Kamla scurries in ahead of her dad, right up to me, her head wobbling as though her neck is a column of gelatin. She sticks out her hand. “Hey, Greg,” she says. “Long time.” Behind her, Sunil gives me a bashful smile.
I reach down to shake the hand of what appears to be a six-year-old.
“Uh, hey,” I say. Okay, I lied a little bit. I still don’t really know how to talk to kids.
“This looks cool,” she tells me, gazing around. “What do we do?” She squats down and starts sifting soil through her fingers.
“Kamla, you mustn’t touch the art,” says Sunil.
I say, “Actually, it’s okay. That’s exactly what I want people to do.”
Kamla flashes me a grateful glance. I give her a small spade and take her through the exhibition. She digs up artifact after artifact, watches the stories about them on the video displays, asks me questions. I get so caught up talking to her about my project that I forget how young she is. She seems really interested. Most of the other people are here because they’re friends of mine, or because it’s cool to be able to say that you went to an art opening last weekend. The gallery owner has to drag me away to be interviewed by the guy from Art(ext)/e. I grin at Kamla and leave her digging happily in the dirt.
While I’m talking to the interviewer, Kamla comes running up to me, Sunil behind her yelling, “Kamla! Don’t interrupt!”
She ignores him, throws her mushroom-shaped body full tilt into my arms, and gives me a whole body hug. “It was you!” she says. “It was you!” She’s clutching something in one dirt-encrusted fist. The guy from Art(ext)/e kinda freezes up at the sight of Kamla. But he catches himself, pastes the smile back on, motions his camerawoman to take a picture.
“I’m so sorry,” Sunil says. “When she gets an idea in her head . . .”
“Yeah, I know. What’d you find, chick?” I ask Kamla. She opens her palm to show me. It’s a shell. I shake my head. “Honestly? I barely remember putting that in there. Some of the artifacts are ‘blanks’ that trigger no stories. The dig where I got it from used to be underwater a few centuries ago.”
“It’s perfect!” says Kamla, squeezing me hard.
Perfect like she isn’t. Damn.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for this!” she tells me.
“What, is it rare or something?” I ask her.
She rears back in my arms so that she can look at me properly. “You have no idea,” she says. “I’m going to keep this so safe. It’ll never get out of my sight again.”
“Kamla!” scolds Sunil. “That is part of Greg’s exhibition. It’s staying right here with him.”
The dismay on Kamla’s face would make a stone weep. It’s obvious that it hadn’t even occurred to her that I mightn’t let her have the shell. Her eyes start to well up.
“Don’t cry,” I tell her. “It’s just an old shell. Of course you can take it.”
“You shouldn’t indulge her,” Sunil says. “You’ll spoil her.”
I hitch Kamla up on my hip, on that bone adults have that seems tailor-made for cotching a child’s butt on. “Let’s call it her reward for asking some really smart questions about the exhibition.”
Sunil sighs. Kamla’s practically glowing, she’s so happy. My heart warms to her smile.
When the phone rings at my home many hours later, it takes me a while to orient myself. It’s 3:05 a.m. by the clock by our bedside. “Hello?” I mumble into the phone. I should have known better than to have that fifth whiskey at the opening. My mouth feels and tastes like the plains of the Serengeti, complete with lion spoor.
“Greg?” The person is whispering. “Is this Greg?”
It’s a second or so before I recognise the voice. “Kamla? What’s wrong? Is your mum okay?”
“They’re fine. Everyone’s asleep.”
“Like you should be. Why the fuck are you calling me at this hour?” I ask, forgetting that I’m talking to a child. Something about Kamla’s delivery makes it easy to forget.
“I’ve been on the Net. Listen, can you come get me? The story’s about to break. It’s all over Twitter and YouTube already. It’ll be on the morning news here in a few hours. Goddamned Miles. We told them he was always running his mouth off.”
“What? Told who? Kamla, what’s going on?”
Cecilia is awake beside me. She’s turned on the bedside lamp. Who? she mouths. I make my lips mime a soundless Kamla.
“It’s a long story,” Kamla says. “Please, can you just come get me? You need to know about this. And I need another adult to talk to, someone who isn’t my caretaker.”
Whatever’s going on, she really sounds upset. “Okay, I’ll be there soon.”
Kamla gives me the address, and I hang up. I tell Cecilia what’s going on.
“You should just let Babs and Sunil know that she’s disturbed about something,” she says. “Maybe it’s another symptom of that DGS.”
“I’ll talk to them after Kamla tells me what’s going on,” I say. “I promised her to hear her out first.”
“You sure that’s wise? She’s a child, Greg. Probably she just had a nightmare.”
Feeding our child has made Cecilia’s breasts sit lower on her rib cage. Her hips stretch out the nylon of her nightgown. Through the translucent fabric I can see the shadow of pubic hair and the valley that the curves of her thighs make. Her eyes are full of sleep, and her hair is a tousled mess, and she’s so beautiful I could tumble her right now. But there’s this frightened kid waiting to talk to me. I kiss Cecilia goodbye and promise to call her as soon as I’ve learned more.
Kamla’s waiting for me outside the house when I pull up in my car. The night air is a little chilly, and she’s a lonely, shivering silhouette against the front door. She makes to come in the passenger side of the car, but I motion her around to my side. “We’re going to leave a note for your parents first,” I tell her. I have one already prepared. “And we’re just going sit right here in the car and talk.”
“We can leave a note,” she replies, “but we have to be away from here long enough so you can hear the whole story. I can’t have Sunil and Babette charging to the rescue right now.”
I’ve never heard her call her parents by their first names; Babs and Sunil aren’t into that kind of thing. Her face in her weirdly adult head looks calm, decisive. I find myself acquiescing. So I slip the note under the front door. It tells Babette and Sunil that Kamla’s with me, that everything’s all right. I leave them my cell phone number, though I’m pretty sure that Babette already has it.
Kamla gets into the car. She quietly closes the door. We drive. I keep glancing over at her, but for a few minutes, she doesn’t say anything. I’m just about to ask her what was so urgent that she needed to pull a stunt like this when she says, “Your installation had a certain antique brio to it, Greg. Really charming. My orig—I mean, I have a colleague whose particular interest is in the nascent identity politics as expressed by artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how that expression was the progenitor of current speciesism.”
“Have you been reading your mum’s theory books?”
“No,” she replies. There was so much bitterness in that one word. “I’m just a freak. Your kid’s almost three, right?”
“Yeah.”
“In a blink of an eye, barely a decade from now, his body will be entering puberty. He’ll start getting erections, having sexual thoughts.”
“I don’t want to think about all that right now,” I say. “I’m still too freaked that he’s begun making poo-poo jokes. Kamla, is this the thing you wanted to tell me? Cause I’m not getting it.”
“A decade from now, I’ll have the body of a seven-year-old.”
“You can’t know that. There aren’t any DGS kids who’ve reached their twenties yet.”
“I know. I’m the oldest of them, by a few weeks.”
Another thing she can’t know.
“But we’re all well past the age where normal chil
dren have achieved adolescence.”
Goggling at her, I almost drive through a red light. I slam on the brakes. The car jolts to a halt. “What? What kind of shit is that? You’re ten years old. A precocious ten, yes, but only ten.”
“Go in there.” She points into the parking lot of a nearby grocery store. “It won’t be open for another three hours.”
I pull into the lot and park. “If the cops come by and see us,” I say, “I could be in a lot of shit. They’ll think I’m some degenerate Indian perv with a thing for little girls.”
Shit. I shouldn’t be talking to a ten-year-old this way. Kamla always makes me forget. It’s that big head, those big words.
“DGS people do get abused,” she tells me. “Just like real children do.”
“You are a real child!”
She glares at me, then looks sad. She says, “Sunil and Babette are going to have to move soon. It’s so hard for me to keep up this pretence. I’ve managed to smartmouth so much at school and in our neighbourhood that it’s become uncomfortable to live there anymore.”
My eyes have become accustomed enough to the dark that I can see the silent tears running down her cheeks. I want to hold her to me, to comfort her, but I’m afraid of how that will look if the cops show up. Besides, I’m getting the skin-crawly feeling that comes when you realise that someone with whom you’ve been making pleasant conversation is as mad as a hatter. “I’m taking you back home,” I whisper. I start turning the key in the ignition.
“Please!” She puts a hand on my wrist. “Greg, please hear me out. I’ll make it quick. I just don’t know how to convince you.”
I take my hand off the key. “Just tell me,” I said. “Whatever it is, your parents love you. You can work it out.”
She leans back against the passenger side door and curls her knees up to her chest, a little ball of misery. “Okay. Let me get it all out before you say anything else, all right?”
“All right.”
“They grew us from cells from our originals; ten of us per original. They used a viral injection technique to put extra-long tails on one of the strands of our DNA. You need more telomeres to slow down aging.”
The scientific jargon exiting smoothly from the mouth of a child could have been comic. But I had goose bumps. She didn’t appear to be repeating something she’d memorised.
“Each batch of ten yielded on average four viable blastocytes. They implanted those in womb donors. Two-thirds of them took. Most of those went to full term and were delivered. Had to be C-sections, of course. Our huge skulls presented too much of a risk for our birth mothers. We were usually four years old before we were strong enough to lift our own heads, and that was with a lot of physiotherapy. They treated us really well; best education, kept us fully informed from the start of what they wanted from us.”
“Which was?” I whisper, terrified to hear the answer.
“Wait. You said you would.” She continues her story. “Any of us could back out if we wanted to. Ours is a society that you would probably find strange, but we do have moral codes. Any of us who didn’t want to make the journey could opt to undergo surgical procedures to correct some of the physical changes. Bones and muscles would lengthen, and they would reach puberty normally and thereafter age like regular people. They’ll never achieve full adult height, and there’ll always be something a little bit odd about their features, but it probably won’t be so bad.
“But a few of us were excited by the idea, the crazy, wonderful idea, and we decided to go through with it. They waited until we were age thirteen for us to confirm our choice. In many cultures, that used to be the age when you were allowed to begin making adult decisions.”
“You’re ten, Kamla.”
“I’m twenty-three, though my body won’t start producing adult sex hormones for another fifty years. I won’t attain my full growth till I’m in my early hundreds. I can expect—”
“You’re delusional,” I whisper.
“I’m from your future,” she says. God. The child’s been watching too many B-movies. She continues, “They wanted to send us here and back as full adults, but do you have any idea what the freight costs would have been? The insurance? Arts grants are hard to get in my world, too. The gallery had to scale the budget way back.”
“Gallery?”
“National gallery. Hush. Let me talk. They sent small people instead. Clones of the originals, with their personalities superimposed onto our own. They sent back children who weren’t children.”
I start the car. I’m taking her back home right now. She needs help; therapy, or something. The sky’s beginning to brighten. She doesn’t try to stop me this time.
Glumly, she goes on. “The weird thing is, even though this body isn’t interested in adult sex, I remember what it was like, remember enjoying it. It’s those implanted memories from my original.”
I’m edging past the speed limit in my hurry to get her back to her parents. I make myself slow down a little.
“Those of us living in extremely conservative or extremely poor places are having a difficult time. We stay in touch with them by email and cell phone, and we have our own closed Facebook group, but not all of us have access to computer technology. We’ve never been able to figure out what happened to Kemi. Some of us were never adopted, had to make our own way as street kids. Never old enough to be granted adult freedoms. So many lost. This fucking project better have been worth it.”
I decide to keep her talking. “What project, Kamla?”
“It’s so hard to pretend you don’t have an adult brain! Do you know what it’s like turning in schoolwork that’s at a grade-five level, when we all have PhD’s in our heads? We figured that one of us would crack, but we hoped it’d be later, when we’d reached what your world would consider the age of majority.”
We’re cruising past a newspaper box. I look through its plastic window to see the headline: “I’M FROM THE FUTURE,” SAYS BOBBLE-HEADED BOY. Ah. One of our more erudite news organs.
Oh, Christ. They all have this delusion. All the DGS kids. For a crazy half-second, I find myself wondering whether Sunil and Babette can return Kamla to the adoption centre. And I’m guiltily grateful that Russ, as far as we can tell, is normal.
“Human beings, we’re becoming increasingly post-human,” Kamla says. She’s staring at the headline, too. “Things change so quickly. Total technological upheaval of society every five to eight years. Difficult to keep up, to connect amongst the generations. By the time your Russ is a teenager, you probably won’t understand his world at all.”
She’s hit on the thing that really scares me about kids. This brave new world that Cecilia and I are trying to make for our son? For the generations to follow us? We won’t know how to live in it.
Kamla says, “Art helps us know how to do change. That’s made it very valuable to us.”
“Thank heaven for that,” I say, humouring her. “Maybe I’d like your world.”
She sits up in her seat, buckles herself in. Shit. I should have made her do that the minute she got in the car. I have one of those heart-in-the-mouth moments that I have often, now that I’m a parent. “In my world,” she says, “what you do would be obsolete.” She sniggers a little. “Video monitors! I’d never seen a real one, only minibeams disguised to mimic ancient tech. Us DGSers have all become anthropologists here in the past, as well as curators.”
“Wait; you’re a what?”
“I’m a curator, Greg. I’m trying to tell you; our national gallery is having a giant retrospective; tens of thousands of works of art from all over the world, and all over the world’s history. They sent us back to retrieve some of the pieces that had been destroyed. Expensive enough to send living biomaterial back; their grant wasn’t enough to pay for returning us to our time. So we’re going to grow our way there. Those of us that survive.”
There are more cars out on the road, more brakes squealing, more horns honking. “I’m not going to miss mass transit when
I finally get home,” she says. “Your world stinks.”
“Yeah, it does.” We’re nearly to her parents’ place. From my side, I lock her door. Of course she notices. She just glances at the sound. She looks like she’s being taken to her death.
“I didn’t know it until yesterday,” she tells me, “but it was you I came for. That installation.”
And now the too-clever bloody child has me where I live. Though I know it’s all air pie and Kamla is as nutty as a fruitcake, my heart’s performing a tympanum of joy. “My installation’s going to be in the retrospective?” I ask. Even as the words come out of my mouth, I’m embarrassed at how eager I sound, at how this little girl, as children will, has dug her way into my psyche and found the thing which will make me respond to her.
She gasps and puts her hand to her mouth. “Oh, Greg! I’m so sorry; not you, the shell!”
My heart suicides, the brief, hallucinatory hope dashed. “The shell?”
“Yes. In the culture where I live, speciesism has become a defining concept through which we understand what it means to be human animals. Not every culture or subculture ascribes to it, but the art world of my culture certainly does.” She’s got her teacher voice on again. She does sound like a bloody curator. “Human beings aren’t the only ones who make art,” she says.
All right. Familiar territory. “Okay, perhaps. Bower birds make pretty nests to attract a mate. Cetaceans sing to each other. But we’re the only ones who make art mean; who make it comment on our everyday reality.”
From the corner of my eye, I see her shake her oversized head. “No. We don’t always know what they’re saying, we can’t always know the reality on which they’re commenting. Who knows what a sea cucumber thinks of the conditions of its particular stretch of ocean floor?”
A sea cucumber? We’ve just turned onto her parents’ street. She’ll be out of my hands soon. Poor Babette.
“Every shell is different,” she says.
My perverse brain instantly puts it to the tune of “Every Sperm Is Sacred.”
She continues, “Every shell is a life journal, made out of the very substance of its creator, and left as a record of what it thought, even if we can’t understand exactly what it thought. Sometimes interpretation is a trap. Sometimes we need to simply observe.”
Falling in Love With Hominids Page 5