The last carbonated meat came to the Royal Institute of Research as a scientific specimen. My wife, Pamela Osborne, first speculated on the existence of the carbonated meat in her master’s thesis. Over time she built it into a component of her diverse career as a biochemical physicist.
I love the field work of science. I went to Africa and got the carbonated meat. My wife handled the financing, did the project management and laboratory science. She was tracking the Earth’s cycles, iron, phosphorous, water, carbon especially. Traces within traces had pinpointed the carbonated meat.
A sizeable network of computers worked together and in a month we had coordinates. I still can’t tell you where I went for a variety of reasons; except that it was north of Burkina Faso and east of Morocco. Somewhere between the rising coastlines and the expanding deserts the last home of the carbonated meat could be found.
I told my Russian aircrew to descend in a half circle north of the smoke, upwind of it a few dozen kilometres. They were as exhausted too but we got down onto a flat spot on a dry plateau. Our search had not been easy. The locals were burning off the last of the carbonated meat with flamethrowers and steel buckets of industrial waste slung under helicopters.
We were in a great big Soviet-era Antonov biplane with tractor tires and wings of corrugated metal, huge four-bladed prop out front. Perfect for low altitude, high endurance work. The cabin and hold was stuffed with camping gear and food and the fourth seat had been replaced with detection apparatus. A silver box with a green light, a fan and a data port on the front. Our camera man died of an infection only a day into the interior. We’d traded his fancy gear and French passport and money and an officially provided stash of silver coinage for aviation fuel. I refused to trade the sniper rifle as it had already been needed.
I doubt the Royal Institute ever got a thank you note for what it had shelled out on this scientific rescue mission. Oleg and Vitaly were gruff and aggressive even when they were being friendly. At first I didn’t like them. As far as I know they are enjoying retirement in Dubai.
I’d saved their lives the day before we collected the meat. Back at the grass field, near Mara-Mari. We landed there planning to refuel at a Shell Oil facility and make one final hop to carbonated meat country. Child soldiers were thronging the terminal. They are never a good thing.
Two singled out the Antonov right away. They were a horrible sight, wobbling with anger, malaria and abuse. I killed them both with the sniper rifle, firing from the hip like some asshole in a movie. One crumpled and the other’s cranium sprayed all over Oleg JFK-style. My Russians certainly responded well to having their lives saved, they were convinced execution for the airplane and its contents was at hand.
This was the second run in with under age soldiery. The first one held an assault rifle in line with my chest at an intersection in the middle of nowhere. Another boy, unwell with yellowy eyes and puffy face.
His bayonet was round, an oversized nail, and as wide as an artery. The silver coins and satellite phone and other goodies were in compartments welded under the bodywork of the Land Rover. We kept money and other items available to hand over to checkpoints and so on. The child soldiers were a little early; we had barely left the capital city.
Where you have carbonated meat, you have diamonds and oil. Where you have diamonds and oil you have child soldiers pointing bayonets. You have corruption, insurrection, mercenaries, ecological degradation, social upheaval, under-funded hospitals, misogyny, extremism, refugee camps and vast, vast greed. We pushed the child soldiers’ bodies under an abandoned trailer and pulled a tarp across them.
With the oil and diamonds gone and the three local cultures left with none of the benefits they turned on the carbonated meat. Scientific value, the enormous rarity of carbonated meat meant little. Science had only just barely become aware of the carbonated meat while helping plunder the natural resources of the entire region. Which do you think had the most impact? A weird bit of flora and fauna. The swindle of the century?
What does carbonated meat look like, you ask? Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral? Yes, all three, in a cylindrical form about the size of an ottoman, tapered toward the bottom. Uniform in size they are gently warm to the touch. They are not harmful to humans, in fact they can be eaten by homo sapiens. They taste like beef jerky crossed with celery and the hard coating on a cherry-flavoured gumball. When sliced open they spill potable water and their skin can be used for shelter-making. Four holes, like for the threads holding a button, are clustered at the top of each carbonated meat, they release streams of pure oxygen, hence the reference to carbonation in their name.
As Oleg made the landing rotation we saw a small team of men torching underbrush at the edge of the jungle. That meant carbonated meat.
I told them to wait with the plane. They would keep the engine warmed up and had the child soldiers’ AK-47s. At least one carbonated meat should be between our landing spot and the edge of the jungle, indicated the detector. A ravine ran down from the plateau and it would guide me out and back. Carbonated meat are like humans in that they seem to thrive near bodies of water.
When I found the meat I was thorn-scraped and footsore and ecstatic. I took a deep breath of its oxygen and exhaled, slowly counting to three. Here it was! Here I was!
Simplicity and gracefulness; the meat was a cheerful shade of emerald. Blending to black along the sides it had near perfect camouflage under vine leaves at the base of a tree. From a few more feet away I would have missed it completely.
I leaned the sniper rifle against the tree, wiped a tear away, and began to separate the carbonated meat from the ground. I had a folding shovel with me. Then I unfurled a special knapsack my wife had designed for retrieving a carbonated meat. I feared the specimen would be heavy.
I had started out on commercial flights to London and then Casablanca. Then there were trains, jeep rides, crowded buses. The long trip in the Land Rover was next as were the shitty, bug-infested hotel rooms. Five long stretches in the air with Oleg and Vitaly in a jump seat made from aluminum tubing and canvas that had not done my joints a lot of good, came next. Also, I’m not really a kid any more. I’m forty-six. Nonetheless, I adjusted the knapsack, picked up my rifle and turned back toward the plateau.
It was hot but the carbonated meat was releasing a modest stream of cool pure oxygen onto the back of my neck. Grasshoppers popped about cheerefully and I kept a steady pace, drinking water often and in small amounts. Replacing what I was losing without swelling the belly. Something I learned in the Air Force Royal Reserve during college.
When I had regained some altitude on the way to the plane I sent a private text message to Pamela. I told her in short sentences without vowels that I’d secured a specimen. I’d be at the institute within three days if all went well. I confirmed her theory that a carbonated meat naturally repels harmful insects. Since starting back I’d had not a single bite from any kind of fly or mosquito even. Also, the carbonated meat was exhibiting a phenomenon we hadn’t known about. It made sounds. I tried my best to describe the sounds. Like a humming or strumming, or no, a purring sound. Like a cricket and like a dulcimer.
I LUV U! STAY SAFE!!!, replied Pamela.
The sounds were devoid of all but the loosest pattern and quite soothing, to be honest. With the carbonated meat keeping me company my back held up well and I kept a good pace, uphill along the ravine and through the lion-coloured grasses to the big biplane.
Oleg and Vitaly were still there but looked jumpy. They said they’d heard motor vehicles and gunshots other end of the plateau. We were afraid of the big, rocket-firing military helicopters we’d been seeing and what they could do to the Antonov while it was on the ground.
Oleg had CNN on his iPhone and the religious anarchy in the capital city was ratcheting up another notch or two. Radical militants were in our vicinity and you could say the only thing they hated more than carbonated meat was westerners with square glasses and heavy university accreditations or the equally godless mercenary servants thereof. Already they’d chucked the camping gear and the big detector box to save weight, stowing the carbonated meat in a custom-made travel case.
The Antonov’s engine hammered into life. We flew at low altitude dead north. The flight plan we filed with the authorities said we’d fly due south at medium altitude. We were going into the neighbouring country, to the extreme limit of the Antonov’s range.
We said we never wanted to be apart again. God, I had missed Pamela. She was beautiful and smart, a redhead. I was too tired to think, let alone talk for much of the first twenty four hours. I had lumps and lesions and lacerations and infected spider bites and I’d lost weight and grown a bit of a beard. There were burns on my left arm. I was bruised and battered, not feeling morally intact but I was excited, too.
Sure, there had been plenty of action. Thing is, presidents and secret agents don’t change the world. The James Bond stuff had been needed but retrieving the last of a dying species had more to do with money and paperwork. The most powerful people in our world are still the lawyers. Inequitable, nature-despoiling dictatorship thrives as much on the pretext of law as on visible force.
On the plane back I started trying to pull myself together. I’d been booked on a big fancy Airbus with two decks, a physiotherapist/massage technician and a little walk-in medical clinic on board. That and the French chef helped but I was still sore and depleted.
The same people that set me up with the cabin on the Airbus, and Oleg and Vitaly before that, got me back onto North American soil with no bother from Department of Homeland Defence or the Canadian Border Security Agency. The specimen and I arrived at the condo mid afternoon on a wet day in October, the sidewalk out front was carpeted with acorns.
Within minutes the lines were buzzing. Plans began to roll forward for press conferences, VIP receptions, academic and public access. We deliberately structured things so that we had a quiet period of about three days before the zoo really got going. Yes, it was selfish to have done that.
My wife and I hosted a little reception. Friends, artists, scientists, a philosopher or two, a couple of family members came.
I’d brought some soil and leaf litter from the spot on where I found the specimen. We used this as bedding for the carbonated meat, creating a spot in the dining room and one in the spare bedroom for it. We misted it lightly now and then with a spritzer. The carbonated meat required virtually nothing to thrive, glowing an even stronger emerald green under the attention of our low-key circle. Oxygen hissed lightly from it and it was as warm as a black cat sleeping on a sun porch.
Our friend Karl Hammer, the photographer, seemed quiet. My sister-in-law tried to bring him out of his shell. Karl removed his sunglasses and pointed out that we were part of a system that had effectively murdered the carbonated meat as a species.
“Here we are”, he said. “In the tasteful, caring environment of close friends, in awe of this living thing, mystified, reverent, even afraid of it, but failing utterly to comprehend the big picture.”
His words killed my wife. The syllables he strung together breathed into reality a fatal complex of doubt. We looked through each other at the table. I could smell the jungle burning again.
After the private social event came the work. Like a wedding, the ball had started rolling and now it didn’t matter if the marriage would be good or not. Pamela kicked things off with a briefing of the Board of Governance and the Major Sponsors Committee. All were floored. I started in on the mainstream media and the bloggers.
I hit the road; Pamela settled three major teams onto the science. The plodding, meticulous stuff that advances real knowledge in real ways. Sixty people, fourteen-hours-a-day and six-days-a-week. A hundred and three cures for a hundred and three cancers kind of thing. Coffee, committees, computers and pure knowledge. Two-hundred and eleven years and the Royal Institute for Research had never seen anything like it.
I was swept off my feet like a vice-president during a terror alert. My ass became famous. It was crazy. The carbonated meat, a previously unknown overtime project of creation, was blogged upon, photographed, holographed, podcasted, broadcasted, cast in bronze. Twittered and Facebooked until the Internet very nearly melted. A stuffed, emerald furry version sold 902.9 million copies in China alone on behalf of United Nations children’s charities. There were granite statues. Hospitals were renamed. Church bells were smelted and recast in the shape of the specimen and found to ring more sweetly. Women in labour cried out ‘carbonated meat’ to ease their pains and regulate their breathing.
Schools, civic parades, books and Roman-style orgies were dedicated to the meat. Children were christened in its honour. A tributary torrent of money and women offered any way I liked them, and I like both plenty of ways, proved unstoppable, too.
When I learned about Pamela, I was in Miami and still in the sack with two movie stars. Apparently, I tried to electrocute myself with a hair dryer and a hot tub carved from green travertine marble shaped like the carbonated meat. Then I remember being in a private jet
Federal police subsequently cleared the movie stars, and me, of any wrongdoing. The charges against us were just a new chapter in the panic. We were seven hundred miles away and pretty much out of our skulls at the time of the disappearance of the carbonated meat. I do not know where it is, if it is alive or not, if there are any left at all.
They said it was murder, but they didn’t see my wife’s note. It said that the carbonated meat was life itself.
copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009
