On one side of the room, there are those who want to project to others that they know a thing or two about food. They gesticulate passionately, because it makes them look Italian and therefore more authentic. For these people, a familiarity with the intricacies of this vintage and that, or that culinary term and this, is a social currency, a desperate token of status, a class-struggle in a cocktail glass. On the other side of the room, there are those who never even think about what they are eating, where it came from, and what that means. To them food is fuel and man is a machine. Whenever I find myself in such a room, I am grateful for the plastic explosives that I keep wrapped around my torso. At an appropriate point in the conversation, I excuse myself and go outside to have a cigarette. I always listen for the sound of a martini glass as I walk down the middle of the road. If you get the timing right, it can land on top of the rubble and not break. The more re-bar the slimmer your chances. But it is true, that sufficiently fine cement rubble can cradle a falling glass, so that breaking it becomes almost impossible. Ping! I find that ironic, but my friend tells me it’s not ironic. She says it’s just funny. It’s how I roll.
Like you, I wander through this life trying to make sense of it all. I search for patterns in everything; in the way people behave, in the way civilizations rise and fall, in the logic of evolution, and even in my own search for patterns. And with not a lot of originality, but with what I think has been a fairly unforgiving discipline, I’ve come to rest on the interim conclusion, that we are merely the consequence of a large number of cell divisions that might just as easily have never happened. There is no god to play the role of father to me – one with whom I can whisper as I walk through valleys of death and otherwise. I am alone, and, objectively speaking, my life is meaningless. I doubt my own, and everyone else’s ability to accept this as the truth.
It’s a well-worn cliché, among those that match Moleskins and turtle-necks, that in a meaningless world, all is equally meaningful. It is logically perfect, but like an antonym, it shackles you as it sets you free. It makes as much sense to devote your life to medicine as it does to join the circus – so join the circus! But when you paint your own face, it never feels like your face. Some point to the heart’s refusal to enjoy cupcakes in gas-chambers as evidence of a deeper compass. One we ignore, in our ignorance. But here be mucky paddocks. So we stand at the end of logic, like an asphalt highway out of Port-au-Prince, cleaved by reality. Before us the abyss, behind us the two-way street of our ambitions. And not much has happened since. Every erection soon becomes the resurrection and falls under its own weight. The prostitutes in torn lingerie and baseball caps wonder if the infinite can be filled with the corpses of equally infinite gods. I look in, but still can’t see the bottom.
And yet it is a beautiful summer’s day on the edge of black. As we wait, the locals set up food stands by the side of the road. So many people have gathered at this dead-end, for so long, that sustenance has become the necessity. In the dead dark emptiness of my mind, the perfume of honey gives some relief, the intense corn-taste of a tamale distracts me, the clean purity of fresh hamachi makes me laugh. And of course laughter is ridiculous in this context. People turn from their despondency and look at me – as you might look at a fool, a child of simple understanding, with a mixture of pity, scorn and envy. I look at the chef who has betrayed me. Two small circles of sunlight sear from just below his hairline, as if life dropped two pixels. He is without ambition. He is completely here with me now, and all these people on the edge of a dead-end highway towards a broken north. He is completely: a man who cuts raw fish. An inflatable orange lifesaver thrown to where two hands fell into gray. I am the one who tasted the raw fish. I laugh, again, because for a moment I honestly truly did forget that hole in the middle of the. I swim through ever-lighter shades of blue because I know that I did taste the what in the what that who’d he and me though I don’t know how. This much we share. And simply sharing that much makes me happier. Orange wrapped around my torso.
Others gather around the site of my second laugh. They grab at the fish and eat it. Some bring loaves. Experts emerge and gesticulate. I slip further and further away from the wooden bench that did not smell of fish. Cleaving backwards into the crowd, the chef’s eyes catch mine. Negotiation is fading him. His hands move faster than either of us can see. Around the stall, big men push out their chests and women cut each other with lacerating glances. Outside the growing mass, I see, a simpleton offering a woman a fish he himself caught in the river. Its head has been beaten into meat. Blood runs through its scales like red finger nails through silver coins. It glitters. She is impressed. He grabs her ass.
