A line projecting from a man's forehead is all oiled up, slippery and infinite, flowing from a far off source, inching backwards on his pate and vanishing against the horizon in the opposite direction.
He cups the line to his ear, listening to the sound of taut sputtering machinery operating in unison. He then follows the line to its terminus or wellspring, traveling by foot until coming to a swivelling metallic ball looming at the center of a city.
The man stands before the ball watching his line run through the walls far above him. The ball is threaded up with a network of hairlines projecting outward in all directions from the hub, octopus style.
The lines run to where they are rooted in the foreheads of men with varying degrees of baldness who move freely, untethered by their threads which they pull while going about their daily business keeping the ball swivelling with each and every movement.
The man, never passing the others of this rooted set on his way to the ball, walks around it banging on the tinny walls, finding the entrance hatch and pulling his line in with him.
The interior apparatus of the parietal structure, or, jargon aside - the innards of the big ball; is a huge control room with rows of floodlights lining a curved ceiling and circular walls all speckled over with tiny openings through which the lines run in and out.
At the center of the room, wedged between floor and ceiling, is a grillwork partition where a cadre of line operators are maneuvering the lines through the openings in the walls as they unwind from slow, moderate, and rapid receding spindles and run through bottles of cure via cause oil.
The rooted set go bald on this oil conveyed to their pates via the lines which shorten as they absorb them, getting pulled towards and into the ball by the line operators.
The ball is a generic umbrella toupee, causing covering and hence curing the bald, who become line operators, causing the baldness of others. The lines are the heavenly elixir of all good men. Overlapping genetically & commercially so that infinitely receding families willing to do business, can get a roof over their heads and benefit from the cure.
The man steps through the glistening webbed network, feeling his line well up inside him, oozing in through a cranial pore, soothing his whole head and face the way cool tonics and aftershaves do.
He watches the operators maneuvering the lines through the openings in the walls.Some operators sit at tables adjacent to the grillwork where they scribble down jargon in little pamphlets, while others thread newly wound lines through bottle and wall openings, pulling them out of the ball and rooting them in the foreheads of the populace.
Still other operators stand facing the inner walls of the ball pressing their eyes against the openings and peering out of them as though through telescopes, scanning the terrain of the city until spotting the rooted set moving closer to the ball.
Sometimes several days pass before even one is spotted, while waiting the operators watch the distant traffic and crowds of pedestrians as well as an occasional mischievous child who throws an egg at the ball and then hides, watching from a distance to see if the operators will emerge to come look for him or her.
Sooner or later, the rooted set come into view, one by one at intervals going bald simultaneously at different rates; the operators pulling them towards and into the ball gently, without tethered coercion, guiding them in through the entrance hatch.
As the man threads a line through an oil bottle he watches another operator shackling a rapid receding spindle in rubber encasing so it won't get out of his control, snapping its line in mid-process, the man at the other end disappearing into the city with a broken thread trailing from his forehead in the wind.
A line projecting from a man's forehead is all oiled up, slippery and infinite, flowing from a far off source, inching backwards on his pate and vanishing against the horizon in the opposite direction.