Strange Animals

by Chad Kultgen

  Pastor Preston said, “That’s a good question, James. I’m a pastor. That means I’ve been called on by Almighty God to spread his word, to gather those who follow in the teachings of his son, Jesus Christ, and to be used as he sees fit. I talk with God every day, James, and I know how he works, and I don’t mean to take anything away from the experience you had. But take it from me, as someone who has had much more spiritual experience than you, if he wanted me to help you go to California, then why would he have told you nothing else about the trip? That just doesn’t make sense. And besides that, why would he have had a whole conversation with you, knowing that you’d come to me to ask for help, but then not tell me you’d be coming? Wouldn’t he have spoken to me, as the minister of his word?”

  James reminded Pastor Preston that God works in mysterious ways, and that no one should question his motives or his actions or presume to know his plans.

  Pastor Preston paused for a moment. The logic of James’s argument was difficult to deny. He was aware that he himself had delivered several sermons making that very point. He eventually said, “You’re right about that, James. I certainly don’t know everything God knows about his plans. but I can tell you that in all my years as pastor of Woodstone, I’ve never sat in this seat and had a member of my congregation ask me directly for money to take a trip, and just as you believe that you heard God telling you to go to California, I can hear him right now telling me that I just can’t help you get there. So, while it’s obviously impossible for me to know everything about your relationship with God, I can tell you that I know mine better than anyone, and right now I have to obey his command. If God does intend for you to take this journey, it seems like he might have some lessons to teach you along the way that he knows you can only learn by doing it yourself, without help from anyone but him.”

  James took what Pastor Preston said at face value. Then James asked Pastor Preston, since he was in direct contact with God at that moment, if he could ask God how James was supposed to get to California.

  Pastor Preston said, “Okay, I suppose I can do that. Almighty Father, can you please help this young man on his way and deliver to him the knowledge and resources that he needs to carry out your heavenly plan?”

  The two men waited in silence for a few seconds before Pastor Preston said, “I’m sorry son. He’s silent.”

  James lowered his head. Pastor Preston could tell he was disappointed, and said, “Listen, James, don’t let this get to you. Sometimes God makes our journey more difficult to teach us a lesson. And even if you don’t end up getting to California, God will still favor you, and he will still love you, because you’re one of his children.”

  James reminded Pastor Preston that he had no choice in the matter. He had to get to California. He had to carry out God’s plan. There was no alternative. He told Pastor Preston that he would do whatever it took to get there.

  As James stood and walked out of Pastor Preston’s office he turned back and he told the Pastor that no matter what would come to pass, he would forgive him for turning him away when he needed help the most, just as Jesus did with Peter.

  chapter

  nineteen

  Karen woke up, and before she brushed her teeth or showered, she rolled over and checked her laptop, which was sitting on her nightstand. The donations were up to a little more than nine and a half million dollars. After spiking during the interview, in the past week the money had been slowing down. She caught herself thinking about the very real possibility that she might have to get an abortion. Although that was the outcome she wanted, the outcome that would prove her point, she couldn’t help thinking that all this work would seem like a waste if the pregnancy was terminated. As soon as the thought crossed her mind, however, she rejected it as the work of her hormones.

  She sat up and scratched her breasts. They had become itchy with regularity as they grew in size. As she reached down to scratch her stomach, which was also increasing in size, creating visible stretch marks near her belly button, she felt something jarring inside. It was unmistakably a kick. She quickly put her hand over the spot where she felt the movement and waited for several seconds, but it did not repeat. She gently rubbed her stomach and hoped she wouldn’t have to endure many more experiences like that. She could sense her resolve weakening in the face of some innate maternal instinct. Despite her rational understanding that she didn’t want this child, didn’t want to be a mother, Karen’s ability to view the child as merely a tool in her experiment was getting strained. She knew that things would become far more complicated than they already were, but there was nothing to be done about that.

  Her first step out of bed was difficult. Her back hurt, her feet and hands were slightly swollen, and one of her legs was numb. Karen had taken to sleeping on her side in order to mitigate some of these symptoms of the pregnancy, but now it seemed that even this strategy was yielding her no viable results. She reminded herself to ask her doctor on the next visit about sleeping techniques that might help her through these advancing stages of the pregnancy.

  She showered, brushed her teeth and her hair, and urinated for the second time since she woke up. Then she put on her most flattering maternity dress. She hated the maternity clothes she’d had to start wearing due to her increased size. They were just another symbol to Karen of the ills of pregnancy, another identifier of her inability to be normal because she was a woman carrying a fetus.

  She got in her car and drove to UCLA, where she had been summoned to meet with a board of advisors, including Professor Noone. On the way there she listened to NPR, which was running a story about her. As Karen listened, a woman who ran a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas explained that while she supported Karen’s right to launch her project, and applauded her for standing up to the right-wing extremists who wanted to control women, she felt that Karen’s website challenge would ultimately make getting an abortion in her home state even harder than it already was. She explained that laws had already been passed, largely by the white Christian men who dominated the Texas state legislature, that were designed to make it virtually impossible for most Planned Parenthood locations and other medical abortion providers to stay open. She claimed that Karen’s website had prompted a discussion in the legislature that could potentially spur the state government to redefine personhood as beginning at conception, which would render even the morning-after pill illegal.

  This argument had become more prominent in recent weeks. People who claimed to be on her side, who claimed to understand and support her efforts, were becoming more vocal about the website’s potential detrimental effects on the availability of legal abortions in states with conservative governments. Karen had no sympathy for their complaints, though. She felt that people who had a problem with the way things were being run should take a stand of their own. She knew that committing herself to this cause would fuel a new debate about abortion, to a level that it hadn’t seen since Roe v. Wade, and that’s what she wanted. She was tired of conservative, religiously motivated legislators chipping away at women’s rights in America while rational citizens and politicians, who were in the clear majority, did nothing. She had come to despise liberal supporters of abortion rights as they accepted the implementation of endless new hoops and burdens when it came to securing legal and safe abortions. She knew the people she would anger by doing this would use it as leverage to push their agenda, and she wanted that. Karen thought that if pro-life activists pushed it far enough, rational Americans would finally push back, and with luck they would push hard enough that the argument would be resolved for good. But the NPR story, and other recent stories she’d heard, suggested that this might not be the case.

  As she parked her car at UCLA, she noticed that she had been followed into the garage by campus security. She got out of her car and asked, “Do you need something?”

  The security officers explained that they didn’t need anything, but they’d been alerted to her arrival and wanted to make sure she got to her advis
ory meeting safely. Karen hadn’t thought she’d need an escort, but when she came out of the garage, she was glad she had one. Students were lined up and down the walkways and streets that ran through the campus. Some were supportive of her, holding signs and wearing T-shirts with slogans like “Karen for President” and “Girl Power,” along with pictures of Karen’s face. Others, though, held signs reading, “You and Your Baby Will Burn in Hell,” and “Your Mother Should Have Aborted You.” This group screamed at Karen as she walked through campus, and their screams set off responses from her supporters. She hoped her presence on campus wouldn’t cause a riot, but that seemed possible. As she made her way to her meeting, she became aware for the first time that she had become a celebrity, which was the last thing she wanted.

  Security escorted her through the crowds and into Dodd Hall, where she was asked to wait outside a conference room. She knew what the meeting was about. The discovery of her identity and her CNN appearance must have attracted the attention of people at UCLA higher up than Professor Noone. She guessed that the meeting was to determine whether she’d be allowed to stay in the PhD program. She had seen other students get kicked out of the program, but usually for lack of attendance or failure to meet deadlines. On rare occasions, a student might be asked to leave based on some extracurricular behavior that was a breach of the school’s code of conduct. But she had done none of these things. To her knowledge, she had given the university no legitimate grounds to dismiss her.

  A few minutes later, an assistant showed her into the conference room where Professor Noone was waiting with the dean of the philosophy school and two other professors whose classes she’d taken. She sat down across the table from them, and Professor Noone said, “Thanks for coming in, Karen.”

  Karen said, “I didn’t think I had a choice.”

  The dean, whom Karen had met several times at various philosophy school functions over the past few years, said, “I don’t know if that was meant to be a joke, but this is no laughing matter, Ms. Holloway.”

  Whether a God did or did not exist was irrelevant to humanity. The only relevant thing where God was concerned was the debate over its existence, and the continued intellectual pursuit of the idea of God. The universe was vast, but it was unlikely that we would ever get to see much of it, or truly interact with any of it, beyond the small speck of dust we called Earth. So while every intellectual pursuit obviously had some inherent value, the sciences of space were not as important to the human race as those of Earth, which included biology, geology, chemistry, and mathematics, but also philosophy. Philosophy was the most valuable of all sciences. It was what gave us guidelines by which we could exist and think. It was what ordered our thoughts, from the first terrified instincts that enabled us to survive as we crawled out of the primordial ooze, into great volumes of knowledge and understanding of the world around us. Any other pursuit, although potentially worthwhile in its own right, simply wasn’t as important or meaningful. These were things that the dean of the philosophy school understood to be true.

  The dean continued, “We obviously called you here today because of recent events that have come to our attention concerning your—how should we call it—experiment?”

  Karen said, “Okay.”

  The dean said, “While we applaud the idea, we have some misgivings regarding your application of the idea. Our Department of Philosophy isn’t merely a place at which students can achieve their PhD status. It’s a family, and we must decide at all times whether the people in that family are upholding the same principles that we are, and that this school has for so many years. I can tell you that some of us here on the advisory board felt you should be dismissed from the program without a second thought. They felt that what you’ve done is immoral, beyond justification. I can also tell you that some of us did not feel that way. Some of us chose to insist that this is a school of philosophy, and that if we didn’t at least give you an opportunity to argue your own position, we’d be acting against one of the most fundamental aspects of the science we’ve all chosen as a profession. So, Ms. Holloway, you are here today to make us understand why you are doing what you are doing. And I sincerely hope this is something you can do.”

  Karen knew in that moment there was almost nothing she could say to save herself. She knew the dean was very likely among those on the board who wanted her dismissed without an argument, and that ultimately his vote, if they even put it to a vote, would carry the most weight. The dean was old, and he was traditional, and in some ways she thought he was just as bad as the close-minded conservatives she was fighting against. She thought about walking out without saying another word. But this was her only chance to explain herself to Professor Noone, and he was a good advisor and the person who was responsible, at least in part, for her decision to come to UCLA in the first place. Some part of her was sorry for doing this against his advice, and she wanted him to know that. And if there was any slight chance that she could remain in the program, she thought it might be by appealing to the board members’ sense of academic curiosity. Perhaps there was a chance, however small, that she could remind them of how they felt when they were young philosophy students trying to do something that mattered.

  She said, “First of all, I just want it on the record that Professor Noone warned me not to do this. I acted against his advice, and he shouldn’t be held responsible in any way.”

  The dean said, “Understood.”

  She said, “Okay. Well, let me explain how I came to the decision to do this. I’ve had a tough time figuring out what my dissertation would be. I’ve had a few extensions, but not because I was being lazy or because I didn’t know enough to grind out a standard dissertation, the kind of thing you’ve all read a hundred times before. I was hesitating because I wanted to do something that would matter—not just here at UCLA or even in the broader world of academic philosophy, but in the real world.”

  The dean said, “Well, you’ve certainly got the world’s attention with this stunt. Whether or not it will matter remains to be seen.”

  She said, “I understand that. When I was applying to PhD programs, I came to UCLA because of the work of some of the faculty here, Professor Noone included. It was work that was important, that wouldn’t just sit in a library somewhere, but that might actually change the way people think and experience the world. To me, that’s what philosophy really is. It’s presenting ideas to the world that they’ve never seen or thought about before—ideas that force people to think differently. And when you do that, you change the world.”

  The dean said, “We understand that, obviously. But you could have just as easily presented this idea or this scenario theoretically, in a paper, and there would have been no problem. Instead, you insisted on putting this idea into action. You’ve taken it far out of the realm of academia, out of the realm of thought. You’ve crossed the line from intellectual discourse into conduct, and it’s your conduct that has given us cause for alarm—and quite possibly put yourself at personal risk. If your advisor warned you against pursuing this idea, why did you feel you had to carry it out?”

  Karen said, “Well, the idea originally came to me when I found out I was pregnant. I honestly don’t think I would have arrived at it otherwise. And the first time the idea popped in my head—and I’m sure you’ve all had this experience—I immediately felt like it was important, it was good, it was possibly the best thing I would do in my life. I knew that without action, without making it real, it would be lost in the shuffle of academic papers and journals. I just didn’t feel like I could let that happen. I knew that the idea by itself wasn’t enough.”

  The dean said, “But I assure you, it was enough. I agree with you—we all do, in fact—that this idea is significant. It demands discussion. But making it real almost perverts the purity of the idea. The debate has become about you now, Ms. Holloway, not about your ideas.”

  Karen said, “I know, and I’m sorry for that. My plan was to remain anonymous, specifically to preserv
e the purity of the idea. But the idea was so big that I got sucked into it. Once it became national news, it was really only a matter of time before someone figured out who I was. Would it have made any difference to you if I would have remained anonymous? I mean, if you had known and the rest of the advisory board had known, but not the world?”

  The question seemed to surprise the dean. He said, “I’m not sure, to be honest. I would never have approved this, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Karen said, “It’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking something different: If I had done this, if the site was live and people were donating millions of dollars and the public debate was happening just as it is now, but my identity was still unknown—and then I revealed myself to you and the board—would that make this any different?”

  The dean said, “I suppose it would.”

  Karen was infuriated by the dean’s response, which she had foreseen. She said, “So then this is all just about public perception of the school. It has nothing to do with my work at all.”

  The dean said, “That’s not true.”

  Karen said, “Of course it is. If you would have been all right with me doing this in secret, what else could this meeting be about? It’s because you can’t have the UCLA Department of Philosophy associated with what might be considered a controversial idea. This, by the way, is exactly why I didn’t just write a paper. People out there in the world would never even have known about this. The debate that’s now going on across the country would never have happened. I would have written a paper, some of you would have read it, I would have gotten my PhD, and that would have been it. But now it’s out there. It’s in the world. And I think there’s some part of you that hates not having control over it. Maybe that’s really what this is about. I don’t know, but I do know this: I didn’t get into philosophy so that I could become one of you, sitting across this table, telling students that philosophy should be explored safely within the confines of academia. I got into it to make people think differently. And that’s what I’m doing right now. Are any of you?”