The take-away slab in front of me tasted almost nothing of its origin. I had to eat, but the tickle on my taste buds said so little of what it was. Between the regulation-issue bread bun, under the squelched lettuce, this beef was a far-distant bastard cousin of the cow it had been cut off. It had as much to do with meat as an amoeba has to do with a full-grown twenty-first century human. Darwin would have had to go back to pits of Galapagos to find the beef in what I was eating. It bullied a path through my senses. The taste was built by my eyes, brain and whatever other organs work on my history. The paper bag and sound of the cash register in the plastic building I’d bought it from had more say in the taste of this meal than the microscopic sensory nodules on my tongue did. In fact, my tongue, hanging out of my mouth, in the mirror, looked much tastier than the joke of a meal in front of me. With a few more inches of dumb impulse in my head I could have quite happily taken the kitchen scissors to it and flung the fucking thing in the frying pan, unsalted. At least it was more or less pure – put together by me. And, so I wolfed the lot in a matter of seconds, biting the inner of my mouth a couple of times.
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This mess of senses overtook my thinking. Glancing and staring, it seemed to me, are the glass of water and hefty, juicy steak of the eyeballs. So, with her coming to visit, I sat, with the taste of my blood and a crap burger clinging to my molars, stuffing my eyeballs with the back of the front door.
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A quick look at someone tells you very little – a quick register of a smile or degree of approximate attractiveness – that’s it. A human face can become a million things under a heavy session of watching though. Gazing and gazing is a dangerous pursuit and I’m not sure it should be trusted.
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The door was much the same. After just an hour it made my brain feel obese. I wasn’t even sure it was a door anymore – this bizarre slot to the box I live in. I let it have senses, waited for a knock to shout out of it. As I stared I considered each fist sized piece of the wood picturing where the knock would emanate from. My eyes took on the task of acoustic rendering, analysing how each knock could possibly sound. And so, the door became a map of noises, hit in different places at different speeds, with fists made of various sizes and tightnesses. All that was only if she knocked with her bare fist. By the time my relentless eyes had finished imaging their skin-on-wood orchestra I was exhausted – a complete stupor of feeling.
So, when the knock came, sounding something like position number 238c in my visual-sound map, I didn’t even recognise it. She had to knock several times before I started my jellied legs towards opening it.
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