The bartender turned the music up even louder. I was almost yelling.
“You wanna see a magic trick?”
“Sure.” She was smirking now.
I didn’t blame her. I was being a bit of a tool. And I probably smelled like a gin factory. At least she laughed at my joke about Jesus and M&Ms. That was nice of her. I’d only just met her, and the only two things I knew about her was she was intimidatingly attractive and her name was Lisa.
I stood up and put my right hand down flat on the table. I asked her to make sure there was nothing unusual, that I wasn’t twisting it weird and so on. She did, and it seemed okay. Okay.
Slowly, my left hand helped my right around in a complete circle. Without lifting my hand, I had her inspect it again.
“Aha,” was all she said, raising an eyebrow. She smiled a little.
“You’re not very easy to impress are you?”
“Well, it’s not magic. It’s just a trick.”
“So you’re a skeptic then.”
“Nope,” she said, “I’m a real magician.”
I squinted a bit. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a magician, but I knew a few card tricks and such. Party things. But even if I wasn’t very good, I still knew the basics behind most of the bigger things, the sleight of hand and stage illusions that get on TV.
“Like a stage magician?”
“Not really. I don’t do entertainment. I practice magic.”
“Like what, incantations, spells and whatever?”
“More like, I studied it at magic school for four years, but sure.”
“Magic school.”
“Yea. I have a degree in magic.”
“You have a weird sense of humor.”
She just smirked at me and turned away.
I turned and walked off. For a while we were talking to other people at the bar, but I found, despite my judgement, I kept looking back her way. I was trying to play it cool, I guess, to act like she wasn’t a big deal. I mean, either she was fucking with me or she was just absolutely crazy. Right?
But still, there was something. In the way she was so serious about being absolutely crazy. She was super confident and that was intimidating. So was the way she looked at me with those hungry eyes, brown and bright, like she was about to make out with me or maybe stab me in the stomach. Or both.
And by and by, a large number of people went outside to smoke cigarettes in the rain, a quiet song came on the stereo, and we were pretty much alone at the bar.
“So how did your quidditch team do?” I asked.
She actually laughed. “I was wondering when you’d say that.”
“What, are you psychic too or something?”
“Nope, it’s just what everyone says.”
“Well okay. What do they ask you next?”
“Well, you’re about to ask me to do a magic trick.”
“Okay. Know any tricks?”
“And here’s where I go, ‘I don’t do tricks, I do magic.’”
“And hence you remain mysterious and unattached.”
“There’s only one guy who can get to me show off my magic.”
“And that’s your boyfriend or something isn’t it.”
“Nope. Jack Daniels.”
I waved to the bartender.

I remember waking up, and everything was very, very blurry. I took a while to blink and wonder where I was. It all came back, except for leaving the bar. My insides felt a bit stirred up, and I could taste the liquor still on my breath.
And she was there. Changed into her PJs. I was still wearing the clothes from the night before.
I let out a groan, practically involuntary. My head was throbbing now.
She turned over, already have awake and looked at me wearily.
“You okay?”
“I’ll make it.”
“Drink some water.” She passed me a glass. I downed the whole thing and felt a little better and a lot of the same.
“How much did we drink, jesus?”
“Well, I drank an iced tea, and you had a bucket of whiskey.”
“What the fuck.”
“Sorry. It was just, I don’t know, I kind of wanted to kidnap you and take you home with me.”
“You could have asked, ‘Will you come home with me?’”
“But then you would have thought we were gonna sleep together and when I told you we weren’t, you would have left.”
I tried to think about it. Thinking hurt. But it sounded about right. That’s what I’d do.
“So instead, you drugged me with booze—”
“And you passed out as soon as we got home. All part of my master plan.”
“Curses, I fell for it. So now what? You went to great lengths to get me here.”
“Well, I was gonna show you a magic trick.”
“I thought you didn’t do tricks. You were quite specific.”
“Well, this one’s a trick.”
“Alright. Let’s see it.”
“Okay, lie still.”
That wasn’t very hard. She got up and pulled the bedsheet up to my chin. Then she sat back and looked at me, smiling.
“Well?” I asked. “What’s the trick?”
“I made your body disappear.”
“You what?”
“Made you disappear.”
“But I’m still here.”
“Yea,” she said. “But you’re just a head.”
I tried to get up. And for whatever reason, I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I could just look up.
“I can’t move,” I told her.
“Yea, duh, you’re just a head.”
“Really?”
“C’mon,” she said. And she picked me up. Well, in that moment I can’t really say my thoughts were very coherent, just a lingering sense of “uh-oh” as she walked into the bathroom and I saw, in the mirror, my disembodied head in her hands.
Eventually, I said, “Wow.”
“Pretty cool huh?” She turned me to face her.
“Yea, it’s pretty cool. I’m still in disbelief. Where’d my body go?”
“Away. Poof. Nowhere. Everywhere. Whatever you wanna think, really.”
“Can you make it reappear?”
“Yes.” She didn’t do anything. Just held me there. “But not right now.”
“You can’t or you won’t.”
“I’m gonna take a shower.”
“What about me?”
“You can watch TV.”
She took me back into her room and flipped the TV on. It was showing the weather. She set the remote next to me and went back to the bathroom. A few seconds later, I heard the shower running.
So that was that. For a minute, I just sat there numbly, trying to take everything in. I was bodiless, totally helpless. This was what she’d wanted, I reflected, she’d brought me back just to do this, to completely emasculate me, right? What a fucked up thing to do.
But I think, no, I know, I was starting to get into it. I liked her. I really liked her, and now I knew that now only was she not actually crazy, but she could certainly do real magic. That was a plus.
I also started to take in just exactly what being a disembodied head meant. I wasn’t breathing, or at least it didn’t seem like I needed to breathe, but I could blow out using my cheeks, and I could still talk. I didn’t seem to be gushing out blood, which was nice, but then again I’d lost my body to a bedsheet, not an axe, so it kind of added up.
I turned my attention to the remote beside me. I wanted to see if I could change the channel, maybe just move a little bit. Gradually, I was able to chin my way over to it until I could reach down and hopefully push one of the buttons with — my tongue? Maybe my chin. I nudged the remote. Nothing happened. I didn’t want to lick it, that seemed rude. I tried nudging it a little harder— and then I fell over.
So it was back to the weather. From my new angle, I could see out into the hallway, just a little bit. The door was suddenly nudged open, just a small bit. I heard a soft sound on the carpet and immediately recognized it as a cat.
A few seconds later, said cat appeared suddenly on the bed behind me, coming up to give me a sniff, but otherwise taking no real notice of me. It sat down a little bit in front of me and started to bathe.
The shower shut off with a clunk. I heard Lisa drying off, the sound of the hairdryer, the toilet. It seemed to go on and on, but then again, I had nothing to do but wait. Finally, the door opened, and there was Lisa, wrapped up in a towel.
“Your turn!” she said, her face glowing. She was smiling, ebullient, happier than I’d yet to see her.
“What’s with you?”
“Oh, nothing.” She came and picked me up and took me into the bathroom, and turned the sink on and pulled up the drain so it started filling up.
“You’re giving me a bath?”
“If you want one.”
“Um… Sure.”
She dunked my head into the sink, and started washing my face. And then my hair. All the while, she was humming, as if delighted.
“You like doing this don’t you?”
“I was about to say the same thing to you.”
“Well, yea. It’s neat.”
“The last guy I did this to almost cried.”
“Really?”
“Yea, he was all like, ‘But I need my body, I’m nothing without it,’”
“So pathetic. Bodies are for losers. Like you. Why do you still have a body? So uncool.”
“Oh, that burns.”
“You can still make up for it. Give me your body. I’ll shoulder the burden of uncoolness.”
She dunked me all the way under water, then pulled me out and threw me into a towel.
“Easy! Hey!”
She started laughing, then pulled me out, looking amusedly at me for a second. Suddenly, she kissed me on the lips.

“You want some more coffee?”
“Nope, but I’ll eat another pancake.”
She cut off another piece and popped it in my mouth.
“So yea,” she continued, “I guess I like to be in control. It makes me giddy, I’m sure you’ve noticed. So thank you for letting me take care of your head.”
“Well, thanks for taking care of my head. It’d be bullshit if you didn’t really, just left me there on the bed.”
“Oh, I’ve done that once.”
“What’d he do?”
“It was an april fools day joke.”
“Oh wow.”
“I didn’t even tell him either, just vanished his body in his sleep, set him in front of a mirror, and came back the next day.
“How’d he take it?”
“Mmm… Poorly.”
“So have you ever been … um… beheaded?”
“I call it, ‘cutified.’”
“Is that the magic school term?”
“No, they say beheaded. But yes, of course I’ve done it. A lot. We had this one professor who would only teach to a shelf of heads. To make sure we were paying attention.”
“What class was it?”
“Calculus.”
“Wait—”
“It was a university. This wasn’t some vocational training camp. It was college.”
“What’s it called?”
“Don’t laugh. Hodgewicks.”
“Hogwarts?”
“Hodgewicks.”
“So, Hogwarts. Got it.”
She put her face in her hands. “This is why I just tell everyone I went to state.”
“Oh c’mon. It’s funny. Admit it.”
“Yep. We even had a quidditch team as a joke.”
“So how’s it work?”
“What? It’s magic.”
“But how do you learn to say, disappear somebody? Or maybe—” I raised an eyebrow, “re-appear them?”
“It’s a way of — you ever do much programming? Like with computer?”
“Yea.”
“Well, it’s a way of programming um… reality. Like most of what we learn is all principle, how to bind things together, how to create extra spaces, how to save a point, and so on. It’s all very complicated, actually, because you can’t do any of it directly, it all has to come from — well, it’s like these fields, that act like magnetic fields, but in a lot of ways they’re not.”
“So what happened to my body?”
“The truth? We don’t know. We know how to make it go away and how to make it come back. It’s done with ‘commands’ a series of mental and physical manipulations, but the “language” of these is unknown. A lot of it is historical - magic’s history goes back a long way, to primeval times, but we don’t “understand” which commands mean what, specifically, except for a few of them. But it seems that it relates to string physics quite a bit - if you film something like, your body disappearing, in the film, get this— you will never have a body! So the way I think about it, at least me personally, and I could be wrong, but we just jumped into a universe where you’ve always been a head.”
“But you can go back, right?”
“Each command has an inverse, yea. So when I bring your body back, you being just a head will still have ‘happened’ to you, but not to the universe at large. But it sort of does. There are grey areas, unanswered questions, and so on, but this is why you don’t usually see this thing on TV.”
“Cause you can’t film it.”
“You can, but it won’t show up right. We could take you on TV right now, and it’d cause a media uproar, but then if we “undo” it and bring your body back, well, the memories of everyone who saw it would be altered along with you having a body again. It all has to do with physical properties, basically. You can combine, adjust, or sever certain things with the right commands. So basically, earlier, I had one world where my bedsheets had nothing in between them, from earlier, and one where you’re lying in between them. You take one and put it on the other, and there you go.”
“That sounds simple enough.”
“It isn’t.”
“Alright then.”
“You all done?”
“Yea.”
She took the plate to the sink. I was picked up from behind, and she looked at me, her eyes on fire. She licked a piece of syrup off my chin.
“Let’s go see a movie. I can smuggle you in in my purse.”