The Humanity Project (4 page)

Her hair was so stupid. Even if it grew out and even if she had somebody else do it from now on, it was always going to be ugly and stupid and wrong. You wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn’t? What if you had to stay you forever?

“So, you give any good blow jobs lately? Huh, Meggie?” Megan had once made the mistake of telling Linnea the things she had done with her last boyfriend.

“Fuck you!”

Now it was Linnea’s turn to go “Oooh.” She tried to get out the door then but the other two were in the way and Megan shoved her in the chest. Megan was big, but a total spaz, so it felt more like getting bumped by somebody on a bus.

Linnea ran into one of the stalls and shut the latch. She put her eye up to the crack in between the door and the metal frame. Megan was right outside, leaning in. “Oh wow,” Linnea said. “The attack of the giant boobs.”

“I am gonna beat your ass!”

“Not from out there you aren’t.”

Megan smacked on the stall door. “Get out here!”

“Make me.”

Megan put her face up to the crack. Linnea wished she had her backpack so she could stick a pen right in her eye. Linnea saw their two pairs of feet. They smacked on the door some more and then pushed on it. Linnea pushed back.

They stopped trying to get in and the feet moved back to the sinks. “Maybe she should just stay in there,” Eyeliner said.

“Yeah, because that’s where she belongs. In a toilet.”

Linnea said, “Hey, Meggie. Your mom is gross. I’m just saying.”

“And your mom’s a whore!”

“Yeah? Then I guess Jay likes whores better than big fat cows like your mom.”

Megan rushed the door again and made it rattle. “He does not.”

“Yeah, right.” Linnea was running out of rotten things to say. She was going to get in trouble for cutting English when it wasn’t even her fault.

Megan and Eyeliner were talking so she couldn’t hear, all whispers. Then they left. The door swung open and they were gone. Linnea stayed put. She knew they were probably just outside so when she came out they could jump her. How long was she going to have to wait for somebody else to come in so she could leave? She unlatched the stall door and peered out to make sure they were gone. There was a window open just enough to let a little air in but she didn’t know if it went anywhere and then she remembered the beautiful day outside and it wasn’t fair.

Why did she have to even
know
Megan, but she did, she was somebody Linnea would have to drag around for her whole stupid life because Jay was stupid enough to marry Angela. And it was a purely horrible thing to realize that Max was what was called Linnea’s half brother but he was Megan’s too. Horrible horrible horrible.

Megan was going to grow up to be just like Angela, a big whiny top-heavy cow with a lot of boys always hanging around her. Did that mean Linnea would turn into her own mother and wake up every day in a bad mood and telling everybody else they were doing things wrong? Now that was depressing.

Some kind of noise started up, somebody shouting, but small and far away and Linnea couldn’t tell if it was inside or outside, beyond the window. Then a ripping, popping sound. A door slammed. Then the echoing noise of feet running in the empty hallway. More shouting, she couldn’t make out the words.

Was something happening? Was it some kind of crazy stuff?

She left the stall and went to stand next to the hallway door. She couldn’t tell if anybody was on the other side or not. She put her mouth to the opening. “Megan?”

No answer. Her heart was jumping around and the commotion of it was making her head feel blurred. She had to decide something but whatever it was wouldn’t stay still. It was about the door, which had always been an ordinary door but now it was like a door in a movie, something the camera stayed on for a long time so you knew it was important. She put her hand flat against it, as if letting the hand do its own deciding, and then came the sound of slow feet coming down the hallway and stopping just outside.

F
oster’s wife belonged to the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Foundation, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and probably some others he’d forgotten about. Foster told her she seemed to join any organization that thought human beings had been a bad invention. His wife said he could make fun all he wanted, but they were all about worthwhile goals, like responsible stewardship and living in harmony with nature.

Harmony, Foster said, now that was a good one. Nature was a constant fight for food or territory, and every creature out there was either prey or predator or sometimes both, and that included forlorn polar bears on melting ice and lovable orangutans and anything else whose affecting, full-color photograph was used to manipulate people like her into writing more checks. Anyway, the next time the deer came down from Mt. Tam and munched on her roses, he wanted to hear her talk about harmony and stewardship. His wife told Foster that he just enjoyed arguing and being disagreeable.

He couldn’t argue back without proving her point, so he silenced himself and waited for her to leave. She was preparing to go out, and this required phone consultations and marching back and forth between different rooms, and wondering out loud where were her shoes, her keys, and so on, and here was the lunch she had prepared for him, and this was how he was to go about reheating it, and he had to remember his medicine, which was all set out on the kitchen counter, did he want her to call and remind him?

“Feral cats,” Foster said.

“What?” His wife’s eyebrows rose and hovered like some old-time Applause-O-Meter, except here the dial went from exasperation to alarm.

“People
want
them to be endangered.”

“Entirely disagreeable,” his wife pronounced, taking herself off.

Foster waited while the car made its way down the long hill of the driveway, pulled into the street and receded, leaving a faint, stinging silence behind it. “Am not,” he said aloud.

In fact, Foster was mildly in favor of preserving marine mammals and hummingbird habitat and scenic rivers, and mildly annoyed by most of his own species. What he didn’t care for was anything he regarded as sentimental or falsely optimistic. Big fish ate little fish. Species evolved or failed to do so. Everything reproduced and died, everything wound up on the scrap heap of mortality. He’d had two bouts with prostate cancer and either that or something else was likely to finish him off sooner rather than later, and he didn’t want to have to pretend it wasn’t happening.

He had the house to himself for some blessed space of hours. She had gone into the city and there she would shop and lunch. She had an errand involving drapery fabric, or maybe it was upholstery fabric or maybe it wasn’t fabric at all, but bathroom lighting fixtures or some other household trophy. It was often true, as she accused him, that he did not pay attention to the things she told him. They had been married more than forty years, and by now he figured he’d already heard everything she had to say.

So much of what came out of her mouth was just a kind of anxious noise, meant to reassure herself that she still existed, still retained her full complement of opinions, observations, preferences, imperatives. From time to time Foster dipped his oar into the stream, answered back, made listening noises, supplied information where required. But he simply couldn’t keep up. What he called talking, she called “communication.” On those occasions when she punished him by remaining silent, he usually had to have the punishment pointed out to him. It hurt her feelings, and her hurt feelings became one more of her infallible grievances, something used against him.

A good marriage? A bad one? A little of each, he thought, and anyway it hardly mattered by this late date, their children grown and gone, and only these last, exhausted years remaining. They’d knit themselves together and now, after the surgeries, the professionally sympathetic doctors, the explanation of what was meant by “recurrence,” it was time to begin the process of unknitting.

There was a sense in which he had already removed himself from her. Dying was something you did alone; he needed to practice for it. He hated his wife’s solicitude, her extravagant worrying, her inquiries after the state of his damaged, leaky body. He pushed her away, he said he was fine, leave him be. Of course her fears were in large part for herself. She was terrified of sleeping alone, waking alone, moving through her remaining days alone. Foster knew this. The future cast its shadow. But he could not allow himself to feel pity for her, lest he feel pity for himself, and so become entirely undone. He wanted to be left in peace, or the closest he could come to it.

Today he had his little space of solitude, and his excellent cup of coffee, and the thin winter sun angling through the windows of the breakfast room. He closed his eyes and let the sun warm his face. He didn’t want to think about anything. He didn’t want to be in pain, or dread being in pain. If only the light could go out and take him along with it.

A noise drew him back to himself. Something outside that scraped or scratched. Even before he opened his eyes he identified it as a rake moving over rough ground.

At the edge of the large and well-kept backyard, with its koi pond and footbridge and plantings of bamboo and Japanese maples, its bird-friendly shrubs and variety of feeders, a man—a young man? teenager? all he could see was a slight figure in a hooded sweatshirt—was raking the dead leaves out of the English ivy. They employed all manner of people to tend to the lawn and garden, and so this was not in itself startling, although Foster had not seen this person before, and his wife usually told him when to expect a crew—that is, the latest person who’d shown up at their door asking for work. Of course it was likely that she’d said something but he’d missed it. For once this bothered him, as if he should be making an effort not to let anything slip past him.

The boy had already filled a number of tall brown paper leaf bags—he must have started working along the driveway, out of Foster’s view—and now he began hauling these around the corner of the house. When he came back to the rake, a black dog bounded alongside him, sniffing the borders and raising his leg on a teak garden bench.

Foster tapped on the window glass but they were too far away. A dog would not do, would not do at all. Who told him he could bring a dog anyway? His wife wouldn’t have allowed it; dogs, in her view, were only slightly less destructive in a garden than deer.

Foster went to the back door and opened it, called out, but now the boy had a leaf blower going, running it along the edge of the beds. The racket was obnoxious. The boy had his back to Foster, the dog was pawing at the edge of the koi pond, onto some scent, maybe. “Hey!” Foster called. “You, scram!”

The dog raised his head, gave Foster a level glance, then went back to his absorbing task. The boy still hadn’t seen him. Foster stepped outside—it wasn’t really that cold—onto the bluestone path. His ankle wobbled—

—or maybe it was his head sending some scrambled electrical message to his ankle, because his vision went white and fizzy, like static, and he pitched sideways into a bush that wasn’t dense enough to support his weight and he tried to catch himself but his hand went right through and then he was inside the bush itself. Twigs in his mouth and hair. He tasted them, a dry taste. He saw the patched sky through their crosshatching. He opened his mouth to speak, but the bush choked out any words.

It was the most extraordinary thing.

The black dog was nosing at him, almost delicately. Foster was aware of the snuffling, the small nudging. The racket of the leaf blower had ceased. Somewhere outside of the bush someone, a boy, he remembered, was saying something in tones of rising concern.

“Sir? Sir? Are you all right, sir?”

It was such a relief not to have to do anything. Be anything. Other than part of a bush.

“Sir? Can you hear me?”

Gradually, he came back to himself. Different portions of him—legs and feet—were on the ground, while the rest of him was suspended in the dense leafless branches, which both supported and imprisoned him. In another moment, he was pretty sure bad things would start to happen, and here they were. Damage reports from his neck and back. Places his skin had been scraped and scratched. His glasses knocked loose. Somewhere out there were all the unwelcome human components of alarm, fear, confusion, and embarrassment.

“Sir?”

“I’m . . .” He started to say “all right,” since that was what you were meant to say, but there should be something else you could say instead. It was all the way back in his mouth where he kept the words. But now he had to contend with this boy, who was leaning over him and pushing through the branches, saying give me your hand, give me your hand, but Foster wasn’t any good at that, so the boy had to stoop and try to get an arm beneath Foster’s shoulders, all the while shooing the interested dog away. It was the kind of dog who wanted to be part of everything.

Getting himself upright took some effort. The bush had nearly swallowed him whole, and Foster wasn’t much help, and the boy had to wade halfway into the tangled space. Back in the hospital Foster had been similarly helpless and other people had moved him this way or that. But then he had been drugged and punchy; now he was mostly curious about the whole procedure.

The boy hauled Foster back onto the path, still supporting his weight. “How about we get you inside,” he suggested, and Foster said Yes, good idea, or tried to say it, but it was hard to do more than one thing at a time, and breathing seemed an even better idea. He hadn’t gotten very far from the back door, so that when the boy draped Foster over his back like some big broken bird, it only took a few steps to get across the threshold. “Stay,” the boy told the disappointed dog, closing the door behind them. Then, to Foster, “Is anybody else home?”

“Nnnn,” Foster managed. He thought he could walk on his own now but nope, here he was falling over again, until the boy got a kitchen chair underneath him and he managed to land properly in it.

“I can call somebody for you. Like, nine-one-one . . .”

That joggled Foster’s words loose. “No, don’t. Call.” His tongue unfurled, regained its strength. “Just need to catch my breath.”

The boy had been bending over him and now he straightened and took a step back, seeming cautious, as if Foster might start flailing around again, or weeping, or any other unseemly thing. He went to the sink, ran water, found a glass on the drainboard and offered it to Foster. “Thank you,” Foster said. He was aware that he was being monitored, and that he was going to have to behave reasonably if he didn’t want ambulances and calls to his wife and every other fuss-making thing. He drank a little of the water. It seemed to stay in his throat a long time. “I guess I just lost my balance out there.”

Cunning was needed. His head still felt gauzy, he scrabbled to hold on to the certainty that he had been, if only for a few moments, something other than himself, but he had to thrust it down and keep talking. “I have some problems with my blood pressure,” not exactly a lie. “I probably stood up too fast.”

He watched the boy weigh this as a reasonable explanation. He wasn’t very old, a high school kid, Foster guessed. One of those god-awful rat’s nests of hair. A baby face, but with something cautious and adult in his manner. His eyes never met Foster’s. Foster said, “My wife will be home a little later. Really, you don’t have to worry about me.”

“You got a couple of pretty good scratches there.”

He was going to have to explain those, he supposed, but first he had to establish himself as a competent person who did not need minding. “I guess my wife must have hired you,” he said cheerily.

“How about I get you something for your face.”

Foster closed his eyes again, giving up. He heard the boy in different parts of the house, looking for what he needed, something else his wife would not have liked. He felt weakened, defeated, a soiled old man. The boy was back. “I’m just gonna clean these up first.”

Foster kept silent. The boy pressed a warm wet cloth to his face, then dabbed ointment. “This might smart a little,” he warned.

Oh Jesus did it. Foster tried not to squirm. He flicked his eyes open, saw the boy’s face close to his own, then the boy backed off, put a little more respectful distance between them.

“Thanks,” Foster said. “I’m good as new.”

“Sure.” The boy’s gaze lifted to the window, thinking of the undone job, or the job after that, Foster guessed. Or maybe trying to keep track of the dog. But he didn’t seem ready to take himself off yet, since Foster might topple over again or worse. “This is a really nice house you have,” he offered.

“Thank you.” It was in fact a nice house, although Foster couldn’t remember the last time he’d given much thought to it, and right now, in the aftermath of his peculiar episode, he had to look around him and consider it. Not just this particular house, his own, but the whole idea of houses. So much empty, complicated space, when all you needed was a few twigs.
And wasn’t the body also a kind of house?
Foster shook his head loose from the strangeness of his thoughts, forced himself back into some familiar notion of himself: brisk and businesslike. “If you want to finish up back there, I’ll just sit and rest. Then it’s fine if you go.”

“I need to put my dog in the truck,” the boy said, which Foster guessed was a way of saying he was staying put.

The boy crossed the kitchen and the back door opened, shut. Foster would have liked to swear. He didn’t think he had enough breath in him. Even if he could manage to get up and lock the door, shoo the boy away, that wouldn’t be the end of it. Someone else would come tapping at the glass, breaking down the door, prodding at him with latex gloves. He guessed he’d be better off taking his chances with the boy.

There was a small, floating space of lost time—that is, of no time at all—before the door opened again. A draft of cold air walked along Foster’s spine. The boy shut the door. “How are you feeling?”

“Ah. Lousy.” Dumb answer maybe, but he didn’t think “fine” was going to fool anyone.