Animal, Mineral, Radical

by BK Loren

  After dinner, I turned on my computer and looked up Kwajalein. YouTube showed videos of the shelling my father was a part of, the aftermath of it, the cleanup. Soldiers walked among dead bodies. They sat with their backs to the woodpiles that were once buildings, their faces young and uncarved and shiny with sweat. They smoked cigarettes on the black-and-white screen. I was grateful I was not seeing this in living color. Any one of those soldiers could have been the man who had raised me: my father, first angry and quiet, and now gentle and old. Things evolve.

  As I fell asleep that night, I remembered a story my father had told me of his growing up. He used to tell it over and over again, each time with a smile.

  “We lived out on the Great Plains of Colorado. Not the Colorado you see in the picture postcards,” he would say, “but the part that looks like Nebraska because it almost is.” When he spoke, I imagined the flatness of the earth, the dry, windblown land, dust devils rising up in swirls now and again, then settling back to earth.

  His family worked as ranch hands, sleeping in the barn, eating what was given to them. The charge for the males among the ranch hands was to break horses. There was no whispering involved. Instead, my grandfather and uncle used two-by-fours to beat the horses into submission.

  But my father was not about to beat horses. Not when he was five, not when he was ten, or even twenty. He knew this in his bones, he said, from the day he was born. He knew it was wrong. So his brother and father went out beating horses, and my father, who was not allowed in the house during the day (women’s work), was tethered to the clothesline out there on the plains.

  In the story he told over and again, he’d say, “Oh it was a good time. So much to discover, the insects, the birds, a whole world right there under that clothesline!”

  I was young and stupid enough to believe his joy. He said it with a smile, like he said everything else that didn’t make sense to me, as if every hardship was a joke. It made me angry. And I hated him for it.

  The next December, my father missed our family Christmas celebration. He’d been hospitalized with complications from diabetes. By then, I’d had a few hardships myself. There was a gentleness between us, an understanding. We talked about my life and my life partner, Lisa.

  “Your relationship,” he said to me from his hospital bed, “I didn’t used to get it. I thought it was wrong.” He shook his head. “I want you to know I get it now. There’s so much love between you.”

  Three days before he died, when the nurse asked him how many children he had, he held up four fingers to show her, then took it all back and added one more. “Who did you forget?” the nurse asked. He pointed proudly to Lisa.

  Somewhere in the time I spent with him as he was dying, his story came full circle, in my view. When I was a teenager, I knew the boy who had been tethered to the clothesline, now a man bursting with anger and unable to express an emotion. As an adult, I came to know the child my father was, the boy who refused to beat horses and grew up to be a man who wept openly for a lost island that was once full of life. The two were one and the same human.

  Before he died, my father had one request: to go home and have a big meal. A feast, he called it. He gave me one hundred dollars and said, “Go shopping. Buy food for a feast!” When I tucked the money back into his shirt pocket, he looked at me blankly. “What the hell am I going to do with this where I’m going?” he asked. He shoved the hundred bucks back at me.

  So with money as my only weapon, I hunted the aisles of the grocery store and came home with a turkey, yams, cranberries, potatoes, green beans, pumpkins, wine, nuts, fruit, a feast! The dinner table looked like an autumn landscape—red, orange, burgundy, deep green—with steam rising from the colors like fog. The house smelled of sage and cinnamon. We—my mother, father, Lisa, my youngest brother and older sister—gathered around the table. Fire glowed at the center, candles flickering in tribute to the now-defunct fire pit.

  We clinked glasses, and my father made a toast that has always seemed odd to me: “At least we have this dinner,” he said. As if there had been so many things before that had fallen short. As if we had spent most of our lives miscommunicating and fighting about small things. As if somehow our last months together were what mattered, and those months culminated in this single night, this feast.

  A few days later, my father took his last breath. Lisa and I were holding his hands when his gravelly lungs sputtered to silence.

  Philopatrism: one word evolved from two, love and father. It had brought me home.

  At least we have this dinner.

  What self-preservation and the quest for food did during millions of years of evolution was to transform a particular family of apes into two-legged super-animals.3

  Further evolutions confound us to this day. In the world of primates, both bonobos and chimps are so genetically close to us that many scientists contend we probably share the same genus (Homo).4 But these same scientists are unsure why some Homo sapiens seem to be more closely related to bonobos, while others appear to be part of the chimp lineage. When bonobos greet strangers, for instance, they break the ice with a little sexual healing. When conflict arises, they work it out by making love face-to-face, a rare position in the undomesticated animal kingdom. Among bonobos, same-sex love is even more common than in chimp culture, and females are the center of society.

  Chimps, on the other hand, often greet strangers by making war and defending territory. In a conflict, violence is almost inevitable. Same-clan murders occur regularly. Males dominate the social structure, and chimps rarely, if ever, make love face-to-face.

  One common denominator found in both bonobo and chimp, however, is the love of food: the social nature of eating, the joy of sharing a simple meal. As omnivores, they forage all day long, munching delectables. But after a particularly successful hunt, they sometimes have a proper sit-down, sharing their meal with a large group.

  The winter after my father died, I found myself still in Colorado, walking early mornings through the streets of my hometown, vaguely hoping for another peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a family feast, something, anything to fill me. By then, my mother had joined my father, and both their bodies had turned to dust. As they disintegrated back to earth, my remaining family exploded like an errant firework—sparks flying, confusion, embers of memory suspended, and then, complete darkness. In the midst of it all, my youngest brother (who has a form of autism) became homeless, and although I had the chance to take him in, I opted not to. Instead, I found him an apartment and offered to pay all but fifty dollars of his rent. But this was not his choice. And so, soft and gentle, intelligent and confused as he was, he ended up on the streets.

  When he did, I began having a recurring dream in which I had murdered someone. The first scene of the dream showed me standing before a bloodied body that had been pummeled beyond recognition. I was the killer. The biggest part of me wanted to confess, but I could not bear the pain my confession would cause my partner and those I loved. And so, selfishly, I took the body into a muddy swamp and buried it. As I write this, I can still smell the musty-wet scent of the mud, can feel the fleshy arms and legs as I wept and shivered and covered the man I had killed.

  Frightening as the dream was, it never woke me from sleep. Instead, it dropped vivid as a memory into my mind midday—so vivid that, in midconversation with someone, my chest would cave, my heart would race, and I would grope for a place to sit down, literally gasping for air. For a few long minutes, I could not make sense of it. The dream felt as if I had lived it, as if this was some other side of me that had bloomed in the night (the werewolf myth, the dual mind of a serial killer) and somehow I had suppressed it. I thought I should see a psychologist to figure out the meaning of the dream, to make the recurrences stop. But it carried such emotional impact that I worried the psychologist, too, might think I had this shadow side that killed in the night and shrank back into my quiet bed by morning. I pictured myself confessing to some cold case, living the rest of my
life incarcerated, convinced I had committed the ultimate crime.

  Guilt is very likely an adaptation unique to humans. My guess is, guilt has evolved over time to instill the virtue of uncertainty in the otherwise vastly arrogant two-legged super animals. As the dream recurred, I thought of Carlos, of his family, of what sadnesses and situations had led them to let Carlos go, away from them forever. I imagined them driving by, seeing Ragman on Central Avenue, knowing he slept behind the bookstore where he eventually burned.

  I began searching regularly on the Internet for my brother. Nothing. No trace. I wondered what I would do if I found him. Take him a peanut butter sandwich? Sit with him on a musty couch, surrounded by a torn construction-paper skyline of spent volcanoes lit by a saffron sunrise? Knowing that the beauty of predawn light doesn’t change a thing, even though it is there, every day, in all its glory?

  Yes, I think that’s what I’d do. My brother Tack and I would sit and eat, and reminisce a little, maybe talk about our earliest shared memory: when my older brother, the one everyone admired, shot and killed a number of birds in the field behind our home. Tack and I collected the feathered corpses and made coffins for each, and the field transformed into a bumpy graveyard where song had once been. Maybe my brother and I could talk about that. Or about the time when I first realized there may have been something off about my shy brother, when a kid down the street threw a football too hard and knocked the wind out of me. Tack, already man-sized in eighth grade, came at the kid, beat him to a pulp, and never showed an emotion. He punched the guy with the same thump-thump-thump that came out of him when he watched Jeopardy! and recited the answers before any contestant tapped the buzzer. When questioned about why he beat the guy, Tack shrugged: no words.

  Here’s another thing I remember about Tack. He almost never joined the family for Thanksgiving dinner. Even as a child, he begged to be left out of the gathering. If he did join, he ate fast, then got up and left. As an adult, he claimed to have other things to do (though he didn’t date, and he had only one friend, a guy the family had only seen once or twice over the course of a decade, or so). Then one day I found out the truth: that Tack was ditching the family on Thanksgiving to go down to the homeless shelter and serve food. There but for the grace of the angels, and then the angels took flight. I don’t know how many years he did this, or when he stopped doing it. I remember seeing, on his dresser, a small stack of letters thanking him for volunteering regularly.

  The loss of the [wild] chimp and gorilla seems imminent. Moving chimps into the human genus might help us to realize our very great likeness, and therefore treasure more and treat humanely our closest relative.

  —Morris Goodman, Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences5

  I strive for the bonobo side of the animal that I am. Being human, I mostly fail. I think of Ragman, of my father, of the people who lived on the island of Kwajalein before my father and his ship arrived. I think of the horses my father refused to beat. I think of my homeless brother as I eat my warm meal in my brick house, and I feel the angels brushing wings with the likes of me, a land animal who wants to believe in flight but is given to fits of gravity. On Thanksgiving, I feel my brother with me, and I know it’s a comfort I’ve devised for my own selfishness. I want to believe that gratefulness can heal me. I want to believe in Thanksgiving, that one day set aside for gratitude can bring people together in our nation.

  This is what Sarah Josepha Hale believed in 1863, when her seventeen years of letter writing to the White House finally made a difference and Thanksgiving became a national holiday.6 It was not the pilgrims bursting the seams of their Puritan penguin suits that gave us Thanksgiving, after all. No, it was Sarah Hale, who hounded first President Buchanan and then President Lincoln, begging them to set aside a day to celebrate “the power of food, women, and home.” Hale wasn’t the first to suggest such an idea—people had been proposing different versions of the holiday as early as Thomas Jefferson’s presidency—but Ms. Hale’s vision remained clear, even as Civil War scarred our land. In 1863, at the height of the war between states, President Lincoln finally acquiesced to Hale’s specific requests.

  And so on the fourth Thursday of every November—originally it was the fourth Tuesday—I sit with my family (no blood relations here, all choices made with the heart) and give thanks. We pass yams and stuffing and turkey, and we celebrate every bite, every dollop, every sip of wine. We laugh and we light candles and we have a feast, because at least we have this dinner, this time together. That evening, I go to bed and feel satiated right down to the pores of my bones. The bed cradles me, and I sleep curled next to the one I love, surrounded on the bed by five animals and so much gratitude.

  In the morning I wake to a world that pulses beauty in its sunrise veins, but whose little cells of people seem doomed to repeat rather than evolve. I am among them, the déjà vu of centuries, millennia, the wars of eons, of gods, of islands blasted to barrenness. But the sunrise is still saffron, melting above solid mountains, and the beauty drips from the sky onto the human mess of us all. And after centuries, millennia, eons of eating—of stuffing my privileged self to the gills that I no longer have—I wake hungry, achingly starved to become more human: the beautiful animal in the core of me craving the evolution of it all.

  BACK WORDS

  I would like to be a fool. A raven. A coyote. A man whose body is painted in wide bands of alternating black and white, my face like a zebra’s, my body a totem. I would be particularly foolish should I become such a man, because as I sit here today, I am a woman. But fools do things backwards, the lines between man and woman, animal and human, heaven and earth, not so clearly delineated as they are to us, the rational ones whose bodies are all one color.

  I would like to be a fool. I would like to wash my hands in dirt, feel the cool, brown earth cleanse me of my sorrows, my pride, my arrogance, and of the belief that cleanliness is next to godliness, when god is most likely dirt, the gritty transformation, my hands like a seed in that solid darkness, like the roots of a tree, all creation beginning beneath this surface. I would like to dry off with water, to be constantly warm in that submersion, the water pressing my body close, a constant fluidity I could not escape, my skin breathing like gills, the substance of life folding around me. I would like to step in the same river once. I would like to learn from water, the way it penetrates without force, the way it wears away all that is solid, stubborn, immutable, the way it understands time, the way rivers tick ahead constantly without praying for immortality, the way they are full at every moment, though we see them rise and fall, the way water connects islands without destroying solitude, the subtle connections between, the silence of water.

  I would like to be a fool. I would like to walk backwards, never forward. I would still reach new places, my movement always ahead, but my eyes cast behind me so that I might see where I have been, where I have come from, the troubles that have beset my course of action, the reasons I have had for celebration, for sorrow, for gratitude, my history, the collective history from which I have emerged and which I am still creating. I would like to keep my eyes always on these things because, looking back, there is always something substantial, and looking ahead, there is an emptiness I cannot help but want to fill—but oh, the more richly I might fill it with the knowledge of what has come before. Living in the present is overrated. It is walking with the rhythm of the past in your bones that matters. The fool lives in the past and is forever in the moment, a Zen mistake, a clock without a battery, its hands spread open on either side of noon.

  I would like to be a fool. I would like to say hello when I am leaving, goodbye when I am coming. In this manner, I would remember, from the beginning, the potential for loss, and so might learn to treasure before losing; as I bid farewell, I would remember the potential for return, all things circling as they do, into something like fullness, small moments of completion that weave together, like Penelope’s cloth, doing and undoing themselves by turns, an un
finished pattern that guides a weary traveler home, as when Athena says to Odysseus, “Keep the unnameable word in your heart,” and the man, poor rational hero, remains adrift for yet another decade, trying to speak what could not be spoken—the word in his heart, his home; the journey at hand, his home.

  I would like to be a fool, to keep the unnameable word in my heart, to speak in silence, in silence to speak, to move in stillness, to be still in movement, to end at the beginning, to begin at the end.

  I would like to be a fool.

  RADICAL

  AS IN ROOTSY, OF THE EARTH, DIGGING TO THE ORIGIN, RESULTING IN CHANGE

  LEARNING FEAR

  Friday night and the gals and I are driving around, doing nothing but being teenagers. Vicki and Laura are sitting in the front seat, smoking cigarettes; I’m hanging my head out the back window because the ashy-sharp scent burns my nose. My eyes water as the cool, dry wind smacks my eyeballs. Laura’s driving. She’s sixteen, blond, Italian, pretty. Stevie Wonder’s singing, “You are the sunshine of my life,” on the radio, and Vicki, the oldest among us, already pregnant at seventeen, is drinking a Pepsi, flicking the ash off her Kool. We’re laughing so loudly we can barely hear the music, and then we’re suddenly quiet, so quiet there’s time enough for me to notice that the layered silhouette of the mountains against the fading blue sky is beautiful, the tenacity of daylight holding on against the darkness that inevitably falls. Laura Deloria and I have known each another since first grade, and although my military family has moved about while hers has remained here in Colorado, I have always considered her my best friend, even during the years when we never spoke. I have little in common with Laura now, other than this, the distant love we share, a recognition of time passed. That’s what I’m thinking when a truckload of guys pulls up next to us and Vicki, for no reason, rolls down the window, bats her eyes, and says to the football player closest to her, “Excuse me, sir. Do you suffer from impotence?”