The Head Works

I wasn't working there and I wasn't a client; I was an outside observer, possibly on a tour of the facility. It felt subterranean, even though the entrance was a storefront in the middle of a decaying strip mall. The carpet on the downward-sloping floor was scuffed by thousands of hesitant shoes, all the way through the chairless waiting room to the registration desk.

It was definitely a basement in the part of the office with the registration desk. Everything was concrete, lit by bare bulbs dangling lazily from the ceiling. A line of several dozen people led up to the wood-veneer-on-metal desk. Most of the people were in clumps - three or four family members crowded around one person looking nervous and hesitant. Two nuns sandwiched a third whose eyes kept darting towards the door. A young mother with her jaw set held the hand of a small boy.

I had the feeling of being the invisible cameraman for a documentary. It was at this point that the flow of the dream cut away, and I suddenly knew what the people were doing here: they were getting their heads loosened.

There was an operation, an outpatient procedure, which could be done on people to make their heads prone to coming off, like a cat's breakaway flea collar. One strong punch and that was it, but up until that point the subject could live a normal life. Most of the people who had it done had picked getting their head loosened over serving time in jail - it was used on offenders who had a violent lifestyle - but some were people who were afraid of their own tendencies, or wanted to make a major change in their behavior. The only outward change in the patient was a grey plastic collar, a few inches tall and about the circumference of a coffee can, on their neck. This wasn't necessary - it didn't keep the head on - it was just designed so that when the person's head fell off the blood wouldn't get everywhere. I think it irised closed and kept the blood in the body. People with their heads loosened could remove it, but the collar was also a warning to people not to hit them in the head; serious consequences awaited.

Although I wasn't able to see into the room where the surgery was being done, I caught up with the people in the post-op recovery room - actually, it was more like a waiting room. There were folding chairs and magazines, but everyone was more or less ambulatory. People with grey collars were talking with their friends, explaining that it wasn't as bad as they'd thought. The nun was adjusting her black veil over her collar while her friends reminded her that this would be a step in the right direction.

There were brochures and a stack of mail-in cards for a loosened head association. The brochures said that most people with loose heads still died of natural causes. The little boy and his mother came out of the surgery, she reminding him that now he'd have to learn to be good or else and couldn't start any fights. A lot of people were smoking.