Zodiac Pets, page 22
During community studio time, he knocked off a spry white egret with a raised foot. The next morning at breakfast Athena hired him for piecework, crafting paddles and switches from scratch. It was his first paid labor since the Beat.
A supermajority at a special assembly allowed him to move into the ideal nook for his solitary moments and post-session healing: the studio apartment under the Muskrat’s porch. On Friday nights he joined in the weekly assembly and voted on all matters after lengthy debates in which he increasingly played a decisive role. His judgment was respected. His root beers, which he gulped in lieu of the red wine that had become a tradition on assembly nights, were misinterpreted as a firm statement on the importance of sobriety in direct democracy.
He didn’t win every initiative. His proposal to rechristen the Muskrat Colony as the clearly more beautiful-sounding Peacefield—after the Adams-family homestead—flopped. He carved a sign for his room instead.
All this time, he kept the Pennacook pad. He may have feared being burned by the Muskrat, as he’d been by Josephine, and tossed out homeless in Maynard. He periodically popped into his old rooms. They and his remaining things were tidy but seemed smaller, as if receding.
In early spring, Auntie Lil “passed in her sleep, painlessly, of old age.” This was what they told Jeremy Wiggins and put in the obit, though who really knew. Her will designated Graham as Jeremy’s lawful guardian, or even parent—if they wished. Why not go all the way? they quickly agreed. Graham adopted Jeremy as his son and they amended his name to Jeremy Quincy Adams Bundt.
One night early in their new family’s history, they were popping cocktail wieners in Peacefield—they had managed to cram bunk-beds into the studio—when Jeremy said, “I don’t want to eat this every night.”
“Every man has his limits,” Graham said, smiling inwardly. He had already stocked up on the easy good stuff: apples, bananas, and cucumbers, plus multivitamins, low-sodium vegetable juice, and those salad bags. He was in the market for an Italian cookbook.
They wouldn’t share a roof for long. Bounty Bag’s hovering probes (upside-down tin salad bowls with dangling cables) eventually circled back to Pennacook. An assistant manager from Chelmsford, Store #32, monitoring the probes’ progress remotely from his virtual cockpit in the store’s crow’s nest, found Jeremy adrift in long-term unemployment. It was a slow, cool, late-summer day. Jeremy had accompanied Graham to the Beat for companionship. Through the window the probe’s red eye spied him playing Minesweeper (1989), a frustrating “classic” that Graham had pushed. The Chelmsford manager checked his files: here was an untapped resource. He pressed the red button and, speaking through the squawk-box, offered Jeremy a senior-sacker position on the spot. Jeremy flung open the window.
“What’s that you say?”
“Welcome aboard,” the probe said, assuming he had accepted. (The mics were not yet up to snuff on these probes.)
That same afternoon an emissary arrived at the Beat carrying Jeremy’s maroon tie. After a brief and clarifying exchange, the tie was accepted. While Graham had him, he flagged for the emissary an old grievance against the company: Bounty Bag’s snub when he tried to work there after high school and they barred him for flatfoot—the very reason he’d decamped to Woonsocket.
“Flatfoot? What are we, the Green Berets?” He checked his tablet. “Ah.”
“What?”
“Your mama nixed it. Said an Adams will sack groceries over my dead body.”
To ease Jeremy’s commute, he moved out of Peacefield and into Graham’s old digs. A rare and mysterious new bus line, perhaps Bounty Bag’s doing, departed in the fog of morning from Pennacook Depot on its way to Chelmsford, then trundled back at day’s end. Graham visited every day after work to cook them dinner, pack Jeremy’s lunch for the next day, and maybe catch a cartoon classic on the old projector.
For all major holidays, and many made-up-seeming Muskrat ones, Jeremy joined Graham in Maynard to celebrate. Even on the Fourth, Old Glory was not to be raised without significant consternation and strife, something Graham never understood.
Graham was no inventor. But one afternoon, as he watched Jeremy struggle to mount and steady the Avalancher, his hard-tailed mountain bike, he hit on a business idea that seemed such a useful and humane extension of the balance bike as to qualify for Adams-level plaudits. He wouldn’t sell balance bikes generally. He’d market them instead as an adult bike for people like Jeremy who, because of a disability, couldn’t ride the pedaled bike. He restructured as a non-profit and started tweaking the website.
The thought had briefly crossed his mind before. This was shortly after Josephine left him. Jeremy had sneered at his dirty old line of Bundterbikes, which looked so frumpy next to the Avalancher (truly awesome in its way). Discouraged, Graham had dismissed the idea as utterly uncool and worthless, about what he thought of himself at that time. But now he relaunched the concept with a new force and a focus on a sleeker design that amped up the fun factor. Sensing his excitement, Athena made room in her workshop for Graham to build a prototype. With assembly approval, she even dipped into the Muskrat budget for a non-sexual saw for Graham to use for the wooden frame. It turned out that a cosmetic refresh—matte-black paint job, a couple of chrome attachments, and a constellation of lightning-bolt stickers—was all it took to win Jeremy’s heart.
An afternoon balance-bike through Maynard Center revealed the banks were up to their old tricks again, hawking trap-door rates. Graham rode by. He was content to go it alone now, perhaps because, in a larger sense, he wasn’t.
Autumn
November 4, 2032
Dear Diary:
As you know, I didn’t meet my deadline. Senior Week came and went, as did the rest of June, July, and August. But autumn has been fruitful! While dabbling in my next project (a roman-à-clef based on the Bounty Bag supermarket protests of 2013), I’ve gradually come to realize that the “Spring Break” interludes—along with these diary entries—do belong in Zodiac Pets. They add a retrospective dimension without which it is hard to understand who I was as a kid or the aspiring grown-up she became.
I’ve decided to just dump them in chronologically. No more edits, no false smoothing. Final one is next.
WLZ.
Quito, Ecuador
Postlude: Quito
We went directly from Commencement back to Pennacook, where, like a kid, I lived with my mom, in my old room, for ten weeks. Except it wasn’t only Mom but also Mr. Susco. It had been a slow dance, but in the four years I was away, Mom had romanced him (and his droid-torso Annika) out of his dumpster and married him.
The match makes sense. Like Graham, both are dreamers. For all Mr. Susco’s talk of how democracy isn’t utopia—that “it isn’t a plan, it’s a way”—he sure gets misty about it. He had converted Mom to the ideal of participatory self-government, and that summer the two of them wasted no time cooking, reverting to Red Barons and other such frozen delicacies, so they could speed off to their next “assembly,” their catch-all term, used only half in jest, for any meeting whatsoever, even of the Pennacook Tic-Tac-Toers. I’d wish them the best and as soon as they were gone, I would ring up dear Lena in Grafton Hill.
I didn’t know if we were together or not. We had gotten back together and broken up so many times and I had thought—known—we had broken up the last time we had discussed the perennial topic. But then on the phone she said she was glad we were still together. It felt like a reprieve, and I let it pass, hoping she wouldn’t forget that and later tell me she was happy we had broken up. Early summer, we corresponded only like that, via text and phone. She was an hour’s drive away, and we both had access to our parents’ cars, but in that strange after-college time small distances seemed vast and between the familiar parental walls one felt the need to petition for one’s freedoms. The broad world had redrawn its curtain.
Lena was preparing with increasing dread for Vietnam. She knew no one there and was quietly terrified of another breakdown, this time on her own. I was lukewarm on grad school and in late June received a response to a long-forgotten fellowship application to work with the orphans from Venezuela and Columbia, in Quito, Ecuador. They not only had a slot for me. They’d had a last-minute cancellation and could offer a position to my partner, too. An escape plan formed.
“Do you want to?” I asked in a phone call.
“Am I?”
“What.”
“Your partner.”
“For sure.”
“I’ll consider it.”
I had decided we would not part. Not only “not yet” but possibly never—if she’d have me. My reasons for wanting to leave her—they, more than Jesus, had driven our repeated breakups—didn’t make sense anymore. I had told myself and Lena that I would leave her because she could never be happy, that cribbed line of Josephine’s. But while we were apart, I had done another one of my self-scans and determined that I, of all people, am equipped to handle Lena’s sadness.
You may think I’m replaying a script. I failed to save my dad, and here’s my chance to relive that again: by burying my future in this new doomed person. No. It doesn’t bother me at all. There are people like me who not only can stand it but whom it simply doesn’t harm. Some of us even see it as a bargain, for everything we get from our Lenas. (I’m with the nineteenth century in thinking melancholy is often joined to wisdom and humor.) Besides, if people like me, who can handle the unhappy, reject them, too, what will happen to them? Where will they go? At the risk of writing a movie poster: Love isn’t a plan. It’s a way.
In July we met at Splash World in Agawam, our first date since college.
“Happiness is shallow and undefined, don’t you think?” I said out of the blue. It was standard-issue college-dorm bull but no less true for that.
“What?” Lena asked. She was eating one of her favorite treats, fried dough with tomato sauce, from the snack stand.
“There are more important things.”
“Mm.”
She gave her answer in the parking lot. The orphans of Ho Chi Minh City would have to find another tutor (we were assured there was a line): Lena agreed to join me in Ecuador.
Quito is bold. It’s not so much in the mountains as in the volcanoes, a crown of momento mori that suits us well as we settle down to our sober math and English-grammar duties. We are on a narrow colonial street, steps from Plaza de la Independencia and the presidential palace, which I can see now through our shutters as I write this. Most mornings are summery, with an equatorial brightness. In the afternoons, there are cooling thunderstorms, and in the evenings a fog rolls in and enshrouds the palms. Down the street, there’s a fading mural of the quintessential old man of Quito, a dapper gentleman in black suit, hat and glasses, off to the café for his coffee and papers. I see more of the compact old women, some in Indigenous clothes (derbies, shawls, stockings, and flats), others city workers in belted uniforms with vests. They are quiet and busy. If their path meets a crowd on the plaza, of the tourists or the protestors with their drums and their whistles, they do not commune, unless they are peddling, or go around but pass through.
The other women in our lives are the nuns at Santa Lucía, the Catholic-billionaire-funded orphanage that granted us the fellowship. The sisters had eagerly greeted us just past customs at Mariscal Sucre but quickly came to worry precisely how Lena and I were partners. There was an uncertain and precarious moment by the curb. Then sometime during the bus ride into Old Town, they settled in favor of a misunderstanding that served everyone’s interest. We were business partners, they informed us: a teaching team. They commenced their doting, which continues to this day.
On the table beside me is a book entitled Ecuador: Land of Enchantment. It is a children’s book from the English Lending Library. I had consulted a similar one in elementary school in Bedford Corners, for my country project. A children’s book is ideal when you want to learn hard surface facts about a place and then experience and interpret it yourself. Land of Enchantment is shorn of travel-guide hucksterism yet strikes a hopeful chord that isn’t provably wrong and is certainly a more fruitful starting point than froth. Injustice is recast as one of the country’s several collective “challenges.” A very recent history of revolt is “fast-paced politics.” The book predisposed me to root for Ecuador, and I do.
Our first week, we had an experience that sealed my bond with Lena while also removing the corrosive taint of pity. We had flown to Coca, for a bus to a canoe to a walk into the Amazon rainforest. The billionaire requires that all teachers take this enriching trip. The first day was the cultural part and of greater interest to me. Two women from the P. community told us about their mostly still Indigenous way of life and then they fried plantains and let us shoot blow-darts at a plastic monkey. Down by the canoes, I had a brief exchange with one of the women that recalled the seemingly mythological writings that Mr. Susco had shared from forced prodigy William James Sidis.
“How does the community make decisions?” I asked.
Through slow translation, the woman said they elected a president and vice president who served one year. They did not make decisions. They came up with proposals. Then the whole community met and voted. You could vote when you became an adult at twelve.
“Is this an old way of making decisions?”
“Very old.”
“Was it before or after the Spanish?”
“I don’t know. It’s old.”
“Vice president,” for one, didn’t sound like an ancient Indigenous word. On the other hand, I didn’t recall the sixteenth-century Spanish being big on democracy the last time I’d met them, in my high-school World Civilizations textbook. Maybe something of this democracy did go back that far or further, even predated the perfect democracy of the Pennacook that Sidis had depicted.
The exchange excited me more than I would have expected. If direct democracy happened once you knew we could do it, and if it failed it might come back like any other truth. But if you found it in many times and places—Ecuador, Athens, Iceland, New England; Tlaxcalla, the Pennacook, and the Muscogee Creek; the Muskrat and the Bari Corporation—it seemed not only a prospect but consistent with our nature, well in range. And if we can do that on the small or medium scale, why can’t we still pull off a more representative democracy (sort of the part-time version) as countries? If anything, it should be easier to save, if we care to.
I e-mailed Mr. Susco. He wasn’t surprised. He re-sent the excerpts from The Tribes and the States and circled back to his hypothesis that our wobbling national democracy, if not Pennacook’s shoddy local one, “may yet draw on its reserve energy and once more be the world’s best example.”
I don’t know about that. The signs aren’t good. Yet I hope in this rewrite I have corrected for the defects I noted at the outset. Here in Zodiac Pets, with its hinged-together structure of my story, both then and now, and Graham’s, I have perhaps evoked something closer to what I believe in. Rather than the perfect or the shattered, the cracked and tattered whole: all that a country or person can be. I am reminded of something that our greatest and most suicidal president said. For a free people, political existence—like life—is a choice. In its bumbling way, Pennacook made the right one. For all his love, my father could not.
The rest of our rainforest trip dwelled on nature. The billionaire’s concept—demand—was simple. We were to draw closer to nature and, after some time suspended among its hazards, love it. This would charge us to fight for conservation. I confess to a detachment that teeters on bad faith in this business. I love nature in the abstract. I know it’s innocent, I know we need and harm it. But this isn’t love. I don’t know nature, really. Until a fellow student in a poetry class embarrassingly corrected me on the point, I wasn’t even clear, at nineteen, on the difference between nature and the country (farms). Worse than not knowing nature, I fear it, “red in tooth and claw,” and mistrust its unforgiving ways. Our guide paused in his paddling to laud the clever big monkeys who dashed low when hawks came so the smaller monkeys, a “buffer,” would get picked off instead, but I sided with the little dumb ones. On the night walk, I was unmoved by the lovely and ingenious spider wrapping its prey, which you could still see twitching.
People, there were piranha, banana spiders, and bullet ants in that rainforest. It seemed to me that if it had a message for our species, it wasn’t “love us” but the more administrable “stay away” (to quote one more song from Dad’s playlists).
On our way to dinner the last night, I slid my hand on the arm-rail like my mother always told me not to do because of germs. I cannot provide a precise germ count but I do know that I brushed from the arm-rail and unfortunately disrupted exactly one otherwise somnolent, eight-inch tarantula. It flopped on my canvas sneaker, and I froze. People talk of the uncanny valley, how a robot might look very much like a real person but there’s just something missing from those eyes. This tarantula was the opposite. Though it looked like a caricature, a stuffed Halloween toy meant to be visible from the sidewalk when hung from thin string, it roiled with life.
I could not breathe and my head throbbed. Had it already bitten and paralyzed me? Would I forevermore stand there on the lodge’s boardwalk, or at best be helicoptered out in this stance, back to Mom and Mr. Susco in Pennacook?
I willed my eyes to rise and meet Lena’s.
Her grin was wide and triumphant. She reached her shoe over and brushed the tarantula off my sneaker and then, in a second and bolder (because unnecessary) swipe, clear off the boardwalk and back into the muck.
She slapped my back and shoved me.
