I knew my mind, and it was strange. It disagreed with my body, and my body struggled to get away. Amazingly, wherever my body went, my brain went too, barking, “No meat for you!” Forced to obey, my flesh got its revenge by growing sea monkeys under my skin and refusing to get out of bed. I was living pallid in Paris when my mother surprised everyone by dying first. After that, I got sick of being sick. So I quit being vegetarian and started chomping down chickens with a cheerful “fuck you!” to the medical establishment. I lost twenty pounds in three months eating roasted birds, making up for twenty years of tofu, broccoli, and brown rice, “healthy” foods that, against all logic, made me sickly and obese.
And I was happy as I laughed without mirth, a laugh filling a body exulting as it animated flesh not of my flesh, the body and blood of the animal, a communion that transmutes water into wine and makes hot dogs, pork rinds, and buffalo wings a refuge of the sacred. Give thanks. It died for you. I was the killer of the sacred lamb, a sticker of the devil’s spawn, a milker of cows and the executioner’s song. I was a creature living in a damaged world that I could not heal. Why not? Let us not mince words: when we eat, we kill. Nothing lives in the stomach except death and fear.
This I learned after traveling the world, by myself, a girl with fallen arches and no sense of direction.
This I understood after my physician grandfather and his Middle of Five Daughters sickened with cancer in their stomachs.
Elderly, he did not resist. His end was peaceful. My mother was younger than most who will read these words. She got angry. It didn’t change the outcome. My death, when it comes, will be different. Because they both really died of regret, “if only . . .” gnawing away at their souls until finally, it consumed their bodies too.
“If” is the most dangerous word in the English language. It is the portal to lost dreams.
I studied the carcasses exposed by my teeth, mulled the pathways that brought them to my plate, and asked myself, could I take a life to serve my needs? But of course. It is childish to pretend otherwise. With every step we take, we destroy a universe. To ants, we are Beelzebub and Kali rolled into one: a towering free-range demon dancing on their graves. To flies, we are the Brave Little Tailor, capable of flattening seven in one blow. To wildlife, we are the Great Exterminator, eradicating untold billions of grain-stealing sparrows so vegetarians can boast that they’re not cruel to animals. Each exhalation of breath releases a hallelujah of poisons into the air. Every poopy diaper injects lush microbes into waters drunk by babes in the woods. Only dead things don’t kill on purpose. They only kill by accident.
Contrary-wise, I now insist on eating birds and mammals, preferably wild ones shot by the man I love but won’t marry, their bodies made into meat by our hands joined together. I don’t feel guilty about it, sez the girl for whom a bee sting is lethal. Death is the promise. It is an ineluctable truth, for Nature is a murderous mother offering food everywhere we look. I can’t pretend to be one with Her as I tromp up bleak mountains, tracking deer in hopes of filling the winter’s larder. Instead, I look at the sheltering sky and think, humbly and with gladness, I stand beneath the heavenly roof of God’s yawning mouth. When it closes, if it closes, it becomes the maw of Hell. When? Today? Tomorrow? Oh, but Apocalypse Now was thirty years ago. The fear rises. The hymns swell. I am hungry. Such is the human condition. We hope and despair, rejoice and revile, celebrate and curse the profane absurdity of being apes rigged up in angel’s wings.
Angels don’t eat. Apes covet meat.
I’m no angel. Not before, and not after. For I can walk, and run, and go places my father cannot on shriveled legs made of bone as he sits, peaceably, letting the light of God shine from his face.
He is a spiritual man.
I am neither.
A Kormic Explanation
“How is my grammar?” asked the yellow hen, anxiously. “Do I speak quite properly, in your judgment?”
—Billina the Yellow Hen, from Frank L. Baum, Ozma of Oz, 1907
This is a love story for grownups. There is sex, death, and snoring. A happy ending is not guaranteed. And so, it is a story about hunting. The real kind that starts with hunger and ends with guts being spilled.
Let’s start at the beginning.
The first year that I’d spent in the capital city of France, I was conducting dissertation research on a dutifully obscure topic interesting to five people in the world, all of whom enjoy arguing a great deal about it. Along with all the other university students, I was living in the 5th arrondissement on the kind of money that turns up under the couch cushions. Fellowships from private institutions paid for these trips, but the sums were barely enough to support a cat, let alone cover rent and food for a human being. I didn’t care. Still in my twenties, I was young enough that starving in attics seemed a perfectly reasonable way to live. I was Mimi in La Bohème! George Orwell in Down and Out in London and Paris! How lucky could I be? Not only was I living in the actual attic of a five-story walkup, but my neighbor wore a black beret and slunk around with a Gaulois dangling from his scowling lips, just like the evil French henchmen in the Flint movies.
Lest you think that I am exaggerating my delight, consider these interesting details about my building. When I opened my door, I greeted a tubby, sparkling-white, pink-nosed cat. Every day, rain or shine, she came and waited quietly on my doorstep until I let her in. She’d march ponderously around the perimeter of the entire room, look at me, meow loudly just once, settle onto the bed, and go to sleep. I’d get dressed, toss Mimi back out the door, and head out for the day. No one knew who owned her. I had no idea why she insisted on visiting me every day.
On the wall between the stairwell and my doormat, there was a small locked door about the size of a fuse box. One day, as I trudged up the stairs, I was surprised to find a queue of workmen lining up in front of this miniature portal, then leaning over and disappearing into it, one by one. When my turn came to go through, I held back and peeked: inside, there was a staircase snaking up to a storage space beneath the rafters. The workmen were turning this triangular wedge into an apartment. A few weeks later, a new tenant moved in: she was a Japanese student half my height and unnervingly silent.
The pup tent had no bathroom or plumbing. At the top of the staircase, there was a chemical toilet.
As the months wore on, I realized that the old ladies who lived in the building couldn’t tell me apart from the midget camping in the rafters. It was as if my imagination had vomited up the fetal twin of my subconscious and turned her into a pigeon pooping on my pretentions. It was a real-life version of the filthy joke about the rented outhouse and the television (if you don’t know it, I’m not going to tell you), but it all boils down to this: when the conversations literally go over your head, be grateful that the joke isn’t on you.
Every evening, after I’d finished chasing down documents in the archives, I’d go for my daily constitutional in the Jardin des Plantes across the street. To the great amusement of the gardeners, I would run in large circles, treating the plant beds as if they were an outdoor racetrack. They could not understand why anyone would want to go around and around through life, repeating the same route and getting nowhere at the same time, but it became a nightly ritual: me, jouncing past the