The hand loosened, letting the contents dribble out between the fingers. Instead of falling in chunks like soil or funneling straight down like sand, much of this substance drifted sideways through the air, the broken flakes of plants and animals from time immemorial.
The broadcast now showed the avatar. Frankie was surprised at how an avatar’s voice would sometimes get emotional while discussing a story—about a product failure or famine—as though the avatar was being personally affected.
This delivery was so different from the way her doctors talked to her, a few sentences stated quietly to the person who would endure the result. This, she felt, was News.
In her chair again, she saw the screen had gone white.
The field again, a time-lapse video, in the corner a counter ticking off the days. The wind blew sideways, creating crests and hollows in the dust, the shape of waves. As the days sped up, the waves began to move, to roll like water across the screen, splashing up against any object in the way: the Hot Wheels bike, then the fence and the home, lapping higher and then cresting over everything, erasing all things human from view.
She forced her eyes from the screen. She shifted in her seat so she was facing away and returned to eating her crackers.
*
A tourist was studying a map of the Foundation. Nearby a toddler clutched her crotch and whined. The keeper walked by, pushing a wheelbarrow full of food. The tourist called out at the keeper’s back, Which way’s the bathroom?
The deaf keeper didn’t pause.
Jerk, muttered the tourist and turned back to the map.
*
Mama was running her fingers through the hair of Adele, not the fur on her body, just the hair on the top of her head. Mama used her fingers to comb it upward.
Frankie wondered if this was some sort of vermin-finding technique, but Mama never paused to examine the skin underneath to search for bugs. Instead every once in awhile she shuffled back to examine Adele, eyes narrowed, before continuing to comb. She seemed intent.
The grooming appeared different also in that Adele winced occasionally at how hard Mama tugged her hair upward.
After a few minutes, Frankie looked away, distracted by Stella requesting the mango pit that Houdina was chewing on. Powerful Stella held her hand out, palm up, the beggar’s gesture transformed. Houdina handed the pit over, grinning nervously.
Then Frankie turned back to Mama and saw the pattern. Mama was combing Adele’s hair into a clear ridge at the top of the head: a Mohawk.
Frankie looked around the enclosure for the hairstyles book that Mama had been staring at yesterday. The keeper must have thrown it away.
When Mama was finished, she knuckled slowly around Adele, pleased with the result, then noticed Frankie staring. She moved over to sit down three feet away, only plexiglass between them, examining Frankie, her head to the side.
Frankie tried to watch the other bonobos, but found her eyes kept sliding back. Once she’d traveled to Tokyo for a conference—long before the current Asian travel advisory had extended to everything within a thousand miles of North Korea. In Tokyo, there seemed to be no stricture against staring, at least at a Caucasian. Any person could stop right in front of her and gawk, no interest in any discomfort she might feel. Mama’s dark gaze was similar.
When she finally lost interest and knuckled away, Frankie exhaled.
*
Goliath tried flint knapping again. He didn’t do it the way Stotts did, but instead held both rocks in his hands to slap them together in front of him like cymbals. Each day it took longer to persuade him to do the flint knapping and when he did, he slammed the rocks together with force—the bonobo version of huffy.
At the end of his arms, the rocks hit with a dull thunk. A few chips splintered off, little puffs of dust. Encouraged, he pulled his arms back and slammed the rocks together harder, gritting his teeth. Dust and chips again.
Each time, there was a loud thunk but no big pieces broke off.
After a while, he put the rocks down and sucked on his right palm which was scraped and lightly bleeding. Frankie realized what she’d taken as uneven pigmentation on his palms was actually bruises from the last few days of this work. Sucking on the scrape, he eyed Stotts.
Twelve
Late that afternoon, Id approached Goliath. Frankie didn’t know how much time most bonobo babies spent investigating the world, but Id seemed continuously in motion—big eyes, skinny limbs, unending curiosity. Goliath sitting there was a mountain of slow-breathing muscle in comparison. Id grabbed hold of the hair on his back and began to scramble upward. Houdina peeped in alarm and knuckled forward quickly to take her baby back, but froze when Goliath looked at her.
The baby reached the top of his head and began hopping around up there. Goliath weighed 10 times what Id did, his huge hands as long as her body. His mouth began to tighten.
Frankie felt a rising fear.
Freshman year, she’d seen an award-winning documentary about male infanticide in the animal kingdom. In many species, infanticide was routine when a new male wrested control over a group, his first act to kill every juvenile, all of whom were offspring of the last alpha male. The documentary had close-up footage of a male lion leaning down to bite systematically into mewling cub after cub, the mother making slashing feints from the side in defense. The deaths put the females into estrus sooner than if the babies were allowed to reach maturity, allowing the male to breed faster, increasing the number of offspring he could sire during his tenure. In another scene, a muscular silverback rushed a female, who screamed and kicked but was half his size. He yanked her offspring out of her arms as fast as if she’d handed it to him and then swung it by one foot toward the nearest tree limb. The camera lingered on the baby flailing just before its skull hit. The audience shifted uncomfortably.
In the next clip, the silverback was mating with the mother, holding her tight, his hips pumping. Francine had gone to the movie with her roommate, a women’s studies major. Susan hissed through her teeth at this scene, assuming rape.
Francine had viewed the scene in a very different light. She was halfway through a seminar in Sociobiology, her introduction to evolution. After each two-hour class, she had a headache from how deeply the concepts made her think, her brain reconfiguring as she walked around campus, examining the actions of the nearby students. Organisms are programmed to feel desire for whatever had increased the chances of survival and reproduction in the previous generations. These instincts are surprisingly unfussy when it comes to contemporary details, able to ignore trivia in favor of function: a bag of Doritos = food; a popular brand of jacket = social status; the football quarterback with bilateral facial symmetry = potential reproduction of athletic and attractive offspring. The amount of desire the person experienced proportional to the size of the potential evolutionary benefits.
In college, she had finally found the courage to visit Student Health Services to state what she hadn’t been able to tell anyone else. Health Services consisted of two very clean and white exam rooms with no one ever in the waiting room, the staff accustomed to asking only for enough information to figure out if they should hand out ibuprofen, antibiotics, the Pill or condoms.
She’d done her research beforehand, finding several multiple-choice questionnaires about pain, picking out the listed descriptors that seemed most appropriate. In the exam room with this first doctor, she looked him in the eye and stated the adjectives clearly, words such as grinding and stabbing. Watching his reaction, she wasn’t sure he’d grasped the full import of the information she was relaying, so she added a few similes: scalding water and ripping flesh. Meanwhile his eyes wandered over her, searching for some proof of what she was saying. There were no visible marks, no bruises, no blood, no splintered bone. She was slender and lightly muscled.
Physical pain, like depression, is not pleasant to imagine. It’s much mor
e comfortable to assume hyperbole.
The first step, he announced, was to rule out the possibility of a persistent urinary tract infection, an illness he saw a fair amount of in Health Services. He put her on antibiotics. When she came back a month later, the pain undiminished, he gave her a different antibiotic because there were so many resistant strains. By the third visit, Francine had begun to feel a bit like a con artist, talking fast and trying to sound plausible. She stated that whatever she had, it absolutely positively wasn’t a urinary tract infection and if he wasn’t going to fix it, then the very least he could do was give her strong painkillers. He noted the request in her file. On campus there was a lot of recreational drug use. From then on, Health Services wouldn’t give her anything more powerful than ibuprofen.
So Francine began to make appointments with specialists in the city. In the exam room, she would take off her clothes to put on the johnnie. Her identity stripped away. Like a prisoner, she sat there, waiting to be given her sentence. Each specialist had a favorite to be used with symptoms such as hers, so many diseases it could be. Inflammatory bowel disease. Ovarian cysts. Pelvic inflammatory disease. Adenomyosis. Each sentence pronounced in a firm voice by a person in a white lab coat, the costume of the medical judge. Different regimes of pills or procedures followed. A few helped, most didn’t; all had side effects. Years later—once she could finally examine photos of the endometriosis nestled in her guts, once she knew its name—she found out it took an average of six years for an accurate diagnosis. Six years of fumbling with pharmaceuticals and scalpels.
Meanwhile, back during freshman year and for a long time afterward, the paramount thing she desired was to appear healthy, to pass as normal in front of the other students. By this point, in an attempt to do so, she’d learned to cultivate the appearance of a laid-back personality, the kind of person who didn’t care about playing sports or arriving on time for class. She walked at a sedate pace, her right arm never swinging. There were days when she didn’t leave her room, not going to class or answering her cell. She told those who asked that it was good to schedule downtime.
A few weeks before watching this infanticide documentary, she’d been in her Sociobiology class, listening while her professor explained Evolutionarily Stable Strategies. He had asked them as a thought experiment to consider the potential advantage to giraffes of having longer necks. He assigned some random values to how much a one-foot-longer neck might help (ability to reach leaves = +2) and how much it might hinder (increased tendency to sprain the neck = -1) and then solved the formula. The straightforward clarity of math. Next he asked would a giraffe born with a two-foot-longer neck be better off (more leaves = +3, many more neck injuries = -3), solved the calculation and compared the results.
The professor stepped back and said, Given the clarity of this sort of calculation, it’s sometimes hard to understand why, assuming these numbers were real, every giraffe wouldn’t have a neck that was one foot longer, all of them genetic clones of the one perfect being—basically a superhero—designed to answer the question of survival.
He paused, surveying the class. She was leaning forward. Her life, she knew, was spent impersonating this perfect being.
The professor said, Because the question of survival changes—a blizzard hits, a disease, a new predator, a meteor strike. Change can happen in a single day, a single moment. Evolution has to have different superheroes just in case, some of whom are definitely not designed for the current situation. A superhero of extreme cold. A superhero of starvation. A superhero of influenza. In what we currently consider normal conditions, these alternatives might do badly, might appear evolutionarily unsound, might faint in the summer heat or have a tendency to put on a few pounds.
He poked himself in the gut. Two of the students in the back were whispering, heads close together.
Glancing at them, he said a little louder, Evolution doesn’t care about any one of us: superhero or not. It doesn’t even care about our species as a whole. The only thing that matters is the continued existence of life. The random reshuffling of the surviving cards in the genetic deck is the method most likely to create a wide diversity of answers, perpetuating life. This means for every successful superhero, there are many more combinations that don’t work under the current conditions, and others that simply don’t work at all.
He added, A superhero with the ability to fly, but not to land.
Perhaps her reaction was audible—a cough expelled from her lips—for the boy to her left glanced over.
The clarity of this image. Herself as a superhero circling round and round the planet, whistling through space, all alone.
Strangely enough, instead of anger or sadness, she felt the fiercest joy. Finally some understanding of why. She was a necessary experiment in genetic diversity. From this day forth, each time she saw an albino, or someone seven feet tall, or a cleft-palate child with the shy grin of a rabbit, she felt the urge to smile at the person as she passed, a friendly greeting from one human satellite to another.
This moment of understanding was so intense, the repercussions rippling out across her life, that she began to think about her professor at different times: what his viewpoint might be on a situation, what advice he might give, what his life was like. She found she looked forward to class, not just to listen to him, but to watch him; he appeared somehow more interesting, his face better lit, his gestures graceful. Outside of class, she turned with surprise toward anyone who resembled him.
It took two weeks for her to understand—one Monday morning at nine as he placed in her hand her midterm—that she had fallen in love with him, this balding man with the apologetic slouch, an encyclopedic knowledge and the unfortunate first name of Hyman. Around him, she felt understood, her pain accorded some purpose.
From the perspective of evolution, her choice of this man—while perhaps not ideal—did make sense. Although he was significantly older, he was a high-status male able to allocate resources toward any offspring he might sire.
She, a young female with an attractive hip-to-waist ratio, began to linger after class, asking questions about altruism, reciprocity and W.D. Hamilton, engaging in such prolonged eye contact that it took her an additional week to notice his wedding ring.
She had never fallen in love before, was astonished by the power, how she behaved as though taken over by an alien. Previously an emotionally stable person, in his presence she emitted high-pitched squeals of laughter, away from him she swung violently from mania to depression. She no longer seemed to require sleep or food, while her mind was unable to stop from fanatically fine-tuning imaginary conversations with him. Years later, researching what was known about the chemistry of love, she learned the names for the hormonal explosives that had been dropped into her personality. Her neuronal circuits hopped up on serotonin, dopamine and adrenaline. Her grey matter currently indistinguishable from that of an obsessive-compulsive on cocaine.
College was when she first learned to fear her ability to fall in love (what Hyman called her reproductive drive).
Perhaps the word fear wasn’t accurate. Perhaps the more appropriate word was awe (as in the way people used that word with God), an inescapable force before which she would bow, a power that reduced her to a subservient if emotional ant, her only comfort from understanding that the force was well intentioned if not necessarily considerate in the details.
When she’d watched the male-infanticide documentary, she was in the midst of this emotional tumult. She watched the mating scene of the silverback and the mother in a very different way from her roommate (who, during the movie, whispered to her deadpan that next time they should see something more cheerful, perhaps a domestic-violence film).
A newborn nursing at the breast releases oxytocin in the mother’s brain, that all-powerful hormone of attachment. Add some cuddling and staring into the baby’s oversized eyes and a mammalian mother will almost always fall in love wit
h her offspring with a biological thunk that drives her—no matter how exhausted, hungry or bored—to do all she can to help the baby thrive.
Now imagine the baby killed.
The mother’s genes have just lost reproductive time and many hard-earned calories. As important as it was before for her to fall in love with the newborn, it was now even more critical to avoid such a disastrous loss again. The most effective way was to mate with the strongest male around, so he would use his strength to protect her next offspring as his own.
Watching the scene of the silverback and the mother mating, Francine found herself thinking of her professor. Unlike her roommate, she considered this scene solidly in the genre of romance films—not an American romance where all worked out in the end, but a European one where there were no guarantees at all. In love herself, she found it easy to empathize, to assume that for the female gorilla this was by far the greatest sex of her life and that it did not in any way negate the fact that her heart was still breaking.
A week later, lying entangled after that first time with her professor in his car, her muscles turned to serene jelly, staring up at the sliver of night sky visible through the back window, her fingers had idly pried from the seat’s crevice the object her shoulder had been thumping into a few moments before.
A baby’s pacifier.
Cupping this new information in her hand, she closed her eyes to check her reaction. Or perhaps, it was more she closed her eyes to hide from the sickening certainty she could already feel rising inside—that this would make not the slightest difference.
*
Id was still jumping on Goliath’s head. The baby slipped and, catching herself, yanked on his hair.
Frankie turned her head away a bit, now watching from the corner of her eyes, unwilling to witness what might come next.
Theory of Bastards Page 8