by Sophie Pinkham

Christina was on strike. She was not yet sure of its form or content, but the language of unions had spoken to her and she had decided to stage a protest, one with definite goals and an undefined length. She would strike until she got what she wanted; she would protest an unfair contract and inadequate wages.

It was raining. The sky of early adulthood was gray, as was that of New Liverpool, that tiresome city where all branches arched in the same direction and the faces of buildings all said the same thing. The tires of her bicycle slid on the wet pavement. There was a bus behind her and a bus in front of her. Angry bus-waiters glowered from the sidewalk. Christina did not have a car and did not know anyone who drove a car; this often led her to wonder whether the cars were manifestations of the city's hostility, poltergeists of an exhausted factory town eaten away by dead thoughts. A pick-up truck careened past and its passengers leaned out the windows and shrieked at her. She did not swerve. Today was the first day of decisive action. The light was yellow; it had just turned red; she pedaled faster and made it past the line of cars as it began to move forward. Her left pedal creaked. She had been mistreating her bicycle, her only mode of transportation, leaving it attached to modern buildings on rainy nights, forgetting it for days, leaving it to collapse on the sidewalk to be scratched and bent by cement and other bicycles heaped against it. Something fell; it was the reflector above the front wheel, smashed against countless bike racks. Tonight she would ride her newly unreflecting bicycle in the rain while wearing black. She would tempt fate. She loosened her grip on the handlebars; they were barely there.

She would go on strike. What was the worst that could happen? For years she had been told of the importance of taking a stand. Today she understood why.

She passed the coffee shop. Old reflex made her examine its rain-streaked window for someone she knew.

She almost hit a parked car.

She turned left on the street on which she allegedly lived. She was embarrassed by her attachment to a temporary home where she lived with strangers and mice, sticky floors, overflowing trashcans and mysterious flies. Two years there had shown her why her mother had once wept over a sink full of dishes; but she had left home and it was too late to puzzle over her mother's dishwasher. In her new home there was a washer-dryer, and she measured her unhappiness in loads of laundry. She washed clothes, towels, sheets, tablecloths and napkins she'd never even used, fearing that they had absorbed the viscous filth pervading the apartment. New Liverpool had taught her that things did not need to be touched in order to be soiled; she had often found splatters of a mysterious fluid on the walls and even the ceiling. Her clothes were dingy around the edges and the pores of her nose were clotted with dirt. What could you expect in a city where the night sky was wanton purple?

It was only starting to be evening and the sky was still gray. The wet bicycle seat was hot with effort. She was not athletic.

She turned into the alley behind her house, realized it was the wrong alley, swerved, and ran into a bush. A homeless man tittered and asked if she was all right. She looked away.

"Girl, your tires are flat," he called as he sauntered away.

She climbed the stairs to her apartment and turned her bent key in the cheap lock. The door was swollen with humidity and she had to force it. When they had first moved in they had demanded a better lock, a stronger lock, a lock like people had at home. The landlord had complied, but told them that a good lock only suggested that you had something worth stealing. They had only bothered to lock the good lock, the Yale lock, once, quickly realizing that the lock was stronger than the thin, flimsy door. Christina didn't even lock the door at all, sometimes, ever since the time she'd forgotten her key and had a boy jimmy the door with a credit card. Not even a credit card--the card you used to get a discount at the supermarket where you waited on line for half an hour behind an obese mother with a soon-to-be obese baby, using food stamps to pay for a shopping cart full of hotdogs, jumbo packs of Diet Coke and Halloween-size bags of candy.

The strike started now. She climbed the stairs. The kitchen table was covered in flooded ashtrays, mounds of stray ash, dried up orange peels and crumpled papers soaked in hot sauce, soy sauce, and God-knew-what sauce. A bulimic roommate was caterwauling upstairs.

There were two kinds of strikes: the ones where you did something and the ones where you did nothing.

For some reason it was always colder inside the house than outside. Christina shivered and wondered who had given rooms permission to be so honest. Why did the table tell the truth so loudly and without cease? Why didn't anyone else seem to hear?

Of course the truth was unbearable, she thought; that was the nature of truth, persistent and unwelcome. On the table was a book she'd bought as a joke for fifty cents at a library sale: "The Miracle of Fasting," by Paul C. Bragg, M.D., Ph.D., Life Extension Specialist. She liked to sit and read it in the morning while she ate Cheerios and drank orange juice in a small space she'd cleared away on the wooden table. It was an old book, faded and stained, with an orange cover and a picture of the author on the front. He must have been in his sixties, with white hair like cotton candy and huge, starkly white buckteeth. His lips were drawn back from his gums and his eyes were fixed on the distance. There were gray palm leaves behind him and his skin was dark and stiff. She supposed this was what you looked like when you fasted all the time. You turned into a happy mummy, and started to resemble Gandhi in the way that dog owners start to resemble their pets.

It was as good a method as any. She would fast. She went into her bedroom and sat on the bed, which was really just a mattress on the floor in the corner, since her box spring had collapsed--whether from old age or over-exertion she was unwilling to decide. Another way to go on strike would be to go to bed and not get up; but she would rather be a Paul C. Bragg than a Yoko Ono. Anyway, a strike required an audience. No, she would fast, and walk around as much as possible while doing so. While fasting she would say hello to all the people she used to ignore, she would stop wearing unseasonable sunglasses and hooded sweatshirts, she would conduct all the sidewalk interactions she had purchased a bicycle in order to avoid. She would see someone she barely knew but vaguely hated. They'd give her half a look, a long "Hi," and the "How are you?" of a host who'd rather you left immediately. "I'm fasting! How are you?" she would exclaim. They'd see the exclamation marks in her face and hurry away. She'd be well nourished by the protein shake of self-righteousness, the multivitamin of political participation.

She was more awake than she had been in months. She had started to wonder if she had chronic fatigue syndrome, or maybe mono from kissing the boy on the wrestling team. Now she understood that she had suffered only the lethargy of the unproductive. She was on strike. She got up and started making the bed. She brushed off the specks of debris that she'd tracked in from the rest of the house. She pulled the sheets tight over the mattress in hospital style, the one she'd learned on visits to authoritarian grandparents who forced her to make the bed to earn her breakfast. She tugged the edges of the quilt into symmetry. She fluffed the pillows.

She left the bedroom; there could be no more hiding. But what was it that fasters did, exactly, instead of eating? She went to the table and picked up "The Miracle of Fasting." Blocks of words were interspersed with headlines:

SICKNESS IS A CRIME--DON'T BE A CRIMINAL

WE LIVE IN A POISONED WORLD

MORE PROOF SALT NOT NEEDED

ENERVATION EXPLAINED

HUMANS WILL NOT TAKE THE BLAME FOR THEIR MISERIES

THE MIRACLE IS IN YOU

LIFE IS SLOW SUICIDE

KEEP YOUR STOMACH ALKALINE

She went to the kitchen cabinets and took out the food that belonged to her. Cheerios, spaghetti, lentil soup, granola. She opened the refrigerator: milk, chicken, apples, broccoli. She put it all on the counter. Should she throw it away? She had never been able to throw away food; with stealing library books, it was one of the few things that she considered morally wrong. Sometimes when she saw that some of her food had started to go bad, she forced herself to eat it anyway, horrified at the thought of wasting it only because she had been too disorganized about her menu plan. Should she donate it to a soup kitchen? Where was there a soup kitchen, and could she balance a cardboard box on her bike? The thought of a soup kitchen daunted her.

She found a cardboard box in a closet, and began packing food into it. She fit everything in neatly, the boxes first, and then the milk, and then the chicken and the vegetables, all covered neatly in Saran Wrap. She found a piece of paper and a marker, and wrote, in capital letters, "FOOD," with a large arrow pointing down. She found a piece of tape, and carried everything back down the complaining stairs, wading through drifts of dead leaves to the front of the house. She put the box on the sidewalk and hung the sign above it. Someone would want it. And the cold air would refrigerate it. The pioneers used to store things on their windowsills. She knew that from watching Little House on the Prairie. She didn't have a television in New Liverpool.

The lady that the landlord called Tic-Toc clocked by in her usual motley ensemble of leggings, a miniskirt, several sweaters, a gray suede jacket, old red pumps, and pounds of costume jewelry. She walked around the block over and over until nightfall, chain-smoking and never looking at anybody. If you spoke to her she veered off into another direction without looking at you, like a bat using its sonar to avoid a stalactite. Like Paul C. Bragg's, her face was brown and dry; but her gray-brown hair drooped around her drooping face, brown with tobacco and not with fasting. She never smiled.

Paul C. Bragg said that if you smoked on a fast you'd vomit, your body screaming in protest at the autointoxication. Anything could be starved away. Christina felt her stomach rumble in happy anticipation of days to come, as fear rolled over and turned to hope.

She spent the next day on a high stool at a high table in the window of a coffee shop, reading a book and not drinking coffee as ostentatiously as possible. In past years Christina had hated coffee shops, particularly ones with large windows and familiar faces. But with hunger blazoned on her face and abstinence glowing beneath her skin, she diffused into the bright, clattering, coffee-smelling room with the pride and ease of a drop of blood in a glass of water. In seminar that afternoon she didn't fall into her usual after-lunch nod, didn't have to strain her eyes straight as the teacher asked questions that got no response. Her body hummed with the grace and energy of a great cat searching for its next meal, and words on the page were undulant and distinct as a pack of gazelles on a dry savannah.

The next day she rode to the bank on her bicycle to cash her last paycheck from her job as a book sorter at the library. She used the highest gear and felt the full force of her muscles. In the exertion of strength her body vanished, assumed. With every push of her foot against the pedal, some vital essence at the top of her skull rose closer to the cold, moist air of a changing season.

She awoke under the gaze of a man with at least twenty piercings on his face. Metal balls polka-dotted the patches of skin not covered by hair bleached into leopard spots, and metal bars raised his skin into long, thin lumps. His earlobes, stretched by enormous black discs, hung nearly to his shoulders. The right side of her body burned.

"Hey, dude! We almost gave you up for dead," said the pierced man. There was a glint of further metal in his throat.

"Anor-exic coll-ege hoes," chanted a female voice in the background. A girl with wrenched-open eyes and fashionably asymmetric blonde hair appeared in the air behind the man.

"Where the fuck are the roasted peppers?" said a third voice.

"You were supposed to get some more from downstairs, asshole," said the girl, turning her head and curling her lips.

"Maybe I would have, if I hadn't gone out to get you more coke, you bitch," the third voice retorted.

The girl laughed. "Use tomatoes instead. They're red."

Christina could hear the sound of gourmet sandwiches being slung through the air. The air smelled like stale coffee. Judging from the belligerent waitpeople and crepuscular setting, she was in one of the sandwich shops farther from campus. The pierced man, who had followed the pepper argument without emotion, turned his mild, gleaming gaze back on her.

"You fell off your bike, dude. Right outside. You were, like, out, and we carried you in. You were lucky it was a cigarette break."

"Wow--thank you," she said. She felt shriveled up, like she'd sat in the bathtub too long.

"You live around here?"

"Could I have a glass of water, do you think?" The blonde girl brought her a plastic cup with cold water, and lots of ice, and a slice of lemon. It recoiled sourly in Christina's throat.

"Maybe you should eat something, man," said the pierced one, helpfully. "Would you like chips, or baby carrots?" It was clearly a line he'd said often. Neither option was very appealing. Christina hesitated.

"Actually--maybe this is too much to ask--but do you think I could have a sandwich?"

"Hell yeah! You pass out on a bike, we'll give you a sandwich. No problem. They aren't my roasted peppers anyway." He laughed, a slow, hoarse bark, a contradiction in itself.

"What kind of sandwich would you like," asked the blonde girl, athletically. She flipped her head, and the long blade of hair on the right side of her face swung to the left side. Her eyebrows were plucked into straight lines.

"Chicken and pesto, please," said Christina.

Six minutes later, still seated on the floor at the back of the sandwich shop, next to rows of bottles of flavored syrup, Christina ate a warm sandwich prepared by a coked-up, underweight blonde and served by a plump, pierced man with a leopard-spotted beard. The sandwich oozed with vinaigrette, and small discs of fresh mozzarella, yielding yet firm, peeped from between the lips of fresh, crisp bread. It took her less than ten minutes to finish.

Her bicycle had not been damaged; she found it leaning against the brick wall outside the shop. She said goodbye to those who had taken mercy on her, and bicycled home.  

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