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I was, above all other things, a woman with a situation. A hard, looming truth had been rubbed into me like a curative ointment, the kind that leaves its faint, crusted mark for good. To get to the point: I weathered a foreshortened family, I endured what were to become the battered last days of a life I was sure I'd barely live to regret.
 All of us were in the future, where we belonged. It actually was the future--a period of time that so embodied what we thought the future would be like that the government had to replace the term with a new one, "fufier," in order to designate the grim, impending series of events that have not yet occurred. Those were the years of corporate oligarchy, of videophonic telephones, meat tablets and robot hearts. Years of silver foil and mass, private flight. We were observed, things were expected of us, a green pill was created to help us remember when to take a certain blue pill. We did all the important things, and let the old and the sick work in The Factories. This was a time of sadly predictable oppression and digital surveillance. That what was most vital about our lives was recorded and stored on a government database was looked upon with such complex detachment that we often forgot it was there. We were, above all, children, barely fit for the sort of lives we led.
When we wanted meat, what we got was meat. When we wanted a morning constitutional, however, what we got was also meat. Meat, it appeared, was all there was left--great, heaping stacks of it, stored in icy towers at the center of the city, tended to by large men in white masks and rubber boots, wielding pitchforks and prods. We learned to shape the meat, to flavor it in such a way that we might not forget what it was like to taste an apple, say--to bite through the tense, ruddy skin which gave way to the sweet, tender center, the eye of the apple. This effect we could approach with spiced, cured ham, stuffed into a tough intestinal sack. Chocolate was hard to eat for those of us who could remember the real thing. Children, though, loved to chew upon the hard, brittle cubes of browned beef that came wrapped delicately in gold foil. Cheese was meat. Juice was meat. Porkcicles. Beefcicles. Baconcickles. This was the fulcrum from which our lives precariously swung.
Chocolate milk was still chocolate milk, but the chocolate, no longer chocolate but hard, shaved splinters of seasoned loin, had a sour, syrupy aftertaste--those of us who remembered called it simply "Chilk" in an effort to preserve the dignity of the earlier, more substantial drink. The children, though, took in Chilk whenever it was offered--how greedy they seemed, always clamoring like blind puppies to take the nozzle to their trembling, puckered lips.
The meat made us look different. We got fat for a while--years, actually--but then the fat left us, so that what we were left with were baggy flaps of limp, oily skin, whole bolts of extra body. We gathered this loose flesh in long, flat clips at our shoulders, so that the worst among us appeared to have wings.
The disappearance of a sustainable agriculture was a regrettable side effect of the Ministry of Air and Justice's efforts, in the years of Fud, to color the air, to advertise the act of breathing with pale, pastel tints that bloomed upon exhalation. The air dispersed by the Fud Bellows did not color the air as promised but ascended, instead, into the pathetic, overwrought stratosphere, gathering there in hard, dark, permanent clouds. Few of us, though, were sufficiently interested in what went on up there to bother complaining--it seemed foolish to continue with the charade that the sky was anything more than wasted space, a vast area that could be put to much better use.
Meanwhile, there was a man to whom I'd found myself married, and a child who we'd drawn up between us not long afterwards, like a bucket from a deep well. The three of us heaved away in a densely overpopulated studio apartment on the narrow, humid side of the city, the side whereat the clouds hung so low as to scrape glacially past our windows, carving dull swaths across the panes, so that what light we did get was diffuse, splotchy. The clouds frightened the child, Philip; when they passed he'd crawl inside the big panda suit and huddle in the doorframe. The panda suit, we'd taught him--it was soft and warm, like a blanket; something to make him feel safe, but the doorframe seemed particularly anachronistic; something he'd picked up, impossibly, from an old Civil Defense manual. We were disturbed by this behavior, and made every effort not to look at the child as he huddled there, shivering in the fur suit, while the passing clouds gently rocked the building.
My husband was a face attendant, unemployed. When he was working, his job was to stand next to his employer all day, emphasizing with slender, fluted face wands the four or five expressions that most clearly brought out the emotional state of the particular person. It was an exhausting practice, and one that had taken years to learn. He was, at the time, five months into his unemployment. Mostly, he stayed in bed.
Suddenly, and as always, it was morning.
"I'm hungry," Philip said. He was standing next to the bed, clutching his belly theatrically.
"Go down and pour yourself some puffs, chief."
"The puffs are gone."
"I'll make you something later."
"But the food is going away," he said. "There might not be any left later."
"Get dressed," I called out, still half blind from sleep, striking at the air.
"Mother, the food."
I went downstairs. The food was, indeed, going away. The shelves were largely bare--the only indication that food had ever been stored there at all were the dark, mottled, angular stains left by the feet of the plastic containers in which the food was packed. The food that was left was just barely there, dim and shadowy, nearly impossible to hold.
We had been warned about the half-life of food. The Fud Bellows were blamed; we had accepted this and forged ahead.
I told my husband that the food was disappearing. I adjusted the pillow under his head and told him that we would be back soon with more. He looked up at me, put a cool hand on my thigh. I needed to shave, he said. Please shave before you go, he said.
"You're not going to try it today, are you?" I said.
He said no. He would not try it.
"I put everything away. All the sharp things, the colorful things. Anything that would tempt you," I said.
He said that, yes, he knew. He said he felt safe just curled up in the big bed.
I cut myself shaving. Actually, it is not accurate to say that I cut myself shaving, because I had not yet begun to shave when I cut myself, and the part that got cut was not my leg but the top of my finger. I reached out for the razor and the top of my left middle finger came off like a pat of butter cleaved from the stick.
I stood in front of the mirror for a good while, holding the newly wounded hand in front of me, fingering with my thumb the lopsided hood of flesh that hung from the tip of my finger. I looked at my hand until it looked like someone else's hand. Blood welled up in the wound quickly, and I dressed it tightly with toilet paper.
I looked down at the fine brown hairs on my naked thigh. Though they faced downward, hung, rather, they appeared instead to be advancing on me, climbing towards my most vulnerable parts. I had only ever shaved the legs so that the men I let fumble around in my vicinity would pass their chunky, yellowing hands over them, knead them assuredly in the night. I slipped on a pair of green dungarees, spotting the waistband with blood from the soaked toilet paper.
I put Philip in a bright orange snowmobile suit. This was difficult with only one good hand. Philip always wore the snowmobile suit when we went out because it had handles, one on each arm and a big one that doubled as a shoulder strap across the back. We occasionally needed to handle Philip--there was no other way.
"Will we have chocolates?" Philip asked.
"We'll see." There was no difference, nutritionally, between chocolates and, say, broccoli anymore--the withholding of sweets had been stripped of its former power. Most parents persevered, however, believing that there was something instructional about the denial of pleasure.
There were people outside, sitting on the stoop, huddled against each other for warmth. Some of them were wearing intricate suits made from torn, soiled cardboard. They looked up uniformly as I drew back the screen into its fitted slot. We did not talk to the people, and they did not talk to us. Sometimes, when we had some and only after I'd put Philip on the bus for school, I would scatter hard crusts of bread out into the yard, and they would crouch there, gathering the bits in their gloved hands when they were convinced I was no longer looking.
I had no bread. The bread had vanished. I showed them the empty sacks we were bringing to the meat tower. They nodded and made room for us to pass by.
We came to the road, which was glazed over in ice. In its reflection we saw the clouds lurching heavily towards the center of town, noisily grazing the tops of buildings.
"Put on your skates, chief," I said.
"I can run on ice." The boy put forth a small, booted foot, making as if to dash across the slippery surface.
"Philip."
"I can. I can run on ice."
"Do you want me to pick you up by the handle?"
"No Mother. Don't pick me up by the handle."
"Then you should put on your skates."
The boy collapsed to the ground and lay there for a while, face down. I turned away, tightening the buckle on my mittens. The left mitten strained against the toilet paper compress, within which throbbed the disabled hand. I could not remember whether or not gangrene was still a real disease, or what its symptoms were. There would be a blackening, I imagined, a loss of feeling, cramps. I would know when it came.
After a short time, the boy righted himself and slowly put on the skates. We started down the road towards the center of town, towards the meat towers.
"Mother?"
Yes, I answered.
"Is father right?"
"Right? In what matter?"
"Right in his head?" The boy looked up at me through the mask of the snowmobile suit, nothing but two distressingly large eyes peering through the embroidered eyeholes. It seemed a strange question. "You mean, is he safe?"
"Yes. Is he safe or is he getting ready to go away?"
"Philip, why are you talking like this?"
"Sometimes he crawls. On the floor, like a cat. He crawls all around the house and makes cramping noises, like he's trying to poop. Does that mean he is getting ready to go away?"
"Of course not. Perhaps he's just looking for something. Perhaps he's lost something, and he's upset, rooting around in the carpet pile for it. You would be upset if you lost something in the carpet, wouldn't you? I've heard you making some funny sounds too, young man, down there on all fours, searching for so-and-so's silver missile arm." But even as I said these words I did not believe them--they seemed to appear in the air before us, wispy as tin foil. I knew that my husband was getting ready to go.
"You're wrong," the boy said, circling in on my carefully concealed doubt. "Cradio's Father did the same thing before he went away. He crawled around on the floor in circles, and the circles kept getting smaller and smaller until he was as little as a finger, and then he was gone."
"It wasn't the same. Your father is not going anywhere."
"You're wrong."
To try to refute him would be to amplify the lie, to give it real weight, so I simply squeezed his hand and we continued on towards the meat tower, the enormous dorsal fin of which loomed ahead in the distance, casting a deep, expressive shadow over the road.
"I want him to go," Philip said, huffing pale clouds of condensed breath. "I don't like to have him in that room, always crawling and putting his mouth on my toys."
"I don't want to hear that kind of talk, Chief."
"But you tell me to tell you how I'm feeling, no matter what."
"That is not a feeling, Chief."
We looked at the apples inside the fruit tent at the base of the meat tower. They were thick and hopeful in our hands; they felt healthy, as if in taking a bite one could inch closer to some more wholesome state. I let Philip put the apples in the canvas sack, along with the taffy brick and the brittle husks of corn, all painstakingly prepared from various cured meats. Philip was quiet--he put the items into the bag without looking at them, as if to look would be to reveal some fragile, thinly guarded secret.
I put the bag in the brushed aluminum bin of the scale. My finger hummed inside the bloody mitten. The husband, the man who withered away his days in our house, among our toys, our things, shamelessly, openly, as if the objects he surrounded himself with did not take an active role in the quiet conspiracy of his own mind, had gray eyes, the grayest eyes I'd ever seen. They had a way of taking in the whole room at once, which was confusing and frustrating when the one thing I wanted was for him to concentrate on what was going on closest to his face. In some ways, it was easy to understand, already, what he would be like after he was dead.
The apples tumbled around in the sack, shaking the rickety scale, and as it shimmied there next to the cash register I noticed that Philip was gone. The farmer pointed towards the meat tower, beneath which several guards had gathered. They cupped their hands to their faces, shouting up to the top of the tower, where Philip clung.
"Just let go easily," they called up. "You'll slide down. You won't be hurt."
Philip did not move. He pressed his face into the cool, marbled beef. He was trying to make himself faint. This was what he did instead of crying. He was high up, into the slender neck of the tower, where the meat was frozen, its surface caked over with shining, granular frost.
"What's he doing?" one of the guards asked.
"Might be hungry," the other guard answered, and then, shouting, "Hello? We can give you food down here, buddy. Lots of, like, chocolate for you? Candy canes, fudge bars, the whole shot."
"Your hands are going to freeze right off, champ," the other one joined in. "Or, you'll get your hands permanently stuck. We'll have to--I'll tell you, we're going to have to cut big cubes of meat where your hands are, and that meat will be permanently attached to you, so then you'll have to go to school with these, like, big hunks of meat all over your hands."
"No one's going to want that," said the other one.
"No sir. You'll be known as the boy with meat for hands. At school--everywhere. They'll look at you and point and say 'hey, isn't that the boy with meat for hands?' And they'll know you're the one because of the big mittens you'll have to wear to cover up the rotting chunks of meat."
"Big mittens, son. Burlap mittens."
Philip responded by burrowing his head further into the meat. He was up to his ears. Even from where I stood, I could see his little fingernails going white with concentration.
I started towards the tower. I remember thinking clearly that this was the time during which something motherly should come to me. I should have been able to conjure up a string of delicate, loving phrases that would turn Philip into an obedient boy, a soft pastry of a child who would loosen his grip just enough to drop contritely to the foot of the tower and bury his small head, fiery with apology, in my lap. But all that came out of me was air, water, heat--the elements of speech but without the speech itself, as if my head had not come with a proper instruction manual, or had not read the one with which it was issued. Suddenly it was as if I no longer had a head at all, as if my body had always held in suspicion the organ that had commanded it with Manichean accuracy for all these years, and the ugly, perforated case in which it was housed, and a wholesale rejection was, just then, coming to light.
As Philip lost consciousness and began to slide down the slick face of the meat tower, slowly, comically, like a drunk collapsing on a greasy lamppost, the men below advancing with slow, lumbering steps, wielding orange safety blankets and oxygen machines, I thought about my husband, lying there on the bed, how long he had been there, how we would find him, later that day, after having put away the groceries, lying on the bed, in the same position that we'd left him, his face gruesomely split in half, a small, blue handgun nestled in the twisted sheets, still warm, the contents of his head spread out across the pillows like an anatomical diagram--how, even with this degree of detail, the events of his life would remain so distant and abstract to us as never to have really happened at all.
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