I always enjoyed the brief, tranquil moments I had alone after school and work. The last remaining rays of sunlight were fading from the interior walls of the house. As always the hazy sunset was a myriad of colors, nothing like the bland, corn colored sunsets of the
Joe,
don’t forget to eat. remember
grandma’s house on sunday.
see you tonight.
Love Mom
She was so sweet. However I knew I wouldn’t actually see her tonight. I would be asleep when she walked in the door, trying to get enough rest to face the long day ahead. I put the frozen dinner in the microwave. It was a beef pot roast with gravy. The whir of air in the microwave would be the only sound in the house for the next five minutes. I took the opportunity to do nothing. I closed my eyes.
I woke up, my head in my arms, to the beeping of the microwave. I ate the salty beef with the fluid mashed potatoes. The middle of the meat was tepid. I went to sleep early, fatigued.
When I woke up in the morning I had sharp pains in my stomach. My upset stomach turned, but it was more of a constant grinding sensation than anything else. I had minutes to get to school. Through my parents’ open door I saw my mom sleeping soundly. I let her rest. Back home, when college was high school and a job was after-school sports, I would always wake up to home cooked breakfasts in the morning, come home to cooked meals at night. Now there was no time. I rushed out the door, passing the tallish grass without even a glance. I did find enough time to manage to get a few McDonalds breakfast sandwiches on my way to school.
School and work passed quickly. During the course of the day, the pain in my stomach subsided, but my stomach started to make noises, uncanny ones. At times when I felt pangs of hunger, I could have sworn that I heard the grinding of metallic gears coming from my belly. I tried to keep my hunger at bay with candy bars between classes.
The hunger got worse by the time I got home. The only thing in the fridge was a hand tossed salad. It looked very fresh; the intermittent light and dark greens of lettuce and spinach were contrasted by white mushrooms, yellow peppers and red cherry tomatoes. I dug in. I ate the whole thing. However when I leaned back, I was strangely unsatisfied. I felt and heard the turning and grinding of gears in my stomach. I had a sudden urge for meat. I looked in the fridge, but there was nothing. In the freezer there were steaks and burger meat, all frozen. I looked at my watch. It would take too long to thaw. I gave in, hopping into my car and driving, faster than usual, to In-N-Out, where I ordered a four by four, animal style. A friend had recently told me about their ‘secret’ menu.
Driving home I heard a series of clunks and pops. I slowed down, trying to listen to the engine. The noise increased in intensity and pitch, becoming a veritable screaming in several seconds time. My spine suddenly arched uncontrollably and as my body straightened, I lost grip on the wheel. There was pain shooting slowly up my spine. The metallic screeching was constant, filling my ears and the air around me. I felt as if my lower spine was exploding, each disc popping loudly with the pain and noise of a shower of sparks. My back arched farther than I thought it could. I managed to not panic through the explosive noise and pain, jamming my foot down on the brake. By the time the screeching stopped, along with the pain, I was at a complete stop, sideways, in the middle of an intersection. My ears were again filled with noise, this time from other drivers. I sped out of the intersection towards home, confused, embarrassed and a little scared.
It was only when I got home that I actually realized that the screeching noise came from within me. I was scared but more so tired. No one was there to talk to, so I fell asleep.
When I awoke, stretching my limbs and back, my movements were accompanied by a dull squeaking emanating from my joints. I felt heavier, or at least more sluggish, and it was only halfway through the working week, usually this fatigue of repetition only found me by Friday. I was cold, but the chills that usually travel over skin and up and down spine came from within, as if emanating from deep in my bones. As I sat up, bewildered, I heard several clinks as if someone had inserted coins into a vending machine in my upper chest. Seconds later I heard a whir that could have been a vending machine releasing candy, the sound coming from my belly. Lastly I heard the clunk of released candy as it hits the tray in the bottom of the vending machine, emanating from the bottom of my torso. However unlike the first sounds, this last one was accompanied by uncontrollable convulsions. My body flailed wildly, only stopping when I felt the sudden need to throw up. I felt my stomach trying to push something out, probably the remnants of last night’s hamburger, but nothing came. I dry heaved for several minutes, strange metallic croaking sounds being thrown from my throat.
I lay in bed for a while. I was woozy; it was hard to keep my eyes open. Later I remember my mom knocking at my bedroom door as she rushed to work. I told her I was sick. As I lay on my stomach, I felt and imagined that there was an entire warehouse facility in my stomach, and workers were frantically moving around storage containers. I thought I was sleeping, but the next thing I remember is opening my eyes to an empty pizza box that I had apparently ordered and eaten, leaving a mess of crusts on my bed. The workers in my stomach had taken a lunch break.
I continued to lie in bed all day. I ordered another pizza, consciously this time, when I started to hear the machinery in my stomach starting to grind with hunger. The day passed by in a blur, as it usually does with school and work, but this time it passed in a blur of stupor and weariness that comes with working in a factory all day, except this time the factory was seemingly inside of me. As I dosed in and out of sleep I dreamed I was one of the many workers slaving away in my stomach, turning gears and moving boxes.
I awoke the next morning when a crane dropped one of my stomachs freight containers onto me. There was a focused pain in my stomach from where I had died.
This Thursday morning was hot, very hot. I rushed to school, not feeling as bad as yesterday, but not better either. I didn’t feel much of anything at all.
When I began sweating from the heat, I smelled corn syrup. I knew the smell from when my dad had taken me with him to inspect a corn processing plant the company was thinking about acquiring. I remembered this particular smell because it was so unlike any corn I had ever eaten, and I had eaten a lot of corn living in
School and work passed by even quicker than usual. Everything I did seemed scheduled and timely, passing as I would have imagined them passing previous to when they actually took place. It was all a blur, accompanied by the hiss of hydraulics, creaking of un-oiled gears, and the general clanking of moving metal parts. Still, as much as these things bothered me, no one seemed to notice, these sounds were so much a part of everyday life people didn’t differentiate them from our surrounding environment. They attributed these sounds to the air conditioning shafts above our heads, or passing cars, or creaking chairs.
On the way home, the car felt like an extension of my body, something my father had always talked about in terms of track driving. However I felt it in a different way, less to do with physics and more with an uncanny kinship tied up in speed. And I sped, the highways of California unfolding before me, the horizon revealing the road ahead, but more prominently the plentiful billboards advertising fast food in a cornucopia of neon, a multitude of shades that took the place of the smoggy Los Angeles horizon as the sun fell.
I felt drawn to these neon signs, the steering wheel directing me towards an off-ramp. The sounds of my stomach’s newfound machinery blended with the noises of the car’s engine. In a blur much like how I felt today at school and work, I visited several drive thru restaurants. At the end of the night I had collected wrappers, cups and bags from McDonalds, Burger King, Carl’s Junior, Jack in the Box, In-N-Out, Taco Bell, Del Taco, and El Pollo Loco, although I don’t remember exactly the order in which I visited these places. As I pulled into our driveway, I felt full and well oiled, no sounds emitting from my joints as I moved. I slept well in the solitude of our house, no one there to make noise as I closed my eyes. The scent of corn syrup coming from my pores accompanied my dreams.
Friday morning, the creaking in my joints had returned. When I woke up my watch disappeared from my wrist, which was slightly swollen. I could have speculated on what had happened to my timekeeper but I chose not to. However, when I concentrated on my wrist, I could picture the time of day in my mind, down to the precise second. Not only that, but my entire psyche seemed to be changing as well. When I would have taken my time, I made everything as efficient as possible. This morning I brushed my teeth in the shower, and swished around mouthwash while I shaved. When I walked outside on my way to class, the uncut grass bothered me, the erratic weeds and irregularity of length seemed utterly too messy, too unstructured. It bothered me.
The day was again a blur. Then, when I arrived home, my taste had changed. Taking a break from fast food, I ate what I could find in the kitchen. I ended up making a sandwich from what I could scavenge from the fridge. At first I didn’t understand what I was feeling as I took bites from my sandwich. All I could taste was a strange metallic stinging sensation, the feeling I’ve encountered before when dared to put a battery in my mouth. Towards the end of my sandwich, this metallic sensation changed. I couldn’t call it taste, but I could definitely ‘taste’ the food more clearly. The essential compounds of the sandwich appeared as percentages in my mind, the breakdown of the foods parts understood as pie charts and bar graphs measuring flavor and composition. I felt I was losing something as these changes came over me, but it was interesting to be able to understand the food I put in my mouth at such a scientific level.
It was Friday night and I felt like I should be doing something. I watched TV for a while, then went to sleep, scared I would get hungry before bed, that my stomach would grind, and the noise would keep me from sleep.
Saturday morning I awoke with a whole day of free time ahead of me. As I moved from the realm of dreams to reality, I felt very in touch with my body. I could feel the metal cables, taut and rippling, spread throughout my body where tendons once were. The joints, heavier and colder, whined as I stretched them for the first time today, un-oiled as they were. Jolts of electricity ran down my spine sending signals by wire to various parts of my body. In my torso I could feel the hydraulics pumping, the clockwork web of gears and the labyrinth of tubes, which mashed my food, chemicals dissolving and separating the different compounds I could now clearly distinguish from one another by my newfound ‘taste’.
When I got out of bed, walking towards the bathroom, my entire body groaned, creaked, and even scraped as my moving parts grinded unnaturally against each other. The hunger I chased away with sleep last night returned, stronger. Without thinking, my mind blurred as my body took over. I made a b-line from the bathroom hallway to the kitchen, where I stared blankly at the stovetop for a moment before reaching for a bottle of cooking oil. I unscrewed it and turned the bottle upside down, emptying the remainder of the oil down my throat, I immediately felt better, and returned to the bathroom. My newfound mental efficiency dictated I should shower, shave, brush my teeth and urinate all at the same time, which is what I did.
Drying off, thinking about my day, the dryness of my body’s sockets returned, the hunger for oil in my system almost immediately unbearable. As I dressed I remembered a colleague of my mother who she had told me about. His car had a converted diesel engine which ran entirely on vegetable oil, which he obtained, used, from restaurants that had to dispose of this used oil anyways. Without thinking I was already stepping out the front door, car keys in hand, a list of restaurants with fried food formulating in my mind. Again the day was a blur; the car seemed to be driving itself, the places I visited all seemed the same, or at least replications of each other, all blurring into one. Even all the oil tasted the same, with the exceptions of Japanese tempura oil, for which I tried to visit as many sushi restaurants as possible. As I went from place to place, I guzzled oil by the gallon. There was no way a human body could intake anywhere near as much fluid as I drank that day, let alone used cooking oil, but I did. My thirst was insatiable, my lips and surrounding skin shined with the grease. I spent all day drinking oil like a drunkard, slamming back containers of oil with bits of fried food floating in them. I sweated oil, I peed oil, and by the end of the day, confused at a life and body that were no longer mine, I cried oil. I don’t remember how I came to be in bed, or how I fell asleep, or what I dreamed…
only how I woke up, joints no longer creaky. It was Sunday, and I awoke to the sounds of my mom in the kitchen. It was the first time I had seen her all week.
“Hey, there you are, how was your week?”
“It was interesting,” Finally I could talk to someone about everything that happened to me. I started in on my story, “So, on Monday, thanks for leaving out dinner by the way, I started to—“
I was interrupted by the phone. Mom shifted her attention from me to the phone shuffling over towards where it rang. Looking at the Caller ID, she quickly grabbed the phone and threw it to me. Here, it’s your dad; tell him about your week, baby. I’m really busy right now, sorry.”
I clicked the answer button and I was talking to my dad, “Hey dad, how’s everything back home?”
“Hello son, everything is good here. We had a very successful merger. But the weather… I’m glad we live in
I told my father the entire story of what happened to me this week, I didn’t leave anything out. He kept contributing ‘uh-huh’ and ‘okay’s to the conversation. It was a one sided conversation in more ways than one. When I had finished my story he interrupted, “Oh son, you were always so good with metaphors, keep on working on your writing in school. But I have to go into a meeting now, say hi to your mom, and, oh yeah, to grandma too. Great story though, vivid details. Talk to you soon.”
With that he hung up. Everything happened too fast in these days and in this place.
The day passed without the usual blur, everything seemed a little slower and calmer without rushing between school and work, and squeezing in meals that had recently become more and more ridiculous. I didn’t feel the intense hunger and my body made less noise than usual, the screeching had become only squeaking, the grinding more of a purr, and the clanking of metal seemed farther away then the immediacy of my belly.
Sunday we went to Grandma’s. I remembered meals at Grandma’s from when we were young, before she moved out here to
I however didn’t really taste any of this, taste no longer had any meaning behind it, everything tasted as if it had just came off the assembly line, carrying with it the hinted scent of metal. Grandma noticed I didn’t approach my food with the usual vigor with which I attacked anything my grandma brought out of the kitchen.
“Why don’t you eat, child? Where did your appetite go? You must eat, eat up, your mother and I can’t eat like the growing boy you are, you have to eat. Eat, eat, eat. After all this is fresh food, and you are what you eat.”
She continued, detailing the farm that her friend owned and from which was delivered bags of fresh groceries every week to her doorstep. I started to feel sick in my stomach, which ached with low pitched squeaking. There just wasn’t enough oil on this food. Grandma always kept her fresh food lightly cooked, with no excess of grease. I eyed a bottle of olive oil I could see in the kitchen.
Next Grandma cleared our plates and brought out a salad. I smelled the freshness of the greenery. If nothing else my mother had learned from her mother how to put together a good salad. It was already tossed with dressing, which was a disappointment for me. I was hoping to be able to dump large amounts of dressing on my salad, savoring the taste of oil, as it was the only taste I could really appreciate anymore.
I thought about what my grandmother had said earlier, the cliché about being what you eat. I thought back to everything I had eaten this week and rushed to the bathroom.
At first it sounded like pots and pans banging around in my stomach. Creaks and squeaks gave way to all out metallic groans, as if huge steel beams were being bent under heavy weight. I felt all this spinning in my stomach, corkscrews of metal working their way up to my throat. I opened my mouth, gagging over the toilet bowl, expecting to lose my meal. But there was nothing. My back arched uncontrollably, pain shooting down my spine to my stomach, where the pain turned into sickness and all of a sudden I was bent over again, hurling into the toilet. At first it was mostly oil, small bits of fried mess mixing with kernels of corn. I barely had time to flush this oily substance before the next wave hit me. A steady stream of corn emerged from my mouth, again and again I breathed out corn, which smelled sweet and syrupy. Again I flushed, again barely in time. Before the next wave hit me, from my throat came the sound of huge iron beams crashing down on one another. This time when it came up, it was a series of nuts and bolts, screws, scrapes of rusting metal, small gears and wires. The wires stuck in my throat and I gagged as I pulled out a long string of connecting steel wires. When that was finished, again I lost it, this time larger pieces of metal escaped my throat, copper tubes and hydraulic pumps and large bulky pieces of unidentifiable machinery. I stayed kneeling for a while, waiting to see if it was over. It was, I could feel the burden of metal, and machinery lifted from my spirit. I took a deep breath, breathing for the first time the full flavors of my grandmother’s cooking. It as just as I remembered it from before this week happened. I stretched my limbs, I felt completely organic, the muscles and joints and bones feeling normal now, human. I left the toilet bowl brimming with oily metal and returned to the dining room.
“What was that racket in there, young man?” my grandmother asked, looking more curious than worried.
“It was nothing, I’ll take care of it later,” I responded, smiling, “Good, and I’m just in time for dessert.”
No comments:
Post a Comment