Issue 22 - 1992

Coe Review • Issue 22
any difference, ‘cause I still have to go through all the hassle. It’s
been so many days now. Get me a new bank card. Call about my
driver’s license. I’ll cancel Macy’s card. Now, today I want you to
eat a good lunch ‘cause I’m gonna cook the Mom’s meat for you.
Promise me you’ll eat a good lunch. Do you promise? And you want
frozen chicken nuggets?” A little later she was humming a Korean
song about barley fields.
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Meanwhile, Jenny’s other brother Adam came up for a visit.
He was a slender self-confident young man who liked to wear polo
shirts. Jenny adored him and was always calling him long-distance
late at night to give him advice, which I am not certain that he
consistently followed. The look of a baby brother still clung to him.
He and his friends from Yale carried in a bucket of giant clams which
they had gathered on the beach. Jenny dumped the clams into the
sink at once and began scrubbing their shells with soapy steel wool
to get rid of every subversive germ; in Jenny’s world, as in Marisa’s,
every alien must be sterilized. She steamed the biggest ones, who
sighed futilely through their excurrent siphons; the rest I popped into
the freezer for five minutes to weaken them so that their numb
adductor muscles would be unable to resist my knife; already sick
from the long oceanless ride in the trunk of Adam’s car, they cracked
open in easy surrender to their sushi doom. I carried them out on a
plate and set them before Adam, who sat at the dining room table
loudly laughing with his friends, these boys evidently respecting
him as their leader, much as Izutsu and Sagara respected Isao in
Yukio Mishima’s Runaway Horses because Isao was going to turn
them into rightwing extremists and then become divine by cutting
open his belly in a ritual rapture that would most likely make the sun
explode behind his closed eyelids; I imagine that Adam’s clams felt
this way when I slit them open; but Adam accepted them without
seeing either them or me and passed them to his disciples, who cried,
“Adam! Adam!”, and Adam gave one clam to Jenny and then ate
one, and passed the clams to Izutsu and Sagara again, who doubtless
were learning how to become divine with him at Yale. - “Well,
Adam, do you need anything?” I said. He went on talking to his
friends. But when he saw me in Jenny’s bed, his jaw fell and he
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