How To Get a Head in Life

Short Story by Dane Curley, with Illustration by Michæl Miglietta

Haven’t seen any velociraptor heads in a while, Guy thought.

Velociraptor heads were particularly grotesque on human shoulders. The proportions were all wrong.

Last person Guy met with a velociraptor head was Todd, an accountant at his last job. Total dork. Why’d he get to have a dinosaur’s head? Didn’t make sense to Guy. Only a complete badass should have such a threatening beast’s head.

Some of the coolest people Guy knew had mutilated monster faces. It’s terribly challenging to have normal relationships with such repulsive mugs. He could easily endure the elongated snout of a lizard from the Cretaceous, on the other hand, but who in his right mind would want to hang out with Todd in the first place?

Then again, Guy wasn’t in his right mind. People didn’t have monstrous heads. They had people’s heads! Human.

This knowledge was no help to Guy. All he could do was wonder why some people looked the way they did. He thought there must be some kind of logic behind it.

Todd was meek. Frail-looking. Dweeby. So was it irony? An ironically impressive head?

This theory debunked itself when Guy laid eyes on his new CEO’s powerful beak. That thing could snap a tree branch. The man looked like Horus, and was certainly a hawk in life and deed. No, Todd’s head seemed quite inappropriate to Guy.

He could neither explain why the many potential loves of his life all donned the most appalling masks. Especially Marybeth. My God! An impressive array of stupefying pustules formed a defensive battery around her head that fired carbuncle cartridges at Guy whenever he leaned for a kiss.

He wanted so much to form meaningful romantic relationships, based on personality and common interests, but could not endure being splattered with blister discharge, however phantasmagoric the juice. Knowing those pustules weren’t really there was no consolation.

Guy’s hallucinations affected every sense. They were true hallucinations: his brain interpreted them as real. And so his accurate knowledge of reality did not match his bizarre experience of it. Worse, this altered view of the world was not fleeting.

These were no mere warpings of reality. Not the sort of wavy, dreamy, “whoa, cool” sort of sights that Grateful Dead fans got from reasonable doses of psychedelic drugs. These were human beings with unhuman heads! In the sharp resolution of Guy’s normal 20–20 vision, atop every set of shoulders he encountered in the world.

The mirror was a source of comfort, however. Guy himself looked just like his mother said he did: handsome. Human. As for describing how she looked to him… It would be impolite to detail beyond, “not gratifying.”

Guy studied psychology in his leisure, when he wasn’t grinding for The Man. He read Jung and Freud, and the more contemporary voices whom he decided were their inferiors. He preferred the less polite, more matter-of-fact way the older gents communicated their ideas, even if those ideas had not yet been proven ‘matters of fact’. Anything was better than politically correct doublespeak to Guy, who longed to shout out descriptions of what he saw, but was forced to refrain for want of fitting in.

He tried applying his psychological findings to explain why some people appeared as they did, and hoped there was an underlying rhyme and reason to it all, that it wasn’t random. He settled on using Jung’s concept of the unconscious mind, as a lens through which to view his odd world.

“Why did Todd have a velociraptor head?” Guy wondered, after reading a chapter in The Portable Jung. “Hm. I guess I should be asking, Why does my mind make him have one?”

A CEO looking like Horus made easy sense, but it took Guy much self-reflection to realize why all women who most appealed to him appeared grotesque: he had a crippling unconscious fear of commitment. This was a “eureka!” moment.

He later applied this self-critical thought to explain why his very intelligent best friend John was, in fact, a cyclopean ogre. Basically, John had the face of an ugly one-eyed idiot. Guy finally admitted this was due to an immature competitive notion that no person could possibly be smarter or more handsome than himself. So the smart, handsome friends had to be nerfed.

Guy was, by the way, delighted that his mother had a monstrous, but not exceedingly ugly guise. He felt this ruled out the possibility of an underlying Oedipus complex. A gallon of sweat departed his brow when he wiped it on the day of that conclusion.

Despite the fact all Guy’s hallucinations remained, he was making genuine emotional progress. While not immediate, he believed a return to normalcy was possible.

Guy’s affliction began on his twenty-second birthday when his then-girlfriend pressured him to try LSD. It was quite the bash! And then it wasn’t.

He’d never really experimented with drugs, so hadn’t had many forays outside his normal frame of consciousness. Sure, he’d tried marijuana, but that weed was sold before the “marijuana space-race.” It gave him a light high: fuzzy and giggly.

These days, due to competition on the legal cannabis market, the leaves are all genetically modified to pack the maximum psychic bang for your buck. But even that mind melting stuff is child’s play compared to the lysergic acid (diethylamide).

Guy had quite a disorienting trip. As he and his lady-friend walked along an urban, cliff-side street, he noticed that all the passersby — dogwalkers, joggers, commuters — they looked exactly like members of his family.

“Oh, I see what’s happening,” Guy remarked, rolling his eyes. “I’m being paranoid about getting caught using this stuff in public, because I don’t want my life to be ruined for having a little harmless fun. So everyone looks like someone I especially don’t want to find out I’m tripping. Yeah, well, nice try, acid!”

The speech dissolved the illusion, and so people ceased looking like Guy’s aunts and uncles. Instead, they began to look especially goofy. Every single person he encountered besides his girlfriend was sporting a terribly stupid facial expression. Their faces seemed permanently distorted, frozen into positions a class clown might use to get a rise out of childish classmates.

Seven hours later, this unfortunate effect did not wear off as the other psychedelic experiences did. It was after Guy realized his own narcissism (during his psychological studies) that these idiotic caricatures faded out and were replaced by a more diverse assortment of horrifying monsters and beasts. These horrors and predatory animal masks have been a feature of Guy’s normal waking life for eight years, progress notwithstanding.

Clearing his mind on a wooded hike upstate, Guy for the first time saw someone with an alien’s head. It looked just like the emoji: huge black oval eyes, sharp chin, big forehead, no hair. It was an odd encounter.

Unlike his typical hallucinations, this big alien head wasn’t sitting atop a normal, clothed human body. Instead of the expected Patagonia jacket and cargo pants, this dude was nude! And his flesh was gray.

At first, the man’s behavior was normal, seeming like anyone else returning from farther up the trail. There was no indication this was truly an unclothed lifeform from another dimension. So, Guy prepared to make the standard polite nod and greeting.

When he was about twenty feet away from Guy, however, the bug-eyed bloke abruptly stopped and kept perfectly still. His back was arched like a cat burglar caught in the act. Guy, of course, kept right on a’walking.

Act natural, he thought, still preparing to make his casual greeting. But when he got within ten feet, the man dropped his jaw real low and let out an unusual, high-pitched “Aaaak” sound.

It was at about this time Guy realized this was no ordinary hiker with an alien head. It was a real-life frickin’ alien! Either that or my mental condition had greatly deteriorated, he thought. Oh… right. Crap. It’s very likely that, isn’t it. Shoot.

Why would his mind generate such a complete fabrication, now? It hadn’t happened before. Maybe there was a seriously weird fellow roaming naked in the woods, alone, costumed and acting like an alien.

“Okay, I’m cracking up,” he admitted. “Look, alien, I know you’re a projection of my unconscious mind, but I can’t even figure out why Todd has a velociraptor head. I’m damned sure not gonna figure out why I’m generating an alien tulpa in the wilderness.”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaak.” It remained perfectly still, other than opening and closing its mouth to ‘aak’.

“I’m not going to sit here and pretend that noise isn’t creepy as hell. I prefer human noises to come from humanoids, quite frankly. Even ones with monster heads.

“But on the other hand, I’m not going to run away from you either. Ultimately, if I run away from you, I’m running away from me.”

It again lowered its jaw. “Aaaaaaaaaa… well, well… well done, Guy.” The alien stood up to a comfortable upright position and took a more friendly and peaceful stance.

“Holy cow, dude.”

“Yes! I am the Brahma Bull himself.” The skittish extraterrestrial transformed into a four-faced anthropomorphic cow — each looking one direction of the compass rose. It oozed confidence and authority, and hummed an endless, uninterrupted “Ohmmmm” that persisted even when it spoke.

“I am the endless ocean in which you float, Guy. And I am also you, the floater. It is not enough to merely realize this, one must act in concordance, as you have.”

“And yet, Mr. Bull, by this very conversation, I cannot claim to have cured my madness, now can I?” Guy felt dejected.

“Perhaps not, Guy. But seeing as you are about to learn why Todd has a velociraptor’s head, you may achieve inner peace despite it.”

“Hallelujah.”

“Have you ever heard yourself say that word genuinely and not sarcastically, before now?

“…Nevermind. We must discuss Todd’s head.”

“Yes. It was a velociraptor’s head.”

“Indeed it was, Guy. And why would a ‘total dork’ have a velociraptor’s head?”

The hum of “Ohmmmm” continued.

“Guy, your human mind has evolved for countless generations, for hundreds of millennia, to address particular traits as threatening, and the absence of those traits as nonthreatening. But your environment, on an evolutionary scale, has abruptly changed.”

Guy’s lips drew an emotionless line as he listened.

“Threats have taken new forms. And deeper within, your psyche works to hash out those threats — to comprehend them and prepare you to survive against them. Simply put, your hallucinations made your unconscious fears conscious.”

Hearing the eight-eyed cow-god explain things made Guy feel somewhat less insane.

“Your culture worships individuality, sometimes to the chagrin of community, but you are very much a member of a species and you are subject to its flaws and limitations.”

“I do have a lot less free will than I like to admit.”

“Indeed. And your fellow man has less than you like to admit. This makes forgiveness more challenging.”

“Hm.” Guy considered the idea.

“The human experience — survival — is drastically different today than it was for the bulk of history. Todd, for all his boyish frailty, is very much a threat to you. As someone who understands money, a new construct, what was a meaningless concept for eons, Todd makes your predator-radar beep louder than any three-hundred pound muscle-man ever can.

“And yet, no man is really a threat to any other who recognizes the value of All.”

“God, I’m such a hippie.”

“Life wants desperately to survive, and so evolution has devised for your species a powerful tool for that end: the illusion of individuality.

“Individuality allows you to appreciate yourself and certain outliers more than those others considered ‘average’. This ability to determine merit is important, but must be tempered by a worldview that values community.”

“Else?”

“Self-destruction.”

The bull-face quaternion rotated as Brahma’s body stood still. Each face displayed a unique emotion as it revolved past Guy’s view. Its mouths nevertheless moved in unison as he spoke.

“As the Yin-Yang symbolizes harmony between chaos and order, it so demonstrates the relationship of all dualities unto themselves. The union between individuality and community, however, requires rebalancing. Humanity has amplified the Yin and diminished the Yang. Or vice versa. Don’t get caught up on the labels, Guy.”

Guy sat down, Indian-style, let out a big sigh, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them at his next exhale. “Todd could hack my bank account, change my password, and destroy my life. Or someone like him. So deep down, I fear him. I hate him.”

“That is why you are sick.”

“I don’t want to hate Todd. Or find endearing women repulsive. Or…

“Life is hard, Brahma Bull. It’s super challenging, and many of these individuals have a penchant for friendly-fire.”

“Yes. They do.”

“And my lizard brain makes me scared. It takes tons of deep thought and reflection by my newer, more human brain to calm the aggressive lizard one down.”

“Yes. It does.”

“And I am in competition with Todd as an individual, but if either one of us ‘wins’, humanity does, too.”

“Yes.”

“And some people are so concerned by the individual competition, they sabotage both their enemies, themselves, and the species.”

“Yes. The flaw in the design.”

“And with such a flawed design, maybe my species’ survival isn’t the best thing for the universe.”

“Life itself is a strange and futile effort at immortality, Guy. Life, in all its forms, is a challenge to God, that it, too, can be timeless and omnipotent. To this, my east face cries, my south face laughs, my west face understands, and my north face screams.

“There is peace, Guy, in keeping your head. And there is peace in letting other people keep their heads. Their own heads, that is.

“When you fashion horrific faces or beasts’ heads onto your fellow humans, you deem them ‘other’. But all, as you, Guy, are floating in the waters of my ancient ocean. And all, as you, Guy, are the ancient ocean itself.

“Ohmmmmmmm.”

Guy dissolved into liquid and splashed into the Brahma’s consciousness. He ineffably split into millions of atoms, then into their smaller parts, and drifted every which way across the infinitudes.

Guy drove home after his vision passed. He made a pit stop for gas and food on the way. The store clerk was brown-haired and handsome. He looked human. He looked like Guy.

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Dane Curley’s previous short story “Holy Crisis” can be found exclusively in print, in Infinite Worlds Science Fiction Magazine, Issue #4. He is on all major social networks, and readers can support his writing by donating through Patreon.