Super Flat Times (4 page)

When we wanted meat, what we got was meat. When we wanted a morning constitutional, however, what we got was also meat. Meat, it appeared, was all there was left — great, heaping stacks of it, stored in icy towers at the center of the city, tended to by large men in white masks and rubber boots who wielded pitchforks and prods. We learned to shape the meat, to flavor it in such a way that we might not forget what it was like to taste an apple, say — to bite through the ruddy skin, which gave way to the sweet, tender center. We could achieve this effect with spiced, cured ham, stuffed into a tough intestinal sack. Chocolate was hard to eat for those of us who could remember the real thing. Children, though, loved to chew upon the hard, brittle cubes of browned beef that came wrapped delicately in gold foil. Cheese was meat. Juice was meat. Porksicles. Beefsicles. Baconsicles. This was the fulcrum from which our lives precariously swung.

Chocolate milk was still milk, but the chocolate was made from hard, shaved splinters of seasoned loin. It had a sour, syrupy aftertaste — those of us who remembered called it simply “chilk” in an effort to preserve the dignity of the earlier, more substantial drink. But the children took in chilk whenever it was offered — how greedy they seemed, always clamoring like blind puppies to take the nozzle to their trembling, puckered lips.

The meat made us look different. We got fat for a while — years, actually — but then the fat left us, so that what we were left with were baggy flaps of limp, oily skin, whole bolts of extra body. We gathered this loose flesh in long, flat clips at our shoulders, so that the worst among us appeared to have wings.

The disappearance of a sustainable agriculture was a regrettable side effect of the Ministry of Air and Justice’s efforts, in the years of Fud, to color the air, to advertise the act of breathing with pale, pastel tints that bloomed upon exhalation. The air dispersed by the Fud Bellows did not color the air as promised but ascended, instead, into the pathetic, overwrought stratosphere, gathering there in hard, dark, permanent clouds. Few of us, though, were sufficiently interested in what went on above us to bother complaining — it seemed foolish to continue with the charade that the sky was anything more than wasted space, a vast area that could be put to much better use.

Meanwhile, there was a man to whom I’d found myself married, and a child whom we’d drawn up between us not long afterward, like a bucket from a deep well. The three of us heaved away in a choked-up studio apartment on the humid side of the city, the side whereat the clouds hung so low as to scrape glacially past our windows, carving dull swaths across the panes, so that what light we did get was diffuse, splotchy. The clouds frightened the child, Philip; when they passed he’d crawl inside the big panda suit and huddle in the doorframe. The panda suit, we’d taught him — it was soft and warm, like a blanket, something to make him feel safe — but the doorframe seemed particularly anachronistic; something he’d picked up, impossibly, from an old Civil Defense manual. We were disturbed by this behavior and made every effort not to look at the child as he huddled there, shivering in the fur suit, while the passing clouds gently rocked the building.

My husband was a face attendant, unemployed. When he was working, his job was to stand next to his employer all day, emphasizing with slender, fluted face wands the four or five expressions that most clearly brought out the emotional state of the particular person. It was an exhausting practice, and one that had taken years to learn. He was, at the time, five months into his unemployment. Mostly, he stayed in bed.

It was morning.

“I’m hungry,” Philip said. He was standing next to the bed, clutching his belly theatrically.

“Go down and pour yourself some puffs, chief.”

“The puffs are gone.”

“I’ll make you something later.”

“But the food is going away,” he said. “There might not be any left later.”

“Get dressed,” I called out, still half blind from sleep, striking at the air.

“Mother, the food.”

I went downstairs. The food was, indeed, going away. The shelves were largely bare — the only indication that food had ever been stored there at all was the mottled, angular stains left by the feet of the plastic containers in which the food was packed. The food that was left was just barely there, dim and shadowy, nearly impossible to hold.

We had been warned about the half-life of food. The Fud Bellows were blamed; we accepted this and forged ahead.

I told my husband that the food was disappearing. I adjusted the pillow under his head and told him that we would be back soon with more. He looked up at me, put a cool hand on my thigh. You need to shave, he said. Please shave before you go.

“You’re not going to try it today, are you?”

He said no. He would not try it.

“I put everything away. All the sharp things, the colorful things. Anything that would tempt you.”

He said that, yes, he knew. He said he felt safe just curled up in the big bed.

I gathered the razor, gels, limb towelettes, and the coral exfoliant mitt from the low dresser at the opposite end of the bedroom. At the entrance to the water closet I glanced back at him. His head looked small, couched in the center of the quilted orange pillow. He had an expression of false restfulness on his face, the guarded look of someone in the process of constructing an intricate, densely populated society deep inside his body. I try to be careful when I say that this is not the man I knew when we met. I wasn’t entirely sure how significantly the person I knew then differed from the other man I found myself next to at the end of each day, the one who remained awake as I slept, slowly chewing dozens of highly involved, conical designs into the bedclothes. He
seemed
different, but sometimes it is the thing that remains most constant that, one day, reveals itself in a strange and terrifying new perspective.

It is difficult to remember with any clarity the time in which we met, partially because I sold a great deal of those memories to buy cloth for Philip’s bassinet. We were both young enough to work for Corporation Three, preparing bolts of data-rich burlap for the Hall of the Life Architects. The only memory I can bring up now about those days is the faint image of a man, most likely my husband, moving toward me from across the workshop floor, just a tiny grain of a figure, more than a hundred meters away, bolt scissors slung over his shoulder, kicking up a fine dust. As the man comes closer — I still cannot make out the specifics of his face — his body begins, with each advancing step, to slacken, to fit itself more comfortably into the airspace through which it moves. What at first seems a fleeting, misguided impression gradually gives way to a more fundamental understanding — here is a person undeniably calmed by my presence. It is as close to the idea of an invitation as I have ever seen. Whether or not the man in this memory is my husband, I know that I situated myself in his life throughout the successive years in order to replicate this experience. I’m sure I was able to pull it off more than once, despite what my surviving memories show (hours and hours of nighttime stillness, him lying on his side, breathing delicately into the blue dark; the steamed ring his mug left on the common table; the sweat glistening on his forehead as the doctor slipped Philip’s purplish body into his arms for the first time), but I am certain it’s been a year or longer since I’ve seen anything resembling even the faintest degree of interest play itself out on his face. Either that or I’ve just been less and less capable of projecting an expression of interest into his recessed features.

I cut myself shaving. Actually, it is not accurate to say that I cut myself shaving, because I had not yet begun to shave when I cut myself, and I did not cut my leg but the top of my finger. I had left the razor on the sink before stepping into the deep basin of the shower stall, and when I reached blindly for it from behind the opaque curtain, the top of my left middle finger came off like a pat of butter cleaved from the stick.

I stood in the shower for a good while, holding the newly wounded hand in front of me, tapping with my thumb the lopsided hood of flesh that hung from the tip of my finger. I looked at my hand until it looked like someone else’s. Blood welled up in the wound quickly, streaming down my forearm in thin rivulets. The water in the tub went pink and sour. When the wound started to sting I got out and dressed it tightly with toilet paper.

I put Philip in a bright orange snowmobile suit. This was difficult with only one good hand. Philip always wore the snow-mobile suit when we went out because it had handles, one on each arm and a big one that doubled as a shoulder strap across the back. We occasionally needed to handle Philip — there was no other way.

“Will we have chocolates?” Philip asked.

“We’ll see.” There was no difference, nutritionally, between chocolates and, say, broccoli anymore — the withholding of sweets had been stripped of its former power. Most parents persevered, however, believing that there was something instructional about the denial of pleasure. I stood on the fence, admonishing the boy one day and then treating him to heaping bowls of meat cream the next. When I denied Philip’s desire, I felt I was doing the right thing, but it also felt good to indulge him in his obsession. I wasn’t sure what lesson he was taught as a result, but it seemed to fit in nicely with everything I’d learned about the world in my own childhood.

There were people outside, sitting on the stoop, huddled against one another for warmth. Some of them wore suits made of torn, soiled cardboard. They looked up uniformly as I drew back the screen into its fitted slot. We did not talk to the people, and they did not talk to us. Sometimes, after I’d put Philip on the bus for school, I would scatter hard crusts of bread out into the yard, and they would crouch there, gathering the bits in their gloved hands when they were convinced I was no longer looking.

That day I had no bread. The bread had vanished. I showed them the empty sacks we were bringing to the meat towers. They nodded and made room for us to pass by.

We came to the road, which was glazed over with ice. In its reflection we saw the clouds lurching heavily toward the center of town, noisily grazing the tops of buildings.

“Put on your skates, chief,” I said.

“I can run on ice.” The boy put forth a small, booted foot, making as if to dash across the slippery surface.

“Philip.”

“I can. I can run on ice.”

“Do you want me to pick you up by the handle?”

“No, Mother. Don’t pick me up by the handle.”

“Then you should put on your skates.”

The boy collapsed to the ground and lay there for a while, facedown. I turned away, tightening the buckle on my mittens. The left mitten strained against the toilet paper compress, within which throbbed the disabled hand. I could not remember whether gangrene was still a real disease, or what its symptoms were. There would be a blackening, I imagined, a loss of feeling, cramps. I would know when it came.

After a short time, the boy righted himself and slowly put on his skates. We started down the road toward the center of town, toward the meat towers.

“Mother?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Is Father right?”

“Right? In what matter?”

“Right in his head?” The boy looked up at me through the mask of the snowmobile suit, nothing but two distressingly large eyes peering through the embroidered eyeholes. It seemed a strange question. “You mean, is he safe?”

“Yes. Is he safe, or is he getting ready to go away?”

“Philip, why are you talking like this?”

“Sometimes he crawls. On the floor, like a cat. He crawls all around the house and makes cramping noises, like he’s trying to poop. Does that mean he is getting ready to go away?”

“Of course not. Perhaps he’s just looking for something. Perhaps he’s lost something, and he’s upset, rooting around in the carpet pile for it. You would be upset if you lost something in the carpet, wouldn’t you? I’ve heard you making some funny sounds, too, young man, down there on all fours, searching for so-and-so’s silver missile arm.” But even as I said these words I did not believe them — they seemed to appear in the air before us, wispy as tinfoil. I knew that my husband was getting ready to go.

“You’re wrong,” Philip said, homing in on my carefully concealed doubt. “Cradio’s father did the same thing before he went away. He crawled around on the floor in circles, and the circles kept getting smaller and smaller until he was as little as a finger, and then he was gone.”

The night before, I woke up to find my husband sitting at the corner of the bed, braiding long strands of the bedclothes into crude rag dolls. He set them on his lap, four in all. “No, I don’t want to,” he said to them. “I want to stay here.” He was holding up his end of a conversation with the stout, featureless figures. “You know I can’t stay here. Because you know. If I tell you, everyone will know.” In the long pauses between speech he sobbed faintly, jaggedly, shaking the mattress. Each time he shuddered I swear I saw him diminish just slightly in size.

“It wasn’t the same. Your father is not going anywhere.” “You’re wrong.”

To refute him would be to amplify the lie, to give it real weight, so I simply squeezed his hand and we continued on toward the meat towers, the enormous dorsal fins of which loomed ahead in the distance, casting deep, expressive shadows over the road.

“I want him to go,” Philip said, huffing pale clouds of condensed breath. “I don’t like to have him in that room, always crawling and putting his mouth on my toys.”

“I don’t want to hear that kind of talk, chief.”

“But you tell me to tell you how I’m feeling, no matter what.”

“That is not a feeling, chief.”

We looked at the apples inside the fruit tent at the base of the meat tower. They were thick and hopeful in our hands; they felt healthy — as if in taking a bite, one could inch closer to some more wholesome state. I let Philip put the apples in the canvas sack, along with the taffy brick and the brittle husks of corn, all painstakingly prepared from various cured meats. Philip was quiet — he put the items into the bag without looking at them, as if to look would be to reveal some fragile, thinly guarded secret.