The Two-Headed Man: Short Story Read online

  I give him a couple of more days, a week tops. He’s got the idea in his head, I’ve read it there. Now, it’s a question of provocation. The ball’s in my court.

  There’s something else going on, though. He wants me out of the way, but at the same time he’s worried about not being this big stoic any more, this big fucking deal, the one and only two-headed man. He wastes me, and he turns into a regular one-headed Joe, and maybe she won’t be so interested in him then. Maybe, underneath, she’s just another freak groupie.

  Sure, I’ve told you about her. Karen, his fiancée. Ugly as sin, dumb, pushing thirty and still a virgin. Always trying to get on my good side. Take a couple of days ago. She insists on buying me a book. “Okay,” I say. “Go to Core”—you know, that bookstore that sells porn—”and pick up a copy of Hard on the Saddle.”

  “Oh!” she squeals. “A western!”

  Samuel knows what I’m up to, but he can’t get it across to her, that’s how dumb she is. So she runs right out and buys the book and comes back and starts reading out loud about jism and hot stiff pricks before she twigs.

  Then she turns beet red, but fuck me if she doesn’t keep reading! And the whole time Samuel’s trying to get her to stop. And trying to hide the fact that he’s got the hard-on of his life.

  We met her at Folios, that café that sells books. We never used to go out all that much, Samuel was afraid of what I’d say. But, still, we went out quite a bit, considering. He gets a righteous kick, having people witness his suffering. Since the old lady died, though, he’s been gagging me. It turns out that a gagged parasitic head still earns you a lot of sympathy, especially if you tell people that you have to control the head for its own good because it’s prone to fits.

  That’s the line he used on Karen. Hooked her right in. Five minutes later he had her wanting to dedicate her life to him.

  Christ, he really thinks she’ll be happy married to him. He thinks that as long as he keeps me gagged, the two of them will be a happy, normal couple. Why the hell doesn’t he just fuck her once in a while and leave it at that? The poor dumb broad has no idea what she’s walking into.

  Sure, I’ve warned her. The minute the gag is off, I say, “Hit the road.” She just smiles, thinks she can handle it. She hasn’t got a bad-looking mouth. You know Jill St. John’s mouth? Like that. Tongue-kiss me, I tell her. She pecks me on the cheek. I tell her to let me eat her pussy. She keeps on smiling. You’ve got to hand it to her.

  I have fired my lawyer for incompetency and betrayal of trust. All along she intended for me to plead temporary insanity. “But we agreed,” she protested, as if the deception was mine, and such was my ensuing rage that I confess I rained invectives upon her.

  I will act as my own defence counsel. I will confront my oppressors alone. Which is as it should be.

  Where my strength comes from I cannot imagine. My prayers go unanswered, and the letters I now receive are either from hustlers or lunatics. My pain is past bearing. The wound has swollen up into one huge hideous boil, which everyone in this hospital pretends not to see, let alone be troubled by. Yesterday morning, at long last, the surgeon paid a visit.

  “This is coming along fine,” he said. “You shouldn’t be feeling all that much discomfort.”

  I was flabbergasted. “Idiot!” I cried. “Open your eyes!” And then I saw that he had the cold, evasive eyes of the drug-addicted nurses, and I understood that he was in cahoots with them.

  “Prepare my papers,” I said. “I am going to check myself out.”

  “I’m afraid you are under house arrest,” he said. “You leave here, you go straight into a cell.”

  The price of purity is abandonment. When Simon was on my shoulder I had moments of longing to be like other men. But I am not like other men. Less than ever, now that I bear resemblance to other men, am I like other men. How can men judge me? How can there be a jury of my peers? I foresee flagrant injustice. In spite of which I have been working on my case—by force of will alone pulling myself out of the fires of agony to write notes and make telephone calls.

  At first I was surprised to find my phone connected, but then I realized, of course! They want to eavesdrop! When I pick up the receiver, before I dial, I extend greetings to the interlopers. “Hello, voyeurs,” I say cordially. “Good afternoon, Satan’s cohorts.”

  I try every hour to reach Karen, but she has bought herself an answering machine. “I will do my best to get back to you,” she promises in the voice of a soliciting whore. Obviously she has already filled the gap left by me.

  To think I almost married her! It is clear to me now that what I took for saintly patience was depravity. I chose to believe that she suffered in silence Simon’s lewd remarks, whereas the truth is she welcomed them. Encouraged them! That is why she objected to him being gagged. I want nothing more to do with her, but unfortunately I must speak with her in order to prepare my defence.

  Regardless of her version of the events of that night, I do not plan to exonerate myself on the basis that I was provoked by any particular action of Simon’s. Granted, I acted in rage, but the realization that I must get rid of him had been growing in me for months. My defence will simply be that he was, and always has been, a devil embedded in my flesh, that he was an incarnation of what the scriptures enjoin every man to expunge from his being. My defence will be that it was my right—as it is the right and obligation of every man—to expunge my own evil.

  A defence, by the way, for which Karen might thank her lucky stars. If I was provoked by Simon, then surely Karen was his accessory. On the night in question she called my gagging of him cruel, she fled in tears. I was so distraught that I bought a bottle of whiskey and drank most of it, and as I drank, Simon managed to chew off his gag. He then proceeded to rave with unprecedented sadism, blaspheming everything I have ever held dear—our mother and Karen, certainly, but also every fond memory, every hope and dream. It was horrible, unearthly for its thoroughness and intimacy.

  He must have known what I was about to do, yet he persisted. Even as I picked up the saw, even as I held it to his neck. God in heaven, even as the blood sprayed.

  I crave whiskey for its sedative effect. I cannot believe that anyone has ever suffered more pain than this. Clearly this growth on my shoulder must be lanced. It is pulsing with poison. If no surgeon will attend to it, I will do the job myself.

  We’re at a restaurant. It’s two years ago. I swear I see Miss St. John, just as she’s leaving. I tell the waitress, “Put a shot in that coffee, I thought I saw Jill.”

  The waitress says no way. “Your brother’s reading the Bible,” is her excuse.

  I’ve got two options. I decide on the cool one. The pressure above my left ear turns into burning while I wrap myself in mystery and dignity.

  A dream comes back to me, the one about being a tree. Sap for blood. Limbs, so to speak. Nightmares about axes … tremors up and down my trunk. Autumn, on the other hand, doesn’t worry me. I’ve gone through enough seasons to know that the dead feeling is temporary.

  If you enjoyed “The Two-Headed Man” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love.

  E-book: 9781443402484

  Print: 9780006475231

  About the Author

  BARBARA GOWDY was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.

  Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.

  Her first book, Through the Green Valley (a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published Falling Angels to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look on Love, was a finalist for the Trillium Awar
d for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into Kissed, a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich. Falling Angels was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.

  Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—Mister Sandman (1995), The White Bone (1998) and The Romantic (2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English and the Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.

  Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Romantic earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in Harper’s Magazine, singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”

  Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel, Helpless, was published by HarperCollins in 2007.

  She lives in Toronto.

  Also by Barbara Gowdy

  THROUGH THE GREEN VALLEY

  FALLING ANGELS

  MISTER SANDMAN

  THE WHITE BONE

  THE ROMANTIC

  HELPLESS

  Copyright

  “The Two-Headed Man” © 1992 by Barbara Gowdy.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  This short story was originally published in We So Seldom Look on Love by Barbara Gowdy, first published in print form in 1992 by Somerville House Publising. First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. in print form in 2001, and in an ePub edition in 2011.

  Original epub edition (in We So Seldom Look on Love) April 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40248-4.

  This ePub edition DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-42186-7.

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