The Shape Your Brain Takes – Briana Courtney

The shape your brain makes when it gets chucked off the edge of Death Bridge is supposed to resemble the form you’ll take in the next life. It’s important for mourners to know, I guess, in case they wanna visit their poor old pal in a zoo. On any given day, there can be as many as fifty families crammed onto the bridge, crying and cradling the brains of their loved ones, then hurling them off the overpass like a football.

It used to be a sort of scenic shortcut into town, a hundred or something years ago, then the Prophet of the Next Life went and reincarnated himself on it–cut his skull open with a handsaw and slung his brain off the deck before his soul ran out, so they say. Real spiritual stuff. Now the path is basically useless–just a bunch of blood and guts and crowds. You should never take Death Bridge if you’re trying to get anywhere. 

I work on the underpass. You should also never take that, unless you’re itching to be concussed by an organ. Only I and six other guys are allowed down there: Chuck, [Jack] Hammer, Roger L., Roger S., Gregory, and a newbie whose name I can’t remember who joined the crew last month. We’re what they call “brain dodgers”. The name alone speaks volumes. We wear yellow hazmat suits with clear plastic face filters, like in the movies, and use these big mops and hoses to collect all the cerebral matter. The biggest thing is making sure the ground is clear in between throws so that no one’s brain gets mixed up with another’s.

If a mother even thinks that the shape of her precious child’s brain has been compromised with another’s, she’s liable to say her son’s been reincarnated as the next president of the United Nations. So we clean the ground as best as we can and try not to puke when we do, and when everyone goes home, we dump all the brains into this giant tank surrounded by about twelve men with hot sticks and a bunch of barbed wire. What happens to the brains after that, I’m not at liberty to say. I’ll give you this though: it’d spoil the whole spirituality of the thing real quick.

I became disenfranchised with the whole reincarnation concept by the tenth grade. Two things happened that fall. First, Johnny Visotti got a cold that ended up being cancer and his parents invited our whole class to watch his brain get thrown off the bridge. Only I hated Johnny Visotti since he stole my journal and taped the pages up in the girls’ bathroom, so I didn’t go. I only heard he became a beetle from everyone else.

One of the entries he’d posted was a poem I’d written about Jessica Fields, who’d agreed to be my date to the winter formal until she saw that. She ended up going with Todd Sherman instead. Todd Sherman. Girls are always going on about wanting a sensitive guy and then end up with a guy like Todd Sherman. I spent the rest of that semester with a magnifying glass in my pocket, just so I could hover it above every beetle I ever came across and fry it close enough to death without causing reincarnation. I probably fried about seventy-five of those guys before the second thing happened, which was that my sister Erica went to college and never came back.

My mother was already smoking by the phone when the call came. Returning messages had never been Erica’s strong suit, but when she stopped returning mine, it sort of sealed the deal. The guys who did her autopsy sent her brain back to us in a small brown box, the same packaging as the water bill and an electric stand mixer. When it came, I suggested we freeze it cryogenically, put it on the mantel in a nice, glossy case like a snow globe. That way, none of us would have to guess what she became because what she became would be right there in our living room.

Hell, I said, if we wanted to honor her, we could even put it back inside her own body and let her keep it, wouldn’t that be a revolution? But my mother nearly had an aneurysm when I said that. She said what if Erica got reincarnated as a rat and we didn’t know because we had never thrown her off a bridge and so we put out a rat trap in the winter and killed Erica? Then, I said, Erica wouldn’t have to be a goddamn rat anymore. 

Erica was too smart to become a rat, anyway. That was the whole deal: smart people were supposed to get beautiful shapes–wild horses and monarch butterflies and brown bears eating salmon right from the icy rivers of waterfalls. That’s because their brains were firm and firmer brains made complex shapes.

But you couldn’t just be naturally smart. I mean, the smartness had to come from thinking and creating and using it for once. You had to really put the thing to work. Otherwise, when they opened up your skull, they were liable to see pure liquid. You couldn’t even throw brains like that; you had to pour them out from Tupperware containers and watch ‘em splatter into insects. 

You’d think that would motivate people, knowing they could become a damn cockroach if they slipped too deep into idiocy. Only it pretty much had the opposite effect of making everyone so confident about their new bodies and apathetic to the ones they currently owned that no one did anything besides stare at a screen and discuss the latest episode of such and such. I mean, you’d really think they were allergic to contemplation. It’s no wonder we have about a billion ants for anything useful or pleasant, like an elephant. 

Erica was nothing like that. If anyone was gonna turn into something beautiful, it was her. She thought thoughts like it paid the rent. There’d be times I’d be talking to her for twenty whole minutes before realizing she wasn’t hearing a damn thing I was saying due to all the things she was thinking about. She thought about time dilation and espionage and nameless emotions (which she had titled herself and then taught me to use in middle school) and lottery loopholes and fermentation and war (by eighth grade, she pretty much knew the history of every war that’d ever taken place) and she didn’t give a damn about being a lovely conversationalist.

It pissed me off to hell and back, too, at the time; she was just about the worst listener in the world. Like trying to talk to an almanac, really. It must’ve driven a lot of other people crazy, too, because by the time she hit junior year, she didn’t have anyone coming over the house anymore. Just spent all her time locked away in her bedroom, finding more stuff to think about, I guess. But you couldn’t say she wasn’t smart as hell. You just couldn’t. If she was reincarnated into anything, it’d be some kind of fancy mushroom, cleaning up oil spills all over the Atlantic Ocean. 

Only Erica ruined it for herself, according to the laws of reincarnation. That’s really what my mother was so upset about. She ruined it for herself because she took what they call “the easy way out”. By which they mean she died on purpose. Thought herself to death, truthfully.

That’s why my mother insisted on going to the bridge, why she insisted on paying some professional shape interpreter out the wazoo for a piece of good news (sleaziest hustlers you ever met, shape interpreters), why she couldn’t leave Erica’s brain in her own skull–because people who took the easy way out weren’t supposed to turn into anything at all, and that’s what scared my mother most: that the life we have here and now might be the only one we get. Only the thing about that is, if we all believed that, I might’ve forgiven Johnny Visotti while he was still alive, and Erica might still be here. 

It was a big shock for everyone, needless to say, when I started working at the bridge. I guess it seemed sort of sadistic in a way, given everything. Only it didn’t bug me, watching everyone lose their loved ones all the time. The odd thing was, it actually helped, cooled everything off even, like how I imagine if your job was delivering babies all day you probably wouldn’t feel too unique when you had your own.

Really, it was just that brain-dodging’s the highest-paying job you can get without a high school diploma, and I couldn’t finish school for jack squat after Erica left. They had to put me on a pause–that’s what I’m on now, a pause. Only I don’t think I’m ever going back. You learn a lot more about life watching people grieve every day than you do in trigonometry, and hell, you feel a lot less inclined to spend your precious human years that way, too.

I don’t know what Erica ended up becoming because I never went. In fact, I specifically told my mother if she or anyone else ever told me what shape Erica got, she’d get two dead children. That didn’t make me feel so great. I knew, though, that Erica was gonna be fine wherever she ended up and I didn’t need anyone telling me differently, especially not some money grabber who never even knew her. I spent that day at the movies instead.

The film I saw was about a little boy who steals all his mom’s money to give to a time traveler to prevent his father’s death, only the time traveler ends up being nothing more than a slimy street performer who takes the money and skips town, making the boy and his mother have to spend the rest of their lives on the streets. I watched it twice and then walked around for a long time after. I walked till I had blisters on my heels.

Blisters on my knuckles, too, because I couldn’t fit them in my pockets and hadn’t brought a jacket. When I got home, my mom was lying on the floor in front of the TV and didn’t even look up when I came in. She’s been that way ever since. Whatever Erica became, it wasn’t enough to encourage her to do anything other than atrophy. The thing I remember thinking, walking around all hunched over in the cold that night, was: what in the world is the hard way out? And I think if you asked around, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who didn’t say, “just living.” 

The new guy on crew—still can’t remember the name— says he knows a place where no one even believes in reincarnation. They’ve got other things, he says, like self-determination and god. He traveled a whole lot before he got here, voyaged all over the planet, supposedly, and he says, “The fermentation of what you don’t know about the world could make a sailor drunk.” I know about gods from my ninth-grade history teacher, Mr. Johnson.

Erica knew some, too. He said people had all sorts of them before we discovered reincarnation and killed each other all the time because of it. But I think it sounds nice, having someone to ask questions to, someone important and dignified to tell you what you’re supposed to be doing here, instead of guessing and wondering why any of it matters if you just have to do it all over again. 

By next year, I’ll have enough saved up to know for myself. I’ve already got it planned. I keep a journal by my bedroom door, have since I started the job, and every day after my shifts, I write down everything I can remember: fights over the lifespan of jellyfish (infinite), black eyes over the difference between the shape of a butterfly and a moth (you’ll never meet a moth in the daytime), cash being passed from parent to shape interpreter, and shapes being changed on a dime. I’ve written about when the trucks came to pick up the tanks filled with brain, and how a drifter tried to climb onboard and got shot because of it. Everything I can remember, I write it all down. 

Roger L. has a wife in the publishing industry who says what I’ve got in there is enough to blow the lid on the whole operation. The two of them would get a healthy cut too, of course. Hell, they can take the whole thing as far as I care. All that matters to me is making it out of here.

I’ll give them a copy of the notebook, withdraw all of my cash from the bank, take a cheap flight to the other side of the world, and make a nice life for myself, wherever it is. I’ll write about all the new things of the world I learn, send a couple postcards to my parents, maybe, and I’ll tell everyone I meet all my stories about what I’ve seen underneath Death Bridge. 

Today it was this: a little girl in a red wool sweater with a pony stitched on it, getting her arm yanked off by her mother. It was afternoon, the busiest time for the bridge. The girl wasn’t even taller than the guardrail of the bridge itself, and her mom kept pulling her through the crowd, telling her to open her eyes so she could see her father throw “Tony”. Only the little girl wouldn’t. She was pink and sniffling and swollen from clenching her face shut and you could tell she didn’t want him to throw it, didn’t want to think of whoever Tony was as anything but Tony. 

But her father threw it anyway, and it landed with a big smack not more than one foot away from me, in the long slinky form of a snake. The old suit next to them said something about an earthworm. 

That’s when the girl went ballistic. She couldn’t help but open her eyes after he said that. She ran to the guardrails and scraped the air with her hands and cried his name over and over: “Tony, Tony, Tony!” She was louder than any of the other mourners. It broke your heart to hear.

The guy’s brain was so close to me I could’ve resculpted it just by moving my left foot. Her mother, who by that point had started forming tears of her own, started yanking her arm again, pulling her away from the bridge. Then something unbelievable happened, which was that I started yelling.

“Hey! Look again!” I shouted, only it was so crowded even the other dodgers couldn’t hear me through my hazmat suit. 

Her mother had given up pulling the girl and her father instead wrapped his arms around her torso and threw her over his shoulder. I unzipped the hood of my suit. 

“Look at Tony! Look again!” 

Her head perked up at the very mention. She was hanging limp over the shoulders of her father, now shaking hands with the interpreter, but I saw her: propping herself and scanning the bridge. 

“Down here!” I shouted. “Look again! Look down here!” 

I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had torn all my vocal cords and become mute–that’s how loud I was hollering. At that point, I guess, some of the guards had started to wonder why my suit was off and Roger L. shot me a look like I oughta shut up, apparently. I don’t have a lot of recollection of that. Hell, I didn’t even know that I had started crying. 

I started to step closer to the bridge, trying to meet the eyes of the girl, who was still searching for my voice. 

“Down here! Look at Tony!” 

But her father had begun making his way down to the other end of the bridge, following the mother who was already gone. The girl’s head was bobbing up and down in the crowd, and every time it came back up, it returned as less and less: a pair of cheeks and forehead, a nose and forehead, and then just scalp. 

Roger beelined for me and zipped my hood back on. 

“Look again!” I screamed, but I don’t even think I got that one out. I was blubbering terribly. He zipped on my hood so fast it felt like it’d never been off. I was standing there like an idiot, still looking for the girl. But she was gone. 

He picked my hose up off the ground, put it in my hand, and gave a thumbs up to those guys guarding the tank; made it seem like all I did was have to sneeze real bad. 

He kept saying something to me, probably trying to calm me down, probably trying to remind me about the plan. But I was hanging my head down, looking at the ground where he’d just picked up my hose. Right underneath me, next to my two big yellow feet, was a big chunk of guts, shaped like the best galloping pony in the whole world.