Barn 8

by Deb Olin Unferth

  The vehicles paused at the corners of the fields and let investigators out into the scrub. They ducked out of cars, hopped off truck beds, ran low along the tree line. They squatted at the far end of the shit, a shit expanse that stretched half a mile from their shoes to the edge of the enormous iron shit factory: the henhouses.

  They waited. On their backs they had small packs of sandwiches, bottles of water, gloves. They had filed off the soles of their shoes, as Annabelle had taught them. They could hear the hum of machinery, that pure sound, the song and silencing of America. Two miles to their backs, on neighborhood side roads, no more than two to a block, the driver-investigators were leaving their vehicles, emerging to walk over with a casual nonchalance, and miles beyond that, sixty trucks at five different truck stops waited.

  In the field the investigators hung back, eyes adjusting, ears twitching. All were arranging their minds into a neat stack of thought, minds that by nature are so small and poorly organized compared to the massive farm. On the top layer of their minds they placed the thickest thought: the calm necessary to move forward—no small maneuver, even for those who’d trained years.

  One layer down was the mind’s assembly team, which was reviewing the steps, how it would all go down, hour by hour—their feet carrying them to their assigned spots, their hands forming the necessary circles and releases, the breakaway plan, the other breakaway plan—checking off each step as they imagined its completion.

  Below that layer, shoved underneath, was another layer, the nagging pragmatist: There is no way this can work.

  Below that, the philosopher: What does that even mean, “work”? What exactly is this meant to accomplish?

  Below that, another layer: the mind’s disassembly team. It was hacking away at the steps. All that could go wrong. The plan lay in broken pieces in a muddy parking lot across the mind.

  And below that was one man struggling in his shackles, shouting upward through the layers, How many things have you fucked up in your life and is this going to be one of them? and had to be drowned out with the clanging and stomping of the others.

  Below that was another layer and another, layer after layer, descending through consciousness into what lies beneath, as the human brain becomes inaccessible to itself and you are floating past mushy desires and blurry primitive terrors, the prickly instinct territory, until you arrive and settle on the bottom, at that hard core of ceaseless longing that unites (or divides) us all.

  But the night they went to get the chickens (the “evacuation” they were calling it, though the auditors insisted it was a “removal”), the investigators knew they were the least interesting aspect of what was going on. The chickens, the sheer number of them, an existentially disturbing, global-crisis amount, they were the subject. The investigators (and AR people of all stripes who stood or crouched, waiting in the damp shit) had to be in agreement on this, or they’d never pull it off. They had to insist (their presence at the edge of the field was mere suggestion, the insistence was still coming) that hens, and indeed all creatures, including arrogant, ignorant humans, are not ugly, stupid, or eligible for ownership. They had to stand by this belief, keep it at the front of their minds (and not the thought that they were likely going to prison, or back to prison for some of them).

  They waited.

  Meanwhile, unseen elements were shifting toward what was coming. The future was pulling the present into itself. Even what seemed to have nothing to do with it took part (the motes floating, the quiet wild air lifting and lowering the trees’ leaves, the excrement sinking under them, the hens’ minds turning as they stood in their cages, the children climbing into their beds two miles off, their parents let loose at last, their quiet wild thoughts running, though tamped down and regulated into squares by their screens) because all movement is linked and rides together.

  When the signal came, the investigator Zee, whom Janey would one day marry, rose and waved an arm. The investigators straightened and followed him in three single files into the field.

  FIFTEEN HOURS LATER Janey will be sitting on the floor beside this investigator, Zee. Her elbow will be touching his hip, her wrists cuffed in her lap. He’ll turn to her and speak. She won’t know his name but she’ll know his voice, that he was the man who’d been last with her in the banker’s barn, the guy who’d said Annabelle had a shitty idea. He’ll say something similar now. Again it’ll piss her off.

  But ten minutes later he’ll have her smiling.

  DON’T MAKE A SHUSH SOUND AT A BIRD. If you must make a sound, make a coo. Shush is the sound of a snake, and birds, all birds, even freaks in cages, still know a snake when they hear one and will panic. Never leave a hen in the cold. Their combs will get frostbite. Combs are used for heat regulation, yes, but also for sex appeal, and a hen with a frost-black comb is not cute. Never turn a hen upside down. Never swing a hen by her legs. When you lift a hen, place one hand under her breast and take both of her legs gently with the other. She’ll tuck in her wings and feel secure.

  If you let chickens mix together to mate and wander as they like, they will slowly slide into the wild ways of their ancestors.

  THE INVESTIGATORS ROSE UP out of the fields and walked through the dark toward the barns. Their shoes left only smooth dirt as evidence. The first trucks began to arrive, cranking their gears, their headlights throwing shapes. A lone investigator stood on the road, flagging them in, though the drivers knew where to go. They’d studied the map, and it would not be unusual for catching crews to turn up at this hour with their long trucks. All over the world farmers know to catch their hens at night, when they’re ready for sleep, not a fight.

  The investigators fanned out, stringing to their assigned barns with no fuss (they were professionals). The investigator Zee opened the door to Barn 2, the one Jarman had assigned him. One step into the cage area and there he was, back in the fucking barns with their racket and dim light and stink. It hadn’t been so long that he’d forgotten them, but still it was a shock.

  He took it all in, the rows of cages, each so long you couldn’t see the other end, the woo woo woo of the birds, like a hundred thousand kazoos, and the low-base pulse of the fans. An extreme density of music, a concert, a long song. Grime covered the cages and hung off them in icicles. He almost allowed himself to think, This is obvious-ass impossible, but he didn’t. He laughed. Well, let’s get on with it. He unlatched the first cage with a gloved hand and reached in.

  CLEVELAND WAS ALSO IN BARN 2. She left Janey in the row, was squeezing around the large metal carts of batteries (the industry term for transport cages), ducking by the investigators, running up the aisle, because she felt she had a responsibility to see the first hens loaded. She had taken the first hen that started all this, after all (where was that hen now?).

  She stopped. It was happening, investigators lifting battery racks up onto the truck with a heave-ho, since the two forklifts were over in Barns 1 and 3. She couldn’t help it, she raised her phone and took a picture (which would later be entered as evidence, along with all the other videos and photos she’d taken over the past months), though Annabelle and Dill had strictly forbade it and no one else was doing it, more professional, apparently, than the head auditor.

  The photo was decent—investigators in work gloves, focused faces frozen in postures of calm. No one would have expected that she and the daughter of Olivia Flores were capable of this. But they’d done it.

  When the batteries on the truck snapped into place the investigators cheered. Not all of them could see what was happening. They were spread through the barn, pulling hens, rolling carts, but they heard the cheers and knew what it meant and they cheered too (woo! woo!), their voices joining the sounds of the hens. And Cleveland raised her voice too, an auditor shouting with joy. Then she turned around and headed back to Janey.

  A starter gun sounded in the collective investigator-minds, and they were off.

  FOR JONATHAN’S PART, it didn’t occur to him that he might be “missing�
� something when the evacuation began. He didn’t care about seeing the first hens loaded. He was busy. And he didn’t have that sensation of “missing” two hours later, when it was all going beautifully. Trucks were coming in and out, the night cool, here and there a whole aisle untenanted now, the hens’ coo diminishing. It was going better than he’d hoped. Wrinkles, yes, but so easily smoothed that the plan would not have been perfect without them because perfection is not perfect without small flaws to remind us of the darkness of (im)perfection.

  The architecture of the design was the most beautiful feature. At any given moment the birds were moving out of the barns at an average rate of 21,666 chickens per hour per barn, or about 130,000 for all six, the investigators doing depop at a rate of 410 per hour per investigator, which is about three or four times slower than a usual depop, not bad. And when the first trucks pulled away at nine, right on time, the shouts that went up felt like a light summer rain.

  You had the flurry inside, yes. He had six crews of fifty-five investigators, each crew assigned to a barn pulling hens, all having to be on their best behavior: fast, focused, working nonstop for hours, taking short breaks (five breaths) as needed. Many (not him) had done handling work in the past. Many more had not. Still, within an hour you couldn’t tell who was who. Investigators rolling empty carts, investigators pushing full carts, heavy with hundreds of hens, three-quarters capacity, which was the most he’d been able to talk Annabelle into (by arguing that if there was too much space, they’d bump around and be injured on the road “unless you want to install nine hundred thousand seat belts”). He noticed his cage design in Barns 2 and 3. And the cage-free barns had the latest style of aviaries. Impressive.

  Of course, the hens were in no position to sit still and let themselves be lifted quickly and quietly. Hens go into a sort of stupor when they sleep, but they will eventually wake and now they were running and screaming like someone had just turned on all the lights. They attacked the investigators with everything they had, going for the arms, necks, eyes. It was rough on them all—investigators and hens—but they had only to make it to the sanctuaries. The hens would be placed in straw with gentle unhurried hands, and from there Jonathan would be home free. (And he could get the hell out of there and go back to Joy because he never, ever, wanted to see Annabelle again, Jesus. Their passion the night before had been childish.)

  All Jonathan had to do was set up the best conditions for them to make it to their destinations alive, not have trucks arriving full of dead birds. Yet there were going to be dead birds. A tremendous number of dead birds was involved in all this. You’d reach into a cage and one would be dead, trampled into the wire by her roommates. There were dead birds scattered over the grates. Neither Annabelle nor Jonathan wanted to leave a mess of dead birds behind, so Annabelle had one investigator running through the barns, gathering up the dead bodies to take along in heavy sacks (and eventually cremate, at Annabelle’s sentimental insistence, their ashes blown over a friendlier field).

  It looked like a siege inside those barns and that’s what it was.

  But if you pulled back from the nitty-gritty, a situation verging on (but not quite) out of control, you could begin to see the shape, this knot of creatures, genetically twisted and stuffed into a line of dark buildings by the million, now coming out in clusters, moving in every direction away from the farm—think star ray, sunburst, firework, explosion—flowing over a pitted landscape. Inhale and exhale, birds released over the country.

  That old, permanent, electric feeling of wanting to please Annabelle was unfastening from the locked depths. He’d fallen in love in these barns (Annabelle only eighteen!), walking up and down, waving his points into the air. Hens had been his life’s work, the improvement of their conditions of confinement. Annabelle had cherished him for it.

  And there it was at last: that sensation of missing. He missed that part of himself.

  If you could see that (and Jonathan did) you could begin to see other things you were missing and missed, as in: it had been plain and you somehow hadn’t seen it, you’d missed it. And missed out, as in: he’d missed out on becoming whoever that person would have been who had continued on that path. And also missed, as in: remembered her in a physical, visceral way (last night!), and he changed his mind (again) from his earlier repudiation. He felt the pain of loss (the wound was open again, goddamnit).

  Hours later, when it was not going beautifully, when investigators were running through the fields, all his orderly escape plans abandoned, smoke taking over the sky, Jonathan had that thought again, that he’d missed her, in yet another sense. He was sprinting from barn to barn, calling her name, hoping he hadn’t missed her, that she hadn’t left, or more likely, gone off to do something crazy (she had, but not the crazy thing he thought), and break her promise. She had to be around somewhere. He was moving against the tide of fleeing investigators, bumping into them, calling out, screaming, “Has anybody seen Annabelle?” though no one was listening.

  But that was still hours off.

  JANEY WAS WATCHING THE HENS move out of the barns at an incredible speed, the battery carts flying down the rows, the racks going up into the trucks, the birds waiting in the cool night air for whatever would happen next to them.

  So why the sinking feeling, the dark premonition?

  It wasn’t looking like it was supposed to look. It wasn’t matching the vision, birds shucking off their cages, the roof falling away, the stars. The roof was still up there. The hens were going from cages into smaller cages, cages to cages, and not that gently. Some of the investigators were not skilled and were hurting the birds as they removed them. And though the transport cages weren’t full, it was still an awful lot of birds per battery. Hens would be injured, some would be dead before they arrived. Meanwhile, only three hours in, some investigators were tired. They all had a long way to go.

  She wondered if she’d been wrong. Had her vision not been a calling? (In fact, it had not been.) She tried to glimpse it: hens with a power unheard of, flapping into the night. She wondered fleetingly (the thought shooting through like a bird) what the other Janey was doing.

  Cleveland was so wrapped up in lifting the chickens correctly (it was harder than it looked, especially when they were at the back of the cage) that she didn’t notice Janey staring into space.

  Zee saw an investigator just standing there at the end of a row, arms hung at her sides, not moving. What was the matter with her? Get busy! Did she think they were there to gawk? He headed toward her. As barn leader it was his job to bark her into action, but as he got close he recognized her—that girl from this morning, the one who’d walked out onto the porch with tangled hair. He stopped, heart jangling. He turned and jogged the other way.

  SEVEN YEARS LATER Dill was on the phone. Zee’s voice was coming through, despite a bad connection. Zee was saying, “She won’t come out of the bedroom.”

  Yep, they still called Dill. He’d gotten them at an early enough age that they’d imprinted on him like baby chicks, the investigators. A dozen or so had anyway. They were all still vegan, and in moments of need they thought of him first.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  Dill swiveled away from the desk, leaned back to face the ceiling. “Give her time.”

  “Her father hates me.”

  “So don’t let him in. Who cares what he thinks.”

  “No, he won’t let me in. It’s his apartment. Her bedroom at her father’s place.”

  “Shit, she moved home?”

  “No, she left home. Our house is home. Janey loves this house. She’s in her old bedroom at her father’s crummy apartment. She won’t come out. She’s been in there for a week.”

  “That is heavy.”

  “I’m telling you. She’s broken. I don’t know what to do. I’m losing my mind. I’m alone in this house. Place is full of stuffed animals. Place looks like a toy chest, like a baby store. I built a fort in the backyard.”

  “He wouldn’
t have climbed a fort for years.”

  “I know it. I just wanted to build it.”

  “You guys were getting ahead of yourselves.”

  “Hardly. I mean, he was out of her body and alive. He was almost three months old.”

  “Almost isn’t enough.”

  “It’s a lot. You know she’s never lived in a house before? She wanted a house. This was her idea. Now she won’t come out of that fucking bedroom.”

  “She’s in mourning.”

  “He was my baby too, for fuck’s sake.” Zee was crying. “She says I’m going on like nothing happened.”

  “Sounds like you.”

  “Of course I am. From day one that’s all you do—go on like nothing happened.”

  Most of them had left AR, or been spit out. They’d gone back to school, become lawyers or journalists or truck drivers, reversed their vasectomies, started families. New investigators had stepped into their shoes, though the US farmers had gotten so good at keeping them out, investigator units had gone international—Mexico, India, New Zealand—but Dill didn’t do that work anymore.

  “We were so close,” said Dill, “if not for Barn 8.”

  Zee sniffled. “Fuck Barn 8.”

  “We could have done it otherwise.”

  “No, we could not have, Dill. You need to give that up already.”

  “We could have.”

  “Not this again,” Zee groaned. “I’m going to kill myself, man. It’s over for me.”

  Dill sighed. Zee was thirty-two, Janey twenty-eight. Life is so, so long. Dill had been crushed by the banker, destroyed, and yet here he was, seven years later, loving someone else. We always think it’s over for us—and it is over—then it starts again. Reincarnation in this lifetime.