Save Face

It sounds like a dream but it’s not. In my day and age, a certain subset of trendsetters soured on the human face. Too many selfies, perhaps. They cut off their noses and replaced them with the distinctive beaks of parrots and puffins taken from the forest floors and rocky isles where supposedly these animals shed them, painlessly. In the beginning, their indigenous neighbors in the global south and far north collected the beaks like seashells and shipped them to the empirical core, where they were bundled, distributed, sold and resold until your neighborhood plastic surgeon could order wild bird beaks in packs of ten, shrink-wrapped. They came in cylindrical tubes like Pringles. Before long the industrial zones of our major cities were sprouting factory farms for parrots and puffins.

            It is a decade of heat domes, wildfires, pandemic, genocide. A grab bag of doom. All anyone can think to do is go to therapy. Probably, in 100 years, it will be obvious that the real solution was to get as rich as possible, as quickly as possible.

            That’s my goal.

            I play that line for laughs because I’m a poet and an adjunct humanities professor, which are two ways to get as poor as possible as quickly as possible. No one ever laughs but me.

            Some bird people were over for dinner, struggling through my home cooking and talking about how, if you stop and look, birds are prettier than people. They had severed their lower jaws, rimmed their eyes with orange eyeliner. It was effective, in the sense that it was hard to look away. When I glimpsed my fleshy human reflection in the darkened window, I admit I felt a pang of jealousy.

            The bird people spoke with the assistance of a computer and a wand that they held at their feathered throats. “Could you just get a few feathers implanted at your temples?”

            “I looked into it,” I said. “But insurance only covers feathers for male pattern baldness.”

            The bird people shook their beautiful heads, their sharp shadows seeming to slice the wallpaper behind them. “The system!” they squawked.

            Meanwhile, my brother died.

            I go by train to Atlanta. Train, because flights are grounded again. Hackers.

Unused to travel, I have some anxiety. I keep checking my phone to make sure my E-ticket will load, until I run down the battery.

            I am mourning, but I am surrounded by vacationers. A family of five. The six of us take up two seats that face each other across a table. Inauspicious beginning, but it couldn’t be different. Meeting this family is preordained. I pull my crossword puzzle closer.

            The five year old offers me a goldfish cracker. I decline with a smile, even though I want it. I want a whole bag for myself.

            In some legends, God protects Cain with the stigma, and Cain still walks the earth. I tell the five year old, whose name is Shiloh, that my name is Cain, but I’m not that Cain. We watch lightning strike the prairie out the train window. I love my country.

            I always felt greedy for my brother’s time. He was younger but busy the way brilliant, gregarious people prefer to be. I consoled myself by imagining decades of collaboration. A whole lifetime as a team. When he was applying to colleges, I tried to lure him to Chicago. He decided to stay in Atlanta. I took it personally until I understood his commitments. He would have been a freshman this fall.

Shiloh is showing me a plush bunny in a scratchy tutu. “Her name is Pineapple,” Shiloh says.

            “Hi, Pineapple,” I say.

            Pineapple turns her back on me.

            “She seems nice but she’s not,” Shiloh says.

            A woman on the train is trying to Facetime with her newborn. We can hear her baby-talk, but not the baby’s. The cosmetic grafting technology is improving. People can look wild and still talk with their own voices. Her beak is an Atlantic puffin’s, sleek and gleaming against the slate gray landscape beyond the window.

            I take myself to the cafe car, where I see the squeaky, shiny packages of goldfish crackers like Shiloh has. I order a fettuccine alfredo and a small screw top bottle of merlot and a cup of coffee and goldfish crackers. A small fortune. I should have packed dinner, but being fed is as close as I come to feeling loved.

            A poster hangs behind the counter: a photo of a briefcase stowed on an overhead rack behind the words, “If you see something, say something.”

            Nobody ever sees anything. Rather, we only see our phones. Maybe historians in the future will make a parable of us, though mass hypnosis by itself is not a cautionary tale. Something truly awful will have to happen.

            It must be a particular kind of pain, the wish to be seen in a world where no one looks. Some people will do anything for attention, like the man entering the cafe car now, elephant trunk grafted onto his face, swinging as he swaggers. Massive as it looks, I realize it has to be from a baby elephant to fit on a human’s face. He tosses it over his shoulder, out of his way, casual as if he’s tucking hair behind his ear.

            These cosmetic grafting suppliers—the original and biggest being Face Yourself and its downmarket spinoff Face Value—have branched like the tree of life. No longer limited to puffins and parrots, they now raise all kinds of animals, especially endangered species. Appropriating the face of a mandrill or a proboscis monkey has become a way of letting it “live.”

            Their factory farms, “conservation habitats,” are land and water guzzling prisons seed-funded by pharmatech and endorsed by the World Wildlife Foundation and Sierra Club. Factories stand on public park and private conservation land, a gift from the Audubon Society. The resistance is marginal. A few eccentric lawyers with no gravitas, perpetually flustered and five minutes late. For my brother, self-loathing and animal cruelty are an inevitable pair. Self-love would inure us against consumer culture, but also expand our love beyond ourselves.

            “Fettuccine alfredo?” the man with the elephant face sneers. “What is this, 2006?”

            Maybe one day the mood will shift.

            The patriarch of the vacationers has concluded, after minimal small talk which I’d wager led him to google me while I was in the cafe car, that I might have a few intelligent things to say about his poetry. When I return, he is spreading it across the table for my perusal. He tosses my crossword puzzle onto my lap to make room. He instructs me in how to properly read the pages, since the stanzas are printed out of order, or rather, he changed his mind about the order after he printed it out. His goal is to curate the reader’s experience toward escalating fury, confusion, and fury about their confusion, then draw them toward an epiphany they will recognize through their relief and gratitude. His baby dribbles wet goldfish crackers onto the first page. He shakes the page, and these too fly in my direction.

            Obediently, I read a long rhyming doggerel engineered so every stanza concludes with, “Be that as it may.” The train chugs in iambic pentameter.

            “Your drivel reminds me of my own seven-page tuneless folk song,” I say. “Every stanza ends with ‘neither here nor there.’”

            This may or may not be true. Power isn’t only about whose direction value flows in. It’s also about who decides what’s real.

            “Where is this train going?” Shiloh asks.

            I stare at her in awe. Nobody knows the future, but some people don’t even know the plan.

            “We’re going on vacation, goofus,” her father says. “Our family enjoys private house museums, of which the Atlanta area boasts over one hundred, each its own stitch in the national fabric.”

            “Are you coming?” Shiloh asks me.

            I shake my head.

            “Cain is going to a funeral,” the dad says. He looks at me. “Yes, I googled you. What was your brother thinking?”

            We look at Shiloh’s quizzical face.

            “My brother was shot by a cop,” I say to her. “Hawk-eyed and saber-toothed.”

            Shiloh’s eyes dart to the disgusting baby.

            “Losing a sibling means losing a version of the future,” I say. “You were supposed to inherit the earth together.”

            “Never trespass on private property,” the dad advises.

            “He was rescuing animals,” I say. “On what was by rights public land. The city just gave Face Value protected land right on the Chattahoochee River.”

            “Never let them see you cry,” Shiloh says, and offers me Pineapple to hold.

            I deploy my trick of avoidance (instant sleep), which involves conjuring a reliably soothing recurring daydream. A very handsome man is lingering in my doorway. He loves me, and he knows that the way to love me is to leave me alone so I can work. His eyes, good humored and hopeful, search my face. He asks, “Do you have enough money? Let me give you some money.”

            I wake up in Atlanta, exhausted like I’ve been keeping up with someone supremely confident. Robin must have visited me in my dreams. Orange crumbs cleave to my fleece. The vacationers leave without a glance toward me. I gather my things and exit too.

            My phone battery is drained. I look around the station for my parents, go out to check the pickup places and feel the blast of wet Atlanta air. I wait fifteen minutes. I take the MARTA, then the bus. On a billboard I see a fresh iteration of my dad’s old ad: “Harvard educated restorative and cosmetic surgeon. Nothing but the best. Reasonable rates.” When Robin and I were kids we thought our dad was famous.

            The old dogwoods on either side of the front door are gone. My parents and I stand in the entryway, my shoes and backpack on.

            “We didn’t think you’d want to stay here,” my mom says dubiously, eyes widened in feigned surprise.

            “What do you mean?” I say, wondering if I missed some important texts. “Isn’t the funeral tomorrow?”

            “Of course it’s tomorrow,” my dad snaps. “We invited everyone we thought wouldn’t judge too harshly, and some of them are even willing to come.”

            “I didn’t mean to irritate you.” I stoop to take off my shoes.

            “We just didn’t think you’d want to,” she says again. “Your father and I barely eat these days.”

            “We assumed when you asked for money, it was for a hotel room,” my dad says.

            My heart is too heavy to speak.

            “It’s OK,” my mom rushes. “We can set something up.”

            My parents, for the record, are sporting matching muzzles and whiskers of Pekingese. “Nothing garish,” my mother says when I wonder aloud what’s different about them. It’s my job to assure her their faces aren’t over-the-top.

            “We’re doing our part to save the animals,” my dad says. “In a time of mass extinction.”

            In the future we will understand that everyone is a baby, and no one is to blame.

            I stand on the threshold of my brother’s bedroom. ROBIN is spelled in painted wooden blocks on the door, but the room itself is teenage-ified, with matte black walls and tattered literature in French and Spanish.

            Gingerly, I venture in. I sit at the desk and try to access his computer but of course it’s password protected.

            Predators, like cats, have vertical pupils and prey, like sheep, have horizontal pupils. Robin scratched dozens of pairs of animal eyes and a few whole faces on the surface of his desk, around the slogan of his movement: Save Face. His own young face, his mugshot from his first arrest, age 15, is on the bulletin board over the desk.

            The dominant feature of the room is a vast number of spiral notebooks from the Five and Dime, filled with his deep, dull pencil, a record of his learning, his thoughts on his reading, and very occasionally a meditation on some emotional ruffle: “Cold/fever—Can’t make up my mind about anything,” he wrote a few weeks ago. “Remember this feeling to access empathy for C.”

            I am C, I believe. He must have written it after I told him I wouldn’t help release a thousand Siberian tigers from their factory farm in a Georgia swamp.

            I unscrew the pad of the desk chair and flip it over. Untuck the stiff base from the rough black fabric. Remove $5000, which I zip into my bag. Robin told me where to find it if something happened to him. I reassemble the chair and sleep in it. The fantasy of the man in the doorway, moneyed and besotted, only works when I pretend I don’t have $5000 in my backpack.

            I dream that I am a character in a story. Another character says to me, “You’re way nicer in fiction.”

            When I awaken I think: Why would I say that to myself? Me, who is scrupulously nice at all times?

            I am finishing my morning coffee when Felix, my parents’ neighbor, stops by to ask if we want him to drive us to the church. We stand in the doorway and I notice his smell like a bloodhound. He is clean but not perfumed, which is rarer in Atlanta than in Chicago. “I do,” I say, panting. “But I think the dogs are out for a walk.”

            But my dad’s car is not in the garage. My parents have already left and didn’t tell me.

            Felix and I drive over. He asks me how I am. When you are grieving, people ask you this a lot. That is one lesson from the past week. Another is that the inner circle doesn’t sit around feeling sad. We race around doing administrative chores. Even the death of a broke teenager is the start of an administrative afterlife. “You might want to close your eyes,” Felix says before we round the last turn.

            My parents’ church offers a vague and undemanding Christianity, distinctly prosperous but not in the flavor of the prosperity gospel. It is undergoing a million dollar restoration of its historic character. Orange tarp flutters over the scaffolding that surrounds the steeple. About 100 people line both sides of the street carrying signs: Justice For Robin, We Want a Murder Charge, Defund Killer Cops. I see a long cotton sheet, eight people holding it together, Face Your Crime in dripping red paint. The police are out in force. Overkill.

            I realize Felix doesn’t know where I stand on anything. “They’re not protestors,” I say. “They’re mourners.”

            “A handsome young white guy,” Felix says. “He’d get more attention if he hadn’t been trespassing with the intent to destroy property. Most people think it was justified.”

            We could drive to the church parking lot but I want to walk through the crowd. I want to pull the people close like a blanket, wrap myself in them to protect me in the church, but the crowd stops at the property line. I put my hands together like the gratitude emoji. Bow and burst into tears. These strangers honor my brother more than his family, and in their midst all the nonessential caveats of the case fall away. Grief like a stampede rushes over me and I wail, “Robin! We need you!”

            Felix guides me up the steps and through the doors. I’m crying like a donkey, which is inappropriate.

            The pews are fuller than my parents led me to expect. The back half of the room is full of friends, mostly in black, but maybe because that is their usual uniform. Their clothing is strategically shredded and snipped to achieve a kind of zero-dollar sex appeal, send a certain anti-establishment signal. Their hair, too, is a zero-dollar hack job. My heart swells with approval. Robin, who seemed so one-of-a-kind, in fact had dozens of identical twins.

            Moving forward, peoples’ presentation becomes more conservative, and more animalized, until my parents, in the front, bathed in stained glass light. They look up when Felix and I join them. My father clasps my hand. My mother keeps wiping her new muzzle with her new paw.

            “You look like a middle schooler taking a dare,” she whispers.

            I promise I am not taking a dare.

            “You looked so awful when you showed up last night,” she whispers. “I figured you were messing with me on purpose.”

            I promise I am not messing with her on purpose, that a poet on the train pelted me with snacks.

            “I thought it went without saying that you’d clean up for today,” she says. “Of all days. My friends are here. The few I have left.” She gives a minute jerk of her canine head in their direction. “I want them to know I didn’t totally blow it as a parent.”

            The minister, whose name is Marcus Aurelius (no relation), has the face of a hamster and the upper body of a silverback gorilla. “The tragic death of this beloved young man,” he squeaks, “is nothing but a referendum on the mental health crisis afflicting today’s youth. Today’s radicalized youth think that anger is their birthright, and lashing out at authority solves problems.”

            The minister’s eyes slide fearfully toward the back of the sanctuary. I see he both disapproves and wants the approval of unsanctioned mourners, like the cow(ard) he is. He is young. He wants to align himself with power, but he knows with whom he will inherit the earth.

            I have words prepared to read. A poem, in fact. It is full of white space, only I printed it on black paper. But my father didn’t tell the minister, and I am never called up.

            “As a kid, he had a heart of gold,” my uncle Scott says. “He would cry when he saw a panhandler. Couldn’t understand why there are so many poor people.” Uncle Scott chuckles. “I took the opportunity to try to teach a lesson about working hard and playing by the rules.”

            The aunts and uncles titter.

            Uncle Scott turns to Robin’s casket. “Robin,” he says. “I guess I’m not a very good teacher, and I’m sorry about that.”

            A few vetted friends share stories depicting a boy who refused to drive, but also refused to speak ill of driving. He refused to eat meat, but also refused to speak ill of meat eaters. He repaired his sneakers with duct tape and shoe glue–

            “Wouldn’t be caught dead in new shoes,” says a high school friend here with her parents. She goes by the name Ancient Fires. We all glance at the closed casket, knowing that new dress shoes are wedged over Robin’s dead feet.

            “All the girls thought he was hot like Jesus,” says a girl named Sun Ra (no relation). She grew up on our street, so I know her government name is Soledad Ramsay. I peek at my mother. “He was a brave and wild thinker,” Sun Ra sniffs.

            How did we completely agree on all topics at all times and yet live so differently? I have generally assumed I was lesser, but the funeral makes it clear that I simply never found a cohort to embolden me. As the older sibling, it was me leading Robin in the substance of our moral and political codes, but for me, it stayed mostly abstract. Robin had a group, I now realize, so the challenge of radical living was bearable for him, even appealing, with realtime acknowledgement and appreciation.

            Another friend tells us Robin was in the main warehouse at Face Value, cops with guns drawn all around, and he called 911 to say, “Help, I’m surrounded by a gang of armed men.”

            This is the Robin I recognize. I remember reading aloud to him David Graeber’s account of doing exactly this during the Occupy Wall Street movement. Back porch, hiding from a family reunion. I was reading to myself and laughed. I reread it aloud so we could laugh together. And then Robin tried it on the Atlanta PD.

            My parents definitely did not expect this cohort at the funeral. Which is to say, whatever mischief he’d got up to as a matter of lifestyle, our parents never fathomed that he wasn’t a lone actor. In their horror and probable shame, it never crossed their minds that he was operating from within a large and jolly gaggle of people who actually agreed with him, enabled him, and tried to live out the principles of cooperative anarchy together.

            “How did he not tell us about his friends?” my mom says. We are standing in the yard, where the refreshment tables have been moved to accommodate the crowd. There will be nowhere near enough food, it is plain at a glance. Nobody pounces on food like an anarchist.

            “How come you drove off without me?” I say.

            “I needed kibble,” Dad says, patting my shoulder. “Nothing personal.”

            Someone in the costume of an anarchist has brought a dog in the costume of a service dog.

            The dog senses my parents, whose perfume cannot mask their salty, uncanny canine smell. He charges them, and rapes their elderly legs with the immediately recognizable impunity of toxic masculinity.

            My father barks and whines.

            My mother clings to her sister.

            The dog, furry pelvis pumping in a frenzy, grunts passionate and lewd, is haywire, switching between the four legs.

            “He never does this,” his escort laments, passively bystanding.

            “Get your dog off me,” my mother says. He has rumpled the crease out of her slacks.

            The human coos at him, “Little Beast, what’s gotten into you?”

            A friend of Robin’s, someone named Timber Wolf, is at my side. “I don’t know how much you know,” he’s saying. “The media isn’t covering the half of it. The night your brother was killed, six of us were arrested. They’re being charged with terrorism.” He looks at me significantly. “We need the bail money.”

            “It’s not a great time,” I say, gesturing to my parents, who are kicking the dog while my aunt tries to distract it with a raspberry tart.

            Timber Wolf shakes his mane. “Fucking tragic,” he says. “The whole thing.”

            I nod, pensive.

            “Robin said you’d have the bail money,” Timber Wolf presses. “That he told you where he keeps it.”

            My eyes are on the steeple under reconstruction. In the words on the architectural rendering on the easel in the foyer, the church is getting a facelift. A facelift, for a church surrounded by real need. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

            Timber Wolf studies me. “That’s cool,” he says finally. “Do you have any of your own? Even a few dollars helps.”

            I blink incredulously. “My brother was just murdered by a cop,” I say.

            I use rideshares so seldom I don’t keep the app on my phone. I search out Marcus Aurelius, who puts his hand on my arm and asks if staying busy is my way of denying death, reminds me that Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

            I ask him for the church wifi.

            I download the app, arrange a ride to the train station, and then circle back to Timber Wolf. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Can I venmo you?”

            And I venmo $500 to Save Face’s GoFundMe, which is really a stretch for me.

            Felix waits for the car with me in the church doorway. I want him to put his hand on my butt, but I settle for listening to the nice things he says. They are all about Atlanta’s restaurant scene, which is in a golden age. A third discovery about grief is that people either avoid you or chat at you. The driver calls to say he’s a block away and afraid to drive through the mob.

            “I wish it were a mob,” I say, but I tell him I’ll walk to him, hang up, gaze at Felix. He holds my gaze, opens and closes his mouth a couple times. I smile, wait for him to find his courage. Finally, shy as a teenager, he says, “Can I send you some poems I wrote?”

            I tell him he may. Then I leave Atlanta.

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Anna Josephson is a writer based in Washington, DC and teaching at the University of Maryland. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Does It Have Pockets, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel about a furloughed intern during a government shutdown.