Right of Thirst

by Frank Huyler

  In what he’d chosen, though, he was as driven and as disciplined as I ever could have wanted, and that was where I saw myself in him. My handsome, good-hearted son—who was I to deny the possibilities, which perhaps were not impossible, not entirely out of reach?

  “Have you been in touch with your teacher?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I talk to her every couple of weeks. She’s really optimistic for me. She really believes it will happen.”

  “Tell me,” I said, after a moment. “How do you feel when you audition for a part you really want, and you don’t get it?”

  “Disappointed,” he replied. “Of course. Sometimes I’m crushed.”

  “Which role are you playing then?”

  “The role of the waiter,” he said, and we both laughed, and I wondered how much Rachel’s illness had prompted him to seek solace with that woman, who believed in him and encouraged him, so nearly his mother’s age, offering what passed for answers. He was so young, I thought, and so confident, and so full of passionate ideas that would not endure the test of experience. But on that night especially I didn’t want to be the voice of caution.

  When I finally told him that he was the best thing in the play, that I thought he’d been terrific, he smiled uneasily and confessed that he was embarrassed by the script, and that had in fact been the reason he’d agreed to the role. His teacher had said that in order to develop as an actor he must be willing to immerse himself even in work he was uncomfortable with, and that my presence in the audience had been a still greater test. He must learn to become a chameleon, and lose himself no matter who was watching, and only later indulge in the luxury of choice, and he was trying to follow her advice.

  I’d been relieved a little by his words. But it also occurred to me that the world is not so pure, and does not respect or appreciate such trips to the monastery, and what would serve him most of all would be to choose works that would put him in the best possible light at every opportunity. But I said nothing about that, and only raised my glass of wine and touched it to his.

  I knew that the trip had surprised and troubled him. When I had called him, and told him of my plans, I could hear it in his silences. He wanted to know how long I would be gone, and when I would return, and though I think by then he understood that I was suffering more than he had realized, to see such evidence of it did little to comfort him. Instead, it disturbed him further, as if the constancy of both my presence and my restraint had sustained him more than he knew.

  A few days before I left, a package arrived at my door. It was from Eric, and when I opened it, I saw that it was a gift—a beautifully made, expensive utility tool, stainless steel, full of blades and pliers and tweezers. I imagined him wandering through a sporting goods store, wondering what to buy.

  He sent a note, also, neither addressed nor signed. Please be careful, it read. Nothing more.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, and I was in the present again.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a little tired, that’s all.”

  “Here,” she said, handing me her water bottle. “Maybe you are not drinking enough water.”

  “Thank you,” I replied, taking it. I must have been thirsty, because I drank nearly half the bottle before handing it back.

  “That’s better,” I said, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand.

  “Maybe you should lie down.”

  “I’m fine, Elise. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “All right,” she said, puzzled.

  “Why don’t you tell me about your research,” I said, less sharply. “I’d like to hear more about it.”

  “It is very exciting,” she replied. “When the refugees come, I will draw their blood and later we will sequence their DNA. They are isolated populations. They have been in the mountains for a long time, but we do not know how long. We know very little. We will look at the mutations and see where they have come from. From East or West or South. Probably it is a combination. But we do not know. No one has done this here before. It is a new technique. And this camp is good because many people will come through. Better than the camps where they will stop. It is an excellent opportunity.

  “I would like to get started soon,” she added, wistfully. “I must collect many samples.”

  “How are you getting permission?”

  “I will pay them,” she said. “It is only the men, so I hope this will not be a big problem.”

  “Why only the men?”

  “Here we are looking only at the Y chromosome,” she said. “It is passed down from father to son. It is a straight line back. We can follow the mutations. It is a very elegant technique. The other chromosomes can come from both men and women. They are more complex to study, you know? Too many possibilities.”

  “So you’re not studying women?”

  “For women, we use mitochondrial DNA,” she said. “It is also a straight line back. But it is more difficult. So we have decided not to do this for now.”

  “I’m curious,” I said, a bit more bluntly than I intended. “How did you convince them to let you come here? You’re doing research, but they told me that they only took people with practical skills and didn’t have time for anything else.”

  “Yes,” she said, uneasily. “I feel a little bit bad about this. But Scott let me come if I take some classes. So I am a nurse assistant also. I will do this first, and only then take the blood. I made this promise.”

  I studied her for a few seconds.

  “I’m not really sure where my ancestors were from,” I said. “I think they mostly came from Holland and England. My grandmother was Russian. She immigrated as a child. But I don’t know much about the rest past a generation or two.”

  “The United States is interesting for genetics. People came from so many places. Anderson is a Scandinavian name. Were your ancestors from there?”

  “They were English Andersons. Though maybe they were from Scandinavia before that. I don’t know.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “Georgia. I spent my childhood there.”

  “Georgia,” she said. “That is the South? Where there were slaves?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “One branch of my family had slaves a long time ago. But I think most of the others were sharecroppers, although my mother never talked about them.”

  The lithograph of the family plantation, circa 1840, was one of my mother’s most treasured heirlooms. There were slaves in the lithograph—stylized figures, at work behind the oxen in the fields.

  “Well,” she said, smiling, “that is interesting. Maybe you are even a little bit from Africa. There is always mixing. More than everyone admits. Or maybe some of your ancestors are Indians. This was very common also. If you want I can draw your blood and you will see. We have a large database. It would be easy.”

  “I know they’re mostly from Europe.”

  “Of course. But in the U.S., often there are surprises.”

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it. Draw my blood. I’m curious.”

  “Will you care if some of your ancestors are from Africa?” she replied.

  “I’ve never considered it. Did you think I’d be upset?”

  “No,” she said. “But sometimes people are upset by these things. So it is good to ask subjects about this first.”

  She spoke very seriously, and I smiled.

  “Well,” I said. “My mother wouldn’t have liked it, I admit. But I think it would be fascinating.”

  “Okay,” she said, cheerfully, “then I will get my case. Also it will be good practice for me to draw blood. I have not done this since my course.”

  She stood, and left the tent, and I sat there for a while, thinking about the work she was doing—how all of human history could, in part, be measured in this way. It was astonishing to think that modern men and women had the signs of those ancient journeys within them. I envied her, in that mo
ment, studying that, and suddenly I wished those opportunities might also have been mine.

  She returned with an oversized black aluminum briefcase, like the kind photographers use for traveling. I had not seen it before. She knelt on the ground at my feet, undid the clasps, and opened the case.

  Inside were hundreds of tiny glass vials, each lying in its own indentation on thin sheets of dark foam rubber. The vials were smaller than those of my experience, smaller even than the ones used on children.

  “Do you always have to draw blood?” I asked. “Can’t you take hair, or epithelial cells?”

  “Yes, you are right,” she said. “But blood is better. There is more to work with, and we can repeat the tests if there is a technical problem. Of course, if they are afraid I will swab their cheeks instead. For children also I do this.”

  She pulled a pair of latex gloves from the case, and an alcohol wipe, and then the syringe, with its capped needle. I watched her, and rolled up my sleeve, feeling a hint of childlike dread as I did so. Then she was readying the syringe, tying the yellow rubber tubing around my upper arm, handing me a square of gauze. My forearm looked very pale beneath me, nearly translucent as I clenched my fist, and braced myself, like diving into a pool.

  She crouched before me, ran her naked fingertip gently over my white skin, and then, finding a blue vein coiling up from the hollow of my elbow, she tore open the alcohol pad with her teeth and touched it there, tingling and shining in the cool air of the tent. She looked up at me, the needle poised in her free hand.

  “Okay?” she asked, and I nodded, forcing myself to watch as the needle drew hesitantly near, as she steadied herself, and let out a little hiss between her teeth, and eased the tip of the needle into my vein a bit too slowly. The sting of a thorn, her hand tight on my wrist, the smell of medicinal alcohol in the air, and suddenly there it was, red and warm, springing into the glass vial. In an instant she released my wrist, undid the yellow rubber strap from my bicep, the jet lessened, and blood rose in the vial like an hourglass. I felt her breath against the alcohol on my arm, her nearness, intent on the task, and then the vial was full, the needle was out, and she was done. A few drops fell from the tip, a few others gathered in beads on the sides of the glass. She wiped the vial carefully with the alcohol pad, then held it up between her fingers, and I flexed my arm, pressing a tiny square of gauze to the oozing circle. In the vial, my blood looked black.

  “You did that very well,” I said, and she smiled.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m a little bit nervous.”

  “Why?”

  “Drawing blood from people you know is different,” she said, simply.

  “Insert the needle a little faster,” I said. “Flick your wrist.”

  She nodded, seriously, carefully placed a sticker on the vial, and wrote a number on the label with an indelible marker she also took from the case.

  “There,” she said. “You are the first in my study.”

  She placed the vial carefully into a slot in the foam rubber beside the empty vials. I looked at it, full as a tick with my blood, and all the men and women whose residue somehow remained within me.

  She reached beneath the foam rubber in the case and withdrew an oversized loose-leaf notebook with a red plastic cover, with stenciled black German lettering on the front. She opened the book, then placed another sticker carefully on the page, and wrote down first the number, and then my name.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I must keep a record of each sample,” she said, “so I do not confuse them. This is very important.”

  “But I’m not really part of the study.”

  “No,” she said, “but the specimens look the same.”

  I looked over her shoulder at the page.

  “It’s a book of family trees,” I said.

  “Yes. For three generations only,” she replied. “Grandfather, father, and son. These are the most I will see, I am sure. And so I can keep track of their relationships more easily.”

  There were several hundred empty pages in the book.

  “Do you need that many samples?”

  “As many as I can,” she said. “Many will be cousins, if they are from the same village. So I have a new page for each village.”

  She closed the case, and locked it again.

  “When do you think they will come?” she asked.

  “Rai said in the next week or two,” I replied. “They have to spread the word. He said they’re dropping leaflets into the villages from the air.”

  “You know,” she said, “we have evolved from things like this earthquake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When life is not so hard,” she said, “traits are not selected so strongly. But when there is a catastrophe, that is when new traits emerge. Without these events, we would not be the same. If life were simple and easy we would be something else.”

  “That’s interesting,” I replied. “I suppose I never thought of it quite that way.”

  We were in the same companionable moment, in a tent on the most remote hillside imaginable, on the other side of the world. For a while at least it didn’t matter that there was nearly another whole adult lifetime—Eric’s, for example—between us.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Why don’t we give a clinic to the village? Until the refugees show up there’s nothing to do. Maybe then they won’t be so suspicious, and you can draw their blood.”

  “Yes,” she said, with sudden enthusiasm. “That is a good idea. I will pay them also, of course.”

  “I’ll talk to Rai about it,” I said

  “This is a very good place for research,” she said. “Europe is not so interesting. Families usually come from nowhere else.”

  “Where are you from in Germany?”

  “I am from Munich. I was born there, I went to school there. That is all.”

  “Your parents?”

  “My father is a professor. My mother is a professor, too.”

  “And now you’re going to be a professor as well.”

  “Yes,” she said, and smiled. “Of course. Was your father a doctor also?”

  “No,” I said. “He wasn’t. He injured his back in the war and most of the time he was out of work. It was difficult for him to stand.”

  “Was he a soldier?”

  “He was in the navy. He fell down a flight of stairs on a ship.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She taught school. She supported us, really.”

  “So you didn’t have much money.”

  “No,” I said. “We didn’t.”

  “That is better, then,” she said, cheerfully.

  “Better for whom?”

  “For you, of course,” she said. “It is always better to earn things than to be given them.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Elise had gone to bed. We were sipping rum and talking about rifles.

  “Western armies,” Rai said, “most of them use 5.56. It is too light in my opinion. You need something with more punch. You need to drop him right away.”

  I have no guns myself, but I’ve read about them, their nuances and characteristics, their endlessly argued differences.

  “It still kills you,” I said.

  “Of course. But with full metal jacket, 5.56 is like a needle. It just goes through. He can still fire back. Not like 7.62. That will stop you in your tracks.”

  “A soldier can’t carry as much ammunition, though,” I replied. “And the recoil is harder to control.”

  He looked at me with surprise.

  “How do you know this?” he asked.

  “I like military history,” I said, thinking of my study, and how I used to sit with a glass of whiskey and let the blur of the hospital recede into my books—Shiloh and Ypres, Normandy and Tet.

  “Yes,” he said. “That is the traditional objection. But one round of 7.62 is as good as a burst of 5.56. That is all you need. Just one.” He held up a finger.


  “What rifle does the army use here?” I asked, pretending to myself that I was humoring him. But in fact I was interested.

  “G3,” he said. “German. Heavy, but very reliable, very good weapon. We make them under license.”

  “In 7.62?”

  “Of course,” he said, and smiled.

  “How far away could you hit someone with it?” I asked.

  He pondered as if it was a serious question.

  “With a scope?” he asked.

  “With the basic rifle issued to an average soldier. Nothing more.”

  I think he was struggling for honesty—he might have made any claim. But he wanted his answer to be true. He thought about it. I saw his youth in the effort.

  “The target is standing?” he asked, and I nodded.

  “With a G3, assuming good light and no wind, with iron sights, and from a prone position,” he said, finally, “five hundred meters. Perhaps a bit more. But a sniper rifle, 7.62, with a scope, much farther, of course. One thousand meters in good conditions, no problem.”

  “Are you a good shot with a rifle as well?”