The Humanity Project

by Jean Thompson

  The boy with the guns walked through the hallway, turned a corner, and entered a classroom where a sophomore civics class was in session. He knew no one there. He had never met or spoken to any of his victims. Now everything was real, he was the star of his own movie, which he watched from a little distance inside himself. He shot the teacher first, three times in the back with the handgun. He aimed haphazardly into the rows of students, who were all still in their assigned seats, because no one had yet fathomed any of it. The boy with the gun did not speak. Later it was estimated he was only in the classroom for fifteen to twenty seconds. For most of the students, it was the sight of blood, not even their own but someone else’s, that set them to moving and screaming.

  Those who had been shot did not realize it right away, or at all. The teacher, who had been bent over his desk, died without awareness or comprehension. Four students were wounded, one grievously. The boy returned to the hallways, where, unwisely, a couple of doors had been opened and people were looking out. The boy fired shots in their direction without hitting anyone.

  And here was where the sequence of events became less certain, because the boy with the guns—only the handgun now, since for some reason he’d dropped the rifle in the main hallway—appeared to hide or evade for a time, and no one reported seeing him for a space of at least twenty minutes. By now police were assembling outside the school, and a team of officers was sent inside, wearing protective vests and helmets. They cornered the shooter in the cafeteria kitchen, surrounded him and wrestled him down in the middle of the stainless steel worktables and clanging pans, and only later were the two dead girls discovered in the upstairs restroom. One of them was Linnea’s stepsister. Linnea had been there and watched the boy kill them. She herself had escaped only because his gun had misfired.

  Art stopped talking. Christie said, “Go on, what happened?”

  “That’s what happened. She watched him shoot the others. He held a gun to her head. He couldn’t get it to work right. Jammed or something. He kept trying for a while. Then he gave up and left.”

  “That’s horrible, Art.”

  “I guess she’s been having some behavior issues.”

  “I’d say whatever issues she’s having, she’s entitled to them.”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with her, Chris.”

  “No school, I guess. Unless she needs to take summer classes. What’s she going to do all day?”

  “Shoplift. Sniff glue. I’m terrified.”

  “Well, try to imagine how she feels.”

  That was his problem, or part of it. He could not begin to imagine her. There was a thread of his own DNA in her, but that was braided into whatever she inherited from Louise, plus there was the confounding fact of her femaleness. What did he know about teenagers anyway? They were impossible, he’d been impossible himself, moody, hormonal, sullen. And that without anybody trying to shoot him.

  He didn’t guess it would have made any difference if he’d been a real father to her. The girls who had died presumably had real fathers.

  Vietnamese was a tonal language, so the same words had different meanings, depending on inflections. That was alarming. What if you tried asking directions to the post office but you were really saying, “Do you know where I can find unusually large eels?” He could count with confidence only to six: What if one were to say to a daughter, “Good morning,” but what she heard was, “I never meant to have children.”

  The airport’s public service announcements about unattended luggage and smoking not permitted chimed overhead. Through the glass expanses of the corridor, planes trundled back and forth. Seven, eight, nine, ten, m something . . .

  A beat too late he heard his name spoken, then had to scramble because she was already walking away. “Hey, Linnea?”

  She looked back at him. “I thought that was you.”

  “Sorry.” In spite of all his apprehension, Art was grinning. He bent down and put both hands on her shoulders. “Wow. Let me look at you.”

  She muttered, embarrassed, but stood and allowed herself to be inspected.

  She didn’t look like Louise. She didn’t look much like anybody except herself.

  Small, with limp hair that had been dyed black, with purple fringes. There was more black involved in her wardrobe, which Art recognized as a kind of uniform: scuffed engineer boots, jeans, a leather jacket encrusted with zippers and other hardware. Earbud wires wreathed her neck. It was difficult to locate and focus on the face, which was probably her intention. The face was arranged into an expression of stony nothingness, which was another sort of uniform. Here, maybe, was a little of himself. Curve of eyebrow, eye color, pointed chin. He thought the hair was a mistake, and the clothes also were a little cartoonish—at least, they weren’t quite what the hipster kids out here wore. She looked like a parody of a perfume ad, the kind where the models struck menacing, vapid poses. But he knew better than to say any of this.

  “Welcome,” he said, releasing her. “Welcome to California. So, you ever been here before?”

  “No.”

  Her tone was heavily patient, but Art understood that he was meant to ask the kind of questions which allowed her to exhibit boredom. “How was your flight?”

  “I threw up, but just the once.”

  “Oh. Are you all right? Do you need anything? 7Up? Crackers?”

  “It was hours ago. It was from the plane. It’s not like I’m pregnant or anything.”

  Art chose to pretend this was humorous. “Oh ha-ha. Come on, let’s go get your luggage.” He considered putting his hand on her shoulder again but decided against it.

  They took the escalator down to the baggage claim. Linnea stood on the step below him, and he had a view of the top of her scalp, where an inch or so of normal brown hair had grown out around her part, bordered by the fried black color. There was something absurd and touching about her efforts to look hard and cool. It made him feel tender toward her, as if she were still two years old, and playing dress-up. He thought he should say something about the shooting at the school, how horrible, how glad he was that she was unhurt, but that moment had either already passed or had not yet arrived.

  They stood together at the baggage carousel. Art hoped that her luggage, its amount and kind, might give him some clue as to how long she expected to stay. “There,” she said, as the bags began to tumble out and circulate. “That one’s mine.” Art lifted it off the conveyor. It was large, plaid, and elderly, the kind of suitcase that gets hauled down from an attic or up from a basement, an extraneous, white elephant kind of suitcase, the kind used for the storage of old magazines. It was as if she was not expected back.

  It weighed a ton, and Art kept shifting it from one hand to the other as they waited for the shuttle bus to take them out to the remote parking lot. It was late afternoon, and just about the best kind of summer day you could have in these parts: bright, warm, the cloud banks rolled up tight and staying put offshore. Art thought of the many useful and interesting features he could point out about the weather, climate, geography, and so on, and knew enough not to start in with the Clueless Dad narrative. And he should stop asking questions, those hopeful interrogatories designed to force the reluctant child to vocalize.

  Welcome to parenthood, he guessed.

  He’d cleaned his car too, but in such a way as to leave ghosts of the recently removed clutter and grime. The dashboard showed the tracks of the rag he’d dragged across it, and the zone of undisturbed dust he hadn’t reached, a dividing line that reminded him of Linnea’s dyed hair. The trunk, when Art opened it to heave Linnea’s suitcase inside, still looked like a place you might stash a body. A Starbucks cup rolled around on the backseat floor. Linnea settled herself in the passenger seat. Music leaked out from her earbuds, a tiny, hectic noise. Art said, “It’ll take most of an hour to get up to Marin. Did you want to stop for anything on the way? Food
, drink, bathroom?”

  She had extracted a pair of enormous white sunglasses from her whatever-it-was, purse, he supposed, a large satchel made of something meant to resemble suede, dangling with fringe and stray cords. “I’ll probably just sleep,” she said. “If that’s OK.”

  “Sure.” It was mostly a relief. “You had a really long flight.”

  “Thanks for letting me come out here.”

  “Sure,” he said again. “Glad to have you.”

  “Because you could have said no. You could have just blown me off.”

  Art was trying to find the parking lot’s exit. “Oh, well . . .” He wondered if that was how she thought of his absence during most of her life. Blown off.

  “And don’t get upset, because I assume it was at least partly your idea, or at least you went along with it, but I’m thinking about changing my name.”

  He glanced over at her. The sunglasses were disturbing. They made her look blind. “Yeah?”

  “From Linnea.”

  “Oh.” He wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d wanted to ditch Kooperman. “To what?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’m trying out some ideas.”

  They’d reached the booth at the exit, and Art fumbled for his wallet and the parking stub. “What brought this on?”

  “It just seems like a good time to be somebody different.”

  The clerk counted out Art’s change, the gate lifted, and he merged into the highway entrance. “Well, sure. People do that. Decide to make a new start. Clean break, that sort of thing.” Although he was agreeing, he wasn’t really sure this was a healthy notion. It was either a harmless teenage thing, or else an announcement of mental illness. The highway signs loomed importantly overhead. He didn’t come to the airport that often, and he always had to think through the different options: 101, no, 380 to 280. Traffic hurtled past him. You could never drive fast enough for some people. He took the 380 exit, then positioned himself in the right lane. “So, who do you think you might want to be? Penelope? Margarita? Claudette?” He was getting a kick out of this. “Prudence? Sharona?”

  He glanced over at her. She was asleep.

  She slept all the way through the freeway, and the stop-and-go traffic of the city, and didn’t wake up until the Golden Gate Bridge. She swallowed and straightened and peered out from behind the ridiculous sunglasses. “That’s the ocean out thataway,” Art said, waving a hand at the open water, the sunset just beginning to color the waves. “And the other side’s the bay. Over there is Alcatraz. I probably have a map at home you could use, get yourself oriented.” He waited. “So what do you think?”

  “It’s different.”

  “From what?”

  “Ohio.”

  Served him right for trying to elicit some admiring response from her. But he persisted. Below them, sailboats dotted the blue water. Above them, the huge, impossible ironwork. Everywhere around them, the storybook view of coastline, peninsula, headlands, rolling ocean. He said, “The bridge is more than a mile long. It took four years to build. It can withstand winds of more than a hundred miles an hour.”

  “Uh-huh. Don’t people jump off it all the time?”

  “Not exactly, I mean, not all the time. They usually stop them nowadays.” Crap.

  “Up thataway,” he indicated the headlands on their left, “there are some, uh, nature things. Places they keep injured seals. Hawks. Are you interested in wildlife? They have some youth programs you could enroll in.”

  Honestly, it was the best idea he’d been able to come up with, and it was met with incredulous silence. “Hey, you know what we forgot, you should call your mom, let her know you got here all right.”

  “If she’s worried, she’ll call.”

  “How about I phone her from the house when we get there.”

  At this mild assertion of adult authority, the sunglasses turned to regard him, then once more away.

  She said, “What’s the name of this place? This place you live in?”

  “Mill Valley.” He was encouraged that she was asking an actual question.

  “Because I bet it’s a valley, and they have a mill, huh?”

  “Bingo.” Art decided not to tell her one of its nicknames: Ten Mil Valium. “We’re almost there,” he said, taking the East Blithedale exit. His apartment building was on one of the frontage roads just off the freeway, though there were trees planted in between to screen the view, if not the noise. It had always seemed to Art to be a reasonable place to live, though now, trying to view it as his daughter might, he saw how it might look as haphazard and accidental as a bird’s nest built inside a shopping mall. By way of compensation, he said, “It’s a great place, Mill Valley. You can hop on over to the beach, or to Muir Woods, or climb Mount Tam, right from here.” He couldn’t remember the last time he had done any of those things.

  He pulled into his parking space. “Home sweet home,” he said breezily. He was reasonably confident that Linnea would not offer any commentary, pro or con, no matter what she thought. And he was right. He lugged her giant suitcase up the stairs, ushered her inside, and stood back to let her take it in. “I’ve got you set up out here.” Art pushed the suitcase across the tile floor, onto the sunporch.

  Christie had picked out the sky blue bedspread and the bamboo shades. He thought it looked nice. “Why don’t you get squared away, and I’ll give your mom a jingle. Then I thought we could go out for dinner.”

  Linnea nodded. “Cool.”

  He guessed he was lucky that so far she was going along with things. He went into his own bedroom and dialed Louise. He didn’t suppose his luck would hold to the point of getting her voice mail, and it did not.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, I just wanted to tell you, her plane got in just fine, and we’re at my place.”

  “You need to keep an eye on her,” Louise said.

  “That was kind of my intention.” Art heard her crossing the hall and going into the bathroom.

  “The term used in the legal system is ‘person in need of supervision.’”

  “Would you like to talk to her?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll tell her you said hi.”

  Art hung up and waited in the living room for Linnea to finish up in the bathroom. He wasn’t used to having anyone else in the apartment besides his now-and-again girlfriends, and even these were infrequent lately. Certain realities about sharing his space were presenting themselves. And what did that mean, “supervision”? He couldn’t spend his every moment with her.

  Louise had probably made everything sound worse than it was. If she stole money, he didn’t have anything much to steal. If she smoked pot, he hoped she’d do it somewhere he didn’t have to know about it, and he’d try to do the same. Or maybe quit; it wouldn’t be a tragedy if he cleaned up his act a little. He guessed he could look forward to a few tricky conversations.

  There were the sounds of water flushing and running. When Linnea came out, Art was relieved to see that she’d gotten rid of the sunglasses. “So, you hungry? Anything you have a taste for?”

  “Food.”

  “I mean, anything in particular? Thai? Seafood? Mexican? Burgers? Sushi? Ethiopian?” He thought he saw one corner of her mouth lift, a half-smile. It was like trying to win over a bored class. Clowning often worked. “Italian? Indian? Nicaraguan? Greek? Pizza?”

  “Honestly, just grub.”

  “We’ll head down to the café, then.” He’d save any fancy waterfront dining or expeditions into the city for later.

  They were back in the car when she said, “So, what am I supposed to call you?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, I don’t think I can manage ‘Dad.’”

  “Well . . . Art, then. And when you figure out what name you want to go by, let me know.”

  He’d meant that to be
a joke, sort of, but she wasn’t going for it. He was beginning to see how having a teenager might be the equivalent of having a bad class in permanent session. There was much that seemed typically kidlike about her, the studied boredom and remoteness. Then there was the odd flash of wised-up humor, and the suggestion of something else unknown, down there deep in the water.

  It was only a five-minute drive to the downtown district and the café, but he felt the need to break the silence. “It’s kind of a neat little town. We have a big film festival. Art festival.” That didn’t sound nearly as interesting as he’d wanted it to. “This place, the café, sometimes they have live music.” He was pretty sure it would be the wrong kind of music. “There’s a bookstore too,” he added. Bookstores, the last desperate throw of the dice.

  The sun had gone down, the soft coastal fog was blurring the twilight, and lights were bright in the plaza and the shops surrounding it. The tops of the mountains overhead were black and mysterious. All in all it was just about the prettiest place he’d ever lived, and he hoped his daughter would see it with friendly eyes. She took in downtown’s lineup of superheated boutiques—apparel, jewelry, antiques, gourmet pet food—without comment. Art said, “We have real stores too. Like, Safeway.”

  “Ha-ha,” Linnea said politely.

  In fact Mill Valley was one of those odd mixes of wealth and distress. The truly rich had houses up in the hills, while those like himself got by in their odd corners. People in tennis clothes drank white wine in the restaurants at one o’clock in the afternoon. But in the parking lot adjacent to Art’s apartment building, a man had lived for some months in a huge stationary white Lincoln, attending to his private business in the line of bushes between the parking lot and the busy street. The scruffy man seated at the café’s entrance, slurping coffee, might have been down on his luck, or just as easily a famous inventor of computer software.