There was only one thing to do. I needed a box of my own.
When you are not in need of a box, the prospect of snaring one appears piddlingly easy and straightforward. Boxes abound, this world a surfeit of boxes. Packages fling themselves at you; in a pinch, you could scoop out the Styrofoam peanuts, feed them to the nearest lemur, and keep the box. The concentration of cardboard rivals that of atmospheric oxygen.
And yet, when bereft of a box, in a non-box-possessing state, the simple procurement of one becomes a staggeringly difficult obstacle, as I was soon to discover. I went to sources that I was sure would land me a live one: a moving company, a department store, a company that sold ready-for-school dioramas over the Web for obscenely lazy children. I figured I’d order a “Washington Crosses the Delaware,” rip out the Father of Our Country, the Popsicle-stick oars, and voilà. I told myself I’d be doing a good deed, since some kid would actually have to do work.
Not so fast. They’d been bought up by the world’s fastest-growing confetti concern, which ground up offbeat items — yachts, chocolate bunnies, erotic Victorian curios — and pressed them into little flakes for those disenchanted with mere papier.
“All the luck,” I lamented. Then I found a box lying outside on top of an orange rind atop a juniper bush, which was itself straddling a gin mill. I didn’t hesitate — I grabbed it, steeping my senses in its ablutional aromas.
Now, embracing my own box with the desperation of a man who wants to show off his fox-trot with his wife at a ballroom dance in order to impress his mistress who is fox-trotting with another man only to find that his mistress’s lover has invented a whole new variation called “the fox-gallop,” which is faster, more rhythmically impressive, and just plain groovaliciouser, I approached the original Box Man on the path.
By now, though, box toting was rampant. Everywhere you looked, there were men and women carrying boxes, boxes carrying men and women, and, most of all, boxes carrying one another, having done away with the middlemen, along with the appetites, petty jealousies, and other inconveniences that had gone with them. The box I was pursuing, I realized, was no longer the one that I had set out to find. I heard a chorus chanting, “This End Up! This End Up! This End Up!” getting closer and closer, but my view was occluded. And then it happened: I was swiftly inverted. Just like that, eye-to-eye with an ant, a divot — holy rhythm.
How sweet they felt, then, that first time it rained, the dolorous globules, reaching my head only after caroming off the long-suffering bottoms of my feet!
Internodium
Our talking is a kudzu of carotids in which we lose our marbles. Hours later, they tumble out as we are snoring, awakening us one at a time, hard little tumors we flick underneath one another. By morning, we lie like border states whose boundaries are rivers, anomalously straight, canals funded by nature.
When I get nervous near you it’s like a utility forms and hits a whole town with its too much. Everyone goes shed ‘n’ attic and unearths devices: those they need, those they never use, those borrowed and never returned, those they wish they’d borrowed and could thus return, those they don’t recognize, those whose uses they can’t fathom, those double-barreled ones that lend skulls cold spots, those too flimsy to withstand unearthing, those that served as stunt doubles for other devices once, in their heyday, those they don’t really need. But want. Among them: electric utensils, rodent rotators, epilepsy inducers, oars, spooling agents, laminators, pompadour replicators, run-on detectors, vaginal dredgers, mechanical fins, metronomic innards, palate ticklers, religious spatulae, hissiphones. Those that look burned but not flammable. Those that come off synthetic yet overripe. Those for pulling, for turning, for penetrating, for twisting and more. Thanks, we say, blushing, thanks. What they do with them is done, and then they are put gently back into their slots, slid onto the hooks and rafters, and eventually I can meet your gaze once more.
Next year starts my stint as anthropologist on that island where relationships and existential quandaries are thrashed out in small talk, and any mention of the weather or the pop diva’s latest gown makes the strongest rack with weeping.
Even the tolls adjust on our approach. You catch them trembling and think it a trick of light. Whatever we hand over, coughed and culled from cushiony crevices, is always “exact” and “change,” and still you clamp down, silent as mile markers, on one bald coin.
Whatever else we are, we are surely a beard that has convinced its owner to stop shaving. How long? No longer do we even notice the Unabomber comparisons, the razors orphaned in the snarl.
Urban Planning: Case Study Number Five
Write when you are starving. Write when you are sated. Write in the throes of eating — find a way, free up a hand between bites, intrachew. If all else fails, invent a new writing implement, half pen, half fork (to think the spork anything other than a mild innovation shows a paucity of imagination); then sweep a bite into your mouth, pausing only briefly before nose-diving right into the midst of your ongoing sentence, the one you left hanging between a dependent clause and an independent. Now, at last, the acts of eating and of writing have fused for you into a single four-pronged gesture, as they did for me long ago.
Truth be told, what food I have now makes a fork useless, barely holding together on the tines. Nowadays, I eat with my hands, manners be damned, though once they gleamed like a new set of steak knives. Who the hell would I try to impress, now, in this bombed-out husk of a building under a crumbling roof, sky streaming in through strung-together sheets of tar and salvaged Sheetrock, funneling water when it rains? Who will I impress — the occasional vagrant who wanders in, having sniffed out a human presence? Or the dark-eyed urchin who comes late afternoons in his second skin of tattered rags? Every day I set aside a few morsels for him to dissolve against his palate.
Sometimes, watching his frantic chewing, I pity him — he’ll never know what food can be. Yet at times I envy him for what he hasn’t known — pumpkin bisque lapping against an atoll of salsa, steam rising from fresh-torn coriander brioche au brocciu, rivulets of mango waiting beneath like buried treasure. He won’t know braised lamb shanks you’d swear were fruit, nor the quivering tangle of Singapore noodles, at once soft and crunchy, nor sesame chicken that winks with a thousand knowing iguana eyes. He’ll never witness the birth of naan, warm and glistening and mottled with birthmarks. He won’t know the translucent green of cabbage drizzled on sushi rice, nor the bolder greens of draped asparagus, nor the snarling green of a cauldron of wasabi. He’ll never burrow in the darkness of elk roulade stuffed with morels, nor come face-to-face with duck confit brindled with chilled open figs. He won’t know the suppleness of shrimp reincarnated on the tongue, nor the squid whose toughness demands that you chew with attention, a bracelet or belt. He won’t know the way smoke’s essence can penetrate polenta right down to the plate, nor ginger’s habit of loitering at the surface, forgotten till you trip over it. He’ll never know the golden, salty saxophone solo of a jiaozi dumpling, its scent nearly palpable as it makes its way across the room.