the oysters
Pat Boone—not the Pat Boone but only a graduate student in Agricultural Science—was driving the oysters down to Mulberry to have them irradiated. He was used to being the wrong Pat Boone but was nevertheless miserable, careening down Interstate 75 in the windless predawn, gripping the wheel of the Food Science van with his troubled pink fingers. He thought he might have a fever; he kept sneezing and his freckles kept getting in his eyes like gnats, reflecting off his pale face and blinding him. He whizzed past lit signs and enticements, antic neon red coffee cups with legs flashing on and off, simulating dancing, and bold messages in balloons above them urging him to WAKE UP. He was awake but dreaming, dreaming of Maura Malone. He saw bits of her—breast, hand, thigh—but none were what he wanted, or, wanting them, he only wanted more. To be awake at this hour was to be unable to see Maura’s marriage as hypothetical.
Keep your mind on the oysters, he told himself. He had two, almost three degrees. He believed the unknown was simply a subset of the known; he expected, logically, the unexpected. The oysters were packed in dry ice in ten bushel cartons, sitting like obedient campers on the long van seats behind him, the first live food items ever to be irradiated. The preservation process was new, not yet commercialized, and on local news programs almost nightly angry college students and young mothers could be seen protesting, mildly scornful doctors and scientists rebutting. Month-old irradiated strawberries that looked and tasted fresh had just arrived on the market; grocery shoppers were videotaped sampling and appraising them. Farmers both excited and skeptical were shown standing in their groves, making thrilling and dire predictions about their industry. The oysters were the biggest story yet; as a representative of his department, Pat would be a part of history. He had twice been interviewed on the evening news, and the Tampa Tribune woman was going to meet him at the plant in Mulberry. In twenty-four hours people up and down the Florida coast would begin commenting to one another over their English muffins about his funny name.
But Maura, Maura slept beside her husband even now: her large tropical husband with his flourishing mustache, not the kind you hid behind but the kind you cultivated with cheerful, automatic faith, the way you would plant a vegetable garden or have children. Pat had met the man at bars and buffet tables many times and found him unbearable. “I’m Trinidadian,” he’d told Pat once, “and we sing when we talk.” The Trinidadian’s smile was so open and precious that it made a small sound, breaking out upon his large, honest face. Pat shook the sound out of his head and drove sneezing and invisible down the dark and empty highway.
In a recent Food Science Newsletter feature story Maura had claimed to have known within twenty minutes of meeting the Trinidadian that he was “the one.” The photo showed her standing glamorously beside the Gammacell 220 as though it were a sewing machine she was about to demonstrate. She wore her white coat and held a pint of strawberries she was preparing to feed into the irradiator, the hard fluorescent lab lights making her sleek, tightly bound-up hair appear glossy and beautiful. “Professor Malone operates our own modest machine,” the caption read.
Pat clenched the vibrating steering wheel with both hands as though it alone could save him. He had known within twenty minutes of entering Maura’s classroom that she was the one. In a year he had thought this a thousand times, and had even known enough not to say it aloud, known that not saying it was the way to sustain it. But surely the eerie, thrilling consummation of his feelings, her finally humming in the familiar hiss of his shower or standing at his range scrambling eggs as casually as a ghost—surely these things were proof of their love’s inevitability. He had known it. Her words in the interview caused him a shocking, embarrassing kind of pain, as though someone had without warning ripped a Band-Aid off his heart. He could not bear to think of the Trinidadian sashaying around so happily unconscious, the way he himself must have looked before he met her. He could not even remember what he’d spent time thinking about before he met her. His own mind, his own heart, before Maura, were lost to him.
He tried as a game to imagine the oysters as cheerful children in his charge, giddy prodigies eager to take part in such a significant experiment, but this was just fantasy and he couldn’t sustain it. Instead he recalled something he hadn’t thought about in years, a childhood vacation on Sanibel Island which he and his brothers had spent feverishly collecting the best whelks and scallops and periwinkles, the rare ones with the live creatures still in them. They took dozens back to their room at the Jolly Roger each afternoon to be boiled on the hot plate, never tiring of watching the mysterious blobs spreading out over the bottom of the pot, the strange sightless animals surrendering in their rubbery, milky puddles. The sexy, velvety smell of the mineral oil they’d used to polish the empty shells came back to him, carrying with it a surge of the old wonder, the nameless thrill of boiling the sea creatures.
But the oysters behind him now were cold and silent and clamped shut, hiding their secrets. His life seemed small and doomed and embarrassing, and the loop of time between his days at the Jolly Roger and the present seemed like someone’s, maybe Maura’s, idea of a good joke. How Maura could be responsible for the sad loop of his life he could not explain.
I am not invisible, he told himself, his eyes blurring. I exist. He wanted to state these things out loud to someone, someone in a position of authority, but he had only himself to address.
• • •
Ebb and flow, stir and settle, bubble and curl. This was what the oysters knew. But now they sensed a change. Something was happening. Of course, they had known everything that would ever happen to them from the moment they had come into existence, from even before they had existed, but they had certainly not bargained for this. Excitement was in the air. A new element hissed around them like a predator. Beneath them rumbled more than the usual uncomfortable earth. They stirred thickly in their shells, uncertain.
• • •
The month-old strawberries, for their part, resented that they were not considered to be “live.” They understood, in their pungent, opaque way, that life was romance. They had played an important part in more than one courtship. Around them almost always the air harbored human hopes and celebration, or at least appreciation. They knew enjoyment. They knew ceremony. If they were not “live,” what was? A machine had once been invented to measure their cries when they were bitten into. Another machine recorded and amplified the sounds of insects eating their way through the strawberries’ viscera. Men had gotten rich off these machines, but where were these men now? Strawberries everywhere felt important and, now, cheated.
• • •
Pat pulled into the plant’s back lot and rolled down a window to clear, expectant tropical air. The sky was yellowing up for morning and the swampy, froggy smell of north Florida seemed far away. He backed the van up to the loading dock, thinking of Maura’s Indian ringneck parakeet, who imitated the backing-up beep of her neighborhood’s garbage truck. The bird was retarded, Maura said; all it did was yell nonsense words and sing over and over what it had learned of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”: “I’m a doo.” Sometimes when the Trinidadian was out Maura phoned and Pat could hear the bird exclaiming in the background as though it were desperate to speak to him. Once, lying unclothed in Pat’s bed, holding him, Maura had told him she loved his apartment because it was as quiet as a graveyard. “Oh, thanks,” he said.
“No,” she said, “it’s wonderful here. You’re completely unencumbered.”
He remembered watching her get dressed that day, feeling too moody to get up himself and see her out, but the moodiness had seemed only like love, a particularly strong swoon. She kissed him, already wearing her dark sunglasses, and said again, “I wish I had a place like this,” and then darted out to her minivan and backed out of his driveway, using only her rearview mirror, not even turning her head. He remembered watching this from the window over his bed, not wanting to remove himself from the wanton crumble of sheets.
Kee
p your mind on the oysters! he told himself furiously.
He unloaded all ten cartons by himself, as no one appeared to greet him. Each weighed fifty pounds, and when he was finished his heart pounded with resentful diligence. If Betsy Murphy had come along, she could have helped. She was a girl in Human Nutrition whose short, strong body he’d often appraised, but he could never quite find time for her. Always Maura was there, surprising him, phoning at odd hours, blocking out more solid individuals. He stood by the locked warehouse doors, puffing in what he pictured as a cloud of his own foolishness.
A bald man in a blue jumpsuit finally threw the doors open and shook Pat’s hand in both of his, apologizing steadily for being late. “You’re the guest of honor,” he told Pat. Pat began to feel better. Together they hoisted the wax-sealed bushels onto dollies and began wheeling them inside. “You must be tired,” the man said.
“I’m all right,” Pat said. The plant was only weeks old and the corridor’s whitewashed cinder-block walls gleamed with promise on either side of him.
“We’ll just get these babies into the holding room, and then get some coffee,” the man said.
“Are you Dr. Roland?” Pat said, remembering his instructions.
The man laughed loudly, throwing back his head. “Oh, no, no,” he said. “I’m no one.”
• • •
The oysters furrowed and trembled, wondering. They felt themselves being moved closer to the source, but the source seemed unusual, unfamiliar. This was not the source they remembered. It was not in the oysters’ nature to be suspicious, but their milky flesh curled a little. They waited, curling and subsiding. Waiting was the same as existing, for them.
• • •
The man who had invented the machine that measured the screams of fruits and vegetables was tired of waiting. He was tired of getting up every day and drinking coffee out of the same cup and waiting for purpose to come back into his life. No one had cared about his machine for years. No one cared if a tree cried when you cut it. This was the kind of thing people had cared about in the seventies. In the seventies, the man had lived in a wood-frame house that sat jauntily on stilts at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico like some happy mantis sunning itself on the beach. His smart young wife had cooked him simple, whimsical food, grits with wacky garnishes, while he worked on his important machines. His baby daughter Deenie crawled around as if motorized, her strange cries filling the airy rooms with promise and egging him on to new inventions, finer tunings. Clouds flew by overhead, hurrying to their satisfying consummations.
When had it all evaporated? It was impossible to trace. The house had long ago blown down in a brief, peevish storm too small to have been given a name. He lived now in a mildewy walk-up with his daughter, who was now a fat nurse, while his wife studied the classics in some stifling, snowbound state up north. Deenie, who could not seem to get a promotion or a boyfriend, came home from the hospital late each night and sat through one silent, reproachful beer with her father before going to bed. He stayed up later, letting the TV’s false light harass his eyes, wondering what was now expected of him. Was he just supposed to sit here, waiting for people to care again, or was his purpose something else? The days rolled by, paying him no attention.
• • •
The man who had invented the machine that recorded and amplified the sounds of insects eating the insides of fruits and vegetables rode his stationary bicycle and whistled a happy tune. Agricultural and Food Science departments at universities all over the country were clamoring for his machine, and large corporations had fought one another for purchasing rights to the patent. They had paid for his stationary bike, his limestone patio, his wife’s pony, his son’s all-terrain vehicle, and some necessary roof repairs on the house. He puffed confidently away on his bicycle, watching through clean glass doors the steam rising off his lawn. Because of his invention, the sky would not fall on him or his family. He rarely thought of his old graduate school colleague, the man who had invented the machine that measured the screams of fruits and vegetables. That story was too sad. His own story had also been one of grief and long struggle, actually, but now that he was a success no one wanted to hear it. He was expected to shut up and be grateful, and that was what he did.
• • •
Dr. Roland was demonstrating for Pat the plywood turntable on which the oysters would ride during their irradiation. He caressed the plywood with absent, tobacco-stained fingers, gazing up at Pat with a salesman’s pride and determination. “You’ll want to keep an eye on those lids,” he told Pat, “but otherwise feel free to circulate during the dosing.”
The wax lids on the cartons would gradually yellow as they absorbed the radiation, but there would be no other visible change. A makeshift-looking motor was rigged up under the plywood to spin it, like some child’s science project. The oysters, though an important part of history, did not, Pat had learned, merit treatment by the plant’s showy and immense automated system. This little approximation, which might as well be a homemade microwave, was going to do the job. Pat tried not to show his disappointment. Other than its large capacity, it was no more impressive than the Gammacell back in Gainesville. What did they think he was, a Boy Scout? He scribbled figures on his pad, the minutes it would take to dose a carton with x kilograys, the total minutes he would have to keep watch. Dr. Roland stood by with neutral respect, keeping a hand on his machine. “This is quite a load of shells to haul,” he said to Pat. “You order them special?”
“Nope,” Pat said. “Just garden-variety Apalachicola oysters.”
“Oh yes, and your reporter is here,” Dr. Roland said. “She’s out in the reception area whenever you’re ready.”
Maura was waking up now beside the Trinidadian; perhaps he sang when he awoke. A weak, sick terror took hold of Pat: what if Maura planned to visit some other student today, someone she had managed to keep secret this whole time? Then he thought of her running her hand through his own thin hair so kindly, so easily—it was impossible. It was impossible that she not love him. “Your body is perfect,” she had told him. “Your body has nothing to do with reality.”
“If you’re wondering about safety,” Dr. Roland was saying, “as well you might, let me assure you there is no cause for concern. As you’ll see when you take the complete tour, there’s a significantly thick concrete wall between us and the source. I just thought we’d best get started right away with these little devils in case there’s a hitch. Plenty of time later to go exploring.”
“Right,” Pat said. He blinked and stamped his feet. “Let’s go. Let’s load them on.”
Silent men in jumpsuits moved at Dr. Roland’s command to lift the oysters onto the machine. There was nothing left for Pat to do but watch.
• • •
The insects who ate their way through fruits and vegetables did not waste time worrying about what would become of them. They knew they were romanticized by no one, and they lived accordingly, hurling themselves with abandon at mouths and ears, TV screens and lightbulbs, suns and caves. If they died, they died. On the wheel of samsara, they had no place to go but up. Life for them held no shame, mystery, or promise, and they did not care who spied on them or recorded them going about the business of it.
• • •
Whatever it was, it was beginning to happen. The sun itself seemed to be rotating. Each oyster sat deep in its own mystery, waiting for the shock. The shock was moments away, already sending waves back in time at them, though the waves were impossible to interpret. The air around the oysters was like music. Ordered currents began to flow. The new earth beneath them began to turn. And then the light cracked into them, and the question mark that was the world snapped itself out straight, dividing them from mystery forever.
• • •
“Back in Gainesville,” Pat told the reporter, “I’d have to orient each oyster individually. Here we have the advantage of dosing whole bushels at a time. We can study both shelf-life and microbiology in one experi
ment.”
The reporter peered at him through grass-green contact lenses, her breath smelling strongly of buttered toast. “How will you be able to tell if the oysters are dead?” she asked.
“We know they won’t be dead,” he said impatiently.
“But just hypothetically,” she said, grinning.
He didn’t see the joke, but he explained to her that any looseness in the shell was an indicator. There could be no slippage between the halves, none.
“Wow,” she said.
He glanced over her shoulder at a carpeted vestibule in which was set up a courtesy telephone for guests of the plant. The phone had drawn his eyes throughout the interview, like a bomb or an unlocked safe. It shone blackly on a small table on which also sat a plate of crullers.
“What’s next?” the reporter said.
“I beg your pardon?” Pat said.
“What other foods will you be working on?”
“Oh, dead chickens,” Pat said, sighing.
“I can see I’m wearing you out,” the reporter said, finally. She went away looking a little annoyed, her eyes somewhat dimmed.
When she was gone, Pat went and sat by the phone. He removed the pocket dosimeter from his beltloop and set it on the table beside the crullers. It was a small instrument that resembled a Sharpie pen, only with a lens at one end. Zero, it had read when he commenced the tour of the plant, and zero it read now. He had absorbed no radiation. He had penetrated wall after wall within the warehouse-sized building, moving ever closer to the source. At every new level, Dr. Roland had pointed out more buttons, more controls, more men. There were earthquake buttons and flood buttons, hurricane buttons and buttons to press if someone fell asleep. There were men whose job it was to watch buttons, and men who watched only other men. The whole thing reminded Pat of some giant child’s ant-farm. He had gone as close as one could go to the great source, and his dosimeter still registered zero.
Large Animals in Everyday Life Page 4