“She’s going to end up in a juvenile facility, some horrible state-run program, if we don’t get her out of here. Not to mention one more marriage blowing up in my face. There’s your answer. And I’d like to think you’d want to help her. Maybe I’m wrong. Feel free to correct me.”
“There’s not a lot of space where I live,” Art said, regretting the words as soon as he spoke. No excuse was going to save him.
Louise said, “Honestly? Even if I tried to take you to court for, what, a hundred thousand dollars of child support, you can’t get blood out of a turnip. Guilt? That’s probably going to last you about twenty minutes after you get off the phone. So how about, this is a chance for you to do something different. Be somebody different. A good guy. A father. Oh, I guess I shouldn’t assume. Do you have any other children?”
“Just her,” Art said, feeling as if he were making a damaging admission of some sort.
As if he should have had more children, or no, if he did, Louise would find some way to use that against him, as in, she hoped he provided better for them than he had their own daughter. Or say he was a model parent to these other, nonexistent children, how did he justify his total neglect of Linnea? Once Art reached this point, he was aware he was doing Louise’s dirty work for her, creating scenarios of fault and blame, and she was wrong about the guilt, it did stay with him, but eventually it circled back into anger.
He said, “Look, I’m either good enough for her, or I’m not. I guess you think I am. I guess you need my help. So if you want me to even consider it, how about you be a little nicer?”
“All right, OK then, sorry—” Louise started out snippy and nasty as before, but here she seemed to swallow down a choking mass of tears, so that words came out clotted and damp. “Such a horrible, horrible thing . . . and she won’t let anything get better. She tried to hurt . . . hurt . . .”
“Take it easy,” Art said. “Hurt who, what did she do?”
“My little boy. She loves him, the two of them were always so great together, and then she . . .”
“What?” said Art, as Louise started in bawling again. “Come on, calm down.” She wasn’t calming down.
Didn’t it always end up with tears, Louise crying over something that was traceable, either directly or indirectly, to a defect on his part, and the rest of it felt familiar too, the exhaustion of dealing with her, like one of those waves the ocean heaved up, the ones that clobbered you and knocked you flat and dragged you out to the murky, roiling sea. “What did she do?” he repeated, thinking of all the things a truly disturbed teenager might be capable of.
“We didn’t see her do it, but his little arm was just black and blue. She hates us. We know she does because she tells us. She starts fights at school. She can’t go back there this fall, they won’t let her. She steals money from my purse and lies about it. She steals from stores. We think she uses drugs.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“For God’s sake, Art.”
“No, really, there’s a difference between a little pot and being a raging meth freak. There’s some things you really ought to put people in jail for.”
Louise said, “We can smell the marijuana on her. Don’t start telling me it’s a harmless, natural herb. Fifteen. Years. Old.”
A chip off the old block, Art thought but did not say. Since it seemed like his turn to move the discussion along, he said, “This sounds like a real bad idea, Louise. Her coming here. Seriously, this is the kind of—”
“It was her idea.”
Louise blew her nose, offstage, then came back to the phone. “She says she doesn’t want to have anything more to do with us, and she’s entitled to get to know her own father.”
“She doesn’t think I’m rich or anything, does she?”
“I don’t think she’s laboring under that misapprehension.”
“What have you told her about me, huh?” Louise didn’t answer. “Never mind that one.”
“I’ve tried to talk her out of it, but she has her mind set on it, and honestly, we all need a break from her, it would be a relief, even though that makes me feel horrible, it’s horrible not to want your own child. Oh, sorry. I forgot who I was talking to.”
“If I say yes to this, Louise, and I’m not suggesting I will, you and I have to agree on some ground rules. Like, you can’t call me up all the time just to heap shit on me.”
They hung up. Art spent the next two days thinking gloomy thoughts. He didn’t believe for a minute that Louise wouldn’t sic the lawyers on him, or at least threaten to, or make some other kind of misery for him. There were other times when he tried on some jazzy, offbeat version of fatherhood, something from a quirky movie, but these moments proved difficult to sustain. In the end, it seemed easiest to agree to some kind of quickie visit, and he called Louise back and told her to put Linnea on a plane.
Her flight from Cleveland was on time, the arrival board said, and she had his cell phone number, in case there was any real problem finding each other. Art had come to the airport early and wandered the concourse, taking in its uninteresting restaurants and its gift stores selling Alcatraz T-shirts and sourdough bread, thinking too late that he should have bought Linnea something, flowers maybe, though he wasn’t sure if she was a flowers type of girl.
They’d had one phone conversation before she’d left, and it hadn’t really gotten off the ground. Louise had called him and said, without preamble, “She wants to talk to you. Here.”
Some fumbling around on the other end, a conversation half muffled by someone’s hand, a conversation Art intuited as hostile, the phone reluctantly handed over, then a girl’s voice, light, cool, uninflected. “Hello?”
“Hi, Linnea. It’s nice to be talking to you.”
“Yeah,” she said, unhelpfully.
“I’m glad you’re coming out here.” And at that moment he was; he had some dim sense of at least her ordinary misery, the things she contended with in that house. “Look, don’t worry about anything that’s going on with your mom, I mean anything you’re fighting about. You’re going to come out here and leave all that behind you. Like, a new start. Hey, for me too. Because I haven’t been, you know, much of a dad. So you and me can take it from the top. Get to know each other. Oh, you need to tell me what kind of food you like so I can go shopping. Are you a vegetarian, anything like that? Because I can—”
“Art?” Louise was back on the line. “She eats most things. That will be the least of your worries.”
And so he had undertaken the cleaning and overhaul of his apartment, a sobering project, considering his chronic lack of housekeeping. There were boxes of old papers, things that had never made it onto a computer: class syllabi, gradebooks, student evaluations, quizzes, xeroxed copies of articles. These were layered with a number of inactive wardrobe items, piles of possibly important mail, advertising flyers, receipts, a package of cocktail napkins bought for some forgotten purpose, a compilation of thriftily saved plastic bags, the cable attachment for a digital camera, and more more more: toppling piles of CDs, bands his daughter would sneer at, books she would find uninteresting, his collection of half-melted candles. He owned nothing that was not sad, dishonored, unworthy. In the kitchen the gas oven leaked gas. He threw out everything in the refrigerator and scrubbed it down with a powerfully lemon-scented cleanser. He couldn’t bring himself to think about the bathroom yet.
Art’s apartment was on the second floor, with an outside staircase, like a motel. He made a great many trips with trashbags dragging and bumping behind him on the stairs, and, as he was hoping, his downstairs neighbor Christie came out to see what he was doing. “You moving or something?” she asked.
“Just cleaning up. My daughter’s coming to visit.”
“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”
“No reason you would.” Art paused mid-step. He had a hopeless thing for Christie. �
�She lives with her mom, in Ohio.”
“Ah.” Christie nodded, looking up at him with her amazing blue gaze. “How old is she?”
“Fifteen.”
“A teenager, good luck.” Christie was wearing one of her gauzy dresses with a little white sweater over it. She looked like she was wrapped in layers of cloud.
“So I’m trying to get the place cleared out a little. Want to see?”
“All right.” Christie followed him up the stairs and in through the front door. Their apartments were identical in layout. Of course, hers was all girled-up. Art stood aside to let her take in the kitchen, or that portion of the main room that functioned as a kitchen.
“I can see you’ve been working.”
“You don’t sound real impressed.”
“I’m not sure anybody else could see it. I mean if they hadn’t been here before.”
“I haven’t gotten around to the bathroom yet,” Art explained, as Christie continued her inspection tour.
“Could I suggest some new towels? And a new shower curtain. And put the toilet paper on the holder, don’t just let it sit on the sink.”
“I could do that. Sure.”
“Where is she going to sleep?” Art indicated the small bedroom across from his own. “I think you should move the bed out to the sunporch and give her that.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because this room looks like an embalming chamber. How long is she staying anyway?”
“That kind of depends,” Art said. He’d been hoping he could get Christie to help him clean up the place. Maybe he still could.
“On what, exactly?”
“How we get along, I guess.”
“How do you usually get along?”
“I haven’t seen her in a while,” Art admitted, and before Christie could ask her next reasonable question, he said, “Hey, would you like some tea?”
“OK. But let’s have it at my place.”
Christie’s apartment made his own look like some kind of evil twin. She’d painted her walls in sunset colors, gold and salmon, and she went in for things like houseplants and woven rugs and pottery that looked as if it had been fabricated by desert-dwelling Indian tribes. She made tea in an actual teapot and poured it through a strainer into matching blue mugs. There wasn’t a thing she did that Art didn’t observe with helpless fascination. “Now,” Christie said. “Tell me about the mystery daughter.”
“This is good tea, what kind is it? Green?”
“Art.”
“I was married for a while. Not real long. It didn’t work out. So we called it quits, and I came out here. From, you know, the Midwest.”
Christie waited. Steam rose up from her teacup and twined through the baby curls on each side of her face. “That’s it?”
“More or less.” Art shrugged. It wasn’t the kind of story that made you look good.
“How old was your daughter then? What’s her name, anyway?”
“Linnea. Not very old. Two.”
“That’s a pretty name. Linnea.”
“Yeah, it’s, ah, Swedish. Her mom was Swedish. Is.”
“So all this time . . .”
“It’s not something you plan, you know? You don’t say, ‘I think I’ll get married to the wrong woman and impregnate her and then bug out.’ She wasn’t ever happy with me. With who I turned out to be. She had all these expectations. She was glad to see me go. I was glad to be gone. Enough time goes by, you almost forget any of it happened.” He thought he understood the parents in Hansel and Gretel, how they’d gone on with their lives after the abandonment in the forest. They had convinced themselves they’d never had children. After a moment Art said, “I’m just trying to be honest here.”
“Yes, it doesn’t seem like you’re shining it up much.”
“I don’t think I would have been any good at having a little kid around anyway.”
“You never know until you try,” Christie said, meaning it as a reproach.
“I wasn’t much of a family type.”
Which was true. But what type was he? In another century, Art imagined, he might have had a nice life as a monk in some comfortable monastery, one with a good library. As it was, he’d been dragging out his education for the last twenty years. He had a master’s degree in English literature, with a specialty in colonial literature, authors such as Kipling, Forster, Conrad. He’d always meant to go on and get a doctorate, and he still kept in touch with his committee, at least those who had not yet retired or died off. But over time his specialty had become somewhat dated. It was too easy to sneer at imperialism and cultural hegemony; anybody could do it, and many people had. It was harder and harder to come up with new and subtle variations, at least in English. In other languages, in other parts of the globe, you could be pretty sure that one population was still busy squeezing the juice out of another, and then sitting on top of the conquered tribes and writing about it.
He thought about starting over, tackling some newer, hotter field, where it was still possible to feel a righteous indignation: ecocriticism, or genocide studies. But as yet he had not taken up the sword. A doctorate of any sort, a dissertation, was such daunting work. Knowledge for its own sake had its limits. Nor was another degree going to land him some plummy professor job. He was forty years old, past his stale date, and anyway, jobs like that were long gone.
He tried to recall the excitement he’d felt when he’d first come out west, that sense of lightness and possibility, his life taking some new and unimaginable shape.
He taught composition courses at one or another junior college. He hired himself out to tutor the indifferent sons and daughters of the wealthy. He graded papers for a national testing service. He wrote online book reviews and attempted to get paid for them. These were the strategies of the overeducated and the underemployed.
In addition, he and a friend were developing a website, which did not yet earn money, although it had the potential to do so, where users could rate other websites. He’d written training manuals for an educational publisher to use in their New Delhi office.
He’d managed to get a trip to India out of it, and he’d parlayed that into three months of sightseeing and dysentery. He was working on a screenplay, a science-fiction epic of post-apocalyptic life on earth, where humans battled one another in huge arenas that were actually video games. From time to time, he made a little money selling pot. He thought about going to culinary school, learning about cooking. He was aware that there were ridiculous aspects to his life, ways in which he could not be taken seriously.
Louise had nagged him about quitting school and getting a real job, earning real money, and he guessed she had been entitled to do so. It was a wife thing. And it took them longer than it should have to figure out they never should have been married in the first place. What did they know? They kept waiting for marriage to take hold, do its thing, meld them into a single being. Each blamed the other for getting in the way of the process. Louise was beautiful, he was smart, or supposed to be smart. Sort of like Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Everybody knew how that had turned out.
Christie said, “So why is she coming here?”
“It was her idea.”
Christie waited for him to keep explaining. Christie was beautiful too. Not in the voluptuous, strutting style of Louise, but in a way that made you take a second look, and then a third. And she was smarter than Louise because she was careful to keep a certain distance between them. She always behaved as if they were funny, sitcom neighbors, and was he going to spend his entire half-assed life alone and broke because he couldn’t measure up to the things he wanted?
He said, “You know what your face reminds me of? A Victorian portrait. Of a fairy or something.”
“Fairy?”
“They did a lot of these flower fairies. Little creatures wearing flower petals an
d flying with butterfly wings. They used, uh, all these very fine, delicate lines.”
“That’s kind of sweet, Art. A little icky, but sweet.”
He was going to have to work up some more casual compliments. He said, “She’s coming here because they don’t know what else to do with her.”
He told Christie the story. Maybe she’d seen it on the news, one of those school shootings. Did she remember? Last year? School shootings had kind of died down, but there had been this one. A boy with a grudge, it wasn’t clear against whom. Most likely everybody. He’d come to school one morning with an automatic pistol in his backpack, and a hunting rifle with a scope, ingeniously concealed in its own canvas carrying case. For Christ’s sake, weren’t schools supposed to have security plans these days? What did they think was in there, lacrosse equipment?
Anyway, in he walked. It wasn’t a huge high school, just medium-sized, in one of those depressed medium-sized Ohio towns that had grown up around a rail line a century ago. The place his daughter had moved with her mother at some unspecified point. Art knew the town, and thought he remembered the school, three stories of dark brick trimmed with granite cornices and a frieze of figures in togas, proclaiming the virtues of an educated citizenry.
The boy had chosen a place to sit and wait, a partially screened alcove at the end of the main hallway. From television, from certain muscular movies, from video games, he was familiar with the concept of the sniper’s nest. The boy said later (because he had survived, to everyone’s disappointment, had not turned a gun on himself or been shot by the tardy law enforcement officers) that he had meant to wait until class was dismissed and the halls full of students. But another boy had come out to open his locker and seen the boy with the rifle, and run off to raise the alarm. And so the shooting had begun early.
The shooter fired twice at the boy but missed. These were in the nature of practice shots. He’d needed to get some of the nervousness out of his hands.
And imagine for a moment that boy, spinning his locker combination, yawning his way through the morning, every part of him turned to the lowest possible setting in order to get through the boredom of his day, his week, and his foreseeable future. He hears something, most probably, and looks up at a place where he is accustomed to seeing nothing. Instead there is this thing that refuses to make sense, a rifle barrel pointed at him, jerking up and down as the shooter tries to adjust the scope. It will not resolve itself into anything real. It takes those first shots, the bullets hitting the wall a few feet from his head, kicking out some of the plaster, for the boy to start running.
The Humanity Project Page 6