I once assigned my undergraduate students a question to answer in MLA format, 250 words or less at the beginning of the semester. If you had to choose one fellow classmate to eat, which one would you select and why? Please select the most appropriate form of cooking, slicing, peeling, boiling, etc, as well as a complementary side dish and wine pairing. For example, if I chose Winston Churchill, I might lob him in the oven slathered in pineapple with a light dusting of brown sugar. The most appropriate side dish for our dear Winnie would of course include a sizeable helping of baked potatoes bleeding sour cream and cheese, bombed with chives and faces split into a scream with a carving knife. To pair, add a crystal glass of Macallan Double Cask scotch, on the rocks, shaken until crumbled into cubes resembling frozen mushy peas floating throughout the alcohol. Please be specific in your cooking. Begin.
Now as I sit here, sand crawling up the crack of my ass, sweat weeping down my balls, and Sam’s great blubbering mass bouncing up and down on the beach, I can’t help but wonder how Sammy boy would look boiling in chopped up pineapples browned in the oven. Of course, from a Marxist perspective eating Sammy would only be natural. Looking at those flabby chicken wings for flesh reminded me of a book I defaced in fourth grade. It was a biology book for kids, titled How My Body Works. I remember drawing horns and spiked tails on the proteins, originally illustrated as happy construction workers, hammering amino acids into muscle. Would Karl Marx approve, I wonder, of seizing Sammy’s chubby forearms as a means of production? Would those enzymes in their fictional hardhats cheer as, bite by bite, my stomach acid transformed the “base” of Sam into the superstructure of Mike?
Sam is an evolutionary biologist. Of course. You’d have to be in order to justify having prize-pig hambones for thighs. He’s the reason I, and two other academics are lying smeared with dirt on the edge of this god-forsaken island. There’s Wilma under a palm tree, lying next to Andrew, face bright red and chest heaving. The boat which brought us here has disappeared. The money we were promised might as well have gone us in smoke. No use for debit cards on Planet-No-Where. No use for cellphones either. The only thing that resembles a cell-phone tower here is the palm tree dropping coconuts next to Andrew.
To the best of my recollection, the first time I stumbled across Sam’s magnanimous bottom went something like this. It happened in winter, on the twelfth of January. To ring in the new year after a bloody spat with a colleague, I wandered in a drunken haze down 124 MacDougal Street to the Old Rabbit Club. At six o’clock, I murdered Grayson Dillard III with an axe and left his body parts scattered in cocoa tins throughout Washington Square Park. At seven o’clock, I made an ass of myself at Negril Village when I refused to pay for a disgusting pile of ackee and saltfish paired with a sad looking boiled banana. At eight o’clock, I downed one whole pint at The Half Pint. At nine o’clock, I introduced myself as Grayson Dillard III before fucking an NYPD officer behind a dumpster. At ten o’clock, I snorted 15 miligrams of cocaine in the bathroom of Jojo’s Philosophy. At eleven o’clock, I slipped on a patch of ice and fell, screaming obscenities all the way, down the steps to the iron door of dear Old Rabbit.
My face collided with the brick wall. My body crumpled into a fetal position. My voice cried out in pain as the bar door swung open. There, his generous stomach jiggling above me, at nearly six feet 4 inches stood Sam. Surrounded by acolytes, smoking and roaring with laughter, Sam blinked his watery red eyes and wheezed, “What the hell do we have here? Hey Jensen, help me get him up on his feet.” Two men of similar size pulled me out of the snow. Sam slapped a pudgy hand on my back and chortled, “Come on you drunk bastard, you’re with me now.”
Somehow Sam and his band of hooligans managed to march me to The Uncommons, a board game cafe. I scarcely remember what I said or did. Did I resist? Did I want to refuse? Did I reveal my knowledge of the 51 Swiss Miss tins hidden in various bushes of Washington Square Park? I didn’t remember. I don’t remember. Whatever I said must have made Sam laugh, because one minute I was lying with a bruised face against the brick wall of The Old Rabbit Club, and the next I was somehow competing in a fierce game of Monopoly against the most obnoxious groups of white nationalists I had ever met.
“Don’t lowball me on Boardwalk god damn it!” Sam roared. “You rolled the dice. You pay the price. Cough up the cash and spill it, Wisner. $1500 right now, in my hand.”
“Calm down Sam, stop trying to Jew me out of every last red cent.” A man, who I could only have assumed was not Jewish, grumbled.
“You want your red cent, go immigrate to a red state.” Sam retorted. “That’s it, come on, come to daddy…”
“Hey, Mikey! What was it you said you did?” A blonde man in flannel turned to me.
“I kill people like you.”
“What was that? Sorry, I can’t hear you in this shop. It’s so noisy.” The blonde man said
loudly, scooching closer.
“I said I teach at NYU.”
“Oh wow! So you’re one of those intellectual types, huh? What do you teach?”
“Fiction.”
“Like Kerouac and Steinbeck, all that literary jazz?”
“Something like that.”
“You know I pegged you for one of those liberal elites.” The blonde man rolled the dice, moving his small steamboat from Marvin Gardens to Pacific Avenue.
“Oh yeah? How’s that?” I moved my iron kitten to Community Chest. The card I lifted stated, Grand Opera Night. Collect $50 from every player for opening night seats. I read the card out loud to the collective chuckle of Sam and his disciples.
“Well that’s one way.” The blonde man smirked.
“Every night is opera night in this country, with the way MediCare is going. Did you hear what these liberals are saying last night? 30 trillion dollars in this MediCare plan. The way I see it, this country is going down the tubes.” Wisner declared, breathing a sigh of relief as Sam handed him $200 of Monopoly money.
“Now gentlemen, let’s not overwhelm poor Mike.” Sam waved his hands grandly over the Monopoly board. “He hasn’t even had two seconds to breathe and you’re already piling on him. Don’t listen to them for a second, Mikey. Why, I teach biology at NYU, didn’t you know? Small world, eh?”
“Small world.” I echoed.To the untrained eye, to confess so calmly, with such an air of unpeturbed indifference, to facts about my whereabouts, my identity, given the nature of the crime I had comitted not a few hours ago might seem stupid. Yet this assessment would be incomplete. Any trace of Grayson Dillard III had been expunged from my apartment and replanted on someone else. His blood wiped like maple syrup across his ex-boyfriend’s apartment when I sat at his desk, forging crazed love letters at his desk in his voice, wrinkling them with my hands and dribbling tear streaks upon them for dramatic effect. I sat in The Uncommons, playing board games with my moral and intellectual inferiors, in full confidence that no one would harm me. I can only credit my high IQ for escaping the law. I was, of course, a victim of an intolerant society, forced to eek out an equally intolerable existance pouring over the half-baked poetry of over-priveleged undergraduates. Beleagured intellectuals however, fail to chaff in the sands of time. Instead they rub against the bleating tongue of the world, close minded as it is, and emerge iridescent and smooth at the feet of hogs. If the Marquess of Queensbury persecuted the exuberant Oscar Wilde, it felt only natural that the Grayson Dillard IIIs of this world should persecute me. Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much.
“What are the odds the two of us should meet?” Sam passed out $50 of Monopoly money to me. “You said you’re a fiction teacher, right? Ever read Men in the Moon?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“It’s a great book. You’ve got to read it. The whole thing is based on The Bell Curve by Charles Murray, have you heard of that?”
“No. I haven’t.” I could feel my ears burning. I began to wonder why I agreed to come here. Maybe it was the coffee. Maybe it was fright. Possibly my resolve had wilted from the cocaine and beer.
“Don’t worry about it. I get it. You’re a wordy person, I’m more of a numbers kind of a guy. A-OK by me, my friend. Someone has to starve to write the next great American novel, and it sure as hell won’t be me.”
“Ah.”
“Now, The Bell Curve, it’s the crime of our generation more people haven’t read it. Some people, students mostly, complain that it’s just a piece of scientific racism. Which is bullshit. Anyone who’s honestly looked at the data can see a link between IQ and race. The truth can’t be racist, can it? Did you know Murray was nearly attacked at Middleburry when he tried to speak on the subject? The whole thing was a damn scandal. Even you, with your liberal views, you would have to agree this snowflake generation has run out of control. Can’t even speak your mind anymore on campus. You make a joke that’s even slightly incorrect politically, and bam! There goes your reputation online from a twitter smear campaign. But at any rate, you’re not a man of science. All the data graphs, statistics, they would bore you. Oh no. You’re a literary man! You want poetry, the Firenze, romance, Van Goh’s Starry Night distilled into words and then splattered with ink! To you, I say, read Men in the Moon. Explains the concepts beautifully. You’ve surely read Atlas Shrugged, or Anthem, haven’t you? More fiction the masses haven’t read!”
And so on. I could barely contain my disgust as Sam continued. Did I know that women had inherent hypergamous natures, driven to suck with vampiric strength, the life-force of alpha males? Did I know that some of Joseph Mengele’s experiments lead to cures? Did I know that eugenics was really, the moral choice, given the devastating effect of disabilities? Did I know that women had evolved to behave with psychological traits not quite suitable for positions of power? Did I know that “toxic masculinity” was simply a mating strategy, designed by beta males to out-game alpha males? Did I know that white people created most of the technological innovations of our world?
It occured to me as I listened to this deplorable trash that Sam viewed himself as the Thomas Jefferson of his group. It was tragic, he seemed to say, that he had to believe in these ideas. He would love to live in a world where racial equality existed, really he would! But that was just it, he had to believe the truth! The truth cannot be sexist, after all, and it cannot be racist. He, Sam told me, was simply the Sisyphus of frankness, rolling a giant red pill for the world to swallow only to see it roll back and squash him in sadness at each attempt. Had I heard of The Matrix, he asked me. Had I seen the scene where Morpheus offered the main character the blue pill or the red pill? Didn’t I realize, that our society was placed in a similar position, we the protagonist, and he, Morpheus offering the truth?
Sam won Monopoly. Of course. I hadn’t planned on meeting him again. In fact, I made a concerted effort to avoid him. If I heard his voice, I swerved into the nearest hallway. If I saw his silleuhette, I often turned and walked in the opposite direction. Luckily the fact that we worked in separate departments meant I rarely risked encounters with Sam. But when I jogged at night, when I walked to the bars, when I walked my way to the Silver Center to teach, I would sometimes see him and need to flee another one of his boring, oppressive diatribes. I almost considered separating his muscle from his spine the moment I met him. But I had a novel to write, and papers to grade. I simply lacked the time to conduct another murder. So with some reluctance, I allowed Sam the Racist to live.
When my novel on the capitalist hegemony in the sexual marketplace flopped, the publishing agency barely squeezed a dime to pay me. I felt like a trout trapped under a sheet of ice, staring with dead eyes up at the privleged elite skating directly over my head. Had I been born as a heterosexual, evangelical Christian man who wrote a personal account of his “coming to Jesus” moment from heroin and booze, I have not a shred of doubt that my book would have been snapped up in seconds. Yet because my book dared to challenge the social hierarchy and structures of power, queering the very structure of the novel itself, people passed over Intersexuality: An Excursion in Utopics.
My book had failed. Teaching paid poorly. My rat-infested apartment had given me the last notice. Bills piled by the pound on my writing desk. I needed a quick cash infusion to prevent the financial catastrophe on my doorstep. So when I found an invitation to participate in a study with a hefty compensation, I leapt at the chance. I didn’t care if they wanted to put my bare arm into a hive of mosquitoes. I would have donated a kidney to keep my finances from burying me alive. I jumped so quickly on the invitation, I failed to notice Sam’s name scribbled in the corner. Dr. Samuel Montgomery. Of course, there were probably dozens of Samuels on campus. How was I to know that this Dr. Samuel Montgomery was one and the same with Sam the Racist?
Yet when I rolled my bag to the tarmac and saw his giant beehive of a body waddle my way, there was no doubt. It was the same Sam, wobbling belly and all. My two companions rolled behind me. First came Andrew, adjusting his Roman collar and the crucifix around his neck before tucking the small leather case of clothes under his arm. Everything about Father Andy had been neatly organized to perfection. He tweezed his nosehairs, combed his hair back with gel, and sported a grin only cheek implants and verneers could produce.
Then came Wilma, with her headscarf nearly blasted off her head as she gripped nails her alligator-skin suitcase. On each fingernail, Wilma had taken the time to handpaint a miniature sunflower. Spectacles the shape of tea-cup saucers magnified her wide brown eyes to nearly twice their actual size. I took note of her hand-made Ethiopian dress, the bangles on her wrists, her massive earrings, and bright blue lipstick. I had heard her speak at an art lecture once. The Paris Review once labled Wilma as l’enfant terrible of the art world. The New Yorker called her photographery kitsch. Her work, in truth, was often, to say the least: kuddelmuddel.
We boarded the private jet chattering about the all-expense vacation awaiting the three of us in some foreign hotel in Costa Rica. I dozed off in the middle of Father Andy excitedly sharing his pre-op photographs with Wilma.
BANG.
Both jet turbines sucked in a flock of geese. Guts and feathers exploded all over the windows. Turbine blades shrieked against the bird bones. Giant gusts of flame erupted from the engines. Yellow oxygen masks dropped from above. Our bodies nearly bounced out of our seats from the turbulance. Sam bellowed at the captain to land in the water. Father Andy clutched his rosary. Wilma screamed. My knuckles turned white over the handles of the arm chair. My heart pounded as the plane nosedived down towards the ocean. The door to the cockpit burst open. To our horror we watched the pilot clutch his chest and gasp before slumping over the controls. Sam unbuckled his seatbelt.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Father Andy shouted.
“Sit down and shut up!” Sam roared. He half-crawled, gripping the headrest of each seat, until he made his way to the cockpit. After yanking the pilot off the control panel, Sam squashed his rotund rear end into the pilots seat and ripped the wheel upwards towards his chest. By some miracle the plane landed in water, near an island. By some miracle we managed to remember that insufferable video’s warning on how to inflate our lifejackets. By some miracle we survived.
And now, after fourteen days of searching and screaming for human contact at the edge of this god-forsaken sandpit, we sit hungry and angry at one another as the sun dips into the ocean like a tangerine sinking in blood. We fired rockets. We have shouted for someone to hear us. No one has come.
Wilma and Andy now both lie in exhastion from screaming against the palm tree. Sam faces the sunset. I wonder how less hungry he must feel. Each pound of flesh feeds him while the three of us have slowly become the skeletal proletariats of this island. On the first day, Sam made a joke about becoming the next Donner Party. We stopped laughing on the third day. We don’t quite make eye-contact about the subject. But we all know the fate which awaits us. The only question which remains is who will fall first.
“No one’s coming.” said Father Andy. His once gleaming crop of hair hung in greasy sand-specked curls around his face. Dirt smudged his cheekbones. Eyes red from crying, face gaunt from hunger, Father Andy looked up at Sam. “Face it Sam. We’re dead meat. We’ve been dead meat since we crashed.”
“Don’t say that.” Sam shook his head. “We have to hope someone saw us. If my math is right, we’re probably about 20 miles away from Cuba. If you give up now, you’ll die.”
“We’re going to die anyway.” Father Andy looked up with exhaustion at Sam.
“Then you’d better go ahead and do it then, and decrease the surplus population.” Sam said sarcastically, kicking sand towards Father Andy before finally sitting down.
“Even if they did see the flares there’s no guarantee they’ll get here before we all starve to death.” Wilma said.
“We’ll fish.” Sam declared. I laughed.
“With what? A coconut tree branch spear?”
“Well it’s better than nothing.” Sam retorted.
“Oh fuck you Sam. You try standing out in the ocean and spear fish. I’ve tried the past few days and you want to know how many fish I’ve caught? Zero, Sam. That’s how many fish. Zero.”
“Then we’ll hunt.” Sam spluttered. “This is an island. Trees, plants, they all grow here. Some kind of animal has to live here. If we search the island one more time, maybe we’ll find a lizard, or a bird’s nest.”
“We’ve combed every inch of this island and found nothing.” I spat. “Even if we do find a clutch of eggs, or some salamander, that’s not a big enough meal for four grown adults to live on.”
“What do you all want to do then?” Sam snapped. “Just lay down and die on the beach? We made a fire. We shot up rockets. We just have to be patient. Someone will show up, we just need more time.”
“Our bodies don’t have time.” Wilma breathed, leaning her forehead against Father Andy’s shoulder. “We need food now.”
Finally, I dared to speak the crime now playing out in our heads. I spoke carefully, and quietly, staring as the others did, into the sand.
“I think we need to consider the possibility....that one of us may not be able to leave this island.” A long pause. No one looked at each other directly in the face.
“That’s murder.” said Sam.
“It’s survival.” I replied.
“It’s evil and it’s wrong. And besides that, it’s unnecesary. The rescue boats will be on their way at any moment.” Sam folded his arms around his ribcage.
“Do you have any proof someone saw it? We might be able to attract attention in the long term, but in the short term? We’ll starve to death if we wait too long.” My demands unsettled everyone, yet I could sense the dawning realization in each of their faces that I was also right. We waited another day. Then one more. Then seven more. Then silently, we all agreed.
We agreed to draw straws to select the first person.
Sam held the twigs in his fat fist. Trembling, Wilma drew the largest straw and breathed a sigh of relief at it’s length. I drew the second lot, and prayed inwardly that it was the second longest and not the fourth. Father Andy snatched the straw. Then Sam unfurled his palm.
Our eyes turned to Andy.
His cheeks drained from red to white. Andy’s eyes darted from mine, to Wilmas, and then to Sam’s, tears dripping from his eyelash extensions.
“Forgive us, Andrew.” Wilma whispered. She walked towards him, attempting to embrace him before shrugged to resist her embrace.
“Get off me.” Andy said backing away. “I won’t do it. I’ve changed my mind.”
“Andy… we all agreed.” Sam said wearily. “No one wants to do it.”
“Well why does it have to be me?” Andy demanded. His chest began to heave, he clutched his heart, darting his eyes again from each of us. “Why? Why do I have to be the one to die? What makes me deserve this?”
“It’s not about what we deserve…” Sam began. But Andy interrupted in nearly a scream.
“I’m a priest! I’ve already sacrificed my life! How many of you can say that? I toiled for nearly twenty years, spooning soup to cancer patients, counseling drug addicts, and I’m the one who’s got to be chopped up into bacon?”
“Yes you damn idiot.” Sam barked. “Yes, you, you fussy peacock of a prick with your $5,000 ass implants, you die first because you drew the shortest straw. That was the deal. Everyone agreed. No one’s special here. We could all cook up a sob story if we tried. No one deserves it. But we’re starving and we’ve got no fucking choice.”
“That’s not true!” Father Andy suddenly pointed at me, trembling. “He deserves it!”
A lump grew in my throat. It couldn’t be.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Sam demanded. Father Andy looked at me. His hands balled into fists. The botox in his forehead strained as his eyebrows twisted in rage.
“I know what he did.” Father Andy whispered angrily. “I saw it all. He’s a murderer!”
Wilma’s face resembled a stone, blank and hard. She looked at Andy, unmoved. Sam looked initially surprised, then frowned, then gripped Father Andy’s collar and growled staring directly into his pupils,
“I’ll ask again, Andy, what the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s true I swear it!” He squeaked, shrinking under the awful size of Sam. “Ask him who Grayson Dillard III is. Go on. Ask him!”
“Mikey, who the flying fuck is Grayson Dillard III?” Sam asked. I shrugged and shook my head, attempting to look as stupidly perplexed as possible.
“How do we even this Grayson person even existed?” Wilma asked.
“Fair point Wilma.” Sam nodded. “We’d better just get on with it.”
“I WAS FUCKING HIM!” Father Andy shrieked. His voice had become so loud Sam released his collar in shock. The priest burst into tears, crying uncontrollably in a heap of sand. “I was fucking him… We met online… He came over to my house and he….” He pointed violently in my direction. “He dragged Grayson by the scruff of the neck and killed him with an axe. I hid in the closet. Watched the whole thing. He hacked him up into tiny pieces. He put them in these cocoa tins. He’s a murderer you’ve got to believe me!”
“Cocoa tins?” Wilma frowned.
“I swear it’s true!” Andy begged. “I can prove it!” He dug into his pockets. To my horror, he withdrew a cellphone. A picture glowed on screen.
“I found him in the kitchen on top of this… weird shrine.” Father Andy said. “Candles. Roses. Chocolates. He arranged them in this giant heart-shape around Grayson.... I didn’t kill him! He did it! He’s a murderer! He’s the one who chopped him up into tiny bits. I couldn’t tell anyone. You don’t know what it feels like. Coming home to…”
“Alright that’s enough.” Sam waved his hands. “God I’m starving.”
I had not been discovered. Wilma and Sam clearly did not believe Father Andy. If anything, Father Andy had doomed himself the moment he displayed the picture. If I simply kept my mouth shut, I would survive undetected.
But where was the fun in that?
“He’s telling the truth.” I said calmly. Sam and Wilma both looked slowly up at me. Wilma’s mouth hung open. Sam stared.
“It’s all true.” Once I began talking, I felt I could barely stop. A strange sort of glee overtook me. “I killed Grayson Dillard III. I split that prep-kid’s head in two and scattered his brains all over Washington Square Park. It felt delicious really. Delicious. Oh he screamed and begged the way I’m sure his mommy begged the president of NYU to admit him. He would have done anything I asked him. For once, the dauphin of Mars Bars had to kiss ass, and god damn, it felt so sweet to watch him snivel on the floor for mercy. You should have heard him whine.”
“You’re a murderer.” Father Andy whispered.
“Yes Andy, dear, we’ve been over that.” I rolled my eyes. “We’ll all be murderers at the end of the night. The only question is who will be murdered? There’s only one reason we’re all still standing here. None of you don’t have the stomach to do what needs to be done. You don’t even have the common sense to know who deserves to go most. That’s why we’ve been bickering all night.”
The three of them sat motionless, staring at me. They said nothing. I couldn’t help but laugh at the three of them, with their giant bug eyes and twisted mouths.
“Isn’t it obvious?” I pointed at Sam. “Sam should be the one.”
Sam stood slowly. I noted how he made an effort to expand his generous form. I could have even sworn that he flexed his biceps. As if that would do any good.
“Please explain to us Mikey, why you think a serial killer shouldn’t get the axe.” Sam asked quietly. “How the hell is anyone supposed to trust you?”
“Oh don’t be stupid. Why would I kill either of you?” I threw up my hands in exasperation. “Wilma, Andy, look at us. We’re shriveling to dust while Humungo over there looks like he just ate a whale. How is that fair? Why should we starve while his metabolism just munches away at the flabs of fat around his stomach? Look at Sam. Look at how fat he is. He’ll outlive each and every one of us on this God-forsaken island. We’ll die before him, and why? Because we bothered to diet and exercise? Because of some thyroid problem? Oh no folks. You’re stupid to believe that. He’ll tell you, of course, that it’s only natural that he should live longer than the rest of us. He’ll tell you that it’s in his genetics. That there is a natural hierarchy of survival, and we petty mortals should have eaten more if we wanted to live. And it’s all a lie. A lie people like him invent so that they can justify squashing us under their fat asses.”
“He’s insane.” Sam shook his head and looked at Wilma and Andy. “Are you really going to listen to this crap? What, you want to use The Communist Manifesto as a reason to kill me when we have a literal serial killer right in front of us? Didn’t you people hear how he chopped that kid up with an axe?”
“His ideology caused the deaths of millions!” I screamed. “He’s the sort of person who marched with the Gestapo, who sold children into slavery, who perpetuates rape culture, and he’s the reason we’re all here on this island now. I’m simply trying to flip this damn pyramid of power upside down.”
“So that’s it.” Sam snorted. “Did I kill anyone? Did I murder a random stranger just for having more money than me? Have I ever treated any of you even remotely unfair---”
SNAP.
It happened so beautifully. Wilma had bashed the backside of Sam’s skull with a piece of metal from the plane wreckage. We had forgotten who held the weapon. A blink of horror and pain crossed Sam’s face as he toppled to the ground. Father Andy soon joined Wilma. We thrashed him dead with plane pieces. It took hours.
And then we ate him.
Morning tinted the sky like the insides of a blue oyster. Sunshine poured into our pupils and caused us to squint as we awoke and stood sharply. We must have made quite the strangest picture. Green pines of coconut trees fanned above our bloodsoaked bodies. Sam’s corpse lay stripped between the three of us. The golden sand had crunched from scarlet to brown overnight. A cruise ship honked off in the near distance. Small boats in the hundreds had crowded at the edge of the beach. Fat tourists in swimsuits gaped in terror at the scene. Parents covered their children’s eyes. An elderly woman fainted. A veteran stared grimly. They all watched with petrified interest as we three cannibals turned to face them.
Did I see the smoke of the ship yesterday?
Of course I did.