Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

So he walks in at the start of his shift while I’m pumping the meat slicer and sort of thinking about him. He’s in the mix, let’s say. The slicer is converting a length of capicola — long as my arm and nearly thick as both of his — into sandwich-ready slices of the same.

I’m pumping the meat slicer with my right arm, catching the paper-thin rounds of capicola in my left hand — both hands gloved — and tossing the slices with measured gestures. Flicks of the wrist. Each little disc into one of three piles. The boss calls them stacks, but that’s because when he does this it all stacks neatly. When I do it there is a mess and when I’m finished the slices of meat make tall zigzagging decks that sway like skyscrapers and need to be straightened before they can be wrapped in clear plastic and put away in the cooler. The decks get shuffled smooth and perfect, like the space of skin between Brendan’s navel and the waist of his skater pants. He’s maddening, constantly adjusting himself or stretching his arms all the way up so the bottom of his shirt pulls up, his pants slung so low, the better part of his boxers is exposed, but even the underwear doesn’t go any higher than his pale bony hips. How old is he? It almost doesn’t matter. He’ll look fifteen until he’s thirty.

Leaving work:

Maybe I’m whistling that song again. Down the street a little ways a man standing at a collapsible table is signing people up for credit cards, offering tee shirts and cheap Walkmans as a signing bonus, wincing in the relentless sun, mopping his forehead with a hairy forearm. I scribble gibberish on the form and take my little radio. He calls out to me that I didn’t show him a driver’s license, or something else he needs to verify something else. And also that I took his good blue pen. I ignore him and cross the street.

My thing:

I like to read out loud. I know Story of the Eye practically by heart but fuck that because holding the book is what’s so good. It starts to get heavier in your hands as you work up to the moment when it is time to put it down. This isn’t a fetish like I can’t live without it. I just mean that it’s so good. The words fill you like water and they reach deep into you like a surgeon would. And nobody loves it like Andrea does. With nothing but Bataille between us I picture our minds over-bleeding like the heart of a Venn diagram. I could pin Andrea with a phrase if I chose carefully enough, but that would compromise my favorite conception of her — as a shifting mystery that dances and rings like a wealth of glass, shattering. She’s my Simone. That is, when she’s not off somewhere with goddamn motherfucking Will.

At the library:

I stake out a back corner with Heart of Darkness and my new Walkman. It has those little buds that go right in your ear. I thumb through the wavelengths, past the classic rock, over now to AM, searching for Rumsfeld. And this also, said Marlow suddenly, has been one of the dark places of the earth. I guess the juxtaposition is heavy-handed, but whatever.

I can’t find Rumsfeld, but some radio personality is reading a list of the atrocities depicted in the photos that have surfaced, in the videos and other photos that are as yet only rumored. Images of horror, and their clinically disinterested annotations, fly across wires and airwaves; the electronic pulses and micropulses like the steady beat of flapping wings, and I imagine storks bearing the names of unnamed methods, dropping each into the fore of the mind where it lingers for just a moment like jewels flashing in the night of time (thus Conrad) or a world where gestures have no carrying power, like voices in a space that is absolutely soundless (thus Bataille).

I flip to the end pages of the book, the blank part, fish the credit man’s pen from my jeans pocket, and start to copy down the list as I hear it: these are the activities with which the poor or underachieving tiers of my graduating class have lately been, in the name of God and country, filling their days:

Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet; Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees; Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear; Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them; Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture; Writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked; Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture; A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee; Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee; Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees. During the orgy shards of glass had left deep bleeding cuts in two of us. Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol; Pouring cold water on naked detainees; Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; Threatening male detainees with rape; Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick. Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

“And even if these allegations are true,” the radio personality says, “what people need to understand is that we are in a war right now, and that means that certain — uh — exceptions must be” and I sort of zone out for a while. “Let’s take some calls,” he says later, and people either agree or disagree with him.

So the end pages are scrawled solid. This documentation will sit sight unseen, lost in a long row of classics, like the factory-sealed deli meats when they sit at the back of the cooler until we need them or they go bad first but we try to use them anyway. This book, I see, has not been checked out in years, and whoever bothered with it on June 7, 1988, left no mark in the text to indicate if it left him with an opinion, feeling, impression, or sense. I know that just means he is a good public citizen, respectful of the library, but I wish instead he’d left a note or tagged a signature, anything to bridge the gulf of years.

But on the other hand the list isn’t like unique or really original. I’ve seen worse stuff in movies. The dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealths, the germs of empires; the horror and despair in so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, and what greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! It kind of kills me to think about too much. The fascination of the abomination — you know. But I have changes of heart sometimes. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate. Suddenly short of breath as I imagine someone discovering my list and them imagining me and what I was thinking as I scribbled. If they could even know, somehow. I have never had any aptitude for what is known as striking a pose. Or maybe I’m not ashamed; just really careful. I check the book out and take it home, not intending to ever bring it back.