“So you’re telling me it’s out of a kind of laziness that you waste—”
The girl laughs. “I guess. I guess it could maybe be called laziness. But you know, waste is a strong word. No one’s ever gonna run out of Curios, right? But everyone, always and forever, has been and will be, running out of time. We’re all gonna die, girl. You know that, right? You’re a grown-up. Of course you know that. You only live once, as my mom likes to say. Why spend any more time poking bone powder than you need to? Well, I mean, I heard you can mail-order supposedly some kind of solution that, you add it to the powder, it destroys the bone parts, and leaves you only with the marrow, but that stuff, even if it works, it costs money. Someone told me it works out to about ten bucks a skeleton. Why bother, right? All told, if you subtract the opportunity costs of sitting here, prepping spines, the only cost of making spidge is the WorkPellets it takes to get the cures to maturity, which is like, I don’t know, not much—less than a couple bucks—and so then you’re more than quintupling the cost by using the solution. If you dose the cure with a formula, of course, that’s another three to seven dollars, depending on the formula, but, still, you’re doubling the cost if you use the solution. So I guess that’s a good reason to spend a little more time poking bone powder, but shy of that…”
“But isn’t the concentration higher if you use the solution? It’s pretty much one hundred percent, I thought.”
“Supposedly,” the girl says. “Still. It’s not that much higher. Not ten bucks’ worth higher. And the yield’s the same.”
“Also, though, I can’t help but think. If you’re spending, what? anywhere from two to nine dollars per cure, then throwing away the amputated bones does seem pretty wasteful. Like, anywhere, say, from seventy-five cents’ to four dollars’ worth of waste, it sounds like.”
“You know? You might be onto something. My math’s not the best. You may have a point. Maybe I’ve gotta rethink this. I knew there was a reason I let you convince me to talk to you. Wisdom. You come on a little stiff in that blazer, but, really, you’re like a natural-born earth mother.”
Offscreen, a man laughs.
The girl laughs.
The woman laughs.
“Okay, so: change of topic,” says the woman. “What do you say to people who think that what you do is disgusting? Handling all the meat and the guts and the bones, etcetera.”
“It depends who’s saying it, and how honest I’m feeling. I mean, if it’s someone who spidges, and I’m feeling honest, I might say, you know, that’s borderline hypocritical, as in, like, where do you think it comes from? And even if it’s someone who doesn’t, I think even they’d have to recognize that it’s disgusting to dissect frogs or fish or fetal pigs or whatever pretty much everyone in this American school system has to dissect at least once in their lives. And those things—they’re living things. They’re animals. Whereas Curios…right? And you know, maybe they say they dissect animals in school because it’s important to learn science or something, because maybe one of them, because they dissected a pig or whatever, will be inspired to become a doctor who will one day cure cancer or whatever. And maybe that’s true, but most of them still eat meat, which I find horrible. Criminal, really. I think it’s disgusting to eat meat. I don’t think we should take life when we don’t have to. But blah blah blah because usually I’m not feeling all that honest, and when someone says they think what I do’s disgusting, I don’t say anything, just nod kind of gravely like this,” says the girl, nodding, lips pressed white, “like, ‘Yeah, I feel you, man. It is disgusting. So disgusting.’ Because the truth is I make decent money off selling the stuff. I mean, it’s not paying for school or anything, but I earn, what do they call it in the old books? I earn pin money. I earn pin money off selling a product that pretty much anyone could make on their own if they wanted, but most people won’t make mostly because they’re disgusted by how it gets made. Or because they’re lazy.”
“How long have you been a vegetarian?”
“Oh, since I was pretty young. Ten or eleven, I think. So, seven, eight years.”
“Do you ever eat cure meat?”
“No. Well, I guess I have a couple times. Incidentally. As in, like, incidental to overloading-by-mouth. I didn’t want to ‘eat cure meat’ when I did it—just swallow the cure, as some people sometimes do. It’s been a long time, though. Not cause I have any kind of moral problem with it or anything, and I even liked the taste a little, which I can’t say about the taste of animal flesh—I never liked it—but my body doesn’t tolerate the bones well. I have more trouble digesting them than most people. What my mom calls ‘a delicate system.’ When I was a kid, and I’d eat sardines—which, ick—I had the same problem, and pumpkin seeds too. I love pumpkin seeds, but I just can’t eat them anymore. Someone told me it might be diverticulitis. You know anything about that?”
“Diverticulitis?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
Sacrament
From Come Again!? with Philip Daley Alejandro
Ca. 1992, NBC Studios, USA
[1 minute, 36 seconds]
A talk show set. The studio audience is booing a middle-aged man in flowing white robes, who sits center stage, nodding thoughtfully and pulling his graying, shoulder-length hair behind his ears. The host, Philip Daley Alejandro, stands in the center aisle, five rows up. A microphone dangles at his side from one hand while he holds the other over his brow, as if shielding his eyes from a particularly harsh and annoying and completely unbelievable blast of sunlight. PDA raises the mike to his chin. “Now wait,” he says. He takes a couple rapid steps down the aisle and pauses. “Wait a minute,” he says. “Are you telling me…Wait!” He runs onto the stage, right up next to the man in the flowing white robes. He takes a knee, casts his eyes downward, shaking his head, hugging himself with the arm of his mike-free hand, and says, “You must—I mean, wait. You’ve gotta just…Wait just a minute!” The crowd cheers. “Okay?” he says, as the cheering tapers. “Okay? You’ve gotta wait just a minute, sir, and you’ve gotta tell me—I mean. Are you telling me—are you telling us,” Philip Daley Alejandro says. “Are you telling us that overloading on a Curio is the same thing as a devout Catholic taking communion in the Church?”
“That’s not what I said,” says the man in flowing white robes.
“Well it kinda sounded exactly like what you said. It sounded like you said the two were the same exact thing.”