The Humanity Project (6 page)

“Art?” Louise was back on the line. “She eats most things. That will be the least of your worries.”

And so he had undertaken the cleaning and overhaul of his apartment, a sobering project, considering his chronic lack of housekeeping. There were boxes of old papers, things that had never made it onto a computer: class syllabi, gradebooks, student evaluations, quizzes, xeroxed copies of articles. These were layered with a number of inactive wardrobe items, piles of possibly important mail, advertising flyers, receipts, a package of cocktail napkins bought for some forgotten purpose, a compilation of thriftily saved plastic bags, the cable attachment for a digital camera, and more more more: toppling piles of CDs, bands his daughter would sneer at, books she would find uninteresting, his collection of half-melted candles. He owned nothing that was not sad, dishonored, unworthy. In the kitchen the gas oven leaked gas. He threw out everything in the refrigerator and scrubbed it down with a powerfully lemon-scented cleanser. He couldn’t bring himself to think about the bathroom yet.

Art’s apartment was on the second floor, with an outside staircase, like a motel. He made a great many trips with trashbags dragging and bumping behind him on the stairs, and, as he was hoping, his downstairs neighbor Christie came out to see what he was doing. “You moving or something?” she asked.

“Just cleaning up. My daughter’s coming to visit.”

“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

“No reason you would.” Art paused mid-step. He had a hopeless thing for Christie. “She lives with her mom, in Ohio.”

“Ah.” Christie nodded, looking up at him with her amazing blue gaze. “How old is she?”

“Fifteen.”

“A teenager, good luck.” Christie was wearing one of her gauzy dresses with a little white sweater over it. She looked like she was wrapped in layers of cloud.

“So I’m trying to get the place cleared out a little. Want to see?”

“All right.” Christie followed him up the stairs and in through the front door. Their apartments were identical in layout. Of course, hers was all girled-up. Art stood aside to let her take in the kitchen, or that portion of the main room that functioned as a kitchen.

“I can see you’ve been working.”

“You don’t sound real impressed.”

“I’m not sure anybody else could see it. I mean if they hadn’t been here before.”

“I haven’t gotten around to the bathroom yet,” Art explained, as Christie continued her inspection tour.

“Could I suggest some new towels? And a new shower curtain. And put the toilet paper on the holder, don’t just let it sit on the sink.”

“I could do that. Sure.”

“Where is she going to sleep?” Art indicated the small bedroom across from his own. “I think you should move the bed out to the sunporch and give her that.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because this room looks like an embalming chamber. How long is she staying anyway?”

“That kind of depends,” Art said. He’d been hoping he could get Christie to help him clean up the place. Maybe he still could.

“On what, exactly?”

“How we get along, I guess.”

“How do you usually get along?”

“I haven’t seen her in a while,” Art admitted, and before Christie could ask her next reasonable question, he said, “Hey, would you like some tea?”

“OK. But let’s have it at my place.”

Christie’s apartment made his own look like some kind of evil twin. She’d painted her walls in sunset colors, gold and salmon, and she went in for things like houseplants and woven rugs and pottery that looked as if it had been fabricated by desert-dwelling Indian tribes. She made tea in an actual teapot and poured it through a strainer into matching blue mugs. There wasn’t a thing she did that Art didn’t observe with helpless fascination. “Now,” Christie said. “Tell me about the mystery daughter.”

“This is good tea, what kind is it? Green?”

“Art.”

“I was married for a while. Not real long. It didn’t work out. So we called it quits, and I came out here. From, you know, the Midwest.”

Christie waited. Steam rose up from her teacup and twined through the baby curls on each side of her face. “That’s it?”

“More or less.” Art shrugged. It wasn’t the kind of story that made you look good.

“How old was your daughter then? What’s her name, anyway?”

“Linnea. Not very old. Two.”

“That’s a pretty name. Linnea.”

“Yeah, it’s, ah, Swedish. Her mom was Swedish. Is.”

“So all this time . . .”

“It’s not something you plan, you know? You don’t say, ‘I think I’ll get married to the wrong woman and impregnate her and then bug out.’ She wasn’t ever happy with me. With who I turned out to be. She had all these expectations. She was glad to see me go. I was glad to be gone. Enough time goes by, you almost forget any of it happened.” He thought he understood the parents in Hansel and Gretel, how they’d gone on with their lives after the abandonment in the forest. They had convinced themselves they’d never had children. After a moment Art said, “I’m just trying to be honest here.”

“Yes, it doesn’t seem like you’re shining it up much.”

“I don’t think I would have been any good at having a little kid around anyway.”

“You never know until you try,” Christie said, meaning it as a reproach.

“I wasn’t much of a family type.”

Which was true. But what type was he? In another century, Art imagined, he might have had a nice life as a monk in some comfortable monastery, one with a good library. As it was, he’d been dragging out his education for the last twenty years. He had a master’s degree in English literature, with a specialty in colonial literature, authors such as Kipling, Forster, Conrad. He’d always meant to go on and get a doctorate, and he still kept in touch with his committee, at least those who had not yet retired or died off. But over time his specialty had become somewhat dated. It was too easy to sneer at imperialism and cultural hegemony; anybody could do it, and many people had. It was harder and harder to come up with new and subtle variations, at least in English. In other languages, in other parts of the globe, you could be pretty sure that one population was still busy squeezing the juice out of another, and then sitting on top of the conquered tribes and writing about it.

He thought about starting over, tackling some newer, hotter field, where it was still possible to feel a righteous indignation: ecocriticism, or genocide studies. But as yet he had not taken up the sword. A doctorate of any sort, a dissertation, was such daunting work. Knowledge for its own sake had its limits. Nor was another degree going to land him some plummy professor job. He was forty years old, past his stale date, and anyway, jobs like that were long gone.

He tried to recall the excitement he’d felt when he’d first come out west, that sense of lightness and possibility, his life taking some new and unimaginable shape.

He taught composition courses at one or another junior college. He hired himself out to tutor the indifferent sons and daughters of the wealthy. He graded papers for a national testing service. He wrote online book reviews and attempted to get paid for them. These were the strategies of the overeducated and the underemployed.

In addition, he and a friend were developing a website, which did not yet earn money, although it had the potential to do so, where users could rate other websites. He’d written training manuals for an educational publisher to use in their New Delhi office.

He’d managed to get a trip to India out of it, and he’d parlayed that into three months of sightseeing and dysentery. He was working on a screenplay, a science-fiction epic of post-apocalyptic life on earth, where humans battled one another in huge arenas that were actually video games. From time to time, he made a little money selling pot. He thought about going to culinary school, learning about cooking. He was aware that there were ridiculous aspects to his life, ways in which he could not be taken seriously.

Louise had nagged him about quitting school and getting a real job, earning real money, and he guessed she had been entitled to do so. It was a wife thing. And it took them longer than it should have to figure out they never should have been married in the first place. What did they know? They kept waiting for marriage to take hold, do its thing, meld them into a single being. Each blamed the other for getting in the way of the process. Louise was beautiful, he was smart, or supposed to be smart. Sort of like Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Everybody knew how that had turned out.

Christie said, “So why is she coming here?”

“It was her idea.”

Christie waited for him to keep explaining. Christie was beautiful too. Not in the voluptuous, strutting style of Louise, but in a way that made you take a second look, and then a third. And she was smarter than Louise because she was careful to keep a certain distance between them. She always behaved as if they were funny, sitcom neighbors, and was he going to spend his entire half-assed life alone and broke because he couldn’t measure up to the things he wanted?

He said, “You know what your face reminds me of? A Victorian portrait. Of a fairy or something.”

“Fairy?”

“They did a lot of these flower fairies. Little creatures wearing flower petals and flying with butterfly wings. They used, uh, all these very fine, delicate lines.”

“That’s kind of sweet, Art. A little icky, but sweet.”

He was going to have to work up some more casual compliments. He said, “She’s coming here because they don’t know what else to do with her.”

He told Christie the story. Maybe she’d seen it on the news, one of those school shootings. Did she remember? Last year? School shootings had kind of died down, but there had been this one. A boy with a grudge, it wasn’t clear against whom. Most likely everybody. He’d come to school one morning with an automatic pistol in his backpack, and a hunting rifle with a scope, ingeniously concealed in its own canvas carrying case. For Christ’s sake, weren’t schools supposed to have security plans these days? What did they think was in there, lacrosse equipment?

Anyway, in he walked. It wasn’t a huge high school, just medium-sized, in one of those depressed medium-sized Ohio towns that had grown up around a rail line a century ago. The place his daughter had moved with her mother at some unspecified point. Art knew the town, and thought he remembered the school, three stories of dark brick trimmed with granite cornices and a frieze of figures in togas, proclaiming the virtues of an educated citizenry.

The boy had chosen a place to sit and wait, a partially screened alcove at the end of the main hallway. From television, from certain muscular movies, from video games, he was familiar with the concept of the sniper’s nest. The boy said later (because he had survived, to everyone’s disappointment, had not turned a gun on himself or been shot by the tardy law enforcement officers) that he had meant to wait until class was dismissed and the halls full of students. But another boy had come out to open his locker and seen the boy with the rifle, and run off to raise the alarm. And so the shooting had begun early.

The shooter fired twice at the boy but missed. These were in the nature of practice shots. He’d needed to get some of the nervousness out of his hands.

And imagine for a moment that boy, spinning his locker combination, yawning his way through the morning, every part of him turned to the lowest possible setting in order to get through the boredom of his day, his week, and his foreseeable future. He hears something, most probably, and looks up at a place where he is accustomed to seeing nothing. Instead there is this thing that refuses to make sense, a rifle barrel pointed at him, jerking up and down as the shooter tries to adjust the scope. It will not resolve itself into anything real. It takes those first shots, the bullets hitting the wall a few feet from his head, kicking out some of the plaster, for the boy to start running.

The boy with the guns walked through the hallway, turned a corner, and entered a classroom where a sophomore civics class was in session. He knew no one there. He had never met or spoken to any of his victims. Now everything was real, he was the star of his own movie, which he watched from a little distance inside himself. He shot the teacher first, three times in the back with the handgun. He aimed haphazardly into the rows of students, who were all still in their assigned seats, because no one had yet fathomed any of it. The boy with the gun did not speak. Later it was estimated he was only in the classroom for fifteen to twenty seconds. For most of the students, it was the sight of blood, not even their own but someone else’s, that set them to moving and screaming.

Those who had been shot did not realize it right away, or at all. The teacher, who had been bent over his desk, died without awareness or comprehension. Four students were wounded, one grievously. The boy returned to the hallways, where, unwisely, a couple of doors had been opened and people were looking out. The boy fired shots in their direction without hitting anyone.

And here was where the sequence of events became less certain, because the boy with the guns—only the handgun now, since for some reason he’d dropped the rifle in the main hallway—appeared to hide or evade for a time, and no one reported seeing him for a space of at least twenty minutes. By now police were assembling outside the school, and a team of officers was sent inside, wearing protective vests and helmets. They cornered the shooter in the cafeteria kitchen, surrounded him and wrestled him down in the middle of the stainless steel worktables and clanging pans, and only later were the two dead girls discovered in the upstairs restroom. One of them was Linnea’s stepsister. Linnea had been there and watched the boy kill them. She herself had escaped only because his gun had misfired.

Art stopped talking. Christie said, “Go on, what happened?”

“That’s what happened. She watched him shoot the others. He held a gun to her head. He couldn’t get it to work right. Jammed or something. He kept trying for a while. Then he gave up and left.”

“That’s horrible, Art.”

“I guess she’s been having some behavior issues.”