This quarter I had the awesome pleasure of teaching a class on making comics. Through the course, students were asked to make 1-page comics on various topics, with the final project being an open call to simply “do something awesome”.
While I spent the past weekend grading, I decided I wanted to do a 1-pager myself. Characters are thinly-veiled ripoffs of minor X-Men. Proof that I should not be allowed to draw, or letter, freehand. Ever.
Peter, Paul and Mary didn’t have to stand so close. They didn’t have to sing to each other. They could have faced forward. Not in and to the side. How many times you think Paul almost knocked Peter’s face with his headstock? How much time you think Mary spent dodging Paul’s right shoulder? You think Peter and Mary, they looked in each other’s eyes all night every?
That was a choice. By the end they stood farther but not very. They sang still a circle. It got made 50 years.
You ask yourself how many people, they sing each other fifty years.
But an oxford comma. They might have.
We watched the signal flares arc, peak, and fall toward the horizon, where the late day heat blurred the divide between sky and mountains. They sang like fireworks, glowing pink.
“I can’t stop thinking about cutting adverbs,” said Glob Herman, his translucent skin getting dark as the world went dark, his bones hardly visible now. “It’s like I can’t think straight at all.”
“We should prob’ly,” said Yoshida Son Of Sunfire, “start heading back soon.” She continued to dance in front of the cars to either that new record or older ones.
“But to where?” I asked. “We’re no closer than we were.”
We let the air cool and trimmed speech. My notebook covered swirls of ink, and it looked like my sister looked, bent over and drawing connections of curled lines and crosshatches.
“I’m ready to see him in another movie,” she whispered, watching me through time. To my left, I could feel her sitting by me, blinking through hair, and then into mist, and gone.
“Cuz everyone doesn’t have a dead sister,” said Glob Herman. “I am mega-unimpressed. You try being six-five and made of wax, then I’ll let you star in your own coming-of-age sleeper hit with killer playlists.”
He rose, sliding the slick of himself from the hood of the jeep and walking slowly away from us, into the evening desert. At each step gravel and dust stuck to him, then was absorbed.
Yoshida ran and held his hand, and I caught them as they stood together, flares continuing to fall. It was fucking beautiful, like a Youtube video or the National song I am writing through. I thought about dead people and relationships, then tried to excise process and focus on choice. They were beautiful. They didn’t worry like I did. Difference was they had to. Difference was they loved and couldn’t. I held my arms, watched daylight fade on the sealant. He held her and she impressed herself on him, wax restructured in relief.
Food does not try to love you, and fail. Food does not consider what you would be like as a life mate. Food does not find pictures of you on the internet after being introduced to you through mutual friends, and think “This person could complete me.”
Food does not do any of these things because it is food.
Food has no history. The things that the food might have been before — plants, animals, the odd seasoning mineral — have centuries of history, both local and cultural. “Food” as an abstract has history, mostly cultural, also familial, political. But food — that is, the food in front of you — it has no history. Its history is five minutes, maybe longer if you got distracted by the cat. It was ingredients thrown into a pot or casserole dish or wok, and cooked or fried, and then put on a plate with maybe a garnish, and that is when it became food. It was food from that moment until it was not, when it went inside you and broke down into sugars and proteins.
Food cares nothing for you because it has no agency. It only provides for you what you have asked it to. Food doesn’t have its own ideas. Food isn’t trying to reason whether or not you and it will be right together. Food isn’t ready to make the hard choices that you can’t. Food isn’t prepared to live with mistakes. Food doesn’t feel guilt. Food doesn’t send you money.
You may think food can do many things — that it can take blame. That it can make you feel better. That it can comfort you. “Comfort food.” But it cannot. Food can’t take the blame when things go wrong. Food can’t wrap you in a blanket and watch Gone With the Wind with you.
You can use food to make you feel better. You can use food to forget. You can do this without seeing it as a conscious act of abuse. You can do it because you are in a constant state of attempting to figure out what you need. Perhaps agency brings complication with it. Perhaps choices are not always absolute.
Ask your food the last time it had a choice. Ask it the last time it had to make a choice that was both right and wrong. Ask it about the responsibility of agency, and if it understands all the thought processes and cultural influences and human histories and personal idiosyncrasies that impact it. Ask food if it has to live with itself anyway. Ask food if it is capable of a larger perspective. Ask a grilled halibut if it understands the compromises that took place in the process of bringing it to your plate. Ask it if it’s capable of forgiveness. Ask it if it can predict the future. Ask food if it feels like a victim.
Tigerman and Gatorman were driving east on One when the rig broke down. They both jumped out to fix what needed, Tigerman screaming “RATCHET HATCHET RATCHET HATCHET” which was pretty much how his kind go. Gatorman snuffling round the sides scattered, confused and looking for tools, maybe trying to help if you asked him the point later. Point was he was skin and tail swarming across chrome, Tiger practically taking the car apart in an effort to fix what gone wrong. They had to move fast for the Murderbears and scavengers; you couldn’t just bite everyone at once anymore, despite how tough you were.
The cat awoke shortly after sunrise and crawled out dirty from the cave where it hid the night before. Normally it didn’t sleep nights, or wouldn’t have, if it had the choice, but it hadn’t had one; it was on the move, and Hunger followed.
So it had taken to cave-sleeping, and night-sleeping, both of which didn’t suit it, but it encountered no one who might have recognized how lonely it was. It slept when it could, and tried to calm its heart when dark came on—a dark that used to be its trusted friend, but had since worn down that trust with night-crashes, night-sounds.
First it searched for water, and found ice encrusted to the lower branches of some nearby firs; this it quickly shook to the ground and lapped up before the ice melted into the gravel crust of the land this far up the mountains.
Above it on a hilly peak, the cat thought it saw a shadow while it drank, and it clung close to the earth as it lapped at the ice. Hunger took many shapes but it was always waiting. The cat slunk next to one of the trunks and waited, as was its habit now; it watched until it was satisfied — perhaps unhappily satisfied — that it was still alone.
The cat crawled back to its cave then, and slept again till night came, and then woke up and its heart beat fast, hearing crashing out in the dark. It had spent too many night like this, anxious and exhausted, starving and not knowing what to do.
Perhaps it would be fine, this time. The cat pushed its head out into the night, and the night seemed to disregard it. It felt the familiar cool wind of the evening sky, the stillness beyond.
The cat went on the move.
It found footholds in the small rocks and lichen of the mountainside, and made its way toward trees at a distant, lower elevation, sticking closely to rocky shadows that it could dart into at each night-creature’s call.
At one point a raw screech echoed across the outcroppings and the cat looked around to find it had no place to hide but a large snake’s burrow, which it darted inside with claws out and teeth forward, plunging its paws into a writhing mass of sliding flesh. It quickly bit through a clench of tails that became mouths nipping at its muzzle; the cat snarled and bit deeper, deeper, feeling blood and bile coat its tongue, numbing it in the process. The cat was starving, but knew it couldn’t eat these snakes; it had tried once, and been sick and vulnerable in a desert valley for an entire afternoon, panting on its side and heaving vomit under an unforgiving sun.
Now the cat simply squeezed the snakes between its jaws until they fell limp, one by one. The bites, and the venom it had digested, would surely make it very sick, and soon. Still, the cat waited inside the burrow, its breathing staggered, watching the stars and moon.
Slowly a sound shuffled overhead. The cat watched, felt the burrow around it squeeze. It smelled musk, and rot, and the dank mold of unkempt fur.
And with a hushing rumble, the moon and stars blotted out. Hunger sat over the burrow.
The cat smelled what would happen before it hit, and pushed itself as flat as possible against the burrow’s back wall as a stream of rank piss and a fetid storm of shit dropped down from above. The den echoed with the groans of the thing overhead, and gravel stuttered into the cavern as the creature’s anus pulsed with discharge. The urine subsided, rivulets running down the pile of shit, and pooled around the ripped corpses of the snakes where the cat had left them.
A huff of air, and Hunger left. Dim moonlight illuminated what remained.
For awhile the cat did not move, knowing there was no escape except through the path of excrement and dead flesh. But then, mewling sorrowfully, it began the slippery climb, paws disappearing into brown filth, finding no purchase on the dead bodies underneath. At one point it fell backward and its bobtail soaked in cooling urine. But then, mercifully, the cat’s claws found the dirt wall of the entrance, and it climbed out.
Once above ground again, the cat could not even bring itself to try and wash the mess from its fur. The heat of Hunger’s waste rose off it, and as the waste dried its pelt began to stiffen.
But as a wind rose it heard, off down the mountain, the soft sound of waves lapping against a shoreline. It imagined how cold a lake bath might be, and made its way toward the water as the moon rose higher.
When the smoke from the Whistlestop patio has filtered into the front seat of your car by the time you make it onto Upas from 30th, in that little crook of sidestreet and gas station before, absurdly, it becomes 30th again, and “Midnight City” is playing on the radio and Anthony Gonzalez sings the city is my church just as you make the next corner and before you know what you are thinking you say to yourself Exactly, and you suddenly realize that you have felt, for some time now, what it is to unabashedly love a place; to be chosen by it, utterly in sync; and that despite the strangeness of it being this city, this time, that at least there are moments when you know that you are where you should be; that for a little while, you are in your right place.
“Tonight on Evenings with an Architect: We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know, Sports Teams and Why We’re All Losers, plus special guest Who Asked You Anyway, with their report on Spiders: The Internet And My Cousins. We’ll see you tonight at five, eight eastern, with all this plus a second look at My Friends and Their Parents Who Will Never Die. Please join us for an evening predicted by your relatives, the future, and that one lady on the subway the last six years. May God bless us all beforehand. This has been ArchitekTUR. Thank you, good night, and bring our children home. Rock and roll my brother, rock and roll my sisters, rock and roll who stands up and asks us all to rock. We hear you, we see you, we love when everyone else does not. Five, eight eastern. Don’t forget us. Despite what you might think, we cannot have forgotten you. Thank you, thank you, split you like the trees, sing you like the moon. We’re so sorry, call your mother, reach out to me. Praises to the stars, rocketships that fly forever, a blue kitten costs you thousands, we are all in search of resurrection, metal so metal so metal-metal. I wrote this song for you, the wind, the plum trees. Holy holy holy, holy holy holy, holy holy ho. I’m getting the signal from our groundscrew. That’s the real light but my hand keeps gripping, muscles never tense. There was this monkey but I doubt he remembers. Kisses for all of you. Peace to find peace, port in the storm, the obelisk. Our hurt is like mine. Mine, mine. Thank you, thank you, there was this train of whisperers praying before the sun. I hear you always, so for serious always. Grass, blades of. One more thing, see you I. One: good night, he whispers, good night good. night.”
I couldn’t find the brute since we’d landed—he’d run off into the highlands beyond the ship, and left his belt and pack hanging on the higher branches of a tree before disappearing a final time. I’d lost Puyoung too, her green eyes glittering the last time I saw her in the dockside markets, smiling at me between tradesmen before sliding sideways, my hand reaching for a fold of fabric and then nothing.
I’d called for her more as a question; I already knew I would not find her.
Somewhere the crew had also left the ship; it seemed like I’d seen them around the farthest corner of the interior less and less often, until they had faded and the corridors rang hollow.
And at some point I came out here to sit atop the hull, and wait.
When I am next, I hope I’ll know.
She smeared the paper with a lumpy blackish-grey paste, laying it thick. Then she pinched the page at both ends, and folded one half over the other, and squeezed it hard with both her hands. I watched, a root digging into my thigh. She squeezed in sections, making the fold as flat as she could. Then she peeled the page apart again, taking care to separate the sides so they did not rip. They opened like an eye.
“What do you see?” She asked. I told her. She looked at the paper herself. “Okay,” she said, and folded the page again into thirds and quarters. Paste began squeezing out the sides.
“What is that stuff?” I asked her.
She didn’t look up. “Bugs,” she said. I paused, and asked what she’d meant.
“Mostly ants,” she said. “And spiders. And some other kinds.”
And she folded the page again, and I could see their little legs now, their abdomens and antennae; their white insides as she ripped the paper into strips.
“Here,” she said, and handed me a folded page that looked like a finger sandwich. As I watched, she took a strip herself. She bit into it, and began to chew.
“Mmm,” she said, and smiled. “S’good. You eat yours now,” she said, grinning through her teeth.
A root dug into my thigh. I breathed in, following the rules and customs of that place.
