My Year of Meats

by Ruth L. Ozeki

“Yeah. He didn’t take it very well.”

  “I figured.”

  “Come on. Let’s go do this and get out of here.” I shouldered the heavy knapsack full of batteries and spare tapes. The boys were ready.

  We were surrounded by enormous trucks rattling in, backing up, raising dust. It was hard to talk over the noise of the engines and the crack of gunshots, which were not gunshots at all but whips striking hide, and the bellows of pain that followed the whipcracks, and the hooves thundering down metal off-ramps, and the clatter of cattle against the sides of the corral.

  The slaughterhouse was a long, low-lying rectangular structure made of cement and cinder block, embellished here and there with curlicues of razor wire and stuck on top with tall smokestacks, like candles, belching a rank steam into the steely gray sky. Sticking out from the side was a pipe like a sewer duct, spewing a viscous, thickened gruel of blood and offal into the tank of a waiting truck. The effluent red sea.

  The boys were all business today, silent, bent to the task. Suzuki’s sensory receptors were twitching, and though he was ten feet away and had his back to the duct at that moment, he knew that I wanted the shot and spun around and nailed it. When he lowered the camera we went inside.

  The boss was a man named Wilson, a buddy of Gale’s. He met us in the office, a wood-paneled panopticon decorated with a large poster of a young blond Amazon in jungle bikini, who overlooked the meat-cutting operations below. The only plant life in the room was a ratty aspidistra in a green wire plant stand. Wilson stood beside it, sized us up, and shook his head.

  “I don’t care who yer workin’ for, I don’t like this one bit. Never woulda agreed if it wasn’t for Gale’s daddy twistin’ my arm an’ sayin’ as it would be a favor to his wife. Said y‘all want to take some pictures to take back home with you to Japan, but I’m damned if I know why. Kill floor’s no place for sightseein’.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you now, Wilson,” I shot back. “Folks in Japan are real innerested in seeing all them new and advanced technologies for killin’ comin‘ from the United States of Ameriker....”

  Dave trundled by me with the tripod and whacked me in the shin with the pan arm.

  “Sorry,” he said, but I got the message and shut up.

  “We’ll be real quick,” he said. “Be outta here in no time.”

  Wilson still seemed reluctant, but then Gale spoke up from the back of the office, where he’d been talking on the telephone.

  “What’s the problem, Wilson? Get ’em suited up and out there. We gotta educate these city folks, show ’em how we murder our animals round here, ain’t that right, Miz Takagi? How we stick it to ’em. That’s what you want, ain’t it? That’s what you been askin’ for....”

  Wilson’s eyes narrowed, then he shrugged and walked over to a row of metal lockers. He took out four yellow hard hats, a bundle of bloodstained white lab coats, safety goggles, and four pairs of knee-high rubber galoshes.

  “Well, yer gonna need to put these on, now.... An’ I got earplugs if you want ’em.”

  He looked at Suzuki. “And you girls with long hair gotta wear a hair net too. We run a sanitary operation here.”

  Suzuki looked at the limp net cast in his direction, looked at me, then grimly started tucking his ponytail into it. Dave had been to a slaughterhouse before and had told Oh to bring the rain cover for the camera and garbage bags for other pieces of equipment that shouldn’t get wet. We were ready. Wilson made a phone call, summoning a young employee named Joey, who was still talking on his cell phone as he walked through the door. Wilson directed him to show us around, and he stayed behind with Gale. As we walked down the staircase and away from the office, I looked back up at the wide glass observation window and saw the two of them, their heads perfectly aligned under the jungle girl’s large proffered breasts. They were watching me, and when I turned around they both burst out laughing.

  Stepping into the slaughterhouse was like walking through an invisible wall into hell. Sight, sound, smell—every sense I thought I owned, that was mine, the slaughterhouse stripped from me, overpowered and assaulted. Steam hissed, metal screeched against metal, clanging and clamoring, splitting the ear, relentless. Chains, pulleys, iron hooks, whipped around us with unbelievable speed, and as far as the eye could see, conveyors snaked into the distance, heaped with skinned heads and steaming hearts. Overhead a continuous rail system laced the ceiling, from which swung mammoth sides of beef, dripping, and heavy with speed as they rattled toward us.

  Blood was everywhere: bright red, brick red, shades of brown and black; flowing, splattering, encrusting the walls, the men. The floors were graded toward central drains for easy cleaning, yet the place was caked with a deep, rotting filth. And thick with flies.

  As we walked through the processing area, we passed cows being sorted by parts—brains, tongues, livers, intestines, kidneys—all scooped or severed, then tossed into separate steel carts. I looked into a cart filled with hundreds of large livers, spotted with blood and oozing a viscous yellow liquid. Dave tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the secretions.

  “Hormones!” he hollered over the din.

  I grabbed Suzuki and trained the sun gun on the glistening, seeping meat.

  It was very, very cold. An acrid, humid stench sucked us forward toward the heart of the place, located behind steel vault doors, which opened slowly and let us onto the kill floor, a huge atrium that was known as the “hot floor,” Joey informed me, screaming into my ear, “because blood is hot when it pours from a living body!”

  Suzuki had been shooting all along, but when we walked through the steel doors, his focus became even keener. He had the camera on his shoulder, pressed against the side of his head for stability, but the hard hat and the safety goggles kept knocking against it, getting in his way, so he whipped them off and tossed them to Dave. Joey started to object, but I tugged on his sleeve and gave him a supplicating smile. “Pleeeeese?” I mimed, pressing my palms together, and he shrugged and grinned and turned his back on us.

  There was no place to stand, so we kept moving, and it was like some sort of obscene square dance, with us doing the do-si-do around massive swinging animals that had been hoisted into the air by a hind leg, suspended between the incremental stages of life and death and final dismemberment. Trying not to get clobbered, we sashayed in and out between the bodies along a slippery grate, beneath which the blood flowed like a dark red river. The workers stood on raised platforms, all in identical blood-drenched coats, yellow hard hats, goggles that obscured their faces, and earplugs that shut out sound. They used power tools to perform various operations on the hanging carcasses—lopping off hooves, decapitating, eviscerating—and the whine of the saw severed the air, its blade slicing bone, searing bone, scorching hide and hair. Skinning a giant carcass is like peeling the pajamas off a dozing twelve-foot child. Evisceration is done with a quick slice up the belly, releasing the entrails, which pour out in a cloud of steam.

  We found the knocking pen. Suzuki and I climbed up next to the operator. Down below, a cow was herded into the pen by a worker wielding an electric prod. The cow balked, minced, then slammed her bulk against the sides of the pen. She had just watched the cow before her being killed, and the cow before that, and she was terrified. Her eyes rolled back into her head and a frothy white foam poured from her mouth as the steel door slammed down on her hindquarters, forcing her all the way in. The worker next to us leaned over and, using a compression stunner, fired a five-inch retractable bolt into her brain. He pressed a button and the metal side of the pen rose up, to reveal the stunned cow, collapsed and twitching on the floor. But the stun was incomplete. He shrugged. He climbed down and wrapped a chain around her hind leg. It was attached to a winch that hoisted her up into the air, where she hung upside down, slowly spinning, head straining, legs kicking wildly in their search for solid ground. The worker approached and took a knife from his belt.

  Suzuki had climbed down. With the camera braced on h
is thigh, he crouched in front of the dangling cow, getting a low-angle shot and waiting for the kill. The worker motioned for him to step back. Suzuki nodded but didn’t move. The cow was breathing hard, raspy breaths through the foam and the spittle, and from time to time she let out a strangled cry. Oh stood just behind Suzuki, trembling and bloodless, holding the boom. His headphones looked like goofy plastic ears, feeding the amplified cries of the animal directly into his brain. His face was all screwed up, leaking tears, like a little kid trying hard not to cry out loud. I climbed down next to him and tapped his arm, pointing to the exit and to the camera mike, which we could use if he wanted to leave, but he shook his head. He would stay.

  The worker put his hand on the cow’s arched neck to steady her, and I stood behind Oh and turned on the sun gun and aimed the beam at her pulsing throat. The worker was talking to her all the while, saying, “There now, girl, calm down, it’s gonna be all over soon,” and then he did the most amazing thing. He bent down and looked straight into her bugging eye and stroked.her forelock, and it seemed to calm her. And when he straightened up again, he used the upward movement of his body to sink the knife deep into her throat, slicing crosswise, then plunging it straight into her heart. This is why it is important that the cow be stunned but not dead when her throat is cut—the blood gushes out in rhythmic spurts, expelled by the still-pumping heart muscle.

  Suzuki had no idea. He did not anticipate the force of this expulsion or the distance the blood would travel, so when the bright-red torrent spewed toward him, he leapt back to protect the camera, knocking into Oh, who knocked into me and sent me sprawling into the path of a thousand pounds of oncoming carcass. I must have caught the meat just as it swung around a corner at the peak of its centrifugal arc. It slammed me, lifting me right off my feet, and that’s as much as I remember, because on the way back down I hit the base of my skull against the edge of the knocking pen, which, appropriately, knocked me right out.

  11.

  The Frost Month

  SHŌNAGON

  When a Woman Lives Alone

  When a woman lives alone, her house should be extremely dilapidated, the mud wall should be falling to pieces, and if there is a pond, it should be overgrown with water-plants. It is not essential that the garden be covered with sage-brush; but weeds should be growing through the sand in patches, for this gives the place a poignantly desolate look.

  I greatly dislike a woman’s house when it is clear that she has scurried about with a knowing look on her face, arranging everything just as it should be, and when the gate is kept tightly shut.

  AKIKO

  When she woke, she was lying in a hospital bed with a needle in her arm and a plastic label attached to her wrist. She lay there for a long time. There were beds on either side of her, and she could hear subdued movement and voices, but a curtain had been drawn around her bed. She coughed a little, then hummed to see if her voice was working, but she didn’t dare speak out loud. Someone would come, she was sure of it. Eventually, if she waited, someone would come and tell her what was wrong with her. Because something must be terribly wrong for one to be in a hospital all of a sudden and not even remember how one got here.

  It was bright inside the curtains, and the light hurt her eyes. It was fluorescent, not real light from the sun, nor was it fresh air that made the curtains shimmy and sway, but rather a backdraft from urgent bodies moving quickly back and forth outside. This light and movement made Akiko nervous, and so did the sounds around her, especially the torque and squeak of rubber soles on hard acrylic tile. She closed her eyes. It was good to shutter it out, stay dark and still behind her eyelids. The darkness she made helped to muffle the noises in the room, and now maybe she could think. So she tried to remember how she’d gotten here, what had happened, but the only thing that came to mind (and she could see it projected like a burst of light against the velvety dark backdrop of her lids) was a crying eye, with tears of blood seeping from its center.

  “Still asleep, are we?”

  Akiko’s eyes popped open in surprise at the exact moment the nurse wrenched back the curtain.

  “Did you have a nice nap, then?”

  How to answer? Was it just that she’d been napping? She had been especially tired recently, but she’d never heard of being brought to the hospital in order to take a nap.

  “Have I been napping?”

  “You’ve been in and out for about eighteen hours now. ‘Sleeping it off’ is what we call it. You got here yesterday afternoon, and now it’s this morning.”

  The nurse was changing the bottle attached to the opposite end of the tube that terminated in Akiko’s arm.

  “What happened to me?”

  “Well ... I should wait until Doctor gets here to tell you, but ...”

  She stopped and looked around, then leaned over and lowered her voice.

  “You lost some blood, but don’t worry. You’re okay.”

  “Blood?”

  “At first Doctor thought you were having a miscarriage, but then he realized it was coming from your bum.” The nurse stuck a thermometer under Akiko’s tongue and wrapped a blood pressure sleeve around her thin upper arm.

  “Your husband found you unconscious on the bathroom floor. He was quite shaken. He must be a very kind husband indeed, to become so upset.”

  The nurse pumped up the sleeve and placed the cool disk of a stethoscope on the inside of Akiko’s wrist.

  “Is he ... ?” Akiko’s words were distorted by the slender glass tube in her mouth, and her voice shook.

  The nurse looked up from her watch, frowned, and readjusted the thermometer.

  “Don’t talk. He left yesterday afternoon. But only when it was clear you weren’t in any danger.” She listened carefully to Akiko’s pulse. She looked into Akiko’s face. “He must be a very kind husband ... mustn’t he?”

  The thermometer was in Akiko’s mouth, so she didn’t really have to answer. The pressure from the inflated sleeve squeezed her arm, tightening, stopping all the blood. She closed her eyes.

  “Maybe not, then,” said the nurse. “Maybe not so kind at all.” With a hiss, she released the pressure. The sleeve deflated and the blood began to circulate again, making Akiko’s arm tingle. The nurse tore off the Velcro and rolled up the sleeve, then plucked the thermometer out of her mouth and squinted at it. She made some entries on the chart, then peered over the edge of it. “He left you a note. I’ve got it here somewhere....”

  She put down the chart and fished around in her pocket for a bit, then pulled out a folded piece of paper. “Don’t you want it?”

  One arm had the needle in it. The other was still tingling and refused to move at all.

  “Well, I’ll just leave it here for you, then. You can read it when you feel up to it.”

  The nurse put the note on the bedside table, then placed her hand on Akiko’s side. She pressed. “Does that hurt?” she asked. Akiko winced. “Mmm. Doctor said he suspected a fracture. He’ll probably want an X-ray.... What happened to you, anyway? How’d you do this?”

  She was nosy, Akiko thought. The nurse was about her own age, short and a bit stocky. Her uniform trousers were stretched tight around the tops of her thighs. She had a round, pleasant face, and her badge said her name was Tomoko, written with the Chinese characters for “friend.” It would be so easy just to say, “My husband kicked me,” thought Akiko. Or “My husband punched me in the face,” or “My husband ...,” but somehow she couldn’t make the words come. She just looked at Nurse Tomoko and shook her head helplessly from side to side. It wasn’t so easy to say at all.

  Nurse Tomoko shrugged and patted her arm, then peered at Akiko’s face, where the lip was healing but was still a bit swollen. She touched it, ran her finger gently over the bump, and shook her head. “Must have hurt, huh?” she said. Then she took a step back. Her quick nurse’s eyes skimmed over the surfaces of things—the nightstand beside the bed, the sheet covering the bed, covering Akiko—checking to make sure
she hadn’t left anything lying about.

  “Well, I’ll be back later to check on you, and Doctor will stop by too. Is there anyone ... I could call someone for you....”

  “No, thank you,” Akiko said. “No one.”

  Nurse Tomoko gave another quick shrug and a smile. “Well, I’ll be back. You can think about if there’s anything you want.” Then she left, snapping the curtain shut behind her.

  The note read:My dearest wife: I hope you are feeling better by the time you read this. What a shock it was to find you unconscious and bleeding on the bathroom floor. My first terrible fear was that you’d had a miscarriage. That you had somehow become pregnant and hadn’t told me. But then the doctor told me it was not a miscarriage, and I was so relieved. But how heartless this sounds. Of course I was not relieved. I have caused you so much pain and I am sorry. I humbly beg your pardon and I hope you will forgive me and we can work things out between us.

  The doctor said you would be fine, so I have gone to Colorado for my business trip. I had no other choice. I wish I could be there beside you, but I will telephone my mother and ask her to Look in on you and help you with whatever you need. (Of course I trust you will understand that what happens between a husband and wife is private and should not be discussed, even with one’s closest relatives or in-Laws.)

  I am sitting in the waiting room, writing this. There is another young husband waiting here, anxiously pacing up and down. His wife is having a baby. My heart is heavy with grief and envy. Please forgive me, dear wife. Promise me that the next time, that other anxious young husband will be me. That is my fervent wish. There is nothing else I can say.

  Your husband, J. Ueno

  Nurse Tomoko found the note crumpled in the wastebasket under the bed. She looked up at the sleeping woman and smiled with grim satisfaction. She knew what the letter said. She had carried it around in her pocket, after all, and had read it earlier that day. Quietly and efficiently she replaced the IV bag on the hanging end of the unit; she must have brushed ever so lightly against Akiko’s arm, but it was enough to make Akiko gasp in her sleep, roll her head to one side, and utter a groan that wrung Nurse Tomoko’s heart. She studied the woman’s battered face: the lip was split and had started to heal; the fading bleed of yellow, green, and blue skin that ringed both eyes told of older battles, as did the thin white scar above her brow. Nurse Tomoko had undressed Akiko when she was admitted. She knew there were other bruises, had stood next to the doctor as he examined the dull green-ocher rings forming around the points of impact on Akiko’s slight body. Akiko groaned again, as though suffering under this scrutiny. Tomoko sighed and placed her cool palm on Akiko’s brow. The weight of the hand seemed to calm her; her bruised features relaxed again as she drifted back into a deep, blank sleep.