I recently took the tip off my index finger while chopping a red bell pepper with a dull knife in my dull Brooklyn apartment. It went right through the fingernail and bounced off the bone. Thankfully, I was making a curry, so the blood mixed right in. I balled up some toilet paper and wound some duct tape tight enough to cut off circulation. Once the bleeding stopped, I filled a little cup with rubbing alcohol to sanitize it. Concerned, my partner, Arty, asked, “Why don’t you sit down before you do that?”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, then dunked my finger in the rubbing alcohol. The pain slithered through my arm, down my spine, and crept up into my belly button, apparently teasing the primordial synapses required for a series of flashbacks. 

Whoosh—

I am watching Sling Blade (1997) with a famous country music artist on Sullivan's Island in South Carolina. He’s one of the good ones, not one of those toad-licking, dog-whistle guys that wear bedazzled guitars and snapback hats. He sings with a truth and weight that can only come out of those mountains that run up and down the eastern United States. He is, in no uncertain terms, one of my gods. 

But I can’t focus on the movie or the moment. I am distracted because the artist has just stated that he is partaking in the Keto diet. He’s just returned from dinner with an actor friend and is lamenting the lack of low-carb options on most dinner menus in and around Charleston. Oh no, I hope he’s not a Rogan guy, I think. Halfway through the movie, he walks to the kitchen and spreads almond butter on a rice cake. I am confused and hungry. All I can see is James Baldwin, another one of my gods, reciting this passage from “Down at the Cross:” 

It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become here. 

Uh, oh. My gods are at odds, and America is dying. 

Whoosh—

I am living with a French woman in Ireland. Her name is Delphine. She is twenty-three and speaks like she is eighty. She smokes two dozen hand-rolled cigarettes a day. We work together on a sheep farm in County Sligo. I fear her and am enamored by her.

We are having dinner with our hosts, Pat and Fidelma. Fidelma serves a lamb roast and brown bread. Pat eats quietly and meticulously, sliding peas one at a time onto the back of his fork. Delphine inhales the lamb roast but does not touch the bread. Fidelma raises the bread plate and says, “Delphine, would you like some bread?”

Delphine proudly shakes her head and says, “No, thank you. This is not bread.”

I choke on a piece of potato skin, which I have yet to master peeling with a fork and knife like Pat taught me. Fidelma takes it in stride. She is polite and kind as ever. “Fair enough, love. It’ll be here if you want it,” she says. 

I wonder what it’s like to feel so strongly about something, to be so sturdy. I also wonder what it would be like to host with such grace and warmth. I reach for a piece of brown bread and slather it with butter. It is delicious. 

Dinner ends, and Delphine and I sit with our feet on the wood stove and read our books. I make a Nutella sandwich with the bread that is not bread and offer Delphine half. She accepts. I am confused, but I am warm and full. 

Whoosh—

I return to Sullivans Island as Billy Bob Thornton puts a lawnmower blade through someone’s skull. Abruptly, I say something like, “Alright, I’ma head out.” I pet the big ugly Scottish hound standing at the door and walk too fast to my ‘98 Toyota Camry. 

Somewhere over the Ravenel Bridge, I am smiling. My windows are down, the tide is low, and the pluff mud smells like quiet death. 

Whoosh—

“Ew. Why are you smiling? You liked the pain, didn’t you? You’re a real sicko,” Arty said when I returned to bloody ol’ Brooklyn. I grinned out of the corner of my mouth like, well, no, but also, not no. Then she made me sit down, and she finished cooking. I put a Band-Aid on and cracked a beer. When dinner was ready, we sat at the table and ate. There was no bread, but there was bread. And where I was, I had never been.