Raised in Captivity

by Chuck Klosterman

  Some days are bad and some days are good. We all go to the bar after work on Thursdays, Fridays, and Mondays during football season. Those are the good days. The name of the place is Wing Bar, for reasons that are not exactly surprising. I like it, but I don’t love it, for reasons that are not exactly surprising. The biggest upside is that I can leave my car overnight in the parking lot across the frontage road, if and when that becomes necessary. Wing Bar is a brick building with dark windows and a neon sign that only says WING BA. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t know what it is. That’s the second-biggest upside. Last Thursday, as I crossed the four-lane street after parking my car, I saw a jittery man standing outside the bar, peering into the windows through cupped hands and constantly reexamining a front door that provided no numeric information. He was wearing a suit and a tie. That was odd. He kept looking at his phone and scrutinizing arbitrary architectural details surrounding the building. His thoughts were easy to read: “Is this the place? This must be the place. But how can this be the place?” It was like his brain was generating subtitles. I stop my approach and watch him worry, for no real reason. He makes a phone call. It lasts ten seconds and he nods for the duration. Then he turns away from the Wing Bar door and walks up the street, and I follow him, for no real reason.

  I know where he’s going before he does. He’s going to P. D. Black’s, the only other bar within walking distance. Black’s is the nice bar. It’s so nice that some people call it a tavern. It’s so nice that, during the day, it feels like a restaurant. It’s bright inside, and there’s only one TV. They enforce the smoking ban. The bathroom stalls go all the way to the floor. I’ve been there maybe three times, always on a date.

  The nervous man in the suit walks fast. He doesn’t notice me, or anything else. When I finally push through the door of P. D. Black’s he’s already joined his group. It’s three other men, all of them short, all of them white, all of them in suits. The other three suits appear to be teasing him for going to the wrong place. They drink thick brown liquor on ice. The bar itself is oak and clean and shaped like a horseshoe, so I sit on the opposite end, twenty-five feet away. I order a pint of Killian’s Red and watch them talk.

  Part of me is worried that I’m too dirty to be in here, but that feeling passes. No one is looking at me. It’s loud, and the assorted conversations drown out the music. Wing Bar is equally loud, but almost always in the opposite way. There are many attractive women here, or at least some attractive women, or at least women. They all seem to be wearing pencil skirts, which I love. I never knew pencil skirts were called “pencil skirts” until recently, when my nineteen-year-old niece explained that this is how one is supposed to refer to skirts of this style. I’d always thought they were just called small skirts. This, I suspect, is the kind of thing people learn in college. Not the only thing, obviously. But maybe it’s an extra thing you learn, in an ancillary fashion, while you’re primarily learning about accounting or hotel management or chemistry. It’s a useless thing for a man to know, ninety-nine percent of the time. But then pencil skirts randomly come up in conversation, and either you know what they are or you don’t. I’ve had to educate myself.

  Beer is expensive in a place like this, but who cares. I’m not destitute. I drink seven. Watching these short guys in suits is awkwardly mesmerizing, despite the fact that their banter is only audible when they all laugh. It looks like they’re constantly arguing, but no one ever gets mad. They drink slowly. They drink like people who intend to drive home. For the first hour, I try to make myself annoyed by their presence. I want to dislike them. But I don’t. I can’t. It’s useless to get angry over strangers. If we concede that life is not fair, we must also concede that it has to be unfair to someone else’s benefit. There’s no way around that. Maybe they deserve it, maybe they don’t. Maybe no one deserves anything. Maybe being smart enough to have a job where you wear a suit isn’t worth the various trade-offs, such as being too dumb to realize how lame this bar is. By the time I start my eighth Killian’s, the only sensation I feel is curiosity. Not about them, so much, but about myself. I’m drunk enough to climb inside my most vulnerable thoughts. I pick up my beer and walk over to their table. Why not? It’s a free country.

  “Excuse me,” I say. They all freeze. They’re robots. “Can I ask you a question?”

  The four suits take turns looking at each other, unable to mask their confusion. One of them says okay, and then they all say okay. I think they might be drunker than me, despite having consumed half as much alcohol.

  I pose my query to the table: “What have you guys been talking about?”

  Again, they haphazardly glance at each other instead of looking back at me. The silence lasts longer than it should. These are bad robots.

  “Bro,” says the nervous man I followed three hours earlier. “We weren’t talking about you. I swear to God. We weren’t talking about anybody.”

  I had forgotten where I was and how I was dressed, and that my hands are covered in scars.

  “Oh, no,” I say. “No no no. I’m not that kind of person. No way. Never. I don’t want trouble. I’m not making accusations. I’m just legitimately curious about what you’ve been talking about tonight.”

  They all relax, instantly. A little too much, the way only drunk people can relax.

  “That’s my only question,” I reiterate. “What have you boys been discussing?”

  “Gary’s wife’s vagina,” says one, and two of them laugh like orangutans on nitrous.

  “No, seriously,” I say, turning to the non-laughing man I assume to be Gary.

  “Why do you possibly care?”

  “It’s not that I care,” I say. “I just want to know. For my own purposes.”

  The four suits can’t seem to accept the simplicity of my request. They smile and squint and stammer. The guy who made the vagina joke finally tries to explain. He’s terrible at explaining things.

  “I don’t think we’ve been talking about anything,” he claims. “We work together, so we’ve been talking about work, but work sucks, so not really. We’re all in a fantasy baseball league, so we talked about which guys still get steals and which guys still get saves. Gary has a little kid. We talked about the kid. The National are playing here next month, but none of us can go, so we talked about how we’re not going to see the National. How’s that? Is that what you need?”

  “But you’ve been sitting here for three hours,” I say. “There must be more. Didn’t you talk about books or movies or anything else?”

  “Books? I don’t think we’ve ever talked about books. I guess we did talk about the last Star Wars movie. We all hate it.”

  “I don’t mean movies like Star Wars.”

  “You don’t like Star Wars?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. It’s just that I thought you’d be talking about different kinds of movies, or current events, or maybe tennis.”

  “Why would we be talking about tennis?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t. “You say you all work in the same office?”

  “He and I met in law school,” said the vagina-joke maker, pointing toward Probable Gary, “and then we both got jobs at their firm,” dismissively waving the back of his hand at the other two robots.

  “You’re lawyers.”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “We’re lawyers.”

  “That’s funny,” I said, even though it wasn’t. “You know, I needed a lawyer once. I committed a crime in another state, by accident. Kind of a bad crime, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I thought it might ruin my life. But I ended up talking to some lawyer over the telephone, and we had two or three short conversations, and he said he could fix everything for around three thousand dollars. And he did! I ended up getting charged with a couple of not-so-bad crimes and I never even had to go back for the court date. I still don’t know how that worked. I never even
met the lawyer in person.”

  “Was it a felony?”

  “I don’t even know. It was a DUI.”

  “Oh, sure,” said the vagina-joke maker. “You can do that. That’s not hard. It’s harder than it used to be, but still not difficult.”

  “I had no idea,” I said. “It seemed so crazy at the time.”

  “It is crazy,” said the nervous little man I’d followed up the street. “That’s the only thing you learn in law school that’s useful: Laws are crazy on purpose. Everything is negotiable. If you make a law complicated enough, you can apply it any way you want. You just need to make sure it’s so complicated that no normal person can understand it, unless they went to law school.” He took a bird-sized sip of bourbon and continued. “What do you do? This doesn’t seem like your kind of place.”

  “Lots of things,” I say. “But right now, Sheetrock.”

  “I’ve heard of that,” said Probable Gary.

  We’d reached the point in the conversation where something had to change. Either they had to begrudgingly ask me to sit down or I had to make up an excuse to walk away. I take the latter option. There is nothing more to be gained from this. I carry my beer into the bathroom, enter a stall, close the door, and pour the remainder of the pint down my throat. I take a long piss and pay my bill. It’s so high I need to use my debit card. The night air is still warm when I get outside, and more humid than earlier. No traffic on the street, in either direction. Why did I ask if they were talking about tennis? They must think I’m an idiot. I walk back toward my car, which I think I can still probably drive. I pass the Wing Bar and consider popping in. The other guys might still be in there. But then again, what would be the point? What would we do? Drink more drinks? Complain about Star Wars? Nobody deserves anything, everything is negotiable, and I need to take a shower.

  The Truth About Food

  It started with a question from a six-year-old, which is the only way it could have happened at all. It was a question only a child would ask: “Do animals eat healthy?” A few of the scientists chuckled. Jokes were made, mostly for the benefit of the chaperones. But when the field trip was over and the kids had left the facility, a not-so-casual argument erupted in the lab.

  “Of course they do,” was the response from the senior researchers, followed by various versions of the phrase “How could they not?” The baseline contention was that nonhuman mammalian life pursues whatever their bodies need, devoid of choice or misplaced agency. The horse eats grain and hay because the horse is naturally compelled to do so. The lion eats a zebra because that is the lion’s instinct. Humans are the only animals with the potential to want what they should not have, with the possible exception of domesticated dogs and cats (since those animals’ lives are dictated by the flawed judgment of humans).

  “But maybe not,” replied the junior researchers, half in jest (but only half). “Isn’t it possible that wild animals thrive despite their flawed diets?” The digestive systems of horses are able to break down the trace protein that exists in alfalfa, and the evolution of their horse teeth requires that they be herbivores. But is this really in their best interest? Would it potentially be good for a horse to eat another horse? Lions get zinc from zebra hearts and vitamin A from zebra livers, but are those limited options ideal? A lion has no access to sweet potatoes. Perhaps that’s to the lion’s detriment. Wild animals can only live in the way they understand, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the best way possible.

  The debate percolated among the lab workers for months, inevitably reduced to a core dispute over the character of ecology. The central issue was unscientific: Could the natural world be wrong? Is the natural world, by definition, the way the world is naturally supposed to be? For a handful of junior researchers, the possibility that it wasn’t became a fixation that collapsed into obsession. Whatever they’d studied in the past was incrementally discarded, replaced by a desire to understand if the diet of feral animals was ideal or substandard. It was not a straightforward pursuit. You can’t just start feeding bananas to jaguars. A musk ox won’t eat salmon, even if you spice it with paprika. It seemed cruel to force animals to eat food they did not readily want, simply to see if it made them better or worse. Instead, the scientists pursued their quest through a back door. Instead of studying the consumer, they would focus on the consumed. They would study food itself—but not in the way it had been studied in the past. They would not look at food as nutritionists. They would look at food through the prism of biocentrism and panpsychism—in short, the belief that everything in the universe possesses some level of consciousness. This, as one might expect, was frowned upon by most of their more established peers. But this was an era when traditional science was trusted less, so radical concepts could be engaged. It was the style of the time.

  Obviously, the data those researchers collected retroactively justifies the unconventionality of their approach. And (of course) that data still remains suppressed, for reasons that are equally easy to justify. But that doesn’t mean the results aren’t real. It only means they can’t be discussed in public.

  As one would expect, the full academic details are convoluted and tedious. We certainly won’t outline them here. All that really matters is the upshot: As it turns out, it is consciousness that generates the material universe, not the other way around. Food is alive. It has a life force, just like all things that grow and multiply. All the qualities we long viewed as food’s essential value—its vitamins, its minerals, its fiber—are worthless constructs. Calcium strengthens bones, but just barely. Vitamin K helps with blood coagulation, but not enough to stop anyone from bleeding to death. The difference between a handful of over-the-counter multivitamins and a handful of gravel is negligible. The myth of nutrition is not far removed from the myth of trolls causing disease. Most of what we eat has no purpose beyond rudimentary caloric fuel. Medically speaking, carrots and Kit Kats are identical. A Big Mac is transposable with tofu. What actually matters about food is more intangible. Food contains an existential power that cannot be measured or captured. It is, at risk of mixing metaphors, the juice of life. But (of course) no life force is eternal. The moment food stops living is the same moment its power begins to fade. This represents the massive advantage wild animals have over humans—the food they consume is almost always more alive. It’s not what they eat, but how and when. The horse may prefer the flavor of oats, but his strength is sustained by uncut grass. The lion chomps the zebra while the zebra’s heart still pumps, and that is what gives the lion a level of power no human can match. Even rotting carrion is closer to life than anything at Panera Bread.

  When it comes to eating, humans are simply doing it wrong. Eat an apple while it still hangs on the tree and the life force is colossal. You share the vigor of the tree in totality, all the way down to its subterranean roots. But pluck that same apple off its branch and the power is immediately reduced by half. Twenty-four hours after harvest, the apple retains (maybe) 10 percent of its value; bake it into a pie and you’re left with (maybe) .02 percent of the original magnetism. This is why humans snack constantly. This is why they relentlessly open insolvent restaurants and invest hours into conversations over where to get brunch. Humans are constantly searching for any meager scrap of life they can jam down their gullet. The average human is (of course) not conscious of this desire. The desire is invisible. But it’s still inherent to who that human is. The hunger for life is always present. There’s a reason toddlers are driven to eat dirt. Dirt contains microbes, and microbes are alive. The craving to consume the living earth is something we train ourselves to unlearn. Only a child intuits that dirt is a good thing to eat.

  The reason the truth about food remains unknown is (I assume) obvious to everyone. The researchers all understood that this kind of knowledge could not be published. Society could not handle this depth of reinvention. We’re not going to start climbing ladders and eating apples off their branches, nor a
re we going to stop pretending that what we currently put in our mouths has any impact on how we feel. Some things can’t be changed. We are animals, but not that kind of animal. We are not healthy, but we are healthy enough.

  Every Day Just Comes and Goes

  His husband always called it the lake, which drove him berserk. They both knew what it was. They both knew it was a reservoir. It had been described as a reservoir by the realtor, on the first day they looked at the house. It didn’t even resemble a lake, except for the water. You could see the goddamn concrete. “Call it what it is. Quit acting like it’s pretentious to use the word reservoir. People know you’re pretending not to know the difference. It’s not amusing to be wrong on purpose. People hate that more than pretension.”

  These were Trevor’s thoughts as he ran along the artificial shoreline, past the half-empty dog park and the desolate basketball courts, struggling to complete an aerobic 4.4-mile jaunt before the sun turned ultra-oppressive. Marital annoyance was his last cogent notion, before the confrontation.