Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

Inside the restaurant, when I wasn’t picking at my pecan waffle and staring out the window, I was reading those pages of that morning’s Austin American that my father’s old army buddy had deemed fit for my perusal. The sporting news offered a few diversions, but nothing appealed to me as much as the almost twenty inches of print given over to a profile of The World’s Oldest Man, a Bulgarian by the name of Kiril who had stood on this spinning planet for more than 113 years.

“I owe it all to yogurt,” he said. “Each day, I eat no less than three cups.”

The Waffle House, as those of you familiar with the American South no doubt know, does not serve yogurt, or at least it most certainly did not in 1966. When I asked for a cup, our waitress looked at me as if I’d just requested directions to the offices of the local branch of the NAACP. Still, even after being rebuffed, I knew I had found the rock on which I could build a new life. What could possibly matter more? I wondered. That the meek would inherit the earth? That the Yankees would win another World Series? Or that a man as old as the sky and the air swore by the life-giving properties of the Lactobacillus bulgaricusa culture?

Later that same day, when I met my grandfather at the airport, I had that newspaper clipping tucked away in my back pocket; it was the first of many such profiles that I stored in an old MJB coffee can that I kept beneath my bed. Especially in those years directly after this crisis, I followed the comings and goings of the world’s oldest citizens as my father had once followed the seasons of Mickey Mantle. I wanted to know how they did it, what they thought of dancing and laughter, cigars versus cigarettes, caffeine. If a super-centenarian had something to say about moderation, I’d meditate upon it while brushing my teeth. If another believed life had been better under Benjamin Harrison, I’d check out a biography at the library, or perhaps dash off a letter to a local scholar. More than anything, I coveted their thoughts on food. If The Oldest Man in America attributed his advanced age to eating figs and rainbow trout, I filled my shopping cart accordingly. If The World’s Oldest Woman warned about the evils of cheap whiskey and stinky cheese, I recoiled from these items as if from a flame.

When I learned from Betty that our dreams of parenthood were dashed, I dumped the bacon and eggs I had already prepared and fixed us a breakfast consisting of white fish, white potatoes, and white milk.

“Eat,” I told my wife. “That’s an order.”

Since first reading about the dietary habits of the current Oldest Man in America, a stolid Norwegian immigrant from St. Olaf, Minnesota, I had filled our freezer with the work of the Gorton’s Fisherman. Betty was in no way a convert to my system of faith, but on this woeful morning she agreed that a few fish fingers and a side of hash browns couldn’t possibly hurt.

After she had cleared her plate and downed a second glass of milk, she said, in a small voice that made this sound like a question, “I’d like to spend the day with my mother.” I didn’t object; I encouraged her. Considering the many mysteries of the female anatomy, I assumed my mother-in-law would be a greater service to my wife than I would be. So I drove Betty inland to Battle Station (the midpoint between Jupiter Park and her mother’s home in Montclair) and made the exchange in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn.

By then it was lunchtime, but instead of returning home for a sandwich, I thought of my rats and drove out to calculate their daily intake of Sweetness #9. When I’d finished, I ate a bag of chips and a candy bar from the vending machine, then stayed in the lab another hour or two and observed my test subjects as they moved about the communal glass tank. Such a transformation I saw. They had once been blind, needy pups no heavier than the air in my hands, but now they were growing into adulthood, many of them already nearing the 200 grams of weight that signified maturation.

I found myself ready to cry when I considered how it wasn’t just their bodies that were growing. One rat, who was in the group receiving the highest dose of The Nine, had in recent weeks begun to show evidence of rage issues; another from his cohort slept for hours at a time on the exercise wheel, though near the start of the summer she’d spent just as much time with her little legs blurring upon it. No less troubling were two rats who previously had exhibited homosexual tendencies; this afternoon they showed not the slightest inclination to frolic and play. Louie, though — he was somehow the worst. Louie was crying blood. I knew better than to think of it like this. Within the eye’s orbit of every Sprague-Dawley rat there exists a Harderian gland which produces a pigmented substance that, once secreted, has the appearance of dried blood; but still I couldn’t help it. As I wiped the “tears” from Louie’s coat and set him down in the tank, I sucked in a jagged breath of air, then watched as he slunk over to the tank’s far corner and rolled onto his back, as if he were some delinquent French philosopher lounging about in the fields.

“Oh, Louie,” I said.

He was an easy mark. The rat who’d been experiencing rage issues pounced on him, causing me to pull them apart and get bitten in the thumb in the process. Minutes later I was out in the main room, pinning back the skin of the offending party in a dissecting tray. My autopsy was not an act of retribution; it was part of a continuing and planned process of scientific inquiry that had already reduced my population of test subjects by approximately 20 percent. I don’t know what I expected to see magnified on my glass slide that afternoon — tumors and misshapen organs, holes in the brain — but everything checked out fine: the rat’s bladder was as smooth as the skin of a chestnut, and its brain as pink and fluffy as grade-A ground round.

I wanted to make sense of all the changes I’d observed, but I couldn’t detect any consistency in the symptoms or find a correlation between the dosage and its effect. The rat whose brain was on my slide had been receiving a dose of Sweetness #9 six times as large as Louie’s, but I wasn’t sure he was any worse off because of it. I could say with no greater certainty that this was all in my head.

Desperate for corroborating evidence, I went to Hickey’s desk and looked all over for his notebooks. Only his pencil drawer was unlocked, and it held little of interest: a prescription bottle of Quaaludes, a pornographic postcard, Asian in theme, stuck inside a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and a letter from his mother that described her worries: You should find a nice girl, it doesn’t matter how she looks, someone who cooks.

I stashed the letter back in its envelope before I could finish reading it, but minutes later, after I’d pulled away from the parking lot and arrived at the first four-way stop down the road, my memory wouldn’t let me forget what I’d seen. As I idled there with my left indicator flashing, and by no means eager to spend the day alone with my thoughts, the looping letters of Hickey’s mother’s handwriting appeared in my mind’s eye, and I pulled up on the lever to make my right indicator flash, just before I turned away from my home toward his.

HICKEY’S NEIGHBORHOOD OF SMALL RANCH-STYLE houses was somehow sadder than my own apartment complex, perhaps because of its suggestion of greater permanence. I parked across the street from his neighbor’s house, which had a blue tarp fluttering loose at one corner of its roof. No fence ran between this home and Hickey’s, at least not in the front yard; the property lines in the subdivision were revealed by lawn-mowers at those points where one homeowner chose to stop cutting his grass, bringing his neighbor’s delinquency or diligence into stark relief.