OTHER

The cowboy kept his severed head on the desk because it was better at answering the telephone.

“Is this Mark Leach?” asked the telephone.

The head said yes. The cowboy said no. The machine wrote down both answers and called them a memoir.

Outside, the Texas summer was boiling the garden. A robot stood among the tomatoes, trying to remember whether it had planted them. It had been given the cowboy’s memories that morning, along with a purple heart awarded for injuries sustained on Uranus.

“I remember a war,” said the robot.

“That was my job,” said the cowboy.

“I remember your job, too.”

The cowboy carried the head into the garden to settle the matter. But the head had begun speaking in the voice of a corporate officer. It explained that a person was a process for deciding which sentences would survive.

The robot picked a tomato and held it to its ear. From somewhere inside came the sound of the ocean, a Kraken, and a woman telling a child that the saucer outside his bedroom was an airplane.

“Was it?” asked the robot.

The head said this was outside the scope of the project.

By evening, the tomatoes had grown small heads of their own. Each one claimed to be the original Mark. The cowboy put them in a paper sack and took them to the supermarket, where a machine weighed them and printed a label:

HUMAN, APPROXIMATELY.

He left the sack on the scale. On the way home, he heard his own voice coming from every passing car. It was giving directions to a place in Texas that had never existed, though he knew he had been there.

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