Invading the airline industry, we ban airplanes and institute long-distance travel by balloon. If the wind won’t carry you to your destination then you weren’t meant to go there.
Invading chemistry, we provoke latent enmities between oxygen and hydrogen. Water breaks up. Life as we know it will have to change.
One day the invasion will be over. One day, we’ll be gone. One day, you’ll have to rely on your own resources. But until then, we’re here. Until then, we’re doing what we can.
Come the Revolution
WHEN NEAL MADE LOVE TO Deanna that night in October, the smell of rabbits was still with him: the mustiness of their fur and of the little pellets they left behind in the floor of the vans. The smell had been driving Neal into a frenzy as he steered the first van into the desert. With his sidelong glances at Deanna, he caught her sidelong glances at him. Yes, he had thought, tonight he would have her. The surveillance cameras, alarm systems, and electronic locks of the research lab had all fallen to her. Tonight she would fall to him.
Three identical white vans had followed his down the dirt roads and onto the wide open spaces. As Neal and the others released the rabbits into the desert, a gibbous moon rose out of the mountains. Neal had an almost painful erection. He said as he opened the cages and released the laboratory rabbits into the wild, “You are free! Free! Free!”
Now, back in his apartment, he repeated the words as he gripped Deanna’s wide hips. “Free! Free!” He was Pappa Bunny doing Momma Bunny. Deanna trembled as he collapsed against her, as he lay down beside her, as he turned her face and kissed her tears that he hoped were tears of passion.
Then he smelled her hair. “Is that White Rain conditioner?” he said.
He knew before she clutched him and sobbed “Yes!” that it was White Rain. He’d led a raid on the manufacturer, spilling hundreds of gallons of their product from the mixing vats. He’d been caught. He’d done time for that raid. The stench of White Rain would never fully fade from memory. “Deanna!” he said. “Gillette makes that! They test with animals!”
“I know! I know!” she cried against his neck. “I can’t live a lie any longer! Neal, I’m not who you think I am. I’m not one of you!”
“What do you mean?” He pushed her away so he could look into her tearful eyes. “You’ve gotten us into the labs. We’ve freed chimps and rabbits and white mice together. We’ve turned loose monkeys and lab rats from labs with the highest security, all thanks to you. Of course you’re one of us!”
“Neal, you’ve been so blind! All you think about is animal rights! Haven’t you ever had a single thought about animal wrongs?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the destructive power of termites and the viciousness of yellowjackets. I’m talking about herbivores that would denude the earth if they could get away with it. I’m talking about bloodthirsty carnivores. I’m talking about animal respiration and digestion, the unending production of CO2 and methane. I’m talking about mucous secretions and bad smells. Animals, Neal. Animals are wrong!”
“But Deanna. We’re animals.”
“That is disgustingly and inescapably true. But that doesn’t make it right.”
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “But you’ve gotten us past all the security, helped us to liberate countless—”
“Liberate? Neal, we used you. Don’t you read the papers? The animals that don’t die of dehydration on the desert are shot. And who do you think does the shooting?”
“But those stories are all propaganda. The same people that control the research labs control the press.”
“No. Those stories are the truth. We get you to bring out the animals. You drop them off in the desert where our snipers can pick them off in the moonlight.”
“Why are you telling me this? I refuse to believe it!”
She held his face in her hands. “Believe it, Neal!” She kissed him. “Believe it! There’s no future in animal rights. Join us!”
When Neal tried to mount Deanna that night in May, the smell of ponies was still with him: the oaty tang of their breath, the rich mustiness of their stalls. How nervously they had stamped their feet before Deanna raised the muzzle of her gun to their heads. The smells, the fear, the muzzle flashes in the dark of the petting zoo had driven Neal into a frenzy as he, Deanna and the others made their way from goats to piglets to chickens and ponies. The operation took under five minutes, and the three black vans were vanishing into the night long before the sheriff’s deputies arrived. As Neal drove, his sidelong glances at Deanna had caught her sidelong glances at him. Yes, he had thought, tonight he would have her again. Finally.
But now she resisted as he tried to press her down onto her leather couch. She pushed him away. “No, we can’t. We mustn’t. It’s so animal!”
She cried. He let her up. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, he knew, but that she had become more and more radical, more committed, with every passing day. No matter how many animals the Animal Extermination Front destroyed, there were always more born the next day. How could they have sex without thinking of the ghastly fecundity of their enemy?
“You’re right,” he said, gritting his teeth. “We’re better than that.”
Disgusted, he put his leather pants back on, then his leather shirt, his leather jacket, his leather shoes with the leather laces. As he slammed the front door behind him and dragged his shoes along the front walk, he didn’t know which was worse, his sexual frustration or the depressing thought that even if he wore out a new pair of leather shoes every day, he would barely make a dent in the total cow population. He lit a cigarette with his leather-shelled lighter and walked the streets, under the moon.
He had intended to be a double agent, to pretend to believe in animal wrongs while staying in touch with his former compatriots in animal rights. But the simple truth was that as soon as he’d killed a few times to prove himself trustworthy, he’d started to like it. He had started to loathe animals. They were, when you got right down to it, easy to hate.
As Neal walked around a corner, engines roared. Tires screeched. White light flared around Neal. He raised his hand against the sudden glare of searchlights on three sides.
“Hold it!” a voice said.
“Jeez,” said another. “It is him! And he’s wearing leather!”
He knew the voices. Old comrades. He could barely make out the shapes of white vans beneath the lights. “Wait!” he said. “I can explain!” Two of them were behind him in an instant, pressing a chloroform-soaked rag against his nose and mouth. “Deanna!” he cried.
Neal’s re-education process had been straightforward. Dr. Andrea Windover, past-life regression therapist and animal rights sympathizer, had given Neal two drugs. One grew hair all over his body. The other drug made him susceptible to deep hypnosis. When Dr. Andrea had made sure that Neal was deeply, deeply relaxed, she said, “You are remembering the life before this one.” When he could remember it in some detail, she said, “Now you are going back to the life before that one.” Later: “Now the life before that.” And once he had the hang of it, she didn’t need to pause between lives. “Now the life before that. Now the life before that. Now the life before that. Before that. Before that.”
Back, back, back. Deeper and deeper into the past she had taken him, back to the days of Australopithecus. When he woke up after weeks of intensive regression, his arms seemed longer to him. When he felt his forehead, it seemed to slope. He wasn’t sure what was real and what was merely the result of powerful hypnotic suggestion. Certainly, the thick black hair all over his body was real.
“You are an animal,” the regression therapist said. “You have always been an animal, remember?”
Neal had wept salty animal tears.
Now as he made his way into the laboratory, dragging his hairy knuckles lightly along the floor, Neal was overwhelmed with sadness, both for the chimps he could smell in their cages, and for his separation from Deanna. “
You’re sure the alarms were all disabled?” he said to his companions.
“Got it,” one of them said, giving him a thumbs up. But Neal was nervous. If Deanna were here, he could have relied on her to get through security. She’d have done it for him, done it for love, even if she couldn’t be trusted to know the details of their plans. These chimps would be disguised as retirees for the border crossing and driven down to the jungles of southern Mexico, where they could live nearly natural lives. But Deanna had gone deep underground after Neal was snatched. Neal had no idea where she might be.
Neal picked the lock on the lab door. “Ooh-ooh,” he said soothingly to the chimps in their wire cages. “Ooh-ooh.”
As the Animal Liberation Front loaded the locked wire cages into moonlit white vans, the first six squad cars appeared, red and blue lights flashing. “Break the hinges!” Neal shouted. Neal hurried to pry open two of the cages himself. Then with all the liberated chimps, he dodged between cop cars and into the shadows of surrounding buildings.
“You must hate animals,” Neal said to the researcher as her young assistant unlocked the laboratory cage and led him out. The assistant dug into his Neal’s with her fingernails. Neal had resisted before. She was reminding him, he thought, that resistance would bring pain. He let her guide him away from the cages to the chair.
“To the contrary,” said the scientist, a woman with gray hair and a syringe in one hand. She was writing something in a notebook with her other hand. “I love animals. I have two cats and a dog at home.”
The assistant pushed Neal down into the chair and adjusted the arm straps. Then, when he was fully restrained, she pinched his arm.
“Ow!” Neal said.
“Are the straps uncomfortable?” the scientist asked, looking up.
“She, um…” Neal looked at the assistant. She was glaring. She was the one who fed him and changed his water. Or ‘forgot’ to feed him. “It’s nothing.”
The scientist swabbed the shaved spot on his arm and injected something.
“I’m not a chimp,” Neal said. “I don’t think I’m even really an Australopithecus.”
“Sometimes one must maintain a fiction,” the scientist said, “for the sake of science. I’m sure the police understood when they handed you over that you weren’t like the others. But under the circumstances…”
The circumstances had been that one of the escaping chimps had been run over by a late-arriving police cruiser. The laboratory needed eight chimpanzees for the study. After the liberation raid, one of the eight was dead.
Neal looked again at the cramped cages, including the one he’d just come from. “I do think you hate animals,” he said.
“This research will save human lives one day,” said the scientist. “I don’t hate animals. I don’t think, as some people seem to, that human lives are worth sacrificing for the comfort of animals. Between the people haters and the animal haters, I think they’re both crazy.”
“But what about me? How can you do these things to me?” Neal said. The research assistant lowered a hood over his face. He felt the brace against his skull. The brace tightened as the assistant locked it into position. “It’s not the shocks today, is it?” He felt the back of the hood open, felt the cold jelly of the electrodes. “I really don’t like the shocks.”
“I’m afraid it is the shocks today,” said the scientist. “Sorry.”
“I am a human being!” Neal shouted. “I have rights! Human or animal, I have rights!”
The assistant pinched the back of his neck. Hard. It hurt. He whimpered. But what he said was, “I don’t like the shocks.”
Later, when Neal lay dazed at the bottom of the cage, he thought he saw Deanna’s face on the other side of the wire. Her lips were parted. She said, “Do you want out of here?”
“I do,” Neal whispered. He blinked. Something was wrong with Deanna’s face. He blinked again. She wasn’t Deanna. She was the assistant.
“If you want out of here,” she said very softly, “then disable the alarm tonight.” She pointed to the wall. “Turn the red key to off. We’ll come for you.”
Neal clutched the wire cage. “How will I—”
“The lock of your cage is in its hasp. But it’s not locked. You can let yourself out.”
“Why would you—”
“Shh. Explanations later.”
Before him was the star-lit desert. Flat. Stony. There was no vegetation to speak of, nothing that would provide cover. He shivered and turned back toward the three women standing before their van. They had given him some kind of drug, something that made him dizzy and made his eyes teary, so now these women with their rifles seemed to be underwater.
“Run!” said the assistant.
“Why?”
“To make it more sporting,” said one of the others. “Run!”
They had come to the lab after midnight. He had opened the door when he heard them. They had shoved him back into his cage and hauled the cage out to their van. A red van. For rescuers, they didn’t treat him very gently. Everybody hates somebody, he thought. He said, afraid that he already knew, “Who do you hate?”
They laughed. “You!” one of them said.
“Activists,” the assistant added. “We hate political activists.”
He thought about that. Was he an activist, or a spy, or a double-agent? “But I don’t even know what side I’m on any more!”
“Doesn’t matter! Doesn’t matter one bit! Animal rights! Animal wrongs! Abortion rights! Right to life! Rights of the accused! Victims’ rights! We hate ’em all the same.”
Now, as the women told him one more time to run or to be shot where he stood, he thought of Deanna. Maybe she’d had a change of heart. Awkwardly, stumbling over ground that felt spongy to his drugged legs, falling and then getting up again, he thought that Deanna could have changed sides. He had changed for her, hadn’t he? Maybe she’d been keeping track of him. Maybe she had changed for him. Maybe the two of them were their own side. Just the two of them.
A rifle cracked and a ricochet sang its weird note.
Maybe Deanna was riding to the rescue even now, he thought. And then, yes, he saw her coming. He saw a white van, brilliant, approaching from the east, rising.
It was the moon.
A Story For Discussion
WHEN THE AUTHOR AWOKE from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous abstraction. He was accustomed to waking up with sore wrists from the previous day’s typing, a headache from the previous evening’s red wine, and an aching back from the night’s lumpy mattress. On this morning he had no bodily complaints of any kind. He had no body. He rose from the bed and looked around to make sure. There was no sign of the body that he’d gone to sleep in. It wasn’t there in the bedclothes. It wasn’t under the bed.
The author wondered if his body might be hiding in some other room of the house, or in some other house in the neighborhood. Suddenly, he found himself rising as if in an invisible elevator—up through the ceiling of his bedroom, past the attic, through the roof of his house, high into the sky. As he rose higher and higher, he was surprised to find that he saw things below him in greater and greater detail. He could see not only the roofs of a dozen, of a hundred, of a thousand houses, but he could make out the individual grains on each shingle. And he saw through roofs. He saw through walls. In apartments and houses, he could see anything he thought to look for. He could see where every set of keys was, for example: in pockets, in purses, on dressers, hanging from ignition switches, lost in high grass or in storm sewers.
What he didn’t see, not anywhere in the city or anywhere in the world, was his body.
There were other bodies that he could see, twining on rumpled sheets on motel beds, on couches. Even this early in the morning, there were two teenagers making a van rock gently in the high school parking lot. The boy’s name was Larry. The girl’s was Crystal. The author listened to what Larry whispered in Crystal’s ear. Nothing
special. Just, “I love you” over and over. The author knew that Crystal shouldn’t rely too much on what Larry was saying at the moment, but he couldn’t say whether she knew that or not. Wait. Actually, he could say. Yes, to some degree she knew that Larry’s declaration was suspect, but Crystal chose to believe it anyway. Her father had abandoned her mother long ago. She wanted to believe. She wanted to be loved. She wanted to be better than her mother at holding onto a man.
The author knew that what Larry wanted was much simpler, particularly at the moment. In a few weeks, however, everything in both of their lives would be far more complicated.
The author felt a faint twinge of guilt over his voyeurism, seeing these young people so clearly and intimately in both the present and the future, but he reminded himself that he was, after all, an author. Everything was research.
Larry’s muscles tensed, and the boy’s bodily sensations reminded the author that he had been searching for his own body. He returned his attention to his own house.
He searched attic, bedroom, and bathroom again. He looked in the closets. He turned his attention to the downstairs rooms, and he noticed something he had not seen before. Something strange. There were people gathered in his kitchen. A gray-haired man was making pancakes in the author’s own house, and a somewhat younger blonde woman was serving those pancakes to much younger men and women who were gathered around the dining room table or were seated on the floor. Who were these people? He didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine what they were thinking. Why were they opaque to him, unlike Larry and Crystal?
The gray-haired man flipped the last of the pancakes and untied his apron. Raising his voice so that he could be heard in the dining room, he said, “The first line of this story parallels the beginning of a famous story.”
One of the young people raised his hand. When the blonde woman called on him, he said “Kafka. The Metamorphosis.”
The older man came in from the kitchen carrying two bar stools. He sat on one. The blonde woman sat on the other. “The Metamorphosis. What do you make of that?”
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