Primordial Soup Read online

  “So no one escapes the soup??”

  “It depends what you mean by escaping the soup?”

  The chairs of some of my classmates shifted in boredom.

  “Sooner or later, everyone eats. Sooner or later, everyone is eaten. If you’re not eaten when you’re alive, you’re eaten when you’re dead. So no one escapes being eaten. It’s just a question of time.”

  “The first law of thermodynamics: energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed.”

  Notes were unanimously taken, for the verbatim law interested my classmates more than did its dire consequences.

  Professor Ranji was inspired; he defined other laws of thermodynamics and assigned the chapters of a heavy reading assignment before darting out of the classroom.

  “Professor Ranji!” I cried, forcing my way through the slow moving students after him. I reached him as he was opening his office door. I’d never seen so many paperback books in my life. There were glasses of leftover juice on piles of books, tall piles, short piles, you could hit each one with a spoon and make a tune. The walls were covered with shelves, the only place free of books, and consecrated to carvings of a smaller elephant within a larger. There was a plastic flute and a rubber cobra on the floor, maybe a child’s because there were also a line of fallen Dominos nearby.

  “Professor Ranji?” I mouthed gently.

  The first thing I noticed when he turned around was a pattern of black points on the tip of his nose which upon scrutiny proved to be razor stubble.

  “Professor Ranji. I’m sorry to bother you, but there are two questions still troubling me. I would not like to die without knowing their answers …”

  “Well, I hope I can be of help and well before then.” He crossed his arms and smiled.

  I heard myself which is always annoying, “Biologically speaking, it took two parents to make you, and your two parents had parents, which makes four, and these four had parents, which makes eight it took to make you. If we kept going, we get to 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, just to make you.”

  My ability for basic arithmetic was slowing, so I did not go on further though logically, I should have, for these far-off relatives did not come into being by spontaneous generation.

  “Okay …” he stroked his beard, pulled down his thick, curly moustache and turned over his lower lip.

  I detected the impatience in his eyes and accelerated, “Well the same holds true with all of us. Which means, mathematically speaking, the former population must have been much greater than the present population.”

  “Are you promoting colonization from another planet?”

  “No, sir, I’m not. According to the Bible, we come from two people only, Adam and Eve, so the sum of people it took to make each of us must grow smaller as we count back … the former population must be less than the present overpopulation, according to God …” My voice weakened on the last words.

  Professor Ranji looked startled; he blinked his eyes slowly. “Don’t tell me you take all that biblical folklore word by word?

  “No, no, no, of course I don’t … word by word …” I twisted my braid around my wrist until it hurt.

  “Every civilization made up stories to explain natural phenomena, you know. That does not mean even they took them literally. You know that? Science has the strength to admit what it doesn’t know, that doesn’t mean we’ve proved God does or does not exist, but a bearded man in the sky looking down at us sounds a lot like what humans would invent.”

  I felt tears swelling in my eyes and looked down. His wedding ring was blurry. So every cell of my flesh was irrevocably made, to feed, to consume, to engulf. Individually, they shimmered, I could feel them starting up one by one, tingling for his own tasty cells, their protoplasmic sauce of life. I imagined boiling an eye of his, white and brown spotted like a billiard ball. The moral dam holding the current back for so long was weakening, as were my legs. Professor Ranji sensed a metamorphosis.

  “And the second question?” he asked, making it a point not to blink his eyes.

  I took in a deep breath, “If what you say about evolution is true, my ancestors are carnivorous reptiles?”

  “What we refer to as ancestors are usually the preceeding generations of the same species. But yes, all life has derived from the earliest forms of life.”

  I found myself shifting my hips slowly from left to right.

  “Perhaps we can have a bite to eat together and talk about this more?” he asked.

  My heart thumped so, for adult ways were yet unfamiliar to me.

  I struggled to keep my voice steady, “Do you like meringue?”

  CHAPTER 16

  A shopping cart partially barred the aisle. Cantaloupe melons were marked down half price. I rolled them to the side, disrupting a few sleepy flies until I found one at the bottom, a pale sphere whose wrinkly skin I could pinch. I fingered the damp bruises. Cantaloupes have no natural division like apricots, where two flabby cheeks swell on each side. My thumbnail was long and extremely hard, for it had three coats of red varnish. With it, I slit open a provisional crack. Mociùté’s buttocks lost a thin liquid I caught with my tongue tip. I dropped the cantaloupe into my shopping cart.

  A butcher looked down at a slab of flesh and, like an artist, executed planes, abstract blocks of meaning, carefully removing frames of white fat. His working biceps, bulging and slackening, distorted his mermaid tattoo; sometimes she was more woman, at others, more fish.

  “May I help you, Miss?”

  “Yes, would it be possible to have a rump roast?”

  “Sure.”

  “With some fur on it, please?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I said with some fur on it, preferably white with a large black spot.”

  “Fur?”

  “The fur only has to be on one side, if the rump roast is too deep a cut, give me something along the back bone.”

  “You mean hairs?” He wiped his hands on his soiled apron, an abstract canvas of chance and skill.

  “Yes, that piece of meat there,” I pointed to one of his displayed amputations at random, “used to feel. It wore a coat to protect it from cold and hungry gazes. Like mine and yours. Because of it, we are both here today.”

  “All I have is what you see,” he half-twitched, half-scowled, unsure whether I was making fun of him, or he of me.

  “Fine. I’ll take that one. Many thanks.”

  Drops of blood forsook the doomed flesh, how they sizzled upon contact with the oven’s scalding bottom. I watched through the brown window, flesh converting into food. Small explosions could be heard as the roast spat. Heat, I thought, brought life out of gases, and if extreme enough, heat returns food back to its original gases. Clouds of smoke filled my apartment.

  Professor Ranji burst in with wild eyes, wet, combed back hair, gleaming teeth in the dark frame of his beard. He dropped a bottle of red wine in and a French bread across the sink, pushed me out of the way, and with his own down-stretched sweater sleeves went to remove the roast, and not without heaven-curdling swears, for I had not used a pan.

  “Thought your place was on fire,” he apologized, fanning the air and rolling up his soiled cuffs until his sleeves looked exaggeratedly big and fat above his elbows.

  The meat rested on the worktop. The top was scorched, the bottom, raw. With the help of a shoeshine rag, once part of a T-shirt and white, he changed the position of the grill to the middle, and threw the meat back in. After he rinsed his hands, he wiped them on his trousers, and opened several windows.

  “Wow, fine place you’ve got here …” he noticed at last.

  “Thanks. My mother has this friend whose husband has a real-estate agency, he let us have it for practically nothing … practically unfurnished as you can see … My mother took in his wife while they were getting a divorce.”

  At the tone “mother,” Professor Ranji shrunk like a probed sea anemone.

  “
Where do they live?” he asked, as though they could be living in the next room.

  “At home. In Wachovi. Ever heard of Wachovi?”

  “The truth?”

  “It’s near Gables Beach … a six hour drive from here.”

  Professor Ranji’s beard made his grins animalistic, almost predatory growls. I was getting goose bumps, taking on the skin of an easy prey.

  “I get the feeling man and wife get sick of each other after awhile, like pot roast every day no matter how much you change the sauce and the side dish, and at the same time, they can’t stay away from each other for good, people miss the food from the country they come from no matter how bad it is.”

  “That’s an interesting theory,” he frowned, picked my biology notebook off the floor and used it to fan the other rooms. My hair was impregnated with the incense of parched meat. He pushed through the cardboard boxes and banana cases I intended to use as dinner, coffee, and night tables; without asking, he rolled up the garbage bags on which sand dollars and starfish were drying and left them in a corner; it’s true, they smelt rather strongly.

  “Wow, that’s a fine animal you got there!”

  “Where?!”

  When I realized he meant Stag Head, I took offence.

  “Hunting trophy?”

  “Graduation gift.”

  “Sorry?”

  “My high school graduation gift. From my mother.”

  “Strange idea.”

  “I asked for him. He’s family, lived with us as long as I can remember.”

  “Lived?”

  “Well, yes. He is preserved. He doesn’t eat, wake or sleep, but he still watches over us like Jesus on the cross. Here, take some, with a toothpick.”

  I held a paper plate out to him. Professor Ranji’s head leaned to one side.

  “Cute, aren’t they?” I asked as his hand moved towards the school of beached sardines, smelly and stiff.

  He ignored the toothpick I was offering him and picked one up by the tail. The mouth was open and tiny teeth could be perceived like the bristles of an overused toothbrush. With a roguish sniff, Professor Ranji split the miniature fish lengthwise. Every vertebra of the tiny backbone could be counted. Professor Ranji scratched it out of its intended bed with a fingernail.

  Mental disgust transformed into a fierce tingling sensation in the zone of my triangle, where my coarse, beastly hairs stood on end.

  “You okay?” Professor Ranji squeezed the muscles over my knee to verify their tenderness, or, maybe, to wipe his hand.

  I relaxed my mouth and breathed again.

  “I’m hungry as a wolf … ” he admitted.

  I looked him in the eye. He was testing me. Lawn chairs were the extent of what my mother had lent me for furniture. With a foot, Professor Ranji pushed the cardboard boxes between us out of the way, reclined his scratchy lawn chair and dropped the sardine from an imaginary point above him into his mouth. Quite soon, he fished it back out and deposited it in an ashtray filled with old olive pits, adding to the concoction his own spit.

  I remembered the cantaloupe and rose; put the plug in the kitchen sink and pretended to give mociùté’s buttocks a warm sudsy bath.

  “You don’t need to wash that,” Professor Ranji said as he came up behind me.

  I handed him a knife, with which he scraped out the tumour of mush and thin cancerous seeds which had killed her, and presented a buttock to me on a paper plate. My legs revelled at the sweetness of the elderly scoops, the alcoholic, musty savour of rottenness. I made no effort to hide it, and he, no effort to hide his distaste. His fingers drummed on the Tropicana box.

  Although scientific discussion was supposedly the reason we were having dinner together, our conversation was limited to small talk. He asked my major, my age, my birthday. Seventeen and a half cut his appetite in two; he threw away his melon half. Like a ritual, I brought the roast to the table and he removed the cork from the bottle. With his hands, he broke the bread in two.

  The slices Professor Ranji cut were ample. They were brown around the edges, pinker, then red and shiny towards the middle, quite similar to my own intimate meats. On a culinary basis, our tenderest meats are synonymous with our weakest flesh. It was hardly ladylike, but I picked up a slice with my fingers, rolled it and sucked the juices out. Professor Ranji did not seem shocked by my bad manners. I chewed his index finger lazily before swallowing the hairy, cartilaginous pulp. It descended my esophagus slowly and painfully. Professor Ranji groaned.

  He took my head between his massive paws and directed it down. I could feel heat already fusing through his trouser’s thin material. I don’t know what exactly I expected to find, though I imagined the small eyeless creature would possess fully developed eyes by adulthood and fancied it certainly bore a lethal sting, three horns, or a terrifying beak.

  With great caution, I lowered the metal tongue to discover still a protective layer of fabric with a built-in opening so the creature would be free to come and go as it pleased. Through this small outlet, I perceived a great nest of black hairs. To one side, the creature sought refuge, for the bulge in the fabric was unmistakably solid. Of course I was terrified, but I knew there was no turning back as I walked down the plank to the adult soup.

  I was dumbfounded. Instead of a living, snarling, thrashing creature, all I found was an inoffensive sausage. Behind the sausage, dangled two meatballs, larger than Swedish meatballs yet smaller than stuffed tomatoes, inside a mitten of raw chicken skin. It did not look as appetizing as I in my most nagging moments of hunger had dreamt.

  Was it an outgrowth of former life, an intestinal casing filled with chicken, beef and pork? So I had been accurate in my hunches all along, man grows sausage links. It seemed he had pierced the domed end with a knife point, for greasy juice was seeping out as though it were done, though a profane rawness dominated the underside where a blue vein sneaked up to remind me of the fragile boundary between food and life. I wondered if it would be too terribly impolite to fork it a few times and boil it more thoroughly.

  Professor Ranji looked down impatiently. He held the sausage firmly at the base, so firmly it seemed that the casing might burst from the additional pressure, and directed it towards my mouth. I closed my eyes and followed the ways of a snake, whose jaws disconnect in order to swallow its victim whole. The thought of a vein running with insect blue blood made my stomach churn.

  “Wait!” I requested.

  Hurriedly, I cut a piece of French bread in half, spread mustard upon both crumbly sides, and returned with a jar of relish. Professor Ranji found my enhancements amusing as I teaspooned the small chunks of dill pickle upon his edible. He was curious as to where I had become such a precocious gourmet. I reminded him that even a child can make a hot dog. Apparently, I was not the sole consumer to spice up his morsel.

  I dropped the sausage inside the French bread and squeezed it with both hands into a lumpy cylinder, somewhat like a pig in a blanket. Barely had I gotten to my knees, introduced it into my mouth, than Professor Ranji cried out in pain, a pain so acute that tears were forced out of his eyes. The mustard, a moutarde de Dijon, burnt him mercilessly. So it was endowed with feelings, selfish feelings of petty preservation that my appetite would have to overcome if ever the meal were to be taken. I fought to deaden my unnatural sympathies.

  He rinsed our first link of sausage in the kitchen sink, but the cold water did it no good. Like cold air can make dough fall, so cold water made his minced meat droop. He presented a cold, sad, limp earthworm in my face. Not even a catfish would bite. This would not do. Offended, I pushed it out of my face like one pushes a wedge of pork fat to the side of the plate.

  “Dessert?” I offered.

  I removed all of my clothes until I was standing in a pair of red pumps. A meringue floated from me, as light as a feather and angelically white. Professor Ranji pawed at it madly, but each current of air caused by his gesticulation only lifted it higher. He sprang onto the kitchen counter and chased after
it. He chased it from one room to the next room, leaping, pouncing, pounding, swearing over cardboard boxes and banana cases. At last, he chased it into the bathroom and closed the door. Standing on the toilet bowl, he switched on the light. The ventilator breathed artificially. The meringue found itself stuck against a noisy plastic disk.

  Greedily, Professor Ranji snatched the meringue. Spun by fairies from the finest threads of clouds, it shrank at the dampness of his tongue. It disappeared more mysteriously than cotton candy, leaving no sugary trace or tangible memory of an aftertaste, but gave one the sensation of having seen the world from afar, so afar that subjectivity was freed from the tug of gravity and saturated by the eternity of space. The peace and absolute existence as an inedible was sensed for the duration of one second. In the language of edibles, it is called death.

  He returned to me dragging his knuckles on the floor, a primitive man without clothing. Invitingly, I danced for him. I rolled apples and oranges down the lengths of my arms. I threw a banana in the air, and caught it in my backside slit, where it remained despite my erratic movements. I combed my coarse bushy hairs with a fork, but it became entangled in the growth, so I left it like a heathen ornament, and shifted, and twisted, and hopped and twirled. Professor Ranji had little appetite, I guessed by the sceptical look on his face. Perhaps I, too, was in need of seasoning.

  Lost, I contemplated the refrigerator shelves. Should I aspire for sweetmeats, with orange marmalade, mint jelly or honey, or was that too nauseating a mélange? I opened a cupboard. Condiments could make him suspect severe limitations in my cuisine, never reaching beyond the hamburger and hot dog. Frustrated, I reopened the refrigerator. In a small Tupperware, there was leftover rice. The solution offered itself to me. I patted it and rolled it into my bottom lips like a cake, and then sprinkled it with soya sauce.

  “Sushi?” I gleamed.

  Professor Ranji preferred tuna sashimi for he sought my tongue. First he tasted it with his own, then he attempted to lure it into his mouth. It was a trap, I knew. Faced with the dire facts of life, I retreated cowardly, covered my mouth with my forearm, content my tongue was still there. It was clear I, the inexperienced one, must precede in the initial bite.