Slavin - Carnivore Diet

Julia Slavin

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK LONDON

for my parents

A man swallowed a pearl that hung from the neck of a slain dragon because he believed it would give him power and physical strength. For a period of time, it did. His military and political might gripped the east and much of the west. But soon a disastrous campaign in the north and an ultimate defeat in the south as the man grew weak and distracted. From the pearl had hatched Chagwanadon, a beast so huge it could not fit the screen of the mans imagination. Springing into the deepest cell of the mans sleep, it showed itself in pieces, a claw, a cavern of a mouth, the fork in a furless tail. It drove the man mad not to know what lived inside him. He demanded the beast show itself in its entirety at once. The beast would not. The more the man insisted, the more the beast pulled up into the mans head, giving him pounding headaches. And still the beast grew. He roared and shattered the mans eardrum. He studied the movements of his prey at night and the man became blind. Soon the man could not contain the enormity of the beast, so he took an axe and split his own head in two. The beast spilled out and ate the man. Only then could the man sleep tight.

Content

MY YEARS WERE THE cartoons best, and Im not bragging. The action figures and the lunch boxes, the videos and the web site, the books and the clothing line: my reign. There was talk of a Harlan cologne. If theres money changing hands, arent you bound to get some? Not if you had the job every kid in America wanted, would have paid to have. Not if your father had given term limits a whole new meaning by getting sentenced to three to five at Ainsville in the middle of his fourth year in Congress and you wanted to stay the hell out of the papers by not suing. And not if your vocal cords were sitting on a fault. The fault is in control, not you. You wouldnt buy a house on the edge of a known mudslide.

You should feel fortunate. Well-wishers consoled me in an odd way. Youve held out a lot longer than the other Harlans. It was true. At fourteen, I had three seasons as the voice of the postapocalyptic rodent of questionable phylum. Was he rat? The animators were not permitted to say. Gold Street Productions said most definitely not. A rat is a pest. Rats bring plague. But look at the ears, the snout with buckteeth for gnawing, the way he chattered his incisors when he was glad. Marsupial, Gold Street said when pressed. But mostly Harlan was a boy. And this was what my contract enjoined: stay a boy.

Dont you think we should take our finger out of the dike? My mother brought a thicker towel to drape over my head while I inhaled chamomile and steam, a home remedy I got from a former Harlan who said he bought himself six more episodes with the prescription. Sweat from my forehead dripped back into the pot. Dike gave me an unwanted hard-on.

She ducked her head under the towel. Can you breathe?

A little.

We dont need the money. According to her. On my mothers government salary we barely paid rent. My golden pipes were settling Dads legal bills, maintaining our home back in Canton, where there was a ramblerbought to establish residencyand a garage with a rusting hoop, just waiting for us to come and die, she said. Id never been to Canton, but that didnt keep me from calling it home. My mother had never been there either before the campaign. She even refused to pronounce the name. She called it can-TON, as though it were a province of China. Still, I tried to convince her to pay off the mortgage. We needed a place where no one would know us.

I came out from under the towel and went in the bathroom to scrub Phisoderm into zits. Looking in the mirror was a disturbing thing to do, but Mom stepped up behind me.

Women are going to love you when youre older. Girls thought I was queer. Wanna go for a walk?

I sort of do and I sort of dont. My voice spanned three octaves.

We could go to a four oclock movie after.

We could go see Dad. I couldnt have meant the suggestion. I never visited Ainsville. She hated it too.

Wanna help paint the dining room?

Im painting Andres dining room.

I made some ice tea. The bathroom was tight, covered top to bottom in wallpaper with a pattern that gave the illusion of a palm forest growing in around you, my fathers remodeling before going into Ainsville. He wanted Morocco. I saw the trees fall in around me, the vines from the ceiling lower, knotting into rope collars.

Youll go straight to Andres? She followed me to the door. There was another attack. In the woods. Behind Carter Baron.

That was a gang war.

Youll be home for dinner?

I headed down the walk. Probably eat there.

Its more fun at Andres.

I zipped my windbreaker, foraging the lint and wrappers in my pockets for gum. I walked with my head down, navigating by the tar and cracks in the asphalt. Andre and I stopped being friends in the fall when, inexplicably, he became good-looking. By the middle of the year, he told me I couldnt sit anywhere near him in hockey carpool, even if the only available seat happened to be next to him. So I contorted myself into the back-back of the Toyota wagon with my equipment and ill-fitting pads sticking out the neck of my jersey, while Andre whipped his head around, thinking I was going to try to touch him. I wasnt going to Andres. I was heading downtown to the War Memorial, for some peace in the exhibit in the crypt, to nod hello to my friends who worked the MIA/POW booths and never remembered me, to run for ice tea and egg rolls while they sold patches and YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN stickers in the rain, decades after the war had ended.

The Mall was empty because of the Tree Murders. I shuffled across the grass to the white path and came to the directory of the dead and missing. I looked up anybody, then walked down into the exhibit to weep with the other weepers, pretending my father was among the thousands of dead. I scanned over the names until I got to the one I picked. Then I reached up my hand. I always came apart at that moment. This was a place for grief and I had plenty. I was ugly. Id lose my job. My family was a disgrace. The girls I loved were always lost to me, hidden behind the providence of athletically promising boys. Everything cried out of me. I knew nothing about these souls who stepped on mines or bailed out of planes during secret bombing raids. And I rarely thought of them. Almost always, someone stepped up to help. Once, a guy in a Hells Angels jacket put me on his shoulders so I could touch a name. Someone else offered to make a rubbing, no charge. A woman gave me Kleenex. Everybody said God bless you. Hardly ever did anyone ask questions. Though I did tell some kids on a field trip from Tennessee that a name was my father, my voice wobbling and cracking. But it didnt matter because thats what a voice is supposed to do at the Wall. Today, a guy with no legs rolled over. He held my hand as I wept and pointed up toward the name Private Princeton Dagman. All that cryings gonna make you blind, boy, the guy said. I rubbed my sore eyes. But I started up again and cried so hard I thought my eyes would wash right out of me onto the guys lap, two eggs sunny-side up.

Mom was in front of the TV when I got home, leaning forward instead of turning it up. Some bow hunters had quite a shock as they crept through the woods near Fort De Russey and found two house painters dangling from the trees. Their torsos were gone, connected to their lower and upper bodies by nothing but backbone, ice-pick punctures covering what was left of them. Their eyes bulged in an expression of terror, how they must have looked as they died. A preliminary autopsy revealed massive infection throughout the remains, bacteria sweating through the skin, gangrene setting in immediately. Nearly wound for wound, the killings mimicked the other attacks in the Palisades. Police pulled over every gray van in the city. My mother wouldnt leave the TV. She watched the story she already knew again and again. All the usuals were rounded up: the homeless park dwellers, the veterans with restraining orders, the gun show enthusiasts, the parole violators. All sorts of leads were followed. But the police remained clueless in pinpointing a killer.