*
His shrink, Irving Renker, had given him a warning about the effects of leaching Celexa from his brain. Espeseth had at the time of the conversation been free of the medicine for just two days. He was quitting under Renker’s guidance, such as it was. “Prepare yourself,” Renker told him. “You might see bums and pickpockets.”
“See in the sense of hallucinate?”
“No,” Renker said. “You won’t hallucinate. I mean see in the sense of notice. You may disproportionately notice bums and pickpockets. Creeps. Perverts. Even amputees.”
Irving Renker was a Jewish New Yorker who’d crawled out of his archetype like a lobster from its shell, still conforming to that shell’s remorseless shape but wandering around fresh, tender, and amazed. Renker advocated physical exercise and could be seen navigating the crests of Santa Barbara’s hills on his bicycle, wearing a helmet and shades as well as an office-ready sweater, blue slacks, and leather-soled shoes. Espeseth had never seen him in the flats, let alone near the beach. He suspected that Renker’s wife did all their grocery shopping. Renker’s office was in an in-law apartment nestled in the scrubby hills behind his home, itself raised on stilts to meet the angle of the terrain. Renker’s front-window drapes were always drawn, thwarting curious eyes. Was there a secret intellectual-Jew hovel there, with book-lined shelves, Sigmundian fetish masks, funky unfumigatable Persian carpets? No way to know. The consultation room was bland: framed abstract watercolors, beige upholstery, brass clock.
Renker’s conversation included, along with the phrases “Keep it simple” and “Don’t overthink,” terms like “black folks,” “Oriental,” “gypped,” and “bum.” Once, as Espeseth reminisced at length about sitting with his three brothers in the front seat of his father’s pickup truck on a fishing expedition, Renker had murmured, “Yes, yes, that’s known as ‘riding Mexican.’ ”
Espeseth never confronted or corrected his shrink. Instead, he’d gently offer examples of appropriate speech, in this case by replying, “Does this mean that the Celexa was, what, making me blind to homeless people? Or more likely to get robbed?”
“It’s a question of emphasis,” Renker said. “You may tend to notice scumbags, to the detriment of those standing to the right and the left of them. I don’t want to suggest you’ll become paranoid, but you may also project scumbaggery onto ordinary people.” That his shrink believed in “ordinary people” was a bad sign if Espeseth dwelled on it; he tried not to. It was what Renker said next that he couldn’t shake off. “In withdrawal from Celexa some patients have described a kind of atmosphere of rot or corruption or peril creeping around the edges of the everyday world, a thing no one but they can identify. A colleague of mine labeled this ‘grub-in-meat syndrome.’ Better to be prepared than have it sneak up on you.”
Grub-in-meat syndrome?
No one, not shrink Renker, not Espeseth’s wife, certainly not the twins, no human listener outside the containment zone of his skull knew that Paul Espeseth had renamed himself Pending Vegan. His secret name was a symptom, if it should be considered a symptom, that had overtaken him months before he quit the Celexa. Could it be a side effect? He’d hoped it would abate when he went off the drug. No such luck. Pending Vegan wasn’t completely sorry. His new name was a mortification, yes, but he clung to it, for it also held some promise of an exalted life, one just beyond reach.
How had his researches begun? Espeseth, when that had been his only name, had checked out of Santa Barbara’s public library a popular account of the world’s collapse into unsustainability under the weight of its human population. He’d gone from that to reading several famous polemics against the cruelty of farms and slaughterhouses. Next, a book called Fear of the Animal Planet, which detailed acts of beastly revenge upon human civilization. It was then that Espeseth felt himself becoming Pending Vegan. A knowledge had been born inside him, the development of which only inertia and embarrassment and conformity could slow. Fortunately or unfortunately, Pending Vegan was rich in these delaying properties.
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.