His mouth is kind of suctioned to the ground now, and he struggles, very carefully, to close it, drawing the lips together, biting into the soil to prevent any precious morsel from being left behind, and he closes slowly on a mouthful of dirt and plate and Kakes. He stands up, shaking, his mouth full. There are big bite marks in the cartoon soil where his teeth have gouged away at the earth. And—tentatively—he bites down.
It doesn’t even make a sound.
Confusion shows on his face, and he bites again, and again, more rapidly: nothing. Then, stretching his throat out to the appropriate width, he tries to swallow the plate whole, again and again, nothing. Finally, disheartened, he spits out the plate, the Kakes perfect and intact, still with that weird magical glow on everything, though now the glow has something smug about it. Kandy Kat looks toward the screen and his eyes have a new wetness to them. KANDY KAKES, the screen reads. REAL STUFF. REAL GOOD.
I looked down at my body as if for the first time. I felt fear wadding up the swallowing part of my throat. I reached down and put my hand on my stomach. I thought about the little swaddled girl in the back of the four-door sedan, so limp and still that she could have been a heap of dirty laundry. I wondered what happened to their dog. There was a bruise on my left thigh that I’d never seen before, and I was hungrier than I’d ever been. On the television screen, the evening news returned from commercial. There had been breakthroughs in the preliminary testing of a new anticancer drug designed to heighten the immune system’s sensitivity to familiar somatic cells growing at abnormal rates. Half of the animals used in testing showed greatly reduced growth for tumors and other unusual structures, as well as a reduction in the number of new abnormalities. The other half died.
ON A TELEVISION TALK SHOW, a man named Michael spoke, his gaze drifting over and over to something beyond the camera and snapping back into position only at the prompting of the host. His scalp had been shaved, poorly. He was seated in a purple armchair that looked ugly and at the same time expensive, wearing a nice gray suit that he kept grabbing at, trying to pull it tighter across his body. He was here to explain the series of events that had led to his arrest, and he had prepared a video to help him talk. Over his head the screen faded to black and then there were scenes of veal farming: shaky handheld shots showing the crated calves gridding endlessly through long dark rooms. They ate in lines, slept in lines, fastened to their positions by lengths of chain. Stillness kept their flesh tender, prevented effort from knotting the fibers of their meat into muscle. Their low-iron diet ensured that color would not stick to the inside of the bodies. Lack of light kept pigment from ripening in the flesh. In the darkness of the warehouse farm, the calves grew whiter and whiter and softer, and the thought of this darkness wrapped around so many swelling lives grew a parental protectiveness in Michael, alongside an aimless hunger.
In the grocery store near his apartment, the slabs of pale meat were faceless, yet somehow still sad. The sadness was in the meat. Or maybe it was in him, he couldn’t tell which: it hovered between them both, stretched taut like a cord. He watched the slices, splayed out on Styrofoam. He handled packages, made dents with his fingers in the plastic-wrapped flesh, and watched them disappear the moment he lifted his hand from the surface. When he held them he could feel the big dark spaces full of moaning life. The grocery store stocked only five or six packages of veal at a time, and he bought half of this veal and took it home. He didn’t know what he would do with it afterward. I just wanted to set it free, he said on the TV.
Michael stored veal cutlets in his fridge and left them there in the cold dark. He went to work six days a week delivering mail through slim slots. As he made his rounds, he thought about the meat shivering in stacks. Sectioned off and stunted, it still needed a guardian. When he went back to the grocery store, the veal section had regrown—as though he had never been there, had never handled the stiff bundles and brought them out into the sunlight, then back into the dark cold of the refrigerator. He bought up all the veal this time, then for weeks afterward he bought all the veal and just kept it until there was no space for the new veal. Because there was no place to store it, he began to eat it instead, this veal that would not fit, filing it away in the utter dark of the digestive tract, tucking it into himself like a parent putting a child to bed. He cooked it simply, seasoned with salt and pepper, fried in butter on the stove. The meaning of the act of saving the veal had become less clear to him even as it became easier and more natural to do.
At the same time, the grocery store had begun to keep more in stock to meet customer demand, the demand that was his alone. Now there were ten to twelve packets of veal each time he came. He couldn’t afford to buy them all, but he did anyway, burying the packages in a hole he dug in the side yard near the rhododendrons, because the fridge was full. When he had used up what was in his bank account, he snuck them out of the store under his shirt, the flat faces of the veal pressed against pale, soft stomach, slab to slab, until one day he was arrested and charged on multiple counts of theft and aggravated assault.
The smooth edges of the cutlets: as if they had just grown that way, perfect and glandless. As if they had been peeled off, gently, from a larger cutlet, a mass long and cylindrical and placid. That even, stirred-together color of the flesh, the occasional streak of pure white that trailed off the side, hinting that it had a history as something larger. Such beauty in the lack of ducts or orifices, unitary and complete, impossible to feed it or cause it pain. A pasture full of veal cutlets sitting under the sun, looking eyelessly up.
I couldn’t do anything for the calves, he said. I’m just one man. But I thought to myself: I can do something for these cutlets.
I looked over at C sitting next to me on the couch, his arm slung around my shoulders. He sucked the residue of beer from the top of the can, then ran his tongue along the crevice. C was great at watching TV. He could go for hours and never get that dead look in the face, the one B and I sometimes wore after we’d spent too long in its shifting, hypervivid light. With the remote in his hand and my head in the crook of his arm, he could pull me toward him for a kiss as easily as he could change the channel. From time to time he did this, mouthed me drily without turning his head, and his lips felt gentle on my face, like swabbing the skin with a cotton ball. C was suited to his life and to the historical period within which his life unfolded. He didn’t long to return to a simpler time, or to destroy the current time, or to build a better future. He was a happy camper. This was one of the things that made our relationship work so well: he always assumed I was happy, too, even when I wasn’t. With C, I could sit there and cycle through hurt, anger, sadness, ambivalence, acceptance, all without disturbing the comfortable rapport between us. As a result, he called me easygoing. And at times when the inner corners of my eyes burned and I knew I was about to spill, I had only to look over at him and his utterly normal grin to feel like I had grossly misread my own situation. Then whatever feeling I was feeling would hollow itself out, so that all I felt was that I no longer knew what I felt. “What you’re describing is called ‘satori,’” C would tell me with confidence. “It’s the Buddhist term for happiness, specifically for becoming unburdened. It’s like what we’d call peace. You should learn to embrace it, not think it to death,” he added.
This is happiness, I thought as the air-conditioning droned behind me like a single monstrous insect. My face tingled or was falling asleep on one side. I had hoped happiness would be warmer, cozier, more enveloping. More exciting, like one of the things that happen on TV to TV people instead of the calming numb of watching it happen. C’s limp palm was damp with sweat. Beneath it my body hairs trembled in the cold. C liked the temperature the same during the summer as it was in the winter so that he could keep wearing his favorite sweater year-round, a nubbly blue wool that was starting to give out at the elbows. I thought I saw my own breath in the frigid air, but it was probably just dust. I wriggled my shoulders around beneath his arm, trying to generate warmt
h, and in response he tightened his grip on me, making it harder to stir. I moved my head around, I made small sounds in my throat indicating that I had something to say. I felt sad, then unsad again. Birds settled on the old oak outside the window, settled there and waited and then left. Where had they gone, and were they better there? From indoors, watching the trees outside sag in the heat was like watching television, a little hole in the world that opened onto something entirely unrelated, trapped behind glass.
“Hey,” I said.
“Are you there?” I asked.
“Hmm,” said C.
I looked back at the TV screen. A large piece of calf was getting chopped and chopped and chopped into smaller, more numerous pieces. It resembled a thing growing out, melting, spreading across the screen.
“It’s so weird,” I said. “He wanted to keep people from eating veal, and then he ate more of it than anyone.”
C turned his head to look at me for the first time in a while.
“Or,” he said, “he wanted to eat it, and that scared him. He interpreted that fear as fear of the act, then used that more acceptable fear to reason his way back to doing what he had wanted to do all along, which was to eat it.” In his blue sweater, in the faintly blue light, he looked far away and boyish.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s so complicated. I thought he looked frightened. He looked sick. Did you see how he kept pulling his suit tight around him? It looked like he was thinking of the meat inside him.”
“Well, he’s also nuts,” C said calmly.
C said everybody was nuts.
I twisted my body around inside C’s hold to get a better view of the TV, flickering with color and light and sound. What was it that made one person go nuts while the rest of the world remained intact around them? I’d ask C on the next commercial break. What the cutlets want, I thought to myself. The flesh desires something different from its sum, I tried to think, but I wasn’t sure, it didn’t sound right. C’s breathing was long and slow and peaceful next to me, and I felt comforted by the fact that what was going on in his head was the same as mine: the image of Michael’s panic-tightened face on the screen threaded its way from the eyes toward the center of the head, through branching neuronal trails to a sludgy affective core. Even if we felt differently about the image and its meaning, at least it was inside us both, acting on our inner parts. Michael’s image made something claw inside of me. Sitting in his ugly chair, he radiated a pitiful and trapped energy. He clutched at the air as he described lifting the allotments of flesh from their casings, peeling them from Styrofoam trays, and laying them onto the frying pan. He described the gentleness of the meat, how it trusted, and his eyes were as wide and gelatinous as a deer’s. When Michael looked down at the imaginary cutlet in his hand, he had the face of a saint.
At that moment I wished that C would look at me like that, touch me like that, and I wondered if there were a way to trick him into doing what I wanted. A new product had just come out from Fluvia cosmetics, designed to soften your skin by tenderizing the subdermal layers that were sometimes stringy with things such as fat, muscle, and pores. The ad claimed that nobody would be able to resist falling in love with your new skin, then showed a beautiful woman holding still as her boyfriend, boss, best friend, and workplace nemesis gathered around, stroking her skin wonderingly with the tips of their fingers. But I didn’t think a product like that would have any influence over C. He was one of those rare people who seemed only to do things that were their own original idea. When he bought deodorizing underarm spray at the Wally’s Supermarket by his condo, it was as though the need had suddenly occurred to him and the correct product had simply presented itself—even though I knew that he had seen the commercials because I watched them with him, watched him laughing at them. He was a graceful consumer: he could consume without being consumed in turn.
In C’s living room, the television talked on. It must have been early in the day: the show had the calm irrelevance of programming at hours when only the trapped and the old and the infirm are watching. Michael was still on-screen, explaining what had led him to attack a supermarket employee with the veal cutlets he had hidden away beneath his shirt. He stopped me and asked what was under my clothing. He told me stealing had consequences in his store, Michael said. That’s when I realized I wasn’t just eating the cutlets. I was eating a whole machine, a machine much bigger than me, and a lot better organized. And when I thought of all the parts of that machine, the meadows and the grasses and the slicing machines and the plastic wrap machines and the factory farm gates and the steel manufacturers and the person who stuck the price sticker on the outside of the package, and the person who killed the calves, and the people they went home to after work, how those and other invisible parts were all there working away inside the piece of meat, I don’t know. I just felt so full. I had been so empty and now I was full like I was maybe going to throw up. And I knew that if I did, it would be just veal, all veal. All the veal I had hidden from danger. I couldn’t let that happen. So I guess I just panicked.
On the grainy surveillance footage, small figures drained of color grappled with light-colored rectangles, tugging them in opposing directions. Michael was the thinner, taller, dark-haired one facing off against a store employee wearing the Wally’s uniform, his foam head huge and smiling. Though Michael was larger and stronger than the grocery store kid, whose flabby arms peeked from his polo sleeves, you could tell he was frightened by the grimace on his face, like a photo of a man on a roller coaster, taken midplunge. He started hitting the uniformed employee over and over and over again with a package of veal, as another shopper stopped to stare. Eventually something dark came out of the employee and spilled onto the floor: it could have been blood or vomit. The image looked just like the grocery store down the street from C’s apartment.
Do you consider yourself a hero? asked the talk show host, a woman dressed in royal blue with stiff, sculptural hair.
What? asked Michael. What? He looked so confused, doubly confused, as though the question were confusing him, but also and more important as though he couldn’t even understand where he was, or how he got there, or how to get back out.
When I looked over again, C had fallen asleep. His head was tipped back and his mouth lay open and pointed up, all the hardness gone out of it, the hands loose and docile as flowers. I saw all the things I liked about his body laid out like a map, and I knew how his chest would feel under my hands, I knew what it would be like to take the lobe of his ear between my front teeth and press them together. At the same time, I had no idea what his dreams were made of, whether they ever involved me, whether they involved other women I knew or did not know. Though I had spent hours and hours for months with C, I possessed a better understanding of what went on inside of Michael’s veal-addled psychology. What Michael wanted leaked through him like blood through a tissue. C, by contrast, remained obscure. I was still staring over at him when he woke up, looking straight into my eyes, scratching at his cheek blearily.
“How long have you been awake?” he asked.
Before I could answer, he stood up.
“We have to get the laundry,” he said.
C sloughed his sweater in preparation for entering the summer swarth. He inhaled sharply, sucked snot back up into his nasal cavity. We were behaving exactly like people behaved, there was nothing wrong that I could name, but for some reason I wasn’t feeling that unalone feeling you were supposed to have when you were with someone else. Was there anything joining me to my life that was a matter of necessity rather than chance? It wasn’t my body, which could be moved from place to place, job to job, fed nearly anything, partnered with anyone. It wasn’t my mind, which seized the fake lives of television people with greater enthusiasm than it did its own. Sometimes I thought about C and the idea came to me that any man’s genitalia, however large or weirdly shaped, would be guaranteed to fit inside my own. Our pairing was coincidental or, at best, lucky. I wished that for once h
e’d just agree with me on any one thing about how I saw the world.
THE LAUNDROMAT WAS A TEN-MINUTE walk from C’s condo, a stand-alone building with a crummy parking lot riddled with cracks in which dandelions tried to grow. At the front counter they sold detergent, fabric softener, bleach. They also sold tampons, shaving cream, disposable razors, small dinosaur toys made out of glow-in-the-dark plastic, novelty pencils, candy bars, and hot dogs. C bought a hot dog from a sunburned teenage girl who sat behind the counter watching a game show where a woman applied makeup to a man who I decided might have been her husband.
“Do you want one?” C asked. “Mmmm,” he added, his mouth full. He made squeaky sounds as he chewed. The casing was popping, splitting, tearing.
“I’m all right,” I said. The Laundromat hot dogs tasted okay, but sometimes you found bits of things in them that had the texture of knuckles. There were only a few other people in the place, older women leaning against the folding tables as they watched their clothes struggle behind the thick glass of the washing machines. We walked over to our dryer, where the clothes had been still for over an hour. I opened up the dryer door and squeezed them. They felt like limp wet fur. “Still damp,” I said. C fed some more quarters into the slot.
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine Page 3
