Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

“It is,” I said. “It is.”

And if I wasn’t wrong to believe this, I now know I was foolish to think my situation would never change. But then I was like that oblivious beachgoer at the all-inclusive resort who goes kicking through the surf with his trouser legs rolled high. The eddies of my memory had stilled; I believed I was safe, that the troubles of my past were far behind me. Only I was wrong. Memory does not follow a predictable lunar pattern. It does not move in and out with all the regularity of the tides. It’s more like a rogue wave, something that strikes without warning and pulls you struggling far from shore. I hadn’t been walking away from my past all these years; I’d been circling round toward it, and soon, just a few years after this barbecue, in fact, I’d feel the sand rush out from beneath my toes and turn and see it on the horizon — a wall of water rising up to improbable heights, ready to engulf me in its shadow and drag me out tumbling round in the deep. Yes, a thundering tsunami rushing toward me, and on its leading wave, balanced there on the nose of a surfboard, I might as well place the bringer of all destruction, the one person who would perhaps cause my old friend Mr. Wilson to feel a warm flush of satisfaction, knowing he wasn’t alone. My daughter, my very own daughter: Priscilla Reagan Leveraux. How dearly I love her, and yet still I sometimes can’t help but wonder if I’d be writing this were it not for her.

* You can always count on a flavorist for a fancy prose style.

* Sweetness #9’s pink glow faded for good in 1994, at which point The Nine’s “natural, dye-free” alternative, first introduced five years earlier, became the only one sold in stores (outside of Mexico). It’s been said that sales alone drove this decision, but judging from the nostalgic frenzy you can still observe on eBay, where one hundred — count boxes of “Mexican Nine” go for exorbitant prices, I believe it’s more likely that the company’s analysts, having observed the rise of Alice Waters out west and seen the musings of agricultural theorists supplant profiles of French restaurants in the pages of Gourmet magazine, forecast the coming of the next great awakening in the country’s food consciousness and suspected the consumer would soon no longer tolerate an artificial sweetener that was so visibly artificial.

* It was selected, too, though any history of Sweetness #9 would be incomplete without a mention of the Mexican state of Michoacán, to which production was shifted only a decade later, after the governor there had unilaterally renamed Ciudad Hidalgo, a centuries-old city honoring a Mexican revolutionary hero, Montaña del Azucar.

* Like the president who inspired me, I did not take copious notes, and often included the events of several days in one entry. The following, dated 5 July 1989, serves as a representative sample: “Bought a batting tee over the weekend and went out to Mill Pond Park with the family. Ernest refused to use anything other than a cross-handed grip before finally abandoning baseball to chase butterflies. Priscilla asked for a try and twice nearly groined me with a line-drive. Betty says she wants to sign up for Little League next year, but I fear baseball might be a gateway sport, and I’d hate for her to develop the shoulders of a swimmer or terrify the boys in the lowest weight class of her high school wrestling team.

“Lovely parade in Battle Station on the 4th! So nice to see so many friendly folk crowding into downtown again. Redevelopment is looking up. Onward, Battle Station!”

IF I HAD BEEN BORN HENRY FORD, Priscilla, in her teenaged years, would have refused to drive. Had I invented the flush toilet, she would’ve grabbed the paper and gone outdoors. As I was a flavorist, that man in the white lab coat responsible for everything from the cherry in your can of soda pop to the savory sauce in your dog’s dish of kibble, she reached for food as if it were a club with which she could strike me.

Maybe if I had been a man of greater faith, I could have more capably fended off her blows; or perhaps it was only that my faith was not great enough. You see, when my story picks back up, I was less prepared than ever to defend myself. The day where I’ll begin was a Monday morning in the summer of 1998, and as I stood in the kitchen with the small of my back pushed into the counter, I read in my paper of the death of The World’s Oldest Man. He was an Okinawan who’d lived with his children and their children and their children too, all in a house of rice paper nestled into the cliffs high above the East China Sea. For weeks I had eaten as he had eaten, drawing strength from the staples of his diet: a lot of octopus and squid (high in taurine, which lowers your cholesterol level and blood pressure) and, somewhat surprisingly, plenty of sweet potatoes. Now he was gone, though, and I was reading the profile of his successor, the first of my ersatz apostles to invoke the by-products of my own profession. Bedridden, all but deaf and essentially blind, childless and apparently alone, this man, one Alfred Livingstone Johnson III, claimed to have reached the age of 113 years and 204 days by cultivating a taste for vanilla cola, TV dinners, and a brand of cream-filled sponge cake famous for its longevity.

“I have not cooked,” he was quoted as saying, “since cracking a can of corned beef in November of nineteen and forty-three.”

It struck me as only the unexpected can, leaving me looking for connections and explanations, deeper meanings, a code. Part of me was thrilled. I wanted to photocopy this profile and push it off on anyone who might think “chemicals,” rather than being the very alpha and omega of our lives, are only added to food in the lab. But this confidence was also short-lived. As the microwave beeped behind me, my mind circled round to more treasonous thoughts, those that said this article had been an editorial room jest, something that had slipped past the copy desk and onto page A22.

Could a man really live that long eating like this?

The questions that undermine our faith don’t arrive through deep meditation and diligent study. They pop up like soldiers from a fox-hole, ready to shoot you down before you even have the time to realize you’re dead.

I tucked the paper under one arm, telling myself to concentrate on my work (the left leg, just focus on the left leg). This morning I had reached into the Deep-freeze for a breakfast sandwich that I’d selected on a recent ramble through my local Acme. (I liked to tour its aisles at least twice a month to stay abreast of all the latest flavor trends.) Sold as “The Manwich,” this heat-and-serve meal weighed in at a hearty 790 calories and was comprised of one sausage patty, two eggs, a couple of slices of bacon, and a roof of American cheese as orange as a road cone. I was not eating it out of idle curiosity or owing to an extravagant appetite. It was my routine on Mondays to sit down to a long working breakfast, so in addition to my knife and fork, I had a legal pad and a pencil beside my plate, along with plans to break down and identify all the components of the flavors I could detect in The Manwich.

My meal’s failures were apparent to me from the first bite: the bacon needed to be microwaved separately for optimum crispness, the “eggs” had been misquoted, if you will, and the savory flavorings used to prop up the processed meats and cheese were no more memorable than the propylene glycol that carried them. Usually, all of this would have given me no small amount of pleasure (FlavAmerica had not been invited to bid on the contract); but this morning I set my pencil down after scribbling only the most rudimentary of notes, then reached for my stomach, feeling the first pangs of gastrointestinal distress, if not the deft acceleration of things to come.