The Cabinet Read online

  Father Cleore had a badger tail on his ass. Bishop Desmond also had a badger tail on his ass. Bishop Desmond’s tail was slightly larger and longer than Father Cleore’s. Because I only saw it from a distance, I couldn’t be sure whether they were really badger tails. They could have been flying squirrel tails or fox tails. Actually, so much time has passed that I now wonder if they weren’t wolf tails or hound tails. But regardless of what kind of tails they were, people should never have tails on their asses. I was only sixteen at the time, but I knew enough to know that badger tails only belong on the asses of badgers.

  As Father Cleore and Bishop Desmond were standing in front of the holy cross, they rubbed their asses together and stuck their faces in each other’s butts and made grunting sounds as they took large whiffs, and when they got tired of that, they lay down and started fiddling with each other’s tails. It looked just like how monkeys pick at each other’s fur. As Bishop Desmond started petting Father Cleore’s tail, Father Cleore looked pleased and wagged his erect tail several times.

  At that moment, the railing I was standing on lurched forward and let out a loud creak. Bishop Desmond looked my way. I was so scared I didn’t look back even once as I started to run out of the church. From behind me I could hear Bishop Desmond shouting at me. But I didn’t stop. I ran and ran until I reached the Zelkova tree on the hill. Shaking with fear, I waited there for my lover Alisa until night came. But when darkness fell, it wasn’t Alisa who came for me, but the police.

  This wasn’t the only odd thing that Ludger Sylbaris wrote. He also wrote that the town butcher, Mr Billy, had four testes and two penises, and that because he was unable to suppress his huge sexual appetite, he used one penis for his wife and the other for the pig. There was also mention of the Daley family who, every other generation, gave birth to a child with talons. According to Ludger Sylbaris, to hide this fact from the world, the family cut off the toes when it was a boy and killed the baby when it was a girl, secretly burying the body in the family graveyard. These are just a few examples of the many stories about the eccentricities of the people of Saint-Pierre, each one being depicted in shockingly graphic detail.

  Was this Ludger Sylbaris’ revenge? Was it his way of getting back at the people of Saint-Pierre who had ridiculed him and locked him away in a tower for twenty-four years for having done nothing?

  Many believe so. They say it was Ludger Sylbaris’ pettiness and deranged desire for vengeance that wrote these stories. But I have a different opinion. After all, is this really how a man who spent thirty years as a recluse at the edge of world would think about the people from his hometown – people who were so tragically obliterated in a volcanic eruption?

  “You locked me in a tower and spat at me. Good riddance! Now you’ll get a taste of your own medicine. I’m the only survivor of Saint-Pierre, so I’m going to pin badger tails on all of your asses. With this record of mine, you will all be remembered for eternity as priests who had badger tails stuck to their asses. Hahaha!”

  Honestly, wouldn’t that be a little childish even for a man in his position?

  I sometimes go into my study and take out The People of Saint-Pierre to read a few pages. Each time I do this I think about those thirty years Ludger Sylbaris spent away from people and what a lonesome life it must have been. A life in which all the people and places he knew had disappeared. A life in which there were never any visitors, nor anyone to ever visit. A life in which you grew corn and potatoes in a vegetable garden, cooked dinner by yourself, and ate alone by candlelight. A miserably quiet life.

  Ludger Sylbaris never once left Saint-Pierre before the disaster. Saint-Pierre was where he was born, the home to everything he ever knew. He couldn’t have known how to live in any other place that wasn’t Saint-Pierre and he had never imagined leaving Saint-Pierre. So, every day, from the time he woke to the time he went to sleep, there was no way he couldn’t have thought about Saint-Pierre and the way it disappeared into the smoldering lava. He would have constantly gone over the memories of Saint-Pierre: beautiful Alisa, and the women who stared and hooted at him; the town at night, when he could hear the ringing of bright bells; the rhythmic beating of the wheels on a horse-drawn wagon carrying milk; the sight of the market with its boisterous and lively patrons; and, of course, the last moments as the town was transformed into a pile of ash. “What was it like down there?” he must have wondered. “And why was I the only one spared to be exiled in this foreign land?”

  Ludger Sylbaris had to write about Saint-Pierre. Not out of some sense of duty, but because it was the only thing he could do. Each time he wrote about Saint-Pierre, the city that had been turned to stone would come back to life with paved streets and wagons filled with milk. The flower beds would be filled with flowers in full bloom, people would be chatting in the market again, the meek sheep would be bumping up against each other’s butts as they followed the shepherd boy. And, most importantly, beautiful Alisa would be waving her hand in the distance and smiling.

  “Ludger! Meet me tonight at the Zelkova tree on the hill.”

  Then why, I wonder, after thirty years had the people of Saint-Pierre changed into monsters? What happened as Ludger Sylbaris walked endlessly through the labyrinth of his imagination? Why, Ludger Sylbaris, why?

  SYMPTOMERS

  According to the 2005 Manhattan Consulting Report, there are more than 1400 people worldwide who consume gasoline as a food and water substitute. Now, we’ve all heard those stories of children from developing countries drinking tiny amounts of gasoline to kill parasites, but this is different. The people to whom this report refers are those who religiously drink two liters or more of refined gasoline every day. What’s more, these people are, in large majority, affluent individuals who live in high-class apartments in large metropolitan cities like London, New York, or Paris: people who work in elite professions, like accounting or law. And not only do these people drink gasoline as if it were a health drink that abates exhaustion and fatigue, they also use it as common ingredient while cooking.

  Terry Burns, an accountant in London who has drunk gasoline instead of water for the last ten years, says he consumes more gasoline than even his BMW sedan. “But no matter how hard I try, my mileage is nowhere near what my BMW gets. Are BMWs really that efficient? Or am I just lacking?” When Terry asked me this absurd question, I didn’t have any intention of giving him a polite answer. But if I had to, I guess I could have said not to worry, as with the way things are going in this mess of a world, it was only a matter of time before BMW invented a car that ran on Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonalds.

  So, why is it that these people – who are as rich and educated as they come – consume something as bizarre as gasoline? Well, the reason they choose gasoline over food like steak or bread is simple: it’s because gasoline for them is much more of an efficient fuel source for the mind and body than food. In fact, they even believe that, like a fine-tuned engine, life in a city requires gasoline..

  “Any problem can be solved with a little bit of gasoline. We’ve all experienced sleep deprivation, fatigue, or emotional instability. But you’ll never make it in modern society if you let things like that get in the way. So, where did these problems come from? We who drink gasoline believe they have been brought about by traditional diets consisting of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Humans become unreliable and lazy when they only eat bread and meat. Gasoline is the way forward for humankind. Just look around you. It’s the twenty-first century. The age of speed! We need to be ready to accelerate at a moment’s notice.”

  There’s Xin Tiandi who lives in Hong Kong and eats glass. In fact, not only does he eat glass, he eats nothing but glass. Xin Tiandi’s existence has led some scientists to claim that there are special calories in glass – calories humankind has yet to discover. Of course, this is a bit of an embarrassing claim to make as a scientist. It’s well established that glass, as an inorganic material, contains not even a fraction of a percent of a calorie. So, as many hav
e argued angrily, it’s preposterous that any human could survive on glass alone. And I tend to agree with this; humans can’t live on glass. But then there’s Xin Tiandi – a man whose ability to live a healthy life in spite of a glass-only diet is like a middle finger to the whole of science. In fact, not only is he healthy, he’s also 54 years old, a father of five, and, barring something unfortunate, he’ll probably continue to live another twenty, maybe thirty years. Tiandi even does tai chi in the park every morning and has just recently joined a club called the Hong Kong Park Laughing Club where people sit in a circle and laugh like idiots to stay young and relieve stress.

  “What’s your favorite type of glass?”

  “Crystal.”

  “And what about your least favorite?”

  “Mirrors, of course.”

  “But what ever made you want to eat glass?”

  “When I was young, I had a beautiful crystal cup. I was so mesmerized by that cup. It was more beautiful to me than diamond or gold. Sometimes I would even place it on my desk and stare at it for hours at a time. It was so beautiful I could look at it over and over again and never get tired of it. Then one day, I got the urge to taste it. You might say that I wanted to transform its visual beauty into a beauty I could taste. And so I ate it.”

  “And how was it?”

  “Good.”

  In Australia there is a man named Steven McGee who snacks on steel. He bites off bits of steel with his teeth, softens them with his saliva, and then swallows the softened steel as though he were eating candy. But it’s not candy, mind you; it’s steel. In 1988 while on vacation in San Francisco, he was arrested for biting off a piece of the Golden Gate Bridge. The case report written by the officer in charge was quite detailed, and SFGATE even published an article about it titled “Man ate piece of Golden Gate Bridge: ‘Too beautiful to resist.’”

  Of course, as manager of Cabinet 13 for the last seven years, I wasn’t the least bit shocked or surprised by this story. I was curious, however, about how human teeth could be stronger than steel, and how human saliva could dissolve it. If more people appeared like Steven McGee, by the year 2100, the act of spitting could be considered first-degree murder.

  My colleague Professor Kwon and I went to Australia to meet Steven McGee. We wanted to confirm that he really could eat steel, and if that claim was true, we also wanted to inspect his teeth and get a sample of his saliva. Steven McGee was collecting scrap metal in the junk yard when we arrived. He gave us a warm smile before offering a handshake. He looked like your average Joe. We asked him if he would show us his teeth and he readily obliged. But in contrast to our expectations, Steve’s teeth were hardly something to write home about. He was actually missing seven teeth, and of the ones that remained, three of them looked like they were about to fall out. He also had horrible breath. His teeth looked like they could hardly bite into a piece of apple, let alone a piece of steel.

  “It must be difficult chewing on steel with these teeth, no?” I asked him, somewhat disappointed that we had come all this way for nothing.

  “Oh, these? Yes, I have lots of cavities. My missus says it’s because I eat too many sweeties. I guess I should cut back. But steel? I have no trouble eating that!”

  Shortly after saying this, Steve picked up a piece of scrap metal that was lying on the dirt and stuck it in his mouth. Then after a few seconds, like magic, you could hear a loud crunch as the piece of steel broke apart in his mouth.

  In Singapore there is a man who lives off newspapers. By now this one should seem quite normal. Compared to ingesting gasoline, glass, and steel, eating newspapers seems almost cute. He says he eats six newspapers a day. In the morning, he opens the morning newspaper and sips on coffee as he nibbles on the paper. He reads each section before eating it, moving from politics, to culture, and so on. And on Sundays when the paper isn’t delivered, he eats a few weekly tabloids.

  “I have no choice on the weekends, but during the week I avoid tabloids at all costs. I can’t stand the taste.”

  “Which newspapers taste the best?”

  “As long as they’re interesting to read, it doesn’t matter what the quality of the paper is. So, in that respect, American newspapers don’t taste particularly good. They’re all so shameless. The New York Times is the worst.”

  “Do you ever eat newspapers without reading them?”

  “I don’t need to read them, obviously. But they taste better if I have read them first. It also keeps me from getting bored.”

  “What is it exactly that you’re consuming? Is it the news? Or the paper?”

  “Both, I guess. It’s like food: you need both taste and smell.”

  “Then I guess you could also eat CNN news from the TV?”

  “Why would I eat that? You can’t chew it.”

  And these aren’t the only people in the world who eat strange things. In Inner Mongolia there is a girl who eats more than a kilogram of dirt every day, despite the best efforts of her parents and teachers. In Finland there is a person who consumes 300 watt-hours of electricity every day to supplement their extremely low intake of protein. And in China there is a person who lives off the roof tiles from a house that has been passed down in their family for hundreds of years. There’s even a person who eats sandwiches made not from bread but sawdust, and a librarian from the Vatican who was tried in court for eating seven hundred rare ancient documents. When asked in court why he ate the books – books that were so important for not just historians and academics but the whole of humankind – the old man simply said, “I was hungry.”

  What should we think of phenomena like these? How can people forgo perfectly fine foods like jjajangmyeon, spaghetti, and stir-fried octopus for gasoline, glass, newspapers, and sawdust? Usually, humans (actually, not just humans, but all animals) can recognize immediately what they can and can’t eat. It’s what we call the Garcia Effect. That is, according to the Garcia Effect, while people can eat sawdust or glass once or twice for fun, they’ll soon realize “Ah, humans aren’t meant to eat this… As a human I should eat what humans are supposed to eat…” and instinctively stop eating that thing. That’s what normal humans do. Why, then, do these people eat the things they do? Is it to prove that humans can actually eat a lot more than formerly believed? Is it to challenge the weak imagination of a world that defines what is and isn’t edible? Or perhaps it’s all just an audition for Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

  Well, I’m not sure if the problem is as simple as that. When we see things like this on the news, we tend to trivialize the matter and say hackneyed phrases like “It takes all sorts,” or “To each his own.”

  But the fact that there are at least 1400 people in the world who drink gasoline instead of water (a number that increases by five percent annually) cannot be ignored. The fact that there are people in the world who survive off glass – that is, the fact that there are organisms that survive eating only inorganic substances – contradicts the very notion of calories. And the fact that there is a person in Finland who has a daily calorie intake that would starve even a bunny and is able to recharge their bioenergy with massive amounts of electricity, flies in the face of all the basic assumptions in biology. But what if we look at this from the perspective of evolution? Might the existence of these types of people suggest that the human gut has evolved to digest and extract the necessary energy for survival from steel, glass, and even electricity?

  Evolutionists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould have argued that species can evolve suddenly after millions of years of evolutionary dormancy – a theory they called “punctuated equilibrium.” In other words, when there is little environmental pressure, a species will feel no need to evolve and will change very little; conversely, when there is immense environmental pressure, a species will be forced to evolve rapidly. (Of course, when Niles Eldredge said “rapidly” he was thinking about before the industrial revolution, when evolutionary timescales were tens of thousands of years. After the industrial revolution, ho
wever, when everything became faster and messier, more extreme and more chaotic, “rapidly” took on a whole new meaning.)

  If we follow their hypothesis, altered environments must accelerate evolution. In other words, Homo sapiens should be feeling more evolutionary pressure than ever. And just look at the events of the twentieth century and the speed of the twenty-first century; these changes are the greatest humankind has ever experienced. Sure enough, the symptoms of this accelerated evolution are slowly appearing all over the world. But perhaps this was to be expected. When the world changes, the essence of what it means to be a human and the requirements for continuing to live in this changed environment also change. And I’m not talking about philosophical or ethical essence; I’m talking about biological essence.

  People are showing the symptoms of an evolving species. Without a suitable term from academia, we have decided to call these individuals “people with symptoms” or just “symptomers.” Symptomers break slightly from Homo sapiens as defined by biologists and anthropologists. They exist between the humans of today and the humans of the future – that is, they exist on the branch between species. They are both the last humans and the first of a new kind.