William Gillespie image by Miriam Martincic.

Mars Needs Lunch

By
  • Jimmy Crater
  • June Crash

No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves with making their bread they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise yeast.

Art by Scott Westgard.

Chapters

The sudden clumping of footsteps on the porch sounded like an upended bag of free-range potatoes.

I was astonished to learn that my housemate Melinda had been embezzling, cooking the books at the Common Grub Food Co-op, where she was an accountant. Many cases of Green Bull had gone unaccounted for, having been ordered by a group planning an all-night drive to a protest in D.C. There were angry hippies on my doorstep looking for her. The one who now addressed me, with bandana, hoop earring, and necklace of hemp rope, seemed as dangerous as a pirate who had never been in the ocean in a boat of any kind.

Something deeply hassled in his attitude let me know that the situation had escalated beyond mere bummer.

“But Melinda is vegan,” I protested, “Can they do that?”

The pirate stared at me through one eye. His other eye seemed to be attending a Grateful Dead concert. “Vegans? Yeah, vegans cook books all the time. They’re hungry people, vegans. Like saber-toothed tigers without teeth, forced to graze on mushrooms and wild plants. They’ll eat paper too, believe me. Think of it: how many times have you been hungry—like, whey hungry—to the point of losing it, and stopped the powermunchies in their tracks with a pepperoni pizza?” I blushed, he continued: “But vegans can’t do that. They don’t get to the stage of meta-eating, where you eat something that’s already eaten. They don’t even butter their popcorn. Once that hunger gets out of control, no amount of falafel is going to put any kind of serious dent in it. A vegan is a ticking time bomb. That’s why I eat burgers.”

I still couldn’t believe it. “So how do you know there wasn’t a miscalculation. You know, a grape gets eaten by a customer or falls on the floor. How do you know she took it?”

“We figure there’s a good chance she did.”

“But a good chance isn’t proof: you can’t split a grape.”

“Dude we’re not talking about just one grape here.”

“How many.”

“Five bunches. A week. Organic grapes. And that’s just grapes. We got lost plantains, bok choi, arugula—all certified organic produce. We’re talking lots of very, very nice vegetables.”

My stomach rumbled in such a way that I’m sure they felt it. I had been hungry lately.

“Have you seen anything suspicious in your refrigerator mon? Because you know she doesn’t make enough as our accountant to eat our food.”

“Well that hardly seems fair.”

“Well that’s why she’s the one who unloads trucks, because we feel accounting is such lowly and degrading work that she needs to have a second commitment to our organization.”

“By unloading trucks.”

“Job rotation.”

“But she’s the only one who unloads trucks or does accounting. What job is rotating?”

“Alright dude you see anything like five bushels of organic purple kale lying around you let us know.”

“How do I find you?”

“We have a website.”

“Where is it?”

“On the web.”

They wandered off through our unmown lawn. We lived across from the bakery on Tree Street. Melinda and I did, along with three cats. It was Melinda’s house; I was renting a room. I was trying to save money, hoping to open a bar or cafe. In town. Cafe Fear, I wanted to call it. La Maga and Wolfy emerged from beneath the porch and watched the hippies go, noses testing the patchouli in the air. They were always wary of sandals.

There came another clanking jackhammer burst like those I had been trying to sleep through earlier.

In front of our house, workers in orange vests labored over steaming chunks of concrete they were loosening from the street and loading onto the back of a truck. The city was removing all the streetlamps and street signs from our neighborhood. The sidewalks were brick, and they had begun systematically digging them up and carting the stones away in wheelbarrows. It appeared that a statewide deficit was causing the city to haul in all public works. As the mayor put it, they were “rolling back the streets.” The bricks, glass globes, and street signs would be sold to other and more well-funded townships—mostly in Norway—leaving us to trip over exposed roots and pipes in the rut where the street once was.

Times are tough, I thought, but what is one supposed to do? Vote?

And so went life on our little street. Normal, I thought. It was a spring war and everyone’s flags and ribbons fluttered gaily. Signs impaled in people’s yards reinforced the prevailing political sentiment: fight whatever wars are deemed necessary to keep people off our lawns.

The detritus of our yard was submerged beneath clumps of unruly grass between which freshly planted flowers exploded in chromatic blooms.

It was Melinda’s first spring in the house she had bought last fall, and she was on a campaign against lawn, tearing up grass and replacing it with whatever flowers could be bought, uprooted, borrowed, stolen, cloned, grafted, or transplanted. Bruxinia, Antlady, Purple Cocklespur, Bellicose. Sweet Deathknell for the leaking roof. Blue Abolinia for no screens on the windows. Pink Carnage for sheet plastic taped where the shower wall would have been. The pulchritude of that. She hated our lawn. Grass needs to be mowed, it’s high maintenance. A plot of grass 100 square feet, over the course of one decade with moderate to light rain, will take about one month off your life in terms of wasted productivity. But the problem can’t be avoided, only made more violent and tragic. By not mowing the lawn, you aren’t saving work, you’re borrowing it, with interest. When you finally decide to pay your debt to the neighborhood, you discover the grass has grown so high the mower can no longer be found. Flowers are Melinda’s final solution. I notice this, I’m fascinated by work.

It’s not just our waist-deep and undulating grass that makes us the envy and pride of Tree Street. It’s not just our NO WAR sign, alone in the block of fluttering patriotism. It’s the debris in the yard. Beneath the foliage you will find enough plates and silverware to set a dinner for two, including a large peppermill. You can rebuild a Ford, discover and cure a deadly new disease, or lash together a raft strong enough to make it to Cuba. Out front the pink flamingo has a broken wing which hangs from its axis; the other wing spins in circles and the flamingo must also fly in circles.

It is a different way of life here and you may think us backward for walking to the farmers’ market Saturday morning and ambling home in the hot narcotic sunshine carrying our blueberries, basil, parsnips, honey, peaches so juicy it is like biting a raincloud, and thick loaves of bread sold by Amish who peddle their quaint wares while taking calls on cellular telephones (they use electricity, but at least they’re wireless). Imagine the sky is perfect and there is nothing between you and blue save an occasional kaleidoscope of leaves. It’s raining light, and you’re getting soaked. It’s enough to be a ladybug crawling this solar salad bowl.

That is just how we do things on Tree Street. When the city cuts down a tree, we read our melancholy tree poetry at the city council meeting, it is just that simple.

There were two cats, there used to be three.

Sebastian had been missing for a week. The awful truth was that I hoped he never came home. I couldn’t admit this to myself, or to Melinda, or to the other cats, though I suspected they knew. I had forgotten to phone in a missing cat report, or put signs up around the neighborhood, or put clothing imbued with my scent outdoors, or look for him. In fact I quickly forgot he was missing. A beautiful purebred espresso-point Siamese, Sebastian was “vocal.” Smart, affectionate, even-tempered, well-behaved, and with a decibel level equivalent to the space shuttle taking off. If the space shuttle could take off continuously all day and night for 13, yes 13 years, which is about 700 in human years. And Sebastian wasn’t slowing down. Bigger than a small dog, and louder than a big dog, year after year he just kept accumulating mass and volume. Wherever this cat was, if he was alive, and around people, then somebody, somewhere, had hands clutched over ears, working through rage.

The junk food industry is alive and well here.

Popcorn has been declared the official state snack food. Since when have states had official snack foods? How closely tied we are to the junk food industry was not at first obvious to me. We live in a town surrounded by a flat landscape more planar than an ocean, square miles of grains and vegetables. Although the family farms have been foreclosed and moved aside for agribusiness, the sense of living in such a high vegetable-per-capita region can make one feel wholesome, even if in practice one eats mostly beef and sugar. But it turns out that the corn sold in our supermarket is grown in California, and the corn grown in surrounding fields is used as cattle feed or for corn syrup in sodas and sweetened foods. The soybeans, an overrated legume to begin with, have mostly industrial uses. If they end up in food at all, it is in vegetarian meat substitute, or snuck into hotdogs disguised as beef clippings. (Since soy is sometimes sold as meat, that makes a vegetarian patty a sort of meat substitute substitute. You pay for a recontextualization of soy, whatever you put on your bun.)

It’s a hoax, all these fields of food. Still, it gives one comfort. New Yorkers take one look at the horizon and get dizzy, start to panic. It’s partially the oxygen that saturates our air—pure, exhaled by leaves—that makes them lightheaded, but they associate the feeling with horigo: a fear of horizontal distances. They are afraid of the risk of starving to death in a provincial city where you need a phone book to find a taxicab and there are no restaurants open after three AM. But I never understood their anxiety. If you evaluated a city by the density of plants rather than people, this is Tokyo. There are ten vegetable gardens on every block. In the Siberian sparseness of the Midwest, most apartments are so large they even contain kitchens. Once you get over the first major hurdles, and learn to boil rice, you won’t need 24-hour South African restaurants to eat like a cosmopolitan.

Fields of beef, legumes and grains. Mosquito farms, scenic culverts and abandoned strip mines. Lincoln’s Outhouse. From the sky, these squared acres must look like a vast cracker plate, and I suppose they are.

Let me tell you a little bit about Chef Gratton.

In Tree City there is also one of the greatest vegetarian culinary schools in the world: Brown Rice University. Collard Greens are prepared one hundred different ways there. Like all great schools, it has its scandals. But Chef Orville Gratton teaches there.

O. Gratton’s lectures were the stuff of legend, how from his podium he might extemporize about the history of the salt shaker as he prepared radish pudding for the entire lecture hall of three hundred.

Gratton’s awful secret was that he ate meat. And that’s not all. I think he was an addict. You see, I met the man.

Me, I tried to avoid beef. Healthy eating. An acidopholus pill, a multivitamin and a high-powered vitamin C before a plate of spicy mustard greens, broiled tofu, garden burgers, basmati rice with sautéed garlic, all sprinkled with Irish cheddar. The sift of pepperspecks down across the spirals of radiatori. The chunks of bell pepper lodged like green meteorites in the wet silky folds of pasta. Thick slice of olive-rosemary bread spread with avocado. Creamy green, a darker tinge indicating longer exposure to the air. The bread has purple stains where kalamata olives have been folded in. I wash this down with lemon ginger echinacea juice and vanilla silk. Moosewood fudge cools on stovetop.

I avoid eating beef, well, especially if anybody’s around, but I’m not vegan. Not that I am without discipline. Just to give an example of how strong willed I am: I’ve quit smoking more than one hundred times. But now that I am living with a vegan, cheese makes me guilty. When I do feel forced to make a nonvegetarian dish—say, white lasagna with portobello and pancetta—I cook furtively, moving quickly, attempting to mask the smell with incense. I feel intense remorse for having prepared in Melinda’s kitchen entrees poisoned with gorgonzola, parmesan, or pecorino romano. I like to cook for Melinda, but sometimes I want to have leftovers. I have attempted to cook double and triple batches of vegan recipes such as Turkish Lentil Spinach Bulgur Soup, but they get devoured immediately, leaving mountains of dishes in their wake.

Dishes are a problem I don’t think we will solve in our lifetime. The kitchen sink is an archaeology of blame. His dirty spoon, her dirty fork. Forensic psychologists are at work on a postmortem to identify the turning point, the moment when the accumulation of unwashed dishes became unstoppable. The refrigerator is filled with souring grudges and plastic containers of moldy blame. Each leftover reeks with the fulsome effluvium of the compounded labor of whoever finally unseals and disposes of it.

Do vegans resent having to wash a knife that a dairy addict has used to dismember a stick of butter? How can they not?

My philosophy is that I will eat anything. This is not ambivalence; it requires a certain rigor to eat literally anything. I try to think of it as eating everything. When I visit a new city, I seek out the most unappetizing, weird, esoteric, unhealthy foods and eat as many of them as I can find. I try to eat the city. But I had never had much of an appetite. Until lately.

Chef got a bad review—once—from a rival restaurant critic and chef who subsequently was injured by a falling fruitcake.

That fraud Chef Gratton, a charlatan, hosted a “party” in which he cooked for and personally served a “select audience of gourmands.” At his house. That is clearly vanity cooking.

Any chef not of Gratton’s fame would be forever barred from cuisine for having the audacity to work around the established restaurant system. Instead of the truth—that perhaps no restaurant would serve salt custard and compost compote—the evening was billed as “intimate.” Reading further, I discover that as accompaniment, the composer Anjali Gaburo played piano. What hackery, that a composer would perform her own work.

This makes me fume. It all hearkens back to that rugged era in the mid-twentieth century when certain painters became celebrated for painting their own paintings, in a dreadful disregard for the established enlightenment convention of apprenticeship. Whether Van Gogh, instead of doing the painter’s work of dreaming pure images, attempted to master the technician’s brushes, pigments, and solvents, because his work was not good enough to merit a full painting studio and its staff, or whether Picasso did not use professional painters to complete his canvases because he was simply too greedy to pay their salaries, I won’t even guess. It is said that Bach himself was a virtuosic harpsichordist, but he did not use his talent to play for nickels and dimes in subway terminals or make his recordings available for downloads for “micropayments.” The only tool the true artist uses is thought.

I have to laugh at the antics of Gratton because I am the greater chef. I have nostrils in my palms, fingers of tongues. I imagine dishes whose flavor shatters empires and moves continents. I do not waste my culinary talents slaving away over a hot stove. Because I have not found a restaurant to provide me with cooks indicates only that my flavors are ahead of their time. Those penny-pinching restauranteers are conservative in their methods.

Yet I have dreams, recurring dreams, about serving my own meals out of a van. A white van with a tiny kitchen. I park beside beautiful parks. The side of the van opens up into an awning and I serve meals to passersby from a sign I calligraphied myself. In this dream, life is bounded and simple, an unbroken circuit of desire and sustenance. In this dream there is no anxiety, no interviews, no resumes, no efforts to impress restaurant owners of my brilliance. No fear, only food. It is a beautiful dream.

I hate it.

Did you know that American poetry is a sham? The great American poet Walt Whitman not only vanity published his “classic” Leaves of Grass, but Whitman, a printer, also vanity-printed and even vanity-typeset his own work! Whitman was a grubby inkstained lout, a mechanic who dreamed of having thoughts, his vision a delusion.

And this is how I met Chef.

Chef was really into the recipes of Ronald Johnson. I used to go over to his apartment and we would read aloud to each other from them. Johnson’s Simple Fare was a forbidden text: recipes calling for shanks, hocks, feet, and no less than a cup of butter regardless of context. But Gratton wasn’t Old School. He sneered at The Joy of Cooking, calling it “the Capitalist Annual Monoculture Cookbook.” Gratton’s favorite cookbook was Monsieur Flambé Cooks for Uninvited Guests. Gratton’s recipe for caper soufflé won an international award. Chef created a patented line of irrational measuring cups that would enable otherwise meticulous chefs to use erratic measurements in a simulation of intuition. If a recipe called for 2 cups of flour, you’d have to figure out how to use the √2 cup √2 times. A culinary artiste like Monsieur Flambé, Chef reasoned, a passionate and mad artist, would never use a measuring cup. Indeed his proportions would vary and be rough. Gratton had never managed to find a publisher for any of his cookbooks, but had published a book on gardening: We Hold These Roots to be Self-Evident: We the People in Order to Form a More Perfect Onion.

At night I dreamt of being a superhero, roaming the downtown, where, if my senses detected an under-executed meal in the vicinity, I might unexpectedly appear tableside in white tuxedo shirt, black cape, and utility cummerbund with garlic press, peppermill, cheese grater, lemon wedges, and holstered cruets of extra virgin olive oil and red wine vinegar. Saving the evening again. But by day I worked as a roller skate simulator tester. My employers were developing an elaborate virtual reality environment so their clients could master the feel of the skates and basic skating techniques before ever strapping on the real thing. The engineers were hoping research and development would pay for itself by cutting costs spent on maintaining real roller rinks. It was believed that in twenty years the most expensive commodity would be space. There was an implication that the real thing—roller skates—might soon lose out in the market to simulators allowing the end user or consumer to have a certain roller skating experience without the inconvenience and danger of the outdoors. It was the new world. I got fired. I was standing on the corner asking passersby if they had any spare social change when a policeman threatened to issue me a citation for vibrancy.

Latency, I corrected him.

That’s how I met Chef. He told me he had social change but none of it was American currency. I was stunned, literally, because I had just been shot with a needle filled with hamster tranquilizer. A team of mercenary veterinarians was roaming the street with a list of people suspected of cruelty to animals. Let me explain: as a child I had had a pet rock. I flushed it down the toilet where it grew in the sewer into a boulder and caused all sorts of problems. Chef, a really very terribly macho guy, took me out for rhino cheese and radicchio sandwiches and tried to explain his idea for a zero-gravity salad bar, the physics of it, the pleasure of sucking lettuce from a tube.

He wore a plaid leather jacket adorned with padlocks, and at that cafe with fabulous mochas (the menu boasted that the building was located over an underground source of pure chocolate), he confessed his alienation over a steaming demitasse of motor oil latte.

He recited his haiku to me:

I know it’s only

poetry but I like it

like it yes I do

Chef had studied literature in college, getting an M.B.S. in metafiction at the University of Antarctica. (His thesis: “Why This is the Title of my Thesis: Recursion, Redundancy, and Redundancy in certain works of late Twentieth or mid-Seventeenth Century Fiction.”) They never, Chef said, read bpNichol. The Canadian studies department consisted of one half-time adjunct penguin. From Calgary. So when Chef moved to Toronto he discovered the works of Jen Schlotz, a poet who had written several books using only the letter X. Subminimalism, some called it. Others called it a reverse lipogram, and you can bet there were some backwards conservative extremists who called it cruel names.

After that Chef drifted.

Chef had worked as a waffle cone designer for an ice cream company that was actually, he suspected, a proprietary front for the CIA. He never did finish designing that waffle cone, despite the billions spent, but he added some flavors to their menu: Iran-Contra Crunch, MK-Ultra Rainbow Swirl. His specialty—the tropical shake—was made of banana ice cream, mosquitoes, and bark, with shell casings folded in for texture. He had another recipe he shared with me: into a blender he would drop a mango, a squeezed lime, and a live salamander. Salamander smoothies, he boasted, if consumed daily, would bring a lustrous sheen to the skin. His recipe for milksnakes was even better.

“The world is entering a severe ergonomic collapse,” he said. “Why, just last night as I was eating a bowl of Betty and Gerald’s Marion Berry ice cream, I got tennis elbow.”

He lost me. You see, I’m really into vegan fusion. My favorite drink mixes soy milk, rice milk, milk, and Bailey’s Irish Cream. The White Cow. I also like B.L.T.T.V.P. sandwiches.

So I went home, had a hot bowl of sandwich soup, and fell asleep listening to the Barely Noticeable Jazz station. Or was I? That was last night.

I was watching the Beef Channel when I heard Melinda’s truck in the drive.

I turned off the TV and pretended to be sketching out a Missing Cat sign. Truth is Melinda intimidated me. She was vegan, and I equated that with suffering. She had mettle. I think that maybe she didn’t see it that way—I think she saw being vegan as a way to reduce suffering, the suffering caused by the meat industry, the inhumanity inflicted upon animals, the environment, the local economy, and workers. True. Still, if somebody offers to buy you a steak, and you decline on ideological grounds, that counts as suffering in my book. So I tended to idealize Melinda as a dedicated revolutionary. Keeping the thermostat set just above sixty degrees when the temperature outside was minus one made her the equivalent of a Zen monk or a Navy Seal in my eyes. There were rumors that the Mayor was selling off our weather, degree by degree. Probably to Norway.

I had been enjoying the movie. Without Sebastian in the house I could hear it. I had sat on the couch and savored how quiet the house was. How nice La Maga and Wolfy were as a pair. One black and one white. They slept curled together like a yin and yang. Both reasonably quiet, small, cat-sized. Not extroverted. Aloof, reserved, dignified: cool cats.

Melinda shouldered her way in the door, hefting bags of groceries, appearing exhausted from work, blowing her hair out of her eyes in exaggerated irritation. Her most recent hair color was purple. Plum, to be precise, though it hadn’t fully taken out the orange. And her roots were molasses. She had lots of hair and the effect was somewhat delicious, like a blender accident.

As she set the groceries down, she said she had dropped by the Humane Society to look for Sebastian. I tried to manufacture an expression of rapt concern as my heart sank, bracing myself for the worst news: they had found him. But, she said, they hadn’t found him. I tried to feign both grief and gratitude, as if I had not been negligent but genuinely too broken up and in denial to have taken the important step of checking to see whether my missing cat had been turned in. I don’t know how well I pulled this off because I became suspicious. I didn’t believe this was happening. It was too convenient. I leave the cat alone with her for a week to go on vacation and when I return he is gone. She, meanwhile has checked at the Humane Society, filed a report, and come up with nothing. Sebastian, according to her, disappeared without a trace the day before I got home. This is a cat the size of a pig. A cat too old to land on its feet, much less to wander off on some crazed adventure. Of the three cats, he would be the least likely to disappear, because he is oldest, and because I am not that lucky. In short, I didn’t know whether I was more upset at the thought that Melinda had perhaps disposed of Sebastian the cat, or at the thought that I knew she had and was playing along.

Felicide? Or maybe there is no special word for the killing of a cat, given that perhaps the architects of our language did not find cat killing to be unusual enough to merit its own word. Scarcely a modification of “to kill.” What else would one kill, after all, if not a cat as excruciatingly intolerable as Sebastian?

But it was inconceivable. Melinda seemed to have no vices or instabilities. A person like that you would think incapable of murdering a cat. She was vegan and she didn’t like television: she wouldn’t eat cheese or watch it. But she was a hard person to share a phone-booth-sized kitchen with. A vegan workaholic is literally starving to death all the time. She cannot eat enough to give her the energy to feed herself. Just thinking about her diet made me hungry.

Now I knew where Melinda got her flowers.

The night sky rumbled as though the universe were in need of a midnight snack.

A jagged flicker of lightning brought the mall parking lot to light, followed by a terrible pounding of thunder. A police car drove by on a nearby street. I looked at Melinda, kneeling in the mud, digging up the nasturtiums. Guilty, I thought, for sure. But what is the crime?

The next flash revealed a rare sight: Melinda smiling, eyes hidden behind a colorful river of wet hair. She held aloft a fistful of liberated blossoms.

Forensic romance novelists are at work trying to ascertain who made the first move. We were kissing in the rain, lips soft, mouths wet. Rainwater poured between us and she tasted like cardamom. I ran my tongue over her lips. Cinnamon. We plunged together into another head-on collision, kneading lips like rosemary dough coated in slippery olive oil. My stomach twitched and grumbled. A long deep roll of thunder passed over us. I was getting lightheaded.

I stopped. I pushed her gently away, overcome by urges that frightened me.

She looked at me curiously, hair streaming across her wet cheeks.

I tried to apologize. “I have to stop. Sorry... I’m afraid I might... eat you.”

At home we made brown rice smoothies and supped them in silence. We played a game of chess. She was a better chess player than me and tried to compensate by playing left handed, but won anyway. I decided I needed to get out of the house for a while.

The neighborhood seemed full of headlights. Apparently the city was rolling back its best streets first, forcing traffic to take circuitous detours through our part of town. Headlights bobbed as cars inched across the intermittent pavement.

The rain had stopped. The moon was lime camembert.

I walked past the Islam pub, and stopped at the window of an adult novelty store. The edible panties had caught my eye. They looked... delicious, especially the blue ones. If the store were open I think I would have bought a pair and eaten them on the spot. I wondered why I was still hungry. I thought the brown rice smoothies would have cured anybody’s taste for food.

Finally I dropped in at the all night pharmacy and patisserie and had a slice of Chocolate-Zoloft Torte with Orange Coffee Filling and Mocha-Prozac Glaze. After that I felt complacent enough to sleep.

I woke up this morning.

I lay in bed thinking about what to eat. The bed was a blanket and I a pig. It reminded me of what Louis Flambé once wrote: “The world is hungry and may someday have us for breakfast and so we must, must, must feed ourselves, because when destiny has us as a four o’clock snack with its tea, snapping our spines like wafers, and then not even for a full meal, then be sure that you make it full by all you have eaten, so it doesn’t eat anybody for dinner and has bad dreams.” Presumably this was more resonant in the original French. I didn’t just want breakfast. I wanted to eat all three meals in one sitting. I wanted to eat encyclopedically, exhaustively, each bite a different gradation of ingredient and spicing. To eat, in one meal, every possible flavor. I wanted to eat the spectrum.

The clock radio came on with a story about the previous night’s meteor shower, which a number of astronomers were claiming was named after them. There were rumors that Sicily had disappeared, but nobody could prove them. I wondered whether it was possible that in my sleep I had swallowed a black hole. I rolled over and looked out my curtain. Standing in front of the bakery across the street were three large, heavyset men wearing sunglasses and white double-breasted chef’s uniforms with towering hats. A breeze brought in a tremendous smell of caramel and nutmeg that brought me to tears. One of the men had a rolling pin hanging from his belt. Their arms were crossed and it seemed there was no question but that they were staring up at me and my stomach jerked and nostrils twitched at that smell that almost reminded me of a delicious dessert I must have had years ago. I closed the curtain now suddenly hungry for breakfast though there was no food in the kitchen. I had awoken to devour every last scrap at around three in the morning. Last night in my feeding I had been chomping coffee beans by the handful. I wondered what had come over me, and sat down to eat tea bags and think.

So.

My place was being staked out by conspicuous and threatening culinary agents of some kind. I had taken to having hunger attacks. Sicily was gone and last night I had eaten pasta straight out of the box, imagining it to taste of olive, lemon, and parmesan. I wondered if this all had something to do with Chef Gratton.

I mean, if people from space came to Earth, what would they be after, really?

Well, not “people” from space.

Obviously.

But still.

And what better way to go about getting it than to draft humans as their agents?

It’s not often that I wake up with a craving for a beer float, but that’s what happened.

Chef.

This all added up. Mars.

But how did Chef fit in?

There was a knock at the door. Through the peephole I spied three gentlemen with bowties. I slid the chain on and cracked open the door. Before I could address them, a bolt cutter bit through the chain, the door burst open, the men swarmed in, and, before I could react, they had seated me at the head of my dinner table, hands bound behind my back with a knotted linen napkin.

The three gentlemen wore white tuxedo shirts and black trousers with gold piping. They were clean-cut and handsome with serious, aloof, borderline-bored expressions. One of them stood to my side, brandishing the largest peppermill I had ever seen. I struggled against the linen as he watched impassively from the corner of his eye. The other two were came in the room swiftly pushing a cart covered with silver domes.

“What is this?” I shouted.

“Appetizer, sir.” the man beside me explained, “Napolean de betteraves et chevre fraiche, vinaigrette d’orange sanguine. Three types of heirloom beets layered with fresh herb goat cheese set on leaf lettuce, dressed with a blood orange vinaigrette.”

“But I’m not hungry!” I cried. As I said it I realized the falseness of it. The men seemed to realize it too.

“Oh, but you are, sir,” my server responded, and a silver dome was set before me and lifted. I was awash in the delicious scent of beets and vinegar. The man gingerly tied a white napkin around my neck. He then took a forkful of beets and held it to my mouth. I tried to protest.

“I didn’t order an appetizer. What is this? Can’t a man serve himself?”

“It’s for your own protection, sir.”

Course after course was brought in and I continued to eat. I made no effort to resist. I ate everything they brought me. Pate de Campagne. Beaujolais. Escargot. The other waiter went into the next room and I caught a whiff of static as he put a record on. Salsa poured happily through the house. Strange smells came from the kitchen, where another waiter, in sunglasses, stood blocking the doorway, a metal tray cocked in his arm. I heard a trilling squeal that seemed to be brought short by the slam of a hammerblow.

I looked at the waiters in alarm. Neither registered any notice.

I woke up this afternoon.

It felt as though a muscular offal chef had taken a meat-tenderizing mallet to my cortex. The sunlight stung like salt. I groaned and rolled over, pulling the covers over my eyes. A crazy dream? In the bathroom I washed down ibuprofin with a Pepto Bismol Stone Sour. When I emerged I caught the distinct smell of shiitake mushrooms and onions sautéed with a splash of soy sauce. And sun dried tomatoes. I groaned. But in the kitchen there was only Melinda. “So hungry,” she murmured. I couldn’t think how to ask her what happened. From the couch La Maga was watching me curiously, ears pricked up. I called to her; she jumped out a hole in the windowscreen.

I went to the window and looked out. It was getting dark. Ominous clouds moved across the sky. Across the street the bakery was open and seemed to be doing business. Through the plate glass I saw Chef Gratton behind the counter, his hat towering, his gestures expansive, articulating his delicacies to a quorum of awestruck ladies. There was a rumble and a breeze that smelled of impending barbeque.

And it began to rain. I went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

It was stuffed with leafy vegetables. It was like opening a terrarium. A squash fell at my feet. I picked it up. It was wearing Sebastian’s collar.

The sight of the collar reminded me of my missing cat. I wondered again whether Melinda had “found a new home for him,” feeling a strange mixture of gratitude, feigned outrage, and relief, followed by an uneasy sense that even to think about the issue might somehow result in this cat being returned to me. The house seemed so big without him. And then guilt, abruptly terminated by selective amnesia.

I don’t mean to give you the impression that all we do in Tree City is eat.

We also drink.

I pushed my way into Molloy, where the culinary students drank. At the bar I ordered a pint of Malone. There were two mute televisions. On the Veal Channel, a Frenchman with an oily thin moustache flayed an eel, holding it up to the camera. A couple of guys to my right chortled.

“I wouldn’t eat Eel Veal prepared that way.”

“You call that an eel? I’ve seen bigger worms.”

On the News Channel, a reporter stood in front of a local supermarket, speaking to the camera. Then crazed shoppers pushing wire shopping carts around as if they were bumper cars. Two angry housewives collided, sending a child perched in the cart tumbling into a lobster tank. Cut to an arm clutching a half-eaten popsicle sweeping an entire shelf of ice cream cartons into a cart. Cut back to the reporter, who concluded the report, paused, pulled a salami from a trenchcoat pocket, and took a bite.

The newscasters seemed to banter uneasily, then segued into a story about the meteor shower.

I pointed at the screen and addressed the culinary students.

“Are people looting the stores?”

“Oh yeah,” one of them responded. His face, with dark wavy eyebrows above wide white eyes, was a plate of bacon and eggs. “There’s a panic.”

“Why?”

The students looked at each other, then back at me. Breakfast shrugged, a grimace flirting with his lips. “Hungry, I guess.” He took a handful of peanuts from a bowl on the bar and shoveled them into his mouth, shells and all.

I finished my beer and ordered two more.

The culinary school stood out in the lightning flicker, with spires, cupolas, a degree of ornamentation that would probably never be fashionable again, and new razor wire sharp enough to sliver asagio.

The locker room was deserted and lit by the sputter of one faulty fluorescent bulb. A chalkboard listed various assignments: Skunk Pâté, Jamaican Pot Roast, Gristle Loaf. Those were meat dishes and this was supposedly a vegetarian culinary school. Most of the lockers were not locked. Cookbooks, aprons, various knives and pots and pans, and a locker filled with electronic gadgetry: a sort of handset, some kind of radio receiver and transmitter. There was a crackle and a voice that seemed not quite human recited a list: “3000 artichoke hearts.... one gallon garam masala.... twenty-four tons whole wheat pastry flour.... 1000 sticks butter.... “ A whining interference punctuated this.

I opened the next locker and at the bottom of it something caught my eye, something I had never seen before. In disbelief, I reached down and held it up to the sputtering light. Amazing. A pair of roller skates. I had been testing roller skate simulators for months and had never seen the real thing. I had been one of the best testers on the crew, and had been declared a master of the simulated skate. I had clocked in at seventy simulated miles per theoretical hour. As far as advanced simulation research was concerned, I was a fully experienced roller skater. Or skatist, whichever. Sitting on a bench, I laced them on, but when I tried to stand up I realized I had put them on the wrong feet.

Holding onto the wall, I moved down a corridor, past a bulletin board tacked with flyers looking for volunteer tasters. Then I came upon a pair of swinging double doors, a sense of activity beyond them. I peeked through the crack. At row after row of tables sat waiters eating. Steaming wheelbarrows of sausage links stood to one side.

I was overcome by a wave of fear, followed by the munchies. I yanked the peel off a banana and sucked the whole thing into my mouth. Then the door struck my head, knocking the skates out from under me, as the waiter who was passing through slipped on my banana peel and came down crashing, his tray and metal dishes spinning loudly to rest.

I was covered with whipped cream and sprinkles when they pulled me to my wheels, their eyes as cold as sorbet.

I am not sure I agree with the ideological grounds of vegetarianism, or at least I am willing to make every effort to discredit them if I have a craving for shrimp scampi.

One can be vegetarian for many reasons. It is the healthiest and least expensive way to live, which you might think would be enough to ensure its widespread popularity. You could also make a strong case for the abolition of the automobile, but any established industry that turns a profit has a certain staying power, even if the product is no good, for example the arms industry. But I digress. Other issues behind vegetarianism include the devastation of land caused by the meat industry. By turning cattle ranches over to farmland, more nutrition could be produced for every acre, with considerably less degradation to the land. Most compellingly to me, the meat industry, beyond adding hog sewage reservoirs to the landscape, also does irremediable damage to many of its human workers.

These complex issues are too often reduced to the mistreatment of animals. Even cows, which should be set free to gallop across the plains. I too might be concerned for cows, but I have met far too many of them. Mistreatment of plants is not an issue. Does this presuppose that animals are conscious and plants are not? How can you prove either supposition? And wouldn’t a lifestyle involving a diet of exclusively plants foster a reverence for plants? Such that you would want plants to grow wildly, not on farms?

Yes, I can play logical games like an indefatigable chess computer if there is a hot turkey sandwich in the balance. Still, I’m pretty sure that one look inside a meat processing facility of any kind would make me a born-again, carrot-carrying vegan. I’ve often felt the same about pro-war protestors. Show them what a cluster bomb does to civilians and see if it takes the wind out of their belligerence.

But I digress. Where was I?

Chef put his arm around me and I bit it.

Looking hurt, rubbing his bite, he tried to be reasonable.

“Mars needs lunch,” he explained.

“Come on. You’re not from Mars.”

“Ah but we are.”

“Mars has been studied. There’s no life there.”

“We live on the other side.”

“But Mars rotates.”

“Ah-ah,” he wagged a finger.

“Ah-ah what?”

“Well, nothing. We move so we remain out of sight.”

“You move? Every day you move cities?”

“Well...”

“Well what?”

“Underground. We keep most of our cities underground.”

“Oh. Fine. Mars. Underground. And you just... needed some lunch.”

“Naturally.”

“And so you decided to raid our planet.”

“It was in the neighborhood.”

“You really couldn’t get it together at home, you had to go out.”

“I swear. Wasn’t so much as a sandwich on the whole planet.”

“So you just looked up and said ‘that blue planet looks open. Only one moon so it should be easy to get parking.’”

Chef gestured in the general direction of the bakery where customers were lined up around the block pushing wheelbarrows filled with money. He took a confidential tone:

“You were asleep and got hit by a microscopic meteor. It sliced through the roof of your house and lodged in your stomach. Only this meteor was no rock. It was a sophisticated gadget, a probe sent to determine a planet’s edibility. It performs chemical analyses on its immediate environment from which it is able to determine the presence of good food. Think of this as a super-intelligent, microscopic chemist and restaurant critic, sensitive enough to detect a strand of saffron on a planet the size of Jupiter. We sent millions of these probes all over the East Spiral Arm and, thanks to your orange ginger cashew sauce, Earth returned the best results: four stars.”

“Four stars? Four our of four?”

“Four out of what in your math would be about 2π, a little more than six.”

“Four out of six? You said we were the best-tasting planet in the whole spiral arm and they only give us four stars?”

“We are connoisseurs. Remember this was out of a sample of only about seven million.”

“And you said from Mars?”

“Ah, yes, the planet you call ‘Mars.’”

“What do you call it?”

“Joe’s.”

“So, out of a sample of seven million, as you say, the best-tasting planet happened to be closest?”

“Well, yes.”

“By coincidence.”

“I suppose so, yes. Martians are four-dimensional. We see a three-dimensional cross section of what you see, giving access to the insides of stomachs, which are now being tapped by a mothership in orbit. This enables us to save on preparation and chewing. This is why you are unable to satisfy your appetite.”

“Look, I know you’re bullshitting me about being from Mars. Why don’t you just admit it?”

“I’m telling you the truth. It’s a relief to be able to speak so openly with a member of your species.”

“It is not. Cut it out. Okay, so you’re from Mars? So tell me: what color is Mars?”

“What do you mean?”

“What color is Mars?”

“It’s... a lot of colors, just like Earth.”

“Yes, but which color dominates?”

“Why, blue, of course.”

“Ah. Blue. How are the oceans on Mars? Are they cold?”

“Cold? No, they’re surprisingly temperate. By our standards, which are, of course, or may be, different from yours.”

“Mars is red.”

“Well, obviously our eyes work differently—”

“—and dry.”

“Nonsense.”

“Mars has no oceans. We’ve known this for decades.”

“Well, easy for you to say. Compared to Earth, sure, not even Venus has oceans.”

“Ah. You’ve been to Venus?”

“Haven’t you?”

“Don’t be snide. How are the oceans on Venus?”

“Well, you know... Cold. According to our standards.”

“You’re lying.”

“Miscommunication. See, on Mars we don’t have oceans, exactly. We have canals.”

“That theory was discredited a century ago.”

“Ahem. Why would the beings who built your pyramids be unable to dig a few canals?”

“Right. If you built our pyramids, you did it with slave labor. Human slave labor.”

“Well?”

“There are no canals on Mars.”

“Next you’ll be telling me there are no gondolas.”

“You are so irredeemably lying. And not even well.”

“Translation problem. Why would I lie to you?”

“Because you’re trying to invade my planet?”

“But it’s not an invasion, it’s lunch. We considered eating you. Really, we did. But the samples we prepared... didn’t suit us. Too many bones. And I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to eat a cigarette smoker... When it came down to it, we didn’t think your meat was as good as your labor. That’s what I love about you... people... you really know how to work. Not all of you, but enough. It’s like you have nothing better to do. Of course I am talking about farmwork, prep, dishes sometimes, stuff like that. Your cooking is uneven. But your chewing is superb. That’s the thing I envy, really: you have great teeth. We have to puree everything. There’s nothing like freshly masticated food.”

“Wait. Wait. So you’re saying that our cooking rates only four stars... and yet all you can cook is soup?”

“And sauce. Sauces of various kinds. To put on soup.”

“So, Chef, or whoever is in there, what happens when everything is eaten? When your proxies have taken to the fields and torn down every ear of corn, pulled every potato, and the Midwestern nights are dotted with the lights of their cooking fires as they move across the agricultural grids boiling every last vegetable, grain, legume, root, and fruit? Long after the stores are stripped and abandoned, warehouses ransacked, silos torn down, restaurants robbed at eggbeater-point by crazed militia chefs, every twinkie unwrapped and devoured, their factories raided and ingredients eaten raw by savage bingers shoving handfuls of raw creme into their slobbering maws? What then, Chef? What is Mars doing for dinner? Do your ships go on to the next edible planet? Or are you going to enslave our people, forcing food production to surpass even arms production, a clanking mechanism dragging every last kernel of food from the Earth until the depleted soil turns to sand and blows away? Don’t you see that this great spherical salad bar can replenish itself endlessly if you let it? Why don’t you dismantle our factories, clean our air and water, replace the capitalist annual monocultures with perennial-heavy sustainable permaculture utopias? Make Venus your Iowa. Drain its acid swamps, grow thousands of tons of soybeans, and garnish them with natural, organic herbs. From Earth. Think of it. A skyscraper-high hibachi on Mercury. A ship comes down, belching coils of sparks, lowering a square-mile slab of tofu on the rails meant for it. A sheet of flame might stretch across the sky, the arcs of ice cream ships. This is how I see things between Mars and Earth. An artificial asteroid belt, open all night. Think of the menus we could create if my people and your ‘people’ shared recipes and spices. Winebottles fired into elliptic orbits, returning a hundred years later, aged to perfection. Think of it. Syrup strained from the viscous red clouds of Jupiter. Gin cooled with chunks of ice from the rings of Saturn. Solar-prominence-charred pork chops. Damnit, my people have come too close to an equitable and nonviolent world, only to plunge into catastrophic war again and again. And now you come here to eat our cows? Why can’t you come bringing morality, a higher purpose, cooperation, synergy, a philosophy of life? Instead you consume us without so much as garnish!”

“Bah! Garnish! Listen to you! No wonder your ‘people’ have never conquered the stars or built a Mars probe capable of detecting our great casinos and golf resorts! You are too busy occupying yourselves with garnish!”

I had figured out how to take their ship out of orbit.

I found Melinda at home, where, hallucinating from hunger, she was cooking a pot of gravel. I explained to her what was going on, and she agreed that we needed to stop them before she ate something she would truly regret. Like Jell-o.

She and I put on an evening gown and tuxedo, each, to help prolong our dignity, making sure we had plenty of cash. Melinda called the Common Grub phone tree to enlist the aid of the hippies, and then we went out into the rut and hit the first dive.

It was an old pub named Bottom. They served good draught beer, so authentic it had chunks of wood floating in it, sometimes a rusted nail or two. We each ordered a pint and bought a fifth of Old Skunk. A couple of waiters walked past outside, glaring in through the glass across which faulty neon slashed the crimson retrograde MOTTO. As I threw back a shot, one waiter staggered into the other.

We kept thinking of more things to drink to.

“To life.”

“To death.”

“To Earth.”

“And its food.”

“And the people whose meal it rightfully is.”

“Hear hear.”

“And the birds of the air.”

“And the beasts of the field.”

“Who are rightfully ours to harvest.”

“No. Who rightfully deserve a seat in the senate.”

“Whatever.”

“To whatever!”

“Cheers.”

Alcohol poured through wormholes in our stomachs and into orbit. We were getting weary but knew we had to persevere. The point was to prove that the human flesh could withstand alcohol abuse better than any other species of life intelligent enough to drink the toxic fluids of fermented compost.

I drank Filigree Gin, Dead Pigeon, Old Fool’s Gold, Goat Stout, Stoat Stout, Red Squid, Afterthought, Left Hook, Barbell Light, and Mayhem. Things started to get approximate.

“I’m not sure, but I drink I’m getting thunk.”

“Oh? How many heads am I holding up?”

“I don’t remember. Which one are you?”

The television over the bar suggested that an unexpected lunar eclipse had just commenced. The moon was obscured in shadow as the mother ship shifted orbit, no longer able to fly a straight line. We were about to get thrown out, so we went into the mud and found our way to Slurs’s. We ordered two bottles of Chivas, two paper bags, and two straws.

All over America, by now, called to action by the volunteer network, our fellow hippies, sloppy stupid and drunk, but righteously beautiful and sensitive, were drinking out of straws too.

Maybe I just don’t respect animals.

I like animals, some of them, but don’t object to their slaughter with anything near the conviction with which I object to the slaughter of humans. Except for endangered species: I object to the slaughter of endangered species. But that is for my benefit, not theirs—endangered species are entertaining. By studying endangered species, human scientists can learn facts about the nature of life those endangered species can never know. Same goes for aliens too until further notice. At this point, I don’t object to the slaughter of aliens. Video games have conditioned me to accept this violence as necessary. But I won’t eat their meat regardless. People either. But people I respect. I forgot to mention that I object to the slaughter of people: I object to the slaughter of people. Sure they’ve got problems—some of them are less interesting than cows and a lot meaner—but I relate to them. I like them. And double for cats. Most cats: I object to the slaughter of most cats.

The ship began to burn up in the upper atmosphere.

Like a cosmic cherries jubilee, its brandy flame lit the night skies. Finally it plunged into the south Pacific. All of Australia smelt like burnt toast. For three days it rained ketchup across the outback, but, aside from a bacon slick off the coast of Washington D.C., Earth was unharmed.

As for me...

I had a bad hangover.

I woke up to a terrible noise in the backyard. I thought the city might be excavating the sewer mains, but when I peeked through the curtain, the growl turned out to be Sebastian. Wherever he had been, my cat had been eating. He was as big as a shed, purring, shedding a cloud of fur. He bumped his head on a sassafras tree, partially uprooting it. I needed to move out before Melinda came home. We had saved the Earth together, I maybe loved her, but I was willing to abandon her just for life without Sebastian. It was her fault, I reasoned desperately, for wanting to liberate the animals. She wouldn’t be happy, I told myself, until free range cows were opening homogenous humanburger franchises in malls everywhere. Let her try to live with Sebastian for awhile: soon she will come to understand that the plant kingdom is a superior and graceful strata of life that deserves to flourish in peace, not be farmed like... plants... in giant... farms. You vegans treat your plants like animals! It felt good to be lying to myself again.

And so I threw my garlic press into a knapsack and hit the road.

I wound up working on a hula-hoop simulator outside of Lake City (their slogan: “Reinventing the wheel. Literally.”), and, to make a long story terminal, I lived happily ever after. I became an old man, I married an old woman, we honeymooned at Viagra Falls, and got even older. Life was good. I opened the Cafe Fear and served only gourmet food: small portions, large prices. I understood the secret of Gratton’s success. Some special customers would give me a nod, I would nod back, and serve them a cheeseburger disguised as a clever meat substitute. Their vegan date would be impressed, they would eat meat, and I would charge ten dollars for this special gourmet cuisine. And life went by, and Tree City, presumably, got taller. The end.

About the Author

Jimmy Crater lives in the Milky Way Galaxy, dividing his writing time between a new science fiction novel Waiting for the Third Shoe to Drop, and his memoir
Life: A Loser’s Manual.

SPINELESS BOOKS EDWARDSVILLE, ILL

Mars Needs Lunch, by Jimmy Crater,
adapted from a screenplay by June Crater Crash.

ISBN 0-9724244-8-2. ISBN-13 978-0-9724244-8-6. $10. © 4 April 2006 Spineless Books.

Second Spineless Edition 2009.

Livestock by Scott Westgard.
Cover design by Crystalline Scoggins.

Beet appetizer courtesy of the
Electronic Literature Organization.

spinelessbooks.com/mars

2005