There are those amongst you who will say that the health of one individual is not connected to the health of his country. I wish nothing more than to agree with you, but after my “illness,” as I spoke of it in court, I have come to accept that while the healthy may be able to disregard the state of the nation, the infirm have no such luxury. The American Condition is real, I am saying. It can trigger in you a response as wild as any new regime of medication. For this reason, I must ask for your patience while I introduce one last movement into this seven-day symphony, if only because in the end it plays such an important part.
I first became aware of it on Monday morning, while driving in to work. The news station on the radio said an explosion had gone off at a Save-a-Lot supermarket in Ewing Township. Not a big one, but powerful enough that a woman was badly burned and blinded in one eye when she opened the fogged doors on the frozen food aisle and reached inside for a box of blueberry waffles. I didn’t think anything more of this until an hour or so later, when I came out of my office to find Beekley going into the supply closet for the old Zenith television set that we only hauled out for that rare natural disaster or moment of geopolitical import.
“Is it Clinton?” I quickened my pace down the hall. “Did they finally come for Clinton?”
Beekley turned in to the break room, trailing the cord. When I got in there after him, Koba was already down on his hands and knees, plugging the set into the outlet behind the emergency Y2K pantry, which by now was half filled with everyone’s least favorite canned goods. When Koba stood, slapping his hands clean, Beekley reached for the rabbit ears and began working at them like a dowser searching for water.
“There!” I threw my hand out as the image of a supermarket rolled into place.
Beekley stepped away from the set as if from a house of cards. A young Asian-American woman stood in the foreground of the store, backed by a line of yellow police tape. She spoke in that voice newscasters reserve for airplanes that have fallen out of the sky.
“On the heels of attacks this morning in Ewing Township and Poughkeepsie—”
“What happened in Poughkeepsie?”
“—violence came to the Acme supermarket in Doylestown a little after nine a.m.”
“Was it another explosion?”
“This time the explosive device rang out on not one aisle but three, each evenly spaced throughout the store.”
Panic ensued, the reporter said. With Thanksgiving shoppers clogging the aisles, the strong trampled the weak, the young pushed aside the old, and the uncoordinated and sickly threw themselves over the glut of shopping carts that had piled up at the front doors.
“Forget your worst day at Costco,” Beekley said, as the camera panned live across the scene. “This is a modern-day Gettysburg.”
In the parking lot, men and women, both young and old, were sitting on overturned shopping carts and the bumpers of fire trucks; some lay with their heads in the laps of strangers as they were treated for broken arms, fainting spells, and minor cardiac events; others stood alone like stoics, staring off into a future they couldn’t comprehend or didn’t wish to join. Seventeen people in all had been injured, four seriously.
The reporter pointed to a boxy red truck that had Bomb Squad emblazoned on its side in large reflective print. “At the moment,” she said, “a robot the size of a riding lawnmower is moving up and down the aisles inside, looking for any evidence of additional danger. The robot has four cameras attached to it, including one at the end of an extendable arm that can rise to a height of ten feet. Only when it’s determined that it’s safe will officers from the Bomb Squad”—again she glanced at the truck—“move in. But even after they do, many people here in Bucks County, if not the entire tri-state area, may think twice the next time they do their shopping. Reporting live for WKLA News in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, this is Sandra Wu.”
I called Betty that day to see if she’d like to have lunch at the English pub on the ground floor of her building. It was a time to be with friends and family, those you loved. But she was in a small town on the outskirts of Amish Country, speaking with the mayor about the prospects of her company’s proposed consulting contract. Hearing she wouldn’t be back for another couple of hours, I drove home to watch the news in the living room.
Priscilla hadn’t gone to school that morning so she could care for Ernst. She sat alongside me on the sofa, the television tuned to one of the news channels. The FBI, the ATF, and a special investigator from the FDA had gotten involved. Tips were coming in by the hundreds to a 1-800 number that had been flashing across the screen for the better part of the morning. As I ate a roast beef sandwich over a plate I balanced on my knees, a former mercenary who’d been a part of armed conflicts in seven countries on four continents described the type of “small-scale explosive device” that might have been used at each of the attacks and how the person or persons involved might have acquired the necessary materials and expertise. His words washed over us like a Latin mass. Nitrogen, organic peroxide. Heat, friction, shock. Very unstable. Detonated by cell phone or timer, maybe packed in dry ice.
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “These types of explosives may be initiated by a complex chemical reaction, but you can find instructions for them online. It doesn’t take a very smart man. I could leave right now and have a box of Cheerios blowing up in your hands by early evening.”
News of another school-yard shooting would have run off me like water down a duck’s back, but this was something else. We weren’t talking about the open market of Gdansk or Kharkov, where butchers hacked into the joints of freshly killed beasts, and a pig’s head hung for sale on a swaying metal hook. This was the American supermarket, a brightly lit place that took double coupons. Who could bring violence to a place like that? And why?
On the drive in to the airport that afternoon, I hit one of the preset buttons on my radio and heard two familiar voices.
“There’s this religious nut out there saying this is God’s punishment for our cultural degradation.”
“Gays, Mark. He says it’s because we’re not roasting gays on the spit. At least that seemed to be the gist of it.”
“That’s right, Bonnie. But you know what? It’s not God who’s angry, it’s our bodies. Poison in, poison out. It’s that simple, America. These attacks are just the fall-out of a food system run amok.”
“You know what everyone needs to do, Mark?”
“What’s that, Bonnie?”
“Plant a victory garden. Take back control of your food.”
“Get a little dirt under your fingernails, America. It won’t hurt you, but not doing it will.”
After picking up Peter at the curb, I flipped over to a station that looked at the day’s events through an economic lens. Here, a man whose smooth voice brought to mind cuff links and silk ties told us that stock prices had fallen for all the major supermarket chains, while commodities such as wheat, sugar, and corn had also taken a hit. He sighed dramatically, as if he’d lost tens of thousands of dollars since breakfast. “I hate to say this,” he said. “but I don’t think it’s going to get any better. I think these prices are only going to continue to fall. This is supposed to be the busiest week of the year in America’s supermarkets, but when people go home tonight, I think they’ll be looking into their fridges and freezers and wondering if they can make do without a trip to the store.”
Betty was doing just that when I got back from the airport with her brother. As the garage door lifted and I drove the Volvo inside, my headlights caught her in front of the stand-alone freezer, holding the lid open. From the way she was staring down into it, you would have thought she was at a funeral, standing over an open casket.
“I can’t believe this was full just two days ago,” she said as we stepped out of the car.
On the drive down, I had told Peter about our purge of Sweetness #9 and Red Dye No. 40.
“I hope you like your steak with a little freezer burn,” I said, as Betty hugged her brother. “I’m not sure we have much else.”
“We’ll be fine,” Peter said. Like many alcoholics on the mend, he looked for happiness in the mere absence of all the many private horrors he had once known. “It’ll give us an opportunity to realize how grateful we should be. In many parts of the world, kids live on a spoonful of rice cooked in dirty water each day.”
“Well, it’s not as bad as that around here just yet,” Betty said.
“In fact,” I told him, carrying his bag indoors, “I think we still have a jar of wasabi mayonnaise in the fridge.”
After Betty had made a bed for Peter on the sofa in the great room, she closed the door behind her in our bedroom and went into the dresser for a Ziploc bag.
“It was on the kitchen table when I came in,” she said. “There with the rest of the day’s mail.”
The Ziploc bag held a plain white envelope, still sealed, with a packet of Sweetness #9 inside. This much was obvious when I pinched the shadowy center and felt the granular texture.
“It’s not the one from work?” I asked.
I had reached for the remote earlier and turned on the television. Betty had me hold the envelope up to the light of the screen. Its contents weren’t pink; that much was certain. The light shined through the packet, clear and true.
I handed the envelope back to her, and as I did, I saw the banner on the bottom of the TV screen: AMERICA’S SUPERMARKETS UNDER ATTACK.
“I think we should get a security system installed outside,” I said.