by Roman McClay
“The Viognier is around 13% alcohol -and grown at 4,300 feet- it was cluster pressed, and barrel fermented. Notice the cheddering of the white cheese; Jack let it sit for, nine months was it, Jack?” he asked.
“189 days, yes,” Jack Three said as they all chuckled at his precision. They each gazed at the deep greens, almost black, the texture of obelisks and tetrahedrons, the stars of grains, the leaf veins, the whiteness of the cheese, the ambergris ; the steam rose and the juices milked themselves from the meat.
“Now, these are small portions, because I have a Strasbourg goose fed on noodles from a rice drum, with much lower unctuousness, and for that I have,” he paused his speech and he placed an uncorked magnum bottle of a leviathan of a wine: the 2015 Château Mouton to which they all nodded knowingly and with expectation; expectation that from that 1.5L bottle they’d all get two full glasses of the First Growth.
He left the Strasbourg on the counter, five plates in a row along the 16-foot concrete slab that was thick and high off the ground; a counter comfortable for anyone -and they all were- at least 74” tall .
They ate and drank and began mentioning things like the way the foie gras blended with the Sauternes wine in a froth on the tongue. Jack One ate heartily and with abandon, imbibing the food and chewing the wine, with arms swollen from chopping lumber two hours prior to the meal. The outdoor fireplace -nine-feet tall and 15-feet wide and three-feet thick of one giant concrete monolith, and steel lintel & back- enclosed upon and let bloom a fire five-feet across and a meter high that bounced light off the containers and the men and was held down eventually by only the ponderous black night.
An ultrasonic pulse -issued from a device that ran up and down the perimeter- kept the mosquitos at bay. The moths spiraled like downed P50 planes into the fire and then darkness of ash. The conversation was robust but quiet, none of them liked to speak loudly so their own ears were adjusted for the sotto voce of conversation among five men of their type.
Jack Two sat back with a mouth full and let it dissolve on his tongue as he stopped eating to look at the artwork all over this shotgun of a house -a mere 320 sqft- and yet perfectly laid out. He never would have imagined such a feeling of space, grandeur and harmony in such a small footprint. But Blax had done it, he thought, he had crafted a shipping container home with no cloistering, and he had done it by refusing to hem in or sequester or make fucking storage boxes and shelving and stupid shit like that, the dumb shit that crammed most of these types of homes with more infrastructure than a Nasa Launch Pad .
It was open, and large, and his Spartan life was so simple that he had no need of this ubiquitous storage that most people -who pretend to downsize- insist that they need when they haul all their crap from a 2,000 square foot home in the suburbs to a tiny home they have had built. Even when normal people tried something interesting they missed the goddamn point, Jack Two thought.
Blax had built bookshelves into the walls, which he had effected by pushing the batten insulation against the metal outer wall with slimboard and boxing the studs with lumber running perpendicular to them. He then sheet-rocked and mudded those 36 boxes which held at least 20 books each, and it ran down the entire side of the house. It was beautiful and functional and the container held more books than he -Jack- could -or had bothered to- count; maybe 800 or 1,000 if one added the shelves of books above the doors and laying all about , Jack surmised as he looked around and let the meal cool and the wine warm.
Paintings by Blax hung next to works by Pinorte, Keith Thompson, and Caia Koopman , and an old French movie poster of, un Tramway nomme Desir was framed in the hall. Buck skulls and racks; bear jaws and cracked skull-bones and coyotes and golden hyenas from the deserts of the Sumerian mass; corvid feathers and blue poppies washed of their piquant azul -and thus now cornflower- were woven in, sutured, with blonde hairs that Blax would -could- rarely speak of. All this confection of artifacts adorned the walls; but Jack knew enough of -about- the fair girl’s hairs plaited in with the long dead flowers to find them beautiful. He often waited until the sun of the winter afternoon was low by the kitchen window pointing south and watched as the turbulent air blew those singular hairs in and out of the low elliptical beams of light. He wondered about this Alexandra of Wisconsin , this Helen of Troy , once of Sparta as the story went.
She was really the only girl Blax spoke of without rancor; without overt or oblique insult .
Large, thin-framed, reproductions of the Parthenon Marbles, also hung high on the wall. They were so white and fissured and amputated and perfect , Jack thought as the conversation between the Jacks went on sparsely. Each thing mentioned by the men, his fellow Jacks, and by their Captain, Blax, was useful, poignant or charming in some way ; he thought as he listened and watched two separate -but ultimately two conjoined- things.
He stared at the reproduction of the Marbles on the wall, focusing on the bearded man of the slab XXI.4 with one leg a dragon’s tail, being attacked by a -and framed in by another- woman, as the stele was lined by black cleaving, and the other sculptures fragmented to his rear.
Next to it was the same half-asp half-man; but now he was assaulting a downed beast, itself being stepped upon by a woman of floating torso engaged with a helmeted solider; the well of his shield to the inside. A hand that once contained a bronze sword was now empty. Jack saw this warrior’s forearm hang in the air, his elbow and shoulder marred with the bronze plating that once too adorned it; its lack now just a golden bruise on the marble.
The tail of the asp, the dragon-to-gorgon, sprung up in all places that man’s feet did not rest; instead it was as if absence of the Greek man was naturally filled with the predator in the imagination of the artist , Jack thought; then he asked aloud what he next wondered.
“LT, who did the Marbles again?”
“Phidias ,” Blax said, and then asked, “which metatope has caught your eye, Jack?”
“Oh, the one with the, well the two that are side-by-side there,” he nodded above, “with the bearded beast with snake legs and in defense and then attack.”
“Ah, yes the Iliad had the Lapiths -the women you see there- in pitch battle with the Centaurs at a wedding feast. The Centaurs had drank too much wine that night, the story goes, and their wildness spit out the bit and the bridle,” Blax said and drank deeply of the red from his own clear stemless glass. He often spoke in sentences that began or ended with strange tropes, metaphors that worked on the listener over time, like time-release medicine, like wounds that had healed in him and would -he implicitly said- heal in you too.
“I think the disintegration of the Marbles adds to the drama, the beauty,” Jack Four added as he chewed his goose and d’Yquem using each hand to shovel it in.
“Yeah, I must admit I do too; I wonder if that is some sign of corruption of my,” he paused, “and our , I guess, our eyes.” He knew his opinion was weighted among his men, and he never wanted to tamp down his Jacks’ enthusiasm, so he added, “but, I agree with you Jack, and so, I suspect, it might just be innate. We might just like things in a state right on that line between cohesion and falling apart, you know?”
Jack Four smiled and appreciated Blax making him feel like it was ok that he liked it that way, and that his own outlook might mean something more than what he often thought of as mere taste or aesthetic; random appeal. Blax often saw things one layer down from the surface, and it rarely felt unimportant or a non sequitur. Nor, Jack thought, did it seem a fanciful narrative with no tether to the actual thing being described. Blax was judicious, not promiscuous with his analysis of the subtext of things. It was as if he was half-embarrassed to offer an opinion from the right side of his brain; the black sheep of the familia-cogitae , the one that shall not be named.
“I wonder,” Jack One said as he stared up at them and made sure to clear his mouth of any food. “How much does each block weigh? In real life, you know? ”
Blax smiled and then began laughing and shaking his head, “Jack, we are not st
ealing the Parthenon Marbles .” But as soon as he said it he knew that was a lie. It was true when he thought it, it was true half-way through the sentence, but by the time he finished the construction he knew it was now -ab initio - a lie. He knew it, somehow, he knew that was exactly what was next on their list. It ran a frisson down his left flank, and made him wriggle a bit in his seat, and his jaws stopped masticating, and his stomach stopped digesting. Blax’s eyes saw almost nothing but the black of the night beyond their surfeit of this victory meal.
Jack One laughed with his next bite of food in his mouth, it was sufficiently dark among their dining table, and so nobody was dyspeptic by the unsightly half-chewed food.
“Really, J.O.?” Jack Two asked Jack One, as if he too could tell that Blax’s denial had just turned into a confession, and that Jack’s laugh was the river card just turned up. They protected the honor of Blax from one another like this, each taking turns saving him any embarrassment when he was wrong. They were like the modules of one mind that chastised itself for errant or impolitic thoughts.
Jack One demurred with a side nod of his head, and a wry smile that seemed to augment not just the smile but the head itself. And Jack Two then looked at Blax’s face as it morphed from one of horror to resignation and something else Jack Two could not quite name. Blax was a meteor behind a night’s sky that itself was clouded and filled with occluding birds and stars that refused to shine light on the outer-galactic and leaden ballistic fired from some house of the gods far removed. Jack thought Blax was a conducting metal for messages from beyond.
He -Blax- was faceless at times, five emotions alive, a man wrought up and caught in his own tail and arms as they flailed; speaking five sentences backward toward one common word that, like a singularity, began at his birth and returned to him like Huginn and Muninn each moon-month, in his dreams. Jack Two stared at him and wanted to feel what he felt, as if that was all the codex he’d need to pull out and decipher the logic and instruction and blueprint for whatever it was he -Jack- would need to defend and genuflect towards and exalt. Jack thought wisdom was knowledge plus time. And thus, he did not see what knowledge fails to add, and what it removes and takes very far away.
Dostoyevsky said, Jack remembered, that man strives for nothing so incessantly and painful as for something to worship . Jack Two felt this was especially true of himself. It did not seem a warning; it seemed merely a truth in need of acknowledgement, not lament.
He needed to love things, and his love for Blax was not yet folded into a steel blade, it was mere unalloyed metal, un-burnished, un-tempered, unbound and adrift in the cosmos, as the fire, the water, the hammer and anvil all sat waiting for this combination to join. Jack assumed it -this amalgam- was going to manifest once he could discern the combinatorial code of the lock on Blax’s inner life, when he could reach the center of the maze of all these pathways; these endless causeways of the man.
“That’s a big job Captain,” Jack Four said as if it was agreed that the job was now already a foregone conclusion; they all -save Blax- ate as if not skipping a beat. Blax was still horrified, thinking of the crashing of stele, the smashing of the centaur by that Italian fuck, what was his name ? he asked himself as his Post-Genetic Coder produced the name: Battista Lusieri .
He then thought of the euphemism that that man had used in contrast to Edward Daniel Clarke -that name Blax had remembered for reasons he kept hidden- who had eschewed the language of business and commerce, insisting on the prose of a man who saw in the Marbles something larger than their already massive size and weight would produce.
Clarke had quoted the Disdar in lieu of his own feelings, but Clarke’s intent was clear: the Ottoman was a puppet for his own thoughts. The Turk’s mentioned tear was part of a nonlocal pair, the one described in the account that lay on his dusky cheek and the one unmentioned, implicit in relief on the white-as-marble Englishman’s own. His tear -and heartbreak- was implicit in the recounting of the, mischief done, to the edifice of grand Occidental art.
The meal was not ruined, no, he would not say that, Blax thought. It was grand, like almost all that they did. But, his heart was heavy, heavier than normal, and this for a man with a mercurial, preternaturally dense -and maybe due to this, an inflexible- heart organ. He was instantly aware of his visage, and how it might cool -if not freeze- his men’s mood. He gathered himself up and said this:
“Well, Jack One brings up a good idea, and I’m sure, now that I’ve had a moment to reflect, that no matter our next mission, it will be part of a noble cause. We have earned the right to question everything, and if this comes to pass, we will question it. But, what did Kafka say, the condemned man will have it inscribed upon his body: Honor your superiors. And Isaiah knows a lot more than I do, and he sees signal where a limited man like me only sees noise.
“I trust his judgment, and while he makes me nervous, that is no reason -or not sufficient reason- to rebuke him or his wishes. He is a demigod, and his notions are our muses, we ignore them at the peril of art; at the peril of our souls. His designs on the world are the cool dreams of a higher being, and our febrile minds ought to find comfort in their nuministic origins, and their rational constructions in the end. He always thinks 1,000 steps ahead. So,” Blax breathed out and lifted his fork, as if to commence eating was his imprimatur ; it was to be the punctuation to that both definitive and unfinished thought.
Jack One smiled larger and larger and wolfed down more and more food; then reaching now his right hand for the plated Strasbourg goose and beckoned -with the left hand- the magnum of Mouton to pair it with his food and his glee.
“Blax,” Jack One said, using the familiar Christian name in lieu of rank, which everyone noticed, “I was thinking of Xerxes right, I was thinking of his mind set, and tell me what you think of this. And Jack,” he motioned to Jack Three with his wine glass as Blax stopped the attempt to pour the Mouton in the glass while it moved in Jack’s peripatetic hand. Jack saw this and -chagrined- set it -his glass- down.
“I was thinking of how he -according to Herodotus - was incredulous and disgusted by the Ioanian Greeks engaging in commerce, because he thought that the way to live was this: you go out into the lands of your enemies, and take what is theirs and bring it back to the tribe, in his case, the Persians, and distribute it amongst your men, your people.
“Yes, sure the king got the lion’s share, for he was the lion after all. But, the idea that you’d set up places the city, as he put it, to lie to one another and sell goods, and trick your comrades for a profit was effete , dishonorable, ignoble. And so raiding by martial men was stealing sure but it was more like plundering , it was not a low thing like mere ignoble theft and trickery.
“It was not unlike the hunter, who goes into the forest and takes a deer or an elk and comes home and shares that take -from the offering of the woods- versus the modern man who goes to fucking Jack-in-the-Box and gets a cheeseburger,” Jack said as he stuffed some fowl meat in his mouth and they all smiled at the reference.
“To modern man the hunter is a murderer,” Jack continued as he masticated. “To the modern man, the man who takes his enemies’ lands and goods is a thief, right? But to ancient man, it was more noble to take from one’s enemies -and distribute fairly to one’s own- and never engage -among one’s peers- in tawdry commerce, never demean yourself or your tribe by commercial feints, beau geste, and deception. And similarly, the hunter feels that while his taking of the deer is indeed sanguinary, it is not murder at all.
“He would say, we say, that the buying and selling of cheeseburgers is tawdry and bleak and unmanly, and that the death -the same so-called murder- is not absent in the cheeseburger, merely hidden -ignobly hidden- only. At least with hunting it is noble and overt and as nature designed it, and once home, no tribesmen must purchase the meat, but rather it is distributed fairly as each member is innately entitled to his shared by dint of all that that member does and all that he brings to the tribe. By definition, a man in th
e tribe is of value to the tribe; freeloaders do not exist; not for long.
“Raiding,” he continued as the Jacks and Blax listened and let the usually laconic man speak, “enemies and taking their shit, is no different than hunting and taking a deer, and conversely -rather- it is the buying and selling of things that is the true crime, as it debases man, it dethrones him, and it -I might add- is still rife with thieving and stealing no more or less than the plundering and appropriating that is done between rival tribes. Commerce is as thieving as raiding is. Only with commerce you steal from your so-called countrymen; with plundering you steal only from enemies.
“Xerxes had it right, you take what you can from your enemies, and then share -without profit, without commerce- share with your tribe. And each man knows his role,” he was now pointing his black butter knife at them all as if it was punctuating each word. “And each man proudly and competently does it. And this maintains the tribe, its culture, and forestalls a descent into soulless commercial enterprise, those low cultures where no one is a man, but rather a consumer, a potential customer.
“Under commercial rules, no man has a culture, or values or ideals, or principles, he just has an eye for a bargain, or a desire for modern convenience, a need for some gadget that will make his life more efficient as he goes to the widget factory to churn out more crap that nobody needs,” Jack One said as he took another bite of goose he’d already cut.
The Jacks were rapt, this was a trenchant analysis and one they could not refute; they felt no desire to refute it. They too had stopped chewing and were pondering it; and pondering the thin layer of hostility that Jack One was wielding alongside that cutlery. But as they all thought this in their way, each with slight perturbations and idiosyncratic associations, Jack One went back to cutting his meal.
