VOLUNTEERS by Nathan Curtis Roberts
The Aria
My wife Janet and I are in the breakfast nook of our Rockridge apartment, debating eugenics. In the end we will decide against them. Janet has stopped using birth control, and I have begun having Doctor Moreau dreams about terrible babies with demon eyes and walrus limbs. Moving from San Francisco to Oakland was supposed to be the first step to starting a family, because this is the Bay Area in the twenty-first century and we are not rich. (Well, not robber baron rich, which you have to be these days.) But we are stalled now at the next step – which presumably would have involved sex – and have been arguing like a Victorian couple who are unfailingly polite and never dare to raise their voices.
“The thing is, Bob,” Janet says evenly, “if it’s ‘no big deal,’ like you keep saying, then why didn’t you mention it before?”
“I didn’t mention it before,” I say calmly, “because it’s no big deal.”
Three days ago I revealed to Janet that I don’t know who my birth parents are. Our fighting has been circling an ouroboros loop around two primary issues: first, whether or not I was deliberately keeping the fact of my adoption a secret; and second, the possibility of my taking a quick trip up to Oregon to investigate my biological ancestry. Neither of us has been fighting fairly. Janet is calling me Bob, which is a microaggression she only uses when she wants me to feel belittled. And I have been running us in rhetorical circles, hoping to tire her out.
“My parents were my parents,” I continue. “I wasn’t one of those kids who daydreamed about having an astronaut father.”
“Your father practically was an astronaut.”
“My point is that I didn’t ever care who my birth parents were. It wasn’t something I dwelled on, because I was happy with the parents I had. I was well-adjusted!”
“ ‘Well-adjusted,’ ” she repeats, snorting haughtily. Janet is a Bucks County Brahmin, a blueblood of the noblest order: her family doesn’t have any money, but her grandmother has a bench named after her in the Bryn Mawr library. Janet speaks with a clenched-jawed Katharine Hepburn voice, everything a stage whisper. When she is angry, which is not often, her voice gets simultaneously louder and more whispery. She takes a slow drink of her coffee, watching me over the rim of her mug. “If it were really ‘no big deal,’ ” she says, “you wouldn’t be having panic attacks in your sleep.” Light is coming in through the bay window, gorgeous and warm. Sound is also coming in. On the sidewalk outside a man is singing in an operatic voice. At first I think the music is coming from the speakers of some car parked on College Avenue, it sounds so professional, but the singer’s voice breaks when he thanks a passerby for a tip. “Le veau d’or,” Janet interrupts herself to say, identifying the aria. “Gounod,” she adds, as if this is going to be of any help to me. “Anyway, why are you suddenly so worried about Huntington’s disease?”
“I don’t know,” I say. And it’s true: I don’t know. This need to find out about my birth parents is fresh. “I’m not worried – or I wasn’t, when it was just me. But now that we’re talking about a baby, I think I should know what all the risks are. Besides, it’s normal to want to investigate these things. Everyone is taking DNA tests, and all I’m asking for is to find out the name of my birth mother.”
“But Robert, even if you discover some family history of something, it wouldn’t stop me from wanting to have a child with you. I didn’t marry you for your breeding stock.”
I chew the inside of my cheek for a few moments before saying, “Anyway, the records are open now. It’s an easy thing, there’s no reason not to just go up and take a peek. Find out if I have a family history of werewolfism. Or whatever.”
“Fine,” she says, setting her mug down decisively. “But if this is the start of a midlife crisis, I’m telling you right now I’m not having it. Thirty-seven is young in this century, and it certainly isn’t midlife. We’re both going to have all our organs replaced with stem cells and live to be three hundred.”
The Lab
Janet owns a store near the Embarcadero called BeauxTique that sells essential oils, natural skin care products, and homeopathic nonsense, but in her private life she is a great believer in technology. When we first met she was a freelance science writer, starting as an aspiring journalist but drifting steadily into grant and technical writing. I was working at a law firm that specialized in intellectual property. Most of our clients were either scientists who wanted to keep the ownership of their research out of the hands of the universities that employed them, or universities that wanted to keep it from the corporations that funded it. Janet had written a grant proposal for a genetics lab out of UCSF that specialized in “purposeful genetic programs,” a phrase Janet herself had concocted as a euphemism for a set of procedures neither of us were ever asked to understand. I was given a tour of the lab, which didn’t look like much; there were machines, whirling-whirligigs that could unlock chromosomes and propel us into a science-fiction future, but most of the lab’s research was done through computer imaging. After the tour I was brought to the borrowed office of a faculty member, where Janet sat with a copy of the grant proposal she’d written three years earlier.
“Was it the lab’s intention,” I asked, using my attorney voice, “to exchange research for funding?”
“I don’t know,” Janet said, thumbing through the pages of the proposal, a manuscript-length stack of paragraphs, diagrams, and figures.
“Was the proposal sent to multiple corporations and foundations, or was it written exclusively for this one?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you wrote the proposal, did you understand that you were essentially privatizing the lab’s activities?”
“I don’t know,” she said. By this point I was feeling frustrated, but I had also begun to notice the way her peach-colored blouse clung to her body, making her torso look fleshy and exposed. Her blonde hair was pulled back from her face, and if she was wearing any makeup, it had been applied to look as if she wasn’t – except for her lips, which were a frosty shade that matched her blouse. “I don’t know,” she said over and over in her Katharine Hepburn voice, growing louder and more whispery each time. Then she threw the grant proposal onto the desk between us and said, “So this is what you do? You show up somewhere and you parse through words so you can make an argument about who owns an idea? But I bet you don’t even care, do you? You would argue the opposite side if that’s who was paying you. You come in and look through everything with some kind of language microscope – a linguiscope! – and then you and the other lawyers sit in a big room and figure out how to make it look like the other side fucked up worse. You don’t know who owns this science,” she said, “any more than I do, and I don’t even remember writing this stupid thing.”
“Listen,” I said. “Why don’t we do this over a drink?”
Soap
At night we do the dishes together, détente more or less achieved. Neither of us wants to do eugenics, we agree; both of us want what’s best for our still-hypothetical child; one of us will head up to Oregon to find some information about his biological parents, and the other would rather be left out of it. Janet washes the knives and I dry them and place them on the magnetized strip on the wall next to the sink.
“Do you know who goes off searching for their birth parents?” Janet asks, preparing to have the last word on the subject. “Unhappy people. Desperately unhappy and unfulfilled.”
“I’m not unhappy,” I say.
“And characters in sitcoms,” she says. “Going off to search for your birth parents is one of those plot lines, like losing your memory or getting stuck in an elevator, that happens so much more often on television than in real life.”
“Adoption isn’t as uncommon as amnesia,” I say.
“Like the episode of Facts of Life where Natalie realizes both her parents have blue eyes but her eyes are brown. Or the episode of Family Ties where Skippy thinks his birth name is Baby Boy Blue. Or the episode – ”
“I am happy,” I insist. We are now cleaning out the silicone molds that Janet makes soap in. Her handmade soaps are among the most expensive things she sells, but also the most popular. She can tell you the exact fatty acid profile of every bar she makes, and how each oil affects the hardness of the bar and the softness of the skin. She is fond of linolenic and stearic acids, and buys flax oil and shea butter by the vat. We are using cheap dish soap to clean the last traces of fancy handmade soap away.
“Or the episode of Friends where Phoebe finds out her birth mother is Teri Garr. I understand you wanting to know if you have a family history of heart disease or if you’re secretly half Black. Just don’t expect me to call you Baby Boy Blue.”
“It’s a deal,” I say.
She rinses off both of her hands and then places them on the counter, as if steadying herself from falling. She says, “Don’t be so fucking smug, Bob.”
Volunteers
The address the investigator gives me is in Clackamas, a working-class suburb of Portland that is known (if it is known for anything) for being the home of the mall where Tonya Harding used to ice skate. The neighborhood is what my mother, the realtor, would describe in a listing as “up-and-coming.” Meaning: it isn’t anywhere at all.
It is the worst house on a bad street. Small and low to the ground, it was never what someone would describe as nice. But now it has shingles missing from the roof, paint chipping from the siding, rusted gutters that are peeling away from the frame. The old blue Subaru wagon in the front driveway is missing its rear bumper. On the window nearest the front door is a fourteen-inch strip of duct tape keeping the cracked glass held together. The place looks haunted. So much so, I consider leaving without ever ringing the doorbell. But this is only my cowardly nerves kicking in. I have read many ghost stories, and I know this: ghosts prefer old mansions; they don’t haunt up-and-coming neighborhoods, poor people haunt them instead. Also, I don’t believe in ghosts. I do believe in poor people, and perhaps I find them terrifying. It’s worth thinking about; this is a time of self-discovery, after all.
There are no lights on inside the house, no sounds coming from within. The only sign of life is the front yard, which is as untended as the rest of the property, but growing lush with wildflowers in a way that can only happen in the rainy, fertile northwest. Generations of nasturtium and cosmos volunteers reseeded and naturalized in a lawn-sized bed of electric oranges and pinks.
There is no sound when I press the doorbell, so I knock. I tap the door quietly at first, and then I rap loudly with the back of my fist. The woman who answers the door two minutes later is older than I was expecting – she has liver spots on her face and the radiant lip wrinkles of a lifelong smoker – but she is not too old to be my mother. “I’m looking for Mary Monaghan,” I say shyly.
I am quite used to managing people – charming them, staring them down, belittling them if need be – but this woman has me undone before she even speaks. She straightens her housecoat and tilts her head skeptically. She looks at me for a long moment, taking me in. Then she snarls to show me the wreckage of her teeth. There is real danger that I will run away, flee this place without ever knowing if she is my biological parent. Finally she turns her back to me and shouts into the interior of the house: “Ma! You awake? Someone from the Social has come to check, make sure you’re still alive.”
“No,” I say. Clearly the investigator has given me the address of the wrong Mary Monaghan. But the woman waves me into her dark little home, and I follow after her, powerless. The house smells like a sticky sweet strip of flypaper. I will later learn that the smell is a combination of the distilled vinegar that is their only cleaning product, and a dollar-store brand of gardenia-scented air freshener. The place is tidy, but the furniture is old and cheap. The carpeting is frayed near the walls and doorways. Motes of dust float in the slants of sunlight that come in through the window blinds. I realize suddenly – and with a strange churn in my stomach, as if I had stumbled upon something disgusting – that there is no electricity. No television, no radio, not even a lamp. The only light is what comes in from outside.
Past the living room is a cramped kitchen that smells more strongly of vinegar than fake gardenia. I glance at the dormant electric range. What do they eat, I wonder, with no heat to cook? (The answer, I will later learn, is cereal and powdered milk.) The woman brings me to a room in the back of the house. Here the smell of gardenia is stronger. She waves her hand toward a twin bed like she is presenting a prize on a game show. “This is Mary Monaghan,” she says. “Alive and well.”
The person in the bed looks neither alive nor well. She looks shrunken and desiccated, like a doll-person fashioned from a dried apple. “There’s been a mistake,” I say.
“This is Mary Monaghan. I’ve got her ID on the dresser here.”
“She’s your mother?” I ask.
“Of course.”
“The person I’m looking for must be much younger. The Mary Monaghan I’m trying to track down is my mother.”
Then she nods her head slowly and says, “Ah.” Everything is suddenly clear to her, it seems. She shuffles back into the living room, expecting me to follow. “I can’t say I’m surprised,” she says. “I’ve been wondering about you lately.”
Albums
The child in the photographs has eyes like buttons, small, dark, and widely set. Her smile is broad but lopsided, and her teeth are so little the gums seem to be swelled up around them. It’s obvious something is wrong with her, but there’s no direct clue as to what it is. Her ears are tiny but they stick directly out; her nose is too far away from her mouth. She is . . . strange looking, disconcertingly so.
“Not what you were expecting,” Charlene Monaghan observes.
“I didn’t have any expectations,” I say truthfully. But she’s right, I had imagined a thousand scenarios, and in none of them was my birth mother a helpless juvenile with some kind of disability. “What was wrong with her?” I ask.
“It was the Downs,” Charlene says.
I flip through the photo album. Light from the window behind us reflects dully from the old plastic pages. In many of the pictures, Mary the younger is holding her hands in front of her, almost as if joined in prayer, her fingers bent and not quite touching. She is smiling gummily in nearly all of the photos, an evidently happy girl, all the way through to the end. Cellophane crackles as I turn the heavy pages of the album, and a year passes before me. Mary Monaghan smiling on a park slide, her hands in front of her chest. Mary Monaghan in a prairie dress, ready for church, beaming, holding her hands together across her boyish bosom. Mary Monaghan still the size and shape of a child, grinning proudly, her pregnant belly almost grotesquely swollen, hands resting upon it, fingers steepled.
“It wasn’t the Downs,” says a new voice. It is Mary Monaghan the elder, pushing herself into the room with a walker. I had taken her for bedridden and mute, but here she is, among us and speaking. “It was the drinking.” On the sofa next to me, Charlene Monaghan stiffens. “Drinking and whoring around, no good ever came of neither. Not that I’m one to judge – I did my share of both.” She pushes her walker into the center of the room and stands perched at it, as if she is delivering a sermon. “Downs can’t have no kids of their own,” my great-grandmother says. “Everyone knows that.”
One Uncomfortable Day
Our day together is filled with awkward silences. These are two women who have long since run out of things to say to each other. Now they will have me to talk about, the time the lawyer from San Francisco showed up out of nowhere and turned out to be a descendant. To me they speak mostly in apologies: “I’m sorry for the state of the house”; “I wish I could offer you something to eat”; “I’m sure we’re not what you were hoping for.” I cannot stop myself from thinking about what must truly make them feel sorry, that their sweet-natured child was raped. No one uses this word, of course, but it must have been rape, it has to have been, for a fourteen-year-old girl with fetal alcohol syndrome is incapable of consent. But are they also sorry that I was born, brought into the world through a vessel that shattered in its effort to carry me? They are tactful enough not to say so.
These women and I will not become friends. They don’t want this any more than I do. All we will have together is this one uncomfortable day. So I must try to do right by them. I do what I am able, and what I am able to do is spend money. I have their electricity turned on and I buy them a smart phone. For the bills I set up autopay against my own checking account. I take them shopping, buy them a television set and a new refrigerator, groceries, enough cereal and powdered milk to last half a year. I am almost prepared to buy them a car, but in the end this is where we decide to draw the line. Instead of getting to know them, I make phone calls on their behalf. I call the cable company. I arrange for hospice care for Mary the elder, who will not outlast the cereal. “Why did she hold her hands like that?” I ask between errands.
“Because that was just how she liked to sit.”
I tell them a little about myself, embellishing wherever I please. My lies fall somewhere between a job applicant fudging his credentials and a grifter outright fabricating them. I do not think they will have heard of Pitzer College or Hastings Law School, so I say that my degrees are from Pomona and Berkeley. When I tell them I clerked for a Supreme Court justice, I do not specify that it was the Oregon Supreme Court. The version of me that I spin for them is just a little bit more ambitious than the real thing, and a lot better at taking standardized tests (he probably also passed the bar exam on the first try, the bastard). But all of it is gilding the lily: these women would have been impressed that I can pay my own bills on time, let alone theirs.
“You’re a smart one,” Charlene says. “You take after your father.”
“Who was he?” I ask, leaping on the first real mention of him.
“Doctor,” Mary the elder says, pronouncing the word with undisguised contempt.
“Director of Speech-Language Pathology at Oregon Health Science,” Charlene says as if she is reading it from a card. “All her life, she just wanted to be able to speak well. She worked so hard at it. It was like she was saving up for the perfect thing, but never got the chance to say it.”
“Did he go to jail?” I ask.
“Not until long after. Not until he did it to someone else’s baby.”
“I see,” I say. It occurs to me that my biological father was the kind of man I would have represented, if the thing he’d stolen had been an idea.
Mathematics
The next day I drive down to Eugene to see my parents. I have time to reflect upon the concept of parenthood. First it is bifurcated: parent becomes mother and father. Then it divides again, like cells in a womb, becoming biological mother and biological father and adoptive mother and adoptive father. And now the organism has become more complicated than I ever expected, with a biological maternal grandmother and a biological maternal great-grandmother – sixteen great-grandparents in total, eight grandparents, four parents, and already we are brushing up against the limit of my ability to do mathematics in my head.
My father – the one who raised me – has no such limit. He is an aerospace engineer who spent the first half of his career at Lockheed Martin and the second half teaching at the University of Oregon. He now spends his retirement building elaborate projects in what used to be my bedroom. It started with model trains, that old Boomer standby, and the track still takes up most of the room. I would come home from college to find him at the desk where I used to study, watching his trains go round and round, two and three at a time, until their elaborate tracks crossed one too many times, and the trains threatened to collide. Always he would switch tracks to avoid a wreck at the last possible second; these are expensive trains, and my father is a sensible man, however much he might secretly desire to watch them crash. Now he does more or less the same thing with drones, which he builds himself. He programs them with elaborate flight plans that have them dancing around each other like menacing fairies, the threat of a terrible collision always present.
My mother was a housewife, a homemaker – a gifted cook and gardener – until I left for college, when she got her real estate license and became a local mogul. I catch her on the way out of the house. She hugs me and kisses my cheek, showing no surprise that I am here. “I have to go into town,” she says. “Will we see you tonight at dinner?”
The yard has been replanted since the last time I was here. All the old rhododendron bushes have been pulled out to make way for flower beds, which are planted with alternating lavender and poppies. In the spaces between these plants are pink and white pinwheel petunias. Everything is very precise, like the front of a courthouse. “I’ll stay for dinner,” I say, “but I can’t stay the night.”
“I’m not sure there’s room for you anyway,” she says. She never asks why I am here.
Upstairs in his workshop my father musses my hair as if I am still a little boy. Three drones hang in the air, but the bulk of his interest has been momentarily reclaimed by the trains. The drones loom over his model village like an alien invasion.
“Are those supposed to be inside?” I ask, indicating the drones.
“No,” he says. “Of course not.” He puts on his imitation-stern fatherly voice and says, “Never have drones indoors, young man. ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ ” He laughs. Then we sit for a while and watch the trains loop around in their near-collision course.
The day before I leave Oregon, the investigator calls with an address. It turns out to be a small white ranch house on a side street in northeast Portland. I do not knock on the door and meet whoever lives inside; I don’t even get out of my rental car. Pasted to the big plate-glass window on the front of the house is a sign that says:
A CONVICTED SEX OFFENDER LIVES HERE. FOR ANY PROBLEMS,COMPLAINTS,OR CONCERNS, PLEASE CALL THIS NUMBER
Leave of Absence
At home in the Bay Area I find that I have a lot to think about. I take a leave of absence from my firm, jeopardizing my chances of ever making partner. I belong to a generation of attorneys who came to their lawyering by default. It was understood that there was money in the world, and that our purpose was to grab as much of it as possible; but if, after college, you could find no specific meaning in any vocation, no acumen for finance or science, or special calling toward celebrity or crime or education, and if you lacked the specific kind of madness that leads a person to a career in the arts, then what you did is you went to law school. Most of my friends from Hastings don’t practice anymore; they have become journalists and publicists, or they went back and added a second generic money-making degree to their resumes: the MBA.
At the Zoo
I take BART into San Francisco every morning, just as if I were still going to work, but instead I wander the city like a tourist. I distract myself with meaningless little projects. One morning I go to the zoo and watch tigers, only tigers, tigers at feeding time, tigers all the way through to closing. A week later I go again and watch monkeys, only monkeys, monkeys throwing feces, monkeys swinging happily from tree to tree. At the zoo, during the day, I notice there are many. . . I don’t know what to call them, not even inside the privacy of my own mind. Intellectually disabled people. They come in little groups, with a non-disabled friend to help them manage. Presumably these friends are supplied by some organization. Most of the disabled people are either very fat or stick thin, and they have faces that give them away, or a strangeness in their movements, and now that I am attuned to them I see them in all their hiding places: at the zoo, at bus stops, on park benches, in fast food restaurants buying and selling value meals, in movie theaters taking tickets. They are cunning in their hiding. I had never noticed them before.
Wednesday
Janet and I spend the day fighting. We have lost our veneer of Victorian civility. There is no pause to listen to, and comment upon, the sounds from the street outside. The aggressions are decidedly macro.
I say, among other things: “Frigid bitch.”
I immediately wish I could take it back.
She says, among other things: “Are you feeling sorry for yourself because you found out your mother was a retard, or because your father was a retard fucker?”
I immediately wish she could take it back.
Saturday
We spend the afternoon sitting at the café across the street, drinking coffee and eating olallieberry pie. Now that we have exhausted ourselves from fighting, there is a new quiet accord between us. “I think by being the one to say the nastiest thing,” Janet says, “I won the battle but lost the war.”
“I’m not really thinking of this in terms of winners and losers,” I lie sanctimoniously.
The Place
The director of the New Outlook Center is named Damien. No one here calls it the New Outlook Center; they call it “The Place.” And they don’t ever refer to their clients as disabled; they call them “The People.” Damien has a spider web tattoo on his neck that disappears beneath his shirt and reappears on his left hand, covering most of his fingers. I initially take him for early thirties, but will later learn he is pushing fifty. Does the tattoo magically keep him young, or is it merely part of an optical illusion of youthfulness? And is it a single continuous tattoo or two separate ones, similarly themed? These are Damien’s mysteries.
“Robert,” he tells me, “you have a very impressive resume, but I’m just not sure you’re a good fit.” Damien’s tone is condescending. When he speaks to The People, he talks to them like peers; everyone else he treats as if they were children.
“Let’s get past all that,” I say. “Let’s just skip over the part where we try to make each other feel intimidated, or small, or whatever. Let’s just get straight to the work.” Damien looks at me with curiosity. I lay it all out for him: “I recently found out my birth mother had fetal alcohol syndrome and my birth father was a man who was supposed to be her doctor. He was a serial abuser of underage developmentally disabled girls. She died giving birth to me. I was adopted by prosperous, upper-middle-class people who did a fine job raising me and set me on the path to also being prosperous and upper-middle-class. I’ve taken a leave of absence at my firm, and I’ve been to the zoo, and I’ve been to the wharf, and I’ve been to the movies, and now I want to do this for a while. You can pay me, or I can volunteer, it barely makes a difference, but I’m going to do it.”
I am assigned a small group of People who are, in Damien’s words, “largely self-functioning.” He shows me to a lounge where People and staff are all playing games together. The room is painted orange, and decorated in posters from children’s movies. In one part of the room are a ping-pong table and an area with sparse exercise equipment. The rest of the room is set up with folding chairs and card tables that are stacked with board games. A mixed group of six People and staff are at a tense moment in a game of Pandemic.
The Place is housed in a rundown warehouse space South of Market. On the street outside, bodegas are transforming into natural food stores, and biker bars are becoming storefront web-design firms. Most of the buildings like this one have been replaced with live-work lofts. But The Place is stubborn; it holds fast. It has a bus, three vans, two office workers, and a dozen enablers who accompany The People into the four quadrants of the city.
The People
My group has two boys and two girls. In my mind they are boys and girls because that is how they seem to me, but they are as grown‑up now as they are ever going to be. Lindsay is the youngest at twenty-five. When Damien introduces us, Lindsay’s first words to me are: “Hello, Robert. My name is Lindsay Erin Abraham. I can say ‘monkey’ and ‘apple’ in sign language. I have Down Syndrome and my IQ is 78.” Then she squeezes me in a hello hug. It is like we are old friends, the way she wraps her fat arms around me and presses her big breasts against my stomach. When she releases me, she shows me “apple” and “monkey,” which I assume she has correct – my knowledge of sign language is less than hers.
“Lindsay,” Damien says. “We’ve discussed when it’s appropriate to hug people.”
“It’s not appropriate to hug strangers,” Lindsay says in a quiet, hurried voice. “Hug people when you know them well and when they want you to,” she says, slurring the words as if she were fabulously drunk. Then she slaps herself in the face, really socks herself good. She hits herself hard enough that the Pandemic players look up from their game to see what the sound is.
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Lindsay,” I say.
“Very please to meet,” she says. The slap mark is reddening on her face.
“You’re going to have to try to keep her from hitting herself,” Damien says to me.
“Hitting is not appropriate,” Lindsay agrees, “others or yourself. Good girls don’t hit. They just don’t do it!”
I will later learn that 78 is a high IQ for someone with Down Syndrome. If it weren’t for that extra chromosome, she might have been a genius.
The love of Lindsay’s life is a big round Black guy named Pete, but Pete has a girlfriend who is a big round White girl named Fanny. Pete and Fanny will be easy to manage, Damien assures me, because all they do is giggle – everything is funny to them – and only occasionally they will try to duck off somewhere to kiss. “If that does happen,” Damien says, “you’ll have to keep an eye on Lindsay. If she starts hitting herself, just hold her by her wrists – you have permission to hold her wrists if she’s doing harm to herself – until she talks herself into stopping. You don’t need to say a word about it. She already knows it’s not appropriate.”
The troublemaker of the group is tall, skinny Hector. When Damien introduces us Hector says, “You look like Clint Eastwood. Seriously!”
“He tells me I look like Bing Crosby,” Damien says.
“Seriously,” Hector confirms. “But you look like Clint Eastwood and Don Johnson and William Holden.”
“William Holden,” I say. “Really?”
‘‘Seriously!”
I don’t look like any of these people, not as far as I’m aware, but I’m impressed that he knows the names of actors from so long ago. Hector’s voice also slurs, but in his case it’s because he really is drunk. Everywhere he goes, he brings a plastic Oakland Raiders cup filled with his preferred beverage: one part Captain Morgan spiced rum, two parts Shasta orange soda. Hector wants to get out of San Francisco – he calls it Mean World Africa USA, after a South Bay marine park that, as far as I know, closed many years ago – and move to Los Angeles, where he hopes to launch a screenwriting career.
Unnecessary Conversation
All four of them have monthly Lifeline passes, but I have to buy a bus ticket and collect a transfer, and my unpracticed fumbling makes The People impatient. Hector brushes past me to claim a seat in the back of the bus. Pete and Fanny want to sit together in the middle and hold hands. It is Lindsay who finally shows me what I am doing: she slides the dollar bills into the machine and collects a piece of paper from the driver. But already the group is separated – Hector is in the back, Pete and Fanny are lost together in a kiss – and the chaos sets Lindsay off. She is hitting herself before the bus pulls away from the curb. The driver gives me an evil look, and I believe he is right to do so.
I try to take Lindsay by the wrists, but instead she hugs me, clings to me as we stand there on the rattling bus, as if we had just jumped out of a plane and I am the only one with a parachute.
When Lindsay and I finally sit down together, Hector moves to the seat behind us. “Nothing is okay, Robert,” he says, “in Mean World Africa USA. Aqui esta nada.” Lindsay shrugs her shoulders and says something in sign language. Hector says, “I’m not really a retard, yo, not like these idiots. I’m epileptic. Hit my head too many times. Didn’t wear a helmet. I still don’t! Helmets are for faggots, yo. You seriously look like Burt Reynolds right now.”
“Don’t say retard,” I say. “Don’t say faggot.” Hector rolls his eyes. He’s heard it all before. “You look like. . .” I try to think of someone. “Buddy Hackett,” I say.
Hector grins. There is a sign next to the bus driver that says:
INFORMATION GLADLY PROVIDED, BUT YOUR SAFETY REQUIRES AVOIDING UNNECESSARY CONVERSATION
Janet
“What do you do with them all day?” is what Janet wants to know.
“We go grocery shopping. We go to the movies.”
“What else?”
“Not much. They’re not fast movers. They’re not in a hurry to get anywhere.” We are laying together on the sofa, watching television. She puts her hand on my chest. I put my own hand over it, giving hers a little squeeze. “Tell you what,” I say, feigning sweetness, “next week I’ll bring them by the store. You can get a look at them yourself.”
“Robert,” she says in her most stern Bucks County voice, “do not bring them by the store.”
“I’ll bring them by the store,” I say innocently. “Why not?”
“No, Bob, please don’t bring them by the store. Whatever you do, don’t bring them to the store. I swear to God, Robert, I’m being serious here. Promise me you’re not going to bring them to the store!”
BeauxTique
I bring them to the store. A shop girl I don’t recognize is manning the register, watching the five of us with a blank face. Fanny and Lindsay are excited by the feminine colors and smells, and immediately start hunting for free samples. Hector and Pete stand near the entrance, afraid to show any sign of interest in the products. They have been brought here against their will, and do not want me to forget it. This is not a place for grown men like them. Because there are two of them, and because Pete is so large, they are effectively blocking the entrance, so when Janet shows up with two lattes in hand – one for her and one for her assistant – she has to squeeze between them to get inside. She rolls her eyes pejoratively when she sees me, but does not say hello. Instead she heads over to the register and whispers something to her employee, who crosses her arms and nods her head like a soldier who has just been given a grim order. The shop girl is dressed in a white blouse and a gingham skirt, and has striking purple hair that is pulled back into an otherwise conservative ponytail; Janet is wearing a similar blouse and houndstooth slacks; the two of them look as if they have color-coordinated. But The People have played the matching game one better, all of them wearing blue tracksuits with yellow piping – part of a large recent clothing donation to the New Outlook Center. In their identical outfits they look like a demented University of California dance crew.
Fanny tries on some cruelty-free lipstick. She then heads over to the entrance to show it to Pete, who likes it well enough, but objects when she tries to put some on his lips. Lindsay has found the essential oils display, and is methodically applying a smear of every scent to her forearm, without actually stopping to sniff any of them. In two minutes she has gone through all the free samples, and smells as if she has taken a suicide dose of potpourri. Hector has been lured a few paces into the store by a display of massage oils. “You folks let me know if there’s anything I can help you with,” Janet says brightly, still not acknowledging that I am here.
“I like lavender,” Lindsay says to Janet. “Which is your favorite?”
“I like lavender too,” Janet says politely. “But my favorite is called Russian Hill.” She points out the sample bottle. “It’s lavender, bergamot, and orange peel. My signature blend. We also have soaps and bath bombs in the Russian Hill scent – I made them myself.”
“Hmmm,” Lindsay says, taking it all in thoughtfully. “I can say orange in sign language,” she says, holding her chin up proudly. “And I can say milk and dog and sleepy.”
“Lindsay,” I say, “this is Janet. She’s my wife.”
“Really?” Lindsay asks, skeptical. Hector shuffles closer to us, trying to look nonchalant about listening in.
“Yes,” Janet says, putting a lot of salt on the word. “For now,” she adds in a way that we’re supposed to take for only half-joking.
Lindsay frowns. Hector laughs. Pete and Fanny have run off somewhere to kiss, and I’m trying to figure out a way to bring them back to the group without Lindsay noticing they’ve been gone. Hector says, “You can’t divorce him! You’re the perfect couple: he looks like Clint Eastwood and you look like Sondra Locke.”
Who the fuck is Sondra Locke? “She looks like Katharine Hepburn,” I suggest.
“No,” Hector says. “She doesn’t look like that at all. She only talks like her. She looks like Rosanna Arquette.”
Janet seems flattered by the comparisons. Lindsay, who still hasn’t noticed that Pete and Fanny are missing, is standing next to her, slowly insinuating herself into a clandestine and inappropriate hug.
The Walk-In
At a party at Damien’s apartment in the Mission district, I smoke dope for the first time since college. Many of my coworkers are here, along with their pansexual, polyamorous array of significant others: Berkeley graduate students, coffeehouse poets, food truck operators. We sit around stoned and make a big fuss about it every time the music changes. It is boring and exhilarating all at once.
Damien asks me if I know what a walk‑in is. “Like, have you heard the concept,” he says. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Sure,” I say. “You’re talking about, like, if you go to the barber without an appointment.”
He laughs. “No,” he says.
“Like if you go to the clinic without calling ahead.”
“No, it’s a New Age thing. It’s when a person is in such turmoil, such a state of, like, crisis, that his soul leaves his body and another, more advanced soul comes in and takes over. It’s like: instead of committing suicide, the original spirit just steps aside and lets the new one have agency. And the person has the same memories and everything, but suddenly he, like, has new skills and a new sense of purpose.”
“You’re saying you think I’m a walk-in.” I am annoyed by the suggestion, but also amused by it. Someone passes me a joint, but I hand it to Damien without taking another hit. I am already so stoned I can barely follow Damien’s nonsense.
“It seems like maybe,” Damien says, exhaling smoke. He gives me a strange little smile that makes me feel uncomfortable.
“I don’t think I’m a walk-in,” I say. “I think I’m just a person.”
“I think a walk‑in is a person.”
“Hey,” someone else says. “Get this.” He is a scrawny fellow who keeps his blond hair very long, even though it is deeply balding. He looks like Riff Raff from Rocky Horror. I recognize him as one of my New Outlook coworkers, though I have hardly ever interacted with him before. I have hardly ever interacted with any of these people before – most of my time at New Outlook is spent with The People, not with my coworkers. Riff Raff does an impression of one of his clients. “ ‘I can’t get outside the box!’ ” he says. “ ‘Help me get outside the box!’ It’s like, Alfonzo, dude, relax. There is no box.”
Others start doing impressions of their clients as well. At first I think it is a trap. In my paranoia, I think they are trying to lure me into making fun of my People so they can condemn me for it. I watch wearily and wait for the trap to spring. But Damien says, “It’s okay to make fun of The People sometimes. They’re probably making fun of us. And what are we supposed to do, anyway, take them seriously? We’re not fucking saints.”
“Stop hitting yourself,” I say suddenly. Everyone laughs, and it gets me into the spirit of it. “It’s not appropriate,” I say. “It’s just not appropriate!” Then I smack myself in the face really hard and it sobers me up a little.
When it is time for me to go, Damien walks me out and says goodbye by kissing me on the mouth. It is a platonic kiss – at least I think it is, in a kind of odd, wet, open-mouthed sort of way.
Outsider Art
Damien says the New Outlook Center is lucky to have me. If this is true, it’s not because of any quality or credential I possess, but because I am married to a grant writer who has been longing for something to do with her time that doesn’t involve a signature scent. Over the past several weeks, The Place has evolved into a kind of family project. “We’re putting energy into this,” Janet observes, “that we would have put into a baby.”
We are in the breakfast nook again with our bagels and coffee. The opera singer is back outside, as he has been most mornings since the beginning of summer. He is doing Puccini’s “Nessun dorma,” according to Janet. The man’s repertoire is not limitless, and Janet is a patient teacher; I am almost reaching the point where I can identify the arias myself.
“Are we ever going to have that baby?” I ask.
“Can we afford it?” she says. We have been going over the finances and things are starting to get scary. Janet is not pleased that my income has practically stopped, or that I have taken on a second set of bills in Clackamas, Oregon. But overall, I think she has accepted the changes of the past few months admirably; if nothing else, they have renewed her curiosity in me. “I mean,” she adds, “probably we are. Once things are stable again. Are you ever going to go back to being a lawyer?”
“Yes,” I say, trying to keep my dread of the thought from entering my voice. “But not until after the fundraiser.”
I have promised to stay at The Place at least until Halloween, when the New Outlook Center has its annual art show. It is the biggest fundraiser of the year, because young tech millionaires consider outsider art amusing. Or maybe they consider it authentic – I don’t know, I’m only repeating something Damien said when I was half-listening.
The afternoon of the art show, The People come dressed in costumes. Lindsay is Little Bo Peep, with a pink petticoat and a matching bonnet, and a real shepherd’s hook that looks far too dangerous for someone with a known history of self-harm. Pete and Fanny are wearing disposable white painter coveralls with black boots and jewel-tone wigs, and for a horrified moment I think they are supposed to be droogs from A Clockwork Orange. But no, they explain to me that they are Team Rocket, a pair of Pokemon villains known as Jessie and James. Hector comes dressed as an actual cowboy: he is the Man with No Name from A Fistful of Dollars. He has a leather-banded hat, an olive green poncho and a sheepskin vest. Damien will not let him carry even a toy gun, but he does have a real cigarillo hanging from his mouth, unlit.
My group’s contribution to the art show is a short film about zombies. We recorded it on 8mm because Hector is an auteur with strong purist feelings against digital, and because The Place has a very nice camera that was donated nearly two decades ago. Hector wrote the script with help from Janet. I served as co‑director and cameraman. The film is nineteen minutes long, black-and-white, and features a cast of dozens of Outlook clients. Hector himself is the opening shot of the film, acting as a kind of master of ceremonies. He stares out at you saying nothing for nearly a full minute, which is a long time when you’re looking directly into his Cubist face. Then he mumbles something, turns, and jogs away. Just before he leaves the frame, his pants start to fall down, and he has to stop to pull them back up. The next shot is of Lindsay hitting herself. She gets three good blows in before there’s an obvious cut, removing the part where I had to step in to stop her. After the edit she turns to the camera and says, “You see, the trouble is I’m possessed! They’re rising, rising from the grave – it’s zombies!” Pete and Fanny end up being the heroes of the film; in a quarter of an hour they meet, fall in love, and slay a score of undead People.
Hector and I argued over how it should end. We had footage of Pete and Fanny succumbing to the horde, being transformed into zombies themselves. And we had a shot of the two of them heading off together into the sunset, not necessarily victorious over anything, but happily together. I was pushing for the bleak ending, but Hector preferred a hopeful one. Janet suggested we return to the opening, and show the shot of Hector pulling his pants up from behind with the words The End superimposed over the still frame of his ass. But neither of us liked the idea of going for this easy joke. We had different ideas about how to go about it, but both of us want to break your heart.
Mean World
What you don’t see in the final cut of the film is Hector running away. After turning from the camera and jogging off, stopping briefly to pull up his pants, he just keeps going. I have to halt production in order to chase after him. As we are running, the two of us, through a residential street in the Outer Sunset, I wonder what I am supposed to do when I catch him. Do I wrestle him to the ground? Do I pull him forcefully back to his own set, to continue doing the thing he has been dreaming of doing? But Hector tires out easily – he has been drinking from his Raiders cup of rum and soda – and after a couple of blocks he allows me to overtake him. “Come back to set,” I say. “We need you.”
“This is my ticket,” Hector says, “out of Mean World Africa USA.”
“So why are you running?” I ask.
Hector shakes his head. “Don’t know,” he says. By now we are headed back to the crowd that has come together to help Hector make his film. Janet is there, holding the script, a concerned look on her face. Damien and Riff Raff are there. All The People with their New Outlook friends are watching us. We reach Sunset Boulevard and wait for the light. A second before it changes, Hector skips across the street, and I think at first that I am going to have to chase him down again. But when I rejoin him on the sidewalk on the other side he is suddenly filled with joy. “I don’t know why I ran,” he tells me again. He looks at the sky, as if he is contemplating a great mystery. “When I make it big, I’m going to make them pay me in gold bullion. Lingotes de oro, motherfucker. I won’t forget you, Robert!” he says, grinning madly. “I don’t know why I ran. Lingotes de oro, Robert. Purest gold.”
Nathan Curtis Roberts’ fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ontario Review, and Best New American Voices.