Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian

Author:Chris Bohjalian [Bohjalian, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307276940
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2005-09-26T22:00:00+00:00

PAIGE SUTHERLAND would never tell Dominique Germaine or Keenan Barrett what she thought of the FERAL offices, because she valued their business and people were entitled to their tastes—however misguided. Still, whenever she dropped by for a meeting it was always disarming to see so many framed images of rabbits intentionally blinded by cosmetic companies and chickens trapped in what looked like hatbox-sized cages and monkeys with wires up their . . . well, in every orifice on their bodies, it seemed. Dominique’s office didn’t have those sorts of photos, of course, because she had those massive paintings instead of birds whose plumage looked more than a little to Paige like human vaginas. She thought they would have been great in a New Age gynecologist’s office.

There was also a massive, framed presentation of the Ovid poem that FERAL used parts of almost everywhere, the lettering in this case a pretentious cross between wedding invitation calligraphy and the ninth-century script of the monk of Saint Gall:

He who can slit his calf’s throat, hear its cries

Unmoved, who has the heart to kill his kid

That screams like a small child, or eat the bird

His hand has reared and fed! How far does this

Fall short of murder? Where else does it lead?

Away with traps and snares and lures and wiles!

Never again lime twigs to cheat the birds,

Nor feather ropes to drive the frightened deer,

Nor hide the hook with dainties that deceive!

Destroy what harms; destroy, but never eat;

Choose wholesome fare and never feast on meat!

Moreover, because so much of what FERAL did revolved around publicity, many of the employees’ cubicle or office walls were covered with posters of the organization’s recent campaigns against leather and ice cream and the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Most of these were pretty unpleasant, though she did notice an exception this morning: On a wall in the reception area hung a nice new poster of fashion models posing nude to protest fur. It was taken in one of the Greek statue galleries at the Metropolitan, and she couldn’t imagine how Dominique or Spencer (or one of his minions) had convinced the museum to let them do a photo shoot there. She was mightily impressed. She thought the group would be a lot more successful if they did more with nudity and less with Ovid.

Nevertheless, Paige, too, was a vegetarian, though she still had her share of leather in her wardrobe and accessories. Oh, she’d been a bit of a phony when she’d first agreed to help FERAL with a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission about New York State’s “Lucky Cow” campaign: a series of television commercials the state’s dairy board had produced that suggested Empire State dairy cows were the luckiest bovines on the planet. In Dominique and Keenan and Spencer’s opinion, the ads took the notion of permissible puffery to an altogether new pinnacle of deceptiveness, since they suggested a dairy cow led a long and bucolic life, and stood around grazing and nursing her young in green fields with small coppices of shade trees most days.

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