Headcheese Read online

  

  BY JESS HAGEMANN

  Praise for Headcheese

  “Winesburg, Ohio for the 4chan age, Headcheese isn’t so much a novel as a living, gasping community, united by dismemberment, like phantom limbs holding hands across the world.

  Headcheese isn’t profoundly disturbing because its characters are fetishistic freaks, but because Jess Hagemann surgically inserts you so deep inside their reality that amputation begins to feel like a fundamental part of the human condition you’ve been missing out on your whole life.

  Reading Headcheese is like realizing the chainsaw was the hero of Texas Chain Saw Massacre and that nothing brings us closer to our true selves than understanding what we’d cut away.

  Jess Hagemann does for dismemberment what Ishmael did for whales—revealing the whole world inside the tiniest details.”

  —Newsweek

  “A provocative and ingeniously assembled novel with enough debauched imagination—and perverse reality—to satisfy even the most morbidly curious reader. If this book was a Google search, you’d read it in incognito mode.”

  —Katie Rife, A.V. Club

  “Jessica Hagemann’s Headcheese unfolds like a Borgesian model of everything: consensual maiming, mutilation, bondage, domination, submission, power, the human heart and all its shapeshifting ways. Just as classical compilators collected the literary fragments or disjecta membra (literally, scattered limbs) of signal authors, so Hagemann presents a treasury of fiction, fact, fantasy, anecdote, parable, fetish and figure. The result is utterly unexpected: a treatise on amputation which stitches tender links. Obscene but never dirty, the urges of this book are as direct, precise and hygienic as the blade which cleaves and cleaves.”

  —Joyelle McSweeney, Action Books

  “A complete collection of psychological mind-fuckery; launching you into the dark depths of body modification and amputee fetishism. Headcheese is a trip down the rabbit hole into a world you’ve never seen or known.”

  —Russ Foxx, Body Piercing & Modification Specialist

  “Chuck Palahniuk writes the House of Leaves of amputee fetishism. Jess Hagemann represents a bold new voice in literary horror.”

  —Preston Fassel, author of Our Lady of the Inferno

  “Jessica Hagemann’s years of talent as a ghost writer shine in her fiction debut: these characters are so real and raw they practically bleed off the page.”

  —Robert Ashcroft, author of The Megarothke

  Headcheese

  Copyright © 2018 by Jess Hagemann

  ISBN 9781946487117 (paperback)

  ISBN 9781946487124 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018959029

  Published by Cinestate

  www.cinestate.com

  Cover Art & Illustrations: Chris Panatier

  Design & Layout: Ashley Detmering

  Copyeditors: Preston Fassel

  Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

  Associate Publisher: Jessica Safavimehr

  Producer & Publisher: Dallas Sonnier

  Author: Jess Hagemann

  First Edition December 2018

  Printed in the United States of America

  

  For

  Leo

  Nic

  &

  Trice

  Players

  (in alphabetical order by first name)

  The girl. 11. F. Japanese. Somewhere in Asia. Not yet aware of her sexuality.

  The mommy. 40s. F. Filipino. Springfield, Illinois. Mother of four. Straight. Married. Quadruple amputee.

  The skinwalker. Ageless. Sexless. Raceless. Somewhere in the Arizona desert.

  Dr. C. 60s. M.

  Fr. W. 50s. M.

  Mr. B. 60s. M.

  Mr. D. 60s. M.

  Sr. J. 40s. F.

  Sr. M. 40s. F.

  Anna. 21. F. Thai. Washington, DC. Student. Pansexual. Single. Double wrist disarticulation and recipient of donor hands.

  Bartholomew ‘Captain Hook’ Jordan. 30. M. Caucasian. Chicago, Illinois. Honorably discharged U.S. Army medic. Plastic explosives specialist at Mantid Labs. Director, Church. Straight. Single. Left transradial amputee.

  Carlos Delgada. 17. M. Hispanic. Springfield, Illinois. Mentally handicapped.

  Don. 53. M. Caucasian. Springfield, Illinois. Farmer, lay chaplain, and volunteer co-coordinator of a veterans’ support group. Married to Petunia, but secretly gay. Right transtibial amputee.

  Eliot. 22. M. Caucasian. New York, New York. Paralegal. Gay. Dating Ira.

  Forest. 19. M. Mixed race. Washington, D.C. Honorably discharged U.S. Marine. CNA at an adult daycare facility. Straight. Single. Right transhumeral amputee.

  George Ma’iitsoh. 76. M. Navajo. Chinle, Arizona. Retired professor of creative writing. Straight. Widower. Suffers from tinnitus.

  Hannah, aka ‘Santa Sangre.’ 30s. F. Figment of Lorrie’s imagination.

  Ira. 33. M. Korean. New York, New York. Stockbroker. Gay. Dating Eliot.

  Jung-il. 50s. Korean. Springfield, Illinois. Nail tech with a cocaine habit.

  Kaylee Bright. Deceased. F. Gulf War veteran.

  Lorrie. 32. F. Caucasian. Springfield, Illinois. Chief Communications Officer at a presidential museum. Heteroflexible. Single. Right transradial wannabe.

  Monica Lightfoot. 42. F. Navajo. Chinle, Arizona. Toxic tort lawyer and tribal shaman. Bisexual. Single.

  Natanjali. 22. F. Indian. Travancore, India. Mother. Straight. Widow.

  Odysseia Baines. 42. F. Caucasian. Copenhagen, Denmark. Sculptor. Lesbian. Single. Double transhumeral amputee.

  Petunia. 53. F. Caucasian. Springfield, Illinois. Homemaker and baker. Straight. Married to Don.

  Quinn. 30s. M. Caucasian. San Diego, California. Bartender. Straight. Single. Left transtibial amputee.

  Ralph. 50s. M. Caucasian. Springfield, Illinois. Construction site manager. Gulf War veteran with PTSD.

  Sarah. Deceased. F. Navajo. Wife of George.

  Trice Killian. 39. M. African American. Washington, DC. Custom prosthetics team leader, U.S. State Department. Straight. Single.

  Umi. 30. Female-to-male transgender. Washington, DC. Bouncer.

  Vicki. 37. F. Caucasian. Washington, DC. Mother of Forest. Straight. Single.

  Weeko. 21. F. Navajo. Chinle, Arizona. Student and waitstaff, Two Spears Casino. Straight. Single.

  Xiomara Dace. 101. F. Hispanic. Springfield, Illinois. Retired. Widow.

  Yuptag. 60s. M. Japanese. Somewhere in Asia. Guru-warrior. Asexual.

  Zed. 40s. M. Springfield, Illinois. Left transfemural amputee.

  

  Actual quotes from message boards posted at

  www.fetlife.com

  I don’t have a sexual attraction towards amputees. But I have a horrible fascination with wanting to be amputated. Maybe I just want to be ruined.

  I am interested in the removal. The after. And what happens to the limbs and the bodies.

  I understand that for many people permanence is very important. But would anybody prefer the possibility of reversible amputations? I think it would be intense if rather than the changes being in my own control, they were in the control of a dominant partner. He could render me limbless and be the one to decide when I get those limbs back.

  My fantasy is of being left with no limbs, incapable of independent movement, just a fucktoy to be picked up and used. Maybe with long-term wear of a bitchsuit my forearms and calves would atrophy so I wouldn’t be able to use them at all, much like a quadruple amputee. I could live with that.

  I also am strongly into the idea of having my penis removed, so I am unable to achieve release. I like the idea of it being a trophy for someone, particularly a dominant woman.

  I want to be blind,
too, and maybe deaf.

  I believe I have had the symptoms of BIID since the age of 10, when I began to play the war amputee with my friends, and had recurrent dreams of losing my left leg in a fire or at the school playground. More recently I have been dreaming of being released from the hospital between two crutches, satisfied at finally being complete.

  I fantasize about being kidnapped and having both hands and feet removed. I would have to live on all-fours like a pet.

  I hate my arms and legs. I feel I shouldn’t have been born with them. I think of myself as a torso until I look in the mirror. I would give up all my limbs if anyone wants them.

  It is the first thing I think about when I wake up, all day long, and the last thing at night. I pretend when I’m driving that I’m using hand controls. I scoot around on my butt or walk on my knees when I am at home. I surf the Internet all the time for videos of amputees and fictional stories to read. I can’t get away from it.

  I have been this way all my life.

  It’s not like being suicidal, this compulsion LORRIE has. She doesn’t want to actually die. Just, sometimes, Lorrie looks at her right arm and thinks it shouldn’t be there. The arm seems an extra and very foreign appendage, like a super-sized skin tag, growing on account of nobody’s fault but undesirable in its strangeness all the same.

  When Lorrie considers her arm, it’s with the dedicated intention of a teenage girl squeezing every last blackhead from the sides of her hormonally-afflicted nose. A gross thing, a bad thing—that must come out (or off) immediately—like a birthmark, or unfortunately large ears, or rather more unfortunately small breasts (the ears being easily hidden by long hair). Lorrie stares in the mirror at the parts of herself she hates, and imagines all the ways (short of magical thinking) to make them disappear. Her right arm and occasionally both bewildering feet.

  From the massage chair at her favorite Korean nail salon, Lorrie leans forward to check on Jung-il’s progress. Eight of Lorrie’s nine toenails are a newly shiny shade of Pomegranate Punch, still wetly red and gleaming as the toe she cut off at thirteen.

  It hadn’t been with suicidal intention then, either, that Lorrie accidentally-not accidentally stepped directly down onto the sheet metal music box. She’d been curious, the way she was about girls that year (how much better they smelled, flicking their flower-scented hair behind them in long waves, than stupid, stinky, testosterone-charged boys).

  She’d thought, I wonder what it feels like (to stick a finger inside yourself) (to be kissed) (to lie to your parents) (to become an amputee) ( … what?) and like all those other experiments, this one had felt marvelously real, too; alive, authentic, part of (though not defining) her goddamn teenage identity. As the smooth copper plate bit into the baby-soft webbing between her pinky and fourth toes, it was a love bite of the highest order: reverential. Clean. Pure.

  With that bright pain came a shuddering wave that peaked in the muscles near her newly-menstruating uterus, clenching and releasing in the most triumphant (read: first) orgasm little Lorrie had ever had. A truer sensation she’d never experienced, or since. Her first scout badge on the long and sometimes lethal road to amputee-dom.

  In April 2002, BARTHOLOMEW JORDAN was a U.S. Army captain and platoon leader in charge of 18 recruits at Camp Victory in Baghdad, Iraq.

  In May 2002, he was an honorably-discharged ex-Army captain, short two recruits and a healthy left forearm. The recruits he lost when their jeep triggered a buried IED. The arm he lost to a Sunni sniper with lucky aim. It was the single greatest moment of Captain Jordan’s military career. Enough for a man with career military ambitions to retire on the spot and go to work for a Chicago-based start-up specializing in plastic explosives.

  On paper, Mantid Labs produces C-4 for a wealthy demolition company. In reality, they work toward refining Sprängdeg m/46, a Swedish plastic explosive, by experimentally bonding pentaerythritol tetranitrate with the thermoplastic dibutyl phthalate. If successful, Mantid Labs will (secretly) own the only putty explosive with a higher detonation velocity than any other studied plastic, allowing for a sensitivity level identical to the Czech Semtex 1-A.1

  On his first day at Mantid, Bartholomew Jordan flexes his fresh hook arm and is, well, hooked on the work. By day two, his co-creators have taken to calling him CAPTAIN HOOK. Bartholomew doesn’t wear a red trench coat or a tri-corner hat, but he has the proud spine and broad shoulders of the captain he was, and the captain he is becoming.

  1 Used in commercial blasting, demolition, and in certain military applications; notoriously popular with Islamic militants.

  TRICE KILLIAN rubs the tired from his eyes, and with a mighty yawn shuts down his system for the night. The 3D modeling software auto-saves then blinks out, momentarily leaving its inverse image on the suddenly black screen. The afterglow shows what looks like a robotic arm, a complex but exceedingly graceful web of fiberoptic filaments and cool blue metal. Hidden beneath a series of seamlessly articulating plates are nano-chips 1/12,000 the thickness of a human hair. These respond to body electricity as fluidly as motor neurons, facilitating every physical whim from a left hook that could, Incredible Hulk-style, smash concrete, to the gentlest caress of an infant’s soft crown or a lover’s lips. Scratch-resistant, waterproof, and easily dissembled for deep cleaning, one might even say the prosthesis is preferable to a real arm. It never gets cold or mosquito-bitten, has perfect handwriting, and executes every command flawlessly.

  By the time Trice packs up his bag for the night and switches off his desk lamp—the only one still burning in the office—the image’s afterglow has faded into top-level secrecy once more. On his way out, Trice flashes his badge at three different ID checkpoints, submits to routine fingerprint and retinal verification scans, slides his bag through an advanced X-ray machine that airports everywhere should have but don’t (because this technology, too, is government-owned), then exits the Pentagon into a humid August evening.

  At 32, LORRIE feels proud of the life she’s created for herself. Single, yes, but in every other way successful: financially, spiritually, civically. Lorrie serves as Chief Communications Officer for a prestigious presidential museum that in addition to “making history come alive” for the children and parents of central Illinois, regularly hosts traveling exhibits on socially-responsible and timely topics. Celeb photographer Annie Liebovitz hung her under-appreciated landscape shots here (some of which showcased the president’s hometown). An off-color version of the Body Worlds2 installation displayed Siberian prisoners’ preserved bodies and the traumas that killed them, which was relevant because four sitting U.S. presidents have been assassinated. Ever wonder what a bullet through the brain looks like on the inside? What poison does to the lining of a stomach? A half-severed penis, the teethmarks still evident? BodyHurts© had been a beautiful crime scene without the blood mucking up all the finer details.

  Such exhibits are always interesting, and Lorrie loves writing the press releases that accompany a new exhibit opening, attending the preview with wealthy museum patrons to get a quote or two over a glass of state-funded sherry, nibbling locally-processed, small-batch cheeses, and skewering olives with more force than is necessary when pretending they are the corrupt (and corpulent) governor’s yellow belly.

  None of the temporary exhibits trump her favorite, however: a permanent exhibit tucked down a dark corridor in a rotunda, the walls of which are painted a lusty red. All the lighting comes from track-mounted spotlights aimed at fathead-wrapped press boards spaced evenly around the round room’s periphery. Entitled “The Maim and the Miracle,” the exhibit had initially opened to commemorate the Battle of Shiloh’s 150th anniversary. It educates the public on the horrors of Civil War battlefield medicine. Cases clustered near the room’s center hold assorted authentic artifacts like a lead slug some nameless Yankee had been told to bite down upon while a doctor with a flimsy saw proceeded to amputate his leg. From the press boards leer enlarged graphics of grisly amputation techniques, including t
he circular amputation, wherein a small knife is used to cut in a circular fashion all around and through the skin and muscle surrounding a bone, before a hacksaw finishes the job. A hooked tenaculum then pulls the arteries from the stump, that they might be tied off and the spiral tourniquet unbound, the flap sewn closed, and the patient sent to (hopefully) mend sans antibiotics.

  Yes, this has been Lorrie’s porn for five years running. Five years as CCO. Five years of lunch breaks spent wandering around the museum’s antechambers, watching people who didn’t know they were being watched, noting their habits, admiring well-behaved kiddos who quietly, studiously read each exhibit placard, and quietly, studiously cursing those who used flash photography to snap selfies with the freestanding wax figures, the “No Flash Photography Allowed” sign clearly photobombing the background of each pic. Meandering backstage of the theater, nodding Hi to the actors in their period dress, then always arriving, irresistibly drawn back to, the Red Room; memorizing each diagram and rusty dull blade, every cracked glass vial still half-full of opium—medicines that almost two hundred years after their production cause heinous chemical burns when you accidentally drop a vial during install. Vials from a kit marked Dr. Braker, Remarkable Remedies, 1863.

  Morphine, a substance in opium, is still used in hospitals today. People still get addicted to it, all of us looking to kill the pain; or in Lorrie’s case, to induce it.

  Quickly, she finishes in the stall, flushes the toilet, washes her hands. Heads back to her office, back to work, where she usually feels satisfied for a full hour before her thoughts worm roguishly back to her right hand, click-clacking expertly against the keys, producing short press-friendly paragraph after productive paragraph, and yet—so useless.

  

  That arm, those tapering fingers; an ordinary limb, even attractive, but unnecessary!