Doomed

Wary, I lifted the heavy tome of Mr. Darwin. For as long as I could recollect I’d been the victim of schoolyard bullies, those giggling Miss Skanky Skankenheimers who’d misled and tormented me. No longer would I tolerate similar forms of demeaning abuse. Tensing the slight muscles of my youthful arms, I took aim. My plan was to swing the heavy book and swat the menacing poop with such force that it would fly the full extent of the room. After that, I’d bolt, running full speed, and return to the bright outside world before my lunatic harasser knew I’d so destroyed his sad, ridiculous toy.

DECEMBER 21, 9:05 A.M. CST Besting the Minotaur

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Gentle Tweeter,

Those long years thence, seated astride a stained toilet bowl in an upstate public bathroom, I tightened my grip on the Beagle book. With both hands I held the heavy, leather-bound volume. Like a golfer preparing to hit a drive down the fourteenth fairway at St. Donats, or a tennis star rearing back to hit a scorching serve over the net at the French Open, I slowly aligned the book with the offensive dog dooky. The magically swollen pet doo-doo jutted eagerly toward me, oblivious to my imminent violent actions. The cinder- block room echoed with the plink-plunk musical notes of dripping water, but otherwise a silence had settled, so intense it proved my harasser and I were both holding our respective breaths. The muscles of my frail shoulders and shoestring arms flexed, rigid as iron, focusing the strength garnered from my mom’s spacey yoga gurus in Kathmandu and Bar Harbor. A wild karate yelp took shape at the back of my throat. Squinting my nearsighted eyes, I told myself: Exhale. I told myself: Lean into the swing.

Steeling myself, I was Theseus about to do battle with the Minotaur in the dank basements of Crete. I was Hercules girding my loins to fight Cerberus, the fierce two-headed watchdog of the underworld.

I told myself: Now.

Wielding the heavy volume from above my head, swinging it diagonally, down and sideways simultaneously, I rendered the threatening doggie poo a mighty thwack. Without hesitation, my backswing landed a second, resounding smack against the loathsome doodie-caca, but it refused to detach and go flying as I’d hoped. Trapped by its own magically increased size, the menacing poo finger appeared to be wedged within the jagged metal hole. The awful dooky bobbed and flopped wildly, flailing and twisting in every direction. From behind the sheet-metal partition a sharp gasp of breath preceded a howling scream. The pressure which had bowed the partition in my direction now reversed, and some great force seemed to tug against the metal wall. The scratched, mutilated barrier pulled away from me, dragged backward by the efforts of the trapped dog boo- boo attempting to escape.

Flogging with the hardcover book, I pummeled my foe’s vile puppy poop with one savage blow after another. In response, the unseen opponent bellowed and shrieked. These were animal sounds. The wailing which might occur on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse. This senseless keening might be a suffering horse or cow as likely as it was a human male.

Striking a hail of blows upon the struggling caca, I likewise found myself howling great screams of rage. Mine was the vengeful whoop of every child ever tormented by cruel bullies, a combination of fury and weeping and sheer hysterical laughter. The concrete room felt flooded, swamped with the outcries of two combatants, the fetid air vibrating with the multiplied echoes. So fiercely did I scream that frothy spittle ribboned from my lips.

Even in the throes of my fury, my naturalist instincts held sway. Even with my soft-focus vision, sans eyeglasses, I saw how the beaten dooky had begun to shrink in size. The noxious boo-boo was recoiling, becoming smaller, shorter, until it seemed about to retract itself back through the ragged hole. To prevent its impending escape I opened the Beagle book to roughly its midpoint and placed the opened volume so that the gutter would cradle the wilting poo. As my colleagues, the Pencil and the Blue Pen, had pressed samples of leaves and flowers, preserving those ferns and grasses for posterity, so would I press my own shocking discovery. At the moment before the poopie-doo-doo might flee, I slammed shut the huge tome. All of upstate trembled with the resulting scream. Kuala Lumpur, Calcutta, or Karachi, wherever my parents were sunbathing, watching their navels fill with sweat, they must’ve heard the outburst. All the world shook with the force of that howl.

Thus I held captive the shrinking tortured number two: sandwiched in the paper middle of Mr. Darwin’s voyage, by my estimate clamped somewhere within his account of Tierra del Fuego. I retained possession of the evil poopie by squeezing the book shut, and continued my efforts to pull it free, yanking from side to side, pulling with all my strength. Getting jerked this way and that meant the poochie-poo-poo was snagged and chewed by the hole’s jagged, snaggletoothed edge. By this point the flimsy sheet-metal toilet cubicle swayed, its bolts rattling loose, and readied itself to collapse.

It happens on rare occasion, Gentle Tweeter, that natural phenomena occur for which we’ve no ready explanation. The role of the naturalist is to take note and to record a description of said occurrence, trusting that eventually that rogue event will make sense. I mention this because the oddest thing happened: As I held fast, gripping my book with the boo-boo-caca shut snugly inside it—me yanking the book on its short tether—the book appeared to vomit. A thin stream of vile sputum jetted from between the pages. This viscous off-white vomitus erupted from the depths of Mr. Darwin’s journal. My memory slows the moment, stretching the seconds so as to depict the finer details: A pulse followed by a second and third pulse of colorless sputum burst from the book clasped in my hands. Not a large quantity, nonetheless it presented itself at such a velocity that I’d no time to react. Before I could move aside, the jelly’s trajectory landed it upon the chest of my blue chambray shirt. Here, my professional demeanor failed me. The spoutings of mysterious phlegm still clinging to my meager child’s bosom, I abandoned the fight. I deserted the Beagle book and the dog boo-boo it still held prisoner. I burst from my toilet stall, and I ran squealing at the top of my lungs.

DECEMBER 21, 9:13 A.M. CST I Flee the Scene

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Gentle Tweeter,

When I burst from the brown-painted door of that hellish public toilet in tedious upstate, the lackluster sun had dropped to late afternoon. Where I’d sated my thirst with too much tea, the empty glass jar still lay in the scorched grass. Soon my deranged attacker would emerge from the men’s restroom behind me, perhaps not deterred by our struggle, perhaps only enraged and bent on the single purpose of seizing me and rending me limb from limb and completing a frenzied sexual act upon my lifeless, beheaded torso within full view of a million speeding upstate motorists.

That endless stream of tailgating tanker trucks and logging trucks and minivans continued to roar around the edges of this shunned traffic island. To my naked face, with my eyeglasses still abandoned back on the bathroom floor, the vehicles layered and overlapped each other until they became the solid wall of their growling tire tread sound. No space existed between them. I stooped to retrieve the gallon-size tea jar, distracted by my impending doom.

Perhaps I had brashly overreacted to the proffered dirty-poo finger? After all, I was a stranger in upstate. Perhaps thrusting doo-doo sticks through holes in toilet stalls constituted a local backwoods custom akin to a mild flirtation. My Nana Minnie once told me, “Boys only tease the girls they like.” In response, I’d quoted Oscar Wilde, saying, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”

Nonetheless, upstate being upstate, it’s not impossible that I’d just now thwarted an amorous country swain. If, indeed, waving caca logs at young girls was some rural prelude to romance, then I’d lost myself a potential suitor.