Bad Brains

In the middle of his head hung his problem, his enormous dilemma, the way a comforter is a giant to an ant. The comforter cannot even feel the ant as it crawls over its threads and pieces, and the ant has no idea where it is going or when it will ever get there.

But he couldn’t describe it, much less try to solve it, his problem. The ticking of the clock on his wall served as an annoyance on top of this, ticking every one thousand. One one thousand, two one thousand. At times he thought the ticking might be off beat, but he realized it was he who was off beat, and he who had a nasty mesh of ideas like peanut butter and pine needles stuck inside his head, confusing him and making him think that the numbers circling around the clock, one through twelve, were really the letters of his name, jumbled up and twisted around to look like numbers. Who would do such a thing?

He scribbled down his ideas onto the paper pad before him, then pen now quivering in his hand, poised, ready to describe his problem, to solve it, to make it better.

“I will help!” it cried. “I can sort out the mess! I, pen and ink, I am the lost child of God!” But the pen was wrong, and it did not help him in the least. It had simply written the same phrase over and over again in a straight column going down the white paper:

bad brains
bad brains
bad brains

He tore the page out of the pad. He reveled in the crinkling sound it made as he waved it through the air. Paper is lucky, because who else can sound like paper? And he answered himself, out loud this time: “Nobody and nothing.”

He wadded the paper into a ball, unfolded it, wadded it up again, then unfolded it. He did this again and again until the paper felt like a tissue and he put it up to his face. He could steal the sound of paper. Gone forever, never to be heard again.

He wadded the paper up and set it down on the blue carpet, a blue carpet that knew only dirty bare feet and grimy shoes. From his drawer he pulled a box of matches. He slid the box open — the cardboard pieces shuffling along one another — and pulled out a match and slid the box shut. A swipe on the box sent the match head into a furious flame, then turned into a calm, quiet, satisfied stream of yellow. He touched it to the paper and the paper grew on the lonely blue carpet.

He laid down on his bed, because if pen, ink, and paper, with their solitary minds and individual sounds, could not unravel the ball of glued yarn in his head, how could he ever hope to do any better?