We All Need To Eat

by Alex Leslie

  Punctuation has the advantage of being an end in itself, a pure digital howl.

  She is at her desk at her transient job at a gallery, and someone is asking her how the new coffee maker could have broken down so quickly. The coffee machine is important, and Soma startles herself by turning and snapping, “There’s a Starbucks on every fucking corner.” Her feet are so hot inside her sandals, as if she’s standing balanced on the bright scalp of a light bulb.

  She copies the message into an email, types, what the fuck, and sends the email to an old friend who knew the dead friend for as long as her. She spends half an hour sending messages to which she does not expect responses.

  Every day, she crosses two bridges to get to this job. This city of bridges where she was born has always known jumpers. They are a routine fable, unseen and accepted and rarely mentioned. She searches the city on Google Maps and examines the blue and black lines, the warp of inlet and coast and crossings. The message about her dead friend still open on her desktop. She thinks, This city is just a set-up, look at all those bridges. She’s old enough to recognize when she’s at her most dramatic, her most paranoid; these extreme thoughts have become another thing she has invented in order to outsmart. Still, she tells herself, people jump from buildings as often as they jump from bridges. It is only a matter of levels.

  She googles the height from which a human body must fall in order to die on impact.

  And is this different for water and pavement?

  And does water become solid if a body approaches it fast enough?

  And before impact, has the person changed into something else? An angel, a stone?

  Stop.

  “Have you wanted to kill yourself?” Soma’s oldest friend, who was close to the jumper, asks her.

  They lift handmade noodles from bowls in a Japanese restaurant across from the downtown public library. The friend’s eyes are hooped in navy, which she has tried to conceal with makeup, producing an owl’s regal, remote stare.

  Soma swallows, adds, “I’ve wanted to, a few times.”

  “Who hasn’t?” the friend says.

  They eat.

  The jumper has flung himself into the new gulfs opened between the people who knew him. He did not leave a note. This is a thing people who did not know him ask Soma—did he leave a letter? It is a thing people know how to ask.

  TV trained them to want a body, an investigation, a discovery.

  Instead Soma googles are bodies found when people jump from bridges and the name of her hometown and reads that in these incidents the body is almost never recovered. She googles tidal patterns. Eyes the charts, the long loops and the filigreed eddies. Absurd that the city exists in the midst of all that oceanic confusion. A city is a simple thing, an afterthought, an aspirational sandhill.

  His body is not breaking down, is not being deboned by currents and all the salts of this world and the one under it. His body is rotating, hand to heel, pinwheeling through open space. She remembers him waving across a room at a fundraiser, making small talk at a housewarming. These moments lack staying power.

  What remains: an endless, gentle tumbling, all parts of him intact, punchlines and organs. For months following his death, clothed and orbital.

  She cannot imagine the moment he jumped—he was a shy person like her, never forthcoming, arrested by neuroses—but she cannot stop his somersaults. His loose, beautiful sandy hair, perpetual motion. He is the first person her own age who has ever died.

  Soma rides her bike around her family’s neighbourhood late into her teenaged nights, years after her mother left. Her mother who visited sporadically but never stayed, though her father promised for years. Told legends that became beautiful with disappointment. Under Soma, the bike is light, another mechanical component of the agile darkness. She rides for hours, her legs slackening with exhaustion, her pendulum knees swinging, because this is her only time alone, inside a world of distant graffiti branches and faceless houses.

  The habit becomes convenient during her first relationship, a girl from her high school who lives in a neighbourhood down the steep hill. Soma leaves and returns during the night, glad that she gets to leave, escape on the cold metal speed of her bike, glide off down the fast black streets, hop the boulevards sideways, tease the gutters with the stripping rims of her wheels, still feeling what she had done inside of her, the wide warmth of that, but travelling fast away from herself, like a pellet of blood that whips up and down all the wet speedy roads of veins but never makes its way to its source.

  She rides until she is tired enough to return. She crawls tired and drained into the heat of her bed.

  There is the fall down the bike’s glimmering chain before the hill assumes its shape, the city flattens into a bowl, darkness flanked by ocean. She stays out on her bike for as long as possible, the ache entering her calves, settling in her feet, exhaustion that does not burn out but hardens in pockets.

  She continues until she has to return to her house, her body spent enough to crumble. Immediately, she sleeps.

  Her brother, always younger no matter how much time passes, never the escape artist she learns to be, complains to her that their mother turned up and screamed deliriously at their father for hours, then left and returned, left and returned, each time louder, the tide coming in, until she leaves for good.

  One night when she was eight or so, her mother entered a new kind of rage like she’d never seen. Plates jumped and danced across the floor. Circles of light roamed the ceiling. A spoon carved a ringing silver halo around her mind. Her brother was a whisper in the collar of her shirt, then gone. Soma ran from the house and felt her mother’s thunder pursuing her. She outran herself.

  The park at the bottom of the street was full of pockets of translucent shadow and soaked grass. Children didn’t come here at night. She had been told not to go to the park alone at night and she did. Clipped trees like great hot air balloons unmoored in the black. Inside one of them, a round dusty room, gnarled branches, reaching upwards, holding the roof up. Soma crawled in, curled up on the dirt and slept. Dreamed about running, a chain of flipped hills.

  She was awakened in early morning by four raccoons watching her, bored, from the entrance to her human

  burrow.

  She staggered to her feet, pushed the dirt from her jeans, and wandered up the hill back to the house she was from.

  The last summer, Soma remembers—the downward pull of the hill, her brother’s blame pulling her back to the surface, and the girl she fucked to learn how, how she rode her bike until dawn more than once, light rising through her eyes, a dawn in her blood, her arms and thighs crossing each other’s revolutions, the soaked streets rivering and the door shutting again behind her, body throbbing mutely past decision, how her brother said, furious at her door frame, “You’re never around anymore,” how she responded, tired of the weight of their savagery.

  “Don’t worry, I’m already gone.”

  stories like birds

  stories like birds

  The Sandwich Artist

  my father always told me, “if anything terrible happens, treat yourself to a nice meal.” Advice passed on from one generation to another, a recipe for a history of starvation, but I didn’t know that yet. I only knew Chinese five spice BBQ pork with pineapple and red glaze, fish and chips bundled in greasy newspaper, corned beef boiled in bags, rotisserie chickens leaking orange condensed steam over tinfoil. I knew sweet and sauced and salty and, later on, spiked. I knew broiled and fat ’n’ happy. I knew how to drink a bad day out of a gravy boat. It isn’t that I’ll run out, it’s that in the beginning there was never enough.

  When my brother hadn’t left the house for three weeks, my father called me up and said, “Hey, I bought a Heritage Farms chicken, want to come over?”

  “How’s Josiah?”

  “We’ll need a lot of garlic, right?�
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  “A lemon,” I said. “Is he any better?”

  “Yeah, he seems better. What else.”

  “Rosemary.”

  “Dried.”

  “I’ll bring some from my pots.”

  “Bring extra so I’ll have some in the fridge. I have wine,” he said.

  “Fresh garlic.”

  My father never bought fresh spices, just endlessly replenished the giant containers of powdered garlic, onion, and oregano from the bulk bin at Real Canadian Superstore. The containers lined the top of the family stove, unmoving as gravestones. The garlic was the texture of instant milk and smelled like chicken soup mix. Its scent flavoured my childhood memories of camping trips, burgers laced with its rank tang. When I started to cook for us, after my mother left, I walked to the grocery stores and asked a white-aproned man restacking the peaches where I could find the garlic. “I don’t know what it looks like,” I told him. He looked at me like I was playing a prank. At home, I scraped at the sheer white outer tissue, then sliced the whole bulb down the middle and hacked bits out with the point of a steak knife, flung the massacred pulp into the pan, juice stinging my eyes. Now, my fingers dismantle garlic instinctively. I press a knife’s blunt side to a clove with the flat of my palm to loosen the casing, and the smooth white clove falls free, its side fingernail-smooth.

  “My garlic not good enough for you?” he growls.

  “We need lots of olive oil for the skin. You got enough?”

  He’s always running out of something.

  “I have lots of oil, just bought a new can.” I wince. He buys his olive oil in bulk too, in a giant can with spout, like an emergency gasoline supply.

  “Tell Josiah I’m coming.”

  “He knows.”

  My roast chicken is perfect. If you know how to make one thing perfectly, you will always get invited back. It’s your basic French roast chicken. Remove the neck from the cavity, keep it for the jus. Halved lemons and salt and crushed peppercorns and a few garlic cloves fisted into the belly, stretch the skin over the neck hole, pin it in place with a skewer. Massage the chicken with oil, coat the skin with rock salt and cracked pepper. Not table salt; the flavour is french-fry sharp. Use salt with enough substance to cook in the oil. Yogourt makes the skin brown and thick, but I prefer the crunch of oil, salt, pepper. Bacon fat if you want smoke. 375 oven until it browns, then 350 with a tent of oil over it. Thirty minutes to the pound.

  Baste often.

  Forget everything you’ve heard about latchkey kids. I loved the freedom. The unclocked arrivals, my backpack’s contents spread out across the three couches, the TV guiding me into the trashiest dead ends of adulthood. I microwaved bags of frozen gyoza, dressed them in Kikkoman teriyaki sauce and honey, and watched drag queens claw each other’s gender identities on Montel, watched Judge Judy preside over trailer-park divorces, watched Maury Povich call paternity test results like a hockey referee bracing for a fistfight. Hustlers and salesmen populated my afternoons while I spooned up Bear Claw ice cream, sucking frozen marshmallow bulges from my spoon while middle-aged women bemoaned their sex drives. It doesn’t even work in the bathtub anymore.

  But my favourite show was Boot Camp. Obese teenagers with multiple misdemeanours scoured toilets with toothbrushes and did push-ups while men in security uniforms bellowed down at the folding adolescent bodies. Sally Jessy Raphael, my favourite TV personality for her inexplicable cruelty and rhinestoned disdain, presided. In my memory she’s a redhead in a white suit with a gaudy red collar. Cruelly cut rhinestones. The teenagers sob, then are blessed by her hand. She absolves us, her watchful monsters.

  I watched, inhaling my Ichiban instant noodles with an egg swirled in, my hot chocolate bloated with marshmallows, Kraft Dinner with butter and instant milk crystals sprinkled on like Pop Rocks. I felt sorry for the kids on the screen, my fellow prisoners who’d somehow had the bad luck of getting caught. But I disapproved of their weakness, looked down on them for losing it on camera. How they sobbed and pleaded for release—I will get better, I will be better. I watched, the judicious observer, stuffing myself like a beast being prepared for her roasting day. My hunger was insatiable.

  After my mother left, my father put Josiah in after-school care; he never asked me if I would prefer to go too. I was a small adult from now here on in—our secret bargain. Until my father brought Josiah home on his way back after his work commute, at sevenish, I was alone. Those hours, after Rosie O’Donnell and Montel and Judge Judy, were when I learned to cook. My father started giving me weekly cash in envelopes. I pushed the shopping cart from the store. Five blocks to our house, neighbours accustomed to my routine, the clatter of the cart on the dimpled sidewalk. I white-knuckled it, always afraid that someone would pursue me from the store for taking the cart. Nobody ever did. My fear placed its wide hands on my shoulders and pushed me forward. But who’s going to chase a ten- or eleven-year old pushing a cart full of chicken breasts, garlic and spaghetti? I ferried my ingredients up the hill.

  I loved frying the most—sautéeing, the cookbooks I started to check out of the library taught me. A new vocabulary of taste and heat.

  I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen; I melted olive oil and butter together, swivelled the pan until they rose in a brown lather, lay the chicken breasts skin-down, inhaled the crackle. I seasoned my meat well. When they got home, it was always seasoned and ready.

  My father catches me at the front door before I can head to Josiah’s room.

  “Josiah’s tired. So maybe we’ll just cook for a while, till he has time to come around.”

  I hear the dim snarl of Josiah’s electronica from his room at the back of the house. He’s almost twenty, not a baby anymore, but he’s our baby.

  My father studies my face. He’s going to tell me what’s going on with Josiah. Why he won’t return my calls, my emails, Facebook posts that linger on his wall. “Soma,” he says. “I remembered to leave the chicken out to let it come to room temperature. Like you said.”

  I nod. I’ve lectured him countless times. Never cook chilled meat, it makes it tough.

  “Did you dry it before you oiled it?” I ask.

  “Yep.” If I haven’t been able to make my family happy, I’ve at least taught them something about how to eat.

  We set to work on the chicken. He hasn’t preheated the oven. “I forgot what temperature,” he complains, “because you never write anything down.”

  I oil the skin, drop the neck in a saucepan of water to simmer for the jus, plunge my hand wrist-deep into the bird, fill it with lemons and garlic and a small hoop of rosemary. Cold in there, small ribbed cave. I pull and seal the skin over the hole. I snow the bird with salt. Always hold your hand at a height, so the salt distributes evenly.

  “Aaaaaaaaah, looks great.”

  He slides the chicken into the oven. The door shuts gently. He bought a new fridge and stove last year. The springs are still eager, jump shut. The stove he threw out was the stove of my childhood education, those adolescent banquets prepared in afternoon isolation. The light in the oven was shot for half a decade. Two of the burners were crooked from use—my hands and wrists developed to rotate the slanted pans so the meat cooked evenly. He didn’t tell me when he threw out the old stove—I arrived one day to the new one, its face gleaming mutely. It felt like my first car had been stolen. I didn’t know that I had loved it, the chipped silver-faced dials and the top encrusted with a generation of spitting pots and my father’s granulated garlic, my first serious burn inflicted by steam, not sunlight. How years of family flavour become paint.

  He flips the oven light on and we kneel side by side, stare in at the bird, pale and naked above the glowing bars.

  “Glad you’re here,” he says, puts an arm across my shoulders.

  Josiah has locked his bedroom door. I pound on it, a Sally Jessy Raphael warden all over again.

 
“What the fuck. I can’t believe you. I came here to see you.”

  I haven’t come in a month from my bachelor apartment on the other side of the city—I’ve been swamped in shifts at the restaurant where I worked as a line cook, the most recent in my string of shitty jobs. Josiah works out of his bedroom, programming online games that people buy from a friend’s site. He has online friends he’s worked with for years who he’s never met; last year he drove across the border to meet a few of them for burgers and nobody got along in person, so they went back to being techie internet soulmates. He emailed me the master password a year ago and I trolled his games, searching for a way into him. A world of elves, trolls, and fairies. Rapunzel-like plots. Rescues and escapes. I surfed through, knowing he would look up my catalogue of movements indexed to the username. The next time I saw him he was eager and bashful. “I liked it,” I told him. “A lot of the games seemed to be about love.” He shrugged, gave me a disappointed look. “All games are about love,” he said.

  I pound the door again.

  His voice thuds through the hollow-core wood. “Go. The. Fuck. Away. Now.”

  Cranks his music up, a remix of songs I don’t know.

  He’s the person I have most memories of feeding. His birthday cakes, his favourite potatoes, the instant Farkay brand Chinese noodles I tossed in smooth peanut butter and honey for him until his voice broke and his legs swept out from under him, the slender trunks of poplars. He was so eager, so easy to fill.

  We were never siblings who gave gifts. People mistook our silence for distance. Friends didn’t mention our absent mother—thought it taboo or rude. But I was frequently told by other people’s mothers, to compensate, You’re lucky to have such a great dad. As if one thing can replace another. Josiah and I knew better, and because we always already knew, we didn’t need to say it.