One of my friend's heads was broken. When I was there it hollered to me: "Bubble bubble." My friend waved to me. He did not know how to fix it. He was standing over it with a soldering iron. He hoped that would fix it somehow. It did not. We were perplexed. The head was a new head. It was shiny, and spoke a lot. Now it was speaking a lot too, but the words were coming out wrong.

"How do you know it's broken?" I asked my friend. He said it sounded like his old lit teacher. "I don't like making things that sound like people I know."

"Toil and trouble," shrieked the head.

It started to make me unsettled. He made the best heads in the world. To make heads, he had dropped out of university. He had made a good man out of himself. Heads were not easy to make. After college I stayed home and wrote fiction. I wrote fiction until my thumbs ached but my tendons grew very strong. I had not made a man out of myself, unlike him. The head spoke with the voice of his literature teacher. That might have been why I was unsettled. I did not like being spoken down to, not from a head.

"I think I'll have to throw it," said my friend. It sounded like a person he knew. Making heads is difficult when one knows many people. After dropping out of college, my friend had known many people. It was difficult for him to make them all sound different from one another. He knew of head makers who got lazy and made their heads sound the same. It was unsettling. The doubling of voices was unsettling. He told me once that those people would hear the same voice from many heads, day after day after day. He told me that those people ended up quite unsettled. They couldn't tell their head apart from others. That takes about five years, and then they would die.

"Fire burn and cauldron bubble," screamed the head.

I told him he could resell the head for a lower price. He said it was for a commission. A lit teacher had asked for a special price. "Sell it to me and you'll have the money," I said. He said he could not. He said that would undermine the ethics of his business. Then his heads would not be the best heads in the world. "You just want a reason to start over," I divined. He said: "Can't, I've already committed so much." The head was for a lit teacher, who had paid well. Half on the spot in a briefcase and the other half for later. He showed me the briefcase and it was full of hundred-dollar notes. The heads on the notes were all the same. I turned away. "I don't like looking at people I already know."

He closed the briefcase and looked at the head. "Maybe he won't notice." It would be easy not to notice. All lit teachers sounded alike. I remembered in school I had a lit teacher, or several. They taught me until they could not stand their own voices. Then another one would take over where they had left off. "Open your books to Chapter Four." I used to want to become a lit teacher. I thought I looked like one of them. All our books were all the same, except the lit teacher's, which was hardback. I thought lit teachers were very rich. Maybe that was why they had money to buy heads. I wondered how they had money to buy heads.

"Fillet of a fennel snake," blasted the head. "Buy from NTUC for $6.83/- a kilo."

My friend said, "They have a lot of spare time." I hit the head a few times. The head crackled. He held my hand back. "Don't treat the head that way." It was like slapping an old teacher. I asked him how he could have made one so similar. "Habit," he said, "pattern recognition." He was very bad at explanations. Making things was not a matter of effort to him. That thought made him sad. He once confessed he was afraid there would be no such thing as originality. One day he would have to start making other people's heads. I pointed out that that day might have come. "I know." He threw his head back. "It shouldn't have been a lit teacher then." I put my arm around him to comfort him. His shoulders were very tense and warm.

I said: "Maybe it's not so bad." He said: "Maybe you should hit it again." And he let me. And for a short time the head didn't sound like his old lit teacher anymore; it sounded like air flowing through a potato chip bag. He said: "Thank you." I said: "Anytime." He said: "Let's sit on it until tomorrow." The head moaned. It was getting very late. I stopped, he stopped, we were getting very tired; it was getting very hard for us to say anything new.