Free The Humanity Project by Jean Thompson

it? Green?”
    “Art.”
    “I was married for a while. Not real long. It didn’t work out. So we called it quits, and I came out here. From, you know, the Midwest.”
    Christie waited. Steam rose up from her teacup and twined through the baby curls on each side of her face. “That’s it?”
    “More or less.” Art shrugged. It wasn’t the kind of story that made you look good.
    “How old was your daughter then? What’s her name, anyway?”
    “Linnea. Not very old. Two.”
    “That’s a pretty name. Linnea.”
    “Yeah, it’s, ah, Swedish. Her mom was Swedish. Is.”
    “So all this time . . .”
    “It’s not something you plan, you know? You don’t say, ‘I think I’ll get married to the wrong woman and impregnate her and then bug out.’ She wasn’t ever happy with me. With who I turned out to be. She had all these expectations. She was glad to see me go. I was glad to be gone. Enough time goes by, you almost forget any of it happened.” He thought he understood the parents in Hansel and Gretel, how they’d gone on with their lives after the abandonment in the forest. They had convinced themselves they’d never had children. After a moment Art said, “I’m just trying to be honest here.”
    “Yes, it doesn’t seem like you’re shining it up much.”
    “I don’t think I would have been any good at having a little kid around anyway.”
    “You never know until you try,” Christie said, meaning it as a reproach.
    “I wasn’t much of a family type.”
    Which was true. But what type was he? In another century, Art imagined, he might have had a nice life as a monk in some comfortable monastery, one with a good library. As it was, he’d been dragging out his education for the last twenty years. He had a master’s degree in English literature, with a specialty in colonial literature, authors such as Kipling, Forster, Conrad. He’d always meant to go on and get a doctorate, and he still kept in touch with his committee, at least those who had not yet retired or died off. But over time his specialty had become somewhat dated. It was too easy to sneer at imperialism and cultural hegemony; anybody could do it, and many people had. It was harder and harder to come up with new and subtle variations, at least in English. In other languages, in other parts of the globe, you could be pretty sure that one population was still busy squeezing the juice out of another, and then sitting on top of the conquered tribes and writing about it.
    He thought about starting over, tackling some newer, hotter field, where it was still possible to feel a righteous indignation: ecocriticism, or genocide studies. But as yet he had not taken up the sword. A doctorate of any sort, a dissertation, was such daunting work. Knowledge for its own sake had its limits. Nor was another degree going to land him some plummy professor job. He was forty years old, past his stale date, and anyway, jobs like that were long gone.
    He tried to recall the excitement he’d felt when he’d first come out west, that sense of lightness and possibility, his life taking some new and unimaginable shape.
    He taught composition courses at one or another junior college. He hired himself out to tutor the indifferent sons and daughters of the wealthy. He graded papers for a national testing service. He wrote online book reviews and attempted to get paid for them. These were the strategies of the overeducated and the underemployed.
    In addition, he and a friend were developing a website, which did not yet earn money, although it had the potential to do so, where users could rate other websites. He’d written training manuals for an educational publisher to use in their New Delhi office.
    He’d managed to get a trip to India out of it, and he’d parlayed that into three months of sightseeing and dysentery. He was working on a screenplay, a science-fiction epic of post-apocalyptic life on earth, where humans battled one another in huge arenas that were