Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  To look on the bright side of things, God bless the Zodiac crew for leaving both morphine and powerful sedatives in the first-aid kit, and, for no reason I can think of, a twelve-pack of Durex Ramses Thins. The last thing our depleted population base needs right now is spermlessness.

  RISPERDAL (RISPERIDONE)

  Identifiers

  CAS number: 106266-06-2

  ATC code: N05AX08

  PubChem: 5073

  DrugBank: aprdoo187

  Formula: C23H27FN4O2

  MOL mass: 410.485 g/mol

  Bioavailability: 70% oral

  Metabolism: Hepatic (CYP2D6-mediated)

  Half-life: 3–20 hours

  Excretion: Urinary

  Fucking fuck. While we were bent over gathering cameras, Brunette Slut took the Zodiac. But to where? At this point she has Fucking enough gas to get halfway to one of the populated islands—if that. Ray offered the astute observation that, “It’s always the brunette who stays under the radar for most of the game who wins these things, isn’t it?”

  So now it’s me and him. On the steadicams we got to witness footage of what went down, Blair Witch–style: who killed whom and how. But that’s another story, not mine.

  In a nook in the rocks, I discovered six cans of Chinese tinned ham (or ham-like) product. Yes, it looked like pâté made from Jeffrey Dahmer’s boyfriends, but to me it was a Sunday roast-beef lunch. I haven’t shown Ray.

  Maybe two hours after the Zodiac was pilfered, a fourteen-foot aluminum boat with Korean markings beached on the sand a few hundred yards down from us. Its sole passenger was a Korean fisherman. We’re debating whether he has any foodstuffs onboard. Well, should he be unwilling to share, our flare guns and some heavy chunks of coral ought to be enough to do him in.

  Here’s the thing about survival: survival is merely survival. It’s nothing else. It’s not a work of art. It’s only that you survived and someone else didn’t. Outwit, outplay, and outlast: and if someone wins this thing, it’s fucking well going to be me.

  STEPHEN MARCHE

  THE PERSONASTS

  My Journeys Through Soft

  Evenings and Famous Secrets

  IT HAD BEEN two years since my last soft evening and I arrived forty-five minutes late to Madeleine Reid’s sprawling neocolonial in the Tuscan Hills subdivision an hour and a half outside San Diego. In the living room, a young Asian woman had already covered herself in Dressdown’s rags and dung-smeared leaves and sat in the empty space at the centre of the room scratching her arms and chest, muttering low profanities. A magnificent collection of throws covered the twelve-piece beige sectional, and the other six guests were either watching or dressing. Somebody had already taken the throw of Ninja and was hiding behind the curtain of the nearest window. The young man nearest to me began putting on Mitzi. Mitzi is simple: a gingham dress with a crinoline and a pack of Lucky Strikes. Mitzi smokes and walks barefoot. A friend of mine who regularly becomes her describes Mitzi as a seventy-year-old woman who wakes up in a twenty-two-year-old’s body. Even though she never exposes herself and would never dare touch a man, she considers herself very risqué indeed, old-fashioned in her sluttiness.

  A fiftyish woman with close-cropped hair had just put an unlit cigar in her mouth. She was Monopoly. Sponge-bag trousers, silk top hat, and morning coat are the other elements of Monopoly’s throw. Because of the ludicrous vocabulary and the fact that he’s constantly comparing himself to Winston Churchill, I had assumed for years that Monopoly was based on Conrad Black, and I was only convinced otherwise when another personast told me she had seen Monopoly spun in a Dallas suburb in the early seventies. The name, combined with the throw, is probably a tipoff. Americans assume he’s a version of the plutocrat character from the game Monopoly. It does explain the name and the top hat but not the sour mood. Perhaps Monopoly is a combination of the two, or perhaps neither. The origin of any highway is never better than vague.

  Suddenly Dressdown screamed out: “My back crunches like candy in a six-year-old’s baby teeth. Pain candy. Positronic con-fibulators! Pain candy! Why won’t any of you help me?” To me the greatest pleasures of Personism are such expected surprises. In Melodies of Self, published in 1999, Columbia sociologist and practising personast Carol Reinhardt described soft evenings as “living tension between posing and becoming, a tension so unstable that it vibrates into a kind of bell tone. It’s a tension between posing and being, but it’s also a relief of that tension, a relief into noisy silence.” Ninja somersaulted through the centre of the room into a low, crouching warrior’s pose. His eyes shifted back and forth for a moment. Then he rolled back to the periphery.

  I remember almost nothing from the rest of the soft evening because I soon entered myself for a spin as Nick Charles. The others followed quickly afterwards, as The Old Gunfighter, Seagull, and Mr. Clean. Madeleine, our host, entered last, as Joan. We spun a lot of highways that night: Violent B, The Mercy Man, Rufus Wainwright, Sammy Sexy as Shit, Oliver Twist, Mary Magdalene, Scaramouche. Two highways I had never encountered before came—Tramontate and Gumper. The former reminded me vaguely of Luciano Pavarotti, the latter of a beautiful teenage girl’s teddy bear. My other memories of the evening are nothing more really than a series of cool, glittering, ephemeral impressions. This was the softness I had craved in my return to Personism, the softness of the highways and, afterwards, the security of the quiet rooms. Lost in the suburbs, I was home again.

  Soft evenings always end with quiet rooms. Before the spins every door in the house is left open, until one by one the members leave the highways for privacy. Madeleine was kind enough to provide each room with noise-cancellation headgear and I relished the smooth letdown—like a hot shower after the big game—for perhaps too long. When I emerged, I was again the last one to the party.

  The throws had all been tucked away. Madeleine introduced me to the group, a fairly typical assortment for a soft evening. Maxwell Cho, architect, and his stay-at-home wife, Geraldine, had just moved from San Francisco. The other married couple, Quincy and Khadija, were both copyright lawyers—the box-ticking, world-builder types. The lesbians, Marcie and Sammy, looked like young Grandma Moseses. Together they owned a sex shop catering exclusively to women. We had the typical conversations: models of cars, babysitters, cleaning ladies, vacations, mortgages, renovations, gas prices and, above all, real estate. Intimate abandon doesn’t end the need for small talk.

  “Are you new?” Marcie or Sammy asked me. For a moment I worried that I had misperformed my spin along the highway, that they thought I was a newbie. Then I remembered I had arrived late. She was asking me if I was new to the city.

  “No, I’m just getting back into the highways,” I replied.

  “You took a break?”

  “Two years.”

  “Like Björk.”

  The Icelandic pop star is the celebrity most open about her Personism. In a recent article in Rolling Stone, she discussed falling into and out of the practice. It was the same article that had made such controversial claims about the blindings in Evanston, Illinois being motivated by Personism. Marcie or Sammy and I changed the subject. We were making the rest of the room uncomfortable. Personasts do not talk about Personism at soft evenings; in playgroups and parking lots and soccer practices, yes, but not at soft evenings. The latest “revelations” about Personism in the press have made these silences even more necessary.

  Accurate figures on the rise of Personism are difficult to come by. The census keeps no record of Personism because it is not considered a religion. The sociologists who have tried to establish its scope arrive at wildly different conclusions. Estimates for the U.S. and Canada begin at 700,000 and reach as high as several million. Everyone agrees, however, that Personism is spreading. “Every suburb now has its nightly session, and where the suburbs go, Personism follows,” writes Carol Reinhardt. “It was a major force by 1982. In the past twenty-five years, Personism has doubled and redoubled countless times.” Due to the casual
nature of attendance probably no definite answer as to the exact number of personasts is possible. Other questions are more haunting and urgent to outsiders: what is the source of the power in this movement that has no institutions and no leaders? What emotion transports the personasts into their whirligig of shifting identities? What insanity makes them perform the “famous secrets,” branding themselves, releasing wild animals onto city streets, burning money?

  My own off-and-on relationship with Personism is more or less typical. When I was seventeen, a girlfriend brought me to my first session. At university, I dropped the soft evenings because I had other things to explore. Then I started work at the Quality Assurance department of a multinational legal publishing company in Scarborough, Ontario, and began attending soft evenings at least once a week. My favourite group was over an hour and a half away, deep in an industrial park on the other side of town. My spins with them lasted over two years, my longest uninterrupted stint on the highways.

  Manny Seligman, in his 1993 book The Gods Beyond the Wall:A Field Guide to Spiritual Sprawl, identifies over three thousand different highways. Many highways are simply well-known historical personalities: Jesus, Buddha, JFK, Malcolm X, Byron, Lorca, Mao, Hitler, Bob Dylan, and so on. Local variations are common. In Canada, I’ve seen Pierre Trudeau; in California, Ron Howard. Celebrity highways have a tendency to appear and disappear violently. At the time of writing, Paris Hilton appears nightly all over the continent but in six months to a year she will have vanished completely. Purist personasts tend to look down on celebrity spins because they’re so shallow.

  Highways from literature are rare but often deeply felt and are more or less permanent: Oliver Twist, Bruce Lee, and King Lear will always have a place at good soft evenings. Commercials produce highways: The Michelin Man, Mr. Clean, and Harpy the Happy Housewife. Other highways represent not people so much as ways of speaking. The highway called Confucius utters aphorisms, but these aphorisms are not limited to Confucian sayings. I have heard Confucius quote Marcus Aurelius, Zen koans, and Led Zeppelin lyrics. The Homer highway would not be recognizably Homeric to a Classics scholar. He just speaks with extended, overblown metaphors.

  The vast majority of highways present no clear origin and don’t fit any category. The most common are Lili, Dressdown, The Baron, The Swinger, Violent B, Scarface, Dick, The Craving, Mr. Bibbly Burton, Trampoline, Vocallisimus, and The Seagull. To complicate the system even further, many highways seem to stand between categories. Often these in-between highways are feminine. Joan, for example, is a combination of Joan of Arc and Joan Baez dressed in flapper clothes. Barbra and Simone similarly fuse celebrity (Barbra Streisand and Simone de Beauvoir) with fictions (Barbra is a visitor from outer space and Simone is a cynical gardener).

  Any explanation for the mass appeal of Personism has to be found in the experience of the soft evening. The soft evening is soft because it is careless, forgetful, the easiest liberation. In the softest evenings, the exquisite loss of the highways stretches into a feeling of distance, a crack that is also a chasm between oneself and everything that matters. After a very soft evening I sometimes feel like I can see into the spirit of strangers in their cars or on their lawns or at their windows. But soft evenings are also profoundly silly. They are childish pranks, larks.

  To understand Personism, however, one also has to recognize the power and beauty of the “famous secrets,” which, because they are so poorly understood, tend to be the aspect of per-sonast practice most frightening to outsiders, the basis of the wildest rumours. If soft evenings are the downtown core of Personism, then the famous secrets are the suburban sprawl. They are the ceremonies for the loyal few, for those who experience Personism as a part of life rather than an escape from it.

  Waste is a big theme in the famous secret ceremonies. A mortgage-burning party is the most common famous secret. Burning piles of one-dollar bills is common as well, and pouring bottles of champagne or vodka into sewers. Other famous secrets seem designed to leave minute marks on other people: giving large sums of money, like twenty thousand dollars, to mentally ill homeless men, or buying the clothes off their backs or paying them to clean up messes of caviar. Other famous secrets focus on the body: deep tanning, excessive exercise, fasting, tattoos or brands (generally of a small grey cloverleaf or red octagon). Sometimes personast ceremonies integrate easily into religious life. The release of doves at weddings began as a famous secret. Other ceremonies act as replacements for religious rituals. A personast funeral involves placing the deceased’s ashes into a simple clay pot, hiking into a silent place, walking a hundred yards from the path, and leaving the pot behind.

  My own experiences with famous secrets have been rare but powerful. In my sessions at the legal publishers, I once witnessed a friend, with a salary of $27,000 a year, burn a small pile of hundreds amounting to nearly seven thousand dollars. The power of the gesture made me sick to my stomach. I dream about it frequently. The sole personast funeral I attended, in the San Bernardino National Forest, was an overpowering encounter with mortality. But I have always fantasized about trying one famous secret in particular: the liberation of animals. As a celebration of my return to Personism, a pilgrimage of sorts, I decided to try it at last. It would also be a chance to explore the world of organized Personism, which had expanded during my hiatus from a handful of semi-professional outfits into a real growth industry. Every personast I knew wanted to set me up with a company he or she had used. In the end, I went with Jed Cushing’s Cloverleaf Tours based out of Canmore, Alberta, in the heart of the Canadian Rockies.

  Jed is a friendly man but reserved, as might be expected from a professional personast. His business is famous secrets, and he has the perfected tan and wiry strength of a man whose work is outdoor leisure. The offices of Cloverleaf Tours, where we met to plan my trip, were in a cool basement off Canmore’s main street. Every surface was cluttered with personast paraphernalia. The walls were covered with photographs from his adventures. Our initial meeting was comically brief. I introduced myself. He suggested a package of silence and release, at a cost of five hundred dollars. I agreed. He showed me the door. I wasn’t offended by the brevity of the meeting though. Some of the famous secrets can be shared only by strangers.

  I awoke the next morning to the polite antiseptic bleating of my alarm clock at 3:30. I listened for a while to the buzzing of the power lines outside my window and made sure to clean my ears thoroughly after a shower.

  Jed was waiting for me in the lobby, his Audi parked outside. The faint murmuring of the Muzak was painful to him, I could tell. We didn’t even say hello. By the time we arrived at Sunshine Mountain half an hour later, dawn was just beginning to play on the far faces. The hill was more or less abandoned for the summer but past the deserted chalet a phantom ski lift continued lifting nobody to nowhere. We loaded ourselves onto a seat and immediately I was aware of the sound of the breeze. What I assumed was a perfectly still day was fragile and ragged twenty feet up.

  The view was sublime—the shifting penumbras of the rising sun against the mountains, deer passing below, flocks of birds. I concentrated on the sound—the minute tick-tick-ticking of the chair on the wire, the vast, vital cling-clang as the chair-hook caught the rotor of the pole, and always the wind.

  At the top of the hill Jed led me along a small path through stands of evergreens. The meaty crunch of our boots on the crushed gravel was deafening. As we crossed an alpine meadow, even the squelch of our socks in boots and our boots on the grass were over-loud. I noticed the sound of my boots more than the colours of the hundreds of wildflowers. We descended beyond a small tarn, through a steep valley filled with galumphing boulders. The valley ended in something like a pile of these boulders, which resembled a cyclopean stairway. Jed stopped me with his hand. He pointed down.

  I had to go down alone into the rocks.

  There I found silence.

  All ambient noise was blocked by the alignment of the stones, all wind too. My own heart�
��s noise grew into a syncopated cash register. It took me a few minutes—or it felt like a few minutes despite my loss of all sense of time—to remember the expected practice for this famous secret. I brought my heart rate down as low as possible. I listened consciously to the silences before and after my heartbeat, paying attention with effort to their encompassing non-sounds.

  Soon I was dwelling in true silence. It’s no exaggeration to say it was the greatest alleviation of my life.

  I dwelt in the silence until a stray host of sparrows overhead passed and wrecked it.

  The walk down to the Sunshine Mountain parking lot was so depressing I nearly wept. Others had warned me but their warnings hadn’t prepared me. I felt caged in my senses. I craved an end to the sun, to the razorback edges of the mountains, the ruby poppies, my own skin, and above all to the noise. You can’t shut your ears, that’s the cruellest fact of anatomy, I remember thinking.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time we arrived back at Jed’s Audi. He popped the trunk and brought out a cage of Boreal chickadees. And once I released the birds from the cage, the feeling of self-loathing, of loathing at having a body, vanished with them into the mountain air. The genius of the famous secret entered my spirit with all its smoothness and coolness.

  Jed was chatty as we drove back to Canmore. “We had perfect weather. When it rains or it’s really windy, I don’t bother. Sometimes the clouds change in the upper levels and I have to come back with the customers. Four, sometimes five times, until they find the silence.”

  “How did you discover that location?” I asked.

  “I was a hiker before I became a personast and I used to love that hollow. I used to hike up there all the time to visit. I didn’t know why.”

  I asked if his hiking had flowed into Personism naturally. “Not at all. It’s like the opposite of loving nature or environmentalism. It’s waste. Oblivion.”