Uncertainty
It was a chilly morning in January when a banker named Milton became aware that as he walked back to his car after work he would slip on a patch of black ice and break his arm. Milton found this so alarming that he immediately set about convincing himself it was not true.

He succeeded only in putting it out of his mind until he felt the improbable rotation of his body, which was suddenly ponderous and unfamiliar. He did not gasp from the surprise—most people would have, he considered later—or yell from the pain , at least not at first. What he'd wanted to do, he told people—though of course he didn't actually do it, the whole thing happened just like that—was to sigh—he way you sigh when the girl calls you into the dentist's for something unpleasant.

This was the first case of Milton's prescience. For a long time it remained the most ominous. He routinely knew the weather, the identities of phone callers, that So-and-so's wife would get pregnant soon. There did not seem to be a common element in any of it. Occasionally he would obtain something of real value; more often the information was amusing or mildly useful.

Once in a supermarket he had seen a woman pushing a cart with a small child sitting in the basket, its two hands clutching a bottle, which Milton realized it would spill.

"Careful with that," he said, smiling.

The child did not understand him, of course, but was so delighted by the phrase that it flung the bottle to the floor, splattering Milton's shoes with formula.

He took to his gift with good humor, but did not tell anyone about it. One evening, after a few drinks, he had almost mentioned it to a friend.

He had just won a good deal of money on an improbable bet over a football game.

"I don't know how you do it," the friend said ruefully as he wrote out a check.

Milton giggled. "You want to know how I do it?"—but then he knew he would not say anything.

He giggled again. "I'm a lucky sonuvabitch, that's how."

_____________


One thing troubled him.

He often thought of his broken arm, which was still in its cast. What if he had stayed at the office that evening, or invented some pretext to ask a colleague for a lift home, thereby avoiding the walk to his car and the murderous black ice?

Attempts to forestall other predictions had all ended in failure. As often as not he ended up causing the very thing he hoped to prevent. The baby's milk, for instance.

It reminded him of a Greek tragedy. It took that sort of anachronistic credulity to buy into the logic of a prediction causing itself. That had pleased him at first. But he could not ignore the hackneyed, frustrating question: How could it be that one knew the future but could not change it? In this day and age.

He determined to ensure that a prediction failed to come true. I shouldn't be difficult. The next time he "knew" what he himself would do, he would instead do the opposite.

But he had never often had predictions about himself. With this conviction they came even less frequently, and breaking them was inconvenient.

His first opportunity came one morning during the commute to work. His coffee seemed unusually anxious to evacuate his bladder. When the prediction came, he could only chuckle at its deviousness. Half an hour later he pulled into his parking space, and as he hobbled to the restroom he said out loud, "All right—you win." (He did wonder, sometimes, whether these premonitions were communicated to him by a greater intelligence.)

A few weeks later, he found to his delight that he would make a tremendous amount of money for his firm—and himself—by investing in a certain company. He remembered his resolution but decided to conduct his test another time.

There was, after all, plenty of time.

It went on like this for several months, Milton foreseeing only things that he wanted to do—or felt that to avoid, on account of his "experiment," would look too much like obsession. No one would know, of course, but Milton felt the need to be vigilant in this regard. Better not even to start down a road that might lead to eccentricity.

Still, he had begun to feel conspired against, and this feeling worried him. He decided that it would be best, for his peace of mind, to go through with it. Just get it done, come hell or high water, and then forget it.

The only result of this was that he no longer saw things—anything—he could hope to control.

At least the answer to the question of his broken arm: if he had heeded the warning, he would not have received it in the first place. He was after all exactly like those Greek prophets who saw a partial but inescapable future. A future that did not need to reach into the past to force itself into being, because it already had—already would—come about through the free will of men.

_____________


Years passed.

Milton was sometimes shown unhappy affairs—death, heartbreak, sickness, financial ruin, usually of strangers. He knew better than to try to prevent them, but they weighed on him and made him in some ways a soberer man.

Yet being largely spared knowledge of his own future, Milton felt in control of himself. He considered that he had reached a sort of truce with his gift, and he was grateful for it. The truce and the gift.

Then he was invited to attend a conference in London. His flight had just begun its long journey across the Atlantic Ocean when he discovered that a woman he had been seeing for several months would soon be driving home from a cocktail party. What soon meant was unclear—tonight. She would be just slightly drunk, but drunk enough. There would be a ring, she would fumble for her phone—always at the bottom of a full purse (he had chastised her for it how many times?). At this time of year that would be enough.

The fact that it would be ice—again—seemed to mean something. Maybe a second chance. It was only seven, too early to be leaving a cocktail party. Did she have any reason to go home so soon?

Not that he knew.

A second chance.

He was already holding the in-flight phone. But how did it work? He read the directions too quickly and had to read them a second time, then a third. In an instant, the dryness of the cabin air became oppressive and he broke out in a deep sweat.

There were reasons people left cocktail parties early. The arrival of an ex-boyfriend. Diarrhea. Parents' heart attacks or strokes. And the ring from his call would certainly be the one to cause her death.

But if he did not call, she would still be at the party—there was no reason for her not to be—and he would have pointlessly missed the chance to stop her.

It was familiar, self-defeating logic. Nonlogic. Either she had left the party or she was still there—it had nothing to do with whether he called. There was no conspiracy of fate, no escape from responsibility; he could still make the right choice. Yet for no reason but pointless coincidence he would make the wrong one.

Minutes passed. He sweat, vacillated, several times began the laborious process of making the call, then abruptly hung up. The idea of determining the moment of her death was too heavy.

He knew at the same time that if he only called, in spite of everything, he might still be able to prevent it. With a rush of adrenaline he would pick up the phone. But if he called . . . .

This continued until long after she was dead.

_____________


Shortly after the funeral, he began to know his own future again. He accepted the knowledge with little question now. The more he complied with it, the more he knew, until it was sometimes difficult to differentiate between the predictions and his own thoughts.

The predictions became increasingly passive and self-referential. One day he awoke knowing that he would not leave bed that day, even to call in sick to work.

"Why not just get out of bed? Go to work, stop this ridiculousness," he imagined friends saying to him.

"I can't," he would have responded.

"Yes you can," they'd say.

"You're right—I can," he would have confessed. "I could get up right now and get on with me life. But I won't."

"Why not!" he imagined them crying. Then he would have rolled over and pushed his face into the pillow. When he turned back, not long afterward, they would have left, shaking their heads in disgust.

But for the most part he managed to hold himself together. Both his personal and professional lives suffered, but it was assumed this was due to grief over the woman. It was seen as a little unbecoming—they had, after all, only been going out only for a few months at the time of the accident—but then, some people had always been deeply affected by death. If Milton was one of them, would could you say? Besides, he still did good work.

_____________


One clear chill morning many months later, he was eating breakfast in a cafe when his gaze fell upon a very attractive woman, significantly younger than he was. She was sitting directly in his line of sight and he allowed himself to admire her surreptitiously for a moment.

Her eyes flicked up. They were not immediately accusing, just curious—but he jerked his head aside like a teenage boy.

He realized that he would look again at the woman, and this time he would stare at her shamelessly, with no regard for her discomfort. Not because of desire, but because he knew what would happen if he kept looking—and because he knew that he would keep looking in spite of that.

Because the circularity and arbitrariness were too horrifying to look away from, he kept looking until the woman stood up abruptly and walked out of the cafe.

Milton waited until he heard the sound—an enormous but surprisingly complicated sound, a messy out-of-place sound—of an I-beam, dislodged from its crane harness by a sudden, improbably perfect gust of wind, falling seven stories onto a city sidewalk, onto trunks of cars and street lights and more people than would seem probable.

Milton stayed in the cafe for an hour, watching the sirens and the news vans all speeding toward the accident; then dozens of policemen who, after all that, had nothing to do but wander around speaking to one another in morbidly jaded tones and telling passers-by there's nothing to see here.

Then he went home and climbed to the roof of his apartment block. The deceptively empty blue sky reeled crazily above him. He sat on the low wall surrounding flat roof, but did not look down; the invisible currents and eddies of air comprised by the sky gently pushed his clothing to and fro.

He knew he would remain sitting here for a very long time, until that sky sent him down as well. How long would he wait?

Hours passed, and finally the sun began to set. "What am I waiting for?" he asked himself.

He got down off the wall and returned to his apartment.

third draft

Uncertainty

It was a chilly morning in January when a banker named Milton allowed his eyes a moment of restful unfocussedness, staring off toward the bland gray sky outside his sixty-third-story office window, and immediately became aware that as he walked back to his car that evening he would slip on a patch of black ice and break his arm. He found this so alarming that he immediately set about convincing himself it was not true.

He succeeded merely in putting it out of his head, so that when he felt with horror the improbable rotation of his un-limber middle-aged body, sensed the incongruous collision between gritty ice and pinstriped wool, he could almost have let out the sigh of one who has just been called out of the waiting room for a very unpleasant dental procedure.

Hereafter, evidence of his prescience began to accumulate, mostly in trivial matters. Once, for instance, he saw a woman carrying a baby in the super market and knew immediately that the child would spill the contents of the bottle it carried (which it did). If he went for a walk, he might be presented with the images of a few strangers he would pass on the way. He often knew the weather.

In all these cases, Milton experienced knowledge in the proper sense, not the sort of everyday hunch over which people exclaim "I knew it!" There seemed to be no common element in what he foresaw except that it came true, and that its coming true was never a surprise. After a month he accepted this completely.

As might be expected, he enjoyed his new gift, and did not tell anyone about it. One evening, after a few drinks, he considered mentioning it to a friend—but suddenly knew he would not. He laughed to himself and shook his head, and forgot about it.

His predictions were almost never about himself or any event over which he had control. He often thought about his broken arm, which was still in its cast. He could have stayed at the office, or invented some pretext to ask a colleague for a lift home, and thereby avoid walking to his own car. But he had not.

Then again, what if the prediction itself had altered his behavior slightly, perhaps indirectly causing him to take a different path to his car—a path that crossed the fateful ice—so that the prophecy had lead to its own fulfillment, as was common (and, he had always thought, silly) in Greek mythology?

He determined that the next chance he had, he would ensure that a prediction failed to come true. The easiest way would be to wait until he "knew" what he himself would do, and then do the opposite.

His first opportunity came that March, on a rainy weekday morning when traffic was particularly bad, and the cup of coffee he'd had with breakfast seemed to be unusually anxious to evacuate his bladder. When the prediction came, he could only chuckle at its deviousness. Half an hour later he pulled into the parking lot, and as he hobbled to the restroom, he rolled his eyes and said out loud, "You win."

In April, after a week in which both his work and social lives had been unusually demanding, Milton decided to treat himself to a quiet dinner alone, but could not decide what he wanted. Then he knew where he would eat—a quiet rooftop bistro he had used to visit with an ex-girlfriend, which he had since forgotten about. He could sit outside—it was a bright half moon, and a few stars were even visible. It was such an appealing thought that he decided to conduct his test another time. There was, after all, plenty of time.

It went on like this for several months; what he foresaw about himself tended to be things he wanted or had to do. He still enjoyed his gift tremendously, but this aspect began to irritate him.

There was one other undesirable facet of his clairvoyance: he was sometimes shown unpleasant things, even death. On one hand, he was often able to stop these things, in which case he predicted not the event itself, but its prevention. Once, by asking a man for the time, Milton kept him from meeting a woman who would otherwise have changed his life dramatically, leading eventually to his suicide (of course the man, a stranger, never knew this). Milton was extremely gratified to be able to help several other people in similar ways. On the other hand, when he saw death or disaster itself, he knew that nothing would be able to prevent it, and this was terribly depressing.

His two complaints—seeing inevitable tragedies, and failing to prove any of his prophecies wrong—both resulted from a simple fact: he was not made aware of contingencies. He was, in fact, exactly like those Greek prophets who saw a partial but certain future, and one in which the prophecy itself might have played a role.

This was difficult for Milton to accept, and he resolved at least not to take it for granted. But when he resolved to go further out of his way to break the next prophecy he could, even at cost to himself, he simply stopped having prophecies he could break. Now almost the only time he ever knew anything about his own future was when he would save the lives of others.

Several years passed in this way. But being largely spared knowledge of his own future, Milton considered that he had reached a sort of truce with his gift, and never once regretted having it. The unhappy affairs of which he knew—death, heartbreak, sickness, financial ruin—weighed on him and made him in some ways a more sober person.

Then, one February, he was invited to attend a conference in London. Shortly after his flight began its long journey through the tranquil sky above the clouds that covered the Atlantic Ocean, he discovered that a woman he had been dating for several months was driving home from a cocktail party. She was just slightly drunk, but drunk enough. She was about to die.

Milton immediately used the in-air phone to call her, but there was no answer. Thirty agonizing hours later, he arrived back in New York. It was impossible to know the exact time of the accident. It had been either just before or just after his call.

After this, he began to know his own future again. He accepted this knowledge, as he predicted he would. The more he accepted it and followed his predictions, the more frequent they became, until it was sometimes difficult to differentiate between these predictions and his ordinary thoughts. His predictions also showed increasingly passive behavior. One day he awoke with the knowledge that he would not leave bed that day, even to call in sick to work.

But for the most part he managed to hold himself together. Both his personal and professional lives suffered, but people assumed this was due to grief over the woman This was seen as a little unbecoming. They had, after all, only been going out only for a few months at the time of the accident. That had been not long after annual reports, hadn't it? It was September already. But then, some people had always been deeply affected by death. Who could criticize Milton for being one of them? Besides, he still did good work.

One clear, cold morning that month he ate breakfast in a cafe. As he ate, he noticed a very attractive woman, significantly younger than he was, who he sometimes saw in his office building. She was sitting directly in his line of sight, and he allowed himself to admire her for a moment—just a moment, nothing lecherous. But she noticed him staring, and embarrassedly he jerked his eyes away from her and put his head down.

But he realized that he would look again at the woman, and this time he would stare at her shamelessly, with no regard whatsoever for her discomfort, until she stood up abruptly and walked out of the cafe. As a direct result (where his prescience was concerned, Milton saw all results as direct), she would be one of those killed when an airplane collided with their building half an hour from now.

There was nothing sexual in the way Milton looked at the woman now. He had never treated the deaths he foresaw as abstractions, but nor had they ever confronted him so directly. He had desired this woman, but she would die. Therefore she would die. Therefore he could not look away. Therefore she would die.

Milton stayed in the cafe until the firefighters evacuated him. Then he went home and climbed to the roof of his apartment block. The deceptively empty blue sky reeled crazily above him. He sat on the low wall surrounding flat roof, but did not look down; the invisible currents and eddies of air comprised by the sky gently pushed his clothing to and fro, and carried from behind him a faint chemical smoke.

He knew he would remain sitting here for a very long time, until that sky sent him down as well. How long would he wait?

Hours passed, and finally the sun began to set. He turned around. His office was gone. "What am I waiting for?" he asked himself. He got down off the wall and returned to his apartment.

first draft

The history of the modern bovine

Standing there before the two of them, I feel a tingling awareness of my body; sumptuous, tight, expansive in its classical perfection. Mine is a body so conspicuously exquisite that those who look upon it feel almost guilty, as though they are participating in a vast squandering of resources.

I have never been so utterly complete, so able to occupy my physical self, my heartbeat,¹ my metabolism. Here is a new pleasure, heady and private: the expansion and contraction of my lungs, the coolness of the air slipping into and out of my throat, and the knowledge of the subtle, sensual rhythm that this causes in the image of my magnificent frame.

I hold still, waiting.

"I can't do this," says Patricia.

"Baby," says Mark cloyingly.

The mysticism and incipience of the moment is gone. Mark puts a hand on Patricia's and says something in a low, gentle voice, to which she responds, sounding upset, perceptibly beginning to lapse back into her typical self-righteous. They are both tired and hungry² and tense.

It is clear that my presence makes Patricia uncomfortable. She wants to speak to Mark as though I am not here, but she is aware of the hypocrisy in that, so she half-glances in my direction as she talks, nonetheless referring to me as "him."³

Mark points out that Patricia has agreed to this. We've met several times, I've spoken to her at great length. But although the force and tact of my rhetoric is unrivaled, I'm not surprised that something like this should happen. It has happened before, or I wouldn't be here at all.

It's best to let them speak alone. I have always found it undignified to back up, but tonight is a night for pragmatism. Awkwardly, I shuffle away to an appropriate distance. Mark casts me an apologetic look, which embarrasses and annoys me. I don't like Mark. Patricia believes that being married to him protects her from being "lumped in" with other reactionaries.

I enter a semi-meditative state, ruminating. Naturally I'm upset about this whole situation, but I of all people should know that this does not always go as one imagined when one was young.

Of course in my case it could have. I could, had I chose, be addressing a banquet of the world's greatest minds: scientists, artists, presidents, economics, philosophers, and of course chefs. All of the very best chefs. Not just Laverne or Strauss or Zhou, but all of them and more. We would talk late into the night, planning every detail to perfection. I was offered the chance. No expense would have been spared.

Instead, I chose Patricia. In her youth she was a respected member of the "intellectual" caste within the so-called "animal-rights movement." She remains a highly visible symbol of veganism, despite having given up formal adherence to that ideology. I suspect this was her motivation as well as mine. She is up for tenure in the Stanford economics department, and a decisive act of reformation on her part would make the appointment less awkward for the university. My own decision incited a degree of controversy, but I remain convinced it was the right one.

I did not expect it to be easy. For now there is nothing I can do. She has read enough of the essential literature,⁵ attended lectures by myself and others, and held with me enough private discussion to understand more than most meat-eaters, at least intellectually. The problem is now one of reconciling her emotions to discovered truth. It is not easy—but, as my former mentor, the great rhetorician Bessie Murray-Grey XIVCCCLXIX, observed, after reaching this phrase there is but one likely outcome.

I stand at a distance, ruminating and considering the works of Yukio Mishima, which of course I have read in the original Japanese. A misguided but beautiful soul is apparent in them. I admire Mishima for aspiring to make something beautiful out of the ugliness of human death.

In contrast to many academics of my standing, I have always found human culture interesting in its own right. I dare say that were it not for my continued support in both academic circles and the popular press, the study of human literature may have died out entirely. This is not to boast—I merely took advantage of a perception that exists, whether justified or not, that my judgments are not to be written off lightly, however unfashionable they may be. Rather, I hope to illustrate that the ignorance exists on both sides, whatever we tell ourselves.

My attention is drawn sharply back to the table as Patricia yells "Because it's wrong, Mark. I'm sorry, it's just wrong. It's wrong and it's sick." Patricia turns to look at me. "How can you do this?" she yells again, pulling her hands out of from Mark's.

Mark says something I can't hear, causing Patricia to look over the edge of the table to see the red wine she has just spilled on my beige carpet.

"What's it matter?" she yells again. "He's going to need it after you eat him, is he?"

Mark shows me his apology face, then says something that gets Patricia to stop yelling. She picks up the glass and, without attempting to make eye contact, says tersely to me, "I'm sorry."

I swallow my cud and continue to wait.

It is impossible to understand Patricia and people like her out of the context of the history of the modern bovine. And it is one of history's great ironies that without these people, there would no modern bovine.⁶ I will relate this history here in brief.

It began after the creation of genetically modified insentient organisms capable of producing a substance phenomenologically identical to beef, with far greater efficiency than traditional husbandry. Naturally this "meat" was widely and rightly shunned, but its existence rendered the killing animals for food, already considered by many to be a practice of little normative value, into a symbol of unsustainable bourgeois excess.

The solution was enlightened. Over a great many generations a new life-form was guided into existence. It was, by a very wide margin, the most rapid evolution ever to have taken place. The remarkable bovine that was the result of this process possessed astounding capacity for reason and abstract thought, as well as the faculty of speech. They quickly developed an advanced culture that recognized⁷ the concept of a bovine's ultimate role as food for human beings.

This was, of course, the first time humanity had been confronted with an equally intelligent species, and reactions were varied. Many felt threatened, and there was justified concern that the the original goal of the project had been lost. Indeed, for a time there existed in human culture such discomfort with the idea of another species that equaled humans, but was fundamentally different from them, that tremendous effort was made to "humanize" us. The very concept of the butchery and the consumption of beef was questioned; entire generations died of old age.

But our intelligence served us well, as it had been intended to. We developed the education system that remains in place to this day,⁸ emphasizing rhetoric, philosophy, and the culinary arts, and were therefore able to employ the twin inducements of just argument and delectable cuisine.

It was, perhaps predictably, more the latter than the former that reestablished our right to be eaten. And while relations have been mostly harmonious, there remains a failure in humanity to properly understand being eaten as a right. This is inconsequential for most, but it lies at the root of veganism.

My early conversations with Patricia betray the extent of the ignorance necessary to maintain this ideology. She spoke at length about my "right to live," tried to convince me that I didn't "have to" be eaten, that there was "a better way." She indicated that I had been "brainwashed" into my "beliefs."

The number of times I was obliged to employ quotation marks just now is telling. As I have attempted to explain on many occasions, the disconnect between human and bovine culture is a structural one: that is, people like Patricia struggle to engage bovinism using human categories.⁹ Some have even gone as far as to suggest that our "cultural addiction" to perfecting our bodies for human consumption stems from a sort of perverse religiosity.¹⁰

It is difficult to convince a person that concepts such as servitude and equality, so-called "animal rights," religion, masochism, etc., are inapposite here—but I believe I have done so with Patricia. Besides the personal satisfaction of it, I strongly believe the symbolism of her enjoying a fillet de moi will be of great value. Perhaps that is naive.

Regardless, my efforts are about to bear fruit. Mark beckons to me, and I approach the table. How long have I been waiting?

Patricia has been crying, but she is smiling now as she tells me she is ready. Mark is grinning in his self-satisfied way. He seems external to the scene—at this moment I even feel somewhat warmly toward him.

The sense I have of my body is returning. I feel purposeful and benevolent.

"Hungry?" I ask Patricia.

"Very much." She is looking up into my eyes.

"Which part of my body would you like?" My voice is soft and deep, paternal and reassuring, but Patricia hesitates. "Shall I choose for you?" She nods.

I direct her to place her hand on my side, near my spine, toward the bottom of my sirloin. Once again my breath takes on an aspect that fills my entire being; the pressure of her hand seems to anchor me to the world. I have never felt a physical sensation with such clarity.

"Here," is all I say. She nods.

Mark, with trite solemnity, informs me that he will have the same. We settle on appetizers. I have already selected the wine based on my recent diet. ¹¹

"Thank you," says Patricia, looking up at me again. Looking down at her, I am overcome by feelings of tenderness and generosity.

"Thank you too," I reply. "The chef will be bring me out shortly." With that, I leave.

My slaughter room has been prepared for me. My chef, flayer, and butcher are waiting to attend on me. We make brief small talk, and I give some last-minute instructions, then I step into a wide gold-plated trough, and let my eyes ease shut for the last time.

The ceremonial restraint harness descends from the ceiling with the hiss of a hydraulic motor, and my flayer and butcher see it down over my body. Though I have gone through the motions of this exercise innumerable times, the weight of the harness feels fresh, and at the same time familiar, as though it were a part of me that had been missing.

Even in the midst of my elation, it is not difficult to imagine Patricia picturing this. She has seen this room and its instruments; she has met these men. "Executioners," she called them at the time. This feeling, in some sense, may remain—or not. A powerful moment came when my flayer related to her a story told be a previous client. The client had explained to the flayer how surprised he had been as a youngster in school to learn that humans do not want to be eaten, and how he had only accepted the fact when his teacher had asked, "Who would eat them?" To refer to the bovine consumption-instinct as "a desire" is not dissimilar to saying that a human "desires" not to drink a bottle of cyanide.

Nonetheless, I cannot escape the feeling that somewhere in Patricia's mind I am a poor soul about to meet his brutal end, shaking and wretched—if not visibly, then somewhere in his own mind. In other words, that her understanding is a facade, behind which she still believes that everything I've described to her is its own facade, and that if all these elaborate constructions were torn down, we would be left in a barren landscape, the two of us alone facing death.

Padded ring clamps shut tightly around my ankles, and, with the sound of more shifting hydraulic pressure, the butcher lowers the platinum-coated ceremonial non-penetrating captive bolt pistol¹² and fits it against my forehead.

The cool of the metal is soothing almost beyond imagination. There is a sense of unfolding, of the components of my body and the world being rearranged into their proper places.

The butcher throws a switch, and the bolt begins to retract. For some reason I open my eyes. Standing in the doorway, unseen by anyone else, is Patricia. She appears horrified. I smile at her. There is a click as the bolt snaps into its cocked position. There is no change in Patricia's face. My butcher is pressing down with both hands on the heavy trigger. I can feel my own heartbeat against the straps of the harness.

Suddenly Patricia seems to comprehend the sound she has just heard. I hear her begin to yell.

Wait.

___________________

¹I must admit that, in way I know to be deeply inappropriate, it reminds me of the last sentence of Hemingway's masterpiece For Whom the Bell Tolls, when Robert Jordan feels "his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest."
²I am afraid I cannot resist the rather sophomoric observation that there is a very obvious solution to this.
³Patricia has made it clear that she believes she respects me. Contrary to what might have been expected, I have been surprised to discover the fervency of this supposed respect. It is, in its own misguided way, touching. If tonight we fail again to move forward, I shall write a monograph about it.
⁵A category in which, I am pleased to say, some have found fit to include my own work, notably Cook, Diner, and Dined: A Thesis on the Tripartite Preparation of Prime Rib, and, among the more populist-minded, Being and Consumption.
⁶ The current unpopularity of this notion is based on a contemporary revision unworthy of further discussion.
⁷Human chroniclers have often erroneously employed the phrase based on.
⁸The subject of bovine institutional development is a controversial one, and one in regard to which I am afraid my opinion differs from the orthodoxy, which would have it that our cultural institutions sprang into being with little intervention from the human world. In point of fact, many of these institutions, inconveniently but undeniably, have roots in human-enacted "programs" of those early days. C.f. my essay "Humanization Programs and the Early Development of Education: A Defense."
⁹I, for one, have always believed that we can ill afford the cavalierness with which we treat this sort of culturally imperialism.
¹⁰One shockingly offensive but briefly popular diatribe, Cult of the Steak, went so far as to characterize butchery as "a ritual sacrifice" that we believe necessary to enter an "afterlife." What our culture has so far failed to understand is that humans need it explained that this is bunkum—that the very categories of "life" and "after life" are peculiar to humanity. For example, over the years I have maintained frequent correspondence with a certain well-known human writer and thinker (whose name, for obvious reasons, I will not include here). Once, I happened to request his thoughts on how human civilization functions under its unique conception of death, which at that time I felt I was just coming to understand. He replied that when he read those lines, he was utterly dismayed. My correspondent is regarded as one of the great minds in operation today, and yet it had never occurred to him that the human fear of and obsession with death was not universal! This ignorance may be inexcusable, but accepting it as a given one wonders not at the persistence of the vegan ideology, but rather at why it is not even more widespread. (In regard to my question, I confess to admiring for the myriad ways in which people cope with their idea of death. A study in the role of death in human literature would be an immense but rewarding endeavor, and one that might find fruitful beginning with the authors I mentioned earlier.)
¹¹Once again, I must object to the fad of adjusting one's diet to suit a particular wine, dessert, etc.—but perhaps now is not the time for this discussion. I have said my piece elsewhere.
¹²This was a gift from one of the associations of bovine academics that I have chaired over the years. Its history is notable, but too lengthy to go into here. As an academic, I have not made a habit of vast worldly accumulation; however, this non-penetrating captive bolt pistol is one of a handful of possessions that gives me great pleasure.

first draft

It is probably artificial and stupid to talk about the “greatest moment” of one’s life—in fact, to talk about the greatest anything is ridiculous,¹ when it comes down to it. But there was one moment in my life during which I thought, This is the greatest moment of my life, although not in those words or any words, being too overwhelmed with the perfection of my experience to think in any particular words whatsoever, especially since the perfection (I use the word loosely) of that exact moment was due at least partially to my having just prior been told to “shut up.”

I was on a bench in Toledo at the top of a very tall and steep bank, so that before me was a winding river with the ruined turrets of some ancient fortress acting as a resting place for birds too last to fly across in one go; and green and gold fields on the far side, with more castles and towers in the distance; and old men in overcoats and carrying Walkmans and smoking on their way home from work in front of me. I was expounding (blathering eruditely) on some topic or other (something about Alzheimer’s research, I think), and my companion (who I was probably in love with), who had been leaning her head back on the bench so that she faced straight up, interrupted me suddenly, saying, “Chris, shut up and look at the sky.”

Of course when a girl (who is four years older than you, and you are only twenty) you are probably in love with gives you a command like this (which essentially amounts to carpe diem, doesn’t it?) you obey her; and I obeyed her, and leaned back my head as she had leaned back her head and looked up at that unremarkable gray sky until my neck hurt and the sky became remarkable; the fissures in its clouds were deep, as deep as the secret gorges that the Greeks would climb down to visit Hell; the clouds were the same clouds that I had looked down on as a child from a high mountain in some national part somewhere and thought, If I just drop down onto them I’ll sink deep and forever into their softness²; and I felt I was about to fall up into them and through their crevices to whatever was above (which, of course, would not be the temperaturelessness of space, which provides nothing and by doing so causes you first to explode, then to suffocate and probably, eventually, to cook in the energy of your own biothermal reactions); and when you are about to travel to the next life without the unpleasantness of dying, you really do feel liberated from a few things, and you can truly relax as you have never relaxed before, forgetting everything about this world—the pain in your neck (until it becomes too bad), the bench, your flight home, the old men walking past, how the sun will set soon, the girl sitting next to you (not completely, of course—not her; is she thinking about you?).
__________________

¹ For reasons not just ideological, but pragmatic, astrological, chronological, philosophical—reasons that are embedded deeply in the core of the existence, etc.
² And they were the same clouds, really; for what is sameness when our bodies can replace (eventually) every molecule and yet we are the same person as much as a person can ever be said to be the same person that he ever was. And for all I know those particular clouds were in fact the exact same collection of molecules, each made of the exact same collection of atoms, etc.; that is, as much as we can ever speak of “particular clouds,” in that there is really only one cloud in the world, and it has existed for all of our time and will continue to exist as long as there is a single water molecule that has the kinetic energy to break off of the scrummy mass of its identicals and hurls itself through nothingness until it collides with some bit of air and is sent crashing meteorically back to bestow its piss-and-vinegar spirit onto some other lucky bastard. And that is the tragedy of clouds, which look so discreet and simple from far far away, but that, like many things (all things, really, although admittedly more dramatically than, say, a person), up close turn out to have neither borders not substance. Which is basically why it was good that I chose not to throw my young self off that cliff.

second draft

"How long it been like this?"

"I understand that this is not easy for you. You have questions. I appreciate your cooperation," recited the doctor. "We have a routine. You will receive more information in a few hours, but first you will perform certain tasks which will help us to better understand your condition. You have agreed to this."

After a due moment of recuperative silence, he led the patient out of the room and down the hall. It was a pleasant old wooden house. They seemed to be on the second story. Whoever had taken the television stand away earlier was nowhere in sight. Who had it been? A graduate student? A thick-necked orderly? He could sense the physical seed of his loss and humiliation throbbing in the center of his brain.

To his surprise, the patient was now able to juggle. He could manage four balls at once. As the patient juggled, the doctor asked him a series of increasingly difficult questions to test his short-term memory. They ate breakfast off of worn white china at a small table in the bedroom, and the doctor asked the patient to recount some early memories in Portuguese.
"Just try your best," said the doctor, in Portuguese.

The patient understood. His scrambled eggs—very soft, light eggs, without too much butter, just a little salt—became almost impossible to swallow. The reader will be familiar with the feeling: a heavy stone detaches from the roof of one's chest cavity, sinking slowly down as if through a cold underground river to settle with a hollow sound among the entrails. An awful feeling.

"Tell me about your mother," said the doctor.

The patient began so speak. His Portuguese was not fluent. He stopped to take bites of his eggs, which a moment before had tasted familiar.

The doctor cleared the table, and replaced the dishes with ten hand-sized ten pieces of cardboard, each a different color.

"Let's play a short game," he said. "One of these cards has a picture of your mother on the back. Can you try to guess which one?"

The patient immediately turned over a yellow card. There was nothing on the other side. The doctor failed to hold back a small sigh. He made a mark on his clipboard.

"You want I try again?" said the patient in broken Portuguese.

"That's all right," said the doctor, standing up and switching back to English. "We're going to take a break for about twenty minutes. Next to your bed are some books you enjoy."

"I don't know if this is important," the patient said, "but the eggs tasted really familiar." His hands were sweaty. Do I say this every day? he thought.

"I see," said the doctor, collecting the cards.

A silence. The patient waited for the doctor to write something on his clipboard.

"It's the way your mother used to make them," said the doctor. "This part of the experiment is over, so I can tell you that. It took a lot of effort to learn to make them in a way you find authentic."

On the patient's part, more dislodged stones clacking down through his body. The phrases books you enjoy and a way you find authentic were so prominent in his mind that we are again left only with non-linguitic thoughts. To try to convey the feeling of being informed by a stranger that you enjoy a particular book: the narrator's imagination fails here.

"Do we have this conversation every day?" asked the patient. Should we say mortified?
"Every day is different," said the doctor. "Try not to think too much."

"But do I always mention the eggs?"

"No, not the eggs."

"But other things."

"Please," said the doctor, bending to pick up a brief case. He was not a charismatic man. He spoke the following as if reading from a card: "This kind of thinking won't help you. You're suffering from a severe neurological condition. It's not your fault if you behave similar from day to day. You're an intelligent and an insightful man, and considering what you go through every day you do very well. Everyone here has a great deal of respect for you."

There was a very short pause. It is truly impressive how much insecurity and indecision can be processed and compressed into a nearly imperceptible lapse in conversation. If the brain were a computer, even the least able among us would be a true marvel of technology.

Still, here we will have to turn to some overworked and perhaps overwrought language. At a time like this, who among us would have the mental resources for aesthetic considerations or rhetorical rigor? Everything he does changes me in measurable ways. Everything I do is a response to him and the environment he has created. (The doctor would no doubt have objected to this as an impossible ideal.) I am powerless. Trapped. There is no escape.

"This is impossible," he said.

The doctor had just begun to move toward the door. He stopped and let his head drop. Turning around, he began, "Jesus, I can't—" then stopped, shut his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

"I don't speak Portuguese," the patient interrupted.

"Try not to think too much," said the doctor. His voice was strained and tired-sounding. Who knows how often he went through this?

"You said that already."


A tiny laugh through the doctor's nose. "See? It can happen to anyone."

"Let me go," said the patient.

"Listen," said the doctor, "I can't do this today. You and I have had this conversation before. We go back and forth. It takes a long time, you get angry, sometimes I do too. You always give in in the end. Please."

The patient felt as though all the stones that had collected every day down at the bottom of his being had evaporated and bubbled up in a rush of air and energy and hope.

"No."

The doctor sniffed-laughed again. "That usually works. You're a very reasonable person."

"I'm sick of being reasonable."

"No you're not."

The patient felt a fresh rush of shame. "You have to let me go."

"You know I can't do that."

"Why should I trust you? What kind of a psychiatrist wears a lab coat?"

"I'm not a psychiatrist. And don't start on the the lab coat today. I know you don't seriously believe that this is some sick science-fiction laboratory where we inject you with 'glowing green drugs' every night as part of some experiment."

The patient blushed. "That's not what I was going to say," he said. In fact, the patient was not confident of this, one of the many perverse aspects of consciousness being that one does not always know in advance what he is going to say.

"Oh?" said the doctor. But the patient could not think of what he had been going to say instead.

"How can I convince you to let me go?"

"You can't. You've made all your arguments before. You always lose. You're not going to think of anything new."

"Maybe you will. Maybe today—"

The doctor interrupted. He spoke while pressing his temples with his fingertips. "Maybe today the accumulation of your imprecations will finally melt my cold professional heart? Maybe I've had an event in my personal life that will make me look at this differently? Maybe my wife said something to me last night over a dinner of baked chicken and peas?"

The patient had stood up during the exchange. At this he sat back down.

"Why is it always baked chicken with you, anyway? Could I possibly eat that every night? Do you have any idea how many nights in a row of baked chicken that would be?"

"No." The patient looked at his hands again. They were not the dried, blue-white, spotted hands he imagined he would have as an old man, but they looked subtly different. But we are not as familiar with the sight of our hands as idiom suggests, and it was impossible for him to tell (and, perhaps interestingly, irrelevant for our purposes) whether or not they actually were.

The silence was the kind that ends arguments. Pacifying, even soporific. The doctor sat down on the bed, remained there for half a minute, and then stood to leave again.

"I'll be back in five minutes," he said. "Don't go anywhere."

"You wouldn't be acting like this if I would remember tomorrow, would you?"

"If you could remember this tomorrow, I wouldn't be here," said the doctor.

"You know what I mean."

"Please just wait here," said the doctor, and left.

There was another door in the patient's room, leading to a small restroom with a toilet, a sink, and bathtub. The mirror on the cabinet above the sink had replaced with a familiar-looking watercolor of a whitewashed stucco lighthouse on a low grassy jut extending into a windswept blue ocean. The patient did not remember that he had briefly imagined a similar scene earlier that morning. One wonders what difference it would have made—assuming he had experienced a sort of memory, then what?

Inside the cabinet, the patient found a toothbrush and a razor. The toothbrush bristles were slightly soft and curved outward like the top of a bushel of wheat; the toothpaste tube had been rolled from the bottom. The patient had always had a habit of brushing his teeth first thing in the morning. He thought: This must be my toothbrush. On the lip of the bathtub was a half-used bar of soap. It is not inconceivable that for one in the patient's position, each of these items proposed a unique and terrible angle from which to view the situation. The razor offered a sort of hope. He did not have the least resolve to commit suicide, but it occurred to him that it would constitute a sort of victory. He turned on the water and brushed his teeth.

Would suicide have made a difference for the patient? Or was he obliterated at the end of each day to make room for a fresh consciousness? It could be speculated—and has been—that no conscious existence is anything but a flicker, a function of the unrepeatable state of the universe at any point, replaced from moment to moment. For us, dialectic concerns like these are a frivolity for undergraduates and the drug-addled; for the patient, they were of immediate, crushing importance.

He finished brushing his teeth and spat in the sink, then stared at where the mirror should have been.

The doctor re-entered. The ritual of brushing his teeth had calmed the patient's nerves. He exited the restroom and sat down at the table with the doctor.

Continuation of 20.2.07 2:14 AM
C.f. 19.2.07 1:44 AM; 11.2.07 4:22 PM; 17.2.07 3:50 PM; 20.2.07 2:14 AM

Between 11:49 and 12:16

Near midnight, the train runs more slowly—especially my line, which is all above ground and runs north-south along the eastern edge of the city. I boarded the train at 11:49pm at the northernmost stop. This city likes to call itself a city that never sleeps, but by this time of night there are hardly any lights on. In the windows, passengers see their own and one another's reflections, and behind them a dim and changing scene made of 7-11s, fluorescent bus windows, street lights with halos of dry leaves, break lights, and vertical signs for cheap hotels.

Most likely there are not so many people in any car on this train. My car had eight one of whom was standing, which meant that less than half the seats were taken. Still, strangers can end up sitting next to each other, even though one could not sit down next to a stranger when there are so many empty seats. What happens is that the car empties, and people are left sitting next to each other. One is too lazy or polite to get up and move to a place where he can have two adjacent seats to himself.

What would happen if you got up and moved? It happens from time to time. You think, To hell with it, we'll both have more room this way, and thereafter consciously avoid eye contact with your former neighbor. So when, on occasion, a person sitting next to you does this, you understand the motivation exactly but feel offended anyway.

There were two young men seated next to each other on my train home tonight. As it happened, they were both headed for the same stop. One of them could have been still in college. He wore somewhat baggy jeans and had spiked hair. The other might have been just out of a master's program, a young office worker or banker, perhaps a lawyer. He wore jeans and an untucked dress shirt, but it was too late at night to be able to tell much about him from the way he dressed. He was tired and quite good-looking, in a certain way that inclined one to think that here was someone who would be successful enough, professionally and socially, without having to suffer too much hardship.

Behind this young man, seated back-to-back with him, was a well-dressed young woman. Her clothing, black pants and a dainty silk shirt with a floral pattern, was too pretty for work, too tasteful for a night out, and too expensive for a student. She was too young to be married. Maybe she was on her way back from a date. She wasn't especially attractive, but she took good care of herself. To the right of the two young men was another young woman. She was naturally attractive, but dressed more casually than the other and had a hairstyle that didn't suit her face, which was lightly made up. If you looked, you might feel she ought to have put on slightly less eyeliner.

As the train moved between one stop and another, the college-aged young man stood up and moved toward the door. Almost immediately, the other young man stood and began to follow.

There had been no apparent impetus for the first young man to stand. The train wasn't very close to the next stop; there hadn't even been an announcement of the next stop to jar him into premature action. He hasn't finished a magazine article or a chapter of a book. He wasn't listening to music, and he hadn't received or made a phone call. It was truly a strange time to stand up, and whatever caused him to do so must have been the result of a long and isolated series of thoughts.

It was clear, though, the first young man's standing had prompted that of the second, who was certainly aware that the next stop was his. But at the slow pace the train was traveling, it would be a full minute or two before it arrived. The second young man could have sat back down, but he didn't, for reasons that are certainly unknown to him, even if he happens to be exploring the issue as I write this. He didn't sit down, but he was aware of having stood at a strange time, and of the obviousness of the fact that it was the other standing that had caused him to stand. He allowed a small part of his mind to lazily consider strategies for defusing the possible implications of follower-mentality or latent homosexual desire.

He took a small step away and turned his back on the other young man, who was facing the door and had not noticed any of this. As he turned, he looked briefly at the prettier girl, who had been looking at him. She looked away, but not quickly enough to appear embarrassed. His attention was quickly transfered to the woman who had been sitting behind him—or rather, to a strange action being committed by this specimen. The was holding both her arms out straight out, her hands meeting to clasp a black object directly in front of her face.

It was a camera phone, although it was unclear what she was photographing. There was an old couple dozing at the end of the car opposite her, but her hands were not pointed toward them. The young man continued to watch.

The phone took its photograph, emitting an electronic simulation of the sound of a camera shutter, which was the loudest noise in the car for that moment, and the only unexpected sound that had been heard for several stops. That is to say, it was fucking loud and one wondered whether he should would feel self-conscious. As the woman drew her arms back toward herself, the her hands rotated to reveal the other side of the phone, which had a large screen. She had been photographing her own face.

The young man smiled, or laughed silently, and sidled over a bit to try to catch a glimpse of the screen. The woman's back was to him, so he didn't know what her face looked like, or why she should choose to photograph it now. Surely she already had a photograph of herself on the phone, if she wanted one. It was not a new model, so she must have had it for some time. He tilted his head farther than would usually be tactful, obviously trying to look over her shoulder. He was tired and the train was almost empty, and no one was paying attention, except me.

But he didn't bend his head far enough or look long enough to tell what the woman looked like. He gave up almost immediately, without thinking about it. A second later the train slowed as it reached the station. He turned toward the door and the back of the other young man. The door opened, and both of them walked out. The profession-looking young man walked quickly, passing the college student in perhaps six long steps, not turning his head even a little as he stepped onto the escalator. At that moment, the college student noticed him for the first time, but, as the young professional walked down the escalator while the student stood, had forgotten about him entirely by the time he reached the bottom. The attractive young woman who had looked at the attractive young man earlier might think about him again in an abstract way, if she is that type of person.

First draft

What follows is a children's story that was told to me by a friend of a friend, in the course of recounting a bad baby-sitting experience. I don't know who wrote it originally or where it's from.

The Stone Rabbit

Because the monster was so terribly ugly, he lived alone in a cave. It may be because he was so terribly ugly that he was even called a monster. No one ever looked at him long enough to be able to tell what he was. However, it is hard to imagine anything but a monster having been so ugly, and so it was widely assumed that he was in fact a monster. In any case, it may be that there is no difference between being monstrously ugly and being a monster.

No one ever explained this popularly espoused, if largely subliminal, theory to the monster, but he wasn't blind. He saw his reflection, and he knew that to call his face "unattractive" would be like referring to the Irish Potato Famine as "that time McDonald's stopped serving French fries." His was an authoritative and enlightening repugnance—all living things were aesthetes in his presence: humans and animals fled from him, the humans struggling to pant the word Monster! through the trembles and constrictions of abject fear, the the animals braying, squeaking, or gasping in a manner that transcended species; plants, those loyal companions to all who fear the the perception and cognition of others, browned and shriveled when he came near, leaving the area around his cave a desolate landscape of dirt, mud puddles, and sparse, rotting vegetation.

In fairness, the monster could never object to the treatment he received. He had a certain amount of familiarity with Aristotle. One of his great ambitions, aside from someday having a friend, was to read the seminal works of Western philosophy. Given his freedom from social commitments, the reader might assume that this project presented no great difficulty, and in fact the monster set about it with spectacular gusto. In fact, his new enthusiasm for academics led him to espouse an obscure theory of "(de/re)constructing paradigmatic temporalities," which he understood to mean he ought to read in alphabetical rather than chronological order. He completed the As without incident, but at approximately the time he came to Barthes he found that certain pages would burst into flame when his gaze fell upon them. He told himself that the problem lay in cheap recycled paper and shoddy binding; however, his ego never known society's soothing caress, he lacked the ability of knowing self-deception that allows so many of us to overcome our daily vicissitudes. He never got round to starting up again on his project. Nevertheless, he had got through Aristotle, and Aristotle resonated with him. He correctly identified the phrase "[the primacy of sight among the senses^*]" as one that was both pertinent to his life and sanctified by millennia of citation, and he copied it in his most careful and florid handwriting along with his other favorite "moments" from the As onto a large unlined sheet of paper taped to the wall near his bed.

A chameleon, Victorian furniture, a child's attempt at oil painting, egg salad. Ugliness is not a universally intolerable feature. In certain objects it may even be desirable. In any case, humans have a great tolerance for ugliness. Zoogoers can admire a chameleon in a glass tank, Victorian furniture may be reclined in, parents coo over the art of their offspring, and heaping bowls of egg salad adorn a great number of picnic tables and Christmas dinners. And this is to say nothing of plants and animals. The demand that one's face will be pleasant to look upon could have, and perhaps should have, seemed willful and capricious to the monster. But he never failed to understand that his ugliness, superficial to his own consciousness, was a thing that burrowed into the selves of others, catalyzing toxic reactions at a chemical level. The chemicals of our selves, he understood, were to be guarded with utmost care. Death itself was preferable to subjecting them to the caustic processes the monster represented. That much he had gleaned from his own reflection and from the As.

Shunned by society, monsters find ways to allay boredom, often, it seems, by carrying off children, livestock, or virgins. If our monster was not bad-natured enough for such behavior, not was he immune to the toxic effects of loneliness. As the reader can imagine, he needed a friend.

From the outset, the monster knew that a human friend was out of the question, contact with civilization being an impossibility. It once occurred to him to keep a pet, and he obtained a hamster. For one such as a monster, the advantages of a hamster are obvious: hamsters sense largely by smell and live in cages. But the hamster, employing the mysterious instincts for which animals are so envied, managed to construct a crude rope out of fiber from its sawdust litter, and one morning the monster awoke to find it dangling from the bars on top of the cage. There was no note.

And so the monster turned, as do so many in his position, to stone carving. "If I can't make a friend," he thought, "well then I'll make one." What he meant, of course, was that he would construct companions for himself rather than finding them.

Night and day he labored. His initial handicap was two-fold: for one, he had never carved stone before; for two, only rarely had he been privileged with a glimpse of the front side of a living creature, since they tended to bolt in terror as soon as they saw him.

He solved these problems with diligence and imagination, respectively. After a time, the dismal landscape around the monster's cave came to be populated with a small but growing society of inventively fronted statues, both human and animal in shape. The monster had no "end point" in mind for his little group—in a hidden, treasured place within his mind was the hope of reconstructing all the people, the sparrows, worms, cows, dear, fish, and other animals that had once inhabited this place. Pragmatically, he knew this would be impossible, but he sometimes allowed himself the fantasy, and when he did it he felt a fluttering joy, as if his imitations of white moths had come to life and were searching ticklingly for yellow wildflowers inside his chest.

But after a point, his work slowed. He wanted to enjoy the fruits of his labor rather than carving away day in and day out. There was a particular female whose company he especially enjoyed. She was not beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, but not quite so ugly as he, and he was flattered by her lack of projectile vomiting. Their conversations were one-sided, but that didn't bother the monster. The two of them would stand arm in arm enjoying each other's company—he discussing Thomas Aquinas or Agrippa the Skeptic, she listening attentively. The monster enjoyed the society of all his creations, but it was she who charmed him in sleep and made his dreams anxious for morning.

Fearing she'd be lonely while he was away, he carved her a pet rabbit, to whom he confessed his feelings for her. There were days he saw nothing in her but stoney indifference; other times it seemed as clear as day that she loved him, and he knew that the next time he saw he would take her into his arms, but when the time came his face flushed bright red and he found himself paralyzed by some nervousness from some unknown source. The rabbit was a good confidant. He offered a sort of immobile sympathy, and never breathed a word to anyone.

In the end, it was she who made the first move. One day, he sweatily held her hand and wondered aloud whether Augustus of Hippo more properly belonged to the medieval or to the classical period, he thought felt a tiny squeeze. Daring to imagine that she would come to life had made him feel ready to sob hard enough to tear himself apart, although he had only let out one heavy, quavering sigh and pushed the thought from his mind as quickly as he could. Now, as he brought his wart-crusted lips to hers, he sensed the barest, most enticing trace of warmth radiating from her. As they touched, she crumbled to dust.

The other statues collapsed as well. As the monster turned to them for consolation, his immense ugliness leveled them one by one, and at an accelerating pace, so that within a month the devastation was complete. He buried the pieces of each as it fell, digging graves as they were first dug, as an escape from the unbearable madness of the spectacle of death, as a denial of having lost.

The stone rabbit alone was not affected. It stood odd-faced and good-naturedly through everything, and when the monster had finished the last burial he collapsed next to it, exhausted and heartbroken, and fell asleep. That night dreamt of being nuzzled by a warm rabbit with brown fur and a constantly twitching nose. When he woke up, he found himself shivering with cold and wet with dew. His arm was draped over the rabbit. It was as cold as the dirt.

In the many years that followed, the monster never carved another living thing. The rabbit was enough. He spent every day with it, stroking it behind the ears and contemplating the As. He sang to the rabbit in his ugly voice, drew ugly pictures for it in the dirt, and told it jokes that no one would have thought was funny. He slept by the rabbit every night during the summer. During the winter when the barren dirt froze solid, he would come out of his cave early in the morning to break the ice off the rabbit and pour hot water over it. Then one day the monster didn't come out of his cave, and he didn't come out the next day, and many hundreds of days passed, and on none of them did the monster come out of his cave, and in his absence first moss, and then grass began to grow, and the yellow flowers and the white moths came back, and there were fish in the stream and the trees grew back their leaves.

On one of the endless number of days on which the monster did not leave his cave, a young man and a young woman walked in the woods, side-by-side with warm laced fingers and steps that were small and zigzagging with ungainly desire. They came to a small meadow with many small hills, abundant in yellow flowers and white moths that they mistook for butterflies. They wandered around the meadow and touched each other's chestnut hair, then fell down on a hill and kissed each other's tingling lips and chests with nothing above them but the sky and the endless universe, and when the young woman worried about grass itch, the young man smiled and lay down his jacket for her, and removed a condom from his wallet.

Later, the young man got up to stand for a few moments behind a tree. When he returned, he found that his lover had slipped back into her white blouse and was bent over to see something on the ground. He approached from behind her and wrapped his hands around her waist in remembrance of act love they had lately carried out. Then he saw what she was looking at. "I wonder who made it?" said the young woman. "It's pretty," said the young man, letting his hands slip from around her waist.
__________________

^*There is a single word for this idea, which no amount of googling has been able to uncover. It appears somewhere in James Joyce's Ulysses, but I haven't got a copy with me.

First draft

There is too much that could be said about this man (some of interesting, much of it not—all very related to the matter at hand) to attempt to say much of anything, except that he no Everyman. We will not give him a name, but don't let that fool you; as far as this story is concerned, you don't have a name either. Assume that you and he are about equally idiosyncratic. Call him "the patient," because that is what he was.

The doctor entered the room shortly. He was entitled to the honorific because he held a Ph.D. in neuropsychology (he would have had a thing or two to say about the second paragraph of this story), wore a long white lab coat, and carried a clipboard. He knocked brightly, professionally as he opened the door. He was tall, broad-shouldered, wore his hair very short, and impressed the patient with a 1950s-style authority. The patient felt a surge of an emotion that might best be described as a hybrid of fear and relief in unknown proportions. Here was the embodiment of an institution, an arbiter of power and powerlessness, of safety and knowledge, of yearned-for consolation, of responsibility, of uncomfortable necessary procedures.

The doctor introduced himself with a handshake that was similar to his knock and haircut. He understood that this must be very confusing but assured the patient he was safe and well cared-for. He directed the patient to watch a short film on a television on a high black metal frame, which he rolled in from just outside the door and pushed out again once the film ended. The film was of the patient himself. In seemingly good spirits, he had explained his condition: "At the end of the day, when you've been awake for a normal amount of time, maybe sixteen hours, you start to feel unbearably tired. Once you fall asleep, you lose all your memories from the previous day. They're trying to figure out why, but nobody's been able to yet. It's best for us if we go along with what they say." When the film ended, the doctor pushed the television frame back through the door. The patient could hear the wheels squeak and the dangling cord knock against the wooden walls as someone pulled it away down the hall.

"I understand that you have questions," said the doctor. "We have a routine. I don't give you much information until lunch time. You have agreed to this."

Overwhelming news of a medical nature is a nearly universal facet of life in the developed world. Its seasoned purveyors have seen too much to be moved by dramatic emotional performances. If only one could accept this news with the same jaded professionalism, as though it were any other business transaction! The patient thought: Have a good attitude about this. You may be crazy, but you're not ranting crazy. You've still got your wits about you. He'll admire you in a way, maybe when he goes home tonight he'll say a few words of praise to his wife and kids over baked chicken and potatoes and peas. He'll have taken off his lab coat by then.

Revision and continuation of 19.2.07 1:44 AM, first draft
C.f. 19.2.07 1:44 AM; 11.2.07 4:22 PM; 17.2.07 3:50 PM

Anyway: To have woken up in a room that is not one's own, and is not where one remembers having gone to sleep, what does one think once the initial perplexity wears off? It is difficult to imagine. There is no popular yardstick for this sort of situation. One may have seen something similar in a spy movie, but one is not a spy.

There is too much that could be said about this man (some of interesting, much of it not—all very related to the matter at hand) to attempt to say much of anything, except that he was as idiosyncratic as you are and should not be taken as an Everyman, even if we still don't give him a name. Call him "the patient," because that is what he was.

The doctor entered the room shortly. He was entitled to the honorific because he held a Ph.D. in neuropsychology (he would have had a thing or two to say about the second paragraph of this story), wore a long white lab coat, and carried a clipboard. He knocked brightly as he opened the door. He was tall, broad-shouldered, wore his hair very short, and impressed the patient with a 1950s-style authority. The patient felt a surge of an emotion that might best be described as a hybrid of fear and relief in unknown proportions. Here was the embodiment of an institution, an arbiter of power and powerlessness, of safety and knowledge, of yearned-for sympathy, of responsibility, of uncomfortable necessary procedures.

Continuation of 11.2.07 4:22 PM, first draft
C.f. 11.2.07 4:22 PM; 17.2.07 3:50 PM

Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, a man waits for a lavatory. Uninvited, the barest inklings of impatience have made their pointless arrival. All the same, he participates willingly and good-naturedly in the unspoken society of long plane flights, and is ready with a smile for the feaser of the protracted occupation. His need is not urgent. He has come here more for a reason to stretch his legs than for anything contained in the restroom. His thoughts have so far drifted pleasantly. He paces a little in the space provided by the emergency-exit row.

With businesslike alacrity, a second man, ignorant of the first, has just arrived on the scene from somewhere else in the plane. It is night, whatever that means in these hurtling confines over the Pacific Ocean, and the lights are off to allow passengers to sleep. As nonchalantly quick as he came, the second man opens the lavatory door and slips inside, closing the door behind him. He does not so much as glance at the first man, who is stunned for a short time. Realizing what has happened, the first man glances furtively about to see if anyone has witnessed the silly injustice.

A third man, farthest over on the emergency-exit row, is the only one to have seen, and now sees the man's glance and divines the meaning of the glance; but the first man fails to turn far enough to make eye contact with the third man, and thus will spend the rest of his life believing that no one had seen what just happened. Although he will be reminded of this trivial incident once in a great while, he will never mention it.

The third man believes the first man's movements betray certain emotions in small quantities tempered by acceptance: indignation, shame, annoyance. It is an accurate perception. The third man turns back to his movie, glancing up occasionally. The first man continues to wait.

Second draft