Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  That’s when the whole dumpster began to rumble. Matty’s whimper segued straightaway into a yelp. What the fuck? Only when the bags at the front started tumbling toward him did he realize what was happening: The space age–looking dumpster was a trash compactor, and that click-and-hum had been the compactor firing up. “Oh shit,” he said, two octaves above his normal voice, and grabbing a backpack strap he made a loose and gawky scramble toward the open end of the compactor, where a giant gray hydraulic ram had begun chugging toward him. Because of the positioning of the hopper doors, however, the only way out led over the ram itself. He hopped onto the pile of bags, thinking he might attempt a hail-mary leap, but the weight of the backpack pulled him backwards and screwed up his footing on the rolling heap. He got his hands on the ram, but that was all, and slipped face-first into the slowly cascading bags, flailing and flopping. When he got to his feet again, roughly a yard of light and air remained between the ram and the sealed portion of the compactor. He girded himself for another, even hail-mary-er leap, thinking he might just be able to scale the top of the ram before it shut him in completely, but the pause he took to compute his odds—if he got caught between the top of the ram and edge of the enclosure, he’d be cut in half in slow motion, or else extruded into the chute like a sheet of pasta—was too long. Already the trash bags were churning into his ankles as the ram plowed them forward with its nested steel blocks unfurling; he watched the last line of light disappear above him, and then: a fetid darkness, a low and unstoppable rumble, Matty feeling his way down to the empty far end of the chute where he now expected he might—Jesus fuck, might die. He banged the steel sides, screaming, the tight tinny echoes melding into one single reverberating howl. He’d give his left nutsack to see Grocery Dude sneering at him now.

  The only previous time he’d faced death—certain death, anyway; he’d had an inkling of mortal danger when he found that turd on his chest—was at fourteen, when he and his mom watched a jackknifing tractor-trailer jump the divider on 287, hurtling into the opposite lane, right at them. But that sight had triggered a spooky calm—an out-of-body-type thing, as if he were in a video game and was about to forfeit a shitload of points, but nothing more serious. Only after his mother had accomplished a startling feat of Formula One–level driving, veering rightward onto the shoulder (one-handed, with her right arm fixed across Matty’s chest) so that the tractor-trailer went barreling past her window, belting their car with huge, violent gobs of mud and grass, and they’d come to a stunned speechless stop—only then did Matty, blinking wildly, realize what had just happened, how close he’d just come to being a chunky red smear on an airbag. It had all happened too fast; there hadn’t been time for awareness. This, however, was different: This was like sitting cross-legged on the highway while the tractor-trailer was bearing down on you at, say, ten mph, slowly enough for you to study the tire treads and to visualize their imminent effect on your face. This involved dread, reflection, calculations, the anticipation of a downtempo squishing. Given the choice, he would’ve much preferred the insta-smack of a jackknifing truck.

  Yet from somewhere in his polluted subconscious came Daniel Boone, decked in a fringed coat and coonskin cap, calling for hereditary calm. Or at least that’s how he’d later interpret it. How else to explain his sudden spurt of reasoning? If there was any chance of survival, he knew, he’d need to put something between himself and the rear wall, so, in frantic wailing blindness, he snatched as many bags as he could snatch and piled them behind him. Because he could only hear the ram, and not see it, he had no hint of how much time he might have left; when he thought he’d made a semi-sufficient cushion, he nestled himself sideways into the bags, with his back to the rear wall, holding his backpack close against his chest, and waited. The wait turned out to be excruciatingly long, though not long enough for him to decree any pledges or prayers, or to inventory his regrets, or to fathom the absurdity of his imminent smooshing, or to hatch even a single cogent thought. What sped through his mind, instead, was something like a TV news-crawl as hacked by an eighth-grader: a streaming sequence of profanities, fuck shit piss fuck damn, that went on and on until he felt the soft pressure of the ram pushing a buffer wall of bags into him, then a single bag rolling onto his head as another one flattened itself on his face, then an intensified pressure as the air in the bags swelled and then with deafening gassy bangs the bags blew, in quick succession like microwave popcorn, and he could feel the backpack growing harder and tighter against his ribcage and the sharp corner of something in a bag behind him being drilled into his ass cheek. Another bag popped, spurting some kind of gelatinous semi-liquid onto his face. He needed air, but his nostrils were goo-clogged. He sensed pressure on every inch of his body, especially his shoulders, and when the pressure turned to pain his mouth flopped open; an instinctual inhale brought a film of polypropylene into his mouth, and his lungs began thrashing.

  And then the ram stopped. He heard another click, and the polypropylene sagged from his mouth as the ram commenced a backwards slog. From deep in his throbbing windpipe came a yawp of joy and relief, sounding like ferfffff, until he realized he couldn’t move. Once again he feared paralysis, but no, he was merely squashed—the nougat center of a big squarish block of compressed garbage. He wriggled his legs, rocking the bags off one another, and then, with more effort, his arms, until the block crumbled into hunks of plastic so deflated they looked vacuum-sealed.

  Matty rolled down to the steel floor just as light came flooding into the compactor from the ram’s withdrawal and sat there, gasping, wiping the unidentifiable gloop off his face with his coatsleeve, as the hydraulic motor spun down and the compactor clicked off. His ears were ringing so profoundly, and the silence seemed so dulled, that he thought he might be deaf; he dispelled this newest fear by inserting an investigative finger into his ear, finding it caulked by that same fucking gloop. He spat. Still stripped of thoughts, a reasonless zombie operating on purely sensory consciousness, he stood up, fetched his backpack from the floor, fastened it onto his back, and climbed out of the compactor and onto the loading dock. As he descended the stairs, he heard the door sweeping open behind him, but he neither looked back or hurried his pace. “Hey!” shouted a voice whose ownership Matty didn’t even try to determine: Grocery Dude, God, it didn’t matter. He flung the loading door up, drowning the voice’s second, harsher hey! with a thick steel clatter. “Come back here!” demanded the voice, but Matty was already on 13th Street, headed east on a sidewalk that felt ten feet below him, only barely aware of the passersby halting to stare at him openmouthed.

  “Holy shit,” said Talmadge, when Matty appeared in the doorway, rising so abruptly that his chair tumped backwards. From the recliner, where she was tuning her banjo, Micah glanced up and frowned. They had that lazy spent look on their faces, Matty noted, like they’d just finished one of the marathon fucking sessions they’d been having way too frequently and loudly for Matty’s comfort. “What happened?”

  Expressionlessly, and without a word, Matty unfastened the backpack and swung it down to the floor. “Dinner,” he said, nodding flatly toward the backpack.

  When it was clear Matty wasn’t going to say or do anything further, Talmadge knelt down and unzipped the bag. He blew a low whistle through his teeth, then looked up at Matty with a mixture of bewilderment and apprehension. Matty’s long woolly beard was encrusted with something greenish yellow, as if he’d been drooling wasabi mustard, though streaks of the same crud daubed his forehead and cap. His coat was splotched with some other, thicker, paler species of glop, yogurt maybe, while his boots gave the impression he’d waded home through an eight-inch flood of butternut squash soup. Several strands of spaghetti clung to his left shoulder, like a lowgrade epaulette. He stank, too—that dumpster-juice smell.

  “What is it?” Micah said, her attention still half trained on the banjo neck. She plucked a middle string, warped the note with a tuning peg, plucked it again.

  Talmadge fished the
uppermost package out of the backpack and held it up to the candlelight: strip steaks.

  “Awww, Matty,” Micah said. “You know we don’t eat meat.”

  Matty clamped his lips together and sighed through his nose, listening to Micah strum a punctuative banjo lick that sounded like a runty backwoods giggle: ding dang ba dada ding dang: like a musical putdown, to Matty’s stuccoed ears. To quell the eruption he felt rising in his throat, some dangerously seething amalgam of physical and emotional bile bubbling just below his tonsils, he reached into the chest pocket of his coat for a cigarette. Realizing the condition of his gloves, however, he replaced the pack into the pocket, sighed again, slipped off his gloves, then repeated the fetching barehanded. A quizzical hush filled the room until Talmadge rose with a lighter and Matty sucked two monumental drags from the cigarette.

  “If you fucking knew,” he began, “what I just went through to get this shit . . .”

  “It’s organic,” Talmadge noted.

  Matty blinked down at Talmadge. They’d never once fought or even quarreled, not even after the night Matty swiped the keys to Tal’s Land Cruiser and got it stuck up to the fenders in some remote Sardis Lake mudflat, but Matty was feeling the sudden sour urge to boot his old friend in the stomach. He resisted the urge. “If you,” he began again, “fucking knew—”

  “Have at it,” said Micah, with the precise tone and meter commonly applied to the word whatever. She strummed the banjo, scowled, fiddled with another tuning peg while Matty aimed a long jet of smoke at her. Now he wanted to kick the banjo.

  Talmadge asked, “What happened?”

  “What happened?” Matty said, his gaze still locked upon Micah. “What happened is that I got crushed in a—in a motherfucking compactor. What happened is that I almost died getting this meat. What happened is that—is that I don’t understand the whole reason why you guys can’t get your fucking groceries through the front door.”

  Micah shot him a fast black glare, underscored by that dimple creasing beneath her left eye, then dipped her head back down to pick a short, forlorn-sounding arpeggio on the banjo.

  “Where?” said Talmadge.

  “Union Square, that big—I dunno.” Matty’s stare was drawn back down to Talmadge, who appeared to be suppressing something. His face was all quivery. “What?”

  “Dude.” Talmadge snorted, covering his mouth with a hand; his eyes were squeezed from what looked to be stifled laughter. “You look like a pterodactyl took a shit on you.”

  “That’s funny. That’s real fucking funny.”

  “Sorry, man.” Trying to swallow his laughter, Talmadge emitted something like a baby’s burp. “It’s just—you stink.”

  Ignoring him, Matty said to Micah: “So you’re not gonna eat any of this?”

  Ding bada dingdang dingdang. “Me?” she said. “No, man. I’m a vegan. That means steak is way off the menu.”

  “I know what vegan means.” Matty drew such a glowering drag from his cigarette that his whole face puckered. “But I thought this whole thing was about, like, waste. This shit was in the trash. It was gonna rot, and turn into worms or someshit.”

  “So fry you up a steak, man.” She was watching her fingers spider banjo strings. “It’s not like we’re stopping you.”

  “What about the rest of it?”

  Micah shrugged.

  “What the fuck’m I supposed to do with the rest of it? There’s, like, veal chops in there.”

  Talmadge dug the veal chops out of the meat piles he’d organized on the floor. He tried lifting them for display, but Matty batted them down. “Cut that shit out,” Matty hissed.

  Plainly annoyed, Micah propped the banjo against the side of the recliner and leaned forward, her eyes meeting Matty’s for the first time since he’d staggered in. “Why’d you take so much?” she asked.

  He grunted. “Whaddaya mean, ‘so much’?”

  “So much meat. We couldn’t eat all that even if Tal and I ate meat.”

  “’Cause this shit’s good! Check out those porterhouses! They’re big as a—I dunno what. They’re huge.”

  “Bigger’n a Texan’s ego,” said Talmadge, courtesy of Uncle Lenord.

  Micah pursed her lips and looked away, signaling to Matty just how unsatisfactory his answer was. Why had he taken so much? Because he could, that’s why. Because twenty-five pounds of it had been lying in the bed of the compactor, and, Jesus—he’d thought that was the whole point, “reclaiming excess” or whatever Micah’d preached. Because, look: Here was a cow. The cow had been killed—with that rad tool the serial killer used in the movie No Country for Old Men—then chopped up into pieces. Some of those pieces had been sold to the kinds of New Yorkers Matty had watched exiting the store: thirtysomething dudes in chunky square glasses and peacoats, coldfaced career mommies toting it back to their Park Slope apartments. The unsold pieces, on the other hand, had been flung into a compactor where Matty Boone had almost died—almost fucking died, people—rescuing them. Micah wasn’t vegan for health reasons; she’d told him that. She was vegan because she despised the whole bloodmoney system: the cow killing, the cow parceling, the smug omnivores peeling the plastic wrap off their bloodless meat in their ethically lit kitchens before cooking up some kind of virtuous multiculti stew. Fair enough. But this meat—this was outside the system, it was extra, this was like the twenty-five percent overage that Matty had learned to tack onto floor tiling estimates the summer he worked with his uncle down in Paterson. If you really gave a shit about cows, it seemed to him, you’d eat it; to sit there picking on your banjo saying awww, no, he thought, was to, like, disrespect the stupid cow whose brain had been popped with a stainless-steel bolt. And, worse, to disrespect the crudded-up hero who’d gotten himself crushed inside a garbage square just to please you. “So an apple in the trash is, like, tragic,” he said, snorting. “But a porterhouse, that doesn’t matter.”

  He saw Talmadge wince, as he replaced the meat into the backpack.

  “Not even close, man.” Micah wagged her head. “You don’t get this at all.”

  “So fucking teach me, okay?”

  “Meat is the absence of a life.” She’d switched to that crisp lecture voice that’d lately been driving Matty insane; he sometimes felt the presence of a teleprompter behind his head. “So to consume it is to support that absence—to endorse it.”

  “Yeah, but what I’m sayin is that the absence was already—absent. So the whole fucking deal gets turned. If this shit rots, then the absence is wasted. See?”

  “I think what Matty’s saying,” Talmadge broke in, “is that once it’s been dumped, there’s, like, no ethical downside to—”

  Micah cut him off. “I know what he’s saying.”

  “All I’m saying,” said Matty, “is that I’ve been hearing you guys talking this shit for weeks, and, okay, you don’t eat meat, fine, whatever, but now you’re telling me to take however many pounds of this and dump it back into the trash, and, I dunno, it seems like someone’s principles might be seriously outta whack . . .”

  “I’m sorry, you wanna talk principles?” She was riled now, her accent gone ornery: you wan talk prince-pulls.

  “I got mashed in a fucking compactor, okay? And not for my fucking principles!”

  “Then eat it, man!” Micah was up on her feet now, taut as a slingshot. “It don’t have to be a party, okay? You wanna eat it, eat it. Jesus.”

  “Fuck it,” Matty said, “I will,” as he gathered five packages into his arms and went stomping to the kitchen where he slapped them onto the counter and with a purposeful clamor shoved aside a stack of plates crusted with the remnants of Tal and Micah’s fruit-mush breakfast and bean-mush lunch. He tore the plastic off a package of two strip steaks, sniffed them, shrugged, and then tried to figure out, vainly, how the hell to light those stupid goddamn Boy Scout stoves. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, fiddling with the cap on the methanol can while entertaining baleful mental images of his beard ablaze in the aftermath
of an explosion. As frightening as the potential pain was the potential irony: SQUATTER DIES IN COOKING EXPLOSION HOURS AFTER SURVIVING COMPACTOR CRUSHING. “Tal!” he shouted.

  Talmadge came slinking into the doorway sideways.

  “Light these fuckers for me.”

  “Don’t be pissed, dude.”

  “Light both of ’em. I want ’em hot.”

  “I got it, got it. Here. Just be cool, okay?”

  Talmadge retreated back to the doorway, as though he needed to remain within Micah’s view range, and there he lingered, half in and half out, while Matty banged two sauté pans onto the burners and unwrapped another package of meat—the veal chops. He plopped the strip steaks onto one of the pans, which wasn’t yet hot enough to produce a sizzle. The steaks just lay there, looking very very dead. Matty poked one, arousing a feeble curl of steam.

  “Might want some oil,” Talmadge offered.

  “I can handle this,” Matty replied, dropping the veal chops into the other pan with an equal lack of sizzle. For several minutes he stood there, monitoring the meat with unblinking concentration, and thereby ignoring Talmadge, until, as commonly happened when he stood still for too long, he was jogged by the desire for a joint—he had one or two pre-rolled packed with his cigarettes, and he knew the drifting odor would curl Micah’s lip that much further. Extending his arm, he gestured for Tal’s lighter by flicking his thumb against his fist; but Talmadge had vanished, which was probably for the best but made something sink inside him anyhow. Lipping the joint, Matty lowered his face to the burner and, with one hand shielding his beard, lit it with the hissy blue flame. Then, glancing around the corner to be extra sure of Tal’s absence, he grabbed the bottle of olive oil and doused both pans. The oil, however, pooled uselessly to the imbalanced sides. He poked the still dead-looking steaks again, inadvertently peppering one with fallen ash. “Shit,” he whispered, brushing it into the meat. Then he heard Micah’s banjo kicking back up. “Shit,” he whispered again. From a pocket he dug his cellphone and a set of earbuds and with a few finger flicks drowned out the ding a dangs with ASG’s “Yes We Are Aware”: a fast filthy avalanche of guitar crunch and cymbal assault, the sonic antidote to that folk-fuck banjo noise and Micah’s voice atop it, all that cooing about rivers and wildflowers and sweet Jesus and fair-n-tender ladies and better times a-comin. He tried flipping the steaks, but they were cemented to the pan; some violent scraping was required. Hankering for something even harder, he cut short ASG and switched to a song by the Scrambled Defuncts, a Moscow atmo-black metal band that Gleb had turned him onto. Yeah, this was better—like a jackhammer in each ear, engaged in a deathmatch race to crack his skull.