Thomas Hrycyk
An Account of a Child with a Double Head
A boy was born with two heads in Bangladesh. The Bengali Boy, having survived a horrific and agonizing birth, was an outcast, a stranger, a marginal being who lived in multiple worlds—understanding better than we ever can the glue that holds us down to this arrangement. And why not? The boy had two brains (but one lacked the means of communication). And the Bengali parents said to people that the greatest gift they offered their child was the inherent ability to earn a living by just being himself. He had a head on top of his head turned nearly opposite so that the front bones were sutured to the parietals of the others. It was a rare formation that allowed the brain cells to splice and grow between the two skulls like a splitting amoeba. The parents, as well as others, conversed on whether both the heads deserved to be baptized.
They had come for miles, traveled for weeks to see the boy with the face on the front and back of his towering head. Some had caught a glimpse before the show. They said his forehead was shorter than they thought: almost trunk-like with his skin stretched tight as if to reveal a little more of the whites of his eyes. They liked that.
The Bengali Boy was back behind the stage in a cotton chair contraption. He did not see his parents. A man in a pearl coat talked to another next to him.
"You are the doctor, yes?" the boy asked.
This unintelligible language made the man leap to his feet.
"No, no, no," he said furiously. "Now be quiet."
"Surgeon?"
"No! Stop! I am here only to cut off a head."
"We will see," said the boy.
And with that, the man pushed the Bengali toward the audience and they stopped their collective movement. All eyes were trained on the boy whose heads moved as if on a swivel. It was clear he had to have been drugged off-stage, but to some, it would seem like the entire theatrics of the performance were real and painful for the child.
The man charged and stomped around and the crowd perked up as if now they understood why they were there. With a wave of the man's sterile hand, an assistant came with a bag which was placed over the head and shoulders. Measuring as if with a guess and shrug, he began to cut at the head with a knife and hacksaw. The women in the audience squealed and screamed as blood seeped out onto the floor. It was like an old guillotine as the head came off as if he were placed in stocks and whumpf! Spectators could see the head fall into the basket. And after the other head fell down in front of him, the Bengali Boy stood up, breaking his restraints, and seizing his newly-severed head, walking toward the audience. At that moment, the lights went off. The crowd reacted as if a rampaging creature was loose in the dark.
The technicians attempted to throw the switches back on but could not. It was a total blackout. People were running up and down the aisles and flashlights were handed out. It was as if spiders were crawling all over the auditorium and snakes were slithering at their feet. No one could find the boy, nor his decapitated head when the power returned. There was no trail of blood nor any body found nearby in the following weeks.
The boy was heard from years later. In a rare statement he said, "People used to talk to me without problems. They thought having a head attached to my own meant I couldn't hide anything. That that was the worst thing about me and it was just out in the air. People used to come and talk to me because being out in public with my biggest confession on display meant I was always exposing myself and was willing for others to do the same."
A reporter asked if the boy was in possession of the head. He said only his own.
Kangaroo Languages
Chupacabra means goat-sucker, but it also means attorney in Puerto Rican. The monster has been described by so many people in so many ways that it has become a misassembly of familiar parts. At the Doya reservoir near Agua Prieta, Sonora, the Chupacabra was described to be like a turkey or a kangaroo, but "it had a beak because it flew." Elsewhere the Chupacabra had been described as a combination of kangaroo, vampire bat, with just a little bit of armadillo thrown in for good measure. Elsewhere it has big red eyes, pointy nose and ears, and a wrinkled face. The fear has even spread to the USA where a blood-drinking kangaroo supposedly terrorized parts of southern Tennessee in 1934. The kangaroo description of the blood-sucker is fitting given that kangaroo in Aborigines translates to 'what did you say?' It's easy to see how the name was chosen by English speakers pointing to the strange creature. It happens very often that extraordinary things provide a path to discover the rules in which they are all included.
In Antonio Amaro, near Sierra de Organos Park, a woman reported to the police an attack on her son. "It was a beast like no other and [it] flew into my son's window and sat on him. My son said the creature smelled like a wet dog." The victim refused to give a statement about the incident. A few miles away, the town of El Ojo gave a press conference saying the beast sucked dry over twenty pigs. A truck driver out near El Escritorio saw the Chupacabra carrying a gunny sack and a peregrine in its mouth. The beast seemed to be contemplating some hellish decision.
A 21-year-old woman from Mesa, Arizona, in 1990, awoke to discover that part of her ear was missing as she witnessed a flying reptile soaring its way across her lawn. Police say there was no logical explanation. But there rarely is one. This is usually why, when a Chupacabra is spotted, aunts are called to the scene because, as we all know, a Mexican aunt is the ghostbuster of choice. But the magic and charm of the tia was not enough as more incidents were reported around Central and North America. Rumors spread about the authenticity of some claims to the point that it all felt like a joke. In later years the gag became that the creature was really disgraced ex-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari trying for a comeback after ruining Mexico's economy and fleeing the country.
But some factions of the agricultural division found the threat of the Chupacabra to be no laughing matter. The government task force issued to investigate the existence of the Chupacabra released its report and it read like a terrible science fiction novel. They claimed to have found no evidence of a goat-sucker, but instead blamed pollution for driving ordinary animals mad, giving them behavioral traits of crazed creatures from another planet. "We have ruled out the theory that the attack on sheep and goats was carried out by a supernatural being or blood-sucking bat," said Javier Delgadillo, a scientist on the taskforce. "One explanation for these attacks could be that animals—bats, pumas, dogs, etc.—have been driven mad by the devastating effects of poisonous gases and toxic wastes on nature. Perhaps what is happening now with the goat-sucker is nature's way of making us pay for the constant damage we have inflicted on the environment."
Since the taskforce's report, little to nothing has been done about pollution, nor have there been further studies into animal behavior as it relates to responses to environmental changes. Instead, in Guaymas, they sell dried skeletons of skates as corpses of baby Chupacabras to tourists for a few pesos. At a stand on Miramar Beach there's a blood-red fruit punch drink with some bitters in it claiming to be the Chupacabra's blood and a Chupacabra meat sandwich that's just skirt steak smothered in salsa.
Meanwhile, folklorist James S. Griffith is being interviewed by the Tucson Weekly in a small diner. He's telling the reporter that "everybody is using the Chupacabra for their own purposes" and he's saying how he thinks that's just wonderful.
Skeuomorphism
The news of the building of a wall seeped into our world a good year after its official announcement. It was late into a bright night and people were celebrating, though they were doing it out of the safety of their homes. Nearing my sixth birthday, I sat out on the porch with my father. As silly as it sounds, I remember all the little moments we shared right then as he creaked his chair without fear of being heard. He liked to speak in movie quotes, and often when he couldn't find the right cinematic snippet, he'd fall back onto television or old literature because it must have let him feel that there was another shell between him and the world.
"I just can't take no pleasure in killing," he started. "There's just some things you gotta do. Don't mean you have to like it."
I asked and he said the old man from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and I was always content when it came from some source that was new to me. I'd check out this Texas Chain Saw in the coming years and see that it wasn't about a lunatic pack of serial killers, but a bunch of our original monsters reimagined as a closed-off family. The man in the beginning who takes the photo and blood-lets is a vampire, the grandpa is a mummy, Leatherface is Frankenstein's monster made up of different parts, and so on. My father would listen to my theory and could tell me who the werewolf was. It was the audience who was transformed by the end. He did not need to hear it from me.
So as we sat back on the porch the night of the news of a wall, my father wondered, stroking what little hair was on his head, who exactly we wanted to keep out and who we were trapping in with us. He'd try to look far into the darkness, to the places across the small, calm lake that was turning into sand and with no success he turned his ear. He claimed to be able to tell in the human voice, hearing the unaltered bravado of a man could give clues to their ability to straddle the categories of wolf and man-composite creature.
"Headed like sundry sorts of wilde Beasts, but otherwise like Men and Women," he would say, quoting John Milton. And then he'd go over any history he knew. Starting with the Aeneid, he'd spout lines like Bible script. "[From Circe's land] could be heard the angry growls of lions chafing at their bonds and roaring in midnight hours, the raging of bristly boars and encaged bears, and howls from shapes of monstrous wolves; whom with her potent herbs Circe, cruel goddess had changed from the likeness of men, clothing men in the features of frames of beasts."
I had yet to see a werewolf and I thought it possible the stories of these freaks originated from imagination and hallucination (as opposed to misperception), and that the rendering of the legend was based on no one in particular, notwithstanding the existence of any past, present, or future foul, hairy beast. And every time I would ask, he'd begin to roll up a cigarette and lick at his lips as if they were on fire. He'd cap off his inhale by letting me know we were living in much more dangerous times.
"Sure these people have changed, ok," I'd said, "but what have they done exactly? Until they are an actual threat to our well-being, I'm not going to start hating everybody I'm not sure about."
But he'd comfort me by saying he could tell—could always get their bluff and read it like a children's book.
In later years, I would ask how he could hurt all those people and he'd quote Renfield from Dracula.
It was back when we learned the news of the building of the wall that I realized as we sat on the porch in the bright night that my father was in fact the werewolf. He was the expression of surplus energy, excess beyond escape. He both held and released a reality from his grips that fluctuated between nature and culture. It was him who went into the night, raiding cemeteries or the living for skulls to juggle. His existence in the world was not because he was an accident and was trapped by the moon, but because he chose to haunt it.
Just then in the boggy thick of our backyard, a man came strolling through on the shore. He waved and stopped to look at us. My father got up and waved back. They met in the middle of the grass near the unused firepit full of burnt metal and they talked loudly. Whatever the man was saying, hands in his long coat, my father could not believe. He approached closer as if the truth would appear with proximity to its source, but it seemingly did not. My father stopped speaking and the man walked off white and stiff as if just thrashed about. My father came back this way having to adjust the sleeves of his shirt and collar as if twisted by anger. He looked swollen by whatever news the man came bearing and with it he told me to go wash up for dinner.
That night he invited over a good portion of our neighbors and they all drank and talked of nice things and when he was alone for but a brief moment I asked him what the man had said and he said more or less the following: the man said the wall to be resurrected would be a mighty one. He had seen the schematics. He said to me in a voice that was not to be tested that trespassing one way or another might be impossible for our city. And that any foreign presence, beast or the like, would be fended off again and again with ferocity and will.
The wall would be built and it would be ravaged, from either one side or another, and partially be my father's fault. And as long as it stood, all would feel wrong and violated. Perhaps Eden always had to be destroyed in order for a discourse of difference to emerge from the swamps.