Eduardo Alcott has sequestered Tyrone in the basement, where they are hunkered on a couch with vinyl protective covering. There are many power tools nearby, and serpentine coils of extension cords. And there is the smell of sawdust. The forlornness of basements is well-known. Alcott has made sure that Tyrone’s brother, a.k.a. the Great White Hope, is no longer acting as his brother’s keeper. The tutelage and indoctrination must be undertaken in a precinct free from interference. The process must be given space and time, as with Chinese reeducation. This, at any rate, is how Tyrone explains the situation to himself.
Today’s lecture, according to Eduardo, is about the perforation of the skull. The theme of today’s lecture is the communication between the contents of the interior of the skull and the environment. The theme of today’s lecture is the urgent need of these two regions to communicate more freely. The theme of today’s lecture is blood-to-brain-tissue ratios and the fluidity of blood. The theme of today’s lecture is the mystical surgery known as trepanation, the boring, scraping, drilling, or cutting of the skull, using such tools as have been explored from Neolithic times up to present times: the cylindrical crown saw, the Woodall trephine, and the cone-shaped cylinder with center pin.
Eduardo, the Mexican ideologue, a fiery and passionate man, claims distant ancestry to the founder of a local collectivist experiment in Utopian thinking, in the following way: the initial Alcott, the Utopian Alcott, for all of his theoretical expertise, got with child a young woman of the Indies who was in his employ, and this unwanted young woman was exiled to the tropical latitudes of her girlhood, where, after prolonged and grueling labor, she whelped a boy, whom she called Alcott after his father, and this Alcott grew up scorned and hated. The lot of bastardy is hard. Nevertheless, this young Alcott, by the name of Neville, was proud and strong. He read widely in the writings of his father and his father’s friends, for example, a certain Walden Pond camping expert. And Neville learned of the immensity of nature, the perfection of nature, and of the pestilence of man. He likewise learned, by virtue of his coming of age in the tropics, of the many religious and mystical practices favored by the so-called savage cultures, among these being cannibalism, incest, sacrifice, ritual amputation, dowsing, and the like. Neville Alcott retired to a cave on a lone island in the Caribbean Sea, taking only his wife, who was a dark woman, a Moorish woman, a former slave or perhaps the daughter of slaves, and together they produced a great line of Alcotts, a coffee-hued line of Alcotts, and these Alcotts rose up in the Caribbean Isles. They were as one with the freed slaves, the abandoned slaves. They were as one with workers of the sugarcane plantations, they brewed rum in the hot sun, they lived in palm-frond shacks when hurricanes blew, and when they had become as strong as an army, these Alcotts were a part of every attempt to overthrow the European oppressor in this hemisphere. The Alcotts rode into Havana in tanks with Fidel, Eduardo said. In fact, Eduardo himself rode into Managua with Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas, and he composed position papers for the Zapatistas, and he abducted villagers with the Shining Path. In every place where the Alcotts could oppose the power of the Anglo and his lackeys, the Alcotts shone forth, until, through the magic of counternarrative and alternative historical systems, as explained by Gramsci and Fanon, this Alcott came back to the place where the original Utopian Alcott once lived himself, to Concord, Massachusetts, where the Revolution of your pestilential country began, and here he intends to begin the process of bringing down the fiendish American power, bringing it to its knees, so that America can know how it subjects the many peoples of the world to its bad television programs, its repellent and decadent movies, its fascistic foreign policy, and also its inferior mass productions of cut-rate goods, such as bad beer and coffee and cars that are the laughingstock of the globe.
Today’s lecture is about the operation “for the removal of stone,” whose history was first articulated by one Paul Broca, a French gentleman who was given a skull by an American prison reformer named Squier, who in turn got this skull as a gift from a Peruvian woman. The skull, sundered from its identity, made the rounds and was for a time much studied by a phrenologist with unusually large ears, called Horsly. Why was this skull so valuable? Every age has its abundance of skulls. The Khmer Rouge, e.g., paved roads with skulls. The skulls in Rwanda outnumber the bowls. The skull in question was of interest because it had a perfect parallelogram cut from its surface by pre-Columbian Peruvians, Peruvians before the pestilence of Columbus and Cortés and their rapacious hordes. This skull had a parallelogram cut out of it, after which the owner of the skull apparently survived for a time. Because, if you believe the writings of Paul Broca, there is evidence of some of the bone growing back.
“There are thousands of these skulls found in the area of Peru,” Alcott says, droning on in his interminable way, licking his lips, running his hands through his wavy gray locks, refixing the aviator glasses to his nose. “Peru is the capital of this historical surgery, the surgery known as trepanation. Peru and surrounding areas, and this is what we wish for you to understand, comrade. From here the operation was exported around the globe. From Neolithic times, from the times which are before writing and history, you find the Peruvians boring holes in the skull. And soon thereafter you find peoples in the Pacific Islands also performing this operation, having in all likelihood learned this operation from the Peruvians, and this we know because of the revolutionary peoples of New Caledonia, where trepanations were as common as the extraction of teeth. And this is the case even in New Ireland, where women frequently carved the skulls of their own children so as to make sure their children would grow up tall. It is possible, of course, that peoples made these journeys by canoe, from the coast of Latin America to the islands, because of prevailing winds. The word kumara, for example, denoting a kind of sweet potato, this also made a transpacific journey, according to linguists, and just so with the operation for the removal of stone.
“Many times”— Eduardo pauses to increase the mystery —“many times, these operations were for legitimate purposes, maybe depressed skull fractures, you know, when a piece of bone is actually driven into the tissues of the brain and surgery is in order to remove the bone fragments and to drain out the pus. As you are aware, my revolutionary brother, there is also the operation that is about the humors, about allowing the bad air to be released, the bad air of humors. The trepan was used to release this bad air into the room, after which the healing would begin to take place, because when there is pressure upon the brain or when the blood in the brain begins to coagulate, according to valid and historically sound medical theory, there is illness and death.
“But many other times, the operations took place in order to release demons who were harassing the medical subjects. Or the operations took place for spiritual purposes. For example, in Eastern Europe, which is the last place this type of surgery reached because this was the most backward place on the globe, you have the Bronze Age Russians, who were really just isolated bands of tribes in the region of the Minussinsk Basin or the Dnepr River. Still, using various scraping tools, they too performed trepanations, after which these tribesmen carried harvested pieces of the skull around with them as amulets. In some cases, you know, we’ve even read of buried remains of tribesmen, in bogs, carrying sacks with them in which there were contained bits and pieces of numerous skulls, all of these fragments removed from living persons. It is to be supposed, my revolutionary brother, that the magic was increased if the piece of skull that was obtained was from a living person.
“Left parietal lobe, almost always the proper region for the trepanning in these Bronze Age times, in Italy, Austria, Portugal, for example. There the skulls were beveled.”
The basement is damp and cold. The furnace is shuddering as if desperate, just a few feet from where Tyrone is sitting. One of Eduardo’s flunkies, a high school kid named Hal, has gone off for more food, returning with hummus and tabbouleh bought in large tubs from the local health food market. Eduardo is very passionate about the health food market. Eduardo is passionate about many things, unless perhaps this is just part of the indoctrination process.
It happened this way: Tyrone and the Great White Hope had jogged up the street, under cover of night, fleeing the residence of Tyrone’s adoptive parents. It seems so long ago. They fled, and there was a brief moment, in the air of autumn, when Tyrone’s liberty seemed grand, like he was a dove released. Then there was some waiting, and shivering, underneath an oak, in the shadows, until an unassuming Econoline van appeared, a van featuring the sort of unsettled idle that is an augury of future muffler trouble, and before he could think twice about it, Tyrone was jumped, blanketed with some rough wool, bundled into the back of the Econoline, which unfortunately did not have the all-purpose Sears love mattress, and then Tyrone, who did not struggle, was blindfolded. Tyrone was told not to ask questions. Tyrone was told that if he cooperated there would be no need for force.
The Great White Hope had appeared to be just returning from some after-school activity, basketball practice or whatever it was he did, oboe lessons. The Great White Hope appeared, notwithstanding excessive bodily ornament, to have his middle-class white-boy routine down pretty good. But appearances deceive. Because the Great White Hope was attempting to shake off the chains of his elite birth; he was attempting to be with the people, alongside his pals, these revolutionary types, who favored the rhetoric of high-powered cranial saws. You held the saw in place with your forehead while you winched the boring mechanism into the head of the sufferer, who was bleeding like a stuck pig.
At first, Tyrone believed that the Great White Hope had given him up to the authorities. But of course he couldn’t figure out why he needed to be blindfolded in order to be extradited back to the Empire State. Tyrone’s revolutionary spirit was clouded at this time. He had a feeling of loneliness, and he believed that the Great White Hope needed to turn him over, perhaps to claim some reward, or to get his photo in mass-marketed periodicals, or simply to indicate his supremacy over his darker adopted brother. Tyrone’s feeling was sorrow, but sorrow is for the weak. In years past, Tyrone had attempted to instruct the Great White Hope. In fact, this was an area of some nostalgia. Tyrone wanted to be certain that the Great White Hope got beyond the standard-issue education of the rich suburban kid. Maybe Tyrone’s kidnapping, in a van that smelled of spoiled milk, was proof enough that the Great White Hope had now come into his own. There was the silence of the van, and then there was incense burning, sandalwood, to cover up the dope smoking and the spoiled milk. Tyrone began to relax, to feel that a condition of permanent flight was paradoxically useful to his legal situation. If he had no idea where he was going, it could hardly be bad for him.
Three or four persons hustled him into a little shack apparently somewhere in the northeastern suburbs. They led him stumbling into a cheap living room, which was done up in the cut-rate paneling that indicated the permanent vegetative state of National Football League enthusiasts. This he knew when the Great White Hope removed the blindfold.
“Sorry, bro. Hope it wasn’t too uncomfortable.”
Tyrone said nothing. Nothing had served him well before. The revolutionaries stared at Tyrone, blinking, as if he astonished them. He noticed that the table was cluttered with ceramic ashtrays of the sort made by fumbling elementary school students. Whoever acted as leader, and it became obvious quickly that the leader was this Mexican man with wild hair and fervent, unblinking eyes, had a school bus full of sixth graders on his payroll. Further evidence of this was to be found in the knit pot holders in the kitchen, where the revolutionaries all ate together. One of the four teenagers standing by offered Tyrone a beverage: Gatorade, the popular sports drink, complete with electrolytes. No telephone anywhere to be found, and a television with only a coat hanger for an antenna. For a time, they all said nothing. Later, the comrades played cards in silence.
After some hours, it came out that the Great White Hope needed to return to the home of his parents. They needed to come up with a story for him to provide these genetic parents. Eduardo silenced the deliberations, motioned to Tyrone to stand up, and took him down into the basement, where, in his stiff, academic English, he began the first of his study sessions on the theory and practice of the organization known as the Retrievalists. Tyrone said the syllables over and over, as if the repetition would give some clear evidence of hidden meaning. The Retrievalists. The first lesson concerned the bogus history of the Alcotts, described above, and when it was over, a wordless teenage girl stretched out a down sleeping bag for Tyrone on the basement floor. The Retrievalists would have him sleep there.
What was it they wanted? Eduardo asked rhetorically on the second day. Naturally, they had many answers to this question. What they wanted was the rescue of this continent from its oppressors. They wanted relief from the oppressors who had wrongly seized the American lands and visited upon the natives a genocide, who had all but wiped out the mighty bison, who had sown among the native peoples such foul illnesses as smallpox and alcoholism. When they had completed this mission, they would move on to other continents, in the following order: Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, South America.
What were their origins? Their origins—and here Eduardo hoped that Tyrone, as newly installed Minister of Information, would soon come up with a better recitation of the facts—were in the environmental movement. They had originally been an autonomous cell in a decentralized organization with no leader, which had no revolutionary position and whose goal was felonious attacks on property. It should be noted that the Retrievalists still supported the cellular structure of this environmental organization, they just needed to enlarge the political debate to include other legitimate modes of instruction and resistance, such as prisoner exchange, propaganda, black-market financing, counterfeiting, cyberterrorism, et cetera.
“We are aware of certain problems of a legal nature in your own situation,” Eduardo remarked on Saturday, in the middle of the indoctrination, “and we want you to know that we applaud your dramatic efforts in the city of New York.”
“If you’re asking about the, uh, the Asian woman,” Tyrone said, “I had nothing to do with that. She’s my friend.”
“We understand that it is important to keep the story streamlined and in a condition where it can be repeated without mistake. We applaud the rigor of your preparations.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with it, sir. I got enough problems.”
“For the time being, you are in the care of our organization, and we would like to present you with some intelligence on the strength and militancy of our efforts, so that you may indeed become our Minister of Information.”
It was like graduate school all over again, that was the truth of it. In graduate school there was always the solemnity and the forced language. Eduardo had a trait in common with the graduate students of Tyrone’s acquaintance, and that trait was facial masking. Schizophrenics used the technique, too, especially when speaking to the manifest and latent content of symbolic systems. Tyrone knew this because he’d had the occasional hallucination himself.
After each session would come the catechism. What is our name? Our name is the Retrievalists. What is our origin? Our origin is in the struggle against the pestilence of humanity. When did we begin our struggle? We began our struggle in 1994. What is the nature of our actions? The nature of our actions is random and discontinuous, but we seek the violent destruction of the property of the oppressor. Who is the oppressor? The oppressor is the large multinational corporation and its allies. When will our mission be completed? Our mission will never be completed. How long do we serve? We serve until death.
On Monday, after some more ranting while the kids are at school, there is a period of a couple of hours when Eduardo Alcott has other responsibilities. What could these responsibilities be? Some kind of computer-programming job that he uses to finance both his living situation and his revolutionary cadre, where he might also have access to a server that conceals the Web presence of the Retrievalists. When Eduardo goes out into the poisonous atmosphere of the world, he leaves behind sentries. For Tyrone’s security. Hal, the guy with the unwashed hair, and Nina, the sullen blonde who always seems to wear her sleeves at such a length that as far as Tyrone knows she has no hands. A big lug with a heavy-metal mullet and a Korn tour jersey, named Glenn. Maybe the conversation that ensues is completely scripted. Impossible to know.
“Our parents are perfectly nice and everything, and we were never mistreated by them,” Hal says.
“Yeah,” Nina says. “Our parents are perfectly nice.”
“We came to believe some things, know what I’m saying? We feel like you walk outside, you see certain things, you know, bad things. How can you not walk around and feel like things are getting worse, you know? Once there was some mystery to this life, now there’s none. Now there’s just waking up and taking the standardized test, making sure that you get into a good college, you know? So you can go work for the Bechtel Corporation or the Carlyle Group. And, like, all this pressure about college, what’s that about?”
“Yeah,” Nina says. “College.”
“I know how to clean my room and I know how to pick the lock on the liquor cabinet. That’s about it.”
Glenn, across the room, adds his own perceptions of the revolutionary situation while sharpening knives. “I had to take the door actually off the hinges at my mom’s. She had it all in this closet with a really strong padlock. I just took the door off the hinges.”
“We’re normal kids. We’re not statistics. But we’ve got to this point where we feel like we have to act, get it? And that’s why we’re going to do what we have to do. Because that’s how a revolutionary movement functions, you know, it acts.”
Tyrone takes in the nuances of the scene. The television, with the sound off, is unwatched, as ever, though it happens to be broadcasting, at present, The Werewolves of Fairfield County. A repeated episode he happens to have seen. Time, in this rerun episode, is moving backward rather than forward. Only the werewolves seem to know how to deal with it.
“We’ve been thinking about it, you know, and we have, like, deliberations. We debate,” Nina says. “What should be the first direct action? Like, what will be the thing that gets us the right kind of attention so that we can continue to attract other soldiers, or whatever, and to promote what we believe in?”
Gradually, as though a curtain is being retracted by an offstage dwarf, the plan under discussion emerges. The plan, like many such plans, involves the element of fire, which in Tyrone’s fevered and heavily sequestered imagination is the most ominous of elements. The plan has been dreamed up by a committee of teenagers, and the plan involves a firebomb, homemade, which shall be used on a local chain business, which does not belong in such an estimable place, a place of nature and wildness, namely Concord, Massachusetts.
“Like, what makes those people think they can just bring a franchise like that into a town like this?” Hal asks. “What makes them think they can do that? Don’t the people who live here have any say in these kinds of things? They don’t have any say because these things are all being figured out someplace else by real-estate assholes and —”
“By some idiot,” Glenn says, grinding another knife.
“By some guy who probably has kids that he needs to put through school somehow, and how is he going to put his kid through school, and he can’t figure out any way he’s going to do it because he shouldn’t have gotten his wife pregnant in the first place, they should have used some kind of birth control, or they couldn’t get an abortion because of where they live, or whatever, so he has no choice but to get a job at this lousy place, and then it’s up the chain or get fired by the big corporation, and so now he works his way up, like, until he’s got the job that is oppressing other people every day, and that’s the job of figuring out where the franchises go.”
“I don’t even like doughnuts,” Nina says. “I mean, I maybe liked doughnuts when I was a kid, but now I think doughnuts are eaten by people who don’t know any better. Like, the whole idea of the doughnut is to dumb you down. People, they eat the doughnuts and they can’t think straight, and they have to take a nap, you know, and then they can’t understand the forces that are working against them, like, they don’t even know whether a doughnut is nutritious or anything, because how are you going to find out? The doughnut is a symbol of how people don’t have any power, and so the doughnut has to go.”
“We tried thinking up some revolutionary slogans for a protest,” Hal says. “You know, like, WE CALL IT DOUGHNOT!”
The three kids laugh, and their laughter is open and inviting, as if it comes from a more innocent place. Tyrone hears fervor, and hears youth, and hears how lovely and frail youth is, how open to the bad ideas in any room, so easily sent on long, erroneous rambles, and these things can coexist, the frailty and openness of youth, the mercilessness of it, and that’s how you get a pair of Cambodian twelve-year-olds who smoke opium to persuade an army of adults that God speaks through them.
“So you’re going to firebomb a Krispy Kreme?” he asks.
“Reduce it to cinders,” Hal says.
“Leaving a black, smoky pile of nothing,” Nina says.
“And when is this meant to happen?” Tyrone asks.
“Can’t tell you that,” Nina says, and she goes and puts her hands on the shoulders of Hal. “Eduardo knows all of the specifics, and we only learn things bit by bit, and that’s because we’re not, you know, so old yet. But we’re in on all the planning and deliberations and stuff.”
“You’re expecting that I’m going to hang around and watch you guys blow up a doughnut restaurant?”
Glenn lines up knives on the counter. “Eduardo says you are a revolutionary.”
“I’m a bike messenger,” Tyrone says, and then says more than he’s said in a long time. “Man, I’ll tell you what I am, I’m a bike messenger. But once I, too, had a lot of ideas about things.” Warming to the subject as he goes, “I had all these ideas that I could change the world, the kinds of ideas that you guys have. I thought I could run for office. I thought I could help the other people who have my color of skin, because I was lucky enough to get a good education, which most of the people with my color of skin don’t have. For no good reason did I get any of this. The dice just fell my way. And I could go back and teach these people how to do better in the world, make more of the world. And the way I thought I was going to do this was first with words, and I went and worked with the words, you know, in graduate school, and when the words wouldn’t bend the way I thought they were going to bend, when I woke up one morning and the sentences all looked like they were going places I never expected them to go, then I gave up trying to do that.”
“That’s exactly what we —”
Tyrone raises his hand, knowing that in this group, if in no other, he can command attention.
“And then I thought that maybe I could change the world by making art, you know, and I started in doing just that. I would take a book and I would mark out all the words except for the few words that represented a secret code, a code assuring that certain systems were in place, big impenetrable systems. I would open these codes for the reader, and I did this obsessively, all night long sometimes. I would do these things, I would do violence to books, and open them up, you know, so that people could see what was really written inside, and when this didn’t change the world, I started, well, I guess I started to get a little desperate, I started making collages, and then videos of collages, mismatched words and books and pictures, all those seductions in the world; I would stay up for nights at a time, and I wouldn’t go out, I’d believe that I had worked out important artistic statements, and when I didn’t make any money at it, as I always thought I would, I got a smaller apartment, still, you know, holding on to this idea that I could change the world, even if I had to economize. And then I got another smaller apartment, always so I could keep the studio where my work was stored, and then I didn’t have enough money for the studio, so I had to get this bike messenger’s job. And that was a blow. At first I said I wouldn’t do it for long, you know, because I had this other important responsibility, but then a couple years went by and I wasn’t young the way I was young anymore, and I was a guy who had this job where I could run free in the city, and eventually these patterns emerged, and I would ride in the city, between all these addresses, all these corporations or agencies or law firms, whatever, and that started to seem like that was the art, that was changing the world in a way. I was making patterns, just like I was trying to write something or draw something; I was going where the addresses told me to go, and I was sort of like the elements, and so I started not going to the studio as much, and the world wasn’t getting changed by me at all. Gradually, it was sort of like the world was a place that had almost no traces of me in it. I was the messenger; I was the person who made it possible for meaning to happen. A word, or a tape recording, or a compact disc with some information on it, these were never meaningful on their own because they didn’t go from one person to another. They were never complete until they were transmitted by me, so I was a thing that was always missing. I was the completion of the circuit, a device for meanings to get made, but in this way I’d stopped meaning anything at all, myself, I was just a guy a split second between when a letter got written and when it got read. I was the time between meanings, a time that grows shorter and shorter the longer you live, until it seems to be going backward, and all of this meant I had not changed the world, and it meant that I had done some good by not changing the world, by deciding to leave it as it was.”
When he finishes his disquisition, there is stupefaction in the crumbling interior of the kitchen, a stupefaction among the revolutionaries. A werewolf bays at something on the television screen across the room.
“But your brother said —”
“Never mind what my brother said.”
“But what about the woman in New York?” Hal asks.
“Why is it a good thing if I hit a woman on the sidewalk with a brick? Which I did not do. Why is that a good thing for me to have done that from your point of view? Did you ever hit anyone in the head? Do you know what head injuries are like?”
Glenn arises from his stool, from his knife sharpening, and he comes to the uncomfortable folding chair where Tyrone sits. “We’re willing to do what needs to be done.”
“You know what’s going to happen if you get convicted of arson?”
“We’re not going to get caught,” Hal says.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret, before I leave, which is maybe what I’m going to do here in a second, and that is that I was actually talking to, uh, to Samantha Lee, the woman, the victim, on the phone at the moment that she was hit, the woman, the victim. She was on the phone, and I was talking to her from the studio, at the moment she was —”
He didn’t realize it, until this dusk, in this safe house, somewhere in the suburbs of Massachusetts, the momentousness of what happened. He fled the city of New York because, as a messenger, transit was his skill, because that is what he did. He fled the scene and he prepared for the worst, which is the lot of the black man, and then the worst came to pass, which is also arguably the lot of the black man, followed by further and further examples of the worst. All of this. Yet now it seems that there is a miserly portion of redemption available to him, and this redemption is in the fact that he meant to say something kind to this woman, Samantha Lee, he had called to do so in the first place, to say something kindly to this woman, who believed in what Tyrone had once done, as an artist, and this is what he meant to say, “I am in the studio tonight” because of you, because of you, because of you, but the line went dead, and now, in front of a bunch of teenagers, he feels the unmistakable import of that moment.
And that is when Eduardo returns.
Eduardo turns off the television. Flings house keys onto the kitchen table.
There is silence in the room.
“Tonight is Monday, and this is the night that I’ve set aside for further loyalty tests,” Eduardo begins. “As you know, I’ve designed loyalty tests for each of you, to make sure you’re up to the revolutionary actions ahead. I’ve just returned, in fact, from making sure that our other comrade, Max, who is presently operating as a double agent, is functioning effectively and that his cover has not been compromised in the first phase of the loyalty tests, in which he gave up his own brother to the movement. He seems fine, except for the fact that his mother says he is grounded for the rest of the semester.
“I can also tell the Minister of Information that news of his case has now reached the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His parents are aware of the situation and they have contacted the out-of-state police.
“Now, what we have scheduled tonight is the next phase of the loyalty tests. Revolutionary brothers and sisters, I have to bring the Minister of Information up to speed and so I must revisit ground covered earlier, and my apologies. We speak again of the ancient surgery of trepanation and of the use of the ancient surgery as a treatment for maladies of the mind. I think we have spoken of its use for depressed skull fractures, most of these resulting from battles where slingshots and rock throwing were common, and we have spoken of its use in situations where demon possession was the diagnosis, also with seizure and epilepsy, but have we spoken of its use with respect to migraine? Yes, the ancient surgery was used as a cure for migraine because migraines were considered a kind of demon possession. And what was the result of the ancient surgery, my revolutionary brothers and sisters? The result was increased feelings of well-being and peacefulness, greater alertness, and increased sexual feeling. This is the truth about the ancient surgery, that it has a very modern capacity, and that is for increased feelings of well-being.
“I hesitate to give you the proof, my revolutionary brothers and sisters, because I’m guessing that you just won’t believe it’s as simple as this, but it is, and this is where loyalty comes into it, my brothers. So now if you could just step forward here and feel this part of my skull.”
There’s no getting around this phrenological obsessiveness of Eduardo’s, and Tyrone watches the kids step forward to where the older man is seated, by the oven, which is set at broil to help with the heating problem. Eduardo bows before the teens, in order to present the crown of his head.
“Please don’t poke at it, my brothers, because the bone hasn’t healed over all the way, and if the skin were to be perforated, well, you know, I could get a bruise on the tissue itself. And this would not be good for the movement.”
The spot is overgrown with hair, so it’s hard to say exactly where or what the evidence is. Glenn is first, massaging the top of Eduardo’s head.
“I can’t feel anything,” Glenn says. “Is this the right spot?”
Eduardo takes his hand, and there is the strangely gentle probing of the skull, the older man, holding Glenn’s right hand, stroking the mild curve at the top of his head.
“Oh,” Glenn says, “I get it. There, right?”
Eduardo drops the hand suddenly, as if it has now grown foul, and he points at Hal. Hal wipes his hand on his grimy jeans and presents himself. Eduardo takes his hand and swipes the hand across his head, like a caress at first and then, as if the hand were some kind of swooping bird, sets it down on his skull, and Hal’s brow, furrowed in concentration, seems to soften.
“You mean that little divot thing there?”
“What else would I mean?” Eduardo snaps.
“What did you use to do it?” Hal says.
Of course, Eduardo points out, he did not perform an auto-trepanation, and he is reasonably sure there are no examples of auto-penetration in the literature of the ancient surgery, especially because it would be impossible to both fold the skin flap over the eyes and simultaneously complete the procedure. However, Eduardo points out that the medical industry in his own land is not as tightly regulated as it is in this country, where the industry is compromised by manufacturers of drugs and by large health insurance conglomerates that control medical practice by virtue of their normative idea of what the human body is and must be. In his country, a trepanation can be procured under sterile circumstances for a modest fee. He points out that the Peruvians had a much higher success rate, in the pre-Columbian era, than the doctors of Europe because they practiced their surgery in the open air, whereas the western doctors performed theirs in operating rooms, where vulnerability to infection rendered the survival rate no higher than 10 percent or so, and that in the rare instance in which a doctor agreed to perform the surgery.
“Of course,” Eduardo says, and now he seems to be making his pitch directly to Tyrone, “we have a migraine sufferer here. And for her loyalty test, she has gratefully agreed to be the recipient of our efforts today.”
Is it possible? Has Nina agreed?
“Because of our situation, we are going to have to make do with the tools at hand. I have spent some time making sure that we have a drill bit that will not penetrate beyond the skull into the brain tissue. We will also need a small hand vacuum cleaner to suction up the fragments from the hole. I think under the circumstances, the boring technique is going to make the best sense. In this technique, a number of very small holes are bored into the skull, in the shape of a circle, after which we gouge out small lines connecting each hole until we pry loose the circular piece of the skull. We would like to offer Nina, the revolutionary sister, the piece of skull fragment when we are done, so that she can make an amulet out of it. And we would also like to assure the revolutionary sister that we have, in advance, procured enough prescription pain reliever to ensure that the operation will be virtually free of pain. So whenever the sister is ready, we will commence.”
Nina begins to cry softly in the corner where she’s sitting, and the crying is so base, such a violation of the revolutionary code, that there’s a flurry of activity in which all of the Retrievalists gather around her. Tyrone has to get her out of Eduardo’s shack somehow. Immediately.
“Does the revolutionary sister want the pain medication now?”
“Look, my brother,” Tyrone says at last, edging closer to the front door, “I think there might be some better ways to test her loyalty than to put her life in jeopardy in order to cure her migraines.”
“What does the minister propose? Unless of course he proposes to call the authorities, who would take a great interest in his own case.”
“Give me the drugs,” Nina says. “Give me the drugs.”
“Uh, you could have her go get work at the Krispy Kreme franchise. She could bring back, I don’t know, information on the time that they close up shop. Which parts of the store are vulnerable to fire. A blueprint, whatever you need.”
“The minister is not taking into account the fact of the ancient surgery creating feelings of well-being and fulfillment. And also there is the matter of allegiance.”
Tyrone could turn the drill on Eduardo and perforate his left shoulder or his wrist or his ankle, so that Eduardo would be in intense pain. Or he could depress the spot where Eduardo’s skull surgery is healed over, bringing upon him a deep and heavy sleep. Or he could hold Eduardo down and give him a half dozen of the Percodans or Percocets that are secreted away on him somewhere. He could persuade the teenagers to turn against Eduardo, in the process giving them great lessons about the preciousness of some aspects of contemporary life, even in these dark times. For example, look at the mountaintops; there are mountaintops all over the place. There are mountaintops in the state of Massachusetts; on any day you could just decide to go walk to the summit of a mountaintop, on the trail that passes over it. Tyrone is no hero, but he could do one of these things, or he could simply do what messengers do. He could flee.
There is no one to stop him; there are no guns in this turn of events, even if Eduardo does yell, “Get the gun!” as Tyrone opens the door. There is no genuine snub-nosed, pearl-handled anything, there are no perforations with bullets, no high-speed chases, or that’s what Tyrone hopes when he resolves upon telephoning the constabulary, come what may, just as soon as he figures out where he is, out in this neglected part of the suburbs, a few filling stations, auto repair shops, the front door of Eduardo’s place swinging wide behind him, looking back to see the room lit up, running and yelling, “Call the police! Call the police!” running and yelling as if he has never used his voice this way, as if he hasn’t spoken in years. The four of them staring, pointing. As he hightails it up the street. Never did a used auto parts shop and a bunch of customers loitering in front of a mini-storage facility seem so wondrous and full of peace.