Don't worry, said the principal, you're not being punished — you just asked a very sensitive question.
Well, why does Harriet Seibel have the biggest, heaviest frontal lobe in school? I reinquired.
Maybe I can explain, said Dr. Kline who, with his sharply cut suits and iridescent violet ties and his passion for ballroom dancing and tropical fish, was a perennial favorite of students in and out of neurobiology. You see, he said, Harriet's brain grows heavier because it's developing more synapses.
Well, how can you tell? I asked.
We can tell, Dr. Kline said, because each week when we do a CAT scan and a microscopic examination of her brain tissue we detect pronounced increases in dendrites… Do you know what dendrites are?
Gosh, Dr. Kline, I said, I don't think we've done that chapter yet.
Dendrites are the filamentous branches of a nerve cell that harvest information from the synapses and forward them to the main body of a cell.
I scribbled notes as quickly as I could and then I looked up. I think she's sad, I said, because the shadow of her head obscures whatever it is she's looking at.
Son, do you know why she's kept in a cage here at Pocahontas over the weekend and fed tapioca pudding the whole time? asked Mr. Chenowirth.
No, I said.
Well, you see, said Dr. Kline, there are more and more toxic pollutants in the atmosphere like chlorine and acrylonitrite, and hydrogen chloride — and the earth's population is increasingly vulnerable to these poisons because it's become too inbred… The level of genetic homogeneity is so high that our immune systems have been left with too limited a repertoire to defend against the toxic pollutants — so in order for the human species to adapt and survive and prosper we need a dramatic increase in genetic variety — and that requires profoundly exogamous cross-fertilization.
You mean mating with extraterrestrials… with aliens… with spacemen?
Exactly! said everyone, nodding.
And, said Dr. Kline, who would a spaceman from an advanced civilization want to mate with more than the girl with the biggest, heaviest frontal lobe in Pocahontas High School… namely…
Harriet Seibel? I ventured. Exactly!!
It will be seventeen years ago this winter that I was taken to the principal's office and first told of Harriet Seibeѕs strange plight. Today she lives in Texas — in the Houston Astrodome— it's the only skull-like structure in the United States that's large enough to accommodate her brain, which has grown by now to truly enormous proportions. And as you've probably surmised, I've fallen in love with Harriet. Being with her is not always easy and our relationship is a stormy one — after all, she's been literally fucked all her life by spacemen — and her attitude toward men is understandably ambivalent but I do love her very much and we're working on things — a therapist visits us at the Astrodome once a week for couples counseling… so we'll see what happens.
One last thought — since I've already succumbed to my nostalgia about those days at Pocahontas High… I was probably the only guy in town who had his own mother as his high school English teacher. But I'll never figure out the way she signed my yearbook:
We are merely goose pimples on the arm of the law.
17. lines composed after inhaling paint thinner
i like the people, i like the climate, i like the food
marsha was telling me all the bands she liked
i glanced out the window of the computer-run monorail at the pink hollyhocks and white queen anne's lace and bright purple wildflowers blooming on the hills and then i looked back at marsha who was wearing a cream satin two-piece dress, gold lamй sandals with chain straps, and pearl-drop earrings she reeked of cheap perfume i like cheap perfume on a blond robot
oh! they're fantastic live! she said i almost got a backstage pass to their concert at madison square garden because i knew this guy who was the hammered dulcimer player for semen-stained panties and the loose unidentified pubic hairs and he knew the drummer for cheap perfume on a blond robot, but this guy had all kinds of physical problems — he was half-human, half-mole, and part cyborg, i guess, because he had a nylon fiber-point penis and long-wearing tungsten carbide testicles and he had to get fetal lamb cell injections and take a muriatic acid sitz bath every day or the mole half would overtake the human half and the treatments made him really moody and capricious — so the day he was supposed to get the backstage pass to the concert he called up and said, y'know that broadway show with the TV commercial that goes "can a proscuitto and provolone sandwich with lettuce and tomatoes and onions and oil and vinegar irrevocably alter the course of a man's life — this is the question posed and pondered with lambent wit and verve in neil simon's delightful new musical, intrauterine memories of mama"? yeah, i said well, i got you a ticket for that instead of a backstage pass for the cheap perfume on a blond robot concert why'd you get me a ticket for intrauterine memories of mama when you knew how much i wanted to go to the concert, i asked and he said, well, i guess the fetal lamb cell injections and muriatic acid sitz baths made me too moody and capricious and i did the wrong thing— i'm really sorry, marsha and i was pissed but i felt really bad for him, i mean here was a guy who when he was three years old played the hammered dulcimer with the astonishing precosity of a mozart and now look at him his band gets its first gig in months playing an assembly at an elementary school and they're supposed to do "home on the range" and he's supposed to sing, "give me a home where the buffalo roam" and he stands up there and in all apparent earnestness sings, "give me a home where the dwarf surf clam and the solitary sea-squirt roam" and it was pathetic — all the kids were giggling and shouting, "it's not 'where the dwarf surf clam and the solitary sea-squirt roam' it's 'where the buffalo roam'!"
i glanced out the window of the computer-run monorail at the crocodile-infested rivers and malarial swamps teeming with electric eels and fifteen-foot anacondas and then i looked back at marsha who was wearing a blush-pink silk blazer over houndstooth check wool bermuda shorts beneath her synthetic skin (a latex-like water emulsion polymer the color of cafй au lait), a network of white plastic arteries circulated compressed air throughout her metal and carbon-fiber chassis she literally had the words hitachi electronics corporation written all over her i estimated her development costs to have been approximately 2 billion yen she reached behind her head as if to smooth her hair and inserted a fresh floppy disk into a disk drive situated inconspicuously at the nape of her neck instinctively i reached across to help her and my fingers brushed against the floppy disk as it receded into the back of her head i looked into her sensitive almost vulnerable pale-blue electron diffraction optical imaging scanners your software is so soft, i said she smiled bashfully, averting her eyes, and continued to talk about the dulcimer player who was half-human, half-mole
shortly after the humiliating fiasco at the elementary school, i was awakened in the middle of the night by a telephone call informing me that he had drowned himself in a fermentation vat at a puerto rican rum distillery i was told by a bacardi attorney that he'd flung himself into the vat with a kind of sublime grace that his back was arched, his legs extended, his hands pressed together above his head as if in prayer i was told that had it been a competitive dive with the high and low marks discarded his score would have been quite impressive i was told that as he hit the surface of the fermenting molasses he whispered my name distraught, guilt-ridden, confused — i began to see a travel therapist and after a number of tearful cathartic sessions, she suggested that i go to europe i took an apartment upstairs from the cern atom smasher in switzerland… but it was like living over a bowling alley… all that smashing so i moved back, to a basement apartment next door to the norad strategic warning center in Colorado under cheyenne mountain and here i enjoyed a long overdue respite from the pierced nipple and enema crowd, here amid the murmuring mountain streams and craggy cliffs my soul was succored in days of arcadian serenity and tranquil restoration — often i'd awaken from an afternoon nap to find a caribou or elk performing a delicate pas de bourrйe on pointed hoof from flagstone to flagstone, his hairy beer belly spilling over his leotard as he minced about the carp ponds and pepsi machines that skirted the grounds of the barbara mandrell in vitro fertilization clinic i had a wonderful next-door neighbor — a warmhearted, jovial, gregarious woman with an irrepressible zest for life she had a deep consuming passion for macaroni and cheese and often i'd awaken from an afternoon nap to find men in white overalls running a thick black hose from their gleaming cylindrical tank truck to an inlet valve in the backyard and pumping gallons and gallons of creamy yellow velveeta cheese sauce into her underground storage reservoir one day she said, dear dear relatives are coming down to visit me from their home in putrid beef, wyoming and she ground the wheat and made pastries she went hunting in the forest and shot the animals and ground their flesh into chopped meat for hamburgers and she took a boat into the ocean to catch the fish and baked a cake and threw the fish in for a fish cake and i asked if i could do anything to help and she said, no no no, you just go into the den and watch TV so i watched a documentary about norwegian explorer and writer thor heyerdahl proving that it was possible for a race of primitive people to have migrated from continent to continent on styrofoam kickboards and i watched a news conference at which the president announced that after having reviewed the film the dirty dozen with the trilateral commission he was sending jean harris, claus von bьlow, john delorean, and nine other upper-crust felons to the caribbean in an armored yawl with a 155-millimeter champagne bottle mounted on deck capable of firing a 600-lb. cork from the coastal waters of eastern nicaragua right into the living room of comandante daniel ortega a gaunt pockmarked dissipated handsome sexy mosquito hovered at the screen window transfixed as if spaced out on smack a thousand images of the flickering sony trinitron reflected in his compound eyes his sharp proboscis flashed in the moonlight like a hypodermic needle with a drop of blood at its tip i could tell he was wearing black mesh panties under his skintight slacks he undulated his tight little muscular cylindrical abdomen it twitched it shuddered in almost imperceptible spasms he was saying, "let me in, marsha" and "marsha, do you have any sweet shit in your liquor cabinet like sambuca or kahlъa or peppermint schnapps or amaretto" and "marsha, don't you recognize me — this is jesus, they freeze-dried my brain at san quentin" and "marsha, this is elvis… this is prince" so i ran and got a can of extra-strength raid and sprayed him through the screen window until death was his final reward the phone was ringing in my apartment it rang 50 times 60 times 70 times 80, 90, 100, 110 times finally on the 117th ring i picked it up… breathless… panting… it was my cousin, the gastroenterologist he said, marsha, you'd better catch the next flight to new york city — your father's got kidney stones i flew in and took a taxi right to mount sinai hospital when i arrived my father was in the operating room immersed shoulder-deep in a special high-tech bathtub there was a large marshall amplifier next to the tub the surgeon turned to the nurse and said, "guitar" the nurse handed him a fender stratocaster the surgeon strapped it over his shoulder "guitar pick," he said she complied, placing a guitar pick firmly in his gloved hand as the surgeon began to play jimi hendrix's solo from "purple haze," he held the guitar up against the amplifier, producing howling high-pitched feedback as my cousin, the gastroenterologist, later explained, the guitar feedback produces shock waves in the warm bathwater which travel harmlessly through the body but shatter the brittle kidney stones into fine fragments he said that the guitar-feedback method of smashing kidney stones had been developed at the monterey pop institute of kidney, bladder, and urethra disease and had just been approved by the FDA i trusted my cousin's medical explication as i trusted my cousin — implicitly esteemed by his professional colleagues, affluent, and socially prominent, he was the shining scion of his immigrant family — although his father had achieved considerable notoriety in his own vocation — baseball he'd been the first rigidly orthodox soviet-style marxist-leninist to pitch for a major league team this was thanks to the enlightened and farsighted hiring practices of brooklyn dodgers owner branch rickey who signed my uncle in the early 50s, to the almost unanimous displeasure of organized baseball my uncle caused tremendous controversy when he refused to pitch on may day and later declined the opening start of a world series because it fell on the wedding anniversary of ethel and julius rosenberg notwithstanding one's political affiliations one couldn't deny his baseball prowess, and in fact he had such an incredible spitball that his salivary glands were insured by lloyпs of london we were reminiscing over falafel sandwiches and diet cokes in the mount sinai cafeteria when my cousin's face took on an unexpectedly somber aspect what's wrong, i asked, do you have food allergies? is the wheat gluten in the pita bread causing you to become moody and capricious? is the nutrasweet in the diet coke making you epileptic? no, he said, it's your father… there's more wrong with him than just the kidney stones we discovered a gas pocket of freon in his brain what's freon? i asked freon's a refrigerant used in air-conditioning systems and he looked at me and with the grim urgency of a network anchorman he said, marsha, the freon bubble in your father's brain is the work of terrorists your father was #1 on the trilateral commission's hit parade well, can't you just install a replacement head? i asked every body comes with two or three replacement heads and instructions on removing the worn-out head and installing the spare to remove your head simply take your left hand and hold the back of your head take your right hand and hold your chin firmly in its palm twist your head sharply with a counterclockwise motion until you hear it disengage to install your replacement head place the head assembly on neck housing and insert guide pins through mounting holes hold head firmly in position with both hands and rotate slowly clockwise until assembly locks into place if your replacement head features a built-in dish antenna you can test head function by standing in the middle of your backyard and determining whether you're picking up any satellite signals if your replacement head fails to pick up any satellite signals then you either installed your head improperly or the head is defective if, after installing new head, you are unable to discern the contradictions in capitalist modes of production, you have either installed your head improperly or head is defective