How We Got Fixed
Bringing their clam chowder and lobster bisque, Tortoise finds Bear and Rabbit have moved to separate tables and are arguing at full volume. Rabbit, using real profanity, swears she never went searching for truth, but God was revealed to her in the Stop & Shop, aisle eight, cleaning supplies. Bear turns red, then violet, hands to his throat in universal distress. Tortoise would intervene, but Bear is choking on rage, not oyster crackers.
God does not expose Herself in a Safeway.
Stop & Shop.
Not even in Whole Foods would She.
God isn't a woman; she's a process.
Bear isn't surprised. At six forty-five in Hong Kong, Rabbit will tell you it's nineteen sixty-nine in San Francisco. She sputters defiance. How can he bring Chinese aggression into this? Bear only says these things to hurt her. Rabbit limps off to the kitchen, where she scrawls on an order slip, which she hands to Tortoise, begging he deliver her request to the chef. Tortoise reads: “He says The World when he means Human Society, as in, that's just how The World is. Make him stop."
Tortoise counsels peace, and Bear understands the gravity, but does Tortoise appreciate inertia? Shall we simply shift Poland back to the right? Bear and Rabbit are miles apart on Sykes-Picot: stupid mistake or deliberate warmongering? First the prize, then the peace, as Rabbit well knows, because she let Kissinger get some titty at a party once, which makes her complicit in the rise of the Khmer Rouge and fall of Allende. Rabbit is incensed. Everyone knows where Bear stands on the CIA blowing people's heads off in Bolivian jungles and photographing the corpse for newspaper syndication. He hung that photo over the bongs in his college dorm. We can't attack each other on history, Rabbit declares. Like the president said, we must attack the future.
She pauses for applause, but morale is low. Tortoise is pushing an alt-left paradigm in which it's dead and he wants to knock off early. His word choices seem involuntary, demonstrating how revanchist violence has infested the collective subconscious. But Rabbit and Bear know Cuba Libre in English is just Rum and Coke. Tortoise might as well take his ease on a gunship veranda with a cool drink and a perpetual lease, and it's true Rabbit's got drawers full of clothes sewed by Guatemalan slave children, but who doesn't?
Bear can see Rabbit’s address to the workers failing, her southern approach blocked. She'll come from the east, then, seizing haiku and the Tang dynasty en route to Calcutta, where she'll leave Bear burdened by western culture and herself rich in silk and spices, though equally compromised by Wahhabist oil. Bear must occupy the restroom. From there he can demand a new constitution, one that includes Blacks, Women and Rhode Island.
Rabbit sympathizes through the bathroom door. We can do a constitution, she says. Will you read my manifesto? She slips it under. Bear endorses the preamble on $10.99 Chicken Parm, but $6.99 Eggplant Parm is either a Utopian delusion or anti-feminist micro-atrocity, depending on your alignment. Could she replace the eggplant clause with an ethical injunction to castrate the patriarchy? Rabbit is reluctant. They only have the one charm. Bear concedes, and now that's settled, can Rabbit come in? She really has to pee.
Bear unlocks the bathroom door. On the very threshold they make a pact to split the Caesar salad. Rabbit will have the vegan casserole, Bear the river trout. Over coffee they'll found a political action committee dedicated to good smells, under banner of lavender and cinnamon, with a bakery in every burrow and clean laundry for all.
Locking up that night, fat tip in his pocket, Tortoise pauses to watch them cross the parking lot. Tottering together under the halogen glow it's clear they have little time left, but Tortoise sincerely hopes they'll use it to avert climate change, despite the odds against them.
Author Bio
David Serafino has published fiction in the U.S., U.K, Canada and India. He has been nominated for various prizes and lives near Medellín, Colombia, where he works as a translator. For his collected stories and a (free!) novel, please visit davidserafino.com.