Objects don’t speak to us because we’re not listening. I was swimming in a dirty lake, a lake fluffy with pollution. A bottle cap floated past and whispered: Leave my girl alone.
A trout swam by and in a Brooklyn accent much like my mother’s but deeper and gruffer, philosophized: There’s plenty of fish in the sea.
I asked him: Do you wish you were there, instead of this filthy lake?
Where, he asked.
Don’t be dense, Trout, the sea.
He said: No, I’m the only fish in this ruined pond, which is actually a filled quarry, and no one disturbs my peace.
Trout is indifferent to others’ suffering. Starving children die from eating poisonous roots. Trout doesn’t care—he calls it Survival of the Fittest—and the new God demands it. The new God’s name is Ratman, a poor translation of the old God’s unspeakable Aramaic name, unspeakable because it will catch in your throat and choke you.
Ratman has come in at the bottom of the ninth. He of the Unspeakable Name is exhausted. He’s thrown a universe of pitches, light and dark, dry and aqueous, but he can’t retire the side.
All You Can Eat Scallops in ragged, weary Panacea, Florida, is close to the Gulf but not quite there. The restaurant’s ceiling is as warped as the planks of a boat salvaged from a hurricane. The waitress, the owner’s niece, is nice enough. She has a tooth here, a tooth there, and the worst complexion I’ve seen this side of a leper colony. The unsweetened tea bitters my gut. The sweet tea is so sugary my gums throb. I finally think to combine them, and that saves the day.
The poisoned children aren’t really poisoned. Ratman was kidding, one of his funny new God jokes. They’re all next door watching TV, a couple of girls on Ratman’s lap.