Behind him on the road, the noise of a car accelerating effortlessly through its gears as it climbed the grade, an expensive sound, and here he was already so wasted, so truly tired, but OK, let’s do it. He downshifted and heard the transmission drop and put his foot on the gas to take a curve. The next instant he skidded sideways with trees snapping and filling the windshield and the metal bones of the truck breaking and shit not again.
EIGHTEEN
Dear Sean,
See, I actually do know your name. I knew it all along.
I hope your OK. That sounds pretty funny coming from me. Maybe you don’t write back because you are way too disgusted with me and who could blame you? Anyway, for what it’s worth I really did like you. I thought you were kind of cute and funny. I was just so screwed up. I am doing better now. I don’t expect you to congratulate me or anything but I am.
You said you do not remember the accident. Do you remember what I told you about my son who is in jail now? I had two kids, a boy and a girl. Well I still have them. My girl is from my first marriage, she is twenty-three now. Her dad and I split up and that was sad but it happens and there wasn’t anything too ugly about it. Then I married this other character and I guess we are still married because I can’t find him to divorce him. He wasn’t the best idea I ever had. He is the dad to my son.
So when you said you had a boy who was the same age as mine that made me I guess mad at you before I even met you. That somebody else had a boy who wasn’t in trouble. I don’t claim this was a good way to feel. But I did.
I also did not plan anything out in advance. I did not know I was going to do anything until I did it.
My son wasn’t any problem growing up by which I mean only the normal things for a boy. I think you will know what I mean. Because of your own boy. They like to get into things! He always did OK in school. He liked riding his bike and playing games on the computer. The same as other kids. I made sure the games weren’t bad ones. It’s not like he was raised in a house where there was no attention paid. And there was never such a thing as a gun on the premises. Never. I had no use for them.
I don’t know whether his father is to blame for never being much of a father or if it was a bad mental character being passed on and nothing anybody could have done. But his father at least did not end up in all the newspapers and television for killing two little girls and one man which is what my boy did. I still can not get used to saying that.
He was my own child and I loved him the same as any mother although it was easier when he was just small.
How is your boy? I hope he is doing well. The way you talked about him I could tell you were so proud of him and happy.
Our problems started up when he was a teenager but nothing big at first with answering back and disrespect. What can you do about that but hope they get it out of their system. He was not easy to live with but in no way a matter for law enforcement. When he was not being snotty to us he was very quiet which was not like him and there was no way of telling what was in his head. I still don’t know, how could you? People sure seem to think I should have. Or that I raised him to be vicious and we all sat around pulling knives on each other. Anyway it was all my fault one way or another for doing or not doing what I should have.
I could not stay living where I was. My daughter left too because all of a sudden we were the evil ones. She is a good girl now living in Kentucky and sometimes we talk but that is still hard for us.
I send my son cards for his birthday and Christmas but truth is I do not want to do even that much.
When I told you about my son and his troubles you said something like you were trying to be funny and that flipped the switch in me. I think you did not actually mean it, you just didn’t know what to say like most people don’t know. And I had been drinking a lot which sounds like a big fat excuse but it’s the truth. Plus I’d been riding that crazy train for a long time.
I was so heartsick. And lonesome. But who would want to be with me if they knew who I really was?
My son was seventeen at the time of his crime but he was considered an adult due to the serious nature of his crimes. The court determined he was not mentally competent and so he is incarcerated where he can get treatment. This is the best outcome for him. But I had not thought he was crazy! When did that happen? They worked backwards from what he did and decided that anyone who killed people he never even knew would have to be crazy. If I acted crazy myself it was out of trying to understand him. He was angry and unhappy and frightened. I could have told them that much. So I became angry and unhappy and frightened.
He had gotten so he did not like going to school. He would not say why. It was supposed to be his senior year. I wanted him to at least finish up and graduate because if not you spend your whole life working jobs where other people tell you what to do, it is hard enough to earn a living these days anyway. I myself have worked many different jobs as head of a household, sometimes two or three at once.
He stopped having friends. They didn’t come around any more. I saw this happening but what could I do? He didn’t want to talk to me about it or about much of anything.
I think he is one of those people who feel there is not enough of him and too much of everybody else. That he was not important. Or that everybody else was a different sort of creature than him and it wasn’t like actual killing.
There is one thing I know I should have done different. Tell him I loved him more often. Back when I still did.
Anyway when I told you about my son and you tried to say something funny, I don’t even remember what it was, I said the hell with you and everybody else. I did not think it through at the time. I was surely trying to hurt myself and you were just along for the ride. Maybe I wanted to do the same as my son did and make an evil act against someone I did not know and for no real reason.
I opened my car door and you said Hey watch it and the air was black and loud and seemed like a solid thing you could jump onto. You started hollering and then the noise of it was cut off because I stepped out into the air. I don’t know how I did it I just did. I was driving in the left lane and I went right on past the road shoulder and into the dirt beyond. It knocked me on the head but no worse. I did not see the car go off the road or hear it wreck.
It was like I had jumped out of my whole life. I wasn’t thinking in any normal way because of my head. I think I thought I was already dead and it took me a while to decide I was not. I picked myself up and walked back the way we had come and after a while I came to where I could look around me and decide what way of living I wanted to start new with.
That is what happened and some of the why. I apologize for bringing you distress which you did not deserve any more than the rest of us deserve our bad fortune. I will sign with my real name and you can look it up. But you will understand that I do not tell you the name I live with now or where I am making my new life.
Sincerely yours,
Shelly Ann Rosa
NINETEEN
During the last week of conference registration the Foundation had a peculiar kind of luck. Their only real celebrity, the author of those aggressively marketed and widely consumed inspirational books, was involved in an irresistible scandal. An old mistress was cast aside for a new mistress, and there followed vengeful acts and public statements by the discarded lady. There was a showy, unserious suicide attempt, and the release of some equivocal e-mails, and interviews with sympathetic media: “Serenity and compassion? He pees serenity and shits compassion. He’s just in it for the money and the sex.”
“Oh dear,” Christie said, reading Imelda’s computer screen over her shoulder, inhaling her heady, expensive perfume. “I hope she doesn’t show up at the conference.”
“Are you kidding? I hope she does. This is gold. I should get ahold of all the press contacts and remind them he’s speaking.”
“I have to introduce him. What am I going to say?”
“How about, ‘Here’s a man who nee
ds no introduction.’ You know how many Twitter mentions he has?”
The author released a statement referring to the old mistress as “a longtime friend of my wife and myself, currently undergoing some personal challenges,” and the new mistress as “a young person who has attended my seminars, along with so many others, in the hope of building an authentic spiritual self.” The author’s wife stayed silent, in public at least. Her husband’s books, with their gauzy celestial covers, were always dedicated to her.
Christie found it all depressing. These guys never disappointed in their ability to disappoint. The same grubby behavior, the same rooting and burrowing and penis-driven folly. She told herself that there were many decent men in the world who lacked fame and the ego that went along with it, who lived tranquil, honorable lives. You didn’t hear about them because virtue wasn’t a good story, didn’t offer up any momentum or trajectory or thrilling sense of what awful thing might happen next. Virtue only kept on being itself, unchanging, like water trapped in a stopped drain.
Maybe that was why she’d given up, without knowing she was giving up, her own insignificant attempts at being virtuous. It bored her.
The conference was taking up not only most of her waking hours, but also most of the available space in her head. It was either a good idea gone wrong, or maybe it had always been a bad idea, or maybe they’d pull it off in spite of themselves, and redirect Mrs. Foster’s project into some better channel. She’d hoped it would produce some clear-minded wisdom, or kindle some blaze of good feeling, and perhaps it would, but not for her. She was too mired in the details of chair setup and parking passes. Not to mention her own machinations—who would need flattering, who would need chiding—which she observed in herself with distaste. Humans just didn’t do a very good job of rising above human nature. And here she’d thought it a good idea to arrange for some number of her fellow creatures to congregate in one space and ask each other searching questions.
Certainly all of Christie’s skills were needed when the scandal broke. Mrs. Foster had seen the famous author’s news coverage also, and she called Christie in distress. “We can’t have him on the program! Call him and tell him he can’t come.”
Christie, unprepared, only managed, “Um, why’s that?” She’d come around to Imelda’s point of view. They’d been clobbered with new registrations.
“I hardly think he sets a good example,” Mrs. Foster said sternly. “The conference is called ‘Investing in Our Better Selves,’ not ‘How I Get Away with This Sort of Thing.’”
“I doubt if that’s going to be—”
“Did you hear what that woman said about him? The kinds of filthy activities he enjoyed?”
Christie murmured that she had heard about something of the sort. Along with most of the English-speaking world. She rather wished she had not. “You know, we did sign a contract with his booking agent.”
“Well get Allen on that part.” Allen being Mr. Kirn. “He’ll know what to do.” The matter settled, Mrs. Foster was ready to get off the phone.
“I believe this represents an opportunity for us,” said devious Christie. “I believe it makes the conference even more important, because people will be thinking about moral failures and confusing impulses and good old hypocrisy, all the really truly human things. If there wasn’t any scandal, he’d just show up and talk about finding God by putting your ear to a seashell.” Christie had perused the great man’s books and had come away with a rather unfavorable impression.
“Well . . .”
“I expect he’ll speak from the heart. He’ll have to.” Of course it was just as likely he’d use the occasion to find new groupies.
Mrs. Foster wavered, and the conference went on as planned.
Imelda took Christie shopping, as she had long threatened to do, and picked out her conference wardrobe: garments in charcoal and teal and peach, in linen and fine wool and silk. Shoes to go along with the clothes, and, over Christie’s protests, makeup. “If you don’t wear makeup, people think you don’t care what you look like,” and when Christie objected that she didn’t care, really, Imelda looked at her severely.
“You can keep it at the office. I’ll put it on for you, what are you so afraid of? Somebody might pay attention to you? Here, let’s practice.”
And so Christie sat at her desk while Imelda patted and fluffed and dabbed with her deft, well-tended fingers. The conference was three days away and she still had a long list of chores to attend to. It wouldn’t matter how good she looked if the caterer didn’t show up or the programs weren’t delivered. “Make a kissing mouth,” Imelda instructed, and Christie pushed her lips forward. “Big kiss,” Imelda urged her, then sighed and muttered at the clearly inadequate effort.
Finally she was finished and held up a hand mirror. “Meet the new you!”
Christie looked into the mirror at her new and bedizened self. Her eyes were outlined in green and gray and her eyebrows were darkly feathered. Her skin’s surface was a layer of rosy sheen, her mouth glossy and pink as candy. Imelda’s face appeared behind hers in the mirror. For two entirely different people, blond and raven-haired, they now looked remarkably alike. “Too much?” asked Imelda. “Here, blot your mouth.” She held out a tissue.
“Thank you,” Christie said. Her face felt sticky. “It’s amazing.”
“Now don’t go washing it right off. Leave it on all day, get used to it. Would it kill you to smile?”
Christie made an honest attempt to leave her face alone that day. She mostly forgot about the makeup, except when she caught people giving her puzzled or intense glances. It was the new her, whoever that was, imperfectly attached to her old, tired self. Other people must be better at the makeover, transformation thing. Like Imelda, with her former and profitable career in identity theft.
She was kept busy with the hundred and one chores, large and small, that needed her attention. Almost none of them could be crossed off a list with finality. Almost all of them required more follow-up, more phone calls, more checking back. Not until she got home, late at the end of a long day, did she take another long look in a mirror.
The lipstick had pretty much worn off, but the eye color had smeared and smudged into startling green puddles beneath both eyes. Only the eyebrows had survived unchanged, dark and angry, giving her something of a Kabuki aspect. She was still scrubbing and rinsing and toweling off when Art knocked on her door.
“Hey, Chris? You in there?” Of course she was. It wasn’t like she had anywhere to hide.
She opened the door to find Art, his hands engulfed in oven mitts, holding a large cooking pot, heavy, by the look of it. “Chicken vegetable soup,” he said. “I made this big old batch and there’s not even room for it in the fridge.”
“Since when did you turn into a cook?”
Art attempted to shrug, but the soup pot was too full. “It’s just soup. Like, boiling stuff. Want some?”
Christie said that would be nice. Art took careful steps into the kitchen and set the pot on the stove. “It turned out all right. Pretty good, actually.”
“Thanks, Art.” She’d been eating a lot of sandwiches from the 7-Eleven lately. “I just got home, so this is good timing.”
Art said he’d eaten, but he’d keep her company. Of course he would. She couldn’t very well tell him no. She set out bowls and spoons, bread and butter. The soup was hot and tasty. Every so often a piece peel, of carrot or potato, surfaced in her bowl, or a limp, flowerlike piece of celery green, but she navigated around them.
They finished eating, and when he made no move to get up and go, Christie put the teakettle on. “How’s Linnea?” she asked, since Art wasn’t providing any conversation himself.
“Good, she’s good.” He wasn’t the right fit for her small kitchen chair; he kept recrossing his legs and hitching himself up. His long hair floated into his long face and he swatted it out of the way.
“Did her friend have any luck tracking down his father? I hadn’t heard.” Art looked uncomprehending. “It was something she mentioned a while back.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Art said, but he wasn’t inclined to be curious. He seemed to have settled himself at her kitchen table for some other, unknown purpose. The kettle boiled and Christie got up to make the tea.
“Work keeping you busy?” She guessed it was up to her to drag whatever it was out of him.
“Yeah, the usual. I’ve been thinking of looking for some other kind of job.”
“Really?” This was something new. Art had never seemed to put much energy into vocational matters. “What kind?”
“I dunno, maybe something in high tech. Information systems. Web design. Software applications. There’s a lot of places where they need worker bees, where they train you.”
“What brought this on?”
“I need more of a steady paycheck. For Linnea, you know, she’s a smart kid, she’ll want to go to college. Plus I might want to retire someday. So I better get to work.”
“Good thinking. I hope you find something you really like.” She wanted to be encouraging about this newly birthed Art, peeking out from behind a cabbage in the cabbage patch.
“As long as it really pays, it’ll be just fine.”
They drank their tea. Once the tea was gone, she could shoo him out, get ready for bed, and pick up where she’d left off worrying about the conference. Art put his cup down. “Beata and I broke up.”
The Humanity Project Page 32
