Connect

by Julian Gough

  As she crests the hill, and swings down into the valley, she glances in her rear-view screens. The road, always prone to early morning mirages, even back when it had been just plain asphalt, was recently coated with a matt-black high-efficiency solar-capture surface.

  Naomi has grown fond of this newest section of the Federal Highway Solar Grid; and not just because buying her electricity live from a solar road surface on the way to work is cheaper than charging at home . . .

  There it is. Her timing is just right. The sun has already heated the flat black river of road so that a thin layer of warm air sits on it, held in place by static, beneath miles of cool, dense, early morning mountain air.

  The pale blue sky, refracted through the unstable lens of inverted air, pulses and flickers on the ground like water, and the dreamscape of Las Vegas, tiny and distant, shimmers up out of a lake that isn’t there; the top of the Luxor pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building.

  The whole world, dissolved in light.

  She arrives at the facility, a low sprawl of connected labs and offices, and parks the car in the shade, behind Lab 3. Plenty of room. She’s early, as usual. Though, to be fair, she gets to park in the shade even when she isn’t early. Because everyone else is always late.

  Naomi walks across the hot asphalt of the parking lot towards the main entrance.

  She sees a small delivery drone make a rooftop parcel drop, to her office.

  Oh, good, my caterpillars. They’d better be well refrigerated . . .

  The drone rises, heads off back to the warehouse.

  Not for the first time, she wonders why they don’t just paint the asphalt outside the labs white, if they’re not going to use it for solar, so it won’t pointlessly soak up so much heat.

  Hmm. Donnie’s car. Parked by the front door. Laaaaaazy man.

  As she steps inside, the hairs on her arms rise at the temperature drop, and she puts her jacket back on.

  Shannon’s not at her desk in reception, of course, so Naomi just walks on into Lab 1, no one.

  Lab 2, no one, the doors popping open at her approach. Good. After the security breach a couple of weeks earlier, they’d tightened up access so much that, for a few days, all the lab doors locked at her approach. A massive pain in the ass.

  Speaking of which . . .

  Lab 3, Donnie Glassford, leaning over a lab bench.

  Her boss. Looking like a shaved gorilla in a Texas Longhorns shirt, as usual. And sober, which is less usual. A pleasant surprise. There’s even a mug of coffee by his elbow. Admittedly he hasn’t actually drunk any of it, and it looks cold and scummy.

  He straightens up, looks Naomi over, pausing in the usual places. ‘No Colt today?’

  Ugh. She studies the faded, peeling decal on the mug, to avoid looking at him. A Texan flag flies above the words ‘Remember the Alamo’.

  ‘He wanted to stay home, work on his game.’

  Donnie nods. ‘Uh huh . . . be with you in a minute.’

  Donnie goes back to work, on a mouse. He’s removed the entire left frontal lobe by the look of it. Nothing complicated. As Donnie always says, ‘It isn’t brain surgery, ha ha.’ The top of the mouse’s skull sits discarded on the bench, a few inches away, like a tiny bicycle helmet.

  Naomi recognizes the mouse. Well, not the individual mouse. But it’s a research strain she’s familiar with; a hairless albino, with a genetically engineered tendency to develop brain cancer.

  She glances at the frontal lobe. Wait, this is one of hers. What the fuck is Donnie doing with one of her mice?

  With his right hand, Donnie lifts the unconscious mouse by the tail, leaving the top of its skull on the bench. With his left hand, he removes the thick insulated lid from a small flask of liquid nitrogen. It boils over furiously, like a cartoon volcano, white vapour pouring down the sides, heading across the desk like a tiny fogbank.

  And he’s let the nitrogen heat up too much, she thinks. If he’s going to leave it there for the whole operation, he should have used a larger flask. Better volume-to-surface area.

  But her anger’s already starting to fade, as the fear kicks in. Donnie doesn’t do lab work.

  The mouse, brain still exposed, twitches in Donnie’s hand. It’s going to wake.

  Donnie dunks it in the flask of nitrogen, leaving only the last half inch of tail held in his fingertips. Tiny volume, relatively large surface area; the mouse freezes to the core in seconds. Donnie pulls it out, turns, hesitates, with the frozen mouse dangling over the bench.

  ‘Damn,’ he says. ‘Sorry, Naomi. Forgot the foil. Will you roll me a sheet?’

  ‘Sure.’ She tastes a sudden squirt of sick in the back of her throat, swallows.

  Swallows again.

  Naomi tears off a sheet of aluminium foil from the roll, lays it on the table.

  Donnie lays the mouse across it diagonally, wraps it like a burrito, labels it with his ungloved hand, picks it up in his gloved hand, and throws it in the freezer. Pushes down the lid till it clicks.

  ‘I’ve been talking to the Ethics Committee,’ he says. He picks up the mug of cold coffee, gives it a startled look, and puts it back down again.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Called in a couple of favours. Looks like we might get a couple of chimps through.’

  ‘OK,’ she says. After a long ban, research on chimpanzees has only been legal again for a couple of years, to help researchers deal with the various primate-to-human epidemics. Getting permission to work on anything that isn’t SIV, Benin fever, an Ebola mutation, or F-strain flu is incredibly difficult. She knows how hard he must have worked to get this. ‘OK.’

  ‘So if you could just publish . . .’

  ‘No.’

  He sighs. ‘Look, everybody here knows you’re doing great research. But if you don’t publish . . .’ He puts on the voice of some old TV character, she has no idea who. ‘. . . It don’t exist.’

  She has an abrupt, vivid memory of the exposed brain of the last big mammal she worked on. A dog with nerve-sheath degeneration. Big black mutt.

  Oh, I got too close.

  Pain research. A long time ago.

  She ran tests on the dog, a week after she’d destroyed its ability to block pain. Trusting, dying, it still licked her hand.

  She blinks away the memory, and shakes her head. ‘It’s not ready.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be ready. You know; better if it isn’t. Ask the big questions, say the method shows promise, blah blah, preliminary results, yadda yadda, and we can get funding to look for the answers.’

  ‘Working on it,’ says Naomi, looking out the window at the blue sky. ‘Nearly there. Just need some more data points.’

  He doesn’t like it when she looks out the window.

  ‘If you don’t publish preliminary findings, it’s really hard to get a budget,’ he says. ‘Got to step it up.’

  ‘I know.’ She keeps looking out the window.

  ‘Seems you have a habit of not publishing papers.’

  Woah. This is a new angle of attack. ‘What do you mean?’ she says, and now she’s looking at him.

  Donnie shrugs.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Impressive, the work you did on Barbary ducks.’

  ‘How would you know that?’ Those ducks, my God. One of her first pieces of research, from her time at Berkeley.

  ‘Those are remarkable papers,’ he says. ‘Really remarkable.’

  ‘Who . . . where did you get them?’

  ‘A lot of stuff in there I didn’t know.’ He looks her up and down as he speaks. ‘Sure, I knew that, with Barbary ducks, the sex was . . . coercive. I knew the females had evolved corkscrew-shaped vaginas, with all kinds of fake exits and dead ends, to outwit the guys; but your paper . . . it really made me look at them differently.’

  ‘I never published that paper. Any of those papers.’ She notices her voice is trembling. Fear? Anger? Both. Oh God, it’s like she’s caught someone reading her diary.


  ‘Well, that’s what I’m saying,’ says Donnie, and shakes his head. ‘You really should’ve. That stuff you did on the guys, tracking the way their penis evolved, so it could evert and ejaculate up a corkscrew, ah, vagina, in a tenth of a second . . . and that whole genital, whatever, arms race, with the duck vaginas changing the direction of the corkscrew, to keep the guys out . . . fascinating. You should have been proud of it.’

  ‘I was. I am.’

  ‘Three great papers. But you didn’t publish any of them.’

  ‘Who gave you . . . where did you read them?’

  ‘Your conclusions in, was it the third paper, the reproductive-strategy paper – yeah – they were particularly, ah, intriguing.’

  Even his mention of that paper fills her with the same complicated tangle of emotions she had felt back at the time. ‘I was out of my area . . .’ Wait, why is she distancing herself from it? It’s a good paper. Even if . . .

  ‘A genital arms race, driven by rape,’ muses Donnie. ‘Rape as the dominant reproductive strategy . . .’

  ‘The female still had a great deal of control over her vagina,’ breaks in Naomi. She tries to remember the paper’s conclusion, but there’s a cloud of shame and fear associated with it that makes it hard for her to think straight. ‘Females could block the—’

  ‘—Yeah,’ Donnie just bulldozes straight through her, ‘but kind of intriguing, that the winning evolutionary strategy for female Barbary ducks is, basically, to make sure they are raped by the strongest rapist.’

  ‘That’s not what I said . . .’

  ‘Hey, I get it,’ Donnie interrupts, and winks. ‘Sex is dangerous.’

  She bites her tongue. Looks up at the ceiling; down at her feet.

  Oh, those ducks. Those strange months, watching them rape and be raped, while her marriage to Ryan broke down. Studying a culture in which affectionate, consensual sex between equals had become impossible; worse, a disastrous error, producing unsuccessful offspring.

  They had backed themselves into an evolutionary situation from which there was no way out.

  They had bred love out of the system.

  Watching those ducks, it was impossible not to think of her mother and father’s strange, bleak marriage; of her own complicated, messy, painful life.

  By the time she was finished, she wasn’t sure if she’d written a scientific paper or an autobiography.

  It was a great study.

  No, she didn’t publish it.

  ‘I mean there’s rape culture, and there’s rape culture, oh boy,’ says Donnie. ‘I hadn’t realized male Barbary ducks were four times the weight of the females. Sure, you didn’t apply the findings to any other species, but it kind of explains football players.’ He laughs.

  She doesn’t.

  She’s worked it out now. It’s obvious.

  ‘It was Ryan, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Mmmm,’ says Donnie. ‘You might want to keep Colt out of the lab for a few days.’

  ‘Look,’ she blurts out, ‘I’m sorry, Donnie, but . . .’ Then she realizes he’s not hitting back at her, he’s just changing the subject. ‘Why?’

  ‘Shannon says to tell you, you might be getting a surprise inspection later in the week.’

  ‘Seriously?’ OK, this is more urgent. ‘Urgh. When?’

  ‘Probably Thursday. She’ll tell you when she knows.’

  ‘Oh, great. OK.’ He’s an insensitive twice-divorced misogynistic idiot, but he could be worse. Be polite. ‘Thanks, Donnie. And say thanks to Shannon.’

  ‘Sure.’ She’s lost his attention. He’s playing with a little hand-held chemical cauterizing tool like he’s never seen one before. Jesus, maybe he hasn’t.

  Come on. He knows you’re wondering. Just ask him.

  ‘Why are you dissecting my mouse?’

  ‘It was injured. The other mice had attacked it. And I was interested in how your work was coming along. You’ve been keeping pretty quiet.’

  She glances involuntarily at the frontal lobe.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says drily. ‘So it seems to be going well.’

  How much does he know? Her face is beginning to ache from the effort of not showing him her emotions.

  ‘Was the mouse . . .’ She stops. Oh, there’s no point in not asking. ‘Was it exhibiting any unusual behaviour patterns?’

  ‘I only saw it for a couple of minutes, but, yeah, it was its behaviour that stopped me.’

  ‘What was it doing?’

  ‘Fighting. Your big maze, the one with the cameras sucking data on movement and choices. This guy was holding his own against maybe a dozen other mice.’

  ‘How?’ She knows the cameras will have caught it, and that getting into a conversation with Donnie about this right now is unwise, but her curiosity’s too much.

  ‘It was using the maze as a three-D space, jumping walls to shake off pursuit.’ Donnie frowns. ‘Very fast reaction times. It seemed unusually aware of its environment. Kind of weird to watch. It will all be on the cameras. They trapped it, eventually, in a dead end with high walls. Overwhelmed it. I pulled it out alive, but it was, you know, basically a goner, so I did a quick autopsy.’

  She wonders how true that is. The body had looked undamaged. She thinks the word asshole so fiercely she’s afraid for a moment she’s said it aloud, and she clenches her jaw. Unclenches.

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘I’ll analyse this.’ She scoops the frontal lobe into a coolbox before he can react, and heads for her lab.

  ‘Naomi . . .’

  If he slaps my ass, I’m going to break his arm.

  She waits till she is in her lab, with the door closed behind her, and locked with an old-fashioned metal key and bolt she’s installed herself, before she finally allows her face to show her feelings.

  Her whole body relaxes, as she quietly snarls, rolls her eyes, sticks out her tongue.

  Feels good.

  5

  Her lab is familiar, calm.

  Better feed the caterpillars.

  There’s an automated feed system, but she likes to believe the caterpillars benefit from regular fresh leaves. Monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus. Everybody’s favourites.

  A couple have already started to pupate. About to break down, and rebuild; transform completely.

  She carefully takes the cool glass lid off the quiet tank, puts it down.

  Leans in, smells the soil.

  As she pulls a handful of leaves from her jacket pocket, the silk of the jacket is cool and smooth against the back of her hand. The soft fuzz on the surface of the leaves gives pleasure to her fingertips. She strokes the leaves, absent-mindedly, as she notices her own voice is still going around and around, arguing with Colt, inside her head; and she realizes it’s been going around constantly since breakfast, right through her drive to work, right through her conversation with Donnie. Whoops. She takes three deep breaths.

  One . . . two . . .

  Better make it five.

  OK.

  Look at the leaves, the caterpillars crunching through them, really look at them.

  Be here now.

  They’re so alive.

  Intense, vivid colours.

  Just . . . little packets of life.

  No, I don’t want to change the world, she thinks.

  But she sits at her desk and dictates detailed notes anyway, her voice a little shaky. The results from the last trial really were extraordinary.

  And she doesn’t have to publish. No one can make her.

  6

  Back at home, after work, she walks to Colt’s bedroom, and stops at the door. Listens.

  Nothing. But that doesn’t mean much.

  She reaches out, to knock; but her knuckles pause short of the door. Naomi hasn’t really looked at, really noticed, the door in a long time. It is covered in posters, stickers, handmade signs from every stage of his life. She unclenches her fist, and brushes her fingertips gently across the rough red paint of a sign at eye level.

  Her
eyes prickle, and she blinks.

  Colt made it, with a big, messy kid’s paintbrush, a few months after they’d moved into this house; after she’d left Ryan. Ten . . . no, God, almost twelve years ago.

  Colt had used red poster paint, and a sheet of paper taken from his mother’s printer. Half the hairs on the brush were bent or broken, sticking out sideways, so there are little scratches of red outlining the main letters. It says ‘No Burglars’. Actually, it says ‘No Burg’ and on the next line ‘lars’. Colt made it after a neighbour’s garage was broken into. He was six. He’d been worried the burglars would rob their house, steal his toys. Couldn’t sleep.

  After he put up the sign, he felt totally safe again.

  The power of words, written down.

  Coffee, she thinks, I need coffee; and dismisses the thought. She listens. No sound. She, very gently, turns the handle of his bedroom door. Swings the door open a little, slowly.

  He isn’t in his bedroom.

  She searches the house for him, but he isn’t there.

  She goes outside. Walks around the house. No sign of him.

  She circles the house again, further out.

  She finds him, still wearing his helmet, but otherwise naked, lying face down in a sandy patch of ground beyond the mesquite bushes, halfway up the ridge.

  Her heart slams, slams again. As she breaks into a run, her legs feel heavy, heavier. Like she’s lifting sacks of wet sand. It takes seconds to reach him, but the seconds are immense, exhausting.

  She drops to her knees beside him on the warm ground, afraid to touch him, wondering where to touch him; looking for blood, for damage.

  Every detail looks strong, sharp. Vivid.

  His body in the low sun, the vertebrae under his tanned skin casting curved shadows the length of his back. Like tiny sand dunes.

  The flexible black plastic band at the back of the helmet, holding it on, is scratched and scuffed.

  The pale marks on his arms . . . Her mind flinches, and she glances away.

  His clothes – faded grey Road Runner T-shirt, black jeans, red boxer shorts, the micromesh skinsuit he wears for gaming – are in a heap a few yards from his body.

  The sand. Little stones in the sand. A couple of dry mesquite twigs.

  A round plastic floss dispenser.