RON RIEKKI - THE SAAMI-AMERICAN TAKES OFF YOUR HEAD

Ron Riekki’s books include I have been warned not to write about this (Main Street Rag), My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle/Small Press Distribution), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press).  Riekki co-edited Undocumented (Michigan State University Press) and The Many Lives of The Evil Dead (McFarland), and edited The Many Lives of It (McFarland), And Here (MSU Press), Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (MSU Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), and The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book).

PHOTO CREDIT:  AMELIE JUMEL  

The Saami-American Takes Off Your Head
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​“But the chief peculiarity of this horrible thing, was the representation of a Death’s Head, which covered nearly the whole surface of its breast, and which was accurately traced in glaring white, upon the dark ground of the body, as if it had been there carefully designed by an artist.”
--Edgar Allan Poe, from “The Sphinx”
 
 
 
 
 
                                                “to see her
 
need, to be her initial witness, to prove she
exists, so she can stop hauling her body
 
from city to city, bed to bed, searching
for herself in the faces of strangers.  When
 
the temperature finally dropped, the rain
froze a mosaic, angry fragmented”
 
                        --Lisa Fay Coutley, from “Dear Mom—”
 
 
 
 
 
The Saami-American Takes Off Your Head
 
Everything seems to have started in first grade.
First grade.
Worst grade.
Cursed grade.
Hearse grade.
You get the idea.
First grade, in my memory, was all about rhyming and violence.  My first fist fight.  What about?
I was making a house made of fake plastic bricks.  We weren’t doing math or punctuation or the history of war that takes up so much of ‘learning,’ but just slowly and busily piling up in front of us what in our minds were skyscrapers or at least was in my mind.  I imagined the fake bricks licking the sky, kissing the Milky Way, reaching up into Heaven when some fellow student, some non-kid, some belly of the beast, no, intestine of the beast, no spermatic cyst of a first grader came up and kicked the living meconium out of my mansion, earthquaked the heck out of it with a Godzilla roar that sounded pretty authentic if a roar of a man in a latex bodysuit lip-synching to the sound of a glove being dragged over a double-bass is “authentic,” because that’s what was done by the sound department in the original Godzilla.  But what, if anything, is authentic?  Are your toes authentic?  How about if we cut them off?  Are they still authentic?  And that’s what I wanted to do to Boyzilla, to Meconiumzilla, to Goddamnzilla with his feet so eager to destroy.  I asked why he did it and he said the insult of insults to my face: “No Indians have houses,” and then he punched me in the face when I was the one who should have been punching him, or worse.
At least that’s how I remember it.
Some people remember it other ways.
Some people told me he said something about teepees, but I didn’t let him finish.  Some people say I punched him before he even made ‘Indian’ plural.  There’s a lot of debate on the owner of the first punch.  I know some even make off-the-wall claims about witchcraft and—I don’t know—voodoo or like there was smoke in the room and I was a ninja or something, that when I punched him—and I did punch him—it was too fast and brutal to have been done by a human.  But the kid was a full year older than me.  Held back in first grade.  As if there is difficulty in brick building.  As if it’s hard to resist kicking and destroying everything around you.  As if two plus two equals four is complicated.  But he got me on the chin.  The mandible.  So that I had trouble eating for a week.  But I got him on the nose.  And I mean good.  Real good.  Real, real good.  An authentic good that’s been crafted by God.  Or something spiritual.  Or demonic.  I don’t know.  Things changed after that.  You see, I hit him so hard I broke his nose.
Off.
I should probably repeat that: I broke his nose off.
O-F-F.
Which a doctor said had never happened before.  In the history of fistfights.  The nose came right off and slapped against the floor like it was meant to be there all along.
Gaaasp!
That’s what the room did.
Although that word doesn’t do enough.
It should be more haunting.  It should be more like the sound of:
Ghooost!
That’s more like the sound I heard.  Not a collective gasp!, but a collective ghost!  Everything stopped.  The plastic bricks stopped falling, in midair.  The clock stopped clocking.  The teacher stopped teaching, although he was never really teaching.  He sort of slept on his desk with his eyes open while we killed time, were violent with time and with each other.
They took Goddamnzilla in for surgery.
After that, the other kids stopped talking to me.
After awhile, it sorta wore off—the effect, the silence, the shunning.
Second grade clears up a lot.  It sort of deletes first grade.  Summer’s an eraser.  It’s so hot that you sweat out the past.  August spits its way into your life and then school starts over again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again in an endless string of grades, of judgment.  An August, another August, and another.  Fall fell.  Winter winted.  There was so much wint gusting about that you couldn’t see a thing, only white, only the Caucasians of the north.  We were in northernmost northern Michigan.  So north that it was basically Canada.  I could see Canada from our street.  I’d look across at it, the metal fence put up around the border as if it would keep out the Canadians when they came.  The Canadians would never come.  Or if they did, they’d simply drive over, politely.  While we checked them for weapons and explosives and tax status and facial recognition and favorite ice cream.
All of this is simply saying time passed.
Then twelfth grade happened and, miraculously, I hadn’t gotten into another fight since first grade.  Once you knock a nose off, people leave you alone.  And I got worried that I was good at violence.  Great at it.  An expert.  Like I instinctually knew how to inflict wounds.  When we studied biology, I tried not to remember.  Who wants to know where the heart is exactly?  I might punch you in that precise spot and knock your heart out.  Flopped on the floor.  Imagine the shock of that.  You’re doing the macho “I’ll-kill-you” speech that happens with so many stupid fights and the next you know someone’s heart has been pummeled out of their chest.  I’d have to pick it up and hand it back to them, apologizing.  I had nightmares about that.  Heart after heart getting knocked out of chest after chest.  Any time a kid was rude to me, I’d imagine their heart flopping against a wall.  One punch and the atria and ventricles would sleep there on the floor, throbbing for attention.
I’m not saying things were peaceful, this subtle fear of me, this reserve of others towards me that was exacerbated by my simply staying away from humans.  And my staying away had to do with some fairly commonplace derogatory comments on my looks.  You see, I’m a hodgepodge.  A mutt.  I have a lot of ethnicities.  A lot.  And I have ethnicities no one has ever heard of.  It must be a bit of a blessing to be German or Chinese or Mexican or Irish.  There are just so many other people you can relate to, who share your culture.  There’s no having to constantly explain: “Irish, do you know what that is?”  See, I’m largely Saami.  Yes, Saami.  Have you ever heard of it?  If yes, my hat’s off to you.  Specifically my four-winds hat.  My chiehgahpi.  I love Saami words.  Indigenous words.  And I love being indigenous.  I also have a touch of Native-American to me.  But a lot of Saami blood.  Liters of it.  Enough to make Dracula happy.
I grew up with pow wows—the kind smell of the peace pipe, the intensity of jingle dresses, the cadence of the bonfire.  But I’m mostly Euro-indigenous.  Which I don’t even try to explain to people, that there are aboriginal tribes in Europe.
Then to make it even more complicated, I’m also quite a few tablespoons of Syrian.  And you would be surprised at how many people do not know where Syria is on a map.  I have people say, “Cereal?  Like Franken Berry?  Boo Berry?  Like Wheaties?”  And they have no idea what Syria borders.  Some people think it’s an island.  Some people think it’s a city.  And they have no idea how to spell it, as if a five-letter word is hard to spell.  To really make me really complicated—I’m also Karelian and Anishinaabe and Lebanese.  And how do you talk about yourself when so many people have nothing to share about Sápmi or Karelia or Lebanon?  Except maybe some stupid Fox News quote that’s really a misquote of a fact that isn’t a fact about a news event that didn’t really happen the way they said it happened if it happened at all.  How many Saami-Karelian-Syrian-Anishinaabe-Lebanese people have you met?
My background is all mystery and absence and sub-subculture, as if you took a submarine and then delved so deep into the standard culture that you were no longer with the dolphins and whales and seagulls, but were instead down in the deepest depths with the frilled sharks and fangtooth fish and vampire squid and all of the creatures that humans never seem to see but have been there all along.  The vampire squid can actually turn itself inside out to protect from predators.  There aren’t a lot of Saami or Lebanese or Karelians in my hometown, so I grew up in the libraries, avoiding recesses where fist fights seemed to be plentiful for the others who braved the chaos of merry-go-rounds that weren’t very merry and swings that were really more about mood swings, where kids seemed to want to experiment with injuries.  I preferred books.  Any book.  I searched and searched and couldn’t find a single Saami book, a single Karelian book, a single Lebanese book in our entire school library, so instead I just read about Phineas Gage who had an iron rod impaled through his head and lived.  And I read about Vincent Van Gogh cutting off his ear and giving it to a prostitute for safekeeping, because if you ever want your ear to be safe you should give it to a prostitute.  And I read about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, how Lincoln was laughing at this line from the play An American Cousin when he was shot:
I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal;
you sockdologizing old man-trap.
Personally, if I was Lincoln, I wouldn’t have been laughing; I’d have been bending over in search of a thesaurus and Booth would’ve shot right over my head.
The point is that the books were all about the body.  All of them.  Every biography I ever read—they always ended with the body.  It was all about the ending acute barbiturate overdose of Marilyn Monroe.  The ending congestive heart failure of Mother Teresa.  The ending decapitation of Marie Antoinette.  Marilyn Monroe became her liver, Mother Teresa her heart, Marie Antoinette her neck.  Every biography always ends with the body.  Every book was like that.  It was all body, body, body, body, body.
I put down the book I was reading and went to the bathroom mirror in the school.  I had to creep so the hall monitor didn’t spot me.  When I got there, I looked in the reflection, my pale red olive skin.  I looked closer, at my acne.  I was told repeatedly that I have acne, as if I wouldn’t know that myself.  I stared through my skin, to see what was underneath, actually trying to see if I could look inside my acne, inside the pores of myself, into the veins and blood and center and soul and maybe this was inspiration, this flash of an idea that hit me when I tried to see my tissues, my layers.  Maybe it was the shaman ancestral blood coming to the surface, but I had a very basic idea, an idea about how much we control our own bodies.  I read in a book that when a person goes into cardiac arrest, every single minute there’s ten-percent brain damage.  That means in ten minutes the person will have one-hundred-percent brain damage.  Except I’d also read that the Guinness Book World Record for holding your breath is over twenty-two minutes.  The body can be conquered.  I didn’t just think this.  I believed it.  I owned it.  I dreamed it.  And built it.  I just took control of the situation and put my hand to my face and brushed all the acne into my palm.  I stared down at my hand full of acne when the door opened and some kid who needed to pee with intensity saw me with a hand full of pus and hair and skin and sebaceous oil and must have thought it was normal because he went straight to his stall and I listened to a long oak of piss rattling around in the echo chamber of toilet and I stared into my hand as if it held little tiny abused parts of God.
I put the acne in the garbage and gave a look at myself in the mirror, a look as if I had no idea what I was going to become.
We had a neighbor who liked to trip kids when they were near puddles.  I was a victim.  And he’d done it to my brother.  He’d done it to just about every child in our city.  We’d all tasted the muddy ice tea of rain puddles.  It never tasted good.  You’d spit and spit and get home with clothes stuck to you.
The bruise that is night came nice and quick.  I couldn’t wait for it.  I was having trouble concentrating.  My heart was as big as the moon, anticipating.  I went to the mirror in our bathroom and took a deep breath, a long inhalation with my eyes closed as if I was trying to breathe in the world.  I let it out and opened my eyes and grabbed my mouth without trying to think about it too hard, what it would mean if it worked, and it did work.  I held my mouth in my hand.  My actual mouth was in my hand!  In the mirror, I saw my mouth-less face.  Monks would’ve screamed.  Police would’ve rattled off every siren they could reach.  You could feel the room was different.  My mouth-less head seemed to make my eyes more intense, my nose more intense, as if my ears had more meaning, and it was as if this were always possible, that every mouth could be removed in every second of every day and that none of us realized we could do it.  If we relaxed.  If we believed.  If we let ourselves flirt with omnipotence, with the power that’s in our hands, we could.
I have to explain something to you quickly.  Sometimes when I walk, I realize I’m not moving.  I realize everything I’m seeing is a screen.  I know I’m still but just my willing to feel as if I am moving allows me to have that experience.  I wish you could do that now.  I wish you could turn a page or touch your cheek and realize your hand didn’t actually move.  It was the projection of a hand.  The projection of a book.  You are still, centered, unmoving.  A theater is playing before you.  A movie you’re creating is happening.
I knew.
I knew all of this.
I put the mouth back in the slot where my mouth goes and I stretched my jaw, removed it.  The horror of seeing your face with the jaw gone, the tongue hanging there like a corpse in a noose.
The jaw fit so perfectly back into place.  And then I was ready to go.
My neighbor’s house has a tree that fell and landed on their roof.  It didn’t do any damage so they just left it like that.  The neighborhood asked them to remove the tree but they said they liked it sleeping against their house.  The problem is the routine reports to the police department of a downed tree.  The police’d say, “We know.  They know.”  My neighbors wouldn’t remove the tree.  There’s something haunting about a dead tree leaning against a dead house in the dead of night.  Especially when you’re going to sneak into the house.  And I was going to sneak into the house.  Or am sneaking into the house.  Actually I’m in the house now with the nameless kid who actually has a name.  His name was Fretta.  Is Fretta.  I’m not joking.  I never joke.  Fretta was his birth name.
The point is Fretta was asleep, one leg covered by blanket and the other leg covered by air, as if it was just lying there, waiting for me, which it was.
The room wasn’t exactly poetic with its complete absence of books and its guitar with no strings and the pile of socks in a water bucket that held no water, just a pile of sick-looking socks.
I put my hand over the leg and wondered for a moment if I’d just imagined everything.  I had been the only one to see my mouth missing.  Maybe it wasn’t really off my face.  Maybe I hallucinate so intensely I can imagine a mouth gone.  A jaw gone.  A nose gone.
My hand hovered.  You couldn’t hear his breath.  The silence did laps around the room.  I went for it.  I took off his leg.
It plopped right off.
No blood.
As if it were just a machine part.  As if you could pop it off and on whenever you wanted.  I walked through the boredom-scented hallway with the moonlight making out with the wind and the big warm leg cradled in my arms.
I sort of felt like I ran faster with three legs, but of course I only had my two.  The speed came from not wanting to get caught.  All it would take is one neighbor peeking into the night to see what they would, I hoped, assume to be a child with a log.  A Yule log.  A Yule leg.  I ran full speed in the summer night.
Nobody saw.  Or yelled.  Or anything.  I got in my house and threw the leg onto my bed, looking down at this one-fourth of a person.  It seemed lonely.  Like it was going to cry.  So I told it that it’d be all right.  And it would be.  I’d be careful with it.  In fact, I thought of putting it back.  But then the screams started.
Maybe it’s a sense the body has, the way it can wake you up in the middle of the night if it feels someone’s in the room, whether a robber or a phantom.  Warning you.  But Fretta had some instinct that told him to turn over and when he did there was absence there.  He’d gotten up to put another sock into the sock water bucket or whatever and I could envision him falling, thudding to his floor, because having two legs helps your balance.  His head would hit the string-less guitar so that it would be transformed into a drum played by a skull and that noise plus his screaming for help would wake his parents, wake neighbors, would even wake up the dead tree in the yard.  I looked out my window, the leg sleeping on my bed behind me, and saw the lights flicking on.  I slowly closed my curtains, as if it was the end of an act and the intermission would be long.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
To return the leg was highly difficult.  I hadn’t thought of him going to the hospital.  But, of course, he would.
Police came.  The big leg of a tree in their yard insulting them with its presence.  How could a leg be chopped off in the night?  With no blood?
So many night-colored squad cars.  The town was bored and this seemed like a needed mystery.  Deputies came because they didn’t believe the story.  They searched the backyard, as if a dog had buried the leg under an elm.  Peeking through my curtains, I cradled the leg and watched, brainstorming how I could do something beautiful for the town instead, something kind and heroic and key-to-the-city worthy, something the opposite of holding a stolen human leg.  Were their girls who couldn’t afford braces?  Could I restructure their teeth in the night?  I imagined a girl waking up to find my hand in her mouth, her teeth in a pile on her bed.  The terror that would erupt from her eyes.  No, I’d have to come up with something else.  Something simpler.
But for now, I had to return a leg.
It wasn’t hard to find out what hospital he was at.  The whole town seemed to be chattering about the poor boy with the poor missing leg and not one person seemed to realize the irony of all of the puddle-terrorism the kid had done throughout his teen life.  Flowers were sent from all over town, including someone who sent a massive funeral sympathy spray collection of snapdragons and carnations, apparently thinking the boy was dead.  Or maybe they thought the leg was dead.  It wasn’t.
A strange thing, the leg still had a pulse.  Which you would think would be impossible, but there it was.  I felt it.  You see, I didn’t chop off the leg.  I merely took it off.  There’s a huge difference.  If you use hammers and chisels you obviously create terrible damage.  But if you simply remove your leg, it doesn’t have a single thing wrong with it.  I thought I might explain this to the world, but people don’t listen.  It’s like every person has their beliefs already chiseled into the gravestones of their mind so all of their thoughts are one big cemetery.  The most brilliant people in the world don’t know much; instead, they are simply open to pouring in new aspects of learning into their minds every day.  That’s why I’m not a fan of hospitals.  Doctors already know everything.  They just tell you what to do without realizing that the Anishinaabe and the Saami and the Inuit have intelligent, complex alternative ways of seeing the body that are just as valid, or even more valid.  For the Saami, the drum is so important for healing and the doctors of this hospital wouldn’t even know how to begin to work a drum into curing.  All they know is humdrum eardrums and it’s all one big stupid conundrum of why they don’t listen to other cultures.  So I had to step into the white hungry building that waited to eat its next corpses and the whole string of the unfortunate living that wander inside to have every cent of the plasma in their pockets sucked out and all I knew was I needed to return the neighbor’s pulsing leg.
It’s hard to walk into a hospital carrying a leg.
Hospitals have camera eyes and security guard eyes and waiting room eyes as if the health system is a big loud gawking combination of George Orwell’s 1984 and Van Halen’s 1984.  I put the leg in a bag.  The problem is hospitals are suspicious of large bags big enough to fit legs, so I made sure it was a duffle bag and I put on my sportiest clothing I owned.
I looked like a freak teammate from Goddamnzilla’s volleyball team that doesn’t exist who just wanted to say hi and pull the world’s largest get-well card out of my bag.
Walking, I glanced from room to room at all these patients with all of their body parts and realized I could take them all.  I could fill my duffle bag with spleens and feet and cheeks and heels and knees and a whole load of other ee body parts that would make them scream eeeeeeeeeeee! when they realized they were missing.
I stared at an old man who stared back and I wondered if he knew I could take his eyes.  He smiled and I realized he knew I could take his mouth.  There’s a way you can talk telepathically with the elderly.  He winked, knowing I could take his eyelid, and I let him go back to his sixtieth time of watching the same CNN update about how soon all of Hong Kong’s dolphins are going to be extinct.  As I walked away, I wondered if that old man could steal my legs.  I thought maybe he could take my brain, that maybe he was one of me, I mean, that he was us, that we were one, that there are others who can do what I do.  There’s a saying that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but my father used to say that lightning strikes places as many goddamn times as it wants, and it’s true.  Lightning will strike a place over and over and over until lightning feels content that it’s done what it wanted to do.  That’s what lightning does.  That’s what it’s made for.
“I knew a Saami elder who could control lightning.”
“What?” Fretta said.
I wanted to pull out his leg and plop it right back in place, but that would leave him with too much questioning.
“Why you here?” Fretta said.  We weren’t friends but we weren’t exactly enemies either, considering I always avoided him like the plague.  We were two opposite strangers.  I wanted to return his leg, but I couldn’t just pull it out.  The shock of it might kill him.  I’d have to wait until he was asleep.  Or sedated.  I thought of how I could sedate him.  Then I thought I’d just leave the leg in the hallway and run.  But it would be seen on camera.  I could leave it in the bathroom.  Someone would figure out it was his.  All this gave me a deep, depressed feeling that I’d never do this again.  From this moment on, I’d only dedicate myself to putting broken bones back in place on ski hills, to ensuring anyone with a cancerous mole on their forehead could have it plucked off free of charge.  Maybe I’d even tell the hospital what I can do and start working that day.
Before I could decide, I was gang-tackled from behind.
They weren’t soft with it.  It was meant to destroy my future possibilities of having children.  A cop-type tackle, the way law enforcement yearns for enforcing, aches for force.  My spinal column didn’t fight back.  They were on me like dirt on earth.  The leg was taken out of the bag and waved in front of my face before I could even grunt out an attempt at explaining.
The police station bed was filled with lice.  That’s why they’re called police.  Etymologically, it’s a mix of poverty and lice.
Each prisoner who’d ever been to this police station had wiped a solitary souvenir booger on the wall so that it was painted with mucus, dust, dirt, pollen, germs, and more mucus.
The cell mattresses had no pillows, which you might not think is a big deal, but try sleeping without a pillow tonight.  It’s a lot harder than you think.
The air smelled like cardiac tamponade.
Why was I arrested?  The neighbor owned security cameras.  There was footage of what appeared to be a leg and what appeared to be me walking by what appeared to be a tree that was pressed up against their house.  Because I looked exactly like the kid in the video, they suspected me, because it was me.  When I’d come to the hospital, they knew I was the one.  Especially when I was carrying a leg-sized bag.
A beast-cop grabbed my ear and twisted it.  It didn’t come off, but if felt like that was his intended goal.
Other cops were there.  They wanted to know how I could take a leg, why I’d take a leg, if I really took the leg, if I had sawed it off.  One said I was a magician.  Another asked if this was a ring of black-market organ theft.  Another said I wasn’t in any trouble, that I was a kid, telling them to leave me alone; that cop sat across from me, saying, “Tell me about the leg.”
“Which leg?”
The beast-cop grabbed my ear again.  It hurt even more.  The door opened and some FBI types came in, the whitest humans I’d ever seen, as if they were purposely draining their blood to ensure a sickly pale dominated their bodies.  They had onyx sunglasses on to provide the strongest contrast to their skins.  They had the cops leave.  It was just me and the very white whites.  Soprano white.  New toilet paper white.  Drought-clouds-without-a-hint-of-rain white.  I asked if they were from the FBI and one said, “Mayor’s office.”  They said it so you wouldn’t know if it was a lie or the truth.  I didn’t care.  Mayor or FBI, I didn’t like them.  One asked if I was thirsty.  I said yeah.  They asked if I was hungry.  Yup.  Sleepy?  A bit.  They asked if I liked candy corn.  If I was a fan of ‘80s horror films.  If I liked playing solitaire and liked traveling circuses and Saami dinner recipes and redheads and hot yoga and if I had any interest in the monastery pillaging of the Vikings or the bear-wrestling of the Renaissance or the history of the Civil Rights Movement or the mountains of Banff National Park or listening to the Braveheart soundtrack and I realized what they were doing.  They had gone through my computer.  Thoroughly.  They’d read my emails and gone through all my social media postings and all of my deleted social media postings and they knew I was interested in bone physiology and how to survive a zombie apocalypse and the proper way to spell accommodation.  They were bragging to me of something so simple, acting as if they were mind readers.  They weren’t reading my mind; they were reading my Internet searches.  The shock was the worry of what the worst thing I might have typed would have been.  But not the worst thing to me, but the worst thing to them.  What had I typed about legs?  About the FBI?  About mayors?  About bad sunglasses?
One of them gave me a long outpouring of what I was going to do for them.  Apparently, I was going to explain, in detail, how to remove a human leg without any blood.  I was going to tell them the secret.  They knew about my nose, they said.  My nose?  No, the nose from kindergarten, the one on the floor.  They knew about my acne.  The kid from the bathroom must have talked, must have seen more than I thought.
“Someone, say, a person who’s on your side might be able to argue that you haven’t broken any laws,” an FBI mayor said.
Although I had.  You can’t go into people’s houses at night and take body parts.
“We’d like your help,” he continued.
“I can’t describe it.”
“Describe what?”
“Whatever you’re saying.”
“What are we saying?”
“I’m not sure.”
“We think you can remove body parts,” another said, “We have no idea how.  And we’re wondering if it’s a trick.  If you’re fooling the world.”
The world?  I hadn’t been anywhere in the world but my hometown.  We’d even vacation in our hometown, camp in our hometown.  We never left for anywhere because our hometown had a hospital and grocery stores and jail and all the things you need for people to have minimal lives.  And because we didn’t have the money to go anywhere else.
“We don’t think,” one said, “that it’s a trick.”
The door opened.  As if by magic.  Except it was a signal.  We were being watched.  They came in with the leg.  They put it on the table.  I suppose they did this with shoplifters too.  They want to see your expression when the pack of gum is placed in front of you, the dress, the soccer ball, whatever it was you took.  You have to confront this thing that seduced you into being in your pocket.
“It’s the kid’s,” one of the mayoral sunglasses said, “He I.D.ed it.”
“You can always tell your own leg,” another said.
There were a lot of these FBI mayoral agents.  Too many.  All clones.  The same height.  I’m sure this was done for intimidation, the uncanniness of repetitive bodies.  If you took off the sunglasses and the clothes though, they’d all have unique snowflake qualities—wider hips, birthmarks in the shape of Australia across a chest, a chocolate-addict butt, a constellation of pimples in the armpit region, something distinctive.  We all do.
“We want help.  With some interrogations.”
“Some questionings.”
“We won’t have any more crime if criminals think this could happen to them.”
“We want you to fly to Ankara.”
“Panama,” said another.
“Manila.”
“Lima.”
“Arizona.”
A string of places that all end with -a.
“Listen,” said one of the clones, “We’ve got a lot of places you can go with us.  You’ll be very useful for your country.”
“You mean, for the mayor?” I asked.
“The mayor,” said another.
“The mayor,” repeated one, but there was no mayor.  There was a mayor, but they weren’t working for the mayor.
They weren’t CIA.  Not Culinary Institute of America.  Not Calgary International Airport.  No, they were some other governmental goon squad that wanted me to do black ops that were really white ops that were really anti-indigenous ops that were really anti-everything ops.  You get bad feelings and then you get worse feelings and they gave me the worst feelings of all, like a tiger snake was trying to climb down my esophagus.
I moved quickly.
They probably hadn’t thought about this, but handcuffs don’t mean much to me.
I took my hands completely off.  The cuffs slid on the floor.  I put my hands back on and then grabbed the head of the guy next to me, easily plopping it off of his neck.  There’s something about seeing a headless person that freaks people out.  A guy reached for me and I took his arm.  Another grabbed me by the throat so I took his throat off.  He kept choking me, even with no throat.  We fell backwards, knocking the table over so that the leg fell, the arm fell, the throat fell.  Feet were in front of me, so I started pulling them off and throwing them in the room’s corners.  The agents toppled and collapsed around me.
I stepped out into the hall.  There must have been sixteen guards, all dumbfounded, found dumb, gawking, immoveable, and, all at once, they started fumbling for their weapons.  I grabbed what was closest to me—a head.  I held it out like a gun.
“Don’t make me use this,” I said.
The head pointed at them.  I thought of squeezing the mouth, curious what that might do.
All the guards stood like it was the National Anthem playing, like they were pledging allegiance to horror.
I saw my duffle bag on the floor.  I started filling it full of body parts—heads and arms and the leg.  A couple of feet.  The bag was overfilled.  With my other hand, I held out the human head and walked towards the guards.  They didn’t move.  Then the head in my hand screamed.  They all moved quickly, almost breaking their own bones in the process.  I walked through them.
“Open the gate,” I said.
The gate didn’t open.
The human head screamed, “For the love of God, open it!”
The gate opened.
“Thank you,” I said to the head.
“Go to hell,” said the head.
I kept the head out in front of me like a lantern and walked down the hallway to the front door and out into the bright machine called the sun.
I tucked everything in the duffle bag and started running.  The bag was too heavy.  The door opened behind me and cops and guards poured out.  I crossed the street and headed to the downtown bar area.  The cop station wasn’t far from the bars.  They did it on purpose so the arrests would be a short transit, a nice easy stroll to your incarceration.  I turned a corner and thought I might lose them, but the head started screaming in the bag.  I poured the contents out in the middle of the promenade.  The head screamed and someone screamed at the heads screaming and it just took off from there, a series of echoing and ricocheting screams like an orchestra of panic.  The cops picked up the mayoral body parts and a few kept after me.  I headed straight for the busiest bar.  It was all college kids, taking solitary summer courses so they could drink more than study.  They were sober and wasted and slightly buzzed but pretending they were wasted.  The zoo-ish music was so loud that the screams seemed like background vocals.  I ran passed the bouncer who wanted my I.D.  He started to come after me, but he couldn’t leave his spot.  When he turned back around, an onslaught of cops stood in front of his sterioded architectural chest.
Ripping my shirt off, I went for the bathroom.  It’s probably the worst place to go.  Bathrooms are dangerous.  I knew a kid who’s been robbed in bathrooms twice.  Both times while peeing.  You’re vulnerable in that moment.  The cops came my way, the bouncer bouncing along with them, abandoning his post.  I did what only made sense.  A frat kid, mid-piss, had a head, like most people do, so I took a hunk of his left face and swapped it with mine.  I wasn’t gentle.  I slapped my face onto him so that it tilted, crooked.  There wasn’t time for precision.  I punched his left face onto mine and looked in the mirror.  I still looked too much like myself.  I grabbed the eyeballs of the guy in front of another stall and plucked them out, giving him mine.  Then I yanked off my headband and put it on another of the urinators.  I muscled my way out, shirtless, odd-faced, unrecognizable.  The pissers were shaking themselves dry now, seeing their new selves in the mirrors.
Making my way through the club, I bumped into a random girl who called me a loser.  I took her nose and headed for the door.  Her friends started screaming and pointing at her face and she kept yelling, “What?  What!”
I headed into the night, grabbing a bargain college shirt from a university store outdoor display mannequin.  I had no idea where to go.
I meant to replace the leg and then, who knows, I might have been done with this forever, but now there were so many body parts misplaced I didn’t know what went with what, who went with who.
I’d probably lost my face forever.
It’s not as if our faces have GPS.
I tried to use the reflection of an exterior bank window to see what I looked like.  I just knew I didn’t look like myself.  They would be looking for someone whose face didn’t match.  I realized I’d have to completely switch with someone.  I wondered how many body parts I could switch out and still be myself.  I needed to keep track of who I was.  My left side of my face was gone now.  Maybe you could take it all away except for the heart and still be you.  Or maybe it’s the brain.  Or the soul.
I walked to a bridge.
It was the least suicidal bridge ever made.  If I jumped, I’d fall a couple of feet.  The water seemed to come right up to the bridge, the waves reaching to touch its bottom.  Like a flood was happening.  Angrily, I ripped my hand off and thought of throwing it into the river.  I could keep doing that, throwing body part after body part into the high-flowing water until my entire body washed away.  Until all that was left was the arm doing the throwing and I’d let that drop into the river too.  I didn’t.
I knew of a homeless tent city to the west.  I found a spot on some grass with all of the tents nearby, their nylon softly moving in the wind.
Before sunrise had happened, the sun had spilled across the sky so that everything was bright.
I had no idea where to go.  I realized I couldn’t go anywhere, that there would be cameras with my new face captured by them.
Someone once told me about a murderer in Opelika, Alabama, who killed a wealthy white girl and they used satellites to find him, that they went back to satellite footage at the moment of the murder and then meticulously traced the car backwards, following it for days until they were able to send in two dozen agents.
I had no intention of killing anyone ever.  I wasn’t a murderer, but I felt as if I had killed everyone I’d touched, killed their old life of comfort with a nose they were so used to, an arm they had come to view as a best friend.  And now it was gone.  Or swapped.  I’d wondered about them, about their body parts, about their new sudden confusion.  If they found their body parts, would they able to put them back on?  Was the head of a mayoral FBI agent talking to his body, asking it to please come back to him?  How did the head breathe without the lungs?  Would the head slowly suffocate or would it just adapt, inhaling and exhaling whether or not there were lungs below?  I imagined the head gasping for air, begging for me to be found.  I needed to act immediately, but there was no action to take, other than avoiding home.
They must have my father now, my brother, my room torn apart.  The head of my bed would be ripped from the rest of it, the pillows inside out, the legs torn off.
As day spread its yellow everywhere, I went further into the woods, deep into the forest where there were only animals that wouldn’t recognize me.  Squirrels never call 9-1-1.  Deer don’t snitch.  I went to where a Saami elder once told me sanity lives: the meahcci.  A Saami word for forest.  Meahcci begins with me, with the self.  We are all part of it.  It’s the place where we are free—the forest.  He told me that town ends with own, because it’s a place about conquering, control, ownership, township.  The forest is beyond control, which is what makes it so perfect.
I went deep.  To a valley.  Where I hid, hungry, looking for berries, the main food of the Saami, a staple, a necessity, the bowl that was always near my grandfather with his old miner body after he’d given up Arctic reindeer herding to go to the Arctic of America, extremely northern Michigan, where the mines took his fingers and his hearing and his life.
I ate from the ground and felt thirsty, sleepy, content.  I watched a wild turkey walk near me, puffing up its back feathers, the pffft of it, and I wondered if it came at me if I could do the same with its body, if I could just reach in and take out any body part I wanted.  The turkey walked away, tired.  I wondered what it had done that made it so exhausted with this life.  It faded.  The day faded.
When night came, I headed into town.  I felt like an animal, emerging, hungry.
It wasn’t hard to find the city; its lights beg for you to go there.  It must draw the animals, make them curious, wanting to walk towards this constant deceptively welcoming light.
All around were moonlit shadows like the dead arisen.
When I emerged from the forest, my body felt infested with thorns and dirt.  I itched and walked, scratching down an empty road.
There was a store.
There are always stores.  Everywhere.  Eventually we’ll have stores underwater.  Stores floating in the sky.  Hell is filled with stores.  In China, I was told, they actually have stores within stores, that there are malls inside of their malls, in their cities with populations double and triple the size of New York.  A New York City packed on top of another New York City.
I went in.
The clerk hated the world, but a specific sort of hatred, one where he wished for locusts to descend and beat us all with baseball bats.  You could see it in his eyes.  I wanted to ask if he knew who I was, curious if I was now famous, infamous.  There is something about doing excessive good or excessive bad—you expect recognition.  I grabbed a newspaper, put it on the counter and said I didn’t have money, could I have it for free?
I watched his head swivel no.  It’s admirable—necks.
I read the newspaper on the counter, seeing if I might find my face, one of my faces, on the cover, inside, anywhere, the newsprint becoming a mirror, but I didn’t find myself there.  On the other hand, there was a story about a West Nile virus found in a town nearby and I imagined the virus being discovered, the virus’s fear when they put the flashlight in its eyes.
There was a story about the rise of hate groups in the U.S., how one had formed here, how there are about a thousand of them in the U.S., with a map provided, one where Alabama could hardly be seen, the state covered with so many fists and Xs and targets and white ghostly hoods and arrows, all of which represented different types of hate, from anti-indigenous hate to anti-Muslim hate, a whole list of antis.  Florida was drowning on the map.  Mississippi had so many Xs and hoods that only its M was visible, all of its Is buried in hate.  The entire south, in fact, seemed to be suffocated by markings.  And New Jersey, the same.  I looked at the X over our town, as if our town had died.  There was a town nearby with an X over it too, so that combined they seemed like two eyes of a cartoon corpse, closed, looking the way corpses’ eyes in the old days used to be sewn shut.  I wanted to open the eyes, to put two fingers on the page and slowly open up the Xs.  I tried but it didn’t work.  The clerk watched me.
I put the newspaper back.
I asked the clerk if I could have something to drink.  He pointed to an ice machine.  I ate the ice, something a dentist friend of my father told me to never do, saying it destroys teeth.  Destroying my teeth, I walked out of the store and headed for the town’s heart.
We remember things emotionally.  What was my first memory?  I’m terrified at the bottom of some stairs.  Why?  Because I know I have to go up them by myself.  I wanted a teddy bear at the top, its eyes peeking out over the edge of the top stair, looking like it needed desperate help, its body limp.  I wanted to save it with cuddles, to hug it forever.  I wanted that teddy bear but I realized the stairs were a mountain, that I could die in the process.  I don’t remember if I went up the stairs.  That has faded.  All I remember is the fear, and how there was a badly done portrait of a redheaded man on the wall with a head that looked like it was softly on fire and how it seemed like he could come alive and grab me with his weak flames at any second.  And that’s it, my very first memory.  And the bulk of all of my early memories are laced with anger and sadness and joy, never boredom.  Boring moments drain from your mind.  I read that if you go on a date and the girl doesn’t feel anything, the odds are low there’ll be another date, but if the girl feels angry or scared or is hurting from laughter or having a burst of romantic feelings—actually they said the emotion doesn’t even matter, just that they had an emotion, any emotion—then the odds of a second date quintuple.  The article said horror movies are great for first dates for this reason, that there’s an impulse to feel like the person next to you protected you throughout the movie, even though all they did was sit nearby.  There’s a feel like you’ve gone through something together.  Roller coasters are the same.  Roller coasters and horror films and white-water rafting are all designed to make people fall in love, or fall in lust, or at least fall into something.
Soon enough, I was at Goddamnzilla’s house.
I tried the front door.  It was locked, which is rare in this town.  It’s a small town, a microscopic town in comparison to Seoul or Sao Paulo or Shanghai or all of the other metropolises beginning with S, the letter so important in making everything plural.  Just add an s to something and you have more of it.  But we’re also a university town, a diversity town, an apply-for-a-grant town, an immigrant town, a migrant town, and with that, sometimes, comes the anti-immigrant rants, from, honestly, people who are really immigrants themselves, immigrants with amnesia, people with ties to this new land of theirs so young that the indigenous view them as zygotes, as embryos that pretend to be elderly.  It’s a town where doors go unlocked.  Windows too.  I went in through a window.  It’s not easy to do, so many things to clatter, to tip over.  Luckily, I knocked over a couch pillow.  I put it back, listening.
I had no idea where he slept, if he slept.  Kids his age can be vampire-level nocturnal.  I expected him with a headset, late night playing a videogame with a gun in the screen’s center, the constant gunfire ensuring hearing loss, the death tolls at genocidal levels.  Instead someone was sound asleep like a brutalized cherub, the body zigzag contorted in peaceful sleep.  I wonder if anyone has ever watched me sleep, if people ever sneak into apartments and houses for the simple joy of this moment, the beauty of watching someone be so peaceful.  My spine tingled.  Even this person—this professional bully—looked as if he was one of the most experienced practitioners of transcendental meditation.  We all appear innocent when we’re tucked in.  Plop a stuffed soft synthetic fur teddy-rabbit next to a sleeping Charles Manson and you’d almost think he was covered with goodness.
I took a leg.
Again.
I don’t know what it is about legs.  I’m a leg man, I guess.  Well, actually I do know what it is about legs.  They’re useful.  I could take a pinkie and someone might get over it in a few days.  A leg keeps reasserting its absence.  In dream analysis, a leg stands for the ability to progress.
I ripped the sheets back, but there was still another plain white sheet covering him, cocooning him.  How many sheets does a person need?  He must like to sleep while feeling in bondage.  There was no way to get it off him, not with the sheet underneath his legs, coiled around his torso.  His eyes opened and I realized it wasn’t Goddamnzilla.  You could see the white hair of an older man, which I hadn’t noticed.  People don’t have grey hairs, but rather only white or the original color.  Grey is a trick of the eye, a white hair next to a brown hair.  I hated his hair, because it was moving, towards a lamp, which clicked on.  It was Goddamnzilla’s father.  Mr. Goddamnzilla.  He slept in orange Auburn pajamas with multiple war eagles dotted all over.  A foot stuck out of the bottom of the sheets.  I took it, snatched it, along with part of his leg.  I ripped my face off.  I didn’t want him seeing my face.  It was probably too late.  He saw me holding my face and his foot and part of his leg and he must have fainted.  Maybe he had narcolepsy, a cataplexy.  All I know is he fell back into his original position of sleep.  I held the foot of a man who collected Nazi plates.  How do I know this?  The light showed a wall and a windowed cabinet with Hitler mustache kitchenware.  Spoons with swastikas, knives with the radiation of evil, cups with unknown German words like a series of Batman sound effects--Fremd! Schaäm!  En!
I believe in fate.
Big fat fate.
I decided to gather more of his body parts, taking my time unwrapping him, my mouth and nose and cheeks left on the side of his bed in case he woke up, so that he would have no face to be able to identify in a series of mugshots.  I placed my lower face gently on a bedside table.  Looking down on him, there was so much to plunder.  I took an arm, another arm, a leg.  I left the head and torso.  He wouldn’t be going anywhere soon.  I took his mouth.  He seemed too helpless with no legs, no arms, no mouth.  To be honest, it was just too grotesque.  I put the mouth back and he woke up, blinked.  I took his arms and legs in a sheet out of the room.  He watched me leave with his body.
People weigh a lot.
Arms and legs are awkward.  I kept dropping them.
His son appeared in the hall.  I was picking up an arm I’d dropped.  I’d forgotten my face, so that part of my head was missing.  In purple briefs, Goddamnzilla wisely jolted back into his bedroom, convinced his nightmares were all out in the hallway.  I opened Goddamnzilla’s door, holding his father’s arm like a baseball bat.  His window was open, a big mouth, empty, Goddamnzilla having been swallowed into the night.
I went back to his father’s room for my mouth, the father watching me take my face and walk back out.
With an armful of arms and legs, I walked out of the house.  Goddamnzilla was running shirtless down the street.  It made me crave doing this to others who were deserving; the worst bully in the school lived too far away, his hairy body a Bigfoot on some Sasquatch mattress that I’d never get the chance to stare at with moonlight peeing all over my body.
I needed a bully nearby.
This was my high school years, nearing their end, so there were so many bullies to choose from, too many.
I didn’t want to collect the arms and legs of every awful person in the city, but rather to exchange them.  It would be impossible to hold them all, but swapping was doable.  I wouldn’t be so ambitious from now on.  A solitary hand, a nose.  I’d keep it simple.  That would be enough.  Racists needed to wake up to find out the vast majority of their body was a whole different color than it was when they’d fallen asleep.  It’d be healthy for a skinhead to look in the mirror and see he was now part Hispanic.
The houses all had different advertisements on who I should volunteer for my great body swap, as if they were begging, “Me!”  “No, no, me, please, me!”  But what strongly caught my attention was the political bumper stickers on trucks and jeeps and windows.  One just about yanked me inside the house:
            How do I Feel About Gun control?
Break into My house And Find out!
I couldn’t refuse the invitation.  If only to ask them about their views on capitalization in sentences.
I put the arms and legs on the lawn, off to the side, so they couldn’t be seen from the door.
I tried it.  It was locked.
I knocked.
I waited.
Supposedly the pathway to Hell is paved with good intentions, except it’s not true.  There is no pathway to Hell.  Just blink and you’re there, a split-second.  A thought can put you in Hell.
A dog barked.  It stopped.
I knocked.  The dog exploded with noise, like it was attacking some gate inside.  Through one of the windows, a light came on, its stream falling on an arm crossed with a leg.  The sheet had fallen open so that the body parts were largely visible, lying there in the grass.  The front door creaked.  The man was a dog, if I had to describe him in as few letters as possible.  Dog-like.  Rottweiler with some extra rot to him.  Also drunk.  Before he asked a question, I took the bottom part of his jaw off.  I took a leg and an arm, the obvious choices.  I’m fast.
I went to my bag on the lawn, took an extra arm out of it.  I asked him if he wanted to have two arms.  He couldn’t answer.  His visible tongue hung limp, swaying a bit like it heard gentle music, maybe some Yanni or Zamfir, the type of music so bad it has to go last alphabetically.  I told him I was going to put an arm on him and he took a swing at me.  Balancing on one leg, he fell over.  The dog bit the gate that separated the two of us; he wanted to eat me alive, eat me dead.  It didn’t matter.  He wanted to swallow me.  With the man on the ground, I put the arm of the Nazi plate collector onto his body.  He pushed himself up, his tongue with pebbles stuck to it.  I wanted to give his jaw back, but I didn’t trust him.  Not drunk.  Not sober.  Not ever.  I told him I’d be back.  I took his jaw and leg and put them with the other body parts.
I got to the center of the street and a door opened in the house across.  A woman stood on the porch, her hair like a movie with a horrible ending.  I struggled to hold the sheet cradled in one arm so that I could wave to her.  She didn’t wave back.  I walked away, looking behind me to see her still standing there.  I started to jog and the jaw fell on the ground.  I put it back in the pile and ran, jutting to the side so that I could cut through a neighbor’s yard.  I got the idea of trying to put an arm on myself, so that I’d have three arms.  It’d be easier than carrying them.  Maybe I could run faster with five legs.
The arm wouldn’t go on.  There wasn’t any space for it.  You can’t just put a leg, for example, in the middle of someone’s forehead.  Not if you rush it.  Maybe it was possible, but it’d take time to figure out, and time wasn’t something I had.  What I had was body parts.
Running, I wondered if I could take off my nose and put an arm there.  It might block my view a bit, but I wouldn’t have to do all this hauling.
I took my nose off and tried to place an arm there.  It didn’t hold.  I tried a leg.  It fell off.  I’d have to carry them.  I put my nose back in place.
The sky sat up there, bored.  Its stars didn’t go anywhere, just sat there all night and then during the day they went into their coffins.  The stars are vampires.
I touched the leg.  I wasn’t sure whose it was.  It was soft.  I felt sorry for it.  Whoever’s it was.  Maybe it was mine.  I tapped it gently, apologizing to it.  I needed to do something good.  I thought maybe I needed to turn myself in.
I left the arms and legs and jaw in the sheets in a backyard and walked out onto the street, waiting for the police to come.
The houses didn’t care.  There were no sirens.  The piss-colored stars had quit trying to succeed.  No one came.  I’d have to sneak into a house and use a phone, commit another crime of trespassing just to be saved.
I thought about statistics, perceptions.  They’d know by now my entire background, would see me as Arab-American, which means as Arab.  They’d see me as indigenous, which, for them, means not American.  I can be perceived as white and as non-white, but they’d see me as non-white as the night sky was right now.  The only reason the sky hasn’t been arrested is because it always keeps itself as far away from the police as possible.
Percentage-wise, Native Americans are killed twelve percent more than African-Americans and triple as much as whites.
They’d give someone like me back-to-back-to-back-to-front-to-back life sentences.  They’d give me life paragraphs.  Life chapters.  Life books.
My family can’t afford to tip, so getting a lawyer would be impossible.
Seeing fifty flashlights coming at you from the opposite end of a road has a supernatural feel to it, a feel that maybe Heaven was coming to me.  Until I heard them.  They sounded nothing like Heaven.
I expected police, but instead a mob formed.  They wore curlers and slippers and army boots and robes and online bulletproof vests that weren’t actually bulletproof but they didn’t know that.  Someone yelled not to shoot and they didn’t.  They just came like rabid elderly werewolves.  I stupidly took a step forward and they sped up, some running, some jogging, some walking, some taking a break from exhaustion.  The things they yelled were not good.  They were four-letter words and twelve-letter words and German thirty-six letter words.  They called me slurs I’d never heard before, made up combinations.  Humans, when angered, turn Cro-Magnon.
I ran.
They followed.
I ducked behind a house.  Their lights slashed the ground.
I jumped a fence and ran into an alley.
A gunshot.
People screamed for them not to shoot, that a neighbor might get killed.  They argued with each other and I ran and got to a dead-end, cornered.
I tried to climb it but I couldn’t.  I thought of throwing each individual body part of mine over the fence and maybe some way I could collect myself on the other side, but they were on me, eye-gouging, choking, neck-wrenching, elbowing, kicking the sun out of my solar plexus, beating my skull, and so I lashed out in the only way I knew, yanking body parts, throwing them anywhere I could, but that didn’t stop them.  There were just too many.  And they all had two arms and two legs that made them seem like each person was four people in one.
I did the only thing I could.  I yanked off faces and swapped them with my own.  I swapped arms and legs.  I took off a knee and put it on someone else’s until the pile of us got lost.  There was a moment where the breathing was all we heard and the confusion took over.  Which one was me?  They didn’t know.  I didn’t know.  I asked along with them, “Where is he?”  And then it became, “Where am I?”  I said these words too, breathed heavily with them, looking from person to person, from body part to body part.  None of us knew who was who.  The bulletproof vests were still there, the rabbit pajamas, the puppy slippers, the useless guns, but the faces had been swapped, as easily as you can take off Halloween masks.
You probably don’t know how devastating this is, was, for them, how their very identities had been bitten, chewed, swallowed, eaten, digested, shit out, flushed, sewaged.  Identify is fragile as hell.  And, yes, hell is fragile.
They examined their arms and realized they didn’t match.  There were different races here, different sexes, different everything, the mob completely at random, neighbors pouring out of their houses to join the horde, shouting exaggerations, deceits, rants.  We were all mixed together.  I knew who was me because, miraculously, I had some core of self.  Or believed I did.  I felt I knew who I was.  I looked around to see who might have other parts of myself, but those were gone forever.  I was this new thing.  The way that viruses replicate.  Become something else.
I wondered if I’d done this earlier in my life.  I suffer from insomnia, perhaps make others suffer because of my insomnia.  I’ve always had it.  My mind going “a million miles per” as my mother used to say.  But there’s also parasomnia, strange nervous system occurrences while you sleep.  And sexomnia, where people actually have sex when they’re asleep and don’t even realize it.  And somnambulism, where you walk in your sleep.  And somniloquy, where you talk in your sleep.
And I wondered if I’d been doing this in my sleep all along—dismemberomnia.  It seemed too easy for me, this body swapping, as if I’d had years of practice.  I wondered if I was really Saami-Karelian-Lebanese or if I’d just switched those parts with other people and created that, taken off a child’s ears in kindergarten and put them on my head, the other kid so stunned they didn’t even speak.  I wondered if I was sleeping now, if all of this was sleep-chaos, sleep-self-destruction, sleep-harm.  Sleep-disassembly.
Maybe I’d added more than I even know so that I was made up of hundreds of people by now.  Sleepwalking into people’s homes while they were snoring and swapping noses, exchanging eyes, trading teeth, switching brains.  I felt like a forty-nine-year old sometimes, a twelve-year-old other times, a seventy-year-old, a nine-year-old, all four at the same time, more.  Maybe all of my neighbors didn’t know they had parts of me, parts of other neighbors.  The people in these hate groups in town not realizing they already were part African, part Asian, part European, part Australian, part North American, part South American, had been taken apart.  They just didn’t know.  And maybe they were like that before I even did those things, with the ancestries more mixed than they ever realized, so that there is no such thing as a one hundred percent African or a one hundred percent European.  Maybe there is only mixture, complexity.  I thought of Moses, the parting of the Red Sea, except doing that with bodies.  About ninety percent of body weight is water.  Maybe that’s all I was moving.  And the rest just came along for the ride.
We all started to go home.
Confused where home was.
They walked away and I wondered what face I had now, because I should walk to where that face sleeps.  Except I didn’t know.
I walked to my original home.
I walked a sort of sleepwalk, the way you walk after something major has happened in your life, where your body has been so pumped full of adrenaline that now all you need is six years of sleep.  I was so hungry I could have popped off a thumb and dropped it in my mouth.
My house, as you would expect, was silent, with cars nearby, just as silent.  They were waiting.
Except I wasn’t approaching.  An old woman was.  I had breasts now.  One that is.  I had breast.  Part of my torso had been switched.  The riot, like most riots, had no sense to it.  My cheek was scratched but I don’t know if the person already had that scar.  I had no idea what I looked like but I felt my hair was longer.  My legs were shorter.  The sky caught my attention and it looked rearranged too, its reindeer herd of stars.  A dark white splotch of pollution blocked the moon so you wondered if it even existed anymore.
Police were inside.  My father wasn’t.  With the front door I knew so well wide open, they stood there.  I had turned myself in, except they didn’t know it.
I didn’t know if I was me either.  When I really felt inside myself with all of the neurons I could, it seemed like my center was still there.  Mostly.
“Can we help you, ma’am?”
The house wasn’t destroyed.
It was stroyed.
Or maybe the word is de-destroyed, the feel that the entire living room had been ransacked and then placed back together in some attempt to fake like it had never been touched.  It had been a living room and then a dead room and now a resurrected room.  With bugs in every crevice.  Bug on top of bugs.  The bugs bugged.  Bugged lamps and bugged chairs and bugged carpets and bugged flyswatter.  The men all sat and stood and leaned as if they owned the place.  They did, now.  This is how quickly place is taken over, invaded, colonized.  The television was on a channel that we never watched, low in the background, a commercial playing, a commercial I’d seen ten thousand times, the endless manic selling.
“Would you like something to drink?”
I shook what was now my head yes.
One of the agents searched for a cup in the house he now owned.
There was suspicion that I wasn’t speaking.  I was worried what my new tongue would do, hadn’t practiced using it.
The man came back with a cup of water.  They were all men.  They studied my face.  My Adam’s apple.  My crotch.  I wondered if this was how they looked at all women.  It was.  He held out the cup of water.
The Saami believe in Maahiset.  There’s some debate on Maahiset.  One line of thinking is that they are the first person to ever die on a piece of land.  That person then owns that land forever.  And then they are there forever, trapped to a tiny space in which they can roam, memorizing every crevice of where they are linked to.  That ancestor actually becomes the land.  They’re one.  As the land lives, they live.  Another take is more precautionary, where one is warned Maahiset will entrap you in lands, will offer you something to eat or drink in a certain area and then once you’ve eaten or drank, you can’t leave, ever.
The word ‘Saami’ means ‘land.’
I am land.
I didn’t accept the water.  I didn’t want their water.  Because it had been mine.  Was now diseased with their presence, their federal presence.
A man came from behind.  I’ve always heard that mountain lions, when they stalk prey, come from the back, and leap at the carotid.  There was a hand on my neck, groin, back, skull, spine.  They pinned me to the ground, their bodies hot into me.
And then they took me to the bathroom.
Three scared neighbors stood in a tub.  Another sat on the toilet.  Another on the sink.  I’d taken baths in that tub as a child, with neighbor kids, us naked and young and innocent and tiny and thin and warm.  They put me in the bathtub, standing there.
“I apologize,” said the federal/mayoral agent with no sense of apology to his voice, “They’ll be taking you all in for booking soon.”  The agent closed and locked the door behind him.  They’d switched the door so that it locked on the opposite side now.
I asked what was going on.
A boy whispered, “They’re arresting anyone who comes to this house.  They’re worried we all might be the killer.”
“What killer?”
“There’s a boy going around killing everyone in the neighborhood.  A serial killer.”
“How many people has he killed?”
“The rumor is hundreds.  I don’t know.  A lot.”
This is how crime in America works.  Pot-heads are treated as cocaine smugglers.  Jaywalkers are kidnappers.  Spitting on a sidewalk, if they want, becomes murder.  If they want.
“I just wanted to give them some roses,” said the person on the toilet, “And a card.  I’m not a killer.”
“I have to go number one,” said one of the people in the tub.
The woman on the toilet stood up.  Everyone turned away from the toilet and a man went over and we listened to him trickle out a pee.  He flushed and we all went back to our positions.
We stood there for a few hours, slowly slumping, leaning, all of us eventually ending up in unhealthy yoga positions on the floor, and then someone took us to the police station.
I recognized a lot of faces and kept wondering if they recognized mine.
They brought me to an interrogation room.  I was the first to be taken.
Two agents and a cop stood over me.
“What’s your name?”  The asker looked like he stabbed angels routinely.  “It seems you have,” he said, “female body parts and male body parts.”
I let that sentence sink in.
I let that sentence drown.
I looked up at his silent head, amazed at how little he moved.  He smiled, except he didn’t smile in the usual sense.  I mean that he moved his zygomaticus muscles in a way that made his mouth move, but with none of the typical joy you’d associate.  Several men put a second set of handcuffs on my hands and feet and slid a straight jacket over me.  The hetero-jacket hurt like hell, like every inch of my body was being choked.
“We know it’s you,” said the agent using his best bad-cop voice, “Or at least part of you.”
Another man stepped forward, cleared his good-cop voice.  “Ma’am, we’re concerned part of the serial killer may be in our body.”
I thought it best to just sit there.
“What are you going to do?”  I spoke before I even wanted to.  I think the combination of lack of food and lack of sleep and lack of water and lack of everything makes you open your mouth, in hopes that water or aspirin or cake or something might fall in.
“In terms of what?”
“With me,” I said.
“Well, we want to know who you are, for one.”
“After that.”
“One thing at a time.”
“I have an itch on my nose,” I said.  I couldn’t move to scratch it.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said the word nose.  Maybe just saying that word gave something away, that my very crime had to do with body parts and merely saying one meant guilt.
The door opened.  Someone whispered and the room emptied.  I looked at the cameras pointed at me.  The world is all cameras now.  George Orwell didn’t realize that Big Brother was going to be all voluntary, that people’s entire identities would be caught up in broadcasting what they were eating, what they were dressed like, how drunk they got, what politics they hate, what music they love, what books they’re reading, when they broke up with someone, when they were depressed, listing a sort of accidental top ten reasons why they shouldn’t be hired, top twenty reasons why someone shouldn’t date them, top one hundred reasons why they should be on governmental watch lists, all strictly voluntary, so the world would know all of their dislikes and fetishes and dreams and errors with updates daily.  Privacy would die because we were too afraid to be private, yearning for attention.  Privacy replaced with piracy.
And I was a pirate of the body.
I couldn’t move, otherwise I’d have taken off my head at that moment.  I’d have stuck it under my shirt, just so I could have a moment alone, away from the incarceration cameras.  I would rather stare into the sweat on my chest than stare into a camera lens.  On average, we’re on camera three hundred times a day.  A guy in our hometown was caught putting a camera in the inner lining of a public toilet.  If I was free right now, I’d find his house, take off his head, drop it a stall, and flush.
Police stations are made to produce anger.  Just the paint alone makes you want to punch things.  The lights never go off, so every person in every cell has light in their face while sleeping so that there is no darkness, no silence, just a constant slamming of metal, and brightness like the sun’s your bunkmate.  My uncle was in prison and he told me prisoners all link up with the prisoners who did the same crime.  Prison is a community college for illegal activity, where you go to study how to be a better criminal.  Robbers link with robbers and learn how to do better robberies.  Drug dealers meet with drug dealers and deal drugs--in the prison, a continual practice, rehearsal, perfecting of their skills—and then they learn where opportunities exist in the outside world for more drug dealing in the future.  Thieves steal in prisons.  Rapists rape in prisons.  There is no stopping of crime, but a magnification, an encouragement.  Prison is one extensive job interview, a LinkedIn.  Because you can’t get a real job when you get out, only go back to what you’ve done, but being better at it the next time.
A man walked in.  It was always men.  And they kept walking in.
“Hello, my Saami friend,” he said.
He touched my breast.  I tried to pull away but couldn’t.
“You might want to give Mrs. Sanderson her tit back,” he said.
He grabbed my lower lip and squeezed, pulling it out, then he grabbed a pen and stabbed it through, so I had an instant violent piercing.  He let go.  The pen hit my nose, jabbed through my lip, stuck there.  He took the pen and stuffed it up one of my nostrils.
“ADX Florence.  Heard of it?”
I couldn’t shake my head no.  I was too strapped in.
Blood tickled my chin.
He continued, “Alcatraz of the Rockies.  All the leaders of your most violent gangs go there.  Aryan Brotherhood, Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings, Wah Ching, all of ‘em.  Know the a-hole who did the Boston Marathon bombings?  He’s there.  The Unabomber, he’s there.  Name a terrorist, a famous convicted terrorist.  You’ll be sleeping next to him.  They’re there.”
He swiveled me to the side and kicked my chair over.  My forehead hit with enough impact to give me a taste of what a lobotomy’s like.
He crouched so his face was near mine, his head resting softly on the floor.
“You see what I just did?  Of course, you did.  I wanted you to see it.  To experience it.  Because that’s nothing.  Compared to what you can do.”  He pulled the pen out of my face.  More blood.  I looked at the red of me on the floor.
“Sorry,” he said, “I should have left this in.  It was like a cork.  Here.”  He took his shoe off, then his sock, and wrapped his sock around my face, tying it behind my head.  It soaked up the blood.  I also could smell nothing but him.
He picked my chair up, me in it.
“You,” he said, “Are either going to be one of the most hated people in the history of the United States.  Or a hero.  Which do you wanna be?”
He moved the sock from my mouth so I could speak.
“We want you to torment some folks for us.  Wouldn’t that be fun?  Like pluck out an eye and play Ping-Pong with it.  You know what I mean?  Use your imagination.  Because you, sir,” he paused.  He sat across from me, touched my hand.  “Ma’am, you’re God’s gift to interrogation.  The thing we’re doing right now.  You should be on this side.  You should be sitting where I am.  I’m really good at what I do.  But I think you could become one of the all-time greats.”
The sock slipped near my mouth again.  He pulled it off.
“Who do you hate?  Pick anything.  And don’t say me,” he said, “You don’t hate me.  You should love me.  I’m going to let you do what you do and you will be taken care of for the rest of your life.  You’ll stay at the prison.  We can’t let you out.  But you can order any food you want.  And I mean anything.  Lobster, I don’t know.  I don’t eat expensive food.  I eat tuna fish sandwiches and crap like that.  What’s expensive?  Because you can have it.  And they’ll allow you to choose from fifty beds.  Any bed you want.  And you’ll basically have double the size of a cell compared to the other prisoners.  It won’t be the Paris Hilton, but it’ll be topnotch.  A better life than ninety percent of this town, wherever we are.  All you have to do is say yes.”
“Yes,” I said, just to get him to shut up.
And he left, satisfied.  His big hot-fudge body loped out of the room.
They cleaned me up and they were kind of gentle, the janitors who wiped up my blood.  While they cleaned, they kept me locked up so my feet throbbed.  I wondered if I’d lose them, my feet.  I said that to one of the cleaners and he said, “If you do, just take another pair from one of the prisoners.”
In America, we’re supposed to have six thousand prisons and jails, but another agent told me it’s closer to ten thousand, almost double that number.  “You got your jails and state prisons and federal prisons—minimum and medium and high and supermax, closed and open—and your military prisons and boot camp incarcerations and psych prisons and immigration detention facilities and reservation jails and civil commitment facilities and juvenile correctionals and I’m forgetting some.  We got every type of prison imaginable.  Like chains.  Like chain-restaurants, but with humans.  It’s great.”  When government agents talk about prison, it feels like they’re talking about their wedding day.
The U.S. locks up more people per capita than any country.  We’re supposed to have 2.3 million prisoners in America, but an agent told me it’s over three million.  There’s a bit of fudging of numbers because of some private jails for private prisoners who are private and when I asked what he meant by private he said, “That’s private.”  He said there are a reported 1.5 million prisoners in China and if I believe that I’m an idiot.  He said they say there’s 1.4 billion Chinese in the world, but the reality is it’s probably closer to two billion.  He said there are so many dissidents there and those in hiding and migrants and “invisible people” who avoid the government that their census is senseless.  He said it’s the same with their prisoners.  They’re only counting public prisoners, not ones in private jails.  He said if you count all the actual prisoners in China and the U.S., we’re talking about five million people.
5,000,000.
And if you count all of the people in the prison system and the court system and the parole system in the U.S., just the U.S., it’s more than ten million people.  More than.
10,000,000.
Let me show you what that looks like, with each zero below representing a person:
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They look like skulls.
They are skulls.
Screaming mouths.
The screaming mouths of skulls.
Full moons.
Empty moons.
And I’d have to do those zeroes like this for five thousand more pages.
Those full-screaming-skull-mouth-moon zeroes.  All of the nothings of that.  The holes of that.  The toilet bowls of that.  The erasers and nooses and empty buckets of that.
And that was all I could think about: nothing.
0 0
No thing
Because, with my eyes covered in the back of a van, that’s all I could see.
We hit about a zillion bumps.  And then we were there.
They opened the doors of the van to reveal a parking area in a deserted valley with everything so dry it looked like the world had a horrible fever and died.  The sunlight reflected off of all of the barbed-wire metal and created a firework display of blindness.  I shuffled towards the gate to get to the next gate to get to the next and next.  Shakespeare said hell is gates.  Dantean concentric circles of gates.  Move the first letter of gate up one notch in alphabetical order and you get hate.  Go in the other direction: fate.
Even the windows seemed angry, destined for anger.  The first bulletproof window had a lightning crack down it, showing it wasn’t so bulletproof.
Inside the prison, passed the first gate, was a white gazebo.  If there’s any place on earth that didn’t need a gazebo, it was here, in this midpoint between gates where I’m sure no one would ever want to rest.
They shuffled me by the chow hall where a line of a hundred prisoners all watched me.
We shuffled to the back of the prison.
“Psych ward,” a guard said, “Put your head down in here.  You don’t want to make eye contact with anyone.  Trust me.”
As if I trusted him.
We went by cell after cell, all of them with shatterproof glass so that each prisoner was on display from all directions.  These were the supposedly worst of the worst, a special area just for them, where they could be constantly monitored.  You could walk around their cells and look in from the north, south, east, and west, nothing hidden, except their thoughts, their pasts.  Their futures were known; they would be here.
“Worst thing that ever happened was the cameras,” a guard said.
“Before the cameras, this place was heaven.  Seriously, a peace-filled heaven,” said a guard, “We used to be able to beat some sense into these guys.  Nowadays, we do anything and they review the footage.  They own the place now, not us.”
“Where are the cameras?” I asked.
“Don’t matter.”
“Everywhere?”
“Don’t matter.”
“But,” said a guard, “We’re taking you where there’re no cameras.  We’ll be safe there.”
We went by a long glass display of toilets where prisoners sat and stood, urinating and defecating, in a long row, each toilet occupied.  Bird nests in hell.  This great human display.  Inhuman display.
They took me to a room empty of all but walls and a solitary light overhead built into the ceiling.  No light sockets, no windows.  A solitary door.
“Who’s staying and who’s going?” a guard asked.
Three guards raised their hands.
“Everyone else leave.”  They left, closing the door behind them.  It locked shut on the other side.
“Taser,” said one guard.
“Check.”
“Check.”
“O.C.,” said the guard.
“Check.”
“Check.”
“Baton.”
“Check.”
“Check.”
One of the guards touched his Taser, his pepper spray, and his baton, making what looked like the sign of the cross.  A cop crucifix.
“We’re gonna take your cuffs off now.  But just your feet.”
“I thought we were taking his handcuffs off too.”
“Only feet.”
“I’m pretty sure they said hands.”
“Feet.  My God, you know what this guy can do?”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t believe what?”
“What I heard.”
“Which is?”
“It can’t happen.”
“Have you seen the footage?”
“It’s fake.”
“We’re only taking off his goddamn leg restraints.  Nothing else.”
The guard approached me, then stopped, addressing the other two guards.
“Do everything textbook.  Three-point position with him.”
The guards moved so that I was surrounded in the center of the room.
They took off one leg restraint, then the other.  My legs were free now.
“The handcuffs?” I asked.
“No way in hell.”
“Are you afraid of a senior in high school?” I said.
“Don’t listen to him.  Let’s go.”
“It’s all fake.  You said it,” I said, “Look how skinny I am.  I’m 132 pounds.  Your stomach weighs as much as me.”
The guy hit me with his baton.
A guard started arguing that I’d have internal bleeding.  The other argued that I was useless dead.  The one who hit me went to the door and knocked.  It unlocked on the other side and they started to walk out.
“Lobster,” I said.
The door closed.
“I want lobster,” I said to the empty room, to the corpse-colored walls.
This prison, I was told, is supposed to hold 13,000 prisoners, but it held more than 28,000.
The population of every prison is overpopulation.
I slid down to the floor.  I fell asleep for a bit.  They came with some meat.  I ate it.  It wasn’t lobster.  It wasn’t fish.  It wasn’t bad.  It wasn’t good either.  It was cold and below average.  D+ food.
He was back.  Hot Fudge.  Just him and the guard I hated.  They took off my handcuffs and paused, seeing what I’d do.  I stretched.  I felt diseased, like my entire body had been squinting for years.  Squinting eyes, squinting pancreas, squinting lungs.
Hot Fudge told me, “You’ll be disassembling a Muslim in a half hour.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“What Muslim?”
“Does it matter?”
Hot Fudge had a mole on his neck.  I wanted to ask him if was cancerous, but thought I’d save the question for later.
“Is he guilty?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Well, what exactly did he do?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes,” I said.
His mole didn’t say anything.  Neither did his neck.  Or his body.
Hot Fudge must have choked a thousand people in his life.  He probably choked every wife he ever had.  Choked neighbors.  Sons.  Daughters.  An endless stream of inmates.  And roommates.  And bunkmates.  And he’d probably cut off actual fingers, fingers that couldn’t be put back.  I imagined him punching tracheas, thinking he was doing it patriotically.  He loved his job.  Except he didn’t have any love in him.  You become your job and he had become hate.  He probably had tortured members of hate groups but he’d become one himself, an official one-man hate group.
“Is there a KKK guy you could bring in?” I asked.
“You have no opinion here,” he said, “No thoughts.”
“I’d just prefer if it was someone guilty.”
“Everyone’s guilty in prison,” he said.
He looked at me and thought about those words.  I looked at him and thought about those words.  We were both in prison.
“I’m going to tell you which body part to take off and when,” he said.
“I’ll say when,” I said.
“You will?”
“Yes.  And it won’t be until tomorrow.”
“Why not tonight?”
“I need sleep.”
“There’s no sleep here.”
“I want my bed,” I said, “I want to see these choices of beds you’d said.”
“Choices?  You have the floor here.  Or the floor there.”
“And?”
“Or you can sleep out with the prisoners.  But you wouldn’t want to do that.  Not with your body in restraints.  They could do anything they wanted to you.”
“I’ll sleep here,” I said.
“Then out there it is.”
Hot Fudge went to the door.  He stopped.
“You sure you want that?  You wouldn’t rather just do your job tonight?  We bring him in.  It’ll be an hour, two.  We take his head off, he’ll start to tell us anything we want.  Who knows?  Maybe we’d be done in two minutes.”  He waited for me to respond, then added, “You know, in Chinese prisons, daily they show videos of decapitations, just to show the prisoners what could happen to them.  Daily.  Videos.  But we could actually show them that live.  Decapitations live.”  He seemed like Christmas was tomorrow.  It wasn’t.  There are no chimneys here.  Just fire extinguishers.
“You said you want him to tell you anything you want?  Don’t you prefer the truth?”
“There’s no truth,” he said, “Not here.  Not anywhere.”
He closed the door.
They came back in and restrained my legs even further, my arms, my head, my chest so that I couldn’t even take full breaths.  I wondered if I’d be dead by morning, from the restraints alone, suffocated, hog-tied.
They shuffled me out to the main floor, through the psych ward, to a room of about four hundred prisoners.
“Open bunking here,” Hot Fudge said, “After lights out, anyone leaves their bunk, they better have a helluva excuse.  That starts in twenty minutes, lights out.  Except there’s no lights out.  Not really.  They’ll yell that, but they’ll all stay on.  Tradition.  But here’s my advice.  That means these prisoners got twenty minutes to do anything they want.  With you.  You might want to make some friends fast.  ‘Cause tomorrow some of ‘em know what you’ll be doing.”
“You’re just gonna let them kill him?” a guard whispered to Hot Fudge.
“No.  Not kill him.  But they’ll do a lot of other things besides kill him.”
They led me to an open bunk.  The top bunk open.  The guy on the bottom had a yellow dragon tattoo wrapped around his head.  Its tail started at his left nostril and went all the way around his shaved head so that fangs were visible on a mouth that looked like it was trying to inhale the world on the other side of his face, stopping at his right nostril.  The dragon was endlessly attempting to eat itself.  Frozen like that for the rest of his lifetime.
Tomorrow, beaten and eaten by Satan and Aryans, I’d be eating cold average meat and spend the day torturing non-violent drug offenders and circumspect Muslims with highly questionable criminal records to the point of exhaustion and then I’d fall asleep on a floor in an empty room where I’d wake up to do it again and again, forever and ever, amen, ripping body parts off people while Hot Fudge spit in their face and grabbed them by the skull and told them to say whatever he wanted them to say.
America.
A crowd formed around me so that Hot Fudge and the guards could no longer see me, only getting a peek at the top of my head.
Whether or not I was in the Alcatraz of the Rockies didn’t matter.  I could have been in the Alcatraz of Death Valley or the Rikers Island of Chernobyl.  All I knew is I had a collection of gangbangers surrounding me.  Mass shooters and mass murderers and masochists were en masse all around me, with their eyelid tattoos and ear tattoos and tattoos on their gums.
A shirtless kid with KK tatted across his forehead, possibly his initials or possibly an unfinished tat where he couldn’t afford the third K, got in my face and said that I was now his, that he was going to rip off my head.
I stepped on one of my feet and slid it off the way that you’d take off a shoe.  That got their attention.
I plucked off a hand so that the handcuff slid off.
I shook my leg and it dropped through the restraints down to the floor.
I took myself apart and the restraints all dropped, useless, and then I put myself back together.
Everyone stopped, confused at what they were seeing.
Mafia hit men were backing up, as if they’d just seen Lucifer.
A guy with a tattoo of a nose next to his nose laughed loudly, amused.  I immediately took off his real nose and threw it on the ground.  It reminded me of first grade.
Prisoners backed up.  At the same time, a couple of guys rushed at me.  I grabbed a prisoner’s elbow and threw it.  I grabbed a head and threw it too.  I didn’t care where, just away from them.  A hand was around my neck, so I took the hand off and tossed it.  Now prisoners were running.  I ran after them, grabbing a spine from someone’s back and tossing that on the ground.  A guard released gas.  They pepper sprayed, blinding several prisoners and guards.  I took out the pepper sprayer’s pupils and flicked those on the floor.  I worked manic, just grabbing any body part I could and throwing them wherever.
A prisoner, crying, picked up a hand from the ground.  He tried to put the hand back on, but just got more and more frustrated, crying like a teenager who’d broken up with their first crush.  I grabbed elbows and toes, lungs and tongues, hips and lips, pharynxes and larynxes, thighs and eyes, knees and kidneys, all of the stupid named rhyming organs.  Whatever doctor named all of the body parts must have been Dr. Seuss.  Anyone who touched me immediately lost that body part.  There were spleens everywhere.  Heads rolling, spinning around like tops.  One of the heads came to a stop and on its forehead was the letters KK.
There must have been a hundred body parts on the floor.
Two hundred.
Three.
Prisoners who still had their bodies intact pressed up against the walls, almost as if they were hoping they could just seep into the steel.  When I moved, the entire room shuffled, trying to keep as quiet as possible.  All of the guards were scattered throughout the floor.  The gas and smoke settled.  I stood in the dead center of it all, a heart right next to me on the floor.  Beating.  I picked it up.  I put it in front of me.
A siren started.
A prison riot siren.
Except this was the opposite of a riot.  The room couldn’t have been calmer.  The beating heart was the most movement of anything.
There was an explosion.
Smoke.
More gas.
Sliding metal.
About fifty guards in crowd-control suits entered.  There was no crowd to control.  The crowd had been dispersed, very literally.
In onyx face-shields and shadow-black tactical vests with all of their bodies shoulder-to-shoulder in a semi-circle, the crowd of guards pointed their cannon-like guns at me.
I’d worked quickly in the smoke, grabbing any parts that seemed to be from guards.  When the smoke cleared fully, they could see that I had reassembled a guard.  Except I’d done it hastily.  With difficulty in seeing.  It was a skill I’d been practicing, secretly.  I’d been taking off my arm and putting it in place of my leg.  And vice versa.  I’d been taking off my forehead and putting my foot there.  I’d basically been learning how to swap body parts into different positions, an even more difficult thing to do.  I’d recently practiced swapping my thumbs, going back and forth, when I was nervous.  My body blocking this little game from cameras so they didn’t even know I was practicing.  I’d done it in my holding cell.  I was much better at it now.
From the smoke walked a guard.  Except he had three heads.  And he had arms for legs.  And he had legs for arms.  And in the middle of his chest was a foot.  And its shoulder was a spleen.  And it had a finger for an ear.  And each head only had one eye.  It wasn’t bad for being so rushed.  But the three-headed guard walked up to the kettle of riot gear and begged them not to kill me, begging that it didn’t want to stay like this for the rest of its life, teary, pounding its fist to its foot-chest.
One of the guards puked.
Another fainted.
Another screamed.
Another was praying to himself over and over again, saying, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die” forgetting one of the lines, but just repeating it like a constant spiral.
“Puh-lease!” yelled the three-headed guard.  It sounded like he might be yelling “po-lice.”  It didn’t matter.  Please or police, all its voice held was desperation.
The guns slowly moved down so they pointed at the floor and not me.
“Put us back together,” said a voice.
“I will.  In time.  But first, I want,” I said, “Lobster.”
“What?”
“Lobster.  Warm.  Good lobster.  Very warm.  Perfectly cooked.  For everyone in this room.  We’ve just been through a lot.  We want lobster.”
Eventually, they brought us lobster.  Plates and plates of lobster.
I put the bodies back together.  It took me hours.  Hours and hours.  Days.  Of taking one body part and matching it with another body.  We ate lobster and I reassembled people.
I couldn’t eat any more lobster.
A guard told me to stop; he said I wasn’t putting the bodies together correctly.
I wasn’t.  I was putting them back in any order that I wanted, randomly.  Whatever body needed a hand, I picked one up arbitrarily and put it on.  I did the same with heads and intestines and ankles.
“You can’t just put them on anyone,” said the mayor.
The mayor was there now.
The governor.
A senator too.
They watched me behind glass.
And next to the senator and governor and mayor, lined up, were all of the people I’d come across, holding their heads in their arms, waiting for me to put them back on, asking each other if anyone had seen their gallbladder, lightly brushing a mustache on their face that didn’t belong to them.  The FBI mayor agents from before, the Nazi neighbor, the pajamaed mob, all waiting for me, impatient and disconnected and behind glass.
I worked hard, putting body parts into proper positions, just on different bodies.  When I was done, the prisoners and the guards were all meshed together, interwoven.  I purposely made sure heads went on the wrong bodies.  People who were once flatly white were now Vietnamese and Latino and Nigerian and Columbian and Jewish and Chinese, all at the same time.  People who were French were now Algerian and Bosnian and Californian and Dubaian and Swedish.  I took bits of myself off and mixed them in too.  Many of these people were now part Saami and Karelian and Syrian.  If someone seemed to match up too perfectly, I looked for differently colored arms, differently shaded cheeks.  I made sure that everyone experienced as much of another culture as possible.
If I ever escaped, I swore I’d do this with the rest of the world.  I would live in the woods and emerge in the night and swap people’s bodies until my fingers bled, until my eyes ached for morning, until every single person was herself and someone else at the same time, until gender was something so confusing and complicated and mixed that the words he and she would have to die from the world’s vocabulary, would be cremated, the letters burning down to ash where they would be forgotten.
Even with them watching me, even with them obviously suspecting what I was doing, none of them tried to stop me.
They didn’t have any alternative.
They didn’t want heads piled up, disembodied.  Arms by themselves were useless.
They let me do it.
The mayor watched.
The governor watched.
The senator watched.
And, yes, the President, too, watched.
There was nothing they could do.
Nothing.