The Humanity Project

by Jean Thompson

  He and Beata had finished their sandwiches, and Art gathered up the wrappers and napkins and paper bags, stood, then realized the trash can was all the way over in the parking lot and sat back down again. Beata had turned away from the distressing family group and was once more looking out over the rolling waves. Art tried to get absorbed in them, but really, they were just waves, doing the same thing over and over. “Well,” he began, signaling that they should get going. He was giving up on the idea of her as a frisky date.

  Beata said, “When I first came here, to the United States? I had no idea how big a country could be. Back home, countries are one next to the other. A train ride. First we lived in New York. On the other ocean. Then here I come to go to college, San Francisco State.”

  “Come here to go to college,” Art corrected her, but she only looked perplexed. Her eyebrows, he noticed, had been drawn into thin antenna lines with hard pencil. “Never mind.”

  “And everything was different. Different weather. More cars, less people. Even this different ocean. And I was different too. Before, I was so very shy. Hard to imagine? What could I say in English? I was still learning. And who to speak to in Polish, but my mother and father? So once I came here, I decided, I would be a cheerful person. Talk to everybody, go everywhere, be brave, be someone not expected.”

  “That’s very positive. Good for you. We should probably start back.” He checked his phone again to see if Linnea had called, but she hadn’t. He was wondering if he should text her instead of calling. There was probably something dumb and parental about voice mail.

  Beata stood up and brushed the sand and crumbs from her skirt. Art watched his feet as he followed her, trying to keep his ankles from collapsing sideways in the sand. Beata kept turning back to look at the ocean, making little regretful sighs that struck him as affected. There was a reason he usually avoided the cheerful types.

  Once they were in the car, Beata insisted they stop to see the seals at the rescue place up the hill, a new building that was half zoo, half hospital. “More nature stuff!” Art, heavily patient, trooped after her. At the rescue facility, workers in yellow rubber coveralls hosed down the concrete. The seals lay around like fat gray sausages. The seals made an awk awk racket. Some of them were wriggling up the ramps to flop into raised tanks, where they dove and bobbed to the surface. They looked out over the edge of the tank with big wet black eyes. The workers held up fish by their tails and dangled them. The seals rose up to take them, swallowing them down whole in an instant.

  There was a fishy stink to the place, not that unpleasant until you thought about it. There were a number of educational exhibits, and Art dutifully read these displays as Beata exclaimed over them. The text was about the fragility of the oceans, the threat to marine life from pollution, floating trash, depletion of fishing grounds, climate change, and so on. The place depressed him. Most places depressed him these days. He wasn’t sure what he was meant to do about the never-ending supply of bad planetary news. He felt like some overlarge and overdeveloped mammal who had strayed out of its range.

  Maybe he would have been more successful at being a different kind of creature, all instinct and no confusion of motives or choices. Everything would come naturally: eat, fight, migrate, breed. He guessed he might just as well turn out to be a failed animal. A woodpecker hammering away at a concrete post. A scrawny hyena pushed out of the pack.

  Beata was off talking to one of the guides, and so he tried calling Linnea again. The phone clicked and a man answered. “Hello?”

  “Linnea?”

  “What?” The voice was annoyed, suspicious.

  “Where’s Linnea?”

  “You have the wrong number,” the man said, and hung up.

  Stupidly, he stared at the phone in his hand. He dialed back, got Linnea’s voice mail. He checked the phone’s history. He hadn’t misdialed. He tried again and the same man answered. “What?”

  “Please put Linnea on. This is her father.”

  “How about, take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut, dad.” He hung up again.

  Beata came back to him then, full of happy information. “Do you know that this place used to be where they kept missiles? Underground. A missile silo. What is the matter?”

  “I keep trying to call my daughter, and some man answers instead.”

  “Huh. Wrong number?” Art shook his head. “Boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know. I hope not.” The seals cackled and barked, the noise echoing off the glass enclosures. Below them, workers were herding the seals around the pens, using big pieces of plywood with handles. Maybe Linnea had loaned her phone to somebody. Maybe it had been lost or stolen. The man had sounded like somebody who might steal a phone. Or do worse things.

  Or else it was nothing at all, some kind of mistake.

  “Art?”

  Beata had a hand on his arm, trying to angle herself into his field of vision. “Is something wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” He took a step toward the glass and looked down at one of the seal pens. Some smaller seals that looked like stuffed animals were being lifted and rearranged. Dread and stupidity paralyzed him. He thought he would just watch the seals for a while.

  “Let’s walk.” Again the hand on his arm, propelling him. A troop of schoolchildren marched down the hall toward them. Beata steered him around them and down a flight of stairs. A window looked out over the ocean, and below them, the beach where they had eaten lunch. “Tell me,” Beata said.

  “I don’t know why she isn’t answering her phone. I don’t know where she is. I never know.”

  “Teenagers,” Beata said wisely.

  “No this is different. Worse.” The ways in which it was worse seemed complicated beyond his power to explain. “I have to go home and see if she’s there.” He had no real hope that she would be. “I’m sorry. I can drop you off at school.”

  “I think I should come with you.” Art started to protest. “The truth? You look like you need some help. You look like a rock. Rocky.”

  They reached the parking lot. The sun had flickered out behind a layer of fog and the wind was chill. Art had a headache, as if weather systems, lows and highs, were booming through his skull. “What about our classes?”

  “We’ll tell them, family emergency. I can call.”

  “It really will look like we’ve run off together,” Art said, reaching for his earlier joke. “Look, you don’t need to come along. I bet this is just her trying to aggravate me. Or maybe she’s not even trying.” He felt queasy about allowing her to witness the abject disorganization of his apartment, not to mention that of his life.

  “I’m calling right now. The number is on my phone.”

  Art drove and listened to Beata manage the call to the program secretary, with whom she seemed to be on first-rate and familiar terms. Without exactly saying so, she was able to paint a picture of a distraught young girl, one of those teen heartaches, requiring both her daddy and some specifically female sympathy and support. Then there was some further cozy talk between the two of them, something solicitous and fond, and then Beata said her good-byes.

  “Thank you,” Art said. He accelerated up the 101 ramp, as if being in a hurry was going to help.

  “You’re welcome. She said she didn’t know you had a daughter.”

  “It wasn’t a general topic of conversation.”

  “You see, Art? Girls like it when you talk to them. Pay attention. Do you even know her name, the secretary? Katherine. She has three boys, one of them is Navy. When a language is new to you, you have to listen.”

  “Yes.” He had to keep himself from grabbing his phone and calling Linnea again, shouting curses at whatever pissant scum answered.

  “Do you listen to your daughter?”

  She was looking at him with her thin antenna eyebrows raised. Art said, “She doesn’t like talking. She was in
an accident. Not an accident, a murder, a shooting. Some other girls were shot. She’s very disturbed. Nobody knows what to do about her. So there’s a lot to not talk about.”

  “Watch your road, please.”

  He was coming up too fast on a lumbering panel van. He braked and changed lanes. “Her mother and I split up when she was a baby. I hardly know her. I’m supposed to be keeping her out of trouble. This phone thing—” He wanted to impress the seriousness of the situation on Beata. “She’s only fifteen, and this guy with her phone sounds—older,” he finished lamely.

  “We’ll find her. She’ll be all right.”

  “She’s already not all right.” His exit was coming up, and he dove for it.

  “You know,” Beata said, crossing her legs somewhere beneath the vast territory of her skirt, “it’s not always a bad thing, to have trouble when you are young. You can make yourself a stronger person from it. Our troubles make us who we are.”

  “Sure. Great.” Art was scanning the sidewalks, hoping to see his daughter slouching along, her hair newly dyed a Mercurochrome red. “I feel so much better now. Thanks.”

  Beata was silent. Art made the turn into the cul-de-sac, reached the apartment complex and his parking space. He shut the engine off and they listened to its ticking as it cooled. “I apologize,” Art said. “I’m just upset. I appreciate you trying to help. I appreciate your being here. You didn’t have to come.”

  “I can wait here if you want.”

  “Please come with me. I’m sorry.”

  She opened her car door. “Sometime soon? You’ll have to tell me all about you being married.”

  Just as they reached the stairs, Christie’s door opened. “Oh, hi Art.” He saw her looking Beata over, then attempting not to.

  “Hey Christie. Have you seen Linnea, she up there?”

  “I think she went out after you left for work. I think I heard her.” Christie was wearing her nurse’s clothes, a printed smock and white pants. Art had been guilty of any number of stray fantasies involving old-fashioned starched nurse’s whites and those little caps.

  “She didn’t say when she was coming back?” As soon as he said it, he wondered if it sounded as if he was hoping for a little private time with Beata. Well, hadn’t he been?

  “I didn’t get a chance to talk to her.”

  There was a moment when he could have introduced them to each other but it passed, and Art said, “OK, thanks, bye,” and started up, embarrassed for no reason. Beata following him to what he was pretty sure was an empty apartment.

  When he unlocked the door he called “Linnea?” for form’s sake. No answer. “Well,” he raised his arms and let them fall to his sides. “Come on inside, so I can figure out what to do next.”

  Art stood back to let her enter. Beata advanced to the midpoint of the main room, taking it in. He was glad she didn’t offer any opinions or commentary. Maybe there just wasn’t that much to say about the place. He opened the refrigerator, moved to make some hostlike gesture. “You want a Coke? Beer? Orange juice?”

  “No thank you. May I use the bathroom?”

  “Down the hall.”

  He waited, looking out the front window for any sign of Linnea. Right about now his afternoon class would be assembling, and, finding the cancellation notice on the door, disassembling. No one, himself included, would be disappointed.

  When Beata returned, she had taken off her dark stockings and was barefoot and bare-legged. “Too hot,” she said, as if he had said something, and he guessed his face had. Her legs and feet were very white and somehow foreign-looking, as if they had spent the summer in a pale northern country. “So. Are you going to call her again?”

  “I don’t know. That guy, I wasn’t getting anywhere.” He didn’t think he wanted Beata listening. It wasn’t likely to be a conversation that made him look, or sound, very good.

  “How about I try.” She nodded. “Yes.” She moved a pile of magazines to sit on the couch, opened her handbag, and extracted her phone. “Number please.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  “By ear. Oh don’t worry, I can be very sneaky. The number.”

  She dialed, and Art heard the small leakage of the man’s grouchy voice through the phone’s earpiece. “Hi!” Beata said. “Who is this?” Her tone was frisky, giddy. It made you think of someone chewing bubble gum. She listened a moment, then giggled. “My name is Tara.” More listening. More giggling. “Thank you.”

  Art was standing in front of her, mouthing questions. She shooed him away. “Listen, is my friend there? Can I talk to her? No, it’s about the party. She said there was a party.

  “Sure, I can come.

  “Old enough to party. Ha-ha-ha.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. It sounds kind of wild.

  “Ha-ha. Well tell her to call me, OK? This number. I’ll think about it. Byee.”

  Beata held the phone away from her and shut the call down. Her face lost its frivolous expression and her mouth tightened.

  “What did he tell you? Was Linnea there?”

  Beata shook her head. “I think so. He didn’t want her listening in. We have to wait now.”

  Art sat down next to her on the couch. He was hollowed out with fear and nervous sickness. Beata’s hand curled around the back of his neck, a cool pressure. He hoped she wouldn’t say anything else and she didn’t. There was only this space of silent sitting.

  Finally he sat up and pushed some air in and out of his chest in an inelegant gulping laugh. “Some lunch date, huh?” He had forgotten that it wasn’t supposed to be a date. He didn’t know what to do about the hand on his neck, so he reached up and patted it with one of his own. Then, because that seemed presumptuous or unwise, he took his hand away.

  “Does your daughter look like you?”

  “A little. Except for the hair. She has teenage hair.”

  “Ah. It’s always hair, isn’t it?”

  “You were really something on the phone.” Art wasn’t sure what he meant by this. Admiration, yes, but also some alarm at how easily she had switched tones. Technically, she had not been talking dirty, although that was the impression he was left with. This was not a good time to let himself get distracted.

  “I am really something even off the phone.”

  Art considered this. “Yes, I believe you are.”

  She rubbed the back of his neck, then released him. “Tell me more about your girl. Her troubles.”

  “Not right now.” Not with Linnea once more out in the dangerous world. There was a confusion in his head, he had to stop himself from rehearsing that earlier nightmare, what must have happened in that school bathroom with the boy, the gun, the screaming girls. He had to remind himself that this had already happened and was not happening to her now. Or was it? Or something worse? And along with the dread there was anger: why had somebody else’s random horrible life landed on top of her, and now on top of him? That boy and his craziness, no one he would ever know, but once you started asking why terrible things happened, you had to ask why good things did too or why anything at all was the way it was in the whole world, and then you were completely screwed.

  To drown out the awful sound of the phone not ringing, Art asked Beata what time it was. Two-thirty, she told him, and Art said good, good, as if two-thirty meant something that two twenty-five had not. Could he call the police? He didn’t think so. That wasn’t the kind of call you made at two-thirty in the afternoon, and anyway, no visible crime had been committed. He needed some other kind of public servant to drive up with sirens and whirling red and blue lights, take his statement, fix him a cup of tea, massage his scalp, and in general feel sorry for him, and it was this kind of need and maybe some other kinds that made him thrash around in the couch cushions, attempting to get some purchase, and clutch at Beata’s shoulders and kiss and kiss and kiss again he
r small, soft face.

  He drew away. “Sorry,” he said automatically, although he wasn’t sure if he was or not. His mouth was still wet and he tried to be discreet about swiping at it with the back of his hand. “Oh boy.”

  “Tarzan,” Beata said. Art felt a dopey smile spreading over his face and tried to get his feet underneath him so as to manage the uncooperative cushions, and then Beata’s phone rang, a frolicking, instantly annoying tune, and she pushed it at him saying, “Answer, answer.”

  It wasn’t Linnea’s number; she still had an Ohio area code. “Hello?” He heard music in the background, something jazzed up and scratchy.

  “Jesus Christ,” Linnea said. “You?”

  “Honey? Where are you, are you all right? What happened to your phone?”

  “Who was it that called about me?” Linnea asked, managing to sound as if the answer was entirely uninteresting to her. “That was just weird.”

  “Tell me where you are.”

  There was a jumble of noise, the phone dropped, or juggled, then retrieved. “Sorry. I think there’s some kind of filter, I can’t hear stupid things.”

  “I want you to come home. Or I’ll come get you. No questions asked.”

  “Such a good one,” Linnea said, meaning, she didn’t believe him, he’d say anything. And he guessed he would.

  The music in the background had a voice in it. Billie Holiday? Art got himself free of the dratted couch, stood. “I don’t suppose you’d care to share who was answering your phone?”

  “Just this guy. You don’t know him. I gave him my phone. It’s complicated.”

  “Please, Linnea.”

  “It was like, a deal. I can’t talk very long, OK? This is somebody else’s whole different phone. Do you want to make a deal too? Say yes.”

  “Yes.” When he turned and looked back at Beata, she had removed her blouse. Underneath it she wore a pink and white bra, high-cut and prim. He wouldn’t have suspected that she had especially large breasts, but she did. Mother of God.