by Rick Moody
Diminished water levels + Diminished oxygen levels + Low capsule temperature + Auto-destruct sequence = Recommended mission abort by reason of infectious disease – Daughter at high school dance = Residual will to live despite infectious disease
Yes, complicated enough that the men and women who had been gathered around Antoine in the conference room did not understand as readily as he did that the meaning was there, if only you allowed it to surface in you as a subliminal intent rather than as a conventional linguistic construct. And what was the subliminal meaning, so slippery that he kept thinking he could entrap it with these brightly colored English-language equivalents? It slithered in his mind, as if it didn’t want to be gazed at straight on, nor named. But it was something like this, in the conference room: because he couldn’t not say it, it was the only way he could keep the thought in his mind: that at the end of all our meanings, in the last wisp of consciousness in which meanings can take place, is longing. That’s what Richards was saying. When everything else is gone, when all our possessions are gone, all our accomplishments, all the things we would have become and did not, all our friends, all our acquaintances, all our carefully ordered antipathies, all our ideologies, all our skepticisms, when they are all gone, there is longing, a daughter we were so lucky once to know and love, dancing. May she remember us.
Rob rubbed ruminatively at his eyes, gazing upon what he thought he knew, in the whispered hum of the desktop system that was doing the projecting, and he didn’t even hear Debra Levin, who may have been in the room ever since, throughout his calculations, throughout his elegiac flights of ratiocination. She was here still, putting a well-manicured hand on his sweaty, unwashed shoulder. He started, and gazed into her benevolent and not-to-be-trusted face.
“Whatever you need,” said Debra Levin, sadly smiling. Leaving her hand there a moment longer for additional emphasis. By the time he’d finished parsing and reconsidering this simple phrase, she was gone.
Noelle Stern, graduate student in the medical school at URB, assistant to world-famous researcher Woo Lee Koo, had experienced the blinding light of revelation. In a way she had never suspected or believed possible. Since, like Koo, she dead-reckoned with the certainties of empirical research and experimental method, she rarely predicted surprise, and this despite her youth in the hothouse of alternative belief systems, Rio Blanco. And yet: against her better judgment she had come to believe that the animals in the URB animal research laboratory were speaking to her.
She was a tiny woman, just a hair over five feet, who wore jump boots and torn jeans and whatever monochromatic sweater she could buy at the thrift stores of Fourth Avenue, a look that her boss, Dr. Koo, had suggested would be inadequate to professional advancement. Her hair of dirty straw she kept often in pigtails, and it was as if it had never occurred to her to clean the lenses of her secondhand spectacles. Hobbies as follows. Sundays, she took lessons in contortionism west of the city with members of the omnium gatherum. For a long time, she’d also played old-fashioned laptop in a band called Momento Mori, but she’d quit because they had insisted on getting a manager. She read widely and wanted to learn Italian. If there had long been an ideological divide between her inherited (from her dad) desire to study in the field of medicine and the heavy drumbeat of left-of-ideological-center Rio Blanco, where she had lived the whole of her short life—a town of easy, relaxed pastimes, including public drunkenness and intoxication with polyamphetamine and OxyPlus (via nasal inhaler)—it had never seemed to amount to a state of irreconcilable conflict until such time as her boss, Koo, began messing with the higher primates.
Koo, as even she would put it, was a runty type from South Korea who had a chip on his shoulder about that land of fraudulence. He had been recruited to URB to study stem cell theory. And he did a little of that. But he indicated that stem cell theory was complex and required more and better animals than were presently available at the school of medicine. Right after she’d been assigned to him, he started trolling message boards looking for apes with neurological complaints. Any ape with a tremor or paralysis was placed in the database she’d created for Koo, and in many of those cases, he’d made direct attempts to purchase. To animals who were, on the contrary, able-bodied, he would occasionally apply enough electrical impulses to their spinal columns to induce paralysis. URB would have become the world’s leading facility for afflicted apes, all of them palsied, trembling, lying inert on the floors of their cages, if not for the fact that (in addition to Koo’s inconstant attentions) URB was going through a period of fiscal whatever you’d call it. Successive state budgets had brought about such reduced circumstances that Koo was trying to make up the difference from national granting agencies who were themselves scrambling for dollars.
The way Noelle saw it, there was no oversight from the university. Nor from the medical school. And Koo didn’t seem as if his heart was in stem cell research any longer. Koo failed to teach his classes, delegated to the teaching assistants all the lecturing, took no interest except at exam time. That wouldn’t have been unusual had he been in the laboratory instead. But he wasn’t in the laboratory, except late at night when no one else was around. In his accented English, Noelle understood him on occasion to be mixing heavy doses of Catholic imagery with his convoluted instructions about what to do with the experimental results. He kept talking about reanimation and regeneration and necrotic tissue, areas of medical intrigue she associated with the realm of the imaginary.
She had herself kicked upstairs with the animals because if she was going to work for a flake, she wanted to be working on the fun stuff. She probably could have been reassigned to another professor, because she hadn’t even bothered to come up with a dissertation topic yet. Graduation just wasn’t much of a goal. Still, Koo, for all his apparent strangeness, was mostly formal and polite, and seemed to take a real interest in her well-being. He invited her to dinner at his home (a dark, mostly unfurnished unit in a development in the western hills), not just to the departmental trips to the bar, which were stiff and forced. One time, Koo had asked Noelle for her advice in dealing with his son, Jean-Paul, who, like all the other Anglo kids in Rio Blanco, was going through a period when he believed he was a Latino gangster. It was all about the algae-fueled vehicle and the baggy clothes and the T-shirts depicting Mexican wrestling personalities. She remembered Koo’s expression as he asked for help, and it was of total noncomprehension. He still loved his boy. This was clear. She’d said that she’d look in on Jean-Paul from time to time, but every time she tried, the younger Koo found a way to cancel at the last minute or to bring along a friend. He was, however, conscientious about sending her the occasional grammatically incorrect text message.
Generally speaking, Noelle had problems with men. There was always some guy in sandals and dreadlocks whom she was trying to avoid but whose telephone calls she was still waiting for. She waited long enough that she could watch her impressions of the man in question go from unreasonable appreciation to doubt to contempt. Sometimes in the space of days. She hadn’t even slept with him yet, whoever he was. Jean-Paul, in his refusal to interact, was consistent with earlier findings, and he was just a kid.
These and other difficulties improved when she started working with the primates. Runaround Sue was her first charge, an ill-mannered chimp from Saint Louis, MO. She’d been born in captivity there, had never swung from the tree branches like a chimpanzee ought in the Congo. Runaround Sue specialized in eating and watching television, and in threatening whatever human being was responsible for her by baring her teeth. According to reports from Saint Louis, Sue had never once been a chimpanzee of status in the group. Other women chimps ignored her. She ate and slept and, on occasion, copulated with lower-status males. Such was the life of the prisoner.
The Runaround Sue who arrived in Rio Blanco had some kind of relapsing and remitting neurological complaint. Maybe her aggressiveness was meant to deflect attention from her weakness. Noelle had trouble not projecting her fee
lings onto the chimp. She even took umbrage at Sue’s name, which had been bestowed on her because despite her status she had been good at mating in captivity and producing children, most of them now full grown and removed to medical facilities elsewhere. Noelle hated Sue’s name, but she sympathized, as she also understood when Sue was prideful and confrontational at the moments when pity and sympathy were coming back at her.
Sue, like the apes who would follow her at URB, was not an alpha animal. The chimps at URB had lots of scars and were missing fingers, had chronic diarrhea, or were, apparently, parkinsonian. These were the animals that had already exhausted the patience of researchers across the country. Noelle loved the outcast apes, though, and spoke to them with tolerance and equanimity. She said to Runaround Sue, e.g.: “You can’t believe what they got up to at the omnium gatherum this weekend. They’re trying to dig a hole from here to Mexico. Fifty-eight miles. They were saying a blessing for the digging, and there was some kind of traditional ritual with tortillas. The earth movers are going to have to go down like fifty feet or something to be below the level that the border patrol uses. They had a shaman dig the first shovelful. And then he broke up some tortillas and handed around crumbs.”
Sometimes the conversations got more personal.
“This guy wanted to go to a golf driving range. Like he thought a driving range was so old-fashioned! Like old-fashioned was good. There’s legislation pending, Sue, that would, you know, deed all the golf courses in city limits to the Union of Homeless Citizens. What a great tent community you could set up on those golf courses. No varmints. And this guy wanted to go to a driving range. Are you kidding me? And then he’d probably want me to sit and watch him take shots. When he hit a really good one, I could give him a kiss.”
Not that Noelle had forgotten that the goal with the primates (and it wasn’t just apes; there’d been occasional spider monkeys and rhesus macaques) was experimental. Runaround Sue hated getting her injections—they all did—and the shock of her hatred of needles roused in Noelle feelings of great pity. But she was paid to administer injections, and so she did. Noelle was never entirely certain afterward what the preparation was that they gave to the chimp. With Koo it didn’t do any good to ask. He would offer some rationale heavy with rhetoric: the injection was to test “whether the introduction of computer-enhanced umbilical-cord stem cells, which promoted mild regrowth colonies in paraplegics, could impede brain lesion reproductive events associated with MS.” The kind of language that was found in grant applications, with the solecisms of ESL decorating its obfuscations. Who knew what the experiments measured? Who knew?
What was clear was that from the first injection Runaround Sue got worse. One leg developed a tremor. Then the leg stopped working altogether. In her cage, without Noelle or Larry, the other graduate student, Sue’s expression, as easy to read as if it had been the face of your own grandmother, was fearful and uncertain. But once Noelle entered the cage (as opposed to hiding out on the far side of the two-way mirror), it got even worse. Despite the failure of motor function in her leg, Sue resumed her ill-tempered provocations—to the best of her ability. Noelle, for example, was hit with a fresh, watery helping of stool nearly every day.
Nothing was worse than watching a nonhuman animal suffer. It was a matter of a few weeks before they gave Sue the lethal injection, and in that time there were losses of muscular function and excretory function, accelerated organ failures, you name it. It was exactly like losing someone you cared about. Koo seemed oddly even-tempered about the whole thing, like he knew what was going to happen. But it didn’t make him happy either. He said things like “It is the nature of this life that what dies fertilizes what lives and causes it to grow better. Maybe what is living also makes stronger what is dead. The living and the dead are not so easy to tease apart. This is a braid of mutual dependence, life and death. With technological advances we can improve on these interdependencies.”
Other primates followed; for example, Alfonse, the orangutan, who was pleasant enough, but who had a completely different type of illness (cirrhosis). Then there was the strange case of the bonobo, Cherry, who was just on the far side of adolescence. It was very hard to do experiments upon bonobos, because they were so affable. In general, unless a zoo had a surplus and couldn’t find a place to send an animal, it was not often that you would find a bonobo for sale. Cherry, to make matters worse, took a shine to Noelle. It was a solid ten months that Cherry lived at URB, and in that time Noelle went from being a relatively dispassionate participant in animal experimentation to being a conflicted, miserable participant. Because bonobo civilization is matrilineal. The female bonobos rally against the males; they do what needs to be done while maintaining a leisurely life of food gathering and group sex. It was like life in Rio Blanco, see. Bonobo social life was like the life envisioned by the omnium gatherum. Whose online broadsides Noelle took to printing out for Cherry, when it was convenient to do so.
Noelle would bring in the computer and joystick (Cherry liked anything travel related and was oddly comforted by alpine scenery), and then, while the bonobo was involved with her haphazard web searches, Noelle would read out broadsides about the coming convergence of the idea of the human body with the idea of geology, and how the body and the geologic truth could meet somewhere, and then the body would be better able to withstand vicissitudes of the heart, intermittencies of the human relations. “O citizens of the ever-enlarging desert, join us this weekend for a ritual of bloodletting and passionate ecstatic release to celebrate the coming of the cyborg!”
Noelle Stern could not be sure that Cherry understood. Nor could she be sure that the bonobo comprehended the news articles she read her about nightly blackouts, periodic military exercises in the sky over Rio Blanco, armed uprisings by would-be emigrants, or the restive homeless army that was mustering in town. Experimental method, the stuff of Noelle’s years in graduate school, argued against mythologies or nonempirical belief systems.
The erroneous belief in the appearance of affect in unfeeling nonhuman animals, for example, according to the theorists of post-postmodernist sociology, is a sign of a weakened cultural apparatus. Animals, in an economy of post-historical global interdependence, exist for the dominance of humans, who are their stewards. Animals are a resource, and they exist in a permanent state of mitigated volition because of insufficient processing power. This was written down in the best known pedagogical text on the subject: The Proper Exercise of Power, by Lyman Johns et al. Noelle had consumed it in year one of medical school, and it was with such violent antipathy that she read the arguments there that she kept the book close ever after. She tried reading some of it to Cherry, just to see, and the bonobo took it away from her, ripped out a great number of its pages, and then rubbed her vulva across the embossed dust jacket. Exactly the kind of highly symbolic activity that the book argued against. In this and other ways, Noelle had come to suspect that Cherry was attempting to communicate more directly with her female researcher, perhaps according to the rules of matrilineal bonobo society. A period followed in which Noelle asked Cherry everything, whether to date a certain guy, whom to vote for in the upcoming midterm elections, just to see whether there were genuine responses. A variety of interpretable and ambiguous responses ensued: Cherry offered her part of her meal. Cherry grabbed her in a headlock; Cherry attempted to rub her pudenda, that horrible word, against Noelle.
It was a brutal shock, therefore, when Cherry suffered mortally what was described by Koo, peremptorily, as congestive heart failure. Apparently, there was some kind of long-standing defect. Even more upsetting, it didn’t take the senior faculty member on the project long to spirit away the body. When, in the weeks after, there was a stray foot in the lab that had electrodes attached to it for laser modeling, Noelle was almost certain it was Cherry’s foot. Koo managed to get the foot to wiggle its toes on its own. With no body attached. Other grad students had a good time using the severed foot of Cherry for practical jokes.
Over at the omnium gatherum, they had begun a project that involved hot-air ballooning. The omnium gatherum wanted to send up hot-air balloons so as to warn the citizens of the Southwest about a repressive police state apparatus that was now hovering everywhere around them, concealed in washes and behind underpasses. With a flotilla of hot-air balloons, like a series of jewels in the cloudless skies, the omnium gatherum would be able to radio back to Earth, with personal wireless handsets, the exact whereabouts of agents of the INS, the DEA, the ATF, and so forth. The flotilla could also use a doctor, they said, to minister to those brave souls who intended to live in this post-nationalist milieu, and perhaps she wished to be the doctor.
While she made up her mind, she had the simplest responsibility remaining to her. She had to go in and observe Morton. In the aftermath of some experimental injection. What the experimental protocol was, she didn’t ask. She’d given a lot of injections, and she didn’t ask what they were, and she didn’t ask when she was directed to observe. To relieve some of the tedium, she’d saved a treat for herself. She had some decent, locally prepared hash, and she was going to smoke it with Larry in the observation room behind the two-way mirror. This ought to have been the night when Noelle Stern’s lack of ambition, her lack of desire to be a doctor in the way that her father had been a doctor, should have come back to haunt her. Because smoking hash in the observation room could really fuck up experimental results. Morton could turn out to be one of those rare serial-killing chimpanzees who had recently been written up in the National Geographic, chimps who for no reason would randomly select other chimps and kill them, rip out their testes and their organs, and feast on the relevant parts. Morton was one of these, she said to Larry, passing the hookah back to him, and he was going to smash the two-way mirror and dismember both of them.