by Ann
Craig Padawer (1961–) is an American fiction writer whose work has appeared in Conjunctions, Fiction International, and After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology. He received his master’s degree in fiction writing from Brown University. ‘The Meat Garden’ (1996) comes to the weird from the surreal, creating a snapshot of a war both familiar and dislocatingly strange. According to Padawer, the story had its inspiration in both the Iraq War and ‘the notion of a body at war with itself…[the tumor] that would inevitably bloom into my father’s death was growing essentially in his mind. It was transforming him in every possible way – not just physically, but mentally. I still find that notion simultaneously terrifying and somehow absurdly beautiful.’
They humped it over metal hills and down through tortured valleys of scrap and smoking slag. For two days, Pilorus had been bitching about how he was swelling inside his suit. His tongue grew so thick that the grunts couldn’t understand what he was saying anymore – but it didn’t matter: they’d been hearing it for days. By late afternoon he was having trouble breathing, lagging badly behind the column so that Wally had to keep falling back to push him along. That night, in their trench, while he tried to eat a can of peaches, something broke inside his throat. And then the thing happened to his hands. It was awful and beautiful and later Wally would feel guilty at the way he’d just sat there, watching in fascination as Pilorus went through those hard changes. The hardest changes Wally had ever seen, until the Consolidation came along and rewrote the rules.
Toward the end, his head burst in a blizzard of seeds that hung in the lamplight and drifted slowly to the ground like a tiny division of poison paratroopers. Only then did Wally reach for his mask and scuttle out of the trench.
The platoon took friendly fire from behind and was harassed along its flanks by rogue Vegan units that had skipped over to Mack through some warp in ideology or the mysterious exigencies of politics. They wore their body armor even after the deep heat had set in, and on certain blistering noons Wally thought he could smell himself cooking inside the government steel. A crack leafhead sniper could thread a seed through a seam in an armadillo suit with all the accuracy of a seamstress, but a grunt would pay any price for the illusion of safety. And so they sweated it. In some sectors the air was so thick with pod shrapnel and spore that they had to wear pollen masks. And they took weird casualties there.
It was a problem of sensation. If it sometimes took minutes to realize you’d just lost your leg to a Mechanical Mary, it could take days before you knew that a Vegan round was germinating inside you, and weeks before your body began to blossom into death. Seed flak passed into you like a bullet fired in a dream, soft and bloodless – you couldn’t tell an entry from a mosquito bite; and there were artillery spores so small they could enter the flesh without leaving any wound at all. In the absence of any pain by which to forecast his death, every grunt imagined he was dying at any given moment.
Mack fire, when it came, was almost a relief. A clock rocket with its shrapnel of escapements and flaming numerals provided instant blood, bones, burning hair. The ringing alarm let you know your time was up as the blast blew the memories out of your meat like a bad odor. And a television bomb would instantly blind you with its eruption of images as its icons burned through your flesh and imprinted themselves on your bones in tiny hieroglyphs that recounted the brief history of the body’s destruction. There was no ambiguity to such wounds. You were either hit or whole, and you knew which pretty quickly.
But a Vegan wound was a covert wound. Once planted in flesh, the round put out roots and tendrils. It drank the blood out of the body and began to feed on the meat until its branches grew inside the victim’s skin like a second set of bones and the body burst into flower. Sometimes you could see a grunt’s face freeze with the knowledge. But most of the time it just arrived, like some sudden agonizing spring, some personal season of devastation. The body ripened with that secret penetration and then almost overnight the wounds opened and the limbs went rigid. A grunt’s first reaction always seemed to be a sort of admiration for the beauty of his own destruction. Wally watched guys look on in fascination as their fingertips burst and the first buds unfolded from their bones.
Vegan ammunition took root in the rubble and the grunts came down out of molten metal hills into steaming basins of greenery where birds clotted the trees and shrieked above their tents at night. They ran spider wire out on the perimeter and laid down trip flares and mirror mines designed to kill the enemy with his own image. Mack anti-floral units operating in their sector hauled spare bladders filled with Blue Elixir and shrivel spray: Intel reports said they could defoliate a Vegan ammo dump in twenty minutes, but what the grunts knew was that the stench could melt your eyes. The enemy was doing such a thorough job that HQ decided to can their crop dusters. Anyway, Mack was just relocating the vegetation: the next barrage would fall two clicks north or east and begin to sprout in a matter of hours. From the air, the sector looked like a scorched grunt undergoing hair restoration. Acres of scrap and dust patched with horticulture. Jungle rose and fell overnight. Their maps were meaningless. And each temporary forest was an ambush waiting to happen.
One night in some nameless cube of greenery not marked on their maps, Wally crawled out of his tent to squat in the rain and he watched through the hole in his poncho as a scissor of lightning clipped through the canopy and suddenly revealed the jungle to be a vast impersonation of vegetable artillery, bark boots and moss fatigues. He was crawling back in a panic when the first zook whistled through the leaves and exploded against the backdrop of trees with a heavy splurt. He screamed ambush but something had happened to his ears and he couldn’t hear himself. Tracers flashed through the canopy and the grunts were spilling out of their tents with defoliant grenades and half-assembled flame guns. As Wally scrambled in, Reno tossed him a piece and he found himself crouched in a nest of vines firing a music gun that he’d lifted off a dead Mack a week before. Wherever he aimed, the notes blew holes in the rain and trees exploded in flaming arpeggios. He spotted a sniper clothed in leaves beneath the slow fall of a phosphor flare, and when he pulled the trigger, music erupted from the barrel and entered the verdant figure in the form of a vicious dance that bent his bones into clefs and fiddled off his flesh in melodic intervals as his body disintegrated into music and the meat’s melody multiplied into the cacophony of death.
Seed flak shredded the leaves overhead and ricocheted off the trees. Grunts were caught without their armor and the rain fed their wounds. The darkness was filled with cries and moans. Men were laying fire down into the feet of the trees, and in some small corner of the night a figure burned inside its uniform of leaves. The air smelled of phosphor and blossoms. The grunts called in for arty, for air, but nobody was sure of their coordinates. And then someone yelled for them to back it out of there before the leafheads sewed them in. The Cav was coming. They began to withdraw, leaving their gear behind and hauling only as much ammo as they could strap to their backs. But when they hit the perimeter, they got caught up in their own wire and had to cut their way out with heat knives while the vegheads routed them with seed flak and compost pellets. In the panic, Tibs tripped one of their own mirror mines and what it did to his image in that instant made his face break like glass.
When the wire finally fell, the grunts broke from the treeline and regrouped, hauling what wounded they could. Stimpfel and Weeps set up a chatter gun on a nearby hilltop and kept the veegs pinned to the horticulture until the Cav came in and laid down dispersion foam. Grunts were stripping down in the rain and frantically running flashlights over their bodies, searching for anything that looked like seed entry. They radioed for medevac and set up triage behind a hill of blistered tin out of which the half-melted corpses of Macks erupted like an expedition of puppets frozen in a glacier.
Wally was tearing open packets of herbicide with his teeth and handing them to Slice. Cecum had taken two rounds of high-speed seed in his gut before being hit
by a nitrogen pellet, and the wound was blooming fast. His right arm burst and the medic lopped it off to stop the spread. But the fertilizer was feeding the seeds now and the bullets wrapped their roots around his bones, burrowing into everything inside Cecum that was soft and vital. They’d kept him standing to cut down on the ground surface, and now his boots had broken open and his feet had taken root.
‘That’s cool,’ Slice kept saying, ‘that’s what we want.’
Air support thundered over their heads and the rain fell and grunts were screaming to be pruned, and in the middle of all the shit coming down on them, somebody was singing. At first Wally thought it was a music gun, but then he recognized Vomer’s voice. He was crooning a weepy ballad about a woman who fashions a tiny man out of chicken to remind her of her lover gone away to war; she lets the little man build a house for himself inside her vagina, and when one day the lover returns she is forced to choose between responsibility and desire.
Whatever was growing inside Cecum had made him rigid, and he stood there in the downpour with his arms forking out along the horizon as if he’d been crucified to the rain. ‘I’m fucked. Oh man, look at me, I’m fucked,’ he wailed until his screams turned to leaves and his eyes burst into blossoms, and Slice told Wally all they could do now was pack him for flight.
A lone leafhead was still sniping at them with a compost gun and some grunts had gathered around the chatter rifle and were taking bets on who could pop him.
‘Dumb fucker,’ Stevo laughed, his voice edging into hysteria. ‘Who’s he think he’s gonna hit with that fert? Cecum here’s already a fuckin’ forest. And I know I didn’t catch any seed.’
‘Yeah,’ Vomer grinned, ‘how d’you know that?’
‘I just fuckin’ know, asshole.’
Dustoff finally showed, dropping down through the rain in a swarm of lights and wind. They clipped Cecum’s roots, sprayed him down with liquid starch and wrapped him in wet burlap like a tree about to be shipped through the mail. Then they strapped him to a chopper and scrambled out from under the blades.
The Cav dropped in a team of Root Rangers with ugly hardware, and after the greenery had been leveled the grunts went in behind them to mop up. They unzippered the trees and found the roasted corpses of leafheads curled like fetuses inside their wooden wombs.
The veegs must have had a Mack advisor attached to their unit because the grunts found a Wooden Colonel lying scorched in that burnt wreckage of trees. It sat in the mud with its legs broken beneath it and its wooden head swollen with rain. The mouth tried to speak but all that came out was a clicking sound and the grunts stood around draped in their ponchos like great dark birds, joking nervously while Litz radioed back for orders. The Mack’s chestpan was cracked and someone reached in there with a stick and tickled the pink flaps of flesh dangling through the breach in the steel. The thing coughed feebly and puked up a bit of pulp wrapped in threads of radiator sputum.
‘Hey, don’t fuck with that thing, man.’
Litz crouched in the mud, his ears plugged into the ether. ‘They want us to break him down,’ he said.
‘Shit.’ Vomer spat into the rain. ‘Fuckin’ spooks.’
The Mack wasn’t dead yet, so they stapled it to the dirt, and as they worked it watched them through lenses clouded with lymph. They ran a wire into him and when they opened his seams with a heat knife and a portable saw they found a live pigeon in there, its body woven through with wires. Vomer clipped the fibers, then held the bird by its wings and beat it against a tree until it looked like a feathered mojo bag leaking gruel. The apertures of the Mack’s eyes clicked closed. ‘You’re set,’ someone said. Reno hit it twice with an air chisel and its head broke open. Vomer checked it out for triggers and when nothing showed they fished out the map cylinder with a wire, cataloged it and sent it back to Intel in a sealed pouch. Then they cut the lenses out, crouched in the smoldering mud and drew cards for them.
Fuck protocol. They’d lost seven men.
That autumn, Mack shelled the city and fire roosted above the buildings like some new form of weather. Toward the end of October a team of wooden guerrillas with wires and rubber fingers commandeered one of the radio stations and Emma saw an old woman and her chauffeur killed in their car by a boobytrapped song. Their heads seemed to swell with music and then burst against the glass, and when the cops finally cut through the hood, clipped the battery cables and opened the car the interior looked like one of those canvasses she’d seen before the war in uptown galleries specializing in Impact Painting. At night, despite repeated protests from the Vegan ambassador, defol trucks rumbled down the avenues, watering the asphalt with herbicide. Come morning the air had a thin bitter smell and the trees sewn to their cubes of dirt stood dark and crooked against the dawn. The panic was on. Everyone was holding their money or shifting it out of the city in preparation for flight, and of necessity the skin industry seemed to pass overnight into a division of the War Department. The premier flesh houses were occupied by noncom officers and spooks from Intel, while the rest of the waterfront was overrun with grunts on three-day passes. Of the civilian clientele, only a few hardcore fatalists still haunted The Hairy Clam, Merkle’s Rubber Womb or the black and blue bar of The Iron Tongue, where the whores had to unzipper their faces to suck you.
Emma’s girls were skittish. The blare of a car horn sent them bolting from their beds, and every Friday at noon, when the carting company came through, the crash of the dumpster out back brought them up out of their sleep still dripping dreams and togaed in sheets damp with business and fear. They would pull on their pollen masks and clot the hallways like trapped crickets, chittering, goggle-eyed and anonymous, and no amount of Darvon could coax them back to sleep.
She had the house on Albacore Street by then. Her maids swept throat clamps and bits of metal out of the beds in the morning. At night, tracers stitched the northern sky with messages too brief to read, as if the war were some subliminal advertisement for a product no one could name. When the peace talks collapsed in early November, Emma shifted her money into an offshore account, had her windows painted with anti-flak lacquer and installed an escape ladder in her third-floor bedroom. At Hippolyta’s urging she increased the brothel’s security budget and rented a goon from one of the waterfront temp agencies in order to beef up the door during business hours. They kept a riot gun, a pair of pruning shears, a spray rifle full of Blue Elixir and two canisters of silence foam behind the bar. But the threats were myriad; there were only so many precautions Emma could take and inevitably the changes brought by the war left her confused and depressed. All these attempts to reduce risk, to make the city safe, to quantify it, were like trying to capture fire inside a paper box. The war could not be reduced to something logical. Her clientele had changed drastically, their desires mystified her, and for the first time since she had opened her own house Emma was scared. On her afternoon rounds of the rooms she came across ominous objects deposited in ashtrays and toilets. Three teeth wrapped in leaves. Dried vegetable ligaments. A pair of paper ears. A knackle of wet seeds webbed in pulp and hair. And once, in one of the third-floor bathrooms, something small and dark unfurling in the water at the bottom of the bowl, bleeding color.
City Hall ferried grunts in from the zone on fuck junkets for R&R. They arrived at the bordello’s check-in desk like travelers disembarking from a dream. Eyes baked into a glaze. Skin ravaged by de-fol. Divots of hair scooped from their scalps by parasites, fear and fert burns. They wore necklaces of detonator cable strung with wooden tongues, lung sprockets and scrimshawed stalks of bone. They kept love letters, dried Yap paws, and puppets of cloth and bundled leaves tucked inside their helmet liners to shelter their heads from stray pieces of sky. Some had their nostrils pierced with firing pins; others wore keechee pouches stapled to their tongues and stuffed with curative seeds, twigs and Vegan prayers tattooed on scraps of rind. One grunt had a trained clock spider that lived inside his nose and roamed his face on a thin leash that was ancho
red to his ear; in a fit of nostalgia he’d removed the spider’s trigger and now it was just a gimmick ticking in his head. Others converted to Carnism, swore off flesh and wore the anal effigies that the monks shipped to the front by the crateful…and still, come R&R, they shuffled into the madam’s kitchen in embarrassment, asking for jars of vinegar in which to soak their effigies while they fucked her girls.
One night an Aluminum Terrorist slipped through a checkpoint on the northern border with forged documents and a paper face. He took a table at The Golden Triangle, then went into the bathroom, where he opened his own seams with a heat knife and assembled a music gun from the pieces he’d concealed inside his body. He came out firing staccatos and fugues. The diners were caught with their food in the air. The music funneled into their ears and traveled down their bones, tearing holes in their bodies as it sought some point of exit. In some cases, it erupted from the victims’ mouths in a bloody song, bursting their tongues and blowing out their teeth, sparing the vital organs. As they lay bleeding, music pouring out of them, the wounded tried to plug their ears with napkins or bits of food. A desperate few pierced their eardrums with toothpicks and chopsticks then cowered beneath their tables as the mechanical assassin moved through the nightclub, until finally one of Ho’s sumos, his ears sealed with wonton skins, managed to draw his pocket cannon and blow a hole in the Mack’s chestpan. Mucus and motor lymph spurted from the wound and the killer’s paper clothes began to dissolve as the fluids saturated them. By the time the cops, the AT boys and the spooks from Intel arrived, the sumos had stomped him flat as a cookie sheet. A pair of trigger specialists had to lift him with a spatula and tongs, while the AT crew sprayed everything down with silence foam. They brought in bunting and sound tarpaulins to muffle the lingering music, and they wrapped the wounded in soundproof blankets to keep them from contaminating the medical crews.