Noah Hoffenberg

The Man with Two Heads

Once there was a man with two heads.

That is to say, he wore a head over his head. It was very much like a form-fitting mask. But in actuality it was another head that he wore over his head.

Wearing the head was like wearing anything else. The man put it on in the morning, as he would underwear or socks, and took it off at night. The second head he stored on a hat stand.

During the day, while the man was going to work, the face that people saw on the man was that of the second head. This second head was very gracious, and grew quite skilled at saying "yes please thank you" and "I'm terribly sorry." Beneath the head over his head, however, the man was invisibly squirming.

His whole day was spent beneath the mask of his other head. Because of an obvious lack of vocal cords, the head worn over the man's head never uttered a word of displeasure.

It, of course, was more like intricate garb rather than flesh and bone. It was whom every body saw, whom every body addressed politely and scrutinized for imperfections behind his back.

Dealing with people is so difficult, he thought as he joked two-facedly with co-workers at the water cooler about last night's Late Show. But underneath his second head, the man cursed himself for talking about issues for which he cared nothing, and cursed himself for not partaking of stronger breath-mints.

At night the man with a head over his head removed his head, and placed it on the hat rack. While brushing his teeth, the man stared in the mirror at his real head. He wished he could peel his face off and become someone else, but he knew that was beyond the realm of possibility.

 

The Book of the Blind

Recently, archaeologists uncovered an antiquated Hebrew manuscript. The volume was bound with brown matted goat fur, much in the same fashion as Meret Oppenheim's fur covered cup, spoon, and saucer, but reeked rather deeply of must.

Compared to the other manuscripts unearthed within the past century, this book was in singularly pristine condition: even the goat smelled gamy.

The book was also very different than other books, of its period or otherwise, specifically because whenever a reader perused its archaic parchment, the words inscribed therein always spelled out the reader's exact thoughts at the very moment of their reading.

The seemingly endless pages performed the same with every perusal, no matter the color or creed or gender of its scrutinizer. As in most Semitic writings, the book's sentences wove human consciousness from the right side of the page on to the left, and absolutely never diverged from the inner voice of its holder.
As a matter of fact, for most readers it became futile to attempt to discern whether their inner voice dictated the writings on the printed page, or if the printed page dictated the thoughts in their minds-eye.

Scientists were brought in. Someone leaked the discovery to the media. Before long, all the world's academics, poets, and writers began to brush up on their Hebrew, so that they too could see their own perfect inner voices inscribed flawlessly in seamless stretches of transcendent prose.

Imagine! Pure narrative! A true Vox Populus! Poets flocked like vultures from all over the earth, just for a brief reading of their soul's true expression.

The book was beyond all explanation. Even when one read its papyrus pages from back to front, or omitted whole segments altogether, the words and lines made perfect sense. And because the sentences on the page were the exact thoughts of its reader, the reader's mind often became very focused, as in the ecstatic meditations of Hindu yogis, or Tibetan lamas concentrating on mandalas in the caves of the Himalaya.
The mental or verbal recitation of the book inevitably resulted in several prominent essayists becoming entranced for periods exceeding three days. A few reasonably reliable non-fiction writers attest to seeing a fancy playwright from New York levitate cross-eyed above the pre-archaic manuscript; a labyrinth of white light was witnessed emanating from the dramatist's head. The fur-covered volume was nothing less than miraculous.

Many furiously contended, both within the bowels of the dig site and at several academe conventions in the semesters following, that the book was a gift bequeathed directly from God. Others speculated it came from powers less than goodly, such as Mephistopheles himself.

Nothing like this had ever existed for the average novelist, and some Arabic critics even argued that Joyce and the self-proclaimed genius Gertrude Stein could not hold a candle to the bookish enigma's near-blinding stream of all-encompassing consciousness. Accidentally, John Ashbery's entire oeuvre was taken to task in heated scholastic debates.

Nevertheless, the archaic text remained at the hands of these scientists, professors, and professionals, each of whom saw the infinite good this fur-covered book could do for fellow associates and comrades in their specialized fields of investigative study. The anthropologists speculated that they would transcribe passages from the dusty tome, and thereby offer clinical proof of natural instincts bent toward stratified redistribution. Literary philosophers wanted to copy out verse after verse, demonstrating once and for all that it is possible for Pierre Menard to rewrite a perfect rendering of Don Quixote without ever having read Don Quixote. Even new age therapists wished to scribble down the random babblings of their inner child.
But alas, none of that would come to be. Because one day, an aged blind man with graven sight, quietly made his way to the book like a postmodern intuitive dancer, feeling out everything. The blind man sidled past a bickering gaggle of researchers, and placed his leatherhard hands, callused by time, upon the mystifying volume.

As before, it became impossible at that time to discern if the sightless man opened the book or if the book opened the man.

A blinding light sprang from the fingered pages, bathing the book-feeler in white tendrils of light. All the lesser literati promptly prostrated on the antechamber's dirt floor.

In a flash, the blind man vanished.

Along with him, as the dejected and now hopeless ragtag band of writers and philosophers soon found out, went the all informative words from with the pages of the supernatural fur-covered book.

Obviously, human beings just don't disappear: these types of things are impossible. The old man must have performed some trickery, smoke and mirrors and such, then stealthily made his way out through the labyrinth of black catacombs where all eyes are equally worthless.

But, the words were truly gone from the thick pages. The blind seer stole away with every man's voice, and left behind a book filled with blank spaces of emptiness. He renounced the remnants of his anxious literary litter, like our God unto His children at Babel, leaving nothing but helpless persons with words blocking all thought breathlessly in their throats.

 

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