Breakfast

by Tyson Koska

The cereal aside, I’m depressed to be here. This wholegrain and fruit spectacle, all these clean and cheery faces, toothy grins and tumbling flakes of bran-such assertions of joy and nutrition. I can't work free of advertising’s little hooks. My eyes flick and finger the front of each fine-looking box. Though I just want cereal, something to pour into my bowl and eat with milk, the hyperbole locks me down, and what a strange paralysis, what immense freedom of choice. This choosing is why I don't shop, because when I do, among other things, I can’t pick a goddam box of cereal.

I spot a young clerk stacking boxes on a full shelf. I ask, “Which one’s best?”

He shrugs, “I don’t know, sir. What do you like?”

That’s the problem, isn’t it? Plain questions become thorny matters of personal choice. Just answer me, I think. And let me get out of here. But instead I ask, “What do you like best?” hoping the swift reversal might dislodge from him an answer, any answer, that I can act on. After all, hasn’t the clerk spent far more time in the cereal aisle than I? Hasn’t he had ample opportunity to work it out. If he can’t choose, then who?

“Um, jeez…” he offers, adding dreamily, “I don’t know, sorta depends on my mood, I guess.”

You see already how distressing this answer is. According to this kid, not only is the quality of cereal dependant on personal choice but also mood at the time of choosing-and more, whatever future mood one may be in on any as yet undefined morning. Breakfast, like all other things, is an indefensible and illogical system of irrational choices, no different than women, politics or religion.

I gaze up and down the aisle again, the boxes yearning for my attention, Corn Flakes, they call to me, Cheerios, they beckon. Shall I simply reach for one and be satisfied? Yes. Done. Decision complete. I can feel the creeping relief of action, the helpless irrevocability of commitment. And yet my hand remains motionless by my side.

I need a method -- I need a more sound system. I could count calories and tabulate differences in niacin, potassium, thiamin. I could contrast the results with published Recommend Daily Allowances, but how can I be sure? What about taste -- I mean, would the pleasure of Captain Crunch or Fruit Loops outweigh the positive effects of Raisin Bran? What's my pleasure worth when it comes to good health? How much sugar does it take to offset tasteless and well-tuned regularity? Mary knows. She could tell me. She could manage this crucial balance; that woman could pick cereal.

The clerk, having now stocked the remaining inventory, darts away. I see the carefully hidden nervousness in him; I see the way he looks back at me as other shoppers slide in and pull boxes from the shelves-these good consumers who hardly falter in their choosing. They select with seeming ease and certainty, yet I am weak and angry and think to myself, this really could go on forever. So I decide to go, without cereal, and resolve to think no more about breakfast. I firmly postpone the implications of my decision, my indecision, and turning to leave this disaster, a man carrying a bag of potato chips and a baseball bat walks by me. I follow him; I am almost pulled by, as if caught in his slipstream. At the end of the aisle he turns left and with focused and confident grace, he approaches the meat section.

The man carefully walks alongside the low open case of refrigerated and freshly-butchered meat. Stopping, he raises his baseball bat in his right hand and, without a trace of irony, stands for a moment as if posed in triumph. It strikes me immediately that this is all quite odd, that this guy, dressed in a yellow trucker’s cap and red flannel shirt gripping a black wooden bat in the meat section of the supermarket, is fantastically unusual.

Then the man lets go his chips; he grabs his ‘slugger’ with both hands and swings downward. A thick thud full of plastic and meat concusses the air. Then his bat is up again, and again down. In quick succession, he pounds the steaks, the burgers, the roasts with inexplicable ferocity-these dead, red cuts get a horrible thrashing. The man’s yellow CAT hat tumbles off his head and onto the checkered supermarket floor. He swings away, the tails of his red flannel shirt flapping with each loft and smash.

If Mary were here she’d hold my arm and say, "Do something," as if I’m the hero who stops maniacs with baseball bats pounding away at meat in the supermarket. But the hero and I both know it’s proximity, not urging, that makes men brave. It’s irrational to step in front of a man with a moving bat, even the hero knows that. Perhaps if I were closer, Mary, maybe then I would step in...And yet I know already she would think me a coward for this reply; would never accept my sound logic and reasoning. Would you, Mary?

The bat's end is dripping now with meat and chunks fly off, styrofoam and cellophane shrapnel splatters gazing innocents. The man flails and in his rage I feel calm, an eerie simplicity. His steady swinging quells me like a river,if only I could step into this same moving water. A few clear seconds pass in untamed fury, his cool blows, the smash, smash rhythm of his anger.

Now the meat manager opens the sliding glass window between the cutting-room and the meat case. He’s white-smocked and clean; he shouts at the batter, “Stop!” The madman turns to the meat manager and smacks his skull against the metal pane of the window. The clean meat manager falls, slaughtered, onto the scrubbed floor, and the bat-man returns to his meat.

"Do something," Mary would beg. "You have to help!" And the worst part, I’d want to and still do nothing because at heart I’m afraid of maniacs with bats and have no wish to be another meat manager with a cracked head. Mary may choose to risk me, to chance my safety for the sake of another, but I don’t see the payoff. Is the person I might save better, more blameless than I am? And though I don’t begin to move or to help, I am filled with tenderness for the victim slumped unconscious on the floor, his smock pulled to the side, his pale face, blonde hair, open eyes awash in the yellow supermarket fluorescence. I admire and appreciate him. I am thankful for his baffling attempt to calm the lunatic… but to be him?

Then, finally, other customers close on the aggressor, and he turns to meet their attack. A different man, puzzlingly near to the action, charges at him from behind-it’s the hero. The lunatic tries to outrun the hero’s destiny but only lurches forward. As the hero slams the man to the ground, the moist club speeds out as if seeking any last solid thing. I see the bat’s thin profile and flecks of beef as it lands across my face. I drop into the refrigerator case. My blood casts a spray across the few untouched packages. My blood reaches almost to the chicken.

Activity is all over me -- I think to myself, I’m lying in a meat case and my eye is pressing on soft red plastic. People talk. I can’t understand them, and I don’t know why I’m lying on meat. The more I think, the less I know. Blood is on my lips, and as I work to hold onto a few grounding facts, consciousness fades.

Now I’m in a meat case; I’m lying in a refrigerator full of meat. Footsteps and voices collide in the high-drama around me.

I’m hurt. I'm alone.

Why am I alone in a supermarket meat case? Where is Mary? What time is it? I seem, actually, to have red meat on my face. I think to myself, what day is it?

I’m lying in a refrigerator, on meat. I try to stand. I’m dizzy. I fall. Someone catches me.

“What day is it?” I ask.

“Thursday,” someone says.

I’m lying down.

“Where am I?”

“You’re hurt,” someone says.

“Where’s Mary?”

“Who?”

“Mary?”

Someone says I’m hurt. "What day is it?” I ask.

“Thursday,” says a voice. “We need help here.”

I’m sleepy-in a confused way. “Where am I?” I ask.

“You’re going to be okay,” a voice says, ignoring my question. “Help is coming.”

“Where’s Mary?”

A voice responds, “Relax.”

A great chaos of reds and whites and hands and gauze flick about my face. Overhead lights now alternate bright and dark, I seem to be rolling along a great cereal-box abacus, such wonderful colors.

I’m in a vehicle. I’m being driven. I speak, but no one hears.

I am waking up.

Was I sleeping? I’m in a hospital room. Where’s Mary? In fact, what time is it? What day is it? What the hell is going on here?

“Do you want to know what day it is?” It’s a nurse, she’s young. Her fingers fidget on my head.

“Yes, how did you know?” I ask.

“It’s Thursday.”

“Oh,” I say.

There’s a nurse in front of me. “You’re going to be fine, everything will make sense later. Now tell me, what day is it?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Standing in front of me is a nurse; she tells me exactly what I am burning to hear. “Today is Thursday,” she says.

“Thank you. Oh, thank you so much.” I whimper. “Please, where’s Mary?”

Some white-clad young woman asks me, “What day is it?”

“I have no idea,” I say, but I wish she would tell me.

A woman is speaking to me as if in mid-sentence “…and it’s a concussion,” she continues. “You’re having problems with short term memory; do you understand what I’m saying?” A woman is looking deep into my eyes. “Some things you can remember, some things you can’t,” she says.

I have only just woken, “…you can’t hold new information right now,” says a woman. “By tonight, or tomorrow, you’ll be fine.”

What will be fine, I wonder to myself?

A nurse is leaving my room. It’s a fucking hospital room. What am I doing here?

I stand up. I’m weak. I seem to be injured. I think it’s Thursday, but I don’t know why I think that.

I see a plastic bag-searching in it, I find my wallet.

I am searching through a white plastic bag, inside are, I think, my cell-phone and my keys. I discover I’m holding a wallet in my other hand.

I’m holding a wallet, cell-phone, keys-they seem so familiar. I’m almost certain they’re mine.

I’m standing in a hospital room with my hands full. I need to keep this randomness together. I don’t know-I need a system.

I have to make a decision, about something, but what? There's a cell phone in my hand, it's my cell phone. I call home; Mary doesn’t answer. I let it ring, but the machine doesn’t pick up. I have to get home. I know that. I need Mary.

I am standing in what looks to be a hospital room with a cell phone held against my ear listening to nothing but air. I panic. I'm in a hospital room. I’m in a panic, but I don’t know why I’m panicking.

I have to get home -- I know it -- I have to do it now. I walk quickly down a long hall, through an automatic sliding door into a brightly lit area. I can’t be sure, but I seem to be outside a hospital. A woman huddles a bleeding man from a taxi. The poor bastard is utterly out of control. I rush into the backseat of their cab.

The driver listens as I give my address; he nods.

“How long will it take?” My ass is sticking to the cracked vinyl seat.

“How many times you gonna ask me that?”

“I'm sorry. I… Excuse me,” I say to the man seated in front of me. “It’s Thursday, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he says angrily.

“I knew it!”

“What’s your problem man?”

“None,” I say, “I don’t have a problem, but my wife -- something’s happened, how much longer?”

“Not long, relax pal.”

“It’s Thursday, right?” A cabby is driving, shaking his head, he won’t answer me -- asshole, I think, and decide not to talk to him.

“Excuse me,” I say to a taxicab driver, “Please take me to…”

“I know!” he snaps.

My ass is sticking to a vinyl seat.

Mary knows if today is Thursday; she knows for sure. Mary can fix this.

I seem to be in a car parked in front of my house. “How long have I been here?” I ask the man sitting in front of me -- the driver. “Let me out of this fucking cab!”

“What?”

“Let me out of here!”

“Three-sixty, man.”

“You fuck, you just let me sit here? Right in front of my own goddam house?” I grab bills from my wallet and push them at the cabby.

I’m running up the lawn to my house as a taxi driver yells at me from behind -- I can’t understand him. Cold grass sticks to my feet; where are my shoes? Christ, oh Christ, Mary, something is wrong. The driveway is empty. The house is locked. I'm holding my cell phone, wallet, keys. I unlock the door, swing it open and understand nothing.

I’m standing on my front porch. A cold draft lingers behind me.

From my porch I stare into my house; it’s dark, empty.

I stare inside my house from my front porch and see a folding chair in front of a small TV centered on my living room floor, otherwise the room is bare. There’s no carpet, no sofa. CD's are stacked in the corner -- no stereo.

I see a coffee cup on a small table next to a folding chair in front of a small TV.

I’m standing inside of my living room, which seems to be empty except for a few pieces of flimsy furniture. Seemingly new curtains hang over the windows; there's an empty cereal box on the floor next to a folding chair.

My empty house smells like soap. It’s devastatingly clean here.

I’m standing in a house, which should be mine, but clearly is not.

Holding tight to a cell phone I find in my hand, I dial home. I hear ringing in the next room.

Here is what I know: I’m standing in a bare room in an almost empty house. Mary is not here, and I am holding a cell phone that appears to be calling the number to my house. There’s another phone, in the next room, ringing and ringing.

Jesus, these rings are oppressive -- these rings are pushing on me from all sides, they are washing over me. Ringing soaks me through now, and I have a strong, cool feeling of waking -- a standing kind of waking. I am waking without sleep; I am remembering. The rings in the next room fall, I am wet in memory, and then -- I am on the hardwood floor. The smell of wood and mops and vacancy splinters inside me… and I remember.

The meat, I remember -- and the bat, the man in the yellow cap and the red flannel shirt.

I touch my head under the bandage. I know the story, the empty cupboard, the cereal box and the few papers underneath it, the 12-hour old signature.

I remember why the phone in the next room is ringing, still ringing. I know why you won’t pick-up Mary. I know there is no system here, there is no logic. This matter is one of personal choice, indefensible -- like so many other things. I am powerless to reach out and to choose. I know you are not here, Mary; I know you are somewhere else. So I turn from the emptiness of our home, and I walk the two miles back to the hospital -- into the bright, constant floodlights.