If your two previous answers are different from one another, please explain the reason for that difference.
She watched the students as they read the two questions on the front. Their lips pursed, they hesitated only a second before they jotted down their answers. Then these young researchers—budding scientists at an Ivy-League university—flipped the paper over to read that final sentence. There was the longest pause. There came the rising sound of them flipping the paper back and forth from one side to the other. The rustling was the literal sound of their confusion, them shifting back and forth between their grasp of the mathematical incongruity and their deep societal belief in this essential difference between the genders. In the end, each student chose to write on one side of the paper or another. Only a few chose the first page, adjusting their original estimates so that the two numbers matched. Most spent their time on the second side of the sheet, justifying their answers with frantic theory-making.
This difficulty of smart people understanding such a simple concept reminded her of the way young men tended to stomp their feet on accelerators, unable to believe they might get hurt. Research showed that although an individual man could accurately assess the danger to other men in the same situation, he was unable do so for himself, always classifying his own skills as above average, his chances of getting hurt as nearly nil. This basic inability to comprehend was hardwired into his brain in the same way that every newly hatched turtle staring across the glittering sand to the ocean was certain it could reach the safety of the waves before the gulls got it.
So Frankie created a theory with three simple postulates:
1. Under the right circumstances, women substantially benefited evolutionarily by breaking the taboo against infidelity to conceive children with their lovers.
2. This benefit helped the species as a whole.
3. In response to the dangerous dilemma of needing regularly to break an important taboo, humanity had evolved a basic inability to assess the possibility that a wife might have a lover, or even to comprehend the blatantly obvious fact that heterosexual women had as much sex as heterosexual men.
The question now became how to test her theory.
Twenty Four
Leaving the enclosure that afternoon, she bumped into Stotts.
She noticed with surprise he was wearing a Bindi. It glittered in the center of his forehead, its logo one of the less expensive Asian knock-offs.
She asked, Hey, what happened? You got a Bindi.
Oh, he said and raised his hand to touch it, Yes, I finally broke down and got one since Tess is away. This way I can Sim-call her through Ava’s eyes. I’ve never been separated from her this long before.
She added, You got the works installed? Lenses, EarDrums and implant?
Yes.
Good color choice, it brings out your eyes.
His expression showed a flicker of discomfort. He said, Let’s move to a different subject. I was looking for you. Have you been assigned a bus yet?
Bus?
To leave on.
Leave?
Cause of Mavis.
Mavis?
He tilted his head and considered the conversation, then said, You don’t listen to the news?
No.
Mavis is all they’ve been talking about for days. It’s a dust storm heading this way. You’ll have to leave with the rest of the personnel. You need to choose a bus.
Dust storm, she said.
He said, Maybe I should slow down. Mavis—the dust storm—is heading this way.
She nodded.
You ever been in a dust storm?
She snorted and shook her head.
Seen them on the news?
Well, yeh.
Around here, the last few years, they’ve gotten big. It’s like during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Sometimes people die: from breathing problems or the static zaps them or they stumble into a farm combine in the zero visibility. In general, you want to avoid the storms.
She waited, conceding this point.
This one’s big enough that the Governor issued an evacuation order for several counties. The Foundation will close. All non-critical personnel will leave. We’ll crank shut the roofs on the enclosures and turn on the recirculation vents, so dust doesn’t get inside. After the storm is over, we’ll vacuum every square foot of the grounds, before reopening.
How many days?
The vacuuming?
How many days would I be gone?
Well, you’d leave tomorrow or the next day, be back next week sometime, maybe early the following week. Once the roads are clear.
Frankie looked back into the enclosure at Adele and Sweetie. She’d already lost so much time because of the broken cameras, as well as her recuperation. She might have just started figuring things out.
She said, I don’t want to go.
He answered, Tough patooties.
DAY 23
Twenty Five
She woke early, around five in the morning, to the generalized feeling of fear.
She lay there, blinking, wondering what was wrong, then realized this was the day that her period would have started. It took her a moment to muster the courage to cautiously stretch, a little at first and then more, in the end leaning into her stretch and arching her back. No pain.
As dawn began, she shuffle-jogged around the foundation, pushing herself, thinking the whole time about how to celebrate. Back in her apartment, she made a pot of coffee twice as strong as the coffeemaker’s voice recommended, heaping the coffee to the top of the filter. While it brewed, she pulled out some ground lamb, a package of chocolate chips and a tube of wasabi paste. She melted the chocolate in a double boiler. When the coffee was ready, she added cream and two spoonfuls of sugar, tasted it, then added another spoonful. Drinking, she let her eyelids flutter shut. There were a few grains floating that she chewed on thoughtfully.
From years of watching others eat what she couldn’t, she’d learned how to appreciate food without putting it in her mouth. Stirring the melting chocolate, she inhaled the smell, admiring the spoon’s wake, the thick folds that engulfed one another like some hidden biological process.
By this point in her recuperation, she’d put on enough weight that her clothing was beginning to fit differently, her limbs less insect-like, her face less pasty. Opening the package of lamb, she pulled a chunk off to roll it into a perfect bite-sized sphere, a ball of ground meat. She tapped the sphere delicately into the wasabi paste, then swirled it through the chocolate to coat it on all sides and pop it into her mouth. Spicy sweet meat.
After taste-testing different quantities of the three ingredients, she stirred some finely diced Vidalia onions into the meat to add texture, then prepped and ate 20 or so of the chocolate balls, sucking her teeth after each. She made more for lunch, setting the balls of chocolate on wax paper to harden. They were round and shiny as homemade bonbons.
*
In the enclosure that morning, Goliath sat beside her, holding her hand. Each time anything of interest happened nearby, he turned to her with his large silent-movie eyes to learn what she thought of it.
With no other toys, Id groomed her as though she were an oversized Barbie. The grooming started with a methodical search through her hair and clothes for vermin, then shifted to Frankie’s face. She worked to scrub away anything that might be dirt.
Houdina didn’t like it when Id was near Frankie. However she wasn’t as tough a mother as Mama. She sat as close as she dared—three or four feet away—but didn’t touch either Id or Frankie. She rocked back and forth on her heels, whining. The whine got louder whenever Id stepped into Frankie’s lap.
Frankie’s freckles were irritating Id. She huffed her hot baby breath on Frankie as she leaned in, concentrating. Her eyes focused. She licked her thumb and swabbed at the freckles, then, frustrated, tried
digging them out with her nail.
Oww, said Frankie. She picked Id up from her lap.
At this, both Id and Houdina squealed in outrage.
Frankie placed Id on the beam next to her and patted her on the butt to scoot her away.
Id stalked off, limbs stiff with hurt pride, to the farthest end of the climbing structure. She sat down there, her back turned loudly to Frankie.
Frankie muttered, Pain in my ass.
Her Lenses transcribed this as Paying MIS.
Her BodyWare was taking longer to respond to any of her commands, as though distracted by some other more interesting conversation. Or perhaps evolving backward toward the abacus. Whatever the problem was, the transcriptions were developing a strong preference for business vocab.
She began reading the text right after she spoke, becoming accustomed bit by bit to its mistakes. A Dell = Adele, Suite E = Sweetie, It = Id, etc. By the end of the day, she was becoming competent at translating the BodyWare’s transcription into what she’d actually said.
From her spot up in the structure, Frankie kept an eye on Lucy who was now ovulating, watching to see if she got near Sweetie or any other male. From this vantage point, she could also watch the Foundation prepare for the dust storm. Staff rushed about, pushing wheelbarrows of equipment or food. Kiosks and other outdoor equipment were covered up. Anything portable outside was removed. Beyond the trees, she could see the highway. One side was filled with cars speeding North, crammed with people and luggage. The other side was deserted.
Still there were a few tourists wandering around. Perhaps they couldn’t leave until later today and had brought their kids to the Foundation as a distraction. Or maybe they wanted their kids tired so they’d sleep during the drive. Each time new people entered the viewing area, it was clear the exact moment when they spotted her. Their eyes would open with surprise, their mouths pursing around an exclamation like Hey or Wow. Then, as predictable as a dog sprinting after a ball, they would point and step in close to the plexiglass, all of them seeming to forget there were other great apes in the same enclosure.
And whenever she turned to look at the tourists, she’d absentmindedly try to figure out which were the mating couples and which were their offspring.
At one point, she spotted Bellows in the back of the crowd, staring at her with an open expression on his face. Then a Foundation employee with a wheelbarrow called to him and Bellows turned away with relief to deal with that more pressing situation.
*
When she turned 28, the endo reached a new level and she minimized her life accordingly.
She moved out of the group house on Staten Island, cutting herself like a cancer out of JayJay’s life. She started living in her office to reduce expenses and so she could wake up and be at work, no need to muster the energy to walk to the subway. By this point in her career she actually had an office, even if it was rather unluxurious—off-campus on 107th Street, in a non-air-conditioned space on the fourth floor of a brownstone. Still she owned nearly nothing: her mattress and sleeping bag, some clothes and bathroom stuff, a plate and spork, a knife and mug. She kept all this in the office’s curtain.
The only activity she engaged in, aside from doctors’ visits and her work and occasional Sim-calls with her parents, was swimming. Exercise reduced pain while swimming was known to even out fluctuating hormones, so every day she swam half a mile in the university’s pool. Dog-paddling was the only stroke that didn’t pull too hard on the adhesions inside. With a snorkel and mask, she could rest her face in the water and paddle along, no energy wasted in lifting her head to breathe. The other swimmers raced past, their arms cutting through the water like synchronized scissors, forcing her into the lane for the elderly. Facedown, sucking hard on her snorkel, she struggled forward foot after foot.
Pain releases endorphins into the brain, chemicals similar to morphine. The kindness of endorphins was why—right after extreme danger or a serious wound—a pure exhilaration sometimes coursed through the veins, the moment slowed down and transfigured with beauty.
Dog-paddling up and down the pool, distinctly high, she watched through her mask the semi-naked bodies in bright nylon kick past her, rowing their way through different stages of life and strength and health. She felt only gratitude that she got to swim on.
Outside of the pool, her heart was not nearly so generous. Once a week she would randomly choose an acquaintance to treat to lunch at the nearby Happy Burger. With great attention she watched the person eat, while crunching through her own spinach salad. Watching was the closest she could get to sinking her teeth into the juicy meat. Watching filled her stomach up more than her salad. She would try to be satisfied, but by the end of lunch, when the other person ordered a brownie or ice cream, the rage would begin to rise, the need to speak and hurt. Saying something cruel helped clean the taste of spinach out of her mouth.
One spring day, she felt better than she had in months and looked for someone to go to lunch with, but when she asked around she found there was no one left who would willingly have a meal with her, even if she paid. On her own, she stared out at the sky, which was a tender blue.
She realized this person sitting here, admiring the sky, wasn’t a person she recognized anymore. She didn’t know who she was without pain.
*
Without much else in her life, Frankie continued to work on her theory about the benefits of the lover’s child.
Historically, a woman didn’t have much choice in her mate. She was married to whomever in the tribe had enough resources to support her and her future children. Although this system increased the likelihood her offspring would get enough to eat, it didn’t optimize the genetic diversity. Evolution could never allow this to be the only way to reproduce.
Thus, it was possible at some point during her life, the now-married woman would fall in love with someone from another group, falling for him because of his smell, the scent of a different immune system, the odor of future healthy offspring. Any baby that resulted from this love, if camouflaged successfully as the husband’s baby, could continue to utilize his social status, food and protection. This child would then have the twin benefits of more resources and a stronger immune system, benefits that could result in a strong advantage.
However, the ability of the child to capitalize on this advantage depended on the secret not being revealed. This secret remaining a secret helped one out of every 10 children, along with their half siblings (since otherwise they could be tossed out along with the mom). Over generations, the need to keep this widespread secret had an impact. Her students flipped their questionnaire from one side to the other, unable to understand a simple concept, programmed to assume woman were sexually hesitant, no matter how many aberrations they knew personally.
For her research, Frankie used a national study from the 1970s that examined blood types in different populations. Through the sheer size of the study, it was possible to locate in the data 439 children who could not be their fathers’, since the combination of the fathers’ blood type with the mother’s could not create the child’s. With the help of three grad students, she began laboriously to track down as many of these children as possible, along with their “legitimate” siblings, in order to compare outcomes.
*
She was sitting in the lunchroom, finishing off the last few chocolate balls of raw lamb when Stotts walked in.
He asked, So what bus you leaving on?
Before she could answer, he spotted the food—what looked like chocolate bonbons—and tossed one into his mouth, saying Yum.
She watched, her eyebrows raised, giving no warning.
He chewed once before his expression got internal. A beat of time. Optimistically his jaws tried once more before he spat the food into his hand.
What the . . . he said.
His eyes were watering. Occasionally there was a larger chunk of
wasabi.
He stared down at the ball of chocolate and raw meat, then at her. His tongue searching his mouth. He held out his hand and asked, What is this?
My new recipe, she said. Chocolate lamb tartare.
He absorbed that phrase, then moved straight to the sink to rinse his mouth out and drop the ball of food into it. He said, Jesus.
She asked, What bus are you on?
He gargled and spat before answering, A few people stay to help the keeper care for the apes. I’m one of them.
She narrowed her eyes, Some people are allowed to stay?
He said, Getting paid time and a half. It’s great timing. I have to help pay for those tickets to England and this Bindi.
*
Three days after that restaurant meal where she’d stared happily at the sky, she went in for her regularly scheduled appointment at the pain clinic to update her prescription. She was handed the normal survey. There were many multiple-choice questions about pain intensity and timing and location. If she filled this questionnaire out, concentrating on her suffering, she would feel more conscious of it for days.
At the moment she had a bad cold. Each time she coughed, her ribs and gut convulsed, making everything inside of her twist, ripping at the adhesions. On the way to the clinic, she’d started coughing and sat down fast on the sidewalk, scared she might faint. A teenager Simming on his Lenses stumbled over her, his knee clonking her in the ear.
In the clinic, after glancing at the pain survey, she put it down on the table and said, No.
The doctor, a Nordic-looking expert in analgesics, was scanning her medical records. Staring up and to the right, his eyes shimmied back and forth as they read, as though he were dreaming with his eyelids open. He asked, No?
She said, I won’t fill this out.
He flicked a finger to move to the next page and said, The survey? Oh no, you have to.
She asked, Why?
His eyes stilled for a moment, staring at what might be a photo or graph. Perhaps, because he was concentrating on something else, he was honest. He said, The insurance company needs it before I can get paid.
Theory of Bastards Page 18