by Lyle Howard
Xavier looked astonished. “Quite the contrary, my dear. I want you to lead as normal a life as anyone can. I just want to see you for regular check-ups and I’ll want you to report to me if you have any unusual food cravings, that’s all.”
“Food cravings? I don’t understand.”
Xavier leaned back against one of the cabinets across from Nancy. “You know, pickles and ice cream. That sort of thing.”
“But isn’t it normal to want strange combinations of food like that?”
Xavier took a deep, impassive breath and stared at his fingernails. “Of course it is. I just want to know about it, that’s all.”
Nancy shrugged. “Well, I don’t see why not.”
The doctor reached over and patted her on her thigh. His hand felt clammy, so she instinctively pulled her leg away. “That’s good. Then what do you say we schedule the procedure for next Monday?”
Nancy was taken aback. This was all too simple. Even when you bought a new car, you haggled a bit first. “Can I ask you a few basic questions, Doctor?”
Xavier’s eyes narrowed and his lips curled even further into a snarl. He didn’t want to give the impression that he was hiding any deep, dark secrets. But at the same time, the less she knew the better. “Anything to help ease your mind, Nancy,” he said condescendingly.
Nancy was quickly getting the impression that she was being treated as nothing more than a laboratory rat. “Can I ask you who the father is?”
Xavier shook his head. “No, you may not.” Nancy looked puzzled and felt a tad frightened. “Any particular reason?”
“I think it’s better that way,” Xavier said, matter-of-factly.
Nancy shifted her weight and the tissue paper crinkled under her rear end. “Well, what I was getting at, is that he’s an intelligent man, right? I mean, you’ re not injecting me with some vagrant’s sperm, correct?”
Xavier walked over to the window and parted the Venetian blinds with two of his bony fingers. He gazed blindly out at the tarmac as the heat rippled off the runway in a translucent, shimmering curtain. Off in the distance, a distorted squadron of fighter jets taxied out to the end of the runway, awaiting instructions from the control tower. “We’re not injecting you with anyone’s sperm, my dear,” he said, coldly. “I don’t know where you ever got that impression.”
Nancy shrugged her shoulders, as particles of dust floated through the two beams of sunlight that crisscrossed Xavier’s face. “I guess it was wrong for me to assume that was how the procedure worked.”
Xavier snapped the blinds closed as if punctuating her sentence. He slid over a stool and half-stood, half-sat on it. “That’s not at all how my procedure works,” he said.
“We don’t inject you with some stranger’s sperm. That’s where your reproductive system ran into trouble in the first place.”
“Well, I just thought … “
Xavier cut her off. “Leave the thinking to me, Nancy. You just live a happy and normal life with your son. That’s all you have to worry about.”
A lump gathered in Nancy’s throat. “A son? You already know that it’s going to be a boy?”
Xavier blew a breath of warm air onto his glasses and cleaned the fog with a tissue. “My dear girl, your son is alive and well and living in my laboratory as we speak.”
Nancy’ s mind suddenly began to spin out of control. This was 1964, for goodness sake, not the twenty-first century! How was this possible? “I’m all mixed up, Doctor,” Nancy confessed. “Are you saying that somewhere in this building is an infant with my genes?”
Xavier shrugged. “Not exactly an infant. Actually, he’s no larger than the tip of a pencil. But to answer your question, yes, he does have your genes.”
Nancy leaned forward. “But how is that possible?”
Xavier held his glasses up to the light to check for smudges before putting them back on. “When we were running your fertility tests, we stole a few of your eggs. No need to panic, just call it a case of microscopic larceny, if you wish.”
“I still don’t understand.”
Xavier shrugged again, as though he was trying to explain something simple to a small child who just couldn’t grasp the concept. His condescending attitude was beginning to make Nancy feel that dreaded uneasiness in the pit of her stomach again.
“Fertilization doesn’t necessarily have to take place in the woman,” Xavier explained.
“It doesn’t?”
“Not if we can duplicate the same conditions in the laboratory. You see, the problem is that I can only parallel those exacting conditions for so long. Then we have to transfer the embryo into a donor. And who better to breathe life into him than his own mother?”
Nancy could feel that her mouth had slacked open. This was like some incredible plot in a science fiction feature. “So you’re planning on implanting, as you used that term, a live embryo into my uterus?”
Xavier was pleased that she finally understood. “That’s my intention.”
Nancy thought a moment over the utter madness of it all. “But then, don’t I have the right to know whose sperm you’ve fertilized my egg with?”
Xavier’s face turned somber. “My dear, I’ve read your application and your psychological profile,” he said, taking her hand gently in his. “I’m offering you what you desire more than anything else in this world. In any transaction there is giving and taking, and as far as I can tell, you’re doing all the taking here. Trust me when I tell you that the father of your child is strong, and healthy, and highly intelligent. We wouldn’t impregnate you with the progeny of some skid row vagrant, as you so aptly put it.”
Nancy managed a distrustful snicker under her breath. She didn’t have to be a clairvoyant to know that the doctor was holding a few of his cards close to his vest, but it was a chance she was willing to take. Like Xavier had told her, every transaction had to have some give and take. Nancy felt the clear plastic mask slip over her nose and mouth and she tried to breathe normally like the anesthesiologist was suggesting. It wouldn’t be easy, but if the gas could relieve the stabbing pain of her contractions, then she would try her best to breathe in the fumes calmly and steadily. In a few minutes this whole ordeal would be all over and she would awake back in her hospital room with her newborn son nestled protectively in her arms. On the ceiling above her, a row of round spotlights began to blend together as the gas slowly took effect. Nancy’s nine months of pregnancy had gone well with the exception of a few, very realistic recurring nightmares. When she explained to the doctor that her dreams involved giant lizards roaming around her house, Xavier laughed off the visions and claimed that they held no special significance. Nonetheless, he offered Nancy the assistance of the base therapist if she wanted to discuss the hellish fantasies, but she politely refused. The last thing she wanted, was to have the Air Force or the people from Social Services thinking she was crazy.
There had been no cravings for special foods like the doctor had worried about and that was good, he assured her. She had set up an exercise regimen like Xavier had also suggested in her third month, and up until the onset of her chemically induced labor, she felt in fine physical condition. Her belly was noticeably smaller than most of the other pregnant women she had seen walking around town, but the doctor assured her that babies did come in different sizes.
Nancy’ s eyes began to flicker as the anesthesiologist told her to start counting backward from one hundred. Her jaw suddenly felt heavy, like it had been stapled shut. The last sensation she was aware of, was that she never uttered one number. Just a few more minutes, she kept thinking to herself, just a few more minutes and I’ll be holding my baby in my arms.
Xavier was surrounded on both sides by a highly efficient and thoroughly loyal operating room staff. Each of the four nurses and the anesthesiologist had gone through extensive background checks and had passed numerous security investigations. If there had been any doubt, any doubt at all to their allegiance, they would have been discha
rged from their duties.
The nondescript strains of a classical violin concerto filled the operating theater while the nurses adjusted Nancy’s feet in the stirrups. Xavier took his seat at the end of the table between Nancy’s feet and, for the first time since Project Sandman had been inaugurated, he felt a sudden trepidation. Taking a deep breath, he hitched up the glasses on his nose and adjusted the rubber gloves on his hands. There was nothing to be frightened of, he assured himself; everything had proceeded normally.
Beads of sweat were collecting under the elastic band of his operating cap, so one of the nurses blotted his forehead. “Would you like me to lower the temperature in here, Doctor?” the nurse asked.
Xavier flinched when he realized he had been daydreaming. “No … no, I’m fine. Let’s get this show on the road, shall we?”
The nurse closest to Xavier on his right nodded in agreement. Everyone in the room had worked together before and each knew their own responsibilities. No one second-guessed anyone, and each person stayed out of everyone else’s way so that each functioned like one piston in a well-oiled engine.
Normally, during a routine delivery, the atmosphere in the operating room would be casual, almost jovial. The banter would usually fly back and forth across the table about who did what over the weekend, or who saw what movie the night before. But this afternoon, the room was uncomfortably sedate.
Xavier was progressing strictly by the book. He demanded and received thirty-second status checks on Nancy’s blood pressure and heart rate. He spoke distinctly as he barked out his requests, as though his voice was being tape recorded … which it was.
Fifteen minutes into the operation, Xavier could see the crown of the baby’s head. He examined the top of the skull carefully and ran his fingers gently back and forth across the skin, inspecting the texture of the flesh. It seemed normal, which was a good sign.
The others in the room couldn’t see it behind his face mask, but the stone-faced Xavier actually managed to force a slight grin. Just knowing that the child appeared normal made him relax a bit. Xavier glanced up at the large window that was angled inward from the auditorium above, and winked at the lone officer leaning forward on the metal handrail behind the glass. General Walter Deering flashed a thumbs-up to his colleague, and Xavier returned the gesture with his gloved finger that was still stained red with Nancy’s blood.
The general had been eavesdropping intently on the entire operation through a two-way intercom system. “Okay,” Xavier instructed to the others, “everything looks fine down here. Let’s proceed.”
With a firm but gentle prodding, and the assistance of one of his expert nurses, Xavier finished delivering the child. While he was cutting the umbilical cord, there was a strange rumbling under his feet that made everyone in the room shift their attention.
“What the hell was that?” the anesthesiologist asked. Xavier looked up at the general behind the window. The old battle-worn soldier had felt the vibrations, too, but he just shrugged it off. There was no testing scheduled in the desert today and the chances of an earthquake in the area were a million to one. The general took a puff on the Cuban cigar he had bought just for this occasion and reached over and pressed a red button on the arm of his seat that clicked on the intercom. His gravelly voice boomed over the loudspeaker in the operating room below. “Nothing to worry about, people. I’ll have it checked into it later. Move along… move along…”
The baby was quickly slipped into a warm blue blanket that one of the nurses had specially quilted for this monumental event. Xavier stood up and stepped over to a stainless steel table that contained various lengths of cotton swabs and a tube of silver nitrate for soothing the baby’s eyes. Suddenly he grabbed for the table, almost stumbling as the floor shook beneath him again. For the second time, the doctor looked up at the general with a concerned expression in his eyes. Deering didn’t seemed worried about the increasing frequency of the rumbling and tapped on his watch, signaling Xavier to hurry up.
“Hold open his eyelids for me,” Xavier directed the nurse, who was rocking the child in her arms, “I’ve still got blood on my gloves.”
The nurse took her left index finger and lifted the boy’s right eyelid. “Oh my God!” she cried, “look at his eyes!”
The nurse loosened her grip on the baby, and the child would have fallen to the tiled floor if Xavier hadn’t been quick enough to catch the infant in midair. The nurse stood with her hand over her mouth and tried not to shriek. “I’ve never seen anything like that!” she whimpered.
Xavier quickly rubbed the silver nitrate into the child’s eyes and folded the blanket over the baby’s head to conceal it.
The anesthesiologist and the other nurses looked up at the general who had jumped to his feet. They all wanted to see what was wrong with the child, but with the general’s threatening presence looming overhead, they all chose to remain standing where they were. Xavier shook his head mournfully up at the general and Deering slammed his fist down on the railing. Everything had suddenly changed. This would have to be dealt with the same way as the eleven cases before.
“What about the woman?” the anesthesiologist asked rhetorically.
Deering clicked on the intercom again from above, just as the window in front of him shuddered again unexpectedly for the third time in as many minutes. “Dispose of her, just like the others.”
The anesthesiologist looked across the room at Xavier. “Do it,” the doctor instructed sadly. The young anesthesiologist, who had already seen his fill of death in the jungle hospitals of Vietnam, was mortified. He stood and uncharacteristically began yelling at his superior officer. “I can’t do it anymore, General! This is the twelfth one! If you want to do it, you come down here and do it yourself! My job description doesn’t include the deliberate slaughter of innocent women like this. This poor woman hasn’t done anything wrong! Enough is enough!”
The craggy-faced general leaned over the railing until his flushed cheeks were clearly visible below. His bloodshot eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets. He screamed so loud there was no longer a need for the intercom system. “Your job description, mister?” He howled. “Don’t hand me job descriptions! You’re a Goddamned soldier whose singular job is to defend this country and carry out my orders! If I tell you that killing this patient is necessary for national security, then you damned well better do it!”
One level below the operating room, Shaky Weldon and Willy Blanchard were quite unaware that they were both minutes away from dying. Willy was pushing an empty, safety-orange electric pallet jack down a long, sterile-looking corridor that led to the chemical supply depot. A few steps behind him, Shaky stumbled along, smiling simple-mindedly at anyone they happened to pass. Shaky glanced up at a wall clock and thought to himself that, if everything was going as scheduled, then another operation was just about to get underway somewhere above them.
“Hey, do you think it’ll work this time, Willy?” Shaky asked, raising his voice to be heard over the grinding of the pallet jack’s electric motor.
The tall black man withdrew a handkerchief from the back pocket of his powder blue overalls and wiped his graying eyebrows. “It don’t matter to me one way or the other.”
Unable to understand anything more than most elementary discussions, Shaky waggled his head like he was trying to hear some far-off sound and then changed the subject as quickly as he had brought it up. “I really appreciate you helping me move all these drums, Willy.”
Blanchard turned a corner and slipped the hanky back into his pocket. “You know they won’t let you work the pallet jack alone, man…some of that stuff’s dangerous.”
Shaky’s head bobbed and his voice became more excited. “Yeah, but you’ll let me work it, won’t you, Willy?”
Blanchard just kept walking. He figured that if he ignored the comment, then it would slip out of Shaky’s mind. And, of course, he was right.
The four-level underground labyrinth of hallways, of�
�fices, storage rooms, conference spaces and operating auditoriums was truly a marvel of design and creative architecture. When the layout was developed, no one in the Army Corps of Engineers would have ever imagined that the main chemical storage facility would be situated directly beneath the operating theater. The room was originally conceived as a conference room-auditorium, but due to budget cutbacks and lack of defense funding, the room was carelessly loaded with a stockpile of fifty-five gallon drums, cases of gallon jugs, and too many multicolored glass bottles filled to their rims with cleaning solutions. Only Blanchard’s skillful execution and deft touch on the controls of the pallet jack had kept the underground structure from blowing up any sooner.
Willy twisted the right grip on the handle of the pallet jack and the motor shut down. Hearing a strange noise behind him, he turned to find Shaky gobbling down water from a nearby fountain and making an annoying gurgling sound as he swished the water in his cheeks. Willy was all for every man’s right to work, but a man-child like Shaky whose elevator didn’t go all the way to the top floor, should never have been allowed to step foot inside an important installation like this.
While it was true that there were times when the inconsequential little man was lucid and useful, more often than not, he was twitching wildly or lost in his own private dream world. It was a side of Shaky that only someone who worked around him, like Willy, would ever see. Unfortunately, Willy was a coward and he could never muster up the resolve to have Shaky investigated. He knew that this menial job was the only bright spot in the poor man’s life, and he couldn’t bring himself to crush the small amount of dignity Shaky seemed to cling to.
As long as Willy didn’t mind sweeping up after Shaky, or reorganizing a room as soon as Shaky had left it, then there was no reason to protest. Although deep down inside Willy knew that if Shaky were to lose his job it wouldn’t have been the worst situation in the world, having him learn that it was his best friend who caused it would surely break his heart. Shaky lacked the mental capacity to understand that Willy would have only been doing it for his own safety and well-being. And so Shaky and Willy continued to work side by side as best friends.