Softhead
Softhead
was what the nurses had called the boy as long as he remembered. Half awake, he lifted his neck gingerly off its support. His cervical vertebrae strained under a load they hadn't been bred to bear as a prodigious skull lifted off the hole cut out of his foam pillow. He touched as he did every morning, at the spot where scalp and forehead met. It was all soft but here was softer than the rest. He pressed so the folds of his brain pressed back.
He recalled receiving this pillow, his sixth, the relief of nestling his head in a cavity that was big enough again. In a few months he would receive another, to mark another year. Yet there was no anticipation this time like the last.
They told him he had fourteen days left until he would be born again. Born again meant the interface. He knew this the way he knew most things, not because anyone had explained it but because he had the space for it. They would open him and a helmet would be fitted for the ultrasonic array to descend into his soft spot fontanelle.
Fourteen days. He made a mark on the underside of his pillow with a nail of his left thumb. On the first morning he pressed the first line into the foam and on the second morning he pressed the second and on the third morning the nurse told him that he had five days left because his skull was big enough. The boy did not understand; he had not been measured. No one had closed caliper arms to the widest point of his skull and said, "He's ready." He pressed the third mark into his pillow then pressed six more beside it for the days that had been taken from him.
Five became two without ceremony. He grasped by habit the handle of his cup and clamped his lips around a soft corrugated straw. Before the first drop had sloshed onto his tongue he knew his orange juice had been switched for an altogether different liquid and when he asked why they said they were reducing acidity ahead of the procedure. He wondered how they knew his acidity needed reduced.
With one day left, the nurse came to shave him. She turned the topology of his swollen skull with the familiarity of hands that had walked this map before. She drew the razor from the edge of his crown straight back and when the blade reached the place where his skull had never firmed, she did not lift or slow. He shuddered as the pad of her finger ran from his fontanelle along the fault which reached to his nape.
He asked: "What happens after the opening?"
"You'll be connected."
"Connected to what?"
She smiled. It was a real smile.
"You will feel a sensation of pressure then warmth. You will feel a little weight, but there won't be any pain. There's never pain."
That evening, footsteps outside his door thinned into silence, then he walked
in the hallway and down the hallway and across the linoleum floor and to a room where was kept what he needed. A steel rod the length of his foot, it would do. It would be long enough to
grip in the palm of his hand like a popsicle, only he raised it much too far to lick, up in a perfect arc until it pointed back and then down and then into and through his scalp and his spot and his brain in his
softhead.