(A D Jameson has a new book out by Lawrence & Gibson, a remarkable little outfit in New Zealand renowned for their beautiful hand-sown craftsmanship. Jameson’s new book, entitled Giant Slugs, is a strange and alluring creation; it’s narrator exiled, ousted, put out by those oozing outsized interlopers, denied his true inheritance, his due kingly crown. So begins this epicene narrator’s epichorial wanderings (part epicrisis, part epicedium) in this largely silly, slightly filthy, pun-laden Epicurean retelling of the ages-old Epic of Gilgamesh.)
On the fifth day, our class was taken on a field trip to Ninja City’s secret portions, the developing suburban bailiwicks, expanding eastward at the rate of three blocks per year. The slogan of these newer parts was, “Virus-Free Since ’93!” Their motto was, “We Will Find the Serum.”
The ninjas who lived there, global warming enthusiasts, threw webbed geodesic domes over desolate tracts—the war-scarred landscape it had been left to them to develop. When the finished dome was turned on, it generated an interior rain that lasted for forty days and thirty-nine nights. When the domes were taken down, the desolation had been transformed into normal, productive topsoil, rich loam like you’d find in a national forest. Other ninjas, the ones whose talents disposed them to comprise the follow-up crew, paved over the mess and poured concrete sidewalks marked with their handprints and the date. Then they built roadside stands from which they sold pints of Noby Sheets’s coleslaw. (She used her spare time once a week to make big vats of the stuff, the most delicious slaw I’d ever tasted.)
We each got one mouthful. “We’d normally have a cookout,” Hooter Iowan explained, “a charcoal bonanza replete with grilled walking ferns and well-done wallaroo, plus apple pie smashed in a cup, and quiche smoothies served from a cart so overladen it’s hard to push between the tables, it gets so stuck in the mud. But Master Adocim, worried sick about what he calls ‘the mutton-like state of your bellies and your butts,’ says that such a picnic will have to wait until after your training is done.”
A ravenous moan went up. Half a dozen acolytes cast desperately about, looking to wolf down whatever wasn’t tied down. We found naught but sticks and muck, forest floor inedibles, to fill our stomachs’ lacunae. I weathered it better than most; I hadn’t eaten for so long that by then I no longer really noticed.
The region’s incessant fighting had kicked so much soot into the sky, creating eternal midnight, that we couldn’t tell what time of day it was—and while we couldn’t tell, it got awful chilly. We instinctively formed a circle to hold in our warmth, while our shaggy assistants fractured and frictioned sticks to ignite a fire. “It’s still not quite time to head back,” Hooter Iowan said. “Keep enjoying your field trip.”
