by John Yunker
“I have videos,” she said.
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“My goal is a thousand signatures. We need more than a quarter million to have a shot at getting this on the ballot. Which is why I’m doing everything short of blocking intersections to get them.”
“Is this date one of your signature-gathering strategies?” Ethan asked.
“Of course not. I’m just here for a free meal.” She smiled.
Ethan assumed she was joking with him, but he could not be sure. While he could always tell what was going on inside of a computer, people were more of a challenge. He was a terrible judge of emotions and other human subtleties, and he knew it but couldn’t seem to solve it. He spent a lot of time over the years asking “what?” as those around him laughed at some inside joke or sexual euphemism that he apparently missed altogether. He was on the outside of most conversations, looking in, trying to see what everyone else saw so easily. He tried not to let it bother him. He was smarter than other people in so many ways, and he contented himself with that knowledge. But he could not help but struggle in moments like this, not knowing if a girl was smiling because she was happy or because she was inwardly laughing at him. At times like this, Ethan often assumed the worst and responded defensively.
“Annie.”
“Yes?”
“I can’t sign your petition,” he said. “It’s not because I don’t agree with your cause, but because as a matter of principle I don’t sign petitions.”
“You don’t sign petitions?” She stared at him.
“Petition drives have gotten out of hand in California. And the only way to fight back is to refuse to sign them altogether. It’s been years since I last signed one.”
“You trying to win a medal or something?”
“Do you realize there were seventeen propositions on the ballot last year?”
“Yes. One was a proposition that I helped get on the ballot.”
“Oh?”
“Proposition 3. To expand the size of battery cages for chickens.”
“I thought you didn’t eat meat.”
“I don’t eat meat, or any animal product. But even those on death row deserve humanity.” Annie stood and reached for her backpack. “Look, Ethan, if you’re not going to sign it, that’s fine. It’s your choice. Give me my clipboard.”
As Ethan handed it back, the waiter approached with Annie’s beer, and she held the clipboard out to him. “Would you like to sign a petition banning foie gras?”
“Sure thing,” he said. “We don’t serve it here.”
“And you don’t have any principles against signing petitions?”
“Why would I?” he asked. Annie looked down at Ethan, and he wanted to jump to his feet, grab the clipboard back, and start again. But it was already too late—he had gone from first impression to last impression in record time.
“Nice to have met you, Ethan,” she said.
He nodded, avoiding eye contact, then stared at her back as she left the restaurant. He paid for the beers, and as he walked home he tried to convince himself that he’d done the right thing. She was trying to use him, and he had held his ground. Back in high school, the only pretty girls he’d gotten close to were those who needed help with their homework. He was branded a computer nerd, and even the emergence of fabulously rich computer nerds did not seem to brighten his prospects. He had come to assume the worst of beautiful women: They wanted something from him. How could they not? What good was he but for a late-night computer question, a re-installed operating system, a signature?
He had been accused by previous girlfriends—all three of them—for not talking enough. The last one—the one with whom he could see a real future, even marriage—told him he was emotionally distant. She was probably right, but he did not know how to rectify the situation. He was fluent in any number of programming languages, but these were foreign tongues to the women he most wanted to be with, and plain conversational English often seemed foreign to him. Over the years, he’d made significant upgrades to his repertoire of small talk. He could banter about the weather in San Diego (or lack thereof) and the best beaches to surf (though he didn’t surf). But small talk only delayed the inevitable. Eventually a woman wanted more. Eventually, in quiet moments together in cars or in elevators or at home waiting for the toaster to pop, he would have nothing more to say. She would ask what she had done wrong. He would tell her that everything was fine. And eventually she would see him as mute, paralyzed, useless. And she would leave.
When Ethan returned home, he logged into eCouplet, telling himself he needed to check his work email, though he only wanted to see her face again. And then he realized his hypocrisy. He had accused Annie of using him for his signature. But he had been using her, too, manipulating a search engine, asking her out under cowardly pretenses. And neither had gotten what they wanted.
When Ethan went to look up her picture, he was denied access. She had blocked him from viewing it.
If he’d only signed that silly sheet of paper, just signed it. She would have put the clipboard away. They would have had a fantastic meal. They might have made the perfect match. Instead, she had dumped him, after only one date.
And it wasn’t even a date.
Jake
First, Jake gave up fish. That was easy. It was a chore of a food, and he’d eaten it only because it was supposed to be healthy. He never could tell the difference between halibut and scrod, and he didn’t care if salmon came from a farm or the inland waterways of Alaska. It all looked and tasted pretty much the same, and it all left him feeling hungry.
Then he gave up pork, also not much of a sacrifice. He liked bacon, but he rarely had time for breakfast. Chicken he would miss. Wings, fajitas, all those pasta dishes that used chicken like croutons. Chicken-salad sandwiches. Chicken soup. Rotisserie chicken from the neighborhood grocery, warm and golden in its clear plastic container.
Then there was beef. Jake wouldn’t miss steak so much as the steakhouse—the dark paneling and green-shaded lamps, the stiff whiskey taken neat, the garlic mashed potatoes and the white-apronned waiters who spoke of cuts and ageing. But as much as he liked the experience, steak was always a bit too highbrow, a bit too theatrical; he was a true connoisseur of the hamburger. In every new town he visited, he would seek out the best burger joint. Mr. Bartley’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where burgers were named for political figures and served with thin, curly fries. Booches in Columbia, Missouri, where palm-sized cheeseburgers were served on sheets of wax paper and could be paid for only in cash. Two Bells in Seattle, where the French baguette that served as a bun attempted to belie the dive-bar atmosphere. But now there would be no more field trips, no more research, no more late-night visits to In-N-Out.
He was now a vegetarian.
He was one of them. Earth-conscious. Crunchy. Cruelty free. Instead of deciding between rare or medium rare, his decisions consisted of tofu: medium or firm. His days began with soy sausages and ended with bean burritos. And though he had accomplished the expeditious transformation from carnivore to vegetarian, he was still only halfway toward his goal.
The 2001 Rights for Animals Conference was a week away, and if he wanted to pass his audition and get on that ship, he had to go all the way. As in vegan.
So Jake gave up cheese and butter. Then he gave up milk. Then he gave up eggs. He worried about losing muscle mass. He worried about starving. Then he worried he wasn’t going far enough. With veganism, he learned, you could never go far enough. Animal products were everywhere—in soap and in toothpaste, in gelcaps, in chewing gum. When he visited an online message board and asked about a brand of vegan cheese he was considering, Alex2000 wrote back: When the chief selling proposition of the cheese is “it melts,” then you can bet it doesn’t taste good.
It didn’t.
Conference attire was another challenge. H
e wanted to look young but not immature, dedicated to the cause but not crazy. He was twenty-eight, but with a tight shave and shaggy hair, he could pass for twenty-four, and he thought that would be good enough to the impress the captain. He wore a used pair of Converse sneakers, old jeans, and a faded black t-shirt. At the last minute, he bought a wristband with the word peace imprinted on it.
The conference was held in a large hotel next to LAX, and Jake’s room overlooked one of the runways. As planes descended past his window in sixty-second intervals, Jake sat on the bed and prepared himself. Originally from Austin, he was fresh out of grad school. He was committed to direct action. He could fix any engine, tie any knot. He didn’t get seasick. And, if necessary, he would mention the helicopter.
He took the stairs to the lobby. To his left, down a long hallway, he saw the welcome table. He completed a registration form and handed over his credit card. The woman at the table, a ponytailed redhead with a pierced nose, looked up and smiled. “Is this your first RFA Expo?”
“As a matter of fact, it is,” Jake said.
“Awesome. Most of the sessions are in those rooms over there and on the second level. There’s an orientation session in Room 105, and the exhibition hall is directly behind me.”
Jake studied the schedule. From Activism Against Vivisection to Blood on the Ice to Free Trade Kills Animals, the following two days would be packed with every animal atrocity he’d ever imagined, and probably more he hadn’t. He began by wandering the exhibition hall. A hundred tables and booths were assembled along eight narrow aisles. He took his time circumnavigating the room, watching people while trying to look as if he wasn’t watching people. Dogmatic t-shirts were ubiquitous: I don’t eat my friends. I think, therefore I’m vegan. Eat like you give a damn.
He chatted with the eager faces at each table. The woman who founded an Iowa dog-and-cat rescue organization. The Chinese man who set moon bears free. Dogs in Ethiopia, cape seals in Namibia, kangaroos in Australia. The biggest draw in the exhibition hall—and the reason for his attendance—was the Cetacean Defense Alliance. People crowded around, three deep, blocking the aisle. Jake wanted to approach the table and begin his audition, but his nerves got the better of him.
Instead, he entered one of the lecture rooms and took a seat near the front. He wondered if the people seated around him could tell that he was an imposter, a carnivore among vegans. Could someone tell that he had only recently stopped eating meat simply by looking at him? Was there a residual smell?
A somber young man stood at the front and introduced a video his group had taken while working undercover at a slaughterhouse in rural Ohio. The lights dimmed to show a video of the men who worked there, punching birds on conveyers as they hung there, strung up alive by their fragile legs. If a turkey came loose, the men kicked it around like a soccer ball. One man reached into the female birds, searching for eggs to hurl at co-workers.
Jake could hear a woman crying behind him, and he fought back the urge to duck out of the room and away from those images. But remained in his seat, watching the tortured birds conveyed through a machine that in one quick motion stretched wide their necks, ran them by a spinning blade, then released them to bleed to death as their bodies continued along the line, their flapping wings eventually going motionless. And then he could take no more.
He hurried out of the room into the main hall, stepping straight into a dark-skinned woman in a long madras skirt and a white Kiss me, I’m Vegan tank top. She grabbed his arms for balance, and he grabbed her waist. After an awkward moment, a moment that lasted a half-second too long, a half-second he would replay forever, she pulled back. Or he released his hands. How was it that this innocuous invasion of personal space had become so intimate? When their eyes met, he smiled and she wrinkled her brow. Then she began to walk away.
“Do you get many takers?” Jake asked.
She stopped and turned around.
“Your shirt,” he said.
She eyed him suspiciously, studying him from head to toe. “You’re vegan?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Then how do you explain that?” She pointed at his wristband, the wristband that Jake suddenly realized was made of leather.
He smiled sheepishly. “I don’t eat it; I just wear it.”
“Perhaps you should visit the orientation session. Room 105. And take notes.” She shook her head and walked off. She had seen right through his disguise, though—he hoped—not far enough.
Jake watched her disappear around the corner, wanting to follow her, to run into her once again. But he turned and made his way to Room 105.
* * *
After a day of videos and lectures and no sign of the woman in the tank top, Jake returned to the exhibition hall. The scrum around the CDA table was as dense as before; Jake had no choice but to plow through. At the main table he purchased a book—The Anti-Whaler—from a young woman wearing a beret. The cover was a photo of the bearded man now standing off to the right of the CDA table, signing each book as it was handed to him.
Jake thought it odd that the man was standing instead of sitting. Yet he looked perfectly at ease, legs apart, solid as a statue. Perhaps after years spent standing in the bridge, he no longer felt the need to sit. As Jake studied him, the man seemed to sway every so slightly, as if he were still at sea. Or maybe it was Jake who was swaying, now feeling his stomach tighten. The moment he had prepared for was now seconds away. His audition.
Now next in line, his mouth had gone dry. He could feel his hands trembling. He forgot what he had planned to say.
“Whom shall I make it out to?” the man asked.
“Jake.”
“Does Jake have a last name?”
“No, I mean, it’s for me. Jake is fine.”
The man took the book and pried opened the cover. Jake had to move quickly. “Do you have any spots left on your next voyage?” he asked.
“Voyages are for tourists.”
“What I meant was that I’d like to volunteer. On your ship.”
“The ship is full.”
“I can fix any engine, diesel, gas, you name it.”
The man handed the book back. “As I said, the ship is full. But we always need volunteers on land. Most of our crew members began right here behind this table.”
Jake left his name with the girl in the beret and walked off. He looked back at the CDA booth and watched the man signing books, occasionally pausing to look up and scan the hall—as if he were looking out over the water and the people were nothing more than waves to him, to be sailed past on his way to the next battle.
Jake opened the flap of his book.
Jake —
Fortitudine Vincimus.
— Aeneas
That night, in his hotel room, an Internet search deciphered the message: By endurance, we conquer.
Endurance. Jake didn’t have the luxury of time to volunteer, to work his way up the CDA ladder, to wait until next season. He needed to be on that boat now, or give up entirely.
He stood at the window and looked down on the airport runway lights, then up at the approaching planes. On this remarkably smog-free evening, he saw the lights of three, then four of them, one after another, stars dropping from the sky. He thought of his father, who spent most of his life as an airline pilot before dying of a heart attack three years ago.
Every landing is just a controlled crash, said his dad, who was a Navy pilot before joining the airlines. He taught Jake to fly a Piper Warrior two-seater when he was seventeen, and a helicopter not long after. The helicopter was the most challenging—it was unstable in every direction. But Jake mastered the controls quickly, brought order to chaos. He didn’t know that those skills would play such a large role in his life, for both good and bad. He’d just been trying to please his old man. Those hours in the cockpit were the only hours Jake still remembered about
his father. They’d moved a lot, renting houses in nice neighborhoods, and Jake had idealized that existence, crediting the many schools he migrated through for his ability to assimilate anywhere. And still he was unable to assimilate here, at Rights for Animals, still unable to become one of them. But having a pilot for a dad was a surefire ingredient to a peripatetic life, to the life that Jake was living—one controlled crash after another.
Ethan
Ethan found Annie working the register in aisle three of the health food store. She didn’t notice him until after he had unloaded his basket onto the conveyor belt.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Just shopping.”
He watched her scan the vegan cheese and tofu hot dogs. She glowed in her bright green apron, her hair pulled back into two small ponytails, like one of those perfect actresses who attempt to dress down to play a certain role.
She held up a carton of almond milk. “This is for you?” she asked.
Ethan nodded.
She scanned a packet of fake chicken. “I thought you ate meat.”
“I’m cutting back.”
He handed her the reusable cloth sack he’d purchased the day before. “I even brought my own grocery bag.”
She eyed him suspiciously, then looked in the bag. “There’s something in here,” she said.
“That’s for you.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll see.” Annie rolled her eyes and reached in and removed a paperclipped batch of signed petitions, twenty-six pages in all, representing most of his colleagues at eCouplet.com, six residents from his apartment building, and the bartender at NuNu’s.
“How many?” she asked.
“Two hundred and fifty-five.”
“Including yours?”
“Including mine.”
She leaned toward him and he leaned forward to meet her, but the conveyer belt kept them apart. Ethan wanted to climb over and embrace her but he could sense impatient bodies to his left, mounting pressure to pay up and leave her for the next person in line.
