The Curiosity: A Novel

by Stephen Kiernan

  My father went to war, they tell me, and came home changed. My sisters were years older than I, born before he went soldiering. My mother made a habit of prayer for his safe return, and when that was answered, of thanksgiving. My sisters said that after the conflict he rarely conversed, worked twice as hard, and often stared at things in the distance. Delivered into this life three years after his return, I knew him no other way.

  It was a war about skin. Cotton, too, the price of shoes, and whether a nation ought to accept the severing of its bonds over internal strife. I learned these things in school, which now is vague like a group of desks in a field of fog, blurred voices and a chalkboard just at the edge of sight. The war about skin I remember, because of the day of my mother’s burial. It was 1880; I was twelve. For some reason she’d chosen to butcher uncooked pork with a paring knife, punctured her thumb, and the infection climbed her arm like black string under the skin. It progressed so rapidly, even amputation would not have saved her. On the walk home from the graveyard, my father began to speak.

  “Never do a job with a too-small knife,” he began, in his usual terse manner. But then he continued, remarking on the war, its causes, and his experience. I had never heard him utter so many consecutive sentences. Although we’d just left a burial, grief like a yoke on my shoulders, still I felt giddy with the intimacy of his revelations. Antietam, Vicksburg, Gettysburg. The sound a ball made as it rifled past your ear. The way a body resisted when you thrust a bayonet, and then gave under the blade. The sight, calming and frightening both, of enemy fires across a meadow at night.

  It was, he explained, all he had known until then about death. Useless, though, he concluded, because it failed to prepare him to lose a wife.

  On that single occasion he spoke of it, never after. But once was enough for me to recall all this time. Oh time, now there is a marvel. Here on the other side of my mortality, I would like to see Mr. Darwin explain this one. I would like to hear Mr. Edison’s theory. I would love to hear Wilbur and Orville make a flight of these fancies.

  Thus far the people here explain little. They feed me gruel and attach things to me. There are numbers and noises, measurings and masks. They speak curtly and fear the dark. Still I am in restraints. Canvas holds my wrists and ankles as though I were a convict. Hm. Life’s ironies are never subtle.

  Cold in childhood; I remember that, too. Frigid mornings when the bucket by the stove wore a skin of ice. Dawns in January when my turn came to light the stove, and I blew hard on the reluctant embers. Dressing whilst still in bed was another way to warm, I discovered one morning when the rafters bore layers of rime from my breath rising through the night. I walked to school under clear, cerulean skies, and learned that cold has a particular beauty, its own brilliance for those who are hardy—and wearing wool, ha.

  Perhaps that is what brought me to adventures, the appreciation of cold. I presumed that because I loved nature, nature loved me. Now I know better. Nature does not know I exist. Nature goes about its affairs, and if I stray from a path in the woods, a bear may eat me. If I dive from a cliff, the rocks will tell untroubled truth upon my flesh. And if I go a-sailing, seeking unnamed species in the northern seas . . .

  Not yet. I am not ready to remember that particular cold quite yet. But what was her name? Her fingers when stretched wide reached smaller than my palm. Her voice was high like a cricket, melodic like a wren.

  The only one I trust here is the first one, present at my waking. She comes when the others are gone. She turns down the lights, a pleasure in a room with neither night nor day. She releases my wrists and tells me to unbind my ankles myself so that I may be the agent of my own eventual freedom. I do not comprehend her meaning but her tone is one I trust. Merely I bend my knees, enjoy my legs’ motion, and keep my own counsel. She insists I am not a prisoner; they want to protect me from illness.

  The one who seems to be the boss would not last five minutes in the shoe mills of Lynn. Lynn, Lynn, city of sin, never come out the way you went in. Someone would arrive at work one morning to find a hog-tied foreman’s hand in a gear, mangled to uselessness. Or his necktie noosed on a rafter, the fellow tiptoe all night for his life’s sake. Or, on one occasion, his carcass in a vat of tanning chemicals, nose down.

  Then they would bring the suspect to me, he would confess, and there would be my Solomonic duty—measuring his conduct against its provocation. Law versus justice. I am a servant of the former who hoped to achieve the latter. I remember the courtroom but not the building that held it. What, though, what was her name?

  My wife—goodness, I had a wife—was Joan. It comes back to me directly now, a marvel from some cobwebbed bin of the mind. I hear her voice from a moment of irritation. Distracted by the courts, I have forgotten some chore. The horses need fresh feed. The farrier did not come as scheduled. We are low on coal. But that is not all. There was another side to Joan which only a husband would know: anytime I reached for her, slid an arm around her waist after supper, or woke in deep night to find our bodies spooned in their bedclothes and my wrist between her breasts, or blinked in the light of a new dawn, having awakened with desire, always her reply was the same: I am willing. Always that, she never once refused me. I am willing. I can hear that whispered generosity even now. What a thing, how she gave herself to me, and how ardent her body was with mine, till we shined, her understanding and her compassion and possibly even her pity, all in that quiet phrase: I am willing.

  It was a decent home, not grand. Gaslights, good chairs in the parlor, a front hall with wide stairs. We sought an honorable life at no one’s expense, and that ambition brought us to the threshold of greatness but not into its inner rooms.

  Perhaps that was what led me to exploration. Vanity, and the desire to make a name for posterity. After all no one remembers a magistrate, however just. No one but drunkards and wife slappers and horse thieves, and the unfortunate victims of their deeds. Yet I submit that it was not weakness which widened my horizons. It was the power of curiosity, of wanting to know. So many great minds in that time were enlarging our sense of the world. Who would not wish to dine at the tables of discovery?

  Here they make the same claim. Hm. I listen to them all day, puttering around me as though I have no ears. They say I am a first. Not a miracle, because there are scientific explanations, but nonetheless. Thus they measure my body weight and heart speed and arm strength. They draw my blood; I watch it pulse from my body into their glass tubes. They snip my hair into a clear bag. One afternoon a man went from finger to finger, toe to toe, trimming my nails into a little white tin. Meanwhile I must eat particular foods, void in containers they remove as though sacred, and remain in this tiled room with the long window that looks upon their desks and nothing beyond.

  They say my name will be known forever. I say, not yet. Not until I tell it to them. I have saved that secret for her, the one I trust, since it fell back into my memory during the afternoon as if dropping from the sky. Until I say it aloud, my name is a fist of coal, warming me silently while one remembrance after another tiptoes forward from its chilly hiding place. Yesterday she promised to tell me how I came to be alive. I relate to her that this question, in my time, could only be answered by God. She laughs, a little melody, and tells me no such luck, she is just a thirty-five-year-old biologist from Ohio. Still, as the day drones along I cannot wait for the others to leave, and her to come.

  Say what you will about the human spirit. I am but four days awakened in this new world. Yet already I have preferences, already I have hopes.

  I wonder what has become of precious Lynn now. Wait. It was not precious to me. I preferred Boston. Lynn was Joan’s home. When she consented to marry me, it was with the understanding that we remain near her mother and brothers. A chilly crew they were, every one, but her father had died in the War Between the States. Thus Lynn was her sanctuary. Hm. Now I recollect that she was older than me, my Joan. By six years, and whilst my sisters snickered and implied, I felt it no comprom
ise. Joan had dignity, and a generous way before I knew about her willingness. Age explained why we only had the one child. The girl’s name, though, her name . . .

  People work oddly in this time. They claim to stand on a frontier of humanity, yet strike me as uniformly joyless. Instead of performing tasks together, they sit each apart, staring at a square of light, speaking into a flat cone, and rarely addressing each other at all. The rather, they sneer behind one another’s backs. They bicker like chickens.

  At day’s end, in the courthouse there was a hush, as in a library, and a feeling that something important had happened in which we all took part. People came to us with their conflicts, enmities, and betrayals, and we sought by degrees to make sense of it all. It was solemn, and often I walked home under the weight of responsibility.

  Here, at a fixed hour they darken their squares of light. They push chairs in against their desks or leave them indifferently askew. They grunt good-byes. Clearly I am missing something, for they seem exhausted by their labors, though mostly what they did was sit.

  And then she comes. The only one to tell me her name. The one who neither complains of her tasks nor troubles her fellows. She carries a board with a clip to hold the papers. She has shown me the words she writes there, a neat and minuscule script. I have learned much from her already: there is a thing called blood pressure, it measures the energy with which the heart pumps vital fluid through the body. Edison’s inventions, which transformed the humble shoemakers of Lynn into factories of mass production, also led to the lights that hum overhead. Apparently the workers here tolerate their insufferable boss because he alone had the capacity to bring this enterprise together, and thereby to coax me back into wakefulness. They are all in his debt. So, I suppose, am I.

  Tonight she is late, but I do not worry. I know she waits till others have gone. She says a machine in the other room records all that we say and do, just as court clerks of my time would mark down every syllable of testimony as though it were scripture. People all around the globe see those recordings, through squares of light like those in this office. She has explained these concepts several times and I still do not comprehend. When I am strong enough to withstand the germs that outside people carry, she has promised to bring me into the other room and show me. I do not understand this concern about germs. Is the world that drastically unhealthier from when I was first alive? Is the air so different?

  At last she arrives. One remaining scientist comes and goes, busy with tasks. She tosses things on a desk, then hurries to start various machineries. She moves with feline grace. No one notices. Oh, I misspeak. One person has noticed, the heavyset man who writes down everything that everyone says. I know his kind. I was a judge for eight years, then a participant in a celebrated Arctic voyage. I recognize a reporter when I see one.

  Midway through her tasks, she hangs her jacket on the back of a chair. I spy a glistening on the shoulders. Ha. It is winter. There are still seasons. Longing swells in my chest. There is a world outside in which snow falls in the evening. I cannot wait to see it, smell it, feel the cold on my face like the touch of familiar fingertips.

  A memory appears then, complete like a jewel. An evening when I returned home late from court, hoping that the little girl would still be awake. I am striding up the last hill toward home, the scent of supper in the chilly air. It is December, a few flakes falling, the fat ones that melt upon landing. All the way home I have been preoccupied with the case before me, a procedural knot I must somehow untie. When I see the gaslights out front, I realize I have forgotten to put something in my pocket. I feel a minor panic.

  There are four buttons on my vest. I never close the bottom one. I clasp it firmly, knowing that if Joan discovers this deed I am certain to hear her disapproval, and yet yank that button free. The fabric does not tear. I pick the remaining threads away; the vest appears as new.

  Tucking the button in my pocket as I march up the walk, and lo—the little one is not inside readying for bed. She is outside, waiting for me in her red wool coat, and runs to greet me as though out of a dim corner of the mind. Her shoes slap on the stones. I remember my delight as if it were just this moment. I squat down to embrace her, she burrows against me like some wonderful animal. Her tiny hand digs in my pocket, and her chilly little nose pokes right in the middle of my cheek.

  Agnes. Her name was Agnes. My daughter, Agnes.

  The woman from now rushes into my chamber before I can hide my tears.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Smell of Memory

  (Kate Philo)

  On my walk to work that night, a bluster of unseasonably late snow caught me unprepared. All I’d worn was a light fleece jacket, not nearly enough for the wind and wet. I hunched into myself, hurrying to stay warm, thinking about the night of work ahead. Suddenly a protester stood in my path.

  “You, woman, are going to burn in hell,” she snarled as I jumped in surprise. She pointed at our building. “Just like all the rest of them in there.”

  I stepped back, taking in the full gang on the sidewalk. The group had definitely grown, up to maybe forty. Half stood under umbrellas, the rest clustered in raincoats or ponchos. There was no one else on the street, it being Friday night and the weather nasty. The front door guard was inside by the security desk. I was on my own. So I brought myself to a calm place.

  “Every one of you,” the woman cried. “Life is sacred and you are demeaning it.”

  “Life is sacred, I agree,” I said, using an intentionally quieter voice. “But what we are doing—”

  “Stop.” She clapped her hands over her ears. “Don’t you dare try persuading me, seducing me with false science. What you are doing is morally wrong, and you know it.”

  “I know no such thing,” I replied. “I was simply trying to tell you—”

  “Don’t,” she said, backing away as if I held a gun. “Don’t you dare.”

  Another protester, an older man, guided the woman away by her elbow. She stared back at me with venom. I escorted my rattled self across the street.

  Minutes later in the control room, I could think of plenty of snappy replies I might have made, but none was the equal of her passion and certainty. Where did it come from, this twisting of faith into judgments of others that bears no doubts?

  Meanwhile the red digital clock reminded me that fourteen days had passed since the frozen man’s reanimation, two weeks in which life was being redefined. Or, to be accurate, the old definition discarded but the new one not yet written. Carthage made regulations about the rare circumstances under which entering the observation chamber was permitted. Essentially, male technicians helped the frozen man into an upright position to go to the bathroom, or performed rudimentary physical therapy to restore his atrophied muscles. That was all. Watching them manipulate his legs like so many parts of machinery, I complained; Carthage ignored me. It felt like the rules were designed to prevent my efforts, or anyone’s, to humanize the poor lab creature we’d awakened.

  If not for the frozen man trusting only me, speaking clearly only to me, I probably would have been unemployed. Carthage had sat at his desk a few days earlier and made that clear with his usual pompous overstatement, Thomas nodding along like a baseball player’s look-alike bobble-head. My ability to remain calm in dramatic circumstances served me well during that particular chewing-out.

  So did the frozen man’s behavior. When Carthage entered the chamber, the person in the hospital bed conspicuously looked the other way. Perhaps he’d heard himself referred to as Subject One a few times too many. How I longed to know his true name. But he was occupied with trying to understand what had happened to him, his reaction alternating between panic and lethargy. So I spent my nearly idle nights at his bedside, easing him into the now. He’d ask questions in a frightened voice. I would answer almost in a whisper. Around everyone else, the frozen man was silent. Without me, there was no link. It was not an ironclad job protection, but someone had to establish rapport across the centuries
.

  My father would have told me to resign. Dust off my résumé, renew contacts, maybe sublet the apartment. Tolliver would always take my call. In hindsight, that advice would have been sound. But at the time no one knew where we were headed. So I decided to indulge Carthage, for the privilege of witnessing history.

  Moreover, this scientific marvel was not a special bacterium, or a cloned sheep. We were now responsible for a living human being, which carried ethical obligations whose depth we had not even begun to fathom.

  My remaining tasks, however, barely reached the graduate assistant level. Ph.D. notwithstanding, I took every overnight shift without complaint. Arriving at work that snowy evening, I accepted that my job was to check monitors, reset recording devices, perform other administrivia. Billings was busy downstairs, experimenting on sardines. Gerber was MIA, but would likely surface before dawn. The last tech grunted “have a good shift” to me and escorted his backpack out into the weather.

  I slipped off my coat, hanging it on a chair, and scanned the gauges. The frozen man’s blood pressure had spiked steeply in the last fifteen seconds. Then I heard him through the audio monitor, snuffling.

  Of course I dashed in. Respiratory stability had been an ongoing concern. I raised my hand to slap the red button on the wall, hesitated, then punched the password into the numeric keypad instead. No point calling the cavalry till I’d investigated.

  It was not his breathing. It was his heart. The man was crying.

  What I did—sure to bring a fresh round of recriminations the next day—is what I believe any human being ought to do for a fellow traveler on this planet who is overcome by sadness. I rushed over, I hugged him.

  The frozen man curled into me, sobbing. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders. He tried to lift his arms but the straps prevented him. He fell back then, clenching his jaw to regain self-control, so I made my next mistake. Or no, others later called my actions mistakes. I call them caring. I undid his wrist straps. Covering his face, he spoke through his fingers. “I am ashamed.”