The Head and Its Hair
by Jeffrey Greene
The official to whom we’d submitted our request rather tersely informed us that the decision to seek an audience with the Head should never be made lightly. Only three questions are allowed to each petitioner, and brevity is not just a matter of politeness, it is a legal requirement. This is essential, we were told, for the Head is very old, far older than anyone now living, and to waste its precious, ever-diminishing time with idle chatter is to deny others their one opportunity to receive its wisdom.
We verbally acknowledged our understanding to the official, who added that the Head should be spared as much as humanly possible the presence of fools and frivolous attention seekers, pointedly scrutinizing our entire family as he spoke these words.
Chastened by this intentionally hostile interview, we prepared our questions carefully over the several weeks leading up to the date of our audience with the Head. The Head will not speak to more than one person at a time, and recording devices of any kind, even pencil and paper, are forbidden in its presence. For that reason, as the adult son with the best retentive memory, I was chosen to represent my family.
I have always been a shy person, more comfortable with books than people. So it was with both intense curiosity and a certain dread that I wore my best robes and tunic and presented myself at the Great Hall of Friendship. I submitted my acceptance papers to one of the Friendly Helpers at the Information Center, and she hung a day pass around my neck and gave me directions to the Forum. The elevators were, as usual, not functioning, the Friendly Helper had warned me, and the ten-floor climb left me out of breath.
The well-marked directions led to a gated opening, where two guards scrutinized my pass before waving me into an impressively large room with a vaulted ceiling. On one side of the room were rows of chairs inside a kind of cage where a Friendly Helper, a decidedly unhelpful man, handed me a numbered slip of paper and told me to sit and wait until my number was called. The chairs were far from full. I counted twenty-three people ahead of me and, from their bored expressions, I knew that my wait would be a long one.
I could see through the wide spaces of our barred cage the Forum, a white marble structure located some fifty yards away in what looked like the exact center of the room. It reminded me of nothing so much as a mausoleum erected to the memory of some great personage. There was another Friendly Helper, a young woman, sitting at a desk set up at the arched entrance and two more armed guards flanking the door.
One by one, numbers were called, and the questioner would walk nervously across the white marble floor to the Forum. After receiving what I assumed were further instructions, the person would be searched by the guards and then admitted. I timed how long it took for a questioner to re-emerge and found that audiences with the Head tended to last between ten and fifteen minutes. The questioners exited from the other end of the room, so I couldn’t see their facial expressions and had no hint of what to expect.
After an hour’s wait, our Friendly Helper announced that the Head was taking its midday nap. Lunch in the building was suggested, and he assured us that the Head would be awakened by its sustaining apparatus in exactly thirty minutes and advised everyone to be back in their seats by then, even though I knew that at least ten people were still ahead of me, and I had plenty of time to linger over my food.
Hanging a bit behind the group hurrying from the big room, we arrived at a small café, where soup and sandwiches were the bill of fare. Most of the questioners bolted down their overpriced lunches and headed back, but I ate slowly, silently rehearsing my prepared questions and trying to reason myself out of the very real possibility of going into paralyzing stage fright when I finally stood in the ancient, august presence of the Head. Thousands of other had done it, I told myself; you can, too.
My number was called almost two hours later. My stomach knotted with fear as I walked to the marble chamber and presented my number to the Friendly Helper who, besides being attractive, was actually friendly and helpful.
“Don’t be nervous,” she said with a warm smile. “He won’t bite. No teeth.”
I smiled uneasily, not sure if I should laugh at a joke made at the Head’s expense.
“Sometimes he’s rather chatty,” she went on, “so just be polite and listen. He’ll answer your questions when he’s ready. His style of speech dates from a time long before our great-great-grandparents were born, so if he uses expressions you don’t understand, just smile and nod.”
I thanked her, then submitted to the guard’s search of my person. That done, I was allowed to enter. The interior of the Forum was smaller than it seemed from the outside, most of its central space taken up by wide, rather steep steps leading up to a marble gazebo supported by four sturdy columns.
As I was slowly ascending, a person who, from his uniform, I assumed was a technician assigned to monitor the machine keeping the Head alive, passed me with a slight nod and a preoccupied expression.
When I reached the top step, I could see within the dimly-lit chamber a mechanical device made of glass and polished steel, perhaps two feet wide and four and a half feet high, its glass front enclosing a dizzying array of buttons and dials alive with trembling little needles that danced back and forth above numbered registers. Although the machine gleamed like it was newly built, everyone knew that it was as old as the Head and, though scrupulously maintained by our finest medical minds, was slowly wearing out and quite beyond their ability to repair. The technological marvels of the Head’s era soared well beyond our own.
Emerging from the machine’s flattened top was a short, thick, mottled column of pocked gray flesh scarcely recognizable as a neck, supporting the most hideous thing I’d ever seen. It was certainly the head of a man, that is, it had the required sense organs identifying it as human: pendulous, outsized ears, dense tufts of white hair clogging the ear canals like invasive weeds, a nose like a shapeless, brownish-orange fungus growing on a decaying tree, eyes almost buried in wrinkled folds of eyelids and collapsed, hairless brows, a small, sagging, full-lipped mouth dragged down by immense wattles into a permanent scowl and diaphanous wisps of hair resembling dusty cobwebs that both floated above and tenuously clung to the naked, scabrously veined scalp.
The small eyes were closed, the jaws working in that busy fashion often seen in toothless people, and its mouth occasionally fell open, revealing shriveled black gums. So grotesque, in short, was the legendary Head, that I was strongly tempted to retreat back down the stairs and leave it to its apparently senile meditations, questions be damned.
But my cowardly impulse was thwarted, for the thing opened its red, watery, cataract-clouded eyes and stared at me with an expression of marked distaste. I froze, and it spoke. That voice: how can I describe it? Sometimes a phlegmy, curdled croak, at other moments a wheezy, breathless whisper, a voice cracked and choking on the dust of its uncounted years yet determined to sound conversational, even sprightly, with a sing-song rhythm that betrayed both the boredom that must have been its constant companion and the unspeakable curse of bodiless life laid upon it by long-dead medical engineers, as if the ability to speak was the last, indeed, only power left to it.
I sensed that the Head’s pleasure in the sound of its own voice, however ruined an instrument, had somehow preserved it from what one would expect to have been a steady retreat into imbecility or catatonia. I had to remind myself that the Head had no lungs, that whatever breathing it was doing was produced by mechanical bellows and a constant supply of blood circulating through its more-dead-than-alive tissues. That this animated fossil could speak at all was a medical miracle, yet I could only wish for the Head’s sake that the machine sustaining it would soon wear out. Until it spoke, I’d pitied it.
“I was the leader of the greatest nation in history,” it said. “I’ve won wars, created millions of jobs, led my people to greatness, put down rebellions, been the envy of the world, built stupendous monuments, solved every crisis that confronted me. What have you done?”
“Done?” I was confused. Wasn’t I supposed to ask the questions? “I’ve, well, read, written, studied history, philosophy, literature, art, music, tried to be a good person, though I’m far from succeeding at—”
“And how’s that working out?” the Head interrupted. “The good-guy project, I mean.”
“Oh, well, uh,” I stammered. “I mean, it’s a process, isn’t it? Overcoming one’s darker impulses? Teaching oneself to be tolerant. Kind. What do you think?”
“Is that one of your questions, Mr. Just-wanna-be-a-nice-guy?”
“Uh, no. But I guess it could be.”
“You already asked three questions, Juwannabe. Or hasn’t your big, expensive education included learning to count?”
“Actually, my first question was—”
“No, I like your questions. They tell me all I need to know about you. Okay, Juwanna, here are my responses, in order: Is being a do-gooder the answer? Hell, no. Nice guys end up in the shredder, you oughta know that by now. Playing by the rules gets you a job flippin’ hamburgers.”
I felt ambushed and could feel myself getting angrier and more flustered by the second. “My name is—”
“Interrupt me again, and you’re outa here. Just shut up and listen, Juwanna. I’m setting you straight, if it’s not already too late. You’re young, you gotta lot of failing left to do if you don’t ditch the nice-schmuck routine. Second answer: ‘overcoming one’s darker impulses!?’ Biggest pile of dog shit I ever heard. Those so-called dark impulses are the steel in your bones, man. It’s a war out there and, in my experience, the more you castrate yourself over trying to be a good boy and walk the straight and narrow, the higher your voice gets and the less anybody respects you. People like your wife, your boss, your golf buddies, they all got your number, and it comes up zero.”
I could follow only a fraction of what it was saying in its archaic dialect, but the contempt, the undying viciousness in that wheezing croak needed no translation into our modern English. The Head despised everything and everybody. This unnaturally surviving relic of an evil time was a kind of sibylline monster in a bottle, kept alive not for its wisdom, I realized, but as a warning. I was surprised that our government didn’t require all its citizens to spend a few minutes with the Head, to disabuse us of any remaining illusions that other historical periods might be preferable to our own.
“The only intelligent question you asked was: What do I think?” it went on. “Well, I’m here to tell you, Juwanna, that you are exactly the same disgrace to the human species as all the other dickless wonders coming in here with their inane questions. You’re weak, ripe for slaughter, all of you gelded wimps in this pathetic century. Somewhere along the way, the guts and sheer willpower that it takes to be great got bitched out of you. I’m the greatest man you’ll ever meet, kid, even whittled down to what you see, and no one in this nursing home of a country is fit to carry my jock strap, so to speak.” The sagged corners of its tiny mouth briefly lifted at its crude joke.
“Of course I have no hope that any of you sheep will get up on your hind legs and grow a pair of balls. It’s not in you. I only wish the white coat brigade had let me croak after that plane crash and buried my head along with the rest of me. Then I wouldn’t have lived to see the tough, take-no-prisoners world I made degenerate into a tofu-eating herd of pansies. You make me want to vomit, which I would, if I had a stomach.”
I stood there for a moment, breathing hard, then turned to leave, my insides churning with rage and humiliation.
“Hold on, Juwanna.”
Barely able to keep an even tone, I said, “My name is Rolance.”
“Whatever. Look, I’ve given you a priceless gift and, maybe someday, after you’ve been kicked around enough, you’ll remember what I’ve said and start acting like a man. But before you go, I need a favor, something I can’t do for myself. You see that little slot there on the side, on my right, your left. See it?”
I looked, found the slot and pulled out a small hairbrush. It was old, the gilded wood handle worn thin with centuries of use, the bristles caked with dandruff and dusty strands of hair.
“Now brush my hair. Very gently, Juwanna, or I’ll scream bloody murder, and they’ll try you for elder abuse of a national treasure.” It smirked at its own joke.
I sullenly complied, careful not to let the bristles or my fingers come in contact with the scabbed, spotted scalp. The hair was so thin as to be almost imaginary, but I did as it asked, and the Head smiled. Getting what it wanted seemed to improve its mood.
“Always try to look your best, kid. I used to spend more on haircuts than you make in a month. You done now?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, put the brush back where you found it, Juwanna. Sorry, I’m terrible with names, so I like to give people their own special names. Names that define them, like yours. Okay, seminar’s over, Juwannaboy — whoa! Can you believe I’m still riffin’, still cookin’, just like the old days — anyway, Godspeed and outa my face.”
As I walked out in a daze, shaking my head and using a handkerchief to wipe the Head’s unclean spittle off my face and hands, the young Friendly Helper favored me with a smile that was both sympathetic and sly. “I hope all your questions were answered to your satisfaction, sir,” she said.
“Oh, yes, ma’m,” I replied, smiling back. “They most certainly were.”
Copyright © 2026 by Jeffrey Greene
