The line between what is already food and what will not be is either rigid or soft. I know with certainty that it exists. In moments of extremity, it glows like a bar of neon light. Sometimes its bounds are decided by my body, stubborn, for example, in the coughing up of a milky paste of plaster and false grass. It leaves a lack inside like a knot that refuses to dissolve or digest, a knot lodged a bit too high in the chest, pressing against the lungs and heart as they try to push themselves out.
You can also live an entire life thinking something inedible until, one day, you find yourself gnawing on it, like a person still asleep.
Captain Robert Falcon Scott sat in a small sled hauled by dogs, headed for a far distal point. He was to travel from the shore at one end of Antarctica to the geographic South Pole, the point at which the earth’s axis of rotation meets its surface. He did this in order to become the first person to do so. It did not bother him that the earth wobbles, that the point toward which he was headed was not precise but rather a sort of consensus on where the center should be if the world were sturdy. It did not bother him that the other men complained bitterly and told each other that the number of dogs, provisions, and sleds would fail to suffice.
It did bother him, somewhat, that his was not the only party headed toward the pole, and that Amundsen’s crew was rumored to be both hardy and well-supplied. Scott’s men groaned.
“In a world in which the number of firsts available to mankind grows ever more paltry…,” Captain Robert Falcon Scott said to the crunch of ice and gasping of the dogs, the sound of air emptying from lungs, “the accomplishment of firstness is sufficient reward in and of itself…. We shall have salted pork for supper…. I am afraid the return journey is going to be dreadfully tiring and monotonous.”
Earlier on, the rabbits were tame. Later, it became clear where they stood in relation to myself, in our tiny food chain of only two links — theirs and mine. When I turned my back, the rabbits would become curious, move closer, encamp themselves in the crook of my knee or elbow. They scattered as soon as I looked at them directly, fleeing to the corners, where they piled seven or eight high, climbing one another, each trying to be the farthest from me. Our fear of each other was asymptotic: time eked out a flattening in how much we could care about killing or being killed, eating or being eaten, and this numbness was a way of understanding each other. We gave up in order to know more. And so I fell asleep and would wake beneath a cover of rabbits, eat rabbit while rabbits played around me, and care for them, keeping them clean and giving them names I would immediately forget.
Experts claim that starvation differs from hunger in several respects. As the stomach begins to atrophy, the phenomenal experience of hunger grows milder, less urgent, even as the chances for acquiring food to cure the nutritional deficit grow slim. “Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered,” wrote Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. In many ways, I am better suited to answer this question than anyone else, which makes me an expert in rabbit starvation. But as I become more knowledgeable, there is less I can say, shifting between a dizzying sense of freedom and a dizzying sense of sickness. In this way, starvation is not altogether unlike thinking, insofar as both processes leave the subject feeling less full, progressively, at all times.
I had a dream I was lying in a very soft bed on a very soft pillow and around me was a blanket that I was chewing on, absently, like a baby chews on its own thumb, but when I woke up I found it was a rabbit I was chewing on, or rather a couple of rabbits, and I felt embarrassed, but mostly tired.
On the open tundra you can see someone approaching from five to ten miles away, dependent on weather conditions, the elevation of the viewer, and the curvature of the earth. Once you see them beginning to approach, you discover it takes forever for them to arrive. Early on, the slowness of their progress put me in a fever state. Who might it be? When they make themselves known, what will they say? Are they the threat I have been watching for? There was nothing to do from this position but ask oneself over and over again: What could that be, making its way so slowly from the horizon to my burrow? Will they arrive? Will they change course? A diet of questions is a steady way to shed weight, and health, and contentment. Now I know that it will not make a difference who it is, which is an attitude that takes the edge off but does not at all alter the fact that this edge is connected to a knife. The sky is blue as always, and today it is scored by a small figure heading toward me — with supplies? With word from the experts at the central base? With a flag to plant at my feet?
Knowing is a weak food, and watching is a weak food, and a figure on the horizon is a weak food destined to weaken with knowledge, as at all times we walk on a thin layer, tread our way toward the far reach, and so on.
You, Disappearing
When I went downstairs this morning and found Cookie missing, I knew that official emergency procedure called for me to phone all the information in to the Bureau of Disappearances. At the prompting of the prerecorded voice, I would enter my social security number and zip code. I would press 2 to report the sudden absence of an animal, 3 for “domestic animal,” and then at the sound of the tone I would speak the word “cat” clearly and audibly into the telephone receiver. The woman’s voice would then give a short parametric definition of a cat, and if this definition matched my missing item, I could press the pound sign to record a fifteen-second description. A three-note melody would let me know that my claim had been filed, and then that lovely prerecorded voice would read out my assigned case number, along with some instructions on how to update or cancel my claim.
Instead, I picked up the phone and pushed your number into it. I was always telling you about problems you couldn’t fix, as though multiplying badness could dilute it.
Cookie’s gone, I said, and waited for your response.
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
Have you phoned it in? you asked. Your voice was casual, like it was someone else’s pet entirely, a pet from a faraway land owned by people we’d never meet.
I didn’t, I said. I’m kind of depressed, I added. I was often depressed, but now we all had better reasons to be.
I’m sorry, you said back.
Cookie loved to chew on wires, I said.
I know, you said. You didn’t say you wished you could be here. I didn’t say it either.
There was nothing more to say. I hung up the phone. Sometimes I dialed you back right away just to hear you pick up and know that your hands were, at that very moment, resting on a chunk of plastic that threaded its way delicately to me over hundreds of miles of wire and cord. To know that even though your voice had disappeared, you had not yet. But recently I hadn’t been allowing myself any callbacks. I was getting more afraid of the day when you wouldn’t pick up.