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Overview
It is more than 100 years in the future and the horrors of factory farming, combined with the widespread abuse of antibiotics, have led to mass extinctions. The majority of all mammals, birds, and fish that humans have eaten for millennia no longer exist. Those not fully capable are deemed undeserving of an equal share of scarce medical resources and are ultimately classified as less than human. As paranoia about our food supplies spreads, a forceful new logic takes hold; in the blink of a millennial eye the disenfranchised have become our food. Don LePan’s “well-plotted” and “formally audacious” novel shows us a world at once eerily foreign and disturbingly familiar (Booklist).
It follows the dramatic events that unfold within a family after they take in an abandoned mongrel boy. In the sharp-edged poignancy of the ethical questions it poses, in the striking narrative techniques it employs, and above all, in the remarkable power of the story it tells, Animals proves itself a transformative work of fiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781593763657 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 05/12/2010 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 568 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
PART 1
I am not cute, I am not a pet, I am not a mongrel. I am a child, that's all. And I want the walls to become the world all around, like they are for Max. And then he wanted to be where someone loved him best of all and I want that too, that's all I want, really.
Sam had just turned nine when those thoughts ran together in his mind; he was young enough not to feel it shameful for the words from a picture book to be going round in his head, and young enough to have his own word for the times that he would be alone and his mind would be running in circles like this: thinks was what he called them. Young enough for that, old enough to hardly be able to remember a time when he had lived as a human.
But there had been such a time. For the first five years and more of his life Sam had lived with his mother, Tammy, his brothers, Broderick and Daniel, and his sister, Letitia. He was the youngest and also the weakest, and when the time came that everyone knew he should be talking by, he wasn't, he couldn't. Years later the memory remained fixed in his mind, as strong and as helpless as a headstone, the memory of watching their mouths move, watching their fingers do things in response to the others' moving mouths, and knowing nothing, understanding nothing. He started a habit then of ceaseless babble to compete, to get attention, to make them do things in response to his moving mouth. Perhaps that is always what it is like to be deaf, before you know what deaf is.
It took time for the others to realize he was different. But ever so slowly Broderick and Daniel and Letitia — and after a time even Tammy, their mother — started treating Sam a bit differently. Not that they were less loving, or not exactly that, though in some sense that may have been what it amounted to. They kept saying how cute he was, as one does with a small child, but also as one does with a certain sort of pet, and soon it became clear that the other children loved him in a different way. For the first year or two they had spoken to him as one does to a small person who is constantly changing, constantly able to hear and understand more — and to say more. But as it slowly but steadily became plain that he was not developing in that way, that nothing he said made sense, that he seemed able to understand little or nothing, their way of dealing with him changed too. Slowly but steadily they reverted to baby talk. "Oose a good little Sammy?" they would coo. "Oose a funny wunny little Sammy?" He would look blankly at their moving mouths, or sometimes start making frantic motions with his own mouth.
"There's something wrong with him. You can see it," they would say, "he's not right in the head. If he was, he'd be talking by now — whole sentences, not just words." They were right. He couldn't understand anything of what they were saying. Nor could he hear the traffic, or the rushing of the water in the river, or the thunder in a summer storm. He couldn't hear the phone or the seescreen; he couldn't hear anything.
"Maybe he's a mongrel. They're not just made, you know. A person can give birth to one. And they sometimes look the same as humans, I guess never exactly the same but almost, not so different that you'd know if you weren't trained. Look at his forehead now; a lot of them have that sort of flat little forehead, don't they? And the eyes, so far apart."
Broderick, many years later
I KNOW THE story is just getting started, but I want to interject here just briefly to sketch some of the historical background that the author of the manuscript I've presented you with has not bothered to fill in. This all happened many decades ago, and I'm very aware that for many younger people today the past is largely unfamiliar territory. In those days, if you were a family that discovered it had a mongrel within its midst — that the mother had given birth to a mongrel — you had several choices. First of all, you had the choice of whether or not you would declare it to the authorities; if you did, it would trigger an elaborate bureaucratic process to decide where the creature would be "placed." The decision itself was for the authorities to make, but you would be asked to make a recommendation, and more often than not they would follow that recommendation. You might recommend that the creature remain with the family, but with changed status — as a pet mongrel, in short, not a human child. Alternatively, you could recommend that it be treated as a chattel — which, understandably enough, few families were inclined to do. A surprising number, however, would check "no recommendation," unwilling either to have the status of a former family member changed (so as to reflect the fact that they were keeping a lower order of being) or to put it on a path that would certainly lead to its being lost to them forever. What such families typically did not or would not acknowledge was that, in practice, "no recommendation" generally put the creature on that same path; nine times out of ten a mongrel that started through the bureaucracy with a "no recommendation" from its originating family would end up in the chattel pens.
You might think that some effort would have gone into diagnosis to ensure that those being relabeled mongrel or chattel, rather than human, were being accurately classified. The fact was, though, that diagnosis was an area where thoroughness was noticeably lacking. (To a great extent that remains the case even today.) The doctors were rarely called in to make a judgment as to the precise nature of the defect; the family's word was generally taken at face value, so long as it did not seem to go against the plain facts of the case. Any inspector, even one with minimal medical training, could in almost every case discern those facts pretty quickly. Sometimes it would have that half-vacant look in the eyes that's such a common characteristic of mongrels; in that case it was certainly easy to tell. Various physical abnormalities could also be reliable indicators. Oftentimes too you'd get a distinctive short stature — typically with a somewhat compressed torso, and legs disproportionately long, and a long face, with elongated forehead and jaw — though that was not the only characteristic physical type for mongrels. Sometimes the most salient feature was rounded eyes, unusually far apart and set far forward, making for a disconcertingly inquisitive appearance. Of course lack of verbal ability was very frequently a tip-off. It didn't take a lot of expertise; that was the fact of the matter. Any human could tell a sub-human when he saw one; it was not rocket science.
Not all families in the situation that Tammy Rose and her children found themselves in chose to report their predicament to the authorities. Often enough — perhaps in one of every three cases — the choice would be to keep things quiet. You couldn't pretend to the world that a three-year-old which couldn't talk properly and which didn't look right was human, that much was obvious. But you could simply change your behavior toward it, gradually coming to treat it as a mongrel rather than a fully human being. That way you didn't run the risk of the authorities deciding for whatever reason that no, in this case the family's recommendation wouldn't be followed, this one wouldn't be allowed to stay in the same family, living as a mongrel, this one would be sent to the Repository, or straight to the pens.
Most neighbors in this sort of situation might start to say Isn't he cute? in a bit of a different tone, but they would not ask the awkward questions: What's the matter with your little Jimmy? Why do you call your little one Bubbles now? Or Percy or Freckles or Bear? But never the same name as it had had before — you couldn't have a mongrel with the same name you'd given it when you thought it was human. Or the same food. Any pet had to eat pet food, that was obvious. To be sure, there were families that would feed them scraps from the table. But a line had to be drawn somewhere.
There's a good deal else that could be said but this is enough of a diversion for the time being. I think what I've given you may be enough for now to make the picture a little clearer.
* * *
As long as he lived, Sam would always remember the day they took away his knife and fork. Letitia cared about table manners. She fussed about them even more than their mother did; Letty would always be looking at the way he ate. Of course all he had been able to do was watch the others, and he thought things were all right, he thought he was doing pretty well copying them. He didn't notice the way Letitia would glance at him sometimes at mealtimes, despairing, then disparaging, eventually contemptuous — particularly if any of her young friends were over. "He's pathetic, isn't he?" she would say.
Broderick would always cringe when he heard this kind of thing. Like the eldest in so many families, he was both careful and caring. In something of a ponderous way he had developed a real sense of the importance of things. Sometimes it could tilt almost comically into self-importance, but he felt too the importance of things to others. He had heard this sort of nasty silliness about Sam before. Finally it became too much. "It's not the same for him!" he exclaimed angrily one evening as he watched Letty mocking Sam in front of her friends.
Much later in her life Letitia came to realize how she had used that mocking. It wasn't just little Sammy but the whole family, her whole world with its worn floors, its shabby furniture, its hand-me-down clothes, its total lack of the sorts of toys and gadgets that would give a child status in the eyes of her friends. Their mother did her best always, but after their father had left there was never enough money, not really, not so as to keep up any social standing. Back then she never blamed her father; he was never there to blame. Instead it had been her mother, and especially little Sam, who she had blamed, who she had sneered at. If she were the one to do it first, if she sneered more loudly and more cruelly at Sam than her friends would ever have dreamed of doing, it would keep their sneers at bay, it would show her to be one of them, a group out of place in this squalor, a group that stood above all this. "It's pathetic!" — that was her favorite phrase. For the tacky lampshades and pictures on the walls, for the rusty car, for the way the spaces under the children's beds had to be used to store tools or sports gear or other odds and ends that were out of season; the tiny house had no attic, no storage room of any kind.
This particular day, the day that Broderick finally snapped at her, she had been pointing at Sam, her mouth wide with glee as the uncomprehending little thing struggled with a plate of spaghetti. Broderick was just coming into the room and must have seen the way Letty had looked at Sam. "It's not the same for him!" he snapped, and instantly was at the table — he had such quick strides for a young boy, Broderick did. He grabbed the knife and fork from Sam's tiny hands. Savagely he sliced into the little pile of spaghetti, cutting it into smaller and smaller pieces. "There," he said, thrusting into Sam's hand the spoon that had been meant for pudding. "See if they feel like laughing at you now!" Letitia still had a twisted little residue of scorn on her face, but fear had pushed it to the margins; Broderick was a husky fourteen and looked a good deal larger than normal when he was fired up like this.
Perhaps you could say that that particular change happened out of good-heartedness. But however you colored them, facts were facts; from that meal onward, Sam never ate with the others or in the same way as the others. Knife and fork were never provided, spoon and bowl became normal routine for him, and it came to be expected that he would eat not at the dining table but in the kitchen, at a little low table in the corner. And mealtime for him would always be a little before or a little after the others had eaten.
One by one the other human things went too. With a lot of gesticulating and wide smiles it was made clear to Sam that the place where he was to sleep would now be a little cot down in the basement. He would have a flannel sheet and heavy blankets, but not the good sheets. They started dressing him in the bright, coarse wool coveralls that you'd see mongrels wearing everywhere. There would be no need for underwear, not anymore, and it would often be a week or ten days before they'd think to put the old coverall in the wash and give him a fresh one. When they did launder his things — his one thing, to be accurate about it — they wouldn't wash what he wore with the others' clothes; it would be a "special load" and their mother would wrinkle up her nose and smile good-humoredly as she held the coverall at arm's length between finger and thumb before dropping it into the machine.
"Boy, does he stink," Daniel or Letitia might say, and sometimes one of them would get the giggles. Sam's body they would wash perhaps once a week. Of course he would break out in little spots and sores now and again, and that too made him less and less human, the change imperceptible on any given day, inescapable week by week, month by month.
The children didn't think much about it either way — even Broderick, who Sam would always believe had loved him. Certainly not Daniel, who had loved Sam since his little brother had been born, in the only way that very young children are able to love a baby sibling — which is to say, in a way virtually indistinguishable from the way in which they love a pet. It can be a strong love, but it can also be a fickle one.
And certainly not Letitia. Much later in life Letty would reach a stage where she loved all the world, but for her such love could never be a place of peace; she was propelled to it out of the tension between the urges that had ruled her as a child and the tenacious conscience that had suddenly taken root in her as she entered adolescence. The tension pumped through Letty's veins a powerful awareness not only of the selfishness and cruelty of the world but also, most painfully, of the selfishness and cruelty that had been a pervasive presence in her own character, aged twelve.
But Tammy cared deeply about Sam. In those years her face could pass for thirty-eight for all the vibrancy and love that could fill it, or for fifty-eight, for all the care and sadness and resentment that filled it too often, too full. Many times she said to Sam with her eyes how sorry she was, how horribly twisted she felt about what was happening to him, what was being done to him. She sometimes thought, too, bleakly and specifically, of what she had done to him. But she was not one to blame herself more than she deserved. For what Sam was going through you could credit equally the quirk of nature that had made the child what he was, the life that Tammy had allowed to go on around him in their own little world, and the life that went on outside, in the wider world — a larger life that pushed the likes of Sam steadily further away from the realm of the human. She could have done more herself, she often thought in later years. Perhaps if Rick had not abandoned them, perhaps if there had been more money. Perhaps if the rest of the world had looked at things differently. But none of that had been the case.
There came a time when things started to go more quickly downhill for Sam. Things were changing day by day for the whole family — especially after the local hospital decided to farm out services to the company putting in the lowest bid, and Tammy lost her job as a cleaner. Tammy had always had the sort of jobs most people wouldn't want to stay at for long, for years stocking shelves in Macy's before they closed down, for years too on the checkout counters at a Your Price store before their scanners were upgraded, then at the hospital. But she had always wanted to stick to it, she was that sort of person. And with each position she had held it had seemed possible that she would be able to do just that. Now it suddenly all looked different. Financial status, social standing — these are words that Tammy didn't much think about. But she knew how much money was coming in, and how much was going out, and she knew she was no longer able to keep up.
Not too long after Tammy had lost the cleaning job she found a new position — lower pay, but a good job, a job with people that valued what she was doing, a job working for the before-and-after-school program in the basement of Sunnyside Primary School. It was a good school, one of the historic old schools in the city core that always seemed to be thriving. But only a few months later that job ended too. The school didn't close, nothing so drastic as that. But enrollment in the before-and-after-school program kept drifting downward, and then the city decided to cut off the base funding they'd been providing for it.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Animals"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Don LePan.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Praise,
Don LePan Animals,
Title Page,
Dedication,
EDITORS' NOTE,
PART 1,
Broderick, many years later,
PART 2,
Broderick, many years later,
Broderick, many years later,
Broderick, many years later,
Broderick, many years later,
PART 3,
Broderick, many years later,
AUTHOR'S AFTERWORD,
Acknowledgements,
Copyright Page,