Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre(47)
Violence, as unpleasant as it may seem, fulfills a necessary social function in chimpanzees.
—ANDREW R. HALLORAN, The Song of the Ape: Understanding the Languages of Chimpanzees
JOURNAL ENTRY #12
October 10
So much has happened. Where do I even begin?
That idiocy with the compost. Spreading it up on the ridge? I watched them all day. Vincent and Bobbi, chatting giddily over buckets of slop. The Perkins-Forsters, Effie doing most of the heavy lifting. Carmen with her rubber gloves and white paper flu mask. Germophobe. Palomino sticking close, apprehensively looking around. At least they only took up the top portions, the stuff that still looked like food. The bottom, newly minted dirt, we’ll need for the garden. Maybe they were thinking that, or were just too lazy to haul it up. I bet you that was the case with Reinhardt.
I busted him taking his burden to the Common House bin. “Busted” is the word because of the guilty look on his face. I watched him hoof his office trash pail (doesn’t he own a bucket?) across the driveway to the Common House. I feel a little mean doing what I did, but the way he looked around suspiciously…
I just had to knock on the window. That priceless freeze on his face when he saw me. It was worth it for the follow-up fake smile, and the ridiculous pantomime. I think he was trying to relate that the steep incline of the ridge was bothering his hip or something. Yes, I have seen him walk with some discomfort, but now, as he shuffled back to his house, his irregular step was a full-on limp.
Weenie.
I thought Mostar would get a good laugh over that. I thought she might need some cheering up. But when I got to the house, I noticed that the lights were on in her workshop. I’m sure I could have gone in, asked what she was doing, but after what happened that morning, she didn’t seem to want company.
And that was confirmed at dinner. She always cooked for us, either at her place or ours. That night she was MIA. I thought about going over again, and even asked Dan if I should. He responded matter-of-factly, “If she wanted to see us, she would.”
Dan and I didn’t eat together either. He was too busy trying to get all the windows re-alarmed. He wasted half the day on the glass, trying to seal the breaks with packing tape. It turned out the real problem was the screens. The connections had been loosened during the quake. He cursed not having a soldering gun, or any real tools for that matter.
Can you believe that? No tools, anywhere! I asked around, the Perkins-Forsters, the Boothes. Nobody. I mean, I guess it makes sense when you’re supposed to have a handyman on call 24/7. But now. I did talk to Mostar about maybe using her 3-D printer, which Dan thought was a great idea. But Mostar reminded us that her only raw material was a polymer-silicon mix. Glass tools? Dead end. So Dan made do with tape, paper clips, and, of all things, glue with a King Kong–ish ape on the front.
Looking at the ape, watching him work, it kind of dawned on me how vulnerable our house, all houses, really are. They’re not built for physical safety. That’s what cops are for. I remember Matt, Dan’s roommate sophomore year. He was a history major. I remember him talking about how rich Romans could afford to live in comfortable homes because they were protected by army forts down the road. But when the empire fell, those ruined forts got built back up into castles. Slit windows. Few doors. Security was everything. Matt always talked about this French movie where a medieval knight travels forward in time to the modern age, and is horrified at what’s happened to his castle. “Who put all these windows in? We’re defenseless!” I was thinking that as Dan tried to re-alarm all our windows.
And I wondered, without telling him, what an alarm would actually accomplish. It’s just a signal, a call for muscle that can’t get to us even if they heard. Maybe the siren itself will do some good. Scare them off, hopefully.
Dan must think so, the way he worked today. I did force him to eat something, a bowl of Bobbi’s puffed quinoa. He was so frustrated by then, almost getting in a fistfight with the upstairs window in the guest bathroom. It’s really small, and against a flat wall. No way for them to climb up or squeeze through. He wasn’t listening by that point, getting obsessive about “finishing the job.” When he started cursing it out, I put my food down and made him take a break. After “dinner” and a hot shower, he admitted that I was right. I was also right about him heading off to bed. I promised to wake him if I saw anything.
And for a few hours, I didn’t. The sky darkened, the house lights went on, then off as our neighbors turned in. I sat at the desk in my office, going over the village’s collective food list. The Boothes and Perkins-Forsters both asked me to make ration books for them. They weren’t shy about their ages or levels of physical exertion. Reinhardt was the only holdout. Maybe he’s too ashamed to get that personal, or maybe he just figures he’s got enough fat reserves to outlast us all. I’m not being mean here, just stating a fact. Technically he could outlast us all, because everyone’s pantries are about as shallow as ours. I’m trying not to think about what we might all look like by January, living on crumbs and the last licks of olive oil. I’m depending on the garden more than ever now, and hoping against hope that Bobbi’s new seed rice will sprout. Does rice need water to grow? Pictures always have it in flooded paddies. Did I totally mess up by sticking it in the ground? I really don’t know what I’m doing.