matter-of-fact assessment of the scene around us: the young men arriving alone in jeans and tight T-shirts, flaunting gym-fit biceps, and soon downing the single malt whiskeys that their straight-backed dames ordered with a regal lift of a finger.
I did my best to hide my discomfort, since Terra was one of the people I hoped to interview. I’d learned about her from articles—though not when she’d confectioned her name or who she’d been before—and I was uncertain as to her allegiance with the big organizations that were carving the Congo into fiefdoms. I knew only that she lived among a rare gorilla species, a largely forgotten cousin to the famed mountain gorilla, in the war-torn east.
As we got to talking about her work and its ever-elusive funding, she made it instantly clear—“off the record,” she said, when I told her I was a journalist—that she was no friend to the big organizations. She was here in a last-ditch effort to win over a certain former four-star general and possible future presidential candidate who would be in attendance, since he was a major donor and adviser to nature foundations.
She then began talking about working overseas and the ravages of being eternally single.
“Men like the idea of me,” she said.
“I know exactly what you mean, but with women.”
She studied my face for a moment.
“You don’t seem like a journalist to me.”
“Why’s that?”
“Too thoughtful. There’s too much emotion under the surface. You’re a cogitator if I’ve ever seen one—a Pisces, I bet …”
I hated astrology and mystical quackery, and was considering how to respond when she asked, “What drives you?”
“I guess … I guess it’s a manic sense of responsibility, the idea that—”
“I knew it,” she said. “We’re the casualties of a generation of bleeding heart liberal parents.”
She wasn’t wrong, and I told her how my mother had raised me to be aware of every injustice (racism, imperialism, the war on drugs, the death penalty, nuclear armament, the abuses of crony capitalism).
“Are you on medication?” she asked.
“No, but I do microdose with lithium,” I confessed, “though that’s a mineral. Really, it should be in all multivitamins.”
“Is it prescribed?”
“I get it on Amazon. I read an article about it in the New York Times.”
“And 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