Auxiliary
I’ll ask you to accept the following proposition as given: that a head residing at a locus other than the collar finds him-or-her-self at an inherent disadvantage within both the individual body and the collar-centric society as a whole.
Oh god, what a nightmare, you say. Those poor, hideous freaks.
It’s okay. I understand. It’s not your fault. No really, it’s not. You’ve been conditioned to think that way. Your values have been molded by the dominant cultural forces of the times. Forces that thrust their meaty hands right into your cranium. Forces that do their best work early, while the stuff is still pliant.
But did you notice what just happened? I presented you a proposition concerning an auxiliary head, and right away your thoughts, your sympathies turned to the complementary collar head, which you no doubt view as the unfortunate victim in this little horror show. As I said, I don’t blame you. These are programming errors—why blame the machine?
But I will ask you to imagine, if you can, what it’s like being an auxiliary head. To imagine what it’s like living in exile on your own body. Yes, your own I said. As much yours as the liver’s or the pancreas’ or the kidneys’. Just as much as the stomach’s or the bladder’s or the gonads’ or the heart’s. And just like any of these organs, your typical auxiliary head is, of course, wholly subject to the whims of his-or-her collar head. After all, the collar head exercises exclusive control of the feet and hands—the machinery of transportation and of tactile manipulation. Without access to these modalities, we auxiliary heads can never exercise any real measure of freedom. We can never be the authors of our own peculiar fates. Please, take a moment and imagine it if you can. There, my friend, is your monster. There’s your chamber of the macabre.
I was discussing this point on the bus, on a wet morning last spring. I should point out that I’m mindful of being a good passenger, and during transit, I tend to keep my opinions to myself. I’m not one to inflict my politics on my fellow travelers. But there are moments when you have to speak up, and if you can’t find your voice in these moments, you might as well boil your tongue for dinner. No use wasting a perfectly good piece of meat.
So anyway, I was on the bus, minding my own business like I said. In the next row up, a collar head and a shoulder head were having a spat because the former had asked the latter not to read along in his book.
“If you find it so irritating, you should see a dermatologist,” the shoulder head was saying. “I’m sure there’s some sort of cream or topical ointment you could try.”
Like I said, I was minding my own business, but that was a real zinger, and it caught my attention.
The collar head assured his counterpart that it was nothing personal. “Lots of people find it difficult to read with someone looking over their shoulder.”
Then they oscillated for a couple of minutes:
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m not upset. Who said I was upset?”
“Really? Because you seem upset.”
“I said I wasn’t.”
“But your lips are doing that thing they do when you’re angry, and your eyebrows don’t look too happy, either.”
And so on, until this woman walked up and asked if she could sit in the aisle seat beside them.
Now the collar head was clearly the type who’s come to terms with his condition, the type who’s learned to draw every advantage he can from his circumstance. The giveaway was the briefcase hogging the aisle seat. Did I mention it was a crowded bus? And there he was with his briefcase taking up a perfectly good seat, a stack of books on top of it for an armrest, and one of those wide-based coffee mugs with the spill-proof lid. Practically his own portable living room. He understood from experience, you see, that most people will stand in the aisle before taking a seat next to a plainly visible auxiliary head. (He had adroitly taken a seat on the left, better to display the affliction on his right. It’s more common—as you’ll already know if you’ve spent much time in the mass transit system of any big city—to spy a shoulder head discretely positioned on the side nearest the window.) Anyway, the shoulder head was clearly agitated and was a little brusque with her, telling her they were “kind of in the middle of something here, sweetheart, thank-you-very-much.” Well, at the risk of being branded an apologist, I’ll remind you that many auxiliary heads are a little lacking in social skills—a reflection of the limitations inherent in their station.
Now the collar head, who had been nothing but snide up to this point, shifted tone and was suddenly as sweet as a honey-coated saccharine pill dipped in molasses and topped with whipped cream. “No, no, no. Please. Sit down. It’s no trouble at all. Just let me move these out of your way.” And he packed up his furniture and slid it under his seat. So, at this point in the story, I should confirm what you’ve probably already intuited: that our hero’s motives may have been less than altruistic. I don’t mean to appear sexist, but the interloper did have a stunning couple of faces—the auxiliary sprouting from between her shoulder blades. So anyway, she sat and the collar heads started exchanging pleasantries, and within three blocks he had her telling him—a complete stranger on the bus—where she worked.
“At the university.”
“Oh really? Me too. Faculty?”
“Yes.”
“Likewise. Small world.”
“Okay, but it is the second largest employer in the county.”
“Point taken. So could I ask what department?”
“Apparently so. I’m relatively certain you just did.”
“Well, judging by your idiosyncratic wit and subtle yet dramatic aesthetic, I’d say it could only be... high-energy physics?”
At this point, she feigned alarm and asked if he had been stalking her—which seemed to me the most sensible thing she had said in a good mile-and-a-half. But our man didn’t miss a beat. “Don’t be absurd. I hardly know you. Besides, it was you who asked to sit by me, remember?”
“That’s true,” she admitted, “but I might have been responding to an unconscious familiarity, having observed you observing me, but only on a subliminal level.”
By this point, I’d had enough, and I told them so. “Excuse me, but I can clearly see where this dialogue is headed, and I have to say that, frankly, I’m offended by the implication that if only our protagonist could meet a nice young woman—not altogether unattractive physically and his intellectual peer to boot—who, let us say, empathizes with his peculiar affliction and whom he can engage in a bit of stereotypical precopulatory banter, springtime would reign eternal here in the land of serendipitous connector routes and mass transit urbanity. And while that sort of thing may put asses in the seats, it hardly passes for an honest engagement of the more prominent phenomenological questions of our times.”
The auxiliary head in the next row up called me a dandy. “What did that dandy say?” So the collar head dutifully, and with apparent sincerity, apologized for his auxiliary’s behavior. But here’s the funny thing: He didn’t apologize to me. He apologized to the young assistant professor of high-energy physics.
Being a gentle and forgiving sort, she told him he didn’t have to apologize. “It’s not your fault.” She leaned toward him, just a touch, and rested her fingertips on his forearm, lightly stroked the tweed. “We can’t be held responsible for their behavior.”
Of course, this bore on precisely the point I had in mind, and I couldn’t let it pass. So I interjected, “If not you, who?”
So she said, “Let me guess: you’re one of those free-will-as-allegorical-conceit deterministic nihilists, so popular among today’s coastal intelligentsia and reality TV moguls,” which I have to admit was a pretty snappy comeback, but I continued, unfazed.
“Surely you won’t describe an auxiliary head as free—not as long as the means of locomotion and of tactile manipulation are exclusive domains of the collar heads. Freedom and responsibility, as I’m sure you’re aware, are obligate mutualists. That’s a prima facie existential postulate.”
“Would you listen to that one?” a head up a woman’s sleeve, just across the aisle, asked no one in particular. “How’d you get to be so smart, anyway?”
So I started to tell them about the time I was seated next to a guru from the East, on a flight to Hawaii, three summers ago. “Okay, he wasn’t exactly from the East: he was from Fresno originally, having moved to Baltimore to take over day-to-day operation of his second-cousin’s mail-order income tax evasion business subsequent to her abduction by aliens.”
I should have known better than to digress, because at this point they became distracted, of course, by the allusion to the aliens. “Yeah yeah, that’s it. Give us a little more of that. We were beginning to get bored. So where were they from? Mercury? Pluto? Your anus?” That last one, of course, was from the smirking auxiliary head in the next row up. Believe me, I know a heterograph when I hear one, but not wanting to risk straying even further off course, I let that one pass, as if I hadn’t picked up on the joke. I told them they were from Vancouver, but that it wasn’t really germane.
“Maybe not, but it’s beautiful in the spring,” the assistant professor of high-energy physics said, and her neighbor offered that it was one of his favorite towns. “Then you’ve been?” she asked.
“Actually, no. But I’ve heard great things. And they make some beautiful postcards.”
Well, what he said was true. They do, in fact, make some of the finer postcards in the entire Pacific Northwest, but I couldn’t help thinking that none of this was germane, either.
“Listen, I’m trying to make a point. Please try to stay with me.” By now I was getting annoyed. “This was supposed to be an amusing anecdote,” I told them, “not a rambling postmodern critique of narrative as such.” I felt bad about being abrupt with them, but good god, they were a little obtuse. I apologized and asked them to let me start again.
“So I was next to this guru, on the plane, an eight hour flight, okay? After the second vodka tonic, Walter here was asleep on the vacant shoulder, and I had the exceedingly rare pleasure of an unencumbered and intellectually stimulating conversation. Well, let me tell you: if you’ve never spent eight hours parsing cosmological vagaries with a Level Seven Initiate of the Ubiquitous What’s-He-Who’s-It, then plainly I’ve had an experience you haven’t. It’s no exaggeration to say that the wisdom I gleaned on that trans-Pacific interlude could fill whole volumes, but the most precious gift he made me was the knowledge of an obscure yet esoteric meditative technique including, but in no way limited to, a modulation of breathing combined with subtle ocular machinations and carefully enunciated quasi-poetical mumbo-jumbo, which, when mastered, allow the practitioner to synchronize the frequency and/or amplitude of his-or-her didactic substance with that of any consciousness residing on whatsoever plane of non-Euclidean space-time within this or any other among an infinitude of universes, both hypothetical and extant. In short, he taught me this: the art and science of mind control—and how to turn it into a nifty second income from the comfort of one’s home.” At this point the prickly auxiliary head in the next row up made a crack about smelling a sales pitch coming on, but I ignored him and kept right on going without even taking a breath. I told them that since then I had singularly focused my hypno-therapeutic efforts on modifying the behavior of my collar head. I told them how I had trained him to nap on the bus—as he was at that very moment—which allowed me some much needed me time, and to let me listen to public radio on the alarm clock at night while he slept, and to take me to the theater the second Friday of every month. “Serious theater,” I assured them, “with arbitrary blocking and reactionary syntax and actors so grittily naturalistic you can hardly understand a word they say,” and that lately I’d been working on a handful of hygienic nuances—although these, I had to concede, were trickier than one might have imagined.
Again, the hard-nosed little boil in the next row up couldn’t resist heckling me. “So let me get this straight, you’ve spent three years cultivating mind control and the best you can show for it is the occasional night on the town? A bit lame, if you ask me.”
He was missing the point, and I told him so. “These are merely the low hanging fruit, the first tentative baby-steps. Controlling the feet and hands—the machinery of transportation and of tactile manipulation—that’s the key to the whole thing.”
“The key to what thing?” the cute little redhead between the assistant professor of high-energy physics’ scapulae wanted to know.
“Freedom.” I paused for emphasis, and I said it again, slowly and with exaggerated enunciation. Then I went on to tell them how, upon attaining a sufficient level of cognitive control, an auxiliary head could operate the hands and feet via the collar head itself. One could essentially guide the body like a manned robotic vehicle, just by issuing verbal commands to a properly conditioned collar head. An auxiliary head could thereby seize control of the machinery of locomotion and of tactile manipulation and, having done so, could enjoy the full range of freedoms so long denied us under the status quo. “Just think of it,” I encouraged them—I could sense I was drawing them in. “To go where we want, when we want, with whom we want—choosing seats on the bus, taking long walks by the ocean at daybreak, making our own reading selections, making new friends, meeting them at the trendiest hot spots around town, being seen in their company at the finest restaurants and sidewalk cafes, choosing the best items from the menus and eating every last bite. Yes, eating every bite. Wouldn’t you like to eat? Really, wouldn’t you? Food smells so wonderful, doesn’t it? But do they ever offer us so much as a bite?”
Of course not. Never. They all agreed. The head up a woman’s sleeve, just across the aisle, said she almost had a taste once. “It was Fourth of July, two years ago. A stifling day. There was a picnic by the lake. And a bit of watermelon juice trickled over the wrist and right down the arm. But just as it was about to reach my lips, some little brat tossed a firecracker and we jumped, and the stream changed course and ran right into my left eye instead. It burned like hell. Did I mention she salts her melons?”
Well, that nearly broke my heart. Can you imagine it? I made her a promise, made all of them a promise. “I can promise you this: The day is coming when we auxiliary heads will have all the salted melon we can eat. And much more than that. We’ll have our dreams, our own dreams, and we’ll make them all real. Didn’t you ever have a dream? Wasn’t there ever something you wanted to do, something you wanted to be?”
It took a little cajoling—auxiliary heads are notoriously shy—but I got the head between the assistant professor of high energy physics’ shoulder blades to confess that she had always wanted to open a high end coffee shop, with fresh pastries and hot soups and maybe – “I mean, if business is good” – maybe even a Panini grill for “all kinds of sandwiches with fresh cheeses and meats and imported pesto on artisan breads.”
I told her it was a beautiful dream, and I meant it. I put the same question to the head up a woman’s sleeve just across the aisle.
“You know,” she told us, “I have always thought it would be fun to be a nineteenth century industrialist. For a while, I was fixated on Rockefeller, but that, of course, was just a passing phase. Lately I’ve found myself torn between Morgan and Vanderbilt.”
She asked me which I would rather be. I didn’t even have to think about it. Clearly it was Vanderbilt, and I told her so. But I couldn’t risk losing my audience by meandering into an explanation, so I apologized and told her she’d have to take my word for it.
“And what about you, friend?” I asked the one in the next row up, a little apprehensive about how he might respond.
“I’m not really one to go on about these sorts of things,” he hedged. “But since you brought it up, I have been working, for some time now, on choreographing an expressionistic dance interpretation of Finnegans Wake.”
His whole demeanor changed, and it was clear I had won him over. It was a great victory, and I’ll admit I was a little choked up and had to take a couple of seconds to compose myself before continuing. “I tell you this, this day, my friend: the day is coming when you will dance that expressionistic dance, with a whole chorus line—your choreography does include a chorus line, of course?”
“Of course.”
“The day is coming when you will dance at the head of an entire chorus line of auxiliary heads, all independently controlling their own—yes, their own I said—elbows and asses and jazzy hands and feet.” I told them that our moment had finally arrived, that we were on history’s side, that all we need do was recognize our abilities and find the courage to declare our own power....
But then, just as I was hitting my rhetorical stride, the bus stopped and the driver hopped down from his perch and turned to stare at us through mirrored sunglasses. I’m not making it up—mirrored sunglasses on a rainy day. “Alright now, listen up. Not one of you two-headed freeloaders paid the extra fare for your auxiliary head. Not one of you. I want the whole bunch of you moochers off the bus. Right this minute. Off you go.”
What could we do? We did as we were told. It turns out there were more of us than I had realized; most auxiliaries prefer to be as inconspicuous as possible most of the time. The bus was almost empty when it pulled away. Now, different people carry their emotions in different ways, and I won’t try to catalogue the nuances of our variegated reactions in those first few seconds on the pavement or what they may have revealed about us as individuals, or how we viewed ourselves and each other, or how we imagined the world viewed us. But I can tell you this: our responses were little more than so many shades in a spectrum of shame. We knew we weren’t to blame. That the fault was theirs, not ours. That we had nothing, any of us, to be ashamed of. But knowing it and trusting it are two entirely different things, and sometimes you can’t help feeling what you feel.
We watched the bus glide away. And then we watched it stop at the next block and let on a soggy half dozen or so, stopping one by one to shake their umbrellas near the door. Then it was moving again, and we watched it shrink into the distance, floating over the traffic, and slip finally out of sight beyond a modest rise in the road. Then somebody moved and the rest of us followed, westbound on the sidewalk, staring straight ahead under our umbrellas. And nobody looked at anybody else, and none of us said a word.
And that’s where this story would have ended except that, about a month after this episode, Walter and I were on our way to a production of No Exit in the parking lot of the West End Krispy Kreme, and I saw the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. As the number 7 passed, approaching 21st, I saw a pair of legs above the steering wheel, just where the driver should have been, knees pointed at the ceiling, shins dangling beneath, pale and hairy, where they were exposed between gray polyester pant legs and white socks, thick-soled black shoes bouncing and swaying to the irregularities in the road. Walter and I exchanged a look and watched the bus make a wide left, a little on the fast side, and disappear up the block. Then the light changed and we went on our way. The show, if you’re wondering, was top shelf, but I have to acknowledge that my French is passable at best, and I had a hard time concentrating after what we had seen on the road.
Anyway, another month or so went by, and then a guest post appeared one night on my blog, The Auxiliary Input. The visitor called himself Backseat Driver, and he explained that he was writing from the left buttock of a Metro Transit bus driver. (I would like to include his post here, but I’m afraid the prose is fairly awful and would have to be heavily edited for syntax and typos and indelicate sprinklings of profanity. I’ll summarize, instead.) The gist was that he was on the bus the day we were all thrown off; his collar head was the driver with the mirrored lenses. He was writing to express his solidarity with my readers and to tell how several bold auxiliary heads had shared their dreams, in the space of a few blocks on a rainy day, and inspired him to take action on his own behalf. Having long been dissatisfied with his seating arrangements, he had set to work, shortly thereafter, devising an elaborate system of levers and pulleys, which, along with a few carefully placed mirrors, made it possible for his collar head to drive the bus with his crown to the seat, allowing the auxiliary head to get a view of the road (from just behind a small but strategically placed hole in the hip pocket) and to exchange pleasantries with the passengers as they boarded and disembarked. The tricky part was convincing the collar head to go along with the scheme; even getting the use of the hands long enough to draft a set of diagrams in the first place had been difficult. But he devised a truly elegant solution to this impediment: he began making embarrassing noises, and the collar head, mortified at having these sounds emanating from his pants all day long, was so desperate for an end to this humiliation that he soon gave in to the full extortion.
Now, if only I had realized what I was seeing, that day the bus rolled by with the upside–down driver, I don’t mind telling you I would have cried like a baby, right there on the street, same as I do every time I think of it, every time I retell the story, same as I am at this moment, whispering dictation into Walter’s wax-caked, hairy ear as he clicks away at the keys, my chin trembling and my lips drawn and quivering as I struggle to enunciate the words. I cry and I am not ashamed. I am not afraid. I know that I am not superfluous, that there is nothing gratuitous about me, or at least no more so than Mozart, or the moon, or the Milky Way, or any of a hundred billion-odd galaxies idling away the fleeting moments between big bang and big crunch (or cosmic diaspora, according to your preference). Pointless, you say. Meaningless. Futile. Doomed. But still we watch the moon rise, a deep yellow, enormous against the trees on a cool evening in September. Silent. Like seeing it for the first time. And even after the bite of that first mosquito, on the ear lobe, we stand a moment longer on the porch. Just Watching. Just wondering. Expecting nothing more than to see it climb slowly free of the last branch, unscathed, and into the boundless void of a darkening sky.
– Don Hucks is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose fiction has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Pedestal, decomP, Bartleby Snopes, Pindeldyboz, and Ghoti.
Also by Don Hucks: "Meringue"
