The Humanity Project (10 page)

“We couldn’t tell. It looked like kind of a nice place to die. All woodsy, and there were these wild turkeys running around.”

“Living on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine,” one of the boys sang, and somebody else said that hadn’t worked out so well for old Jerry, and Yeah, but that was rock and roll, baby.

Conner was just as glad they weren’t paying any attention to him. He watched his girlfriend without looking at her, keeping his face impassive, wishing he hadn’t ordered the stupid sandwich that he now had to keep track of. The paper bag kept slipping off his lap and he had to shift his knees around, juggling it. Finally he put it on the floor. His girlfriend didn’t look pleased. He guessed that he had something to do with that. The guy to her right was staring at Conner, sending him little hate Valentines. So that’s the way it was.

The boy who never had girlfriends was named Kenny. He was Korean and had black hair in a scrub-brush cut, and wore the button-down oxford shirts his parents bought him with the sleeves ripped off. He was talking about another weird thing he’d pulled off a website. Because there were websites out there designed for guys like Kenny, the deeply bored and the deeply lonely, and not just porn sites. Conner wasn’t paying attention at first, preoccupied with the effort it took him to sit still in his chair. Then he said, “What?”

“The universe is going to end.”

“Come on.”

“It expanded for, what, a hundred billion billion years, that’s from the Big Bang point. Then it’s gonna start contracting, and fall in on itself and, whoosh. No more universe.” Kenny looked happy, explaining the upcoming total death of everything.

“No way.” This from the guy who’d been staring at Conner. The new, designated stud. “You mean there would just be this big blank sky?”

“There wouldn’t be any sky. There wouldn’t be any anything,”

A silence, while everybody tried to wrap their heads around that one. It was deeply unsettling, trying to imagine the nothingness of nothing.

“You are making this up just to annoy people, Ken-Bot.”

“Uh-uh. Check it out yourself. It has to do with the density of the universe, how they measure that, and if the decreasing density of matter proves to be more of a force than decreasing temperatures as the stars cool.”

“What is he talking about?”

“Ah, it’s just a Kenny thing,” said the guy currently fucking Conner’s girlfriend. He was somebody Conner remembered seeing at parties, somebody’s friend. He wasn’t anyone special, one of those beach guys who worked on their tans to the point of skin cancer. He looked sort of like a baked potato. His girlfriend, meanwhile, was bent over her phone with her long, taffy-colored hair hiding her face. A moment later, Conner’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out to read her text: YOU SHOULD PLEASE JUST GO.

Kenny said, “But the good news is there are probably alternate universes. Like string theory, where strings have length, but not width, and they vibrate in ten or eleven dimensions, not just the four we can perceive.”

“That’s awesome, Kenny.”

“He’s deep.”

Kenny beamed, the way he always did when everybody gave him a hard time. He probably went out of his way to look up strange shit just so he could trot it out and be abused. Conner watched his girlfriend watch him not answer her text and not leave. It was stupid, he didn’t want to start up with her again but he didn’t want to be replaced either. Something mean and ugly and unfair was surfacing in him.

The beach stud was having an urgent private conversation with Conner’s girlfriend, and she was tightening her face and looking away, and as he watched them Conner was made aware that everyone else was watching too, and they had been doing so all along, watching the three of them and hoping something interesting would happen.

A waitress came over, asking if they needed anything else, and there was some back-and-forth, they did and they didn’t, no, finally. The waitress had the checks ready and ripped each one off a pad and set them down. Conner rose out of his chair and took his girlfriend’s check. “I got this one.”

It surprised everyone, including Conner himself, and it took the beach stud a couple of beats to say, “I don’t think you do, bro.”

“I’m not your bro, bro.”

Now that there was the scene the others had all been waiting for, there was a drawing back—something fearful and recoiling—then an avidness as they settled in to watch. His girlfriend said nothing. Her face was remote and private, shut down until everything was over. It was all up to the beach stud. Conner waited, watching him and looking for reasons to hate him in and of himself: his idiotic tan, his short and somewhat piggy nose. He decided to wave it away, laugh it off. “Sure, knock yourself out. Want my check too?”

“No, Conner,” his girlfriend said, because she must have seen it in his face, or in the cords in his neck tightening, that he was ready to kick his own chair away and take the four steps that would lead him to where the beach stud sat, and with any luck he wouldn’t have time to stand up and Conner could break his oinky nose with his first punch. Why was she telling him no? Was she embarrassed? Did she care about her new piggy sweetheart, didn’t want to see him bloody? Conner’s muscles were one electrical charge away from motion

and in an alternate, parallel universe, some seventh or eighth dimension, Conner split the skin of his knuckles on the bone and cartilage of a thing that used to be a face.

—while in another universe, Conner invented the most terrible words ever spoken, spitting fire, dripping poison.

—in yet another, he and the girl never stopped never stopped making love.

—or he no longer cared.

—or he had never been born.

—or there was only the nothing of nothing.

But he had only what was here and now. Conner turned his back on the table and pushed his way through two sets of glass doors to reach the glare-lit parking lot with its baked-concrete and gasoline smells. He started the truck and made the tires squeal as he headed out, which was stupid, and also stupid was forgetting his idiotic sandwich, but he was glad for that because he wanted to feel hunger in the same way he wanted to feel hatred. Down deep, something he would guard in secret, because that was who he was, his true nature, and it was no one’s fault but his own.

The name of God is Truth.

The mind persisted in making thoughts. You could not force yourself into not-thinking. You could only attempt to redirect the mind, through order, discipline, habit. Chanting helped. First out loud, then silently. Freeing yourself from the burden of comprehension.
The name of God is Truth. The name of God is Truth. The name of God is Truth.
After enough repetitions, the words shed meaning. The meaning became a part of your breathing, in and out, in and out, from the core of your being. The meaning was branded on the beating heart.

The name of God is

From upstairs, the sound of a long, rolling crash.

The name of God is

Followed by a door slamming.

The name of God

And feet in boots kicking something shut. A kitchen cabinet?

The name of

Then the music starting up, a troop of angry-cool black men, making rhymes out of cusswords. Christie opened her eyes, searching the corners of the ceiling. The bass vibrated above her. You almost expected to see plaster knocked loose. She couldn’t understand all the words, but
mofucker
came through clearly, and often. Maybe you could consider the horrible music a kind of chanting.

Because everyone’s reality was separate, different. Because—Christie was waiting for Mrs. Rubio’s door to open, for Mrs. Rubio to go upstairs and complain so Christie wouldn’t have to—different people gave themselves over to different energies. Automobiles, for instance. There was a surprising portion of the population for whom nothing was as important as automobiles. Or certain television shows. Or the long drama of enmities among families, or between lovers, or between oneself and anyone else.

On cue, like a cuckoo popping out of a clock, Mrs. Rubio’s door opened and Christie heard her house slippers slapping and flapping up the stairs. She pounded on the apartment door, waited, pounded again, and when it opened, the staccato of her voice was added to the chorus of racket. A moment later the volume of the music was lowered just enough to comply, to a sullen, muttering noise. Mrs. Rubio descended the steps, slower now, pausing mid-stair to decide if she needed to go back up and make further demands. Not today. Her apartment door shut with a righteous slam.

Christie got up from her cushion and the small table with its careful arrangement of polished rocks and a single stem of plumeria in a vase: her shrine, although she would have been embarrassed to call it that to anyone else. Sunday morning. Where was Art? Probably at some coffee shop, reading newspapers and enjoying some adult alone time. Mrs. Rubio had already taken her complaints directly to him, and he had made his usual ineffective promises. Not that Christie herself would have known what to do if her own damaged and difficult child had boomeranged back into her life. Except she would not have had such a child to begin with. Or any child, as it happened.

She made herself a fresh cup of tea and took it outside to the picnic table that served the apartments as an outdoor leisure space. It was a fine summer morning, and up and down the cul-de-sac people were walking dogs and washing cars and opening their balcony doors to let the breeze in. She liked sitting out in the middle of so much ordinary human activity. She liked being part of it. Like it was all a kind of giant ant farm, and herself just another dutiful and obscure ant.

She was thirty-four years old. She was aware that she was different from those around her: less tethered to the things they considered urgent and important. More self-contained, detached. When she was younger she had tried to acquire those relationships other people thought worth acquiring. She had been married for a few years, in her twenties. It had not been an unhappy episode, not exactly, but she had been relieved when it came to an end by mutual and anticlimactic agreement. It was almost as if it happened to come up in conversation.

After the marriage ended she was miserable in ways she had not expected. She took the failure on herself, as evidence that she truly was deficient, damaged, freakish, incomplete. She embarked on a series of boyfriends who seemed to promise the kinds of passionate experience she lacked. Each one was worse than the one before, and when the last one held her head over a toilet and slammed the lid down on it again and again, she gave herself permission to stop trying.

She worked as a nurse, which suited her calm and undemonstrative manner. She was not overwhelmed by pain, either her own or other people’s. She bore down on wounds, disease, infirmities, mortified bodies, and did what needed to be done, without fuss or becoming unnerved. When her patients were grateful, which was often enough, she felt as if she accepted their praise under false pretenses. They believed her to be not only skillful, but compassionate.

Yea, though I give my body to be burned and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.

She was thrifty with her money and saved what she could, although she was aware that this was one more cautious aspect of her personality: she did not wish to be dependent on anyone else. She allowed herself some small indulgences (of food, of household purchases), then worried that she was too attached to them. She took meditation classes at a Buddhist center in the city, although she avoided joining anything that resembled a practice or a congregation. She called her parents in Michigan every weekend, sent birthday cards to her nieces and nephews, kept up with her circle of hometown and school friends on Facebook. It was so much easier on everyone else when you did the things that were expected of you.

She had no reason to believe that much of anything in her life would ever change.

The teacup warmed her hands and she closed her eyes again, trying to reclaim the morning’s peace. It did no good to be disappointed or resentful. If you lived around other people, you had to expect them to keep bumping up against your boundaries. You just wished they wouldn’t leave so many footprints.

mofucker mofucker mofucker

Eyes still closed, she heard someone walking toward her along the sidewalk. They stopped short, regarding her, she felt certain. She wasn’t really surprised when Art spoke.

“Hey Christie.”

Her tea was growing cold. She opened her eyes. “Good morning.”

“Mind if I join you?” He arranged himself on the other side of the bench, putting his untidy heap of newspapers on the table between them. She didn’t really mind, but it would be nice if people stopped assuming she didn’t.

“Linnea was playing music again.”

“Shit. Loud?”

“Extremely.”

“I talked with her about that. We had a whole conversation.”

Christie let this remark settle. She said, “Mrs. Rubio went up there. She’s going to get you in trouble with the property managers.”

“Shit.”

“I can’t say that I blame her. I mean, Mrs. Rubio.”

“I was only gone for an hour.”

“Well, the first forty-five minutes were just fine.”

Art groaned and let his forehead smack against the table, in the center of the pile of papers. “What am I gonna do?”

“Take her downstairs and make her apologize to Mrs. Rubio.”

“I can’t make her do that. I can’t make her do anything.” Art raised his head. Pieces of wispy hair floated up briefly, then drifted back to their place wreathing his scalp. He wore his hair in what Christie thought of as hippie comb-over style, although she reproached herself for being unkind.

“She’s only been here, what, two weeks? It’s like an alien life form taking over.”

“Art.”

“
Teenagers from Outer Space.
That’s an actual movie. A cult classic from 1959.”

“Very humorous,” Christie pronounced. She didn’t intend to encourage him.

“Maybe I’m trying too hard to be the nice dad. Making it up to her for, you know, not being around for so long.”

“That’s a good insight. Now, how are you going to integrate it into your behavior?”

“You are so tough on me,” Art said, giving her one of his admiring looks.

“Well, someone needs to be.” From time to time, it was necessary to deflect the admiration and everything that went along with it. She was fond of Art, in an exasperated way. She supposed they should have a Talk, though she kept putting it off. “She’s still up there, go lay down the law. Man up. Dad up.”

“Yeah, OK.” He picked up his newspapers, then set them down again. “We actually did have a pretty good conversation the other night, her and me. I got us some dinner from Saigon Palace? And we were just hanging out in the kitchen eating? And I mentioned that I used to have a motorcycle. I ever tell you about that? A Honda V-twin cruiser. Just for tooling around. I showed her some pictures. Dad, the Forgotten Years. Me in leathers, if you can imagine that. She wanted to know why a Honda, she said, ‘Better a sister in a whorehouse than a brother on a Honda.’”

He waited expectantly, but Christie’s polite, interested expression didn’t change.

“I guess I don’t get it, Art.”

“Because some people think the only real bikes are Harleys. Or maybe, the old Indians. They call the Japanese bikes rice burners.”

“Oh.” She nodded. “Sure.”

“It just cracked me up, I don’t know where she gets these things. Oh well. Had to be there.” He was embarrassed now, telling a joke that didn’t land right.

She hadn’t meant to make him feel bad. “I don’t really know anything about motorcycles. But that’s very interesting, that you used to have one.” She thought the point of the story was so that Art could tell her about having a motorcycle. A motorcycle sounded like a very Art thing to do. And of course he’d buy the clothes that went along with it. “Did you take any interesting drives? I mean, road trips?”

He must have sensed that she was humoring him. He muttered something and gathered up his newspapers, wadding them every which way. “So I guess I’ll go talk to the problem child.”

“Good luck. Try asking her why she plays it so loud.”

“Pardon?”

“Have you ever done that? I mean, she’s a kid, maybe she can’t articulate it very well, but some kinds of music probably have to be loud. Because it’s angry, it’s supposed to be in your face. Maybe she wants to have people mad at her. So she can be mad back.”

“Yeah?” Art, not very convinced by this strategy. “Yeah, I could do that. Sure.”

She tried again. “How’s your Vietnamese coming?”

“Oh, I kind of gave up on that. Don’t have the time right now. You have a great day.”

Christie watched him shamble off. Because she felt guilty about not being who he wanted her to be, not being personally available to him, she had attempted to make it up by being helpful. She’d only managed to aggravate him and put him off, so that he had to be rude to her in order to reclaim his pride.

You could not be all things to all people. You were allowed to have boundaries. But you could do more damage trying to keep your distance, trying to negotiate politely, than by being outright rude. If truth was the highest value, where did truth fit into human relationships? Should she just come out and say to Art, “You ought to not be enamored of me”?

Five minutes or so after Art had gone inside his apartment, Christie watched Linnea come out, slam the door behind her, and whip around a corner of the building, out of sight. So much for the Dad talk.

Art said she wouldn’t talk about what had happened to her at school, the shooting. Just flat-out wouldn’t. He’d tried a couple of times, tiptoeing around the edges. Nada. He didn’t want to push it.

Christie thought that people shouldn’t have to talk about such things on demand. But they ought to find a way to tell the story to themselves.

On Mondays and Tuesdays, Christie worked at a public health clinic in San Rafael. The clinic was in the Canal neighborhood, where most of the Mexicans and Guatemalans lived. Christie had learned enough Spanish to get through the basics, and there was a translator for more complicated situations. Twice a month, a dentist volunteered his time. They made referrals to mental health services, to employment services, to addiction counselors. There were pamphlets, in English and in Spanish, on nutrition, domestic violence, birth control, prenatal care.

In addition to the immigrants, the clinic regulars included the homeless population, both regular and transient, and a certain number of people who fit into neither category. These might be young workingmen, or mothers overwhelmed with small children, or those who had lost jobs. Some of these looked like they ought to be shopping at Nordstrom, not waiting their turn at a community clinic. But anyone could slide a long ways down these days, and when they showed up there, furtive and diminished, it meant they had probably already maxed out the credit cards and were afraid of answering their phones.

It was always a surprise that there were so many genuinely poor people in Marin County, where, as somebody once said, you could get tired of seeing all the Lexuses and Jags. Where exquisitely dressed children (they always seemed to be either blond or biracial) enjoyed ergonomically designed playgrounds, and where real estate, even after prices swooned, could still fetch obscene millions. At the clinic, you saw all this through a layer of economic distortion, like a pair of glasses with the wrong lenses, so that neither poverty nor wealth, viewed side by side, seemed entirely real.

At the same time, you couldn’t help noticing how many people (poor or not, but most often the poor) were complicit in their own suffering. The smokers, the addicts, the diabetics who would rather lose a leg than stop eating sugar. The parents who let their children’s asthma medicine run out, the pregnant women who looked at her blankly when Christie asked about birth control, the alcoholics with their scabies and untreated sores. The ignorant, the obstinate, the quarrelsome.

Public health, she understood, was about providing services to those who were least likely to be good patients. She took their blood pressure, listened to their leaky hearts, tested for STDs, dispensed condoms, instructions, advice. Then the same people came back again and again, with the same complaints, bad habits, and neglect. The name of God might be Truth, but surely his middle name was Patience, to put up with so much repetitive and avoidable folly.