BUT I’M GETTING ahead of myself.
Back in Davis, Mr. Benson moved out of 309, the apartment directly below us. I knew Mr. Benson slightly, a man of indeterminate age, which usually means mid-forties, who’d once described himself to me as the only fat man in the city of Davis. He clerked at the Avid Reader bookstore and he often sang “Dancing Queen” in the shower, loud enough that we could hear it upstairs. I liked him.
For the last month he’d been up in Grass Valley, taking care of his mother. She’d died one day after Thanksgiving and clearly there’d been an inheritance, because Mr. Benson quit his job, paid off his lease, and hired a moving company to pack up his stuff. He himself never came back. I heard all this from Ezra, who also said, sadly, that Mr. Benson had turned out to be more of a slob than he’d ever let on.
While 309 was being cleaned, painted, repaired, and recarpeted for some new occupant, Ezra let Harlow move in. I’m guessing the apartment owner didn’t know this. Ezra was sorry to have her on the third floor with the miscreants, but ecstatic to have her in the building. He was in and out of 309 all the time; there was so much work to be done there.
Harlow escaped the disruptions, the lack of furniture, and possibly Ezra’s attentions by spending a good chunk of the day in our place. Todd glowered, but it was so temporary. Soon we’d all go home for Christmas and when we returned, someone would have moved in for real. Presumably, I told Todd, this someone would want the apartment without Harlow in it, but Todd wasn’t so sure about that.
My guess was that she’d eventually go back to Reg. I hadn’t seen Reg since that morning in his car, and Harlow had hardly mentioned him. I didn’t even know who’d broken up with whom.
Harlow sat on our couch, drinking our beers and talking feverishly about Lowell. He’d warned her he wouldn’t be back, but she hadn’t believed him. Like everything else he’d said, she passed this under the microscope of obsessional limerence. I was his sister. Of course, he’d be back, if only to see me.
What had he meant when he’d said she made him nervous? When he’d said he felt like he’d known her forever? Weren’t those two things contradictory? What did I make of them?
She wanted to know everything about him—what he’d been like as a little boy, how many girlfriends he’d had, how many of them serious. Who was his favorite band? Did he believe in God? What did he love?
I told her he loved Star Wars. Played poker for money. Kept rats in his room, most of them named after cheeses. She was enchanted.
I told her he’d had only one girlfriend all through high school, a wild-eyed Mormon named Kitch. That he’d played point guard on his high school basketball team but ditched the most important game. Shoplifted Twizzlers with his best friend, Marco. It was like dealing dope; nothing I said was enough. I grew impatient. I had papers to write.
But what had he said to me about her?
“He said he was glad we were friends,” I told her. “He said you really seemed to care about me.”
“I do!” Harlow’s face was a glowing orb. “What else?”
There was nothing else, but that seemed too cruel to be the right answer. Equally cruel to let her go on hoping. “Travers is gone,” I said, right into that glowing face. Maybe I was talking to myself as much as her. I’d spent half my life waiting for Lowell, and now we all just had to learn to live without that waiting. “Here’s the thing. He’s a wanted man. Like picture-in-the-post-office wanted. Wanted by the FBI as a domestic terrorist for the Animal Liberation Front. You can’t even tell anyone he was here or I’ll be arrested. Again. For real.
“Before this weekend, I hadn’t seen him in ten years. I don’t have the first fucking clue what his favorite band is. Travers isn’t even his name. You really, really, really need to forget about him.”
There I go again, not keeping my mouth shut.
Because what could be more Casablanca? Suddenly Harlow saw that what she’d always wanted was a man of principle. A man of action. A domestic terrorist.
Every girl’s dream, if she can’t have a vampire.
• • •
THE ANIMAL LIBERATION FRONT has no governing body, no headquarters, no membership roll. The structure is a loose one of autonomous cells. This is the headache for the FBI—one name leads at most to two or three others and then the line goes dead. Lowell had come to their attention by talking too much—a rookie mistake he’d never repeated (and ironic, considering all the times he’d said I couldn’t keep my mouth shut).
Anyone can join the ALF. In fact, anyone involved in the liberation of animals, anyone who physically interferes with their exploitation and abuse, is automatically a member so long as the action takes place according to ALF guidelines. The ALF will not countenance physical harm to any animal, human or otherwise.
Destruction of property, on the other hand—destruction of property is encouraged. The infliction of economic damage on those profiting from misery is a stated goal. As is the need to publicize abuse—bring those horrors occurring in their secret chambers out into the open. This is why a number of states are considering laws that make the unauthorized photographing of what goes on in factory farms and slaughterhouses a felony. Making people look at what is really happening is about to become a serious crime.
Just as membership is automatically conferred with direct action, no membership is possible without it. You don’t join the ALF by sympathizing. You don’t join by writing about how sorry and sad the suffering of animals makes you. You have to do something.
In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was under way. Torture damages the inflicter as well as the inflicted. It’s no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the military directly from a job as a chicken processor. It might be slow, Derrida said, but eventually the spectacle of our abuse of animals will be intolerable to our sense of who we are.
The ALF is not so interested in slow.
How can they be? All that misery, all that misery is now.
• • •
HARLOW DETERIORATED. Her face was swollen, her eyes red, her mouth pinched, her skin pallid. She stopped coming to our apartment, hadn’t touched the food in our refrigerator in two days, which probably meant she wasn’t eating. Ezra, tool belt slung low about his waist, called a summit meeting on the fourth floor—just him and me—to say that he’d recently come upon her lying facedown on the newly installed carpet of 309. She was maybe crying, he said. Ezra was one of those men so deeply unnerved by a woman’s tears he didn’t even need to see them.
He blamed Reg. For all his blithe confidence that he had his fingers on the pulse of the building and its occupants, Ezra had missed a beat. “You need to talk to her,” he told me. “Make her see that every ending is a new beginning. She needs to hear that from a friend.” He thought Reg might be a closeted homosexual or possibly a survivor of child abuse. Was he Catholic? If not, there was no explaining such cruelty and Harlow was lucky to have escaped when she did.
Ezra said he’d told Harlow that, in Chinese, close a door and open a door were represented by exactly the same character. He himself had taken great comfort from that same observation whenever times got tough. I don’t know where he got this, though most of his quotes came from Pulp Fiction. I’m reasonably confident it’s not true.
I told him that, in Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees, and that it wasn’t clear to me that the solution to Harlow’s heartbreak would be found in the ancient wisdom of the East. I didn’t go talk to her. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I had.
But I was still angry with her. Harlow, I felt, had no right to such grief, no real claim on Lowell. She’d known him for what? Fifteen minutes? I’d loved him for twenty-two years and missed him most of that time. Harlow should be taking care of me, is how I saw it.
I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that’s simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?
If so, jealousy is mine and it’s tempting to read this sad consistency as a matter of character. But my father, were he still alive, would surely protest. Who did I think I was? Hamlet? Current psychological research suggests that character plays a surprisingly small role in human behavior. Instead we are highly responsive to trivial changes in circumstance. We’re like horses in that, only less gifted.
I myself am not convinced. Over the years I’ve come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we’ve done and more to do with who they are. Of course, it suits me to think that. All those people in junior high who were so mean to me? What unhappy people they must have been!
So the studies don’t back me up. There’ll always be more studies. We’ll change our minds and I’ll have been right all along until we change our minds again, send me back to being wrong.
Till then let’s give this one to my father and let me off the hook. Maybe my jealousy mattered less than the fact that I had finals. I felt honor-bound to complete at least some of my classes. Plus I had a term paper due and while I wouldn’t say I’d left it to the last minute, only a paltry number of minutes remained. I was quite interested in my topic, which was surprising, because the professor had forced us to clear that with our TAs some weeks ago, back when there was no way to predict what I’d be interested in by the time I wrote it. My topic was how the theoretical accommodation of evil in Thomas More’s Utopia expressed itself in the real world of his own life and politics. It was one of those subjects to which everything that slithers across your brain seems relevant. I find this to be true of most topics.
And then there were all those phone calls I had to keep making about my suitcase. The woman who worked in luggage at the Sacramento Airport had started calling me sweet pea, that’s how intimate we’d become.
So I back-burnered Harlow, the last person in the world you should back-burner. And then, twenty-four hours before I was supposed to be on a plane to Indianapolis, while I was in the very midst of packing a duffel bag borrowed from Todd, humming “Joy to the World,” thinking about what I should and shouldn’t say to my parents about Lowell and whether the new house might be bugged, too, the way we’d always assumed the old one was, which drove my father crazy—like we were lab rats or something, under constant surveillance, your tax dollars at work, he’d say—and was probably the real reason they’d moved. As well as trying to figure out how to ask them for a new bike for Christmas, since I’d lost the last one in a drug-induced fugue. While all this was happening, a policeman came to the door.
It wasn’t Officer Arnie this time. This officer didn’t introduce himself. He had a triangular face, like a praying mantis, wide mouth, sharp chin, and a vibe of pure, implacable evil. He asked me to come with him nicely enough, but I sensed we weren’t going to be friends. He didn’t tell me his name, which was okay by me. I didn’t want to know it.