A Marriage Made at Woodstock (28 page)

The animal-rights group was now chanting in unison.
“Animals have feelings, too! Animals have feelings, too! Animals have feelings, too!”

He saw Chandra appear on the steps of Radnor Laboratory, a natural podium. She raised an arm and the Animal Coalition, forming a protective wall around her, grew quiet so that she could speak. Behind Frederick, the People First crowd grew restless. They moved forward.

“It wasn't so long ago,” Chandra shouted, “that fifteen thousand babies were born severely deformed because Thalidomide was thought to be a safe drug, due to animal testing.” The Animal Coalition roared in support, their candles hoisted dramatically over their heads.

“Would you rather your kid died?” a thin woman yelled from Frederick's right. She seemed very tired. “Instead of a rabbit?” The People First group burst into a loud wave of approval. The woman was smiling now, buoyed up with the comfort of her comrades, their praise rising up around her.

“Why don't you people move to the jungle,” someone else yelled, “if you like animals so much?” A thunderous ocean of applause followed this suggestion. Frederick bulldozed his way closer to the front, hoping to get away from the People First gang so that he could hear what Chandra was now saying. Across the tops of a hundred heads he could see her beautiful face, aglow with the moment, that Impressionist face, flushed with its second in time.

“We have alternatives to this cruelty,” she said. “We have highly developed mathematical and computer models, cell and tissue cultures already in existence.” A murmur of displeasure swept over her detractors. It came at him like a billowing, angry wave. Frederick had no heart for protest anymore. No wonder he'd gradually grown away from it as the years of his married life passed. Maybe he never had any heart for it to begin with. And now he felt the guilt, his old compadre, arrive again.

“If your husband was dying because he needed a heart transplant from a monkey, you'd be the first to do it!” This latest declaration came from a woman at Frederick's right elbow. He tried to imagine himself with a monkey's heart. Would he crave bananas? Would he consider lice a culinary gift? He tapped the woman's arm, just above her elbow, enough to get her attention in that mad sea of humans.

“What?” she asked. She eyed him suspiciously.

“She wouldn't want her husband to get a monkey's heart,” Frederick said. “Trust me on this.” Chandra might even deny him an artificial Jarvak's heart, considering that she seemed to hate him these days. He felt someone tapping on his back. Herbert.

“We should get out of here,” Herbert said. The crowd went forward just then, bodies bending like reeds. “Come on, Freddy.”

Frederick couldn't take his eyes off Chandra. She had managed to quiet her own group, her hands waving, the hands of a conductor. The evening had drawn inward, the sun having already sunk toward some happier longitude. Candles now bounced and flickered like crazed lightning bugs, dots of fire strung upon the night.

“Each year tens of millions of animals are burned, shocked, poisoned, and killed,” said Chandra. “And it's all for repetitious experiments that are conducted for unnecessary research data so a few people can earn PhDs. Or in the hopes that they'll get grant funding.” The Animal Coalition broke into an inferno of applause as the People First supporters swelled forward again in anger. It was with difficulty that Frederick maintained his balance. He felt Herbert's hand grasp his arm.

“You got your training for this at Woodstock,” Herbert said, “but I have none.”

When Frederick was able to right himself, Chandra was gone. The Radnor steps were now swarming with people from both groups, signs were being flung down in anger, and mayhem seemed to be the mood of the moment.

“I've got to find her, Herb,” Frederick said. “You go on home.” He saw Herbert's face form a protest of its own, his mouth about to speak words, and then Herbert was swept backward into the crowd, Jonah being sucked into the belly of the whale. Frederick was propelled forward, toward the edge of the crowd, its outskirts. He would feel right at home there.
You
live
on
the
outskirts
of
humanity, Freddy.
He needed to think like Chandra, like a Seminars of the Mind person. What would she do next? She had given her speech to the crowd, but he knew that that wouldn't satisfy her. He'd bailed her out before for trespassing, once during an attempt to sabotage a deer hunt, once at a Fur Free Society protest when she'd managed to sneak inside the Portland Fur Boutique and spray the walls with a bloody red paint. He felt quite sure, somehow, that Chandra was hoping to infiltrate the halls of Radnor Laboratory. Pushing forward through the undulating crowd was rather like being on an inner tube in a wave pool. But he finally crested the last mass of bodies at the edge and then rode out into a serene pool of folks hovering near the front steps. “Hello, Mr. Stone,” he heard someone say. Halona. Behind her, Sukie. They still held lighted candles. Sukie looked like a tall, thin rendition of the Little Match Girl. And then Robbie's face appeared, not a single bump or bruise on it. He was carrying a picket sign, the way Frederick had once carried picket signs, a lifetime ago, with Chandra's little pleas to humanity scrawled on each of them. Frederick nodded hello, but Robbie graced him with the middle finger of his right hand and then disappeared back into the crowd.

“Where's Chandra?” he asked. Halona hunched her shoulders. Sukie had already disappeared toward the front of the building.

“She just seemed to vanish,” Halona said. “She was here a minute ago.” The back door, or entrance, Frederick decided. If he was going to think like his wife, that's what his choice would be. A private route into the bowels of Radnor Laboratory while all eyes were on the crowd out front. She had always been the Queen of Distraction. He made his way, discreetly, down the side of the building. Both groups had turned their attention to the newest speaker, a tall man with a beard who spoke of sharing the planet with all living things. The People First group had turned its full attention on drowning out his words.

“Human beings first!” they chanted. “Human beings first!”

At the rear of the building, Frederick found the lifted window and smiled. She had always had a way of bribing people, either with money or charm. Would a janitor have left it open for her? An infiltrator from the Animal Coalition, perhaps? No matter who did the job, she was someone to be reckoned with, his wife, Chandra Kimball. A red plastic milk crate sat outside the window. Frederick hesitated only a second before he stepped up onto it and then lifted himself across the waiting sill. He inched down the dark hallway, his eyes struggling with the dim light, toward the soft murmur of voices, which rose and fell quietly. Whispering. Excited levels and tones. He recognized Chandra's voice almost immediately. He crouched along the wall, hurrying now toward the voices. He stopped in front of one door.

“Oh God,” he heard Chandra say. He grasped the door handle and turned the knob quietly. A light had been switched on in the room. There she was, kneeling on the floor before one of the cages, an animal of some sort in her lap. He could hear quiet curses now coming from his wife, and around the room other voices filtered up to him, other people kneeling before open cages.

“Shut that door!” someone whispered loudly. “They might see the light!” He realized for the first time that he was in a room with no windows. Of course, it would be a room with no windows. The unspeakable could occur in rooms with no windows. He recognized several members of the Animal Coalition.

“Tim, you and Elaine get those cats over there,” Chandra was directing. He could hear the sobs she was fighting back. She stood, a cat in her arms. Frederick saw that its head had been shaved bald, several red pinpoints the only indications of where the wires had been. All around him now, he saw eyes staring out of the metal cages, frightened eyes, eyes filled with pain. Cats, monkeys, rabbits, some thin and dying, others waiting for what might come next. He felt his stomach heave with a bout of nausea. A small chorus of meows had begun, with cats pushing against their cages in the hopes of being freed, dogs barking now, desperate. Chandra turned with the cat in her arms, and they stood face-to-face. He wanted to say so much to her, wished to speak all the things that one can utter in a few seconds, words to last a lifetime. Her eyes were filled with tears, the cat in her arms looking now with caution at Frederick, as though he might be one of the white-coat people. He reached his arms out to her, not to hold her, not to touch her, but to take the animal, to do his share. She gave the cat to him, its body curling quickly into the crook of his arm, its purring beginning instantly. He tried not to think of the bald head, the holes made by the wires—what the hell had they been doing? Instead he listened to the rhythmic purr, an animal ready to forgive this new human for what the last one had done.

“I'll get another one,” Chandra said. “There's a van just around the corner, to the right of the window. You'd better hurry, though. They can keep them busy out front just so long.”

Frederick turned toward the door, the cat safe in his arms. Chandra was already busy with the cages where the monkeys pressed their thin faces up to the bars, eyes full of more intelligence than Frederick had ever seen during happy hours at the China Boat. He couldn't do this, not after this one rescue. He didn't have the heart for it. And suddenly, he was full of love and compassion and thankfulness for those who
could
do it. He looked around the room at this moving pinwheel of people, strangers bonded together in a common need, men and women rocking animals in their arms as they unlatched cages. He recognized a few faces from past meetings in his living room. But he had never paid much attention before to Chandra's coalition members. He knew only what he had read in that day's paper, that the leaders of the group consisted mostly of professionals—a dentist, a librarian, a veterinarian, a writer, a history teacher, a classical musician. Hardly a crew of demented radicals. What Frederick found most unusual was that the animals seemed to know:
These
are
not
the
humans
with
the
needles
and
the
wires
and
the
pain.
His own eyes were blurring. He was, after all, allergic. Chandra passed him again, a monkey in her arms. She was still softly issuing orders.

“You can bring them to my house,” Frederick heard himself say. “You can bring the sick ones to Herbert. It'll be okay.” She smiled at him, and it seemed genuine. It had been a long time since he had seen her smile.

“Thanks, Freddy,” she said. “But we've got it all planned out. There are vets in our group, so we have places.” Of course they would have a plan, two plans, ten plans. It was just that he wanted to be included, a quiet streamer on the pinwheel he saw twirling before his eyes. They were all moving about with such forethought that, even though he held a cat of his own, he still felt like an observer.

Outside, he handed the animal over to the woman who seemed to be in charge of van duty. She quickly deposited the cat in a cardboard box.

“It's got a nice blanket in there,” she whispered. “We just need to keep it as quiet as we can. These animals have been through enough.” Frederick nodded. He felt good, having only transported the cat out of the building. He wished he could do more, but he knew that he couldn't. He dug down into his pocket again and came up with two twenties. He gave it to the woman.

“Put this toward some food, litter, that sort of thing,” he told her. She gave his hand a little squeeze as she took the money.

“You're Chandra's ex-husband, aren't you?” she asked, and he nodded. Her
ex-husband
. Everybody seemed to know that he had been
extraneared
. Everyone had seemed able to go on with their own lives as though this event were not at all important. He realized that the time had come to hoist his jacket collar up about his neck, hang his head in poetic remorse, and amble off toward a new life. But it seemed that he needed his old life to slap him one more time in the face. As he stood by the door, waiting for her to appear, he felt like an old boxer, getting back up on shaky feet only to be knocked down again and again, long after the crowd has lost its taste for blood, even with the crowd yelling, “Stay down! Stay down!” He watched as they all filed out, the vet, the lawyer, the librarian, the musician:
rich
man, poor man, beggar man, thief
. They filled the van with fragile animals. Chandra appeared finally, the last one out, a blanketed bundle in her arms. Her face was pale, her eyes intense. This was no easy job she'd undertaken. At the doorway, she reached out a hand to steady herself before she saw him waiting, there in the lurch of his life.

“Chandra,” he said, but he could tell by her eyes that they wouldn't talk, not then, not at that important moment. She lifted the blanket away from the bundle and Frederick felt his facial muscles tense, and a gasp come from his mouth. It had once been a cat. He could tell this by the shape of its head, its body, its blank oval eyes. But the body itself was furless, a pinkish white carcass breathing up and down, up and down, the same motions that would produce a chuckle in the human being.

“Dr. Joseph says that it's been treated with chloroprene,” Chandra said. Her voice was tinny, a tremble behind her words. “They're searching for a cure for baldness. They've been doing these very same tests for years now, with the very same results.” Frederick reached out a hand to touch the cat, its skin as hard as rubber now. It looked at him with a deep inquisitiveness. It was something not real to him, as if it were created by computer animation for a movie.