Дуглас Престон - Jennie

Now I had a very different relationship with Jennie. There was a time when there was no boundary between Jennie and me. We were like Siamese twins. We didn’t know where one started and the other left off. [Laughs.] Why? I don’t know why. I was a lonely kid. She was the only friend I ever had who accepted me without question. She didn’t judge me, or criticize me, or lay bullshit on me. She accepted me just as I was. Now that’s irresistible.

Jennie taught me a lot. You know, I was a smart kid. They told me I was a genius. Now don’t for a moment think I’m impressed with that kind of bullshit. Jennie taught me just how worthless that is. Being smart. Jennie wasn’t smart by human standards, but she had a set of values. Real values. You see, for Jennie, freedom was the highest value. Language gave Jennie freedom. Although I didn’t know it at the time, she taught me the real meaning of the word “freedom,” not the bullshit meaning you get from politicians and priests.

Here’s what she taught me: human beings are terrified of true freedom. Self-imposed slavery is what life is all about. Slavery is what every human being strives for. School, college, nice house in the suburbs, nine-to-five job, promotion, retirement. People are never happier than when they are making arrangements to have their freedom removed. They pile up possessions and debt and responsibilities. It’s just as Dostoyevski said in The Brothers Karamazov . Christ offered people freedom and scared the shit out of them, so they crucified him.

Jennie was different. She fought tooth and nail for her freedom. I don’t know where we white people went wrong in our evolution, or where we had to compromise, why we chose slavery. A coyote will chew off its own leg in a trap. I had a tarantula spider last year, big hairy old thing. Found it last fall cruising through the chamisa out there. Looking for a mate, which they do in the fall. I brought it home and put it in a big glass jar. I fed it grasshoppers, watered it, kept it warm when it was fifteen below out there. It had everything it needed. But day and night, day and night, week after week, it was trying to climb through that glass. I’d hear it faintly scratching all night long and when I’d wake up in the morning — there it was, still trying to get out. I thought, damn, even the spider, whose brain is so fucking small you’d need a microscope to see it, has that overwhelming desire for freedom. So where did we go wrong?

Jennie had that same overwhelming desire for freedom as the tarantula. She couldn’t live in our society because we tried to rob her of freedom, just like we rob ourselves of freedom. We wanted to break her and make her a human slave like the rest of us. Live free or die, was her answer. Literally.

I’m rambling. Jesus, now I’m really going. Well, I suppose you might as well get it all on tape. What do you want, some stories or something? Why am I here? Why are you so obsessed with that question?

You want to know why? When we finish talking, I’ll take you for a ride. Did you see those two horses in the corral as you came in? Yeah, we’ll go for a ride, and I’ll show you some of the sights. It’s not bad out there, about fifteen degrees, with wind chill maybe five below. We’ll ride up to Los Gigantes.

See, I can’t tell you why I’m here. You wouldn’t understand. I can only show you. Throw some more coal in the fire.

The freedom I’m talking about is a Navajo concept. The traditional Navajos look down on those who accumulate possessions, think it’s a vice, a weakness, like drinking or adultery. They also think it’s dangerous, makes one a target for witchcraft.

Those mountains behind us there are the Lukachukai Mountains, and that low mesa in the distance is called Black Mesa. This whole landscape is sacred. The Navajos were never expelled from their Garden of Eden. This is it. It’s a harsh landscape but it’s beautiful in its own way. You have to be out here at least a month before you can really understand what I’m talking about. All the bullshit of our sorry century just falls away like rotten scales, and you suddenly see the world for what it is.

Growing up with Jennie. It’s hard for me to imagine what my childhood would have been like without Jennie. I hardly remember anything before she came. It was like she was this... this shadow of me that finally arrived and made me complete. We had some good times. We used to go to a place called the bridge. Jennie always came along. Did my mother tell you about that? Hah! She hated me going over there. Her brain conjured up all kinds of horrors about what went on there.

The bridge was this railroad bridge that crossed the Sudbury River. The tracks of the old Boston and Albany. A dirt road ran alongside the river and under the bridge. It was a beautiful spot, with these white clay banks and muskrats splashing about in the river. The moonlight would shine through the trestles, making crazy shadows and flickering off the water. And the stars through the trestles, millions of stars. When it got cold in the fall, we’d build a big bonfire and sit around talking. We were going to change the world. We hatched all kinds of plots, blow the world up, start a revolution. We’d get high, and our plans got ever more intricate. But it never came to anything. It was all bullshit. You can’t change the world. You’re goddamn lucky if you can change yourself even a teensy, tiny bit.

To change, you’ve got to internalize the revolution. You’ve got to start a goddamn revolution inside your brain. You’ve got to become Hamlet, a subversive in your own court. So to finally answer your question, that’s what I’m doing out here. Internalizing the revolution. I’m making myself free.

There was a group of us met at the bridge. We had a feeling of infinite possibilities. Funny though, at the same time it all seemed futile. That may sound like a contradiction. I guess it was a contradiction. We’d drop strawberry fields — that’s a kind of LSD, came in a pink tablet — and lie down on the sand. And we’d stare up through those old trestles, and the night sky would be boiling purple and black. And I’d think, shit — at any moment I’ll see the streak of missiles heading for Boston and that’ll be it. We grew up with that, thinking the world could end at any moment. Expecting the world to end. At the same time, we were going to change the fucking world, totally change it, make it an anarchistic utopia. [Laughs.] That’s a teenager for you.

So we’d gather around that bonfire, singing the Internationale, drinking cheap wine and smoking pot, thinking we were actually doing something. Jennie used to come to the bridge. She followed me everywhere. She was like a kid sister, sensitive as hell about being left out. She was a founding member of our revolutionary council. While we talked she drank Old Milwaukee beer. And why not? It made her mellow and happy. Like a happy old drunk. Sometimes we’d all get drunk and stoned and stagger around laughing. Jennie would be signing Phooey! Phooey! and rolling around on the ground and clacking her teeth. Once she threw up all over herself and we had to wash her in the river. Jesus it was wild.

Jennie didn’t like pot. She wouldn’t touch it, even after she saw me smoking it. We never gave her any other drugs. My friends wanted to give her acid but I said no way. Jennie had no way of knowing what it was, or how it might affect her.

We had all kinds of outrageous stoned conversations with Jennie — me translating of course. She was confused most of the time but she loved us laughing at everything she said. I wish I’d written some of those conversations down. We asked her what she thought of Nixon and Kissinger and America. All kinds of shit. We taught her stuff like Nixon sucks! and Fuck Ameri-K-K-K-a! Spelling out the “K’s” in ASL, see. She gave us her opinions on nuclear war, Vietnam, and Hubert Humphrey. They were usually one word opinions: Bad! or Phooey! Right on, Jennie!