Jessica R Pomerantz
A model is a simplified abstract representation.
�Katya,� I said, �You�ve just got to eat. Your x-rays came back today, and it turns out your bones are mostly hollow.� I brandished an apple. She kicked it out of my hand with her hollow foot.
�Don, you make me eat apple, I have you killed.�
�You know what? Richard�s going to lift you up, and your hip�s going to fall right off your body. Just wait.�
�I have Russian mafia all over you like bad suits you wear.�
�Great, Katya, thanks.� Now, I used to find Russian accents endearing. But this was before I got involved in dance. Katya fit the bill for standard ballet dancer. Except that her accent came and went, and I got the idea sometimes that her real name was Kate, born and raised in the Midwest Kate.
Even then, I didn�t plan to direct a dance company forever. I had other plans. But those alternative plans didn�t include the reconstructive esophagus surgery, either.
A model is a simplified abstract representation, designed to focus on some portion of reality.
I had been saving; I had been making clever investments for quite some time. Ballet was sterile; the movements were false. Maybe the accents were too. Ballet was a dance that no longer described mankind. No more horses and carriages; no more ballet. Evolve. Be modern and thus surpass. A best use of resources leads to productive efficiency. Ballet was waste; it was squander. It laughed in the face of technology with its ancient practiced moves, and I saw this as I directed my dancers. I saw this falseness, this opportunity cost as Katya was deliberately flubbing my name.
�Listen, Kate. It�s Dan. My name�s Dan,� I would say.
�Yes, Don,� she�d say, stretching up on her pale brittle toes. She never corrected me when I got her name wrong, because that would imply she had been listening.
My investments were aimed at modernization of that species known as dancer. I was sick of directing my efforts through an ancient mechanism. I couldn�t communicate with ballet any more than I could speak Sanskrit. I waited for the dance world to catch up with everything else. And while it didn�t, I realized I had to take some initiative.
When I was still in college I took an economics class, and along the way I understood that mathematics was not the language of nature any more than ballet was. If anything was the language of nature, it was probably manure. Just watch a dog come across a pile of shit and see all the information he gleans, see all the time he�ll spend there, extracting knowledge about his world. I too could communicate like that, through the excrement that is the human. The economy is too complex to comprehend, but the human being is so simple. I made some investments anyhow.
The idea was a hypermodern dance company. Each dancer would have fiber optics attached to her posterior. They would write messages of light in the air. At the very least, it would be a revolutionary Vegas act. At its greatest, it would be a refutation of modern American lethargy coupled with an illustration of the futility of linguistics. It would be fit for the Kennedy Center, a whirlwind of technology, dance, and the human excrement of language. Those women�s asses would be my paintbrush. I would exceed the production possibility with pure innovation.
My investments were wildly successful. I would be talking out of asses in no time. Perhaps the economy was too complex to understand, but I knew enough. After one particularly lengthy shouting session with Katya, in which she lost her accent several times and would not call me by my correct name, I checked the progress of my portfolio via a call to my broker and decided it was time to venture out on my own fiber optic path. I headed home to break the happy news to my close and personable companion, Dave.
Despite Dave�s close and personable nature, I haven�t seen him since my second operation, haven�t spoken to him since the day before that day, fourteen months ago. Not that I wouldn�t try. It�s just that he hasn�t shown up. I could write him notes in response. One doesn�t necessarily need an esophagus, a voice, to hold a conversation. I also haven�t tasted food for fourteen months. Silent, isolated, starved; I�m more of a dancer now than I ever was before.
Although my condominium security system was disarmed, it wasn�t Dave who was there on the sofa. Dave wouldn�t have slammed and locked the door and clubbed me over the head until I lost consciousness. When I woke up, this madman was kneeling on me, pointing a gun at my throat. He was very close and he had very bad breath. I have an extraordinary sense of smell. Next to us was a small pile of my personal effects: a watch, a pair of cufflinks, a money clip, and several earrings.
�Take whatever you want,� I said. My eye was swelling, my head felt split. Some of my terror was subsiding in favor of adrenaline and resentment. As soon as this guy was gone, I�d have the cops all over his ass. I�d commit him to memory like no victim before, and draw such a picture that he�d be arrested in minutes.
�Oh, you bet,� He said. This guy didn�t fit the standard criminal profile, it seemed. He was balding, approaching his golden years, dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt. Would be attending my shows at the Kennedy Center next year. Not a common thief.
�Who are you? What do you want?� I shifted a bit. This guy wasn�t a dancer. He was crushing me.
�I want you to look at her. Look at her.� Seemed reasonable enough. We both still seemed to be acting out of rational self-interest. He had taken a picture out of his breast pocket. It was a young girl, maybe eleven. Smiling for her school picture. Normal girl. Also wouldn�t be a dancer. A little on the hefty side.
I looked at the picture. I looked at him.
�Do you remember killing her?�
I thought about it. I didn�t remember killing her. I said, �I�ve never killed anybody.�
�Oh, you think again. You think real hard. Do you remember making any calls to your broker?�
�What?� I shifted again. This guy was insane, cracking my ribs with his weight, wasting my time with his insanity.
�Ten thousand shares of Tarbinide Incorporated. I looked you up. Haven�t you been following it? Their pharmaceuticals have been responsible for seventy-seven deaths in the past week alone. You check your profits, don�t you? Why don�t you check their fucking consequences? You killed my little girl! You killed my daughter!�
Evidently, this man didn�t understand the concept of limited liability.
�Listen. It�s just an investment. I didn�t know��
�Didn�t know? Those are your dollars. That was your decision. Don�t you know? You�re the shareholder. You own that company. You�re the producer. You�re the goddamn producer! You burned her stomach away with your money. You made it happen.� He was crying and spitting and sweating. I wanted to ask him if he�d visited the hundreds of other investors yet, or even the CEO, to threaten him with this little gun and this bruising of ribs, but I�d started to understand that not each of us was acting as a rational agent.
�I�m sorry. You know? I�m sorry about your daughter. I didn�t realize. I�ll help you. We can do something about this��
He was crying now, loud. �It consumed her. You were the producer.� This guy knew some economics too. We could work out some sort of deal, economist to economist, I was sure. We were both wearing button-down shirts.
�I�m sure we can work this out,� I said. I was willing to forgive the pistol-whipping and all. I�m a reasonable man.
�Oh, you bet we can,� he said. �I want you to do something for my girl.�
�Sure,� I said. �Anything.�
He held up my cufflinks. �Eat these.�
�What?�
�Your profits consumed her, killed her. Your money, your drugs burned away her stomach.�
�Wait�� I started to panic. I started to feel like I wasn�t quite in charge of things. I tried to get up, and he jabbed me in the throat until I couldn�t breathe very well.
�Now I want you to consume your profits. It was your decision. You account for it.�
I struggled. I cried and begged. He hit me with his gun over and over. I tried to bargain. I tried to be rational, still. I waited for Dave to come and he didn�t. This guy was screaming, screaming at me to swallow, to take responsibility. He said I could keep my fucking profits but I had to absorb the cost of her pain.
He wasn�t leaving. And no one was coming to save me.
Finally, I did it. I swallowed an earring. Small�a silver and onyx earring. Still, it scratched and burned its way down my throat.
�There,� I said. �Are you finished?� But he wasn�t. He cocked his gun. I had never even seen a real gun before that day. He put it to my throat and nearly pulled the trigger. And so it continued.
By the time I got to the watch, my blood had come up my throat and run down my shirt, into the carpet; it spilled around my ears. I felt my esophagus tearing and tearing, splitting apart. I felt the watch in my throat, in my esophagus.
And I woke up in the hospital.
A model is a simplified abstract representation, designed to focus on some portion of reality, to communicate some simple notion.
Katya and the dancers came to see me, and they were as melodramatic as performers usually are. Dave stopped coming after the first surgery. He left a note I did not open. In the fourteen months since, I�ve thought most about my economics teacher, and some about other matters.
He took a class once, my economics teacher, taught by a physics professor, a Nobel Laureat. The man, this physicist, stood on his tiptoes to fill a board with only the smallest piece of chalk. He wrote and wrote, but he never ran out. I can�t do that, my economics teacher had said. I need a full piece of chalk. I hide full pieces of chalk all over the room.
I think about teachers a lot now, to pass the time here. When I first woke up in this hospital, I thought I was paralyzed, catatonic or something. Couldn�t move, couldn�t speak. But that was just the pharmaceuticals� paralytic effect, initially, although I still cannot speak or eat. Or swallow. I wrote a description, but they never found my attacker.
When I was in high school, I was part of an accelerated program. I had begun accelerated education in kindergarten. I think I knew how many inches were in a foot. I had this amazing teacher in high school; probably responsible for the only valid education I ever received. Besides this. I�m still getting that education to this very day.
By the time I had moved on to more mediocre institutions, I learned that she�d suffered a car accident as a young adult requiring surgical attention resulting in malpractice�a missing vertebrae. And when her pain was intolerable, years later, corrective surgery crippled her. Also, a tunneling of the vision led to absolute blindness. It was a rare genetic condition. After her forced retirement, a number of medical developments fought for control of her body: tumors, an aneurism in the heart, and a mysterious loss of consciousness, waking up in blood. Cardiac arrests, bad reactions to anesthesia, a broken pain pump. This medical trauma couldn�t touch her. What I imagine fatally wounded her was the disappearances, some abrupt, some slow, of her friends, family, and colleagues. In turn, they all left her side.
Cufflinks, earrings, watches�it�s what people do to each other that I can�t swallow.
A model is a simplified abstract representation, designed to focus on some portion of reality, to communicate some simple notion. Take a step closer to the real world when you add detail.
