The Humanity Project

by Jean Thompson

  Leslie exhaled and her fringe of bangs puffed up. “You’re all nuts. Everybody in your whole nuthouse foundation, including my mother. The lawyer’s just the last straw.”

  “Mr. Kirn? What’s he done?”

  “Oh don’t tell me you don’t know.”

  She didn’t, but for a moment she was transfixed by Leslie’s glaring staring eye, intent and hostile, the iris yellow-green, the pupil shrunken to a point. It looked like the eye of an angry chicken. Pawk pawk pawk. “What about Mr. Kirn?”

  “He says he’s leaving the board. He’s giving up his law practice and he wants to go on a Buddhist pilgrimage!”

  Yes, and Christie herself was going to attend clown college and join the circus. “Oh, really?” She tried and failed to come up with some sufficiently distressed response to this news. She was distracted by a small commotion. One of the homeless men had grown comfortable enough to begin an animated conversation with the others at his table. He was entertaining them with some story told at full volume: “Dude! Where’s my dawg? Du-ude! Where’s my dawg!”

  “Would you excuse me?” Christie turned away from Leslie and her indignation, walked over to the man, and put a hand on his shoulder. They spoke together for a while.

  The waiters brought out coffee and desserts. The booksellers had set up a table along one wall and people were browsing through the offerings. It was almost time for the famous author to speak. He was making his way to the podium. Christie walked over and met him there.

  The famous author began speaking to her in his deep, authoritative, media-tested voice, telling her how pleased he was, how honored, how grateful for the excellent hospitality, and so on. At some point Christie became aware that his hand was climbing over her forearm on its way up toward her shoulder. She looked down at it and eventually he stopped talking and the two of them stared at the hand as if it were some alien entity. Then he took the hand away and sat in the chair next to the microphone.

  Christie picked up one of the books from the booksellers’ table. She figured she could at least read his list of publications and accomplishments from the jacket flap. The book was called The Journey to the Mountaintop: A Seeker’s Guide. Its cover art showed a snow-covered peak, vaguely Himalayan in aspect, tinted with rainbow shimmer. People bought this stuff, they couldn’t get enough. They wanted stories of affirmation and purpose, and hardships overcome. They wanted to believe in happy endings in the face of all evidence to the contrary. She guessed she wasn’t any different. Maybe just more easily disappointed.

  She stepped up to the microphone and tapped a finger against it to make certain it was on. The room began to quiet down and settle itself for listening. “Good evening,” Christie began. “If I could have your attention, please.” She felt a little dizzy, all those faces watching her. She had no idea what she was going to say. “Thank you so much for being here tonight and lending your voices and your presence. Thank you to those who have supported The Humanity Project with their resources and hard work. And to our honored guest, tonight’s speaker, who, as we all know, has many demands lately on his time and energies.”

  A perceptible shift and murmur in the crowd. Was she referring to . . . they were uncertain if . . . A few sniggers, of the nervous sort.

  Christie referred to the book jacket. “He has written . . . ‘nine best-selling volumes that explore, in eloquent yet straightforward language, our quest for meaning and purpose in a world that so often seems to lack them. His words have brought comfort and inspiration to millions.’”

  She stopped reading. The faces of the audience were turned toward her like flowers. The anxious earnest conference-goers, the homeless men waiting for the next good or bad thing to happen to them. The Latino family, who did not appear to understand English, let the amplified noise wash over and around them. If she turned her head enough, she would be able to see Mr. Kirn, Mrs. Foster, Leslie Hart, and the others. “I don’t have much to add to what others have said about him, those who know him far better than I, and those who have studied his eminent works with care. He is, in many ways, so much more . . .”

  She paused, vacantly. The room was silent. A tide of dread gathered in it and rippled toward her. What if she flaked out? Stopped talking? Someone would have to do something!

  “. . . so much more celebrated than the rest of us. But every bit as human. Because to be human is to be broken. To be of the world is to be soiled by the world. To be alive is to be, in spite of everything, hopeful.”

  She looked out onto them. They looked back, stricken. Except for the Latino family, who had no expectation that she’d make sense to begin with. “Please join me in welcoming our distinguished guest.”

  The audience applauded, as much from relief that she’d gotten through it as from anything else. Christie walked away from the microphone and over to the corner where Conner stood. She said, “I think I might know where your father is.”

  • • •

  Conner didn’t want to wait until morning, so Christie said they could take her car. He offered to drive. Christie said that would probably be a good idea. She was on the downslope of drunk, and she was tired and hollowed-out. “You don’t really have to go,” he said. “I mean, I could drive Mrs. Foster and all back home when they’re done here and get the truck, and you could write everything down for me.”

  But he was so clearly anxious to leave that very minute that she waved this off and said she didn’t mind. Mr. Kirn was given the keys to Mrs. Foster’s car. One of his last official duties before hitting the Buddhist trail. Oh surely he wasn’t serious about that; there were things she simply could not fathom about people. Conner spoke with Mr. Kirn about the new arrangements and Christie hid in the ladies’ room until Mr. Kirn was out of sight.

  “I might have gotten your hopes up for nothing,” she told Conner once they were under way. “It’s not like it’s a sure thing.”

  “We’ll find out pretty soon.” He’d retrieved a hooded sweatshirt from Mrs. Foster’s car and taken off his coat and tie. He looked like an ordinary kid again.

  They weren’t going that far, in terms of distance, but they would have to travel down one set of hills, then west on the flats, and up more hills, a half-hour’s drive to this place where the homeless were said to camp. They might have moved on by now. Or the man at dinner could have been mistaken, or lying. Or it was just as likely that Conner’s father might not want to be found. But it wasn’t her job to point any of this out.

  Meanwhile, here was this peculiar interval, peculiar to be sitting in her own car as someone else drove, hurtling through darkness and this boy beside her, whom she could once more allow herself to admire as if from a distance, and without distress. She said, just for the sake of saying something, “Have you seen Linnea lately?”

  He looked over at her, then away. “Not really. I think she’s going out with some guy from her school now.”

  She probably shouldn’t have asked. She tried to remember anything Linnea had said about Conner’s father. He hadn’t been able to work and he’d lost his house and when did that turn into something you got so used to hearing about so many people, and so used to saying? She would have liked to ask Conner more about him, but he didn’t seem like a boy who was in the habit of talking about things, and she thought she understood that right now the mechanics of driving were what he needed to do in place of talking, and furthermore that in all her besotted staring she had overlooked everything that was fragile about him.

  She sat back and closed her eyes. She was going to have to tell Mrs. Foster she was leaving the Foundation, going back to nursing. Imelda could step up and run things in her place. Imelda would be a whiz, all enterprise and energy. She wouldn’t spend time worrying about whether money was either a good or a bad thing. She wouldn’t take herself too seriously.

  Maybe she dozed. When she opened her eyes again they were driving through Fairfax, the downtown left
behind them, the houses rising street by street into the hills. “Go up to Deer Park Villa,” Christie directed him. “You know where that is?”

  “Yeah, I do.” After a few more blocks he said, “They found my dog right around here.”

  “I don’t suppose,” Christie said, “that you’re keeping your dog at Mrs. Foster’s?”

  “I’ve got him up in my room. I only take him out when she’s not around. I guess I should probably tell her.”

  “I wouldn’t bother thinking about it right this minute.”

  They reached the gates of the Villa, closed now. “Take that turn,” Christie directed him. Then, later, “Turn right.” Conner slowed as the road narrowed. The trees were closing in around and above them and the car’s headlights didn’t penetrate the green walls. They both leaned forward, trying to see. “Look for a white sign.”

  “What is this place anyway?”

  “There’s some man who lets these guys camp on his property.”

  The road was barely more than one lane and didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Christie began to doubt the directions and hope they could get themselves downhill again. Then Conner said, “Is that it? The sign?”

  A rusted white No Trespassing sign was attached to a chain, but the chain had been taken down and the sign lay on the ground. Conner downshifted and they bumped along a grass-grown drive, still slick from the last rain. It didn’t look like anywhere that humans had been for a long time.

  The drive came to an end in a half-cleared field. Conner brought the car to a stop and kept the engine running. The headlights showed an empty, weedy space, a ring of cinder blocks around what might have been a burn pile, a heap of rebar and rusted barrels. Christie said, “I don’t think—”

  “I saw something.”

  “Where?” She didn’t see anything but the end-of-the-world landscape. “Let’s just go.”

  “After I get out, lock the doors,” Conner told her. “Do you have a phone?”

  Christie fished it from her purse. “No service. Please don’t go out there.”

  “All right, look, can you turn this car around if you have to? Can you get out to the road and into town again? If I don’t come back in ten minutes, that’s what I want you to do. Sound the horn before you start back, and keep hitting it as you go. Don’t stop anywhere until you’re in Fairfax.”

  “We can get the police and come back here.”

  “These aren’t people who hang around waiting for the police.” He opened his door. “Ten minutes.”

  Conner got out and she watched him moving along the beam of the headlights, the gray sweatshirt ghost-pale, then take a step into darkness, hesitate on the edge of her sight, and vanish.

  She didn’t want to keep track of time because it would run out and she’d still be sitting here alone, as she had been, in one way or another, all her life, and there was nothing out there in the dark worse than that.

  Conner came walking back along the trail of light, and someone else was with him, a limping figure so encrusted with leaves as to look like a walking tree. Every so often the figure stopped and brushed at himself and shed some leaf clumps. Christie opened her door and got out to meet them.

  “I wrecked the truck, sport,” the man said. “I’m real sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” Conner told him. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I lost Bojangles.”

  “Somebody found him. I have him, he’s fine. Christie, this is my dad.”

  “You got Bo? No way. No . . .” The man shook his head. The front of his shirt was matted with dried blood, one of his eyes was black and swollen, and there was a long scabbed-over place on his scalp. He smelled like something that had been buried and then dug up again.

  “How’s he doing?” Christie asked. “Can you get him in the backseat? We’ll take him to Marin General.”

  “Aw, I’ve hurt myself worse having a good time.”

  “Dad, quit trying to talk. Just get in back here and chill out.”

  As if all he had needed was someone to tell him what to do, the man limped a few more steps and leaned against the door Conner was holding open. “I’m going to get this nice car all goobered up.”

  “It’s my car,” Christie said. “Don’t worry about that either.”

  He cocked his head so as to look at Christie with his good eye. “I know you from somewhere.”

  “I’m pretty sure you don’t.”

  “Come on, Dad. Get in.”

  Conner’s father balanced on the car door and reached out to brush Christie’s face with the tips of his leafy fingers. “Nursie.”

  She remembered him then. She did. Her skin felt burnished. How strange to be so remembered and so touched, in so much forlorn darkness. It was another mystery.

  EPILOGUE

  It’s been five years now, and five years is a long time when you’re talking about the difference between ages fifteen and twenty, between the sad girl I was back then and the trying-to-get-it-together one I am now. But of course, she is me and always will be. I know her terrors, her anger, and her shame.

  I didn’t see Conner anymore, not after his dad came back. Whatever it was, desperate friendship or peculiar courtship, it was over. The two of us were always some kind of accidental, lost-in-space collision anyway, a pair of separately damaged goods. I think I knew that all along, even when I was all moony over him.

  The old lady loaned Conner money to go to school, Sonoma State, and he and his dad moved back north somewhere. You know who told us that? Christie! She went with them! Up and left! She turned out to be this secretly nuts person, just waiting for a chance to bust out and show it!

  Ordinary life accumulates a day at a time, and only after a long stretch of it can you look back and see how far you’ve come. I went to school, I did my homework, I moped around. I nudged my way into a couple of friendships. I acquired a boyfriend, a sweet, dopey guy who played jazz piano and aspired to hipsterdom. We hung around together in coffee shops and other people’s basements and had a lot of enthusiastic sex. My dad didn’t much like him and kept saying rude things about piano players.

  We were going to take on the world as a couple of wised-up cultural renegades. Of course that didn’t happen, we broke up, but no hard feelings, I’m grateful. He was my claim to an expanding patch of normal—that is, normal, age-appropriate teen heartbreak and pissed-offedness.

  I graduated from Tam High without any visible evidence of aspirations, talents, or inclinations. I enrolled at College of Marin and took a class in mass media that got me into film. Not making films, and not “cinema,” please! But camera work, lighting, and sound. All the backstage stuff. Something just clicked. I liked the idea of being the one behind the scenes who made it all happen, who could break it down into the basics.

  I worked a bunch of jobs when I wasn’t in class, saving up money. I got into the film program at Cal State Northridge this year and right now I’ve got an internship with a production company, working in the digital film lab. We call ourselves lab rats, and of course the interns have to do the most boring, suckiest things. But dudes, we are right behind you, we are paying attention, and we are coming for your jobs!

  I live in the dorms with a roommate but I’m almost never there because of work and classes. The hours are long, but like they say, at least the pay is shit. Everything in the movie business is need-it-right-this-minute drama, and huge temper tantrums from people who get paid way too much, and are way too important for their own good. But I’m going to be one of the ones they don’t even notice. Like a mouse in the walls, going about my own business, darting out when nobody’s watching.

  My mom and Jay and Max came out here for my high school graduation. That was quite the occasion. I hadn’t seen any of them for three years. My mom had gotten kind of fat, like a big bowl of blond pudding. She kept grabbing me and hugging me and smashi
ng me into her boobs. I guess it was OK to see her, aside from the hugging thing, but I wished she could have just owned up to basically throwing me away. She chose a husband over a child. I can understand it, but don’t expect me to give her a total pass on it.

  Jay looked older too. Him and me didn’t say much, but we didn’t have to. We’d both had the same piece cut out of us.

  Max was now this long-legged snaggletoothed boy who of course didn’t remember me. I got him to play Call of Duty with me and by the time they left, we were on mellow terms.

  It was so strange to see my mom and dad together, doing the Dance of Awkwardness. You could tell they were embarrassed that they’d ever set eyes on each other. If you want a good reason not to get married to whoever you’re in love with when you’re in your early twenties, look no further. Don’t think I haven’t taken that to heart.

  But here they were, at least going through the motions of doing the right thing by the product of their unfortunate union, me. They acted, if not exactly proud of me, at least relieved. They didn’t buy me a car or anything, they weren’t that kind of people, but they did all chip in for an iPhone, which was kind of sweet. My dad, being a giant dork, also bought me the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. My mom rolled her eyes. She is famous for her eye-rolling. She got that it was a lame gift, and at least we could bond over that.

  They are my past, the movie already made, one I can’t go back and edit so I came from somewhere different.

  There are parts of that movie I shouldn’t let myself go back and watch. But sometimes, in spite of myself, I do. After every lie I told, the movie is the truth.

  There’s a window letting in bright sunlight. That’s one of the things that throws you off, how mild and pleasant the light is, how it is reflected off the mirrors and chrome fixtures. There is nothing that is even worth paying attention to in this ordinary, utilitarian room. Two sinks, three toilet stalls, a paper-towel dispenser on the wall, and a wastebasket to receive them.