No Spoilers in Title

Read at St. Dymphna’s yesterday for Page Garcia and Matthew Danger Lippman’s Wednesday night.

When I was a child I went to a Haunted House. At the very end of the journey through, after pissing myself over all the skeletons, beyond the radioactive green ooze, I came to a dark room full of holes you couldn’t see into. A teenager in a ski mask told me that if I wanted to leave I had to reach through the wall into one of the holes. There was nothing else to do, there was no choice, only bravery and risk.

I cringed as I pushed my bare little hand, like a small white spider, past the curtain and into the dark hole. I shrieked as something soft brushed me, for anything in the dark could be anything. Now I realize, in hindsight, it was Dollarstore Halloween Cobwebs that brushed me, but behind the wall it was ectoplasm, it was death itself clinging to my trembling flesh. It was the cotton batting inside a dried-up brain.

“Reach Further” the teenager said. And so I did. There was nothing else to do, no way backwards, and besides I kind of wanted, kind of needed, to find out. Goosebumps erupted all over me as my fingertips found something soft… wet…

“Feel them” the masked teenager said, so I felt. They were round and smooth. They slid around as I explored them.

“Those… Are… Eyeballs” the teenager said thickly, drippingly, oozingly, as he tapped his plastic mask with plastic witch nails t-t-t-t-t…

I did not scream but dug my hand deeper. I pinched and I squeezed.

“Hey don’t mess them up” he said, but I quickly squeezed another handful before retracting my arm. Without another word he opened the wall and released me into the parking lot.

For about a week I told everyone who would listen about the eyeballs. I told them how horrible and sickening, how I screamed and screamed and how they laughed. I did not tell how I had squeezed, how I had felt them spurt gelatinously through my clenched fingers. At school one of the teachers finally pulled me aside and told me they weren’t eyeballs. She said they were just peeled grapes, and that I needed to calm down.

I was mortified, my world was rent asunder. I did a lot of thinking and I did not calm down. Although humiliated, now I knew the secret. I knew about the infinitesimal film that separates the mundane from the Great Mystery; that interatomic distance that divides the known from the unknown, a veil as sheer and fragile as the skin on a grape. How thin a line, how potent, how extreme. Once peeled, the grape could be anything. And there’s more than one way to skin a grape.

In the year 2010, in Naperville, Illinois, a team of specialists, engineers and surgeons at Edward Hospital took a deep synchronous breath and wiped the sweat from their brows. The huge machine—the new machine—with its torque motors, magnifiers, and stabilizers, was poised within the sterile field, holding uncannily still. Like an object in a photograph, it was. Nothing in life should be able to hold so still. At the very center of everyone’s attention, under the machine, at the center of a beam of light, the grape was transfixed against a blue field. Slowly, smoothly, with the smallest scissors in the world, the da Vinci System did surgery on the grape. And the rest, as they say, is history.