Good Bones Part 2

4. MARZIPAN METHOD.

We've often thought men would be easier to control if they were smaller. Well, here's a tiny rascal you can hold in the palm of your hand!

Usually found on wedding cakes, these formally dressed minigrooms require painstaking attention to detail, but it's worth the time you spend with the paintbrush and the food colouring to see the finished result smiling at you with deceptive blandness from the frothy topmost layer of Seven-Minute Boiled Icing!

We much regret the modern custom of subst.i.tuting plastic for the original sugary confection. For one thing, there is absolutely no payoff when you feel the urge as we do! to pop one of these dapper devils into your mouth and suck off his clothes.

5. FOLK ART METHOD.

You've seen these cuties in other folks' front yards, with little windmills attached to their heads. They hammer with their little hammers, saw with their little saws, or just whirl their arms around a lot when there's a stiff breeze. Alternatively, they may just stand stock-still, holding onto bridles, lanterns or fis.h.i.+ng poles. Some of them may be in gnome costumes.

Why shouldn't you concoct one of these cunning fellows for your very own? No reason at all! Just coat your hubby with plaster of Paris, and

Epaulettes.

WHEN WAR HAD finally become too dangerous, and, more to the point, too expensive for everyone, the world leaders met informally to devise a subst.i.tute.

"The thing is," said the first speaker, "what purposes did war serve when we had it?"

"It stimulated production in selected areas of the economy," said one.

"It provided clear winners and clear losers," said another, "and it gave men a break from the boring and trivial domestic routine."

"Expansion of territory," said another. "Privileged access to females and other items in demand."

"It was exciting," said a fourth. "Something was at risk."

"Well then," said the first, "these are the benefits our subst.i.tute for war must provide."

At first the world leaders focused their attention on sports, and a lively discussion ensued. Baseball, basketball, and cricket were dismissed as too leisurely. Football and hockey were both seriously proposed, until it became evident that no world leader would last two minutes on either Astroturf or ice. One of the world leaders, who was interested in archology, suggested an old Mayan game played in sunken ballcourts, in which the loser's head was ceremonially cut off; but the rules of this game were no longer known.

"We are looking in the wrong area," said a world leader from one of the smaller countries. "Forget these rowdy games. We should be thinking birds."

"Birds?" said the others, sneering both politely in the case of the older and more machiavellian nations and less politely, in the case of the younger and cruder ones.

"Bird display," said the speaker. "The male birds, in their elaborate and brightly coloured plumage, strut about, sing, ruffle their feathers, and perform dances. The watching female birds choose the winners. This is a simple and I might add a melodious method of compet.i.tion, and has much to recommend it. Let me just add, gentlemen, that it has worked for the birds."

The great powers were against this proposal, as it would pit their own leaders against those of the smaller nations on a more or less equal footing. But for this same reason the smaller nations were in favour of it, and because there were more of them than there were of the great powers, the resolution was voted in.

Which leads to the happy state of affairs we enjoy today. Once a year, in April, the play-offs begin. Throngs of chattering and expectant women crowd the football, cricket and jai alai stadia of the world. Each is provided with a voting device, with pushb.u.t.tons ranging from 0 to 10. The world leaders compete in groups of six, with the winner going on to the next round until, finally, there is only one winner for the entire world.

During the subsequent year the men of the winning country enjoy certain privileges, which include: modified looting (department stores only, and only on Mondays); ordering loudly and banging the tables in restaurants; having the men from all other nations laugh at their witticisms in a grovelling manner; preferential dating; complimentary theatre tickets; and two days of rape and pillage, followed by ritual drunkenness in the streets. (As everyone knows which days are the two chosen ones, people simply board up their windows and go away for the weekend.) Winners also get an improved foreign exchange rate and the best deals on fish processing. Each country enjoys its triumphant status for a year only, and since all know that next year it will be somebody else's turn the women see to that the more extreme forms of riotous behaviour are self-policed.

The compet.i.tion itself is divided into several categories. Each one of these is designed to appeal to the female temperament, though there has been some difficulty in determining exactly what this is. For instance, the "aroma" category in which the condensed essences of the compet.i.tors' sweat-socks, cigars, used tennis s.h.i.+rts, and so forth, were wafted through the audience had to be discontinued, as it made too many women sick. But the name-calling, muscle-flexing and cool-dressing bouts remain. So does joke-telling, since it is well known that women prefer men with a sense of humour, or so they keep telling us. In addition, a song must be sung, a dance must be danced though a solo on the flute or cello will suffice a skill-testing question must be answered; and each world leader must describe his favourite hobby, and declare, in a well-modulated exhibition speech, what he intends to do in future for the good of humanity. This is a popular feature, and occasions much giggling and applause.

Best of all is the military uniform category, during which the contestants march along the runway to the sound of recorded bra.s.s bands. What colours we see then, what festoons of gold braid, what constellations of metal stars! Gone are the days of muted khaki, even of navy blue: we live in the age of the peac.o.c.k. Epaulettes have swollen to epic lengths and breadths, headgear is befeathered, beribboned, resplendent! The stimulus to the fas.h.i.+on industry has been prodigious.

From our new system a new type of world leader has emerged. Younger, for one thing. Lighter on the feet. More musical. Funnier.

And history too is being revised. Daring military exploits, megadeaths, genocides and other such emblems of conquistadorial prowess no longer count for much. The criteria have changed. It is being said, for instance, that Napoleon was practically a catatonic on the dance floor, and that Stalin wore ill-fitting uniforms and could not sing to save his life.

Cold-Blooded.

TO MY SISTERS, the Iridescent Ones, the Egg-Bearers, the Many-Faceted, greetings from the Planet of Moths.

At last we have succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng contact with the creatures here who, in their ability to communicate, to live in colonies and to construct technologies, most resemble us, although in these particulars they have not advanced above a rudimentary level.

During our first observation of these "blood-creatures," as we have termed them after the colourful red liquid which is to be found inside their bodies, and which appears to be of great significance to them in their poems, wars and religious rituals we supposed them incapable of speech, as those specimens we were able to examine entirely lacked the organs for it. They had no wing-casings with which to stridulate indeed they had no wings; they had no mandibles to click; and the chemical method was unknown to them, since they were devoid of antennae. "Smell," for them, is a perfunctory affair, confined to a flattened and numbed appendage on the front of the head. But after a time, we discovered that the incoherent squeakings and gruntings that emerged from them, especially when pinched, were in fact a form of language, and after that we made rapid progress.

We soon ascertained that their planet, named by us the Planet of Moths after its most prolific and noteworthy genus, is called by these creatures Earth. They have some notion that their ancestors were created from this substance; or so it is claimed in many of their charming but irrational folk-tales.

In an attempt to establish common ground, we asked them at what season they mated with and then devoured their males. Imagine our embarra.s.sment when we discovered that those individuals with whom we were conversing were males! (It is very hard to tell the difference, as their males are not diminutive, as ours are, but if anything bigger. Also, lacking natural beauty brilliantly patterned carapaces, diaphanous wings, luminescent eyes, and the like they attempt to imitate our kind by placing upon their bodies various multicoloured draperies, which conceal their generative parts.) We apologized for our faux pas, and enquired as to their own s.e.xual practices. Picture our nausea and disgust when we discovered that it is the male, not the egg-bearer, which is the most prized among them! Abnormal as this will seem to you, my sisters, their leaders are for the most part male; which may account for their state of relative barbarism. Another peculiarity which must be noted is that, although they frequently kill them in many other ways, they rarely devour their females after procreation. This is a waste of protein; but then, they are a wasteful people.

We hastily abandoned this painful subject.

Next we asked them when they pupated. Here again, as in the case of "clothing" the draperies we have mentioned we uncovered a fumbling attempt at imitation of our kind. At some indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or wooden coc.o.o.ns, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state, which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings. However, we did not observe that any had actually done so.

It is as well to mention at this juncture that, in addition to the many species of moths for which it is justly famous among us, the Planet of Moths abounds in thousands of varieties of creatures which resemble our own distant ancestors. It seems that one of our previous attempts at colonization an attempt so distant that our record of it is lost must have borne fruit. However, these beings, although numerous and ingenious, are small in size and primitive in their social organization, and attempts to communicate with them were not or have not been, so far very successful. The blood-creatures are hostile towards them, and employ against them many poisonous sprays, traps and so forth, in addition to a sinister manual device termed a "fly swatter." It is agonizing indeed to watch one of these instruments of torture and death being wielded by the large and frenzied against the small and helpless; but the rules of diplomacy forbid our intervention. (Luckily the blood-creatures cannot understand what we say to one another about them in our own language.) But despite all the machinery of destruction which is aimed at them, our distant relatives are more than holding their own. They feed on the crops and herd-animals and even on the flesh of the blood-creatures; they live in their homes, devour their clothes, hide and flourish in the very cracks of their floors. When the blood-creatures have succeeded at last in overbreeding themselves, as it seems their intention to do, or in exterminating one another, rest a.s.sured that our kind, already superior in both numbers and adaptability, will be poised to achieve the ascendancy which is ours by natural right.

This will not happen tomorrow, but it will happen. As you know, my sisters, we have long been a patient race.

Men at Sea.

YOU CAN COME to the end of talking, about women, talking. In restaurants, cafes, kitchens, less frequently in bars or pubs, about relatives, relations, relations.h.i.+ps, illnesses, jobs, children, men; about nuance, hunch, intimation, intuition, shadow; about themselves and each other; about what he said to her and she said to her and she said back; about what they feel.

Something more definite, more outward then, some action, to drain the inner swamp, sweep the inner fluff out from under the inner bed, harden the edges. Men at sea, for instance. Not on a submarine, too claustrophobic and smelly, but something more bracing, a tang of salt, cold water, all over your calloused body, cuts and bruises, hurricanes, bravery and above all no women. Women are replaced by water, by wind, by the ocean, s.h.i.+fting and treacherous; a man has to know what to do, to navigate, to sail, to bail, so reach for the How-To book, and out here it's what he said to him, or didn't say, a narrowing of the eyes, sizing the b.a.s.t.a.r.d up before the pounce, the knife to the gut, and here comes a wave, hang on to the shrouds, all teeth grit, all muscles bulge together. Or sneaking along the gangway, the pa.s.sageway, the right of way, the Milky Way, in the dark, your eyes s.h.i.+ning like digital wrist.w.a.tches, and the bushes, barrels, scuppers, ditches, filthy with enemies, and you on the prowl for adrenalin and loot. Corpses of your own making deliquesce behind you as you reach the cave, abandoned city, safe, sliding panel, hole in the ground, and rich beyond your wildest dreams!

What now? Spend it on some woman, in a restaurant. And there I am, back again at the eternal table, which exists so she can put her elbows on it, over a gla.s.s of wine, while he says. What does he say? He says the story of how he got here, to her. She says: But what did you feel?

And his eyes roll wildly, quick as a wink he tries to think of something else, a cactus, a porpoise, never give yourself away, while the seductive waves swell the carpet beneath the feet and the wind freshens among the tablecloths. They're all around her, she can see it now, one per woman per table. Men, at sea.

Alien Territory.

HE CONCEIVES himself in alien territory. Not his turf alien! Listen! The rus.h.i.+ng of the red rivers, the rustling of the fresh leaves in the dusk, always in the dusk, under the dark stars, and the wish-wash, wish-wash of the heavy soothing sea, which becomes yes! the drums of the natives, beating, beating, louder, faster, lower, slower. Are they hostile? Who knows, because they're invisible.

He sleeps and wakes, wakes and sleeps, and suddenly all is movement and suffering and terror and he is shot out gasping for breath into blinding light and a place that's even more dangerous, where food is scarce and two enormous giants stand guard over his wooden prison. Shout as he might, rattle the bars, n.o.body comes to let him out. One of the giants is boisterous and hair-covered, with a big stick; the other walks more softly but has two enormous bulgy comforts which she selfishly refuses to detach and give away, to him. Neither of them looks anything like him, and their language is incomprehensible.

Aliens! What can he do? And to make it worse, they surround him with animals bears, rabbits, cats, giraffes each one of them stuffed and, evidently, castrated, because although he looks and looks, all they have at best is a tail. Is this the fate the aliens have in store for him, as well?

Where did I come from? he asks, for what will not be the first time. Out of me, the bulgy one says fondly, as if he should be pleased. Out of where? Out of what? He covers his ears, shutting out the untruth, the shame, the pulpy horror. It is not to be thought, it is not to be borne!

No wonder that at the first opportunity he climbs out the window and joins a gang of other explorers, each one of them an exile, an immigrant, like himself. Together they set out on their solitary journeys.

What are they searching for? Their homeland. Their true country. The place they came from, which can't possibly be here.

All men are created equal, as someone said who was either very hopeful or very mischievous. What a lot of anxiety could have been avoided if he'd only kept his mouth shut.

Sigmund was wrong about the primal scene: Mom and Dad, keyhole version. That might be upsetting, true, but there's another one: Five guys standing outside, p.i.s.sing into a s...o...b..nk, a river, the underbrush, pretending not to look down. Or maybe not looking down: gazing upward, at the stars, which gives us the origin of astronomy. Anything to avoid comparisons, which aren't so much odious as intimidating.

And not only astronomy: quantum physics, engineering, laser technology, all numeration between zero and infinity. Something safely abstract, detached from you; a transfer of the obsession with size to anything at all. Lord, Lord, they measure everything: the height of the Great Pyramids, the rate of fingernail growth, the multiplication of viruses, the sands of the sea, the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. And then it's only a short step to proving that G.o.d is a mathematical equation. Not a person. Not a body, Heaven forbid. Not one like yours. Not an earthbound one, not one with size and therefore pain.

When you're feeling blue, just keep on whistling. Just keep on measuring. Just don't look down.

The history of war is a history of killed bodies. That's what war is: bodies killing other bodies, bodies being killed.

Some of the killed bodies are those of women and children, as a side-effect you might say. Fallout, shrapnel, napalm, rape and skewering, anti-personnel devices. But most of the killed bodies are men. So are most of those doing the killing.

Why do men want to kill the bodies of other men? Women don't want to kill the bodies of other women. By and large. As far as we know.

Here are some traditional reasons: Loot. Territory. l.u.s.t for power. Hormones. Adrenalin high. Rage. G.o.d. Flag. Honour. Righteous anger. Revenge. Oppression. Slavery. Starvation. Defence of one's life. Love; or, a desire to protect the women and children. From what? From the bodies of other men.

What men are most afraid of is not lions, not snakes, not the dark, not women. Not any more. What men are most afraid of is the body of another man.

Men's bodies are the most dangerous things on earth.

On the other hand, it could be argued that men don't have any bodies at all. Look at the magazines! Magazines for women have women's bodies on the covers, magazines for men have women's bodies on the covers. When men appear on the covers of magazines, it's magazines about money, or about world news. Invasions, rocket launches, political coups, interest rates, elections, medical breakthroughs. Reality. Not entertainment. Such magazines show only the heads, the unsmiling heads, the talking heads, the decision-making heads, and maybe a little glimpse, a coy flash of suit. How do we know there's a body, under all that discreet pinstriped tailoring? We don't, and maybe there isn't.

What does this lead us to suppose? That women are bodies with heads attached, and men are heads with bodies attached? Or not, depending.

You can have a body, though, if you're a rock star, an athlete, or a gay model. As I said, entertainment. Having a body is not altogether serious.

Or else too serious for words.

The thing is: men's bodies aren't dependable. Now it does, now it doesn't, and so much for the triumph of the will. A man is the puppet of his body, or vice versa. He and it make tomfools of each other: it lets him down. Or up, at the wrong moment. Just stare hard out the schoolroom window and recite the multiplication tables, and pretend this isn't happening! Your face at least can be immobile. Easier to have a trained dog, which will do what you want it to, nine times out of ten.

The other thing is: men's bodies are detachable. Consider the history of statuary: the definitive bits get knocked off so easily, through revolution or prudery or simple transportation, with leaves stuck on for subst.i.tutes, fig or grape; or, in more northern climates, maple. A man and his body are soon parted.

In the old old days, you became a man through blood. Through incisions, tattoos, splinters of wood; through an intimate wound, and the refusal to flinch. Through being beaten by older boys, in the dormitory, with a wooden paddle you were forced to carve yourself. The torments varied, but they were all torments. It's a boy, they cry with joy. Let's cut some off!

Every morning I get down on my knees and thank G.o.d for not creating me a man. A man so chained to unpredictability. A man so much at the mercy of himself. A man so p.r.o.ne to sadness. A man who has to take it like a man. A man, who can't fake it.

In the gap between desire and enactment, noun and verb, intention and infliction, want and have, compa.s.sion begins.

Bluebeard ran off with the third sister, intelligent though beautiful, and shut her up in his palace. Everything here is yours, my dear, he said to her. Just don't open the small door. I will give you the key, however. I expect you not to use it.

Believe it or not, this sister was in love with him, even though she knew he was a serial killer. She roamed over the whole palace, ignoring the jewels and the silk dresses and the piles of gold. Instead she went through the medicine cabinet and the kitchen drawers, looking for clues to his uniqueness. Because she loved him, she wanted to understand him. She also wanted to cure him. She thought she had the healing touch.

But she didn't find out a lot. In his closet there were suits and ties and matching shoes and casual wear, some golf outfits and a tennis racquet, and some jeans for when he wanted to rake up the leaves. Nothing unusual, nothing kinky, nothing sinister. She had to admit to being a little disappointed.

She found his previous women quite easily. They were in the linen closet, neatly cut up and ironed flat and folded, stored in mothb.a.l.l.s and lavender. Bachelors acquire such domestic skills. The women didn't make much of an impression on her, except the one who looked like his mother. That one she took out with rubber gloves on and slipped into the incinerator in the garden. Maybe it was his mother, she thought. If so, good riddance.

She read through his large collection of cookbooks, and prepared the dishes on the most-thumbed pages. At dinner he was politeness itself, pulling out her chair and offering more wine and leading the conversation around to topics of the day. She said gently that she wished he would talk more about his feelings. He said that if she had his feelings, she wouldn't want to talk about them either. This intrigued her. She was now more in love with him and more curious than ever.

Well, she thought, I've tried everything else; it's the small door or nothing. Anyway, he gave me the key. She waited until he had gone to the office or wherever it was he went, and made straight for the small door. When she opened it, what should be inside but a dead child. A small dead child, with its eyes wide open.

It's mine, he said, coming up behind her. I gave birth to it. I warned you. Weren't you happy with me?

It looks like you, she said, not turning around, not knowing what else to say. She realized now that he was not sane in any known sense of the word, but she still hoped to talk her way out of it. She could feel the love seeping out of her. Her heart was dry ice.

It is me, he said sadly. Don't be afraid.

Where are we going? she said, because it was getting dark, and there was suddenly no floor.

Deeper, he said.

Those ones. Why do women like them? They have nothing to offer, none of the usual things. They have short attention spans, falling-apart clothes, old beat-up cars, if any. The cars break down, and they try to fix them, and don't succeed, and give up. They go on long walks from which they forget to return. They prefer weeds to flowers. They tell trivial fibs. They perform clumsy tricks with oranges and pieces of string, hoping desperately that someone will laugh. They don't put food on the table. They don't make money. Don't, can't, won't.

They offer nothing. They offer the great clean sweep of nothing, the unseen sky during a blizzard, the dark pause between moon and moon. They offer their poverty, an empty wooden bowl; the bowl of a beggar, whose gift is to ask. Look into it, look down deep, where potential coils like smoke, and you might hear anything. Nothing has yet been said.

They have bodies, however. Their bodies are unlike the bodies of other men. Their bodies are verbalized. Mouth, eye, hand, foot, they say. Their bodies have weight, and move over the ground, step by step, like yours. Like you they roll in the hot mud of the sunlight, like you they are amazed by morning, like you they can taste the wind, like you they sing. Love, they say, and at the time they always mean it, as you do also. They can say l.u.s.t as well, and disgust; you wouldn't trust them otherwise. They say the worst things you have ever dreamed. They open locked doors. All this is given to them for nothing.

They have their angers. They have their despair, which washes over them like grey ink, blanking them out, leaving them immobile, in metal kitchen chairs, beside closed windows, looking out at the brick walls of deserted factories, for years and years. Yet nothing is with them; it keeps faith with them, and from it they bring back messages: Hurt, they say, and suddenly their bodies hurt again, like real bodies. Death, they say, making the word sound like the backwash of a wave. Their bodies die, and waver, and turn to mist. And yet they can exist in two worlds at once: lost in the earth or eaten by flames, and here. In this room, when you re-say them, in their own words.

But why do women like them? Not like, I mean to say: adore. (Remember, that despite everything, despite all I have told you, the rusted cars, the greasy wardrobes, the lack of breakfasts, the hopelessness, remain the same.) Because if they can say their own bodies, they could say yours also. Because they could say skin as if it meant something, not only to them but to you. Because one night, when the snow is falling and the moon is blotted out, they could put their empty hands, their hands filled with poverty, their beggar's hands, on your body, and bless it, and tell you it is made of light.

Adventure Story.

THIS IS A story told by our ancestors, and those before them. It is not just a story, but something they once did, and at last there is proof.

Those who are to go must prepare first. They must be strong and well nourished and they must possess also a sense of purpose, a faith, a determination to persevere to the end, because the way is long and arduous and there are many dangers.

At the right time they gather together in the appointed place. Here there is much confusion and milling around, as yet there is no order, no groups of sworn companions have separated themselves from the rest. The atmosphere is tense, antic.i.p.ation stirs among them, and now, before some are ready, the adventure has been launched. Through the dark tunnel, faintly lit with lurid gleams of reddish light, shoots the intrepid band, how many I cannot say; only that there are many: a band now, for all are headed in the same direction. The safety of the home country falls behind, the sea between is crossed more quickly than you can think, and now they are in alien territory, a tropical estuary with many coves and hidden bays. The water is salt, the vegetation Amazonian, the land ahead shrouded and obscure, thickened with fog. Monstrous animals, or are they fish, lurk here, pouncing upon the stragglers, slaying many. Others are lost, and wander until they weaken and perish in misery.

Now the way narrows, and those who have survived have reached the gate. It is shut, but they try one pa.s.sword and then another, and look! the gate has softened, melted, turned to jelly, and they pa.s.s through. Magic still works; an unseen force is on their side. Another tunnel; here they must crowd together, swimming upstream, between sh.o.r.es curving and fluid as lava, helping one another. Only together can they succeed.

(You may think I'm talking about male bonding, or war, but no: half of these are female, and they swim and help and sacrifice their lives in the same way as the rest.) And now there is a widening out, and the night sky arches above them, or are we in outer s.p.a.ce and all the rocket movies you've ever seen? It's still warm, whatever, and the team, its number sadly diminished, forges onward, driven by what? Greed for treasure, desire for a new home, worlds to conquer, a raid on an enemy citadel, a quest for the Grail? Now it is each alone, and the mission becomes a race which only one may win, as, ahead of them, vast and luminous, the longed-for, the loved planet swims into view, like a moon, a sun, an image of G.o.d, round and perfect. A target.

Farewell, my comrades, my sisters! You have died that I may live! I alone will enter the garden, while you must wilt and shrivel in outer darkness. So saying and you know, because now this is less like a story than a memory the victorious one reaches the immense perimeter and is engulfed in the soft pink atmosphere of paradise, sinks, enters, casts the imprisoning skin of the self, merges, disappears ... and the world slowly explodes, doubles, revolves, changes forever, and there, in the desert heaven, s.h.i.+nes a fresh-laid star, exile and promised land in one, harbinger of a new order, a new birth, possibly holy; and the animals will be named again.

Hardball.

HERE COMES THE future, rolling towards us like a meteorite, a satellite, a giant iron s...o...b..ll, a two-ton truck in the wrong lane, careering downhill with broken brakes, and whose fault is it? No time to think about that. Blink and it's here.

How round, how firm, how fully packed is this future! How man-made! What wonders it contains, especially for those who can afford it! They are the elect, and by their fruits ye shall know them. Their fruits are strawberries and dwarf plums and grapes, things that can be grown beside the hydroponic vegetables and the toxin-absorbent ornamentals, in relatively little s.p.a.ce. s.p.a.ce is at a premium, living s.p.a.ce that is. All s.p.a.ce that is not living s.p.a.ce is considered dead.

Living s.p.a.ce is under the stately pleasure dome, the work-and-leisure dome, the transparent bubble-dome that keeps out the deadly cosmic rays and the rain of sulphuric acid and the air which is no longer. No longer air, I mean. You can look out, of course: watch the sun, red at all times of day, rise across the raw rock and s.h.i.+fting sands, travel across the raw rock and s.h.i.+fting sands, set across the raw rock and s.h.i.+fting sands. The light effects are something.

But breathing is out of the question. That's a thing you have to do in here, and the richer you are the better you do it. Penthouse costs a bundle; steerage is cramped, and believe me it stinks. Well, as they say, there's only so much to go around, and it wouldn't do if everyone got the same. No incentive then, to perform the necessary work, make the necessary sacrifices, inch your way up, to where the pale-pink strawberries and the pale-yellow carrots are believed, still, to grow.

What else is eaten? Well, there are no more hamburgers. Cows take up too much room. Chickens and rabbits are still cultivated, here and there; they breed quickly and they're small. Rats, of course, on the lower levels, if you can catch them. Think of the earth as an eighteenth-century s.h.i.+p, with stowaways but no destination.

And no fish, needless to say. None left in all that dirty water slos.h.i.+ng around in the oceans and through the remains of what used to be New York. If you're really loaded you can go diving there, for your vacation. Travel by airlock. Plunge into the romance of a bygone age. But it's an ill wind that blows n.o.body any good. No more street crime. Think of it as a plus.

Back to the topic of food, which will always be of interest. What will we have for dinner? Is it wall-to-wall bean sprouts? Apart from the pallid garnishes and the chicken-hearted horsd'oeuvres, what's the main protein?