SIGHING FROM ABOVE
One winter, I bought a Tamagotchi angel in a Chinatown market. The angel lived in a little plastic cloud made somewhere in an industrial zone in Southeast Asia, quite far from the Chinatown I found it in. There was a two-dimensional floor over which my two-dimensional angel floated in front of a dark star on a camouflage-green screen. It was made of seventy or so pixels that seldom changed except to animate a bounce, a smile or frown, or a teardrop over its forehead, which signified that it was sick and dying. It wore a flowing robe, like the angels of all the garage sale paintings my grandmother collects, and had a small halo and two wings. My angel moved around its inch by inch screen, hopping, shitting, and begging for angel food. I gave it a shot whenever it was sick (it was always sick). When the little teardrop appeared at the corner of its head, I had to toggle one of the three buttons on my plastic cloud to retrieve the shot. After I would administer the medicine, my angel would quickly be restored to good health, to holiness, and so the small imperfection of my universe — the declining health of my angel — was corrected until it shit on the floor once again, and I had to clean it up using a separate but similarly enacted function.
After a few weeks, I started to think my angel had mixed feelings about being my angel despite my faithful attention to its every need. I had mixed feelings about it too, especially as my life became increasingly consumed with its care. I began to feel that my days feeding and tending to such a simple computer program of so few actions (sleep, eat, shit, get sick, die) were being wasted. If computers don’t eat, why should a Tamagotchi? Moreover, I wasn’t sure this was “appropriate behavior” for an adult. I had supposed at the time that it was a theological question, what’s appropriate with regard to interfacing with angels, and therefore beyond me. I had very little knowledge of religion, but what I did know made me uncomfortable. An angel, made of light much like mine was made of light, led the only credible insurrection against the Christian God, until he too shit in his plastic cloud and was hurled into the underworld. Perhaps my Tamagotchi was a little underworld unto itself and my angel was actually the latest incarnation of Satan, our most famous herald of the Lord. I wondered if my tedium was some contrapasso earned in a life before a death I’d forgotten I’d suffered. The crude but nevertheless spitting image of an angel, the angel of darkness, the inverse of his earlier life in the upper echelon, the silver jet of a totalizing, incomprehensible power that hangs above us, like the sun, obtained in a plastic egg I kept in my pocket.
A few weeks after I got my angel, I rode the J train to a friend’s apartment in Bushwick for dinner. It was the end of spring but the temperatures still hovered in the mid-fifties. In this refrigerated May, my Tamagotchi angel’s behavior slowed down to a crawl, punctured only occasionally by shouts for food, for a shot, for a cleaning after it messed on its screen. My heater was broken so when my friend invited me over to dinner I figured this was the perfect opportunity to warm my angel up.
Angels eat so fast — nothing is ever enough. No matter how filling the meal might be, however complex (think about food as necessary fuel on the molecular level — but also as metaphysical splendor, food for the sempiternal kingdom arisen over us), it is never enough.
We watched the Food Network “for inspiration” while we cooked. Guy Fieri gnawed on the charred leg of a hog at a Texas BBQ. The meat industry is relentlessly excluded from our experience of its service: Guy doesn’t show where the pig sleeps, but we can assume the machine isn’t gentle when it handles her. My favorite chef, Gordon Ramsay, once said that someday restaurants will only sell atmosphere. In a reversal of his prediction, now that atmosphere is food. As a subject a hog is not atmospheric; in fact its presence is so excessively physical that it must be hidden from our experience of its flesh. Fieri renders it such in the theatrics of his consumption: the largesse of its death becomes a tribute to the life it gives, excessively, in the mouth of Guy. I stared at the TV while my friend tenderized the beef with a hammer.
I think you could fit this moment into a poem by Evan Kennedy, though he would likely reshape it into a wholly different poetics out of which one city might be posited against the backdrop of another, encircled in angels like wireless internet, the one I most want to live in, a kind of San Francisco of the sky. I am the most social animal in this city, I go from apartment to apartment for dinner and drinks, for sleeping around, for communing with the saints. But not to digress, there’s this poem by Evan that I found online in which he writes,
as I’m betting I’ll make that
heaven my home, and have an eye
for it and ear for it, rather both
eyes and ears for it and my own, as
we’re not opining that we’ll stay
these beasts,
I suddenly felt myself among those beasts, there in that unencumbered logic of dreams, years back at the Best Western in Savannah, Georgia, where I hid away for a long time and spent my nights and days listening to La Monte Young recordings and an audio file of Alice Notley reading “At Night the States” on repeat. In Savannah, I watched a lot of Gordon Ramsay, too. I thought about this gilded cult to which he belonged: the hovering system that coordinates the sexless angels whose lack of an anus indicates they don’t eat, yet the presence of mouths, which I suppose are their right only as enunciation, all made of light anyway so what does it matter, suggests we might put a hamburger there and see what happens. I’m betting I’ll make their heaven my home, some gold-leafed atopia linked by tramway back down to earth, below us the size of a blue M&M lost in black cloth. Do Tamagotchi angels have stomachs? I asked my Tamagotchi angel. I put my hand on my own to feel the movement within and confirm that I was still alive.
At the Best Western, the same where Paula Deen ran her first restaurant, The Bag Lady, I spent my afternoons sitting in a dark room, watching the TV glow with Food Network personalities at the center of the room. The living faces of America’s top chefs smiled, hovered there, and I searched their expressions for signs of my own coming transcendence, for reconciliation with this tearful world. It was like going to church. The smell of Paula’s fried chicken, then unknown to the rest of the country, wafted up from the kitchen below, and I often went to bed dizzy with hunger, the TV humming in the background.