it works?”
“It’s hard to say. I started it at the same time as vitamin D megadoses.”
“Vitamin D is fucking manna. Every person in America should be mainlining it!”
I nodded, blanking briefly as I wondered what her standards for a thoughtful man were, but then she realized that I hadn’t mentioned my name. I told her and she said, “Béchard? Is that French Canadian?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m half.”
“Oh. What a tease. I wish I were free. J’aime les Québécois. They’re so earthy, so bodily. My family used to go on summer vacations up there. We had a little beach place in the Gaspé, on the water. My father would tell me how much he loved the peasant exuberance of the French Canadians and the joie de vivre despite the poverty. He always talked about those dark French Canadian beauties. He was a total pig beneath his WASP trappings, but I loved him. Anyway, I was up in Montréal for a conference recently, and, man, c’était le fun! I really hope your American side hasn’t screwed you up.”
“I hope not too,” I said, not sure if I should be offended or flattered, and certain that I’d been screwed up from all sides: collaboration on a grand scale.
Maybe she sensed my discomfort or lack of words, because she circled back to the subject of responsibility. I was feeling guarded now, exposed when I was supposed to be the one doing the exposé, and I wanted to reinvest myself with journalistic restraint. So I listened to her talk about her drive to do something for the world, the innocence and kindness of gorillas, their purity, and how protecting them alleviated her perpetual sense of guilt.
I sympathized. Sometimes, like tonight, by going to a cougar bar, I did things to defy my sense of moral obligation—though also to step out of my life, into a circumstance where my self might become so unfamiliar that I could briefly perceive it.
Terra stood and picked up her corduroy jacket and purse.
“Normally,” she said, “I’d invite you back to my hotel, but I’m saving my eligibility for the general. It would be weird to disengage tomorrow so that I can seduce him.”
“I can see how that could be problematic,” I replied.
As soon as she left, her aunt, Michaela, returned and sat with me. The stillness of her face made it appear carefully balanced as it tilted toward me on her long neck. She’d been a choreographer and was now an art collector. She spoke softly, intelligently. We forget how much we hear words simply from facial expressions. I moved closer, inclining my ear toward her, and we remained like that, in murmured conversation, until the bar closed, and we said good night.
The next day, I switched to the hotel hosting the conference to take advantage of the attendee rate. The inaugural event was just starting, and the hall seemed to proclaim nature’s salvation, its windows built to frame the views and catch the refracted softness of mountain light.
Everyone was murmuring about the general, and when the lean, gray-haired man entered, Terra was already at his side, her dreadlocks hidden in a white turban that made the blues and whites of her eyes shine in her tanned face. She displayed her freckled cleavage in a long green dress, as if nature had cleverly sent a white dryad to steer the general toward the deliverance of black people’s forests.
He took the stage and in the gruff voice of leadership, worldliness, and pragmatism painted the future of conservation with a watery mix of magniloquence and corporate euphemism. The twenty-minute talk boiled down to saving the rainforests and their species, which he compared to renaissance art, from the hoi polloi who want to cut down or fry up everything, but how, alas, the saving could be done only with the help of the hoi polloi, by educating them, by brotherhood, etc.
Terra was waiting as he descended, and with his sylph at his side, he took questions, the crowd turning around them—a great Charybdis of networking. Eventually, conferees broke into groups that, from their postures, suggested the animals they hoped to protect: a sloth, a skulk, a bloat at the buffet; a troop and pandemonium at the wine bar; a bask, a rout, a zeal, all near the high windows, admiring a pink sunset.
As I loitered, the talk seemed perfunctory—who was on the ground, doing what. The conferees spoke in appropriated oppression (slaving away at a project, shackled to their desks) but as soon as they learned I was a journalist, they became wary or excused themselves.
One man wandered between flock and busyness with an air of exile. As if he’d acquired a skin irritation in some tropical redoubt, or simply a mosquito bite, he kept scratching his back, going about with his elbow lifted like a dorsal fin.
I intercepted him. His eyes were brown—soft, intelligent, a little shut down, as if he expected to be made fun of.
“A journalist!” he said. “I shouldn’t be seen talking to you, but I shouldn’t even be here. I booked this conference the week before I was laid off. Funding cuts. The eternal funding cuts that target the dissenters.”
I knew I’d found my man and barely had to prompt.
“Nature conservation is bullshit,” he told me. “The reality is we’re consigned to offices and our relationship to the field is that of excursionists on weekend outings. I’m serious. We’re disconnected. That’s why people can’t out someone like you—”
“Pardon me?”
“Someone like Hew,” he repeated in a whisper, though hundreds of voices clamored in the hall. “H-E-W. It’s the name no one’s saying but everyone’s thinking.”
“I haven’t heard of him.”
“He’s the node in the jungle they plug their machine into. Without him, the lights don’t turn on. No grand successes to brag about. No pretty maps of new parkland. No photos of dashing white men in khaki with smiling Pygmies. That’s what this conference is really about—the illusion of achievement in order to raise money. Terra is surrounded by enemies. She’s trying to save herself from Hew.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“What you need to get is that the real cannibals in the jungle are the big Western organizations. They chase donor cash, and those who get it consume the projects of those who don’t. Everyone here is a competitor, but they’re forced to put on good faces and spout salvationist doctrine. Now, Terra, she’s the real deal. It’s her work that’s about to be devoured. She used to be a typical tree hugger—”
“Aren’t all conservationists tree huggers?”
“Hardly. We live and breathe realpolitik. It’s like believing in democracy and human rights but having to do business with China.”
“Or other countries believing in democracy and human rights but having to do business with the US.”
“Point taken. Anyway, Terra is a little on the crunchy woo-woo mystical side of things, but she does phenomenal work. She goes native at quantum speeds. Believes in their values. Participates in their ceremonies. Holds and kisses the babies. None of it’s for show. She’s been living out there for a decade, trying to generate support for the eastern lowland gorilla, but it never caught on as a species. It had a bad name and wasn’t sexy. It lacked the primal, hippie shagginess of the mountain gorillas.”
He was animated now, rubbing his knuckles against
