It's Kind of a Funny Story

What are the chances, in picking a meal for me, that Argenon Hospital gets the one thing I can handle right now? Between fish nuggets and veal marsala and a Technicolor quiche and other items of disgust I see handed out on trays to other people (Armelio, the President, hands out all the trays, announcing people’s names as he does so: “Gilner, Gilner, that’s my new friend!”), I get curry-flavored chicken breast: it doesn’t have real liquid curry, just a lovely infusion of yellow spices and a plastic knife and fork to cut it up. It also has broccoli, the vegetable I like best, and herbed carrots on the side. When I open the plastic lid, I grin, because I know something has shifted in my stomach—not the big Shift, but something concrete—and I am going to eat this. Besides the chicken and vegetables, the tray has coffee, hot water, a teabag, milk, sugar, salt, pepper, juice, yogurt, and a cookie. It’s as good-looking a meal as I can remember. I start to slice the chicken.

“Does anyone have extra salt?” Humble, across my table, stretches his neck to the room.

“Here.” I split him off my salt packet. “I would’ve hooked you up.”

“See, you didn’t speak to me,” Humble says, pouring the salt on his chicken, looking at me through eyes surrounded by thin and purple-hued skin, as if he got punched in both a week ago. “So naturally I assumed you were one of those yuppies.”

“I’m not.” I put chicken in my mouth. It tastes good.

“There’s a lot of yuppies in this place, and you have that look about you, you know—the yuppie look of people with money?”

“Yeah.”

“People who don’t care about other people. Unlike me. See, I genuinely care about other people. Does that mean that I sometimes won’t be inclined to beat the hell out of somebody? No, but that’s my environment. I’m like an animal.”

“We’re all like animals,” I say. “Especially now, when we’re all in a room eating. It reminds me of high school.”

“You’re smart, I see that. We’re all animals, high school is animals, but some of us are more animal than others. Like in Animal Farm, which I read, all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others? Here in the real world, all equals are created animal, but some are more animal than others. Hold on, let me write that down.” Humble reaches behind him to the one window in the dining room, which has board games stacked up under it. He pulls Scrabble off the top of the stack, fishes out a pen from the box, removes the board, flips it over, and writes on the back of it, which is already covered with scribbling—

“Humble!” Smitty says from the door.

“Hey, hey, okay!” He throws his hands up. “I didn’t do it!”

“How many times do we have to tell you, no writing on the Scrabble board! Do you need pencil and paper?”

“Whatever,” he says. “It’s all in here.” He points to his head, then turns back to me as if absolutely nothing had interrupted our conversation. “Me and you, we might be equals, but I’m more animal.”

“Uh-huh.” I clearly picked the right place to sit.

“I need to be the alpha male in any given situation. That’s why as soon as I noticed you I made a few judgments. I saw that you were very young. Now in the wild, the lion who sees new youngsters from another pride, another breed, he’ll kill and eat those youngsters so he can breed his own offspring. But here”—he gestures around, as if you need to elucidate what “here” is, as if you don’t just take it for granted once you’re inside—“there unfortunately appears to be a distinct lack of women accepting of my breeding potential. So in your youth you are not a threat to me.”

“I see.” Across the room, Jimmy is trying to open his juice with one hand. The other hand stays at his side; I can’t tell if he can’t move it or just doesn’t want to. Smitty comes over and helps him.

“It’ll come to ya!” he says.

“Do you feel that I’m a threat to you?” Humble asks.

“No, you seem like a pretty cool guy.” I munch.

Humble nods. His food, which was sitting on the plate in front of him, very innocent and oblivious, gets destroyed over the next twenty seconds as he eats half of it. I continue my slow and steady pace.

“When I was your age—you’re fifteen, right?”

I nod. “How’d you know?”

“I’m good with ages. When I was fifteen, I had this chick who was twenty-eight. I don’t know why, but she loved me. Now, I was doing a lot of pot back then, my whole life was pot. . .”

It’s weird how your stomach can come back around. As I tune Humble out, I eat not because I want to, not because I have to overcome anything, not to prove myself to anyone, but because it’s there. I eat because that’s what people do. And somehow when the food is put in front of you by an institution, when there’s a large gray force behind it and you don’t have to thank anyone for it, you have the animal instinct to make it disappear, before a rival like Humble comes along and snatches it away. I think, I think as I chew, my problem might be too much thinking.