Kiley’s alone this time. What is she doing driving the car? Just outside her car window is the black box, that menacing master of modernity. Any human contact is well hidden behind the looming smirk of this machine.
The hum and buzz of technology manifests itself in the sudden explosion of human voice into the open car window: “FRIES WITH THAT?"
Garbled, but somehow decipherable through the webs and crackles of wires and static… “FRIES WITH THAT?” …and Kiley’s answer, somehow now very important: words spoken and recorded on the other unseen end by the push of a button, these same words recorded again only morphing now into the fries themselves: calories; lard; complex carbohydrates; mono-unsaturated linseed oil; pooling and sinking into the dimpled yellow sad limp fry, recorded not on paper but on flesh. No longer a fry, but clumps of cellulite, folds of fat and dimpled wobbly flab… born from the grease that feeds our drive-thru generation.
Floating, I watch as in it’s digested form it clings to thighs and bellies and arms, desperate and maniacal, a Marine to clinging to his fallen flag.
This Fat. Worthless, inanimate and pointless, not just an additive or an ingredient, but it… of and from and by…. polyhydrogenation!
And finally this: this box, screaming and roiling, shaking and over and over the voice: “FRIES WITH THAT?”
“FRIES WITH THAT?” And Kiley too, shaking and cowering, all at once hating the lumps of polyunsaturates that feed her and ruin her, forcing her generation to try to squeeze into their acid-washed jeans and cheap polyester tube tops, stretching over rolls of stomach.
Kiley answers, softly at first, but then louder, finally drowning out the relentless blare of the microphone: “I DON’T! I DON’T! I DON’T WANT THE FRIES! I DON’T WANT THE FRIES!”
“KILEY, HEY!” I cry out, waking with a jump.
Oh man, I’ve got to get home… I’ve got to get home, my mind keeps repeating over the splash of pee I’m donating free of charge to my Saudi toilet. I lean against the bathroom wall, watching the stream in the mirror.
I’ve got to get home I announce to the aging, sagging face looking sadly back at me.
Asleep again, now I’m on a checkout line at Winn Dixie.. I know I’m asleep, I know I’m watching myself advances on the line. Then I see The National Enquirer and I know my time is near. The Enquirer is just like death… you try not to think about it, but it’s always there waiting for you right above the Tic-Tacs and there’s not a thing you can do about it!
When my turn came, I was all alone on a grassy knoll at the front of the store, facing the cold hard stare of the checkout girl, the girl with Kiley’s face.
I placed the milk of the lower fat persuasion, all two and one-half pounds of swordfish, and the stuffed dog on the fast moving blackness of the conveyor belt.
“Is that all?” she asks in a manner some checkout girls with the rank of Assistant Manager use. It was a kind of dialect, but I understood it well enough.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so my little rabbit?” Now I was pleased not to have left the stuffed dog unbought on the shelf.
“Paper or plastic?”
This was the question I hated. I never knew how you were supposed to answer. My wife Geri always knew, but her cell phone would be turned off. For a moment I felt the responsibility of the whole environment on my shoulders and this was maybe the toughest thing I’d ever have to do.
“Shit, nothing, nothing” I screamed, exiting quickly through the automatic sliding doors into the warm suburban air.
There is never any end to suburbia. “Maybe suburbia is what we have instead of God?” I would ask Geri, she would know…maybe I could page her.