?Interrobang! · Track 19 · middle

Realer Than the Real

OBJECT (intimate, what Sisukiro found): the notes and prototypes of a secret invention. OWNER (re-linked by Sisukiro): Real Truffle Rita — truffle-flavor chemist from a food-science lab; note the irony of the name. FOUND AT: a deep, unexplored cave in southern China. THE (UN)LIKELY STORY & THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION: Rita fakes truffle flavor for the masses though she loves the true fungus; hid her secret invention in a Chinese cave. Is the synthetic love less real than the true one?

Lyrics

In a karst tower crack, south of Guilin.
Where the air is old water and stone.
I found your little box, Rita.
Left here all alone.

They call you Real Truffle Rita.
A joke you never told.
Your lab coat smells of the ghost molecule.
The beautiful lie they sold.
2,4-dithiapentane.
A perfect, hollow thing.
For potato chips and olive oil.
The flavor the factory brings.
But you knew the scent of dark soil under the oak roots.
You knew the hunt, the real thing in your hands.

Is the synthetic love less real?
The one you build from parts?
The careful architecture of a feeling?
Two separate, beating hearts?
Is the copy less true than the thing it recalls?
When you breathe it in, and for a moment...
you're not here at all?

Your notebooks weren't for the company.
These formulas are for something else.
Not for Tuber melanosporum.
But the memory of a person's shelf.
The scent of his jacket, November, 1998.
The ozone scent before a specific rain.
Little glass vials of moments.
A prototype for pain, or joy.

Is the synthetic love less real?
The one you build from parts?
The careful architecture of a feeling?
Two separate, beating hearts?
Is the copy less true than the thing it recalls?
When you breathe it in, and for a moment...
you're not here at all?

So you brought your secret work down here.
To the deep, wet, living dark.
Did you come to bury the counterfeit?
To extinguish the bright spark?
Or did you come to offer it?
To prove that what you made by hand...
was just as sacred as the fungus?
A treasure in this ancient land.

I open one small bottle.
It doesn't smell like earth, or rain.
It smells like a promise.
Real.