Every night, as his people did, he unravelled his skull. It was not easy in the cramped quarters of the bunk, but he managed all the same, clamping the standard-issue flashlight between his toes as his two hands worked to undo the laced diploe that comprised most of his pericranium. The first few times after lights-out we watched, entranced, after he had patiently explained it to all fifteen of us in that tiny room, scrawling a brief diagram of the procedure on the back of his locker with dry-erase marker: unfold the flaps of skin behind the neck, like a fortune-teller-flower, and begin pulling on the loose end he so carefully tucked away the previous time around. With that would come undone the first sutures between the occipital calvaria, which then flay open to bring with them the temporal and parietal calvaria, exposing the fish-white musculature that lay within. The undone bone would go into his helmet, lined especially with a different plastic bag every night, coming together in a soft pile of fibre that looked not unlike cotton. When he was done, all that remained would be strips of muscle, the steel frame of his jaw, the enamel whites of his eyes -- and his gold-plated sewing-machine brain, camshafts clattering and shuttering in the humid night air.