Headless, Manitoba

On torrid summer days, I used to love running around the backyard post until a disorienting spell surmounted my little brain and sent me tumbling. Then I would stare up at the sky and watch it spin uncontrollably. Clouds would shambolically drift about, bereft of reason and an epidermal permanency. The blue, if only momentarily, would suck my dizzy soul upwards with an invisible straw as I tried to get my bearings. Those were the good old days, I tell you. Those were the days of my care-free youth.

Shortly after my eighth birthday, my parents died in a vicious car crash on their way to the cabin. Both died from severe head trauma. Somehow they managed to pin a moose to a tree in the process. When their bodies were extricated from the wreck and the car was pulled away from the tree, moose guts spilled out like slippery beans from the open wound of a can. A local boy who saw the moose before the car was pulled away said the moose was desperately trying to free itself from the quagmire it was in. He said he saw a “fear glaze” in its animalistic eyes.

My grandparents took me in. They gave me free range over their two-storey house. When asked if I wanted to sleep in the basement or a furnished attic, I chose the latter. The chests and antiquated exotica of the attic indelibly changed the cellular make-up of my ripening imagination. I spent hours building imaginary civilizations and scenarios in that attic. The dusty spaces of my bedroom seemed infinite.

Next to my bed was a picture of my parents from their honeymoon in Las Vegas. I surrounded it with Christmas lights and cheap garland. I tried to talk to their photographic specters, some kind of lingering essence they had left behind, but after two weeks I realized it was a fruitless effort. On occasion, I would kiss my fingers and then touch their glass-encased foreheads.

My grandfather was a crotchety man who had a penchant for collecting newspaper articles, model planes, imported beer cans, and other junk that washed up like ocean effluvia on the shores of his personal history. The garage was littered with tons of junk. The neighbors complained to him about the billowing junk in his yard. He didn’t give a shit what they had to say. He kept on collecting.

My grandmother was a lover of the church and soap operas. She baked apple pies for her Mennonite congregation every Saturday night. She was loved by the community. There was something wholesome and saint-like behind her facade of wizened flesh and dentures. Sometimes she would come into the attic and read biblical passages to me. I learned about the archangels and the cherubim from her. I learned about the serpent, the tree of knowledge, Adam, and Eve. Sometimes I would ask her, “Where is the tree of knowledge now?” She would always say, as she was yawning, “In your dreams. Dream child.”

My atheistic grandfather despised the otherworldly outlook of Christianity and all religions. That’s why he didn’t go to the citadel and worship. While others were listening to the sermons in the stuffy church, my grandfather would relax in his rocker and drink lemonade with a radio blasting away in the background. One Sunday, while I was casually playing with some toys in the living room, he told me, “Your grandmother likes the church and God, but I don’t. I see nothing positive in it. It’s all a big fairy tale for grownups. The only thing above man, in a metaphysical sense I mean, is a chaotic whirlpool. All good things come from chaos.”

The religious outlook of my grandmother and the anti-religious outlook of my grandfather did nothing to really stifle or subvert the affection they intermittently showed one another. However, my grandmother’s religious zeal forced me to go to church twice a month. Despite my short-lived protestations, I always ended up in the passenger seat of my grandfather’s Studebaker with the AM radio playing some deplorable song about unrequited love. My grandmother, in a muffled, incomprehensible way, would sing along.

In the pew one wretchedly hot Sunday morning, while sitting betwixt my grandmother and an enthused man with a flatulence problem, I spotted the girl of my dreams. She contentedly sat two pews ahead of me. Her name was Amanda Adams. Her pigtails were perfectly nestled on the zenith of her beauteous shoulders. From where I was sitting, I caught whiffs of a perfume that was highly suggestive of some type of strawberry jam. I imagined it was hers.

After the sermon was over, I excitedly ran over to her pew and, without knowing what to say exactly, I gently tugged at one of her pigtails. “It reminds me of braided wheat,” I said, sheepishly. She giggled. Based off the giggle, I surmised she appreciated my sense of humour and candor. A part of both of us, right there and then, in that stuffy church of God-lovin’and God-Fearin’citizens, silently acknowledged the fact that we were already in love.

From that moment forward, we were pretty much inseparable. We rode our bikes together down dirt roads that led to dark impasses. We read one another ghost stories. We shared candy and milk and glances. We sailed together on the high seas of uncharted youth, and watched as the mythical islands of adulthood passed us by. Neither of us wanted to land on those islands. We always wanted the rolling waves of the sea and the sanctity of the blessed ship.

By an ice cream shop one day, the impulses of nascent love forced our lips together in a cursory embrace. She tasted of walnut ice cream. Later that afternoon, we both cut our fingers and made a blood pact. Until death do us part. The high seas shall have us forever. We kissed again. And again. And again.

One afternoon, as we fervently rode down to the river, Amanda and I crossed paths with Sterling Owens, an inveterate rebel and school bully who was about ten years older than the both of us. Sterling was smoking a marijuana cigarette in a shack sometimes inhabited by the homeless. He asked us if we wanted to try some grass. We both declined. He then proceeded to ask us if we had any change. We only had pocket lint. For some reason Sterling Owens took a liking to us right there and then, even though we had nothing to offer him. I think Sterling, despite the ten-year age gap, was on the same ship as us. He probably pined for the uncharted waters as well.

Every week we saw Sterling Owens down by that shack, inhaling the sweet smoke of the reefer, imbibing some stolen wine or beer or anything he could get his recidivistic hands on. “You two again,” he would say, somewhat drunkenly. “What are you doing?” We would always tell him we were playing. “Ah...I used to like that,” he would respond. “We are here on this earth to play, me thinks.”

Once, when my grandparents left for the better part of the day so they could attend to errands, Sterling Owens came over, fried out of his skull. With my left hand in his right and Amanda’s right in his left, we led Sterling up two stairwells to the attic. Sterling immediately took a liking to the attic and its ancient inanimate denizens. “So much cool stuff, bro,” he said. “Your grandfather has collected some gems.”

Sterling then went over to a cobweb-ridden window and wrested an old frame from the slanted grip of too many Monet replicas. The old frame contained a picture of my grandparents. They were in their mid-twenties in the picture. They were standing by a sign that said “Headless, Manitoba” on it.

“Do you kids know what happened in Headless, Manitoba some years ago?” We shook our heads horizontally on the corner of the mattress. I remember I was holding Amanda’s clammy hand. I remember seeing the silhouette of Sterling Owens in the brazen light-pool that came into the room from the outside world. He was holding the picture frame above his head and gazing at the wooden sign captured inside the photographic facsimile of an erstwhile moment.

“Headless, Manitoba was a prosperous town with an asylum in it. All the crazies from all across the country used to be rounded up and taken to Headless. These crazies were so crazy they probably thought oranges were bombs and bombs were oranges. Anyways, the asylum used to receive potent drugs from all around the world. Some of the drugs were anti-psychotic, but, supposedly, others were ultra-psychotic. The US military sent these ultra-psychotics to Headless and tested them on unfortunate patients. They wanted to know if they would’ve been effective in warfare. One drug was supposedly stronger than the rest. It was so strong, they had to lock it in the basement and guard it with guns.”

Amanda and I attentively listened to Sterling’s story about the asylum at Headless. When he both felt the story was getting suspenseful, our lips tightened and our young hearts started to race. We were so impressionable back then. Mostly every story uttered captured our imaginations in the bear-trap of myth. However, Sterling Owens’ story turned out not to be a myth. It was the truth.

“Of course, the asylum closed down when a better facility was constructed somewhere in Quebec, and most of the residents moved away due to poor economic times in the community. I hear, however, that the ultra-psychotic still dwells in the basement of that abandoned asylum. It must be waiting for the exploratory and bedlam minds of a new generation.”

After the day was done, Amanda and I didn’t hear from or see Sterling Owens for weeks. We figured he was kicked out of his house and living on the streets. As we read our ghost stories and consumed our hot chocolate, we tacitly worried for the young man who commandeered the wooden wheel of our imaginal ship.

Sterling Owens arrived in my backyard on a night when the moon seemed pregnant with light. I was sleeping—dreaming of video games taking on a larger-than-life omnipotence. I didn’t hear the first rock hit the window, or the second, but I heard the third. Groggily, I approached the window. He was waving at me and beckoning for me to come outside. At first, I was reluctant. I was worried I was going to wake my grandparents from their sleep. But then my boyish curiosity swept over my cognitions and I crept down the stairs. In the kitchen window, I saw an owl staring at me from a curled branch.

As I approached Sterling in my pyjamas, I could visibly see how giddy he was. He looked like he had discovered, for the first time, the meaning of life, and the ultimate destiny of the cosmos.

“After seeing the picture frame in your attic, I said to myself, ‘Sterling...ride this wave.’ The picture frame was like a message from God or some secret satellite in the corner of my brain. Boy, I went to Headless, Manitoba, and I found the abandoned asylum. I went deep into the dungeons of that dirty place. After rummaging through layers and layers of countless junk, I eventually found a secret passageway to a room filled with dusty vials. I took the vial that said ‘schizotoxin maximus’. Boy, I think I found the holy grail of drugs!!”

I wouldn’t have believed Sterling Owens’ story if was clean. But he wasn’t. He had caked-on mud on his pants and shoes. He reeked of sewer water and reefer. Dirt was smudged on his face. Christ, I think he had even managed to cross paths with a skunk.
“Here take a look.”

From the confines of his acid-washed blue jeans, he pulled out a vial with the words “schizotoxin maximus” on it. The label was yellowish and brownish and antiquated. It looked like the real deal. It looked like a psychopharmacological weapon used against the enemies of imperialism.

“Do more research on this stuff, Sterling,” I said with a worrisome inflection. “You don’t know what it will do to you. It could really mess you up.”

But Sterling Owens was set in his ways. He loved getting messed up. If schizotoxin maximus promised the trip of a lifetime, Sterling Owens was going to try it at least once.

“It will be fine, buddy.” And with those succinct words, Sterling Owens hopped the fence and giddily sauntered off to a park bench where he presumably took a dab of the mysterious drug. Under the pregnant moon, I prayed for the welfare of his being. I could tell the owl was staring at me from some vantage point in a vast tangle of branches.

Two days later, after remaining in his system for approximately 48 hours, schizotoxin maximus took hold of Sterling’s sanity and forced it to prostrate itself before the gods of madness. It started off in a mild fashion: perceptual distortions, coruscating blues and indigos coming out of the woodwork, weird thoughts. Then a whole new dimension was added to the trip. Geometric hallucinations began to speak in the language of psychobabble. Sea monsters came spilling out of his eyeballs. Trees turned into frightening pterodactyls. Up became down. Down became up. The laws of physics gave way to the laws of bedlam and malarkey.

Approximately four days into his momentous trip, my grandparents and I spotted Sterling Owens when we went to the grocery store for milk. He was running around naked in the parking lot, scaring the unsuspecting citizens of a pious community with sphinx-like rhetoric about the coming of the age of man-eating blobs. The manager of the grocery store tried to cover Sterling with a blanket, but to no avail. In his delirious state, Sterling didn’t care for clothing or the staid customs of a community that supposed up was strictly up and down was strictly down. He was liberated, or at least his oblique mind thought so.

When our eyes met in that parking lot, he did a jumping jack and yelled, “Behold! King of the high seas! Legend beyond time! We shall meet again, but not in this lifetime or galaxy.” At that moment, Sterling ran into the bushes. He chased an innocent rabbit, killed an innocent rabbit, eviscerated the guts of an innocent rabbit, and then hung the guts on numerous trees.

That night, Sterling ran into hallucinatory characters, mythical archetypes from the realm of phantasmagoria. He carried on lengthy conversations with them before he decided to blow-off their heads with his newly acquired psychokinetic powers. While laughing hysterically, he watched them stagger around looking for their heads. When they disappeared suddenly, he started to pout and asked nobody in particular, “Where’s my mommy?”

Fourteen days into the trip, Sterling Owens felt like he was no longer human. He felt like he was a “star person”. He had carved alchemical and peculiar symbols into his soft flesh. His reason: the symbols were actually the constellations of his vast, galactic body. He used them to communicate with other star people.

Amanda and I found Sterling, quite possible sixteen days into the life-shattering trip, on the winding road that led to the river. It looked like he was trying to levitate. We, in our coy and compassionate ways, tried to communicate with him in English. “Let us get you help. Let us clothe and feed you.” Our efforts were all for naught. His eyes were too glassy. His mind was too amorphous and distant. A sublime madness had hijacked the airplane of his soul, permanently. Invariably, he was destined for the asylum.

We rode back to my grandparents’ house while under the spell of a thick silence. Along the way, I spotted a yard with a strange post in it. “Ride over there,” I told Amanda. When I got to the post, I spontaneously dropped my bike and started to run around the metallic protuberance. Amanda joined in. When we both got too dizzy, we both collapsed into each others rubbery, tingling arms. We looked at the wobbly sky and the drunken clouds. I picked a dandelion out of the earth and put it in Amanda’s hair. We kissed. And again. And again.