days' time spent in the sun atop this memorial.
Eduardo had told me more about the South American documentary filmmaker. When they had arrived in the village where the berry-eating guru was purported to live, they found that the man and his followers had been exiled to a nearby mountain peak by the village inhabitants, who were all-too-eager to lead the filmmaking crew to the place, as if the film crew had set down in some inverted Transylvania and the Dracula was more village oddity than horror. When they arrived they found a man who was nearly blind and used a series of ropes, suspended waist-high, to navigate from shack to shack in the compound. There were two women with him, the only remaining members of what had been a fifty-person community. One of the women was ascetically thin, suffering, Eduardo told me, from what the filmmaker thought was dysentery. The other was large to the point of engorgement, evidently pregnant, although both women claimed, with apparent pride, that it had been years since they had menstruated. The old man’s gastronomic philosophy seemed to extend to the sexual, in that he claimed that, while fruit was an essential part of a healthy diet, the consumption of any mature seeds from within the plant would produce sexual urges in the consumer, and was therefore to be avoided. Similarly, milk, as a product of secondary sexual characteristics, was abhorrent to him, and any vegetables displaying particularly phallic properties were forbidden (to the women), while he abstained from those exhibiting yonic attributes. When the film crew inquired about the former members of the flock, now gone, the guru replied that some were “apostates,” while the rest had ascended. When asked if the ascended disciples had died as part of the ascension process, the guru replied in the affirmative, although when asked about the whereabouts of the bodies neither he nor the women were able to give a clear answer.
I find a flower arrangement that has broken loose from its moorings, and I re-fasten it as well as I can. I suspect that Eduardo was the filmmaker in question, and that his story is merely a framing device for his own experiences. On a small obelisk someone has attached a single immense magnolia bloom. Together, the two objects look like a satellite dish, listening for particularly eloquent songs in the sky.
I swear there is a plot to all of this.
A televangelist is speaking on the radio. To my right, two men are talking. I continue eating.
“The problem with the white was that red showed up too readily. We needed to be hygienic, but not shockingly antiseptic.”
“I assume you tried matching the red shades to completely obscure the discoloration?”
“Yeah, but it didn't test well. No one wants to use a red tampon. The suggestion is overpowering. Ditto yellow—too reminiscent of bodily fluids. Gross.”
“Blue tones?”
“It discolored well, but too cold.”
“Hence green.”
“Right. It balances it out, it basically just makes the blood—which is somewhat transparent, in sufficiently small quantities—look dark, and it looks fresh, clean, without being clinical.”
“Natural. Organic.”
“Exactly.”
“People really want that?”
“This isn't the Johnson administration. Your mother wanted to completely conquer her body, subvert it, with science. ‘Mankind is at last master of itself.’ Now we tell people we want to embrace the body, but really they still want the same thing. Control, submission. The difference is that now it's to some vague overarching pattern of harmony with nature rather than science and reason.”
“How long did it take you to do the research on this?”
“About six months. For your firm, of course, we could accelerate the process.”
“I need a timeline of about three.”
“You've got it.”
They shake hands. I take another bite of doughnut. Outside I see a homeless man. I wave. Things are looking up.
In 1967 the infamous establishment known as Touches opened to instant but short-lived fanfare, gaining a lurid reputation and substantial clientele, its time prematurely come when a senator was found there in flagrante delicto and the judicial hammer brought down when studied ignorance was no longer an option to those officers beholden to the expressed (if not practiced) morality of the people. The property was officially closed but never in reality abandoned, as it continued to play passive host to three decades of intermittent debaucheries ranging from the wee-hours trysts of teenagers to the full-blown orgies of post-ironic scene-conscious twenty-somethings to the desperate meetings of addicts and those in flight. In the late nineties, a conglomerate of developers decided to make something of the place's reputation and location, and therewith began the process of stripping up wood laminate and carefully preserving zebra-print carpeting. The resulting series of apartments, spanning three floors and ranging from efficiency studios to penthouses, were immediately rented to a waiting list of eager urbanites clamoring for something edgy yet sophisticated. On an inset bookshelf in Eduardo's apartment I find a photo album.
“What's in here?” I gesture.
When I had asked Steve about the small white plastic tab which he had found in the bathroom, he had explained that it had held pills. He had found it sitting atop the frame of a picture hanging on the bathroom wall, invisible to all but the tallest patrons but reachable for Steve, blindly stretching. Apparently someone had stashed it there and forgotten to come back for it. Inside were five white oblongs stamped with “LMF”--Steve explained that this stood for “leitmotif,” the trade name for a brand of medication that mediated the user's sense of continuity, adjusting their temporal perception via a broad range of neurological manipulations, alternately speeding up or slowing down the user's sense of time depending on their condition. It was prescribed to patients suffering from Parkinson's disorder and schizophrenia, as well as those with exceptionally severe attention-deficit disorder. Because of the broad distribution of the neural configurations that govern one's sense of time, the spectrum of effects induced by leitmotif was correspondingly large, but the manufacturer generally claimed that judicious prescription could result in a decreased (or heightened) aptitude for pattern-recognition, an accelerated (or decelerated) sense of time, enhanced (or diminished) sense of integration, and a minimization (or magnification) of attention to details.
“What's in here?” I gesture.
“Take it down and see.” Eduardo says.
Inside are pictures of a prom, of cars in driveways and televised parades crossed by grainy bands, a marriage, hospital beds. There was a school play and a pasted-in hospital discharge notice. Someone ate a turkey sandwich alone in a dim diner. There was a birthday in a white room.
“I found this in the thrift store over on third.” He says. “I have no idea who these people are, but I like their pictures.”
I look closer at the teenagers attending the prom pictured in the album's early pages. They wear oversize sunglasses and scarves and vintage jeans, garish sweaters and checkered blouses.
“When do you think these were taken?” I ask.
“No idea.”
“I think I used to know these people,” I say.
“Oh yeah? Friends of yours?”
I don't answer. From the window I can see the street below, where a sidewalk vendor sells meat on a stick.
“I'm hungry,” I finally say. “Wanna grab a bit to eat?”
When Eduardo and I arrive I am no longer even surprised to see the words again superimposed above the building. Eduardo makes a comment about “the real grit of Bible-belt culture, slash commerce” but I ignore it. When our food arrives I start to talk.
“Do you know they've developed a form of test-tube meat that can be made in a laboratory, without requiring the slaughter of animals?” The phrases are kiped from articles I have read somewhere, in the human-interest inserts of some newspaper.
“No kidding?” He takes a bite of burger and I can see the pink juice run down his chin, rendered inoffensive by the dim gre
en-tinted light emanating from the fixture hanging low above our table, obscuring our eyes from each other.
“Yes,” I say, “a form of protein culture, a tissue complete with blood vessels, that can be scaled up from filets mignon to whole chucks, to supernaturally large cows, rendered unsacred by the fact of their prima facie lifelessness.”
“And how does it taste?” Eduardo asks.
“I don't know,” I say, “I've never tasted it. But it's generally described as bland. I was exaggerating about the filet mignon. It really isn't modeled after any specific kind of meat.”
“It would certainly raise some interesting implications if it were,” he says, taking another bite. “Imagine: braised okapi. Side of bengal tiger. Things too exotic or endangered to be, as things currently stand, commercially viable dining. Orca whale. Panda bear. Or even extinct animals—filet of Tasmanian devil, breaded dodo, mastodon burgers. You could even make stuff up. Unicorn pate. Butterfly sausage. Or even--” He paused. “more taboo delicacies.”
I took a swallow of water. Eduardo filled the silence.
“I once had a friend who did a documentary on European scientists and the various programs they had to halt once the world war started and their attentions were fixed to bomb-making. One guy in Czechoslovakia managed to keep a chicken heart alive in a nutrient bath for fully thirty
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