My Year of Meats (17 page)

For seven months after the accident, Christina Bukowsky lay in the converted living room, silent, immobile, dribbling a silvery thread of saliva from the corner of her mouth. It was one of the few precious signs of her life, and Eleanor wiped the drool with love and respect. At first Christina’s one blue eye would open and close, for no apparent reason, not triggered by any particular noise or change in her environment. One minute it would be closed, and the next, open. The only other movements came intermittently from her bowels and regularly, if reluctantly, from the heave-ho, heave-ho of her emaciated rib cage.

For seven months, a thin stream of townspeople (there were only 973 people in the town of Quarry, Indiana, after all) trickled through the door of the Bukowsky household, which was always kept open. And each person brought something that he or she loved. That was the other part of it. Along with the contribution of food, you had to bring the Thing in Life That You Love Best, to share with Christina. A Hope was okay too. And if, like Alfred Cotter with his brand-new John Deere tractor, or old Lettie Crumb with her new cemetery plot under the weeping willow, which she’d exchanged for the one by the dying oak—if you couldn’t actually carry the Thing You Love Best into the living room, it was okay to just bring a photograph. It was all about compassion, Mrs. Bukowsky figured. Compassion: “com” (with, together, in conjunction with) plus “passion.”

Whatever it was, it worked. Slowly Christina’s good eye started to respond to stimuli. It would open when she had visitors and close when the visitors left, and track their movements around the Living Room in between. Then her little fingers started to move too, an aimless, slow-motion wriggle like anemones in the deep sea. Hope grew among the townspeople, and when the second eye opened and looked around, the Bukowskys were cautiously ecstatic.

Then, after seven long months, the miracle they’d been waiting for finally happened. It was the same day that young Daryll Spilkoff finally saved enough money to buy the new Crash Test Dummies CD. He arrived early for his sitting, ollied up the front porch steps, and dropped his skateboard in the middle of the Living Room floor. He attached the earphones of his portable CD to Christina’s immobile head and played her the cut “At My Funeral.” At the end of the song, Christina opened both her eyes, licked the spit off her cracked lips, and spoke:

Daryll got up and walked to the back porch and called out to Mrs. Bukowsky, who was watering her tomato plants.

“Uh ... Mrs. B.?” he said. “Uh ... I think, like ... Christina wants a lamb chop.”

It had been her favorite food before the accident.

That was the beginning. By this time, the townspeople of Quarry were invested in Christina’s rehabilitation. They had grown to look forward to, and in fact even to count on, their visits to the Living Room and the opportunity it gave them to talk freely about the things they loved best—topics of conversation that would send their own loved ones at home into eye-rolling, mind-numbing catatonia. And miraculously, these same topics appeared to have a therapeutic effect, provided the listener was already, literally, catatonic.

Whatever the reason, the outcome was quick and linear. The media got hold of the story and pumped it for all it was worth from every angle, including the exploitation of small-town America by the corporate retail giants. Wal-Mart did the right thing, paid a handsome settlement, and the family used the money to transform the Living Room into a Deluxe Physical Training Center. Mr. Bukowsky outfitted their house with a gothic web of ramps and lifts and pulleys and elevators for his daughter’s wheelchair. It was the work of a zealot. Mrs. B. hired a physical therapist from Chicago, enlisted the townspeople, who continued to come by at their appointed times, and had the therapist train them in the most modern of rehabilitation techniques, which they took turns practicing on Christina. The girl had no choice but to get better.

And then, as though right on cue—just when the house was ready and the townspeople were trained and Christina could get around by herself in her wheelchair and didn’t need so much individual attention anymore—then came the supplicants, the prayerful and those full of hope. They were parents with damaged offspring, like Mr. and Mrs. Bukowsky, and soon, before anyone really understood what was happening, additional beds had been installed to accommodate the variously crippled children, and the townspeople were doing double and triple shifts. The town of Quarry had discovered a new natural resource—compassion—and they were mining it and marketing it to America. At the March town meeting of 1989, the town voted to change the name officially on its charter. Quarry became Hope, and Mr. Bukowsky was elected mayor. Within a year the Hope Renewal Center, run by Mrs. Bukowsky, had moved into a brand-new two-hundred-bed long-term-care facility. The townspeople found jobs with the Center or started their own businesses as affiliated service providers. Motels and restaurants were necessary to house and feed the relatives of the Center’s clients. A CD store and a butcher’s shop were among the businesses that sprang up along the newly thriving Main Street. The Mayor and Mrs. Bukowsky starred in a promotional videotape,
Welcome to Our Living Room: The Bukowsky Method of Compassion and Renewal,
and published a best-selling book by the same name.

There was only one unanswered prayer. “We had hoped ... ,” Mrs. B. confided to me wistfully. The Mayor reached over and took her hand. He looked worried, but she smiled at him reassuringly.

“It’s okay. I don’t mind her knowing. And it helps me to talk about it.” She turned back to me. “You know, Christina is going to be sixteen in a few days, and, well, we’d hoped that in spite of her legs that perhaps she’d be all right, you know, inside.”

I didn’t know. “Is there something wrong with her internally?”

“It’s just that her periods ... we’d hoped that ... she’s an only child, you see ... but it looks like she won’t be able to ...”

“She’s such a beautiful girl,” the Mayor explained. “We had hoped one day that she might be able to have a husband and a family of her own, you know, in spite of her legs....”

But Christina’s body and her mind were not cooperating. She’d never shown the slightest interest in boys, even Daryll Spilkoff, and aside from the wounds from the accident, she had never shed a drop of blood from between her crushed and lifeless legs. It was as though her lower regions had just had enough of bloodletting.

This was the Bukowsky story, and as far as I was concerned, it was almost perfect. My only problem was the lamb chop.

Pork was Possible. Beef was Best. I knew that now. But Ueno had never said anything about the relative status of lamb. BEEF-EX represented domestic lamb and mutton interests in Japan, and although I had a hunch that these were second-class meats, technically my chops shouldn’t be a problem. Of course, it was also true that most of the lamb products imported by Japan came from Australia, not the U.S., and that Australia was America’s main foreign competitor for the Japanese meat market. Featuring lamb could be seen as tantamount to treason. But frankly, my loyalty to BEEF-EX was pretty stressed. And I couldn’t make a program without a Meat of the Week.

We were scheduled to shoot for three days, the third of which was to be Christina’s Sweet Sixteen party, and Mrs. Bukowsky was going to serve Hallelujah Lamb Chops. I didn’t tell Ueno. I figured he’d learn soon enough, and I’d never get another meat like this, so beautifully integrated into the core of the family narrative. Documentarians are suckers for good narrative, since we have to wait patiently for them to happen and can’t just make them up from our imaginations. It was a rare storytelling opportunity, not to be passed up for a small discrepancy in the species of meat.

You see, Christina Bukowsky was beautiful. Not beautiful in any ordinary, earthbound, Midwestern sense of the word, but transgressively so. During the seven months of her withdrawal from our world, her skin had grown so clear that you could see life moving below the surface of her cheeks. Her hair shone like a mutable golden corona, whose shiftings and waftings sent fractured particles of light into the leaden air of Hope. Her eyes were blue, but not the hue she’d been born with, not the steel blue of Eastern Europe, dulled by gazing daily at the blighted postcapitalist landscape that was formerly Quarry, Indiana, at the end of the twentieth century. No, she’d once had eyes like that, but she had closed them tight in terror as the monstrous Goodyears crushed her. Those blue eyes were gone forever, and when she opened them again, her new blue was pellucid, the eyes of an angel that had rested for a while on Another’s countenance.

And the best was that you could see it on-camera. Back at the Compassion Inn, I watched dailies with the crew. We’d done an interview with Christina and her parents that day, and the results were startling. Christina was simply and heartbreakingly radiant. Sitting in her wheelchair on the porch, as a mild breeze toyed with her golden locks, she talked about her accident and her parents and her community of Hope, but she could have been counting chickens and still have made you weep. Suzuki was superb. In the most exquisite approach I’ve ever witnessed, he dollied almost imperceptibly around her radiant face, and then, slowly zooming in to the source of her luminescence, he penetrated the blue of her eyes at the exact moment they spilled crystalline tears of beatitude and joy.

It was the oddest moment. Sitting on the edge of a pastel polyester coverlet on a king-size bed in the Compassion Inn, I felt an overwhelming sensation, a tremendous shudder that I imagine must have been akin to grace. Suzuki and Oh felt it too.

“Too bad about those legs, huh?” said the flight attendant. “She’s great from the waist up, though. I wonder, do you think she still can, you know ...” He pantomimed a bit of the old in-and-out with his fist and forearm, and looked to the boys for confirmation.

Oh turned silently away, which was perfectly in character, but Suzuki surprised me. He stood up and crossed the room. His face glowed like a red paper lantern, and when he was nose-to-nose with the flight attendant, he let loose a torrent of Japanese expletives that I’d never before heard or even imagined. It was like being transported back in time, into the thick of a samurai drama, and this effect was only heightened when, having finished cursing him, Suzuki stepped back and slapped the flight attendant’s face. Twice. Once in each direction. Like a lord disciplining a retainer. Of course, this being America, the subtleties of this feudal interaction were lost.

The flight attendant quit on the spot and later tried to sue us, but by then the New York office had closed and no one was left to care.

It seemed that Suzuki had fallen deeply in love, and so had Oh. The following day we borrowed a wheelchair to use as a dolly, and with the Betacam braced on his shoulder, Suzuki chased Christina up and down the ramps and lifts and elevators and all through the house. Oh pushed. I knew the footage would be splendid. When a cameraman gets under the skin of his subject like that, the resulting images are zen in their oneness. I left them alone. The Bukowsky parents and I stood at the bottom of the stairs as they thundered above us, Christina’s laughter ricocheting through the house and making the floorboards shiver with pleasure.

“She’s never laughed like that before,” said Mrs. Bukowsky softly. “No one’s ever
played
with her like that before.”

“After the accident, it’s like she’s on another plane,” said the Mayor. “Above us somehow, but not really here. I mean, she’s physically here, and happy, but at the same time she’s not fully participating. But I guess maybe it’s our fault, the way we’ve been treating her—”

At this moment the two wheelchairs came hurtling down the ramp next to the staircase and spun to an abrupt halt. Christina’s cheeks were pink from the infusion of blood to the surface of her skin. She looked up at her parents and paused just long enough to flash a wide-eyed smile, then she glanced quickly back at her pursuers, who were momentarily tangled up in camera cables. Then she spun away. Suzuki heaved the camera onto his shoulder, and Oh, brandishing the boom pole like a lance or a banner, gave a mighty thrust to the wheelchair and they took off in pursuit.

“It’s like I always said, dear,” said Mrs. B. to the Mayor. “You never know who it’s going to be, or what they’ll bring, but whatever it is, it’s always exactly what is needed.”

Suzuki? Oh? It was a disturbing thought. I spent a sleepless night worrying if I should leave them behind, to woo Christina into a successful puberty, but the next day, after the Sweet Sixteen party, we all left as planned. Christina was sad, yet she was still too young to have her heart seriously broken, at least by the likes of my camera crew. But at the party she had this new way of turning her wheelchair off-center from the person she was talking to and shooting a veiled glance and a heavenly smile back over her shoulder. It was positively coquettish. There was no mistaking it.

Suzuki was quiet in the van and on the plane and for several weeks afterward. I noticed that he and Oh stopped shooting out the crotches of blond girls in their motel room. Our visit to Hope had changed them.