There is a man in my head. I don’t know how he got there, but he’s there.

He has goggle eyes and a girl’s giggle.

I don’t know his name, or even how I know him. No context, no place. Just the face—the goggle eyes and the girl’s giggle.

I run through all the names of all the people who I know. None fit.

My memory is fine. Beaten like the body of an old car, repaired countless times, been in plenty of fender benders—but essentially intact. So if I have a man in my head and I can’t remember how he got there, yet my memory is broker-insured, what to do?

To get to the sea, follow the river.

I think someone said that. Maybe I made it up. I tried to follow the river. The sea is the man in my head, right? To find the sea you follow the river downstream. I can’t tell which way the current is going, and I don’t even have a raft to float on and laze away while the river takes me to my goal.

While the man is in my head I’m out of character. I’ve got words in my mind that I don’t know, such as “aplomb”.

I’m scared of those words. The man in my head knows what they mean, and he giggles his girl’s laugh when he makes me use them.

Follow the river.

Follow the river to the sea, and the man in my head might pop out. An immaculate frontal lobe birth to rival Zeus’s leg pregnancy.

If I can name him, place him where and when, then I might be able to rest. The goggle eyes. The giggle. He knows my name. The man in my head is so duplicitous.

Hah, he’s talking in threads again. With a bounty of heliocentric matriculative ascension on offer, I step into the river and let it drown me.

It’s not so bad.

Cool, slimy things touch tentacle to teat and secrete muck into my blowhole. I can breathe the stuff of the river—it’s only brain matter, see? Getting into and out of no-head’s-land.

Ethereal monks live in the river. They’re thoughts and impulses, dreams and—occasionally—an alcohol-twisted monster. It’s as if in the past I’ve come to them and desecrated their shrines. The river monks allow me back in with trepidation (the man in my head’s word) but acquiescence.

They know me and they know their river can be at odds on occasion, but never even.

The monks lend me their sight. A new world opens up before me, and I see that the river is not an omni-ferrous flow, but part of a great tributary system.

The current sucks me along. The shiny things whip me with their milky tentacles, gently to let them know that they love me because I made them. They are me and when we whip me they whip themselves.

I offer a token handshake and they flee, I think because the man in my head hates them and they hate his girly giggle.

The current sucks me down, down, down. I wonder if this is still the river or if I’m in a bath going down the plughole.

No, not a bath. A kitchen sink, because the water is both putrid and scoured. Scraps of watermelon husk and chicken giblet cloy my skin—even though I know these are only insubstantial representations I can’t help but recoil.

Then I’m through the plughole, out in the ocean. The man in my head surrounds me.

She is not the sea, endless and unknowable, as I had thought, but a lake, hidden from praying eyes nestled high in the mountains. A reverse lake, filling the river—and she is no prey.

I realise the goggle eyes are only large cartoonic saucers, and the girly laugh—girly for a man—is a fine womanly laugh. The elusive man in my head, now found, has become an architect of femininity.

We embrace.

Countless dreams that I never remembered having before flood through me, opened like a pinprick to a balloon.

She giggles again with an erotic edge. I still can’t think of her name, and I suspect that I’ve never known.

A fissure opens beneath my feet and drags me from the embrace.

She waves and disappears.

The river has become a vacuum, hugging me back to the source. With a delicious plop I emerge back on the outside of my mind.

The man in my head is gone. A woman has replaced him.