The Humanity Project (35 page)

“Oh. Hey there, how you doing?” He looked a little wild-eyed, and he was breathing strenuously.

“Tell your guys to come on over.”

“Yeah?” He considered this. Christie thought he would have been just as happy to create a big stink and get thrown out.

“Sure. More the merrier.” She beckoned to them; they hung back, unsure. “Go on, tell them.”

Scottie went to confer with his followers, and pointed to the food. The Latino family led the way, then the men, hesitant at first, shuffling along the line of pans holding the dilled salmon, the vegetarian lasagna, spinach with feta, couscous with dried cranberries, pasta primavera, and the rest. “What is this shit?” Christie heard one of the men mutter.

“So, you guys hungry?” she asked cheerily, and another man said something about how he could always eat.

“Go ahead, help yourselves, and grab a seat wherever you can.”

She watched them heap their plates, then wander the room until they found empty chairs at the various tables. The conference-goers, puzzled at first, seemed to decide that this was included in their registration fees: personal interaction with genuine poor people. They scooted their chairs over to make room, they seemed delighted to have these shy and furtive visitors in their midst.

Scottie was still planted at the front of the room, eating a piece of stuffed endive. Christie said, “This really was a stupid stunt. What were you going to tell these people if we turned them away?”

“I was going to take them to the pancake house,” he admitted.

“It was crummy to use them as props.”

“Not props,” he argued. “Protesters. Why waste all this money so people can sit around on their asses eating snazzy food? What’s it supposed to accomplish?”

There was a whole list of things: Dialogue. Engagement. Information sharing. Consensus building. La la la la la. “You know, here’s your chance to argue your case in person. Ask for a piece of the action.” She nodded at Mrs. Foster’s table.

“You think I should?”

“Sure. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Let a thousand flowers bloom.”

“You’re right. I mean, you work for a useless, wasteful boutique charity, but you’re right.”

He raised his arm and, belatedly, Christie managed to bump fists with him. She watched him go, then turned back to the buffet food, or its remnants. By now it looked as if it had been trampled underfoot. She picked up a dinner roll and contemplated eating it.

Leslie Hart came up to Christie, her heels clattering on the parquet floor. “What on earth is going on? Who are these people?”

“Um, you’d have to ask him.” Christie indicated Scottie, who had made his way to the head table by now and was glad-handing the famous author, Mrs. Foster, and a couple of the waiters. “Don’t worry, there was plenty of food. It’s sort of like, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.”

Leslie exhaled and her fringe of bangs puffed up. “You’re all nuts. Everybody in your whole nuthouse foundation, including my mother. The lawyer’s just the last straw.”

“Mr. Kirn? What’s he done?”

“Oh don’t tell me you don’t know.”

She didn’t, but for a moment she was transfixed by Leslie’s glaring staring eye, intent and hostile, the iris yellow-green, the pupil shrunken to a point. It looked like the eye of an angry chicken.
Pawk pawk pawk.
“What about Mr. Kirn?”

“He says he’s leaving the board. He’s giving up his law practice and he wants to go on a Buddhist pilgrimage!”

Yes, and Christie herself was going to attend clown college and join the circus. “Oh, really?” She tried and failed to come up with some sufficiently distressed response to this news. She was distracted by a small commotion. One of the homeless men had grown comfortable enough to begin an animated conversation with the others at his table. He was entertaining them with some story told at full volume: “Dude! Where’s my dawg? Du-ude! Where’s my dawg!”

“Would you excuse me?” Christie turned away from Leslie and her indignation, walked over to the man, and put a hand on his shoulder. They spoke together for a while.

The waiters brought out coffee and desserts. The booksellers had set up a table along one wall and people were browsing through the offerings. It was almost time for the famous author to speak. He was making his way to the podium. Christie walked over and met him there.

The famous author began speaking to her in his deep, authoritative, media-tested voice, telling her how pleased he was, how honored, how grateful for the excellent hospitality, and so on. At some point Christie became aware that his hand was climbing over her forearm on its way up toward her shoulder. She looked down at it and eventually he stopped talking and the two of them stared at the hand as if it were some alien entity. Then he took the hand away and sat in the chair next to the microphone.

Christie picked up one of the books from the booksellers’ table. She figured she could at least read his list of publications and accomplishments from the jacket flap. The book was called
The Journey to the Mountaintop: A Seeker’s Guide
. Its cover art showed a snow-covered peak, vaguely Himalayan in aspect, tinted with rainbow shimmer. People bought this stuff, they couldn’t get enough. They wanted stories of affirmation and purpose, and hardships overcome. They wanted to believe in happy endings in the face of all evidence to the contrary. She guessed she wasn’t any different. Maybe just more easily disappointed.

She stepped up to the microphone and tapped a finger against it to make certain it was on. The room began to quiet down and settle itself for listening. “Good evening,” Christie began. “If I could have your attention, please.” She felt a little dizzy, all those faces watching her. She had no idea what she was going to say. “Thank you so much for being here tonight and lending your voices and your presence. Thank you to those who have supported The Humanity Project with their resources and hard work. And to our honored guest, tonight’s speaker, who, as we all know, has many demands lately on his time and energies.”

A perceptible shift and murmur in the crowd. Was she referring to . . . they were uncertain if . . . A few sniggers, of the nervous sort.

Christie referred to the book jacket. “He has written . . . ‘nine best-selling volumes that explore, in eloquent yet straightforward language, our quest for meaning and purpose in a world that so often seems to lack them. His words have brought comfort and inspiration to millions.’”

She stopped reading. The faces of the audience were turned toward her like flowers. The anxious earnest conference-goers, the homeless men waiting for the next good or bad thing to happen to them. The Latino family, who did not appear to understand English, let the amplified noise wash over and around them. If she turned her head enough, she would be able to see Mr. Kirn, Mrs. Foster, Leslie Hart, and the others. “I don’t have much to add to what others have said about him, those who know him far better than I, and those who have studied his eminent works with care. He is, in many ways, so much more . . .”

She paused, vacantly. The room was silent. A tide of dread gathered in it and rippled toward her. What if she flaked out? Stopped talking? Someone would have to do something!

“. . . so much more celebrated than the rest of us. But every bit as human. Because to be human is to be broken. To be of the world is to be soiled by the world. To be alive is to be, in spite of everything, hopeful.”

She looked out onto them. They looked back, stricken. Except for the Latino family, who had no expectation that she’d make sense to begin with. “Please join me in welcoming our distinguished guest.”

The audience applauded, as much from relief that she’d gotten through it as from anything else. Christie walked away from the microphone and over to the corner where Conner stood. She said, “I think I might know where your father is.”

•   •   •

C
onner didn’t want to wait until morning, so Christie said they could take her car. He offered to drive. Christie said that would probably be a good idea. She was on the downslope of drunk, and she was tired and hollowed-out. “You don’t really have to go,” he said. “I mean, I could drive Mrs. Foster and all back home when they’re done here and get the truck, and you could write everything down for me.”

But he was so clearly anxious to leave that very minute that she waved this off and said she didn’t mind. Mr. Kirn was given the keys to Mrs. Foster’s car. One of his last official duties before hitting the Buddhist trail. Oh surely he wasn’t serious about that; there were things she simply could not fathom about people. Conner spoke with Mr. Kirn about the new arrangements and Christie hid in the ladies’ room until Mr. Kirn was out of sight.

“I might have gotten your hopes up for nothing,” she told Conner once they were under way. “It’s not like it’s a sure thing.”

“We’ll find out pretty soon.” He’d retrieved a hooded sweatshirt from Mrs. Foster’s car and taken off his coat and tie. He looked like an ordinary kid again.

They weren’t going that far, in terms of distance, but they would have to travel down one set of hills, then west on the flats, and up more hills, a half-hour’s drive to this place where the homeless were said to camp. They might have moved on by now. Or the man at dinner could have been mistaken, or lying. Or it was just as likely that Conner’s father might not want to be found. But it wasn’t her job to point any of this out.

Meanwhile, here was this peculiar interval, peculiar to be sitting in her own car as someone else drove, hurtling through darkness and this boy beside her, whom she could once more allow herself to admire as if from a distance, and without distress. She said, just for the sake of saying something, “Have you seen Linnea lately?”

He looked over at her, then away. “Not really. I think she’s going out with some guy from her school now.”

She probably shouldn’t have asked. She tried to remember anything Linnea had said about Conner’s father. He hadn’t been able to work and he’d lost his house and when did that turn into something you got so used to hearing about so many people, and so used to saying? She would have liked to ask Conner more about him, but he didn’t seem like a boy who was in the habit of talking about things, and she thought she understood that right now the mechanics of driving were what he needed to do in place of talking, and furthermore that in all her besotted staring she had overlooked everything that was fragile about him.

She sat back and closed her eyes. She was going to have to tell Mrs. Foster she was leaving the Foundation, going back to nursing. Imelda could step up and run things in her place. Imelda would be a whiz, all enterprise and energy. She wouldn’t spend time worrying about whether money was either a good or a bad thing. She wouldn’t take herself too seriously.

Maybe she dozed. When she opened her eyes again they were driving through Fairfax, the downtown left behind them, the houses rising street by street into the hills. “Go up to Deer Park Villa,” Christie directed him. “You know where that is?”

“Yeah, I do.” After a few more blocks he said, “They found my dog right around here.”

“I don’t suppose,” Christie said, “that you’re keeping your dog at Mrs. Foster’s?”

“I’ve got him up in my room. I only take him out when she’s not around. I guess I should probably tell her.”

“I wouldn’t bother thinking about it right this minute.”

They reached the gates of the Villa, closed now. “Take that turn,” Christie directed him. Then, later, “Turn right.” Conner slowed as the road narrowed. The trees were closing in around and above them and the car’s headlights didn’t penetrate the green walls. They both leaned forward, trying to see. “Look for a white sign.”

“What is this place anyway?”

“There’s some man who lets these guys camp on his property.”

The road was barely more than one lane and didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Christie began to doubt the directions and hope they could get themselves downhill again. Then Conner said, “Is that it? The sign?”

A rusted white No Trespassing sign was attached to a chain, but the chain had been taken down and the sign lay on the ground. Conner downshifted and they bumped along a grass-grown drive, still slick from the last rain. It didn’t look like anywhere that humans had been for a long time.

The drive came to an end in a half-cleared field. Conner brought the car to a stop and kept the engine running. The headlights showed an empty, weedy space, a ring of cinder blocks around what might have been a burn pile, a heap of rebar and rusted barrels. Christie said, “I don’t think—”

“I saw something.”

“Where?” She didn’t see anything but the end-of-the-world landscape. “Let’s just go.”

“After I get out, lock the doors,” Conner told her. “Do you have a phone?”

Christie fished it from her purse. “No service. Please don’t go out there.”

“All right, look, can you turn this car around if you have to? Can you get out to the road and into town again? If I don’t come back in ten minutes, that’s what I want you to do. Sound the horn before you start back, and keep hitting it as you go. Don’t stop anywhere until you’re in Fairfax.”

“We can get the police and come back here.”

“These aren’t people who hang around waiting for the police.” He opened his door. “Ten minutes.”

Conner got out and she watched him moving along the beam of the headlights, the gray sweatshirt ghost-pale, then take a step into darkness, hesitate on the edge of her sight, and vanish.

She didn’t want to keep track of time because it would run out and she’d still be sitting here alone, as she had been, in one way or another, all her life, and there was nothing out there in the dark worse than that.

Conner came walking back along the trail of light, and someone else was with him, a limping figure so encrusted with leaves as to look like a walking tree. Every so often the figure stopped and brushed at himself and shed some leaf clumps. Christie opened her door and got out to meet them.

“I wrecked the truck, sport,” the man said. “I’m real sorry.”

“That’s all right,” Conner told him. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I lost Bojangles.”