An accident has caused a young man’s forehead to cave in. It collapsed like a paper bag when he stood up too fast in the woods and hit his head on a woman’s musical instrument case. Other than looking freakishly odd, he seemed fine after the incident. Smitten over the man, a woman showed her desire by going to the Monument, a hill that their community deems sacred, and stripping it of human-made structures. She wonders what the Blue Bottle would say about that, as she feels a strong urge to restore the Monument to a pre-human condition.
After the man’s cave-in incident, friends are strangely moved by his look, so they put a stocking cap on his head to hide the huge dent in his forehead. They all walk through the woods to attend an odd tennis match, and the man stays in the trees as his friends play below. His hat comes off, and while no one is surprised at his looks, he becomes the focus of everyone’s attention. A woman asks him if he has seen the Blue Bottle about his condition, and he says “No.”
The story pauses, and the scene changes to my driving a car in my small hometown. The roads are oddly marked (like I am in a future version of the town) so I miss a left turn. I drive on and make a dangerous u-turn, and eventually arrive to a future/alt version of my father’s business. In the shadowy rooms, I hear music, and go over to turn it off. It is a collapsible frame with speakers, wires, and buttons. The off switch doesn’t turn it off, but another janky switch does.
The man with the crushed forehead finds himself on the Memorial mound. Something drives him to strip away the human additions to the area. While he pulls a large piece of plastic out from under the duft of the trees, a woman shows up. “Have you visited the Blue Bottle yet?” she asks. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?! No.” “Well, I happen to be his house mate and we live just down the trail over there. Do you want to meet him?” “Sure,” the man answers.
While walking to the house, the man asks the woman why he is called the Blue Bottle. “Have you ever tried heroin?” she replies. “Uh, no,” he responds. “Well, it he’s called the Blue Bottle because of that.”
They approach the house, which bustles with activity. They walk through rooms of people preparing things for a feast and ritual, eventually leaving the main house through another door and into a courtyard. A man sits at a table and welcomes them with a smile. He asks the man with the caved-in forehead to sit.
While chatting, the Blue Bottle places a large round piece of leathery-looking bread on the table. He tells the man that he needs to eat the bread, so the man with the caved forehead picks it up. Parts of the loaf flak away, so the man breaks off the thin parts and pushes them into a small pile on the table. A bearded man walks up to the table, saying nothing, grabs a handful of the flakes, and eats them. He walks away, and the Blue Bottle replies “now that it looks like a buffalo, you should eat it.”
The man with the caved forehead breaks off a piece of the bread, laughs, and exclaims “now it’s shaped like a bicycle saddle!” He eats the piece, and then is shown to another outlaying building. He walks through a room that holds a long row of industrial stoves and ovens. A crowd of people work the ovens, while he walks by and exits out a screened-in door.
He exits out into a large field full of people preparing and congregating around bonfires. He looks back at the screened-in door and sees a sousaphone player exiting into the field with other brass band members. That must be the only entrance into this field the man with the caved-in forehead muses.
Whatever the loaf of bread is, the man does not feel any different. He finds himself by a fire, using his depressed cranium to make noises that mimic prehistoric animals. The crowd stops and listens to his sounds and slowly begin to grow weary of these realistic noises. Somewhere deep in their ancient homo sapien brains, a fear and flight trigger switches on. They’ve had enough of these scary sounds, which make them feel hunted.