Changing the Subject

by Stephen-Paul Martin

  I said: It’s really that bad? I thought we were living in the age of the hip scientist who’s actually a cool guy when you get past all the research and the terribly brilliant scientific papers he’s published.

  Doug said: That’s just an image. When you get right down to it, these guys are all caught up in prestige and money, and that means taking yourself seriously when you’re with colleagues. But Larry couldn’t stop himself from crying. It really got to him—the sadness in JoJo’s eyes, the tender way he was holding Larry’s hand. He could never get the look in that chimp’s eyes out of his mind. The whole experience got him so upset that he joined PETA and began writing articles and lobbying and picketing research facilities. And soon his government money stopped coming in, even though his work with the chimps has been recognized all over the world. So that was the end of my job. He couldn’t afford an assistant any more.

  I said: Sounds horrible. But how did Larry convince himself that his own work was okay? It sounds like he was still keeping his chimps in a restricted situation, even if he was being nice about it.

  The waitress came back with our coffee and food, avoiding Doug’s encouraging eyes and quickly turning away. For a second he looked like he might start crying. I remembered that back in New York I’d always felt strange about the contradictions in his behavior. On the one hand, he seemed like a sensitive, intelligent guy. On the other hand, he wasn’t afraid to push his way to the front of the line, and he often went out of his way to use macho language. Any woman he wanted was a fox, and of course he himself was a wolf, not someone who spent all his time doing experiments and writing professional papers. But in the wake of the feminist movement, men with attitudes like his were seen by intelligent women as pigs, and I could see that he felt more unsure of himself than he had in the past, especially now that he couldn’t find a job.

  He shrugged and looked at his spinach croissant and said: Actually, PETA wasn’t too pleased when they came and saw that Larry kept the chimps in cages at night. But he told them that without some kind of research the human race would just go on treating animals like food or work machines and—

  I said: But why did he want to teach chimps to talk? Why not just let them communicate in their own way?

  Doug said: He wanted to show the world how smart they were.

  I said: Talking equals smart?

  Doug laughed: I can see you’re not a scientist. What did you end up doing, by the way? Someone told me you were in law school after your career as a rock star ended.

  I said: That lasted a year. I tried about ten other things after that, and now I’m a freelance photographer. Last week I was taking menu pictures, full-color shots of hamburgers and ham sandwiches, even though I don’t eat meat anymore.

  Laughter came from the next table. I turned to see myself looking back twice from the mirror shades of a white-haired woman wearing a big straw hat. She said: Do you really know what an animal is?

  I glanced at Doug and we shared confused looks. Then I looked back at my doubled self in the woman’s wraparound shades.

  She said: A real animal, not a dog or a cat or some other cuddly, quasi-human creature. Have you ever actually met an animal in the wild?

  I said: Where would I find the wild? Does it even exist anymore?

  She smiled condescendingly and said: You have to know where to look.

  I said: A former girlfriend once told me about a hiking trip she took in the Yukon wilderness, where she got cornered for several hours by a mountain lion. If a group of hikers hadn’t come by and scared it away, the cat might have killed her. At the time, she was a hard-core member of the Animal Liberation Front. She’d spent time behind bars for letting animals out of their cages. But her feelings changed after that.

  The woman said: My son was killed by a grizzly bear.

  I didn’t know what to say. I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn’t want to create an unpleasant situation. I wanted to say that people kill people far more frequently than so-called wild animals do. I wanted to say that sharks, supposedly the most fearsome of all non-human creatures, are responsible for only two human deaths each year, whereas just in the U.S. more than two people had probably been killed by other people in the short time we’d been talking.

  There was something unnerving about my face looking back at me twice from her shades. I could almost see the ocean behind my head in the depth of her lenses, dolphins leaping and splashing in the waves, the wall of mist in the place where the sky came down to meet the sea, a distance pulling me out of my body, forcing me to grip the sides of my chair, forcing me to penetrate the reflections in her glasses, penetrating her eyes and looking through her head and beyond, creating a tunnel of distance in the opposite direction, as if I were moving east against the motion of the sun, looking through the woman’s face across the room and through French doors to a flagstone patio, where people in bright summer clothes were talking and laughing, while beyond them big white clouds floated over the desert floor, which ended eighty miles away where black peaks bit the sky and made it bleed, and sixty desert miles beyond those peaks was a government air force base, where planes had been designed in the form of huge translucent amoebas, energized by the sun to move at supersonic speeds, constantly changing their colors and shapes, piloted from the base by a tiny computer worth billions of dollars, planes that glowed in the dark and made people think they were looking at UFOs, and seventy miles northeast of the base was a UFO information center, a squat brick building filled with souvenirs and doctored photographs, open only one weekend a month, staffed by an elderly couple who’d been abducted fifteen years before, one of them convinced that they’d had a son before the abduction, the other convinced that they’d never had any children, that instead they’d been raising an orphaned chimpanzee before the abduction, and a hundred miles further east was the Grand Canyon, except that it wasn’t there anymore, having been replaced by a hundred billion tourist pictures, images filling the canyon up to the rim, spilling out into parking lots and campsites, a garbage dump of burning clichés, replacing the sky with a fingerprint of smoke, making me feel unpleasantly hot as I looked back at myself in her wraparound shades.

  She said: My son was killed by a grizzly bear.

  I pulled my face away from the matching faces in her glasses. I said: What was your son like?

  She kept staring at me. She lifted her upper lip with what looked like disdain. She said: What was my son like? How can you even think of asking me such a question? My son is dead. And you of all people should know exactly what my son was like. My son loved animals. He protested against the abuse of dogs and monkeys in research labs. He protested against oil companies drilling in wildlife habitats. And now he’s dead, massacred by one of the animals he was trying to protect. I got to see his body—or what was left of it—when they brought it back from the Yukon. I’m sorry to say I didn’t take any pictures, or I could show you what he looked like, though I guess that wouldn’t quite be the same as telling you what he was like. What’s anyone like? Is anyone like anyone else or anything else or—

  I said: I guess not. I guess—

  She said: Don’t interrupt.

  I felt embarrassed. I hate it when people interrupt me, and I pride myself on not interrupting others. In fact, I feel superior to most people simply because I don’t interrupt them and most people I know interrupt me on a regular basis.

  I told her I was sorry.

  She said: I hate it when people interrupt me, and I pride myself on not interrupting other people. In fact, I feel superior to most people simply because I don’t interrupt them and most people I know interrupt me on a regular basis.

  I told her I was sorry.

  She said: So don’t interrupt me again, especially since I’ve got important things to tell you, things that should make you even more disgusted with our species than you already are, but maybe not as disgusted as I was when I heard that my son had been arrested for breaking into a research lab, this place at Stanford wh
ere scientists were seeing what would happen if you took baby monkeys away from their mothers. Did they really need to spend millions of our tax dollars on experiments designed solely to figure out what should have been obvious even to a moron: that baby monkeys will be terrified, become depressed and probably go insane if you separate them from their mothers? How stupid can cruelty get? So my son and this group he was working with got arrested for breaking into the lab and liberating all the monkeys, making sure the poor creatures got sent back to the jungles where they belong. My son spent three years in jail for that. Can you believe it? Three years, for doing something that should have made him a hero.

  She stopped talking but didn’t turn her glasses away from my face. I couldn’t stand the reflections any longer. I thought of changing the subject, a skill I’ve developed over the years because I don’t like fighting with people. But I wanted to tell her the story of how three of my friends had also spent three years in jail, how they’d heard about a guy in northern Idaho making money running a bear-hunting farm, where he kept domesticated bears and offered people a chance to kill them on film, designer excitement for people willing to pay thousands of dollars to look like fearless hunters in the wild, except that the wild was carefully managed, populated by bears trained to be docile, even friendly, so friendly that when they saw people with guns, they walked up to them expecting to make friends, only to get their heads blown off by people who’d already paid for stuffed versions of the animals they would soon be killing. My friends had gotten so mad that they’d gone and released all the bears and then blown up the guy’s house. I wanted to tell her this and other stories, but I couldn’t face the awkward faces looking at me from her shades. I looked back at Doug hoping he would change the subject, and I wouldn’t have to do it myself, since I hate it when people see that I’m afraid of confronting conflict. But he just sat there looking at me, trying hard to keep his face as blank as possible. He finally got up and shook my hand and said: Good seeing you. Let’s keep in touch.

  I watched him walk out the door knowing I’d probably never see him again. I thought briefly of all the other people I’d probably never see again, and their faces all became one face, a face I told myself I’d never seen before, until I realized it was mine. I ran my hands across my face just to make sure it was mine. Then I quickly looked around the room to make sure no one had seen what I was doing. All the other people in the café were touching their faces, looking around to make sure no one had seen what they were doing.

  I thought of opening the book I’d been reading, hoping the older woman would drop the conversation. I knew if I turned and let my face get sucked back into her glasses, I would no longer have any means of preventing myself from becoming someone else, or rather, becoming someone else twice, becoming her son before and after his death. I tried to think of all the reasons I couldn’t be her son, the most obvious reason being that she wasn’t my mother, so I turned to her planning to say that her son died for a good cause, and how bicycle accidents kill more people each year than grizzly bears have killed in the past hundred years. But she was gone. The steam was still twisting up from her ham and cheese omelet.

  I sat there for the rest of the day, watching the shadows of clouds gliding over the canyon, imagining how different my life would have been if I’d been raised by people destined in their old age to run a UFO information center. Would I have grown up recalling iridescent lights in the sky, a globe of rain with lightning bolts, dogs barking incessantly for no apparent reason, my parents disappearing for several hours, returning in slightly modified form, unwilling or unable to talk about where they’d been, convinced that they should adopt all the orphaned chimpanzees in the world? Would I have grown up assuming that every time my dogs barked something strange or magical might happen? It’s often assumed that dogs have special abilities, a kind of ESP that alerts them to things that human beings can’t detect, even with expensive technological devices.

  Just an hour ago, for instance, my dogs began whimpering, pacing nervously around my living room. The phone rang. It was my cousin Frank. He and his family had just landed in San Diego and wanted to stop by for a few minutes before taking a vacation trip up the California coast. I generally try to avoid my cousin Frank. He’s a Republican who likes to talk about his favorite primetime TV shows. We haven’t seen each other in years, but soon he’s at my door smiling and laughing, his wife is making herself at home at the kitchen table, and their two little boys are cowering in fear because they don’t like dogs.

  Trying to be a good host, I take the dogs into the backyard, assuming that if I smile and make small talk for a while, Cousin Frank and his family will decide to go to Sea World or the San Diego Zoo. But after I make a pot of coffee and put the boys in front of my computer, Cousin Frank starts criticizing President Obama for not being more aggressive in challenging Iran’s nuclear-development program. Since I see no point in discussing politics with Republicans, I decide not to ask Cousin Frank why he thinks it’s okay for the United States, a nation which still spends millions of dollars a day on hydrogen bombs, to respond with moral outrage when other countries even plan to make nuclear weapons. But his wife can sense that I think Cousin Frank’s opinions are absurd, and before too long she decides that it’s time to go to the zoo.

  I’m relieved. But then Cousin Frank is urging me to come along, which I wouldn’t do even if Cousin Frank were President of PETA. I can’t stand zoos, even the supposedly humane San Diego Zoo. I can’t stand looking at animals behind bars. They all look so trapped and depressed. The San Diego Zoo is famous for its animal habitats, designed to replicate the places where these animals might otherwise be living. This is nonsense. The so-called state-of-the-art enclosures and trails the zoo’s reputation is based on are just disguised prisons, and the animals know it. After the time I went there with my brother, I swore I’d never go again, and I’m not about to break my vow. So I tell Cousin Frank that I’ve got an appointment to take photographs of grilled hot dogs in half an hour, and he can’t really object because he didn’t give me advance warning about their visit.

  As soon as they leave, I take my dogs to the canyon. But after about thirty minutes dark clouds start to gather in the northern sky. The wind comes up, and soon it’s raining. We’re near a cave at the southern end of the canyon. My house is at the northern end, two miles away, so we scramble up into the cave and wait for the rain to stop. The view from the cave is usually outstanding. On relatively smog-free days, you can look south over the treetops and see the San Diego skyline, and beyond that the Coronado Bridge and the ocean.

  But it keeps raining harder and harder, so hard that it’s hard to see anything but rain. Soon there are flashes of lightning and the loudest thunderclaps I’ve ever heard. My dogs are terrified and cower in the back of the cave. I put their heads in my lap and try to help them feel safe, singing the songs I used to sing to them when they were puppies crying at night for their mothers. The rain shows no signs of letting up. It just keeps getting more intense. The gathering darkness feels like it might make all the light in the world obsolete. The sound of the rain in the trees is loud enough to make thinking obsolete.

  Soon the dark has become opaque, solid and flat as a blackboard, and I’m sitting in a fifth grade classroom. The teacher is teaching us how to walk a dog, but the chalk in his hand keeps breaking. I want to tell him that before he tries to teach us how to walk dogs, he should learn how to write on a blackboard. But I’ll get in trouble if I say something like that, and I’ve been in trouble many times before, to the point that a few weeks ago the principal called in my parents for a conference, advising them to send me to a special school for kids with behavior problems.

  Now the teacher is drawing Noah’s Ark on the blackboard, except that it’s not a boat. It’s a globe of rain with bolts of lightning. I raise my hand to complain, but no one else in the class looks worried, and the teacher ignores my hand and keeps on talking, explaining that Noah was chosen by God because h
e had magic powers, that before he was born people would plant wheat and get corn, or plant corn and get barley. But Noah’s presence began to change everything. He was God’s favorite person. God loved him so much that he gave him dominion over all non-human creatures, allowing them to survive only if they entered the Ark and became subject to human control.

  The teacher’s head gets hit by lightning, shattering and tumbling like an avalanche into the dark. Someone takes the teacher’s place in the classroom, a man I’ve seen many times in the canyon, a guy in his early seventies with a lame Great Dane. He told me once that he got his dog from the animal shelter, that he’d rescued many dogs there over the years, and he always looked for the older ones that he figured no one else would want, since most people go to the shelter looking for puppies. But this man focused on dogs due to be put to sleep, or given away to research labs, figuring he could make their last few years as pleasant as possible, then go back and get another old dog and do the same thing. I remember leaving that conversation so moved that I went home with tears in my eyes, the same tears forming in my eyes right now as I realize that my dogs and I have been in the canyon all night, and the rain is still coming down, though it’s not as opaque as before.

  The gathering transparency is dreadful, slowly becoming a pane of glass so clear it can only shatter, breaking what it might have allowed me to see into sharp prismatic fragments. I want to put them carefully back together, building a rainbow, but everything is too sharp, as if the colors were forbidden, as if the mere act of giving them names would mean the end of all names. Instead, I try to give myself a new name, but I don’t know what I should call myself, and suddenly I can’t remember the name I already have.