The Humanity Project (12 page)

Mrs. Foster poured out the tea and they drank, looking out to the backyard and its pleasing vista of formal plantings and fishpond and Mrs. Foster’s elaborate collection of bird feeders. The cats, able only to watch from behind closed windows, must have thought they’d died and gone to hell.

“How have you been eating?” Christie asked. “Are you getting enough protein?” Mrs. Foster could be a picky and irregular eater, given to things like cheese and crackers for breakfast.

The nautical outfit made Mrs. Foster look like a captain in some small, loopy navy. “Cooking is so much fuss in this weather. I like a nice salad, watercress if I can get it, goat cheese, toasted walnuts, dried cranberries. You try it sometime.”

“Add some cooked chicken.”

“And a little high-fiber cereal. And some calcium pills.” Mrs. Foster smiled in a way that was meant to be mischievous. She had once been a pretty woman, and there were still remnants of this in her coquettish manner. She had recently had her hair colored, so that it was no longer white but coppery gold. It poufed out thinly over her scalp like a tangled, vining plant.

“Seriously. You have to feed yourself at least as well as you feed the cats.”

“I don’t know how people get excited about cooking for themselves. Where’s the comfort in it?”

“I do every night,” Christie said, incautiously, because any such statement was likely to get Mrs. Foster started on one of her favorite topics, how Christie should find herself a nice man, marry, and have children before it was too late. But Mrs. Foster was listening to the sound of cat commotion in some distant precinct of the house: guttural war cries, attacks and retreats.

“I don’t know why they have to fight like that,” Mrs. Foster complained. “There’s plenty of everything for everybody.”

“Cats don’t really like other cats. Most of them. They’re solitary hunters.”

Mrs. Foster waved this away. “Well they must get together once in a while. Or there wouldn’t be any kittens. Oh, if there was such a thing as ghosts, my husband would be haunting me day and night. He didn’t have any use for a cat. And he was so fussy about this house. It’s a beautiful house, of course. But it’s not a museum, it’s meant for living.”

Sooner or later, Mrs. Foster’s conversations all led back to her husband, if only to complain about him. Christie didn’t understand their marriage. But then, she hadn’t understood her own. Trying to be discreet, she checked her watch. She had another appointment this morning. She didn’t have much use for a cat herself.

Christie was about to make her final speech about better eating habits, when Mrs. Foster said, “He wasn’t the easiest man to live with. He wasn’t always sympathetic to different points of view.”

Christie murmured that people were, oftentimes, and understandably enough, partial to their own way of seeing things. As she was herself. Her prickly, unbending self. She wondered if she should get a cat. A nice tame cat, not one of the feral hellions. She could pet its rumbly fur, watch its pink tongue paddle in water, attempt to bond with the creature.

“Of course I got mad at him. So mad I’d cry. Oh he could be an aggravating man. I came to understand, it was just his nature. Like the poor cats. There were things he couldn’t help.”

But what if you wanted to help it? Why were you so unhappy about it, if it was really yours, your true nature, the skin that fit you best? Wasn’t she always trying to escape it, rise above it, step out of it like clothing? Be someone better? At times the bright edge of her finer self was almost visible, before it blurred and disappeared.
All truth is very ordinary.
Was that a teaching, or had she made it up herself?

Mrs. Foster was saying she wanted it to serve as a memorial to her husband. Memorial? Something Christie had missed, not listening; she put her teacup down on its saucer, centering it carefully, willing herself to focus. “Nothing to do with animals,” Mrs. Foster said. “That would be a bad joke, considering the way he felt about them. Or claimed he felt. So much of that was just teasing, meant to upset me. Well, don’t I have the last laugh. I could fund an entire endangered species. Too late for him to stop me.”

“Ah,” said Christie, nodding. The closest she could come to the humorous agreement that seemed required of her. What was Mrs. Foster talking about? She felt tired, scattered. Beneath the table, something furry brushed her leg and she jumped.

“No, this will be all about people.”

“Ah,” said Christie again. Sooner or later she was going to have to produce words.

“Because this is going to be my new start. My next chapter in life. I even have a name picked out: The Humanity Project. And who better to be in charge but you? If you would just consider it. If you would be able to help me.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand, what did you need me to help you with? What kind of project, what did you mean?”

Mrs. Foster’s smile turned girlish. The brass buttons on her jacket winked. “It means I would like to give you rather a lot of money.”

•   •   •

The animals used to eat us but nowadays we mostly ate the animals. There were not many places remaining on earth, or many circumstances, where you could get yourself digested by a bear or a big jungle cat. Or alligator or hyena or great white shark. We could imagine such a thing, but only in a shivery, unreal fashion. We didn’t actually think of ourselves as food.

Some of us were vegetarians, for reasons of conscience or health or both, but most of us were businesslike and untroubled about the creatures we ate. They came in so many unexpected and delicious varieties, things like snails and catfish and venison and the estimable hog. So much art and skill and effort had been devoted to pleasing our tastes. Cheeseburgers alone had been the subject of considerable experimentation and debate.

The Bible said: We had been made in God’s image, and He granted us dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth over the earth.

“Dominion” was like a contract we could bring out to show any reluctant or recalcitrant fish of the sea or fowl of the air and so forth. Whereas: “Dominion” shall be understood to include, but shall not be limited to, the following. Confinement, slaughter, packaging, distribution, and consumption. Genetic modification, where deemed necessary and desirable by the party of the first part. The diversion and damming of rivers. The removal of forests and the leveling of mountaintops. Any other alterations of habitat for purposes of the extraction of resources or the expansion of agriculture, roads, or settlements.

For purposes of sport, for those creatures that provided sport, other practices were allowed.

But we were not easy in our hearts. It seemed that more should be required of us. We were aware that while some of us kept pets that we named and loved, others of us scissored the ears of fighting dogs. The huge feedlots and hog containment buildings polluted our air and water, the cramped and mistreated hens produced eggs that sickened us. The oceans filled with floating plastic trash, the bees died off, the migrating birds exhausted themselves and fell to earth in parking lots and freeways. We knew (when we thought about it or were forced to think about it) that the very process of dominion had made us, somehow, less than human.

If we were made in God’s image, it remained to be seen if He would still recognize us.

We justified some of the things we did because they came naturally to us, and others because they were done out of necessity. But when we saw those pictures from the Gulf of Mexico, the oil pouring out like the earth’s very blood, the great seabirds rendered foul and black and stinking and opening their doomed mouths to choke and die, their suffering shamed us because it served no purpose, and nothing could have been more unnatural.

T
he last thing she expected was that she’d end up bored.

Because here she was stuck with her father, the Prince of Boredom, a guy so squirrelly and anxious to please there must be some mistake about them being related. He was an
intellectual
, Linnea’s mother used to say, meaning it as a putdown. Linnea had expected him to live in a house, not an apartment. That was one thing. She should have realized that what her mother meant was money.

By now Linnea had been in California long enough to believe nobody was going to send her back right away. She found the places Art hid his dope—in the closet in the pocket of a bathrobe, in the kitchen behind a rice cooker—and extracted enough to roll joints out of Tampax wrappers. When Art was at work, she smoked in the bathroom with the exhaust fan on, then sprayed Tropical Citrus air spray everywhere, a joke. The stuff just screamed dope, that you’d been smoking dope. She figured Art knew what she was up to but was too chickenshit to come out and say anything. Linnea imagined herself asking, all casual, “So, you get high?” Just to see him stammer and fall all over himself trying not to answer.

Her mother had built him up over the years as somebody cruel and powerful but really, he was just Art.

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Art taught English to Dummies somewhere Linnea hadn’t paid attention to, but it meant he was gone all day. Linnea waited until he left, then ran out to catch a commuter bus into the city. She transferred at the toll plaza and rode all over San Francisco, past neighborhoods of small yellow or pink or cream houses shouldered together, and Asian people with shopping carts, and hulking warehouses, and tough-looking streets, and parks, and traffic, and stores selling the whole world, and big humpy hills, and fog that made the bus windows drip and then a few blocks later unraveled into sunshine.

It was amazing that she could hand over her fare and sit on a bus and she was just a kid, ordinary, who cared where she was going? Nobody staring at her because she had been turned into some kind of pitiful freak when they didn’t know one thing about her and never would.

Once she had to call Art to come get her from the toll plaza because there weren’t any more Mill Valley buses, and he got all pissy and worried and wanted to know what she was doing out there and Linnea said, “Sightseeing.” Then Art planned a big-deal night on the town for them where they had dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf in a restaurant filled with Japanese tourists and Art asked her if she wanted to go on a cable car and Linnea said, “You’re kidding, right?”

Once in a while they accidentally had a good time together, mostly when he forgot he was supposed to be a Dad in Charge.

Sometimes her mother called her, but Linnea never answered. Then her mother called Art, and Art made her get on the phone. “Yeah?” Linnea said into the receiver.

“Lose the attitude,” her mother said. “No one’s impressed. I hope your father isn’t letting you get away with—” Murder, she might have been about to say, but she stopped herself.

Linnea had a sensation of dark feathers, wings, brushing past her head, just beyond her field of vision.

She shifted the phone at her ear and said, “He’s right here, if you need to talk to him.” Art was flipping through the TV channels, listening and pretending not to.

“No, I want to talk to you. I worry about you. I worry about you every minute.”

“Well don’t bother.” Linnea stared at Art until he put the remote down and went into his bedroom.

“Have you met any kids your age? Made any friends?”

“Yeah, I’m part of a gang now. We do gang things.”

“Very not funny. I’ll take that as a no. You have to try harder, Linnea. You have to take responsibility for your own life.”

Linnea didn’t answer. Her mother had learned all these handy-dandy slogans.

“Aren’t you going to ask about Max?”

“Sure.” A silence. Linnea sighed. “How’s Max?”

“He misses you. He keeps wanting to know when you’re coming home. I tell him, we have to wait and see.”

Linnea put the phone down and walked to the front windows. Beyond the roofline of the apartment building was a rim of orange sky left over from the sunset. Back in Ohio, it would already be dark. There would be fireflies, which they didn’t seem to have in California. When she came back to the phone, it was making a tiny buzz, her mother talking and talking. Linnea picked it up. Her mother said, “There’s nothing wrong with being a survivor. It’s nothing you should feel guilty about. Linnea? Have you found a counselor out there? Because you need—”

Linnea shut the phone off. She yelled to Art that she was going out for a walk, and let the door bang shut behind her.

She sat at the picnic table, smoking a cigarette. She was supposed to be quitting, but she wasn’t really. Her mother would probably call back, and then she and Art could have a grand old time going on about what was wrong with her.

She had learned to make everything she had left behind her feel less real, the same way you avoided touching a hot stove, or were careful to walk around a hole in the street. She learned to fill her head with
Don’t don’t don’t
, a charm to take up space. The last thing she wanted was another counselor making her talk. Talking was always supposed to be this great idea, but only if you said the kinds of things that allowed people to feel better about you.

When she got back to the apartment, Art said, “Your mom wants me to tell you about some things.”

“How about we don’t but say we did.”

Art smiled, in a sad, curdled kind of way. Linnea knew he thought her mom was a real piece of work. It was messed up to think of the two of them ever being married, which was maybe why she had turned out so messed up herself. “All right, great, go for it.” She might as well get it over with.

“Your mom’s been looking at schools for you.”

Something sick-making crawled up her throat.
Don’t don’t don’t.
She shoved it down. “Huh,” she said. Bored here.

“Yeah, there are these private, yeah, private schools with programs . . .” Art sketched an expansive shape in the air to illustrate programs.

Linnea didn’t say anything. He went on. “This one’s in Montana. They do a lot of outdoor stuff. Ranch stuff. Horses. Hiking.”

The sick came back up her throat and she spat it out as words. “You mean a loser school.”

“No, honey. Nobody thinks that about you.”

“Who else goes to this swell school, huh? Druggies? Kids that weigh three hundred pounds and cut themselves up?”

Art looked miserable and hangdog but she wasn’t about to feel sorry for him. “What did I do, huh, that I have to go away to some kind of jail?”

“I promise you, it’s not a jail.”

“Like everything that happened is my fault. That’s what my mom thinks. That this is all some big excuse to act up.”

“She just wants you to be happy. Me too.”

“Why is everybody supposed to be HAPPY? That’s asinine.”

“No it’s not. What do you—”

“It makes people HAPPY when I go away.”

“You wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Not until September.”

“NOBODY. WANTS. ME.”

And then she really was sick, barely made it to the toilet in time, kicking the bathroom door shut behind her, tasting the sour, foul mess, snot too because she was crying and she hadn’t meant to, puking until she practically turned herself inside out. Like the cat—was it a cat?—so torn and horrible. She’d seen it yesterday on the edge of someone’s yard, a coyote got it, the man said, lifting it up with a shovel, and once a thing was dead, it remained dead, was always and finally dead.

When she was done puking she got up and rinsed her mouth out and splashed cold water over her face. She wished she could just stay in there but it would have to be the only bathroom in the place. Art was waiting for her. “Seven Up,” he said. “Come on, drink it.”

Linnea did, and it helped some. Art said, “How about I talk with your mom. Nothing has to be decided yet.”

“OK.”

“You have to give her a break. Me a break. Yourself a break. Nobody knows what to do when there’s a tragedy. Nobody practices for it.”

“OK,” she said again, because she was tired, wrung-out, shaky. She wanted to fall asleep and wake up somewhere else. She wanted everybody to forget about her, like she was dead. Plant another tree and move on. If you were dead, at least nobody thought it was all your fault, and no other girl’s father would scream into your face, wanting to know
How is it you got out alive?
Even though Jay had apologized later. He’d still come out and said it.

•   •   •

L
innea had thought she could just keep her head down, cruise through one day and then the next and the next, until the end of summer, avoiding any mention of what might happen farther down the road. Then she’d enroll herself at Tam High, show up at the apartment with her textbooks and ask Art to help her with her homework, and that would be settled. Now her mother had wrecked everything.

Art could have said he wanted her to stay, but he didn’t say it because he didn’t want her to. Linnea didn’t really blame him. She hadn’t been very nice to him. He wanted her to like him, but mostly he wanted to be let off the hook, put in just enough time with her so that nobody would be mad at him. It was a stupid situation.

At least there weren’t any more calls from her mother. Maybe she and Art were talking, hatching some new crummy thing to do to her. She needed to get her hands on some money. Art gave her a few dollars here and there when she asked. He wasn’t cheap, exactly; he just wasn’t a money kind of guy. Linnea had needed new clothes because everything she’d brought with her was wrong, and she’d gotten him to pay for them by telling him an affecting story about how every Christmas when she was a little kid, she pretended that her best present was from her daddy.

She could get a job. Or she couldn’t. She didn’t know how. But say she talked somebody into letting her do some moron teen job, scooping ice cream or flipping hamburgers. It still wouldn’t be the kind of money she had in mind. She had to have enough to run away on and find someplace to stay, though she didn’t have any clear idea of how she would do either of those things. And she had to have the money soon, in case her mother and Art ambushed her and announced that all of a sudden it was Montana time.

She was going to try and sell some of Art’s dope, partly for meanness, partly for money purposes. She was handicapped by not knowing exactly what people charged or paid. Back in Ohio, guys had given her whatever they had some of, dope or different fun pharmaceuticals. She hadn’t needed to buy anything. This was the one time Art could have given her actual fatherly advice, and she couldn’t ask him.

The best way to proceed, she decided, was to take some small-enough quantity—no matter how much she took, the supply was always replenished—and try to peddle it in some casual way. Which she tried a couple of times around Mill Valley, but it didn’t work because she was so lame. Really, she could not have been more of an idiot. She’d thought it would be easier to make friends, or at least talk to people. It was like she’d forgotten how to talk normal, like when she opened her mouth, animal noises came out.

This time she was going to go about it differently and be more businesslike, find some actual potheads. She took a bus into the city and headed for the hippie museum, otherwise known as the Haight. Art probably used to hang out here, being a groovy guy. About thirty years too late for the party.

She had been here before but only at night, those occasions when she’d managed to sneak away late at night, and if she tried that stunt again she guessed she’d be punching her ticket to Montana. So here she was, ten o’clock in the morning, disappointed to find Haight turned into an ordinary street. No music thundering out of the clubs whenever anyone opened a door, no costume parade on the sidewalks, where everything and everyone had a thrilling, illegal air. Once she’d hung out on the front steps of a house with a party going on inside, too shy to actually go inside, waiting for someone to talk to her, but no one did. And once two girls had pulled her back as she tried to cross a street. “Watch it,” they said, nodding at the cop car at the curb. “Curfew.”

“Thanks,” Linnea had muttered, ducking her head, embarrassed. It was unfair and stupid that she still looked so much like a little kid.

A couple of times she saw kids she was pretty sure lived in Mill Valley. She kept her distance from them. She didn’t want anybody thinking she was one of those rich Marin kids who came down here to get their kicks.

This morning she walked around for a while, pretending she had somewhere to go. She hadn’t thought much about how she was going to sell the stuff, how she intended to connect with her fellow desperadoes. She read attentively the flyers taped in layers to the light poles, advertising concerts, a free clinic, work-from-home opportunities. The overcast daylight turned the streets with their painted murals into a used-up kind of place, tired and untidy.

She peered into store windows, as if she was contemplating the purchase of motorcycle jackets or vampire dresses or crystal jewelry. Tibetan art, steel boots, massage oil, Day-Glo wigs, incense, studded belts, skateboards, vinyl bras. She only had twenty dollars, and everything cost so much, as if money had taken over here too. Besides, she didn’t want to go into anywhere they made you leave your backpack because she had two fat Baggies of dope in one of the zip pockets, and it wasn’t the summer of love anymore, people outright ripped you off.

She went into a coffee shop and ordered a mango smoothie and sat at a table to drink it, killing time. The girl behind the counter wore one of those tasseled hats with the strings hanging down, the kind that looked like it was knit out of wool from really gnarly sheep. She had green and blue tattoos winding around both arms, a flower design. Linnea thought that would be something, to show up back at Art’s with tattoos. A big
FUCK MONTANA
around her neck. And there wouldn’t be anything anybody could do about it.

The counter girl washed dishes and chopped up different fruits for the drinks: strawberries, kiwis, honeydew, pineapple. Some kind of hectic dance music Linnea didn’t recognize came from speakers in the corners. A boy and girl came in and ordered lattes and walked out again, draped and sagging around each other, as if they’d been having sex and were about to go back and have more sex and were just taking a coffee break.