Gargantua: The Battle for the Shoe Box

This summer, our apartment has apparently become the Boss Level for the biggest, baddest flies around -- the ultimate challenge for these vile little hand-rubbing beasts to see if they can be the ones to best us for our apartment, affectionately known as the Shoe Box. Perhaps it's because Doga has proven himself to be deadly accurate with the heavy-duty rubber oven mitt, arcing it like a deadly missile and smooshing flies like they were never meant to be born in the first place.

Whatever the case, at least once every 48 hours or so a new fly comes to test their merit. 

And I want to take an aside here to clarify -- when I say big, I mean enormous. These things are, I exaggerate not, the size of dimes. They buzz like they're taking steroids-- it's Vin Diesel's guttural mumble coming from a little black bug. It's terrifying.

And today, I almost met my match. 

To clarify, Doga was in Arizona, so it was just me in the Shoe Box. I was sweaty. I was tired. I had just lugged up three bags' worth of laundry five floors from the laundromat, and closed the door (which was wide open while I lugged in the laundry) when I heard the roar. The bugle horn of battle in the Shoe Box. Another fly had come to challenge us. And he had come at our weakest, when the Shoe Box's champion Doga was gone. 

Dutifully, I donned the oven mitt and began stalking my prey.  It was huge, one of the biggest I'd seen, but it was lethargic, nothing like the quick flies that had sped around dizzily, evading our gazes for hours. I thought it would be an easy conquest. The fly alighted on the wall. A perfect shot.

I was nervous. The sheer size of the Gargantua terrified me. In my moment of indecision, the oven mitt arced and missed. Gargantua, now alerted to my presence and aware that a being in the Shoe Box was actively trying to murder him, flew away. With power I knew not that he possessed, he began flying in dizzy, panicked, tremendously fast circles. I tried to ignore it and fold laundry. It was nearly impossible to kill flies when they were panicked.

But Gargantua would not be ignored. Brazenly, he flew in front of my face, his buzzing droning constantly. He was teasing me. He aligned on the laundry. He aligned on the wall behind me. The window, The bed. He was asking for me to engage. 

So I did. In a wild frenzy I began slapping the walls, the laundry, the bed, the window, each time the satisfying thunk missing its mark. Breaking the cardinal rule of fly catching, I desperately starting swinging the oven mitt in the air, hoping to smack it down from the sky.

A word of advice, folks: that never works.

Gargantua was making a fool of me. Twice he alighted within my raincoat, which was hanging on the door. Loath as I was to have a dead fly in my raincoat, I was desperate. I swung once-- and again. And, buzzing laughter, each time Gargantua emerged unfazed. He really liked my raincoat. 

The third time he landed in my coat, with everything I had, I slammed the mitt against the door.

And the buzzing stopped.

I let my breath out in relief. It was over. Gingerly, I took the raincoat from the hook and shook it out, expecting a corpse to tumble out. But nothing. Now slightly more alarmed, I checked the pocket and sleeves. Still nothing. The floor, too, was bare. Had Gargantua landed somewhere I hadn't seen? I was Achilles without the body of Hector. I had nothing to tie to my chariot to humiliate. 

Was Gargantua still alive? 

Unnerved, I went back to folding laundry.

And not five minutes later, the deep droning buzz again. He was alive. He was mocking me, taunting me. He landed on the wall behind me, as if his very life had not just been in danger of being cut short. I donned the oven mitt again, and again we jousted. 

I was desperate. I was angry. I was cheated of victory. I needed a new weapon. 

In a red blur of battle haze, I rummaged through the bathroom cabinet to find something that might kill a fly more effectively than an oven mitt. An aerosol of some sort, perhaps.

I found the spray-on sunscreen that Doga had purchased just before leaving for Arizona (which he had presumably left behind). It was unopened. I twisted the cap, and went hunting. 

Gargantua was on the floor between the head of the bed and the wall, and in a crazed frenzy like some sort of unhinged exterminator I began spraying sunscreen trying to knock him out. The room began to smell of coconut and chemicals. I got dizzy. Gargantua evaded the aerosol with the grace of the ballerina. I gave up and opened the window. 

Both of my weapons had not worked. I didn't know what else to do. Gargantua had won. Exhausted, spent, close to tears, I went to return the oven mitt to the kitchen.

But then, he made his first big mistake. Flying in front of me as innocently and delicately as a baby rabbit nibbling grass in front of a lion -- Gargantua landed on the window of the kitchen. Just within arm's reach.

I would not miss again.

Out flew the oven mitt. With a resounding crash it made contact with the window. I saw a flash of black, falling. His body had fallen behind the radiator, just out of reach.

I had won. The Shoe Box was mine again, and mine alone. 

It was almost too much to believe. It didn't feel like victory. I could feel the exhaustion of war filling my limbs. As the adrenaline began to seep out of my body, I realized that I was starving. 

I went to the window sill, where my glass nut jars sat, to eat a few walnuts in victory. And there, between the walnut and hazelnut jars, was him.

Gargantua, rubbing his little hands together smugly. 

He had survived. He was hiding. The corpse that I thought I had seen behind the radiator, in that conveniently unreachable spot, was a fly that Doga must have killed ages ago. A decoy. 

But Gargantua miscalculated. The same disgust, the distaste for killing such an enormous insect that had protected him in those first few minutes of battle -- the first moment when the oven mitt missed him against the wall -- was gone. It had burned away in the fire of war. I was battle-hardened. 

Coldly, mercilessly, deliberately -- I pushed the glass jar against the window and crushed him. He was still alive for moments after I removed the jar. I ripped off a paper towel and crushed him again. Still, his little legs moved. Finally, with my fingers, I ended his life.

Some part of me screamed at the murder, at the life that was ending at my fingertips. But I shoved that feeling down. I allowed myself a groan of agony at the sheer monstrosity of the situation. But I would not allow myself to stop killing. 

The battle with Gargantua had forged a monster. But that monster had won.

The site of death

I deposited Gargantua's body in the trash can. He had fought gloriously -- he was the best of his kind, but he had been bested. 

So now I declare: flies of the world, come. Come to the Shoe Box to avenge your brethren, if you dare.

I will be waiting.

P.S. My bed still smells like sunscreen. 

Battle instruments

Pomegranates

 My younger self was quite ambivalent about pomegranates. My dad (ever industrious) would break into the pomegranate and methodically rip out the seeds, as quickly as possible, depositing them into a bowl for my family to consume, which I did half heartedly. The little seeds were unpleasant and stuck in my teeth, and the juicy flesh was pretty to look at and tasty enough, but nothing special really.

It turns out the problem wasn’t the pomegranate. The problem was me. I had been doing it wrong. 

As an adult, I had the opportunity to buy and consume my own pomegranates. Dear reader, I will tell you what I learned about the perfect (and as far as I am concerned the only) way to eat pomegranate.

Rather than sawing it in half, as my dad had done for us, use a paring knife to make a shallow cut into the fruit, just through the pith but no further, all the way around, and then into sections.

Then, using your fingers, penetrate through the loamy white flesh with your fingers, extracting a segment of pomegranate studded with scarlet arils dripping juice, and exposing the cavernous inside, with fruit glistening like so many garnets in a pithy cave. Take a moment to appreciate the beauty. Glorious. 

Reader, when you attempt this yourself be sure to do it over a large plate or a cutting board. The mess is important here. Give yourself permission to make one.

Continue to use your fingers to extract sections of the fruit, roughly if necessary. Delicately tease the pith away from the arils with the tips of your fingers, lick the scarlet juice that accumulates on your fingertips and suck the fruit away from the pith in large luscious gulps. 

Juice and pith and peel and arils are everywhere, but it is the pure unadulterated pleasure that is key now, the rhythmic prying and sucking and hits of sugar, and penetrating still deeper into fruit yet unclaimed, the rapture, oh the rapture…

Phew. It’s intense. 

While I was staying with my parents I mentioned this newfound love of pomegranate and my mother bought me a package of pre-peeled pomegranate, to my disappointment. As you may have guessed, the pleasure in eating pomegranate comes from the chase, the challenge, the conquest of penetrating to the interior and extracting the fruit myself. Take that away, and all you have are seedy arils and the lackluster pomegranate experience of my childhood. 

At some point in my pomegranate guzzling, it occurred to me (who could’ve seen it coming) that this must be what men feel like when they — ahem — “take” — a woman’s virginity.

I am referring here to, of course, The Myth of Female Virginity, this idea that women have interior treasures that can be penetrated and taken by men, the myth of the youthful and blushing bride, dressed in white, endless comparisons to fruit and flowers and whatnot expounded in length in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. 

Here, with only a pomegranate, I am able to at least partially recreate the myth. Of course, with none of the institutional power or historical relevance that The Myth of the Virgin has enjoyed, but as I am sating myself with my pom conquest, I get it. I can feel it too.

And for perhaps the first time in my (albeit extremely privileged life) I feel myself to be the Beauvoirian Subject in a sensual encounter, acting upon an Other (my pom) to transcend my emptiness and find at least for the moment a fickle reason for existing. 

Fighting words for the existentialist. Beauvoir’s entire argument in The Second Sex hinges upon the idea that existents in general are empty— without an inherent being or meaning, and defined only by their choices. Men, like all humans, must define themselves by making authentic choices for themselves, but have instead historically opted for the easier route of striving towards meaning by subjugating, controlling, conquering, an Other— a passive person who, like a child, allows all her decisions to be made for her. As she meticulously argues, women are historically and socially primed for that role. In other words, our cultural and social institutions have led us to internalize that it’s a man’s world, and we’re just existing in it for their benefit. 

She argues that the Myth of Virginity (and other myths) are essential to keeping women in the place of Other, as existential fodder for the male gaze. By ingraining in us that women have something that can be taken, or corrupted, some idea of innocence or purity, society prevents women from being adventurous enough, bold enough to assert her own independence and live authentically as a human, not an idea or an Other. “The myth of Woman substitutes for an authentic relationship with an autonomous existent the immobile contemplation of a mirage.” She says.

The whole first half of her book is devoted to understanding such myths, picking them apart and where they may have come from. Because it’s only by understanding them that we can reject them and claim our place as existents with just as much a right to meaning as men.

I have been lucky to live a few years beyond Beauvoir, in a world where a woman not being able to vote is scandalous and where sex happens between two consenting adults who should have equal amounts of agency, not a dude deflowering some fruit or flower metaphor. 

In existential terms, I have very rarely felt being the Other as viscerally or as ardently as Beauvoir must have felt, or countless women during and before her time. But I have also never felt the privilege of being a Subject dominating an Other. 

Until I ate pomegranate.

Maybe that’s why Persephone did it and doomed us to winter (or maybe that’s why the men who invented the myth made such a big deal out of a woman eating three measly pomegranate seeds). If we’re feeling generous, eating a pomegranate in its own small way is an expression of sexual and feminine freedom. 

As a final caveat, you don't have to be a woman to enjoy the sensation of objectifying something. Anyone who has also never experienced the dominant end of the Myth of Virginity who would also find a pomegranate experience enlightening. For that matter, it doesn't even have to be a pomegranate. Grapefruit, peaches (though overdone), even concord grapes might do the trick for you. The trick is to feel entitled to take the literal fruits of your labor with whatever you do eat.

So, in conclusion: buy a pomegranate. Eat it the right way. Learn about and engage in a myth that has subjugated women for eons, without repercussions (because this is an actual object). And have fun :)