Unleashed, page 11
Fifty-five-year-old Randy Walters became a central source of information about these people. He was a neighbor and a lifelong Michigander, and he’d come to know this group over the five years they’d been in the area. He worked a small farm of his own and was a firefighter. After meeting him at the feedstore, they sought his advice. Some of the local residents regarded the group with skepticism, but Randy was touched by them, sometimes amused. His own sons and daughters had fled the area, seeing no future in farming and having no interest in leading a “life in the sticks.” So Randy took a paternal interest in these young people and was happy to help them out.
It was a steep learning curve, Randy reported. The young commune members had been city dwellers all their lives and knew next to nothing about farming. The first couple of years were a real struggle. The Upper Peninsula was a challenging place to farm, due to its short growing season and less-than-optimal soil. But after five years they were still at it. “They were tougher than I thought,” Randy told reporters. Still, every year they confronted new problems—infections, infestations, equipment breakdown—and he worried about their sagging spirits.
They were always talking about how rotten the world was and how soon it was likely to end. Given their bleak view of the future, Randy was surprised when they went ahead and had kids: four-year-old Zoe, three-year-old Henry, and a baby named Clara. There were four men and five women in the group, and Randy confessed he never knew exactly who was coupled and which of the adults were the parents of those kids.
“Some people around here suspected they were all doing it with each other—you know, free love and all that—but I never asked. If that’s what they wanted, have at it. But lots of folks disagreed with me.”
Randy had gotten into the habit of stopping by to check on them at least once a week. He enjoyed chatting with them, and they appeared to enjoy him too. He felt responsible for them, and his visits, he felt, lifted their spirits. His own too. Sometimes he saw them more frequently if they sought his advice on a problem.
“So, I go by one morning—a Wednesday—for a friendly chat. They’d recently taken to raising pigs, just a few, you know, and I don’t know a damn thing about raising pigs, but they loved to ask my advice anyway. They would tell me about those pigs, how smart they were and how much the kids loved them. It’s true, by the way—pigs are damn smart animals. They named all their animals, and they’d named one of their pigs Wilbur after that kids’ book. The little girl, Zoe, she just loved that pig. She would walk around the property with the pig on a leash as if it was a dog.
“So I drive up to the farmhouse, a big house, not in great repair. All nine of them lived there, along with the kids. A bit crowded, but they made it work. Right away I could see something was cockeyed. Usually there would be a bunch of them outside doing chores, but that day I didn’t see anyone. I go looking for them out back behind the house where the barn was and there was a yard there too, and I see some of the animals had gotten out of their pens and they were laying there in the grass. A couple of cows and some sheep and a couple of pigs. Just laying there, not the least bit interested in straying. And then I see the two kids, Zoe and Henry, they were there too. Zoe had her body draped over one of the pigs, maybe Wilbur, maybe not—I couldn’t tell those pigs apart. She was sobbing. Mommy! Mommy! I kept asking her what had happened, but she wouldn’t say. And Henry, he was sitting in the grass holding one of the chickens, his face right down in the chicken’s feathers and the chicken not doing anything to try to get away. I’ve never seen anything so strange in all my life.
“Where are your parents? I kept asking, and both children looked at me as if they had no idea who I was or what I was asking. Shell-shocked, you know? Like they’d been through something pretty bad.
“So much goes through your mind at a time like that. Corralling the animals. Finding the adults. I tried to get the kids to come with me into the house, but Zoe wouldn’t leave her pig, and then I thought maybe some intruder might be in there and it would be dangerous to go in with them. You know, my mind was going crazy with thoughts. At any rate, I left the children in the backyard and I went inside by myself. I wouldn’t normally just enter someone’s house without being invited, but I knew something was really wrong. I went in with my hand on my weapon. I was ready for anything, you know, bodies, bad guys, whatever. I walk around in there, real careful. It was eerie quiet and a terrible mess. There was laundry everywhere—you know, jeans and T-shirts and overalls and work boots and caps. Scattered everywhere in the living room and kitchen. Underwear too. Who leaves underwear in the kitchen?
“Then I go upstairs and I hear something coming from the end of the hallway. I go down there, real cautious, and, for the love of mike, there was the baby, little Clara, six months old, lying in her crib, whimpering. It’d been so long since I’d held a baby—but she was reaching up to me, so I picked her up. Poor critter. She had a dirty diaper, and she reeked something awful. I felt so bad for her. Such a lightweight innocent little thing.
“I go back outside with the baby to the backyard, where I’d left the other two kids. By then I knew we had a major problem underway, so I called the police.”
* * *
—
Randy’s story captivated large numbers of people, not just those in the Midwest, but people across the country. No one could find those nine commune members—the Michigan Nine, the press had started to call them—not after a week, not after two weeks. People wondered if maybe a hostile community member had done something to them. Remembering the abandoned clothes, people speculated that the nine commune members might have been forced to disrobe at gunpoint then were marched into a van stark naked, exposed and helpless. Some wondered if the disappearances of the Michigan Nine had anything to do with the women who’d gone missing in Mendocino and the Pacific Northwest. The big difference was that men had disappeared with the Michigan Nine, though much of the media focused on the event as if it had only included women. Women disappearing excited the media, but missing men seemed more ho-hum. It was hard to come up with any meaningful motive for a perpetrator except sex. Everyone seemed certain that sex was involved, though the people putting forth this certainty weren’t experts in forensics or sex crimes. They had no real idea how to explain any of those events. People kept expecting law enforcement to tell them what had happened, and then they felt naïve for believing that such disappearances could always be explained. Systems were breaking down all around—everyone should have known better.
The children had been taken into protective services, where they were under psychiatric observation. The baby seemed to be okay, but the three- and four-year-old were not doing well. They wouldn’t respond to questions about what had happened. They sobbed when they were separated from their favorite animals.
After a month passed no one still had any idea what had happened to the Michigan Nine. It made people think existential thoughts. It made them wonder if someday they, too, might disappear.
21
Some nights Philippa dreamed of Dar, vague images of them in a car, or walking along a ridge with a view out over the ocean, resembling a place in Mendocino she once went with her parents. In one dream they were walking along a beach strewn with dozens of resting elephant seals, still and imposing as the monuments of Stonehenge, animals so big they could easily crush a person, but he wasn’t afraid and neither was she. Weaving among them, they placed their hands on the leathery skin of the creatures’ backs, brushing off flies and parasitic creatures that appeared to be making homes there. They never talked in those dreams, and they never had sex, but she woke feeling aroused and furtive, as if she was harboring a terrible secret she must never divulge.
Everything around her began to look different. While the city was still chaotic, it no longer felt as if every passerby and every car was out to get her. She walked to campus feeling bold, determined to thwart whatever appeared. As little as a year earlier she would have confided all this to her mother, but now she felt stronger for telling no one.
He told her to call him Dar. Not in class, he said, but when she came to office hours. He couldn’t stand the formality of titles, and he said his identity as a professor was tenuous. She told him about her nicknames—how her parents called her Pippa, but she preferred Phipps. After that, she had a dream in which she was walking around campus repeating loudly: Dar. Dar. Dar. The force of his name spoken aloud made people jump out of her way.
Confident as she’d become, each time she made her way to his office she worried a little she was making a fool of herself. She thought of the mime she and her parents had seen on one of their trips to San Francisco, a guy in white face and a fedora on the corner of a downtown street pretending to be stuck in some room from which he couldn’t escape. They watched for a while—she was seven or eight and had never seen a mime before and wondered why his face was white—until her father rolled his eyes and urged them to move on. “My god,” he said when they’d passed out of earshot, “didn’t he get the memo that we’re done with mimes? You gotta feel sorry for the guy.” This had surprised Philippa. She’d liked the mime, but apparently the rest of the world thought he was pathetic. She wondered if people would roll their eyes at her now. How pathetic she was to be obsessed with her professor.
Their meetings had become almost ritualized: tea, Oreos, a little tossing of the baby basketball, which she was getting better at, his taking Alice onto his lap and indulging her with attention. They played a game in which each of them suggested an animal they might like to become. Dar often mentioned animals she’d never heard of. Tarsiers he liked because they had huge eyes that allowed them to see in the dark. Sea cucumbers did a kind of shape-shifting by turning themselves to liquid in order to slip into a crack before solidifying again. He liked the albatross too—of course she knew about albatrosses, but she had no idea they could fly up to ten thousand miles without having to rest. Even in this so-called game, he was teaching her.
To rise to his level, she did some research. Wouldn’t it be fun to be a lyrebird, who could mimic almost any sound, including chainsaws, lawn mowers, car alarms, barking dogs? Or maybe the mimic octopus, who could impersonate its predators? Or what about the self-healing axolotl?
Dar suggested the scarlet jellyfish, an animal with the talent for immortality. At the end of its adult life cycle it reverted to a polyp and started its life cycle again. “Well,” he said, “it’s really only theoretical immortality because the polyps can’t move and are fair game for predators. Still, it’s not a bad gig if you can get it.”
Philippa considered immortality. “I’m still figuring out this lifetime. I don’t know if I need more than one.”
“When you get to my advanced age you begin thinking another life would be pretty sweet.”
“You’re not so old.”
“Another four years and I’ll be looking forty straight in the eye. Funny how you can get so old and still feel like a kid.” He separated his Oreo and licked the cream with extra exuberance to underscore his point.
She watched herself beginning to flirt with him, collecting tidbits of information and observations she thought would please him. She used to think flirting was something you learned and decided to do. Now she saw it was a behavior that lived inside you like an instinct, waiting to be activated.
He told her chickens had thirty different alarm calls.
“I don’t think I’d like to be a chicken,” she said. “Not if they need thirty alarm calls. They must be scared all the time.”
Sometimes she was sure he had a crush on her too, but then, just as she was settling into the delicious possibility of reciprocity, some tiny thing would shift, something as small as the way he repositioned his body, and she felt herself becoming the pathetic mime again, the guy who imagined his audience was interested when they were really only humoring him.
One day Dar said he’d like to be an animal that moved gracefully. He brought up several YouTube videos: gazelles bounding over an African plain; a murmuration of starlings circling a church steeple; a school of bright blue angelfish gliding through a reef, changing direction in perfect unison. “Imagine moving like these guys,” he said wistfully. His aspiration touched her.
Another day he answered the door with his phone at his ear. “Gotta go. A student is here.” She hesitated, but he beckoned her inside. “Don’t forget. I’m still a working stiff,” he said into the phone as she passed through the doorway. The person on the other end of the line said something inaudible that prompted a gruff belly laugh from Dar before he hung up.
He told her it was his friend Ivan. Throughout their meeting she felt unbearably self-conscious again, and after ten minutes she made up an excuse to leave. She couldn’t stop thinking about the way he’d said working stiff, italicizing it with his voice, as if her arrival was a burden to him, an unpleasant reminder of his obligation. She’d thought he liked talking to her; it had seemed to her they were becoming friends. Now she saw it was possible he’d only been indulging her.
22
For two full days after Lu had removed the artwork George didn’t speak to her. Not a word. She had crossed a line she’d never crossed before. He was furious about a hole that had been poked in the Rothko. She overheard him on the phone talking to people who might fix it. The walls remained empty. On the third day a call came in from his mother, Abigail, in Florida. His father had had a stroke, and she needed his help. George had a brother in Maine and a sister in Vermont, but George was the go-to son, the youngest and last to launch himself. Because his parents had helped him out so much, he felt he owed them. Furthermore, Abigail was a forceful woman, impossible to refuse.
“Do you want to come with me?” he asked, knowing Lu would say no. How could they travel together when he wouldn’t even talk to her? Visits to George’s family were never easy to begin with, and to bring their current discord into a visit would be foolhardy.
“I doubt your mother wants me there at a time like this. I bet she wants you all to herself.”
He conceded she was probably right.
“And I should stay closer to Pippa, just in case.”
“Pippa is fine. You worry too much about her.”
“We have no idea, do we?”
“We need this break. It will be good for us. When I get back, a long talk is in order.” She turned her face so his kiss fell on her cheek. George drove himself to the San Francisco airport and flew to Florida, an irritated husband but an obedient son.
In his absence, Lu became a wanderer. A domestic nomad. She swam from room to room, a fish incapable of stopping. A hummingbird allergic to stillness. Insubstantial, lonely, missing Pippa with a poignancy she wouldn’t have thought possible.
Channeling young Pippa, she went outside and lay belly down in the grass, ear to the ground, listening. She didn’t hear anything special, only a distant chainsaw and some blackbirds in the trees, but it was pleasantly cool. A car approached, slowed, stopped. Lu remained still, eyes closed.
“Lu! Are you okay?” It was Julie, the spa owner from the ladies’ lunches, her former boss. “We missed you at Alyssa’s the other day. I’ve been meaning to email you. Gloria is doing the next one.”
Lu remained silent.
“Lu?” The car door opened.
“I’m fine!” Lu called. “Just napping. Sorry about the lunch—I just forgot.”
“No worries. Go back to your nap. Sorry to interrupt.”
Julie drove off. It occurred to Lu she should be embarrassed, but she wasn’t. She texted Pippa: Hey honey. That was all she could think of to say. She should tell Pippa about George’s father, but she didn’t have the energy. Fifteen minutes passed then a cat emoji appeared. Lu sent back a dog emoji. Pippa sent a fish. Lu sent a snake. Pippa sent something Lu didn’t recognize.
L: What was that?
P: Ferret.
L: I miss Emilio.
P: No, you don’t.
Lu closed her phone, proud of herself for knowing when to stop.
It suddenly occurred to her that Marley’s painting might be somewhere in the house, the painting George had bought for himself. She found it in his study closet. A three-by-five-foot encaustic painting featuring a bright red human heart against a pale orange background, a few nonsensical words carved here and there in the wax. She dragged her fingertips over the textured surface, noticing the M embedded discreetly in the lower left corner. To her surprise, Lu liked this piece—it wasn’t often that she and George shared the same taste in art.
She began another text to Pippa—Something has happened here—then deleted it. Since Pippa reached high school Lu had been on the verge of confiding in her, but at the last minute, she always decided against it. Why open floodgates best kept closed?
* * *
—
George called, and she answered out of habit. His mother sent her love; she was sorry Lu couldn’t be there too.
“Hello back to her,” Lu said. Abigail didn’t want her there. She had always condescended to Lu, believing George had married beneath his station: a woman with working-class origins who’d eschewed education. George’s parents had not traveled west for George and Lu’s wedding, a beautiful occasion held at the winery with two hundred guests in attendance, including Lu’s mother, but not George’s parents, who said it was too far for them to travel, though they routinely traveled to Europe. On their visits east Lu had tried to be cordial, to help Abigail around the house, and Abigail had always been overtly cordial back, but Lu could feel the underlying restraint and hauteur.
“It’s a shit show here,” George said. “My father can’t speak. He’s like some kind of an animal now—he eats and sleeps and shits. He can’t walk without a lot of help. There seems to be something going on in his brain, but it’s impossible to tell.”
