Marks

When I was a kid, two Japanese monks dressed in long robes appeared on a TV variety show. One held a samurai sword, the other an armful of different-sized fruit. One monk lay down on his back and balanced a watermelon on his stomach. The other raised the sword high over his head and brought it down in a flash until the two halves of watermelon fell to the floor. The monk on his back was clearly untouched by the blade.

The two men switched roles. One monk placed the curve of a banana on the curve of his head. The other swung a wide, horizontal arc so that, after the blade penetrated the fruit, one third fell to the right shoulder of the monk, one third fell to the left, and the middle third balanced on the flat, upturned side of the sword. Not a strand of hair had moved. The monks dealt in their turn with an orange, a kiwi, and finally two blueberries poised in the cleft of one man’s chin.

After I moved out of the house, my first roommate hated that I would slice an onion without a cutting board under it. I asked her to show me any marks I had made on the countertop, but she never could find them. Many years later, a man I loved claimed all I needed to do was to run my hands over his stomach before he could feel tiny slices being made of his liver. He sometimes woke up choking in the middle of the night after dreaming I had kissed him, turning his tongue to filets.

As Lao-Tzu might say, the vegetable cuts as deep as the knife. The potato skin lets the blade in, but it reaches around the knife too, almost as if a grief lived in the steel, some hard sharp thing only a milky juice could soothe. You or I might watch this and not know anything is happening. We’d look for marks but find nothing.