science experiment on myself.
By the time I graduated high school, I’d managed to sample quite an assortment of youthful indiscretions, but in the manner of nibbling off a corner of all the pieces of chocolate in a Valentine’s Day box and putting each one back in their paper-lined spot with an airy look of innocence. Given that adults were always pushing foods on me that made me sick, I had no confidence that forbidden fruits were any worse for my system than, say, avocados or crab cakes. To my teenage self, ingesting beer-in-a-can was fraught with the same mixture of fear, hope, and anticipation that I felt before trying the fish eggs-in-a-tube that Anja from Norway received in a care package: even though it was ninety-nine percent likely that I was allergic, how would I know unless I tried it? Same went for Vegemite, Marmite, and Nutella®, exotic spreads that WASPs seemed to love but which landed me in the Infirmary, where I convalesced dyspeptically on a regimen of ginger tea and Saltines.
In the same spirit of doomed experimentation, my plan was to earn my high school diploma and be done with formal education forever, because I’d tried it, didn’t have much use for it, and decided that it was not for me. It irked me that adults were under the impression that I was of a cheerful temperament, whereas in reality I was a misanthropic ball of peevishness. It was almost as if I was two people in one body. I used to think that I’d been a twin in the womb, and I’d eaten the other one while it was still underdone. It would explain a lot, really.
So what’s a surly teenager to do? For lack of a better plan, I went to college. This was where the trouble really started, because my antisocial, colorblind self still really wanted to be an artist.
“Foolish human!” the angels giggled as they threw cold water on my dreams. And lo! I was drenched with new allergies—to ink, clay, and paint. I was a sex-change operation away from being a Bubble Boy, the doctors warned, because making art was extremely bad for my health. Unless I was prepared to move to Antarctica and make ice sculptures for penguins, I had some unpleasant realities to face.
Slowly, and rather against my will, I was turning into a scholar named Double Ch’in. Now all I needed was a dragon to slay. So I decided to go looking for the monster of my dreams. By the time I’d finished my undergraduate degree and started on a Ph.D., I’d begun waddling around small continents in sensible shoes, carting around my precious packet of toilet paper, sunscreen, and a jar of antihistamines. Disappearing for months and years, I burrowed into cities such as Florence, London, and Seoul, but mostly Paris, a place that bears remarkably little resemblance to the romantic fantasies spun about it. This was fine with me. I wasn’t looking for love, drugs, yoga classes or any other “girl” narratives attached to stories about free spirits bravely traveling alone. When your trips abroad are being paid for by your father/divorce settlement/publisher, you’re not free. You’re expensive. Besides which, I grew up foreign in a native country. From birth, you’re an alien being, a world traveler by default: dropped down the chimney by migratory storks.
In cities called Cosmopolitan, everyone is born of a bird. We are all the same kind, fine in our feathers but naked in our skins. Not all birds fly. Not all birds can. My mother prayed I’d run into a nice Korean boy and start making legally wedded babies. My father hoped my peregrinations would put me on the road to Damascus, where I’d see God’s truth and start preaching His word, writing letters to the Corinthians and voting Republican. I was Saint Paul’s namesake, after all. My parents had been expecting a boy, because apparently I’d been one in the womb. That’s what the baby doctors told them. I chose to disagree. Given my conversion when I saw the light, my destiny was to become an apostle. Failing that, my father was thinking accountant. A good career choice for girls. Ah, but in Latin, Paul also means “little,” which is what I ended up being. Or rather, very short. Sometimes wee, mostly Weeble. The wobble was incontestable.
I knew my mind, and it was strange. It disagreed with my body, and my body struggled to get away. Amazingly, wherever my body went, my brain went too, barking, “No meat for you!” Forced to obey, my flesh got its revenge by growing sea monkeys under my skin and refusing to get out of bed. I was living pallid in Paris when my mother surprised everyone by dying first. After that, I got sick of being sick. So I quit being vegetarian and started chomping down chickens with a cheerful “fuck you!” to the medical establishment. I lost twenty pounds in three months eating roasted birds, making up for twenty years of tofu, broccoli, and brown rice, “healthy” foods that, against all logic, made me sickly and obese.
And I was happy as I laughed without mirth, a laugh filling a body exulting as it animated flesh not of my flesh, the body and blood of the animal, a communion that transmutes water into wine and makes hot dogs, pork rinds, and buffalo wings a refuge of the sacred. Give thanks. It died for you. I was the killer of the sacred lamb, a sticker of the devil’s spawn, a milker of cows and the executioner’s song. I was a creature living in a damaged world that I could not heal. Why not? Let us not mince words: when we eat, we kill. Nothing lives in the stomach except death and fear.
This I learned after traveling the world, by myself, a girl with fallen arches and no sense of direction.
This I understood after my physician grandfather and his Middle of Five Daughters sickened with cancer in their stomachs.
Elderly, he did not resist. His end was peaceful. My mother was younger than most who will read these words. She got angry. It didn’t change the outcome. My death, when it comes, will be different. Because they both really died of regret, “if only . . .” gnawing away at their souls until finally, it consumed their bodies too.
“If” is the most dangerous word in the English language. It is the portal to lost dreams.
I studied the carcasses exposed by my teeth, mulled the pathways that brought them to my plate, and asked myself, could I take a life to serve my needs? But of course. It is childish to pretend otherwise. With every step we take, we destroy a universe. To ants, we are Beelzebub and Kali rolled into one: a towering free-range demon dancing on their graves. To flies, we are the Brave Little Tailor, capable of flattening seven in one blow. To wildlife, we are the Great Exterminator, eradicating untold billions of grain-stealing sparrows so vegetarians can boast that they’re not cruel to animals. Each exhalation of breath releases a hallelujah of poisons into the air. Every poopy diaper injects lush microbes into waters drunk by babes in the woods. Only dead things don’t kill on purpose. They only kill by accident.
Contrary-wise, I now insist on eating birds and mammals, preferably wild ones shot by the man I love but won’t marry, their bodies made into meat by our hands joined together. I don’t feel guilty about it, sez the girl for whom a bee sting is lethal. Death is the promise. It is an ineluctable truth, for Nature is a murderous mother offering food everywhere we look. I can’t pretend to be one with Her as I tromp up bleak mountains, tracking deer in hopes of filling the winter’s larder. Instead, I look at the sheltering sky and think, humbly and with gladness, I stand beneath the heavenly roof of God’s yawning mouth. When it closes, if it closes, it becomes the maw of Hell. When? Today? Tomorrow? Oh, but Apocalypse Now was thirty years ago. The fear rises. The hymns swell. I am hungry. Such is the human condition. We hope and despair, rejoice and revile, celebrate and curse the profane absurdity of being apes rigged up in angel’s wings.
Angels don’t eat. Apes covet meat.
I’m no angel. Not before, and not after. For I can walk, and run, and go places my father cannot on shriveled legs made of bone as he sits, peaceably, letting the light of God shine from his face.
He is a spiritual man.
I am neither.
A
