Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  His sudden friendliness was a relief to me. I was going to spend the night in Canmore and I asked him if he could set me up with a soft evening. He demurred apologetically, claiming he didn’t spin on the highways anymore. “I get my fill up here on the mountain during the day.” Jed has been on over a hundred famous secrets in foreign countries, in places as distant as Antarctica and Kyrgyzstan. He owns the most expensive noise cancellation technology currently available. “Fifteen grand,” he said tapping the small black ball on the dashboard, which explained why the car was so utterly quiet. His basement holds two sensory deprivation tanks.

  “How many trips a week do you take?”

  “In the summer as many as three or four. That’s all kinds of famous secrets though. Not just silence and release.”

  Canmore is a perfect spot for a business like Cloverleaf Tours. Not only is there enormous traffic from the United States and increasing numbers of European personasts who have bought property in the Canadian Rockies, but the suburban growth in nearby Calgary, an oil town in boom, offers a handy domestic market. “Every week they plant a new bed of roses and I’m the one with the bouquets,” Jed said.

  I asked what he thought attracted so many people to Personism.

  “Have you seen the trees in those Calgary suburbs? Five-foot trees in the middle of the horizon. City ordinances say you got to have them. That’s the only reason they’re there. You can live in Pine Lake Hills or in Pine Hill Lake. You get lost. ‘Oh, no, you’re on Riverview Drive in Pleasant Mount View. You want the Riverview Drive in Pleasant Mountain View. It’s a very easy mistake to make.’ And like that. Which is why I’m here.”

  The next morning I happened to drive through those suburbs on my way to the airport. The overpasses and cloverleafs in their sublime curves twisted counterintuitively around the never-ending subdivisions, the cathedral-like malls, the walls soundproofing life from the roads, the otiose, mocking patches of grass and sidewalk. This landscape shaped Personism as surely as the Arabian desert shaped Islam or the cool lake of Galilee shaped Christianity. It is also the landscape that shaped me.

  In the 1995 case, Reno v. Whittaker, the United States Supreme Court denied tax-exempt status for Personism on the grounds that it didn’t qualify as a religion. According to the court, personast activities lack an articulate set of beliefs. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists all participate at soft evenings without any sense of contradiction. The term “cult” also doesn’t apply. No institution benefits from the soft evenings and leading a session doesn’t offer financial or status advantages.

  Nonetheless sociologists and journalists generally treat Personism as a new religion for lack of a better approach. Brett Groundsman, author of Bless This House: How New Religions Are Shaping Suburban and Exurban American Life, justified his inclusion of Personism with the claim that its ritual contains “a complete vision of life and the place of the self in the universe.” Groundsman has to find this “vision” in peripheral famous secrets surrounding birth and death, ignoring the fact that the majority of personasts have never heard of these famous secrets and it’s hard to see what vision of life, other than ephemerality, one can find in soft evenings.

  In search of an answer, or at least clearer questions, I attended the seventh annual conference of SIPS (Society of International Personast Studies) held at the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel in Orange County, California, this past November. The conference venue was almost too appropriate. The hotel’s wide grid and large rooms meant that we more or less had to commute to the lobby. The building was attached to Fashion Island, an open-air luxury shopping plaza.

  At the opening night reception, over three hundred professors from two hundred universities drank Pinot Grigio around the lobby fountain. Mark Grenstein, a professor of Sociology at Duke University and the president of SIPS, introduced himself. He was a tall man, at least six foot six, with a slightly vulture-like stoop, an English formality of dress, and courtly manners. He had heard that I was working on an article about my experiences as a personast. To change the subject, I complimented him on the venue and remarked on its appropriateness to the subject of the conference.

  “Yes, Orange County is something of a homecoming. Our first conference, in October 2001, took place in Orange County.” He himself had not begun his work on Personism then. A colleague at Duke had attended and reported back on the scope of the movement. It coincided powerfully with his own research on faith and human geography. Around that time too, he had attended his first soft evening.

  “That’s the funny thing about SIPS,” he said. “Ninety-nine per cent of us practise what we preach, which sounds admirable but doesn’t offer the greatest deal of objectivity.”

  I asked him if the lack of distance was that unusual; the leading scholars of Buddhism tend to be Buddhists, Catholic theologians are Catholic, and so on.

  “I’m not saying it’s unusual, I’m saying it’s problematic. Besides, Personism is not a religion. Above all it’s not a religion. Come hear my talk. The entire point of Personism is that it’s not a religion.”

  Professor Grenstein was called away by a SIPS member who wanted to discuss an article in Rolling Stone. The whole party was abuzz with the “Rolling-Stone Issue.” Six months earlier the magazine had claimed (“White Voodoo,” May 2007) that a series of blindings in Evanston, Illinois were the responsibility of “personast cells” in suburban Chicago. Over the course of two months during the summer of 2005, fifteen people, all homeless men and prostitutes, were dropped in front of Glen-brook and Highland Park Hospitals missing their eyes. They had no recollection of how their eyes had disappeared. Most person-asts, myself included, found the idea that personasts could blind people absurd. The violence it would take to rip out the eye of a stranger would be opposite in every way to the spirit of relief in soft evenings. It didn’t help his credibility that the author, while claiming to be a personast himself, made basic mistakes. Soft evenings are not like orgies. If we were capable of orgies, we wouldn’t need Personism. He also included a description of animal slaughter, which could not have been more inaccurate. Silence and release are famous secrets, not holding and killing.

  Everyone at the conference agreed that some kind of statement needed to be made and that SIPS was the appropriate body to make that statement, but who was going to make it, and how, were less clear.

  Then, at exactly 9:30, the question was abandoned and the hotel lobby emptied. Too late I realized that I had forgotten to make my own arrangements for a soft evening.

  Day One of the conference was humming when I managed to navigate the labyrinth of the hotel’s hallways to the conference centre. The choice of panels and variety of approaches was baffling. In the morning, I heard a member of the faculty of religious studies at Harvard analyze the latest statistics on Personism. Her analyses were new because they took into account the financial and racial criteria of the participants but her conclusion, as far as I could tell, was that personasts were all members of the middle class. Next, Gary Portsmouth, who chairs the Urban Studies department at Syracuse University, gave a fascinating dissection of the Lili and Mitzi highways, tracing both of them back to a character in Colette’s autobiography, Earthly Paradise.

  As it turned out, I was going to know Gary well by the end of the conference. After lunch, I attended a panel on the rising popularity of Personism on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One panellist described it as our “Paul Moment”—the moment when experience separates from setting. The man beside me tapped me on the shoulder. It was Gary Portsmouth. “That is quite a misunderstanding, if you are a reporter. A misunderstanding of Paul, of Personism, of the Upper West Side. Allow me to show you.”

  At SIPS, the soft evenings begin in the middle of the afternoon and end early in the morning. They are different from ordinary soft evenings in their precision and hallucinogenic intensity. The throws, which for most devoted personasts are four or five objects, become entire costumes with makeup and masks at SI
PS. At Gary’s session a whole suite had been cleared and filled with two dozen coat racks. People stripped naked before they spun into their highways. Improvisations and integrations were flawless. In the course of the next two days, I witnessed and became the greatest highways of my life. Not only did I meet a dozen fresh highways, like Ivy, Samsung, and Simon Bolivar, but the common ones like Violent B and Sammy Sexy as Shit were illuminated in excruciatingly vivid new ways.

  I pulled myself away only to eat and sleep, but did manage to catch the keynote address by Mark Grenstein that wrapped up the conference: “What Do They Dream About in Paradise?” I caught the last five minutes anyway. Fewer than a dozen people were in attendance. The lecture hall could easily have sat five hundred. “They claim that we’re ultimately hollow, that we’re just a series of resonant hollow gestures,” Mark was saying. “Loneliness is the new epidemic. Loneliness kills more people than heart disease.” His voice echoed with double meaning through the hall empty of dreamers too busy dreaming to talk about dreaming.

  After the lecture, Gary and I drove out of Orange County. We had agreed to meet some fellow personasts at an Olive Garden in the City of Industry. There were closer Olive Gardens but after two straight days of highways, we wanted to talk. If we stayed close to the hotel, conversation would soon develop into a soft evening, we all knew.

  “They’re all going to be talking about the blindings,” Gary said. “That’s all they’re going to talk about.”

  “Sensationalism.”

  “No, It’s true. I was in Evanston. The lunatic fringe, but it’s there. Soft evenings, then silences, releases, the wastes, the burnings, the self-etchings. You can see. They call it eye-popping. The same with the fetuses in Atlanta.”

  “Why don’t you mention it to the others?” I asked after a moment.

  Gary shrugged.

  The Olive Garden was harder to find than we expected. I needed to stop at a liquor outlet for a few bottles of peach schnapps just in case a soft evening broke out, and the slight change in plans had thrown us off course. We turned from a freeway onto a jammed three-lane highway. It took us half an hour to find a turn off the highway, and we took it. The sun by this time had nearly set. It took us another half hour to find a highway going the right way, and then Gary accidentally drifted into the exit lane. We found ourselves in a dead-end back alley at the rear of what looked like a refinery. A youth standing out of the shadows on a loading dock cocked himself out the darkness with pure menace, slackening the leash of a furious pit bull.

  Gary swiftly executed a three-point turn and accelerated us back the way we came. “That guy would make a good highway,” he said, smiling.

  YANN MARTEL

  WE ATE THE CHILDREN LAST

  THE FIRST HUMAN trial was on Patient D, a fifty-six-year-old male, single and childless, who was suffering from colon cancer. He was a skeletal man with white, bloodless skin. He was aware that his case was terminal and he waived all rights to legal redress should the procedure go wrong.

  His recovery was astounding. Two days after the operation, he ate six lunch meals in one sitting. He gained eighteen kilos in two weeks. His liver, pancreas, and gall bladder, the sources of greatest worry, evidently adapted very well to the transplant. The only side effect noted at the time concerned his diet. Patient D began to eat bananas and oranges without peeling them. A nurse reported that she had come upon him eating the flowers in his room.

  The French medical team felt vindicated. Until that time, the success rate of full-organ xenografts was zero; all animal transplants to humans—the hearts, livers and bone marrow of baboons, the kidneys of chimpanzees—had failed. The only achievements in the field were the grafting of porcine heart valves to repair human hearts and, to a lesser extent, of porcine skin onto burn victims. The team decided to examine the pig more closely. But the process of rendering a pig’s organ immunologically inert proved difficult, and few organs were compatible. The potential of the pig’s digestive system, despite its biological flexibility, stirred little interest in the scientific community. It was assumed that the organ would be too voluminous and that its high caloric output would induce obesity in a human. The French were certain that their simple solution to the double problem—using the digestive system of a smaller, pot-bellied species of pig—would become the stuff of scientific legend, like Newton’s apple. “We have put into this man a source of energy both compact and powerful—a Ferrari engine!” boasted the leader of the medical team.

  A visit to Patient D’s apartment three months after his release from hospital revealed that his kitchen was empty. He had sold everything in it, including fridge and stove, and his cupboards were bare. When asked what he ate, he confessed that he went out at night and picked at garbage. Nothing pleased him more, he said, than to gorge himself on putrid sausages, rotten fruit, mouldy brie, baguettes gone green, puffy skins and carcasses, and other soured leftovers and kitchen waste. He spent a good part of the night doing this, he admitted, since he no longer felt the need for much sleep and was embarrassed about his diet. The medical team would have been concerned but for the fact that all tests revealed what was plain to the eye: the man was bursting with good health. He was stronger and fitter than he had been in his entire life.

  Regulatory approval came swiftly. The procedure replaced chemotherapy as the standard treatment for all cancers of the digestive tract that did not respond to radiotherapy.

  Les Bons Samaritains, a lobby group for the poor, thought to apply this wondrous medical solution to a social problem. They suggested the operation be made available to those receiving social assistance. The poor often have unwholesome diets, at a cost both to their health and to the state, which has to spend on their medical care when they become ill. What better, more visionary remedy, they argued, than a procedure that in reducing food budgets to nothing would create paragons of fitness? A cleverly orchestrated campaign of petitions and protests—“Malnutrition: zéro! Déficit: zéro!” read the banners— easily overcame the hesitations of the government.

  The procedure caught on among the young and the bohemian, the chic and the radical, among all those who wanted a change in their lives. The opprobrium attached to eating garbage vanished completely. In short order the restaurant became a retrograde institution, and the eating of prepared food a sign of attachment to deplorable bourgeois values. A revolution of the gut swept through society. “Liberté! Liberté!” was the cry of the operated. The meaning of wealth changed. It was all so heady. The telltale mark of the procedure was a vertical scar along the belly and a slighter one at the base of the throat. It was a badge we wore with honour.

  Garbage became a sought-after commodity. Unscrupulous racketeers began selling it. Dumps became dangerous places. Garbage collectors were assaulted. The less fortunate had to resort to eating grass. Little was made at the time of a report by the Société Protectrice des Animaux on the surprising drop in the number of stray cats and dogs.

  Then old people began vanishing without a trace. Mothers who had turned away momentarily were finding their baby carriages empty. The government reacted swiftly. The army descended upon every one of the operated, without discriminating between the law-abiding and the criminal. The newspaper Le Cochon Libre tried to put out a protest issue, but the police raided their offices and only a handful of copies escaped destruction. There were terrible scenes during the roundup: neighbours denouncing neighbours, children being separated from their families, men, women and children being stripped in public in humiliating searches for scars, summary executions of people trying to escape. Internment camps were set up, always in remote parts of the country.

  No provisions were made for food in any of the camps. The story was the same in all of them: first the detainees ate their clothes. Then the weaker men and women disappeared. Then the rest of the women. Then more of the men. Then we ate those we loved most. The last known prisoner was an exceptional brute by the name of Jean Proti. After forty-one days without a morsel of food excep
t his own toes and ears, he died.

  I escaped. I still have a good appetite, but there is a moral rot in this country that even I can’t digest. Everyone knew what happened, and how and where. To this day everyone knows. But no one talks about it and no one is guilty. I must live with that.

  TIMOTHY TAYLOR

  SUNSHINE CITY

  INFINITY. THE NUMBER beyond the numbers. That one really messed people up. When they found out what I used to do for a living they’d question me. I remember a man asking once if there wasn’t a single pattern behind it all. Like a master key.

  I had no answer to that. There either was no pattern, or there was but it had no meaning. Or possibly, there was a pattern but it was coded-up inside everyone. Infinity in our bones and minds. Infinity in the fragmentary moment, the glance, the blink of first love or terror. At the doorstep of sleep, in the pixelation of the day, the greying out of senses. At the moment of death, the dawn of the underworld. Perhaps there, infinity spread. Completion and understanding, the torn veil, revelation and apocalypse.

  But I couldn’t speak it into existence, even if I knew we all longed for it, ached for it, wept for infinity in our private places.

  Frick called from Sunshine City. He said: “Happy fortieth. My God Hoss you really are forty years old. Where the hell are you living?”

  I’d been sleeping. Once work was gone, life was an avenue of non-events to which I could not bother assigning probabilities. I doubted probabilities. I let the numbers go and slept a great deal. On waking, I smoked weed, which was free by the forest-load in the hills a few hours’ drive from my camp, and so was a vice only as much as it was also a virtue.

  I told Frick where I was. In the Mojave fringe. And heard him punch up the lat/long on his computer. He liked this kind of thing, Frick did. Sharp coordinates. “Thirty five point two three two,” he said. “One seventeen point eight and a smidge. Hot as hell I bet.”