TELEVISION TALK SHOW, a man named Michael spoke, his gaze drifting over and over to something beyond the camera and snapping back into position only at the prompting of the host. His scalp had been shaved, poorly. He was seated in a purple armchair that looked ugly and at the same time expensive, wearing a nice gray suit that he kept grabbing at, trying to pull it tighter across his body. He was here to explain the series of events that had led to his arrest, and he had prepared a video to help him talk. Over his head the screen faded to black and then there were scenes of veal farming: shaky handheld shots showing the crated calves gridding endlessly through long dark rooms. They ate in lines, slept in lines, fastened to their positions by lengths of chain. Stillness kept their flesh tender, prevented effort from knotting the fibers of their meat into muscle. Their low-iron diet ensured that color would not stick to the inside of the bodies. Lack of light kept pigment from ripening in the flesh. In the darkness of the warehouse farm, the calves grew whiter and whiter and softer, and the thought of this darkness wrapped around so many swelling lives grew a parental protectiveness in Michael, alongside an aimless hunger.
In the grocery store near his apartment, the slabs of pale meat were faceless, yet somehow still sad. The sadness was in the meat. Or maybe it was in him, he couldn’t tell which: it hovered between them both, stretched taut like a cord. He watched the slices, splayed out on Styrofoam. He handled packages, made dents with his fingers in the plastic-wrapped flesh, and watched them disappear the moment he lifted his hand from the surface. When he held them he could feel the big dark spaces full of moaning life. The grocery store stocked only five or six packages of veal at a time, and he bought half of this veal and took it home. He didn’t know what he would do with it afterward.
I just wanted to set it free,
he said on the TV.
Michael stored veal cutlets in his fridge and left them there in the cold dark. He went to work six days a week delivering mail through slim slots. As he made his rounds, he thought about the meat shivering in stacks. Sectioned off and stunted, it still needed a guardian. When he went back to the grocery store, the veal section had regrown — as though he had never been there, had never handled the stiff bundles and brought them out into the sunlight, then back into the dark cold of the refrigerator. He bought up all the veal this time, then for weeks afterward he bought all the veal and just kept it until there was no space for the new veal. Because there was no place to store it, he began to eat it instead, this veal that would not fit, filing it away in the utter dark of the digestive tract, tucking it into himself like a parent putting a child to bed. He cooked it simply, seasoned with salt and pepper, fried in butter on the stove. The meaning of the act of saving the veal had become less clear to him even as it became easier and more natural to do.
At the same time, the grocery store had begun to keep more in stock to meet customer demand, the demand that was his alone. Now there were ten to twelve packets of veal each time he came. He couldn’t afford to buy them all, but he did anyway, burying the packages in a hole he dug in the side yard near the rhododendrons, because the fridge was full. When he had used up what was in his bank account, he snuck them out of the store under his shirt, the flat faces of the veal pressed against pale, soft stomach, slab to slab, until one day he was arrested and charged on multiple counts of theft and aggravated assault.
The smooth edges of the cutlets: as if they had just grown that way, perfect and glandless. As if they had been peeled off, gently, from a larger cutlet, a mass long and cylindrical and placid. That even, stirred-together color of the flesh, the occasional streak of pure white that trailed off the side, hinting that it had