Jonathan Lethem - Lucky Alan - And Other Stories

The great obstacle would be in explaining his decision to his daughters. Pending Vegan admired Chloe’s and Deirdre’s negotiation between their native animal-love and the pleasures of meat-eating. It struck him as a hard-won sophistication, something like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s capacity to keep two opposed ideas in mind at the same time. The girls’ early rites of passage seemed to consist mainly of such paradox-absorbing efforts. That, for instance, Mommy and Daddy fought but loved each other. That human beings were miraculous and shyness ought to be overcome, yet also that they should violently distrust the too-eager stranger as a probable monster. That an hour of television or the iPad should be judged an intoxicating surfeit, while parents binged on screens at every opportunity. Pending Vegan routinely spent three hours sitting on the couch, watching his football team lose. The Vikings, talisman of his ancestral roots. Yet, unlike the Redskins and the Chiefs, they never had their name and logo criticized as racist. No one felt sorry for white people, which might explain his fascination with Jews, who seemed to have it both ways. Had Irving Renker been eavesdropping on Pending Vegan’s thoughts, he would have chortled. Quit drifting .

Civilizing children was pretty much all about inducing cognitive dissonance. His daughters’ balancing of their desire both to cuddle and to devour mammals was their ticket for entry to the human pageant. If Pending Vegan admitted to them that he now believed it wrong to eat animals — even while he still craved the tang of smoky steaks and salt-greasy bacon — he’d lower himself, in their eyes, to a state of childlike moral absolutism. Or perhaps it would be in his own eyes? He’d been Pending now for six months. Some otherworldly future inquisitor, most likely a pearly-gates sentinel with the head of a piglet or a calf, would hold him accountable for this delay, a thing comparable to the period when the Allies had learned of the existence of the death camps yet checked their moral outrage against military-tactical considerations. Nothing had changed in his eating habits or other behaviors. He hadn’t distributed pamphlets or obtained a bumper sticker. Nothing had changed, except that he had awarded himself a secret name.

Boiling in shame, he led his family into the shark-observation area, trudging onto a moving walkway behind other families and their strollers. Another piece of coercive architecture, the passage tunneled beneath the sharks’ tanks, illuminating the creatures from below, the better to consider their white bellies and jack-o’-lantern grimaces. It struck him now that the park’s design was somehow alimentary. You were being engulfed, digested, shit out.

“I’m scared,” Deirdre said.

“But I’m not,” Chloe said.

Pending Vegan didn’t presume to speak for the sharks. He pointed instead at the glimmer ahead, as the moving walkway ground them out of the darkness.

“Daddy?” Chloe said.

“Yes?”

“Are dolphins and killer whales really people’s pets that went back into the sea?”

“Not pets,” Pending Vegan said. “Wild animals. Like pigs.” He shuddered at the proliferating confusion: The girls knew pigs as farm animals. Just that morning he’d been surreptitiously reading a blog named The Call of the Feral . The castes of the subjugated: Pet, Domesticated, Feral, Wild …

“Why can’t we have a pet?” Chloe asked.

Pending Vegan’s wife turned to him. He avoided her eyes, but felt them anyway.

“Your father doesn’t like pets,” his wife said.

“Almost time for the eleven o’clock show!” he said, desperate to change the subject. And so they slugged out of the shark gallery’s gullet into daylight.

All of SeaWorld was squirming.

Grub-in-meat syndrome, the suggestion that Renker had unhelpfully planted, was itself a grub squirming in the meat of Pending Vegan’s mind.

*

They’d had a Jack Russell terrier, a neutered two-year-old male named Maurice that they’d adopted from a shelter, a total freaking maniac whom his wife had adored and he — well, Pending Vegan had also adored the dog, though it had been like living with a puzzle he couldn’t solve. Maurice moved at bewildering speeds, leaped vertically like an illegal firework, demanded everything, and invaded all their most intimate spaces. And then — and this, the reason that any mention of pets on the part of the girls chastened him, and the reason that his wife’s gaze froze his blood — when Pending Vegan had seen the dog’s behavior around his pregnant wife, he’d banished Maurice from their lives. The dog had been too attentive, too obsessed with her pregnancy, curling itself along her stomach at night as if hatching the twins with its own heat. Maurice had begun snapping at Pending Vegan when he approached his own marital bed. In the third trimester, he’d taken the dog back to the shelter, and though this was barely forgivable, perhaps not forgivable at all, after the babies came Maurice was never mentioned again.

The girls had no way of knowing they’d been womb-cuddled by Maurice, unless their mother one day told them. Chloe and Deirdre instead stanched their mammalian craving with Pixar creatures. Driving here, they’d been attention-glued to video screens mounted on the backs of their parents’ headrests. This spared them the sameness of I-5, its repetitious suburban exits, noise-barrier walls, and dead yellowed hills. Near San Diego, a road sign showed a silhouette of a fleeing Mexican family, like moose or deer, not to be hit in their illegal flight across the freeway’s five lanes. Pending Vegan felt blessed to be excused from explaining it.

Family life, a cataclysm of solitudes.

As a boy he’d endured backseat travel without the help of movies. Instead he’d directed his gaze out the family station wagon’s windows, past a zillion miles of the Chippewa National Forest, the U.P., and southern portions of Ontario and Manitoba. As a ten-year-old, in his ecology phase, he’d invented a time-killing game known, like his new name, only to himself. In this fantasy, Espeseth’s parents’ car featured a long invisible knife, like the wing of a plane, which could extend or retract from the side of the station wagon according to his mental instructions. He and his parents were only pretending to be nobodies, the sole Protestant family from the suburb nicknamed St. Jewish Park. In truth, they were emissaries from another world, sent to reclaim the landscape from the intrusions of the human species. He alone was orchestrating the blade, which shot out to lop off each electrical pole and road sign, and retracted to spare as many trees as possible in the effort. Houses, and other cars, it sliced through mercilessly. His fantasy even included an alibi-providing element of delay, which explained both his not getting to see the glorious destruction he’d wreaked and why no human authority was able to locate and neutralize the mysterious force that tore through his surroundings: The sliced objects fell apart five minutes after his family’s car passed by. By this method, the earth would be returned to the flora and fauna.

Lately the image of the invisible blade had returned to Pending Vegan. It would come at the sight of some architectural abomination, or a roadside blighted with billboards. SeaWorld, however, was impervious to the fantasy. Had he begun slicing up this labyrinth of discord, he’d merely murder the creatures trapped within it. By the logic of his childhood fantasy the blade would free the tortoises and the sharks and the porpoises from their tanks, to pour out and die gasping in sunlight on the concrete walkways.

Once inside Shamu Stadium, contra Renker, Pending Vegan noticed no bums and pickpockets. In Shamu Stadium he noticed furloughed military. The soldiers between rotations, out for a day trip with their families, their unfamiliar young children and stoical neglected wives, to see the killer whales. They were knowable by their short haircuts and bicep tattoos, by the wary swivel of their thickened necks. In their upright stolidity it was as though various civilian bodies had all been poured into the same unforgiving mold. Ethnicities reduced to traces in the soldiers were more tangible in the wives and children — in Renkerian terms, mostly black folks, Mexicans, and Orientals. Maybe even a scattering of Gypsies? How to know? Simplify, simplify .