The Year of the Cow’s Eye

That year, my mother worked as a secretary at a law firm. At night, she took paralegal classes at Cleveland Community, getting home long after I had fixed a tuna sandwich and slipped into bed. I’d stare up at the ceiling until I heard the reluctant gears of the garage door begin to churn, and when my mother poked her head inside my room, I’d feign sleep. My father had the same job he’d always had, always would have: Regional Sales for a snack food company based in Akron, hawking individually wrapped oatmeal pies and chocolate cupcakes, all sugar and lard and yellow number five, three boxes for the price of one. In his briefcase, he carried a laminated flip-board presentation which he wiped clean with Windex every evening.

That year, my parents — –good-natured Mid-Westerners, descendants of chapped-handed dairy farmers, a bit of Irish thrown in somewhere on my father’s side to keep things interesting — –they argued constantly; about money, about the position on the thermostat (and then, the heating bill), about their friends the Millers, who had bought a big house in Shaker Heights, about the possibility for a new car with power windows (one window on our Corolla was permanently stuck in the halfway position, covered with plastic when it rained, which it did often that fall, because this was Ohio, gray being the official state color, and so yes, it rained.) My mother complained about Larry Weinstein, the senior partner at the firm, and his grabby hands — the nerve he had to tell her to dress more appropriately, meaning lose the slacks and let’s see some leg. All this she relayed to my father over breakfast one morning as he held the sports page in front of his face like it was a sneeze guard. Without looking up, he said, What do you think you’re going to do? Quit? Start problems? My mother’s face turned crimson in gradients, and then mine followed.

I was eleven, about to be twelve, Fatty Matty, Fatso Mattso, or just plain Fatt, taking my first awkward steps into the chilly waters of adolescence, big on top, skinny on the bottom, a klutz. At school I hid behind the pages of Treasure Island, The Invisible Man, anything by Jules Verne. I sat against the brick wall by the parking lot, across from where the stoners blasted metal through their ghetto boxes and smoked Marlboros while the theater kids puffed on cloves, all of them huddled up against each other⎯the wind off Lake Erie had a way of doing that, of forcing people together. After school, I’d plant myself in front of the television, do a half-assed job on my homework and eat cupcakes that had condensation forming on the inside of the wrappers, boxes of which were shoved into cabinets, stacked in the coat closet, piled against the wall in the garage next to the broken snow blower.

I had always been a quiet, affable kid. It had never really occurred to me to cause problems, if for no other reason than to avoid putting any more stress on my parents; but for the first time, I found myself getting into trouble at school. I scattered thumbtacks across the faculty parking lot, then wait to see if any tow trucks showed up at the end of the day. In English class, a dead sparrow I had discovered in a field one morning eventually found its way into Mrs. Stender’s desk drawer, along with a note attached that read: Bored to Death. Mrs. Stender screamed, jumped backward, lost her balance and gashed her head on the metal chalkboard ledge. A few weeks later, I made a cow’s eye disappear from my station in the biology lab, and had it reappear later that day during lunch, ogling Suzie Abrams’ faintly mustached face from between the starchy white buns of her sloppy joe sandwich. One by one, the entire seventh grade was brought into Principal Isernhagen’s for questioning. I’d deny it, shrug my shoulders, play the loner without a motive. But in the end, there was no accounting for the fact that mine was the only cow’s eye that had gone missing. My parents were called, but my father was traveling, and my mother, sounding exhausted and exasperated on the phone, was unable to leave the reception desk of the law firm to come get me.

So it came to be that in the windowless detention room off the faculty lounge of High Plains Middle School, I first met Luka Kolyakov; Luka, who had appeared out of nowhere earlier that year, having escaped (or something like that) from Russia. Let’s all welcome him, Principal Isernhagen had said in the auditorium as Luka stood motionless and tree-like with his pointy elbows, tangled nest of blonde hair, crooked nose, and a thin pink scar that traveled from the corner of his mouth to his right eye, which drooped a little because of it.

But would anyone welcome him? Or, would they learn to call him Khrushchev, Commie, Chernobyl? Would he find his crowd? Or, would Brady O’Donnell, older and broad shouldered, snatch Luka’s pants out of his hands after gym class and shove them into an unflushed toilet? Luka pulled a knife and ended up in that detention room with me that day, fair enough, but Brady went completely unpunished (the gym teacher, it turns out, was also the soccer coach, and Brady, a strong defender, was needed for an upcoming game; plus he was good-looking and well-liked by most). But Luka, on the other hand, with his patchwork clothes and sandpaper accent, well, who brings a knife to school anyway? This was Cleveland, America. It was still the Cold War.

His first words to me: You are boy behind hidden cow’s eye? Hidden spoken like something was caught in his throat. These words began our brief and tenuous friendship.

⎯You are boy behind hidden cow’s eye?

⎯ I guess.

He held his thin hand out and I shook it.

⎯That is good joke.

(If I hadn’t reached into my backpack and taken out a cellophane-wrapped brownie and slid it across the table, maybe it would have gone no further. But if it’s lonely at the top, as they say, then it was even lonelier at the bottom.)

He chewed the brownie, unimpressed.

⎯In Russia, cow’s eye is special food. Delicately, yes?

⎯ You mean you eat it? Delicacy?

⎯Yes, we eat. Delicately.

⎯Gross. What does it taste like?

⎯When she comes, my mother will make syrinkis for me. Maybe for you too.

⎯Where is she?

⎯St. Petersburg. Waiting for visa.

⎯When will she get here?

⎯Not today. My father says maybe not tomorrow either.

I was a tub dressed in stiff Kmart jeans, stretched out sweaters, off-brand tennis shoes, but if anyone dressed worse, it was Luka, his clothes pathetically eastern European: tight denim pants, polyester shirts with absurd collars, a matted brown jacket with tufts of synthetic stuffing poking out of the seams. We became friends through attrition. It was basic math; as the days became colder and the wind pushed everyone else inside, we were simply what remained. No longer dispatched to the reading wall, I showed Luka how to play tetherball. I lent him my handheld football game, my Six-Million Dollar Man action figure, I taught him how to balance a stack of pennies on his bony elbow and catch them in his hand with a quick swipe of his arm, a feat he received endless hours of pleasure perfecting, as if this would have been impossible anywhere but in America. In exchange, Luka taught me how to smoke a cigarette, demonstrated the correct way of opening a butterfly knife, showed me my first porno mag⎯a relic from Prague or Amsterdam. The women wore thick blue eye shadow, mouths open wide as if they were singing opera. His father had given it to him, he told me. His father also had tapes. If I wanted to see them, which I didn’t, I just had to ask.

(It’s worth mentioning here that according to rumors that had popped up around school, Luka’s father had connections to the Russian mafia. In the course of one week, I overheard that he had cut a man’s ear off (hallway), blown up a house (cafeteria), buried someone alive (bathroom), and so on. I never asked Luka if it was true. Like all rumors, no one, including myself, was actually interested in its veracity, it was enough that it was just there — entirely plausible and yet somehow impossible at the same time. (Much like the story of a conflagration on the Cuyahoga River on the night I was born.)

⎯You will come to my house after school? Luka said one morning.

This was three, four weeks into our friendship, after we had gauged each other’s trust, after I had become more confident in this unfamiliar role as a companion.

⎯I will show you pictures of Russia. Of my mother.

⎯Okay.

⎯Is very beautiful. I have many.

We rode the city bus, crossing over to the other side of the Cuyahoga, past the dog food plant and the paper mills that gasped ammonium vapors, past the spewing smoke stacks that used to be part of Standard Oil — we called them the Cigs — all of them collectively making our eyes burn. We stepped off in front of a multi-family, high-density apartment complex, thirty identical rectangles with sagging porches and wind chimes tinkling off key, the occasional rusted out barbeque. Luka led me in silence past buildings called Oak, Cherry, Maple — woods that had decidedly not been used, not even remotely considered, during construction.

When Luka unlocked the front door and we went inside, I was struck by the smell, an amalgamation of something sour and fishlike mixed with cigarette smoke trapped in carpet fibers and couch cushions. This was a tiny one bedroom apartment, musty, sun-starved, paper thin walls. There was an alcove kitchen with burn marks on the counters, a folding card table against the wall, an empty bottle of alcohol I didn’t recognize, stacks of Russian newspapers piled up on the floor. I don’t know if it was guilt I felt standing in that apartment, but I couldn’t imagine what kind of life in Russia had been so bad that this was an improvement. I pictured Luka huddled in a damp cave or living under a tarp on some howling, icy tundra. In any case, I wanted to leave, I knew that much. I noticed, off in the distance, the blue refractions of light from an aquarium. It was the only thing that seemed alive. I walked over to it and looked inside.

⎯You have fish?

Luka pointed to a rock cave and knocked on the glass.

⎯Here is where Humphrey Bogart likes to hide. But Talia is not afraid. Talia swims everywhere.

⎯I don’t see anything.

⎯Maybe they are sleeping.

I pressed my face against the cool tank and peered into the cloudy water, but I am absolutely sure there were no fish in there, just green slime that coated the pebbles and clung weakly to the air valve.

⎯You would like to see a secret?

⎯I should probably go home.

⎯I show you first. Is very good secret.

⎯I guess. Then I need to go.

Luka pulled a chair into the kitchen and climbed on top of it. He opened a cabinet and pulled down a small discolored suitcase. He set it down on the floor with care.

⎯You can’t tell anybody I showed this.

⎯I won’t.

⎯You promise?

⎯I promise. What is it?

He unlatched the suitcase and lifted the lid. I had never seen guns before, not up close, not where I could touch them. There were three of them, dull and black, scratched and duct taped together like old salvaged toys.

⎯Are they real?

⎯Of course they are real. This is Kalashnikov. These are Markarovs. Here.

Luka picked up one of the pistols and handed it to me. I took a step back.

⎯That’s okay.

⎯It is not loaded. The bullets are somewhere else.

⎯Put it back.

⎯You are afraid?

⎯No, I just don’t want to.

⎯My father says, in Russia, gun is like freedom. Everyone wants, but no one has.

⎯But he has them.

⎯You have shot gun before?

⎯No. Once, at a Boy Scout camp. I shot a rifle. But just at a target.

⎯What is Boy Scout?

⎯Never mind.

From the other room, someone coughed and we both jumped. Luka quickly returned the briefcase to the cabinet and put his finger to his mouth. He walked to the back of the apartment and tapped quietly on the bedroom door.

⎯Papa? Papa?

Luka opened the door. From where I was standing, I could make out the edge of a bed with no sheets on the mattress and four intertwined legs hanging off the end, two of them thick with hair, two of them plump and smooth. There was a gruff exchange in Russian, something was thrown against the door and then the sound of glass breaking. A woman giggled, and Luka, head down, closed the door behind him and ran past me. Outside, he fumbled with the lighter. He lit up a cigarette, sucked it in, blew it out his nose, coughed.

⎯Who was that?

⎯My father.

⎯Who was with him?

⎯A woman.

⎯Your mother?

⎯No, shithead. I tell you. My mother is in Russia.
⎯I know. Then who was she?

⎯Not my mother. Last week, it was also not my mother. Next week it will again not be my mother, okay?

⎯Okay, okay. Sorry.

We wound our way in silence through the maze of dead end streets, covering for each other while one of us stole chrome caps off car tires. We walked along the sooty banks of the Cuyahoga River throwing rocks at cans and boxes that floated by. Back then, the Cuyahoga was a moving landfill. The water was thick and brown, breathing with subsurface gasses. Luka kicked an empty water jug into the river and together we watched it capsize and sink. To change the mood, I told Luka the story my parents had recounted to me on so many occasions, a story which by then had taken on such mythic proportion, I wasn’t even sure if it was true.

What happened is this: On the night I was born, the Cuyahoga River burned. Slick and slow moving with industrial sludge, it self-ignited, like magic (some say the sparks from a passing cargo train were most likely the catalyst, although that is pure speculation.) The river burned! my father would tell me. Can you imagine? You should have seen it. Your mother and I were newlyweds then, she was even more beautiful pregnant. She and I (and you!) were walking, there was a sound, and the whole sky glowed orange, isn’t that right? And here my mother would add, He’s right, sweetie, the river caught on fire, and a few hours later, there you were! We were both so happy. (Today there is still a saying in Cleveland: “You don’t drown in the Cuyahoga, you decay.”)

Luka looked at me with slanted eyes.

⎯This is true story?

⎯My parents say it is.

⎯That is good story. You are lucky.

⎯I am?

⎯I do not have story to tell you now. Maybe later I tell you story.

⎯That’s okay.

In December, my father’s company was sold to a candy and cigarette distributor across the lake in Canada. There were layoffs, but my father was spared, for better or for worse. He was instead assigned the unenviable task of traveling around the country whipping the sales teams of other crusty, jaded lifers into shape. He may have kept his job, but he lost his freedom. Gone for weeks at a time, he took on a ghostlike presence; I heard his footsteps creaking through the floorboards in the middle of the night, I could smell his Old Spice lingering with his Pall Malls after I woke up, bleary-eyed, late for school. On the few occasions when he was at home, he only managed to mumble a greeting to me as though he vaguely remembered having met me once or twice, or he confined himself to his den off the kitchen, where he drank vodka tonics, listened to Springsteen, read spy novels. My mother’s skirts had gotten progressively shorter. She had stopped complaining about her boss. Instead, she walked with heavier footsteps, moved in quick, abrupt movements. I became accustomed to the muffled arguments coming from my parents bedroom, tuning them out the way you do a jackhammer outside your window.

I began sneaking out of the house after my mother had gone to bed. I’d meet up with Luka at the 7–11 on Astor Road to play video games and flip through motorcycle magazines. It had become something of a hangout, a safe house for each of us. Absconding into the dark, running through backyards, hopping fences, darting behind trees when I saw headlights — it all gave me an unsettling, gelatinous feeling of something — of the possibility that I might not go back, that I might just keep on running. Luka’s mother still hadn’t come from Russia. I imagined (and still do) that Luka just walked out the front door, his father not even asking where he was going. But for me, the thought of my mother waking up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and finding my bed empty was too much. Before I left, I put a note on my pillow that said something to the effect of: Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m at the 7–11 playing video games. I’m not kidnapped or anything. Love, Matt.

This particular night (and it did start out that way, as just some night), I arrived at the 7–11 and found Luka playing Air Force Commando in the corner. I knew he saw me, yet he didn’t say anything to me as I stood behind him. He wasted all his ammo in the first few minutes, holstered the plastic gun, kicked the machine.

⎯Fuck this game. It is piece of shit.

⎯ Don’t worry about it.

Luka kicked the machine again, kept kicking it, until Tyler Jansen, a boy that had dropped out from the high-school adjacent to our middle school, looked up from behind the counter and blew the bangs out of his eyes.

⎯Hey Khrushchev, you break the game, I break your face.

⎯This game is already broken.

⎯ Come on, Luka. Let’s get some candy.

I pulled him into the candy aisle. Luka took a package of Gobstoppers and slid them into the waist of his pants, like a dare. Tyler looked up from his magazine again.

⎯You girls better pray I don’t catch you stealing.

⎯Do you have Charleston Chew?

⎯What? Sorry? You say something, Khrushchev? I don’t speak no Commie talk.

⎯In Russia, my father would kill you for one dollar.

⎯Well I guess we have a problem, Khrushchev, because this ain’t Russia, and from the way you’re sliding candy down your ass crack, you don’t have no dollar anyway.

⎯You. Fuck you.

⎯You fuck me? No thanks. I’ll pass.

I had to drag Luka by his jacket to get him to leave. We walked along Memorial Drive, a four lane thoroughfare that traced the edge of Lake Erie. We climbed the pedestrian stairs up to the overpass; it was the mid-point between us, I’d go one way and Luka would go another. A front was coming in off the lake, the mist needling our faces like sand. Below, cars sloshed by in random pulses while out on the water the lights of a cargo tanker flashed blue and red, its baritone call barely reaching us. We stood for a while looking down at traffic, hawking loogs, jumping up and down to stay warm. I turned to say goodbye to Luka but stopped short. He was holding gnarled chunk of brick (or something) he’d found sitting in the gutter, tossing it into the air, each time thrusting it higher.

⎯We will play a game, yes? You go first.

⎯What?

⎯You know what is Russian roulette? Like that. With cars.

⎯No way, you’re crazy.

⎯Probably it will just hit the ground.

⎯No way, no way.

⎯You are afraid?

⎯I’m cold. I’m going home.

⎯Pussy.

⎯It’s late.

⎯Fag.

And I was going home, I turned to leave, but from the corner of my eye, I saw the brick. It was already airborne, free of gravity for a few short seconds, sailing, yes, like a brick, over the guard rail. Luka’s eyes were frozen and wide. There was a brief respite of silence, and then a thud, and a crash down below, the sound of metal being reshaped. Luka said something in Russian and took off running, his long limbs waving wildly, but I could only stand there, my face damp with mist, feet firmly anchored, until I heard sirens off in the distance.

When I got home that night, wet and shaking, electrified, I expected to find my mother pacing, worrying her hair, her bathrobe pulled tight, somehow having sensed what had happened, what I’d been up to. But the house was as dark and quiet as I’d left it. The note I’d written was still on the pillow, undisturbed, and if there’s a feeling that’s both relief and disappointment, then that’s what I felt as I crawled back into bed.

The next morning, my mother was making us both identical lunches: peanut butter and butter sandwiches, an oatmeal raisin cookie from the stash, carrot sticks.

⎯I’ve got class tonight Matty. Here’s some money for pizza. Maybe invite your little friend, the Russian boy over, what’s his name?

⎯I don’t know, maybe.

⎯You look tired. Are you sleeping okay?

⎯Yeah.

She turned to the black and white television sitting on the counter, where a newscaster was talking, a somber look on his face. She turned up the volume and we listened to the details, laid out for us in monotone: Car, hit by brick (or rock, or some other large object) thrown from above on Memorial Drive. Female, pregnant, St. Luke’s, I.C.U., anyone with information — –

My mother gasped, shook her head and dropped the sandwich in the bag.

⎯What kind of person would do something like that? Who goes around like that? What kind of sicko? (Sicko being a word she reserved for the worst of the worst, the dregs, the ones who were beyond saving.) She kissed me on the forehead, handed me my jacket, and I was out the door before she could see I was crying.

At school, I avoided Luka, checking the hallways for him before I moved from class to class. During lunch, I went to the nurse with the complaint of a phantom stomach ache and curled up on a cot. But when I was crossing the soccer field to go home, I saw Luka’s thin frame running towards me. I pretended like I hadn’t seen him. When he caught up with me, his eyes were narrowed, no sign of friendly recognition in his face. It was as if he’d aged overnight.

⎯If you tell anyone, I’ll beat your ass so hard.

⎯But⎯

⎯I swear to God I will.

⎯That woman is in the hospital.

⎯You shut your face.

Before I could even register what was happening, Luka’s arm was around my neck in a choke hold. My right arm was pinned behind my back.

⎯You promise, you fat fuck. Yes? You tell no one.

⎯Okay, I won’t. I won’t. I promise.

To say I was crying would not do justice to the blubbering, bawling, hyperventilating pile of lard I was when he finally let go and I collapsed to the ground, gasping. I remember the feel of the cold grass rubbing against my cheek, the rash I’d have from it the next day. Luka looked me up and down, pursed his lips, nodded his head in a theatrical gesture of satisfaction, a gesture that suggested there was no more business between the two of us. (Only now do I realize that Luka was imitating his father; I’ve seen it performed time and again in second-rate mob movies.)

⎯Good. Good. You see? We are friends. We are Comrades.

He sank his head into the collar of his jacket, turned and walked away from me, the frozen blades of grass crunching like broken glass beneath his feet. Luka and I exchanged only fleeting glances in the hallways after that day. Who was avoiding whom, it was not clear.

My father traveled more and more as the winter wore on, always calling from some other city to say he was being sent out to more districts, that he wouldn’t be home for another few days, another week. Occasionally I saw Luka hanging around with one or two other kids I didn’t know, puffing on cigarettes or spitting chew, but those sightings were rare. I kept to myself, having long since resumed my position against the reading wall. At home, my mother seemed to be on a kind of personal crusade. She took an extra class at paralegal school in order to graduate early. She moved about with a determination I couldn’t quite figure out. Her lips sometimes moved as if she were talking silently to herself. Occasionally, I saw her pocket a few bills from the flour jar where she kept her rainy day fund. One afternoon, I walked into the house, and used to finding it quiet and empty, was surprised to see my father’s coat flung over the dining room chair, his suitcase still sitting by the door. I heard my parents’ voices in the kitchen and climbed halfway up the stairs to listen.

⎯How long, Ben? How long has it been going on?

⎯For Christ’s sake I don’t know. Four, five months.

⎯Five months?

⎯It just. It’s not what you think.

⎯Five months, Ben? Four months? Six months?

⎯Calm down. Just calm down and let’s talk about this like adults.

⎯Were you even in St. Louis this week?

⎯Can we just talk? Let’s just talk.

⎯ I’m such a fool.

⎯I’m sorry.

⎯Go to hell.

Maybe I’m compressing time here, maybe in actuality, that conversation came after Luka’s death. This was thirty years ago. But for the sake of argument, the way I remember it is like this: Luka’s mother was not coming from Russia. He told me this on the day he died, having come to school with a swollen lip and a bruise on his left cheek, blue and speckled like a robin’s egg. It was the first time we had spoken face to face since the day on the soccer field. I didn’t know what to say to him. The visa application had been denied, or misplaced, or something like that, his father had told him. But what mattered — what Luka was to get through his head, was that she was not coming. We had walked a few miles down to Lake Erie, and he told me all of this as we sat on the frozen sand, listening to the shushing of the surf come in off Lake Erie, a lake that swells and recedes like an ocean, that’s how big it is.

His last words to me: It’s cold.

The official conclusion was that Luka’s death was an accident, explained to the authorities in detail by Luka’s father via a police translator named Sergi. What happened is this: Luka’s father came home later that night. Yes, he had been drinking, he couldn’t deny that, he was a drinker (he was a Russian). There was a woman with him, plump and busty (also a Russian). Yes, he was married, but his wife was still in Russia, he wasn’t proud, but that’s personal business, a complicated situation. When they entered the apartment, Luka was upset, talking nonsense. He was waving a gun at them. Yes, it was his gun. Permit? What is permit? No, he wasn’t aware he needed this, he was new to this country. Trying to reason with his son, he approached slowly. (Here he reenacted how he moved towards where Luka had stood, walking carefully, his hands outstretched, palms up). When he got close enough, he grabbed Luka’s arm (like this). There was a struggle, here you can see that the fish tank was knocked over. Water went everywhere. They fell to the ground, the woman was screaming, and then, the hollow, surprisingly quiet crack of the gun discharging, no louder than the popping of a champagne cork.

(Of course, having not been present, it’s obvious that I am imagining some of these details, that my mind has filled in certain blanks, but I am still struck at how vivid it seems, it’s as if I am in that apartment with them, watching, reaching out to them like holograms.)

Pictures were taken, chalk lines were drawn. To the best of the detectives’ abilities, the story seemed intact, although it was late, the officers were tired and underpaid, and there would be other bodies to deal with that night. Remember, this was Cleveland. There would be a cursory investigation. Luka’s father would have to pay a fine. They would have to confiscate the weapons. (Eventually, he would be deported, sent back to where he came from on a plane full of other like-minded Russians.)

At school, Isernhagan stood at the microphone in the auditorium as the student body fidgeted in the stands. We all liked him, he said. We all knew what a good student he was, what a good friend, how he laughed. A moment of silence please. If you feel the need to speak to someone about this — –.

But the school year was in full swing. Volunteers were needed for the decorations committee, the float committee, the dance committee. The Spring Dance was three weeks away. No one would need to speak to anyone about it.

In fact, my wife Jess would be the first person I’d tell, twenty or so years later. I’d carry it all with me like rocks in my pocket, through high school, through my parents divorce, through more weight gain, an addiction to amphetamines (and then, weight loss), until that weekend, driving with Jess up to the Finger Lakes where we’d hide out in a rented cabin, breathing in fresh air and each other. This is when we were still married, when we still did such things. Jess would pull on her earlobe, partly to be coy, partly because it was just a thing she did. She’d flip the pages of her fashion magazine with a hasty snap of her wrist, grunt, cluck her tongue. That was a long time ago, she’d say. You were kids. You were eleven. Or she’d just squeeze my knee and rub my neck, because it was a long, long drive. And for the rest of the ride up I-90, every time we’d go underneath an overpass I’d be back up there with Luka, looking down at the cars.

I could have said something, after that night on the bridge, turned Luka in to the police. He would have gone to juvee. He would have hated me for it, there’s no question. It would have been the end of our friendship (it ended anyway.)

Or, going back even further, I might have used better judgment in biology lab that morning, so many mornings ago. I can almost see myself, still fat and lonely but with less anger, experiencing a brief moment of blessed epiphany (if in fact they do exist). A moment in which I decide against the profoundly absurd impulse to hide a cow’s eye inside the sandwich of a girl I hardly knew. A pretty girl. A perfectly nice girl.