Tin Can ~ Karen Schauber
The room smells of feathers and beaks and claws. Jerzy uncovers the metal tray revealing a scrambled gelatinous mess. He looks up and smiles, a wry flicker, do you want large or small? I swallow hard, don’t return the smirk. The small canister we have taken refuge in, a collapsed Quonset shed, is absent of tools, equipment, and any gear with which to produce sustenance. Jerzy portions out the lumpy oatmeal and pushes a cylinder of burnt-umber liquid across the steel slab toward me. It’s slick and tacky, glistens like crude oil. Nom nom he says, as his fingers curl around the neck of a makeshift spoon. I’m watching the syrup—Vermont Maple, he reminds me—sludge out of the pipe and wonder where he gets the energy to prop up this Potemkin village.
I peer out of the sliver of window eager to see the sandstorm subside. But the heavy metal clatter of cyclonic whipping and howling persists at Yuja Wang speed. We have no way of gauging when it will let up; when we may exit this tin can.
Atypical sedges and lichen meticulously extricated from the substrate along the northern stretch of the escarpment, all lost now. My tungsten carbide knife, satphone, and water supply, gone with the cache. Stationed here between the coastal lowland and continental plateau on an extended research grant, we were the last remaining hope for a sustainable nutrient-dense crop to feed the multitudes. After six months of harvesting prized specimens: we have nothing to show.
Jerzy is on hands and knees, fishing out tiny pill bugs scrabbling in the folds of the corrugated metal and twisted rebar. Our next happy meal, he announces. They are quick, scattering like motes of light: mottled-brown with a row of zipper-like white teeth along their outer shell. I sink further below the metal cladding, close my eyes, imagine sucking the tiny carapace like marrow from a shank bone at Thanksgiving dinner. The interior, soft and spongy with a rich, unctuous, meaty flavour. I catch myself ruminating, slipping, not a good sign. I don’t let myself go there, begin square breathing… feel my belly expand like a balloon, hold for four counts, slowly exhale for four more, silently repeating until I feel centered, in control again. Jerzy grumbles fuck, his thumb and palm chafe as he rubs the insects clean like sandpaper.
He is losing it. Becoming unpredictable. A world-renown scientist, at the top of his field, and my Mentor—someone I’ve always been able to count on. We don’t talk about next steps. We don’t talk about everyone we have lost—Nikolai, Sergey, Katerina, Jerz… swallowed by the raging storm, their lifeless bodies strewn about the scorched earth like loose-leaf pages spilling from a research logbook. – The worst of it, I can’t reach anyone to let them know what has happened.
Jerzy is pointing to his tongue – does it look swollen, his words are garbled, foreign, as he squeezes the bulbous pink muscular organ. These little fuckers may be poisonous, he gags, they’re probably ingesting leached chemicals from the structure’s corrosive hull. He’s beginning to itch, becoming hyper-jumpy. We have nothing to counter the histamine. Neither of us mentions anaphylaxis; we don’t go there, not yet.
I…we have been on our own for days, which days I am not sure; clearly not thinking straight. I massage my wound, a blooming dark purple rutabaga, leaching through the ragged cloth bandage I fashioned out of my shirtsleeve during my….our frantic retreat tearing into this tin can —the infection not yet overripe, not yet putrid. My head is still swimming, swelling, the clanking inside upending, distorting my perception. I’m hanging on the best way I can.
Jerzy falls quiet, finally. The brusque scratching noise from his side of the canister has come to an abrupt halt. Pill bugs mute. I hoist myself up onto my elbows to check on him. He’s nowhere to be seen——the ‘wake-up call’ I’ve been avoiding.
