A man in orbit, wearing a neoprene and fiberglass space suit, always finds himself seven feet behind a very ordinary Ohio-Turnpike-Rest-Stop-convenience-store style tuna sandwich, also in orbit; and, well, he's kind of hungry.
"The cheese in the mousetrap is always free."
colloquial expression
I am in the interior of a solid egg-shaped chamber without windows, doors or furniture of any kind. Suddenly, I remember a spatial paradox, in which someone trapped in a tiny room, opens one of two doors on either end; only to look back, and see that as he exits through one door, he is also entering through the other. A deep feeling of despair envelops me. I quickly awaken, and as always, find myself here.
You could say that I was just going around the corner—the corner of the earth in any case. It's not really a corner, more like a shaded ellipse that gradually merges into itself, while somehow never quite consummating its own transformation. I was in a fast orbit, so even as I circumnavigated the night side of the planet, the edge was little more than a slightly hazy transition zone into a liminal miasma that was always one step ahead of wherever I found myself. In this way, it was much like the tuna sandwich that I had been chasing for what seemed like an interminable series of revolutions around a completely silent world. I was always about seven feet behind the transparent bag that held the tuna sandwich, which was always moving at the exact same speed as my own bag; or, what you might call my spacesuit; although, truth be told, it was more like a neoprene and fiberglass prison—one with an incredible view of the unreadable ocean dominated landscape below. I couldn't even tell you when I had first discovered myself encased in this suit, with its tubes of cool air running through the fabric of my coverall-undergarments, and its waste and oxygen piping; all like the component-parts of some self-contained prophylaxis intended to seal me of from the airless tundra of ultraviolet radiation just outside the quarter inch of high-tech fiber separating me from the coldness of space.
In my mind's eye, I would often picture myself—as if from the distance of one of the antennae festooned satellites that would sometimes pass as close as a dozen kilometers—free floating in space like a large Blue whale, with its baleens open and feeding on krill and minnow sized fish in the diffuse Sargasso of the interplanetary void. At those moments I could feel the intensity of the emptiness that shrouded any object which might pass through this etheric medium. It was such an oppressively barren environment, that I was often given to seeing strong, compensatory, visual apparitions, or at least prone to mistake one sort of object, for something completely unrelated. For example, on one occasion, after staring for a long time, in the direction of Sirius, while crossing over the night side, I thought I could make out the shadowy profiles of a brigade of seahorses moving towards me from the horizon-line of the far southern hemisphere. When they came closer, I realized I had been looking at a refracted image of the aurora lights, shining across the scattered drapery-like folds of distant cloud tops. In a similar instance, not long after, I was musing on the weightlessness of objects in space—particularly terrestrial objects, which when deprived of the pull of gravity always seemed less substantial, even though their actual mass remained the same—when I began to imagine how a disembodied human placenta might look if it happened by chance to be passing somewhere to the east of my position in orbit, over Africa. I began musing over the burden of having a physical body, which was so cumbersome and unsuited to such an environment, when I thought I saw something resembling a jellyfish hovering very close to the spot on which I was focused. It was too large to be a star and seemed more animated than was likely with an interstellar object at a greater distance. My initial surprise was mitigated somewhat by the realization that this odd placental phantom, was in fact a piece of insulation which had come loose from a nearby satellite and was now billowing out in response to the invisible force of the solar wind. None of my lucidly imagined fantasies however, could displace my one true obsession from its position of primacy in my mind—the tuna on white-bread sailing just ahead of my own position, and protected from the elements by a relatively thin layer of heavy-duty, high-tech, plastic wrap.
Unfortunately, one of Newton's laws, the one regarding objects in motion, was always in evidence, insuring that the sandwich constantly remained seven feet in front of me, no matter what I might otherwise do to shorten that distance so as to bring it within reach. Since I did not have a cane or flensing hook, or even the wherewithal to control such an implement in this gravity free environment—especially while clad in the complex armature of an air-conditioning ventilation system wrapped in mobile-home insulation—I was forced to fall back on my own imagination, which I often found, was more prone to contemplate the meaning of the just-out-of-reach tuna sandwich, than to actually devise strategies for obtaining it. And, of course, this would lead to an even more disturbing question; namely, what would I do in the aftermath of consuming said tuna sandwich—would another merely emerge in its place; and, if so, in consonance with what principle of physics? Moreover, what if a replacement sandwich failed to materialize; would not the absence of a tuna sandwich lead to a condition of existential emptiness, forcing me to confront the truth of my situation? The truth being that I was stuck 200-miles above the earth without even understanding how I could have come to be here—this was my dilemma.
Over time, the sandwich began to represent every unrealized possibility from the separate and disconnected life that I had probably once experienced beneath the concentric itineraries of the popcorn cloud-tops that moved like marching brigades of drunken soldiers far below. In this other life, I knew I had eaten many tuna sandwiches, could even taste their essence as I attempted to clear my mind and strategize a way to obtain the one just in front of me. Such efforts were always futile however, as I would find myself lost in some fantastic memory of a sandwich eaten on the subway as it traveled across the Manhattan Bridge; or, in another recollection, coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel, one hand on the steering wheel, navigating the potholes and expansion joints on the New Jersey side, while balancing a hot pepper, cheese and onion covered tuna hoagie on one knee. Such memories were always painful, suffused as they were with the pathos and melancholia of sharply remembered pickle slices and other condiments, as they fell to the floor in an avalanche of mayonnaise and bread and precious tuna salad. It was as if these losses—always a relatively small portion of one half of a sandwich, never anything remotely close to the entire edifice—somehow represented the symbolic loss of something that could never be recuperated; and now, after an un-measurable blank ellipses, between my strangely disembodied memory of a life on solid ground, and the one I was currently living, within a vast ocean of space, I could fully appreciate the cumulative amount of flavor and nourishment that all of those small fragments and pieces amounted to.
None of these sandwiches was ever so abstracted as to be merely an archetype, or some form of uber tuna-hero; rather, each one was a distinct individual, with a specific constellation of singular qualities. There was the home-made tuna salad, with its mixture of Hellmans mayonnaise and Miracle Whip, absorbed into an oatmealy matrix of bread-crumbs, lemon juice and emerald-colored celery shards, that I had once consumed while watching a grainy video print of This Island Earth, in the small Lower East Side apartment I occupied for several months. And the tuna-on-a-poppy-seed-roll, mixed with the perfect combination of pimentos and spicy mayo that I had wolfed down while riding the D-Train to Coney Island to meet a girlfriend one afternoon. I could vividly remember the flavor of that sandwich, but could not recall a single detail of the girl on whose behalf I had risked indigestion in eating it so quickly. Nonetheless, it had been delicious, and I savored every second of the two minutes that it took before it disappeared in a snirt-storm of mayonnaise covered bread-crumbs. But most poignantly delicious of all had been the foot-long hero at the Indian-owned Blimpies on 4th street, right next to the Waverly theater in the Village, that I gobbled up, like an automated paper-shredder, one afternoon, just after finding two live Sonic Youth bootlegs at Other Music. The Indian restaurant owners were always far more generous with the various condiments, as well as with the tuna-salad itself; and this one had spared me not the slightest of gustatory pleasures as he piled on vinegar-peppers, and salad oil, in addition to the usual toppings, in what I would forever remember as the best tuna sandwich I had ever eaten anywhere—the gold standard by which all others would be judged from that date forward.
Ironically, the sandwich that I now chased, continuously, as we both rotated around the same corner, circling the earth 36 times a day, was essentially an unknown quantity. I did not know which, if any, condiments it might contain, although on several occasions I thought I glimpsed a separate bag which seemed to give off a faint greenish hue, like those sour pickle slices that I once found so essential for most sandwiches. And, while it sat in a thick plastic casing which, no doubt maintained constant refrigerator level temperatures—bending and absorbing rays of sunlight, while reflecting oil-slick refractions of cloud, ocean and land formations from the earth's surface, mixed with the occasional bright glinting of extraterrestrial debris and the gleam of distant satellites, passing nearby—it was almost opaque, and therefore impossible for me to read. Only at those specific moments, all 36 of them, to be exact, when the sandwich apparatus, and I, would make the very brief transition between the night and day zones, at the penumbra, where one mixes briefly with the other, could I get a clear view of what was inside that dense, but momentarily transparent, polymer bag. When this would occur, my adrenaline levels would rise with a rushing sensation as if my arteries were suddenly coursing with methedrine-laced rocket fuel, which would concentrates around my groin region, and enhance the visceral sense that I was indeed on the cusp of a transcendent moment. I would then, physically, feel myself being pulled into a region of inchoate, but potentially lavish, fantasy scenarios, such as imagining that I was swimming in a large, deep-sea-submersible, testing pool, filled with tuna salad; or, wearing pants and a polo-shirt made of tuna skin, while making out with a girl whose body was scented with tuna-oil; or, perhaps even, frolicking inside of a winter blizzard scene of blinding whiteness and big snowflakes—except that instead of snow, it would be tuna salad falling and covering the ground.
These fantasies may have seemed grandiose, or simply banal, in light of the far more limited reality that was before me, but they also allowed for my transition from a passive observer, of a continuously orbiting victual, to a participant in my own liberation. This transition however, was limited by the absolute boundaries that separated my self-contained ecosystem from that vast region where everything was merely the infinite expression of one seemingly immutable law: the impossibility of life, even the sort inclined to eke out the most humble and limited type of existence. My desire to transcend those boundaries would soon be tested.
It was at an unexpected moment, sometime later, when I noticed that an opportunity had arisen for me to finally break the stalemate in my endless pursuit of the tuna sandwich. Flying through the penumbra, and into the night zone, above the earth, I had found myself transfixed by the beauty of the various land formations and ocean currents below. The pattern of city lights, which seemed to emerge like an unreadable motif of different sized candles, burning in myriad patterns and intensities, particularly over parts of Asia, was mesmerizing, and one lost all sense of how to measure distances. This combined with the sporadic rhythms of lightning, which approximated a flashing strobe-effect that could only be read in totality from the distance of space. I quickly passed from Asia Minor to the Great Rift Valley, and then the entire continent of Africa, shimmering below me like an intermittently illuminated lava-lamp made from pixelated nodes of sparkling light. Slowly, I noticed that one light seemed to separate from the others and angle in my direction, as if it were responding to some un-conscious cue on my part to engage it. I realized that this wasn't a light shining up from continental Africa, but a fortuitously erratic reflective metal-beam, coming straight at me from another point in near-earth space. Most likely, it had broken off from the superstructure of one of the older spy-satellites still floating in orbit as little more than a ghostly historical marker of shifts in technology, which periodically usurped these aging hulks with more efficient appliances. Of course, it was easier and cheaper to simply allow them to live out their last years, spinning in slowly decaying orbits that would come to a dramatic end when they finally entered the atmosphere, flaming out over the oceans, in a process often built into their very design capabilities. Quite frequently however, a piece, or several pieces, of one of these machines, would remain in orbit after breaking away from the larger apparatus, prior to its conflagration. As it wobbled closer, I noticed that this one was probably almost ten feet in length, and had a curved ending due to a slight accident that had most likely occurred during the moment when it achieved its independence, causing it to hook around like a cane. "Now I had a tool," I thought, as I reached out in my spacesuit to grab it.
Once I had the metal beam in my hand, I quickly realized that hooking the sandwich bag—as I had taken to calling the satchel—would be the equivalent of attempting to retrieve a golf ball from a swamp using a length of aluminum drainage pipe. The spacesuit apparatus was quite awkward in zero gravity, and my difficulty reconciling the mass of the suit with the almost uncontrollably rickety support beam, would likely cause the lightweight material to bend and sway like a Date Palm caught in a hurricane; or worse, come loose from my grip altogether, and float off in the opposite direction. Just as worrying, was the possibility that the suit-gloves—which were primarily designed for protection from the coldness of space, and probably never intended to be used for gripping objects—would slide across the material of my makeshift flensing-hook, like Teflon coated mittens slipping along the cigar-shaped bodice of a Sea Cucumber. Getting a grip was going to be difficult, but without one, the rest of the process would not be possible.
I clasped my gloved-hands together, as if I were winding-up in prelude for genuflection, and gripped the length of lightweight metal as best I could. As I shifted my position, to be more aligned with the direction in which I was going to 'hook-my-prey', it occurred to me that the more aggressively I pursued this course of action, the more likely I might be to overcompensate in some way and create some rapidly unfolding, and unanticipated, disaster. Perhaps this idea was never really able to take root and germinate quickly enough to effect the rapidity with which I set about the task; for in that moment, I reached forward, like a prehistoric Mammoth hunter with a Clovis-tipped spear, and tenuously nicked the edges of the sandwich bag, and began guiding it towards me using the reverse momentum of my own thrust.
Maybe if I had waited until arriving at the penumbra, I might have been able to see the satchel more clearly, and thus guide my movements more effectively; because, just as I began to draw the bag closer, all hell broke loose, and within a millisecond, I found myself, unintentionally, moving rapidly off course; again, thanks to a basic aspect of Newtonian law, which I might have paid heed, had I paused for even a moment to question the likelihood of attaining something of such dubious long-term value coupled with such enormous risks in the event of failure. Suddenly, I picked up speed, and was flying at high velocity in the opposite direction, as the bag with the tuna sandwich became smaller and smaller until it receded into a single point in the inky blackness of the void. I simultaneously realized that my orbit was decaying, and I would imminently begin free falling back into the atmosphere. While I had longed for such a moment, I knew that the suit would only protect me if I came in at a very specific and precise angle; and, I had no way of knowing whether that would be at all likely, given the cause of my reentry and the speed with which it was now taking place.
I was falling somewhere over the deserts of Australia, which seemed to get exponentially larger and larger within my field of vision, every second. A self-repeating image loop—a sequence of cartoon frames showing Wile E Coyote falling off of a butte and into a deep chasm—began to play out in my mind, the way such thoughts often do, when one begins to feel the need to invent a mantra to counteract an unusually tedious activity, or a looming danger. This was definitely the latter. Australia was now so close that it was no longer a continent laid out before me, like an inert, yellowing, animal skin; but instead, appeared as a dangerous copper-toned predator, whose details were beginning to resolve into hardscrabble desert outback. The coyote would often fall into landscapes much like this one—although with their steep cliffs and canyons they usually resembled the southwestern US—as he would fail time and time again to consummate his appetite for that elusive bird. His obsession with consuming this sparely built avian now seemed analogous to commodity fetishism; and yes, I was suddenly analyzing a cartoon in a Marxist context, engaging in this entirely-beside-the-point intellectual onanism, just at the moment when I was hurtling towards a fiery end over one of the driest places on earth.
But the thought continued to seduce all of my attentions, for I believed that it must have had some metaphorical resonance with my own situation—exactly how I wasn't sure. Perhaps the significance was in the coyote's burning desire to continue pursuing the roadrunner, which like any commodity—or a certain tuna sandwich—always exists as a fantasy, precisely because the happiness it promises is unattainable. It seemed sadly axiomatic, that I would have this insight, not before, but after a disastrous attempt to procure something whose significance was almost completely symbolic, and which was unnecessary in any practical way—as my nutritional needs were met by the, admittedly colorless and flavorless, molecular feeds from my oxygen tubes. But, just like the Coyote's unquenchable hunger, satiation remains elusive, and cannot be realized except in those rare, ephemeral, moments, when he believes he is on the verge of capturing the bird—all of this while utilizing expensive ray-guns and anti-gravity machines procured from a company called Acme.
This thought was interrupted by the strong feeling that I might also soon need one of those mythical anti-gravity devices, as there was no longer any Australia, only a shimmering mustardy yellowness, and the awareness that the suit's exterior was beginning to heat up in the outermost layers of the atmosphere. It occurred to me suddenly that there was a parachute somewhere on the back of this bulky getup along the protruding area that also housed the air conditioning and waste disposal systems. I only had to survive the next few seconds of Reentry, and then I could, presumably, unlatch it. However, there was the ever looming possibility that it would not open at all, and I would spend my last seconds on earth with the bittersweet knowledge that, while making it back to the surface, I had been ground into burrito meat in the process; and worse, that my last thoughts had been about a stupid cartoon where an insane coyote chases an emaciated bird who possesses a one word vocabulary, repeated twice:
"Beep Beep," intoned something in the back of my oxygen tanks, an indicator that the 'heat emergency' was now over. Somehow, I had survived Reentry, while musing on a long-forgotten Saturday morning animation. Now, I had only to get my chute to open, and I would be able to walk to the nearest town—which in this outfit would still take hours and risk dehydration—and, yes, order a tuna sandwich, to make up for the one that was, no doubt, still floating in space, somewhere high above the earth. I was falling at a rate that only gave me slightly longer than a few seconds—which, by coincidence, had arrived—to pull out the rip-chord. I could feel something familiar, next to the emergency oxygen activation switch. I pulled it, and a long cable suddenly began to stretch out like the powerful tendrils of a mechanical squid. It was as strong as a rope harness despite being significantly smaller in its dimensions. I would find out very soon, if the chutes would actually come out; and if they did, I would, indeed, be planning my next meal—as I could already envision it, on hero bread with lots of condiments and spices... And, I would be thinking about this glorious sandwich, all of the way down, until I landed.
JZRothstein (final draft) 10/3/2013
Short story by Jeffrey Z Rothstein
Read 613 times
Written on 2013-10-16 at 18:32
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Tuna sandwich
"The cheese in the mousetrap is always free."
colloquial expression
I am in the interior of a solid egg-shaped chamber without windows, doors or furniture of any kind. Suddenly, I remember a spatial paradox, in which someone trapped in a tiny room, opens one of two doors on either end; only to look back, and see that as he exits through one door, he is also entering through the other. A deep feeling of despair envelops me. I quickly awaken, and as always, find myself here.
You could say that I was just going around the corner—the corner of the earth in any case. It's not really a corner, more like a shaded ellipse that gradually merges into itself, while somehow never quite consummating its own transformation. I was in a fast orbit, so even as I circumnavigated the night side of the planet, the edge was little more than a slightly hazy transition zone into a liminal miasma that was always one step ahead of wherever I found myself. In this way, it was much like the tuna sandwich that I had been chasing for what seemed like an interminable series of revolutions around a completely silent world. I was always about seven feet behind the transparent bag that held the tuna sandwich, which was always moving at the exact same speed as my own bag; or, what you might call my spacesuit; although, truth be told, it was more like a neoprene and fiberglass prison—one with an incredible view of the unreadable ocean dominated landscape below. I couldn't even tell you when I had first discovered myself encased in this suit, with its tubes of cool air running through the fabric of my coverall-undergarments, and its waste and oxygen piping; all like the component-parts of some self-contained prophylaxis intended to seal me of from the airless tundra of ultraviolet radiation just outside the quarter inch of high-tech fiber separating me from the coldness of space.
In my mind's eye, I would often picture myself—as if from the distance of one of the antennae festooned satellites that would sometimes pass as close as a dozen kilometers—free floating in space like a large Blue whale, with its baleens open and feeding on krill and minnow sized fish in the diffuse Sargasso of the interplanetary void. At those moments I could feel the intensity of the emptiness that shrouded any object which might pass through this etheric medium. It was such an oppressively barren environment, that I was often given to seeing strong, compensatory, visual apparitions, or at least prone to mistake one sort of object, for something completely unrelated. For example, on one occasion, after staring for a long time, in the direction of Sirius, while crossing over the night side, I thought I could make out the shadowy profiles of a brigade of seahorses moving towards me from the horizon-line of the far southern hemisphere. When they came closer, I realized I had been looking at a refracted image of the aurora lights, shining across the scattered drapery-like folds of distant cloud tops. In a similar instance, not long after, I was musing on the weightlessness of objects in space—particularly terrestrial objects, which when deprived of the pull of gravity always seemed less substantial, even though their actual mass remained the same—when I began to imagine how a disembodied human placenta might look if it happened by chance to be passing somewhere to the east of my position in orbit, over Africa. I began musing over the burden of having a physical body, which was so cumbersome and unsuited to such an environment, when I thought I saw something resembling a jellyfish hovering very close to the spot on which I was focused. It was too large to be a star and seemed more animated than was likely with an interstellar object at a greater distance. My initial surprise was mitigated somewhat by the realization that this odd placental phantom, was in fact a piece of insulation which had come loose from a nearby satellite and was now billowing out in response to the invisible force of the solar wind. None of my lucidly imagined fantasies however, could displace my one true obsession from its position of primacy in my mind—the tuna on white-bread sailing just ahead of my own position, and protected from the elements by a relatively thin layer of heavy-duty, high-tech, plastic wrap.
Unfortunately, one of Newton's laws, the one regarding objects in motion, was always in evidence, insuring that the sandwich constantly remained seven feet in front of me, no matter what I might otherwise do to shorten that distance so as to bring it within reach. Since I did not have a cane or flensing hook, or even the wherewithal to control such an implement in this gravity free environment—especially while clad in the complex armature of an air-conditioning ventilation system wrapped in mobile-home insulation—I was forced to fall back on my own imagination, which I often found, was more prone to contemplate the meaning of the just-out-of-reach tuna sandwich, than to actually devise strategies for obtaining it. And, of course, this would lead to an even more disturbing question; namely, what would I do in the aftermath of consuming said tuna sandwich—would another merely emerge in its place; and, if so, in consonance with what principle of physics? Moreover, what if a replacement sandwich failed to materialize; would not the absence of a tuna sandwich lead to a condition of existential emptiness, forcing me to confront the truth of my situation? The truth being that I was stuck 200-miles above the earth without even understanding how I could have come to be here—this was my dilemma.
Over time, the sandwich began to represent every unrealized possibility from the separate and disconnected life that I had probably once experienced beneath the concentric itineraries of the popcorn cloud-tops that moved like marching brigades of drunken soldiers far below. In this other life, I knew I had eaten many tuna sandwiches, could even taste their essence as I attempted to clear my mind and strategize a way to obtain the one just in front of me. Such efforts were always futile however, as I would find myself lost in some fantastic memory of a sandwich eaten on the subway as it traveled across the Manhattan Bridge; or, in another recollection, coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel, one hand on the steering wheel, navigating the potholes and expansion joints on the New Jersey side, while balancing a hot pepper, cheese and onion covered tuna hoagie on one knee. Such memories were always painful, suffused as they were with the pathos and melancholia of sharply remembered pickle slices and other condiments, as they fell to the floor in an avalanche of mayonnaise and bread and precious tuna salad. It was as if these losses—always a relatively small portion of one half of a sandwich, never anything remotely close to the entire edifice—somehow represented the symbolic loss of something that could never be recuperated; and now, after an un-measurable blank ellipses, between my strangely disembodied memory of a life on solid ground, and the one I was currently living, within a vast ocean of space, I could fully appreciate the cumulative amount of flavor and nourishment that all of those small fragments and pieces amounted to.
None of these sandwiches was ever so abstracted as to be merely an archetype, or some form of uber tuna-hero; rather, each one was a distinct individual, with a specific constellation of singular qualities. There was the home-made tuna salad, with its mixture of Hellmans mayonnaise and Miracle Whip, absorbed into an oatmealy matrix of bread-crumbs, lemon juice and emerald-colored celery shards, that I had once consumed while watching a grainy video print of This Island Earth, in the small Lower East Side apartment I occupied for several months. And the tuna-on-a-poppy-seed-roll, mixed with the perfect combination of pimentos and spicy mayo that I had wolfed down while riding the D-Train to Coney Island to meet a girlfriend one afternoon. I could vividly remember the flavor of that sandwich, but could not recall a single detail of the girl on whose behalf I had risked indigestion in eating it so quickly. Nonetheless, it had been delicious, and I savored every second of the two minutes that it took before it disappeared in a snirt-storm of mayonnaise covered bread-crumbs. But most poignantly delicious of all had been the foot-long hero at the Indian-owned Blimpies on 4th street, right next to the Waverly theater in the Village, that I gobbled up, like an automated paper-shredder, one afternoon, just after finding two live Sonic Youth bootlegs at Other Music. The Indian restaurant owners were always far more generous with the various condiments, as well as with the tuna-salad itself; and this one had spared me not the slightest of gustatory pleasures as he piled on vinegar-peppers, and salad oil, in addition to the usual toppings, in what I would forever remember as the best tuna sandwich I had ever eaten anywhere—the gold standard by which all others would be judged from that date forward.
Ironically, the sandwich that I now chased, continuously, as we both rotated around the same corner, circling the earth 36 times a day, was essentially an unknown quantity. I did not know which, if any, condiments it might contain, although on several occasions I thought I glimpsed a separate bag which seemed to give off a faint greenish hue, like those sour pickle slices that I once found so essential for most sandwiches. And, while it sat in a thick plastic casing which, no doubt maintained constant refrigerator level temperatures—bending and absorbing rays of sunlight, while reflecting oil-slick refractions of cloud, ocean and land formations from the earth's surface, mixed with the occasional bright glinting of extraterrestrial debris and the gleam of distant satellites, passing nearby—it was almost opaque, and therefore impossible for me to read. Only at those specific moments, all 36 of them, to be exact, when the sandwich apparatus, and I, would make the very brief transition between the night and day zones, at the penumbra, where one mixes briefly with the other, could I get a clear view of what was inside that dense, but momentarily transparent, polymer bag. When this would occur, my adrenaline levels would rise with a rushing sensation as if my arteries were suddenly coursing with methedrine-laced rocket fuel, which would concentrates around my groin region, and enhance the visceral sense that I was indeed on the cusp of a transcendent moment. I would then, physically, feel myself being pulled into a region of inchoate, but potentially lavish, fantasy scenarios, such as imagining that I was swimming in a large, deep-sea-submersible, testing pool, filled with tuna salad; or, wearing pants and a polo-shirt made of tuna skin, while making out with a girl whose body was scented with tuna-oil; or, perhaps even, frolicking inside of a winter blizzard scene of blinding whiteness and big snowflakes—except that instead of snow, it would be tuna salad falling and covering the ground.
These fantasies may have seemed grandiose, or simply banal, in light of the far more limited reality that was before me, but they also allowed for my transition from a passive observer, of a continuously orbiting victual, to a participant in my own liberation. This transition however, was limited by the absolute boundaries that separated my self-contained ecosystem from that vast region where everything was merely the infinite expression of one seemingly immutable law: the impossibility of life, even the sort inclined to eke out the most humble and limited type of existence. My desire to transcend those boundaries would soon be tested.
It was at an unexpected moment, sometime later, when I noticed that an opportunity had arisen for me to finally break the stalemate in my endless pursuit of the tuna sandwich. Flying through the penumbra, and into the night zone, above the earth, I had found myself transfixed by the beauty of the various land formations and ocean currents below. The pattern of city lights, which seemed to emerge like an unreadable motif of different sized candles, burning in myriad patterns and intensities, particularly over parts of Asia, was mesmerizing, and one lost all sense of how to measure distances. This combined with the sporadic rhythms of lightning, which approximated a flashing strobe-effect that could only be read in totality from the distance of space. I quickly passed from Asia Minor to the Great Rift Valley, and then the entire continent of Africa, shimmering below me like an intermittently illuminated lava-lamp made from pixelated nodes of sparkling light. Slowly, I noticed that one light seemed to separate from the others and angle in my direction, as if it were responding to some un-conscious cue on my part to engage it. I realized that this wasn't a light shining up from continental Africa, but a fortuitously erratic reflective metal-beam, coming straight at me from another point in near-earth space. Most likely, it had broken off from the superstructure of one of the older spy-satellites still floating in orbit as little more than a ghostly historical marker of shifts in technology, which periodically usurped these aging hulks with more efficient appliances. Of course, it was easier and cheaper to simply allow them to live out their last years, spinning in slowly decaying orbits that would come to a dramatic end when they finally entered the atmosphere, flaming out over the oceans, in a process often built into their very design capabilities. Quite frequently however, a piece, or several pieces, of one of these machines, would remain in orbit after breaking away from the larger apparatus, prior to its conflagration. As it wobbled closer, I noticed that this one was probably almost ten feet in length, and had a curved ending due to a slight accident that had most likely occurred during the moment when it achieved its independence, causing it to hook around like a cane. "Now I had a tool," I thought, as I reached out in my spacesuit to grab it.
Once I had the metal beam in my hand, I quickly realized that hooking the sandwich bag—as I had taken to calling the satchel—would be the equivalent of attempting to retrieve a golf ball from a swamp using a length of aluminum drainage pipe. The spacesuit apparatus was quite awkward in zero gravity, and my difficulty reconciling the mass of the suit with the almost uncontrollably rickety support beam, would likely cause the lightweight material to bend and sway like a Date Palm caught in a hurricane; or worse, come loose from my grip altogether, and float off in the opposite direction. Just as worrying, was the possibility that the suit-gloves—which were primarily designed for protection from the coldness of space, and probably never intended to be used for gripping objects—would slide across the material of my makeshift flensing-hook, like Teflon coated mittens slipping along the cigar-shaped bodice of a Sea Cucumber. Getting a grip was going to be difficult, but without one, the rest of the process would not be possible.
I clasped my gloved-hands together, as if I were winding-up in prelude for genuflection, and gripped the length of lightweight metal as best I could. As I shifted my position, to be more aligned with the direction in which I was going to 'hook-my-prey', it occurred to me that the more aggressively I pursued this course of action, the more likely I might be to overcompensate in some way and create some rapidly unfolding, and unanticipated, disaster. Perhaps this idea was never really able to take root and germinate quickly enough to effect the rapidity with which I set about the task; for in that moment, I reached forward, like a prehistoric Mammoth hunter with a Clovis-tipped spear, and tenuously nicked the edges of the sandwich bag, and began guiding it towards me using the reverse momentum of my own thrust.
Maybe if I had waited until arriving at the penumbra, I might have been able to see the satchel more clearly, and thus guide my movements more effectively; because, just as I began to draw the bag closer, all hell broke loose, and within a millisecond, I found myself, unintentionally, moving rapidly off course; again, thanks to a basic aspect of Newtonian law, which I might have paid heed, had I paused for even a moment to question the likelihood of attaining something of such dubious long-term value coupled with such enormous risks in the event of failure. Suddenly, I picked up speed, and was flying at high velocity in the opposite direction, as the bag with the tuna sandwich became smaller and smaller until it receded into a single point in the inky blackness of the void. I simultaneously realized that my orbit was decaying, and I would imminently begin free falling back into the atmosphere. While I had longed for such a moment, I knew that the suit would only protect me if I came in at a very specific and precise angle; and, I had no way of knowing whether that would be at all likely, given the cause of my reentry and the speed with which it was now taking place.
I was falling somewhere over the deserts of Australia, which seemed to get exponentially larger and larger within my field of vision, every second. A self-repeating image loop—a sequence of cartoon frames showing Wile E Coyote falling off of a butte and into a deep chasm—began to play out in my mind, the way such thoughts often do, when one begins to feel the need to invent a mantra to counteract an unusually tedious activity, or a looming danger. This was definitely the latter. Australia was now so close that it was no longer a continent laid out before me, like an inert, yellowing, animal skin; but instead, appeared as a dangerous copper-toned predator, whose details were beginning to resolve into hardscrabble desert outback. The coyote would often fall into landscapes much like this one—although with their steep cliffs and canyons they usually resembled the southwestern US—as he would fail time and time again to consummate his appetite for that elusive bird. His obsession with consuming this sparely built avian now seemed analogous to commodity fetishism; and yes, I was suddenly analyzing a cartoon in a Marxist context, engaging in this entirely-beside-the-point intellectual onanism, just at the moment when I was hurtling towards a fiery end over one of the driest places on earth.
But the thought continued to seduce all of my attentions, for I believed that it must have had some metaphorical resonance with my own situation—exactly how I wasn't sure. Perhaps the significance was in the coyote's burning desire to continue pursuing the roadrunner, which like any commodity—or a certain tuna sandwich—always exists as a fantasy, precisely because the happiness it promises is unattainable. It seemed sadly axiomatic, that I would have this insight, not before, but after a disastrous attempt to procure something whose significance was almost completely symbolic, and which was unnecessary in any practical way—as my nutritional needs were met by the, admittedly colorless and flavorless, molecular feeds from my oxygen tubes. But, just like the Coyote's unquenchable hunger, satiation remains elusive, and cannot be realized except in those rare, ephemeral, moments, when he believes he is on the verge of capturing the bird—all of this while utilizing expensive ray-guns and anti-gravity machines procured from a company called Acme.
This thought was interrupted by the strong feeling that I might also soon need one of those mythical anti-gravity devices, as there was no longer any Australia, only a shimmering mustardy yellowness, and the awareness that the suit's exterior was beginning to heat up in the outermost layers of the atmosphere. It occurred to me suddenly that there was a parachute somewhere on the back of this bulky getup along the protruding area that also housed the air conditioning and waste disposal systems. I only had to survive the next few seconds of Reentry, and then I could, presumably, unlatch it. However, there was the ever looming possibility that it would not open at all, and I would spend my last seconds on earth with the bittersweet knowledge that, while making it back to the surface, I had been ground into burrito meat in the process; and worse, that my last thoughts had been about a stupid cartoon where an insane coyote chases an emaciated bird who possesses a one word vocabulary, repeated twice:
"Beep Beep," intoned something in the back of my oxygen tanks, an indicator that the 'heat emergency' was now over. Somehow, I had survived Reentry, while musing on a long-forgotten Saturday morning animation. Now, I had only to get my chute to open, and I would be able to walk to the nearest town—which in this outfit would still take hours and risk dehydration—and, yes, order a tuna sandwich, to make up for the one that was, no doubt, still floating in space, somewhere high above the earth. I was falling at a rate that only gave me slightly longer than a few seconds—which, by coincidence, had arrived—to pull out the rip-chord. I could feel something familiar, next to the emergency oxygen activation switch. I pulled it, and a long cable suddenly began to stretch out like the powerful tendrils of a mechanical squid. It was as strong as a rope harness despite being significantly smaller in its dimensions. I would find out very soon, if the chutes would actually come out; and if they did, I would, indeed, be planning my next meal—as I could already envision it, on hero bread with lots of condiments and spices... And, I would be thinking about this glorious sandwich, all of the way down, until I landed.
JZRothstein (final draft) 10/3/2013
Short story by Jeffrey Z Rothstein
Read 613 times
Written on 2013-10-16 at 18:32
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