Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  “Yeah, because he certainly . . .” Zebra broke off abruptly and looked at Campbell with apprehension.

  “It’s okay, Zebra. You’re absolutely right. Horace lacks sensibility and sensitivity. He’s nasty and he exploits his victim-hood shamefully, particularly as far as Kit is concerned. He’s made her feel implicated in her family’s guilt even though she wasn’t even born when her grandfather did what he did. She feels at least partly responsible for the fact Horace is a vicious mess. Which is ridiculous, but that’s the way it is,” Campbell concluded.

  He comes and goes,” Pinto added. “I mean, Kit doesn’t have to put up with him hanging around all the time. But a little of Horace goes a long way.”

  “He’s a kind of a curse,” Minnie said. No one contradicted her.

  “And the disease seems to be a family curse as well,” Campbell added. “Because now Kit’s mother is in the first stages, even though she’s still pretty young. She can’t remember sometimes who Kit is when she goes to visit. Her brain just kind of whites out.”

  “Plaque and tangles,” Pinto said.

  “What?” asked Zebra.

  “It’s what kills off the nerve cells in the brain of people with Alzheimer’s,” Pinto explained. “Plaque is a sort of protein and tangles . . .”

  “Plaque! Ugh! Like filthy teeth. Could we change the subject please?” urged Minnie.

  And so they did, with Campbell asking Agnes how she had first got interested in animals’ rights. Caught off guard, she began telling them about the fateful morning she had seen Noona looking out at her, with all her vulnerable dignity, from the cover of the British Sunday magazine. She did not of course speak about the context; grappling with the decision her parents had pushed at her to get rid of her own “monkey face.” That was long behind her. What she must convey, as frankly as she could, was the force of the connective bond she had experienced, looking into the liquid eyes of a being who had suffered so much and endured.

  “It came,” she told the group, without fear she would be mocked, “the way I imagined mystics might have a vision. I mean, up to that point, I suppose I had always thought of my own being as distinct and single, like a stem or branch. But afterwards, I seemed to be looking up into a great canopy of leaves and I understood I was part of a mighty, many-branched tree. And that really, it mattered intensely how you related to all the creatures in the entire company of beings; that you be empathetic and respectful and protective, where need be.”

  She stopped talking, worried she had gone on too long; that they would think her foolish, or jejeune, or even worse, insincere. In fact, she found when she glanced about her that they were all regarding her intently, and that some were smiling at her warmly. One of these, she was delighted to see, was Campbell.

  “Yes,” he said. “A mighty, many-branched tree. What a neat image.”

  She felt elated at his enthusiasm. She had never spoken of these things to anyone before. Was this what acceptance was like — this heady warmth? As to the other part of her story, would any of them have guessed? Were they focusing on her features now, thinking that of course anyone who looked like her would be bound to empathize with a chimpanzee? She was very glad the bitter-tongued Horace had left.

  These solipsistic thoughts deflated her. She renewed her vow to focus outward on these people who had listened to her so attentively.

  “But don’t you think,” Minnie was saying, “that Fergus takes it just too far? I mean rats and worms! Ugh!”

  “Fergus is a crusader and an idealist,” Campbell said. “He’s challenging us to examine preconceptions and undo learned aversions.”

  “I can’t love or respect a worm,” barked Minnie. “And do you really believe Fergus would smile sweetly if he woke up and saw a rat at the bottom of his bed? He’d go out and buy a box of Warfarin like everybody else.”

  “Does Fergus ever come to your meetings?” Agnes asked.

  A heavy silence followed on her question.

  Pinto finally broke it: “Fergus has to be very careful. He’s under a caution. He got in a bit of trouble at the college where he taught previously. Some parents complained about his conduct to the university board of governors. They said he was propagandizing and inciting his students to commit acts of violence. There was a girl who apparently got hurt in a demonstration outside an abattoir.”

  “Fergus was there,” Campbell interjected. “But it wasn’t his fault. The meat plant brought in some very heavy security guards who were into excessive force.

  “Essentially, he’d be risking his job if he was seen with any of us outside the university — even in a pub, which is just so stupid. But that’s the way it is. He’s in a delicate situation, a kind of everlasting probation, and it’s going to be very hard for him to ever get tenure anywhere.

  “Of course, he’s still absolutely vigilant and committed to the cause. His probity . . .”

  “His what?” asked Minnie.

  “Probity. It means honesty, being morally upright.”

  Agnes noted with delight that Campbell’s explanation to Minnie was free of condescension.

  “In fact,” Campbell continued, “I want us to talk tonight about some information Fergus passed on to me. And we must all swear never to reveal he was the source. I’m deadly serious here. Are we agreed? Whatever happens, we didn’t find out what I’m about to tell you from Fergus Jonquil.”

  Everyone including Agnes nodded their assent. She felt flushed and jubilant because she had just taken an oath as part of a group and was about to be privileged with secret information.

  “You know that chocolate factory at Bridgewater?” Campbell asked.

  Zebra, Minnie and Pinto all said yes. Agnes had never heard of Bridgewater.

  “Well, apparently one of the Big Pharma companies has bought the plant and it’s going to be turned into an animal testing laboratory. It’s top secret.”

  “Christ!” said Minnie.

  Pinto moaned.

  Agnes, meanwhile, did battle with the nauseating images that bombarded her: cramped cages, metal restraints, muzzled jaws, spilled blood and viscera, deliberately exposed organs, broken bones, inexpressibly sad eyes.

  “We have to stop it,” Campbell was saying.

  She clung to his words and to the pure glistening idea behind them. Stop it, yes. At last, she could do something more than sending her few paltry dollars every month to help support animal sanctuaries around the world.

  “Dogs, cats. Rabbits. We know when the first animals are due to be delivered. After 1:00 AM on the morning of October 27. So I suggest we be there to meet them. We’ll do a peaceful sit-in demonstration in front of the main doors. I went up there on my bike last week to check the place out. There’s a wooded area behind the plant where we can hide and keep a lookout for their headlights; then take up our position in front of the doors. And we’ll bring along some sympathetic people from the media.”

  “You don’t mean that crazy Trot from the student union paper, do you?”

  “Minnie, do you know how much you sound like Horace right now?” Campbell asked.

  “God!” Minnie grimaced.

  “Anyway, Tom’s all right. He’ll come, even if no one from the city paper does, or The Chronicle or CNN.”

  “CNN!” exclaimed Perdita.

  “Well, we can try,” said Campbell, with such brisk certainty they all seemed to take heart.

  Agnes felt a surge of energy from crown to toes; something speedy and bright was rushing through her cells, making her skin buzz all over. She saw their little group shot into the future by a bolt of pure will, its source an unquestionable moral rightness. She had never experienced an emotion quite like this before, even at her most rapturous moments of insight. When she’d first turned the corner and seen the Ark sign, she’d had no inkling she was embarking on so vast and noble an undertaking. If she was ruthlessly frank with herself, she had come mainly to gaze at Campbell Korsakov. Now she found herself looking, with an admiration akin to a
ffection, at every single person in the room. She belonged here. It was an astonishing feeling. So astounding, and so heady, that she did something she would never have done otherwise and accepted the joint Perdita held out to her.

  “It’s quite strong,” Pinto murmured to her.

  Agnes inhaled and shuddered at the sulphurous rasp in her mouth and throat, and the very unpleasant skunky odour in her nostrils. It did not take long for an insidious cookery to begin in her blood and brain. The effects were at first pleasing enough. A soft glow surrounded, or perhaps emanated from, all the objects in the room. Everyone — not just Campbell — looked exceptionally beautiful, benevolent and sensitive. She wondered if this was the way mystics saw the world, with the natural goodness of the human soul so readily apparent in the flesh. The light seemed to spill outward, from every individual countenance, so that they were all floating in the same lucent sea, a holy company.

  Abruptly, it all changed: their faces turned shadowy and angular, the glow disappeared. A worm of panic began wriggling in her belly. She saw Perdita lean over and whisper something in Pablo’s ear. They smiled at one another cruelly, and sent a furtive glance her way. Agnes understood, with a dreadful unassailable clarity, that they were laughing at her. She began to grasp, under the sure prompting of the wriggling worm, that she had been invited to this gathering specifically as an object of mockery. Her panic fed on every simple gesture: the way Campbell rubbed at his left eyebrow, and then stared stonily into space, as if he had had enough of the game and simply wished her gone; Minnie’s deliberate flexing of her fingers, one by one, which she then regarded studiously; Zebra’s attempt to keep a silver-coloured CD spinning upright on the palm of his right hand. All these gestures, she recognized, were coded and pregnant with meaning.

  How terribly cold and abandoned she felt. Then the fear came rushing in: first that she would disgrace herself by losing control of her bladder or bowels or temper; then, that she could actually feel the others’ harrowing, hate-filled thoughts penetrating her brain. She began to dwell obsessively on the brain’s awful physical vulnerability. She pictured the plaque and long tentacles that might even now be choking and consuming the moist pink tissue inside her skull.

  She stood up in great fright, only just managing to find the words she hoped would allow her to escape with some modicum of dignity — before she fouled herself, or declared aloud how wretchedly paranoid she felt. She kept telling herself she was in this very uncomfortable state of mind because of the drug. It would pass. She would shortly feel normal and perceive rightly again. But each time she tried to grasp this fact tightly as her salvation, it eluded her. She was engulfed again by a sickening wave that made her dizzy and nauseous.

  Out on the front porch, beneath the gaudy Ark sign, she inhaled and exhaled as deeply as she could, while holding fast to the wooden railing. Then she launched herself deliberately out to the sidewalk and began to walk with all the determination she could muster. She would not fall down. She would not get lost. She would not, above all, become hysterical or blubber or babble. She looked at her feet, willing them to perform the forced march that would ultimately bring her to the safety of her room in the dorm. She wanted, above all, to feel safe, and secluded. Had there been one of those massive anthropomorphic trees Piero di Cosimo loved to paint, with a gaping hollow in its trunk, she would gladly have crawled inside, and curled up to sleep until it was all over. Why, oh why, had she been so foolish as to try the stupid drug?

  Pinto’s multi-coloured moon face swam suddenly into view. “Agnes? Are you all right? It’s very pokey weed, according to Camel. That’s why they’re all navel-gazing back there, or just staring into space.”

  How huge he was, like a kindly giant come to rescue her. She found the sound of his voice steadying. Surely she could trust him?

  “Paranoid,” she said.

  “I get like that,” he told her. “That’s why I don’t toke anymore. I just say no and then sit and watch them all go zombie-like for half an hour.

  “It would be good,” he confided, “if there was somebody else in the group who didn’t indulge. Then I’d have someone to talk to when they all fly off to their zone.”

  He looked at her with such hope, it made her smile. Was she starting to feel normal again? But the instant she posed herself the question, the fear struck again. Plaques and tangles will eat my brain up. There will be nothing left of me.

  “Would you like to walk by the river?” he asked. “The rippling . . . the sound of water . . . it might help.”

  She nodded. She realized she had put herself in his care, but was uncertain when exactly this had happened. There was a great comfort, she discovered, in walking beside so large a man with so gentle a disposition. The thought crossed her mind that this was the way she had imagined God when she was a child. She had a sudden urge to tell Pinto this, but then thought better of it.

  He found them a bench beside a particularly fine willow. “It might help,” he counseled her gently, “to keep your breathing in rhythm with the flow of the water.” She tried and then sat, quietly, as Pinto began to tell her stories. Because of the potency of the pot, she found she was picturing very vividly what he described, as if it was indeed happening in front of her: the red dog dancing, then making a bright ring about the house; the boy burying his face in her soft fur.

  At one point she looked up and saw how full the moon was. She had not realized it was so late. As she turned around to ask Pinto the time, she caught sight of a man sitting very high in the branches of a tree farther along the bank. He was a small person, delicately made, and Agnes could see, even at that distance, that he was wearing a kind of cream-coloured smock or tunic, and that his dangling legs were bare. He was staring out at the river and the floating moon. Perhaps he felt her eyes on him, because he turned his head and looked at her and nodded. She did not point him out to Pinto. She knew that he was there for her alone, just as she knew that if she looked away for even a second, he would be gone.

  Of course, she thought, he would have sat that high in the ancient trees in the contado outside Florence, with a drawing pad on his knee and a pocketful of brown and red chalk. Where better to observe the forest animals, and catch their lineaments and very character upon the paper, without disturbing them?

  She felt quite peaceful and filled with wonder at his appearance. “I should get back to the dorm,” she told Pinto. “I am fine now. Thank you. You’ve been so kind.”

  Pinto uttered a gruff sound, shifted his bulk upon the bench, and stared stolidly out at the river. “It’s very late,” he said. “The main doors to your building will be locked. Do you have the code to get in?”

  How could she have been so stupid? Because she had never before been out past eleven, it had never occurred to her to bring the code for the electronic lock.

  “You can sleep in our spare room,” he told her.

  She was immediately excited by the idea of sleeping under the same roof as Campbell. Just thinking of him lying naked, or half-naked, in the room next to hers or just down the hallway, sent ripples of heat through her belly and thighs. She could feel her clitoris getting erect, her labia swelling. She had already had several orgasms brought on by intensely vivid fantasies starring Campbell Korsakov and half-feared she might come spontaneously right there on the bench, beside this finely moral and upstanding man. She had never before met anyone to whom the word “upstanding” applied. These thoughts touching on Pinto’s exemplary character helped temper her ardour, and she knew this to be a happy result.

  They walked back to the Ethical Ark in an easeful silence that seemed to be one with the thickly clustered stars and the creamy-white moon. Whenever she glanced at Pinto she thought how noble he looked in that light, which softened his cruelly variegated complexion. She chose a bright star at random and made the child-like wish that Peter Pinto Dervaig would some day meet a woman who gave him the love he so much deserved. As they made the final turn into Pinto’s street, she stumbled on the
curb, perhaps because of her mounting excitment about staying the night under the same roof as Campbell. Pinto gave her his hand to steady her. She had a fleeting sensation, before he let it go, that he had caressed her palm with his thumb. She must, she thought, have been mistaken.

  She was delighted to find that Campbell was still up, talking with Zebra. The others had gone. He bestowed on her a smile that made her catch her breath, so swiftly did the tide of desire rise in her again.

  “Hi guys. Have a nice walk?”

  “Yes,” Pinto replied. “Agnes is going to sleep in the spare room since it’s so late.”

  “Sure. Great. Glad to have you.”

  Have me. Have me. Have me, Agnes chanted to herself as Pinto led her up the stairs and showed her the bedroom and where the bathroom was. He took a towel and clean sheets from a jumbled linen cupboard.

  “Do you want help making up the bed?” he asked.

  “I’ll be fine, thank you. I really appreciate all your kindness to me tonight.”

  He took a small step toward her, hesitated, then let his large hand rest a moment on her shoulder. “Goodnight, Agnes. Sleep well.”

  Closing the door of the bedroom, she had a quick look about. It was a narrow space, sparsely furnished: just a futon on a single-bed frame and a chest of drawers with an old oval mirror hanging above it. There was a pull-down blind rather than curtains at the window and this she chose to leave open so that she could lie in bed and gaze at the moon. After she had made up the bed and plumped the pillow, she took off everything but her vintage slip, with its openwork cream lace at the bust. That she might at any moment hear Campbell coming up the stairs made her skin prickle. Of course, he had no reason whatever for coming to her room, but the meagre possibility he might tantalized her and kept her restless. After fifteen minutes of lying rigid, trying to quell the riotous jumble of erotic images in her head, she got up to use the toilet. She was as quiet as she could be, and saw and heard no one in the hallway on the way back to her room. She did not think she had drifted off, and was therefore surprised when she heard her door creak open and someone whisper her name.