The Tourist Trail (9 page)

First, Jake gave up fish. That was easy. It was a chore of a food, and he'd eaten it only because it was supposed to be healthy. He never could tell the difference between halibut and scrod, and he didn't care if salmon came from a farm or the inland waterways of Alaska. It all looked and tasted pretty much the same, and it all left him feeling hungry.

Then he gave up pork, also not much of a sacrifice. He liked bacon, but he rarely had time for breakfast. Chicken he would miss. Wings, fajitas, all those pasta dishes that used chicken like croutons. Chicken-salad sandwiches. Chicken soup. Rotisserie chicken from the neighborhood grocery, warm and golden in its clear plastic container.

Then there was beef. Jake wouldn't miss steak so much as the steakhouse—the dark paneling and green-shaded lamps, the stiff whiskey taken neat, the garlic mashed potatoes and the white-apronned waiters who spoke of cuts and ageing. But as much as he liked the experience, steak was always a bit too highbrow, a bit too theatrical; he was a true connoisseur of the hamburger. In every new town he visited, he would seek out the best burger joint. Mr. Bartley's in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where burgers were named for political figures and served with thin, curly fries. Booches in Columbia, Missouri, where palm-sized cheeseburgers were served on sheets of wax paper and could be paid for only in cash. Two Bells in Seattle, where the French baguette that served as a bun attempted to belie the dive-bar atmosphere. But now there would be no more field trips, no more research, no more late-night visits to In-N-Out.

He was now a vegetarian.

He was one of them. Earth-conscious. Crunchy. Cruelty free. Instead of deciding between rare or medium rare, his decisions consisted of tofu: medium or firm. His days began with soy sausages and ended with bean burritos. And though he had accomplished the expeditious transformation from carnivore to vegetarian, he was still only halfway toward his goal.

The 2001 Rights for Animals Conference was a week away, and if he wanted to pass his audition and get on that ship, he had to go all the way. As in vegan.

So Jake gave up cheese and butter. Then he gave up milk. Then he gave up eggs. He worried about losing muscle mass. He worried about starving. Then he worried he wasn't going far enough. With veganism, he learned, you could never go far enough. Animal products were everywhere—in soap and in toothpaste, in gelcaps, in chewing gum. When he visited an online message board and asked about a brand of vegan cheese he was considering, Alex2000 wrote back:
When the chief selling proposition of the cheese is “it melts,” then you can bet it doesn't taste good.

It didn't.

Conference attire was another challenge. He wanted to look young but not immature, dedicated to the cause but not crazy. He was twenty-eight, but with a tight shave and shaggy hair, he could pass for twenty-four, and he thought that would be good enough to the impress the captain. He wore a used pair of Converse sneakers, old jeans, and a faded black t-shirt. At the last minute, he bought a wristband with the word
peace
imprinted on it.

The conference was held in a large hotel next to LAX, and Jake's room overlooked one of the runways. As planes descended past his window in sixty-second intervals, Jake sat on the bed and prepared himself. Originally from Austin, he was fresh out of grad school. He was committed to direct action. He could fix any engine, tie any knot. He didn't get seasick. And, if necessary, he would mention the helicopter.

He took the stairs to the lobby. To his left, down a long hallway, he saw the welcome table. He completed a registration form and handed over his credit card. The woman at the table, a ponytailed redhead with a pierced nose, looked up and smiled. “Is this your first RFA Expo?”

“As a matter of fact, it is,” Jake said.

“Awesome. Most of the sessions are in those rooms over there and on the second level. There's an orientation session in Room 105, and the exhibition hall is directly behind me.”

Jake studied the schedule. From
Activism Against Vivisection
to
Blood on the Ice
to
Free Trade Kills Animals
, the following two days would be packed with every animal atrocity he'd ever imagined, and probably more he hadn't. He began by wandering the exhibition hall. A hundred tables and booths were assembled along eight narrow aisles. He took his time circumnavigating the room, watching people while trying to look as if he wasn't watching people. Dogmatic t-shirts were ubiquitous:
I don't eat my friends
.
I think, therefore I'm vegan
.
Eat like you give a damn
.

He chatted with the eager faces at each table. The woman who founded an Iowa dog-and-cat rescue organization. The Chinese man who set moon bears free. Dogs in Ethiopia, cape seals in Namibia, kangaroos in Australia. The biggest draw in the exhibition hall—and the reason for his attendance—was the Cetacean Defense Alliance. People crowded around, three deep, blocking the aisle. Jake wanted to approach the table and begin his audition, but his nerves got the better of him.

Instead, he entered one of the lecture rooms and took a seat near the front. He wondered if the people seated around him could tell that he was an imposter, a carnivore among vegans. Could someone tell that he had only recently stopped eating meat simply by looking at him? Was there a residual smell?

A somber young man stood at the front and introduced a video his group had taken while working undercover at a slaughterhouse in rural Ohio. The lights dimmed to show a video of the men who worked there, punching birds on conveyers as they hung there, strung up alive by their fragile legs. If a turkey came loose, the men kicked it around like a soccer ball. One man reached into the female birds, searching for eggs to hurl at co-workers.

Jake could hear a woman crying behind him, and he fought back the urge to duck out of the room and away from those images. But remained in his seat, watching the tortured birds conveyed through a machine that in one quick motion stretched wide their necks, ran them by a spinning blade, then released them to bleed to death as their bodies continued along the line, their flapping wings eventually going motionless. And then he could take no more.

He hurried out of the room into the main hall, stepping straight into a dark-skinned woman in a long madras skirt and a white
Kiss me, I'm Vegan
tank top. She grabbed his arms for balance, and he grabbed her waist. After an awkward moment, a moment that lasted a half-second too long, a half-second he would replay forever, she pulled back. Or he released his hands. How was it that this innocuous invasion of personal space had become so intimate? When their eyes met, he smiled and she wrinkled her brow. Then she began to walk away.

“Do you get many takers?” Jake asked.

She stopped and turned around.

“Your shirt,” he said.

She eyed him suspiciously, studying him from head to toe. “You're vegan?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Then how do you explain that?” She pointed at his wristband, the wristband that Jake suddenly realized was made of leather.

He smiled sheepishly. “I don't eat it; I just wear it.”

“Perhaps you should visit the orientation session. Room 105. And take notes.” She shook her head and walked off. She had seen right through his disguise, though—he hoped—not far enough.

Jake watched her disappear around the corner, wanting to follow her, to run into her once again. But he turned and made his way to Room 105.

* * *

After a day of videos and lectures and no sign of the woman in the tank top, Jake returned to the exhibition hall. The scrum around the CDA table was as dense as before; Jake had no choice but to plow through. At the main table he purchased a book—
The Anti-Whaler
—from a young woman wearing a beret. The cover was a photo of the bearded man now standing off to the right of the CDA table, signing each book as it was handed to him.

Jake thought it odd that the man was standing instead of sitting. Yet he looked perfectly at ease, legs apart, solid as a statue. Perhaps after years spent standing in the bridge, he no longer felt the need to sit. As Jake studied him, the man seemed to sway every so slightly, as if he were still at sea. Or maybe it was Jake who was swaying, now feeling his stomach tighten. The moment he had prepared for was now seconds away. His audition.

Now next in line, his mouth had gone dry. He could feel his hands trembling. He forgot what he had planned to say.

“Whom shall I make it out to?” the man asked.

“Jake.”

“Does Jake have a last name?”

“No, I mean, it's for me. Jake is fine.”

The man took the book and pried opened the cover. Jake had to move quickly. “Do you have any spots left on your next voyage?” he asked.

“Voyages are for tourists.”

“What I meant was that I'd like to volunteer. On your ship.”

“The ship is full.”

“I can fix any engine, diesel, gas, you name it.”

The man handed the book back. “As I said, the ship is full. But we always need volunteers on land. Most of our crew members began right here behind this table.”

Jake left his name with the girl in the beret and walked off. He looked back at the CDA booth and watched the man signing books, occasionally pausing to look up and scan the hall—as if he were looking out over the water and the people were nothing more than waves to him, to be sailed past on his way to the next battle.

Jake opened the flap of his book.

Jake —

Fortitudine Vincimus.

— Aeneas

That night, in his hotel room, an Internet search deciphered the message:
By endurance, we conquer.

Endurance. Jake didn't have the luxury of time to volunteer, to work his way up the CDA ladder, to wait until next season. He needed to be on that boat now, or give up entirely.

He stood at the window and looked down on the airport runway lights, then up at the approaching planes. On this remarkably smog-free evening, he saw the lights of three, then four of them, one after another, stars dropping from the sky. He thought of his father, who spent most of his life as an airline pilot before dying of a heart attack three years ago.

Every landing is just a controlled crash
, said his dad, who was a Navy pilot before joining the airlines. He taught Jake to fly a Piper Warrior two-seater when he was seventeen, and a helicopter not long after. The helicopter was the most challenging—it was unstable in every direction. But Jake mastered the controls quickly, brought order to chaos. He didn't know that those skills would play such a large role in his life, for both good and bad. He'd just been trying to please his old man. Those hours in the cockpit were the only hours Jake still remembered about his father. They'd moved a lot, renting houses in nice neighborhoods, and Jake had idealized that existence, crediting the many schools he migrated through for his ability to assimilate anywhere. And still he was unable to assimilate here, at Rights for Animals, still unable to become one of them. But having a pilot for a dad was a surefire ingredient to a peripatetic life, to the life that Jake was living—one controlled crash after another.

Ethan found Annie working the register in aisle three of the health food store. She didn't notice him until after he had unloaded his basket onto the conveyor belt.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Just shopping.”

He watched her scan the vegan cheese and tofu hot dogs. She glowed in her bright green apron, her hair pulled back into two small ponytails, like one of those perfect actresses who attempt to dress down to play a certain role.

She held up a carton of almond milk. “This is for
you
?” she asked.

Ethan nodded.

She scanned a packet of fake chicken. “I thought you ate meat.”

“I'm cutting back.”

He handed her the reusable cloth sack he'd purchased the day before. “I even brought my own grocery bag.”

She eyed him suspiciously, then looked in the bag. “There's something in here,” she said.

“That's for you.”

“What is it?”

“You'll see.” Annie rolled her eyes and reached in and removed a paperclipped batch of signed petitions, twenty-six pages in all, representing most of his colleagues at eCouplet.com, six residents from his apartment building, and the bartender at NuNu's.

“How many?” she asked.

“Two hundred and fifty-five.”

“Including yours?”

“Including mine.”

She leaned toward him and he leaned forward to meet her, but the conveyer belt kept them apart. Ethan wanted to climb over and embrace her but he could sense impatient bodies to his left, mounting pressure to pay up and leave her for the next person in line.

“There's hope for you yet, Ethan,” she said, ruffling his hair.

That night he logged on to eCouplet.com to find that she had removed the block on his account.

* * *

Annie suggested a Mexican restaurant in North Park. They each ordered black bean tacos (no cheese) and margaritas, his with salt, hers without. When they'd first met, Ethan noticed that Annie always seemed to be looking off to one side, as if her mouth were gently caught on some invisible hook, and he'd assumed she was bored with him. But now, as he studied her, he realized that it was just the way she was. Knowing this gave him hope that she would not walk out, or toss her margarita into his lap, when he told her the truth about how they met.

“I have a confession to make,” he said. He told Annie that he worked for eCouplet.com, about his blatant manipulation of algorithms and, indirectly, of her. And then she laughed.

“What's so funny?” he asked.

“You must be one hell of a computer geek,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Because whatever you did with that algorithm, it must've worked,” she said. “You're my one and only eCouplet success story.”

“I am?”

“Success is relative, I suppose. But my dates don't usually make it through to dessert,” she said. “Either I walk out, like I did with you, or they come down with a sudden case of the flu.”

“Why?”

“I come across as a bit, I don't know,
abrasive
. Like when I told you I despise anyone who eats meat, fish, or cheese.”

“Oh.” Ethan had never considered that she might have difficulty meeting men. Nor had her activism struck him as offensive. Perhaps it was because her animal-rights narratives and environmental vocabulary were as exotic to him as his technical jargon probably were to her. They were like tourists from two different countries: There was no pressure to get along because they weren't supposed to have met in the first place.

* * *

When Annie's roommate got a job in Seattle, selling her condo and leaving Annie without a place to live, Ethan offered up his apartment. “You can stay as long as you want,” he said.

She moved in, and they made love that first night in the bathtub. She floated up and down on his arms, weightless. He watched her eyes close and her head fall back. She moaned, louder and louder, and he nearly lost himself listening. Afterward, they dripped over to his bed and he massaged her body dry with a towel, meticulously following the flowing lines of her tattoos, ending at her feet. He kissed her toes and her ankles and worked his mouth back up her body, until he reached her eyelids, closed again. He wanted to say right then that he was in love with her, but she was somewhere else. He often lay awake watching her sleep, wondering where her mind was, wishing that he could be there too.

She said from the beginning that she didn't want a relationship, that they were only “roommates with benefits.” Ethan was happy to abide by her semantics, just as long as she returned to him each night. He thought he could convert her, make her fall in love with him over time. It did not occur to him that she might also be trying to convert him.

“I signed up to volunteer with the Cetacean Defense Alliance,” she told him one evening over dinner. She told him about their anti-whaling battles down in Antarctica. The ships they had sunk during the five years since they began their missions. The larger ship they had recently purchased. “It's called the
Arctic Tern
,” she said. “And if I'm lucky I'll get to join the crew this season.”

“Going to Antarctica?” Ethan asked.

She nodded, then invited Ethan to volunteer with her.

“Does the boat have Internet access?” he asked, half joking. But this wasn't the answer Annie wanted, and Ethan spent the rest of the evening alone at his computer. He wanted to be as free as she was, and he didn't want to lose her, but he wasn't quite ready to join up with a bunch of outlaw activists, to plan on leaving his job for months at sea.

Since meeting Annie, he had returned to his algorithms with renewed energy. He developed an
opposites attract
feature, which matched people with their apparent opposites. He named it Antipodes. And when he told Annie about it, he thought she would see that she was the inspiration, that she was needed here, here with him in San Diego. But she didn't seem to care. She was too busy organizing another environmental extravaganza, a whole weekend of events taking place throughout San Diego County. She had invited the über activist Adam Cosgrove to deliver the keynote at the Hillcrest Community Center. She pointed him out in an issue of
Vanity Fair
—a tall, scruffy blond man standing topless on a black sand beach. He had served time in Oregon for burning down an animal-testing lab. He had been interviewed by
60 Minutes
. He had dated Hayden Panettiere.

Ethan asked her if she had a crush on Adam.

“Of course,” she said. “You would too if you were a woman—or a true activist.”

Ethan shouldn't have let her comment bother him, but she was right; he wasn't a true activist, and it was just a matter of time before Annie left him for someone who was. Ethan began to imagine the many ways that she could exit his life. He worried about the men who paused by her register. She was the prettiest clerk in that store, and men would surely go out of their way to be in her line. They would talk about vegan foods with genuine knowledge and interest; they would make her laugh. And she would forget about him.

He asked her to quit the job. But she refused. He asked where their relationship was headed. “There is no relationship,” she reminded him. “Just two people sharing an apartment, taking it one day at a time.”

In a parallel universe, Ethan told himself, Annie was his girlfriend. She had decided to settle down, had decided that she wanted children after all. A programmer always considered multiple outcomes for every scenario, and Ethan stayed focused on the outcomes that favored his dreams. The challenge was in knowing how to effect this change. Annie's mind did not work like any algorithm he had known, and every day his mind kept busy trying to debug it.

In the absence of clues, Ethan figured his best strategy for winning her over was plain old proximity. He attended all of her protest events and fundraising drives. He joined activists holding angry signs at busy intersections as drivers honked at them. And he sat next to her the evening that Adam Cosgrove delivered his keynote speech at the Hillcrest Community Center. The room was crowded with people who looked and dressed a lot like Annie and Adam—hemp clothing, long hair, tattoos; Ethan felt like more of an outsider than ever before. Physical proximity alone, he had begun to realize, was only making him feel more distant from her. He needed to go further if he wanted to be a part of her world. His mind whirled as Adam spoke about protests and animal rights, his battles with the law and his time in prison. And when he asked for questions from the audience, Ethan was the first to raise his hand.

“How would one go about building an incendiary device?” Ethan asked. “Like the one you used?”

To answer, Adam demonstrated. He picked up an apple-juice container from the potluck table. You needed only to fill it with fuel, he said, then to shove an old cotton t-shirt into the top and insert a slow-burning fuse. He held up a cellular phone and his iPod. He explained how to set the device off remotely, at a precise time.

Ethan had no idea how soon he would regret asking that question, how soon he would be running the scenario through his head over and over again, as if it were an algorithm he could go back and fix—the
if/else
equation that worked reliably in computers but always led to surprises in real life.

If Adam had not answered the question. If Adam had not provided such detail. If an unfinished condominium development in La Jolla had not been set on fire later that evening by a similar type of device. If Ethan had not raised his hand, none of these things would have happened—and Adam would not have been arrested by the FBI the following morning. And Annie would not have left Ethan to run to Adam's defense.

So many ifs, all set in motion by one question. Ethan had always lived in a world of undos, of parallel universes. But he could not undo what he said. He could only watch as Annie slipped out of his universe and into someone else's.