Boiling a Body
By Mia Pattillo
June 27, 2019. Aka Island, Okinawa, Japan.
Standing on the side of the road, I try to stare into the guts of the sun spilling across the water. Light floods my retinas and I am left instead squinting at the sea’s edges. Heat rays shimmer and swarm like unearthed worms in moist dirt. Veins pulse underneath my eyelids, and I count the seconds between each pulse. I have taken physiology and still I do not understand the machinations of our bodies.
The five of us continue walking along the road. My flip flops slap against the pavement, each slap growing louder and louder until the rubber piece rips out of the bottom. I trip and tumble; my knee cracks open.
Clouded air rolls over me as I try to unravel the sun’s red mass into individual threads. My friend calls my name, and I call her name back: “Fizzy.” Threads of my clothing wilt with humidity. Threads of sun dissolve. Air mixes with blood and I feel fizzy.
I dissolve, like seasoning in a boiling pot.
Later at dinner, I am absentmindedly running my spoon straight through the thin rainbow circles of grease in my ramen soup as they divide and multiply into smaller circles, splintering into clones. I listen quietly as my friends talk, touching the rawness on my knee, rubbing it with one hand and swirling my spoon with the other. It stings, but I cannot stop touching it.
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Fact: Frogs use their eyeballs to swallow. They eat their prey whole, then their eyeballs sink down into their mouth and push the food down into their throat.
At night, I dream that I use my eyeballs to swallow the sun. Rainbow heat waves turn to grease and blood bubbles and threads soften and seasoning dissolves and my body turns to soup.
I have never known bodies that have boiled like that.
(I have never known bodies that have boiled.)
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Death by boiling was used in the Holy Roman Empire as an execution method for counterfeiters, swindlers and coin forgers during the Middle Ages, as well as in England and Scotland during the 15th and 16th century. In the Dutch town of Deventer, one can still see the kettle that was used for boiling criminals to death.
Richard Roose, an English cook, was boiled to death for giving several people poisoned porridge. John Melville, a resented sheriff, was thrown into a hot kettle by other noblemen. Supposedly, the nobles each took a spoonful of the brew afterwards.
Ishikawa Goemen was an outlaw hero of 16th century Japan, known for stealing gold and valuables to give to the poor. After a warlord murdered Goemen’s wife and captured his son, Goemen attempted to assassinate him. He failed, and was sentenced to death by boiling in an iron cauldron with his son. At first, Goemen held his son up high to protect him from the heat, but then plunged him suddenly into the bottom of the cauldron to lessen the pain and quicken his death. He again held up the dead body of his son in an act of defiance until his own body succumbed to pain. Father and son finally sank down into the pot and into death together. Today, a large iron kettle-shaped bathtub is called a goemonburo in Japanese, which translates to “Goemon bath.”
What is the boiling point of the human?
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➢ Boil: Liquid reaches 212ºF; bubbles vigorously rise from bottom of pot and continually break surface.
In the “Heat” episode of the food documentary Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, chef Samin Nosrat tells me that it is better to simmer beans than to boil them. This is because when beans are boiled they cook unevenly and their skins often break apart. Bubbles break the surface of the water, then the beans follow suit, splitting their own surfaces.
I lightly run my fingers over parts of my body, count the number of different shades the sun has marked with its uneven cooking. Some surfaces suffer more than others: shoulders, chest, tips of ears flush like pink lady apples and threaten to split open. Other surfaces—inner thighs, armpits, soles of feet—hide their tenderness from heat’s violence.
Perhaps the question I should be asking: What is the breaking point of the human surface?
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June 29, 2019. Aka Island, Okinawa, Japan.
Sitting in the driver’s seat in front of me is an older woman who knows things about the island that I want to know. I try to ask her about these things but two miles go by too quickly for me to know anything and soon we are stopping at her house because she has seen the way our shoulders split with sunburn. She pulls out a knife, clips several leaves off of an aloe plant. Slices one down the middle and oozes its juices. I want to tell the woman that it reminds me of ultrasound jelly, but I do not know the Japanese word for “ultrasound.”
We skim our cracked shoulders with pulp. Our pores once snatched sun and now they snatch relief, drinking up bead after bead of moisture in seconds but leaving our flesh tight and dry as it was before. The woman tells us to peel and squeeze and rub over and over until the glossiness lingers. This means our skin is satisfied, even if only for the moment.
I try to nourish my parched flesh. I push aloe into the cracks of my thighs. I rub ultrasound jelly into my belly button and wonder how my imaginary baby is looking.
Behind us sits a man watching as he sips from a yellow bottle of iced tea. The radio on the table plays Japanese pop music on low volume. The sun sets and oozes out purple juices like burst berry clusters. I want to put the juices in a mason jar to take home, bring some purple sunset to my mama so she can spread gooey Okinawan heat waves over her toast on chilly mornings.
That night, the tropical rain traps us in our hostel. We pay for an overpriced and under-portioned meal, then grow restless from nibbling vestiges of hunger. The island has one grocery store, so we run through the torrent to purchase cups of purple ice cream that taste of beni-imo, Okinawan purple sweet potato. Our Okinawan ice cream melts the same way the Okinawan sun sets: dripping purple and too quickly. We lick up the rays that ooze over the rim, onto our fingers, into purple pools on the floor.
For the rest of the night, we occupy ourselves with aloe on the tatami of our hostel room. Cut, peel, rub, squeeze. Fill the splits in our bodies before they break too far open. Quench our thirsty skin until we lie there: minds thoughtless and bodies gleaming.
Are my surfaces breaking?
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Fact: Frogs never drink.
Instead, they absorb water through their skin. They use a “drinking pouch” located on their belly and the underside of their thighs. Like any amphibian, they also use their skin to absorb oxygen from water. So any time the frog is underwater, the skin does the job of both drinking and breathing. The skin is, quite literally, life-sustaining.
Fact (revised): Frogs never drink through their mouths.
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July 3, 2019. Zamami Island, Okinawa, Japan.
For days, we cannot stop shedding skin. Flesh flakes sliver onto sheets, linger on the cuffs of sleeves, find their way into our luggage. We peel off every flap of skin we can find and wake up the next morning with a hundred more. We sprinkle bonito flake seasoning on our Japanese pancakes and wonder how many flakes are dried fish and how many flakes are us.
Peeling off dead skin is simple and painless—nothing like peeling off live skin which stings and exposes what is raw and red and wet. But still, the flesh under dead skin is tender. Unwrapping it feels meticulous and intimate, like catching patches of our rudimentary bodies before they are marked by anything. There is no carnage. It makes it too easy to slough off pieces of ourselves.
One day I accidentally spend an hour sitting on the bathroom floor pulling at tissue after tissue of my flesh, holding translucent strips dirtied by sand and filth up to the window. I watch sunlight stream through the tinted cellophane of my body, then crumble the strips like baby powder into the toilet. I have never seen the sun passing through my skin like that.
My friend tells me that the dead outer layer of the skin acts as a shield from the sun. With less of the layer, the body is more susceptible to sun damage. But even if peeling my skin is a self-perpetuating violence, it feels too rejuvenating to stop.
What am I peeling toward?
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July 4, 2019. Zamami Island, Okinawa, Japan.
Coarse sand rubs against my back as heat waves twist above me like snakes. I have never been so aware of the feeling of being boiled, exposed flesh too new to be pierced by unfiltered sun. I rub the rawness of my knee, I pick away at another flesh flake on my chest. For the first time I am feeling, really feeling, what it feels to have a surface broken.
When beans are boiled they cook unevenly and their skins often break apart.
Boiling down a liquid means reducing its volume and concentrating it by evaporating anything else with a lower boiling point. High heat reorganizes aromatic compounds in food to produce deep flavors that do not exist in their pale versions. So to boil down is to slough off the extraneous, reach to the essence and concentrate it into deep flavors.
There is no doubt that here on this island I am beginning to learn what it is to break my surfaces, to boil down. As I peel off pieces of myself, I am wondering what deep flavors I will find. Wondering if they exist at all.
How many surfaces must be sloughed to reach the essence?
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Fact: Frogs eat their dead skin.
This is the ultimate way to recycle all the components they use to produce their skin. To not waste the nutritious protein found in the skin. Shed, but not leave it behind. Push it into the mouth and swallow.
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I dream that I am eating frog off of a porcelain china plate. Deep fried golden in peanut oil, speckled red with flecks of paprika and cayenne. I pry apart the legs, twisting them in unnatural angles. I chew off the coating of bread crumbs and egg batter: expose the surfaces, the drinking pouch. Tear off the frog skin, which sizzles with heat. Push it into my mouth and swallow.
I eat frog the same way I peel my skin: layer by layer, slowly and meticulously. Waiting patiently to reach what awaits underneath. Waiting patiently to see what flavors I will find there. I pull off the final layer.
A bare porcelain china plate reflects my own face and I awake from my dream, surrounded by curled skins littering my tatami mat.
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In the “Salt” episode of Salt Fat Acid Heat, Samin Nosrat travels to the Japanese island of Kami-kamagari to learn about the harvesting of sea salt from kelp. One method is burning seaweed and using the resulting ashes. Another is collecting seaweed and allowing it to dry in the sun until salt crystals form. The crystals are then washed off into vats of sea water, creating a concentrated brine. The brine is boiled down to yield salt. Unlike other places where sea salt is harvested from water alone, the Japanese method of making salt from kelp gives the final product a greater depth of flavor.
Kelp: the calcined ashes of seaweed, used as a source of various salts for flavor.
After watching the episode, I drive to the grocery store and purchase three different seaweeds. For the next week, kelp dominates my palate. I consume its calcined ashes day after day: wakame in my miso soup, hijiki with avocado and sesame seeds, nori wrapped around grilled rice balls.
I have never known ashes to melt on my tongue like that.
(I have never known ashes to melt.)
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Every January, my grandmother cooks a feast for the ashes of my grandfather. She wakes up at sunrise and spends several hours bustling about the kitchen as the house fills with steamy scents: white rice, baby bok choy, gingko nuts, bamboo shoots, shiitake mushrooms, roasted tofu. Five different colors of fruit. Other foods that I do not remember by name. Rice tea and rice wine. Arranged carefully and colorfully in clay dishes, set one by one in front of the urn. At sunset, my grandmother tosses every dish in the trash.
I do not know whether my grandfather consumes the feast or not. My dreams tell me that I am not meant to make meaning of what happens when soul parts from shell. But every year, my grandmother continues to cook for ashes.
Every day, I continue to consume ashes. I smuggle packets of miso paste in the pockets of my mother’s old coat. I bring jars of dried kelp to the library, stir the paste into boiled water, let the smell of calcined seaweed permeate open spaces. I nourish myself, eating product of sun and sea and plant.
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July 9, 2019. Tokashiki Island, Okinawa, Japan.
I stretch out and tug an arm span’s worth of seaweed toward me. Each blade, less blade than bubble, bursts like a grape between my thumb and forefinger. I massage the clumpy jelly into my neck, mimicking the patterns of my mother’s hands kneading horse oil into her own neck each night. The dabbing, the circling, the pressing.
I imagine that the iodine of the kelp trickles into my pores. I imagine that the stalks relieve me like horse oil. I know these two things contradict one another—iodine is more harmful than healing—but both are hollow anyways. Kelp is simpler than that. Still, I dab and I circle and I press.
I rip off a jagged piece, watch its thick torn edges flap and shimmer in the heat. Pull the piece closer and closer to my face, letting it grow blurry until it touches my eyelashes. Then I jerk my head back. There is always that hazy moment I particularly like just before the lenses of my eyes adjust into focus. Colors without form, a cobweb of particles. Sometimes I see double or triple.
My friend tells me I’m weird. I fling a piece at her and duck underwater.
Opening my eyes in the brininess of sea water makes them sting. A slant of light refracts off a mass of seaweed, illuminating half in fluorescence.
I envy its ability to photosynthesize. If I could, I would spend all day bathing in sunlight and turning it to energy, call it productivity.
I imagine drying in the sun until my skin crisps up, letting salt crystals form in the cracks of my flesh. Throwing away the layers of surfaces and boiling the rest down to yield flavor.
But where does my surface end and body begin? Where does my surface end and whole-wide-world begin? I have no answers (I am not meant to have them), so I swallow what sun I can and I keep it for myself.
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Once when I was seven I asked my mother “Where is God?” and she said “God is in everything all around you” and I karate-chopped the air and said “Am I karate-chopping God?”
So now I am trying to return to that sense of disregarding the boundaries of things, the distinctions between organ and alien, the me and not-me, the inside and outside. To disregard my flesh as pretty packaging, to disregard surfaces and essences altogether—they are so fragile. When I was seven, I reached out to the something of air that I thought to be God. I don’t know what I touched, but now I imagine whatever it was to be touching me, touching the inside of me, filling my innards and making my organs whole.
I open my mouth and let the ocean water fill me. I gulp and feel the salt coating my tongue, sliming down my throat.
Mia Pattillo is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied science, narration and society. She currently lives in Atlanta, GA.