A Partridge in a Pear Tree by Rachel Rodman continued...
After that disastrous sales season, we donated a considerable portion of our excess stock, just to avoid paying storage fees. Many of the remaining P. & P.T.s went to charity shops; others were distributed as birthday gifts for orphans and pediatric cancer patients. Still others, finally, were placed as décor in free clinics and soup kitchens-in bad neighborhoods, that is, where people held Art in no great regard, and many were very hungry. It was here, by one ugly turn and then other, that it was first observed that the pear-infused partridges were good to eat...delicious, really, it was said, even when prepared in an unskilled way, over some hasty fire, surreptitiously set to burn in a metal barrel or in the fireplace of a foreclosed home.
By the following February, once we had finalized the bankruptcy paperwork, the P. & P.T.s began to generate a real buzz. It almost seemed cultish. People expressed their admiration with subway graffiti, or in disturbingly detailed portraits: decapitation, then de-feathering, which were etched in sidewalk chalk. Sometimes, in the night, a ghoulish chant, "Yum! Yum! Yum!" would drift up, sourced beneath some abandoned bridge, and we came to know what that meant, when the partridges' bones, picked clean, would afterwards be discovered there, together with overturned pots, stamped with our company's old logo.
We had long been aware of the Law-known to every manufacturer-that, no matter what a product is or what it is intended for, someone, somewhere, will attempt to eat it or have sex with it. In the past, a sub-cult of Suburban Draculas had apparently even taken to installing spigots into the bark of their Fuses, in order to pump out an edible sap, which they lugubriously referred to as the "life-force." But this time, it was only the disgusting and tragic secondary use that actually became popular...and as a brutal death, not as a mere enervating bleed. And that this should happen to our PartridgeTree-the one Fuse, of all of our Fuses, to whom violence was congenitally foreign-seemed to be considerably more wrong.
We remembered, though it was now emotionally very difficult, how these dear creatures had once regarded the crowds of shouting protestors with absolute serenity...and utter incomprehension. They had never, in themselves, experienced anger or suffering, and they simply had not understood it, observing it in another.
In May, once we had closed up shop entirely, we were approached by another, much larger company. It presented a Faustian offer. It possessed, it said, the political clout necessary to deflect the protestors, "like zombies bumping off a cattle catcher." This quip made us laugh a little, in spite of our previous intention to appear unimpressed and inattentive. The company would also, it said, allocate discretionary funds, which we might devote to one or two of our own pet causes.
At first, we balked. A few of us were such extreme idealists that we stormed off immediately, angrily refusing it. "We don't make food," we said. But, in the end, most of us agreed. Because life is like that, ultimately, for almost everyone: tawdry and horrible and disappointing. And, in it, you can choose to perform some diluted, degraded, scarcely recognizable bastardization of your actual passion-to cling, that is, to at least that much-or you can just give up entirely.
After joining the company, we were assigned to a new division, created expressly for us: NewFuse Edibles. At Management's direction, we puzzled out how to grow turkeys on cranberry bushes and guinea fowl attached to leeks, such that the meat might be infused with the flavoring of its partner, prior to harvest. In another project, we replaced geese organs with vegetative equivalents: celery, reshaped to serve as lungs; parsnips as kidneys; modified carrots as intestines. During the stress of these NewFuses' deaths (and some light shaking) each vegi-organ would crumble apart and then sift together, resulting a pre-made stuffing, which would be perfectly situated, right in the goose's belly. We also, finally, made novelty plants whose branches yielded feather-covered spheres. When the rinds were peeled back, an appetizing striation of fruit and meat was exposed. In the first model we artfully interspersed pineapple and chicken; in the second, we took a similar approach using orange and duck.
Most of us, after we had acclimated, were not utterly unhappy. We even came to acknowledge the truth of the company's motto: "People like to eat," and learned to repeat it without irony. We also came to joke about the agreements that connected us to Management, comparing them to the syntho-biological tethers that we ourselves had invented, tying vegetable to animal. We debated, at length, which half we were, animal or vegetable. This, in the end, became the point of the joke, and there were countless variations upon it. Each, though, at heart, was a trifle bitter.
As part of our contract, we had negotiated two points. First, the manufacture of the P. & P. T.s would not be reinitiated. Second, our discretionary funds would be used to salvage the survivors-as many as one could. To our surprise, the company hadn't fought too hard. It was, it said, primarily interested in the process of Fusion, which, being combinatoric, was infinitely exploitable. It wasn't especially committed to selling partridges, which, in its view, had simple been a proof of principle. Quail, pigeons, and so on, would equally serve its turn.
When the survivors arrived, we installed them in the break rooms and hallways. We chose bright spaces, next to windows and skylights. With the janitors, we shared the tasks of caring for them: watering and pruning. We also distributed occasional treats-cubes of sugar, for they liked that best, or sometimes little squares of salted seaweed. For people outside of our story, the creatures quickly became amusing historical pieces-a "Point Zero," against which the success of the NewFuse Edibles might be better understood. Sometimes investors, taking the tour, would come by and chuckle about them.
At pauses in our projects, when the centrifuge was running, or the cells were incubating, we would come out of the lab to sit with them. We stroked their various parts: leaves and fruit and feathered heads, and promised (for there was nothing else to promise): "You are...meaningful." There seemed, in that, to be something worth living for-for us, as well as for them-if only for the purpose of grieving about it.
When we dreamed, after that, we continued to dream together. Or at least we felt that we did. During the day, sometimes, one of us might catch the eye of another, and both would give a conspiratorial little half-smile, knowing that we shared the identical thought-the same memory, really, recorded during some previous sleep. And then we would look away.
There was just one dream, really. It was set in the desert, and it contained just a few pictures. In it, from a yellow dune, a penguin waddled forward. Its mouth was open, panting. Its serrated pink tongue was extended: thirsty, thirsty. It held out its flippers in an unnatural way, so that the inner halves, which were normally held tight against its body, were exposed. Here, in the white, there were many red wounds.
Behind the penguin was a thorn bush. It was light brown, just a touch darker than the yellow sand. Its thorns were speckled with blood.
After a preliminary waddle, the penguin would make a feeble dive into the sand. Here, it would wave its wounded flippers, forward then back, in an obvious attempt to swim. About it, the sand would slosh a little-something like the ocean, which the penguin probably remembered, in a racial though not a personal way. Sometimes, on an upstroke, the penguin would lift its beak and squint at the sun.
Inevitably, though, after the penguin had traveled a short distance, the living tether, joining it to the bush, would tense. After another moment, once the penguin had pushed a little farther, the rope would whip it back, forcing it against its vegetable half, where its flippers would again be impaled. From the holes-a beat before the blood-grey-petaled flowers emerged, then fell, as the bird struggled to extricate itself. Upon touching the sand, they disintegrated. Part dust, part smoke.
If we had been awake, we might have said, "Tragic," or even "Beautiful," out of habit...and neither would have been quite right. But it was a dream, luckily, and deep enough, that we weren't able to articulate anything so inaccurate. And in the weird biology of dream-hearts pounding, eyes furiously flickering-our breath would catch...then stop...at the grand, expressive sweep of the thing, because, My God, it was such an image, whatever else it might be.