On one side, they reached the ribs. The tearing stopped. In trepidation I wondered whether they could see me as I could see them. I decided that from light one cannot see well into darkness, but from darkness one can see into light only too well. Through a narrow crack in the flimsy stomach lining, I saw one human, refracted and distorted, cutting streaks of light flesh and streaks of dark flesh, piercing it with metal claws, and lifting it into its mouth. The human shouted. I cannot tell the moods of humans from their faces. I don’t think they have moods and emotions. I know they scream and squeal and grunt and hiss, and mostly, they rattle quite monotonously. It is a strange custom they have, to gurgle noise when they are more than one. Maybe they keep themselves at bay from each other by their constant noise, the way dogs keep away from each other by growling and cats by spitting. Well, if my supposition that they hate one another (in a cold, unemotional way) is true, then I don’t understand why they gather in groups so often. And if they are alone, they have special boxes that rattle out similar noises, flickering with lights.
After making sounds with its throat, the human was quiet. It stretched its lips and showed its flat teeth. I don’t know what they have teeth for, when they cut their food with artificial claws.
It was pleasantly warm, and I could begin to breathe without strain. I did not dare move enough to eat the flesh around me. All of a sudden, the human stood up and light flashed into my eyes from a large metal surface. The metal cut into the bird and more light poured into my shelter.
I knew there was no more time to hesitate. Lest I should be cut with the edge of the super-claw, I jumped out of the bird. I staggered, weakened by having been in the heat for so long, blinded by light. But I didn’t stay still. I jumped forward, for you mustn’t stay still when humans are around. You must never underestimate these creatures. They are awkward and slow, but suddenly, puff, gotcha!.
To make a long story short, I leaped out of the bird. I landed in a warm container of squashed cranberries. There were many high-pitched sounds in the room. My heart skipped beats, but when it did beat, it made up for the missed ones; it beat frantically. I jumped over and over again. The white stone of squashed cranberries tipped over; I ran and jumped from the edge of the elevated plank of wood. I fell into the lap of a human with bare legs. Some humans wrap their legs and others leave their legs bare. The things they use for wrapping are soft and fun to chew; I heard they were mashed balls of cotton. Actually, I had never chewed their wrappings, and now I had no time to take up that experience as, at any rate, there was enough new experience pouring into my life, and I wanted to make sure that experience would not be my last.
I bounced off the lap, which was changing angles as the human fell to the floor. The chair squeaked and the human screamed. But I have already said there was a lot of screaming. I am repeating myself. They were repeating themselves too. I did not know why they screamed so much. I wished to think that it was all because of me, but I was too humble to dare to imagine that those powerful creatures that raised inedible buildings would have given little me so much recognition. Someone else fell on the floor—it was a furry floor but I couldn’t figure out what sort of animal they had skinned for it—with a dull thud and a piercing shriek. A couple of humans were throwing their metal claws at me. I ran behind a white box.
Well, these humans were preoccupied enough. Some vomited right there on the floor, others over the elevated plank of wood and over the turkey. Then they took everything that was on the table and put it into dark plastic bags. What a pity that the half-digested food all went to waste. But I was not in the mood to try to save the food. First I wanted to save my stomach. I enjoyed seeing them walk out of the room in their usual vulnerable manner, on hind legs—when I used to love them, I worried they might trip any moment. Once they were gone, I scurried across the floor and slipped into a garbage bag, where I found the bird. I hid inside its walls once again; that was the only way I could think of escaping, knowing they would throw it out sooner or later.
I have just said “when I used to love them.” Do I no longer love them? That’s right. They are arrogant dirty bastards. Yet we have courage to eat what they eat, and to sniff what they sniff. On the other paw, they would not touch what we eat. I spent so much time liking them. I could not just like and like without encouragement to go on.
I hate them. The way they cut up some of us, the weakest among us, in their experiments and feed us poisons to see just how we’d take it, that is wicked. And how many times have they nearly killed me? I could have killed some of their old ones, but I haven’t done it. Whenever I entered their cubicles and sniffed the air, I could tell whether there were old, feeble mammals there still breathing. I could have easily chewed their necks and bit through their jugulars; I was considerate and let them sleep on. It is true, though, that whenever I ran into some who didn’t breathe, I began to tear their flesh, making the point that they were animals clean enough to eat. But look at how they treat us. They tear us apart while we are still alive, and when we are dead, they throw away our corpses without ever considering them edible, even though our flesh is more nutritious and richer in minerals than theirs.
Humans have repaid our kindness with hatred, our admiration with contempt, our service with poison, our love with murder. But we will outlast them.
CHARITY DEDUCTIONS
I HAD ALWAYS been proud to be an American, and I felt sorry for those who weren’t Americans. Several years ago, as I watched the starvation in Ethiopia on CNN, I wanted to do something about it. I gave nine hundred bucks to one of those charity deals and then I read in the papers that the CEO got more than four hundred grand a year. I was upset—I was feeding his fat bum, plus paying his diet bills, instead of the people I was trying to feed. And then I read where the money sent to Ethiopia went: the Ethiopian government confiscated most of it to buy artillery from Russia and Slovakia in order to attack Eritrea again. I realized you can’t do charity through an institution. The red tape is going to tie your hands, your money, and nothing—nothing good, that is—will be done.
So when the war in Bosnia dragged on, and predictably, international organizations helped it drag on, I grew exasperated. The U.N. created a safe haven of Srebrnica, and then disarmed the Muslims in it, and the Dutch soldiers helped the Serbs enter the disarmed city. Then the Serbs shot 8,000 men (mostly boys) in the soccer fields. And in Sarajevo, the food that was dropped by international aid organizations served mostly to keep people alive so Serbs would have live target practice. Out of contempt for relief organizations, I decided to help alone—privately. Our country is built on private enterprise, that’s why it works. If charity is going to work, it too has to be private initiative—an individual helping an individual. I figure, if half the people in the world can’t manage, the other half can help them, one on one, and there won’t be any problems. When you have excess of blood, you donate some, and even your health improves. I believed in such beneficial sacrifice.
Of course, to be truthful, I’ll say that the American system of tax deductions is the greatest source of philanthropy and big-heartedness in the world. If the tax laws had been written a little differently, we wouldn’t worry about the misery in the world half as much. Nothing wrong with that. It’s the results that matter, not the motives, and our country achieves wonderful results. Sometimes.
I went to a Bosnian refugee camp, looked around, and when I saw a miserable family—a thin, birdlike man, a woman in a scarf, and a sad-looking fifteen-year-old with big eyes—I said, I’m going to help them, provided they speak English. I don’t have the time to learn other languages, and if people haven’t learned English by now, in their adulthood, they probably won’t. Only kids and secret agents really learn languages.
“You guys want to go to America?”
“That’s my dream. I know it can’t happen,” said the woman.
“Yes, because it’s far from all this,” said the man and pointed at his surroundings.
“Yes, because o
f the NBA,” said the kid. “My name is Toni, like Toni Kukoc.”
They all looked intelligent, or that’s the impression that their bulging eyes created since they reflected so much light. I had the impression their lights were all there, literally. I asked them what they did that they could speak English. The man said he was a chemical engineer. The woman was a high school teacher of sociology and geography. That struck me as funny—I mean, who’d want to study sociology and geography at high school, and then what good did it do? Is that what these people did—study sociology at high school? No wonder they went to war. And why would you want to study geography if you don’t have enough money to travel? It’s like studying wine from books without ever drinking anything but Avia and Concho y Toro. (By the way, that’s what I drink. I just can’t see pissing away more than ten bucks per day. Even ten bucks is disastrous, $3,650 a year, plus it’s not tax deductible, and in terms of gross income, you need to make five and a half grand exclusively to afford that).
My not drinking lavishly actually allowed me to do the charity, which would be fully tax deductible—my airfare, their airfare, groceries for them, one quarter of my utility bills, since they would occupy roughly a quarter of our house. I could even make money on charity expenses: the expenses could sink me into the lower tax bracket. Yes, with some creativity, I could help this family and it wouldn’t cost me a cent. I won’t go so far as to say that if I were squarely in the middle of a tax bracket so that my charity deductions couldn’t knock me down into a lower one, that I wouldn’t consider this charity at some of my real expense, but I could see the beauty of it all. Rather than give money to the government to bomb away, I could do international goodwill, improve America’s standing as a friendly and generous nation.
Anyway, the man was a Croat, the woman a Muslim, and the lad considered himself a Bosnian.
I worked out their papers, and was eager to get them on our rich diet as soon as possible. In Cincinnati, they got exile status, and for a while they’d stay at my house, until they got their feet on the ground. My wife May was all excited about helping them, and so was my daughter, Tina, who was sixteen. Our two older kids had already gone to college; one was finishing up at OU in Business Administration, and the other was trying to become a professional baseball player, now as a member of a farm team in Birmingham, Alabama. Anyhow, the two sons gone from our house made the house too large.
May and Tina welcomed us at Covington International Airport in Kentucky. We stopped by at Starbucks, and I got them Venti cappuccinos.
“So big?” commented Selma.
“Is that coffee?” Miro asked. “It tastes like hot chocolate and water.”
As they were hungry, we went to Big Horn steakhouse. Free trips to the salad bar, eat as much as you like. Sixteen-ounce steak.
“This is beautiful,” Miro said. “How can they just give that much meat?”
“You better get used to it,” May said. “Everything here is big.”
In the middle of the meal, Selma gasped. “Blood, I see blood!”
“Where?” I asked.
“Right here, in the steak. It’s not cooked!”
“Oh, yes it is—it’s just medium rare, juicy.”
“In our country, we can’t do that, we cook it all the way through,” she said. She couldn’t eat afterward and clearly fought down a gag.
They slept, it seemed, for two days, and when they woke up, I admit, what we did was not the most fun—we took them to our Unitarian Fellowship. The congregation, or rather fellowship, loved hearing about a Bosnian family. For a while, all of us were invited to dinners, to several prosperous homes of doctors and businessmen. But that lasted only about a month until the novelty of charity wore off.
No one in the family drove. “We didn’t need to,” Miro said. “In Sarajevo, you could walk everywhere or take a tram.”
Oh, we loved to walk,” Selma explained. “Every night, half the city would be in the streets, walking back and forth, drinking coffee, chatting with friends in Bascarsija. You know, the old town that looks like a bit of Istanbul.”
They seemed to consider this a mark of high culture—not to be able to drive because they came from such a fine cosmopolitan city, unlike faceless American suburbia. The consequence of this was that my wife and I gave them rides to Kroger’s for their groceries, and then to the symphony hall to listen to Bruckner—they were amazed that I had no interest in the symphony. Actually, I enjoy something great, like Beethoven symphonies, but Bruckner? I don’t have the time. Then, when I still worked as an accountant and had just begun to study the possibility of day trading, I worked seventy hours a week, and after seventy hours of high concentration, give me Mozart, something to relax me, something that’s harmonious, not something that sounds like a thousand cats in heat—spayed cats in heat, spayed just a few days too late. Maybe I could have gotten into Bruckner if I didn’t spend so much time driving them around. Maybe I would have even read Musil, Mann ohne Eigenschaften. That’s what Miro read.
Plus, Toni needed to go to basketball practice. He got onto the high school team and wanted me to arrange for him to talk to UC Bearcats coach Huggins. “I don’t know the guy,” I said. “All I know is he’s a horrible alcoholic and workaholic, and he abuses his team so much that they always start the season ranked number one but by the end of the season can barely walk—all bandaged up, if not hospitalized. If you are good enough, he’ll learn about you, don’t worry. They got scouts out there.” Yes, he was growing tall, but not the strong kind of tall—lanky, fragile. You feared watching him play that any minute he’d fall and break into pieces. Bearcats, who were known for their tough physical game, would tear him apart.
At least the boy had ambition, I have to admit that. More than could be said of his father. The only chemical engineering the man did was to smoke five packs a day and stink up the whole house. And the man made pathos-filled faces when he smoked, as though he was considering the fate of the solar system, which would vanish in five billion years. His mustache drooped, his eyebrows rose like his eyes didn’t have enough space, and he looked at me like someone stepping into his dream, trampling on it. I know, I don’t sound generous right now, but I need a valve to complain. Charity may be easy but generosity is hard. I mean, personal generosity. Giving money directly, even to a fat cat CEO, to handle the kind of moodiness in people that probably led to the wars would be much easier, but here I was, committed. I like to finish what I start, so even as my antipathy for the family grew, I thought I’d see them through it all, until they became gainfully employed citizens. But that smoke tested me. Nobody in my family smoked, but everybody in theirs did, even Toni the kid. His mom would shrug, lifting her lighter to the cigarette dangling from his lips. “Better that he do it with us than with gangsters outdoors.”
“But how will he become a college basketball player if he weakens his lungs?” I said.
“He’s not weakening anything, he’s only smoking.”
“No smoking is the rule in this house, as I am allergic to it.” “Allergic to smoke? Is there such an allergy?” Selma asked. “You Americans are very inventive when it comes to allergies.”
“I just don’t like it, all right? Do I have to explain? And don’t you know about lung cancer?”
So during the day they would open the window and smoke, and the smoke would climb up through my window, and in the winter, they’d run up our heating bills. I don’t know where they thought the heat came from, that it was like Iceland, or something, just coming up from the earth for free, and I bet it’s not for free there either. At night, they thought I didn’t know they smoked inside.
“In our country, everybody smokes.” Milo spoke reproachfully, like it was an American shortcoming that we no longer collectively gassed ourselves.
“What country is it?” I couldn’t abstain from asking. “Or rather, what country was it?”
They just looked at me pained and soulful. Was Bosnia a country? Yugoslavia? One wasn’t recognized ye
t and the other had mostly fallen apart. Well, I could sympathize with them there. That’s why I love America; we got this amazing country. Yes, smart people like that, they deserved better. But then, look at Tesla, he came from that part of the world, landed with a few cents in his pockets, and lit up the globe with his work and energy. And he didn’t smoke, did he? The mysteries of motivation!
“What can we do when we worry so much? We must smoke,” said the wife, and stretched her arms wide, unmindful of the fact that her shirt wasn’t buttoned on top. She didn’t wear a bra, another mark of European sophistication. I wondered what happened to her religion. She brought her arms back and said, “See, I don’t know what to do with my hands without cigarettes.”
I was copaying their health insurance, and Caritas was paying the remaining portion of it. I bet these guys figured that if something went wrong with their hearts, bingo, they would get a heart transplant, which, by the way, costs about $195,000, for free, and they could keep smoking until they’d get another heart, lung, kidney. This is the country of replaceable parts. Many exiles come here just for medical reasons; they land in NYC, rush off to a city hospital and say, “Take care of me! You are rich and I am poor, and you owe it to me.” Yes, our medicine is the best, no doubt about it. Of course, people go to Canada and Germany for the same reasons.
But perhaps they were not thinking about it at all. That was too pedestrian, pragmatic, crude for them. Their thoughts and feelings were subtler. Ordinarily, smoking is a premeditated murder, but this was simply meditational murder. Misapplied eastern mysticism taking place via venomous breath.
“Yes, what can we do when we have to think about so many things,” said Milo. “We must smoke.” He winked at me.
Did he see how Selma’s breasts flashed at me? Did he mind? Or was that normal to them? They had probably spent their summers at nudist beaches on the Adriatic. Maybe he’d seen it, and now wanted to relax me—Americans were notoriously uptight when it came to sex, and he tried to relax me with his charming wink.
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