Family of Origin

by CJ Hauser

  Fuck, the voice said.

  Let’s go, let’s go.

  Elsa got up. She was wearing a tank top and underwear and no bra. She strode over to the door and flung it open, turning on a Coleman lantern as she went. Jinx was up and growling low, curled around the side of Elsa’s legs.

  There were two men running down the ramp.

  Elsa, close the door, they’re leaving, Nolan said.

  What do you want?! Elsa shouted.

  Palo Alto

  THREE YEARS BACK

  It was the week Ian lost his job at Stanford that Keiko first saw the rat in the lemon tree. They were still living in Palo Alto that summer, even though Ian would not be returning to the Biology department in the fall, his tenure having been denied after he’d written an apologist’s defense of a recent article published by the Reversalists. The op-ed appeared on a pop-science website, and the headline the editor had attached to it read: “Just Because They’re Crazy Doesn’t Mean They’re Wrong.”

  Have you seen this? Keiko said, thrusting her phone at their son. She was a microbiome researcher. The Greys had prided themselves on being a kind of macro/micro power couple for as long as Nolan could remember.

  Nolan was twenty-six and lived in San Francisco and was beginning to regret coming home for the weekend. He had come to complain about his job and be coddled by his parents. No, Nolan had not seen this.

  I never said that, Ian said, taking his glasses off. What I told her was—

  The trouble is that you told her anything at all, Keiko said. Half of this country doesn’t even believe in evolution. Why would you muddy things with nonsense?

  It’s not nonsense if it’s true.

  Your father is losing his mind, Keiko told her son.

  * * *

  ——————·

  That was the night Keiko saw the rat, Milo.

  Nolan named the rat in an effort to lighten the mood, though both Ian and Keiko had frowned at him when he did it, which at least made him feel as if things were normal again. Keiko had been in the yard picking lemons, thinking to squeeze a wedge over their salmon dinner, and she’d just grasped one when she saw the rat—gray, slinky-bodied, white gullet and long whiskers—trying to disengage a fruit of his own. He touched the lemon all over with his paws, grasping at it like a too-large dance partner he could not quite accommodate.

  The sight of his touching and touching the skin of the fruit repulsed Keiko. She dropped her lemon, walked inside, sat at the table, and put her face in her hands.

  Then she made her demands.

  Ian told her that where there was one rat, there were probably many. Statistically, he said, to get rid of one rat would do nothing.

  Nolan knew that what Keiko actually wanted was for Ian not to have aligned himself with crackpots, not to have humiliated himself by losing his job. But this was impossible, and so she was desperate to extract from him instead an infinity of smaller, possible things.

  Get rid of it, Keiko said.

  Ian complied, less out of understanding and more because she had posed to him a problem, and he was in the business of devising solutions.

  He bought a Havahart trap.

  At dinner, they ate their salmon quietly and without lemon.

  That night, Ian set out to catch Milo.

  Keiko had gone off to bed at ten o’clock, in a mood. Defensively, Nolan had tried to do the same. If he could go to sleep now, he could make today end, and in turn tomorrow would come quicker and he could flee to the city. Perhaps his parents, who never fought, would work things out and their life would return to normal while he wasn’t looking.

  He was half-asleep on the couch when he heard Ian in the kitchen: cupboards clicked, a glass rang on the counter, a cork popped free of a wine bottle. Ian crept past Nolan’s pullout couch with a glass of wine and a flashlight.

  Nolan got up. He was wearing boxer briefs and a Giants t-shirt worn soft and holey at the armpits. He had grown his hair out again and was vain about it. He’d tied it up in a small bun for sleeping, but now pulled it loose. He poured himself a glass of a decent Petit Syrah he couldn’t believe Ian would open for just himself and grabbed another flashlight from the kitchen junk drawer.

  Ian was sitting in a plush chaise longue. The red patio tiles were still warm from the day.

  Nolan sat on the chaise next to his father, balancing his wineglass on one steepled knee. After a moment, Ian clinked his glass again Nolan’s.

  The tree was overgrown, fat lemons dangling like moons over both sides of the fence. The plastic Havahart was balanced on one post, baited with peanut butter. Next door, their neighbors’ mother, an elderly woman with dementia, had been sent out to smoke her last cigarette of the day beneath her grandchildren’s unused basketball hoop. From beyond the fence they could hear her quietly talking to herself in Spanish. At the edge of the patio, Keiko’s potted succulents were purple in the semidarkness. The rosemary border was oily and fragrant.

  They played their flashlight beams along the top of the fence where the lemons hung, two spotlights dancing around a stage, anticipating a marquee performer. Nolan ran his fingers through his hair as they drank and waited.

  The rat appeared.

  Nolan was quiet, but danced his flashlight rapidly to draw his father’s attention. Ian caught Milo in his beam. Nolan noticed the rat’s pink nose and pearl-gray fur and thought he looked quite clean. The rat trotted efficiently along the rails, sniffing the lemons, then caught the scent of peanut butter. As Milo hesitated, deciding, Nolan found himself wishing he would avoid his fate. Go for the wildness of stolen lemons.

  The rat let out a small squeak as the door to the Havahart snapped shut behind him.

  Ian picked up the trap.

  What are you going to do with him? Nolan asked.

  Release him in the strip mall.

  What if he doesn’t like it?

  He’s a rat, he’ll like it, Ian said.

  Nolan knew Ian didn’t really believe this and felt sorry for him. He’d never felt sorry for his father before. Keiko and Ian had always been so competent that, even in his late twenties, Nolan considered it agreed upon between the three of them that he was the one to be sorry for—it had been a heavy pour of the Syrah; Nolan threw pity parties when he drank—but really, what was all this for? Maybe it was crazy, but was it wrong if Milo wanted to waltz with fruit when the moon was clear? Wanted to preen his pearl-gray fur and forget the rest of the world as he rolled in Keiko’s rosemary and admired himself? Wanted to sink his teeth into a lemon’s neck and suck all the juice from the evening?

  Just Because They’re Crazy Doesn’t Mean They’re Wrong.

  He looks quite healthy, Ian said, inspecting Milo through the mesh.

  Must be all those lemons.

  Ian jangled his car keys.

  * * *

  ——————·

  Nolan got into the passenger seat still wearing his boxers. Brought his wine. Ian gently buckled the boxed rat into the backseat.

  They drove, their windows down, the night sweet. A Sibelius concerto was playing quietly from the stereo. Nolan sipped his wine, drinking in the car a slight thrill.

  They didn’t talk, but as they drove, Ian began a kind of monologue addressed to Milo. He spoke to the rat as if Ian were a mafioso driving a failed accomplice to the bus depot. He told Milo that their current arrangement was untenable. He had no personal problem with him. He would bring Milo to their destination safely, and no harm would come to him provided he stayed there. But Ian did not want to see Milo again. Not in his yard, not in his lemon tree. If Milo returned, well, then there would be trouble. Ian couldn’t promise Milo he would not come to harm if he returned. Was he understanding him? Capishe?

  Nolan inspected his father. He knew Ian would have spoken like this whether or not he’d had company in t
he car, and Nolan found this charming. But he was also thinking about Keiko saying that Ian was losing his mind. Keiko, so adamant that this rat who had crept into her garden was the thing spoiling it. (But surely things had been spoiled in other ways before. Surely Nolan’s unhappiness had not started with the rat.)

  They slowed, pulling into a strip mall, a line of dumpsters behind its restaurants. Several other rats scattered as they approached and idled, but they did not look so clean, so nice, as Milo.

  The open driver’s door dinged as Nolan watched Ian set the Havahart by the dumpsters and unlatch it. He heard his father softly talking to the rat again but could not make out his words. Milo did not leave the trap.

  Nolan finished his wine and cradled the empty bulb in his hands.

  Leap’s Island

  What do you want, Elsa repeated, holding the Coleman lantern high, so it cast half her face in light.

  The men stopped. Looked at each other, then started back up the ramp.

  We heard Dr. Grey was dead, one of them said.

  We didn’t think you’d be in here, said the other. There are rooms at the Lobby that regular people stay in.

  Who are you? Elsa said.

  Jim, said the one.

  Mick, said the other, swiping off a faded green baseball cap that read FARMS = FOOD.

  We’re sorry for scaring you, Jim said.

  I wasn’t scared. Elsa gestured for the men to come in but remained in the doorway so they had to brush past her naked legs as they entered. Elsa felt them sizing her up, but she didn’t mind. Elsa was never afraid when she was meant to be. Stillness was frightening, because it meant you were waiting for the other shoe to drop. So long as you ran headlong into trouble, it could never take you by surprise.

  * * *

  ——————·

  They were rusty-haired with Irish blue eyes, but leathery and tanned. They were lean and their legs were so ropy it felt indecent to look at them. Both men wore t-shirts that read HERITAGE FARM NETWORK.

  Mick and Jim sat at the table while Elsa poured vodka and pineapple juices and Nolan introduced himself.

  Brothers? Nolan asked. Mick nodded.

  Siblings? Jim said tentatively, pointing from Nolan to Elsa, as if it seemed unlikely.

  Elsa said, What exactly did you want from the house?

  The brothers looked at each other. His logbook, Mick said. Everyone on the island wants to publish, but no one’s collected any data worth a damn. We thought if we could give it to Mitchell, it might buy us some goodwill.

  We were also hoping for a note, Jim said. He had opened one of the Ziploc baggies of undowny feathers on the table and now began arranging them in size order.

  A suicide note? Elsa said.

  He would have left one, if he were drowning himself, Jim said.

  What makes you so sure? Elsa said. She didn’t like these boys theorizing about her father. If there was anything to be theorized, she and Nolan would have done it already.

  We took him out on our boat for count days, Mick said. We were close.

  Well, there’s no note, Elsa said, gesturing around at the shack. For you or anyone else.

  Then it was an accident, Jim said. Plain as that. He’d now arranged a dozen tiny feathers on the table in a kind of mandala wheel.

  Nolan was pacing around the shack, obviously irritated, tripping over the edges of the braided rug. Jinx followed at his heels.

  That doesn’t mean anything, Elsa said. You don’t have to leave a note to kill yourself. She couldn’t stand the way people on this island described Ian so intimately. The man she had known had always felt a million miles away, and it made Elsa feel dizzy and furious.

  You seem young to be Reversalists, Nolan said.

  Truth, Mick said. That’s the trouble. Most people out here, they came to get away from us.

  Us? Elsa said.

  Millennials, man, Jim said. Millennials.

  * * *

  ——————·

  Mick and Jim Riordan were, unbelievably, New Yorkers. Born a year apart to a trust-funded expressionist painter father and a “pure math” mathematician mother, they went to a prestigious private school where, based on the promise of their finger-painting and precocious reading skills, they were subjected to a series of intelligence tests that soon confirmed what their parents had always known would be true: their children were geniuses.

  They graduated from high school together at ages twelve and thirteen; from Penn, magna cum laude, at fifteen and sixteen, having written a joint honors thesis about the evolutionary advantages of the pupa cage-building practices of the Arctiinae moth (as compared to the small log-cabin structures of the bagworm moth’s more attractive but ultimately inferior larval shelters). They were immediately accepted to the PhD program at Stanford to pursue their research into the evolution of larval shelters. And they would have, except that the year Mick turned twenty and Jim nineteen, the wooly dusk moth went extinct.

  The brothers had wanted to study the wooly dusk moth because it had, to their mind, one of the most advantageous larval structures. It built, in essence, a perfect geodesic dome of leaf bits, attached and shellacked by an excretion that rendered the leafy dome shiny, impregnable, and perfectly disguised. The dome was usually found suspended by a viscous filament, leaflike, from a branch. But deforestation in Brazil had cut the wooly dusk moth’s habitat in half, their number precipitously declining, and when the moth suddenly appeared on the endangered species list, it became impossible for the brothers to get specimens. Mick and Jim were beside themselves with the news. Because of their dissertations, but also because they loved the genius little builder.

  They were drinking beers in their shared apartment one night, debating what course to take, when Mick said, Let’s just go. We could observe it in the wild.

  Much to the dismay of their advisors, the brothers left in the middle of the spring semester of their first year of the PhD, dropping from classes, TAships, and two different research projects they’d been assisting, and went on an observational trip to Brazil. The brothers had no delusions that they would actually find a now-endangered wooly dusk moth in the wild, but they had to see what they could learn before the wild was gone.

  They trekked with a guide from the Sao Paulo Biosciences Institute for a month, then extended the trip to three. They saw more species in those three months than they’d seen in the whole of their careers. Cocoons made from what looked like indigo wool. Dusty wingspans as wide as a man’s face. Phosphorescent eyespots. They saw species they knew nothing about, and fully half of them were on the verge of extinction because of deforestation. The wooly dusk moth itself never manifested, and by the same time the following year, it was declared extinct, the particular tree it made its larval cages from a prime victim of logging.

  Mick and Jim returned to Stanford in the fall with enough observational notes on rare and endangered species to write about for the rest of their careers. But when they thought about returning to the classrooms, the labs, they couldn’t bear it. What was the point of studying these things when a year from now they might not even exist anymore?

  They considered moving to Brazil. They considered becoming advocates for forest preservation or anti-logging lobbyists (child geniuses often have an inflated sense of their own capabilities). They considered joining the Earth Liberation Front. But ultimately, they were so depressed by these conversations they decided to do nothing.

  They came into their trust funds at age twenty-one and used the money to buy a farmstead in Ohio, where they started the Heritage Farm Network, trying to backward-engineer frankenseeds, contaminated by drifting Monsanto GMO species, back to their original DNA. They grew and cultivated a dozen heritage seed strands. They sold their heritage seeds to other farmers and their produce to a local CSA. They lived alone, ignored phone calls from their parents and from
professors who said they were squandering their talents. They spent most nights watching horrifying documentaries about the vanishing honeybees and fracking. They compulsively read every environmental doom-and-gloom think piece published and were infamous on a dozen different conspiracy subreddits. They had always been casual weed smokers, but around this time, they made it a daily habit.

  Their appetite for consuming information grew exponentially, and their belief in the possibility of doing anything about the problems they researched dwindled. They were manic, ravenous, despairing, and high. They googled and googled more bad news.

  And then, following a particularly pessimistic thread of internet forums down the rabbit hole, they found the Reversalists’ website.

  They knew it was their place. They sold the farm. They ignored Mitchell’s application procedures. They packed up a seed kit, a bag of clothing between them, and bought a boat.

  When they arrived at the island landing, the first person they saw was Ian. He had thinning sandy hair and glasses, and when they spied him, skinny-chested and shirtless on the wharf, the collars of at least three different sunburns were outlined on his chest.

  That your boat? Ian asked.

  The brothers nodded.

  Then we’re going to be friends.

  A meeting, chaired by Mitchell, was called to deal with their unexpected arrival, because even though the islanders were egalitarian in most things, it was Mitchell’s island and it was Mitchell’s money, and so he dictated who belonged. Despite the small draw of his movement, Mitchell refused to let in just anybody. The brothers had ignored the application procedure. Typical millennials.

  Most of the islanders considered the brothers members of a younger generation they were trying to forget existed. In fact, most of the Reversalists’ research had started not with the ducks, but with their abiding sense that something had gone unstoppably wrong with the world, and that the generation of young people rising up were the cause of it. At best, the millennials were stupid, lazy, entitled narcissists who could not be trusted. At worst, Mick and Jim and the whole of their generation were an evolutionary step backward for humanity. An insurrection of idiots who would trample everything the Greatest Generation and the Boomers had achieved and doom the species permanently.