Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
“So you would say bears are scarier than dolphins in the end?” I asked him.
“You want scariest?” he said. “Scariest is not the animals we know about. It’s the animals we don’t know about. Have you ever seen the statistics on estimated unknown species globally? We don’t know half the crap that’s alive on this planet, John. And I mean down at the very bottom of the ocean, in the Marianas Trench … that’s an undiscovered planet, in terms of what’s down there. And who knows what size those animals are, what they’re capable of? Well, the animals may know. They may know what’s down there, and they may know how to communicate with it.
“Have you ever heard the big Bloop?” he asked. “You should look it up.” He was sick of telling me things. He started looking around for the check.
I did look it up when I got home. Six years ago one of the navy’s spy microphones, a thing they had hanging way down in the ocean to listen for Soviet submarines, picked up the sound of something alive—its voiceprint made that clear, that it belonged to something biological—only, in order to make a sound this large, the animal would have needed to be vastly larger than any animal we know about. It left a mark on the seismograph something like what a small undersea tectonic event would have done. Microphones three thousand miles apart both captured it. You should look it up.
* * *
Have fear, that’s what Marc Livengood taught me. What he teaches us. And if I’ve in any way satisfied the expectations of this assignment, it’s in coming away with that drop of distilled realism: You want to know what to be afraid of in the next fifty years? Everything that walks and crawls, friends. Everything that moves. Because it hates us. “Why do they hate us?” Remember that? How quaint it already seems, when you think we were so recently asking that question about one another! And yet perhaps the answers are the same; maybe we can apply the lessons of the one to the other. They hate us because they can’t be us. Can’t have our thumbs, our brains, our music, our beautiful flowing hair. Can’t have it can’t have it can’t have it. And right now, sure, I say that I feel bad about that. But in the moment, in the moment when I’m letting explosive tracer rounds erupt from the mouth of my firemaker, just hosing metal right into the faces of a bunch of screaming giant eagles as they come for my daughter—and my cats, who will never betray me, not ever, or who perhaps have betrayed me and are scratching the hell out of my back while I struggle to aim—will I be thinking, “Ah, too bad, wish we hadn’t done you like that”? Don’t kid yourselves.
We gave them so much. That’s what galls me. What did they have before us? What did they do? We gave them jobs, we put them on television, we cried for their losses. It seems their idea of repayment is the tooth and the claw. I don’t think we need them. Everything we need we can make from corn.
Not that I don’t hold out hope. If you and I are here in a half century, I hope we’ll be celebrating the end of this war. I hope we’ll be telling with highest zest, again and again till our great-grandchildren are sick of it, the story of the day of the accord, when we knew it was over. Of little Bindi, a woman now, wind in her face, her feminine beauty still touched by a bit of
Mad Max
dog-boy caninity, as she was escorted out through the waves between white flags to a meeting with Dolphin Leader, where they brokered a détente in the chirpy language Steve had just finished teaching her when he got spiked. We will promise to live in greater harmony with Gaia.
But I’m not sure we’ll ever say the world is
ours
again, not sure we’ll ever really feel at home here again. That may be for the best. Being brave, after all, means saying in every situation, “I’ll comport myself as I think honorable, no matter the risk and no matter what the voice of frowning power has to say about it.” That’s the kind of thinking that’ll get you raped by a rhino.
Takeaway message? Let’s be proactive. Starting with a subscription to
Varmint Masters
. We’ve been working with this settled agriculture for more than ten thousand years. What it’s gotten us is a poisoned planet and a bunch of furious, mentally retarded beings with teeth and claws and tusks and tentacles and retractable poisoned darts and venom that they can spit and noses so strong they lift tanks and on and on and on, and what do we have? What were we given in this fight? Opposable thumbs. That’s pretty weak, I’m sorry. But guess what? Guess what,
animales
? We did something with those thumbs. We built these weapons. With them we are going to fire on you.
* * *
Big parts of this piece I made up. I didn’t want to say that, but the editors are making me, because of certain scandals in the past with made-up stories, and because they want to distance themselves from me. Fine.
I made up Marc Livengood. I made up the trip to Nairobi. But I didn’t make up the two incidents in Kenya, the battles of monkeys and men and the murder. I did not fabricate a single one of the animal-related facts or stories, the incidents. There’s even a real-life guy on the Internet whom I could have used in place of the made-up Marc, but that got messy, because he wanted money, and anyway, he seemed insane.
* * *
Editor’s note
: Gay Bradshaw, Christina Holzapfel, and everyone at the Institute for the Future and the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University are serious scholars and researchers who had nothing to do with this story and have never discussed animal violence with the author, much less endorsed any of his assertions, nor would they, presumably.
* * *
Author’s note
: Since this article was first published, they’ve discovered a hot-pink millipede that can shoot clouds of cyanide from its body. There’s a chimp on a preserve in Indiana that’s having full-on conversations with its owner. Dolphins have been seen using tools—so far, only for digging. An unprecedented uprising of komodo dragons in Indonesia has led to the death of a fisherman.
The New York Times
just reported that human hospital admissions for dog bites are on the rise. Not slightly but by over 40 percent. Anne Elixhauser, a senior research scientist with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, is quoted as saying, “It’s really kind of frightening, and unfortunately, we’re at a loss to explain it.”
PEYTON’S PLACE
Practically every day, cars stop in front of our house, and people get out to take pictures of it, and of us—me and my wife and daughter—if we happen to be outside. Or they’ll take one of Tony, who cuts the whole neighborhood’s grass. Tony loves it. He poses for them, with his rake and lawn bags, grinning, one arm thrown wide as if to say, “All this, my friends.” I’ve told him several times to start charging, but he won’t even hear it. He does it, he says, because it makes him feel famous. Sometimes it’s only one car. Other times it’s eight or nine in a day. It depends what time of year it is, and what’s happening on the Internet. Once there was an event of some kind in town, and we got more than twenty. I go for long stretches when I forget it’s even happening. I really don’t see them, since I don’t leave the house that much, and they’re always quiet, they never make trouble. But a month ago my new neighbor, Nicholas, who just moved in next door, came over to introduce himself. He’s a tall thin guy in his fifties, glasses and a white beard. Very nice, very sociable. Before he left, he said, “Can I ask you something? Have you noticed that people are always taking pictures of your house?”
Yeah, I said—pressing
PLAY
on my spiel—it’s silly, I know, but our house used to be on TV, not anymore, those people are fans … Isn’t that funny?
“I mean, it is constant,” he said.
I know! I said. Hope it doesn’t bother you. Tell me if it ever gets annoying.
“No, no, I don’t mind,” he said. “They’re always polite. They almost seem embarrassed.”
Well, tell me if that changes, I said.
“Okay,” he said. “I just can’t believe how many there are.”
Nicholas and I have had some version of that conversation three times, one for every week he’s lived next door. Each time I’ve wanted to tell him it’s going to end, except that I don’t know if it will. It may increase.
* * *
My brother-in-law sells trailers in the Arizona desert—indeed he professes to “have the trailer game in a chokehold” in that part of the world. Not long ago he told me about the Stamp. He had a boss whose office was across from his in the trailer they worked out of. They sold trailers from a trailer. The boss had a huge, specially made rubber stamp on his desk that read
APPROVED
. Whenever things were getting tense in my brother-in-law’s office, when the boss could hear that negotiations were becoming sticky, usually on the matter of the prospective buyer’s gaining loan approval, he would saunter in with the Stamp. Saunter doesn’t describe his walk, which my brother-in-law demonstrated. The boss was a little guy, and his legs sort of wheeled out from his body as he walked, like something you’d associate with a degenerative hip condition. He’d come wheeling up to the desk like that and
bam
bring down the Stamp on the application,
APPROVED,
and wheel away, leaving the buyers stunned and, as it dawned on them, delighted. “You understand,” my brother-in-law said, “a lot of the people I was selling to were gypsies. As in, literal gypsies. They didn’t have mailing addresses.”
The story goes some way toward explaining how my wife and I got permission from a bank to buy a giant brick neocolonial house—also how the world economy went into free fall, but that’s for another time and a writer with nothing to do but an enormous amount of research. My wife was eight months pregnant, and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the converted ground floor of an antebellum house, on a noisy street downtown, with an eccentric upstairs neighbor, Keef, from Leland, who told me that I was a rich man—that’s how he put it, “Y’er a rich man, ain’t ye?”—who told us that he was going to shoot his daughter’s boyfriend with an ultra-accurate sniper rifle he owned, for filling his daughter full of drugs, “shoot him below the knee,” he said, “that way they caint git ye with intent to kill.” Keef had been a low-level white supremacist and still bore a few unfortunate tattoos but told us he’d lost his racism when, on a cruise in the Bahamas, he’d saved a drowning black boy’s life, in the on-ship pool, and by this conversion experience “came to love some blacks.” He later fell off a two-story painting ladder and broke all his bones. A fascinating man, but not the sort I wanted my daughter having unlimited exposure to in her formative years. Not my angel. We entered nesting panic. We wanted big and solid. We wanted Greatest Generation, but their parents, even greater. We found it. It had a sleeping porch, and a shiplike attic where I in my dotage would pull objects from a trunk and tell their histories to little ones. We asked for the money, and in some office, somebody’s boss came forward with the Stamp.
Around the time it became clear that we’d gotten ahead of ourselves financially—and thinking back, that was a seismic twinge in advance of the market meltdown, a message from the bowels that people like the guy with four cell phones and a Jersey accent working out of a storage unit in Charlotte, who’d loaned us the money, probably shouldn’t have been loaning hundreds of thousands of dollars to people like me, not that “magazine writer” isn’t right there behind civil servant on the job-security pyramid—that was when we remembered something our buyer’s agent, Andy, had said, something about a TV show that might want to use the house, and somebody might be calling us. We had written it down. A guy named Greg.
Often I think of Greg. What an amazing guy. Truly amazing, as in he brought us into a maze. We only ever saw him once. I’ve never seen him since. And this is a small town—you see people. It was like they flew him in for this meeting. He was a heavy guy in a tentlike Hawaiian shirt. Goatee, sunglasses. Did he tell me he played rugby or did he look exactly like someone I knew who played rugby? He sat across from us at our kitchen table, a thirteen-foot dark wood table that purportedly came in pieces from a Norwegian farmhouse, relic of nesting panic (long table, order). Greg sat across from us. He explained that they’d mostly be using only the front two rooms of the house. This was the place they mainly shot. The rest of our character’s house had been re-created on a set, and the transitions would be made seamless in editing.
He laid out the deal they’d struck with the previous owners. We move you into a Hilton. Meals and per diem. We put everything back the way it was. We take Polaroids of your bookshelves to make sure we’ve put the books in order. That’s how thorough we are. We even pay people to come in afterward and clean up. The house looks better than you left it. We’ll pay you $
___
for an exterior shoot, $
___
for interiors.
The combined amount equaled our mortgage.
Yes, I think we can work something out.
“The front two rooms”—that phrase, in particular, we heard repeated: it has a poetic density to it, like “cellar door,” so I remember. The front two rooms.
Maroon minivan, Greg gone.
A lot of movies and TV shows are shot here, in our adopted coastal hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina—Wilmywood. It started when the late Frank Capra, Jr., came here to make
Firestarter
in the early eighties. He liked the place and stayed, and an industry evolved around him. Dennis Hopper bought property. Now half the kids who wait on you downtown are extras, or want to be actors. You’ll be in Target and realize you’re in line behind Val Kilmer. We have studios and a film school, and we’re known in the business for our exceptionally wide variety of locations. You can be doing beachy beachy, and suddenly go leafy established suburb, go country hayride, then nighttime happening street, pretty much whatever.