Marcus Pactor
Vision
My wife and I have ingested hundreds of plants in the three months since she converted us to the ways and practices of Veganism. Although I have borne the yoke of our new religion without overt complaint, some of our less palatable meals have left me slumped before a TV cop drama and, rather than see the chalk outline of a corpse or the shoving of a suspect through a window, I have envisioned my wife as a twelve-year-old girl lost in a pasture glutted with cow patties.
Sunlight blankets that fetid landscape at a gentle morning angle. A line of hills is stitched across the pasture's western edge. At the foot of the nearest hill stand the gray shapes of a barn and a house. She steps in patty after patty to reach the help they promise. On her arrival, a middle-aged man leans from his rocker on the porch to flick his cigarette at the feet of the stained and stinking girl.
I agree with any reader who thinks a more apropos vision would locate my wife inside a slaughterhouse amid any number of fearful mooing cows, automated blades, pools of blood, and stacks of meat. I experienced much of this more-apropos vision minutes before I began composing this report, though its wandering star was Chava Bernstein, a student and savage at the university where I work in the financial aid department.
A Psychologist would wonder why I would begin this report with any vision. I do not worry overmuch about the wonderings of any Psychologist. I currently report to enough human and non-human figures of dubious authority. Among these are my wife; my employers at the university; any and all government officials who rule my current home city of Jacksonville, Florida; the world at large; and my unsleeping mind. A reader may see this mind and its fellow authorities as a series of flat and steaming cow patties, not in the sort of pasture romanticized in the poetry of Renaissance-era England, but upon the desk and papers in the study of a middle-aged human who has been punished in his own home for his heretical consumption of a #1 Combo Meal.
Witnesses
In late September I, my wife, and her mother came to the square and classically set table under the recessed canister lights of our dining room to celebrate the elder woman's eightieth birthday. She had known nothing of our conversion until my wife removed the steel covers from the plates. My wife then described the perils of cows in our time to explain that we were honoring both the occasion and all mobile life with a tofu stir fry entrée and tapioca pudding dessert.
My mother-in-law required pills to maintain the stable operation of her kidneys and heart, but age had in no way damaged her essential self. She still demonstrated, for instance, the archaic and stereotypical social grace of the American Deep South she had learned from her forebears. This grace required politeness no matter how ill-suited and unwanted a gift she might receive. She dutifully chewed and ingested her birthday dinner, though I noted the shock movements of her mouth each time she felt the alien texture of tofu therein. She continued without comment until her plate held no more than a few grains of rice and a residue of soy sauce. She thanked my wife for this new experience. She said it was rare that a woman of her years encountered anything new.
My wife preached against the evils of anthropocentrism and called for us to think beyond ourselves to the tethers strapping us to every living thing. She explained that each time a human ingested a Vegan meal, they improved their position in the spiritual landscape of the universe.
My mother-in-law said that she was embarrassed because she could not remember when she had last thought about her position in a landscape as vast as the universe. She asked permission to change the subject and tell the story of a time she had experienced something as new and distinct as the taste of tofu. This story began with a recently deceased cousin of hers persuading her many years ago to kayak with him and a group of his friends down one or another river through the foothills of North Carolina. Around one or another bend they kayaked past a dying black bear. This bear must have been shot in the gut as it had ascended from the water with a belly full of fish. Now it lay with its back to the sky, its head and chest and arms splatted ashore, its remainder tugged along but in no danger of coming unmoored with the current. It moaned and leaked blood into the kayakers' water and fun.
Later, around their campfire, the kayakers sipped beer and shared what they would like to do to the bear's killer. But in the presence of the bear they had kept silent, so all they heard as they kayaked downstream was the rush of water and the strangeness of its death moans. My wife's mother said she was sure that at some point in history she could have described those moans, but now we would just have to imagine how strange and painful they were and how they would always be with her. She also retained, she said, a vision of fish crowding round to eat the leakage from the bear's submerged wound. She said she could not say precisely how the vision of that black bear had changed her life but it certainly had.
She told the story with the aforementioned grace of her dead people. I was listening to her with perhaps a fragment of a similar grace, but I was watching my wife. My wife was watching and listening with a definite fragment of the dead people's grace but also the peculiar grace of the Vegan elect.
This grace appeared not in any manner or expression but a bleached orange glow. The glow was no vision. It shone through the skin drawn tight over my wife's cheeks and forehead. It shines now, down the hall, despite her sleep. It may dim or brighten in a given moment, but it has been constant since that dinner. By the close of the story of the bear, we could have turned off our recessed canister lights, because my wife smiled with great pity and the wide ray of a morning star traveled from the deep space of her mind to gently blanket the landscape of our living room.
The glow loses none of its allure in bed. Some nights while she dreams it compels me to look through the dome of her skull into the pasture of her mind. There a gasless herd of cows eats grass while a faceless and genderless human rests barefoot under the shade of a large and wondrous oak. I would like to be that human rather than the one staring through the face of my wife in the dark of our bedroom.
Sulfur and Cruciferous Vegetables
A reader of this report might believe that my wife's glow has been, in the week since the birthday dinner, a regular enemy of my sleep. A Psychologist likely suspects that the glow has illumined some ashen hurt which only needs to be articulated to be resolved. But I have not slept well in two months, and I know that my and my wife's gaseous emissions, the direct result of our changed diets in general and increased intake of beans in particular, have again and again short-circuited my dreams.
A singular emission has tonight driven me to the oak desk in my study, where I now compose this report. I have opened the study's window so any subsequent emissions can exit into nature, and nature can enter with its wind, insect talk, and traffic noise of insomniacs driving up our street and blaring hip-hop in search of a highway out of their minds.
My emissions tonight remind me of an early morning, two hours before dawn, three decades ago, when my father and I drove through the town of Sulfur, Louisiana on the way to a fishing excursion in the Gulf of Mexico. This town earned its name by plaguing us with a scent that I now compare to ten thousand rats shot in their guts, and whose killers, instead of leaving them to bleed out in a stream of sewer water, drenched them in bleach and gas before setting them ablaze.
I would like to describe the singular dark that accompanied that scent. I would like to describe the fat smokestack west of the interstate and the chemical orange smoke it leaked into the night. I would like to describe the grid of steel trellises and catwalks and ladders and pipework and halogen lights caging that smokestack, the way the smoke seemed to harden into orange death cracks across the pavement of night sky.
My father could have described those things. If he were still a member of the present world, and I asked him to describe that waste management facility, he would light a cigarette and lay out its every aspect as well as, for no reason but to extend his chance to speak, the specific design and color of wrapping paper taped around a gift he received from one or another schoolmate on his eighth birthday.
His gift of recollection had maddened my wife whenever he cornered her with a story of his past. But early this August, three days after my father's burial, my wife offered that gift as evidence of the power of carciferous vegetables to preserve memory. She and I sat across from each other at the dining table under the dimmed recessed canister lights. The glow of her grace was accompanied not by a smile but a mourner's glow. She spoke into a plate of raw broccoli about my father and how in each stalk and floret before us lay the source of his power. She said any smoked memory in the landscape of our brains or spirits might remain accessible, and its meaning might even be clarified in the decades to come if, as he did, we accepted with whole hearts and enthused mouths the benefits good food granted us.
The truth is that anytime anyone had ever served my father broccoli in my presence, he pantomimed a series of gags and vomits that would embarrass a schoolboy. I did not argue this point. Nor did I say that, although I had already ingested hundreds of members of the family of carciferous vegetables in the month since our conversion, I had acquired no power to describe the singular dark my father and I had witnessed in Sulfur, Louisiana decades ago.
I could not even recall any lines from any poem. I should remember at least a couplet from the college survey I took on the poetry of Renaissance-era England, especially since my wife and I met in the class. I do remember that she and I went to Outback Steakhouse on our first date. Neither of us ordered a side of carciferous vegetables that evening. She came to the date in a flowery dress that extended to the base of her toes. Her hair was still wet from her shower. I took this wetness as a sign of misgiving in regard either to me or to the general prospect of romance. Twenty years later, that wetness remains to me a sign of misgiving.
Now the word "cruciferous" suggests to my mind the tortures of the Christian god on the cross. He is, as I understand it, a god whose excellence rests on the fact of his murder. I also understand that the Christian god fathered the Christian god. I do not really understand the content of the previous two sentences. I will never understand why I wrote "carciferous" each of the three times I meant, earlier in this section of the report, "cruciferous." I observe too that "carciferous" shares its first five letters with the word "carcinogen." "Carciferous" shares its first three letters with many words. The first such word that comes to mind is "carnivore."
A Contrast between Psychologists and Vegans
A Psychologist would feel free to draw conclusions about me based on the above-mentioned misspelled word and subsequent word associations. I hope no reader of this report believes in Psychology. Faith in any god you like has in its favor an inherent distrust of reason as a tool for fully understanding human operations and purposes. Psychology generates reasons why a misspelled word can and should be used to chart the landscape of a human mind. A Psychologist's most successful explanations are so obvious that, after hearing them, a normal human cannot stop calculating how much money and grief they could have saved if, instead of meeting that Psychologist, they had treated themselves to a cheeseburger.
A Psychologist's more complicated explanations often refer to a buried father. If such a reference cannot explain the matter, then a certain memory, a Psychologist will say, has been repressed due to trauma. Therefore it is only a matter of time and transfers of money to the Psychologist's bank account and many more thoughts of many more sacrificed cheeseburgers before the Psychologist will identify one memory as the stinkingest cow patty in a pasture glutted with cow patties, and each of these cow patties, the Psychologist will say, must be studied and described in great detail and tethered to that central stinking cow patty until the day after you have transferred to the Psychologist the last hundred dollars they need in order to make a down payment on a choice coastal property.
All this is to say that no matter how I scorn the practices and beliefs of Vegans, I much prefer those beliefs and practices to those of Psychologists. But it would be the most paranoid dream of carnivores come true if Vegans were elected to leadership roles in each national government of the world, and these new leaders surrendered the sovereignty of their countries to even more zealous Vegans who had infiltrated the leadership of the United Nations. The now-supreme institution would quickly ban the ingestion of meat in order to promote the ethical well-being of animals and humans alike. Our new bean-and-cruciferous-vegetable diet would lead to such an unending series of unprecedentedly loud and virulent emissions that sleep would become impossible for most, if not all, humans. These frustrated humans of every country in the world would enact morbid violence against their brothers and neighbors and cops. Our overlords would probably not mind watching mass murder on their monitors inside their secure compounds, particularly if they had received a more-than-favorable forecast of the coming harvest of kale. They might even celebrate when the last two humans beyond the compound walls murdered each other at the same time. I can see each of those humans coating a shoe with a wet cow patty, then forcing their shoe into their counterpart's mouth until they both collapse. The compound doors would open and, I suppose, a leafy glory would grow over Earth.
I do not think it would be so much better if, before we came so close to that glory, our overlords repented and slit their wrists in the fashion of ancient Rome's disgraced leaders. True, we would again be free to ingest the food of our choice. But we would wreak such misplaced vengeance upon farm life that cattle, fowl, and pigs would be made extinct shortly after the peace. A cannibalistic second civil war would erupt. Our gaseous emissions of digested cops, neighbors, and brothers would be more wretched than any emissions heretofore inhaled in recorded history. I might compare this gas to the gas emitted from a smokestack at a waste management facility in Sulfur, Louisiana, if that smokestack were the size of the moon. This smokestack's emissions would be inescapable no matter how far one managed to travel across our unloved and unsleeping planet.
Observed and Surmised Benefits of Vegan Practice
Every Tuesday evening, my wife serves plates heaped with raw kale, slivers of radish, and wedges of tomato. Her salads slowly dim the glow through her skull till it resembles a circle drawn and lightly filled in with an orange crayon. I cannot say whether this dimming is due to the number of chews required to ingest a leaf of kale; to the number of kale leaves, radishes, and tomatoes that must be chewed in order to call a salad a meal-in-itself; or both. Yet we chew and ingest under the recessed canister lights on an evening like a sabbath. We eat under a silence like the silence of several austere monkish orders of the Christian religion.
Whenever I chew leaves of kale, I do not feel the sort of holiness in me that I imagine an austere Christian order promises to its monks. I doubt my wife feels holiness either. I never ask her what she is feeling when she is chewing a mouthful of salad. I imagine that she is feeling or thinking that a true Vegan must sacrifice their desires to their practice. If the Vegan is not enjoying their practice, they can at least enjoy the knowledge, if it can be called knowledge, that they are improving their position in the spiritual landscape of the universe. I imagine that my wife is thinking or feeling that whatever the kale is making her suffer inside her mouth is worth what the kale will become inside her body. I imagine that she is imagining the ways in which the kale will improve her body and mind above and beyond the minds and bodies of humans she has seen wobbling up and down the aisles of grocery stores with boxes of frozen dinners in their carts and no purpose to their lives and no consciousness of the plight of cows in pastures far from Jacksonville, Florida. She may be imagining a cow and its calf walking together in a safe pasture under a gentle afternoon sun.
After each salad dinner, my wife extends her hand. I take it. She says she is glad we are doing this together. I say I would ingest many thousands of leaves of kale every day if she wanted. She smiles. Her glow revives. The table is cleared, the dishes loaded in the dishwasher, a movie of her choice is viewed. Love is made. There is, I admit, something good in the thoughts and feelings I imagined she felt and thought while she chewed kale. There is at least something to the idea of a ritual order to an evening. Or perhaps I am like any human who thinks there is something to any evening that ends in sexual relief.
The aforementioned ritual activities which culminate in our lovemaking may sound to some readers like the stuff of mediocre poetry. These readers may believe the description in the preceding paragraphs lacks only elements such as end rhymes and a regulated meter. I pity any and all readers who have never been granted sexual relief in the wake of a salad dinner.
Possible Downsides of a Stringent Diet
A Psychologist reading this report has likely and mistakenly inferred by now that my wife and I live in a suburban home which we exit through a door leading to a garage or paved driveway where our cars our parked. This Psychologist will not question their other inferences even after they learn that our property is in fact located in our city's urban core. We and our neighbors park our cars either on a curb or, in our case, a backyard of dirt, dead grass, and cat patties. Each weekday I navigate this yard to my car. I step in an average of three cat patties a week because the urban core of our city is overrun with stray cats.
And on the morning after our latest salad dinner, two weeks after my mother-in-law's birthday, I stepped in a cat patty I mistook for semidry mud. I cannot explain why I registered my mistake only after I cut my car's engine in the university's parking garage. But as soon as I removed the key from the ignition, I smelled the smell of a gutshot rat, and a second later I found the patty in the tread of my left shoe. Although I was able to scrape most of the excrement onto the garage wall, I had no choice but to carry the shoe and remaining mush with me to my office, where I stored it in a rarely used filing cabinet behind my desk.
I had no reason to suspect that my misstep foreshadowed any work-shaped trouble. I worried over only the usual potential of my gaseous emissions to damage interoffice relations, which I curtailed in the usual manner, leaving a crack in the window in which appeared a percentage of a giant oak and an occasional squirrel darting along its limbs. The view suggested a coming day of routine paperwork, email correspondence, and internet zone-outs, all of which could be done with my feet socked and hidden under my desk.
The hours droned into a lunch of lentil soup leftovers from two nights before and on into the afternoon, when the receptionist buzzed in Chava Bernstein. From her blanketing black dress and lack of make-up I inferred that Bernstein adhered to one or another rigorous strain of Judaism. But she did not have the quiet humility I expected of such a Jew. She did not even say hello. She slapped my desk at least once in the middle or at the end of each of her sentences explaining that, although the semester was in its sixth week, she had not yet received her allotment of financial aid. Each slap reconfigured the network of loose pens, lunchware, and bureaucratica atop my desk. Bernstein inspired a more rapid and more-powerful-than-usual leakage of my gaseous emissions into the room. Not enough leaked through the crack in the window into the vast and scent-scattering light of day.
I was grateful, though, that she did not claw through my skin with her rough black nails. Unlike most female humans I have observed, Bernstein had hands whose backs were thickly furred. I observed her fur and nails throughout the period of her slapping and threatening to circumcise me at the entrance of the student union unless she was satisfied with the results of our meeting.
My gaseous emissions in no way slowed her attack. I wondered if her savagery was the result of her kosher diet, which forbids the pairing of cheese and meat in any meal. I supposed that the prohibition of cheeseburgers had over the course of her life shaped Bernstein into the present slapping psycho figure.
I closed my eyes in an attempt to see, beyond the slaps and threats and emissions, a vision of my wife at the conclusion of our sabbath love. I saw instead my mother-in-law's black bear leaking blood into the rush of a river, local fish nibbling at its wound, other bears approaching to eat their cousin, flies chewing their share of the corpse. I saw a smoke-edged me drawing my left shoe with the residue of cat patty from the rarely used filing cabinet behind my desk and feeding it to Bernstein. Of course, I was professional enough to smile and assure her that, if she completed several pieces of paperwork, the problem might be resolved by the end of the week. To her credit, Bernstein pretended throughout the scene that she smelled nothing in the air.
Kohlrabies and Their Potential
In the late afternoon, believing my wife would be meeting for several hours a gardener for advice on how to turn our lawn into a cruciferous Eden, I left work early and acquired a #1 Combo Meal from our local fast-food dispensary. I should have ingested this meal either inside the dispensary or at the far end of its parking lot. Instead, at the same table at which I had endured salad the night before, I enjoyed a cheeseburger slathered in barbecue sauce, dipped French fries in a blob of ketchup, and slurped a tall cup of soda undiluted by ice.
My wife discovered me licking the last residue of grease and condiment from my fingers. A dark dot appeared in the core of the glow of her skull. On closer inspection this dot turned out to be a closet of her mind. This closet was lit bleached orange by a flashlight held by someone at floor level but out of view. From the closet's ceiling a cow with black cartoon eyes hung from a series of ropes knotted around its forelegs. It bled from its slit throat, perhaps onto the shoes of the flashlight's holder. It was no more dead than that black bear moaning at the river's edge when my mother-in-law kayaked past. It gently mooed. It blinked gently through long cartoon eyelashes. A cartoon of a middle-aged smoker stood and aimed the flashlight close on the meaty wound. This man wore a tall black hat and monocle. He twirled each end of his handlebar mustache. He flicked his cigar beyond the reach of the flashlight's glow, then ate his fill.
No doubt a Psychologist would have much to say and prescribe in response to the vision reported in the previous paragraph. A subtle Psychologist, supposing one exists, might steer me back to the subject of my father. They might ask me to again describe our drive south from our home in New Orleans through Sulfur, Louisiana to the fishing mecca of Grand Isle. They might link the bleached orange crack of pollution across the night sky to the bleached orange glow illumining the closet of my wife's mind. They might entangle those images with the burning-bleached-rat-massacre scent of the night's air and to the blood of the many redfish my father and I caught just before sunrise. They would wonder why my father, so often desirous to extend his chance to narrate one or another memory in one or another home to one or another cornered human, turned silent on this long drive. A more intelligent Psychologist would instead show me on an internet map that Sulfur, Louisiana is located outside of Lake Charles, a nondescript city on the Texas border and far west of the interstate path my father likely would have taken to drive us from our home to Grand Isle. And if I showed them on the same internet map a town called Port Sulfur along that likely interstate path, they would tap their pen on their knee. They would ask why I have omitted the word "Port" from each mention of the fetid town's name. They would ask why I have each time spelled its name with an "f" when this and every map of Louisiana on this burnt planet spells both it and the variant outside Lake Charles with a "ph." They would suspect other inaccuracies in my descriptions of southern Louisiana. The most fervent adherents to their creed would henceforth be on the lookout for a third chronically misspelled word in this report so they could identify a pattern they could diagnose as a treatable condition. They would assure my wife and me that this condition could be overcome after a lifetime of therapy at no small cost to us and our insurance company.
My wife is no Psychologist. Her discovery of my transgression led only to a change in her plan for our dinner. She drew from her bag of gardener giveaways a pair of kohlrabies. I silently observed their resemblance to jellyfish. Leafy tentacular stems drooped from their bulbheads.
When my wife set the kohlrabies on the cutting board, I imagined that they might have brainpower more advanced than a jellyfish, perhaps more advanced than any fish or man, but that they lacked the anatomy to voice their thoughts and claw their will into the face of the world. I nearly asked my wife what we would do for meals if scientists ever proved that our vegetables were conscious, but she was already severing the first kohlrabi's tentacles, and the thunderous pops of the blade against the cutting board persuaded me against speech. She quartered the kohlrabi's bulb and core. She swept the leaves, stem, and fragments of core from the cutting board to the bare counter.
I understood that the apparently solid blank green uniformity of those fragments was a failure of human vision. Like any blinding light or total darkness, the solidity of the core of a kohlrabi fools us into thinking it contains no more than itself. I pocketed the fragments while my wife sliced the remainder of the kohlrabi into thick wafers.
The internet says that a kohlrabi can be seasoned with garlic and cumin, breaded and crispy-fried, then served as an appealing side dish for a steak dinner. It also says that even an amateur chef can effectively blend several of them into a stir fry. The internet offers me seventy total kohlrabi recipes to consider, but when a cat screams outside and darts through our side yard, I leave off research to stare through my square of window.
The Dark and the Function of a Kohlrabi in Vegan Practice
As I suggested near the end of the previous section, a darkness contains much beyond our vision, but we know that any number of humans are snoring therein. And although my study's window opens only to a side yard, I can almost see in its local darkness any number of worn-out humans driving home after their graveyard shifts, keyed-up humans speeding across town to commit any number of crimes, humans foraging streets for breakfast and/or love, insects mating and/or dragging remnants of the dead home for a feast, and that screaming cat and its kin leaving patties for humans like me to mistake for mud tomorrow. By "humans like me," I mean the humans of any country in which cats multiply with no more purpose than to leave patties and ingest whatever meat they come upon without regard to its preparation.
My wife referred to no internet recipe before serving the kohlrabi wafers naked and raw.
Under the recessed canister lights of our dining room, her glow darkened to an unlit and empty version of the closet described at the beginning of the previous section. I turned plateward, because if I stared too long into my wife's skull I would be sucked into the void of its deep space. We endured the unmediated bitter taste of kohlrabies. We substituted its mean crunch for words. This meal was clearly meant to be a kind of atonement for me. What it meant for her remains a mystery. Even the least capable Psychologist, however, must know my wife and I viewed no movie and made no love after this meal.
Hours later, the aforementioned singular gaseous emission ripped me from slumber into a bedroom predictably dark beyond the range of my wife's restored skull-glow. This emission granted me the vision of Chava Bernstein mentioned in the first section of this report. I saw her moving with care inside the shadowed rectangular block of a bedroom drawer as though the drawer were a film screen and she were an actress. A camera seemed to zoom in on Bernstein's face while she puzzled over her sudden displacement in space and time. It zoomed in closer to show her lips articulating any number of Jewish prayers. It shifted away to show glinting blades arranged in pinwheels on tables, spatters of blood growing into puddles on the floor, and cow-bodies hung from ropes and hooks. It panned wide to show slabs of meat piled all around. Bernstein wandered silent through this slaughterhouse landscape without ever reaching a door or wall, without ever coming across a middle-aged smoker or anyone else to ask for help. She was and was not the human I had met in my office. Her unexpected self-control irritated me. No matter how long I watched, she was never tempted to test the edge of a blade. She never sullied herself either on purpose or by accident against any pile of meat. She never screamed.
Generally Unseen Contents of a Kohlrabi's Core
Now at the open window of my study I am wondering if either the disappeared cat or its disappeared pursuer is responsible for the patty in which I stepped this morning. I am also fondling the quartered parts of the kohlrabi's core. I am emitting the gas of my combined kohlrabi dinner and #1 Combo Meal into a darkness filled with the gasses of dinners of humans as numerous as the unseen stars or the rats of a large city's sewer system. Most humans think these gasses dissipate into the landscape of the universe, but they may be joining together in combinations even more numerous and rabid than rats and stars. If so, sleepless humans like me are currently inhaling them through our open windows. We curl our lips if we detect them at all. Some of us convert our visions into nova-grade lights, others into snapping rodent teeth.
It strikes me as unlikely that a second human is awake at this hour composing sentences which include thoughts like mine in a report meant for readers to study after they croak. "Croak" may be the least poetic way to describe the action of death. There is almost certainly a poet awake at this hour who would suggest a better word to me. But it strikes me as nearly impossible that any poet, awake or not, would prefer to write a poem about the gas products of human dinners around the world rather than one about the stars hidden by the light pollution of Jacksonville, Florida or visible in the pre-dawn sky above Grand Isle, Louisiana or the desert mountain caves of Christian ascetics in Middle Eastern countries or the pastures of England at the height of the Renaissance.
Earlier in this report I wrote that, although my personal and academic history suggests that I should be able to remember at least one couplet from at least one Renaissance-era English poem, I cannot. I can, however, recall several of those poems' tropes. Whenever I like, I can see in the glow of my mind a low hill draped in the greenest grass on which the whitest sheep graze while a young man sits barefoot under a wondrous oak and imagines the young woman he hopes to marry. I can also see a mild sun shining like a happy father overhead.
When I picture the stars and the deep space in which they burn through our current century, I picture them and the visions of all past and present human minds trapped inside the supposedly solid and uniform core of a giant kohlrabi, therein quietly and unknowingly serving its untranslatable will.
Although I have not been to Grand Isle, Louisiana since my father took me there decades ago, I remember the stars burning overhead an hour before dawn. I remember too the soft plish of our boat when we lowered it from our trailer into the Gulf of Mexico. We had not ridden far offshore before we came upon a grassy islet no larger than a minivan and shaped like the clipping of a toenail. Again and again we cast into the water at the islet's bend, for each time we did we reeled in another redfish. After setting the thirteenth member of our haul in the cooler, the ice began to turn an increasingly intense shade of glassy rose. I stared into that ice till my father asked if I was alive. Then I knew the sun had risen. I remember thinking that the sun meant peace.
The ideal reader of the previous paragraph, if not this complete report, will regard the younger version of me with empathy. That version is neither the first nor the last version of me to have thought he could derive meaning from a particular vision he received at a particular moment. The ideal reader of the previous paragraph, if not this complete report, has made that same mistake again and again. I see this reader now looking up from this sentence and staring through a nearby window into their local darkness. They hope a door of light will open in the trunk of one or another shadowed tree and that through the door will come the gift of a time machine.
But I know that somewhere along our journey south into the Gulf of Mexico, sometime after the shoreline faded into a gray smudge behind us, when the sun dropped a spangled and wavy blanket of light across the water, my father and I came upon two sharks at war. Their bodies flashed through a chaos of water and foam. I seem to hear now, beneath the wind entering through my study's window, the slap of their fins against the water's surface. I can almost see as I saw then one shark's open mouth rising into view. Each tooth therein was the size of a hand. Those teeth could not have been so large, but I must report the vision as I have received it. I do not know if this shark bit through its rival. I have inferred, though, that the foam went rosy at the war's end, that the loser's blood leaked into the gulf while the victor ate with relish. I wish I had seen the finishing chomp, but one second after the shark's mouth opened to its impossible teeth, my father turned the boat and gunned it to shore.
He and I must have cleaned the boat upon our return home. My mother likely tried to compliment us on our haul. My father and I likely pretended to care about her opinion. Somewhere, perhaps in the driveway, my father must have set his cutting board atop a spare cooler. He flicked his cigarette at the concrete. He raised a knife whose blade was as mean as any of the previously mentioned impossible shark teeth. One second after my father detached its head, the fish excreted a string of diarrhea. It is good that I cannot remember these events in too much detail. They would digress too far from the subject of this report.
Cat Patties without End
Not far beyond the window of my study is the privacy fence we share with our neighbors. Beyond that fence stands the neighbors' house, and beyond their house stand the houses of neighbors upon neighbors and their yards of cat patties without end. A reader of this report might expect that after standing so long before the window I would be able to discern the shapes of both privacy fence and neighbors' house despite the blanketing dark. A Psychologist would want to see in those shapes a summarizing vision of my mind. They would expect that this vision would resemble the pipework and ladders and catwalks and trellises surrounding a giant smokestack I once saw decades ago when my father and I drove through a town I have misspelled "Sulfur" throughout this report. They would smile when I described that smokestack leaking bleached orange cheeseburger death into the night. They would think they could draw conclusions about the nature of my person.
But I see neither shape nor leak in the dark theater. I do hear beyond the window a cat scrambling through wet grass. Its moans enter the room. Maybe it is one of the cats mentioned earlier in this report. Maybe crotch-scented teens kidnapped it from a farm in central Florida yesterday morning and kicked it into the street outside our home in the afternoon. It may have wandered for hours across our property's unfamiliar and disorienting landscape until it came upon and ingested a supper of strychnine. Now it moans and scrambles and flails in the dark. I plug my ears. I shut the window. I still hear it. I smell it, too, in each word of this report.