Headcheese, page 2
What keeps Lorrie from performing an auto-amputation? The gesture, which one could make a limited number of times, would be meaningless and not half so enjoyable, she feels sure, if executed alone, without a partner, without an audience.

On Tuesday, Lorrie drives to Chicago, her hours on the state’s dime, her mileage to be reimbursed. When she isn’t writing press releases she fills in as artifact courier, personally overseeing the packaging and shuttling of artifacts on loan from the home institution to her presidential museum. Normally the couriering is a contract lackey’s job, but state budget cuts mean more and more that the work load is high and the available hands scarce (another reason to keep her own!) and so full-time staff go in lieu as needed.
Lorrie’s assignment is to pick up an 1888 Harrison-Cleveland silk campaign flag from the Field Museum’s3 textile collection and see it safely back to Springfield by 5:00 PM. Given that the round trip takes 7 hours on a good day, she has just over an hour to meet with the Field’s Collections Manager, and scrounge food to eat in the car on the way back. What a day.
Lorrie sips her black coffee and checks her black eyeliner in the rearview mirror and sings Stevie Nicks songs all the way to the Windy City, just because she can.
2 An exhibition of real human specimens preserved through Plastination.
3 The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago.
On Tuesday, TRICE is in the Pentagon’s janitorial closet, the only room without video surveillance in the whole compound. He’s fucking a nurse against a shelving unit of bottles and toilet paper. Only she’s a zombie nurse. Only it’s Halloween and the face paint and ridiculous getup help disguise that she’s the First Lady, the wife of the fucking president of the United States. A wobbly bottle of Windex finally falls over with a thud. Trice stops thrusting long enough to make sure no one who matters has overhead. “Hey, keep it down!” the janitor-lookout loud-whispers from the hallway.
Trice had fixed the janitor’s son up with a robotics apparatus that ultimately won for the boy the state science fair and a scholarship to a good school. Even the Pentagon’s janitors barely make a living wage, but now his son is going places. In the hallway they hear the janitor chuckle. In the hallway the janitor doesn’t hear another sound. Government officials are nothing if not discreet about their indiscretions—it’s usually not their fault when they’re finally exposed.
As a bio-mechanical engineer, Trice understands at a glance how things—especially bodies—work. All the interlocking parts, the balls and sockets, the tarsals and metatarsals, the pistoning muscles and the small, vibrating bones of the inner ear canal, one called a stirrup. He tells the First Lady as she pulls her nurse’s skirt back down that he’d like to put her in stirrups and take a vibrating something to a small other something until it isn’t so small anymore. She laughs softly and rolls her eyes. “Use your words, Trice.” Then she’s gone. He doesn’t know when he’ll see her next, but she always gives him the signal. They never meet in the same place twice.
On Tuesday, CAPTAIN HOOK nearly blows off his other arm. To a glass beaker full of potassium chlorate he adds two drops too many of sulfuric acid. Bartholomew never excelled at science in school, but as an adult he’s learned a new appreciation for chemistry in particular, fascinated for the first time by the fact that heavy metals can also be gases, that gases can be pressurized (he knew this principle well enough from war—a gun merely channels a gas-pressured force in one direction), and that pressure can be so precisely calibrated as to explode magnificently at exactly the desired moment.
In the mountain there is a cave.
In the cave there is a man.
In the man there is an unbroken concentration upon the cave wall, which he gazes at all day and all night while “seeing” nothing whatsoever.
The man’s name is YUPTAG, and he meditates on and for eternal life.
One day, A GIRL approaches the cave entrance. She sees Yuptag and is not afraid. She asks him what he is doing. He makes no reply. She sits beside him and for a whole day stares at the self-same wall. She leaves when the sun goes down.
The next day, the girl returns with the dawn and a knife.
“Teach me,” she demands.
When Yuptag still makes no reply, she brings the knife down thwifft through her other outstretched arm, severing it completely. Throwing the arm at the man, the girl leaves the cave.
The next day, the girl again returns with the dawn and a knife. Yuptag still sits where he always sits, staring the same intent stare. Standing directly in front of the man, the girl brings the knife to her throat with her one good hand.
“Teach me,” she demands.
For the first time, Yuptag’s eyes focus on the girl.
“Okay,” he agrees. “We begin by sitting.”
The girl sits next to the man and she learns.
Every Sunday night, DON leads a veterans’ support group next door to the presidential museum. A farmer and lay chaplain trained in tenets of most major world religions, he’s never seen war except through the memories of a dozen haunted men of all ages, having served a combined 29 tours in 14 different countries. Some of them are amputees. One is paralyzed from the neck down. All still feel like they are sometimes back in the line of fire, sending and dodging bullets. Watching out for their soldier-brothers. Watching out for themselves.
Because when they were deployed they never could relax, not for a minute, not fully—alert even when they were sleeping to the echoing sounds of engines and waiting, always and unconsciously waiting, for the next bomb to explode somewhere far off or right overhead, right under your buddy’s foot as he took one ill-conceived step too many. Because they can not otherwise relax they drink coffee at these meetings, and stay as wide-eyed and jumpy as they ever were, chemically fighting a tiredness that, if entertained, would swallow them whole.
“Ralph,” Don prompts quietly. “You’re up.”
RALPH has been concentrating all night on the wall. The wall is cinderblock, painted gray, clean but unremarkable in this bookstore basement. There is nothing at which to stare.
“Ralph,” Don’s soft voice comes again, when it seems the 45-year-old Gulf War4 vet is not going to respond. “Want to tell us what you’re seeing?”
This tactic is a favorite of the just-graying chaplain’s to lift the pressure off personal share time. If the guys (and women when applicable, though there are none present tonight) could let their thoughts play like a movie, and if they could learn to reframe those thoughts as something removed and cinematic, it anesthetized somehow the bite of the personal. They could describe the scene as they would that of any film, and then it was only sharing art, only talking about the writing and the actors’ expressions and the director’s stylistic choices and the producer’s vision.
Like some movies do, it might feel real, but like all movies do, it would eventually end—and that’s what Don taught them to do: watch their mind-movies; there was something to be learned. Then turn them off and go to bed and rest, goddammit, rest; they deserved it.
Finally Ralph speaks. “It’s 1991. I know because we’re all wearing Desert Night Camouflage, but we’ve seen pictures of the new uniforms with the Three Color Desert print and we got those the very next month.
“There’s a woman in the room, very pretty. Blonde hair in a bun, straight back. She’s my superior, and anyway there’s no fraternizing, so I don’t talk to her, only stand at attention and pretend I don’t overhear what she’s telling the Lieutenant Colonel. Kaylee is her name. 1st Lieutenant KAYLEE BRIGHT. She’s briefing the LC on a new technology, some kind of bioluminescent application. You fly low over the ground, spraying a sticky mist. At night it glows. The idea is that anywhere someone’s disturbed the soil, say to plant an IED, we could see it, right? They’d have broken the surface of the application. It’d show like a dark spot. It sounded pretty good.
“The LC ordered Kaylee to go on a test run that night, to accompany the pilot who earlier that day had sprayed the stuff. They’d fly back over, and see what they could see.”
Ralph pauses. Breathes. Continues.
“In the next scene, Kaylee’s in the copilot’s chair when a rocket launcher blows the wing clean off their tiny plane. The craft dips then nosedives, straight into the sand they were skimming but 50 yards above. The sheet metal crumples like an accordion, like a Chinese finger trap inhaling, expanding, finally ballooning into flame.
“Kaylee doesn’t feel the fire because the plane’s window frame cut her head clean off upon impact. Not even her bun came undone.”
4 Codenamed “Operation Desert Shield (2 August 1990-17 January 1991) and “Operation Desert Storm” (17 January 1991-28 February 1991).
Fiddling with her bun in the bathroom mirror, LORRIE wonders why she always looks so pallid on camera. Any more make-up and the clown effect would be worse, so she supposes there is nothing for it. Except perhaps a beach vacation. Five long days of UV and Tanqueray. Maybe she’ll see if they need a courier for any loans from the University of Florida’s art department. Just head down there and—
“You ready?” a male voice calls from outside the door.
It is the cameraman, and Lorrie thinks again that it’s the museum director’s job to make media appearances, not her own. She’s only supposed to write the damn scripts.
Lorrie exits, and teeters on uncustomary heels across the museum atrium. She stands where they tell her to stand, across from the wax figure First Family and next to a new display case holding a just-acquired document from an auction in New South Wales. It never fails to surprise her how many bits of material history find their way across whole oceans, into the hands of collectors with fetishistic interests; or who just know a good thing when they see one. This document is a handwritten letter from Dr. Horace C. Braker—the same Braker whose rotting leather medical kits full of powdery white vials are permanently displayed in the Civil War medicine exhibit. In the Red Room.
Lorrie begins: “What you see here is a letter from Dr. Braker to his wife, who was at their home in Rhode Island. The letter reads like most others in the Braker paper collection: long lists, heavy on procedure and instrument inventory. Dr. Braker had planned to write a book on battlefield medicine once the war was over. As you can see (and here the camera zooms in for a close-up), this particular letter catalogues the surgical implements included in a new kit Braker had just received from Boston.”
The anchor prompts her: “Can you read some of those descriptions for us? I understand they’re quite graphic.”
“Sure,” Lorrie replies, “though they’re not graphic so much as medically accurate.”
They’re only words, and words stripped of their context are only sounds. But something about those sounds resonates primally with the core of Lorrie’s being.
“Six-inch serrated,” Lorrie reads, and all those sensual esses pool like drool in her mouth. She swallows quickly, the way you do after having other 6-inch things in your mouth, so as not to choke, or gag—unless that’s the point—but not on TV for Christ’s sake. Lorrie feels glad that her sleeveless blouse is high-necked, with a pretty, ruffled front. They won’t see her reddening chest, and it might distract from her pinkening face, and anyway, who hears the word “sharp” and thinks “sex?” Only freaks.
She shakes her head. The anchorman is asking her another question.
In the palace there is an aging warrior.
In the warrior there is a secret.
The wisdom-bomb he is about to drop will be deadly. But it could save many more lives.
“When you think of war,” YUPTAG admonishes, “you think of glory. You think in archaic terms of an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ of vanquishing an enemy. If you acknowledge the bloodshed at all, it is whatever percentage you deem an ‘acceptable necessity.’ It’s not real to you, here, now, until you’re in the middle of it, there, then.”
The warrior parts his robe, revealing a ghastly, self-inflicted stomach wound. With a moan, he reaches into the cut, grabbing ropes of offal, drawing them out.
“This is your reality check. Visceral destruction.” He chokes on the blood now flowing from his mouth. “Literal decay.”
Yuptag looks around at his comrades lining the room. “Do not let my death be in vain.”
In 2003, Melody Gilbert5 made a documentary called Whole. It’s a UK film and hard to find in America. Even harder to find on the internet. Is it that well-policed or does nobody care except for the film’s stars? Men with missing legs due to intentional gunshot wounds, as only in dismemberment could they feel, at last, whole.
Doctors call it Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID).6 Maybe there’s a place where the wires crossed, where the signals aren’t transmitting correctly, and so limbs feel “extra,” not of the self.
That guy, does he see couples holding hands and wish he had a hand? Does he see the girl put her legs, two, in her boyfriend’s lap, and think if nature gave us two, and everyone else is doing it—walking, eating, loving—with two—
5 Documentary filmmaker and professor of film at the American University in Bulgaria.
6 A psychological disorder in which an otherwise healthy individual feels that s/he is meant to be disabled.
FACTS ABOUT AMERICAN AMPUTEES:
You have upper extremity and lower extremity amputees and the occasional bouncing torso we call a nugget. You have transradial and transhumeral depending: above or below the elbow; depending on whether a shoulder disarticulation means the ribs end their starfish seige at the back or there’s more.beyond.continuing. You have partial hands with so much or so little as a piece of one digit missing (Ada McGrath’s silver-soldered fingers in Jane Campion’s7 The Piano, for example—silly woman trying to kill herself despite having a daughter, having George the tattooed Maori man with a man butt that actually looks good naked [rare]). You furthermore have transtibial or transfemoral depending on: above or below the knee.
Among Americans, 80% of lower extremity amputations are due to poor vascular conditioning (diabetes). A small fraction, trauma (war vets; farming or lawnmower accidents).
Among Americans, the majority of upper extremity amputations are due to trauma (war vets; farming or lawnmower accidents). 300 Americans are double-arm amputees. They were electrical lines-people or other victims of their trade.
Some number of Americans contract some disease annually. The bacteria makes the body reject its own extremities. Slow suffocation of, rotting away of, extraneous parts falling lopsided at inopportune moments.
Sunflower seastars8 contracting Sea Star Wasting Syndrome twist their arms into knots, send the arms crawling away, until the arms tear off of the body, spilling offal. They rip themselves apart. They die within 24 hours. Citizens spotting the bodies are encouraged to tweet #SickStarfish.
Color in the rectified socket, the liner sleeve, the locked and articulating joints. Shade the socket the color of connection between the residual limb and device, the lining the white of rubber, the black of a silicone sleeve, fitting tight, fitting sweaty, you want to take it off for sex.
I smell how synthetic material intensifies the human smell of you. It grows the bacteria that eats limbs.
If you don’t have one? (A limb.)
Who asked about penises? Penises are not [are] a limb.
Chuck P.9 wrote a story about biting and choking and the ghosts that haunt people when they lock each other in a room but convince themselves that someone else has the key.
Color the custom-molded fit of the rectified socket a color that reveals more about your psyche than you realize. Pull the fiberglass fitting on like a rigid pair of underwear, a second skin, a second limb. Become a walker, a SKINWALKER, and know that no matter how tight the fiberglass rods, the 3D-printed bolts and pegs, the electro-myographic nodes at raw skin points of attachment, twitch twitch fast-twitch, the device will weigh as much as a flesh-and-bone foot (4-5 pounds) with an ankle and lower calf (10 pounds) from the knee down (20 pounds), also a shoe. It’s all for balance, or a weighted sense of self. Wait for a sense of self to return, to engage for Madonna’s10 very first time, reruns on Gagavision11 and the shellaceous points of a cone bra, leopard leotard, silver hot pants, stripper heels (they’re more comfortable; you can wear them for longer).
The leg has its weight-bearing load, plus the stressures of acceleration, walking, maybe a curved carbon fiber rod for the amputee runner. If you didn’t want the leg, you probably don’t want to run, and what if you had a debilitating fear of pain? Would the pain outweigh the desire for orgasm? Isn’t all pain sexual? Do surgeons study medicine because they’re sadomasochists, committed to the moment over eight long years of the first scalpel-slice open, the first needle-and-thread piercing of, sewing of, a severed limb.finger.toe back onto the body? That whole head transplant, will it actually work? Will the eyelids flutter and how many capillaries will that mean re-attaching, how many spinal nerves?
No more and no less than the first cut.
First human head amputation and transplant, scheduled for 2017, in China, by an Italian doctor,12 on a Russian man13 with muscular dystrophy who wants a new body.
Who wants a new body?
A “better” body, like LORRIE—she only wanted a better body when she stepped on the music box. I wonder, for all the body-shaming and eating disorders we manifest, if everyone switched out their bodies for ones they liked better, would they see them through the same infected, disillusioned eyes and be as dissatisfied?
Is it all in the damn head?
7 A New Zealand screenwriter, producer, and director.
8 Among the largest sea stars in the world, Sunflower seastars have 16 to 24 limbs with a maximum armspan of 3.3 ft.
9 An American novelist and freelance journalist.
10 An American singer, songwriter, actress, and businesswoman.
