The Royal Boxhead Society (First Few Pages)

The boxhead society lay dormant in a gray morning. The mess hall, made of pale limestone, held a rusty bell in its spire and buttressed a flag, limp in the dusk. A tall wooden fence surrounded the property and the gate couldn’t be opened from the inside. This was painted white and the paint never peeled. The dormitories were divided between boys and girls and looked like boxes sunken into foundations of salt and dirt, with no grass growing in their courts and barely any trees to decorate the walks.

Orphan 108’s box was cardboard, nothing fancy on it except for the words “fragile” stamped near his left ear, for it used to hold valuable china glass. It fit securely. It wasn’t comfortable, but the smell of the cardboard wasn’t bad and it sounded like an ocean in there. He had a hole for breathing through and holes for his eyes and ears. The warden, who claimed himself the architect behind the box and the society at large, was a licensed psychologist and had gone to at least two universities. It isn’t clear whether he graduated from either, but the licenses are hanging in his office if you ever want to see for yourself.

“So, Mr. 108,” the warden said. “What do you want me to do for you?”

“The main thing I want to know,” Orphan 108 told him in a personal meeting, “is where my dad is. Can you help me figure that out? That’s the only reason I’d keep you around.”

“Now listen here,” the warden said. “I can definitely help you with those things. That’s why I’m here. To help you understand. You didn’t always have me around, but I’ve always been close. Do you know why you’ve got to wear this box on your head?” The square monument wagged back and forth, no. “Well, it’s because you don’t really know who you are, and you don’t really know who you are because nobody really told you. Your parents sort of failed you, didn’t they?” Orphan 108 continued to stare at him, not knowing what to say. “That’s why you’ve hired me. That’s why everyone hires me. I’m a contractor. I’m here to help you figure it out, all with the newest ideas, the best education, the sleekest looks. Not to worry. You’re under my care now, 108. You can be my child now. I’m trying to do you a favor. Put on the box each morning after washing your face. Avoid mirrors. Mirrors make it worse. And don’t let it get you down. But you must always wear the box.” The first few days Orphan 108 wore the box on his head, he had to hold it down so it wouldn’t swivel. It was hard using the bathroom. He couldn’t really look down and aim, you see. Eating demanded some adjustment. He had to learn how to deliver each spoonful through the little mouth hole, which wasn’t much wider than a thimble. Everyone wore boxes on their heads, supposedly for similar reasons. Apparently some of them had been unspeakably abused by their “caregivers,” slashed and burned and bruised, so the box was more of a helmet, a makeshift skull, than an alternative face. Their parents had done this to them. Every time. The father had been on evil mongrel to his sons and daughters. Wanted to scrawl pain and deceit into their little psyches, until by some good providence those parents passed away or the state took them away and plopped them on the city’s edge where the evening smog liked to settle in its musing disrespect. A pool of discontent, out of view, out of sight, a charitable hiddenness. The warden stood on the edges of the property, a foot in the gray and one in the light.

 In October, when a dull scrape of grey sky hung densely over everything, and the kids were twiddling their thumbs in the mess hall, 108 looked up from his sketchbook and spotted a boxhead sitting by herself (she was dressed in a polka dotted skirt, so he assumed she was a girl) with the head drooping downward. She had drawn a big smile on the box to indicate she was ecstatic under there, constantly in good spirits, but her posture told a different story. As she sat there, a little stuffed giraffe clutched in her hands, 77, the athlete among them whose box sported the signatures of basketball greats like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan, sat down beside her, quiet as a mouse. She didn’t stir. 77 leaned in towards the girl, and once his lips were right up next to her earhole, shot his gum through it so she gave a scream and 77 rolled over laughing, “Get it out of your hair, 109! C’mon now, get it out if you can!” 109 rushed out into the cold without a coat on, her fingers diving into the earholes trying to dig out the gunk. She’d dropped the giraffe at 77’s feet. All the students in the lobby jeered, “Boxhead, boxhead!” even though they were boxheads themselves. 108 wasn’t usually one to slip into a conflict like this, but he got the notion that if he wasn’t careful, old 77 would saunter over to him and try some of this same nonsense; 108 wanted nothing to do with that. So out he went after her, also without a coat, only to see her running towards the fence in that flailing skirt. He ran after her. She was fast. He called out, “109, 109!”

She must have thought he was 77, because she called back, “Leave me alone, you cruel thing! What did I ever do to you?” She didn’t stop until she reached the fence where she thrust her little hands through and let herself sag, mumbling and sobbing, “Daddy” and leaving 108 to wonder if he should bother her after all. He stood a few yards back, noticing a gentle fall of snow just beginning, and when she convalesced enough to sniff and take a step back, said, “109, it’s just me. 108.”

She turned around and judging by her weepy brown eyes behind the box, she was surprised and pleased. “Oh, 108,” she said. “I thought you were 77 at first.”

“That’s all right.” He paused as the snow added sleet to its mix and the pellets bounced off their cardboard heads. Her smile, scrawled on with a red marker, didn’t fit the trembling lip that peeked from underneath. 108 said, “Well, he’s a real fluke, that one. Did you get that gum out of your hair?”

“No,” she sniffed. “It’s stuck right above my ear. How am I supposed to get it out?”

“I don’t know,” 108 said, woefully. “Have you tried a cu tip?”

“No, not yet.” In just a second the two of them realized that all the cures they could think of for 109’s dilemma outlawed taking the box off the head. Their warden didn’t let them to see each other’s faces. Boxheads, as they were affectionately dubbed, wouldn’t be able to stand the pain of another gaze, whether sympathetic or horrified, so for their own sakes must keep the thing on all the time in public. “Just be grateful it’s just the head,” the warden told 108 once during a weekly “session.” “Some poor devils have boxes put on them all the way down to their toes. These are terrible burn victims, with tears and scars all over. You wouldn’t want to see one. Believe me. Keep the box on. It’s for your own good.”

“Well,” said 109, shivering and withdrawing from the fence. “I suppose it would be good to go to my private room and deal with it. You know, with no one around. That’s how this works.”

108 nodded. The snow came down harder, piling in dusty patches on the dirt and crowning a flat soccer ball in a nearby ditch. “Yes, I guess that’s right.” He paused, staring at her. Her eyes, brown and large and curious, had lost some of their weepiness and glittered from within their caverns. Her lips were full and pink and stable. All this to a degree that he was tempted to remove the box from her head himself and see if her face could really be all that bad. He gave a step forward but she stepped back in retreat. He stopped, calculated himself, and said, “Come on. I’ll walk you back.”

They walked the long way back. The dormitories were concrete boxes against the back of the fences, some of the rooms windowless, with a cracked sidewalk serving as the vertebrae between its doors and the mess hall, above which lived the warden in his satin suite. He kept a therapy couch in there, the most comfortable couch in the orphanage. Newcomers sat on the couch while the warden explained their situation. The kids stared at him, moonfaced, trying to understand they’d been sent there by misfortune of terrible abuse, but through his care their identities would be reformed. They usually could remember no such abuse. A missing eye, a clawed off nose, missing lips. Something hideous about them that couldn’t be erased, only hidden. Something their parents had done to them. Then, plop! On the box went, the decorative smile sloppily crayoned into the cardboard.

109 put her fingers on the knob of the door of the girls’ dormitory, and turned around and looked at 108. She thought she was sort of looking at him for the first time, right in the eyeholes.

“Thanks,” she said.

“You’re welcome, 109,” 108 replied, scratching a theoretical head. “I’ll see you around sometime?”

“Okay.”

She slipped inside. 108 walked back to the mess hall and looked up just in time to glimpse the warden’s figure standing in his upper room window, the pale face brooding downward and a pair of white bony fingers fondling a nearly expired cigarette. Their eyes met for a moment, and then the warden stepped back into the shadows of the office.

In his room, 108 sat down on his bed and checked the dormitory. No one stirred in the hallway. Shafts of grey light mottled the wooden flooring. Snow fell thicker. He pulled out a sheet of paper and a clipboard with a pen in his hand. He tried putting the pen to page a couple times before finally drawing an elongated circle that he hoped might turn into some semblance of 109’s eye: a single, sheltered eye. He wasn’t pleased with the outcome. It wasn’t oval enough. Too round. He turned the sheet over and tried again. There, a little better. He added a strand of eyelashes on top of the eye and tried to craft an iris. He slid a crease underneath the ball of the eye to give the illustration just enough 109-ness to satisfy him, wondering and wondering what she really looked like. Perhaps there wasn’t even a face to behold under there. Maybe there was just an expressionless blob, somehow graced with eyes as brown as cinnamon butter, planets shining in the middle of bland oblivion. He didn’t want to guess, so he left it at that. He put the drawing underneath his bed and laid down on his back to study the ceiling.

His neighbors would be shuffling down the hallway soon, each to his own cell. There they’d take off their boxes and lean their arms against the windowsills to try, as they did each evening, to glimpse of the city to the west. Some of the older children harbored some memory of the metropolis. Did it teem with energies unknown to the orphanage, full of people surely more important and beautiful than they could ever be? But what harm could it do to try and manage just a peek of the silhouette against the sunset? The warden promised 108 he’d take them as soon as they were old enough. But they needed to remember that people out there would sport those leering, beautiful faces, cheekbones of perfection, photographs of the divine everywhere.

108 spent the first couple hours of the night on his side observing the spread of stars in the sky. They had appeared above the lip of the snowstorm, now brewing to the west, and without a moon to wash them over, smiled down as sincere as diamonds in a pool. No motion interrupted the view, no sound. 108’s box lay lopsided in the silver square of light. The ears of the flaps were starting to wear, and he wondered if the warden was going to give him a new one someday. Maybe he would get one and look good enough to move up in the society. Maybe be worthy enough for a father to look at him, even. He didn’t know if that was even a category, but he didn’t suppose there was harm in hoping so.

Six a.m. brought a blue band of light in the east. The city huddled against the opposite horizon, and the orphanage remained a puddle of shadow and snow. 108 sat up in bed almost before his eyes were open and swung his legs over the edge. He dressed shivering and watching his breath come out in plumes, wrapped himself up in a scarf, and stole outside. He sometimes took walks like these in the mornings before breakfast. The orphanage always nested in solitude in its own way. A speck on the edge of the world. But some variations of loneliness are better than others. Those empty mornings were the better to take in, happier than the daily functions of the orphanage. The children did not often play together. Some would start out, and then suspect the playmate of foul play and withdraw to their own corners, their own slides. They had boxes on their heads, for goodness sakes. No facial queues to react to, none to give, no one to receive a smile and no smile to give.

A grove of trees stretched above the fence at the far side of the property where the fence had enough creases in the paneling to peek through. He made his way through a foot of snow and placed a hand on the fence’s surface, feeling its frost. The open air had no eyes with which to judge him. He sometimes felt like the trees were the kindest figures in all the earth because they practiced silence, nakedly, leaves obeying wind, sun, and snow.

Then he blinked. He realizing he’d forgotten to put the box on his head when he felt a snowflake land on his nose. Usually the motion came as naturally to him as putting on underwear. It was the last item to go on. Underpants, shirt, pants, socks, and then the box. No question about it. Five years, every day, and he chose a frigid, solitary morning to forget it. He was wearing no gloves and so brought his fingers to his cheek, touching skin, and then looked behind his shoulder to see if anyone was watching. The lantern above the mess hall door bloomed with light. It was probably only Birdie, a woman he used to talk to a lot but who stopped speaking once her heart broke. That’s how the warden explained it, anyway. She had a tragic condition and wore not one box on her head, but two. One had a large smile on it and paintings of whales, deer, and mountains all over it, and the other, the one she usually wore, was a frowning mask, scrawled all over with a black Sharpie pen. But her eyes remained pure and green behind both facades, and that’s where 108 always looked whenever he saw her.

Birdie looked out the window and saw this boy leaping through the snow drifts with no box on his head, and her heart almost stopped. It’d been a while since she’d seen a child without his visor. The knights without their armor. Too long. She for one wanted to see their faces. She felt like she couldn’t love them all the way if their faces were all boxed up. So she stared, forgetting herself, so her knitted brows went soft and she found her fingers meeting with the cold edges of the windowsill. I’d call his name if he could hear me, she thought to herself. I would tell him that he is a very, very good boy. But she hadn’t been able to speak those kinds of words to the boy, or anyone else, in a long, long time, and she felt too lost in herself to start trying now. So, Birdie the lunch lady kept walking past the window and into the mess hall where the cold oatmeal and toast were waiting to be heated up.

“Oh God,” 108 breathed, drawing up a ragged hood over his face. “Such an idiot! An idiot!” He turned on his heels and sloshed back through his tracks, spurning the snowdrifts as he went and feeling as naked as a mole rat. He felt his hair reconfigure itself in the wind, the roots of the hairs tickling his scalp with pain since it was usually matted and flat. A figure appeared in a window, passed without looking out. Strangely it wasn’t just any peer 108 was afraid of running into. It was 109. The thought of her looking at him and not recognizing him precisely because he wasn’t wearing a box on his head made him thrash with anxiety. He swept into the dorm and hurried up the stairs, passing only one another orphan in the stairwell whose eyeholes apparently hadn’t been cut out to include much periphery. 108 said, “Excuse me” and the fellow grunted admission in return. Dashing into the room, he collided with the tall, wispy figure of the warden, who was examining the box in the light of the window as if wondering why there wasn’t something in it.

“Warden!” 108 gasped, trying without success to slow down his breathing. “I was just running back to put it on.” The warden neither moved nor spoke in response. He only stood there, stroking the edge of the box with a gloved finger. “108,” he said, softly, once the boy had collected his breath. “What’s your favorite color?”

108 thought about it. He didn’t know. Then he remembered 109’s eye, brown, gold, and green all in one. He said, “Golden brown. If that’s a color.”

“Golden brown. That’s a lovely color.” The warden looked down on 108’s face, his tuft of hair hanging over his gray eyes, swamped in their shallow orbs, their formless penetration. 108 reached out to try and take hold of the box. The warden held it at bay, smiling. “Golden brown. How would you like a new box of that color? Perhaps with some other things you like too. I could draw all sorts of things on it.”

“Like what?” 108 muttered, blushing.

“Tigers. Trucks. Baseballs. Big buildings. Trees. T-Rexes.” 

The list was accurate. 108 wouldn’t mind an updated head, but he didn’t understand why the warden wanted to reward him.

“That sounds really nice, sir,” said 108.

“It is really nice, 108.” The warden smiled, then settled the box over 108’s head and patted the top of it, adding, “I’ll have something cooked up in no time.” 108 trembled with relief and tightened the box over his ears.

 The world had sounded different with it off. The air lacked that gentle hush of seashore rhythms that he’d taken to be basic atmosphere. He watched the warden trot downstairs, chortling out greetings to nearby orphans, and then took out the illustration of 109’s eye from underneath the bed. Untouched, unsoiled. He held it to his nose. There was the faint smell of cigarette on it, but then again, everything smelled like that after the warden walked through the room. He slid the drawing into his sketchbook and set it on the windowsill. Bright daylight lit the hills of snow and the city on its folding edge of regress. He went down for breakfast.

There was a hill between the orphanage and the view of the city. A bald hill domed and windswept, with a skirt of forestry at its base. These were the woods the warden hunted in, and he thought himself to be their only visitor. But in March, the snow was crusting into ice, and black rivulets trickled down the hill in veins, and a man hiked the hill with an armful of kindling and a hooded face. It was hard to tell if he was tall or short. He wore a cloak, ragged at the edges, but he wasn’t poor, and seemed to be hiding his stature underneath the clothing. He took off the hood at the top of the hill and lay the wood on the ground, standing still for a moment with his back to the orphanage and setting a pair of steely eyes westward towards the city. The air was still, though robins twittered beneath him, and he knelt down to arrange the wood into Lincoln log fashion; he burrowed into the snow, fortified the fireplace with a  few stones, and then set a match to the underlying twigs so a healthy flame fused along the timber and bred a blue filament of smoke. He blew on the fire, cradled its protection with a steady palm, and then rose to his feet again to watch. The flames spread and crackled and whined with combustion. Blue and white flame burned away the easy surface of the wood and the turned orange, fomenting and fleshing out into a spiral. The fellow brought out no fowl to cook, no marshmallow to toast. He only stood there solitary and hugging himself, just apart enough from the fire to make the dot of flame visible against the sky and available to the orphan who might be watching. The warden, fondling his cigarette in his study, stood in the window and squinted against the morning, trying to focus on the brown and yellow blur on the hill. “Damn my eyes,” he said.

The fire grew to shoulder-level, melting the snow around its margins and drying a crown of hibernating grass with its heat. The stranger added logs as the fire demanded and kept staring into its white-hot center, as if wanting to melt the whole hill clean and move on.