Текст книги "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Автор книги: Marge Piercy

Соавторы: Marge Piercy
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“You’re playing them along, aren’t you?” She came up beside him as he was mopping the day room.

“Why not?” he asked her. He had become friendly again, but he no longer flirted or told her wild stories. He was numb, stripped to a wire of will she could feel. They had not burned out or cut out as much as they thought, she hoped. Something of Skip survived.

FOURTEEN

Jackrabbit went on defense. For a week Luciente sank into a low energy state that made it hard for them to connect. Then she took a day’s retreat at Treefrog and seemed herself to Connie.

Lunch at Mattapoisett was yellow soup thickened with tidbits of shrimp, crab, clam, and fish. Hawk was eating with them again, after several weeks with her friend Thunderbolt’s family.

“It got dull, sitting at the table with mems I can’t talk to. Now the taboo’s off, I’m back. I think I’d warm to stay in our family. See, today I brought a guest for lunch.”

Connie had often seen visitors besides herself, mostly people from nearby villages or others on their way through, traveling on some piece of business. Sometimes a whole troupe of players or musicians stopped for a week. Old friends or former mems came visiting. Then there were the people without village called politely drifters and impolitely puffs. Once she had seen a man with a small tattoo on his palm, which Luciente told her marked a crime of violence. Unlike the other guests, drifters often sat apart. People seemed uncomfortable with them. Sometimes they seemed to know each other, and when Connie passed near them, she heard a slang she did not recognize.

Why did Hawk bring this guest to the table? Connie saw on his palm that same tattoo, that warning mark. He was a big‑boned oversized man with little flesh on him, perhaps in his late thirties.

“Waclaw just got done studying with the Cree!” Hawk bubbled.

“On the Attawapiskat. That flows into James Bay from the west.” He spoke in a hesitant voice from deep in his barrel chest.

“How long did you have to wait to study there?” Hawk asked. “Did you have to wait long?”

“Six years,” Waclaw said. “I was lucky they took me at all.”

“Six years!” Hawk’s face sagged. “That’s bottoming!”

“If they let everyone come who wants to study with them, they’d be swamped,” Waclaw said reasonably. “Most people won’t wait and so they don’t have to say no.”

“Was it worth it, waiting so long?” Hawk asked, still whining with disappointment.

Waclaw nodded. “It firmed me. I almost stayed. I am going to see my old village and decide. They say I can come back if I choose, to the Attawapiskat.”

As soon as lunch was over, Connie asked Luciente, “He’s a criminal, isn’t he? I saw a tattoo.”

“Not anymore. Person atoned. Has been studying up north.”

“The Cree, he said? Like Indians. You still have real Indians?”

Luciente nodded. “Those lands are strongly protected, under their control. Only hunting, gathering, and some scientific activities go on … . The Cree have a mixed way of living. They hunt and fish, they’ve created some Far North agriculture, some handicraft, limited manufacture. They have to take care, for the land is fragile.”

“What’s to study there?”

“A discipline, a sense of wholeness. Something ancient. They are often part‑time hunters or gatherers, part time shamans, part‑time scientists.”

“But was that his atoning? Going up north and living that way?”

“Never!” Luciente laughed from the belly. “That’s a great privilege. That’s why Waclaw had to wait six years. Don’t know what person did to atone. Ask, if you must, but we usually don’t. We feel it’s closed–healed. Forget!”

Connie followed at Luciente’s heels into the experimental fields where Luciente was recording comments on performance. “This chews it up. I think we found some good strains to work on next year.”

“How come you leave so much woods?” Connie asked. “Like that argument at the council. All over Mouth‑of‑Mattapoisett I see patches of woods, meadows, swamps, marshes. You could clear a lot more land.”

“We have far more land growing food than you did. But, Connie, aside from the water table, think of every patch of woods as a bank of wild genes. In your time thousands of species were disappearing. We need that wild genetic material to breed with … . That’s only the answer from the narrow viewpoint of my own science.”

Bee waved to them, leading a group of kids through the fields on a combination bug survey and lesson in insect life. “Good luck in Oldtown!” he shouted. “Push us over!”

Connie looked after his broad glistening back, the shirt peeled off and tied around his waist. “What’s he talking about?”

“I have to fall by Oldtown later and present our new recks.”

“Wrecks?”

“Half word, half rib. Grasp, it’s a request but we wish it was a requisition. For what we want to do scientifically this winter.”

Connie made a face. She let Luciente burble on awhile about the Shaping controversy, but finally she burst out, “It’s so hard for me to think of you as a scientist!”

“How not? I don’t comprend.”

“I mean the only scientist I know is Dr. Redding … . I guess we’re his experiments. But I’d hardly ever meet a scientist, I mean, like in East Harlem. Not that I’d want to …”

“What’s different about meeting a scientist and meeting a shelf diver?”

“Like my sister Inez, she lives in New Mexico. Her husband drinks, she has seven kids. After the sixth, she went to the clinic for the pill. You know–No, you can’t! It’s so hard for a woman like her–a real Catholic, not lapsed like me, under his thumb too and him filling her with babies one right after the other–so hard for her to say, Basta ya! And go for the pill. See, she thought she went to a doctor. But he had his scientist cap on and he was experimenting. She thought it was good she got the pill free. But they gave her a sugar pill instead. This doctor, he didn’t say what he was doing. So she got heavy again with the seventh child. It was born with something wrong. She’s tired and worn out with making babies. You know you have too many and the babies aren’t so strong anymore. They’re dear to you but a little something wrong. So this one, Richard, he was born dim in the head. Now they have all that worry and money troubles. They’re supposed to give him pills and send him to a special school, but it costs. All because Inez thought she had a doctor, but she got a scientist.”

“All this is really so?” Luciente stared from black eyes hard with wonder.

She looked away to the river, just a stream here with coffee‑brown waters. They were heading back toward Mattapoisett now, passing as always older people, children, young people working here and there, weeding and feeding, picking off beetles, setting out new plants, arguing earnestly with scowls and gestures, hurrying by carrying a load of something shiny balanced in a basket on the head or in a knapsack or basket on the back, baby under arm or on hip or back. “They like to try out medicine on poor people. Especially brown people and black people. Inmates in prisons too. So … you must test drugs on people too? You have to.”

“We use computers for biological modeling. Most drugs are discarded long before the testing stage. In your time I think people talked about effects and side effects, but that’s nonsense.”

“How? Like when I take Thorazine, the effects are controlling me, making me half dead, but I get lots of side effects, believe me, like sore throat and … constipation, dizziness, funny speech.”

“But, Connie blossom, all are effects! Your drug companies labeled things side effects they didn’t want as selling points. It’s a funny way to look at things, like a horse in blinkers.”

She thrust out her chin. “But there’s a difference. The main effect is the thing you do something for.”

“But Connie! The world doesn’t know that. Don’t you see? Let’s go around this way–the bees have been set out today.” They walked through part of the Goat Hill complex, where fish were being raised in solar‑heated tanks and the water fertilized by the fish was used to grow vegetables. Inside the fish domes, men and women, gleaming with sweat, were working wearing only brief shorts. Outside there was a special cooling‑off pool with people splashing and swimming in it. “Instance, a factory makes a product. But that’s not all. It makes there be less of whatever it uses up to make that product. Every pound of steel used we have to account for–whether what’s made is needed and truly desired. It’s a pound less for something else … . Let’s get a bike.”

“You’ll have to pedal for me.” Connie hung back.

“Fasure I’ll tote you like a baby. We’re for Oldtown.” On a two‑seater, Luciente argued over her shoulder a little breathlessly. “A factory may also produce pollution–which takes away drinking water downstream. Dead fish we can’t eat. Diseases or gene defects. These too are products of that factory. A factory uses up water, power, space. It uses up the time, the lives of those who work in it. If the work is boring and alienating, it produces bored, angry people–”

“You didn’t answer me who drugs are tested on. I want to know. Is it criminals?”

“I’m sorry. I started speeching. We volunteer.”

“I’ll bet. That’s what they say about the prisons. They said Claud volunteered for the hepatitis. But for a buck a day, you’d kill your best friend in prison. Because you got no other way to touch money. Everything in the canteen costs. Your family’s in trouble. You want time off. They say maybe you’ll get parole if you go along. So you volunteer.”

“But nobody lacks here. All you get for volunteering is a little prestige. Local councils may give luxury credits or extra sabbatical. Mostly just time off. If enough people won’t volunteer for something, we put it aside. Sometimes people choose such a proj for atoning, but that’s between them and whoever you hurt.”

“Have you ever volunteered?”

“Not for drugs. I don’t like taking drugs, even when I’m supposed to. We don’t use them much. We do co‑op curing, when the healer helps the person firm better habits of minding, better eating or carriage of the spine.” She pedaled at a steady rate. They were cruising past Mattapoisett now, past the weir, and Morningstar, who was loading boxes of pillows and comforters on a boat, stopped to wave. They passed the bridge to Cranberry and pedaled toward the wharves of Oldtown. “I’ve put in for testing new apparatus. Broke my scapula testing a solar airboat. We do admire each other for taking chances for the common good. Everybody is feathered to be admired, how not? More love, more attent. Besides, everybody always yearns for extra time. Life is short and there’s so much to do!”

They left the bike at one of the racks and walked along a path in Oldtown, where the main harbor was. It was a Portuguese village whose main activities were boatbuilding, boat repair, shell‑fishing, and deep‑sea fishing.

“They get up at three or four in the morning when the boats go out, so evening meetings are out for them. They have their meets in the afternoon, so that’s why I have to present a reck at three P.M. Isn’t it beautiful here? Some of these buildings are four hundred years old!”

They had adapted the old buildings, although between them were the same fields and plantings as everyplace else. An old man with a wispy beard was slowly picking blackberries, eating some, putting most in a basket over his withered arm, on what must once have been the lawn of a resort hotel. With him was a child who was eating rather more than picking and singing with him sometimes in unison and sometimes in a bouncy counterpoint, interrupting with questions every few minutes which he slowly answered.

“Why is life short?” Connie asked. “Your old people are healthy, sure, they live with everybody else. But they age. And they die, not much later than we do. Why not live longer?”

“We decided not to try.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“The councils. The town meetings. That’s how general questions of direction of science get decided.”

“You mean by people like me? How could I decide if they should build an atom bomb or something?”

“Of course you could decide. It affects you–how not? A rep from the base talks. On the local level for a small proj. But if it’s a major proj–such as research on prolonging life would be–then everybody decides. What it would cost to begin. What it would use up in the way of resources and labor. All that would be set out. What would be consequences on the whole yin‑and‑yang of it, that we could foresee or guess.”

“But how could I know if you’re a good scientist or not? I know nothing from nothing about genetics. By the time I figured it all out, I’d be an old woman.”

“You couldn’t tell. But you could decide whether my base should stiff on breeding borer‑resistant zucchini or scab‑free potatoes or gorgeous and edible day lilies. As for results, whether experiments are valid, we researchers all put in time checking each other’s work. Done by lot.”

“But it sounds like some kind of dictatorship. I mean in our time, science was kept … pure maybe. Only scientists could judge other scientists. All kinds of stories about how scientists got persecuted by the church or governments and all that because they were doing their science.”

“But Connie, in your day only huge corporations and the Pentagon had money enough to pay for big science. Don’t you think that had an effect on what people worked on? Sweet petunias! And what we do comes down on everybody. We use up a confounded lot of resources. Scarce materials. Energy. We have to account. There’s only one pool of air to breathe. You grasp neurologists made the aplysia extinct by using it up in experiments? Almost did the same to chimpanzees! What arrogance!”

“But why don’t you prolong life? Did old people vote on that too?”

“Fasure. We did a breakdown by age after to make sure young weren’t voting extended age away from the old … . I think it comes down to the fact we’re stirr reducing population. Longer people live less often we can replace them. But most every lug wants the chance to mother. Therefore, we have to give back. We have to die. Finally, people get tired. After a while people you were sweet friends with, hand friends, they die of accidents or diseases, whatever. The old age of the heart comes.”

“You just give up.”

“We’re part of the web of nature. Don’t you find that beautiful?”

“Like dumb animals? No! Dust to dust and all that?”

“We have a hundred ceremonies to heal us to the world we live in with so many others. Listen.” Luciente waved toward the child and the old man, who had finished picking blackberries. They sang together as they got ready to leave:

“Thank you for fruit.

We take what we need.

Other animals will eat.

Thank you for fruit,

carrying your seed.

What you give is sweet.

Live long and spread!”

“We learn when we’re kids to say that to every tree or bush we pick from.”

Seconal or not, she did not sleep that night. The next morning they were coming for her, they were going to take her to the hospital where they performed the actual operations. Night before the electric chair. She stared into the thin dark, the light on down the hall at the nurses’ station, where the weekend night crew were playing contract bridge. They had an ongoing game in which the night nurse played partners with Stan the Man, the women’s attendant Jean played partners with the orderly Chris. The nurse and Stan the Man were ten years older than Jean and Chris, and they called their game the Generation Gap. They were full of jokes and drank beer all night.

Although their game was noisy, they were not what was keeping her awake, no more than Tina’s soft mumbled snoring from the other bed. It was the morning to come. Tomorrow they were going to stick a machine in her brain. She was the experiment. They would rape her body, her brain, her self. After this she could not trust her own feelings. She would not be her own. She would be their experimental monster. Their plaything, like Alice. Their tool. She did not want to pass over to Mattapoisett tonight; she wanted to taste the last dregs of her identity before they took it from her.

Lying in the partial dark, she found anger swelling up in her like sour wind. There wasn’t enough! Oh, not enough things, sure–not enough food to eat, clothes to wear, all of that But there wasn’t enough … to do. To enjoy. Ugliness had surrounded her, had imprisoned her all her life. The ugliness of tenements, of slums, of El Barrio–whether of El Paso, Chicago, or New York–the grimy walls, the stinking streets, the stained air, the dark halls smelling of piss and stale cooking oil, the life like an open sore, had ground away her strength.

Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. The rest was garbage.

Who could ever pay for the pain of bringing a child into dirt and pain? Never enough. Nothing you wanted to give her you ever could give her, including yourself, what you wanted to be with her and for her. Nothing you wanted for her could come true. Who could ever pay for the pain of rising day after day year after year in a dim room dancing with cockroaches, and looking out on a street like a sewer of slow death? All her life it felt to her she had been dying a cell at a time, a cell of hope, of joy, of love, little lights going out one by one. When her body had turned all to pain, would she die? Die and poison the earth like a plague victim, like so many pounds of lead?

Outside the trees were turning early, from the drought. The branches of the pines ended in brown nosegays of dead needles. They were cutting their losses. The maples and oaks sported branches already bronze, a dulled version of autumn color. The sky was a hazy buff blue, as if it were dusty for miles up. By nine o’clock, when they took her over to the other hospital, it was already hot for September.

They did not cut and shave her head until she was on the new ward. Valente had told Dr. Redding it upset the patients. The cold touch of the scissors nudged her nape, her ear with its shivery weight like a shark nosing past. With each clack of the blades, her hair fell from her, to lie like garbage on the floor. To be swept up and thrown away. No blackberry bushes would grow from her head’s shearing. Rich in nitrogen and trace elements: Luciente was always saying things like that. But Luciente was not with her this morning.

Sybil had stood at the door watching her go, her face working as she tried not to weep. In her mind now she could see Sybil’s auburn hair falling, the long beautiful hair of a fine natural red that varied strand to strand. Often she had brushed Sybil’s hair for her and always it amazed her how much yellow and brown and brass and carrot and chestnut there was in Sybil’s auburn hair, a spectrum of warm colors.

As they were shaving her head, she tried to think of Bee, whose massive well‑modeled head looked handsome that way. But she did not think she would look as strong and fine with her hair stolen. She had had no breakfast. They gave her a heavy sedative but they did not knock her out. They told her she would not really be conscious, but she was. She could hear the orderlies making jokes as they wheeled her to the operating room.

She had been prepared for any horror. Anything except boredom.

First Dr. Redding drilled on her skull. It did not hurt; it was merely horrifying. She could feel the pressure, she could feel the bone giving way, she could hear the drill entering. Then she saw them take up a needle to insert something. She did not understand what it was, because she felt nothing. They seemed to be waiting for it to take effect, whatever it was, and she waited too in gasping anxiety until she caught a reference to “radiopaque solution.” They were dyeing her and she was dying. The pun hung in her penetrated brain.

Next they fitted a machine over her, what they referred to as a stereotactic machine, and they pounded it into her head with three sharp metal pins as if she were a wall they were attaching a can opener to. Tap, tap, tap. They seemed to be figuring out at what point they were going to zero in, as they put it She felt faint and weird. She floated miles above her helpless body propped in green sheets and towels in a sort of operating chair, like a fancy dentist’s chair. They were using an x‑ray machine. They spoke of target structures and Dr. Redding boasted, “No more than a point‑five‑millimeter factor of error.”

Terror cut through the veils of the drug like a needle penetrating the bone supposed to protect her fragile spongy brain. How much of her was crammed into that space? Perhaps they could wipe out the memory of Claud by the slip of a needle. The brain was so dumb, not like the heart knocking on the breastbone loud and fluttery as a captured bird. It hid in its cage of bone, imagining itself safe.

She wanted to weep, to scream. But she was contained in a balloon way back up through her skull, perhaps floating out through the hole they had cut in her, floating out there above them, lighter than air. How patient they were to take so much of their valuable medical time deciding where to push in. How wonderful that they did not simply use a great big can opener and take off the top of her skull and scrape out the brains with a spoon. Some people ate brains.

“You could eat them. Fried,” she said suddenly.

Morgan’s eyes above the mask widened. “What did she say?”

“Something about eating,” the operating nurse said.

“Doubtless we stimulated an appetite center,” Dr. Redding said. “We’re down there. The higher you cauterize, the more you involve the intellectual faculties. I don’t think these patients have a lot to spare in that department. We’re after the centers of aggression, the primitive emotions run amok.”

Now they were looking at photographs, like those of the moon taken by astronauts. That unknown precious country of her brain. They had a dummy second machine, like the one sitting on her skull squatting like a mosquito about to draw blood, and they were fiddling with the dummy. She would have loved to try it out on them. Suddenly she thought that these men believed feeling itself a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix. Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel. From an early age she had been told that what she felt was unreal and didn’t matter. Now they were about to place in her something that would rule her feelings like a thermostat.

Time … time. Yes, the surprise was the boredom. She could almost have slept, hunched there. The green masks of robbers covered their faces, but she could easily tell Dr. Redding from Dr. Morgan. Redding was brisk and in control and chipper. Morgan was prissy with worry, his every motion a bureaucratic procedure judged against inner or outer rules.

Now a new object was presented, crowed over. The nurses crowded close to see. The new toy. It was a metal disk embossed like a coin, no bigger than a quarter, with tubes and a miniature dialysis bag attached. She would be a walking monster with a little computer inside and a year’s supply of dope to keep her stupid. The whole thing would fit in the palm of her hand; it would fit under the roof of her skull, perched cozily on the brain.

Her head felt wrong as they put it in. Everything felt wrong. Maybe it would feel right again. They were closing with cement. A temporary measure. They said they wanted to monitor the reading for a month or two, they might want to change the chemical she was being fed from that dialysis bag. They kept their options open with a cement plug.

Afterward she had a massive headache. Even her teeth seemed all to ache. She did not want to move. She did not care about anything. She lay in her bed and through half‑closed eyes she ignored the patients and nurses passing on the neurology ward.

After they moved her back to her own ward, for a week she lay numb and uncaring. Acker came and talked to her. He tried to get her to perform tests and answer questions, he brought his charts and what she always thought of as his children’s games. Why should she answer? They were waiting for her to heal before they played with her, she felt.

Skip, who was being a good patient, brought her food on a tray. Politely, he did not look at her, more nude than if her clothes had been taken away.

Tina read her the newspaper, tried to start conversations. Sybil came in and sat patiently, let her alone and then returned, hoping. Tina’s voice, rising like an indignant wasp, buzzed at her. She could not want to talk. She could not care. She was a spoiled orange rotting green. The only person she cared to watch was Skip as he came and went, sweeping the ward and running errands for the attendants and the other patients. He was dressed in his street clothes and his hair had grown short and patchy. He looked younger and older than he had: younger in his angularity, his new awkwardness; older in the wary lack of expression on his face. She felt his will all the time like a knife he was carrying concealed, and she envied him for retaining his will. She wondered, when she could bring herself to think at all, how he preserved the power of his will hidden inside.

They had decided to operate next week on Alice. They felt they knew just what tissue in her brain to coagulate now, where to burn a hole in what was called Alice. Then she would have her electrodes removed, they promised, just like Skip. They were tired of playing with Alice, who had become sullen and passive. At times she giggled a lot, she seemed drunk and slaphappy, sitting on the edge of her bed. Then she slumped into a blank depression.

Skip now had grounds privileges. He went to the canteen and brought back doughnuts, danishes, candy bars, cigarettes for any of the patients who had the money. The doctors had their own coffeemaker near the meeting room, and even the patients were sometimes allowed to make coffee in the afternoon in the small kitchen the lower staff used. Dolly had come by to visit her right after her operation, but had not been allowed in. Dolly had deposited some more money for Connie. Connie pretended to order sweets from the canteen with the others. Remembering Luciente’s urging, she withdrew change for an order but then quietly told Skip not to bring her anything. Seventy‑five cents at a time, she was accumulating capital for escape. That much energy remained to her.

Wednesday Dr. Redding announced to Skip loudly, so that all the other patients could hear, that Skip was being granted a weekend furlough. He could go home to his parents from Friday night through Sunday afternoon. Dr. Redding rolled out the pronouncement with conscious drama, saying that if Skip proved he could handle himself, this was the first of many furloughs, the first step back into society. They were all to envy Skip; they all did. The doctors were almost done with Skip, unless further surgery should prove necessary, a little phrase they added.

Skip said he was grateful and he’d show them he could handle a visit home. He drooped there, no longer graceful under his shorn hair that spoke of the barracks, of the army, and looking Redding in the eyes, he told him how good he was going to be, how he was their cured and grateful little boy.

She felt a strange pang, like something plucked in her.

Friday, as Skip was organizing himself to go home and waiting for his parents to come to collect him, she got up for the first time since her operation, except for walking to the bathroom and back, and put on her robe. Shaking, she tied the loose cord and stumbled off to the men’s side. She sat down on Skip’s bed and waited for the dizziness to clear. She wasn’t allowed to do that, but the attendants hadn’t appeared yet.

Skip looked at her with bloodshot weary cautious eyes. “Hello, monster,” he said softly.

“Hello, monster,” she said back, and smiled for the first time since before her operation. “There’s too little of you and too much of me.”

“Can you feel it inside?”

“I feel rotten. Snowed.”

“I admire you for trying to get away, you know? I wish you’d made it.”

“If I get a chance, I’ll try it again,” she mouthed softly.

“But … with that thing in your head, you might die.”

“Maybe it’ll just wear out its batteries or whatever it runs on and give up. Use up the drug. I know a guy, Otis, who has a metal peg in his knee from Vietnam.”

“I think maybe something in the brain’s more dangerous … . But why not go down trying?”

“You’re going outside today.”

Skip grimaced. “Home with my loving parents. Back from the factory where they sent me for repairs, on a trial basis. Like if it’s broken, get it fixed. If it’s crooked, get it straightened out. If it’s kinky, iron it.”

“But you still got a will to fight them, I can feel it.”

“They won something. I don’t feel like fucking anybody. Or loving anybody. I don’t feel any love at all. I feel like a big block of ice.”

Tony walked by whistling, saw her sitting on the bed, and came in. To avoid his touch, she rose. “Take care, Skip.”

“I mean to take care.” He gave her a mirthless grin. Then he kissed her lightly on the mouth. “You keep trying.” His lips were cool and hard. Shyly she kissed him back.

Tony made obscene smacking noises. “Come on, break it up. No PC. They fixed you okay from being a faggot, but you’re crazy anyhow!”

As quickly as she could move on her heavy waterlogged legs, her dizzy body riding its private stormy weather, she lumbered back through the ward to her own bed.

Sunday night Skip did not return. By Monday the rumor crept through the ward as fast as patient could whisper to patient. Sunday morning early, Skip had slit his throat with an electric knife in the kitchen of his parents’ home. They had hidden the razor blades, the sleeping pills, the aspirin, but they had not thought of the electric carving knife.