LUDIC LOG

I strapped the breathing apparatus to my face and thought about madness.

Madness: the word that was flung my way by everyone whose path I had crossed since I first set my course to the frigid hell of these deep Atlantic waters in search of the truth. Because it was the truth, I knew it inside: I knew it down where my soul lived, where the most tenacious claws of belief sank into my heart: Chicken of the Sea was the best tuna. This was more than a slogan, a fleeting fancy of a Madison Avenue copywriter, more than the small-print words on a can: it was truth. All I had to do to quiet the fire in my brain was to prove it, and there was one way to do that. It was this way that madness lay, so said they all.

What did I care? Madness drove many of the great quests of our time, and madness fueled the searchers who brought light to our world. Perhaps all the great discoveries were guided by madness. I understood, and I accepted. It was never me, and always them. They who called me mad, they who tried to derail the mighty engine of my passion, they who said "For Christ's sake, Larry, it's just a goddamn can of tuna fish". I knew my heart, though, and I did not listen. Each time someone told me that they were just trying to help me, I told them that they could help me by getting out of my way.

Some were more accomodating than others. My brother Henry was my good right hand, before the accident with the diving bell that took him from me. He did not understand, but he aided me: blindly and stupidly, but he aided me. At first he tried to convince me that they were all the same, as if they were just flaked fish from a can, as if there was nothing more to them than the label. What's wrong with Bumble Bee, Star-Kist, or (I shudder still to remember it) Harvest? What's the big deal, he would ask me? I want the best, Henry, I would say. The best tuna. This is why God put me in the world. I feel it where I live. Is Bumble Bee the best? Is Star-Kist the thing that will allow me to realize my purpose? Did Harvest win a Gold Medal taste award from the American Tasting Institute? Don't give me store-brand shit and call it premium sugar, Henry, I told him. I know my own mind.

But still he pursued me. And I knew it was out of love, I knew it. Damn him for loving me, damn him for helping me, damn him for dying.

"So you want the best," he told me once on the deck of a fishing trawler somewere out of Antigua. "You got it already. It says right there on the can. Chicken of the Sea, the Best Tuna. Why you gotta keep up this crazy game for?"

"You don't get it, Henry," I told him. I told him this a lot. "It's not enough just to say you're the best tuna. I have to know. They have to prove it. I'm not going to sacrifice my purpose in life over some ad executive's whim?"

"So that's why we're out here?" he said, the cold winter wind slashing salt across his face, a bearded doppelganger of my own. "I don't get it."

He never did get it, and he never would. He didn't understand that there were forces at work on that paper label, that there was more arcana in the dolpin safe logo than in a thousand pages of kabbalah. That like their secret masters in the Illuminati, the purveyors of hidden enlightenment at Chicken of the Sea International in San Diego, California liked to hide their cryptic truths in plain sight. Henry, like so many other people walking blind through this world, didn't get that those words were more than just a jingle: they were a secret revealed, a great uncovering waiting for the right ears to hear just what it was saying. In that jingle lay the mighty purpose of my birth, the very direction of my life.

Let them all scoff. Let them laugh, let them gainsay and contradict and say I'm the slave of madness. A few say they're all extinct; most say they're a myth, that they never existed in the first place. Henry told me even if they were real, I'd never catch them all. But I don't need to catch them all. The revealed wisdom says: ask any mermaid you happen to see.

I only need one.

They called him Fishfinger, and his lust was for fish. From cod to scrod, but most of all, heaven-fallen, flaked, chunked, light: the tuna. The site of the can, compact and flat, sent him into an almost sexual fury. When the opener pierced the dull metal skin, he wouldn't eat it, but drink the broth, feeling its salty trickle down his throat. Then: the taste he'd die for, the taste he'd kill for. The taste he had killed for, time and again. And Bond would pay the price of his deadly fever for the mercury-rich flavor of the best tuna.