The Humanity Project

by Jean Thompson

  “And when I think about the money some people spend on, you name it. Tennis shoes. Cell phones,” Scottie began, but Leslie Hart cut him off.

  “Funny how tennis shoes and cell phones are exactly what you see so-called poor people spending money for.”

  “So-called poor? How about if I said, sports cars and private schools?”

  “How about, tattoos and crack cocaine?”

  “You seem to be equating poverty and crime.”

  “I didn’t say that, but draw your own conclusions.”

  The two of them were egging each other on into an entirely pointless fight. Christie tried to reach the calming center of herself and failed. They were both being jerks and you’d have to be the Dalai Lama himself to deal with them. She said, “I don’t think there’s any point in perpetuating stereotypes. I’d like to think that ‘humanity’ is the thing we all have in common. I’m sure that’s why Mrs. Foster chose the word.”

  Leslie looked unhappy, in a complicated way, at the mention of her mother. Scottie said, “Sorry. Nothing personal.” He subsided, but with an air of poorer-than-thou piety. Christie had a sudden intuition that he had been raised in a wealthy home, that he sat around his parents’ own prosperous dinner table, berating them. And Leslie Hart? She was probably old enough to be his exasperated parent.

  Moving on. “I’ve been doing some reading up on foundations.” And she had, she had. “There are a couple of ways to proceed. You can function as an umbrella organization, making grants available to projects other people propose. You can run your own initiatives. Or you could do a combination of both.”

  Mr. Kirn dipped his head, a discreet nod. Somehow, she had won him over. Was it possible that she was making sense? Heartened, she looked at her list again. “That is a structural question, and it can be addressed somewhere down the line by the eventual board of directors.”

  “And who will they be?” Leslie Hart asked. “I mean, you can talk all you want about humanity, or giving people money for new, improved smart phones”—she wasn’t one to let a good attack go to waste—“but it’s money my father worked hard for. I don’t want to see it handled carelessly.”

  Scottie asked, blandly, just how Mr. Foster had earned his millions, and Leslie Hart said that was none of his business. This time Mr. Kirn and Christie took care to avoid each other’s eyes. There had been some inherited family money, then Mr. Foster had added to it, made his own fortune as an executive in one of the giant pharmaceutical firms and a substantial holder of its stock. It was a firm whose name was often in the news for its aggressive promotion of medications that were later found to have distressing side effects, like the patient dropping dead.

  The meeting went on for almost another hour, and never got much better. Leslie, who was angry at her mother, had to settle for being angry at Scottie. Scottie kept on being smug. Mr. Alvarez slept. Christie asked herself what she’d expected. She knew well enough that nothing ever got decided by committee.

  Finally Mr. Kirn thanked everyone for coming. It was a suitably anticlimactic finish. Christie waited until the others had left the conference room. She was depressed, and her nerve endings felt shredded, and the last thing she wanted was to have a lot of intense follow-up conversations in the elevator or the parking lot or, God forbid, in the ladies’ room with Leslie Hart. But she hadn’t reckoned on Mr. Kirn, who had stationed himself in the hallway. “If you have a moment,” he said, holding open a door.

  “Of course,” Christie said, drooping but polite, and she followed him into what must have been Mr. Kirn’s private office. There was a lot of dazzling window glass here also, and some sleek, angular modern furniture that Scottie would have sized up and sold off to fund the county’s needy.

  “Please,” Mr. Kirn said, indicating a chair where she should sit. It was more comfortable than it looked. “That didn’t go too badly in there.”

  “Really?” She was too tired to keep up mannerly pretense. “I thought it was a street brawl.”

  “It could have been worse. And you kept everybody in line.”

  “Barely. Thanks.” She didn’t necessarily believe him, but she was grateful for even insincere compliments by now. “We didn’t really accomplish anything.” She wondered what he wanted. Surely it wasn’t worth any portion of his billable hours to give her a pep talk.

  “You accomplished an initial organizational meeting.” Mr. Kirn looked as fresh and pressed as he had an hour ago, and Christie had to remind herself that he was used to adversarial proceedings, probably even enjoyed them, the way some people enjoy boxing matches. He was younger than she’d first taken him for, certainly closer to her age than to Mr. Alvarez’s. All his prosperous trappings had misled her, even as they put him in a much different world than hers. It depressed her to realize that money was such a large part of how she regarded people. It depressed her to think how much she had disliked nearly everyone in the room.

  “Humanity,” Mr. Kirn said, in a musing tone. “We didn’t get around to a good working definition, did we?”

  “No. Well, mankind. Human-ness. People. I expect Mrs. Foster means it in the sense of what’s positive and aspirational about people. Altruistic.” She wished he’d get to his point. She wanted to go home and take a long, soaking bath. She was often too critical. She was often too trusting. How did you manage this human thing anyway?

  “Conscience-driven,” Mr. Kirn suggested. “We’re not supposed to act like animals, we know better.”

  There was some argument you might make to this, but Christie couldn’t sort it out. She said, “Maybe money doesn’t help anyone. Make any difference.”

  “Oh, I think you’ll find it’s going to make quite a lot of difference. To a lot of people.” Mr. Kirn seemed to meditate pleasantly on the prospect. “I think you’re going to have to put Leslie Hart on your board of directors,” Mr. Kirn said, switching back to all-business mode. “Otherwise she might be inclined to try some sort of legal maneuver to keep her mother from endowing the Foundation.”

  “She could do that?”

  “She could try. She could create enough obstacles to make sure the Foundation never gets off the ground. And I suppose she still might, no matter what you do. Is it true what she was saying, about the cats?”

  “There are several cats,” said Christie faintly, thinking of them.

  “She could raise questions about her mother’s mental fitness. She could argue that you’ve manipulated her so as to benefit yourself financially.”

  Christie gaped. “None of this was my idea. I’m a nurse.”

  “I understand.”

  What, exactly, did he think he understood? “The whole thing just sort of landed on me. She had to talk me into it, I thought I’d be doing her a favor. And so far it’s all been a real—”

  She stopped herself from saying “pain in the ass,” although that was what she meant, and shook her head.

  “I believe you,” Mr. Kirn told her, and she wanted to believe him, even though nothing that came out of his mouth seemed entirely believable, or at least entirely uncalculated. “But I really would advise you to try and head off trouble by giving Mrs. Hart some oversight.”

  Conquer the miser with generosity.

  “Won’t she just try to obstruct everything?”

  “She’d only be one voice. One vote. And if she agrees to be on the board, she can’t really object to the Foundation itself.”

  Christie was silent, thinking unhappy thoughts. It was true that the Foundation, and everything connected to it, had been nothing but a source of aggravation so far. But she had also tried on the idea of being a part of such an enterprise, which could, at least potentially, do good in the world. Fill in the hole of her own deficiencies when it came to the question of humanness. Put Mrs. Foster’s money where her own mouth was. There was something wearying about going over your own moral inventory again and again, somet
hing her energetic midwestern parents would have called “navel-gazing.” Didn’t she want to actually accomplish something? She did. And by now she didn’t quite want to give up on the prospect.

  She raised her head. “I wouldn’t have to have Scottie, would I?”

  “Oh no. You’ll want someone who’s used to evaluating grants and familiar with community programs, but we’ll find somebody with better table manners.” There was a joke in there and he relished it. “You’ll also want someone in charge of fund-raising, and a publicity director. An accountant with the kind of tax specialities a foundation requires. Depending on the size of your staff, maybe an office manager. Anyway, all those people would be paid employees. Not the board.”

  “So who else would be on the board?” She wasn’t even sure what a board did. She was that ignorant.

  “Anybody who’s prominent in business or philanthropy. Or just prominent. Anybody who could raise your profile and give you instant respectability.”

  “Like, Bono.”

  She meant it as a joke, but Mr. Kirn seemed to consider it. He said, “Matt Damon has a foundation dedicated to improving global water resources. Did you know that?”

  She didn’t. She assumed that Matt Damon wasn’t available any more than Bono was. She was really tired. She hoped that Mr. Kirn wouldn’t keep making jokes. And in fact, when she asked him who else he had in mind for the board, and he smiled and said, “Me,” at first she thought he was.

  NINE

  The dog wasn’t eating. He’d stand at his food bowl, sniff, and walk away, back to his spot in front of the fan. It had come on gradually and now there was no way not to notice. Sometimes Sean or Conner coaxed him with lunch meat or hot dogs, and then he might get through a few mouthfuls of his ration before he lost interest.

  His ribs were starting to show through his skin, moving up and down as he slept.

  “It’s the heat,” Sean said, though neither of them believed it. They didn’t want to think about what it was instead.

  “I should take him in to the vet,” Conner said. Both of them were watching the dog sleep, although there wasn’t anything to see.

  Sean said maybe they should wait a little, maybe he’d come around on his own. He was thinking that you never knew how much a thing like that was going to end up costing.

  “I should at least call.”

  “Go ahead, see what they tell you. Sure.”

  How could he say anything else? But the vet would tell them to bring the dog in, and he’d want to do blood tests, X-rays, everything in the world. They didn’t have that kind of money, and Conner knew they didn’t have it, and that was one more thing there was no point in saying.

  He’d always been Conner’s dog from the time he was a pup, a little black fur ball tripping over his own ears. Not the smartest dog in the world. Just your basic dumb, lovable model. It killed Sean to watch his son steeling himself against one more shitty event. “Hey,” Sean said to distract him. “Did you get me that stuff?”

  “Yeah, I did.” Conner got up and went into the kitchen, came back with a plastic bag. Sean opened it and fished out some bandage-shaped items in plastic wrappers.

  “What am I supposed to do, slap one of these things on my ass?”

  “If that’s where it hurts.”

  “Funny,” Sean said. He shifted positions on the couch, hauling himself up by the elbows so he could reach his hip and decorate it. “Like this?” It was just a square of sticky-sided gauze. “It smells like Vicks VapoRub.”

  “It’s got camphor and menthol and soothing stuff. Just try it, OK?”

  Sean let himself grumble a little more about it. Conner kept wanting him to use different kinds of herbal crap instead of his pills. Everybody thought the pills were a bad idea, but they didn’t have any better ones. What did they know? Most days, he felt like this old Mickey Mouse cartoon, where Mickey was playing music on a xylophone made of bones. They were over in cartoon Africa, trying not to get eaten by cartoon cannibals. Mickey used two other bones to play the xylophone, banging out a tuneful melody. That was him now. A symphony of bone music.

  The problem with pain was that nobody else could see it. Nobody had to believe you if you said it was bad, or worse, or enough to pop your eyeballs out of your skull.

  And everybody got tired of your pissing and moaning, most of all you. He guessed he’d have to suck it up and at least pretend the patches helped, though he’d taken some Percocet earlier, before Conner got home and could give him a hard time about it. He sagged into the couch again to wait it out. The dog woke, raised his head, panting, then lay back down to sleep.

  They were back to living in their old house again, though in peculiar, half-assed circumstances. The duplex hadn’t worked out for long. The landlord didn’t want to pay them for the work they’d done, and since none of what they’d agreed to was in writing, the guy was free to jerk them around as much as he wanted, and he had. Sean and Conner had stuck it out for two months, long enough not to pay any bills, and finally the landlord showed up with the sheriff and that was that.

  He’d never had the sheriff call on him before. He’d done plenty of things that were illegal, sure, but up until now, he’d never felt like a criminal.

  Then they’d moved their furniture and boxes into Floyd’s garage and taken up residence in a converted motel in Santa Rosa. It was nothing either of them could stand for long, a single room with a couple of beds and a kitchenette. The rug had a pattern that looked like paint drips, and there were heavy plastic window curtains, and a smell of drains. The toilet sweated. It was exactly the kind of place that showed up on the news, where people got into stupid arguments and shot each other.

  Then one night Conner came home and said, Funniest thing. Nobody was living in their house. It was just sitting there.

  Sean drove past it. Not even a For Sale sign in the yard, nothing. The grass was a straggly untrimmed yellow. The blinds across the front windows were closed. Dead house. He guessed the banks had gobbled up so much property, they were having trouble digesting it all.

  They went back later that evening. Not the middle of the night, when somebody might have called 911 on them, but dinnertime. Pulling up in the drive all casual, like they owned the place. Ha-ha. There was a heavy-duty padlock contraption on the front door, but they hadn’t bothered to change the locks in back. There were some advantages to a house that wasn’t worth that much to anyone.

  “I wish we’d cleaned better,” Sean said, as he kicked wadded paper trash and stray coat hangers out of the way. The place made him nervous. He felt like a ghost, coming back to haunt it.

  “Dad? The water’s turned off.”

  Sean flipped a light switch. No power either.

  But a buddy of his had a homemade valve key you could use on the water shut-off. The next day Sean found the valve head out on the street and directed Conner to fit the key and work it back and forth until the valve gave and water shuddered through the pipes.

  The power was trickier and Sean handled that himself, in case he got electrifried. You had to get the cover off the meter and mess with the plugs and receptors, strip the hot wires and reconnect them to the load. “Watch,” he told Conner. “You’ll either learn how to do this, or how not to do it.”

  He got a little anxious, hoping he wasn’t going to get knocked on his ass with his hair on fire, but he guessed he was still good for something, because the meter clicked and started turning and now the juice was on, courtesy of Pacific Gas and Electric. If he was a criminal now, he might as well take full advantage.

  They left the front door padlocked and went in and out the back. Moved some furniture in, just what they could get by with. Didn’t unpack more than they needed. They were camping out, but at least it was free. They parked the truck on the street so it could have been anybody’s. The neighbors were people who had their own problems and didn’t ask questions.
Sooner or later they’d run out of luck all over again, but by now they’d gotten used to making it up as they went along.

  It was a good thing he’d had a son, not a daughter. You couldn’t expect a girl to put up with rough living. A boy, it just taught him some of the hard things he’d need to get by.

  “Conner?”

  But Conner had gone to bed. Or maybe he’d left for work already. It was not quite dawn, and once more he’d woken up without being aware he’d fallen asleep. The television was on, turned down low, a gray program that might have been a documentary, some gray kind of history. His hip was on fire and his backbone was saying snap, crackle, and pop. He got himself to the bathroom and took two more Percocet from the bottle he kept behind the heating duct. He lay back down, slept some more, and when he woke up it was bright day with his mouth full of paste and the television turned off and a note on the kitchen counter saying that Conner had taken the dog to the vet.

  Back when he’d only thought he had bad luck, he’d tried to stay positive. Ride it out, wait for things to turn around. Either he was stupid then or he was even stupider now, because all evidence and history to the contrary, a part of him still wanted to believe he wasn’t entirely beat down and someday he could look the world in the eye again. But first there were some holes in his head that needed filling.

  He remembered more about that night than he let on. He just hadn’t known all that much to start with. Pretty Lady, 38. The whole stupid conversation was right there on his computer where he’d left it. By the time he was in any shape to sit at a desk again, she was long gone from Craigslist.

  He invested in a few nights of drinking at Ted’s, not that he expected her to show up there, and she hadn’t. He found the bartender who thought he remembered her, or somebody like her. Heck, he saw a lot of girls. “Who’s she, the one that got away?”

  And Sean said it was something like that.

  Then there was the wreck, and here his brain really didn’t have much to contribute. It was possible that not remembering was a very good thing. He was sure he hadn’t been driving, and lucky for him the police agreed, and after they asked him the same questions twenty different times, they satisfied themselves he hadn’t been in Tahoe stealing cars. By then he was in sad enough shape that they quit pestering him.