The Whale Belly

Fifteen years ago I was walking across a mostly empty parking lot towards the back entrance of the supermarket when I saw a shirtless man running towards me with a chainsaw. I hadn’t noticed him until he was about twenty feet away, because I had been listening to music with headphones on and staring at the ground. My head went fuzzy, and I went somewhere in between flight and freeze, a sort of shuffling stumble, while averting my gaze like I’ve done so many times when pursued by monsters in bad dreams.

But then he changed directions. My tunnel vision receded, and I realized that there were half a dozen police officers flanking and pursuing him. They all looked wrong, though. Too slow, clumsy, dispassionate. The shirtless chainsaw man slowly jogged in loping circles and the officers seemed to sway with him, sticking out limp arms and legs in a desultory attempt to block his escape. It looked like some end-of-practice football drill, or a drunken ballet, except with chainsaws and tasers. The shirtless chainsaw man was crying, though I couldn’t hear him over the music. Sweat and tears glistened all over him. He held his tragedy mask of a face up to the sky.

This went on for about twenty more seconds, though who knows how long they had been at it before I arrived, then he fizzled to a halt in front of one of the police officers, hung his head, and handed him the chainsaw like a contrite child. A different officer walked up behind him and touched his arm. He didn’t resist the cuffs and they took him away in a squad car, his face leaning against the glass.

I continued on to the store and bought what I had had in mind from the beginning. Vegetarian barbeque brisket and tofu egg salad, something I used to eat a lot of back then for some reason. They came refrigerated in eight ounce containers. I bought one of each along with some beer and tortillas and walked back through the parking lot and on to my apartment a few blocks away.