Itoh, Project: Harmony

“Don’t worry about keeping up with me,” Cian said. “I always leave some anyway.” She closed her lunch box with an audible snap. “My parents want me to eat it, but it’s way too much for the middle of the day.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t really get hungry until two or three o’clock. At noon I still feel full from breakfast.”

“Do you know why we eat lunch at noon?” Miach asked through a full mouth.

I shrugged. “Is it because we’re hungry?”

“Apparently Cian isn’t.”

I looked in Cian’s direction, then lowered my head. “Oh, right. Sorry.”

“That’s okay, you don’t have to apologize.”

“Neither of you do,” Miach joined in. “People get hungry whenever they feel like it, that’s natural. It’s that the school system doesn’t approve of natural human flexibility.”

“Well, if you’re going to have a group of people eating, it makes sense to eat together.”

“Why can’t we eat during class is what I want to know.”

Now that she mentioned it, it did seem curious that people often read or watched media channels while they were eating, but we weren’t supposed to eat while we read our textbooks in school. Maybe it was because it would distract us from class? But that didn’t make sense either. Class and lunch were equally boring. At least, my mother’s lunches never tasted good enough to distract me from anything.

“It’s a rule. These rules are meant to divide up our time, partition it, control it. Strictly speaking, by getting hungry around two or three o’clock, Cian’s digestive system is going against the rules—and Cian blames her own body for not being able to get with the program. She blames herself. How silly is that?”

Miach was in the zone now. Miach, our ideologue. She gathered up another ball of rice with her chopsticks, still talking. “The time divisions at school have been the same for a long while. What started as the idea that it was fun for everyone to eat together, or that it made more sense for work, eventually became proscribed in more detail, with start times and end times. It became a rule. You know there was no such thing as lifestyle pattern designers before lifeism took off? But once something like that becomes popular, it becomes the thing to do, then it becomes a rule, then it becomes law. Just another of the invisible things out there trying to control our bodies.”

Miach kept talking at full speed, her cheeks full of a lot of rice and a little bit of toppings. Finally she tossed back the last bit of rice, packed up her lunch box, and put it back in her bag. Then she stood and walked over to the railing that ran around the rooftop and spoke out loud, like she was making a proclamation to the scenery—or even to the entire world.

“‘It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most “private.”’”

“Who said that?”

“Michel Foucault.”

Even though her lunch was much bigger than ours, Miach had finished way before we were done. I ate up the last of mine, wrapped my lunch box in a cloth, and tucked it away inside my bag. A quiet breeze blew, brushing past our foreheads and through our hair.

Death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it.

“So is that the only way out?” I asked quietly.

Miach was looking out over the city, confronting it. “I used to be in another place, under the dominion of another power. It was hell,” she said without turning around. “That’s why I escaped, to come here. But here’s crazy too. This is no place for people to live.”

“What was it like, the other place?”

“The exact opposite of here. Over there guns kill people.

Here, kindness kills them. It’s all the same.”

So here I was, thirteen years later, in that other place Miach had told us about.

Already, several small-scale disturbances had broken out across the globe. The police forces, accustomed to the peaceful routine of everyday life, were immediately overloaded, and many cities and admedistrations had gone weeping to those few remaining countries with standing militaries to beg for assistance.

Franz Recht picked up the knife his wife always used and looked at it.

It was the knife she used to cut cabbage for her sauerkraut.

The knife she used to slice blutwurst.

Franz Recht had never been very good at cooking. He had left all that to her. He would clean up around the house and go shopping, but he had never cooked a single meal. It had been a long time since he had even set foot in the kitchen.

Once he had stepped in though, his eyes had started to swim. Perhaps he was dazed by the sheer variety of potentially lethal items he found there. Practically any of them would suit his current purpose. Which made sense, when he thought about it. This was a place for ending and processing life.

Cutting, carving, beating, burning, stewing, steaming.

Many religions have rules about food.

Kosher

Dietary restrictions followed by those of the Jewish faith. As blood is life, goes one teaching, the blood must be removed from food in the proper manner. A strict observer’s kitchen will have two sinks. One to drain the blood and purify the food, the other for typical kitchen use. Pork, considered to never be clean, is prohibited.

Halal

Tenets of Islam, especially those pertaining to food. Halal literally means “that which is permitted by Allah.” All meat must be slaughtered according to the method called dhabiha if it is to be halal. Dhabiha requires that you use a sharp knife to cut the windpipe, esophagus, and carotid artery swiftly, so as to cause the animal as little pain as possible, while leaving the spinal cord intact. The preparer then says “ Bismillah Allahu akbar ” to ask for Allah’s blessing, and only then is the meat considered to be halal.

This was the way food used to be. Only consumed after all the necessary, annoying protocol had been followed. That was how killing was too.

“Honey!”

A call from the door. Franz’s wife was home. His eyes went to the entranceway. Franz went down the hall to greet his wife just inside the door, where he plunged the carving knife he had just picked up in the kitchen into her chest.

Being a rather moderate Christian, Franz had no need for halal or dhabiha. He certainly wasn’t going to say Allahu akbar . He just had to thrust out with his arm to bury the knife—the one she used to cut the cabbage for her sauerkraut—into her rib cage.

Her eyes met his in surprise.

Perhaps he was frightened, or perhaps—being an amateur at this—he wasn’t sure how much force was necessary to actually kill, or whether he had managed to hit a vital organ. So to be safe, Franz knelt over his fallen wife and stabbed her again and again. He stabbed her in the chest and the stomach and everywhere except her head, that head with the beautiful face. He kept stabbing for several minutes until her body was in ribbons.

Then Franz put a hand to one ear and called the police, while he was still straddling his wife’s corpse. Yes, I just killed my wife. Yes. You know, what they were saying, how we had to kill someone or we would die? I figured there’s no death penalty in this country. And I don’t mean to be demanding, but could you please send a patrol car to pick me up? What?They’re all out? I see, well I suppose everyone is busy these days. Busy like me.

Franz hung up the phone and stared at the body beneath him for a few moments before he began to weep.

“And that’s just one example,” Stauffenberg was saying. Everyone participating in the AR session was standing, stunned, wherever they happened to be in the real world.