Toyota Head
I shake the green box and nothing falls out, so I yell for Bruce, I say, Bruce, did you move the money from the commission, and he says, You spent that already, Dear.
The usual fang stabs behind my eye and into my head. My gut recoils, as if this empty Tupperware rectangle could drop me back on the road to Albuquerque, could snub the front of my Corolla and launch my brother through its window like a rocket, shards of tempered glass his contrail. As if my bones would buckle again and my vertebrae spring from my neck and my wrists uncouple and my mind scramble against the non-stick wall of my brainpan.
Broca’s Area: a plug of gray matter named for a mutton-chopped Frenchman who sliced into stutterers’ skulls and found a void behind the eyes. When my noggin knocked the steering wheel, I bruised my Broca and could not speak. I could hear, listen, understand, write, but fished for words and reeled up only an and. The first word in a desert of words in the ward when I roused again, my forehead bandaged tight, my wrists in casts. The doctors asked if I wanted water, and all I could say was and and and and and. No hope, they muttered under their masks.
The next day, a man with copper wire hair and a chromium smile leaned over my gurney and unscrolled last week’s newspaper. My giddy face shone at me from a years-old snapshot of a gallery opening, reprinted in gray scale.
This you? he said.
I nodded.
I’m Bruce, said Bruce. Speech therapist, class of oh-nine.
I nodded.
Reception tells me you don’t have insurance?
I nodded.
So you’ve got bills and I’ve got loans and we can help each other out. Sign here—he handed me a clipboard—and I’ll fix you up at half the cost of the house team. An X will do.
Six hours everyday we spent on speech therapy. To rebuild my neural infrastructure. Six hours in the basement of the hospital under mulched paper ceiling and naked fluorescent tubes.
How are you? Bruce would say.
And?
Good. Repeat after me. Good.
And.
Follow the movements of my mouth.
Ooat, I’d say.
Okay. Let’s try bad. Move your mouth with my mouth. Bad.
Bad. And bad. And bad!
Good!
Oh, those hard six hours to trace the sounds his puce lips drew. After adjectives, we stacked nouns, verbs, pronouns, prepositions. Determinants last and still rough. All from his ridged lips, his domino teeth, his flat tongue like an underground animal. Even now, I speak his Boston accent, honk syllables in my sinuses. No other voice to stencil from.
Friends dropped in, unspooled stories of times we climbed roofs and rode helmetless through forests on wild horses, swam naked in darkness, lay on tracks until the oncoming Santa Fe express rumbled in our ribcages. I hated them that led me to the wild life I lost, that lost me my brother. Told them to wear seatbelts and they never came again.
If they want to die, Bruce said, they’ll die.
Parents always loved Brother better. The meat eater. The able one. The heterosexual. Could tie a hundred knots, read a map, clean a salmon, pray to God, fly to heaven through the tinted window of my Corolla. When the nurses unwound my head and revealed the stigmata stamped there by the symbol on the steering wheel, my folks took it as a sign of judgment and fled back to their Utah tabernacle. With nervous fingers, I traced my Mark of Cain, the trademark scar etched on my brow, and cried. Brother, I would let you teach me now, teach me to read a compass or chart stars. To survive alone.
Don’t play the prodigal, Bruce said. Focus on healing. Focus on my words.
I focused hard, every lens in my head trained on his sweet maw until it seared into my cortex like a cattle brand. I dreamed of those lips pressed on my lips. We’d recite Shakespeare in tandem, our mouths synchronized, and I’d wake to dewy bedclothes.
I and you, I told him once. I you.
Verb missing, he said.
I you, I you. I held my palm to my hummingbird heart, to his.
His gaze flicked to my groin. He loomed close, notched his chin in my temple. His toothy stubble tore at my ear.
I can’t, he whispered. Not while you’re a patient.
So patience I had. And now my larynx stalls when I shake the green box and no roll of bills rolls, and Bruce says, You spent that already, Dear.
I did not spend it, the money from my latest painting, the best since my brain got pollocked. An oil portrait of a woman (a woman, woman, Whatshername) with a flat nose like a spoon. Rich color, almost too rich, but if it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it. Many things I forget but not that. I lashed the bills with purple thread and wrote a note: Save to buy new bicycle.
The first painting after the accident nearly ended me. So excited to slip out of the hospital and into the studio. The paint cans gaped open. Dust drifted on pools of orange, crimson, aqua. I slopped one brushstroke over the next to build Bruce’s face, but with my mind’s eye blinded, I couldn't keep count. I stepped back after a day’s work and saw three noses, five eyes. A chin cleft in two. Hundreds of teeth. His lips a wide mauve arc across the canvas.
The day of my release, Bruce had shoved a yellow sticky note into my pocket. I yanked it out and called the number.
I need a life model, I said.
Nude? he said, and I gave him my address. Two hours later, he pressed through the door, shy as a deer.
Can I see? He licked his wonderful lips. What you’re working on, I mean.
My throat wheezed no, but he stepped behind the easel, behind me. Held my shoulders in his paws like shovels. His fast heart pummeled my back.
It’s amazing, he said.
I heaved sobs. Stammered thanks.
I hoped you’d call, he said. He unlaced the drawstring of my smock, dragged down the zipper of my pants.
Shut your eyes, I told him, and shut mine. Wept the whole time. Our hands, damp with paint, smudged lavender prints over our bare bodies, and afterward it no longer seemed wrong to paint him multiplied.
I sold the picture, and made more. Found folks liked to see themselves constellated. Paid off stacks of hospital bills until at last I surfaced solvent. Picked up my first debtless commission from this Lady Whatshername and scattered her noses over the canvas like a flipped cutlery drawer. Earned four hundred greenbacks to add to the green box.
And when I ask for them, Bruce says, You spent that already, Dear.
His smell dusts our sheets and my clothes. His tissues bloom in the wastebasket. His sweater perches on a chair under a pair of socks rammed through each other like a fist. He sprawls in the other room, on the beige couch. Fluorescent television light pulses across his shiny forehead. Last night he took me to an Iberian restaurant where I forgot my veganism, ate cod mashed into potatoes and piri-piri chicken and tiny squids with their heads still on, eyes like raisins.
Taste good? He stroked the black hair that had sprouted on my forearm under my cast.
Have you done this before, I asked, with clients?
Once, he said. When I still dated girls. But she didn’t mean anything.
I stabbed a vinegar carrot. What happened to her?
Don’t worry, he said. She’s gone. He winked eyes like rivets. I’m your Bruce.
My Bruce. My Bruce who fucked me facedown so I could hide my steering wheel scar, that cowboy brand, from him. Who bought me a balaclava so I could face him, see in his revved-up eyes the moment he forgot that I flung my brother out a car window on Route 66. Who runs my website, grills tofu, kisses my clueless mouth. Who taught me that I could yet be loved. And when I ask my Bruce for my money, the money from the green box with the purple string, he tells me, you spent that already, Dear.
I fill the airbags in my chest. Throttle my heart rate down to neutral.
Right, I call back to Bruce. How stupid of me.
Nicholas Guerreiro (@napguerreiro) is a graduate of the Theatre and Creative Writing programs at the University of Victoria in Canada. His plays have been performed at SKAMpede, Impulse Theatre's PeekFest, and the Victoria Fringe. He won the 2017 On The Verge contest for Creative Non-Fiction and all four rounds of the 2015 Times Colonist So You Think You Can Write contest.