Changing the Subject

by Stephen-Paul Martin

  Tammy comes to take our order. She tells us what the specials are. She’s got them memorized. Craig jokes about how good her memory is. She tells him that his beard looks fake. He laughs and takes if off, stuffing it into his pocket. I’m trying to figure out if I’ve ever seen Craig with a long white beard. It doesn’t seem likely, since his hair has always been black and he’s not going grey. Then why didn’t it bother me when he first walked in? He looks at me carefully, maybe wondering about my reaction to his suddenly beardless face.

  He says: What’s wrong? You look angry.

  I know I can’t say what I’m thinking, so I say: It’s just that my mind keeps wandering. I can’t focus. I had all sorts of things I wanted to talk about before I got here, but now I can’t remember what they were.

  He says: Maybe you better start writing things down.

  I say: I wish I could. But I can’t remember to write things down. And even when I do, it’s like the writing itself is changing the subject, as if the words had other places to be.

  He finds this funny. Or at least he’s got a big smile on his face. I don’t want to talk about writing things down, so I put a big smile on my face. The two smiles cancel each other out, and the temperature drops about ten degrees, then quickly goes back up again.

  Tammy starts to say that she remembers things because she can’t afford to forget, that people would get mad if she didn’t get their orders right, and she’d get lower tips. But people at a table across the room are waving at her like they want the check or something for dessert, so she nods and smiles in their direction, tells us she’ll be right back and hurries away. I’m impressed that she can handle a job like this, with people always wanting her attention.

  I look outside. The wind is even stronger than before, blowing leaves and branches down the street beside the park, knocking over a garbage can, whirling trash all over the Green World parking lot. Suddenly I remember. I show Craig The New York Times and ask: Have you heard about this new book, this novel based on Abu Ghraib?

  The big smile is back on his face: There’s only one thing to say about Abu Ghraib, and I’ve already said it.

  Craig’s arrogance can be obnoxious. But I’m used to it. I’d probably be the same way if I’d gotten the kind of attention he’s gotten over the years. I say: You mean that op-ed piece you did for the L.A. Times? I don’t remember it all that well.

  He looks annoyed, but he tries to sound calm: Then let me remind you. I won’t quote myself exactly, but the argument was that people were missing the point about Abu Ghraib. So many people claimed to be surprised when they saw the pictures. This tells you something sinister about the success of the American image machine, the spell it casts every day on the minds of the nation. Think about it: Bush knew he could claim that Abu Ghraib was nothing more than a few crazy people doing evil things. According to Bush, it had nothing to do with the war itself or his way of doing things. He knew most people would buy such nonsense, since they’ve always been told that when our country wages war we don’t get nasty. Our elected officials wage only virtuous wars, and they wage them only in virtuous ways, unlike those demonic leaders in places like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea.

  I say: You don’t think Bush believed his own bullshit?

  Craig says: Not for a second.

  I say: I think he’s put himself under a spell without knowing it. He’s so trapped in self-deceptions that he has no connection to anything outside the absurd story that he can’t stop telling himself.

  Craig says: There’s no way to know. Bush himself is just an image, a collection of pictures and sound bites.

  I want to insist that Bush is more than an image, but I can’t get past what I just said, that Bush is trapped in a story that he can’t stop telling himself. I thought the same thing about myself ten minutes ago, except I told myself that someone else was telling the story.

  Tammy comes back and asks us what we’re having. Craig quickly looks at the menu and orders vegetarian lasagna. I decide to have the same thing, mainly because it reminds me of normal lasagna, which often has red meat. I briefly feel embarrassed, assuming that Tammy now thinks that I don’t know how to think for myself, that I can’t make simple decisions, that the best I can do is imitate my friends. She narrows her eyes and seems to be focusing just above the bridge of my nose. I tell myself that she’s reading my mind. I’ve never believed that anyone really has telepathic powers, but maybe Tammy has something else, something she learned from her study of psycholinguistics, assuming that’s what her major was, assuming she went to college at all. I try to give her a look that says I’m not that easy to read, that I’m the kind of book teachers put on their syllabus to get the lazy students to drop the class. She smiles with all her teeth, as if she wanted us to see that she doesn’t have any cavities. She tells us our food will be ready in ten or fifteen minutes, then smiles at someone waving at her from a table across the room. I watch her try to seem pleased that people keep wanting her attention.

  Before she goes, she gives me that strange look again, like she’s reading my mind, and I’m convinced that she looks quite a bit like the woman who told me not to forget. I’m surprised I didn’t see the resemblance at first. But when I try to picture the suicide woman, I can’t recall her face. I feel like an idiot. After all, she told me not to forget, but the only thing I remember is her teeth. They were perfect and looked like Tammy’s perfect teeth, or like my ex-wife’s teeth.

  She called me a few days ago, at half past three in the morning. She’d finally seen how much of a jerk her current husband was, and now she wanted me back. When I told her I was doing fine on my own, she got mad and threatened to put me under a spell. She’d learned the art of casting spells from the man she left me to marry, who owned and directed a school of magical studies in northern New Mexico. A mutual friend informed me that she’d gone insane for a while, convincing herself that a demon had given her supernatural powers. Her doctors finally found her the right medication, and before too long she was functioning like a normal human being again, except that she still believed that she could put people under spells.

  When she made her threat, I laughed and told her I didn’t believe in spells. But now I’m not so sure. I’ve never been so hungry before. It really does feel like I’m being controlled by something else, something that’s pretending to be me, telling me what I think and want and what I should do about it. I want to ask Craig if he’s ever thought that he might be under a spell, but I’m afraid to sound like a fool. Still, I’ve got to say something. I can tell he can tell there’s a question I want to ask. So I quickly think of a substitute question, which comes out wrong, like I’m conducting an interrogation instead of just talking, and of course I hate the word interrogate, but I manage to say: So Craig, what were you doing yesterday? Were you outside at about half past noon?

  He looks alarmed: No. Why?

  I say: Strange things were happening.

  Craig reaches for his beard, as if it were still on his chin. I feel like telling him that it’s fine with me if he puts it back on. He says: So I’ve heard.

  I say: I’m sure you heard about the vomiting on junk-food row. I was there. I saw it happen. But right before that, I was going for lunch at The Happy Earth, and I was standing on a corner when a woman tapped me on the shoulder and smiled and told me not to forget. Then she ran out into the street and got hit by a car. I was—

  Craig puts his hand on the table as if it were a basketball that he was getting ready to slam-dunk. He says: Last week at the conference, I was eating lunch with Bruce Duncan—

  I’m annoyed that he just changed the subject, but I say: Bruce Duncan? I thought you hated him.

  Craig says: I do. But he wanted to talk to me about publishing my keynote address in his journal, and he volunteered to pay for my lunch. So we were sitting there eating when I looked at the salt and pepper shakers on the table, and they did a little dance, as if they were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It took about thi
rty seconds.

  I say: With music? Did Bruce Duncan see it too?

  Craig says: Yes and yes. The music was like something Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers might have danced to, and Bruce definitely saw it, and we traded puzzled glances. But we were right in the middle of an intense conversation, and when I tried to mention it later one of his grad students came to the table and said she had to talk to him right away. He rushed off with her and I didn’t see him again at the conference.

  I notice that our table has no salt and pepper shakers. Looking around, I can’t see any salt and pepper shakers on the tables. I guess The Green World doesn’t believe in altering the tastes that Mother Nature gave her food. But if the place is on its way to becoming a family restaurant, it’s sure to have salt and pepper on the tables before too long. The way I feel right now, I could dump a full box of salt on a juicy cheeseburger bigger than a turntable. The craving is so intense that I have to remind myself that turntables don’t exist anymore, except in thrift shops.

  Craig says: Has anything like that ever happened to you?

  I decide that it’s time to get back at him for changing the subject. Instead of answering his question, I tell him how stupid I felt when I told the feminist at the museum about the food I’d seen in the sky.

  Craig looks puzzled: What made you feel so stupid?

  I say: I didn’t see food in the sky. I just heard about it on the radio. I fell for a hoax.

  He gives me a puzzled look and says: Hoax? There was no hoax.

  I say: You’re telling me that the sky was really filled with cheeseburgers and fried eggs?

  He smiles: And hot dogs covered with sauerkraut and mustard.

  I say: You’re not joking? You saw the food in the sky?

  He says: I didn’t actually see it, but my friend Priscilla did, and Priscilla doesn’t make things up. It’s not her style. In addition to being my friend, she’s my accountant. The only time she lies is when she does my taxes.

  I say: Where was she when she saw the food?

  Craig says: In her office. She’s got a big picture window facing the ocean.

  At first she just thought the sky was filled with strange clouds. But when they came closer, she saw that she was looking at food—cheeseburgers, Rueben sandwiches, ham and Swiss cheese omelets. Of course she thought at first that something was wrong with her vision. But the other people in her building saw food in the sky too, and they were freaking out, running up and down the corridors, shouting and slamming doors. But Priscilla just sat at her desk and watched.

  I say: Why would food in the sky freak people out? Sure, it’s weird, you don’t expect it. But I don’t see why anyone would feel menaced.

  Craig says: I think it has something to do with size. When you see a pork burrito the size of a football field, your brain can’t take it in. Your body panics, even if you know there’s no real threat.

  I say: So what happened after everyone freaked out?

  Craig says: Nothing happened. Priscilla sat there watching, and finally the food went away.

  I say: And then she called you up and told you what happened?

  Craig says: She told me when she came over last night, right after we finished making love.

  I say: So Priscilla’s your lover. You never told me.

  Craig says: Right. And please don’t tell anyone else. I don’t want my colleagues to know that I’m sleeping with an accountant, especially since she’s also a Republican.

  In Craig’s line of work, people who work with numbers are viewed with contempt. They’re seen as uncreative hacks, doing work that a robot could do.

  I say: My lips are sealed. But I still want to know what you think about that woman killing herself on the street yesterday. What do you think she meant by Don’t forget?

  He shrugs: There’s no way to know. Don’t forget that you watched her kill herself? Don’t forget the important things in life? Don’t forget to brush your teeth? Don’t forget about Abu Ghraib? Don’t forget who you are? Don’t forget that you’re not who you think you are? There’s no way to know.

  Tammy comes back and says: Your food will be here in a minute.

  The mere mention of food makes me want to rush into the kitchen and eat everything I can find. I’m wondering why Tammy didn’t start us off with a basket of bread and butter. I don’t want to look like I’m under a spell, so I smile at her and tell her there’s no hurry.

  Craig says: As I just said, there’s no way to know for sure what she meant.

  Tammy says: Who?

  Craig ignores her and says: The important thing is what you think she meant, what you think is important about not forgetting. I made the case in a recent essay that refusing to forget is a radical action, a way of resisting the official amnesia produced by mainstream culture.

  He’s quoting himself again, but this time it doesn’t bother me all that much because I agree with him. I’m nodding along with every word.

  Tammy says: Do you guys really think that anyone’s actively trying to make you forget?

  Craig says: I—

  I say: I—

  But Tammy has already turned. She makes a beeline for the bathroom. Two first-person pronouns hang in vegetarian silence, in air that’s never been tarnished by the smell of grilled and greasy red meat.

  We look at each other wondering how to talk without first-person singular pronouns. First-person plural won’t work. It makes you sound schizophrenic. You has more potential but still has limitations, a history of being marked wrong on high school compositions. We could try to talk without pronouns, like the prose in scholarly journals, but we’ve always agreed that scholarly journals are boring.

  The cook steps out of the kitchen, glancing quickly around the room. Our eyes meet but it’s like he doesn’t see me. He still looks like a therapist I was seeing five years ago, a guy whose technique involved a book of ancient symbols, woodcuts on yellowed pages that looked old enough to crumble on contact but held together quite well when I actually turned them with my hand. Each symbol was an abstract pattern I’d never seen before. When I looked for more than thirty seconds, the symbol turned into something else I’d never seen before, and thirty seconds later became something else which became something else. The therapist told me to turn the page only when the symbol stopped changing, which sometimes happened in thirty seconds and sometimes in thirty minutes. Each session went the same way as we slowly worked our way through the book, which seemed to grow a new page with each page I turned. I felt like I was being changed, as if the transformation of shapes that meant nothing to me was changing the way I thought about things that did mean something to me. Parts of my life I’d forgotten were coming back to me, crucial recollections—things from childhood, things from high school and college, things from dreams. I was pleased with my progress. I’d never done such meaningful reading before.

  But my therapist always reminded me that the book was just a first step, preparation for something else, the power to read images in the world and not just on the page, signs I would learn to recognize once I’d advanced my skills with the book. At the time I wasn’t sure what he meant, but now it occurs to me that a cheeseburger in the sky might be one of those magical images, and it only seems absurd instead of magical because I’m not evolved enough to read it properly. Or maybe my confusion shows that I’m already reading quite well. Maybe confusion has gotten a bad rap over the years. Maybe it deserves more respect than it usually gets. This thought appeals to me greatly, but I know I might be kidding myself. I often do. Maybe confusion is no more than it seems: a mental mess. And how would all the vomiting fit in? Could someone barfing possibly be seen as a magical image? It seems too crude, but maybe it’s my concept of magic that’s crude. Maybe my mental images of magic are blocking me from seeing what magic really is. I wish I could call my therapist and discuss the situation. But he’s not my therapist anymore. After nine months of the book, he said we had to stop, that he was broke and had to find a way to make more money.
Has he gotten a job as a cook?

  I look back at the cook but he’s turned away. I keep looking. He doesn’t look back. The men in the next booth are laughing loudly, pounding the table, talking about stolen identities. One of them claims that identities can’t be stolen, that the motions concealed by the static shape of a first-person singular pronoun can’t be held in place long enough to be taken away. A man with a shiny bald head makes a firm declaration, talking as if he wants everyone in the room to hear what he’s saying: The I itself could be stolen, but not what it signifies.

  The other four men at the table find this funny. They’re laughing and pounding the table even harder than before. At first I’m tempted to laugh along with them, even though I’m not part of their group. The laughter shows no sign of letting up. It starts to feel sinister, as if they might really know how to steal identities, or at least the linguistic surfaces of identities. Maybe they’re practicing some kind of evil magic. Maybe they’re members of a secret society. I wonder if they have a book of spells.

  Suddenly they’re all silent, like junior high school students when the teacher unexpectedly walks back into the classroom. The moment waits for something to happen. Nothing does. The moment waits. It waits and waits and waits for something to happen. Nothing does. I decide that the moment must be waiting for me to change the subject, so I think about what I’ll be doing later, when lunch is over. I decide that I’ll get a bag of burgers to go from GREAT! BURGERS, then go home and check on YouTube to see if anyone has a video of the sky yesterday. People seem to be filming almost everything these days, as if they’re always waiting with their cameras, as if the whole purpose of life is to get things on film. But what if what’s on YouTube is fake? What if the whole thing yesterday was staged, and they used a computer to make images of a sky filled with greasy cheeseburgers, then put it on the Internet as a hoax? I know Craig said his Republican lover saw food in the sky, but I can’t be sure that he isn’t joking. He’s played tricks like this on me before, and it’s also hard to believe he would sleep with a Republican.