in a corner of heaven, the ultimate place: my room, with its bed, with its nets moving in the aftermath of the soon-forgotten storm; and there, the dear old fox. His grimace is tender, now that I look.
But before I falter, before I rest on that bench, I gauge the angle upon which I will always proceed, and I quicken, I quicken, I quicken my pace.
