Consumption
Sunshine O’Donnell
Winner - 2005 Editors’ Prize in Nonfiction
We are a hundred thousand years beyond insanity.
Plato does not speak of this.
–Rumi
On the New Jersey beach as a small child he saw armies of beached jellyfish pieces glistening in the midday sun and edged in sand like chicken breasts coated with Shake-n-Bake. The jellyfish and their various lost pieces stung. They showed up in hot, primary-colored plastic buckets, or they rubbed up against him in the soupy green sea. Their marmalade parts could be found flung far on shore. All over the beach brown-baked children crouched around the jellyfish, poking them with twigs or driftwood, sometimes throwing them at each other, or dropping pieces into someone else’s bathing suit. Often he couldn’t see the jellyfish but he knew they were there. He would come out of the water prickling with pins and needles in the midday sun and his mouth would taste like metal and salt for hours. If he drank enough Lime Rickys that day, his pee would be bright green by the time he got home.
Today he is forty years old. He lives with his wife in a house that is hours away from the shore. He finds himself still waiting for summer but the summers now are shorter and more humid, the seasons no longer reliable. When they drive to the beach for the weekend he can no longer just watch the waves. He looks at the ocean and he sees back in time a million years, watches 4,000 centuries of rain rock the basins, water shifting its way from atmospheric top to bottom like a lava lamp. Then he sees forward as the oceans boil into vapors as the sun rides on empty and then eats itself, a starving core seething through one element after another with a hysterical and inefficient metabolism.
Sometimes he wishes he didn’t know this, how all roads lead to extinction.
He once believed in a final core, the one center, the smallest unit, a beginning and an end. He did not yet know that nothing in space is greater than what it bridges, molecules lightyears apart, a universe harsh, unpredictable, violent, silent, empty. He once thought that unification would be like knowing the tune and also the words. He believed in the discrete division of surfaces. He believed every day that the sun would rise, bridges would stand as he crossed them, his atoms would stay stuck together, the jellyfish sting would soon go away. Now his not-knowing is enormous, he feels so temporary, so small, living the narrowly probable life of a soft and edible machine, or an animate, leaky canteen. He obsesses over the decadence of toilets flushed with water. His lifespan will be the shortest distance between two points.
This is why he cannot watch the waves. He knows that to live here on Earth means that he must accept the randomness and possibility of sudden catastrophic weather, earthquake or volcano, flood, famine and drought, microbal plague, animals that bite, insects that sting and plants that can poison you, the possibility of impact, of quicksand, of a bus suddenly careening in your direction, that someone might murder you, molest your child or leave you because they don’t love you anymore. That one day there might be a blast that will melt his gelatinous eyes and the skin from his outstretched arms will drip like the hot cheese that hangs off a slice of pizza. That the universe is flesh-eating. That the universe is cannibal. That most of what surrounds him cannot be detected and cannot be seen.
But then, for a moment, this happens.
On the way to his car to retrieve his glasses at dusk, he suddenly sees a swollen green seed-casing drop from the tree in his front yard. It carves an invisible helix into the air as it falls, and there with the driveway gravel grating the bottom of his sneakers and the keys clanging dully together in his hand, it all comes back to him: the beauty of cordata’s flowering backbone splaying its evolution of budding bone-shoots from his spine, the sexiness of spoons, the viper jaws of printer cables sucking at the splitter box, the greedy cohesion of water, the greedy cohesion of fingers, the screen of sky flickering stars now dead, the biological genius of love and hunger, the ash-strewn and hand-hewn steps of Pompeii split open and now leading nowhere, the plastic of his steering wheel molded to mimic mammalian skin, the word AIR BAG stamped in the center like a cattle brand, the existence of someone who was paid to design these synthetic wrinkles for this wheel, a person who was born and ate food and studied post-modern art, who finds consolation at night by saying but at least I still create.
Then he is twelve billion years old, his bones a thesaurus of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, sulfur. He languishes in the hugeness and smallness of things, though now he no longer believes in things, he sees instead webs of events masquerading as motion in three crude dimensions. For the moment on Earth, on this still-burning ember, he stands on a thin crust of soil that’s been poorly corseted with asphalt, and he watches while the day declines into itself taut, dilates until it breaks and collapses, becomes a lingering hemorrhage spun out and slow, its perishable verges sizzling. A billion-year-old light struggles to his eyes, gasps of light smuggling their pure shards under cloaks. He stands steeped in a Higgs field which quivers, trembles, pulsates, throbs, and the universe thrums its voluptuous entropy.
Then he remembers that the sky is riddled with poison. He remembers that he does not believe in these fairy-tale words, never or forever, anymore. He barely believes in time and place, and now the sand has gotten into his shoes.
As a child he could not look at sand without seeing infinity.
The bundle under the blanket next to him moves a bit. Beyond her he sees patches of light seep through the curtains and slick themselves against the wall near their bed. The light could just as well be car headlights or the torches of body-collectors during the plague, the birth of a star, or bodies of phosphorescent creatures in the Arctic waters, sun flares ruining the radio signals, an asteroid falling, a bomb falling, an airplane falling, anything that radiates and is called back to Earth. On his nightstand there is:
a cell phone
a telephone
a Palm Pilot
a remote control
because he is still entranced by shiny things and the glory of his prehensile thumbs. The feel of plastic buttons is as sightlessly familiar to his fingers as soil or thread must have been for his ancestors. Louder. Softer. Up. Down. Off. On. But still he loves blizzards, blackouts and strikes, when machines become ridiculous, events that send people running to buy water and batteries or carrion compressed into cans. Water, energy, food, the things always measured by too much and not enough.
Too much. Not enough. When they still smoked, he would open a brand-new pack and beam at the wealth of tightly-packed tubes. They were both always shocked when, later, they would find only one cigarette left in the box. They had smoked them all with the assumption of the box’s inexhaustibility. The empty box made him sad, desperate, disappointed and surprised. This has happened a million times, a strange and startled response to the emptiness of things once full, the refrigerator, the gas tank, the medicine bottle, the belly. Like all humans, he is learning-disabled when it comes to empty. He will always be surprised.
He knows he has passed the point of no return.
It’s all right. Here is another.
When they bought their first house he hated the bathroom, which was done up in metallic black and green wallpaper and scrubbed-but-still-stained linoleum. The bottom of the linoleum had been buttered with thick black asbestos. When he remodeled the bathroom and tore up the floor, the asbestos was brittle and broke into a fine powder whenever he touched it, and someone said put something in there, like a time capsule, before you lay the new boards. He found an empty Tupperware container and then realized he no idea what should go inside, which objects could represent this time and generation. A silicone breast, a prescription bottle, several worn-out TV remotes, porn of all kinds, plastic shopping bags, a bottle of iced tea? All of the things that even in their excesses are unable to satisfy? How would he represent this, living on the very cusp of the beginning of the fall of an empire? Which small pimple of land on the tectonic plates would become the next capital of excess and brute force to dictate the trends of humanity?
He put the Tupperware container away.
In the fossil record, only those beings with hard parts are remembered.
When he was young he touched jellyfish that had already been dead for hours and then ate sandwiches without first washing his hands. He was ignorant of germs. He did not know that all warfare was biological. What does he know now? There is nothing he can be certain of now, except maybe this: he loves his wife, he will suffer and die, all that he sees will soon disappear.
This is the last time.
There it goes.
Have another.
The universe wants to fatten him up.
For a moment again he can see this now, how generous the universe is with him. It is showering him with moments the way Greek gods once showered mortals with gold in order to seduce them. The seductions always worked. Nothing persuades homo sapiens sapiens quite like excess, abundance, the promise of more. There is a lust that’s built in, a perpetual need-war between mouth and groin. Out loud he whispers the universe is generous but his wife does not stir. He congratulates himself for being so enlightened. He is knee-deep in the old husks of spent moments. He is the wealthiest man alive.
Once he ate sandwiches by the waves and he did not care about these things, not even the germs, not even the stray grains of sand in the bread. He did not know that this small star would someday soon begin sputtering out, flailing its desperate flares against a dark falling no one would see. What was it he saw, staring out at the water while his small feet were sucked into black holes of sand? His lips were so dry with salt that the skin felt tight, drum-like, he could feel his heartbeat resonate through them.
He chewed his sandwich pensively. The sound of water painted him. A red-faced man carrying a sweaty white ice-box dragged his feet through the beach and called Creamsicles Fudgesicles cold Italian ices with a voice as gritty and dry as the sand while the seagulls grazed and rejected cigarette butts and peanut shells gone spongy. Everything was beautiful.
The jellyfish were beautiful. He was beautiful, too, because his body was brand new and it still belonged to him. His flesh was the only thing holding him in. He was as exposed as the jellyfish but he had no idea what it meant to be exposed. He had no idea that he had no idea. He had never heard of Darwin, he already knew that he was part fish. He watched the water absently, teasing its foamy apron with his toes, and there was nothing he did not understand.
Sunshine O’Donnell is an award-winning poet and educator who teaches creative writing, visual art and quantum physics to underserved children in schools, institutions and residential facilities throughout Pennsylvania. She was a professional journalist and copywriter for 10 years before founding The Coffeehouse Project literacy program in 1997. O’Donnell is Program Director and lead instructor for Philadelphia-based Grow from Your Roots, a non-profit organization providing experiential eduation in writing, art and science to poverty-stricken communities. She has been honored by city and state agencies for her humanitarian contributions to journalism and education.