Barn 8 Page 21

  The so-called noncontamination may be the cause of my lethargy, headaches, and disorientation. In fact, initially when I saw the hens, I thought I was hallucinating.

  They are excellent climbers, as a side note, once they get the hang of it. I glimpsed a few lurching around in the lower parts of the trees, somersaulting out of them, stringing through the leaves. Bravo!

  Against them, you’ve got winter.

  For them, you’ve got that it was spring.

  Against them, you’ve got that it was spring and that if there was a time humans would brave chemical contamination and its subsequent potential cancers and neonatal disorders, it would be then, when humans are let outside.

  In the hens’ favor, you’ve got the local economy—and the fallout from its demolition. This was the year the state went bankrupt. The senate elected to reduce benefits, pensions, library hours, and—most relevant to the hens—funding to state parks. All state parks were hereby shut down indefinitely. Humans in search of weekend entertainment would not be coming this spring. No rangers leading nature walks, no peanut brittle in the welcome center, no PowerPoint shows of rocks. Not that we ever had much of that anyway, what with the contamination.

  Against them you’ve got that, despite the park’s closure, the state did still employ individual rangers to monitor the parks and do low-level maintenance—not to keep the paths free of brush and prevent nature from taking back what’s hers, which takes a whole team, but to drive through from time to time, make sure no vandals—or chickens—were taking over in there. You would think the ranger of this forest would spot tens of thousands of chickens, but, in their favor, the ranger in charge of this patch of forest happened to be me, and I had become delinquent to the very highest degree. I was through being the codependent mediator between human and nature. I didn’t really give a fuck anymore. I’d spent my adolescence and young adult life trying to obtain the position of head ranger and, first, in what could only be a cruel joke, I was put in charge of a contaminated forest empty of animals and, second, within a year the park was cut in a line budget item. The handful of other intrepid rangers and volunteers left and I was alone.

  So in the hens’ favor you’ve got that I did not, as I was supposed to, drive through my assigned amoeba-shaped piece of forest each afternoon, the piece carved out to abut and buffer the contamination. Instead I sat in the state park ranger trailer and watched tremendous amounts of TV. I was working through every season of every show I had ever heard of.

  I’d never been able to do this before. As a child raised by a public librarian and a high school history teacher, occupations as adorable and close to extinction as my own, I’d lived under a severe, screen-restricted regime. I’d missed every media event essential to a healthy social childhood, and I continued to as a young adult out of loyalty. But now in the weeks before the chickens showed up, I’d decided that these state park fucks could go fuck themselves. I was going to catch up on my shows.

  At first I watched out of loneliness and boredom. But gradually I began to feel pleased with my little radiant porthole. I had no actual TV set, of course. The state does not outfit the ranger trailers with them, but I had the internet, which they had to give me since cell service is spotty out here and I had to file the reports online. I had access to hundreds, thousands, of shows. Shows about war between planets, shows about people wanting to be married, shows about being black drivers, shows about people jumping off of cliffs and into cars, about dogs, zombies, France. Then there was porn, which had me sidetracked for a week before I let myself be dragged away by the whole genre of shows about comedians enacting themselves having embarrassing sex, failing children, being funny in a world that doesn’t understand them. I began to understand why people rushed home from work to sit in the glow, bits of color touching their faces, the room darkening and lightening not in response to the earth’s daily churn, but to the hourly TV one. I could nestle the state-issued laptop between my knees, the show two feet from my face, which was better than having it across the room with all that dull, hopeless “real life” space between me and the screen. The room faded out of existence and it was almost as if I was there with them, inside the show.

  I had to send the daily reports, yes, on the defunct state of the state park. I filled out the reports online while I watched the shows on the other half of the screen. A perfect setup, because no show—no matter how good or how much I dreaded or longed for its characters—took up more than 70 percent of my concentration and usually considerably less (and honestly couldn’t one say the same for even the most passionate affairs in “real life”?). Between the report and the show I came close to having 90 percent of my attention attended to, leaving only 10 percent to wave alone in the wind, thinking or racing with irrational fear or fury.

  Who says that what we experience while watching TV isn’t every bit as real as what we experience while watching what isn’t on TV? If TV creates the same emotions—sadness, desire, rage—and if the emotion is sincere, and frankly a hell of a lot less work, why shouldn’t it count? Isn’t it true that in “real life” people and promises disappear with less ritual than on-screen anyway?

  I was in this condition when the superchickens showed up.

  Now and then I’d glance up from my laptop and find the room still there. Through the smudged trailer window along the couch where I reclined, I could see green getting greener, light failing, dark falling, light returning. I’d look back at the laptop.

  Then one day I glanced out and saw a trail of chickens, all puffed up, poking around.

  What the hell is that? I thought. A chicken?

  I looked back at the show. I thought nothing at all.

  I looked out the window a few hours later and saw more of them, hundreds.

  I looked it up online while watching a show about vampire women—an unbelievable number of episodes to this one, I’d be safe for months—and there it was, an article about an entire farm’s worth of chickens stolen by radicals. Did anyone realize they’d dropped some off here?

  Why didn’t someone come looking?

  Ah, I’ll tell you why. Because I said the hens were dead! No one wanted to come onto this land unless they had to. The ranger association wrote and asked me if I’d spotted any domestic white leghorn chickens. I looked out the trailer window at the group gathered around the cooked brown rice I’d put out there. Yeah, some, I wrote back. They all died in a day. Probably the contamination. I bagged them up and buried them. Then I added to keep them from coming: I’m still getting those headaches, by the way. And: Could you add a bit more to the supplies account? I’m almost out of food.

  Meanwhile, outside the trailer the superchickens ran over the grounds. Even the local boys, who might conceivably drive in looking for something to torture, stayed away, more interested these days in their heroic exploits as oxy-morons. You can imagine.

  The chickens nested, laid eggs, so they had that going for them too. After a couple of days, I walked through the forest and looked at the chickens and the eggs, the enormous number of eggs. Eggs everywhere. I thought, Neat, maybe I’ll have some chicks. Maybe this is the start of a new generation of chickens, right here in my radioactive forest. Then it hit me. Wait, there aren’t any roosters. Don’t hens’ eggs need to be fertilized?

  I looked it up. Yes, the chickens had to get fucked in order for this to happen. I was researching all this while I wrote reports and watched season three of the vampire show that by then was taking up only 30 percent of my attention. Then I watched season eight of a show about a hospital (20 percent). Then I watched a show about a supernatural firefighter (40 percent). And I began to think, This is a tremendous roadblock, the absence of a rooster. Not even a roadblock but a dead end. These eggs were not going to come out fertilized. Tens of thousands of hens, each laying eggs every thirty-two hours, according to the United Egg Producers website. And it was spring, the perfect time. Still, no way. Scientifically impossible, unless you wanted to count on a virgin birth, whi
ch hasn’t happened in a while. I did discover in my browsing, while watching season four of a show about a family that sits on sofas all day (10 percent), that occasionally a chicken does change its sex from female to male. A hen becomes a cock! It happens in one out of ten thousand birds. The hen grows a cock on its head and starts to crow. Why do they do that? I do not know. Proves something about something. But the trans cocks do not produce sperm and so will never be able to fertilize a chicken.

  No, the lack of sperm would be their defeat.

  I didn’t like that. It seemed an unfair disadvantage.

  Even more, these superchickens weren’t supposed to want to sit on their own eggs! This is the kind of breeding that had been going on. Bred to breed themselves out of existence. Humans had screwed them but good.

  I could see them out there. I watched with binoculars, while watching season two of a show about a family with sick kids that keep getting better and better (8 percent).

  So that’s the only thing I did. The human mind bends toward action, though we like to pretend it leans toward lethargy. Guess how easy it is to buy roosters. You press a button during the closing credits of a show about bombs that go off in deserts or underwater (25 percent). Available for pickup next business day. I ordered two dozen roosters. I had to agree to terms and conditions that included promising I would not turn them against each other for a fight. The farm called in the morning and said I could come pick them up.

  I drove into town in the state park truck for the first time in a month. I loaded up on feed, then I drove to the farm an hour away. An old farmhand helped me put the crates of birds in the back. Each rooster was in its own separate compartment, two per crate with a divider between them. Back at the park I hoisted the crates onto the ground but did not open them. I considered.

  Even with the roosters I was going to have to depend on human error. Humans had already erred so much, it seemed too much to hope that there could be yet more, and also inconceivable that there wasn’t a hell of a lot more to come.

  I was going to have to hope that humans had not been able to make every single one of these chickens insistent on not sitting, that a suppressed gene would leap forward, assert itself in a chicken who was here and alive and who would meet up with a rooster, and that the two would find enough in common to want more than friendship, to each be searching for more, for love perhaps, or at least sexual or biological satisfaction.

  We were going to have to hope that primitive gene was strong, stronger than humans, and that the hen would sit, not one day or two, but that she would desire the whole situation, to create, nurture, tend, protect (stay no matter what), to conquer all that humans had done to her, that she’d sit and busily poke at her nest, pull bits of twig and leaves around her, pick out bugs, gently turn her eggs, and that the other hens would watch with interest and envy, that they would feel their own stirrings within them and imitate, and that after a few days the hens would begin to feel the shuffling of their babies beneath them and be moved enough to break into the ancient twittering song that hens sing to their embryos, songs that the embryos sing back, whatever transmission of information occurring in that music forever unknown to us because, no matter how smart we think we are, the simplest things are still sealed off.

  Maybe the chances of this were low, yes. But surely not as low as the original spontaneous creation of life, however many million years ago. Not as low as the routine daily occurrences happening all around us, sperm swimming up canals, genes mutating, and so on, the evolution of animals, human and nonhuman. Before I could change my mind, rule against myself skewing the odds, removing a handicap, and instead let the hens rise or fall on the vicissitudes of fate, not man, I opened the crates. I released the birds one by one. The roosters put out their heads, clucked. They stepped hesitantly into the trees.

  JONATHAN SAID, “Annabelle, can you hear me?”

  Joy and the girls were at a birthday party at Holy Moly Cheese, where they would play Cyber Robot and Cracker Cracker. Joy had been so patient with him about this. He was worried about her family, he’d told her.

  “Annabelle, I know you can hear me.”

  She had promised to resign for good after this. They hadn’t discussed what that meant. She’d been in a medically assisted coma for over a month now. The doctors said she was ready to come out.

  “Annabelle,” he said, “come on.” If she’d just open her eyes.

  Q: Name?

  A: Didn’t I answer that already?

  Q: This is for the form.

  A: I can’t even feel my feet anymore. I can’t feel my shins.

  Q: This last part won’t take more than a few minutes. Then all you do is sign and you’re done.

  A: All right, fine. Just hurry up.

  Q: Name?

  A: There you go again.

  Q: For the form.

  A: Annabelle Green Jarman.

  Q: How long were you involved in the organization?

  A: In what capacity? I had, let’s see, eighteen years as daughter, three as wife, eight as investigator, two as outlaw, or depending on how you’re—. Hold on, what was that?

  Q: What was what?

  A: I heard something.

  Q: We didn’t hear anything.

  A: All right.

  Q: So would you admit that during your involvement—

  A: There it is again. Did you hear that?

  Q: No.

  A: It’s gone now.

  Q: We can skip some of these. Final question. Could you tell us—

  A: Hang on. There. Did you hear it? Someone’s calling my name.

  Q: Sorry, nothing.

  A: I’m going to go see. I’ll be right back.

  Q: You can’t go back out there now. You already signed.

  A: I haven’t signed anything.

  Q: You almost signed. It’s right here. We just need your initials really.

  A: I have to get my legs off this. I don’t know if can—

  Q: Wait.

  A: What?

  Q: We can’t promise what comes next for you, if you go.

  A: No one ever did before and that didn’t stop me.

  Q: He won’t stay with you.

  A: You just said you weren’t going to tell me.

  Q: He’ll go back to the other woman. Dill won’t stay either.

  A: Oh. Well, what if I stay here? What happens then?

  Q: We can’t tell you. Not until you sign. Right here.

  A: Do I go before a judge?

  Q: Oh no, nothing barbaric like that.

  A: Do I come back as something else? A cow, an insect, a tree, a boy?

  Q: [to each other] They can’t help it. Earth is all they can imagine.

  A: What then?

  Q: Just sign.

  A: Hum, tempting.

  Q: Here, use this.

  A: Hang on. I hear him again.

  Q: No, that’s not him.

  A: I know his voice.

  Q: He won’t stay. In fact everything you love will soon be gone. Fish and elephants and birds—especially birds. It all gets worse from here on out. Earth will be covered with contamination.

  A: Oh … Is there anything left for me if I go back out there? Anything at all?

  Q: No.

  Q: Aw, come on, tell her.

  Q: It’s not our place.

  A: Tell me what?

  Q: Nothing.

  Q: There will be a moment.

  A: A moment?

  Q: A gathering of humans.

  Q: Mostly humans.

  A: Where?

  Q: A room.

  Q: A household.

  A: And I’ll be there?

  Q: Yes, you’ll be among them.

  A: Among what?

  Q: Music and chatter and light.

  Q: You’ll be older.

  Q: Older, yes, still slim, your hair will be up.

  A: I wear it like that sometimes.

  Q: He won’t be there.

  A: What will I be doing?


  Q: Passing a platter of food.

  Q: Laughing.

  Q: Grilled vegetables. You’ll be a little high from a glass of wine.

  Q: In fact if you concentrate now, you can almost see yourself outlined in the human blur. See it?

  A: I think so.

  Q: There you are.

  A: Will it be enough?

  Q: Almost.

  A: I hear him again.

  Q: He’ll go back to her.

  A: I’m going. Excuse me.

  Q: We thought your legs were numb.

  A: They seem to be working now. Or not quite, woops. No, I’ve got it. I’m coming, Jonathan. Wait up.

  I BELIEVE IN THE AUDIT, even now when I know it’s not possible. One cannot enter a barn and look at every object and animal, leave no spot unexamined. Can’t do it.

  Therefore I regret to inform my superiors that I, Cleveland Smith, in sound mind, resign from my position as head auditor. I was fired, prosecuted, imprisoned, but some positions one has to decide for oneself to leave. But insofar as the auditor is one who looks and reports, I do not rescind my right to look, only my duty to report, for I believe in the beauty and horror of small corners, forgotten faces, wide expanses. I will continue to look. I will watch the world molt.

  I, Janey Flores, resign on behalf of the old Janey Flores, the one who stayed behind in New York. She will no longer be reporting for duty in my mind. Henceforth there will be only one Janey Flores (in addition to the 1,883 others currently alive worldwide, not to mention Jane Flores [12,921] and J. Flores [1,164,046]). With the old Janey Flores goes the entire apparatus: the friends she would have made, the words she would have spoken, the moments she and I would have met. From here forward, there will be no echo, no stereo. My words are mine alone.