The Portable Veblen (30 page)

“The snails were screaming!”

“I’d scream too if you were feeding me to the chickens,” said Marion, who was flipping zucchini pancakes on a blackened griddle.

“It sounded like—” He dropped his jaw to strike the right pitch.

Justin sat at the table spooning up his daily bowl of mush. He said, “Like this, Paul?” and began to imitate Paul imitating snails in a most loud and lunkish manner, yodeling so cavernously Paul could see his fleshy uvula, hanging in his throat like a slug.

Paul began to gag. “Cut it out!”

Not Justin, no way.

“Shut up!” Paul heaved a few times, but Justin’s yodel only grew louder, and Paul went over and slugged him squarely in the chest.

“All right. Go to your room and calm down,” said Bill. “Do you hear me?”

“He wrecks everything!”

“Wrecking what?”

“Dad, I heard snails screaming!”

“You punched your brother for that? Go to your room and take a deep breath and pull yourself together!”

Gielow grasped it all. “So you want vindication.”

Paul nodded with gratitude. “Exactly.”

Gielow said, “My brother was a bastard too. No better motivation. I know you’ll do an excellent job.”

Later at the library, Paul’s friend Mrs. Brown helped him find two promising references,
Invertebrates Around Us
and
Gastropoda Today
. Zeroing in on
Helix aspersa,
the common garden variety, Paul searched for documentation. At home he set up his experimentation center, a stress-inducing bucket with a microphone affixed, and filled it with at least seventy robust snails. He took pictures of every step of the process, prepared the abstract, drew diagrams, and was well ahead of the deadline, giving himself
plenty of leeway lest the circumstances that caused snails to scream be difficult to reproduce.

He learned there were more than thirty-five thousand species, making
Gastropoda
the second largest class of
organisms
on earth. He studied diagrams of the pulmonary vein, the pedal ganglia, the buccal mass, the dart sac, and dissected a number of hapless standbys in the process. A great deal was made in the literature over the fact that the internal structure of
Helix aspersa
was asymmetrical, but Paul found it much more interesting that snails were hermaphroditic, possessing the organs of both sexes.

Early on he had one unexpected result—snails seemed to enjoy escargot. Almost every night there were one or two fewer in the bucket, thin fragments of shell scattered on the bottom. Cannibals! Paul planned to make much of this repugnant discovery and found supporting text in
Gastropoda Today,
and maybe that should have been enough. Maybe he should have been satisfied with the unexpected, rather than insisting on a predetermined result. After all, many of the greatest discoveries of all time were purely accidental, falling under the heading of what scientist Max Delbruck named “The Principle of Limited Sloppiness.” Look at Sir Alexander Fleming and his moldy petri dish, which led to penicillin. Look at Pasteur trying to kill some chickens but vaccinating them instead. Roentgen playing around with vacuum tubes, nothing to do with seeing people through to the bones!

So what else had factored into his discovery that distant morning? Paul recalled the old battle of the crack. He and Justin had shared a bedroom for years (until Paul seized the old laundry room as one of his first steps on the road to self-definition) and Justin’s things had always taken up a lot more space than his. Justin had a
wheelchair for occasional use, a sleep apnea machine that roared, and big bulky clothes and shoes, and he wore braces on his legs then. But brothers shared rooms, Bill insisted. He’d always shared a room with his brother Richard. There was no reason Paul and Justin couldn’t. Paul’s bed was stuck behind the door, and one day he deliberately pushed it away from the wall about a foot. And every time he came back into the room, the bed had been pushed back. Diligently, he’d pull it out again. At night, as his parents whispered between themselves and came to Justin’s cries when he fell out of bed, Paul faced the wall and the crack between it and him and fostered an angry determination to hold on to the space no matter what. In the mornings, as they dressed for school, Justin always had to stub a toe on the protruding bed and, with an exaggerated bellow, try to squeeze Paul’s crack out of existence.

Were the screams of the snails something he’d fabricated to assert himself? To show he had a will? One afternoon, alone with the mute gastropods, Paul began to think the screaming-snail memory was, after all, a myth of his cheerless youth. Like the myth that peace signs and slogans such as
War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things
were ever going to change a fucked-up thing.

In kindergarten, did he really chase a girl all around the school who wouldn’t accept his Valentine?

•   •   •

1995.
B
Y ALL ACCOUNTS,
the van and the people pouring from it that day looked like they belonged in Clinton-era Humboldt. Many of them lived off the grid themselves, in parts of New Mexico, Oregon, as far as Saskatchewan. There was a man with blond
dreadlocks, another man with brown dreadlocks, a Jamaican with black dreads streaming down his back, a woman wearing a sari tied around her waist, blond hair caught in it. Wiry weathered men jumped out, grabbed duffel bags and army surplus ammo cases, not for real ammo but to keep cameras and valuables dry on the river.

There were Marshall and Kip, with their cutoffs and bare feet, their Guatemalan
calzoncillos,
and their woven vests. There were Cool Breeze and Curtis and John. Cool Breeze wore a scarf around his head like a pirate. John kept aloft a Hacky Sack with the talent of his blackened feet. Curtis had straw-colored hair and a dirty mustache. There was his mother’s best friend, Caddie Fladeboe, who looked like Mama Cass, laden with turquoise stones.

Paul remembered the smell of them invading the house, the decibels reached by their voices in chorus, while he retreated to his bedroom to finish his project. Tomorrow was the fair. He had everything to perfection, except for one small detail. The inevitable pungent smell of burning pot invaded his room first, followed by the happier aroma of his mother’s cooking, which drew him out at last, a huge vat of lentil stew and whole-wheat flatbread and a salad full of nasturtium flowers, but the BO of the group and the way they all sat together in a pile, shirtless, raspberry nippled and muddy toed, made him return to his room as soon as he’d filled his plate, and he ate alone on the edge of his bed designing moats and drawbridges to surround the house he’d have someday to keep them all out. And after he practiced his presentation he climbed into bed, stuffed cotton balls in his ears, which made him feel all the more isolated, then drew a pillow over his head
.

•   •   •

I
N THE MORNING,
he had to wake his dad for the keys to the Dodge truck, Betsy—and had to step over the guy with the blond dreadlocks and one of the women together in a sleeping bag in order to get out the door, with his display board tucked under one arm, and the bag containing the tape recording and the report in the other. Bill followed him out to say good-bye, despite having stayed up partying all night. “We picked up some crazy friends, didn’t we?”

“Yeah. They stink.”

“I’ll hose ’em down today, will that help?” Bill said.

“Probably not.”

“So you ready to go with your report?” Bill asked, almost as an afterthought.

“I got my results.”

His father nodded, but clearly couldn’t remember the details of Paul’s report at that hour.

“So you and Mom are coming, right?”

“Today?”

“Of course it’s today. You know it’s today!”

“Sorry, son. I’m feeling a little flat.”

Pressing this small advantage, Paul said, “I was wondering. Don’t get mad. Would it be okay, since people are here who can watch him, if you don’t bring Justin?”

“Why?” Bill looked pained.

“So you can look around without worrying about him.”

Bill scuffed the ground with his moccasins. “Justy loves your
school events. He gets so much out of being part of your life. Come on. Think how little he has compared to you.”

“Dad, please? These people are going to be here, right? Can’t he stay with them?”

“We’ll see.”

His father said good-bye and good luck and Paul tore off. As he rammed Betsy up the dirt road, always hoping to destroy her so they could get a new car, he wished Justin had never been born. To wish someone had never been born required, per Paul’s method, an elaborate journey in a microscopic submarine up the progenitor’s urethra into the gonad, where missiles were deployed in all directions, mowing down sperm by the millions.

•   •   •

T
HAT DAY IN BIOLOGY
, they shared their reports before setting up the displays in the gym. Paul’s turn came and he stood before the class and said:

“And finally, after twenty-seven hours of recording time, the proper conditions asserted themselves and the snails began to emit sound, which I will play for you now.”

He could barely look at Gielow, who beamed at him so paternally it was scary. The recorder was queued. As it began to play he could hear the sounds from last night’s party—the Grateful Dead riffing on “Truckin’,” pillars of laughter, loud and moronic—but looking up at his classmates, he realized these were the normal sounds of hearth and home in these parts.

It sounded cheesy, grating, the way he’d rubbed the mic along the box, and when the sound rose in pitch to a whistle from what
was clearly a narrow opening, culminating in an explosive, slurpy sound, Paul cringed. Though it was very clear to him that these sounds could be produced by shoving a plastic straw through a Styrofoam block, he prayed it wasn’t clear to anybody else.

“Oh, my word,” said Gielow, after Paul let the tape run on. He gazed furtively around at his classmates for signs of mockery, but they were ready to believe. This alone was a startling discovery, worthy of a project someday. “Fantastic. Did you have doubts all those hours before? Was there a point at which you wanted to give up?”

Paul nodded fiercely, rationalizing that the facsimile of the noise was valid. To share what he’d heard had been his aim. To expose others to the awesome truth about snail sounds had been his purpose. To come in empty-handed would have left him nowhere, with nothing, though he vowed he’d never do anything like this again.

“Yeah. I had all the usual doubts when you have an unproven theory. I knew what I’d heard was real, though, so I was determined to wait.”

“Let that be a lesson to us all,” Gielow said.

People in the class asked decent questions. “Do you think they make noise only when stressed out?” “Did the other snails react to the scream?” “Do you think it’s communication, or just some kind of gas like a fart?” He handled the questions deftly. He had once heard the noise loud and clear and that’s what mattered most.

Later that afternoon, Paul stood beside his project in the assembly room, waiting to explain it to the roving judges. On one side of him was Millie Cuthbertson, the girl he’d liked since fourth grade,
with her quiet and refined ways, her self-control, her friendly face. Her project concerned the heart rates of dogs when taken to the vet, who happened to be her mother. Her standard-sized thirty-six- by forty-eight-inch display board was covered with pictures of various breeds, pictures of the vet/mother, and neatly colored graphs that showed the names of the dogs and their usual heart rates and their rates at the vet, glued onto orange and green construction paper for accent. Paul secretly thought this could have been a third grader’s experiment, but since he liked Millie a lot, he said, “Nice. Did you use a certain protocol with the vet?”

“Like how?”

“I mean, was your mother exactly the same with every dog?”

“Sure. She’s very professional.”

“She doesn’t favor one breed over another?”

“We have a collie, so it’s possible she likes collies more than other dogs,” Millie considered. “But if you look at the statistics on the collie that
wasn’t
ours—” She searched endearingly on the chart, allowing him to look down the armpit of her blouse where he could see her bra, which was very plain and white. “Here, well, look, it’s one of the lower ratios. Let me see. It’s the second lowest, after the deaf fifteen-year-old Yorkie. That’s a good point, Paul.”

Paul nodded modestly. “I think of things like that.”

“Have you seen my project?” interrupted Hans Borg, on the other side of Millie. Hans had made schemata of Hagia Sofia in Constantinople from various angles and had analyzed the structure for weak spots in case of a great quake.

“That’s neat,” said Millie. “How did you think of it?”

“My family toured Europe last summer,” Hans said, rather
smugly for someone so pale and pug-nosed. “Turkey was totally the most amazing.” Paul had never been to Europe, and at this point hated Hans, who frequently dropped hints about a rich grandmother in Los Angeles who wanted nothing more than to finance Hans in all future whims, great and small. Paul had seen Millie carrying around a copy of
Atlas Shrugged
lately, so while Hans Borg was being questioned by a judge, he asked Millie what she thought of Ayn Rand. Then he told her to check out
Slaughterhouse-Five,
and mentioned that Vonnegut’s uncle had been a brilliant scientist who invented the seeding of clouds, and that another relative of his coinvented the horizontal panic bar on public doors after nearly burning up in a theater fire. The brand name was Von Duprin and the “Von” was from Vonnegut. This
Jeopardy!
-quality trivia seemed to impress her, so the conversation continued to open up. He told her a story about how a dead, bloated cow in a field once exploded on his dad. She told him how her mother had found a two-pound brick of hashish in the stomach of a Labrador.

All the while, Paul’s head turned to the door for his mother and father, arriving late, breathless, apologetic.