March: Evening Meal

It was dinnertime and the light was dying. We drove out to the west of the city, a place of endless warehouses and numbered streets. At one point, the road went from asphalt to gravel to dust. We pulled over and got out of the car. I remember my father and mother, well dressed, walking along the dim streets between the blind buildings, their windows shuttered. We were looking for a restaurant they had gone to years ago.

After the light of the day had perished, we arrived, but the restaurant was dark. There were people inside sweeping and moving tables, but the lights were barely on. My father called to them in a booming voice, asking if they had closed for the night. I couldn't hear the answer, but he did. He looked dejected. But one of the men inside the black restaurant came towards us. Though I couldn't see his eyes, he let us know that there was another place a little farther down the road. A unique Italian place.

So we walked a little further, though it turned out to just be the next warehouse over. There were white lights strung up all around. The whole place seemed to sparkle. There was grass outside the warehouse, a well-manicured lawn that lead us towards our tables just inside. The whole of the warehouse was open, with the kitchen in the back. The tablecloths were green; the menus were white and black. There was a bottle of water on the table. The string lights continued to go back into the warehouse, which seemed to stretch on for eternity. Our table was right on that border between inside and outside. We had a roof over our head, but as we looked out we could see the night sky beginning to fill up with stars, commingling with the string lights all around us.

The menus were short; there were only three dishes on the front. My father called the waiter over and ordered one of everything, thinking we would try them all. The first dish to come out was a black and green bruschetta, a bitter mixture of olives and basil that spread nicely on the crusty bread provided. My mother ordered a glass of white wine; my father ordered a glass of red. The next dish was some sort of smallish fish that was baked until crispy. Four on the plate they came out, on a bed of something green. The heads and tails were all on them. My parents attacked the fish, piercing the flesh and digging around the bones. The eyes looked at me. My mother, seeing my nervousness, took one of the fish and beheaded it, laying it in front of me, plaintively. I was to eat this. The last dish was a pasta. It came served in a large bowl, big enough for us all to eat out of. It looked to be spaghetti, something simple, something I could recognize. But in the center of the birds' nest were mushrooms of a sort, according to my mother. There looked to be a thousand of them, all round and clustered in the center like eggs from ants or a cluster of deer droppings. Again, my parents dug in ravenously while I watched. It simply didn't look appetizing.

While they ate, I scanned the menu. It was full of words I did not know, and terms that made no sense to me. I also wondered why it was so short. I turned the menu over and found a story on the back. I began to read aloud:

“Within the republic of (a name I could not pronounce), there lived two peoples. One were tall and olive skinned with long dark hair that the men would tie behind their heads and the women would wear straight down. Their women wore long gowns of white and black, while the men wore black pants, white shirts and black vests embroidered with signs of their profession. The others were also tall, but much paler, and they all wore flowing garments, no matter their sex. It came to be that after hundreds of years of coexisting, the two peoples grew to dislike one another. And so the king of the land, sensing the disturbance, drew the two peoples together and had them create a coliseum, a place where they could elect champions to settle disputes. And

so it began that peace settled upon the land once again.

And there became men whose only profession was to fight within the coliseum, no longer for the benefit of arguments, but for entertainment. They would choose their weapons and fight, to the death. There was a man, (a name I could not pronounce) who became the champion of the people with olive skin. He became a symbol of oppression for the people with flowing garments. He fought terribly with a whip and was never defeated. His vest was embroidered with a whip made from roses. He was greatly respected amongst his people and while he lived, he had a wife and a daughter who were his all. He fought within the coliseum for many years, defeating everyone who came his way with his whip, and preserving the dominance of his people.

Until it came time for his daughter to marry. The man she chose was one of the flowing garment people, who, upon meeting the champion, extended his hand in friendship and gratitude. She was so happy for them to finally meet, and for her father to accept their love. But he was angered, instead. He took his whip from the wall and he struck the man cruelly in the throat, lashing at his arteries and splitting his neck with precision. His daughter's lover was dead on his floor, and his daughter ran to the king. The king, who was a fan of the olive skinned champion was saddened to hear the news, but knew that order must be kept. The royal guard was dispatched to the champion's house and they took him away, his wife cried in the doorway.

They brought the olive skinned champion to the coliseum the next day. The stands were filled with people who had come to watch the execution of the olive skinned champion. Half of the seats were filled with his people, who wept for their champion was no more; the other half was filled with the people of flowing garments, celebrating the righteous justice they were about to witness. And the man's daughter came out, holding her father's whip. He was made to kneel in the sand and dust. And his daughter, tears falling, began to exact the punishment. The champion was to be flayed to death with his own weapon, by his daughter. The champion shed tears all throughout, and his daughter too. And where he knelt, the dust seemed to pill and bead as it mixed with the blood that rolled down his back. And where his daughter stood, the dust seemed to bunch and coil as it mixed with her tears. She was very distraught and he was a strong man, and so the execution took more than a day and a night, and when it was done, both the champion and his daughter died of exhaustion. They were removed from the coliseum and the dust from where each stood became the inspiration for our last dish.”

My parents had finished eating, looking down at their plates and the food they had just consumed. The bowl was still filled, nearly to the brim, with the pearled mushrooms and nested pasta, one encircling the other in caring, loving arms. And so they ordered another drink, and my mother began to talk.

“It seems to me, that story was very similar to one by Delilo... or Delany.” “Which?” said my father from beneath his glass of red wine.

“I can’t remember its name,” said my mother with some sad frustration in her voice, though she shook it off quick. “But it was about a soldier in the desert of Afghanistan. He was stationed, between the desert and the mountain, alone for the most part. He had dug himself a fox-hole in which to live in that loneliness, beneath the sun and the wind. Every now and then, he would be visited by a member of his army, to be resupplied. But the heat was extreme and the sun unrelenting. He began to have visions and could not continue his task of monitoring the people who would come and go across that natural border. And so he began, as his mind baked in the desert, to take his time with a rifle and shoot those

he saw, thinking them aberrations and fakes. He would aim carefully and take each life through his cross hairs, leaving the bodies to fall where they would. By the morning, the dust had covered them as though they had never been there.

“But his military got wind of this action, and sent a group to capture the man and bring him to justice. The locals and affected families also heard that this was to happen, and so they followed the military convoy. They numbered in the thousands, all of them stood on the hills beneath the mountains in the wind. And as the sun beat down upon the desert below, they watched from above, all living in blowing white robes. And the soldier was made to come out of his fox hole into the beating sun, the everlasting heat, and he threw himself at the feet of his comrades, but they felt nothing, for he was a murderer and deranged. They had him walk, from his foxhole, towards the mountains, for he was to ask the families of the people he murdered for forgiveness. And as he stumbled across the desert, shuffling through sand and stone, one of his comrades sat upon a hill with a rifle and took his head between the cross hairs. The soldier fell at the foot of the mountains and the sand covered him as if he had never been there.”