I OMITTED MORE from my breakfast with Lowell than his instability. I also omitted a great many of the things he’d said. These things were too ghastly to repeat, and really you already know them. I omitted them because they were not things I wanted to hear and you don’t want to hear them, either.
But Lowell would say that we all have to.
He’d told me about an experiment here in Davis that lasted thirty years. Generations of beagles were exposed to strontium-90 and radium-226, their voice boxes removed so that no one would hear them suffering. He said that the researchers involved in this jocularly referred to themselves as the Beagle Club.
He talked about car companies that, as part of their crash studies, subjected fully conscious and terrified baboons to repeated, horrific, excruciating blows to the head. About drug companies that vivisected dogs, lab techs that shouted at them to cut the shit if they whined or struggled. About cosmetic companies that smeared chemicals into the eyes of screaming rabbits and euthanized them afterward if the damage was permanent or else did it to them again if they recovered. About slaughterhouses where the cows were so terrified it discolored the meat. About the stuffed battery cages of the chicken industry, where, just as my uncle Bob had been saying for years, they were breeding birds that couldn’t stand up, much less walk. About how chimps in the entertainment industry were always babies, because by adolescence they’d be too strong to control. These babies, who should have still been riding on their mother’s backs, were shut into isolated cages and beaten with baseball bats so that later, on the sets of movies, merely displaying the bat would assure their compliance. Then the credits could claim that no animals had been harmed in the filming of this movie, because the harm had all happened before the shooting began.
“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.”
They, my brother said, whenever he talked about humans. Never us. Never we.
A few days later, I recounted all these same things in my blue-book final exam for Religion and Violence. It was a sort of exorcism to write them down, an attempt to get them out of my head and into someone else’s. This ended in Dr. Sosa’s office, under a poster-sized full-color print of the Hubble photograph “Pillars of Creation.” A quote hung on the opposite wall: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Dr. Sosa’s office was clearly meant to inspire.
I also remember it as festive. Strings of Christmas bubble-lights festooned the bookshelves, and he had candy canes for us to suck on while we talked. “I don’t want to flunk you,” Dr. Sosa said, and we were on the same page there; I didn’t want that, either.
He sat sprawled back in his desk chair, his feet crossed over a makeshift pile of magazines. One hand, resting on the roll of his belly, rose and fell with his breath. The other held the candy cane with which he occasionally gestured. “Your earlier work was good, and your final . . . your final had a lot of passion in it. You raised a bunch of really important issues.” Dr. Sosa sat up suddenly, put his feet on the floor. “But you must see that you didn’t answer the actual test questions? Not even close?” He leaned forward to force me into friendly eye contact. He knew what he was doing.
So did I. Did I not train at my father’s knee? I mirrored his posture, held his gaze. “I was writing about violence,” I said. “Compassion. The Other. It all seemed pertinent to me. Thomas More says that humans learn to be cruel to humans by first being cruel to animals.” I’d made this point in my blue-book essay, so Dr. Sosa had already withstood Thomas More. But as I’d leaned forward, Christmas lights had sprung from his temples like incandescent, bubbling horns. My side of the argument suffered as a result.
In point of fact, Thomas More doesn’t advocate doing away with cruelty to animals so much as hiring someone to manage your cruelty for you. His main concern is that the Utopians keep their own hands clean, which has turned out to be pretty much the way we’ve done it, though I don’t think it’s been as beneficial to our delicate sensibilities as he’d hoped. I don’t think it’s made us better people. Neither does Lowell. Neither does Fern.
Not that I’ve asked her. Not that I know for sure what she thinks about anything anymore.
Dr. Sosa read the first test question aloud. “‘Secularism arose primarily as a way to limit violence. Discuss.’”
“Tangentially pertinent. Do animals have souls? Classic religious conundrum. Massive implications.”
Dr. Sosa refused to be diverted. Second question: “‘All violence that purports to have a religious basis is a distortion of true religion. Discuss with specific reference to either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.’”
“What if I said science could be a sort of religion for some people?”
“I’d disagree.” Dr. Sosa sat back happily. “When science becomes a religion, it stops being science.” The bubble-lights gave his dark eyes a holiday twinkle; like all good professors, that man did love an argument.
He offered me an incomplete, because I’d been so attentive in class all quarter, because I’d come to his office and put up a fight. I accepted.
My grades came just after Christmas. “Do you have any idea what we’re paying for you to go to that college?” my father asked. “How hard we work for that money? And you just piss it away.”
I was learning a ton, I told him loftily. History and economics and astronomy and philosophy. I was reading great books and thinking new thoughts. Surely that was the point of a college education. I said that the problem with people (as if there were only one) is how they think everything can be measured in dollars and cents.
Between my grades and my attitude, my name went right onto Santa’s naughty list.
“I’m speechless,” my mother told me, which wasn’t remotely true.