Inside his apartment, Tom sits down on the green sofa that he bought second-hand for three-hundred dollars.
The clock ticks.
On the coffee table sits the helmet Uncle Barry gave him. Barry says it’s made from spare parts in the garage. The helmet is still partially wrapped in newspaper.
The A/C unit shuts off.
Uncle Barry says you wear it and then communicate with God. It’s a spiritual thing. Astral projection, Uncle Barry assured him.
The hum of the refrigerator turns on.
Inside the bowl of the helmet, Uncle Barry has welded a long piece of sharp metal. It’s been bent and twisted to shape a sort of jagged corkscrew. You twist a handle and the steel turns. It drills a point through your skull and pierces a part of the brain. Uncle Barry demonstrated on a piece of old plywood held tight in a vice.
The neighbor’s television turns off.
Tom always wonders what God might be like. You hear about Him on the radio. You see Him on TV. People talk about Him.
Tom must’ve mentioned these thoughts out loud to Uncle Barry. He must have placed the idea in his uncle’s head at some point.
Uncle Barry invents all sorts of things. He’s like the guy who invented the brick that goes in your toilet tank. Now he’s invented this too: a space helmet of sorts; astral projection he calls it.
A shadow forms near the window and crawls across the interior of the apartment.
Tom bends forward and takes the helmet in his hands. He turns it over and fits it over his head. The helmet is heavy and uncomfortable. Uncle Barry has glued some foam strips along the helmet’s inner curves, but there’s all sorts of other stuff inside the helmet too. Gears and springs and other metal bits. It’s ill-fitted and puts pressure on Tom’s head in all the wrong places. The helmet sucks.
There are footsteps in the hallway outside the apartment door.
Uncle Barry has welded a face plate to the front of the helmet with some spare door hinges and a sheet of metal he’d beaten with a hammer, then modified with tin snips. The plate swings down over your face and locks in place with a switch. Uncle Barry says he fashioned the plate after a monkey’s face; but it really could be any animal. Uncle Barry says animals don’t have souls.
A dog barks outside.
Tom swings the plate down and across his face. He locks it into place and the deprivation is immediate and oppressive. Tom panics and tries to unlatch the plate, but Uncle Barry has devised some sort of locking mechanism. Tom’s stuck inside this contraption.
A fly buzzes nearby. Unseen.
Tom’s neck is starting to get sore. The helmet is heavy and unwieldy and gravity pulls his head downward toward the floor. The fatigue is incessant.
Tom no longer wants to meet God. Maybe this feeling will pass, but for now he just wants to be free of Uncle Barry’s helmet.
The clock ticks.
He rises from the couch. The weight of the helmet makes him top-heavy, and he stumbles and staggers half-blind across the carpet into the kitchen.
There’s a screwdriver in here somewhere; Tom knows it. He keeps some tools in a plastic Tupperware, just in case he needs to build some furniture or hammer a nail into the wall.
But he can’t find anything and the helmet is not helping matters. It gets caught on the trim of the drawers and bangs off the underside of the cupboards.
Frustrated, Tom spots the knife block on the kitchen island through the drilled eyeholes of Uncle Barry’s helmet. The knives are easily within reach. He rests his heavy head against the wall.
The A/C unit switches on.
Knives are not screwdrivers, and Tom can’t really see what he’s doing with the butcher knife, besides. The blade is too narrow. The point is too thin. He fiddles about blindly scraping the knife along the exterior of his cage feeling for grooves or screwheads the knife might catch against. Any kind of escape mechanism that will separate the helmet from his head.
The neighbor’s television turns on.
There’s blood everywhere. It's all over the white linoleum and countertops. It's sprayed halfway up the wall. And now Tom figures he should have stopped the first time the knife slipped and sliced along the flesh of his neck. But he didn’t stop.
He feels exhausted. His fingers are cut and bleeding and sore. The weight of the helmet keeps dragging his head toward the floor. The pressure points of various things inside the helmet press against his skull in uncomfortable ways. It sounds like there are bees inside his head. It’s getting harder to breathe.
Tom can’t administer first aid. He can’t use the telephone to call an emergency line. He puts the bloody knife on the counter with a shaking hand and sinks down against the kitchen island to sit on the floor. He holds the unwieldy helmet between his hands and wonders how long it will take to bleed out.
The shadow that has spread across the interior of the apartment recedes. It slowly makes its slanted path across the room to disappear at the base of the window. It does this every day, without failure.
Tom feels the handle in his hand. It juts from the helmet at a right angle. Uncle Barry whittled it carefully from a block of wood. Tom bets his uncle didn’t cut himself to ribbons with the carving knife, either. All it will take is a few twists. The drill also has a locking mechanism.
A dog barks.
Tom is free. Uncle Barry’s helmet has opened the gate. A blinding, searing white hot gate that nevertheless has provided him with freedom. Freedom from the helmet. Freedom from the world.
A fly lands on the helmet’s surface like a lunar lander dropping onto the moon.
There it sits and tastes Tom’s blood with its feet.
And before long, it grows as still and contemplative as its host.
The clock ticks.
-- Michael R. Colangelo is a writer from Toronto.