A Carnivore's Inquiry

by Sabina Murray

  She was awash in her life, precariously balanced on a raft that threatened to sink at any moment. Appropriately, she had on her dresser the postcard of The Raft of the Medusa, which she had purchased at the Louvre on her honeymoon. I find this ironic since her honeymoon—a send-off into married life—was the start of what proved to be a journey destined to end in tragedy. The painting depicts a moment of hope. Two passengers wave billowing scarves in the air, presumably to alert an approaching ship to the survivors’ presence. The tiny raft has floated to a purpose and the divine hand of God, poised just beyond the picture frame, is about to snatch this small band of pioneers—eighteen people in all—out of water and away from certain death.

  The actual raft of the Medusa was a makeshift floating vessel made of planks tied with rope and was intended to keep close to 150 people afloat—French settlers and soldiers—who were shipwrecked off the coast of West Africa on the way to Senegal. The senior officers, who were to tow the raft and its passengers to safety, commandeered the rowboats. After a short stint of rowing and towing, however, the officers decided to cut short their labor—and the ropes—and took off into the sea.

  The raft and its inhabitants, knee-deep in water, were left to the seas and skies and menace of sharks. There were three kegs of wine; this was their only sustenance. One hundred fifty people floated in the searing heat with no food, some wine, and not even the space to comfortably sit.

  On the first night, most people panicked or despaired. The people looking out to sea, moaning at the sky, et cetera, were despairing. The people plotting against each other, bouncing up and down in a dangerous manner, and challenging others to duels, were panicking. All, even those deeply in prayer (which is neither panic nor despair) were appreciating their situation.

  Everyone was hungry.

  The following morning, the death toll was at twenty. Some people had been dragged from the edges of the raft by the sea’s salty hands. Others had drowned, their feet tangled in the coils of rope while still on board, their bloated bodies floating in the well of the raft’s center. The following night, in the intense darkness, the people at the peripheries of the raft pushed toward the center to escape the encroaching sea. There was hysteria. Some of the sailors broke open casks of wine and driven by hunger, fear, and alcohol, became mad. One man took a hatchet and slashed at the ropes; the raft would sink and all would drown. He was overcome by other passengers still hoping to survive. In the escalating skirmish sixty-five people died.

  On the third day—after some futile attempts at fishing—the living began to butcher and eat the dead. This gave the passengers strength and hope. Some considered the bodies manna from heaven, the presence of this new food an act of God.

  On the fourth day, a tinderbox was discovered; the flesh could now be roasted. People found stealing wine or afflicted with hysteria were cut down by appointed executioners. Nothing was wasted.

  On the sixth day the sick were thrown to sea, to preserve provisions (wine and flesh) for the others. Bones tossed into the ocean’s yawning mouth were already stripped of flesh and cartilage.

  On the seventh day, the Argus sailed into view. The survivors, fifteen in all, were saved, although five died before reaching land.

  Little of this makes it onto the canvas of The Raft of the Medusa. There is no mayhem, disorganization, hysteria. Movement. Instead, the passengers are posed in such a way as to suggest classical statuary, although here it might be interesting to note that Géricault used the severed limbs of dead criminals as models for his work. This accidental nod to the truth of the story interests me. I am not saying that Géricault was unaware of the sensationalistic subject matter of his work. In fact, that was Géricault’s great innovation, which ushered in the Romantic age: Géricault took the bizarre and sensational as inspiration for his monumental works of art.

  This is the job of the romantic.

  There is a story that Géricault set up a small studio devoted to the painting of this great picture. His young friend, the painter Eugène Delacroix, came to visit. We are told that on seeing the great canvas, Delacroix was so affected that he took off running down the street. I ask this question: Was it the canvas that sent him running, or the numerous severed limbs that littered Géricault’s studio? While Géricault’s memories of Michelangelo’s statuary were fresh (the painter had just returned from Rome), the various limbs from which he drew had started to decay. Critics have even suggested that the atmosphere of decomposition in Géricault’s studio is evidenced in the blotching, greenish patchiness of the canvas’s sky.

  While on the subject of meat, I wonder how the raft of the Medusa would be treated if, perhaps, it had been painted by Goya. Would Goya have created fantastic creatures instead of recycling corpses? Would his creatures have managed the flesh-tearing accuracy of Saturn Devouring His Children?

  One Halloween (which my mother revered, much as hat-wearing Episcopalians love Easter) my mother decided that I should go as an Algerian. I didn’t know what an Algerian was, but it looked much like a genie and I liked my belly bare (despite the autumn chill) and that my face was obscured with a silk veil. The veil was deep red, one of my mother’s favorites, and smelled of Arpège perfume. To dress me, my mother had opened up one of the art books in the house and studied a painting by Delacroix. In the painting, the women’s faces were bare, but my mother assured me that this was the choice of the artist who wanted to catch all their beauty, not just their eyes. I remember this Halloween in particular because I didn’t go trick-or-treating. My father had arranged for some parent to pick me up at five and supervise my door-to-door collections, but my mother sensed a hesitancy on my part—the other children liked to make fun of me—and called them up and said I had a cold.

  “What will I do?” I asked, relieved.

  “Well,” she said, “we’ll just have to wait for the children to come here.”

  “We don’t have any candy.”

  “That’s true,” said my mother.

  “We could go buy some,” I suggested.

  “We could,” she smiled and I felt the hair on my arms stand up, “but that would be boring.”

  She opened the kitchen cupboard and pulled out a box of brownie mix. She nodded to herself.

  “Why don’t we just get candy?” I said again.

  “Shut up, Katherine,” she said. “I’m thinking.”

  She took her bottle of pills off the refrigerator (she’d been depressed, sleeping a lot for the last month, and I think the pills were meant to counteract that behavior) and shook it festively. I was only nine at the time and hadn’t really developed as a person, but I did have that unquestioning morality, which is the way of children. I said, “We can’t give the children pills.”

  “Haven’t they been making fun of you?”

  “They make fun of everyone,” I argued. “Besides, Miss Wood-house says it’s only because I’m smarter than they are.”

  “What a lovely woman,” my mother said genuinely, but she had already dumped the contents of the brownie mix into the bowl and I knew the neighborhood children were doomed.

  The first child to show up was Parker Burnham from across the street.

  Parker—who must have been six—was wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh outfit with the hood pushed off his head. He rang the doorbell just as the last of the brownies was being placed on the plate. Parker had perpetual allergies. His eyes were runny and his nostrils red-rimmed. He breathed through his open mouth and looked so pathetic that for a moment I thought I would do the noble thing and knock the brownies off the plate.

  My mother opened the door.

  “Drick or dreat,” said Parker Burnham.

  “Trick,” said my mother, and offered him the plate. Parker didn’t know what to make of this and looked down the path at his mother, who was chatting with some other parent and not really paying attention. “Go on,” said my mother, “have one.”

  “But it’s not wrapped.”

  “Which is why you should eat it n
ow, before your mother sees.”

  And Parker gobbled it down.

  By the end of the next hour, my mother’s dosed brownies had been ingested by a significant amount of children, who were exhibiting some bizarre behavior—specifically, the hyperactivity and hallucinating warned of on the bottle of pills. Randy Gertstein leaped off the roof of his front porch, forgetting that—even on TV—Batman didn’t fly. There was some candy dumping and a lot of mask-inspired hysteria. My mother was a dangerous woman.

  When all the children had finally been rounded up and brought home, my mother made popcorn and we put on the TV, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde with Spencer Tracy. I found it hysterically funny, especially the way he showed his evil transformation by swinging his eyeballs and pulling his lips off his teeth. After that, we watched The Wolf Man. It must have been close to eleven when it ended (my father showed up in the last fifteen minutes) and I remember weeping at Lon Chaney Jr.’s demise as my father listened to the messages on the answering machine, mother after uncomprehending mother, wanting to speak with him as soon as possible.

  12

  I left for New Mexico the day after the Intravenous gig. I knew the drive would probably push the old VW Rabbit to its very limit, but I needed a long drive. Roads were the best thing about America—how it was possible to go and go for impossibly long periods of time without ever getting anywhere.

  Arthur hugged me by the car. “This is your last chance,” he said.

  “My last chance for what?”

  “To take me with you,” he said.

  I kissed him in a friendly way. “I have a couple of personal issues. I think a road trip will be good for me. And that will be good for us.”

  Arthur nodded. He gave me fifty dollars so I wouldn’t have to rely solely on Boris’s credit card. I hoped Boris wouldn’t get the bill until I was already in New York. But the thought of Boris getting so pissed off that he dumped me really wasn’t that frightening, particularly not when tempered with the possibility of a mortgage-free property sale. This was not much of a plan and if I’d stayed around to think about it, I might have talked myself into something better. But I didn’t. Escape was too inviting, although all that time alone with a broken cassette player left me far too much time to think.

  I thought of my mother’s pale hands and the expert way she could twist her unruly hair into one perfect, symmetrical bun. I thought of the soles of her shoes upturned as she gardened, the calculated way she must walk to wear such even treads. When she prepared vegetables, she held the knife lightly in her hand, her movements so fast that they were indistinguishable, and the rinds and peels fell away in perfect coils and petals. Her slices and juliennes were miraculously exact, products not of nature, but of my mother’s exquisite workmanship. My mother showed me how to apply makeup, how base was not a uniform mask, but rather stippled over dark spots, swept lightly across the smooth forehead and cheeks, how unevenness in application resulted in a regular, unblemished complexion. How was this woman, so capable of controlling nature, at the mercy of her body? Was there no way to save her?

  I pulled into a truck stop some time after six. That day I had consumed two packs of Camel Lights, a dusty box of Oreos, and some Funyuns, which had blown out the window somewhere in Pennsylvania and were probably poisoning birds. I think I was in Indiana at that point, although I’m not sure if I’d managed to drive that far. All truck stops are the same to me. In the waning light, the land spread beyond the building and gas pumps in promising flatness. Even the sunset-lit clouds were strewn in horizontal shreds. I saw some low trees crouching beneath the weight of the sky. Against this, a blinding “Stuckey’s” sign outshone the sun, which—despite its gorgeous hot yellow—was slipping into the land with the hopelessness of an egg yolk flung against a glass pane.

  I parked in the assigned area and walked through the diesel gas pumps to get to the restaurant. Trucks pulled in and stopped with great, creaking brakes. Trucks pulled out with tremendous chuffs, like steam engines. Gnomelike men and heavy trolls with straining bellies jumped down from their vehicles that exuded heat, dust, and smoke. I walked quickly to the restaurant.

  The restaurant was brightly lit and flooded with instrumentalized country standards that, without their words, were almost sinister. I took a stool at the counter and ordered a senior special grilled liver and onion dinner.

  “Honey, you all right?” asked the waitress. She wasn’t old, maybe only thirty, but had the mannerisms, makeup, and hair of someone much older.

  “Why?”

  “You look pale.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I probably am pale. Nothing that liver won’t fix.” I smiled and pushed my menu back across the counter. I was arguing with myself in my head. Everywhere I looked there were men eating alone, eyeing me in various degrees of subtlety all the way up to open staring. I wanted to protect my solitude, but at the same time this solitude was giving me anxiety. I was halfway through dinner when I noticed a dirty hand on the counter out of the corner of my eye. The nails were outlined in black. This was a hand that never came clean. I smelled gasoline and oil. I turned my head. The man sitting next to me must have been close to fifty. His face was deep and lined. In contrast, his body was lean and youthful. His jeans were narrow but ample for his small hips. His forearms were muscled in an exaggerated way, like Popeye. He was drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. I finished my dinner and he left me alone. I had a headache coming on—a bad one—and needed a cigarette, but I’d forgotten mine in the car. I looked back over at the weasely guy and caught him straight in the eyes. His pack of Raleighs was on the counter.

  “Can I have one of those?”

  “Didn’t know folks like you smoked anymore.”

  “And what kind of folks are those?” I took the pack off the counter and shook a smoke out. He lit a match and held it for me.

  “I meant it as a compliment. You look like quality people.”

  “No offense taken, but you really shouldn’t be so quick with your pronouncements.” The cigarette tasted like pure tar, almost liquid. “You have no idea what kind of person I am.”

  He was intrigued. He looked straight at me and I held his look. “I’d like to get your dinner for you.”

  “No,” I said. “But you can get me a drink.”

  “Don’t drink anything but coffee anymore.”

  “I love coffee.”

  He nodded to the waitress and she topped us both off. He watched me stirring creamer into my coffee. I watched him drumming his fingers on the counter.

  “Do you like country music?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I replied.

  His truck was parked out on the edge of the truck stop, which was a small concrete island in an expanse of endless, hissing grass. The parking area was lit by street lamps that made the light dim and far, as if the lamps were a part of a man-made constellation glowing for some other, skybound life form. The concrete out beyond the dull pooling of those lights was cracked—thrown up in some areas and eroded in others. Where the ground showed through, more grass thrust itself skyward. A smell of moist soil soaked the night air. The silence was briefly interrupted by the hooting of a distant owl, and then—by contrast—increased. I followed the man across the uneven tarmac to the truck. He leaped up to the cab with ease and I was close behind him, although without the same grace. He was a primitive with no need for conversation. He placed his oil-tainted hands on my face and pulled me to him. My stomach churned and for one moment—with his tongue inside my throat—I thought I would be ill.

  I pushed him off, which he seemed to like. “Why don’t you put on some music?” I said. I pulled my feet up on the seat.

  “There’s some tapes in the glove compartment. Put on anything you want.”

  I dropped the glove compartment open and a straining light came on inside. Willy Nelson, Red-Headed Stranger. Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Best of. There were some other tapes—Johnny Cash, James McMurtry, John Prine—in among the papers and empty cigar
ette packs. I dug around. My fingers found a long, leather sheath. At first I thought it might be a flashlight and brought it out. It was a knife with a handle inlaid with antler, a big knife. The blade had to have been six inches long. I pulled the knife out of the sheath. There was a hook at the end, a serrated edge, a smooth edge. The knife was clean, recently oiled. I could see my reflection lit by an outside fluorescent light, distorted through the center, where the blade rose to a low spine.

  “What do you use this for?”

  “It’s a deer knife.”

  “Do you kill the deer with it?”

  “Hell no. That’s for gutting. You can use it to skin a deer too. Or a rabbit.”

  I held the knife, mesmerized, envious.

  “You should put that knife down,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Blade’s sharp. We wouldn’t want an accident.”

  “An accident?”

  “You wouldn’t want to cut yourself.” I saw fear flicker in his eyes and then his hand reached across to me, reached to reclaim the knife.

  I remember that I didn’t want to give it up.

  I’ve never fully accepted the idea of accidents. Rudimentary knowledge of Latin demands that we recognize that “accident” comes from “accidere,” to happen, and that “accidere” comes from “cadere,” to fall. I, however, would like to point out the “dent” (although an accident itself) in the word—teeth—because accidents are the teeth of life. Occasionally man finds himself in the jaws of existence, chewed over, and when there is no reason that makes sense, the happening is an accident. This occasion for onion-peeling comes about because of the years I spent mulling over the word. Every now and then a car hits a patch of ice and terminates the lives of all the churchgoing folk within it, and maybe that is accidental, but growing up with my mother I found that a ponderous number of accidents were always happening.

  When I was thirteen, my father found himself in the desirable position of making a business deal. To cement the goodwill between him and his future ally, he decided to have a dinner party. My mother referred to such moves as “prostituting one’s family.” She referred to the people invited to these parties as “the living dead.” Business parties at our house acquired the acronym N.P.s, which sounded antiseptic and proper, but actually stood for “necrophiliac prostitution.”