I’d always been an inquisitive kid when I was growing up, always wanted to know how things worked, what the magic was behind the curtain, so to speak.  I was constantly taking things apart and tinkering with their inner workings and then putting them back together, or taking them apart and not putting them back together – drove my old man crazy sometimes.

One day, when I was twelve, I decided to find out more about myself, to see what makes me tick, find out just what it is that makes me ‘Me’.  And so, I cracked my own skull open to see what was going on in there.

Split it right down the middle by hitting myself on the crown of the head with a short length of steel flat bar that I found out in our garage; another piece of debris that served no practical use but which my father couldn’t bring himself to throw away lest its true purpose be revealed as soon as it had been irrevocably discarded.

I held the piece of metal in a two-handed grip, lined it up with the middle of my head, took a few practice swings and then slammed it into the top of my skull, edge on, with all the force I could muster.

I heard the ‘CRACK’ and felt the immense shock of pain in the same instant.  To say it rang my bell would be a gross understatement – it put me on my fucking knees.

I went down onto the concrete floor, almost face planted, threw my arms out in front of me and caught myself in the last instant, the jettisoned steel bar clanging loudly as it bounced and skittered across the garage.  Easily could’ve been a broken nose in the bargain if my reflexes had failed me.

For the next several minutes I was seeing stars and the room was spinning and I had an intense queasy feeling in my stomach.  I’m not sure how I kept from vomiting, but I never did.

After a while, I managed to stand back up again, on shaky pins to be sure, but at least I was back on my feet.

I reached up and felt the top of my head and I could feel a small gap where the bar had started to cleave my skull into two pieces.  I pushed my fingers into the gap and peeled my head apart.

It made a moist sucking sound as the halves separated.

Almost lewd… lascivious… wet and pornographic.

I laid each half of my head down onto a shoulder.  I have to say, it wreaked havoc with my vision.  Peripheral, depth… all screwed up.  Interesting new perspective, though.  I lurched around the garage like that for some time, stumbling into things and trying to get a handle on my new situation.

Bruised my shins something awful and dislocated a finger when I banged my hand against a doorframe that turned out to be not quite where I thought it was and, at one point, I jammed a thumb into an exposed part of my brain which triggered some kind of convulsive reflex and I ended up kicking myself in the ass.  I must’ve looked ridiculous as I poked and prodded at the contents of my cranium, trying to divine the inner workings of my biological existence and bumping into shit.

I decided enough was enough when the sun started to go down; figured it was time to set things back to normal.  So, I pushed the two hemispheres of my head back together and then tightly wrapped several courses of gray duct tape around the whole thing, starting under my chin and then up and over the top a few times.

It took several weeks but, despite one hell of an ugly scab, everything seemed to be healing up quite well after that; the bone in my skull looked to be stitching itself back together nicely.  I was concerned my hair was going to part a little funny going forward, but figured it would just add character so I didn’t let it bother me too much.

But then the bone just kept on stitching and soon enough my head had grown ‘in twain, in full,’ as my father described it, and the bifurcation continued to ripple down through the rest of my body, eventually leading to me budding off from myself.  

And then there was us.