The Human Stain

"I've seen them around, up in the hills. Looked just like that one, the one I saw. Probably is him." And she laughed again. She wasn't drunk—hadn't even got half her coffee down when she'd run from the house, let alone had a drink—but the laugh sounded like the laugh of someone who'd already had a few. She was just feeling good being here with the snake and the crow and the stuffed bobcat, none of them intent on teaching her a thing. None of them going to read to her from the New York Times. None of them going to try to catch her up on the history of the human race over the last three thousand years. She knew all she needed to know about the history of the human race: the ruthless and the defenseless. She didn't need the dates and the names. The ruthless and the defenseless, there's the whole fucking deal. Nobody here was going to try to encourage her to read, because nobody here knew how, with the ex- ception of the girl. That snake certainly didn't know how. It just knew how to eat mice. Slow and easy. Plenty of time.

"What kind of snake is that?"

"A black rat snake."

"Takes the whole thing down."

"Yeah."

"Gets digested in the gut."

"Yeah."

"How many will it eat?"

"That's his seventh mouse. He took that one kind of slow even for him. That might be his last."

"Every day seven?"

"No. Every one or two weeks."

"And is it let out anywhere or is that life?" she said, pointing to the glass case from which the snake had been lifted into the plastic carton where it was fed.

"That's it. In there."

"Good deal," said Faunia, and she turned back to look across the room at the crow, still on its perch inside its cage. "Well, Prince, I'm over here. And you're over there. And I have no interest in you whatsoever. If you don't want to land on my shoulder, I couldn't care less." She pointed to another of the stuffed animals. "What's the guy over there?"

"That's an osprey."

She sized it up—a hard look at the sharp claws—and, again with a biggish laugh, said, "Don't mess with the osprey."

The snake was considering an eighth mouse. "If I could only get my kids to eat seven mice," Faunia said, "I'd be the happiest mother on earth."

The girl smiled and said, "Last Sunday, Prince got out and was flying around. All of the birds we have can't fly. Prince is the only one that can fly. He's pretty fast."

"Oh, I know that," Faunia said.

"I was dumping some water and he made a beeline for the door and went out into the trees. Within minutes there were three or four crows that came. Surrounded him in the tree. And they were going nuts. Harassing him. Hitting him on the back. Screaming.

Smacking into him and stuff. They were there within minutes. He doesn't have the right voice. He doesn't know the crow language.

They don't like him out there. Eventually he came down to me, because I was out there. They would have killed him."

"That's what comes of being hand-raised," said Faunia. "That's what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain," she said, and without revulsion or contempt or condemnation.

Not even with sadness. That's how it is—in her own dry way, that is all Faunia was telling the girl feeding the snake: we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there's no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It's in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn't require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It's why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It's insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity? All she was saying about the stain was that it's inescapable. That, naturally, would be Faunia's take on it: the inevitably stained creatures that we are. Reconciled to the horrible, elemental imperfection. She's like the Greeks, like Coleman's Greeks.

Like their gods. They're petty. They quarrel. They fight. They hate. They murder. They fuck. All their Zeus ever wants to do is to fuck-goddesses, mortals, heifers, she-bears—and not merely in his own form but, even more excitingly, as himself made manifest as beast.

To hugely mount a woman as a bull. To enter her bizarrely as a flailing white swan. There is never enough flesh for the king of the gods or enough perversity. All the craziness desire brings. The dissoluteness.