Franziska—immediately dismissive of the report—had argued vigorously that the “so-called” code reflected nothing more about human morality than the biases of those who’d detected it.
“But why,” I remember countering (I was genuinely curious), “is the idea so distasteful to you, so difficult to imagine? You! Who have devoted yourself to unlocking the very essence of life!”
“Precisely for that reason!” Franziska had returned. “Because I have come to understand enough about the essence of life to know that it can’t be reduced, the way this research proposes it does, and that no single part of it exists in isolation!”
“A flimsy evasion!” I shot back. “Are you suddenly a poet?”
She threw up her hands. “And yet, if we accept this,” she said, “if we concede our capacity for ‘moral’ judgment on the basis of something invisible to the eye—the existence of which we must merely take on faith—what separates us from the cultivated ignorances, and blindnesses, of our most unguided ancestors?”
“Well, what is the alternative?” I shouted. “Shall we repress science? Turn things over to the masses? Have some fanatic—some semi-educated boob—draw up a chart, willy-nilly, one column for ‘right’ and one for ‘wrong’? Why should we continue to trust and accept the inexplicable and conflicting impulses according to which human history has so far been driven, if there exists—as this research suggests there does—another, better, and more obvious way?”
And then it occurred to me—just a glimmer of an idea, which I tried immediately to put from my mind. Was it possible, I wondered, that Franziska was herself deficient of the “moral gene”? Was it not likely that a primary indication that one lacked the “moral gene” was a failure to accept the possibility of its existence? A willingness to accept—even an enthusiasm for—ambiguity?
A chill shivered through me. Perhaps to pursue childbirth with Franziska was, after all, rather ill advised? Who knew what hidden predilections, what invisible gaps or shortcomings, we might unknowingly pass on to our children, given that we had not yet had the chance to fully discover them within ourselves?
I thought perhaps I would press Franziska, despite her romantic ideas on the subject (how badly she had wanted to “throw herself” into the thing! To just let it “happen”), toward having ourselves thoroughly examined by that geneticist, our former professor, who might subsequently warn us of any gene (or lack thereof) that could prove disadvantageous to a potential, future child. It had by this point become quite obvious, after all, that if “it” was going to happen, it was not going to be “naturally.” Yes, I considered, we had a responsibility to make as certain as possible that…
But just as quickly as the thought occurred, I stamped it out. No doubt this, too, was a defensive gesture. It would be impossible, I realized in the split second after the thought had occurred, to go on living life with Franziska—perhaps to go on living at all—if I was to believe her lacking in this crucial, one might even say essential, way. Coolly, deliberately, I pushed the thought into the darkest corners of mind.
It did not always stay there, of course. As usual, once conceived, the idea had a life of its own and there was really no telling when or along what pathways it would come—but when it did come, it came as an irrelevant flash, which, for the most part, did not even merit the distinction of being called a “thought.”
But here it was again, weeks later, as I watched Franziska calmly, fiercely, sweep her empty suitcase from the bed. Well, really, I thought, as she disappeared into the closet. It might explain a few things. But then she reappeared, turned toward me, and adjusted her glasses in the way she always did when she became in any way disconcerted or confused.
“Well, I’m glad,” she said. “I can only imagine how very exciting this must be.” Then she burst into tears.
There was no way I could have anticipated it. Franziska was romantic, yes, but she had never been overt, exactly, with her emotions, and was certainly not prone to tears. In fact, the more upset she became, the more she steeled herself against them. Her edges became harder, more distinct; I could sometimes almost feel them in the air between us. They had, for example, pressed in upon me sharply—had nearly taken my breath away—on those terrible evenings after she had flown the red-eye from Auckland or New York and the two of us had lain, angry and disappointed, in one another’s arms. (“Is it me?” she had asked. “My body?” Impossible; that perfect body, upon which it would be unreasonable to expect anyone—who did not attend very carefully, over a very long period of time—to detect any discernible change. “Do you not love me?” Equally impossible: often, and despite everything, when I looked at her, I still felt that same sense of going under, of being swallowed by a sudden wave. “Are you afraid?” Here I would have no choice but to hesitate, but increasingly I could reply with some confidence, “No.”) But despite how she tortured herself—and me—on those occasions, she had never once cried. And now here she was: her face crumpled, her back hunched as though she had been hit, her hands dropped helplessly to her sides—suddenly racked with sobs.
“What is it?” I asked. I rushed toward her—“What is it? What is it?”—before I was even quite certain why, or what I would do when I reached her. “What is it? What is it?”
My arms closed around her. She did not pull away. But she did not stop crying either. There was nothing more I could do, I realized, but hang on. So I did, and Franziska cried until she couldn’t any longer and her sobs gave way to rasping sighs.
“Shh…shh…” I whispered. “It’s all right, it’s all right…”
* * *
—
That was six months ago now. Franziska recovered; apologized. The incident had not been mentioned again. I am not sure, therefore, why exactly it came to mind in the moment that, crouched next to Dr. Singh, and squinting into the light, I first glimpsed the nearly invisible germ of a long-extinct tiger at the end of the pinched tweezers I held, tremblingly, in hand. I gazed at that beautiful, monstrous thing, and I thought of the way my arms had opened, extended themselves, had—without thinking—closed around Franziska. As though that would be enough. How the words I had used had tumbled from me, unbidden—emerging from somewhere deep inside me. As though there was a place in me that actually believed, not just in the idea but in the actual physical presence within the body of that most invisible and most improbable thing, which I have so far been able to define with no greater accuracy than that common and most rudimentary of terms: “love.”
HERO COULD QUITE HONESTLY SAY she hadn’t felt this way for several decades. Seriously. Not since she was a teenager on forced road trips with her parents back and forth from Spokane to Eugene to visit her sister, Zoe—already in college by then. For seven straight hours, her parents would sit in the front seat and argue, and Hero, with her headphones on, would sit in the back and pretend that she didn’t exist.
Yes, quite honestly, she could say that was the closest she had ever come to genuine despair. Even after her divorce, which had been messy as hell, she had merely oscillated between vengeful euphoria and a state of trance-like acceptance, adopting a sort of banal fatalism and embarrassing herself, both in public and private, by saying things like “Things always happen for a reason” and “It’s probably for the best.” These and other inanities she later blamed on never, during that entire period, having gotten a full night’s sleep (Quinn had still been a toddler then). But she’d been lucky, too; had been able to afford a certain amount of hackneyed fatalism—to be gloriously, rather than desperately, vengeful. Rog had left her the same week her first solo show had received a glowing review in the L.A. Times. It had been the first and, frankly, so far the only exciting moment of her artistic career.
* * *
—
Stepping out of the climate-controlled car into the midday heat was like stepping into a brick wall. She was reminded again of road trips with her parents: how her father would pull off angrily at historical markers (she was quite certa
in then, as now, that he did it not to satisfy any personal interest but out of pure spite). He would turn to her in the back seat and, with exaggerated courtesy, inquire if she thought she might be able to drag herself from the car. He had no idea it was a literal request. Hero’s legs—when she did somehow manage to follow her father to the curb—felt, beneath her, as though they’d been made out of lead.
Hero felt something like this now, and couldn’t explain why. She’d been coming to the Paradise Valley Senior Center to visit her grandmother, Kitty Moy, every Tuesday afternoon for the past fifteen years—as long as Quinn had been alive. If she didn’t exactly look forward to her visits, she had certainly never dreaded them. She considered it a duty, and was proud—even perhaps a little smug—about the fact that she rarely missed a week.
Even after, as Kitty deteriorated, it hardly mattered anymore. Over the last year or so it had become increasingly apparent that Kitty’s short-term memory was pretty well shot: she could hold on to new information for periods of only about fifteen minutes. Hero could have come six times a week or not at all and it would have been, to Kitty, more or less the same. But still, continuing her regular visits was important to Hero, even if (at least in any obvious way) it was no longer important to Kitty.
The visits had, after all, been the one consistent thing in her life since Quinn was born. And besides, no one else was going. Her parents still lived in Spokane and hardly travelled anymore. Zoe, even if she had lived nearby, would never have been able to “take the time” (she was an announcer on the Channel 10 news out of San Diego. The way she talked about it, it seemed she honestly believed that nothing would actually happen if she wasn’t there at six every evening to announce that it had). Ordinarily, just the fact that out of everyone in her family it was she alone who had made any sort of effort was enough for Hero to feel personally gratified. As if her “good works” could really serve to counterbalance the criticisms (mostly unspoken, and predominantly imaginary) aimed at her from both Zoe and her parents.
From Zoe: the concern that she had never remarried, and didn’t even have a proper boyfriend; that she had never managed to make something of herself. (Aside from that single solo show the year Rog left, she’d never again been mentioned in the L.A. Times.)
From her parents, the reproaches all revolved around Quinn. From the beginning, Hero and Rog had been meticulous about splitting both time and parental duties as near as possible down the middle—and for just as long, Hero’s parents had silently warned her that all that was really being compromised was their son.
To think that she might have offset these and other concerns with a weekly visit to Kitty Moy was, of course, absurd; it was precisely because of the choices both Zoe and her parents held in such contempt that Hero had been able to maintain, if nothing else over the past fifteen years, her regular Tuesday afternoon visits.
So, all right. There was no way around it. It was not Kitty who needed Hero, but the other way around. Perhaps especially this fall after Quinn had informed her he’d prefer to live fulltime with Rog. Just like that. Out of the blue. As she was driving him to the arts magnet school out in Pasadena he’d just begun attending this year.
“It’ll be easier for all of us,” he’d told her. She could practically hear how the words had being rehearsed ahead of time. They certainly weren’t his. But they didn’t sound like Rog either; Rog would never have thought to use the first person plural—even in the form of a patronizing cliché.
No doubt she had the new school counsellor, Devon, to thank. An irritating young man who gave Hero the uncanny feeling whenever he spoke to her that she was a character in one of his “case study” scenario flash cards.
But Quinn seemed to like him.
“What about school?” Hero had asked after he’d made his announcement. It was the only thing she could bring herself to say out loud.
Quinn was silent. Which meant, evidently, that it went without saying for all of them—Quinn, Rog, and even the sympathetic Devon—that she would continue to shuttle Quinn to and from school, nearly an hour each way in the worst traffic, though now none of the days would be officially “hers.” “Her” time would now amount to just that: the roughly two hours she and her son would spend stuck in traffic, driving back and forth between Pasadena and Venice Beach.
Because, of course, she would continue to drive him. It did go without saying, because it also went without saying that Rog was, and always would be, off the hook. That his other commitments were just far more important than hers—demanding in ways that neither she nor Quinn could be expected to understand.
Possibly, this was true. If only because Hero had never managed to settle into a genuine “career” (i.e., a way of earning a steady income) the way Rog had. He’d worked his way up to general manager of a large pool company, and last year had been able to buy up a sizeable share. She was meanwhile working part-time at an early learning centre called Journeys, where she taught “aesthetic and creative development” to three-year-olds. The best part was that it was flexible. The director didn’t mind if she arrived late or had to cancel suddenly because of a schedule glitch with Quinn. No one, not even Journeys parents, became overly concerned if three-year-olds missed out on a few minutes, here or there, of their “aesthetic and creative development.”
Who knew, though, really, the sort of long-lasting effects those missed minutes had on a child? Hero had thought this angrily from time to time—though never really in earnest. Perhaps, she’d reflected (half to punish Rog and half to punish herself), they were just as important, or more so, than getting a design delivered, or following up on a shipment complaint.
* * *
—
Inside Paradise Valley it was cool. The girl at the desk looked up, smiled blandly, and indicated the guestbook with the stamen end of a synthetic flower taped to the side of her pen. Hero signed her name in the book, then checked the time and scratched it into the adjacent box: 1:34. She was always extremely precise when she wrote in both the “time in” and “time out” columns.
She started toward her grandmother’s room, but had not gone far when she met one of the nurses, Gina, coming in the opposite direction. Gina had a full tray of meds and they rattled as she approached. “Oh, honey,” she said, “the wedding got moved back. The bride’s late again, I’m afraid. They’re all still in the auditorium.”
Before Hero had an opportunity to ask, “What wedding?” Gina waved for her to follow. “I’ll take you,” she said, without looking over her shoulder. Her career had cultivated in her a brisk, practical manner that so seamlessly integrated graciousness and command that it was impossible to tell if you were being taken care of or ordered about.
Hero double-stepped to catch up.
“What wedding?” she asked. She said it as though she was trying to recall something she’d forgotten—but there was nothing to recall.
Gina just nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “It got moved from Thursday to Tuesday this week because of the bride’s schedule—but look, now she’s late again anyway. Honestly. We all love her, but if it keeps up, we’re going to have to get a different bride.”
* * *
—
At first it had been just the occasional slip-up. Difficulty retrieving a name, a misplaced detail in a story. Small blunders that could be masked almost successfully by Kitty’s habit of speaking irreverently, jumping from subject to subject, trailing off mid-sentence, referring to even her closest friends as “what’s her name…” But then the larger moorings began to go. She would forget the day, the time of year, where she was, who was still alive, who wasn’t, and why. Once the details had been reintroduced, she would do all right for a while, but then a few minutes later she’d be adrift again.
It had been Hero’s idea to set up a large whiteboard across from Kitty’s favourite chair onto which the morning nurse wrote down the date, the weather, and any important event that might be happening that day. When Hero came, she wrote down some
thing about her own life. Just some little thing that would serve to remind Kitty over the course of the week, whenever she looked up, that Hero had been for her Tuesday visit—and would come again. Last week, for example, Hero had written “Quinn is enjoying his first weeks at school,” even though she didn’t quite know if it was true. During the nearly two hours they spend together every day in the car, she and Quinn barely speak. They listen in reverential silence (enforced by Quinn) to Quinn’s iPhone, set to shuffle. Even though the playlist is therefore allegedly random, Hero can never tell one song, let alone one band, from the other because they all sound the same. A dispassionate lyrical whine: the very sound, she once complained to Zoe, of repression. “I honestly find myself hoping,” she’d said, “he’ll suddenly develop an interest in thrash punk, or death metal.” She would turn the volume up herself, she promised. Until the car shook and people turned to stare at them when they stopped at the lights. A few good death metal albums would, she quipped, be a hell of a lot cheaper than therapy.
* * *
—
At first Hero had thought: a couple of the residents, probably. It did happen from time to time. Since Hero had been visiting Paradise Valley, there had been four or five weddings, one memorable divorce. It was supposed to be heartwarming. And it was. It reassured you: “It’s never too late!” But what Gina had said about needing “a new bride” threw her. She must have looked as confused as she felt, because Gina laughed. “You’ve been coming here how long and you’ve never been to a wedding?” she asked. “We’ve been doing them—what?—two, three years? Every week! Same place—” She threw her head back and rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. “Usually same time. You’ll see. They just love them. Kitty especially. Cries like a baby.”
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