That morning, this one, mutton gray, marbled with gristle and hock shoulder, boiled beyond recognition. The entire world boiled in the same pot, meat and potatoes, carrots and parsnips, calf’s tongue, tripe, a liver, shoeblack with cirrhosis and whiskey, and great aunt Alma’s raspberry tarts mince with sugar and allspice, the scum rising to the top of the simmer. An empanada, that’s what he heard, overheard, the man in the hat, ritornelli of oboes, French horns, clarinets, cellos and the clashing of cymbals, a symphonic dissonance, an upheaval, an inharmonious cacophony, and not a dog in sight.
He often saw this one man, a beggar, with an almsman’s hat and a tic, sitting on a flap of cardboard box, his feet splayed like pear-halves in front of him. When the man in the hat hadn’t seen him in over a month, he wondered where he gone, and why. When next he saw him, espied from a distance, sitting, legs akimbo on his flap of cardboard, he noticed that he had lost a considerable amount of weight, forty pounds, an entire leg’s worth of weight. The ticking had worsened, to the point where, much as he tried, he couldn’t contain it, his lips and forehead ticking and trembling absurdly, his eye, the left one, marking off time like a metronome.
He, the man in the hat he, went into the library and found a book on ticking and quaking, on such things as jimmy-leg and palsy, Gherkin’s disease and somnambulism, a medical compendium of pathologies and corporeal afflictions. He read, burrowed into the cornered of the stacks like a dormouse, his hat placed on the table next to him, as hats, as he had learned, were frowned upon in public reading rooms, until his eyes watered and stung like lye. In the chapter of Maladies of the Intellect, he came across a folio on nervous diseases and psychiatric infirmaries, and having read almost to the end, he saw the subtitle, Pharmacological Interventions and their side effects. He read that certain antipsychotic drugs could cause unsavory side effects, one of which was uncontrollable ticking. As he read on, his eyes briny with sweat (which his hatband generally prevented from scalding his eyes) he came to understand why the almsman had lost so much weight in so short a time. The folio explained that people so inflicted, the savant and the neurotic, the schizophrenic and the addle-minded, suffered from repeated medication changes, which caused either rapid weight gain or loss. He gathered from this, from the folio’s authors, that the almsman had one of these inflictions of the intellect, and had recently had his medication changed.
Lithium and bishoprics, Librium and therapeutic Quaaludes, a peasant’s broth of anti this and anti that, a pharmacopoeia of stimulants and depressants, uppers and downers, tablets and pills that made you constipated and disaffected, once removed from the couture of life. He had heard, somewhere, overheard, that some of these poor sods refused to take their pills, tablets and salts, substituting alcohol and street drugs, tonics and tinctures, morphine diluted with commode water, grains pulverized into a fine euphonic sift, best savored on the tripe of the tongue, a cumquat with no seed or spidery insides. An arm gone blue where the tubing cinches the elbow, just above the crook, the needle hooking a vein like a throw rug, fingers knitting curlicues in tarn thickened skin. Blood roe, a sanguine life force basted with morphine and hex, and the smell of camphor and junk sickness, like an abattoir after the last hammer puts the crinkle in a bull’s legs.
Graves are deeper around the edges, where the shovel heels into the hard topsoil, mulching grass, dirt and scrawl. His grandfather, the man in the hat’s, drove a fish truck for the Mercury Fish Company. Having one leg as he did, he double-clutched with a dowel attached to the skirt of his trousers, shifting gears with his right hand, the left one grappling with the steering wheel.
He often saw this one man, a beggar, with an almsman’s hat and a tic, sitting on a flap of cardboard box, his feet splayed like pear-halves in front of him. When the man in the hat hadn’t seen him in over a month, he wondered where he gone, and why. When next he saw him, espied from a distance, sitting, legs akimbo on his flap of cardboard, he noticed that he had lost a considerable amount of weight, forty pounds, an entire leg’s worth of weight. The ticking had worsened, to the point where, much as he tried, he couldn’t contain it, his lips and forehead ticking and trembling absurdly, his eye, the left one, marking off time like a metronome.
He, the man in the hat he, went into the library and found a book on ticking and quaking, on such things as jimmy-leg and palsy, Gherkin’s disease and somnambulism, a medical compendium of pathologies and corporeal afflictions. He read, burrowed into the cornered of the stacks like a dormouse, his hat placed on the table next to him, as hats, as he had learned, were frowned upon in public reading rooms, until his eyes watered and stung like lye. In the chapter of Maladies of the Intellect, he came across a folio on nervous diseases and psychiatric infirmaries, and having read almost to the end, he saw the subtitle, Pharmacological Interventions and their side effects. He read that certain antipsychotic drugs could cause unsavory side effects, one of which was uncontrollable ticking. As he read on, his eyes briny with sweat (which his hatband generally prevented from scalding his eyes) he came to understand why the almsman had lost so much weight in so short a time. The folio explained that people so inflicted, the savant and the neurotic, the schizophrenic and the addle-minded, suffered from repeated medication changes, which caused either rapid weight gain or loss. He gathered from this, from the folio’s authors, that the almsman had one of these inflictions of the intellect, and had recently had his medication changed.
Lithium and bishoprics, Librium and therapeutic Quaaludes, a peasant’s broth of anti this and anti that, a pharmacopoeia of stimulants and depressants, uppers and downers, tablets and pills that made you constipated and disaffected, once removed from the couture of life. He had heard, somewhere, overheard, that some of these poor sods refused to take their pills, tablets and salts, substituting alcohol and street drugs, tonics and tinctures, morphine diluted with commode water, grains pulverized into a fine euphonic sift, best savored on the tripe of the tongue, a cumquat with no seed or spidery insides. An arm gone blue where the tubing cinches the elbow, just above the crook, the needle hooking a vein like a throw rug, fingers knitting curlicues in tarn thickened skin. Blood roe, a sanguine life force basted with morphine and hex, and the smell of camphor and junk sickness, like an abattoir after the last hammer puts the crinkle in a bull’s legs.
Graves are deeper around the edges, where the shovel heels into the hard topsoil, mulching grass, dirt and scrawl. His grandfather, the man in the hat’s, drove a fish truck for the Mercury Fish Company. Having one leg as he did, he double-clutched with a dowel attached to the skirt of his trousers, shifting gears with his right hand, the left one grappling with the steering wheel.
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