Glossolalia

Short story (or advertisement for a BBQ grill on facebook marketplace) - written late 2020.

David, the homo erectus, walked slowly along the bank of the Mashavera. Still in shock from his injury, he was determined to make his way back to the cave, the one he’d struggled for years to turn into a home. He took his next few steps with care. He knew that if he were to lose his balance and fall, it would be the last time.

The physical pain was sharp and unusual, but it was partly drowned by the constant hum of thoughts he’d been lately having. Ironically, by taking away his attention from the pain, his wandering mind has kept him this time focused on the task most pressing, his survival.

He had been unusually pensive of late. By his estimate, more than the other men in his tribe. More, he reckoned, than his father had ever been. ‘Yes, definitely more than him’, he murmured to himself. Mind you, his father plummeted to his death long ago, while trying at the brink of a cliff to trace the outline of a star with his index finger. David was a small child when it happened, no more than a few dozen moons of age. But somehow, he had nurtured to maturity fidelitous memories of his father’s aloofness. ‘What a dunce my old man was,’ he would often say to himself.

He wondered if his own children would be deep thinkers like him. Or maybe more so. He had an inkling to that effect: that ‘thinking’ was generationally on the rise. Will they think he was a dunce too? Maybe a troglodyte? That, he surely was. He lived in a cave after all. They all did. In any case, he won’t be around to find out. If anything, this injury will make sure of it. That thought gave him a strange comfort.

Attempting to curb his own vanity, David reminded himself that upon close examination, he was not much of a thinker. At least not in the sense that Eugene was, whose list of credits included the invention of the sol-stick just the year before. It’s what you would call a torch in modern times. Funny enough, a sol-stick was the cause of his current injury.

Eugene was David’s neighbor and his peer in the tribe. Although David’s first instinct was to doubt any of Eugene’s claims to physical or mental prowess, some were simply irrefutable. For example, he could not in good conscience deny that Eugene had single handedly perfected the spear throwing technique that every man in the tribe now puts to good use. And probably in other tribes too.

Eugene learns from experience, David decided. That’s what set him apart. While he himself would brood endlessly on the meaning of this, that and the other, Eugene was out somewhere conducting an experiment, with or without intent, and learning something practical in the process.

Still, he loathed him. If for nothing else, then for the smug look that developed on his face when he was about to disclose to a crowd of people his latest exploit. He could swear that upon one of those long sermons of self-satisfaction, the air around them would physically thicken. At least it did for him.

Did David envy his illustrious neighbor? He couldn’t decide. Envy, in his mind, implied that one wished - to some degree - to embody the subject of their envy, to bear their likeness, or to possess some of their qualities. He could harbor no such feelings when it came to Eugene, or anyone else for that matter. Though he was foremost in recognizing his own flaws and his mundanity; in secret, he was a big admirer of himself, and would sooner die of small self-inflicted wounds than wish to become someone else.

Perhaps, instead, he coveted some of Eugene’s possessions. His cave whose opening overlooked the valley came to his mind, or his well-kept set of stone tools, or, he thought guiltily, his wife. He rebuked himself instantly for thinking her a thing to be owned. His progressive beliefs about women notwithstanding, he was still, it seemed, a man of his environment. That depressed him. Though, he told himself: ‘Surely no harm will occur if I just admired her and kept it to myself’.

While their kind stood straighter than the other apes, she - Lucy was her name - stood straighter still. He did not know why, but he liked that about her. He also liked the way she gracefully shared with the tribe’s children the bounty of her gathering expeditions. No trace of pride or entitlement to gratitude would loom over them as she did so, much unlike her husband.

Thinking about the other apes reminded him of what had happened just a few days ago. A group of six hunters from his tribe, uncharacteristically led by him, managed to hunt the largest mammoth the tribe had ever seen. He was leading them on account of being a few years their senior, not for being perceived as a natural leader. That did not particularly bother him. Hunting mammoth is a team sport which requires no sophisticated leadership or specialized division of tasks.

What did bother him was the ease at which he and a small group of inexperienced hunters bested that mammoth. It took only a few swings of their sol-sticks to disorient the beast, separate him from his group, and ultimately lead him to the spear-lined pit that they had prepared. Usually, it took a larger group of hunters to successfully trap and kill an adult mammoth. But that one showed little resistance.

He often wondered why some beasts were so docile and easily manipulated by his kind, and whether it was fair to take advantage of their helplessness. Were they in awe of the walking ape with opposing thumbs? He did not see the appeal himself. He found his own appearance, and that of other members of his species, unintimidating and uninspiring. Some less so than others, like Lucy’s, but uninspiring still.

It must be the tools then. They surely help. The thought that the thriving of his entire species was courtesy of Eugene’s inventions sickened him. So much so that he finally recalled his other sickness, the injury he had sustained a short while ago. Grateful that this train of thought temporarily numbed his pain, he picked up the pace. His wife must be worried by now.

Two million years later, almost to the day, another David, perhaps a direct descendent of David the homo erectus - had the plagues and saber-tooth tigers spared his progeny - is planning a barbecue for his colleagues.

Like his supposed progenitor, David of the year 2022 is burdened by life. Hunted not by the beasts of prehistory, but by creditors, bankers, marketeers, hustlers, bosses, and overzealous co-workers. Predators all the same.

‘You should be more proactive.’, his wife proudly declared, after he had complained to her about his work environment; how he’d been unable to navigate the rough terrain of socio-professional hierarchy. He would complete his tasks to the tee and then some, but it was not he, but others who got on first name basis with the people in upper management.

Golf and poker on weekends, he imagined, were among the privileges those social fiends enjoyed. He had neither interest in those games, nor any real evidence that they even took place. But if Hollywood films had taught him anything, it was that those activities happened, and when and where they did, his exclusion was the unspoken in-joke.

His low self-esteem, and his inflated sense of self-relevance juxtaposed perfectly to present him with that fantasy. He didn’t like it, but that spool of cephalic film had its own momentum. It couldn’t be halted at will. Incidentally, if film trivia was of any social capital at his company, he would have been vice president by now.

The whole thing overwhelmed and depressed him. He loathed more than anything the fact that his child’s future may become secure only to the degree that he was able to tolerate and appease people he did not care for. It doesn’t have to be that way, he thought.

Too much pressure.

He knew his wife meant well by her proposal of him hosting a barbecue, but he still maintained that she’s a presumptuous bitch. Maybe she should get a job and throw a barbecue for her colleagues, he thought to himself and smirked, feeling slightly satisfied with that patronizing nugget of inner dialogue.

What nagged his mind today more than his wife’s overreach into his work life was the call he’d received from Tim, his colleague, and unbeknownst to the man himself, his archnemesis. Two days before the barbecue would have taken place, Tim called David on the phone spouting a list of demands and inquiries. He did this presumably to mark his territory and make himself at home even before setting foot in the house.

‘Does your barbecue have a flat griddle surface or is it just a grill all over?’. Among the battery of questions he had to answer, that one perplexed him the most. Is he trying to micromanage my party? He wondered if those questions were tactics of psychological warfare, crafted specially to break his will and suck the life force out of him.

‘I’ll bring a cast iron skillet with me,’ was Tim’s concession to the lack of flat cooking surfaces at David’s house. He later explained that the purpose was to get an even browning on burgers: A much superior cooking method to cooking them directly on the grill, he claimed.

David thought for long about the pedantic request. Did he really need to ask? He could have shown up at the party with that skillet’s handle lodged up his rectum and gone on to perform a lewd culinary circus act for all I cared. No one else would bat an eye either. Because the man always had his way. He did because he knew how to. Things went his way professionally too. ‘It’s because I’m really good at networking,'' he would often say. It came naturally to a slimy person like him. If all the trite self-help books took a human form, it would look like him. I bet he wasn’t born head first like most infants. It wasn’t a breech birth either. What came out first from his mother’s birth canal was his right arm, with his fist gripping a few bloodied business cards to handover to the doctor and nurses. No chance wasted.

But he has a point, David thought, retracting part of his initial skepticism. Not about networking, but the burgers. He never understood himself why people cooked things over metal grates, and the ridiculous grill marks that this method of cooking produced. If the browning was so desirable, why not have it all over? They look pleasant, he thought. People are simple creatures who like visual patterns, and advertisers took notice. They always do. He worked at an advertising agency. He hated it.

An image in his head of a piece of meat, adorned with perfectly parallel grill marks, made him both hungry and depressed. Maybe the grill mark pattern resembled something. Like his own life, at times charred by direct contact with adversity, and in the times intermediate, still suffered the imminent pain radiating from afar. The difference was that life wasn’t as predictable.

What does it matter anyway? It dawned on him that the whole ordeal of torching animal parts and eating them communally is much more ritual than function. His craving for meat faded for a moment and he felt repulsed. He wondered how it all started...

Ardi was rearranging the cave’s furniture – made up of stones and tree branches - when she heard footsteps that she instinctively knew were her husband’s. Something was odd about the sound. The steps were fast and slow at intermittent intervals; not his normal gait. In an environment such as hers, one’s hearing became very sensitive.

She went to the cave’s opening, anticipating his arrival. Moments later, he appeared. The sight she beheld shocked her. His right arm was bent at the elbow in such a way that suggested he couldn’t extend it if he wished. At the same time, it was violently shaking, as if his arm alone was suffering the chill of a harsh winter, while the rest of his body was somewhere else much warmer.

At his arm’s extremity was what used to be his hand, the same hand that unconvincingly caressed her hair to console her three days ago, for having been feeling oddly sad for a while. Though it had felt forced, as most of his attempts at intimacy were, it still brought her some comfort. His hand was now gruesomely deformed.

‘What happened?’ she asked, frightened. ‘A sole-stick.. and a cackle of Pachycrocuta’, he managed to utter those words before falling unconscious. He woke up hours later in his own bed, feeling groggy. He saw that his hand was wrapped in a few large leaves, kept in place by some twine made of plant fibers.

‘The elders prepared a special ointment for it. They had never seen an injury such as this before. But they think you will be fine’.

He didn’t feel fine. But he was glad he wasn’t dead. Cheating death, he thought, circumvented his usual moods of despair. He knew it wouldn’t last too long though. That train gets delayed but ultimately arrives. He wondered what a train was. It wasn’t the first time strange words interrupted his otherwise standard vocabulary. A mild case of glossolalia perhaps.

Maybe I can deliberately cheat death every other day and lead a happier life that way.

Days later, after he’d explained what had happened to everyone willing to listen - startled by the hyenas, he had tripped on a stone and fell, and his hand got caught in the flame of the sol-stick that he had intended to stave off the animals with - he decided to disclose to his wife the detail of the incident which intrigued him the most, and which he had so far kept to himself.

‘What is it, dear?’. She suspected that he’d been bitten by one of the Pachycrocuta, and for fear of being deemed as cursed and subsequently cast out, he hid that detail from the elders. Their tribe had too many superstitions to keep in one’s own memory, or maybe they were just ‘stitions, as no one seemed to think there was anything ‘super’ about them.

‘No, it’s not that’, he told her, reassuringly. ‘After I’d escaped from the hyenas, and I was on my way back, I was struck by the smell that emanated from my burnt hand’.

‘I know what you mean. I was there before the elders covered it with the herbal ointment and leaves. It smelled wretched’, Ardi replied with some disinterest in her voice.

‘No’, he said in protest, ‘that smell came later. When it was freshly burnt, it smelled… pleasant.’ The expression on his face showed an odd mix of doubt, embarrassment, and playfulness. ‘What are you talking about?!’, his wife said, her tone of voice annoyed and alarmed.

‘I mean it, Ardi, it was a pleasant smell. It made me salivate.’ He lowered his voice now, especially as he said that last word, so as not to attract attention from any neighbors that might be passing by.

‘This is far worse than a Pachycrocuta curse. You’ve completely lost your mind!’. He pleaded to his wife that she wait for his explanation. ‘I think the flame has a magical power to make flesh tastier. A magic so powerful that it even made my own flesh seem palatable to me’.

‘And what do you suggest? That we start setting ourselves aflame and eating our own bodies?!’ She was still confused, and now angry at him. ‘No, I think we should torch some animal flesh and try to eat it. Do we still have any of that antelope leg left?’. Ardi responded affirmatively.

That night, which was fortunately dark and moonless, the two of them treaded stealthily to the outskirts of their cave commune where they couldn’t be detected. They took a sol-stick and what remained of the antelope leg with them. David collected some twigs and started a small fire with the sol-stick. The meat that remained on the antelope’s leg bone was scattered sporadically on one end of it, leaving the other end free for David to hold and present the meat to the fire. Little did he know, this happenstance resulted in the world’s first shish kabab.

He removed the meat from the flame just as its smell started to remind him of the smell that enticed him the day of the incident. The two of them took a piece each, and the rest was history. ‘It tastes much better than normal, and it’s much easier to chew!’ she declared triumphantly.

Enthralled by her husband’s discovery, she hugged him like she hadn’t done in a while. He pressed her body closer against his, and this time it felt sincere. ‘I think things are starting to look up for me. This discovery shall rival any of Eugene’s inventions.’ Secretly, he wondered what Lucy would think of this.

‘Forget about him for now. What should we call this?’ Ardi tried to ask him with excitement, but before she could finish speaking, he was overcome with a glossolalic trance that made his body shiver with euphoria.

‘Babe, I think we should call it a barbecue.’