Empire
by Helene Lovett
           
There was a girl who lost control over her body. She let her mind become distracted and in the meantime her body kept dancing and running until her muscles began to break down from exhaustion. She eventually got plugged into the wall. Doctors poured over her heart to make sure it would not collapse. The muscles were rebuilt. Essentially, new, stronger innards came into being underneath the same skin sac. The girl’s mind remained removed from what was happening to the rest of her. It looked on, an idle observer as the body strengthened. The only part of her, the girl felt, that was entirely in her possession, was her head. And not even her whole head, because her face was out of her control as well. Eyelashes and flakes of dry skin fell into her lap like leaves. Their departure demonstrated to her that these body parts ran on their own clocks — clocks embedded like tiny coins inside of her so that she could not see them.

But if each body part was autonomous, she wondered, was her mind the only thing that was hers, presiding over the rest of her like the dictator of a multistate, satellite empire? How much of an empire has to be retained for the empire to maintain its name? If the central state is cut out, but the satellite states’ governments continue to coexist peacefully, can those states retain their name as an empire?

A chicken named Ralph had his head cut off, but continued running around the pen as it always had before. He was still referred to as Ralph.

Amoeba, starfish, and coral lack brains and anything that can be defined as a head. How much of a coral must be severed so that it is no longer the same coral?  If you chipped off a piece of coral, would the small piece be its own coral? If you sliced a coral in half, would it become two corals? When a nucleus divides in mitosis, there is never a point when the nucleus dies. The original nucleus simply ceases to be as it is converted into two identical daughter nuclei who may also divide themselves. The distinction between single identity, multiple identities, or no identity is a permeable membrane.

There was once a man who lost his head in a war in the sense that he went crazy. There was a hole in his head and the doctors decided to cut the whole infected head off because, with their advanced technology, they thought they would be able to keep him alive. They wanted to see if the feat could be pulled off.

They were successful, and plugged the man into a wall to keep him preserve. Though he could not think or speak, he would live peacefully for many years before dying of old age. "His bed plate," said Ted, the name the doctors gave him because they did not know his real name when they found him, and their database didn’t have a DNA profile that matched his. His real name was Scott, and his family thought he was dead. But to the doctors, the only ones who knew of his existence, he ceased to be Ted after a few weeks and was referred to as the corner bed thereafter.

What name would you give this man if you had to refer to him in a conversation?

“The anonymous person?”  This would be the name of all of us on the banks of an infinite river of strangers’ bodies. Names are the plastic packaging on cadavers.

If names are extraneous, and the label “stranger” is derived from the Latin “extraneous,” then each of our names is a stranger. Stranger still, is the ease with which we shed and accumulate names as we move through space. I have shed “child,” “girlfriend,” and “sleeper” only to be plunged back into these identities when context rises like water around me. It is hard to estrange a name, though they come and go like strangers.

A stranger that goes to my school recently got a concussion in a football game. However, no one guessed until, on the sidelines, another stranger asked him for his name and he said “Blueberry.” Had he become what he claimed to be? His body parts had become meaningless. His brain was not functioning well enough to emit anything else, regardless of whether he meant to identify himself. Over the next few days, the story of Blueberry circulated throughout the school so rapidly that the boy’s real name was lost in the process.                

People who had never even known his first name were telling Blueberry’s tale. Fewer knew if he had since remembered who he was before Blueberry. We still do not know if he has any will to remember. He might not even recall “Blueberry.” How much more of himself can he lose? I asked a friend who Blueberry was and discovered that I had already been storing two pieces of him since elementary school. His name and face had been floating inside of me, unattached to anything but the other half of the identity fragment. The boy is back at school now, with brain damage. He leaves class every thirty minutes to go sit in a vacant classroom. I peer through the memory of the girl who told me this to watch him sit at his cluster of empty desks. Perhaps he tries to remember who he is there. In turning him into a character I have stripped him of his body and buried his real name.
             
A mirage of the boy plays with the girl who lost control of her body in a cavity inside my head. She asks him why they are alone. Perpetually shy, he tells her quietly that everyone is already here and gives her a stare like obsidian before folding into the air. The girl looks for these others in every corner of the brain before she looks inside her mouth and finds them, every possible person in the universe, every possible character, born and unborn, and folds herself into her own mouth.
             
Though I feel no kinship with this girl who was plugged into the wall, she and I were once one. She was me and I was her, until one day the passage of time allowed me to peel myself away from her. This process allowed me to separate the mind of the past girl from her heart and view them as separate entities the girl had no control over. They were only connected to her in the sense that they both inhabited her body; she had no raw evidence that they existed. She could not feel her heart decaying inside of her. She was only told it was so. She wished to see her body cut in half in order to prove definitively that the doctors had not fabricated the existence of her organs.
             
If the dissociation between the present “I” and the different parts of the past “I” had not occurred, I would not be able to see past pieces of myself as characters. On the other hand, I am using the present I as a character too, and could even invent a life for a future I, a hypothetical I inside of a black hole, a time-traveling dead I who has returned to haunt the present, or an I reincarnated as a god in control of our thoughts at this moment. In other words, with a pencil in my hand, the I is wildly out of control. The hand controlling the I is much like the headless chicken in its abandon, its surrender of identity, and its urge to be in many places at once.
             
Time, at some point, came in like a scalpel and carved a new mind from the old one belonging to the girl in a way that allowed me to dissect the old mind the way I might take apart and judge a sad old friend lying dead on the table in front of me.