4
At the Sixty-Seventh Street entrance to the park, we could hear the faint clop of hooves and the jingle of carriages making the late-night loop.
Through the restaurant windows, waiters reset tables at Tavern on the Green, snapping open white tablecloths that billowed before settling over the round tops.
In the nearing distance stood the great black pool that was Sheep Meadow, bottomless.
There was a cessation of street noise once we crossed onto its grass, this stiffened by the iron air, so that the lawn, made vaster by the darkness, crunched beneath our feet.
I felt brave.
I was certain we all did.
We were beside ourselves, whispering and laughing, rousing ourselves, shushing each other, bashing into each other, not believing there would be a rendezvous, believing we were going to learn something.
That we had decided to accept this invitation was in and of itself some sort of triumph, since good sense dictated this was the last place we should’ve been at such an hour.
The ambient light was bright enough to illuminate a smudged outline of the man.
He was standing on the exposed rock, near the meadow’s tree line, a small outcropping atop this lake bed of grass that looked comparatively bleached.
He wore an overcoat that rounded his shoulders and had his hands stuffed in his pockets.
Atop his head, a hunting cap, brim folded up, that made his round face seem rounder.
His large glasses were tinted.
He was double-chinned, closer to tubby—thick, that is, but not hulking.
At the sight of us, he flapped the coat’s panels a couple of times—in greeting? He seemed utterly unruffled by the fact that he was outnumbered, a confidence that we could only attribute to his adulthood and was somehow unsettling.
It suggested an as yet unrevealed power—that he might, at any moment, spread his coat’s wings and take flight.
“You showed up,” he said.
Tanner, Cliff, and I stood in a loose crescent beneath the rocks, which made the man seem taller.
Oren squatted behind us, his elbows on his knees.
“Let’s hear it, man,” Cliff said.
“The meaning of life,” Tanner said.
“Do I get your names?” he asked.
“You do not,” Tanner said.
“Fair enough,” he said.
“The floor is yours,” Cliff said.
“Here’s the thing,” he said.
“You know more about your feelings now than you will know ever.
Swear to God.
Something happens to you, say something good or bad, it doesn’t matter, and you let yourself feel it, and because it’s practically the first time, you don’t rationalize it or analyze it or overinterpret it, it’s just the thing itself.
You don’t build a shell around it, it pierces you, it enters you, and, swear to God, if I could go back in time, you know what I would eliminate? What I’d lobotomize from my brain? The future.
I’d let myself experience everything as it happened like you do now instead of wondering like I always did.
Why isn’t this some other way instead of that? When will things be different? Better? Will they get worse? Do you understand?”
“No,” Tanner said.
“But keep going,” said Cliffnotes.
“It’s complicated, what I’m trying to explain,” he continued.
“It’s inside-out thinking, but if I could communicate it, you’d realize that right now you are the most honest that you will ever be, and if you could somehow stay that way, then you would triumph over life, swear to God, because at some point soon, and maybe it’s already happened, you’re going to get hurt badly and repeatedly, small hurts over and over, things you don’t feel right now, like tick bites or leeches attaching to your skin.
You’re going to stop listening and feeling and instead start making arguments, every day of your life asking yourself what isn’t instead of what is, and then it’s all over already.
You’ll think you’ve bitten the apple, but really the apple’s bitten you.
Your argument for what isn’t becomes the world and you become the argument and then it’s already happened: the beginning of adulthood.”
“I don’t follow any of this,” I said to Tanner.
“I think I understand,” Tanner said.
“This guy’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,” Cliff whispered.
“Because phonies think they know,” the man continued.
“But phonies don’t know what they don’t know.”
“Like my dad,” Oren said.
“You’re saying something bad is going to happen to us?” Cliff asked.
“Something bad happens to everyone,” he said.
“Except it’s not bad.
It’s just something.
That’s the trick.
Recognizing it’s just something.
That’s the difference between pain and suffering.
Suffering’s the former and pain’s the latter.”
“I’m confused,” I said.
“So what happened to you?” Cliff asked.
“When did you stop feeling?”
“I have never stopped feeling.”
“When did you stop making an argument?”
“I have not stopped feeling or making an argument.
I fight against not feeling and making an argument.”
“But when did you know,” Tanner asked, “that you weren’t…not?”
“Excellent,” he said.
“I know exactly when I knew I wasn’t not.
I know exactly when it happened.”
“Okay,” Tanner said, and rubbed his hands together, “here we go.”
“It was in Hawaii.
Have you ever been there?”
None of us had.
“This was when I lived on Oahu,” he said.
—
He lived there in a way he had never been able to repeat in his life.
He had a job, it was true, but his salary could only afford him an efficiency room with a warming plate, a mattress, a corner for his guitar, a bathroom with only a toilet.
To bathe, he used his kitchen sink, splashed his face and, with a dampened rag, cleaned his armpits and balls, or he went to the Y to shower.
On his days off, he put on the only good clothes that he had, the blue button-down shirt and white shorts and penny loafers that, after he combed his hair nicely and parted it to the side, made him look enough like a tourist that he could approach the front desk of luxurious hotels to ask what time check-in was and then join the sunburned families on the elevators.
He pushed the buttons for the floors none of the other passengers pressed, nodding at the couples during the quiet ascent, and then, getting off at his floor, he wandered the hallways, looking for the maid carts from which he helped himself to pillow mints and bars of soap and a roll or two of toilet paper, which he placed in his book bag.
He raised the polished lids on room service trays and feasted on the uneaten slices of mango and pineapple, the clusters of red grapes, the bitten strips of bacon, the toast points hardened with egg yolk, or, God bless, the untouched Danish or pastry, which he washed down with the miniature pitchers of heavy cream or a slug of coffee.
If it were lunchtime, he’d next wander to the open-air restaurants and, like one of the small birds that landed beneath the wrought-iron legs of chairs or, bravely, on the tables themselves, help himself to what remained on unbused tables: the half-eaten Monte Cristos or tails of coconut shrimp, the curled ribbons of carrot, the split rose-hearts of radishes; even, sometimes, the parsley garnish, because the bright green bite of it was enormously refreshing.
Picking up a newspaper someone hadn’t bothered to properly throw away, he might even take a seat, push the tip tray toward the somewhat baffled waiter, and say, “I’m not quite done here,” and then dip a soiled knife into the water glass and wipe it on his pants leg before cutting away the uneaten parts of burgers and omelets.
Or, in a moment of inspiration, he’d drop a piece of cutlery so that it tinkled on the concrete loudly enough to bring the waiter over.
“Could I get another fork?” he’d ask, and, upon the server’s return, wrap what was left in the new napkin, thanking him, and convincing even himself that he belonged.
These days spent among the tourists were vastly different from his shifts at a factory on the outskirts of Wahiawā, near the Schofield Barracks.
It was a vast, high-ceilinged space with clerestory windows that, no matter the weather, seemed to pale the light to a fossil gray.
The factory was an interconnected and intestinal array of machines, laid out lengthwise, of belts and sluices and sorters that transformed one thing into another.
In this case, potatoes arrived in semitrucks, whose payloads tumbled onto conveyer belts that bore the tonnage of unwashed spuds, passing them first beneath high-pressure jets that unzipped their skins, which were funneled off to be ground into animal feed, while the peeled were sorted into handfuls and washed again and then fed to the slicer, where they were multiplied into tens of thousands of discs before being spread flat and, rinsed once more, tipped into oil vats in which they were fried.
To then be variously seasoned and funneled into mylar bags, crimped and sealed and boxed, and loaded once again onto another fleet of trucks.
He could not help but imagine, standing among the industrial clatter, an arterial clogging—not just the bodies whose insides were spackled with this mix of starch and salt once consumed but of the roads filled with wheezing trucks, of high-density feedlots ankle-deep in excrement, of once-clear streams clotted with the starchy silt of the runoff, of the islands’ winds seasoning the ozone layer with the factory’s poisonous sediment—the mess and noise of it all making its ineluctable way down to the water table and seeping quietly into tributaries and then into the sea.
Behind the factory and atop a slab of concrete were several picnic tables, these adjacent a scummed pond fed by one of the factory’s main drains, the water’s edge fluffed with food waste, pulverized potato processed to a bubbly powder.
Pigeons flocked and fed on these soapy dregs, and watching them while he ate his PB they splatted on the concrete floor.
This madness had infected all the men except him, who had realized the bird’s only chance of escape was the windows.
So now he took aim, cursing his weak arm with each toss but elated when a desperate heave finally shattered one of the panes.
He fired again, knocking out another.
Several of his coworkers had noticed his ploy and their faces registered something like appreciation: how he had iterated on the game, adding to it the satisfaction of breaking what did not belong but was owed to them, while introducing a new challenge—put a clock on the field, so to speak; gave the game a limit, a terminus.
The pigeon seemed to sense the opening, the fresh air they could all smell.
Darting, it homed toward sky.
And as it climbed now, toward its escape, beelining toward safety and purpose beyond the empty window frame, it took a shot square in the chest.
A great cheer went up as the bird fell.
It landed on the floor, one gray wing flapping fishlike on the concrete.
The man nearest where it landed turned and, with a quick and forceful step, crushed its skull with his heel.
At this another cheer went up.
Then he bent and pinched the prize by one of its wings, the torso appearing headless, and nodded in victory as he pivoted, stretching, for all to see, the creature’s entire and surprisingly broad wingspan to receive everyone’s applause.
And, after taking a bow, after raising the bird above his head to what had become an ovation, he tossed it onto the conveyer belt.
Which everyone silently watched as the creature slipped into the sorting machine’s innards, the dark in which it would be transformed and eventually consumed by some unlucky customer, thoughtlessly biting into what was once feather, some salted piece of claw, a metacarpus bone, some brittle sliver of beak, as much a part of the food as any other ingredient.
“That’s it?” Tanner said, since the man had gone silent.
“That’s the story?”
“I don’t get it,” Cliff said.
“Me neither,” I said.
“I do,” said Oren.