The Head by Marguerite Alcazaren de Leon

The Head
by Marguerite Alcazaren de Leon

I found a floating head in my closet today.

He was a good-looking head—mestizo, a very proper kind of attractive,
as if found and raised by a pack of old matinee idols. Short hair, soft eyes,
sharp nose, straight teeth. Clean-shaven, be-dimpled, piercing-free. Pleasant,
proportioned. He looked so correct, like a template.
All my friends had already bragged about finding heads in their closets,
and I was almost convinced that I would never get to experience this. Each
and every morning, ever since the outbreak began three months ago, I would
stare at my closed closet doors, concentrating on every inch of their dark,
swirled wood, imagining the special something that could be floating in wait
behind them. And each and every morning, when I would finally pull those
doors open, I would be let down. Having nothing but laundry revealed to me
again and again, I was beginning to think that it was all an elaborate lie.
That, or the heads didn’t think I was worth the trouble.
“Hey, gorgeous,” the head said with a deep, calm drawl.
“Hi.”
“Why are you smiling?” he asked, smiling. There was no trace of
surprise in his voice. “You like what you see?”
“Yes.”
“Honest.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “I like that.”
“What are you doing in my closet?”
“Impatient!” He wiggled his eyebrows again. “I like that.”
Slick. I liked that. I liked a challenge.
According to legend, the heads only came every ten years, staying on
Earth for a few months at a time. They chose a new portal each decade—
ovens in the Forties, beds in the Seventies, toilets in the Nineties and closets
in the new millennium. The first head of this decade was supposedly found in
Poland, and news of the current portal quickly spread through text and email,
inciting the excitement typical among women during head season. All the
heads were said to be male, and all of them visited our planet from another
dimension just to meet whole bodies of the opposite sex. What exactly
transpired between a head and a woman, however, was only known to the
both of them. Nobody had ever dared to give away the details, making it the
world’s—maybe even the universe’s—best-kept secret.
And I, Cassandra Ebreo, celebrity investigative journalist, was going to
spill it.
The head floated out of my closet and surveyed my room, hovering
over to the wall of photos from my paparazzi days. Ignoring the local stars’
wincing, washed-out faces, he lingered instead on their torsos, most of which
were bent forward in an attempt to flee the camera’s flash. Next to the
photos were some of my best articles from Star Chika! Magazine—“Fifi
Lagdameo’s Secret Sex Slave Past,” “Paolo Tan: Yes, I’m Bi-Sexual,” “Freddy
Castro and the Bora Orgy”—which the head pored over as well.

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The Head by Marguerite Alcazaren de Leon

“You wrote these?” he asked.

“Yes.”
“You don’t have your picture in your column.”
“My work should speak for itself,” I lied.
“That’s too bad.” The head turned and winked at me. “I bet you look
great in pictures.”
I didn’t. I wasn’t completely ugly—all my body parts were where they
were supposed to be, at least—but nobody would ever be drawn to me. I was
very overweight, a large, soft clot of a human being. My face was all wrong—
eyes too close to each other, nose too round, lips too thin. My skin was a
bland shade of brown and had too many wrinkles for a twenty-eight-year-old.
I was the classic corpulent confidant among my friends, the token tacky tag-
along in a group of otherwise pretty young things.
“What did you come here for?” I asked.
“You’re so eager,” the head said with great relish. “It’s intoxicating.”
“I’m saving us time.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re forcing yourself to flirt with me. You came here for something
else, obviously.”
“I’m not forcing myself.”
I looked at him pointedly. He stared back, and we held each other’s
gaze in silence. I raised an eyebrow. He raised an eyebrow. I blinked once. He
fluttered his eyelashes. I rolled my eyes. He ran his tongue slowly across his
lower lip. I snorted, unimpressed. He moaned deeply. We continued this for a
few more minutes, until we had run out of tics to sling at each other, and
then lapsed back into silence.
“You try too hard,” I finally said. To my surprise and delight, the head
dropped his gaze to the carpet.
“I know,” he muttered.
Triumph coursed through me. It seemed a bit too easy, but then again,
I had a gift. I really did.
“But that’s how the Big Head trained us,” he added.
“The Big Head?” I glanced at my bed. My notepad was on the
comforter, waiting.
“The Big Head is our teacher and leader,” the head began, looking up.
“He was the one who created, developed and perfected the art of the Esses,
the art that all heads depend on.”
“And what are the Esses?”
The head sheepishly shifted his gaze to the wall of photos. “I’m not
supposed to tell.”
I stifled a chuckle. From naughty noggin to shamed skull. Was this part
of the secret? Was I not supposed to tell the world that this Casanova of a
cranium wasn’t what he was cracked up to be?
“You brought it up,” I said.
A sorry schoolboy, the head faced me and took a deep, nervous
breath. I, the headmaster, calmly awaited an apology for his playground

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high-jinks, a statement that would bare his and his fellow heads’ puerile
philosophies.
“Subtle Sleaze, Suggestive Subterfuge, Sly Smarm and Sexual
Subtext,” he mumbled.
“Oh.” I hoped I could remember the terms for my notes. “But they all
sound alike.”
“There are degrees,” he explained resignedly. “Subtle Sleaze is not as
potent as Sexual Subtext, for instance. And the mechanics of Sly Smarm are
very different from Suggestive Subterfuge, though there are times when you
can merge them to get Subtle Sleaze. It’s an art, a discipline. It takes years
of training.”
“But why? What for?”
I frowned. The base of the head was one smooth, rounded pad of flesh.
I was tempted to check his top and back for any sizeable protrusions, but
from where I was standing, there was nothing extra poking out. Still, the
possibility of something retractable kept me panicked. The head noticed my
wary, wandering eyes and spun around slowly, sideways at first and then
vertically, as if being roasted on a spit.
“Nothing there,” he said after the third and final spin, his voice
breaking. “Nothing, I promise. But that is part of the problem.”
“I’m sure it is.” I felt very relieved.
Suddenly, the head rushed over to my bed and flung himself face down
on a pillow. He began to shudder, and I could hear a muffled blubbering from
across the room.
I walked over to him calmly. Since he was under great pressure, it was
only natural for him to break down so quickly. That was how it was with
celebrities. Once they quit their roles, they become too comfortable with the
idea of being real people again and tend to bare too much of themselves. I
suppose he was no different, and this was a good thing. It was going to be
much easier to get my information now that the head had given way to his
true, sniveling self. Climbing onto my bed, I reached for my notepad and
waited for the head to tire from his dirge. It took fifteen long minutes.
“I’m sorry if I upset you,” I said cautiously, staring at the silent,
trembling mound of hair. “Just let it all out. I’m here to listen.”
The head slowly rolled himself face up, resting against the salty stencil
of his mug. Despite his bloodshot eyes and the mucus threaded across his
upper lip, he was still very attractive. I gave him the warmest smile I could
manage.
“It’s awful,” the head began, staring at the ceiling. “It isn’t an ache. An
ache exists. It’s there. It’s pissing you off. But this—” He stared at the great
expanse of bed sheet beneath him, his eyes crawling through every inch of
clean, blank linen. “—I don’t know what this is. I’m not supposed to, because
there’s nothing there. But I know there’s nothing there.”
“Like you’re missing out on something?”
“No. I can’t miss out on something I’ll never have. I can’t ache or itch. I
don’t have anything to ache or itch with. I never will. I’m worried over

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something that isn’t anything. I’ll always be this way.” Tears coursed down
his cheeks again, and the thread of mucus grew thicker. “I feel nothing,
literally. It’s nothing. It’s like that empty moment after a sneeze that never
pushed through. No, wait, that’s not right. It’s like the thought of that empty
moment after a sneeze that never pushed through. It’s like I have to feel
nothing. Can you imagine how awful that is? I hate it.”
“Do all heads feel this way?” I continued. I found his sneeze analogy
particularly eloquent. Unless guided by scripts, the celebrities I interviewed
never made their own figures of speech.
“Of course they do. That’s why we’re here.”
“Okay. So what do you want from me?”
The head propped himself up higher on the pillow, his red eyes
dropping back to me. He put on a solemn, determined look. Suddenly, I felt a
little scared, the gravity of my question only beginning to resurface. This was
it. This was the moment. At last, he was going to tell me the one thing I
should never, ever tell anyone else, the one secret that had been safely kept
throughout all of history. It had to be something staggering, something that
would blow my mind, and it only occurred to me then that I might not be able
to handle what he was about to say. It had been easy for me to bring the
head to this point. What came after, however, might be very difficult. After
all, what could someone like him, who had trained for years, had crossed
dimensions and had one pretty perplexing problem, expect from me? What
could I possibly offer?
“A kiss,” said the head.
I blinked quickly.
His request was quaint. That was the kindest word for it, at least. Once
upon a time, kisses were perfectly legitimate goals. When I was a junior
contributor for the Manila Post ten years ago, my editors told me that news
of celebrities snogging was gold. Using my gorgeous friends from the Post’s
Lifestyle and Beauty section as gate passes, I then went with them to the
trendy bars night after night with an instamatic, looking for cases of lip lock. I
often returned to the office triumphant. It was probably because I didn’t look
like much. Compared to everyone else, I wasn’t worth noticing, so I skulked
around and took pictures all I wanted without getting caught. My editors
loved my gumption and I was given my own column soon enough.
Nowadays, though, a kiss isn’t worth much. The writers at the Post now
are told to scour for sex scandals—of course, the more perverse, the better—
and kisses are just seen as standards, starting points. Amateur fare. An act
whose risk and relevance has been slowly smudged off. A kiss could be
dismissed.
But the head wanted a kiss.
“Just a kiss?” I asked as casually as I could.
“A kiss is the farthest we can go—” The head looked downwards. “—
obviously.
“Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

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“No.” The head’s face was beginning to crumple again. “We have no
women where we come from.”
“No women?”
“None.”
“At all?”
“At all.”
“But how—”
“Spontaneous generation.”
“Wow.” I nodded very slowly. That was going into my first paragraph.
“So you really went all the way here just to kiss me? That’s really the best
you can do?”
“I wish I had knees!” the head suddenly cried. “I’m begging you! A
kiss! That’s it! That’s enough! Why don’t you believe me?”
“I do!”
I really did. It was just taking me a while to accept that things were
much easier than I had expected. But now that the head mentioned it, a kiss
really was the worst he could do. All he had was a mouth, so a kiss was the
most intimate act that could gratify him. Any other deed would be more
servile on his part. The moment this fact sunk in, I felt true pity for him at
last. Even a bit of shame, actually, for having been nervous at all. The head
wanted a kiss because he couldn’t want anything else. It was one of the
saddest things I had ever heard. As sad as bold star Maricon Rivera’s
mastectomy. As sad as the deaths of Ricardo Joaquin, Paolo Antonio and
Nikko Natividad in that motel fire.
“Please?” the head implored, floating up from the pillow. “Please let me
kiss you. Please? Please? Please, please, please, please, please, please,
please?”
As sad as the fact that I had never been kissed, even.
I would let him. After all, he was a good-looking head, and he did have
a desire to kiss me. Never mind that this desire was borne out of immense
desperation. He would still be crushed if I refused him, and that was enough
for me to consider it sincere flattery. This was the closest I had ever come to
kissing anyone, let alone anyone handsome, and if I let this opportunity pass,
I doubted that I would ever get the same chance again.
I had written about all the flirting and kissing and screwing the
beautiful people had done, knowing that I barely had a shot at the same
debauchery. Of course I felt bad that I would have to get my face carved and
my arms, thighs and stomach vacuumed if I wanted some decent degree of
passion. Of course I felt bad that I had neither the cash nor courage to do so.
Of course I wrote for revenge.
He had no body and neither did I. We were even.
“Please? Please, please, please, please, please, please, please?”
“Okay.”
Both of us grinned.
“With tongue?” the head asked.
“Sure,” I replied immediately.

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The head slowly hovered over to me until his face was millimeters from
mine. He was so close, his eyes looked like they had fused together into a
single, strange organ. He looked like an alien. Then I remembered that he
was, and the kinkiness of it all gave me an extra thrill.
“This really means a lot to me,” he said. His deep, calm drawl had
returned. I stopped myself from echoing him and closed my eyes.
We kissed.
It was sloppier than I had imagined. A pair of tongues flicking and
flipping like fish in a soft, moist cave. A force-feeding of muscle, spit, hot
breath. A fluctuating wetness. It was the oddest, most haphazard, most
graceless activity ever concentrated in such a small section of the human
body. It was fantastic.
As we continued our lovely little mess, I opened my eyes for a second,
eager to know what a man kissing a woman looked like from the one
perspective I never thought I’d have. His right eyelid was shut tight, and the
bits of his cheek and mouth I could see were in slow, constant motion. Right
before I closed my eyes again, I could sense the slightest sparks of light
coming from different directions, like the ones mentioned in all the romance
novels I had flipped through in bookstores with both disdain and desire.
So this is a kiss, I thought, pressing my mouth harder against his,
swinging my tongue around his muggy hollow with increasing vigor. I am the
luckiest woman in the universe.

+++

I found a floating newspaper in my closet today.

It was in the exact same spot where I had found the head yesterday,
which was also where he had retreated to and disappeared from right after
our incredible kiss. It seemed that a kiss really was all he wanted. When we
had finally pulled away from each other—which I think the both of us had
found difficult to do—he just smiled, floated back into my closet and asked
me to close the doors. I did, and when I pulled the doors back open a second
later, there was nothing there but my stack of shirts. Like I had never had the
privilege.
The whole experience, however, no matter how wonderful it was, was
still something I had to announce to the world. No amount of pleasure I got
from the head’s visit was going to dissuade me from sharing one of the
greatest, most significant scoops a human being could ever stumble upon.
The Big Head, the art of the Esses, the staggeringly simple request. It was
pure gold.
I was going to be famous. I could just imagine it: after the article gets
published, I would take my friends out to celebrate at some hotspot,
somewhere with a dress code and a line of glitterati at the door, and I would
be the one responsible for getting us in. Me. Not my friends’ size-25 jeans.
Not my friends’ expert use of boob tape. Not my friends. Me. The one with
the landmark exposé under her garterized belt.

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I now understood, though, why women thought it better to keep

everything a mystery. True, the kiss the head and I had was special, but in
this dimension, the fact remained that a kiss wasn’t anything ridiculously
rare. Why tell anyone that all that head brouhaha was for a kiss when you
could make it appear like you had done something extra-extraordinary?
Something you could only have done with a floating head from another
dimension? My job had taught me that no one was ever as interesting as
they seemed. Many believe that they need some sort of pretense to enhance
themselves, and the heads gave women the chance to have just that.
However, unlike them, I wanted to be revered exactly for who I was and what
I’d done.
My only regret about the head encounter was the lack of
documentation. I should have rigged a video camera in my bedroom, in
retrospect. Then again, I was part of an industry where hearsay and cold,
hard facts were treated equally. Besides, I was going to tell the truth, and
one that many women could confirm. Some of them were bound to break
their own silence knowing that I had readily broken mine. It just would have
been nice to have a souvenir.
The gift from the head, however, was far from a keepsake.
I had just stepped out of the shower, clean, fresh, ready to write my
masterpiece, a tremendous sense of purpose pulsing through every inch of
my body. The folded newspaper hovering in my closet was a complete
surprise. It stopped floating the moment I touched it, falling limp like any
other broadsheet. I unfolded it carefully and skimmed through the front
page.
The Daily Head Herald. Headline: “Bad Head-start for Senate Head
Hedda.” Beneath this was a picture of a head with long, curly hair, pearl
earrings, thick glasses and a lipsticked mouth hanging open as if to
announce some nasty decree. It was a picture of a female head. My
eyebrows shot up and I started rifling through the rest of the paper, checking
the other pictures. There were just as many female heads in them as male. I
continued flipping. A news piece on several missing head boys and head
girls. A positive editorial on the rise of male-to-male head love teams in the
media. A want ad for domestic head helpers, 21-25, male or female. When I
reached the entertainment section, my grip on the paper tightened.
The main piece was entitled “Charity Chat with Hedgar Marquez,” and
next to it was a large, dramatically-lit, black-and-white studio picture of the
head I had found in my closet. I started reading, going through each printed
line as calmly as I could.

Hedgar Marquez, star of the action-suspense hit Headhunt and the award-
winning mental patient drama Headcase, is one of the most generous men in
entertainment. This super-talented, super-sympathetic actor is the founder
and spokesperson for the Give a Hoot, Give a Hat Foundation and donates
half of his film earnings to various head and non-head rights organizations.
His latest selfless endeavor was volunteering for the 2006 Bodied Dimension

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Outreach (BDO), and the Herald was lucky enough to get an exclusive
interview with him upon his return.

Daily Head Herald: First off, we would like to commend you for all the
charity work you’ve done.
Hedgar Marquez: Thank you.
DHH: You are so in-demand right now. Don’t you feel stressed volunteering
while your acting career is at its peak?
HM: No. I love to help others. I’m working on two films right now—Dawn of
the Head, out October 2006, and Headin’ 4 Luv, out February 2007—but that
doesn’t stop me. You make time for the things you are passionate about.
DHH: Why did you choose the BDO?
HM: Our head community has been helping bodied women feel better about
themselves for decades. My great-grandfather, in fact, was part of the
original 1928 outreach, and I’ve always wanted to be part of the tradition.
Also, I’ve always wanted to use my acting skills for the greater good.
DHH: What can you say about the plight of bodied women today?
HM: They need us heads. All those unwanted pregnancies, all that paranoia
over body image, all that hype over the orgasm. It’s devastating. They’re
trapping themselves in their bodies, and it’s important that we make them
happy in our own little way. They need all the love and support they can get.
DHH: The Art of the Esses script, written specifically for the BDO, calls for a
kiss. What did your girlfriend, comedienne Hedie Pasqual, think about that?
Weren’t you afraid she’d get jealous?
HM: Oh no. Hedie was okay with it. We’re both professionals. She even
helped me rehearse the script a few times before I left. She’s very
supportive that way.
DHH: We heard the both of you have big news.
HM: Yes! We’ve decided to sprout a baby this September! It’s very exciting.
DHH: Congratulations! Who won the coin toss?
HM: Hedie did.
DHH: That’s alright. You can sprout the next one.
HM: Of course. You know, it really saddens me that the bodied can’t have
what we have. The love couples like Hedie and I have for each other can’t be
tainted by the curse of sexual intercourse. The bodied will never be able to
relate to this. That’s why the BDO’s such a wonderful cause. It gives bodied
women a chance to believe that they can fully satisfy someone with a single
kiss. It’s a treat for them, a chance to live out a fantasy. More importantly, it
allows them to see themselves as stronger, more worthy individuals. There’s
just one problem, though.
DHH: What’s that?
HM: Until now, bodied women still keep the kissing a secret. I don’t
understand it. They talk about everything but the kiss. And since they don’t
bring that out into the open, their old anxieties bounce back. I think that’s
what’s lacking in the BDO program. The bodied women get to have their fun,
but there’s no follow-through. The BDO administrators told me that this part

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is beyond us, that it’s all up to the women now, but I think it’s time we gave
them a little extra push. That’s why I chose to visit Cassandra Ebreo. When I
looked through all the dossiers, I knew that she was the one. (turn to page E-
4)

My fingers trembled as they flipped the pages. It frightened me how

well I could grasp what I had read so far, and I was certain that the rest of
the article would be just as clear to me.
I reached page E-4. Placed above the rest of the interview was a stolen
snapshot of my kiss with Hedgar, taken right outside my bedroom window. I
looked away from the paper for a moment, mortified, realizing that the
sparks of light I had sensed before had come from a camera’s flash. When I
returned to the article, my sense of urgency was all but gone.

( from page E-1)

DHH: Who is Cassandra Ebreo?
HM: She’s a gossip columnist. That’s the first reason why I chose her,
because I knew that she could say her piece well and others would listen.
The second reason why I chose her was for her appearance. She’s very plain
and on the heavy side, and we know that isn’t considered attractive among
the bodied. It’s no surprise she’s never had a relationship with a man. I felt
really sorry for her, and I’m sure she felt bad about herself too, so I knew
that if she were given the chance to redeem herself, she would. She was in
the right occupation, the right body type and the right psychological state to
be the poster girl for bodied women empowerment.
DHH: Was she a good kisser?
HM: No. But that was to be expected from her, and that’s alright with me.
It’s an outreach. It’s not like she had to be good at it for my sake.
DHH: Do you plan to join next year’s BDO?
HM: Definitely! Hopefully, by then, a bit of follow-through has happened
among the bodied. I really trust Cassandra to do her part. She’s lived such a
sad life, being a poorly-bodied woman, but I know she has it in her to change
all that, to speak up for the good of all bodied women. With any luck, thanks
to her, there will be no need for the BDO in the future.
DHH: Hedgar Marquez, you are indeed an inspiration.
HM: Thank you. I’m only too glad I was able to help. It’s really important
that we heads do our part for the unfortunate. We are a blessed people, and
it’s our responsibility to reach out to these poor creatures.

I took another look at the picture. The way my body leaned all the way
forward as I kissed Hedgar suggested a state of pure rapture. The caption
read: Hedgar Marquez in an act of goodwill. I folded the newspaper up,
sliding my fingers along its creases with extra force, wishing to squeeze out
every drop of its vile, black ink.

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Something small and yellow slipped out of the pages and floated onto
the carpet. I picked it up slowly. It was a Post-It, a message written on it in
impeccable script.
You must know everything. Fight for your plight, Cassandra. Let the
truth inspire you. Your friend, Hedgar.
I looked up from the note. Before me was my closet, its doors flung
open, a soft strip of morning light running down its inner panels. I crammed
the note and the newspaper into the very back, stuffing them beneath a pile
of clothes that no longer fit, and shut the closet closed. The strip of light was
still there, running across its doors like a barricade. Like a gag. I pressed a
finger to my lips.
Not a word to anyone.●

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