My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

16. capo di tutti capi

Harriet Seibel had the largest, heaviest frontal lobe in Pocahontas High School in Mahwah.

Why does she have the biggest frontal lobe in town? I asked, raising my hand one day in biology class. And no sooner had I asked the innocent question than I was whisked off to the principal's office. All the Pocahontas High VIP's were there: principal, vice-principal, security chief, head of the neurobiology department, faculty advisor to the Eugenics Club, a representative from DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and Pocahontas High's media liaison, Mr. Chenowirth.

Don't worry, said the principal, you're not being punished — you just asked a very sensitive question.

Well, why does Harriet Seibel have the biggest, heaviest frontal lobe in school? I reinquired.

Maybe I can explain, said Dr. Kline who, with his sharply cut suits and iridescent violet ties and his passion for ballroom dancing and tropical fish, was a perennial favorite of students in and out of neurobiology. You see, he said, Harriet's brain grows heavier because it's developing more synapses.

Well, how can you tell? I asked.

We can tell, Dr. Kline said, because each week when we do a CAT scan and a microscopic examination of her brain tissue we detect pronounced increases in dendrites… Do you know what dendrites are?

Gosh, Dr. Kline, I said, I don't think we've done that chapter yet.

Dendrites are the filamentous branches of a nerve cell that harvest information from the synapses and forward them to the main body of a cell.

I scribbled notes as quickly as I could and then I looked up. I think she's sad, I said, because the shadow of her head obscures whatever it is she's looking at.

Son, do you know why she's kept in a cage here at Pocahontas over the weekend and fed tapioca pudding the whole time? asked Mr. Chenowirth.

No, I said.

Well, you see, said Dr. Kline, there are more and more toxic pollutants in the atmosphere like chlorine and acrylonitrite, and hydrogen chloride — and the earth's population is increasingly vulnerable to these poisons because it's become too inbred… The level of genetic homogeneity is so high that our immune systems have been left with too limited a repertoire to defend against the toxic pollutants — so in order for the human species to adapt and survive and prosper we need a dramatic increase in genetic variety — and that requires profoundly exogamous cross-fertilization.

You mean mating with extraterrestrials… with aliens… with spacemen?

Exactly! said everyone, nodding.

And, said Dr. Kline, who would a spaceman from an advanced civilization want to mate with more than the girl with the biggest, heaviest frontal lobe in Pocahontas High School… namely…

Harriet Seibel? I ventured. Exactly!!

It will be seventeen years ago this winter that I was taken to the principal's office and first told of Harriet Seibeѕs strange plight. Today she lives in Texas — in the Houston Astrodome— it's the only skull-like structure in the United States that's large enough to accommodate her brain, which has grown by now to truly enormous proportions. And as you've probably surmised, I've fallen in love with Harriet. Being with her is not always easy and our relationship is a stormy one — after all, she's been literally fucked all her life by spacemen — and her attitude toward men is understandably ambivalent but I do love her very much and we're working on things — a therapist visits us at the Astrodome once a week for couples counseling… so we'll see what happens.

One last thought — since I've already succumbed to my nostalgia about those days at Pocahontas High… I was probably the only guy in town who had his own mother as his high school English teacher. But I'll never figure out the way she signed my yearbook:

We are merely goose pimples on the arm of the law.