Read an Excerpt

I first saw the Big Giant Floating Head on the same day that my wife Liz announced on Twitter that she didn’t love me anymore. You can go back on her timeline and read the tweet: @bouchergutter, I don’t love you anymore. Not sure I ever did! Then she tweeted out a picture of the letter I’d sent her three days earlier, in which I apologized and asked for forgiveness, along with the caption, Cant wait to finally DIVORCE this loser.

I didn’t see Liz’s tweet at first because I was riding my bike through town, a twelve-foot aluminum gutter drain balanced on my shoulder. I wasn’t particularly good at gutterwork, but I hadn’t completely failed at it yet either—not like I had at marriage, and writing, and most everything else. For years before that I’d worked in fiction—as a novelist, bookseller, editor, verb salesman, you name it. But I’d hurt people—hurt myself—with my last book, a novel called Golden Delicious. That story’s too sad for me to tell, suffice it to say that someone died because of me and I subsequently gave up writing and books altogether.

Something broke inside me when I did, though: A heart-sized hole formed in my chest; my imagination grew a beard and its spine began to curve. Then I began drinking, lost my driver’s license, and got kicked out of my own house. Not even the bike was mine—I was borrowing it from Bill Sunflower, a gutter guy I worked with who was letting me crash at his place while things cooled down with my wife. Liz and I had gone through this kind of thing before, but every time she took me back. When I checked my phone at the corner of Main and Lex that day, though, I saw her tweet and my stomach roiled. There was a thought in my head, a literal voice, that said, It’s over, Chris. Like, over-over.

I changed course and pedaled home—it was only a few blocks away. Liz was working from home at the time, and she was sitting at the kitchen table and saw me approaching. She stood up and grabbed her phone, threw open the window, and started shouting at me. You can see it all on her timeline: me standing in the driveway next to my own pickup truck (which I wasn’t allowed to drive at the time), the bike and the drain at my feet, shouting awful things at Liz. And look how beautiful she is—her fireplace eyes, her hair a parade—even as she shouts back at me, “You’re drunk!”

“No I ain’t!” I say, though I clearly am.

Then you can hear the wrinkle of paper: Liz’s holding my letter. “You were drunk when you wrote this, too!”

“No, sir!” I say.

“Oh, really?” Liz holds the letter in front of the phone. “I’m not a man of worlds,” she says. “What’s a man of worlds?”

“Words, I meant!” I say.

“I know I’ve mistake,” she continues. “You’ve mistaked?”

Then you can hear me say, “Liz.”

“Do you mistake often, Chris?”

“Liz,” I say again, my voice as thin as paper. “What is that?”

Then Liz says “Holy—,” and the phone turns off.“—shit,” is what Liz said next, when she saw what I was pointing at. “Is that a—”

“It’s an eye,” I said. It was: a giant eye, staring at me through the trees behind the Camerlenghis’ house. “There’s another one next to it,” I said. I crossed the street. “It’s a face!” I shouted. From that angle I could see the whole thing: blue eyes, brown hair, chin stubble—a big giant floating head, staring right at me with a smile on his face like he was listening to a joke.

Liz came outside. “Jesus Christ, Chris,” she said.

Then Glen Camerlenghi swung open his porch door. “Leo won’t stop barking,” he said. He looked up and saw the face. “What the hey is that?”

I crossed back to our side of the street.

“It’s moving—Chris, it’s moving!” Liz said. “It’s following you!”

It was. I took a few strides down the sidewalk and the Big Giant Floating Head moved with me. “Crap,” I said.

“It’s some sort of fancy drone,” said Glen. “Right?”

I ran back across the street and picked up my bike.

“Chris?” said Liz.

“I’m calling the police,” said Glen.

I hoisted the drain over my shoulder and mounted the bike.

“Where are you going?” Liz shouted at me.

I started pedaling and the Big Giant Floating Head followed. I sped up and the head sped up too. I took a sharp turn on Gore and the face stayed with me—hopping trees, lifting over buildings, dropping lower in clearings. There was no outrunning it. Two or three people shouted at me along the way—“Hey!” one said; “Look up!” said another—and at the light on Argyle an old man in a blue van kept beeping at me. I stopped at the crosswalk and gave him the finger, and he rolled down his window. “There’s a big giant head above you, guy!”

“No shit!” I said. Then I saw a gap in the crossing traffic and pedaled away from him.

Two blocks from Bill’s house, though, I heard a police siren and I saw blue flashing lights behind me. I looked back: it was Cass Donner, who used to stop me all the time when I was driving and had once arrested me for public drunkenness. Cass was OK—not as bad as some of the other cops in town. I stopped pedaling and she got out of the cruiser and stared up at the face. “What do you know about this, Boucher?” she said.

I shook my head. “Picked it up at my house, followed me here.”

“It’s following you?”

“Seems to stay just that far behind me,” I said.

The face smiled down at Cass.

Cass took a photo of the face with her phone. “Just stay there, OK?” she said, and she ducked into her cruiser, where I heard her say something into her walkie.

I put down the gutter and checked my phone. There was a text from Liz: Where r u is that thing still followng u?

I didn’t reply. There was another one from Bill. Waitin on that drain, he wrote.

Got held up, I replied. Be there in a few.

Then Cass appeared behind me. “I want you to just hang tight for a few minutes, OK?”

I got off my bike.

Cass looked down at the drain. “Gutter drain?”

“Yuh-huh,” I said.“For your place?”

I shook my head. “Working with Bill Sunflower.”

“Holy moly—that guy,” she said.

Then a fire truck pulled up in front of me and two guys hopped down from the cab. One was Al McLeod, who was in the class behind me at Coolidge High; the other guy I didn’t know.

“Like I told you,” said Cass to the second guy.

McLeod put his hand over his eyes, as if blocking out the sun. “Just hanging there like that?”

“Following our friend Christopher here,” said Cass.

McLeod found his phone and took a picture of the face.

“Let’s get up there,” said the other guy, and McLeod nodded. They got back in the truck, moved it thirty or so yards down the road, and parked under the face. Then McLeod raised a ladder off the back of the truck and the other guy climbed it. When he reached the top of the ladder he was about twenty feet below the Big Giant Floating Head. “Whoa,” he said.

“What is it?” shouted McLeod.

“It’s breathing!” shouted the guy.

Al looked back at Cass and me.

The firefighter scrambled down the ladder. “Fucking thing is breathing,” he said.

Cass and McLeod met him on the ground and they huddled and talked about what to do.

What the fuck C, texted Bill.

I sat down on the curb. Cops here, I typed. Waiting for them to let me go.

By this point, some neighbors were gathering on the sidewalk. Then another cop car pulled up and a cop I didn’t know got out and ran over to Cass.

WHAT, Bill texted. Wht did u do?

Nothing, explain it when I get there.

Finally, Cass walked over to me and I stood up to talk to her. “Well,” she said. “We’re going to get the word out and see what we can find out. In the meantime, we’ll just keep an eye on it.”

I nodded.

“You think it’ll keep following you?”

“Guess we’ll see,” I said.