Tonight's reading will be from the Book of Migraines; chapter twelve, psalm nine;

By Betsy Shebang

He woke up frightened, big headache,
a bright light was grinding away on the ceiling
and with a double take he snapped his eyes open and sat up in bed
and that was the first moment he knew
he had a movie projector in his head.

Late for his new job, oversleeping, soaked in sweat, he burst through the doorway like wet newspaper tripping over his own feet to land with an apologetic slap on the linoleum floor. Had she noticed? She glanced over from behind the checkout counter, for several seconds he counted, and then she turned back to her customer. The image danced. The image smiled and turned.

He met the real HER in college and she always smiled to see him but she wasn't good about returning his phone calls and after a few quiet dates she moved to Los Angeles, saying she wasn't going to have a phone number. With that the skies opened up and it rained for thirty days and thirty nights and when he returned for the Winter quarter he found his whole world underwater. He held his breath most of the time and his heavy backpack kept him from floating away from the footpaths on campus, but while he wrote soggy notes complaining to his friends about the building pressure in his head, he couldn't tell them about the real changes. The water held his ears closed and he heard the machine grinding loudly day and night. He could rub his skull and feel the metal corners slowly pushing through. Still unsure of what was happening to him, he combed his hair carefully to cover the shiny nubs rising from his scalp, but every time he turned his head his hair would spin and wash slowly around like a lazy octopus resting on top of him and soon he realized everyone could see him for the freak he was.

The doctor was a brainless blind man who could find nothing wrong. He stared at the doctor and the bright light flickered out from the lens where his nose had been and the moving picture washed over the doctor's face and white coat. Again he saw her dancing and smiling and when the doctor turned to open the door the images fell together and suddenly he thought she had turned into the doctor and he panicked and fell off the table and fractured his leg. The doctor called two nurses and they rushed in and lying on the ground he looked up and by now he understood that something peculiar was happening. Both nurses looked just like her, pouting and caressing him with mysterious and unspoken desire as they applied a splint to his shin.

The world was overrun with duplicates of her - shorter or taller, thinner or fatter; her wardrobe had been divided up among thousands of women and clean-shaven men and everywhere he went people stared at him horrified by the angular protrusions that gave his skull the shape of a large lunchbox with a huge lens for a nose and two giant film reel mouse ears lined up straight like a weathervane from his forehead to the framing knobs at the back of his skull. When he could sleep he now had to lie his head on its side but for months the grinding noise had been steadily growing louder and he found himself hiding exhausted in flashy nightclubs where he reasoned that his odd appearance might be less conspicuous.

He could no longer see darkness. Every surface became his uneven screen and the picture grew brighter and brighter as he squinted to see the shadows beneath the blanket of his eternal daylight. Unemployed after the disaster at the cake mix factory, he found a temp job labelling shelves at a paint store and seemed at last to have arrived at an island of sad stability, until that moment when the blur of customers and costumes and clones parted and he saw her, glowing like a glorious memory come to life. Her graceful hands tapped with detatched precision at the register keys and she smiled warmly at the customers as if she'd grown up spending precious holidays with each of them.

It was immediate and he felt it deep in his throat. The moment swallowed and sinking heavily into him, a reminder of some perfect bliss he'd known before but he couldn't remember when. He'd lived a lifetime of watching stories happen to other people and suddenly, he sensed, he hoped, he was inside one of them. The waves had gathered around his feet and lifted him. He grinned, frightened with the feeling he was suddenly, finally alive.

That was the night she came to visit him in his sleep.
I'm getting sick of doing this, she said, so listen carefully.
Don't pretend you've just met me.
I am the spirit of love gone past.
I am the angel of love in the present,
but you knew that.
I am the pattern of love yet to come, your only future,
your trap.
You may like these little visits, but I've had plenty.

She fixed her eyes upon his for a moment before lifting herself to walk away with the sound of thin cracking plastic. Film was spilling from his head and covering the floor, catching under her shoes and wrapping tight around the legs of the chairs that had faced one another. As she stepped smaller and smaller into the distance the world spun around like the drain plug had been pulled to let the whole sea that buried him and the air he breathed and the paint from the walls rush into an escaping whirlpool. The last of the film fell from the reels and he collapsed soaking wet onto his bed, empty white light searching out in front of him, a single headlight from the center of his face.

The ceiling was bright white and now he was awake, big headache, and with a frightened double take he snapped his eyes open and sat up in bed. A voice repeated inside his head. He was trapped. Alone. A walking movie projector.

The world was bright but far away. The wall surface was lumpy with furniture and decorations but this morning he felt that all he owned was the beam of flashing light that followed his gaze in every direction, now reaching out plain white in front of him like an empty canvas. Yet he could see. The pictures were no longer repeating. The world's wardrobe had changed. It was almost comforting. And of course he knew he had no choice. He had decided already without realizing it. He would follow the searching light in front of him, out the door and into the desert world. Unable to disguise it, he thought instead to follow it forward and see where it led. And finally he laughed as he rose out of bed. The man with a movie projector in his head.

Copyright 2001 Betsy Shebang