The Problem of Human Consumption
Steve Almond
 

Paul, in this case, is a widower. His wife died thirteen years ago. He kept their daughter away as much as he could. There were relatives around to play with her, to shower her with gifts and praise. His wife grew pale in the study. Her hair fell out. The disease ate her body in delicate bites. How do you explain such things to a four year old?

Paul has not moved or remarried. He has not taken a new job or dated a pretty secretary. To become unstuck has proved more than he can manage. He took his one grand risk of love. He met his desire and clung to her and she dissolved in his arms.

He lives with his daughter in this same house, which is a little too big for the two of them. (There were plans for a second child.) Jess has grown into an awkward beauty. She has a great head of hair, which she wears long down her back. Paul watches her on occasion, speaking to one of her suitors on the phone. She has aspects of her mother, an easy, unexpected laugh; that hair, which floats behind her like the train of a gown. But she is burdened with his bones – stolid, heavy. She dresses to conceal her figure, the broad pallid curves. Her young body swims inside baggy jeans and sweaters.

The moment in question is a Saturday night. Paul is alone in his home. Jess is out on a date, with a boy, or perhaps a group of them all together, at a bowling alley or movie house, chattering about the people they fear they are, or wish to become.

Jess has given herself over to this second life, among her peers, and Paul makes every effort not to hold her back. It is vital that she find happiness where she can.

Paul occupies himself by acquiring expertise: airplanes, butterflies, the history of the labor movement. He reads articles in his study, by the dozens, and sends electronic messages with his new computer. He imagines them flying from his fingertips, lighting the dark circuits of the world with knowledge.

But on this particular evening an ancient restlessness has stirred within Paul and he wanders from the soft lamps of his study into the kitchen and makes a sandwich. The fridge is divided by shelves, because Jess has decided, of late, to become a vegetarian. He admires this decision. It strikes him as the only sustainable solution to the problem of human consumption. (Six billion mouths to feed. The energy required to raise a calf versus a field of beans. He has studied the problem.) Paul has even considered telling her how much he admires her decision. But this would deprive Jess of the pleasure of her righteousness. And it would expose him as a hypocrite, because meat is one of his few pleasures. He gazes at the items on her shelf – the bumpy soups and mysterious chutneys, a jar of green liquid that appears to be growing spores – and reaches for the smoked ham.

The first sandwich only serves to make him hungrier, so he eats a second. The phone rings and he goes to pick it up, but there’s only a dial-tone. These hang ups are a new development. They make Paul feel embarrassed, as if Jess is ashamed of him.

            He wanders the house, unable to attach himself to a task. He turns on the TV and allows the colors to wash over him for a few minutes. They make his eyes tear up. He doesn’t worry about his daughter. There is something ruthless in her sensibility. He pities the boy who mistakes her for an easy mark.

Paul arrives at Jess’s room. He’s not sure how he got here. A minute ago, he was watching the History Channel – that terrible siege at Stalingrad, grown men feeding on the soles of their children’s shoes – and now he’s standing in his socks before her room. The door is open a crack, because Jess knows her father isn’t a spy. He has always kept himself from such obvious curiosities.

Her room is much larger than most of her friend’s, because, in fact, he’s given her the room that once served as the master bedroom. He sleeps downstairs, in the room that used to be his study. And his study is the room that she slept in as a child. All these changes were made hastily, after the funeral, and they never seemed unnatural to him. Jess has always required more room than him.

As it is, she’s expanded her possessions to fill the room. She has a set of drums in one corner, which she rarely plays anymore, thank God. There are two desks, one devoted to her schoolwork, the second to her recent fanatical interest in astrology. There are a few sweaters on the bed, which is half-made, and a stack of books on her nightstand, all devoted to astrology.

The room is warm, unexpectedly so, and filled with the sweet, slightly burnt residue of sandalwood incense. Paul turns this way and that. He lopes into Jess’s bathroom and pees and wipes the rim and stares at the bulky makeup bag beside the sink, afraid to touch it. He walks back into her room and glances at the possessions on her dresser – an ivory chopstick, a tube of something called Spirit Gel, a tiny tin of breath mints – strange relics of her personhood scattered in the low light.

There is another object there, glimmering beneath a pile of scrunchies. Paul doesn’t want to disturb the pile. He doesn’t want to snoop. But he does want to know what might be glimmering, so he turns on the light and peers into the pile. The object is his wife’s wedding band.

Paul’s reaction is one of terror. He hurries over to turn off the light and sits on the edge of the bed and his heart is galloping. He has always assumed his wife was buried with her ring. He has an image of her laid out, the slender gold band on her finger. This is ridiculous, though, because she insisted that her body be used for medical research, and they didn’t bury her at all. There had been a memorial service.

He tries to remember the last time he saw his wife, but cannot. He remembers only the rails of the bed, the steel of them, and the humiliating smell of decay. At some point, she must have given Jess the ring. But why had she done this? And how had Jess managed to keep this from him? And why? Was this a secret between the two of them? And if so, what was the ring doing on her dresser, left out like a bit of costume jewelry?

These are the mysteries that consume him as he sits on his daughter’s bed with his hands in his lap. They matter as much as any of the others, the fact that people die for no good reason, that they choose to hate when love becomes unbearable, that a certain part of them, starved of happiness, gives up, shuts down, goes into hiding.

Paul can feel the squeeze of panic in his chest. He has worked so hard to avoid the traps of mourning, the self-pity and rage. He has made sure his daughter feels loved. He has given her all the gifts of compassion she will bear. But this ring, it feels like a betrayal.

He wants to leave her room, shut the door, drift back to his study. Instead, he gets up and walks to the dresser and stares at the ring. He removes the scrunchies one by one, with the chopstick. He picks the ring up and puts it down and picks it up again and it’s heavier than he expected or denser or something and he notices a hair, a single strand of his daughter’s hair, clinging to metal. The hair is looped through the band, actually, in such a way that when he holds both ends the ring is suspended. He lifts one end and then the other and the ring slides back and forth and this simple motion, in the somber light of the room, strikes him as miraculous: the ring is defying the law of gravity.

It is at this precise moment that his daughter appears in the doorway. She often finds her father asleep at this hour, in the chair in his study. The habit has become a joke between them. He denies in mock indignation, she gently accedes. Whatever you say, dad.

Jess is in the doorway for a second before her father realizes she’s there, and for a portion of that second she’s not even entirely sure what she’s seeing – a stranger in her room, a thief, should she be frightened? – but then she recognizes his socks and the bedraggled clumps of the hair above his ears, which she has always wanted to trim.

She sees that he is hunched over something shiny and that this shiny thing is sliding back and forth, between her father’s fingers. There is an instant, the tiniest of instants, in which she too believes the object is floating in the air and this possibility of magic is a thread that connects them.

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