by Sharon Heath
Shaking Sally Price’s powder-soft hand, I gestured with my head toward the house. “And that was in the 1970s. There’s nowhere to run now.” I smiled apologetically. “Which is why I’m disturbing your peace and quiet so late on a Sunday night.”
“No worries. I’ve got way too much peace and quiet these days. Boring myself silly.” Sally Price ushered me in and hastened to turn off the speakers. The television was still on, but soundless. On the screen, three rough-looking men wearing bandanas rode ominous-looking motorcycles up to the front of a boarded-up warehouse.
“Sons of Anarchy?”
Sally Price made a self-deprecating face. “It’s not the show, really. Though it is a rather clever adaptation of Hamlet.” She shook her head, her pale brown face flushing a little. Her eyes flicked over to the screen. “No, it’s the guy in the middle. He’s called Jax Teller in the show. I suppose this is life’s little joke for me passing up on a blind date twelve years ago with a new British actor in town named Charlie Hunnam. He ended up marrying someone else a year later.”
Staring at the mute screen, I sympathized. The man was ridiculously gorgeous—sensitive and sexy looking at the same time. Shooting a quick look at Sally Price’s lithe body and her face like an angel’s despite the good-natured laugh lines at the outer corners of her slanted, pitch-black eyes, it occurred to me that she and Charlie Hunnam would have been—at least in the physical beauty department—a perfect pair.
Mistaking my thoughts entirely, she said, “I know. It’s nuts. An entomologist and an actor would make an awful couple. Which is why I turned down the date. Well, that and my sociopathic ex-husband having secretly racked up so much debt I’d had to sell at a loss the house my parents had bought for us. It took five years’ worth of scrimping just to pay everything off and get him out of my life forever. These days, I’m afraid it’s only felines I trust in the male department.” She craned her neck until both our eyes lit on a long-haired calico cat sitting atop a tall bookshelf in the corner of the room, a king of his house blinking in self-satisfaction. “And butterflies, of course.”
Which was her signal to get down to business. But in the back of my mind, I was already hoping to count on Sally Price becoming a friend. My favorite kinds of women were—like Sammie—super bright people likely to swing from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again in a heartbeat. It didn’t hurt that we women had verbal centers on both sides of our brains, as opposed to men’s, whose verbal capacities were contained solely in the left hemisphere.
“So here’s the scoop,” I said, and I actually told her the whole sad saga of my sojourn in Hades, crying a bit when describing Mother’s fall, and sobering as I went into detail about my own. Why had I chosen to share with a stranger, rather than a friend like Sammie, what would undoubtedly be described by most people as a momentary slip into psychosis?
Sally Price confirmed the rightness of my instinct by casually commenting, “My mother always said that nothing went better with the deeper truths of life than hot chocolate. I make mine with organic cocoa and sinfully rich whipped cream. Want some?” But she was already up and out of the room, returning five minutes later with a pastel-colored tray appositely depicting Alice’s foray into the rabbit hole. Setting it down on a rustic pine coffee table, she plopped herself onto the dusty-rose chenille-covered couch beside me. It dawned on me that no one but a single woman would live with such furnishings and that this had to be the coziest place on the planet to be sharing the oddest secret of my already odd duckish life.
“So,” she said, putting down her wide-rimmed floral cup and licking at her chocolate mustache. “Let me make sure I’m following you. You think your father was directing you toward the enzymatic activity that occurs as the caterpillar moves through its stages of metamorphosis?”
I swallowed hard. “Yes, I do.”
“Well, let’s think about this. On the surface of it, it seems pretty questionable that applying a butterfly enzyme would activate Dreamization.” She stopped, and gave me a complicit wink. “But we scientist are all about the questions, aren’t we? Forgive me if I repeat a bunch of stuff you learned in high school. As you probably know”—I didn’t—“in order to effect its metamorphosis into a butterfly, a caterpillar must release enzymes that literally allow it to digest itself. Inside the chaotic mess that ensues in the pupal transformation, everything turns into goop except for pre-existing discs that have been present inside the holometabolous insect larva, or caterpillar egg, from the very beginning.
“Each of those imaginal discs contains the potential for each butterfly body part. In some species of butterflies, those discs begin to take shape even before the caterpillar enters the chrysalis stage. But,” she paused, tapping her nose and then scratching it, “how could that possibly be applicable to humans? We have no such discs that I know of. And if we did, would they enable us to achieve flight? And not just any flight, but a material surge beyond the spacetime continuum? That’s a pretty big leap, pardon the pun.”
I knew it seemed ridiculous, but something inside me felt increasingly insistent. My heart was flipping and flopping. “I have no idea, but bear with me as I think aloud. I suppose you’re familiar with water bears, or moss piglets? Those tiny little tardigrades that can curl up into dry husks called tuns, in a seeming dead state, for decades? Ironically, it takes only water to re-animate them. Several teams before us had already figured out how to create optical cavities by using two laser beams on water bears that allowed them to exist in two places at the same time. Employing the insights of cell therapies used in the treatment of various diseases, we’ve re-animated the tuns using water, then found a way to issue instructions to a key trigger cell that signaled all a moss piglet’s cells to simultaneously exchange its light matter for dark and then reverse the process, effectively throwing the water bear into a cellular black hole where it actually dematerialized from one of its two places and rematerialized into the other. Pretty miraculous in its own right. What if there’s something in caterpillars’ enzymes that might help hasten that process for humans?”
Sally Price shrugged. “It’s an incredible long shot, but who am I to say absolutely not? We humans have harnessed so much of our natural world to completely alter reality. It’d take a lot of experimenting with a team comprised of entomologists, biochemists, and physicists to see if there was actually anything we could use.” But then she shook her head, puffing out air loudly. “I’m afraid I feel pretty dubious—I think we’d certainly know about any human counterparts of imaginal discs by now.”
“Ye-ssss, maybe. But what about the enzymes of dead butterflies? Has anyone investigated their properties with human application in mind? My father-butterfly took flight again only after he’d folded his wings and seemingly died.”
“Well, on a purely practical level, that would be a heck of a lot easier to investigate. Extracting enzymes from living butterflies would be a right pisser. Sorry,” she laughed, gesturing toward the TV screen. “I really do need to stop watching that show.”
But I was off in my head now, wondering whether the human body actually did have some sort of imaginal discs of its own, embedded somewhere within the black holes in our cells. Had Dreamization always been a potential for us humans, one that had taken millions of years and just this moment of existential crisis to discover? Was that why it was even possible for us to imagine it?”
When I came back to the present, Sally Price had drained her cup and was holding it aloft, her eyes fixed on mine. “You know, I like it. I’m a big believer in signs myself. I have no problem with you seeing something most people wouldn’t give the time of day to. You phoning me just when I was beginning to weary of Jax Teller for the very first time feels right to me. If I actually stop fantasizing about the one that got away, I’m going to need something to obsess about.” We both laughed, and she set down her cup with a sharp ting right next to mine. “Whether we accomplish what you’re hoping for or not, we’re bound to learn some interesting thin
gs. If you’re looking for a new team member, count me in.”
Chapter Thirteen
WITH SALLY PRICE leading the way, and with our corporate sponsor helping us fly under Congress’ radar, we spent the following year or so experimenting with the enzymatic action occurring on dead butterflies. My wish had come true: Sally had become a friend. Thank goodness, Sammie and Makeda weren’t the fully paid-up members of the Green-eyed Monster Club that I was, so I wasn’t forced to carve my heart into pieces to share my limited free time with the three of them. Adam called us collectively “the Force,” since our joined energies seemed to multiply exponentially when we occupied the same room. Of course, it was something of a play on words, since “the force” in Star Wars refers to the sacred universal energy that connects us all, while force is also a scientific term for a vector that has both magnitude and causes movement in the other.
Unsurprisingly, I’d been able to persuade Sister F. to step in with caring for Callay when I returned to work three mornings a week. If I do say so myself, Callay was the most amazing child: her voice had the clear and pleasantly piercing quality of a wood thrush, her apricot-hued cheeks were as chubby as a cherub’s, and her scalp gave off an intriguing scent that was slightly minty, with just a hint of something tart, like ripe grapefruit. And best ever in the beauty department, her round, birth-blue eyes grew greener by the day, reminding me of the love shared by myself and Adam that had made her.
She was a bit slow walking—as Nana might have said, “Still unsteady on her pins”—but, unsurprisingly, she was proving to be quite precocious verbally. By a year-and-a-half, she could actually articulate at least some of her needs with rudimentary sentences. She’d come up with her own names for the people closest to her, a few of which became household nicknames employed by us all. I’d begun to make a list of them when she was nine months old, and, needless to say, as more and more people came into her orbit, the longer the list grew. Here are some of them:
1. For me, of course, Moomah.
2. Adam became Dadam.
3. Makeda was Kayka.
4. Sofiya, whom Makeda had already enrolled in AYSO, was tickled to be called Fifa, and her sister Melesse was equally delighted to have become Yes.
5. Melky she aptly dubbed Bear, except she pronounced it Behw.
6. Sammy was, to my friend’s glee, Mammy.
7. Sally Price became Thrprythe.
8. Sister Flatulencia’s moniker was what Adam called “another corker,” though Sister F. didn’t seem to mind at all hearing those rosebud lips joyously cry out to her when she arrived on her babysitting days, “Thtinky!”
9. Finally, Buster—and don’t even think of suggesting a cat is not a person—became for all of us Buthter-do!
I knew Callay was in the most loving hands with Sister Flatulencia, and it filled me with a sweet-and-sour nostalgia when I’d return home in the afternoon to see that woman’s familiar slender form standing sentry by my daughter’s crib, her posture just a little less erect than in the old days and the pubic-looking tendrils escaping from her signature bandana now white with age.
Speaking of the life cycle, thank goodness we were able to use the natural deaths of butterflies in the butterfly pavilion to make our work possible. I can’t tell you how not-so-secretly happy I was when Sally and her entomology team discovered that, at least for our purposes, the usefulness of butterflies purposely killed by common research methods—freezing and heating; submerging in ethyl acetate or KAAD; grabbing the thorax—proved to be nil. Instead, twenty to twenty-five of those who’d died naturally were harvested from the pavilion each morning, driven to Pasadena at what was undoubtedly ticket-worthy speed by Sally Price to ensure we had enough viable yellow and gold and brown and blue cadavers to work with. Coming so soon after Mother’s death, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to kill the glorious creatures just to move our project along —especially when some species, such as monarchs, were threatened with extinction.
I found it particularly poetic that our project to save our species was being propelled by dead butterflies when all of life on this planet was made up of dead stars. The fact was, thanks to Sally Price’s expertise in entomology, I ended up learning more facts about butterflies than I could possibly have imagined, including some features of a surprisingly sexual nature, such as:
1. The female butterfly has a digestive organ right next to her vagina called the bursa copulatrix.
2. The male butterfly, like many other insects, delivers his sperm inside a package called a spermatophore. This package can contain all kinds of goodies, such as proteins that help sperm swim quickly or—as Amir put it—“the competitive little buggers plug up the female’s vagina so other males can’t get in.”
3. But the female has her own tricks, like disabling those proteins and using them to maintain her own body and her eggs.
4. But the male would prefer she restrain herself, giving him better odds of fathering some eggs. So he builds spermatophores with tough outer envelopes. A female can’t mate again until she’s cleared the first spermatophore out of her system.
5. Inside the female butterfly, sperm swim to their own storage organ while the rest of the spermatophore goes to the bursa copulatrix and gets broken down.
The bursa’s digestive power is prodigious, its enzymatic activity exceeding what goes on in the caterpillar’s gut. But more important for our purposes were the nutrients of the saprophyte, or bacterium, that flourished on the dead butterflies—in particular, the saprophytes that attached themselves to the bursa copularix. After innumerable failed attempts at their distillation, Sally Price and Gunther successfully injected those saprophytes into a series of moss piglets. The saprophytes acted as a force, exceeding our wildest dreams by increasing the piglets’ capacity to dematerialize and then rematerialize farther and farther across their cages.
Our best hunch about why this was working was that the force of the injected saprophytes somehow called forth a miniature gravitational wave, or wrinkle in spacetime, allowing the moss piglets to disappear at the lowest part of a wrinkle while being tumbled along the spacetime fabric, reappearing at the next rise of a ripple. The first time we’d retrieved a moss piglet from another corner of his cage, I had a strong hunch that he’d gone through his own version of what I’d experienced during labor and, even before that, on the morning of Zeki’s funeral in Tikil Dingay, when I had initially felt as tiny as Uncle Bob in his pocket-sized incarnation, then expanded Alice-in-Wonderlandishly, observing unusually colorful tops of trees outside the orphanage before returning to my normal size again. It would give me no end of satisfaction that sweet Zeki, whose life had been cut much too short by medication-resistant epilepsy, would live on by contributing something significant to the development of Dreamization.
In that first Dreamization of a tardigrade, I’d turned excitedly to Adam and Amir and Katrina and Tom and Gunther and Bob, exclaiming, “We need to work on this. I want to see us find a way to mathematically compute the ratio between the experience of diminution to the point of disappearance and the expansion back into visibility relative to riding gravitational waves at a quantum level. And we need to know how the organism resettles back into its original size and shape.” Needless to say, no one had laughed at me. We hadn’t come this far, nor had science itself, by ridiculing the seemingly outrageous. Reality had proven itself from the dawn of time to exceed the farthest flights of the human imagination. That was, after all, why the human psyche had sought out such an infinite variety of gods.
Returning home from the lab that night, I’d dug through my closet—still way too crowded with a score of Mother’s Chanel suits that I couldn’t bring myself to give away—to find the little enamel cask containing some of the gritty Ethiopian dirt that I’d held back from flinging onto Zeki’s casket. On an impulse, I poured some of that dark soil into my hand, sniffed its undiminished dank richness, then tucked as much of it as I could into the pink pocket of one of Mother’s suits. The incongruity of
it felt particularly satisfying and settled my rumbling belly down after all the day’s excitement. I’d been passing wind like crazy ever since coming home.
Adam and I had our own private laughs about how central digestive processes were proving to be for Dreamization, given what was going on in our own bodies. We didn’t know whether it was the Ethiopian cooking or just getting older, but our farts were becoming increasingly odoriferous, and we joked that we’d soon be giving Sister F. a run for her money. Like her, we’d tried Beano to disappointingly diminishing returns. Speaking of the relationship between digestion and sexuality, we did find that the more frequently we had intercourse, the less we passed gas. As Nana might have said, “Who knew?”
Having more frequent sex wasn’t hurt by the fact that Melky had permanently moved in. Now that Makeda had returned and healed from her genital restoration surgery, performed personally by Dr. Percec, the two lovebirds would disappear at odd times of the day and night, coming out of their bedroom laughing and glowy. I took no little secret pride that I’d managed to fund the operation with my Nobel prize money, which I’d finally managed to convince her—and it was true—had been just languishing in a bank all these years.
I believe it was Claire Booth Luce who said that no good deed goes unpunished. Somewhere in the midst of the sexual Renaissance at our Old Mill Road property, Adam developed a rather voracious appetite for porn.
How did I know? Because Adam, being Adam, couldn’t bear to keep it from me. One night, when I was feeling particularly haggard from juggling my time between Callay and the lab and eagerly looking forward to falling asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, he brought over his laptop to my vanity table and pulled up a porn site showing a series of couples copulating, including a very dark-skinned man and an equally pale-skinned woman engaged in an activity that he explained to me was called “soixante-neuf.”