Heterotroph

by Martha Strawbridge

In the beginning, there’s the old VW Bug, mist blue. There’s dad at the wheel. Me, two and a half years old, strapped to a car seat in the back. One of us is exhausted. One of us is crying. One of us is fishing for some change from the cupholder in the center console and passing it to the other in the back seat in a desperate bid to entertain us. The crying does stop.

Then there’s me staring at the change between the folds of my baby fat.

There’s the white luster emanating from every nickel. 

The warm glow of every penny, the light bouncing off the dome of each tiny man’s forehead, rippling through each head of hair. Light cascading off every IN GOD WE TRUST and LIBERTY and E PLURIBUS UNUM. The sweet perfume of soft metal fills the air, the nickel-coated copper colliding with copper-coated zinc.

There’s a flush of blood beneath my cheeks. Galaxies of amino acids swirling beneath my tongue. Long, thin strands of iron flaring across my gums. All those tangled wires.

Then there’s my soft red mouth, my gaping lips. Me funneling the change in, dime by dime, nickel by nickel, penny by penny. There’s a chorus within my skull, reverberations of smooth edges against smooth faces. 

Then there’s the silent struggle, me testing the strength of the outside world against the semi-calcified surface of my tiny teeth. There’s a winner and a loser. 

I tilt my head toward the sunroof. Part of the outside world dives so far down the back of my throat it’s no longer part of the outside world. 

The DSM-5 defines pica disorder as the persistent eating of nonnutritive, nonfood substances over a period of at least one month. The final criterion of the definition, that such eating behavior persists to the degree of warranting clinical attention, secured my diagnosis that very moment, there in the back seat, as my throat clenched down and released the gurgles of my choking. 

There’s me now, and everything I’ve ever swallowed. The penny came first. Then the mud, then the ice, then the rocks, the thousands of them. The limestone, sandstone, shale. Anything soft enough to crumble against my teeth but hard enough to put up a fight. The bits of asphalt I’d pick off the sidewalk. The cigarette butts, the soda tabs, the gum wrappers, the uncooked rice. The perlite in our flower pots. The graphite rods from my mechanical pencils, how I’d tip them back into my mouth like they were Pixy Stix. 

Me loving it all, the taste, the texture; how it tasted like the structure of everything coming undone, how it felt like all hell breaking loose. 

The origin is impossible to know. How the first living things instinctively knew to cram their insides with outsides is impossible to know.

Like how during the Jurassic, the sauropods instinctively knew to swallow especially smooth rocks which then functioned as gastroliths. How some part of them instinctively knew that the gastroliths would grind down the plants passing through their digestive tract, and, like a scythe, reap from them a bounty of untapped nutrients. 

Like how the sauropods instinctively knew to teach their young: here, kid, eat this. And this was the tenderest love they could hope to offer. 

Like how long after the dinosaurs died off, there were still the birds who instinctively offered rocks to their depths. How the rocks would grind themselves down to pebbles deep within the birds. And how the microbes within their guts then instinctively knew to eat the pebbles.

Like how the magpie became famous for instinctively swallowing anything it could find. And the magpie’s throat became a spectacle for everything it consumed and everything it produced, for it also produced an otherworldly warble. The magpie eats snails and the eggs of other birds; it plucks gems out of rings and necklaces to furnish its nests and insides with opulence; it is the first to descend, along with crows and jays, upon fresh corpses strewn across battlefields to feed on the succor of decaying flesh. 

It was the Church that claimed the magpie was the only bird not to weep during the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. That each magpie carries a drop of the devil’s blood on its tongue. That each tongue, if cut open and the blood released, would grant the bird human speech.

Then in the fifteenth century, the magpie, or the pica in Latin, inspired the title of an ecclesiastical document, the Pica Sarum, concerning matters of Catholic feasts.  

And the lettering of this document, in turn, inspired the typographical unit pica, which measures the width of a character set in 12 point font.  

I mean that this has been my primary unit of measurement against the universe. And when I swallowed the penny in the back seat of the VW Bug, it tasted like the holiest of feasts and the most forbidden of fruits.

Then there’s the squeal of brakes, then multiple fingers in my mouth, then dad on the side of the road counting out each drool-coated coin going oh god oh god oh god. 

There’s him staring into my empty mouth in horror, one penny short. 

There’s me staring out at him as I fall deeper and deeper into myself. There’s him disappearing as I disappear. The edge of the memory beginning to blur. 

Me, small and round, dropping into the darkness beyond my mouth.

The walls of the throat closing in, heaving out, closing in again. The microbiome of my larynx all writhing toward me, springing from my depths, dangling like bunched grapes. 

And when I say I reached out to clasp their serpentine forms, believe me when I tell you it was as sacred as any moment when I’ve reached out for another in a dark room and knotted my fingers with theirs. The space as charged as any mass or motel room, so ripe with desire and decay. 

Further down, there’s Galena Limestone, Decorah Shale. Flowstones of calcite alternate with manganese compounds, all of it glittering and opaque. The youngest of it is 750,000 years old. The shale is older than life itself.

This far back, all time breaks downs.

In a million moments, I’m being given everything I could ever want. A million moments where I’m the most spoiled child on this earth, so glutted with love I might puke.  

And in a million moments, I’m looking for the one thing that will make it all disappear. 

One moment, I’m wedged between the shoulders of my parents in church. Light is oozing through the stained glass, a geometric Eve reaching across the banquet of Eden for a jewel-toned fruit. This is why we called ourselves Cafeteria Catholics: because we could, like Eve, pluck only the prayers we loved from scripture to devour entirely, and then spit everything else back out.

One moment, I’m dropping beyond the mouth of a cave in a boat that only seats four. The cave was discovered at the base of a bluff in northern Iowa in 1953, its entrance blasted open and walls and shallow waters illuminated deep red by a string of small spotlights. All of it, we learn, is drainage from a small tributary of the Mississippi called Bloody Run Creek. 

We’re told the name comes from the soldiers at Fort Crawford, who would wash their animal hides in its waters. I try then to picture them, their heads bowed over their carcasses, rushing against the onset of decay to cut them open, watching the intestines shoot out as though spring-loaded, the sheets of blood raining into the current. Then my imagination fails, and I’m thinking only of the mineral composition of the waters. How the copper deposits in some creek beds can drench the water a deep red, too, like blood. 

The DSM-5 suggests that many cases of clinical pica may be the result of a mineral deficiency. It would take a simple blood test to confirm: low iron and/or low calcium and/or low zinc, etcetera. In proper supply, these minerals neutralize the toxins produced by plants and meat decomposing in the digestive tract. They manage the rot and decay. 

An article published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry posits pica as a result of different kinds of deficiency. Inadequate parenting is implied in many cases. Poverty is a common factor. Older children demonstrate a fraught relationship with the prospect of intimacy. 

There was the little boy who would punch a hole in the wall of his observation room so he could eat the plaster. When the hole was patched up, he’d punch another. 

There was the young girl who would stuff as much tinfoil in her mouth as physically possible, then cry for more. 

Another child similarly craved dirt.  

There was Linda, who ate half of a thick encyclopedia. 

There was James, who would run a half block to get a brightly colored flower to eat. 

There was Ann, suffering from severe separation anxiety, who was hospitalized at nineteen months for ingesting lighter fluid. There was Ann’s absent father. There was Ann’s mother, who was extremely poor and also meticulously clean, who began eating dirt when she first got pregnant at sixteen. The DSM-5 notes that pregnancy is a common factor among grown women with pica. The stuff of the earth neutralizes the morning sickness and supplements the nutrients demanded by the fetus. Ever since, Ann’s mother has regularly migrated to Maryland to eat a particular strain of wet clay.

There’s me in the near red darkness of the cave, the cool air, the packed earth. How every rock I’ve successfully liquified against my teeth has been an obliteration of time itself, layered and sediment. How every time I hear nonfood I think of nonlife, that cushy space where it’s impossible to die or disappear.

Me as a child in the therapist’s office, convulsing with fear and rage, threatening to bite through the cord of the floor lamp and electrocute myself unless my parents were let back into the room. The therapist leaning forward in her chair with a pad of paper and a pencil: can you draw where it is you think your family will disappear to? Me, returning a blank sheet of paper. I think they’ll end up here.

There were all the chipped teeth, the emergency orthodontist appointments, the bleeding gums. Once a dentist told me my teeth were one half to one third the length of an average adult tooth, and I thought about the width of a pica, and then the width of the universe, and then how my only two options seemed to be to vanish the world or vanish myself in the process. 

There were all the things I put in my mouth but never swallowed. Every rubbery article of clothing of every Polly Pocket I ever owned. The Band-Aid I suctioned off my pinkie in the doctor’s office late in my teens. The sticker I peeled off a lamppost in Las Vegas printed with the image of Jesus Christ, who was Watching Me. 

There were the hundreds of reeds I soaked in my spit from middle school through college. How I opted for saxophone because the tone was brassy and breathy at once, how jazz was a dark room I could crawl into where the walls pulsed like lungs, every line I transcribed both scripture and scandal.

There was a video I watched on my phone taken from the interior of an opera singer’s mouth. All the pink and wet, like I was watching porn. How I still thought then it was possible for me to produce something beautiful from the emptiness of myself. There was the night in the motel room with the saxophone player whose vibrato was more soulful than mine, his altissimo more saccharine. How there were no lights save for the digital clock on the dresser. How we held hands for a while and I thought this might be something like holy. 

There was me swallowing my what about your girlfriend. 

And him swallowing his what about your boyfriend. 

And when he kissed me, he bit my lip so hard it drew blood, and it tasted like sweet guilt.

How I willed myself to regret it but couldn’t because there’s always been the instinct to consume what isn’t mine. And once I’ve swallowed it, there’s no telling what it becomes. It could become everything. It could become love, it could become life itself. And on the other hand, it could become nothing at all, the blankest of pages, the most barren of caverns.

And there would be no way to tell unless you cut me open.  

The memory fades back in after the emergency room. After the X-ray, the teal halo on black. He’s pushing me on a grocery cart through the produce section of the grocery store saying, there’s nothing we can do now but give it time. 

I’m staring at all the glittering produce, wondering whether it once was possible for us to grow our food within ourselves. As a child I fantasized long rows of corn stretching across my stomach lining. Vines ripe with fruits coiling through my small intestine. I imagined us all carrying our own private Edens, offering whatever we could to the lush and rot of our soils. 

After all this time, it remains unclear what happened to my penny. Either I passed it uneventfully or I embedded it permanently as part of myself. 

Then either I was two and a half years old or I was ten thousand years old. As old as the discovery of copper embedded in the shores of the Aegean. As old as the first copper tools in ancient Egypt. The copper scythes that cut open the earth and the copper scalpels that cut open the bodies.

Either I was ten thousand years old or I was older than life itself. As old as the hydrothermal vents on the bottom of the ocean, the sulfur they’d spew out, the toxic air above, the acidic rain, the limestone nearby, the marble. The copper condensing out of it all. 

As old as all the inorganic stuff oozing around in the primordial soup. The prebiotic materials assembling and dissolving spontaneously in the ocean, the tidy rows and slick planes popping into and out of existence at whim. The air above, hydrogen swirling around methane swirling around ammonia. 

Then at some point, one theory goes, a bolt of lightning. The undoing of all structure, the fusion of primitive atmosphere and primitive ocean. 

When the conditions were replicated in a laboratory, the air turned a turbid red, which, when tested, revealed the presence of dozens of amino acids, including twenty of the most common found currently in living systems.

And when the acids fell back in the ocean, it was like the sky was raining blood. 

And in the ocean, they combined with one another, they interlaced their fine threads. 

Then it was clumps of fine threads engulfing other clumps of fine threads. It was the very first instance of a thing consuming something that was not itself. 

And from this, somewhere along the way, across some blurry line, came life. 

Then came the animalcules writhing across sea and land, microbes devouring dust, bacteria feasting on the bedrock, eroding the limestone over eons into gaping caverns. 

Then, in one version of the origin story, came a garden, a fruit that was promised to open the eyes of its consumer, and make her like God, and make her know know good from evil. And when the forbidden was finally consumed, God stepped in to condemn:

You will crawl on your belly
    and you will eat dust
    all the days of your life.

In my version, it’s me in the back seat of the VW Bug. 

Then it’s me in the boat lodged in the back of the cave, the seams separating me from not-me stretched taut and humming. There’s the soft music of decay, of dissolving back into the earth. There’s an alcove above our heads, a spotlight illuminating a print of Oertel’s Rock of Ages. 

The seams sigh, then give. 

Then all of us are dancing in the dim light. Me and everyone I’ve ever loved and everyone I’ve ever wanted to love all embracing. All of us writhing toward each other, trying to figure out what we can make together with our bodies. Weaving our fine threads.

Me and my family, all of us sinewy and graphite. Because when the therapist said my blank page didn’t count, I just drew us standing there as stick figures, holding hands in the emptiness. 

And there’s me holding your hand in the near dark, wondering what the Magpie says when its tongue is cut open. If it sounds even close to what I’d say if you cut me open. 

Then our tour guide asking if we want him to turn off the spotlights so we can see Total Darkness.

Me in the boat, exclaiming, yes. 

Because the light in the alcove is suddenly so glaring. And the woman clinging to the Rock of Ages looks pained as she rests her chin against the stone, her red robe slipping from her body into the current.

And the light above her coming down sharp and hard, like lightning. 

And the water leaping onto her like it’s alive.

Me crying, again, yes.

Because it’s only when I’m this close to communion that I’m able to admit what I might lack. 

Me, in the rock, holding out my hand. 

Then my hand disappearing.

Then me disappearing.

Published April 23rd, 2023