Cannibals in Love

by Mike Roberts

  “Gail watched him painfully, wishing he wouldn’t do this to himself. She knew he would finish the glass and go back out to work in the hot sun to be physically sick behind one of the outbuildings…” I stopped again.

  “Okay, so I’m just gonna tell you about it.”

  Danielle laughed at me. “If you want to. I mean, it’s fine, I like it. I like the writing.”

  “I’m still working on it,” I said, feeling frustrated by my unwillingness to keep reading. I was thinking about too many unrelated things. Everything I had taken out. All these invisible holes I had left there on the page.

  “This is a story about cows?” Danielle asked with a bemused look.

  “Sort of, yeah. I mean, it’s really about the farmer.”

  “August.”

  “Right. August. This is his family’s dairy farm, where he was born. Fine, fine.” I gestured with my hand. “Except that now his cows are triggering some kind of nervous collapse in him.”

  “They what?”

  “Well, see, it’s actually a kind of allegory about the Invasion of Iraq.”

  Danielle laughed when I didn’t. “Seriously?”

  “Dead seriously.”

  “Okay. Tell it to me, then.”

  “All right, let me think…” I hemmed. “No, just let me read about the farm first.” I flipped ahead two pages and kept reading.

  “A dairy farm is run on a religion of routine. Deviation is damnation, and every day begins at four a.m. when Buck Karen—the only employee of the Amelia Dairy—begins milking the herd. At five, August joins him in the milking parlor to help move the cows. He feeds the young calves and dry cows from the round bales of hay. Manure is scraped, and the parlor floors are hosed. By ten o’clock August’s neighbor Elvin Hale arrives to fill the Amelia’s silos with feed, always removing the glove from his right hand before waving across to the two dairymen. At eleven a.m., Buck feeds forage to the milking herd, and pulls away in a cloud of dust in his rust-colored pickup. August puts the herd out to pasture, and the afternoon is spent repairing fences and maintaining equipment. Buck is back by three to start the—”

  “How do you know all of this?” Danielle stopped me, grinning widely.

  “I dunno. A guy just picks things up.”

  “You liar,” she said, giving me a teasing shove.

  “Okay, I did a little research.”

  “How much?”

  “Off and on, I’d say, four years.”

  “Four years!” Danielle said. “You’ve been learning about dairy cows for four years? To write a short story?”

  “Off and on,” I said, trying to sound defensive. But I was smiling with her, too. “I was in a weird place then, okay? It seemed important.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Tell me about the cows, then.”

  “See, that’s the thing. There had to be the cows because all I had when I started was the ending.”

  “You started the story so that you could write the ending about the cows?”

  “Right.”

  “So read me the ending.”

  “No. I can’t read you the ending. The ending is terrible. It makes no sense.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the ending is the part of the story that’s true. That part all really happened. I read about it in the newspaper. It was horrible and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That’s what started this whole thing.”

  “The cows.”

  “Right.”

  Danielle was intrigued. “So tell me what happens!”

  “Ahhh, all right…” I agreed. “See, the milk starts to make August Caffrey extremely ill—”

  “Lactose intolerance?”

  “No, no. Worse. Way worse. Some sort of nervous condition that I invented for him. It’s all very psychosomatic and paranoid, but also totally debilitating. It’s all very real for August, and it’s all inside his head, too, which is why he can’t stop it. And it keeps getting worse. So August starts to blame the cows. He develops these crippling sensitivities to light and temperature and smell, and he has to stay in his bed with the curtains closed tight…”

  “This all really happened?” she asked eagerly.

  “No, no, none of this happened,” I said. “I made all of this up. This is just the story. Only the part with the cows at the end really happened.”

  “Okay.”

  “Right … so there’s this storm—a big old midwestern tempest, right? And Gail, the wife, and Buck, the other dairyman, have been trying everything they can to hold it together—to keep the herd milked; to save the farm—while August has been shut up in his bed having these terrible fever dreams about his dead father, and about his son…”

  “Kurt.”

  “Right. His corn-fed, hay-haired boy Kurt,” I offered wryly. “And, anyway, this storm comes, and there’s no one there to bring the cows back in. So they’re all just freaking out, stranded in the pasture. And the only thing they know to do is to crowd themselves under this giant elm tree for protection…”

  “The American Elm.”

  “Right, the American Elm, exactly. Except I keep changing the way that I’m describing this giant family tree, throughout the story: the Grandfather Elm; the Ghost Elm; the Fortune Elm; the Sorrow Elm…” I stopped, unsure. “Because the elm tree has become like a character in the story.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” she said, as though this were obvious.

  “Right, right.” I smiled, feeling both annoyed and impressed by her attentiveness. “Because really the American Elm is the farm, you know? It’s been there longer than the farm. Longer than the town or the state or even the country.” I stopped and suddenly picked up the story again, reading from the ending.

  “Out in the field the cows felt the weather in their arthritic joints and dropped to their knees, long before the storm was present in the sky. Through a hot sleep, August heard Gail’s wind chimes calling in the clouds like church bells. The sky went ink-black and started to drip. When it all finally cracked open it was enough to stir August bolt upright in his casket-bed. He could hear the pellet-rain pinging off the windows in staccato. And he could hear the banshee lowing of his cattle, willing their heavy bodies upright with no small difficulty.

  “August swung his feet out onto the floor, in a cold sweat, unsure whether it was night or day in his blacked-out bedroom. He knew he had to bring them in, though he could hardly make his body begin. It raced with everything that he must do. He fought through the fug of bed rest, knowing exactly where they were now, pushing together in a craven huddle under the massive Deliverance Elm. Shoulder to flank, with mooing impatience. They forced themselves in with the butts of their heads.

  “August limped through the downstairs with his hands trailing along the walls. Even the muted stormlight was painful in his eyes now. At the precipice of the house, the family dog howled at the storm without mercy, but was struck dumb at the sight of its master in shambles. It backed up meekly, with its tail between its legs, giving August a wide berth to pass. But the farmer stopped cold, frozen by the gray apparition of his wife running toward him from the field.

  “‘August! For God’s sake, get back into the house. You’re not well. You’ll catch your death out here!’

  August said nothing, fastening to his zombie-resolve.

  “‘Please! It’s hopeless; the cows can’t be moved! Just leave ’em,’ Gail pleaded. ‘Come with me. I’m going to call Buck.’ She reached for his hand, but he took it away.

  “‘No … I have to bring them in,’ August insisted in a hoarse voice.

  “Gail’s face went white with panic, and she hurried into the house.

  “In his heavy jacket and boots, August walked out into the teeth of the storm. The sky filled with lead as the thunderstorm invoked its Midwestern Gods. August rushed forward, lunging for a pitchfork on the ground—a sick, comic prop planted by the Devil himself. Up the hill, he carried it out in front of him, in two hands, like a rifle. A sickly sweet taste gathere
d in his mouth that he could not spit away. The speed of the storm and the strain on his empty body made his head throb. He trudged on, leading forward with the crown of his skull. And then there was just a single crack!

  “The first clear thing that August saw, after that, were the smoldering flames hissing off the Murder Elm. He lost his drowning grip on the pitchfork and started running up the hill, with his boots sucking in the mud and shit…” I stopped again, feeling like I had been reading too long.

  “Don’t stop,” Danielle said, hanging on the story.

  “This is the part that happened, though.”

  “What happened?” she asked in earnest.

  “Well…” I hesitated. “The elm tree was struck by lightning and the cows died of electrocution.”

  “Oh,” she said, dropping back in her seat.

  I’d just ruined the entire story with this death knell, but I wanted to tell her the truth. I wanted someone to see where I’d begun. I wanted to try and untangle it all in my own head, too.

  Danielle tried not to look disappointed. “It’s sad. The cows all died.”

  “A lot of them.” I nodded. “A few lived.”

  “Read it to me,” she said hopefully.

  “Okay.” I cleared my throat artificially and kept going.

  “Black and white, death was laid out in front of him. One single bolt of lightning had inexplicably killed forty-three of his fifty dairy cows. This, he would later learn from Guinness’s London office, was simply unprecedented…’ That part is true, by the way,” I offered solemnly, and kept reading.

  “August was shell-shocked by the scorched earth and carnage that he saw. He sent the live cows ambling backward with his unsteady movements. He picked up the head of a dead Holstein and shook it to make it real, but the emptiness he felt knocked the wind out of him.

  “‘What a waste, what a waste…’ he said in a hollow voice.

  “The living cows circled and stared, in reproof, while August sank down among the humiliating dead. He felt a weight that crushed involuntarily. He tried to rise to his feet again and couldn’t. He felt the ground disappearing and suddenly rushing up to meet him. August’s rope had just been cut from the top branch of the Gallows Elm. He looked at the curdling udders with frenzy as he felt himself sinking into the soft earth. His head spun. Death of the cattle is death of the farmer is death of the farm…’” I stopped.

  “And it goes on and on, a little,” I said quickly, as I turned the whole thing back to the front page. “It’s not right yet, exactly. I’m not convinced I’ve earned this big kind of biblical ending-thing.”

  “Gosh.” Danielle exhaled. “I feel a little dizzy now.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s a good thing. We missed our stop,” she said with a laugh, looking around. “It’s good. It’s weird, really weird.” She smiled, imparting something strong in her silence. “I can’t believe you got all of that into ten pages.” She laughed again, breaking her own tension.

  I started to say something about this, but I stopped myself. Nodding mutely instead.

  “Here,” she said, taking the story away from me. “Let me read it for real. I’ll take it home. I can give you notes.”

  “Oh. You don’t have to do that.”

  “No, let me,” she said, pulling out a pen. “Write your email address on the front. I’ll send you my notes. I like it, I do. It’s good.”

  There was something charged in this proposition, like she’d just caught herself sounding insistent and was surprised. I smiled at her and she looked away. I wrote my email onto the top of the story and I gave it back to her.

  “Thanks for not asking if I’m on Facebook,” I said dryly.

  Danielle laughed, and her eyes got big and shiny. “Have you ever read Michel Foucault?”

  “Who, the philosopher?” I smiled, thinking this a particularly strange question to ask on a city bus. “Wasn’t he the guy with the circular prisons…”

  “Right, yeah. The Panopticon,” she said excitedly. “And I was reading that last summer—for something totally unrelated—and I had this epiphany about Facebook.”

  “Facebook?” I asked, not understanding.

  “Right, right, so listen. The purpose of the Panopticon is to induce a conscious and permanent visibility upon the inmates, right? You never know who’s looking at you, or when. You give up your privacy and you behave because you never really know who’s watching. So, with Facebook, what happens is that the population begins to self-report. And then we all start to surrender our privacy in order to indulge in the loss of everyone else’s privacy. Right?”

  “Holy shit,” I said, a little startled. “Facebook is the new Panopticon!”

  “Fucking Facebook!” she shouted. People looked up at us from their seats. “It’s Facebook,” she said more quietly. “The prisoners are the guards and vice versa.”

  I laughed because I had no idea Danielle had it in her. Who knew this pretty girl from the suburbs was capable of making these kinds of advanced paranoid connections? All of a sudden I thought I might be falling in love with her.

  “That’s dark, Danielle. I like that one a lot.”

  She sat back and demurred. “Yeah. Well, I don’t pretend it’s any kind of earth-shattering conclusion. It’s all up on the Internet already. It just struck me when I thought of it.”

  “No, it’s yours. Own it,” I said, charmed. “So did you quit Facebook then? After you figured out you were—what’s the word—self-reporting?”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. Are you kidding? I had to,” she said. “What about you?”

  “A while ago,” I offered solemnly. “I had no idea I was in a penal colony, though. I just didn’t think it was that much fun.”

  Danielle smiled at me, and I took away her pen to write Foucault/Facebook on the top of my hand. She laughed and looked away, out the window, before reaching up and pulling for the next stop.

  “Facebook is nothing. Give it more time, they’ll think of something way worse.”

  * * *

  We got off the bus, and back on again, as the dull sun began sinking into six o’clock. Danielle stood closer at each next stop, using me to block the wind, she said. This was the end of our day out in the city. We were having fun just watching the people on the buses, with their strange comings and goings. We made jokes behind their backs, but never mean jokes, really. We just wanted to keep talking.

  We showed our transfers and stood on the crowded #20 as it arced us back across the river at rush hour. The conversations became very easy, and I confessed that I had only just discovered Don DeLillo and I was taking the year to read every one of his books in order. It was always so strange to discover a thing that everyone else seemed to know so implicitly. Danielle nodded and admitted to doing something similar with Keanu Reeves movies. And then we laughed and gushed about the greatness of River’s Edge.

  Halfway up the hill, Danielle pulled the cord, saying that she wanted to walk the last ten blocks. But we mostly walked in silence. The whole day had been a dance this way. Our hands swinging, and nearly touching, like live wires. This was a danger to be fully conscious of. That was the fun we were having.

  How could I say what my intentions with Danielle were? On some primal level I wanted to steal her away. I wanted her to fall in love with me, of course. But our errands were done and the day was over, too. We walked past my bike, past Powell’s, to the Whole Foods. Danielle was looking around for her boyfriend, but I was not. His absence was a reason to keep going, to keep on walking. We went inside, out of the cold, out of the dark. We walked around the bright supermarket, trying samples and looking at the fancy foods.

  Danielle pulled out her cell phone and told me he was there now. Outside somewhere, she said. We went back through the automatic doors and onto the street, where the night was suddenly threshed with neon lights. People were standing around and coming home from work. Some gutterpunk kid was yelling for his mutt dog to get out of the street, a
nd Danielle made one last crack about dogcatching.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m off the clock.” And we laughed in a hollow way.

  She looked around the street, and back at me. She smiled with her nerves, I thought. We touched hands unconsciously and held on too long. I squeezed and let her go, feeling something unexpected. This happy rush of warm blood as we looked at each other without speaking. Danielle blinked first and turned away.

  “Well…” she said nervously. “This was a lot of fun, actually.” She was afraid to really look at me now. Afraid that I could make her lose herself, I hoped. I wanted her to hate me as she hated herself for wanting me to steal her away.

  “Yes…” I said, smiling and waiting for her to look back up. That look that said that she’d enjoyed our secret day in the city. In the movies this would be the kiss-moment. We would lean in and I would take her at the waist and bend her backward, or something.

  But we didn’t take a kiss here. Or, rather, I didn’t, maybe. I liked the tension too much to spoil it all now. I didn’t even want to touch Danielle again in this moment where men and women always hug platonically. Just to let the pressure off; just to say goodbye. But we didn’t.

  “I guess I should let you go, then,” I said. “He’s probably waiting for you.”

  “Right.” She nodded, turning to look again. “Yeah.”

  “Have fun,” I said. “Have a good night.”

  “Okay.”

  I could tell she was bemused. Nodding and turning away from me, walking away again. I could see she had something else to say; I was supposed to stop her now. I was supposed to take the last word and try something dangerous in the halo of the streetlight. But I didn’t do that because I didn’t want to ruin it.

  I let Danielle go, and I watched her body go blurry in the reflected lights as she turned the corner and came together with a different body altogether. Gone.