Rick Moody - The Diviners

“Jeff, what are we talking about?”

“I got one word, Len, one word for you. And that word is miniseries. ”

“Jeff, let’s just get this over with.”

At which Jeffrey Maiser turns to his helpmeet, the embalmer, and tells her to hold his feet, he’s going down.

Eduardo Alcott has sequestered Tyrone in the basement, where they are hunkered on a couch with vinyl protective covering. There are many power tools nearby, and serpentine coils of extension cords. And there is the smell of sawdust. The forlornness of basements is well-known. Alcott has made sure that Tyrone’s brother, a.k.a. the Great White Hope, is no longer acting as his brother’s keeper. The tutelage and indoctrination must be undertaken in a precinct free from interference. The process must be given space and time, as with Chinese reeducation. This, at any rate, is how Tyrone explains the situation to himself.

Today’s lecture, according to Eduardo, is about the perforation of the skull. The theme of today’s lecture is the communication between the contents of the interior of the skull and the environment. The theme of today’s lecture is the urgent need of these two regions to communicate more freely. The theme of today’s lecture is blood-to-brain-tissue ratios and the fluidity of blood. The theme of today’s lecture is the mystical surgery known as trepanation, the boring, scraping, drilling, or cutting of the skull, using such tools as have been explored from Neolithic times up to present times: the cylindrical crown saw, the Woodall trephine, and the cone-shaped cylinder with center pin.

Eduardo, the Mexican ideologue, a fiery and passionate man, claims distant ancestry to the founder of a local collectivist experiment in Utopian thinking, in the following way: the initial Alcott, the Utopian Alcott, for all of his theoretical expertise, got with child a young woman of the Indies who was in his employ, and this unwanted young woman was exiled to the tropical latitudes of her girlhood, where, after prolonged and grueling labor, she whelped a boy, whom she called Alcott after his father, and this Alcott grew up scorned and hated. The lot of bastardy is hard. Nevertheless, this young Alcott, by the name of Neville, was proud and strong. He read widely in the writings of his father and his father’s friends, for example, a certain Walden Pond camping expert. And Neville learned of the immensity of nature, the perfection of nature, and of the pestilence of man. He likewise learned, by virtue of his coming of age in the tropics, of the many religious and mystical practices favored by the so-called savage cultures, among these being cannibalism, incest, sacrifice, ritual amputation, dowsing, and the like. Neville Alcott retired to a cave on a lone island in the Caribbean Sea, taking only his wife, who was a dark woman, a Moorish woman, a former slave or perhaps the daughter of slaves, and together they produced a great line of Alcotts, a coffee-hued line of Alcotts, and these Alcotts rose up in the Caribbean Isles. They were as one with the freed slaves, the abandoned slaves. They were as one with workers of the sugarcane plantations, they brewed rum in the hot sun, they lived in palm-frond shacks when hurricanes blew, and when they had become as strong as an army, these Alcotts were a part of every attempt to overthrow the European oppressor in this hemisphere. The Alcotts rode into Havana in tanks with Fidel, Eduardo said. In fact, Eduardo himself rode into Managua with Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas, and he composed position papers for the Zapatistas, and he abducted villagers with the Shining Path. In every place where the Alcotts could oppose the power of the Anglo and his lackeys, the Alcotts shone forth, until, through the magic of counternarrative and alternative historical systems, as explained by Gramsci and Fanon, this Alcott came back to the place where the original Utopian Alcott once lived himself, to Concord, Massachusetts, where the Revolution of your pestilential country began, and here he intends to begin the process of bringing down the fiendish American power, bringing it to its knees, so that America can know how it subjects the many peoples of the world to its bad television programs, its repellent and decadent movies, its fascistic foreign policy, and also its inferior mass productions of cut-rate goods, such as bad beer and coffee and cars that are the laughingstock of the globe.

Today’s lecture is about the operation “for the removal of stone,” whose history was first articulated by one Paul Broca, a French gentleman who was given a skull by an American prison reformer named Squier, who in turn got this skull as a gift from a Peruvian woman. The skull, sundered from its identity, made the rounds and was for a time much studied by a phrenologist with unusually large ears, called Horsly. Why was this skull so valuable? Every age has its abundance of skulls. The Khmer Rouge, e.g., paved roads with skulls. The skulls in Rwanda outnumber the bowls. The skull in question was of interest because it had a perfect parallelogram cut from its surface by pre-Columbian Peruvians, Peruvians before the pestilence of Columbus and Cortés and their rapacious hordes. This skull had a parallelogram cut out of it, after which the owner of the skull apparently survived for a time. Because, if you believe the writings of Paul Broca, there is evidence of some of the bone growing back.

“There are thousands of these skulls found in the area of Peru,” Alcott says, droning on in his interminable way, licking his lips, running his hands through his wavy gray locks, refixing the aviator glasses to his nose. “Peru is the capital of this historical surgery, the surgery known as trepanation. Peru and surrounding areas, and this is what we wish for you to understand, comrade. From here the operation was exported around the globe. From Neolithic times, from the times which are before writing and history, you find the Peruvians boring holes in the skull. And soon thereafter you find peoples in the Pacific Islands also performing this operation, having in all likelihood learned this operation from the Peruvians, and this we know because of the revolutionary peoples of New Caledonia, where trepanations were as common as the extraction of teeth. And this is the case even in New Ireland, where women frequently carved the skulls of their own children so as to make sure their children would grow up tall. It is possible, of course, that peoples made these journeys by canoe, from the coast of Latin America to the islands, because of prevailing winds. The word kumara, for example, denoting a kind of sweet potato, this also made a transpacific journey, according to linguists, and just so with the operation for the removal of stone.

“Many times”— Eduardo pauses to increase the mystery —“many times, these operations were for legitimate purposes, maybe depressed skull fractures, you know, when a piece of bone is actually driven into the tissues of the brain and surgery is in order to remove the bone fragments and to drain out the pus. As you are aware, my revolutionary brother, there is also the operation that is about the humors, about allowing the bad air to be released, the bad air of humors. The trepan was used to release this bad air into the room, after which the healing would begin to take place, because when there is pressure upon the brain or when the blood in the brain begins to coagulate, according to valid and historically sound medical theory, there is illness and death.

“But many other times, the operations took place in order to release demons who were harassing the medical subjects. Or the operations took place for spiritual purposes. For example, in Eastern Europe, which is the last place this type of surgery reached because this was the most backward place on the globe, you have the Bronze Age Russians, who were really just isolated bands of tribes in the region of the Minussinsk Basin or the Dnepr River. Still, using various scraping tools, they too performed trepanations, after which these tribesmen carried harvested pieces of the skull around with them as amulets. In some cases, you know, we’ve even read of buried remains of tribesmen, in bogs, carrying sacks with them in which there were contained bits and pieces of numerous skulls, all of these fragments removed from living persons. It is to be supposed, my revolutionary brother, that the magic was increased if the piece of skull that was obtained was from a living person.