The Rest

They never found the rest of Tommy’s head. The police searched the site of the accident, but the weedy overgrowth flanking the gravel berm of the train tracks made the task difficult. The detective explained that a flock of carrion birds might have flown off with the pieces. Or, if the head was still intact, a mother fox could have dragged it to her hole to feed her cubs. Or, he said with a bit of embarrassment, playing with the holster of his gun, Maybe my boys just missed it. Lorrie suspected the detective’s last speculation was correct.
She dreamed someone would find his face in the dirt beside the road like a mask, a Tommy mask, flung from his head where it used to stretch into a big dopey grin as he waited to see her reaction to the stench of his silent fart. And sometimes, when she thought he’d farted because of the stupid grin he was making, he was only looking at her with his soft blue eyes, smiling a row of his crooked, tobacco-stained teeth, before he reached over and rubbed the nape of her neck.
Ten pounds of his head were knocked clear by the Eastbounder, every recognizable part of his head, but he was still alive, spasming with seizures under the sheets of the hospital bed. The doctors said it was a miracle, but that only meant they were dumbfounded. It was a miracle they’d admitted him to the hospital at all. No one knew how a train collision could have shucked off his face and skull and most of his brain, only to leave that wobbly little stub of his brain stem intact, dangling from the torn stump of his neck. The nurses set a tiny pillow under it. A pillow at the top of her enormous, headless man.
Flagmen, like her Tommy, were always getting hurt for the sake of the railroad, for the sake of punctuality. Tommy was a good flagman, a man to be relied on. The electrical crew put their full faith in him. Not a single worker was struck down by a train while he was on watch, except for him. He would have been happy to know that no one else got hurt besides Craig.
When Lorrie mentioned Craig to others she added the asshole after his name to differentiate him from other Craigs and other assholes. Craig got a piece of skull shrapnel lodged in his leg, but it was only a minor injury. After the surgeon removed it, Craig sent the piece to her in a little jewelry box. She found the gesture thoughtful. In the hospital, she was tempted to take the fragment out from her pocketbook and place it on the empty pillow where it would have gone, if his head remained, but she didn’t know what part of his skull it was from. It was too small to tell.
The remainder of Tommy was right there in front of her: stable, breathing, pumping blood. When the nurses sponged him every couple of days, she couldn’t help but look at his misshapen toes. Those toes that were broken as a kid running barefoot through his parents yard at night and smashed within football cleats on the high school’s frozen turf in November.
His friends wouldn’t have recognized him in that state. Only his mother, if she was alive, could have. Only his mother and Lorrie. Lorrie paid attention to the parts of him that rarely got seen. In a lineup, she would know which was her Tommy. Show her any part of him, and she’d know.

A fly buzzed around Tommy’s room. Lorrie sat on watch with a swatter. When he was first admitted, the doctors discussed sealing up the top of his neck around the hole of his esophagus using skin grafts from his ass to prevent infection. They had since decided against it. It’s only a matter of time, they said. The fly landed on a severed muscle that protruded near his exposed spine.
Her heart skipped a beat. The fly crawled over the edge of his esophagus and out of sight. She froze, scared that her movement might drive it deeper. It rattled through him with a frantic, electric buzzing. A chill pulsed through her legs. She reached for the call button on the bed, but the fly shot back out and ricocheted off the ceiling and flew in tight arcs, smacking against the walls.
An intern with long, dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses came in and introduced herself as Sheila. Sheila asked if she could read in the room during her breaks. She told Lorrie that she wanted to specialize in brain surgery and thought she could learn something from Tommy, so Lorrie told her fine.
Her bladder was painfully full. She handed Sheila the swatter and asked her to keep watch. When she got back from the bathroom, Sheila was standing at Tommy’s bedside, hands clasped over the swatter as if in prayer, peering down at him.
“What kind of person was he?” Sheila said.
Lorrie noticed a large surgical scar hidden beneath the hair on Sheila’s temple. A swoop of hair was clipped to cover it, but it had fallen out of place.
“He could be a pain in the ass,” Lorrie said, “but he was loving in his own way. Like a noisy dog that won’t stop barking. He always reminded you he was there, and I liked that. I felt better when I knew he was nearby. Like whale song for sleeping. Tommy song. I think he was aware of it, too. He was loudest when he was around me.”
“He has a presence,” she said.
“Now?” Lorrie said. “He’s just a lump, now.”
“But there’s a fullness to him. I’m not exactly sure why I feel it. I’ve seen a dozen comatose patients with brain death, and their bodies are empty, like cars left unoccupied on the side of the road. I know he doesn’t have much of a brain left, but something feels full about him. Your fly’s dead.”
Sheila pointed to the ground. The tiny creature lay broken on the floor. Its legs pointed up at Lorrie in an accusatory manner. The fly wanted to use Tommy as a home for its maggots, but Sheila prevented it, and Lorrie was grateful.

The chaplain came by the room to give Tommy last rites. On his intake forms, under the section for religious beliefs, Lorrie had penned in Catholic, but the only time she’d ever seen him at Mass was for a funeral. The chaplain flinched when he saw Tommy.
“I was told that . . .” He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket to check the name. “Thomas may wish to receive last rites?”
“Go ahead,” she said.
He unzippered a little leather shaving bag and took out a small vial of holy oil. He dipped his thumb in the oil then leaned in to anoint Tommy’s head but corrected himself. Lightly pulling back the collar of Tommy’s hospital gown, he traced a cross on his chest and recited his holy words.
“What happens to him now?” she said. 
“I’m sorry?” said the chaplain.
“What’re his last rites supposed to do?” 
“Are you Catholic?”
“My family is,” Lorrie said. 
“I’m sure you’re aware of ensoulment –– when a soul drifts down from heaven at the moment of conception?”
Lorrie shook her head, no.
“Well, at the moment of death, the opposite occurs. The soul schisms from the Earthly body, and in that moment, we are all judged by God. We are soulful creatures, as the nuns said in middle school. I always liked that. Soulful creatures. It sounds like an R&B song. Anyways, the ritual of last rites prepares the soul for that schism from the body and the voyage back to God.”
“What do you think about Tommy?”
“What do you mean?” the chaplain said. 
“Being mostly dead, but not totally?”
“That’s a really good question. Perhaps, it would help to pray on it?”
“I kind of thought a head made a person a person, made them alive, because that’s where your memories are stored, and that’s where your personality comes from, and, of course, that’s where your face is. But now, I don’t know.”
The chaplain swiveled his head about the room, unsure of where to set his eyes. He folded his arms and nodded at the floor. He stayed like that for a few minutes.
“I should be moving along,” he said. “Would you like to pray with me before I go?”
“Nah, that’s okay.”
The chaplain splayed his hand and signed a cross in the air at Tommy, then he left.
The holy oil beaded on Tommy’s chest hair. Lorrie hadn’t touched him since the accident.
Paramedics, doctors, nurses, interns, and then a priest had all handled his body, but she’d been afraid to touch him in that state. Pulling down his gown, she placed her hand on his chest. She could feel the shallow thump of his heartbeat. His skin was warm, sweaty even. A few curly, gray hairs were mixed in with the brown on his chest. To get a reaction, she plucked a hair, but nothing.
With a clenched fist, she ripped a whole clump of hair from his chest. The skin turned red and raised where the roots had been planted. Stripping off his gown, she slapped his penis, but no response. She almost curled up on the bed beside him, but she stopped herself. She didn’t want the memory of snuggling up to this headless body to overshadow the others. She was afraid that it would replace her memories of being together in bed, sleeping late on weekends, refusing to disentangle and start the day. She was afraid of losing what little she had left.

The doctors popped in once-in-a-while to take a look at Tommy and to check if she was still there. They fumbled with their charts and gave her small, professional nods when they entered, but when they were huddled together, thinking they were out of sight, they just shrugged and shook their heads, looking to each other for suggestions.
The neurologist walked in each morning and stood next to Tommy. “Thomas, you cannot hear me, but can you feel this?” He rolled a spiked metal wheel down Tommy’s inner arm and over his fingers. The empty pillow was silent. “If you can feel this, tap your finger in response?” The neurologist nodded, made a note on his chart, and performed more reflex tests. The tests were more for her sake than for his. It was theater. An act to show they cared.
The interns pilgrimaged to Tommy’s room each day. It became a sanctuary for them. A place of pseudo-religious energy. Sheila once left a candy bar for Lorrie at the foot of his bed, and Lorrie forgot to pick it up. The other interns repeated Sheila’s gesture, believing it was an old physicians’ ritual. They arrived with sweets and stacked them in a neat pile on the floor by the foot of the bed.
Lorrie would pretend to sleep and watch through a lattice of eyelashes as a handful of them tiptoed in and stood there with their hands clasped over their mouths. They would delicately place their offerings and leave. A thin, ashen, young man in scrubs came in to pay homage and left a Mars Bar. Afterward, he had to be consoled by an older nurse who held him as he shivered outside the room.
Tommy had a Do Not Resuscitate clause in his will, but he hadn’t needed life support so far. He received a little water during the day, but that was it. The nurses squirted a water solution of antacid medicine down his esophagus with a little laboratory dropper to dilute the stomach juices that kept being regurgitated in a fountain of spray onto the wall behind the bed. Tommy survived a year on just BBQ potato chips and Budweiser. Lorrie knew he’d last a while, but she was scared for how long.

The staff was growing impatient. The doctors recommended giving him a high dosage of morphine for his pain. She asked them if he could even feel pain in his state. They said no, but in palliative care, patients can be administered the highest dosage of painkillers allowed to make them comfortable in their final hours. Lorrie asked if it would speed up the process. They said it might, so she agreed.
People were waiting on his organs, and he was taking up hospital space that somebody else needed more than him. All the waiting had drained Lorrie. There was no forecast other than death. She wanted it to be over. The chair in the hospital room was the most uncomfortable chair she’d ever sat in, and the whole building smelled like urine and disinfectant. With all the disease in that snake pit, she was surprised that Tommy lasted as long as he had. He’d never had such good health.
Without food, Tommy shriveled. She also lost weight. Nothing in the hospital cafeteria looked appetizing: the yellow Jell-O molds, opaque and congealed like pus in their plastic containers; the rows of stale pre-made sandwiches; wilted, soggy salads. The tastes she craved before the accident: salts, sugars, grease, acidity, weren’t registering on her palate. She drove past a Burger Palace on her way to and from the hospital. The smell of the fry oil wafted down the road. Normally, it would have made her salivate and crave french fries, but her tongue remained dry and rough against the roof of her mouth.
A week of sitting in the hospital chair and sleeping on a cot next to Tommy was too much. She missed the distractions of work. She needed to sleep in her own bed.
It was 9 p.m. when she walked into their apartment. The first time since the accident. The television had been left on, and a commercial played. She half expected Tommy to be there on the couch, watching TV with a beer bottle in his hand. For a moment, she thought she heard his voice, then the babble of a company spokesperson refilled the space.
Going straight to their room, she threw herself onto the mattress and pressed her face deep into his pillow. She inhaled the vinegar scent of his sweat. Her world swirled with him again, but every subsequent breath dragged her further away from that sensation. She breathed harder and harder and wrapped her head in the fabric.
She desperately wanted to get back to that first smell. For a second, the smell made her think that he was there. The last particles of Tommy were drifting beyond perception, and she needed to consume them before there was nothing left to sense, until he existed only in memories, on computer hard drives, and in the fading prints of pictures. She knew her memories of him would disappear, too, but at a pace slow enough to ignore, and once they were gone, she wouldn’t remember they existed at all.

A familiar voice woke her. Someone was standing in her bedroom doorway. “You need to come with me,” the person said.
Lorrie shot upright in bed. Her eyes, fogged with sleep, failed to focus.
“Who is it? Debbie?” Lorrie said, searching for the light.
“It’s me, Sheila, from the hospital. You weren’t answering your phone.”
“What’s going on? How’d you get in?”
Sheila came forward and seized her hands and yanked her out of bed. Lorrie’s clothes felt hot and sweaty. It was night. Sheila handed Lorrie a set of keys.
“You left these in the deadbolt,” Sheila said. “You need to go to the hospital. I’ll meet you there.”
Lorrie locked the front door and got into her car as Sheila sped up the road. Her cell was on the passenger seat. She had thirteen missed calls. It felt like only a couple hours of sleep, but the date had changed on her phone.

The hospital shone like a Christmas tree rising up from the darkness of the parking lot. She nearly left the car running.
Inside the building, the elevator opened, and she stepped out onto Tommy’s floor. Security guards rushed by and burst through to the staircase. The nurses behind the front desk stopped and glared at her in horror. One nurse pretended not to have seen Lorrie and took a step back, trying to escape. Another picked up the phone and dialed an extension with pounding, finger-breaking strokes.
As she turned the corner, the nurses’ eyes followed her. Keeping vigil, the interns were gathered in the hallway. At the front of the group was Sheila. She grasped Lorrie’s hand and walked her inside. The bed was empty. Sheets were tossed on the floor, and the shrine of candies was trampled. A brown stain marked the middle of the mattress.
“Is it done? Is he dead?” Lorrie said.
“No one knows where he is,” Sheila said.
“What do you mean?”
A clack of shoes came from behind them, and a group of administrators took their places around the bed. Up front was a man wearing a white lab coat over a suit. His sparse hair matched the stark white of his coat.
“Hello, my name is Harold Vetch, Chief of Patient Advocacy Services,” he said.
“Where is he?” Lorrie said.
“There has been an incident that we are investigating to the full extent of our resources.” 
“Did someone take him?”
“We don’t know. We are reviewing the surveillance tapes as we speak.”
Lorrie imagined a grotesque little man handling Tommy’s body like butcher meat. He’s hauled into a laundry bin and carted into a van parked surreptitiously at the loading dock, then driven to some basement lab to have the choice cuts sliced from his body. Skin, kidneys, liver, pancreas, tendons. Enough of Tommy was missing already. She wanted his brain in his head, his heart in his chest, his feet at the ends of his legs. She wanted him whole.
Lorrie asked Sheila to help her search the building. Several interns nearby offered their help. They dispersed in all directions, and Lorrie followed Sheila toward the elevators.
“Patients change rooms all the time, and sometimes they’re mistakenly moved,” Sheila said.
There was a place Lorrie wanted to look first, and she asked Sheila to take her there. They boarded the service elevator to the morgue and descended through the building. Lorrie didn’t want to go there, but she was afraid of not knowing. If all of him was lost, she would never get over it. She needed something to bury. The corrugated steel flooring vibrated through her shoes. Hunched and hyperventilating, the back of her shirt dripped with sweat. Sheila stood beside her with the rigid posture of a dancer. She was calm, almost serene.
The elevator gently stopped. The doors slid apart. She followed Sheila into the hallway and through the two-way doors of the receiving room. She expected a troll to be working down there, but at the front desk was an attractive young woman, eating a cheese sandwich. Sheila spoke to her while Lorrie looked around the room. It smelled like ammonia. Polished metal and tile glistened under the lights. The room wasn’t as frightening as she’d imagined. 
“They haven’t had any newbies since he vanished,” Sheila said.
Lorrie forced air into her lungs. The speakers in the ceiling screeched on, and a man’s voice came through, calling them back upstairs.

In the security room, a man scrutinized a wall of computer screens. On the monitors, figures ran in reverse at high speed through the halls. Harold Vetch sat beside him and stood up to offer Lorrie his chair.
“I don’t want to sit down,” Lorrie said, shifting her weight between each foot.
“Please, I would highly recommend sitting,” he said.
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“As a physician and an administrator, I sincerely recommend that you take a seat before viewing this recording.”
Lorrie reluctantly sat. But only because the rage radiating through her whole body made her legs shake.
“Press play please, Martin,” Vetch said.
The video showed an empty hallway from a high angle. After a minute or so, a nurse walked into frame, yawned, scratched her crotch, and walked out of frame.
“What am I supposed to be seeing?” Lorrie said.
“Please, watch,” he said.
Bare feet and naked legs appeared at the top of the video monitor and waddled forward, revealing a penis. The figure waddled further, showing his stomach. The quality of the picture was terrible. Lorrie’s eyes focused on the figure as he came closer into view. He bumped into the wall. Her legs went numb, and her bladder loosened. The man was missing a head.
“What does this mean?” Lorrie said.
“It means that he appears to have retained some motor function, which propelled him from his bed.”
“Where is he now?”
“We don’t know. Martin’s still going through the tapes.”
She stood up and walked out of the room as Vetch spoke.
Lorrie didn’t know where she was going. One after the other, her legs swung forward until she was moving as fast as she could. Sheila trailed behind. As she came up on a junction in the hall, an intern ran past. He slid to a halt and waved for Lorrie to follow. He smiled at her, giddy as a young boy, and she pitched herself around the curve.
Her stride outpaced his. Soon, he was ten doors behind. She shot around another corner. Sitcom voices rang from the open doorways. Sheila caught up as she turned the corner. Down the corridor was the front lobby. A crowd had formed around the entrance. Her gait slackened as they came near.
Interns kneeled at the center of a crowd, jotting notes on their steno pads with tears streaming down their faces. Two of them held each other. At the center of the spectacle was a middle-aged man caught inside the revolving door. He knocked lightly on the glass, as if he might wake a sleeping beast. He looked pleadingly at the onlookers, his eyes wide and his mouth open, sucking air. The man’s focus shifted from the spectators to the cause of the jam opposite his position.
Wedged between the edge of the door and the circular wall was Tommy. His stomach was compressed unnaturally thin by the pressure of the door that pinned him to the jamb. His legs hung out into the lobby, while his torso jutted into the inner quarter of the revolving doorway. Tommy’s body didn’t fight to free itself. It was stuck there, oblivious.
The other man’s family stood on the sidewalk outside the door with their foreheads pressed against the glass, speaking comforting words to him. His daughter ricocheted from one person to another in the room shouting, “My dad’s claustrophobic! Someone get him out!”
The man bellowed howls of panic and slumped to the floor. An intern reached out and gently placed his hand on Tommy’s ankle. His leg twitched, and his right arm jerked about, spastically slapping the panels. Gastric juice spurted from his truncated esophagus onto the glass pane and sent the trapped man into a screaming fit. A late shift nurse arrived and spoke to the trapped man, telling him to hang on until maintenance could arrive and take the door off its axle. The nurse turned to Tommy.
“Oh God . . . this man’s been decapitated,” the nurse said and turned to the interns. “Did the door do this? Did any of you call the coroner? Where is his head? Help me clear the scene. For Christ’s sake, we can’t just leave a human head lying around the lobby.”
Lorrie squirmed her way into the crowd. A hand gripped her arm from behind.
“He’s breathing,” Sheila said, holding her. “Look, he’s still breathing! Tommy’s still here.” 
Lorrie shook her off and moved closer to the door. She could smell him. It was a sweaty human smell. Pheromones and particles of his skin were deep in her sinuses. As she breathed, she could almost taste his breath on her tongue. The air felt electrically charged. The hairs on her arms stood up. Her brain pulsed with the memories Tommy had lost in the accident.
Every day they had spent together, she had absorbed pieces of him. She consumed him as much as oxygen, as much as water, as much as the potato chips he stuffed into his face that formed the fat of his belly. Soon, the ground would absorb him, too. Beetles and flies would eat his tissues and fertilize the soil at the spot where a wild potato might grow. A potato for someone else to fry and eat, and he could live all scrambled up in that person for a while. 
With all her energy, she put out her hands and pushed the door. The crowd of onlookers gasped. Someone shouted at her to stop, but she persisted. There was a crack from Tommy’s lowest rib as the door squeezed past him. He burst free, bouncing between the plexiglass panes within the chamber of the revolving doors. The momentum flung Lorrie forward, and she was caught inside the revolution. Without a plan, she continued to push. The trapped man was shoved along, making a full rotation until he finally rolled out from the opening onto the feet of his family. Tommy was ejected into the lobby, falling onto the linoleum with an audible whack of flesh. Lorrie continued to push as she saw Tommy’s body lurch and flail on the floor, slipping on his own fluids, trying to get up amid gasps and shrieks from the crowd. She knew her time with Tommy was over, so she kept pushing. She shot out of the doorway and hurdled the freed man now supine on the ground. She shoved past his weeping daughter and escaped across the parking lot into the frigid, windy night.
To ease her panic she counted to a thousand as she drove home. Second by second she logged her distance from Tommy. The counting reassured her time flowed forward, and she drifted along with it.
Lorrie stopped at a red light and examined herself in the mirror. Her image wouldn’t last forever, she knew. The world would tear her body apart into new and frightening combinations — the way it did to Tommy. And like him, she would persist in a million horrific forms. But living or dead, their atoms spun in a collective pool, and on occasion they would find themselves together again, only in different orders, unconscious of what had been shared.

ξ

Connor White received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His writing has earned support from the Key West Literary Workshop, and his work has appeared in Clarion Magazine, The Des Moines Register, Postscript Magazine, The Southern Humanities Review, and MonkeyBicycle. He is the co-creator of the Be On The Lookout Podcast, featuring original horror stories. Currently, he lives and teaches writing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Follow him on Twitter at @connorewhite.