The Parable of the Well-Intended Lobotomist (From Film Show) – J. P. Guernsey

November 16, 2025

It opens with a man in his car on the road waiting behind a handicapped school bus that is stopped at a street corner to let off a retarded child. The man is waiting for a palpably long time, presumably because the retarded child cannot be left alone and the bus driver is waiting for the arrival of a parent or guardian—a presumption which is vindicated by the arrival of an old man with a warm but tired face—the retard’s grandpa. He’s got with him on a leash an adolescent golden retriever, trained to sit very politely by his side, the leash with such slack as to appear unnecessary other than as a formality, as though part of the dog’s wardrobe, like a coat or walking stick he had fetched for himself on the way out the door in order to look sharp for his owner’s grandson. Then the boy exits the bus, lumbers over to the curb with a broken, nervous gait, hugs his grandpa, and attempts to pet the dog by slapping it on the head far too brutally, the way the retarded can sometimes be seen attempting to show affection toward animals and sometimes women.

The bus shuts its doors and drives away—the man in the car behind takes a few extra seconds to drive off himself and turns left onto the next street, the bus having turned right. He parks his car in his reserved spot at the General Hospital. After a morning of surgery, the man, a neurosurgeon, sits down across from the hospital’s chaplain in the cafeteria. After the chaplain takes a bite of his sandwich, the surgeon asks him if the mentally retarded are guilty for their violence. The chaplain, a Protestant of some sort, tells the surgeon that our brothers and sisters with special needs are a gift to the world and will surely see the Kingdom of Heaven. Surely—the surgeon hears it again in his head as he sips a spoonful of his soup. Surely. Surely. Surely. Special Needs Kingdom of Heaven.

That night, the surgeon is working tirelessly in his basement, the bright light of a waning gibbous through a small window illuminating his construction: a homemade surgical setup. After gazing briefly at his creation, the surgeon kneels down to pray inaudibly in the moonlight.

The next day the chaplain is taking a big bite of another sandwich. Next he’s walking to his car, fumbling for his keys. He slows down to focus on finding the right key and drops them once and bends over to pick them back up. He’s sitting in his car and pressing the SEEK button on his FM radio until he lands at the 1:26 mark of Aqualung. He sits hunched a bit with an expressionless face, taking a few slow breaths, hardly moving, until the 2:18 mark, where the surgeon reaches from the back seat and puts a plastic shopping bag over the chaplain’s head. The song continues over a montage of routine hospital work until the 3:11 mark, where it fades out over a shot of the surgeon’s front driver’s side wheel and door as he pulls up gently in his driveway. He pops open the trunk and carries a slightly stirring golf bag as one would a bride.

The chaplain opens his eyes, electrical tape around his head holding a washcloth in his mouth. He struggles in his chair a few times, spurring the surgeon to calmly look up from his notes and take off his reading glasses.

“Pastor Jim,” he says, “I think you’re a very good man who deserves everything you’ve promised others. I want to be personally involved in your seeing the Kingdom of Heaven.”

The chaplain’s brow furrows and he struggles once again, briefly, one weak shake. A few heavy drops of rain echo very faintly from outside.

The surgeon looks down at his notes then back up at the chaplain and says, “Would you like to hear the prayer I wrote? ‘O God, make me a maker of martyrs, priest of cognitive sacrifice, Judas of the frontal lobes. Endow me with the power to crucify the Vitruvian Man so that there might be ushered in an extinction of sin and this species might be saved.’”

The chaplain breathes out of his nose a lot more heavily than he did in his car, which now sits among a less populated parking lot as rain pours down. A time lapse ensues until the sun rises on a dry parking lot.

In the basement, the surgeon is stitching up the chaplain’s head. He takes a good look at the finished product and leaves his patient awake but still bound and heavily anesthetized and walks over to the basement’s kitchenette to start a pot of coffee. The full coffee-making process is documented, down to each single drip until the pot is full. The chaplain has a big, dumb grin on his face.

Audible camera flash. The surgeon is on stage with the retarded chaplain, receiving a Nobel Prize. He shakes many hands, speaks to many reporters, smiles and nods under the twinkling of many cameras. UNESCO declares his basement a World Heritage Site, the house above converted into the world-renowned Salvific Impairment History Museum. The surgeon takes his new grant money and moves to Switzerland to further his research. Lab assistants are hurriedly carrying patients up the snowy mountain in golf bags to the mountaintop research center, Le Grand Martyreur, where the would-be martyrs emerge from their golf bags to receive their scalpeled tonsure.

One night, the lighting is somber. The surgeon and his team are studying numerous charts that lead them to a disheartening conclusion: at the current rate, they will be unable to make a dent in the world’s population of sinners. Further, those too old who have already consciously sinned may only end up deprived of the faculties to repent. The team grows worried, but the surgeon has the answer to their problem in big, bold letters on the next slide: CHILDREN ARE THE FUTURE.

Le Grand Martyreur shifts its focus to a new field: dysgenics. The whole extended team is gathered outside the front gate the following morning before a crowd of reporters. “For the sake of the human species’ salvation,” the surgeon tells the world, “it has become imperative that its offspring be bred for it.”

The foot-assistants are replaced with golf carts, some bringing up children, others former patients. Le Grand Martyreur has split into two teams: Prenatal Retardation and Juvenile Retardation. While the men and women are brought to meet with the hemifertility specialists, the children are brought to the Trauma Center, where the leading psychiatrists and pediatricians have collected reports on the most effective methods of impairing a child’s development, including but not limited to: iron- and folic-acid-fortified food, reduced sunlight, polyester underwear, SSRIs, sugar restriction, “Pentecostalism,” almond milk, cross-country running, fluoridated water, scary movies, noise-amplifying wallpaper—there’s file a stamped CANCELED in red which details that the molestation program was resulting in far too many homosexual patients, thus preventing sufficient reproduction and terminating the dysgenic bloodlines pre-maturely. The JR department’s ambiguously sexed Chief of Staff reads the report and slams a fist on his or her desk. He or she turns to his or her typewriter and yanks out the freshly typed page headered TRAUMATIC HEAD INJURY.

Up in his office, the surgeon also reviews the canceled molestation program, resting his left temple on his left thumb while the coinciding elbow and forefinger rest on his desk and tap his forehead, respectively. He takes the molestation program from the JR file and moves it to PR.

The next day while the coffee is dripping, he’s telling a colleague his idea: “Imagine if the process of retardation could begin from the very impetus of life: the moment of conception.”

“Doc,” says the colleague, not even lifting his eyes from his newspaper, “we’re already beyond that. We’re retarding before conception. Isn’t that the whole purpose of the gene editing program? If you’re just trying to cover all your bases then yeah, go for it I guess, but that’s no bombshell, with all due respect.”

The surgeon grabs the sitting man by the lapels of his lab coat and jostles him to full attention:

“That’s all potential. Nothing but potential. It’ll pay off, I’m sure, but that’s not what I’m talking about. You’re setting a very complex board with the genetic program, but what about the first move? Do you understand the difference between setting up the board and making the first move? You can rig the spaces all you want, but what if we could ensure that the player never draws a one or two? What if the player never even has to leave home? What if instead of simply priming a life to potentially be less capable of sin once it’s more developed, what if the life were conceived in such traumatic fashion that it never makes it past that starting point?”

“Straight to Heaven…”

“Straight to the Kingdom of Heaven. Do not pass GO; do not collect Original Sin.”

“We would be breeding Heaven’s population.”

“We would be Le Grand Martyreur.”

But they come upon the issue of the parents: the volunteers who were coming to Le Grand Martyreur PR were expecting to have and raise children. Part of the research’s grant is distributed as a stipend to volunteers, so financially unstable expectant parents made up a large portion of the project.

That night the surgeon is sitting alone at a booth in a tavern, forkful of fish rising to his mouth, deep orange light cast on his face in the dim room from the tabletop lantern. The flame flickers a few times. At the other end of the restaurant, at the bar, a young, attractive woman laughs with a small group.

Rain begins to seep from the early night sky into an inclined corridor bridging two streets with stone steps stretching down the hillside between buildings. The young woman stops on a step to light a cigarette from her purse, umbrella in one hand and lighter in the other as she holds the long cigarette in her mouth, maneuvering in a manner displaying grace and skill. She watches the rain in front of her for a moment, then the dark spots the drops are forming on the stone where now falls the lit cigarette as the surgeon grabs her from behind. She lets out a strained cry, but he covers her mouth with one hand, the other pulling her panties down from under her skirt. The woman’s stiletto heel slips off the ledge. Both figures fall forward and hit their heads hard on the stone. For a very brief moment blood mingles with the increasing rainfall as the two lie still. Cut to black. Fade into a reel of the handicapped school bus along its route. Adagio from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2.