Somewhere in size between a beach ball and a classroom globe, the giant head floated in and out of the morning rush hour on Sixth Avenue, bobbing between the blondes and browns and blacks of a hundred haircuts. It zipped right, into the tall building, where it would move its lips into a telephone before floating down the hall into a glass-walled room. Other heads were there, happy to be together, and their lips moved in unison before they all floated off, back to their glass cubes that kept them from floating off.
The giant heads had no necks or chests, no arms, no legs; there was no below. Bodyless, the heads were built to issue orders, make money, hit the number, cut deals. Without a body, reality fell away; the heads noticed little besides issuing orders, making money, hitting the number, cutting deals. They liked to be together, the heads, murmuring about newspaper headlines and the best most clever books; sometimes the heads showed pictures of their little heads at play in the pastures beside their summer homes. Heads liked rain hats, hair salons, and fine films.
After lunch one day, the heads were called to a large auditorium. They swiveled back and forth, quietly murmuring about what was happening. They shuffled papers and looked down at their phones; typical head stuff on any given day. A really Huge Head – not the biggest one by far but a pretty big one nevertheless– walked onto the stage and began moving his lips.
Seemed the Gianormous Head that brought the most money to the other heads had touched an intern. The Gianormous Head was inappropriate, they said. No touching, no mixing; the heads must remain heads! The large head used the Gianormous Head as an example of what not to do. The smaller heads said, no we’d never! We wouldn’t even know where to begin…
Confused, the heads floated back to the glass holding pens to contemplate this. Why would the Gianormous Head reach down to touch something heads didn’t feel! The heads felt discomfort at the idea so they quickly went back to issuing orders, making money, hitting the number and cutting deals. As long as they did that, they were in their lane, functioning as heads.
During the evening commute, the Giant Head decided to go away for a rest. Because the Head had to go further and further away from Headquarters to feel true separation, this time, the head would roll on the beaches of the South Pacific. Upon arrival, the head stayed in the room, checking email and sobbing with exhaustion for two days.
The sun rose and shot the room through with warmth and the peaches, blues and grays of early morning light. Walking to the bottom of the stair, the sensation of grass on bare feet sent the Head scurrying toward the water. Looking down at waters edge, the head let out a scream: forming slowly beneath it were the fuzzy outlines of a central body with four stubby outgrowths. A warm tingling rose and flooded the head as million billion nerve fibers lit up. Fuzzy became form as a leg grew from the outgrowth, becoming longer and longer with indentations and curves. Another grew beside it. A center like the body of bee joined the legs to the two outgrowths closest the head, which moved outward, bending and flowing into complicated ends known as hands. The ocean called and the head answered, and somehow in some magical moment of a wild mysterious energy exchange, a whole human was born.
Moving into the water, stones cut into the feet and kelp snaked around the legs, pulling and prodding this newly born body. Light and color played off the ocean. The current was an ecstatic threat, dangerous, mocking, and wildly exciting. Everything pulled and pushed and flooded the body with sensation and power. As the below part came alive, a soft pink skin slowly covered it and everything it brushed it brought equal pain and pleasure.
Every day the body went to the ocean and stayed inside it all day long. The water had arms and legs that entwined around the newly- made swimmer, rocking and warming and brushing and kissing. The Honu had big black watery eyes like a Spanish lover; day-glo eels swam in and out of the legs; a rock outcropping housed the Emerald City. Wet sand cupped butt cheeks and calves; dry sand scrubbed skin everywhere. And the sun was all, penetrating all the darkness from ugly thoughts to bone. An entire organism had grown from just a head and all it needed to be whole was the natural world.
She made the call back to Headquarters; the head had died in a terrible boating accident. It would not be returning in the same form, if it returned at all. It couldn’t. It had felt the water, dove deep down, played with enchanted creatures, and risen up into the shafts of light. It had seen wonder and felt it with a newly grown body. Suddenly, the potential of the body – for touch, for connection, for love, for humanity – became the deepest desire; not issuing orders, making money, hitting the number, cutting deals.
A body was sent back across the oceans to New York City, and the long walking away began. The Giant Head was no more; she had decided to live.