1.
She was a solid-bodied female of perhaps twenty years of age with a plain face, an unusually low, simian brow, small squinting eyes, tentative manner like that of a creature that is being herded blindly along a chute. In a bulky nylon jacket, unzipped. Rust-color frizzed hair. Approximately five feet three, weight one hundred forty pounds. Full bosom of an older woman, thick muscled thighs and legs, thick ankles, large splayed feet and a center of gravity in the pelvic region.
Entering the lecture hall, alone. Blinking nervously as she glanced about for an empty seat. Or for someone to smile, wave at her and invite her to sit with them …
But no one. Not likely. And so, taking her seat in the fifth row, settling her bulky backpack at her feet.
There it is—she is. Our subject. Like an electric current these words ran through the technician’s brain as (covertly) he took several quick pictures of the girl with his iPhone.
It was a season of protracted heat, drought. No precipitation for months and since early September a hot, arid wind like a persistent cough.
Behind the green-tinted glass columns of Rockefeller Life Sciences Hall the temperature was fixed at 66 degrees Fahrenheit. From vents in the twelve-foot walls humidified air moved like invisible caresses.
The first to sight the girl—the (potential) experimental subject—was the senior technician in the Professor’s (restricted, government-funded) primate laboratory. Liking to think of himself as a scout—a peregrine falcon—in the service of the Professor, anticipating solutions to problems which the Professor had not (yet) considered.
For the distinguished Professor was so intensely absorbed in his work he seemed often not to know whether an experiment was nearing completion, was only midway, or had just begun, considering the most complicated experiment but a sequence of steps like bricks in a walkway to bring others to the destination at which the Professor already waited like a Buddha basking in his own enlightenment.
Of course! An experiment is not a blundering to discovery but a confirmation of what is already known.
The search for the new experimental subject had not officially begun. But the senior technician N____—(name unpronounceable—Chinese? Korean? Vietnamese?—too many consonants crowded into a single syllable for the non-Asian ear to grasp)—had been keeping his falcon-eyes open.
Alone of his colleagues N___ was in the habit of wandering in the lower University campus where he wasn’t likely to encounter anyone he knew, or who knew him. A tall (six feet, two inches) dark-clad knife-blade of a man, lithe as a shadow flying across a walkway, exquisite in aloneness as a figure in an ancient Asian woodcut. Though visible to anyone who actually looked at him yet N___ had the advantage of invisibility that is the particular prerogative of his species: deceptively bland Asian face, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, short-cropped very black glossy hair, dark flannel sweatshirt or hoodie, running shoes.
His age?—could be mid-twenties. No one could have guessed late thirties.
Even in the primate laboratory N___ did not always appear visible. Standing only a few feet from the Professor he’d heard the Professor inquire irritably, “Where is N___ when I need him?”
At which point N___ did not smile (visibly), cleared his throat and said in his most courteous nongloating voice: “Professor, I am here.”
He’d sighted her, unmistakably. He was certain.
After the lecture lingering at the front of the amphitheater. As undergraduates streamed past waiting for the low-browed girl that he might (unobtrusively) follow her.
Having grasped instinctively that the girl was of that subcategory of young female who was not likely to have friends; certainly, not male friends. She will be grateful for attention. She will not ask why. She will not suspect a motive.
The subject of the Professor’s lecture that day had been the phenomenon called mitosis. Stages of cell mitosis, stages of cell cycle, meiosis. All of life is involved in the replication of life: that is the meaning contained in the word life.
No one understood the why of such a process. But they were beginning to understand how. And very exciting it was to them, the Professor’s handpicked team, the process of how which they were learning to replicate.
At the lectures it was N____’s custom to sit at the very end of the first row of seats in the semidarkened amphitheater, that he might observe the faint glimmer of hundreds of computer screens cast upward on young, earnest faces. The Professor’s carefully chosen words, uttered through a microphone, further amplified by the PowerPoint presentation (which N___ had helped prepare for the Professor) were channeled through the neurons of the young, fingers rapidly typing on laptop keyboards as in a mass hypnosis.
And then, after fifty intense minutes, the spell was broken. The lecture was ended. Lights came up in the amphitheater, the Professor exited the stage. Laptops were shut, backpacks gathered. Where there’d been respectful silence, relieved chatter began.
Biding his time until the low-browed girl passed in the aisle descending steps with an awkward sort of care and gripping her bulky backpack to her chest. Of course, oblivious of N_____.
Exiting the amphitheater, following the girl outside. Like a practiced predator taking care to keep others between them and following at a distance of about thirty feet.
It was not difficult to keep the low-browed girl in sight: frizzed rust-colored hair that looked as if she’d brushed it with rough, random strokes of a brush, stolid mammalian figure, slightly rounded shoulders, a way of pushing herself forward that was both “perky” and defeated. The girl wore an unflattering University jacket of some grape-colored nylon fabric, which she kept unzipped and open, for she was overweight and inclined to be warm on even a chilly autumn morning; perhaps bizarrely, in a gesture that should have been embarrassing to her, the low-browed girl hoped to draw attention to her sizable breasts as if not grasping (of course, the ideal experimental subject was not intelligent enough to grasp) that she was at least thirty pounds beyond the undergraduate ideal for a twenty-year-old female, even if her earnest simian face had been attractive. On her sturdy thighs and legs were jeans that looked stiff and new, also unattractive.
How different this female specimen was from most of the undergraduate girls at the University! If they adhered to a type, regardless of race or ethnicity they were likely to be slender, with long straight silky hair, flawless skin. They were not hesitant but confident. They did not exude aloneness even when they were walking alone.
It was something of a mystery, N___ thought. That the girl with the low forehead, quizzical eyes and diffident manner had dared to enroll in the introductory biology course, competing with premed students, biochemistry majors, neuroscientists …
N___ felt a pang of pity for the experimental subject. But by definition, no specimen who so matched the requirements for the experimental subject could be anything other than pitiable.
How slowly the girl walked! No more than half N____’s normal speed. If he weren’t vigilant, he’d have easily caught up with her.
Following the girl across campus and into the student union, a featureless cube offensive to an eye attuned to the elegantly minimal architecture of Life Sciences. Relieved at least that the girl hadn’t returned to her residence hall where N___ couldn’t have followed her. Hoping she wasn’t meeting a friend for lunch which would ruin his plans.
But the experimental subject would not have a friend, ideally …
Having to wait, at a little distance, as the girl entered a women’s restroom.
This, N___ resented. There came into his pristine mind an unpleasant vision of the restroom interior: crumpled paper napkins (and worse) in a trash bin, hairs in sinks, a smell of toilets and drains, the plain, pasty-faced low-browed girl peering at herself anxiously in a communal mirror, primping her hair, puckering her fleshy lips … Admired in the Professor’s lab for his fastidious care in prepping experimental animals for the insertion of electrodes into their brains, as for making sure that his tech assistants kept the animals’ cages as clean as possible, N___ felt a rush of repugnance, indignation. If there’d been the faintest glimmer of romance in the prospect of befriending/seducing the experimental subject, minuscule as bacteria flourishing in a petri dish, this vision would have killed it.
In the lab, among his colleagues who were both appreciative of the technician’s help when they required it and resentful of his close (if scarcely verbal) relationship with the Professor, it was speculated that N___ was, whatever age he was, not so much “virginal” as “asexual.” No one had ever seen N___ with a woman in what might have been romantic circumstances, nor indeed with a man.
N___ had a vague sense of this reputation. So long as the Professor held him in high regard, he did not so much mind what others said of him though it amused him to think that anyone should consider him a virgin.
“Asexual”—yes. Probably.
The cafeteria was only just beginning to fill. Casually N___ fell into line behind the low-browed girl who appeared hungry for lunch, at five minutes before noon. A good appetite! A healthy female specimen made for breeding, wide-hipped and with a (probable) high threshold for pain.
N___ was taller than the girl by a head. This was good—(was it?); authority exudes from superior height in Homo sapiens as in other mammalian species. Moving a sticky black plastic tray behind hers, seemingly by accident giving her tray a nudge.
“Hi, h’lo—thought I saw you in Intro Biology, was that you?”
Exactly what a fellow student might say in these circumstances. Composing the bland-inscrutable Asian face into a friendly smile and hoping the girl would not perceive immediately how forced and insincere these banal words were.
Startled, the girl looked up at N_____. Stammering, blushing—“Yah … yes. Intro Biology, I just came from the lecture …”
Surprised that N___ was speaking to her. Touchingly grateful for the friendly smile from the tall neatly dressed handsome (?) young Asian man.
“… like, my head aches from trying to make sense of … what’s it … miyotis …”
“‘Mitosis.’”
“‘Mi-to-sis.’ Yah.”
Looming tall, not too close to the low-browed girl, friendly but polite. Gentlemanly. Pushing his tray behind her tray as if they were casual acquaintances and not total strangers.
It was the girl’s wish to present herself to this unexpected fellow student as overwhelmed by the biology lecture. Imagining that, to N_____, seeming even less intelligent than she probably was would appeal to him as male.
But it was a way for N___ to connect with the girl, a stratagem to deflect her suspicion. Falling in with her tone of wry puzzlement N___ volunteered cheerfully that, of the Professor’s lecture that morning, he’d understood just a fraction himself—“Eleven percent.”
A joke: eleven percent. To glance at N___ would be to guess that N___ was hardly of that cohort who have difficulty understanding an undergraduate science lecture; a more experienced individual than the low-browed girl would have guessed postdoc, research science, Chinese?—Korean?—Vietnamese?—quirky but brilliant.
Unsuspecting any stratagem on N____’s part the (naive) girl imagined N___ as a kindred undergraduate though surely—for so N___ perceived the girl’s brain cranking into action like a computer of another era—smarter than she was. Just possibly, potential help to her in preparing for exams. Tutorials. Study dates. Nodding fiercely in agreement, “Oh, gosh, I know! The same with me. He’s, like, a famous professor, a scientist—they say … I try so hard to understand him but it slips through my brain, I guess. Sometimes I try so hard it hurts.”
As if the girl meant to be funny N___ laughed. Not very convincingly but in her excitement the girl took no notice. Like an actor reading a script he has never seen before N___ said that he felt the same way—“Except it’s my back molars that hurt, from grinding.”
Wincingly unfunny but the girl laughed as if she’d been tickled. Her mouth was large as a pike’s mouth, her hilarity breathless and overdone.
“You mean, like—at night … Yah, sometimes I grind my teeth too, it used to be worse when I was a little kid …”
Smiling at N___ coquettishly now. Oh, this was flirting!
N___ had not been in such intimate quarters with a female for some time. The Professor did not encourage females in his primate lab—even gifted female postdocs had been turned away, and female research scientists in Life Sciences were pursuing their own subjects. N___ had little contact with undergraduate girls enrolled in the lecture course for he was not one of the Professor’s team of teaching assistants; he’d more or less forgotten the (hypothetical) sexual imperative that a male naturally seeks a female mate, to reproduce his own kind. N___ did not care much for his own kind—his DNA. Yet he felt the pathos of this so clearly lonely and love-starved girl who not even smiling could make pretty. He would have to harden his heart against her, not to succumb to pity.
Of all human emotions, pity is the least useful.
For the scientist whose research involves experimental animals, pity is particularly not-useful.
Asking the girl if she was having lunch with anyone and when she shook her head no asking if he could sit with her and she laughed in sheer confused delight (it seemed) as blood rushed alarmingly into her face. Eagerly she said, “Yah—yes.”
“Well. Maybe we could sit together …”
“Oh—yes.”
Deftly N___ guided them into a corner of the cafeteria, where no one was likely to intrude.
Rare for N___ to have lunch in so public a place. Usually he ate in the lab, take-out food in Styrofoam packages and not what might be designated as “lunch.” Just ate when he was hungry, or rather became aware in the midst of work that he was hungry.
Like characters in a broadly humorous, brightly lit TV situation comedy they introduced themselves: N___ with a plausible-sounding name—“Nathaniel” for wasn’t that an Anglo name, slightly formal, archaic?—and the girl with a name that suited her: “Merry Frances.”
Merry—?
But no, the name must be “Mary Frances.”
“That’s a nice name …‘Mary Frances.’”
“It’s for my grandma. I mean, it was. I mean—my grandma is—isn’t—alive …” Pausing, breathless. “‘Nath-an-yiel’—that’s a nice name.”
N___ smiled. Tried to smile. Not recalling how Asian boys smiled at Caucasian girls.
Not that N___ had been a boy for fifteen, twenty years.
In so public a place, amid a babble of undergraduate chatter, N___ felt exposed, absurd. Here was “Nathaniel Li” in the alarming company of “Mary Frances Bowes.” If anyone from Life Sciences happened to see the Professor’s chief technician in the clamorous student union, sitting across a table from the smiling, stolid undergraduate girl—how astonished they would be! Unless the colleague was from the primate lab, and could guess what N____’s motive was …
During the course of the cafeteria meal by asking discreet questions N___ was able to determine that 1) Mary Frances had few friends at the University; 2) Mary Frances did not have a “boyfriend”; 3) Mary Frances was living some distance from her family which was a “broken-up family” and she was “not real close” with them; 4) Mary Frances was enrolled in the College of General Studies yet had signed up for Introduction to Biology with the (questionable) hope that it would aid her application to nursing school—“I always wanted to be a nurse ’cause I want to help people all I can. It’s what Jesus wants us to do—I mean, Christians … It’s real hard to get accepted in the nursing school here but my advisor said they’d be impressed if I took Intro Biology and got a good grade …” Her voice trailed off wistfully at good grade.
So that was why the girl was in the Professor’s lecture course, valiantly trying to take notes amid a sea of premed students and science majors murderous-competitive as sharks. A responsible advisor would have urged her to take only courses in the College of General Studies in which, in fact, she might receive good grades.
N___ pushed himself to sound sympathetic, convincing. “Well. If you work hard … maybe—somebody could help you …” Picking with a plastic fork in the “Asian salad” swill he’d selected in the cafeteria line, lifting his eyes to meet hers, shy-Asian-boy smile: “… Maybe I could help you.”
Have you no mercy for her? Once, you were her.
But no. No mercy. Not in Life Sciences.
Recalling the girl’s eager eyes on his face when he’d told her he could help her. Feeling a shudder of guilt and self-revulsion that the experimental subject was so unwary, so easily led and so tractable.
But it is not in the nature of the peregrine falcon to pass up its prey.
Especially if the falcon is hunting in the service of his master who expects much of him, that is not outwardly stated.
For there was the understanding that, if the Professor’s renowned primate lab violated certain legal restrictions, committed certain acts that might be ruled “scientific misconduct”—not often, but occasionally, in the service of scientific progress—it would be the chief technician N___ who took the blame, and not the Professor. In the many years of the primate lab it hadn’t yet happened that any outside authority had challenged the Professor’s findings, still less his methods, for the primate lab was one of the crown jewels of Life Sciences, bringing in approximately twice as much money in research grants as its nearest competitor, and so the University had no wish to look too carefully into the “ethics” of its experiments even if the University had had the means to undertake an investigation, or could have known where to begin.
In any case, N___ would be the individual held responsible. N___ would be the member of the team to be disciplined, even “suspended”—“terminated”—for he was not a PhD appointment to the University, but rather an employee of the Professor.
This possibility N___ understood and accepted tacitly though he and the Professor had never discussed it; just as N___ understood that, in the event of an investigation, a harsh ruling, ugly public exposure and the loss of his appointment, still N____’s coveted Green Card would not be rescinded, for the Professor would protect him from deportation to the birth-country he had not glimpsed in more than thirty years. And, in time, there would be a considerable reward for the chief technician. He was sure.
It helped that in this affluent adoptive country, under the protection of the Professor, N___ had forgotten his origins. There’d been “war”—“civil war”—a terrible air bombardment. A sky churned into havoc, clouds bleeding guts. Not once. Not twice. Countless times.
Collapsing walls. Clots of flame. A refugee camp, with a muddy burial ground. Before that a protracted escape-by-boat, or had it been the reverse, or had there been more than one desperate escape-by-boat, and more than one squalid camp. And more than one death. More than one language and N___ had forgotten them all. His brain refused to process these lost languages so that the name on his Green Card—“N___”—had come to seem mildly preposterous to him, too many consonants packed into a single syllable, a foreign name.
All that was changed now. N___ could barely recall his adolescence, let alone his childhood. Let alone his young childhood. The English spoken in his adoptive country was his language now. He had no interest in any other language. He had no interest in any other country. Vaguely he was aware that he had relatives who shared a surname living in Canada, possibly in Vancouver, a cousin his own age who was a research scientist like himself. But he had no interest in any other N___ for (in fact) “N___” was (almost certainly) not his birth name but a refugee-camp name given to a mute parentless child not (evidently) terminally ill and so worth “naming.”
Instructive to remember too that N____’s surname was, or rather is, the most common of surnames in his native country. One of the most common surnames in the world. Not much pride in this and indeed, N___ was not one to take pride.
Like removing a CD from a player, such memory. Sliding in another CD. A phase of life: slice of neural memory in the brain. In an autopsy you could slice—very thinly—such neural matter. Store it, with care, in formaldehyde. Hardly necessary to recall, let alone record. So long as he had his Green Card and the identity that went with it: “N_____.” So long as he had the protection of the Professor who was his sponsor/employer in this affluent adoptive country.
Sending a rare email to the Professor: Something to report on preliminary scouting for Project Galahad.
Next morning at the weekly lab meeting there was N___ with a proposal.
Taking the others by surprise. For that was the Professor’s chief technician/right-hand-man for you—crafty and unpredictable. In the way that N___ hid his smile somehow up inside his deceivingly bland Asian face so that you felt it rather than saw it, inscrutable.
Informing them that he’d sighted, he’d vetted, at least to a degree, a very promising female specimen for (classified, confidential) Project Galahad.
The female was twenty years of age. A first-year student in the College of General Studies with a (quixotic?) hope of being accepted into the nursing school. By her own account she had virtually no friends. She and her roommate “didn’t get along.” Most crucially she had no boyfriend, fiancé, husband.
She did have a family, but not living close by. And no close ties.
She was tractable, credulous, eager to please. Not very bright. Not very attractive. Physical type: wide-hipped, sturdy-boned.
N____’s proposal: with the permission of the lab, he would move forward in securing the girl as the experimental subject.
But no: objections were immediate. For N___ had adversaries in the lab. Rivals for the Professor’s esteem. Pointing out that initiating even the first stage of the experiment was in violation of University policy regarding classified research, since the primate lab did not (yet) have permission to move forward; also, the schedule for Project Galahad hadn’t yet been established …
But yes of course. Permission would be granted eventually. A schedule could be drawn up within a few days—N___ could compose a draft. It was unwise not to take advantage of the female specimen he’d discovered for she appeared to be ideal, and if they lost her through an excess of caution they might not find another.
But—no. It was months too soon for Project Galahad, there wasn’t yet a budget …
But—yes. The Professor’s NIH (National Institutes of Health) grant could be tapped for miscellaneous expenses.
The senior members of the primate lab were meeting in the Professor’s office on the eighth floor of Life Sciences. Sitting at an oak conference table heatedly discussing N____’s proposal as with a bemused expression the Professor scrolled through images of the twenty-year-old female specimen on N____’s iPhone.
As others debated the issue the Professor remained silent. Stroking the crisp white goatee that gave him at a little distance the (misleadingly) benign look of a wire-haired terrier.
At such times the Professor’s brooding silence did not indicate that he was listening to his younger associates, who spoke as much to impress the Professor as to reason with one another. Yet, the contemplative way in which the Professor stroked his goatee did not indicate that he was not listening, perhaps very carefully to each word.
The father is most powerful when he does not indicate his preferences among the children. Only the most subtle hints, but these must be conflicting hints, fertile for endless speculation.
At last putting N____’s iPhone down on the table and pushing it in N____’s direction.
With a terse nod of his head, yes. The female specimen was ideal.
Around the table, a ripple of assent. Even those who’d most opposed N___ now agreed, it was wisest to begin at once.
“So, N____—will you be the one to prep her?”
Gravely N___ said: “Of course, Professor. I have already begun.”
It is known that Homo sapiens shares 95 percent of DNA sequences, and 99 percent of coding DNA sequences, with certain ape species; and in some human beings, the simian kinship seems more evident than in others. Many times this thought has occurred to N_____, seeing the experimental subject waving to him, blushing at the mere sight of him—“‘Nath-an-yiel.’ Hi!”
Meeting at the student union. In the main library. In a coffee shop on campus. In a coffee shop off-campus. Never in her residence hall since N___ did not want to be seen by girls who knew her, in her company.
The delight in the coarse-skinned face, the glisten in the small close-set eyes. The thrilled smile.
“Mary Frances. Hi.”
Seeing, to his embarrassment, that Mary Frances’s chapped-looking lips began to turn rosy. Her rust-red frizzed hair began to be more frequently shampooed, brushed.
In her pudgy ears, pierced earrings.
The nails of her stubby fingers, filed and polished.
An attractive sweater, fitting her sizable breasts snugly. An attractive shirt. Necklace, scarf. Whiff of something cheaply sweet like lilac.
(The pretext for) their meetings was N___ kindly providing help for Mary Frances with the biology course. Securing her trust. Making her grateful, indebted.
For all his intelligence N___ wasn’t a natural teacher. Research engaged his interest, not teaching. To teach another, you have to care.
Yet, in the service of Project Galahad and what it might mean for scientific progress as well as what it might mean for the careers of everyone in the primate lab, N___ was determined to care.
Over the years he’d acquired a sympathetic and instructive manner with younger students in the lab. His natural disdain for persons less intelligent than himself he’d learned to disguise. Though he was impatient with stupidity he could sympathize, to a degree, with ignorance; it was astonishing that Mary Frances knew so little about science, but he was impressed by her determination to learn, and volunteered hours of his time tutoring her in elementary principles of mitosis, meiosis, gametes, chromosomes, genetic diversity though he felt (he could not help it) a faint revulsion for the girl, both physical and intellectual … and also a sort of angry pity for her, that a girl who looked like Mary Frances could sincerely believe that a young man like “Nathaniel” was genuinely interested in her.
He hoped that she wasn’t boasting about him, at least. Hoped she had no one to whom she might boast.
By degrees N___ began to take some (small, grudging) pleasure in teaching the girl something valuable about biology. Enough at least to prepare her for lab quizzes and exams.
Mary Frances did not seem to grasp principles or abstract theories but she had a capacity for memorization, at least for temporary memorization. N___ could coach her to repeat something enough times to get her through a limited period of time—a day, a few hours—before it began to fade.
Despite himself he began to take a sort of pride in his tutoring. And indeed it was flattering, to see that look of adoration in a (white) girl’s face, which he’d rarely seen before in any face.
Running to greet him one day as he approached the coffee shop, with childish joy waving a sheet of paper—“Oh—Nath’iel! Oh gosh! Look! Look at this! Thanks only to you.”
Startling N___ by hugging him, pushing herself breathless and heated and smelling both frantic and fragrant against him, laughing as the two came close to toppling over on the walkway.
In red ink on white paper, a beautifully rendered B–.
It was only a weekly biology lab quiz graded by a postdoc but a B was impressive, for a student of Mary Frances’s capacity. N___ was himself impressed.
“It’s, like, you are saving my life, Nath’iel. Oh gosh—I love you.”
How soon then, to initiate the impregnation.
By measured stages seduction, sexual relations, impregnation. And if impregnation, gestation.
Birth, and beyond birth.
Of course, much had to be spontaneous, or seeming-so. With the Professor’s approval N___ had drawn up a tentative schedule based upon a normal nine-month gestation, birth sometime the next summer if all went as planned.
If successful impregnation, an engagement ring. If necessary, plans to marry after the birth.
Promise her whatever is required. You will know her very well by then.
Soon, N___ steered the female specimen away from campus. He preferred to spend time with her less publicly, he said.
Soon, meals together in (inexpensive, ethnic) restaurants and cafes where N___ wasn’t known. For certainly that was the next step, taking out the experimental subject on “dates.”
(Of course, N___ kept receipts for all expenditures and was reimbursed weekly out of the Professor’s “miscellaneous” fund.)
Tutoring the girl in biology was still crucial but was not the only, or even the primary subject of their conversations.
How did one fall in love? N___ had no more personal experience of falling in love than he’d had of personally experiencing impregnation, gestation, birth in laboratory animals whom he oversaw in the Professor’s elaborate experiments.
Drawing a deep breath one evening as they sat at a small table in a Chinese restaurant awaiting their meal N___ took hold of Mary Frances’s hand that lay, like a small animal in a pretense of sleep, on the tabletop. Steeling himself for the immediate pressure of her (hot, moist) hand, grasping his as a drowning person might grasp for life.
“Oh—Nath’iel. Gosh!”
A single heartbeat thudded between them. Suddenly, they were a couple.
Soon then, Mary Frances dared to slide her arm through his as they walked together. Leaning against N_____, giddy and clumsy as in a three-legged race.
Together, crossing a street. At a pace that left the girl breathless trying to match N____’s long-legged stride.
“Oh, Nath-iel! You are so tall.”
Such inane remarks the girl made. There was something childlike in her naivete that made N___ want to protect her.
“People are always saying, Asians are so smart. Not like the rest of us. And, know what?—they are right.” Pausing, leaning against N_____. “And handsome, too. And sweet.”
This was bold. This was unmistakable. Yet, N___ did not wish to take advantage of the girl, just yet.
He was fearful of her emotion, that threatened to overwhelm him. Her warm, often overwarm body, leaning against his, denser than his own and (possibly) more resilient. Her eyes he saw were mud-brown, shiny with feeling.
Like a precious coin that has been covered by the thinnest soil the girl’s soul was too easily exposed. Seeming to take no notice of how guarded N___ had been in speaking of himself she did not hesitate to open her heart to him, confiding her most private secrets—bullied in middle school, friendless in high school, lonely and “miserable” at the University until she’d met him.
Oh, there’d been some guys at the University—“frat boys, real assholes”—who’d asked her out to “disgusting ‘keg parties,’ they call them”—but she’d had enough sense at least not to say yes.
“Really bad things happen to girls at ‘keg parties.’ All along Posner Avenue—those damn frat houses …” Mary Frances shook her head wryly, with an expression both disgusted and wistful.
N___ wondered uneasily if Mary Frances was a virgin. The very term virgin was quaint, faintly ludicrous to the ear, like an old-fashioned clinical name for a disease.
“Guys can be mean. Nasty. Back in middle school they’d tease us—try to scare us. ‘Pig-snout’—they called a friend of mine. She’d run away and cry. Just nasty.”
Shaking her head, such disgust that N___ had to suppose it had been Mary Frances herself called such a name.
Once begun, the girl could not seem to stop. A faucet turned on, and farther on. Soon confiding in N___ all he might wish to know, and more, of her life.
Except for cousins in the navy she was the first of her family to leave her small town, and she was definitely the first to go to college; everybody in the family thought she was “snooty” for going to the state university and not to a community college. They weren’t “supportive” of her at all, in wanting to become a nurse. But she planned to surprise them by becoming a nurse and not returning home but (maybe) living in the urban area near the University.
“D’you think that’s a good idea?”
“A good idea—what?” N___ had been listening so intently to Mary Frances, watching the odd twitchy movements of her mouth, he’d lost the thread of what she was saying.
“Living around here. After I graduate.”
“Y-Yes. It’s a great idea.”
“’Cause I am getting to like it here. Getting to know you …”
No idea how to reply. N___ murmured a vague smiling assent.
“But I have a lot of work to do, I guess … to get admitted to the nursing school. To pass Intro Biology …”
“Well. I can help you, Mary Frances. Like I have.”
“Oh, gosh! Oh, I am so lucky …”
Deeply moved, Mary Frances grimaced, shook her head mutely, swiped at her eyes
Where had N___ seen this gesture before? Had to be one of the primate lab animals. A female chimpanzee named Maude who’d learned to mimic human mannerisms with eerie precision—a way of courting favor with her masters, they’d thought.
In an aggressive male chimp, like the alpha male Galahad, such a gesture might be meant in mockery. If his teeth were bared, an outright gesture of defiance against his jailers.
But Mary Frances was wholly sincere. Nothing meant more to her than nursing school, she said repeatedly; it was the predominant theme of her life, her dream of helping other people. Though N___ had known Mary Frances only about three weeks he’d heard her speak in this way countless times, and could have finished her sentences for her.
“’Course, I might just end up married …”
Boldly Mary Frances spoke, casting a coy/hopeful glance at her companion who seemed at first not to know how to reply; then asked, gamely, with a weak smile, if she thought she might like to have children, and Mary Frances said, “Oh yes. A family. I do.”
N___ heard himself ask, as if this were a perfectly normal conversation of the sort he had frequently: “How many?”
“How many? Children? Oh gosh, maybe three … Maybe four.”
N___ was smiling foolishly. A dull blush had come into his face which Mary Frances saw, and misinterpreted.
“’Course, that’s all in the future, Nath’iel. We’re having a really nice time now …”
The rest of the evening passed in a blur. Crossing a street on the way back to campus and to her residence Mary Frances slid her arm into N____’s, and came close to leaning her head against his shoulder. A faint stir of desire in his groin, like a young snake waking.
Rehearsing what he would say to the experimental subject, soon. I love you, Mary Frances …
But no. He could not.
For one thing, how could N___ fashion his face, uttering such improbable words? Surely, even the low-browed girl would not be so easily deceived …
I—I—I l—love …
More plausibly N___ might say—I care for you, too.
Steering a careful course, as he thought it. Between his (outward) display of affection for the female specimen and his (inward) repugnance for the female specimen.
If the challenge was to overcome his (physical) revulsion for Mary Frances a yet greater challenge would be to overcome panic that for all his revulsion he was becoming (physically) attracted to her …
No! Not possible. The low forehead, the russet-red fringe of hair on the forehead, the matronly breasts and hips, the plain face with its simian cast—he could not be seriously attracted to that.
Yet, Mary Frances’s soft limpid brown eyes were sometimes attractive. When love for N_____, frank adoration for N_____, shone so frankly in them.
When love for N___ glowed in her face like reflected candle-light. Ohhh gosh, Nath’iel, you are so handsome.
When it was not jocose and exaggerated and lipstick-smeared, her smile could be attractive. To a degree
When she refrained from grabbing his arm and speaking excitedly she could be, if not attractive, not (totally) unattractive.
Shame! You are falling in love.
N___ laughed, appalled—this was preposterous. Clueless Mary Frances joined in, giggling. Like a trained dog, eager to please its master and also to imitate its master. If she’d had a tail, N___ thought in disgust, she’d be wagging it, thumping it against his legs.
His lab colleagues had advised N___ to proceed cautiously. To behave like a (stereotypical) Asian male, courteous and deferential, warmly friendly, shyly affectionate, fascinated by the (white) girl’s inane chatter. Above all, no threat to the (white) girl.
He, the Asian male, was too reserved to initiate sexual relations. If something should go wrong with Project Galahad it would be prudent if the girl, and not N_____, had actually initiated the next, intimate stage of their relationship. N___ would behave as (in fact) he felt in the low-browed girl’s presence—physically awkward, reticent. Not so comfortable with touching, and being touched.
It might be a matter of weeks before a sexual relationship could be established. Possibly months. Crucial not to hurry. Not to move prematurely. For the integrity of the experiment would depend upon the bond N___ established with the experimental subject, her unquestioning loyalty to the young man she knew as “Nathaniel Li.” And yes, if necessary, this young man would enter upon an engagement with the experimental subject, during the pregnancy. If/when there was a pregnancy.
Marriage was a possibility. Though it would not be an actual, “legal” marriage of course but one arranged through the Professor’s contacts.
By the last week in October a furnished apartment had been secured for N____’s use. (N___ would never bring the experimental subject to his own quarters of course. On principle, N___ never brought or invited anyone there.) The apartment was just far enough away from the University to assure some measure of privacy; its shelves had been hastily filled with books sloughed off from N____’s colleagues’ libraries or picked up by N___ at sidewalk sales. The bed would be freshly made, towels and hand soap in the bathroom. It was N____’s responsibility to at least partly fill kitchen cupboards, bureau drawers, a closet or two, to suggest actual occupancy.
Reporting to the Professor weekly even when there was relatively little progress to report.
Stroking his stiff white goatee the Professor peered at pictures of the experimental subject on N____’s cell phone. Such an unattractive female! It was no wonder she was grateful for N____’s attention. The Professor evinced indifference to N____’s reports even as he insisted upon a voyeur’s particularized account. In what ways had N___ touched the female specimen? Kissed her? And what sort of kisses? Light, glancing, casual or—impassioned? Had the female specimen signaled sexual receptivity, as a female chimpanzee might, in estrus? (But this was a joke: female chimps in estrus lifted their swollen genitals boldly to the male chimp’s face.)
No? The experimental subject had not (yet) displayed this behavior? The Professor laughed as if suspecting that N___ was keeping something from him.
2.
Not a very aesthetic procedure. But at least not very difficult: procuring the first store of semen from Galahad.
Fortunately, Galahad was a lusty young animal in the prime of life and ripe for reproducing his kind—whether ejaculating into the vagina of a female chimp in the rabid heat of estrus or into a technician’s rubber-gloved hand and a sterile glass beaker.
“Galahad, my friend! Hel-lo.”
It was remarked in the Professor’s primate lab: the chief technician N___ was not nearly so relaxed with his own kind as he was with certain of the experimental animals and especially with the young male Galahad, a beautiful chimpanzee specimen to whom he gave treats and even groomed with a bristle brush.
Galahad was nine years of age, four feet ten inches in height, one hundred lean-muscled sixty-six pounds. Emerging out of the black-haired pelt at his groin, an astonishing frequency of erections like living, writhing, tubular things—giant sea slugs with blunt blind heads of a bright-rosy hue, stiff with blood and translucent frothy liquid rife with the sperm of Pan troglodytes verus.
Nature’s imperative to reproduce species, to replicate DNA into the next generation is never more evident than in chimpanzee sexual behavior. No romance to it, simply energy, zeal, application and repetition.
N____’s younger colleagues joked nervously about Galahad and other hot-blooded male chimps in the lab. If these near-human creatures could seize control of their jailers, if they could free themselves from their cages, they might imprison their jailers, or might just murder them where they overpowered them. In their place, that was what (murderous, vengeful) Homo sapiens would do.
Pan troglodytes verus (western Africa) were not carnivorous animals, essentially. Their preferred diet was fruit, nuts, vegetables, insects. If these were not available, small mammals. But out of meanness (just possibly) the rampaging males might mutilate and devour those human specimens who’d mistreated them and spare others who’d been kind to them. Ape memories were excellent, unforgiving, like the memories of certain corvids.
Apes were capable of humanlike behavior: rage, tantrums, vengeance. In the wild, ape communities were strictly hierarchical, with a strong alpha male dominating and all others chimpanzees subordinate to him; in captivity there was no community, only just (caged) specimens. You could argue that a caged specimen is sui generis, an aberration.
Older chimps in the Professor’s lab, male and female, were not nearly so exciting or as readily aroused as young Galahad. Lust had dimmed in their eyes—they’d endured too many experiments for the good of humankind, or rather for the good of Big Pharma. Since the Animal Welfare Act of 2010 these chimpanzees were no longer routinely subjected to the sort of painful experiments they’d endured when younger, but they had not forgotten their torturers …
One of the Professor’s most famous experiments, however, hadn’t involved electrodes in chimpanzee brains or injections of cancer, TB, AIDS into their blood but rather the discovery that chimpanzees could recognize themselves in mirrors. That is, individual chimpanzees were capable of recognizing themselves as individuals, in mirrors, and not simply as “chimpanzees.” In a sequence of experiments now recognized as historic the Professor had drawn red dots on the foreheads of chimps who were then positioned before mirrors into which they gazed with great excitement and fascination, waving their arms wildly, grimacing and mugging; like Narcissus falling in love with his reflection the chimps came eventually to comprehend that they were in some unfathomable way seeing themselves, and not just another chimp on the farther side of a sheet of glass. This was a sight which they’d never seen before, and for which they had no neural imprint to guide them.
When the first chimp gingerly touched his forehead, leaning close to the mirror and rubbing the red dot with his fingers, everyone in the lab had burst into spontaneous applause.
N___ hadn’t worked in the Professor’s lab at that time. But almost, he could remember, he’d applauded the Professor’s great discovery which would be replicated over the years in other laboratories.
Few other animal species can recognize themselves in mirrors. Certain apes, but not all monkeys and not marmosets. Asian elephants, Eurasian magpies. Dolphins, orcas. But not dogs or cats. Not horses. Not crows. And not brain-damaged, retarded or severely autistic human beings.
N___ was capable of seeing his reflection in a mirror or glass and not (immediately) recognizing himself. But this was only natural (he believed) since N___ resembled so many other young Asian men of his type, slender, cerebral, self-effacing, with glasses, glossy black hair, dark clothing, an air both earnest and stealthy.
Not visible, by design. Yet not (entirely) invisible.
In a variant of the classic mirror experiment the young chimp Galahad had recognized himself in record time. Waving arms, grimacing and mugging, in an expression of sheer animal joy, but in his manner something guarded, wary. Here was the quintessential (male) chimpanzee, tirelessly virile, fecund, whose copious sperm wanted only to populate the world in its own image. Out of Galahad’s flat, low-browed hairless face innocently round eyes blinked and glistened with crafty intelligence, playfulness. His fingers were hairless, like his toes, the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, as if in mimicry of his human jailers; his thumbs and big toes were opposable; his brain allowed him a cognitive map of a considerable range of territory, far greater than that of most human beings. (N___ had no doubt that, in tests involving spatial memorization and hand-eye coordination, Galahad was superior to slower-witted individuals like Mary Frances.) He was not burdened with conscience, and he was not burdened with ambition. He did not dwell simultaneously in the present, the past, and the future, to his detriment. He could comport himself like a baby, for treats, he could “smile”—but if he wished, he could sink his sharp teeth in your face, and tear it off in a heartbeat. It seemed appropriate, N___ thought, that this fine specimen would be the father of the first Humanzee to survive—if all went well.
“Galahad! Hel-lo.”
Slipping on the surgical gloves, a tight fit.
He brings her flowers. She is so touched that tears stream from her small squinting eyes. In turn, he is touched by her emotion. The gratitude the experimental subject feels reflects upon him—it’s as if N___ sees himself for once in a mirror that flatters, not flattens.
She loves me. Therefore, I am worthy of love.
At last in early November breathless Mary Frances dares to stand on tiptoe to kiss N____’s cheek and then, as if impulsively, N____’s mouth; and to whisper in N____’s ear that (maybe) they might go to his apartment that night … And N___ draws in a deep breath and says yes—“I’ve been thinking the same thing, Mary Frances.”
Walking hand in hand then to the furnished apartment on Edgar Street which N___ has seen only once, and then hurriedly. At least, he has the key to open the door and does not fumble it.
Seeing, inside, on a coffee table, a much-annotated paperback copy of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals placed there deliberately, as a joke, presumably by a lab colleague. N___ wonders what other jokes may lie in store for him, in these several rooms that constitute an experimental laboratory of a unique kind.
Still gripping N____’s hand Mary Frances blinks and squints like one who is blinded by a sudden light. With a little cry saying, not very coherently, “Oh, this is where you live, Nath’iel! It’s—like—a ‘bachelor’ place—I guess.” Then, with awkward coquetry, “Could be a little more—cozy …”
“Well, it will be, Mary Frances. Cozy. Now that you’re here.”
Now that you’re here. Forced, flat words. But Mary Frances seems not to notice, marveling at several shelves of the hodgepodge of used books as if they constituted an impressive library: “Gosh! All these books … I guess you’ve read all these books, Nath’iel?”
Hears himself murmur modestly. “Oh, well—some of them.”
“Are you, like, a teacher? ‘Assistant professor’—is that what you are called? And you teach these books?”
N___ has been vague in identifying himself to Mary Frances. So far as she knows he is someone attached to Rockefeller Life Sciences, a young colleague of the distinguished Professor; she has sighted N___ in the Professor’s company, setting up the Professor’s computer for his PowerPoint lectures. But N___ has been purposefully elusive in giving a title to his role, a subject attached to his work.
Chief lab technician. Peregrine hunter-falcon, sent out into the world to do the Professor’s bidding.
Thinking: the seminal solution, in a syringe in a compartment of the refrigerator, carefully wrapped in gauze. Must be brought out, to be at room temperature, or near-room temperature, by the time of use. Twenty minutes?
Many times N___ has coolly rehearsed in his imagination the steps of the insemination. First, he must establish that the subject has ingested enough flunitrazepam to render her erotically stimulated and yet lethargic, dreamy; confused, yet not alarmed; trusting as a child is trusting.
“Mary Frances? I think you will like this. I—I chose this—for us … For this occasion.”
Prominent as a prop in a play, a bottle of red wine on a counter in the kitchen. N___ has not purchased the wine but guesses that it is sweet, to appeal to the experimental subject’s probable taste for sweet things. N___ pours wine for each of them and in Mary Frances’s glass surreptitiously dissolves the colorless and tasteless drug that will enter the girl’s bloodstream within seconds.
“Oh! This is—kind of—going to my head …” Laughing as she trips on a carpet, and N___ catches her.
And, soon afterward: “It is getting kind of cozy here, I guess … But must be sad here, Nath’iel, isn’t it?—to be alone so much …”
So wistfully she speaks, in her clumsy attempt to be coquettish, N___ understands that she is speaking about herself.
Neither is accustomed to drinking, it seems. Yet Mary Frances finishes the glass N___ has poured for her taking no notice that N___ only pretends to drink his glass. He cannot risk losing control of this situation which is quite unlike anything he has ever attempted in his life, and for which there would appear to be no precedent.
Unorthodox methods are but shortcuts to scientific advancement. But, being unorthodox, they cannot be shared with anyone outside the laboratory.
At last, after an appropriate number of minutes, leading the experimental subject into the bedroom. Switching on a light. Hoping that Mary Frances doesn’t sense that this room isn’t really a familiar place to N_____, he’d had time only to cursorily glance around earlier that week, to bring over a few items, stock the refrigerator and a storage area with things essential to this step of the experiment … Even as N___ assures the girl that he will “be careful”—that is, he will use a condom—certainly, he will use a condom—he understands that Mary Frances is too excited/distracted to care what he might do, or even exactly to notice. As soon as N___ gently nudges her onto the bed, and they begin kissing, and running their hands over each other, and tugging at each other’s clothing, Mary Frances is oblivious to all else.
Love love love you. Oh—Nath’iel …
A single glass of wine might have been sufficient to render the naive girl intoxicated, and Mary Frances has had two, in fairly rapid succession. And so the flunitrazepam will be doubly, even triply potent. N___ hopes he will be able to revive her—eventually.
It will not be an aesthetic experience but it should not be onerous: “making love”—“having sex”—with the experimental subject. Essentially a mechanical act like most physical processes that are quasi-involuntary, “instinctive”—in which N____’s body might participate while his mind looks on bemused. Or rather, his mind looks away, fastidiously repelled.
This is not actually me but another in my place—“Nathaniel.”
It is difficult to tell if the experimental subject is drunk, or just wildly affectionate, or both. She is very demonstrative, sobbing with emotion. Many times moaning Love you, Nath’iel. Love love love you not seeming to notice that her lover remains (grimly) silent.
Does he dare to see the girl in the bed? The unclothed female body, so much larger, fleshier than he’d imagined? Heavy breasts corroded with faint bluish veins, nipples like copper coins, heated skin with myriad small blemishes and marks, coarser than his own. Wiry rust-colored pubic hair like underbrush sprouting at the pit of the protruding belly, far thicker than his own, or any he’d ever seen, or imagined. Yet it is touching, Mary Frances seems to have shaved her lower legs, that are hard with muscle; her thighs, slack and jiggly, are covered in coarse hairs. Touching too, the low-browed girl with simian features had taken time to apply mascara to her eyes, lipstick to her mouth.
Despite his reputation for aloofness among his scientist colleagues N___ has felt desire intermittently in his life. Precarious and perishable as swirls of cloud in a windswept sky. Long ago—in another lifetime, and in another language—before he’d become N____—he’d been attracted to very young girls—(children his own age?)—with smooth, hairless, epicene bodies—and long silky (black) hair. These were not sisters of his but might have been sisters for all had been children together, lost and helpless and desperate to be saved by—whoever would save them … In his new lifetime no one matters to him, not as these young girls had mattered. And all of them vanished. He will not think of it, never thinks of it, for there is no purpose to such thinking in his new life as the chief technician of a renowned primate laboratory.
Wondering in subsequent years if it is a sort of sex-fetish—the female must have a full head of hair, preferably falling past her shoulders, yet the female must not have hair, hairs, on any other part of her body for such hairs are repulsive to the male eye …
Ugh!—having to touch the female hairs. That are springy and resilient to the touch, like Galahad’s hairy pelt.
Yet N___ is discovering that despite his disdain he is “attracted” to Mary Frances—perhaps because of his disdain. (There are fine hairs even on her breasts!—disgusting.) It is somehow exciting to him, the girl has become so—passionate. Her skin is coarsely mottled, flushed. Her smeared lips are parted. She is panting, grunting. She is shameless, grasping at him with her hands as no one before has ever grasped at him. A descent into chaos, N___ thinks. Dissolution of a compound, hissing like acid. Fastidious N___ is falling into pieces, he is no longer he. What springs out of the base of his flat belly, like the rosy-pink fleshy tube that springs out of Galahad’s belly, is not he.
A crude stranger, suddenly frantic with desire. Grunting like a chimp.
Nothing aesthetic here. Only just raw appetite here.
No holding back, N___ must enter the female body as Galahad might have done. Shuts his eyes, ceases breathing. Immediately the female grips him, muscled arms, legs. Inside the heated flesh, muscle. He is thrusting, pumping. Involuntary. Helpless. The chief technician in the Professor’s esteemed lab has become a wildly thrusting machine, brainless as a chimp.
Fleeting images of very young girl-children with long silky (black) hair pass through his brain like wraiths. But too quickly, he can’t hold on to them and will forget them at once.
At last, it is over. Has ended.
Spent and exhausted on the sweat-slick body of the female. His spirit seems to have detached itself from the ordeal. Possibly N___ has died (he thinks): his soul floats above his lifeless body. He feels nothing—for air cannot feel.
The other, the low-browed girl, is barely conscious. She has been sobbing. Her face appears swollen, damp with tears, mucus. Her flesh has gone slack as if boneless. The drug has worked perfectly as the Professor has assured N___ it would.
How N___ would like to flee! Extricate himself from this smelly embrace, hurriedly dress and flee to his own apartment, step into a shower as hot as he can bear …
But no. Now comes the most delicate step of the procedure.
The syringe, filled with the frothy-clotty semen of Pan troglodytes verus, has been placed strategically beneath the bed, where N____’s groping fingers can locate it.
Very carefully, N___ raises himself on his elbow. He is still breathing hard, audibly. (When is the last time N___ has breathed audibly? Even when he jogs in the early morning, he does not pant; his heartbeat is only slightly accelerated, like the calm cascade of his thoughts.) With the most remarkable composure, under these awkward circumstances, N___ brings the tip of the syringe against the vagina of the experimental subject. Inside that nest of damp, sticky hair, as coarse as chimpanzee hair. N___ inserts the tip of the syringe as carefully as he can so as not to disturb Mary Frances who lies spread-eagled and sprawled in the damp bedclothes. (Though by this time very little could have disturbed the unconscious girl, who could not have been more deeply asleep if she’d been anesthetized.)
Within seconds the syringe is emptied of its cloudy liquid. N___ has succeeded in the first step of the experiment!
Unknowing, sprawled in a bliss of erotic satisfaction, Mary Frances slumbers on. Perhaps she will be impregnated this very night—it is not probable, but a possibility. The raw yearning with which she’d made love with him suggests that she is ovulating.
Ovulating! Disgusting thought.
Cautiously N___ climbs out of the rumpled bed and stands beside it, naked. With his iPhone he takes several quick pictures of the stuporous experimental subject, to email to the Professor who is sure to be waiting for the latest news.
Step one: completed.
Wondering whether, in fact, he might flee the premises and shower at his apartment, and sleep in his own, pristine bedsheets that night; or, for it is more in line with the romantic narrative in which N___ and the experimental subject each have roles, he should shower here, and try to spend the remainder of the night with Mary Frances who may, in the morning, need to be placated and assured that she is cherished by her lover.
No. Not possible that he can “sleep” with her. Someone will have to change those soiled sheets before he comes anywhere near them again.
The lab administrator can arrange for housekeeping. He will have nothing to do with it.
Deciding that he will shower in the apartment on Edgar Street. It would be distasteful to dress in his clothes, his body sticky and unclean.
It is the first time—he supposes, resigned, that it will not be the last time—that N___ showers in this apartment. At least, there is a good supply of towels, for which he has the lab administrator to thank. At least the shower is adequate—the water temperature is more responsive to calibration than the shower in his own small apartment.
N___ is still giddy—he is still mildly repelled—he feels a thrill of something like vanity. No one else in the Professor’s laboratory could have executed the procedure so flawlessly. His colleagues will make crude jokes, out of envy. But not even the married men, seasoned in the routines of sex, experienced and adroit in feigning emotions they have long since ceased to feel, could have performed as convincingly as N___ performed with a female as unattractive as the experimental subject.
If the experiment comes to fruition, the Professor will single out his chief technician for special thanks though, given the unorthodox nature of the experiment, the details of N____’s contribution will not be divulged.
Previous experiments with creating a (forbidden) hybrid species, a Humanzee, have ended in failure. Insemination of female chimpanzees and other apes with the sperm of Homo sapiens have never resulted in fertilization, so far as reliable records show, though there are accounts of the efforts of the Russian biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov attempting, in the 1920s, to create a hybrid species by impregnating a female ape, that ended with failure and the exile of Ivanov to Siberia.
There are (unverified) accounts too of human females impregnated with the semen of apes, whether voluntarily or otherwise, in laboratories in China, in more recent years; but no scientific data, no conclusive results. If there are rumors that a Humanzee was actually born, somewhere in China in the 1970s, it is usually the case that the Humanzee died soon after birth, and its remains were lost. No data, no photographic evidence.
Ideally, the experimental subject would be a human female voluntarily involved in the experiment, who would nurse and nurture the Humanzee after birth, as human females have occasionally nursed and nurtured chimpanzee infants; but overly restrictive “ethics” laws in the US and elsewhere make such an experiment impossible, and in any case, as the Professor has many times pointed out, no human female could be trusted to continue with the experiment if/when the hybrid specimen is taken from her by research scientists. If, for instance, for whatever reason, the Humanzee had to be euthanized and anatomized, like any experimental animal. Thus, ignorance on the part of the experimental subject is crucial to the project.
When N___ returns to the humid, smelly bedroom, revived from the shower, hair wetly combed, he sees with a small thrill of disgust that the girl is still unconscious, asprawl and oblivious. Hardly a girl, which suggests innocence, but a young woman, which suggests experience.
Softly the young woman moans in her sleep, her back teeth grind just audibly. Her eyelids flutter, he is panicked that she will wake up, but she continues to sleep. Has a forked sperm of Galahad’s pierced an egg inside that slack, fattish belly yet? For N____’s sake, he hopes it will be soon.
Must keep in mind, they are a couple. He will leave a note for her on the bedside table—
Dear Mary Frances
You are so beautiful.
I will call you soon.
Please lock door when you leave.
Thank you.
—Nathaniel
It requires twenty minutes to compose the note. Each word is eked from him. Like squeezing leaden drops of blood out of his veins.
Realizing later that thank you was (probably) not the appropriate phrase.
In a turmoil of dismay, disgust like that sensation of diarrhea microbes simmering in the gut, about to explode through the intestines—N___ lies awake in his chaste bed in fresh-laundered sheets reliving the sex-intercourse with the experimental subject. A part of him is so appalled, it hovers in the air above his prone, motionless body like a wraith. Another part, more callow, careerist, beyond shame, is calculating that the Professor will be very impressed with him. Very.
No. He cannot do it again. Cannot.
But must. One injection of semen will (surely) not be enough.
In his insomniac misery N___ finds himself thinking of the mountains west of Red Bluff. Where with a college friend he’d hiked, backpacked and camped long ago in another lifetime it seemed.
In the mountains above Red Bluff they’d found an abandoned cabin overlooking a fast-moving stream, white-water rapids. Sleeping bags on the floor of the cabin, a birch-log fire in the fireplace. Even when pelting rain fell from the sky he’d been happy there with his friend as aloof and reticent as himself, and as smart.
N___ has long ago lost contact with his friend who’d failed to win a prestigious fellowship to Cal Tech as N___ had. But at the time of his thirtieth birthday N___ returned to hike and backpack alone near Red Bluff wanting to give himself a gift and not knowing what to give himself, remembering he’d been happy on the trail there overlooking the white-water rapids, but the cabin had collapsed and he hadn’t been able to sleep in his sleeping bag on the floor, or build a birch fire as he’d remembered … Yet still for a while he’d been happy there listening to the rushing, downward-plunging mountain stream. So happy!—he recalls.
“Was this person—‘Mary Frances Bowes’—a virgin?” the Professor inquires with an air of bemused disdain.
Taken by surprise N___ cannot think of a reply.
Was the experimental subject a virgin? Possibly. Or not. No? Is it important, belatedly? N___ tries to explain that he doesn’t know, can’t recall. In the height/depth of sexual urgency his consciousness was obliterated, he’d (virtually) ceased to exist.
Scrolling through the pictures on N____’s cell phone, stroking his stiff white goatee, the Professor seems distracted. At last glancing up at N___ as if he has forgotten that N___ is there.
“Good work, N____! Project Galahad is under way.”
Nath’iel? Hi. Kind of missing you. Give a call …
He has given the experimental subject a cell phone number to call. It is not his cell phone and when he checks it, he sees that Mary Frances has called several times. Maybe he will call back, or maybe he will wait for a day or two.
Even after they have become lovers it is N____’s stratagem to see the experimental subject intermittently and unpredictably. Not setting dates with the girl but promising to call her so that she is never sure of him, cannot take him for granted, and is grateful when he calls; often, practically sobbing with relief which she tries to hide, and N___ tries not to acknowledge. Neediness in the female is her disadvantage, and her disadvantage is their advantage. Keep her, the Professor has said, on edge.
“The crucial thing is, if and when the experimental subject becomes pregnant she must be led to believe that you will continue to love her, and that you and you alone will provide her medical care. She must not become desperate and tell someone. She must not arrange for an abortion.”
N___ sees desperation in the small squinting eyes, and feels a thrill of guilt—She is afraid of losing me. Me! As if he were a rare treasure and not rather (as he often thinks of himself) an empty vessel waiting to be filled.
Clinging to N____’s arm when they walk together. Exasperating, and flattering! So desperate is the girl to establish that they are, not two individuals who see each other only occasionally, and who are obviously mismatched, but a couple.
N___ still tutors Mary Frances in biology at least once a week. This was the original pretext of their relationship and it is the (only) part of the relationship that N___ enjoys. It is satisfying to him when Mary Frances earns a decent grade on a quiz or, at midterm, a not-disgraceful grade of 74 which translates into a solid C—passing.
“Oh Nath’iel! I love you.“
Flinching from Mary Frances’s exuberance as she throws her arms around his neck to hug, pressing her bosom against his narrow torso. Feeling a sharp current of desire, in the same instant rebuffed.
He has lost something of the acuity of the peregrine falcon. He must try to retrieve it!
N___ doesn’t want to think that without him Mary Frances would soon forget everything he has taught her. Carefully memorized definitions of biological terms, processes—a synopsis of Darwinian evolutionary theory N___ had prepared for her in the simplest possible terms: in danger of evaporating overnight.
She might not get into nursing school, N___ thinks. How disappointed she will be!
For by then, N___ will out of her life. The experimental subject will be expelled from the experiment, of no further use.
Possibly, she could train to be a nurse’s aide? A hospital attendant?
Elementary school teacher? No doubt, Mary Frances could make the right man a good wife.
Maybe, in some circuitous way unknown to her, the Professor could help her find work. N___ will inquire, in time.
N___ doesn’t see Mary Frances for days. A week. It is part of the stratagem but he doesn’t miss her and tries not to think of her—that is, of their frantic and convulsive couplings in the bed in the Edgar Street apartment which are followed by 1) Mary Frances’s stupor, lasting for hours; and 2) the injection of chimpanzee semen, executed by the lab technician with unwavering skill if with unyielding disgust. When at last they meet for dinner at an obscure Chinese restaurant in the vicinity of Edgar Street N___ sees the wild anguish in the girl’s eyes, the chapped lips that look as if she has been gnawing them, and the thought comes to him—Is she pregnant? He realizes that he is frightened of the possibility.
Mary Frances clutches at N____’s hand. It is her worry, she says, can’t sleep at night worrying, that N___ does not “respect” her now. “I mean, now that we are, like, seeing each other—kind of—‘seriously’… .” Her voice trails off weakly, she is deeply embarrassed and can’t bring herself to say, having sex.
Quickly N___ says that his feelings for her have not changed at all—of course he “respects” her. But then his mind goes blank. He has no idea what to say next.
“I hope you mean it, Nath’iel, and aren’t just saying it to—be nice …”
Still, N___ can’t think what to say. He is supposed to say—Of course I love you.
Impulsively then, Mary Frances leans forward across the table, and kisses N____’s startled mouth. Her eyelids droop coquettishly, pathetically. “I think about you—us—all the time. Really hard to concentrate on my courses! Y’know—what I am thinking: do you? Darling?”
Darling. It is a word, an utterance, that sounds as if it has been many times rehearsed. N___ feels a trickle of icy sweat run into the small of his back.
A waitress arrives with sticky plastic menus. A Chinese-American girl of about twenty, child-sized, straight-cut black bangs, beautiful thick-lashed eyes, quizzical half-smile taking in N___ with the plain stocky white girl who appears to be in an emotional state, tears on her flushed cheeks.
N___ looks away, can’t meet the waitress’s skeptical eyes.
Can’t acknowledge the waitress’s mute query—Why, you and her?
3.
Each week reporting to the Professor: “Not yet.”
Assiduously the chief technician will record in his (encrypted) notes for Project Galahad: eleven acts of sexual intercourse followed (within seconds) by injections of chimpanzee semen, intermittently through the month of November; each injection successfully executed without the suspicion of the experimental subject who’d been administered a powerful tranquilizer to render her lethargic, unaware of surroundings.
Prudently, N___ lessens the dosage of flunitrazepam dissolved into the subject’s drink. The first dose left the female comatose for nearly ten hours.
And then, following the eleventh episode in early December, insemination.
That is, impregnation.
In the New Year, what a shock! But also relief. N____’s first thought is that he will no longer have to go through the motions of lovemaking with the experimental subject …
Shyly, hiding her face against his neck, on a sofa in the apartment on Edgar Street, on a cold windless evening in late January Mary Frances tells her lover that she is going to have his baby. N____’s thudding heart muffles his hearing but he does hear the emphatic—your baby.
Stammering apologetically, “I—I thought maybe—I might be p-pregnant—a while ago—but I wanted to be sure before I told you … I didn’t want you to worry for no reason, Nath’iel.”
This is touchingly considerate of Mary Frances, N___ would think, if N___ had the capacity to think at the moment.
N___ has been waiting for such a revelation for weeks—since the first heroic effort of sexual intercourse in November—yet is now not prepared. Oh, what is the experimental subject saying!
(He is thinking that he must get to a phone—he must contact the Professor. Or—maybe he should make sure that the experimental subject is really pregnant, and not imagining it? He does not dare misinform the Professor about something so crucial …)
Awkwardly N___ embraces and comforts Mary Frances who is wetting his shirt with her tears. Is the distraught young woman weeping out of joy, or fear? Apprehension, or excitement?
She’d taken a drugstore test, Mary Frances says. Twice. So far as she can calculate, she is about five weeks pregnant.
She’d thought she might be pregnant, at least two weeks before. No period for eight-nine weeks, and her breasts “sort of achy, sensitive.” And a “real, queasy feeling in my tummy” in the mornings.
Period—awful term. Achy, sensitive—awful. N___ tries not to visibly recoil in revulsion.
Mary Frances is saying she hopes N___ isn’t upset! She hopes …
“D’you still love me, Nath’iel? I love you—more than ever.”
But N___ has not told her he loved her, at all!
Pleading with N___ as if the pregnancy were her fault alone: “Are you angry with me, Nath’iel? Please tell me you are not …”
N___ stammers: “Of course—not. I just can’t understand how it happened, Mary Frances. I thought I was very careful, but …” Feebly his voice falters. He is perspiring, shivering.
This is such a private matter. So intimate. Physical.
Shameful! (And N____’s role in it, unspeakable.)
Innocent, trusting Mary Frances is pregnant. Mary Frances’s womb has been inseminated. The numerous injections of chimpanzee semen have had the intended effect, a human female has been impregnated by a chimpanzee. It is no longer a theoretical experiment with a clueless experimental subject but is rapidly becoming—“real.”
Yet it does not seem real to N_____, just yet. He wonders if all “fathers” feel this way, having been told that a female with whom they have had sex is pregnant.
But it is only an experiment, N___ reminds himself. The fetus, the infant, the creature-to-be-born, is not his; does not bear his DNA. The experiment will be known in the history of science as Project Galahad.
Mary Frances’s face is mottled with happiness like measles. Her usually coarse skin glows. She is mistaking N____’s silence for male dismay, perhaps.
“I hope this is not a terrible shock to you, Nath’iel. I know that you—you tried—to prevent what has happened. I’ve been praying for both of us, Nath’iel. I want us to do the right thing. It’s like God found a way for us, without our knowing. It was meant to be.”
Meant to be! But it was not meant to be. If Mary Frances knew what was beginning to germinate in her womb, she would be appalled, terrified …
“I have to pinch myself, to believe it’s ‘real.’ Oh God—me. My parents would be so ashamed.”
It is typical of Mary Frances to think aloud, in a sort of rambling exclamatory monologue. N___ has heard certain of his (white) colleagues in Life Sciences thinking aloud in this way, moving their lips, even grimacing and gesturing. He would never behave so riskily. His thoughts are meant for N___ alone.
N___ doesn’t know what to do with his hands, shyly caresses Mary Frances’s back as she presses against him, quivering with emotion. In the agitation of the moment N___ cannot think clearly. It is a profound fact—the experimental subject has become the impregnated subject.
The impregnated subject is likely to become one of the most famous/notorious female specimens in the history of science.
In a lowered voice Mary Frances tells N___ that she doesn’t believe in abortion. Hesitating to speak the word, that sounds harsh and blunt in her breathy voice: abor-tion.
N___ stammers that he doesn’t either. Does not believe in abortion.
Hears himself uttering such asinine words! Why would one believe, or not believe, in abortion?
“Oh Nath’iel darling! You don’t? Really?”
“I—I don’t. No …”
“Then—you want us to have the baby? Our baby?”
“Y-Yes …”
Our baby. N____’s head is swimming. He wonders if the agitation he feels is the agitation he would be feeling if indeed the inseminating sperm had been his.
Now Mary Frances is weeping in earnest. Her warm, fleshy body smells of perspiration and great joy. Already she seems motherly to him, matronly. Her sizable breasts, wide hips … Daringly she takes N____’s loose, limp hand and presses it against her soft belly, that bulges beneath the waistband of her slacks.
It seems that Mary Frances has been anguished about telling him. Worried that he wouldn’t want her to have the baby—“It’s, like, what most guys would want. Lots of girls I know. ‘Get an abortion, I’ll pay for it.’ Like a baby is some kind of accident, and not God’s plan.”
“Yes. That—is so …”
“Lots of guys, they’d drop a girl cold. Maybe try to get out of paying for the abortion, even. Bastards!” Mary Frances shakes her head in disgust. How fortunate it is, N___ isn’t one of them.
N___ hears himself say with numbed lips that of course he wants her to have the baby. Mary Frances is so naive, she doesn’t question how she has come to be pregnant when, so far as she knows, N___ took precautions each time they’d grappled together on the bed; he supposes that to one who believes that God ordains all things, an improbable pregnancy has to be a part of a plan.
Ironic that, though indeed this pregnancy is a part of a plan, it is the Professor’s plan, and not God’s.
How thrilled the Professor will be! How pleased with his chief technician, another time.
N___ assures Mary Frances that she is so precious to him, their baby is so precious, he will oversee her medical care—entirely. She will not have to see any young, barely trained doctor provided by University Health Care—she will have a private doctor, the most distinguished obstetrician in the vicinity. Through his contacts in Life Sciences N___ will arrange for her prenatal care beginning with an examination within a day or two.
Seeing the wondering expression in Mary Frances’s face N___ is inspired to tell her what the Professor has planned: “There’s an excellent obstetrics clinic in Life Sciences Hall, on one of the high, ‘restricted’ floors. Not just a clinic for prenatal care but where you will have the baby. What isn’t covered by my contract with the University, I will pay.”
N___ is speaking extravagantly. Why is he saying such things? His heart beats rapidly and his face is flushed with the excitement of fatherhood. Almost N____ is thinking that indeed he would want to pay for the baby, for he is responsible.
How suddenly it has happened that Mary Frances Bowes, a plain-faced female to whom N____ would not have given a second glance under normal circumstances, has become a unique and priceless specimen. A female human successfully impregnated with the sperm of Pan troglodytes verus, possibly for the first time in history. Without her knowledge the female’s fleshy/slatternly body has been transformed.
What is Mary Frances now worth? In terms of the scientific research the birth will spawn, many millions of dollars.
In terms of the scientific careers the Humanzee will enrich, yet more millions of dollars.
A Nobel Prize for the Professor. If all goes well.
Of course, the exact details of Project Galahad can never be revealed. The identity of the experimental subject/birth mother, the identity of the chief technician/surrogate father. The (unorthodox) means by which the impregnation was administered. Somehow, utilizing the genius for which he is known in the scientific research community, the Professor will find a way to present the lab’s astonishing findings to the world that will protect the researchers from charges of ethics violations, and worse.
He will receive acknowledgment, if not the sort of fame that will accrue to the Professor.
Seeing how the experimental subject is gazing at him, with what adoration, awe, neediness, N____ wonders: will Mary Frances expect him to marry her? Once the euphoria of the hour wanes, marriage will certainly be an issue.
This too has been scripted beforehand. N____ is prepared.
Informing Mary Frances in a voice of regret that since he is in the United States on a special science-research visa he is not allowed to enter into any legal, contractual arrangement with any US citizen under penalty of expulsion—“It’s a State Department regulation. So, Mary Frances, we could not be married, at least for the foreseeable future, until I become a US citizen.”
“Oh! I—I guess so …”
Mary Frances absorbs the information with a glazed smile. Perhaps she is not quite hearing N_____. Perhaps her brain is cranking out its elemental plan of childlike cunning—best to bide her time, not to appear upset, not to make demands on N_____. God will work out things for the best.
N____ says, relenting: “We could become engaged. Would you like that? It would have to be a secret, though—like the pregnancy—for as long as you can keep it secret. And my identity, you would have to keep secret.”
“Engaged! Do you mean it, Nath’iel?”
“My schedule can’t be changed, unfortunately. I couldn’t see you any more than I have been seeing you …”
“Oh no, I mean—I wouldn’t expect it. ‘Engaged’—that would be—wonderful …”
Mary Frances throws her arms around N____’s neck like a drowning person. She could not be more dazed than if N____ had given her flunitrazepam to dampen her cognitive abilities.
“As long as you understand, the engagement would have to be a secret from your family. The identity of the father of the baby would have to be a secret. Otherwise I could be deported. And then we would never marry.”
Marry as a collective verb, in an utterance of N____’s. He is somewhat dazed himself, as if he has been drinking.
Mary Frances hugs him tight, tight. Confessing to him in a rush of words, that she is very ashamed—“Darling, I don’t think that I can take you to meet my family anyway. They are—they are good Christians—but—they don’t like people they call ‘Japs’ or ‘Chinese’—‘Orientals.’ Or Mexicans. They don’t like—well, anybody who doesn’t look like them. (They are very biased about Negroes!) Even if I explained who you are, an ‘Asian person’ with an advanced science degree, a professor at the University, and nothing like what they might think—(they would probably think ‘Communist’)—they would not forgive me. I don’t know that I could ever return home to them with our baby, or you. Please forgive me, Nath’iel—in this happy time, I am so ashamed.”
N____ is stunned by this revelation. He has so naturally assumed his superiority to the low-browed white girl, it’s a shock to him that she might not share that conviction. In defying her racist parents Mary Frances is being bravely magnanimous in loving him.
N____ assures Mary Frances that he understands. Of course there are people who can’t help their prejudices against other races. He doesn’t doubt, he tells her—(though in fact N____ does doubt, vehemently)—that her relatives are “good Christians.”
Thinking how fortunate he is, for the sake of Project Galahad, that Mary Frances doesn’t want to introduce him to her family, and will keep her pregnancy a secret from them.
To celebrate the happy occasion (as an expectant father might plausibly wish to do) N____ opens a bottle of red wine with shaky fingers. Requires several tries to extricate the damned cork. Pours wine into two glasses but Mary Frances declines hers, eyes glowing and glazed with joy—“Oh Nathi’el, gosh! Now I’m ‘expecting,’ I can’t drink.”
But Mary Frances will sit close beside N____ on the sofa as he drinks from his glass, snuggling against him like a fevered, furry creature. Not drinking with him but it’s as if the sweet red wine has gone to her head, or into the damp netherworld between her fleshy thighs. Her eyelids droop and her lips part, her head heavy upon his shoulder, stubby fingers tight-clasped through his, pulling his hand to rest on her soft stomach. A little sleepy-happy moan deep in her throat, of utter euphoria. N____ sits very still, neither yielding nor resisting.
He has not (yet) contacted the Professor with the good news. His thoughts swirl like a hive of aroused wasps even as the experimental subject sinks into a light doze.
Is the news good? For whom, good? N____ swallows a mouthful of wine. Thoughts continue to swirl, unresolved.
Soon then, N____ is instructed by the Professor to bring Mary Frances to the hastily constituted “Obstetrics Care Clinic” on the tenth floor of Rockefeller Life Sciences Hall where she is examined by an individual introduced to her as “Dr. Ellis”—gynecologist/obstetrician—middle-aged, male, Caucasian; in fact, N____ recognizes the man as an experimental embryologist and one of the Professor’s collaborators.
After a thorough examination including highly detailed blood work kindly “Dr. Ellis” informs Mary Frances that, as she has suspected, she is approximately five weeks pregnant—“Which makes your due date approximately two hundred sixty days from now, my dear, in mid-September.”
“Ellis” has been briefed on the unorthodox nature of the young woman’s pregnancy; he has signed a confidentiality contract with the Professor, with whom he has worked on several projects in the past, of a sensitive nature involving the effects of experimental pharmaceuticals upon unborn fetuses (of black and Hispanic pregnant women patients at a city clinic). In calculating the expectant mother’s due date he has shrewdly averaged the gestation periods—two hundred thirty-seven days for Pan troglodytes verus, two hundred eighty days for Homo sapiens.
Telling the young woman that the estimate is only approximate of course. “Some babies insist upon coming into the world earlier than they are expected, and some babies come later.”
Mary Frances bursts into tears. Stammering to the doctor that she is so happy, God has blessed her at a younger age than she’d have imagined.
N____ has accompanied Mary Frances to the Obstetrics Care Clinic where he waits for her, for some time. N____ is the only person who waits in the small lounge. Fascinating to him, to see how an area of the tenth floor that was formerly office space for junior staff has been refashioned by the Professor’s directive, virtually overnight, with the addition of stark white floor-to-ceiling partitions that give the space a clinical atmosphere. There is even a receptionist’s desk, and a receptionist. There is a nurse named “Betty”—a mature woman in a white nylon pants suit, pale stockings and rubber-soled white shoes who has greeted the experimental subject warmly and will be an essential contact for Mary Frances through the months of the pregnancy. On the white walls are posters relating to women’s health—diagrams of the female body with reproductive organs luridly highlighted, posters advertising essential foods for girls and women, photographs of Olympic women athletes bursting with health and strength. The receptionist, a younger woman, smiles at N____ as one might smile at an uneasy young father-to-be.
Against a floor-to-ceiling plate glass window, a large potted plant with shiny spear-leaves which N____ thinks he has seen before. In the Professor’s outer office?
Fortunately N____ has brought along his laptop to the Clinic—the lightweight little computer is attached to N____ like a colonoscopy bag.
Mary Frances is with the doctor for more than an hour. Each of the experimental subject’s appointments in the Clinic will be thorough. Every aspect of the unorthodox pregnancy will be recorded. Unknown to the subject the examinations will be videotaped and studied by the members of the primate lab; these will include weekly pelvic exams, and an amniocentesis in the early second trimester of the pregnancy, for the progress of the hybrid embryo must be carefully monitored. Members of the primate lab are concerned that the hybrid fertilization will not “hold”—the Professor himself has cautioned against excessive optimism and not to be disappointed if Project Galahad ends in a miscarriage, for that is usually nature’s way of correcting a genetic anomaly. But even a miscarriage will prove scientifically valuable, for the remains of the fetus, however rudimentary in development, will be eagerly and exhaustively studied.
Dr. Ellis has prescribed a restricted diet for Mary Frances, low in sodium and high in protein and calcium; daily exercise is “a must” and no bad habits—smoking, alcohol. Nurse Betty provides pamphlets for Mary Frances to take home and consult. If Mary Frances has any questions about the pregnancy, any questions at all, she is to call Nurse Betty at once on a private number—“Let’s make that a promise, Mary Frances!”
All this attention is deeply moving and flattering to Mary Frances. Already her experience as an unwed expectant mother is totally unlike the dire predictions her mother and female relatives would have made for her; indeed, Mary Frances cannot believe how nice everyone is being, including dear, darling “Nath’iel” who has surprised her by being not disapproving and resentful since she’s become pregnant, but supportive of her decision to have the baby.
Both Dr. Ellis and Nurse Betty caution Mary Frances, however, not to discuss her prenatal care with anyone. Not a roommate or a friend, not a family member or a relative. For the Life Sciences Obstetrics Care Clinic is a privately endowed health-care facility that can accept very few patients, and these are usually limited to the wives of tenured faculty. Other young female students at the University are eligible only for minimal prenatal care at the University infirmary but Mary Frances is “different”—“special”—because of N____’s appointment in Life Sciences.
Before Mary Frances leaves the Clinic she is asked to sign a “confidentiality contract,” agreeing not to discuss any aspect of her prenatal health care. This includes the identity of her obstetrician and the location of the Clinic. Crucially, it includes the identity of N____ whose work-visa would be revoked by the State Department.
Seeing that Mary Frances is looking flushed and confused by so much happening to her within a small space of time N____ takes the contract from her to examine. He has seen a draft of the document previously, yet its contents are obscure even to him, who’d helped compose it: seven numbered paragraphs of tight-packed small print which grants to the Clinic certain prerogatives regarding the pregnancy and birth, including the surrendering of the infant at the time of birth or shortly thereafter, as well as the surrender of the fetus in the event of a miscarriage, at the “discretion” of the Clinic. Such an unorthodox document could have no legal binding of course but it is supposed that the naive experimental subject could be intimidated into accepting its terms if necessary.
N____ hesitates just a moment before telling Mary Frances to sign—“Go ahead, darling. It’s just legalese. It’s just routine.”
With a giddy smile and a flourish of a pen Mary Frances signs the document.
Has N____ called her—darling? The word slipped out, unbidden.
“Ideally, as soon as the hybrid is born, the mother should die. For in this case she can’t be trusted to nurse it, and she can’t be trusted not to reveal our secret.”
The Professor speaks so thoughtfully, tugging at his stiff white goatee, others around the table are tugged in his wake, as a large speeding vehicle tugs smaller vehicles in its wake.
“Yes. That is—true. But to be realistic …”
“—we can’t just kill her. Of course.”
“Of course not. But in the event of her ‘dying in childbirth’—being killed by an embolism, for instance—”
“—that would be very practical. An embolism is plausible. But—”
“—a hemorrhage, after a difficult birth. We’ll schedule a caesarean, in any case. And the medical report would be that both mother and infant failed to survive a difficult birth. There’d be no problem about death certificates so that the Humanzee could be raised in seclusion, right on this floor, for its natural life.”
“Yes, but—isn’t it more likely that the embryo will self-destruct? A miscarriage …”
“… she would never know. What was in her womb …”
“… or a stillbirth. In which case she might see the body, and realize that …”
“No. She would not, necessarily. A premature infant Humanzee would probably resemble a human infant just enough that a drugged and distraught female wouldn’t know the difference even if she did ‘see’ it.”
“If it lives, the female can still be told that it has died. Just make sure that she’s sufficiently groggy from the anesthetic …”
“But consider the possibility that she can nurse it—would want to nurse it. The strong maternal instinct to ‘nurture’ might overcome revulsion—”
“… if she ‘sees’ the infant Humanzee but doesn’t recognize it as something other than human …”
“The maternal instinct is so powerful, the female would wish to believe that her infant is normal, so she might actually see it as normal …”
“… or a human infant with birth defects, a Down syndrome infant for instance, which she could certainly nurse and with which she might bond.”
“That might work …”
“That is taking an enormous risk …”
“Except as the Humanzee matures wouldn’t it become clear to even the most deluded female that her baby isn’t—human?”
“But would it make a difference? If the female bonds with the infant, even a deformed or hybrid infant, isn’t that enough for her to remain its chief nurturer? Isn’t that the essence of the female instinct?”
“No, no! Wait—”
“Ridiculous—”
“Dangerous—”
“We can’t have her ‘nurturing’ the hybrid as if it were hers. Bringing it up like a child! It’s ours and belongs in our lab.”
“She would never give it up, once she ‘bonded’ with it. No nursing!”
“Better to take it from her immediately after the birth, tell her it’s dead. Show her—something. An infant corpse, an aborted embryo. I could easily acquire the remains of an embryo from an abortion clinic. She’d be so agitated she couldn’t think straight …”
“… maybe tell her it died, but we can harvest its organs. ‘Give life to another baby.’ Pay her off …”
“Tell her there’s medical insurance at the Clinic. Five thousand dollars. That should do it.”
“She won’t be alone and grieving—N____ can take care of her …”
“What if she has a breakdown, is taken to an ER? They see she’s had a baby, they ask what happened to the baby …”
“I told you: the ideal situation is that the mother dies as soon as the creature is born. We can provide nursing, nurture. What about Maude?”
Maude! A ripple of approval around the table.
During this discussion N____ sits in a state of suspended animation, numbed as if by Novocain. Taking notes on his laptop as usual. It is typical of N____ not to provide much commentary at the weekly meetings unless the Professor or another colleague asks his opinion; now, the Professor pointedly turns to N____ to ask what he thinks.
“’What do I think?”—N____ seems to be considering.
A long pause. A fleeting and indecipherable expression crosses N____’s face. His fingers have ceased typing on the laptop. The Professor and the others wait. Very straight-backed the chief technician sits, staring at the laptop screen as if searching for the answer there.
4.
Methodically N____ parcels out his time with the experimental subject.
Following the Professor’s directive. The female’s disadvantage is the male’s advantage. Keep her on edge.
Keeping Mary Frances both dependent upon him and uncertain of him. Lonely for him and yet fearful of contacting him. “Crazy in love with him”—(she has said, embarrassingly)—yet fearful of annoying him. Just when the experimental subject thinks that she may have offended N_____, and that N____ may have abandoned her, N____ will call her as if nothing is wrong; N____ will bring her flowers, take her to dinner and to the movies, bring her back to the apartment on Edgar Street to stay the night.
N____ will (clenching his teeth) call her darling. Acquiesce when the experimental subject seizes his hand to press against her alarmingly swelling belly.
Listen intently, nod, smile indulgently as Mary Frances chatters excitedly about names for Baby.
“Tiffany” is her first choice, if Baby is a girl. Runners-up: “Brooke”—“Emma”—“Sarah”—“Elizabeth” …
“Nathaniel, Jr.” is her first choice, if Baby is a boy. Runners-up: “Joseph”—“Matthew”—“Jonathan” …
Asked what his favorite names are N____ says that he has no favorite names and will let Mary Frances choose.
“Oh, but—not even one name? Say it’s a baby girl …”
N____ can’t recall the names Mary Frances has suggested and so says, “Well—there’s ‘Mary Frances’—”
“Oh, gosh no. That’s sweet of you, Nath’iel, but—not a good idea. ’Cause there’s no ‘Mary Frances, Jr.’—there’d have to be ‘Big Mary Frances’ and ‘Little Mary Frances.’” Mary Frances shakes her head, laughing. “But ‘Nath’iel, Jr.’—that would be nice. We could call him ‘Nath-ie’ …”
N____ shudders. His name attached to the hybrid Humanzee.
“‘Galahad.’ That’s a distinctive name.”
“‘Gala-had. ’Is that a well-known name? Not the Bible, is it?” Mary Frances frowns, considering.
N____ says, “It might be in the Bible. One of the obscure books. It’s a traditional name.”
“Yes, I like it, kind of—‘Gala-had.’ It’s different. Like, high-class!”
N____ gazes at the experimental subject with something like affection. A weird, unwished-for rush of affection. To be so easily made happy! He who has no family, no siblings, feels their absence in his life now. If he’d had a sister like Mary Frances, relentlessly cheerful, optimistic … He will miss her, he thinks, when Project Galahad has no need for her.
Following her initial visit to the Obstetrics Care Clinic Mary Frances is issued an electronic ID card that allows her to enter the restricted tenth floor of Rockefeller Life Sciences unaccompanied by N_____. (Mary Frances’s card does not admit her to other restricted floors, but only to the Clinic on the tenth floor; she could not, for instance, wander about the eighth floor in search of her handsome Asian fiancé “Nathaniel Li.”) Soon she comes to look forward to the weekly appointments with Dr. Ellis which are comforting and flattering to her, for she is treated “like a princess” by the kindly doctor; indeed, Mary Frances has never heard of any expectant mother who has been treated so well, and only wishes that she could boast a little to her relatives back home—“But no, I won’t. I promised, and I won’t.”
After the clinical examination with Dr. Ellis, Nurse Betty takes time to chat companionably with Mary Frances about how the expectant mother is feeling. Nothing is too trivial for Nurse Betty to inquire after: what are Mary Frances’s moods, how is her appetite, does she have morning sickness, does she sleep through the night or get up to use the bathroom, and how many times; is she maintaining a good diet, getting exercise every day, is the baby starting to “move”—“kick”? Sometimes Nurse Betty invites Mary Frances to have coffee with her downstairs, to continue their conversation which veers onto other subjects: their respective astrological signs (Nurse Betty, Gemini; Mary Frances, Capricorn), their favorite foods, TV shows, celebrities.
It is wonderful, Mary Frances tells N_____, how Nurse Betty has become her closest woman friend at the University. How Nurse Betty is just so nice, and so kind. How Nurse Betty cares about Mary Frances as her own mother definitely wouldn’t—“Mom would just scold and say how ashamed they were that I was having a baby, and nag why I wasn’t married.”
Nag why I wasn’t married. This has become a woeful refrain.
(N____ has not (yet) given Mary Frances an engagement ring. He has declared that they are “secretly engaged”—but it must be kept a secret from all of the world.)
Usually, N____ only half-listens to Mary Frances’s chatter. His brain is elsewhere. If a brain could be encased in a laptop, N____’s brain is there encased, in the labyrinthine pathways of a thousand interests as remote from the expectant experimental subject as Jupiter is remote, and as unfathomable to her as that planet would be.
In fact N____ has no need to listen to Mary Frances’s chatter for he knows far more about her pregnancy than Mary Frances herself knows. At the weekly primate meetings he and the others are briefed on the expectant mother’s medical condition, in detail, by their embryologist colleague; if “Dr. Ellis” has videotaped the pelvic exam, it will be shown in ghastly magnification; the results of the amniocentesis will be of particular interest, indicating indeed that the developing fetus is genetically consistent with a “hybrid” species; ultrasound images of the maturing fetus (not obviously not-Homo sapiens initially, but definitely male) are displayed, and discussed. Every word however banal and irrelevant to Project Galahad that passes between Mary Frances and the kindly physician, and Mary Frances and the friendly nurse, is replayed for the team, and these words N____ must endure in dread of an impulsive outburst by the expectant mother—Oh but gosh! He doesn’t love me! The father of my baby doesn’t love me! Doesn’t even touch me now I am pregnant! Goes all stiff and cold if I touch him!
“You must introduce me, N____! She will never suspect a thing.”
So many pictures and more recently videos and ultrasound scans of the experimental subject has the Professor seen, so familiar has the elder scientist become with every square inch of the pregnant female’s epidermis, still more the shadowy fecund interior of her uterus bearing its precious cargo, as well as her uterine canal and vagina, at last he decides that he must meet her in the “flesh”—in the fifth month of pregnancy when Mary Frances’s belly is already round and heavy as a drum and her face is flushed with a rude sort of female health and vigor.
“My dear, hello! N____ has told me, he has been tutoring you in my undergraduate course …” The Professor seems surprised, the experimental subject is an actual person, not nearly so unattractive as her pictures have suggested; her pink-lipstick smile is childlike, trusting; her small mud-brown eyes shine. She is wearing colorful clothes, red shorts that reveal inches of her pudgy thighs, a sleeveless candy-striped blouse that exposes her fatty upper arms and billows over her belly. Her body, big-breasted, big-hipped, misshapen now with pregnancy, exudes its own attraction, like that of a large animal in the prime of its life.
Reluctantly N____ has brought Mary Frances to meet the Professor, seemingly by chance, in the first-floor lounge in Life Sciences. As if the distinguished Professor would be lingering here just waiting for them. It does not seem to occur to the experimental subject that it is odd, the Professor does not seem to think it is odd that his chief technician, an adult research scientist, seems to be romantically linked with a twenty-year-old female undergraduate in General Studies, low-browed and barely articulate.
“Oh yes, Nath’iel did … ‘tutor’ me. Saved my life, literally …”
“Did he! ‘Literally.’ That was kind of him.”
Mary Frances murmurs, blushing, not very coherently that she “really loved” the Professor’s lectures but had trouble remembering them afterward—“Even when Nath’iel explained what you were saying, and had me memorize, it was just so, so hard … Like ‘Ontology repeats philology’—something like that …”
There is a pause. N____’s face flames, he cannot look at the Professor.
Of course, in his lecture, the Professor had spent some time ironically debunking the famous nineteenth-century formula Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—the (now discredited) theory that as the human fetus develops in the womb it recapitulates, in miniature, the stages of animal evolution itself, culminating in Homo sapiens. N____ had to instruct his easily confused student in the original meaning of the catchphrase, in order to discredit it; but this turned out to be too complicated for Mary Frances who soon reversed the point of the Professor’s lecture, and seems to have scrambled the formula itself.
The Professor laughs, delighted. “Ontology repeats philology’—that is a novel idea, my dear. Thank you!”
N____ dreads the Professor telling this anecdote to his colleagues in the primate lab. Teasing a subordinate, sometimes mercilessly, to rouse the others to laughter, is one of the Professor’s less admirable traits; yet few fail to laugh when he does.
(Except N____ refuses to laugh when the Professor is being witty at the expense of another. His impassive face, downturned eyes, stiff posture give no hint that he is even aware of his mentor’s playful cruelty.)
N____ has not been tutoring Mary Frances recently. One semester of Intro to Biology was more than enough for the struggling first-year student who’d managed to pass the course, through N____’s valiant effort, with a C–.
(Did N____ cheat on behalf of the experimental subject, preparing her lab reports for her? Providing her with exam questions before the final?) At N____’s suggestion Mary Frances has concentrated on General Studies courses in elementary school education, public health, “communication arts,” in which she has managed to earn B’s and C’s without making herself anxious and exhausted. Her hope of nursing school has been deferred.
And now the spring semester has ended also, and most undergraduates have departed the campus. Except Mary Frances of course, who will remain over the summer months, ever more pregnant with the hybrid Humanzee, living now in the apartment on Edgar Street and seeing “Dr. Ellis” and “Nurse Betty” each Monday morning without fail. (N____ has moved out of the Edgar Street apartment, or rather has pretended to move out, since he’d never lived there, explaining to Mary Frances his need for greater privacy and quiet in which to do his work. It is Mary Frances’s assumption, if she thinks of it at all, that N____ pays the rent on the apartment.)
Eyeing her closely, greedily, the Professor shakes the warm fleshy hand of the experimental subject, and inveigles her into an awkward sort of banter—an older, white-bearded gentleman asking questions of a stout flush-faced girl clearly in awe of him; squinting at him, smiling nervously, leaning back so that her weight is on her heels, one hand absently resting on the swell of her belly. Oh!—she is provoked to laugh, the gentlemanly Professor is so witty.
In sulky silence N____ listens to the exchange, standing a little apart from the two, as if he were not the Professor’s chief and most trusted technician, and the girl’s most intimate acquaintance, indeed, in the girl’s fevered imagination, the father of her baby-to-be.
N____ is relieved that the Professor has let drop Ontology repeats philology. And notices that in his enigmatic way the older man seems rather in awe of Mary Frances. (Is he reconsidering his chilling strategy of deleting her from Project Galahad by allowing her to die, or rather arranging for her to die after giving birth?) N____ feels a stab of something like sexual jealousy as the Professor’s playful remarks provoke the pregnant girl to blushing, and to giggling foolishly.
In reply to his queries Mary Frances tells the Professor that she is staying on campus that summer and not returning home—“I love it here! I have my own apartment here. The wonderful maternity clinic, I could not get anywhere else.” Glancing at N____ as if waiting for him to concur. Waiting for N____ to declare proudly to the white-haired gentleman—We are having this baby together, Professor.
N____ says nothing of the sort. Stiffly N____ stands several feet away from Mary Frances and the smirking Professor as if disdainful of listening to their conversation.
Though wincing when the Professor asks, “Have you selected a name for your baby-boy-to-be, my dear?”
“Oh! How did you know it would be a baby boy?”—Mary Frances asks, wide-eyed.
“Why, I—I did not know—it was a guess.” Adroitly the Professor smooths over his blunder saying he has a sort of “second sight” about such matters, an intuition based upon how far back on her heels an expectant mother balances herself. “Male fetuses tend to be heavier, on the whole, than female. The mother’s posture corrects for this.”
“His name is maybe going to be—well, we don’t know. Yet.” Mary Frances’s face turns rosy; she’d come close to revealing her favored name, “Nath’iel, Jr.”
Soon then the Professor goads Mary Frances into stammering that yes, she and N____ are engaged, kind of—“Nath’iel doesn’t want people to know but well—we are.”
Clapping her hand over her mouth in the realization that she has revealed a secret! Mary Frances is chagrined.
N____ smiles grimly. He is certainly not going to chide Mary Frances in front of the Professor who has been glancing at him bemused.
Of course, the Professor knows that N____ and the experimental subject are “engaged.” And the Professor knows that the “engagement” is supposed to be a secret. It is mischievous of him, like a naughty grandfather, to have pried the secret out of credulous Mary Frances.
“Well, then. Congratulations are due to you both! But I will keep your secret, of course.” Pausing then, before saying, with an amused glance at N_____, “And why does your fiancé want to keep the engagement secret, Mary Frances? I am just curious.”
“Because”—Mary Frances casts a dismayed look at N____, “Nath’iel might be deported by the US government if he ‘enters into a contract’ …”
“Yes. I see. That is so—‘Nathaniel’ is not an American citizen quite yet.”
Is there a veiled threat here? But why? The Professor has always favored N____ and has assured him that, under his protection, N____ will be granted citizenship soon.
Unexpectedly, as if he were addressing a child, the Professor asks Mary Frances if she likes animals?—of course, Mary Frances says yes. The Professor asks if Mary Frances would like to visit the animal lab on the eighth floor of Life Sciences?—of course, Mary Frances says yes.
N____ hears a humming in his ears. N____ feels faint. A strong desire to strike the smirking Professor on his right temple where a pale-blue vein throbs like a writhing worm. Strike, smite. Cast the white-haired Professor down dead.
The humming in N____’s ears is just air-conditioning. By now N____ should be accustomed to the climate control of Rockefeller Life Sciences Hall where currents of cool air buffet heads like malicious spirits. Outside, a premature heat wave has come in early June.
N____ says there isn’t time for them to visit the eighth floor even as the Professor slides his arm through Mary Frances’s arm with startling familiarity and leads her to an elevator. With his ID card the Professor accesses the (restricted) floor where experimental animals are kept in air-conditioned isolation.
On the eighth floor the Professor leads Mary Frances through another security door into the animal quarters where the air is both cold and stale-smelling. Though the Professor has not exactly invited N____ to accompany them N____ has clearance to enter the animal quarters at any time he wishes, and it would be awkward for the Professor to exclude him.
So many animals! Rats, mice in small wire cages. Chattering monkeys, marmosets in larger cages. Mary Frances is amazed, wide-eyed. The circulating air is so chilly, Mary Frances hugs herself, shivering. Oh but the smell.
Against a farther wall, in large cages, are several chimpanzees. Like prisoners in solitary confinement sighting their jailers, and suddenly aroused to attention. Is it mealtime? Too soon for mealtime? Most excited and garrulous is the handsome young specimen Galahad, screeching and flinging his arms about eagerly to draw the attention of the stocky rust-haired girl in red shorts and billowing striped blouse whom he has never seen before.
Galahad recognizes the men, coolly ignores the men. Though in Galahad’s crafty shiny eyes the thought that, if the Professor comes near enough to his cage, Galahad will seize the Professor’s wrist and sink his teeth in it to the bone.
N____ isn’t sure how Galahad regards him. Seemingly, Galahad “likes” him, for N____ often gives Galahad treats. Yet, N____ knows better than to trust the crafty wild animal whose semen he’d been milking for weeks.
“Ohhh is this a chimpanzee?”—Mary Frances is thrilled. She pronounces the word carefully. “Gosh! He’s big. What’s your name, Mr. Chimpanzee?”
The Professor tells her: “His name is ‘Galahad.’”
“Oh hi there—‘Galahad.’ That’s a nice kind of high-class name somebody gave you … Wow, you are big, and you are handsome.” Brightly Mary Frances smiles at the chimpanzee, to N____’s relief not seeming to recall having heard the name “Galahad” recently. “You kind of smell, though. I guess you can’t help it.”
Galahad extends his forearm through the bars, hairless palm up and fingers extended in an urgent appeal. Though pared short his nails are sharp-looking. So curious, Mary Frances must be thinking, the chimpanzee’s palm is as hairless as the palm of a human being, and as pale as her own. The chimpanzee’s face is hairless, and his shiny-black eyes resemble her own. The chimpanzee’s coarse hair covering most of his body is dark russet-red-brown, the approximate hue of her own hair.
Playfully Mary Frances waves her hand, sticks out her tongue, and Galahad immediately mimics her by waving both hands, sticking his tongue far out, to her delight—“Monkey see, monkey do. That’s just what it is!”
Mary Frances asks the Professor what the animals are doing in the lab, and the Professor says they all do their work, humans and animals alike—“Furthering the cause of science. Shining a beacon into the deep, bleak cave of ignorance.”
“Do you, like, do ‘experiments’ with them? Like make them run through mazes, to get bananas?”
The Professor laughs. “Bananas are the favored reward, yes.”
With a genial smile the Professor turns to N_____. “D’you have your cell phone, N_____? Please take a picture of your friend Mary Frances with Galahad.”
N____ is offended by this command and pretends to pat his pockets, searching for his phone. Tells the Professor that he doesn’t have his (damned) phone. With the same genial smile the Professor instructs N____ to look more thoroughly, of course he has his phone, a chief technician is never without his phone, and so N____ discovers the cell phone in a deep pocket of his khaki shorts.
Pictures of the smiling experimental subject standing in front of the caged Galahad who smiles in his own devious-chimp way, baring saliva-wet teeth.
N____ is furious with the Professor for so manipulating Mary Frances and him. N____ has no choice but to obey the Professor. He will mail to the Professor several colorful and unnervingly sexual pictures of Mary Frances posing in front of the chimpanzee’s cage which (N____ supposes) will long outlive them all—human mother of the first hybrid Humanzee, chimpanzee father of the first hybrid Humanzee.
Even if the hybrid doesn’t survive, even if the pregnancy ends in a miscarriage, prints of these images will survive as priceless collector’s items. As an amateur historian of his field N____ has to wonder what names, what findings, will accrue to them. The Professor’s name, surely. But his own? Very likely not.
Galahad has begun leaping about inside his cage, so far as Galahad can leap about inside his cage, frantic to keep the wavering interest of his human visitors. Putting all dignity aside the handsome chimp emits a heart-piercing cry, repeatedly bumping his flat forehead against the bars of his cage with a lovelorn expression. “Oh—you are something!” Mary Frances cries. There is something like a fever between them, an electric spark of mutual recognition, N____ can’t help but notice.
Naively Mary Frances approaches the chimpanzee’s cage to pet his head through the bars as N____ deftly intervenes: “No. Stay back. He might bite.”
Indeed, Galahad clicks his sharp glistening teeth, angry at being thwarted. Mary Frances backs away cringing. Galahad has begun to shriek, baring his teeth in a savage expression, furious with the experimental subject as if she has personally wronged him. He spits, reaches his forearms through the bars, claws at her, rubs his (suddenly swollen, bright pink) penis against the bars. Quickly N____ ushers stunned Mary Frances away as the Professor chides the chimpanzee: “You are a naughty boy, Galahad. Such bad manners, you never learned from us.”
In another cage a smaller, more somber chimpanzee with a thinner pelt crouches in a posture of dread. N____ sees that poor Maude’s scalp has been shaved recently, that electrodes have been inserted in her brain in a battery of neurological tests. She shrinks from both the Professor and N_____. She is less lively than usual though gazing fascinated at Mary Frances with mournful brown eyes. Mary Frances says cheerfully: “Oh, hi. I bet you’re a female, are you? Looks like you had babies—lots of babies.” N____ sees that it isn’t just the chimpanzee’s scalp that has been shaved but her bruised upper arms where IV lines have been inserted.
Mary Frances asks what the chimpanzee’s name is and the Professor says her name is Maude.
“That’s a nice name—‘Maude.’ Did you have baby monkeys, Maude? What’d they do with your babies?” But Mary Frances becomes contrite, the female chimpanzee is looking so sad. “Gosh! D’you think I could feed her and the other ones? Like, bananas? Would that make them happy?”
Unfortunately no, Mary Frances is told that the animals are fed only on schedule, and given treats only during trials. Otherwise they would be clamoring for food continually and would be unmanageable.
Before the tour ends the Professor has one more request of N____: would he please take pictures on his cell phone of Mary Frances and him together, in front of the chimp cages. But N____ dares to say no, can’t, his cell phone has lost its charge.
The Professor gazes at N____ for a long moment, bemused. Or is the Professor alarmed. Saying then, in a tone that will not be contradicted, that N____ can use his cell phone, in that case.
N____ has no choice but to concur. His usual stoic-Asian demeanor has become jaundiced, sullen. Taking several pictures of the smiling white-haired Professor and the smiling experimental subject in front of the captive chimpanzee’s cage and noting only belatedly, scrolling through the images hours later, that the Professor’s right hand is cupped casually, yet unmistakably, at Mary Frances’s waist; and that the two are standing closer together in the image than N____ would have sworn they’d been in life.
Maybe he will have mercy on her, then. Won’t arrange for her to die of an “embolism.”
5.
“Oh! Feel Nath’iel, Jr. kick.”
Reluctantly N____ allows Mary Frances to seize his chill hand in his, to press against her alarmingly swollen belly where in fact N____ does feel, with a tremor, a distinctive kick.
“That’s for-sure a boy baby! You can tell.”
On a baby calendar Mary Frances is marking off days in a bright-red crayon. It is midsummer, and then it is late summer, and soon it will be September and the fall term at the University where Mary Frances has decided not to enroll until (maybe) the spring term since Nath’iel, Jr. is due near the end of September.
Or maybe she won’t enroll then. Maybe (Mary Frances is thinking) she will be a full-time mother for as long as she can be. As long as God advises. (N____ has not tried to dissuade her.) She has made no mention of nursing school for months.
Dr. Ellis’s estimate of two hundred sixty days is weeks away. Yet N____ is uneasily aware of the fact that the gestation period for Pan troglodytes verus is only two hundred thirty-seven days, and so the hybrid baby could come “early” while at the same time, since the gestation period for Homo sapiens is two hundred eighty days, the hybrid baby could come “late.”
Mary Frances has struck up conversations with other expectant mothers casually encountered in town. In their exchanges it doesn’t seem to have come up that Mary Frances’s due date is earlier than the average, nor has Mary Frances betrayed the trust of Dr. Ellis and confided in these other expectant mothers that she has a “special” maternity care under the auspices of Rockefeller Life Sciences.
There has been one upsetting incident: after months of estrangement Mary Frances receives a call from her home, and a series of text messages from an older sister named Rhonda, informing her that their mother has been ill with an “undiagnosed condition”—“some kind of bad arthritis,” and “depression, maybe.” The messages are reproachful, chiding. Mary Frances is panicked that she will be expected to return home, and she cannot possibly return home, not in the (pregnant) state she is in, and not if she has to leave N____ behind …
N____ is relieved to see how devoted Mary Frances is to him, and how adamantly she insists that she certainly will not return home—“Not for a long time, maybe never. They would never accept Baby, and they would never accept you.”
N____’s pride is bruised just slightly, that Mary Frances has to insist upon her allegiance to him over her racist family.
In midsummer heat in the Edgar Street apartment with its barely functioning window air conditioners the very pregnant experimental subject lies contentedly on a sofa for hours watching TV, or half-watching TV, surrounded by baby books, women’s health books, baby clothes ordered online, bibs, diapers, rattles, small stuffed animals; nibbling handfuls of raisins and Cheese Bits, Rice Krispies, stale pizza slices, broken doughnuts, syrupy-sweet fruit yogurts in four-ounce containers—“As long as it isn’t ice cream, Nurse Betty says it’s OK.” Her favorite weird foods are swaths of peanut butter on Count Chocula cereal and sushi swathed with mustard.
Despite Dr. Ellis and Nurse Betty who have cautioned her not to gain more than twenty pounds, by the first of August the primigravida has gained thirty-four pounds and has become so large, at times she can barely heave herself to her feet, and must clutch at furniture, or N_____, to keep her balance.
How large is the hybrid fetus?—eight pounds, five ounces.
Eight pounds, eleven ounces.
Nine pounds …
During the soporific summer months when even some of the research faculty are away from their laboratories, and the Professor himself retires to Lake Tahoe with his family, N____ tries to maintain the Professor’s directive to keep the experimental subject on edge; to thwart her expectations of his behavior and resist any sort of domestic routine. The female’s disadvantage is our advantage. But it has several times happened, away from Mary Frances, in the chill of the lab in Life Sciences, or in his own apartment some blocks from Edgar Street, N____ begins to feel—is it alone? Lonely? It is not an existential condition N____ has felt often in his previous life, and he is surprised and resentful to be feeling it now.
Calling Mary Frances on her cell phone and vexed when she doesn’t answer at once. Doesn’t return his calls within minutes. Hours?
Though he’d set aside an evening to be alone with crucial reading in his field, catching up on scientific papers, N____ becomes restless, decides to join Mary Frances for supper after all. Stops by the Chinese restaurant for her favorite takeout—greasy/oily sauces with lumpy chicken nuggets on mounds of sticky white rice or noodles. To counter these large portions Mary Frances will restrict herself to two six-ounce containers of fruit yogurt, and not ice cream.
So happy to see N____ in the doorway her eyes fill with tears. Declaring to him that she and Baby were missing him badly. “Like, we just prayed to God, ‘Please let Nath’iel come over,’ and thirty minutes later—here you are.”
Despite the faulty air-conditioning at the Edgar Street apartment Mary Frances seems to be enjoying the third trimester of her pregnancy. Not only are her thick ankles swollen, her entire legs are swollen; the lard-colored skin of her belly is stretched tight; her breasts have become half again as large as they were. Her face appears swollen, even the eyelids; her eyes have become slits, out of which her adoring eyes shine. The pregnancy is a great cocoon inside which something is growing, thriving, eager to burst free. Even the expectant mother’s “tummy troubles”—(N____ guesses this means constipation, doesn’t inquire further)–don’t upset her greatly, for Dr. Ellis has prescribed a battery of drugs for her to take if natural remedies fail.
N____ glances away not wanting to see Mary Frances unclothed—her pregnancy is so enormous. But sometimes plaintively she asks him to help her rise from bed, or from a chair; to help her step out of the bathtub, where she takes long steamy-hot soaking baths, exulting in the contentment of late pregnancy; whispering and singing lullabies to the feisty Nath’iel, Jr. in her womb. N____ stands outside the door, his cheek against the door, listening. Feeling just slightly excluded.
Until Mary Frances senses him on the other side of the door and calls out, “Nath’iel? C’mon in! Nath’iel, Jr. and me are lonely missing you!”
Not likely that N____ will enter the smelly steamy bathroom, stare appalled at the enormous belly floating in soap-scummy water like a great fish belly-up, and at the floating balloon-breasts with their rude bold ruddy nipples like copper coins, and the cheery flushed face oozing oil from every pore, not damned likely N____ tells himself and yet—sees his hand push the door open, and draws a deep breath stepping inside.
Casually he mentions to the experimental subject that a “certain percent” of babies are born with birth defects. These are usually, but not necessarily, the result of genetic abnormalities. Often, the result of premature birth.
Mary Frances is immediately stricken. Pressing her hand against her belly as if with sudden pain.
“Gosh! I know. ‘Preemies’—so little, their hearts are not strong. Or something is wrong with their little lungs, or they are deaf.” Mary Frances pauses, her voice quavering. “But that won’t happen to Nath’iel, Jr., he’s going to be a big strong baby, Dr. Ellis says. He won’t be premature.”
As if this were an utterly ordinary conversation N____ asks Mary Frances how she would feel if their baby had something wrong with him? If he was disfigured somehow, or—disabled?
“How would I feel? Oh, sad—real sad. Like if it was a Mongoloid baby, and looked funny—poor things.”
“I think you mean ‘Down’s” babies. Not ‘Mongoloid.’” N____ speaks stiffly, the outdated Western racism offensive to his Asian ears.
“‘Down’s’—is that the same thing? But they are so sweet, like angels. An aunt of mine had one of—them. Our mother would tell us, she wished we were more like Timmy, she could love us more. I never blamed her—Timmy was so sweet, never acted up like other boys, liked to be hugged and kissed and have you feed him, even when he got to be kind of big—ten, eleven. He couldn’t go to school, I guess.” Mary Frances pauses, considering. “Well, I would love one of them, if my baby turned out that way. I would be sad but I would be grateful too, that my baby was special, and that Jesus had a plan for him.”
“You would think—‘Jesus had a plan for him.’”
“Well, God does. I guess it would be God, who creates things. Jesus helps you with your attitude, but God is the creator. I think that’s it.”
N____ lets this pass. A flush comes over him, of pure annoyance, embarrassment, hearing Mary Frances speak matter-of-factly of her religion, a rural-based branch of Protestant Christianity. In the past she has said such preposterous things, and N____ has not challenged her.
“If a baby was disfigured somehow, or didn’t look ‘normal’—you would love him just the same, Mary Frances?”
“Oh I think I would love him more.” Mary Frances speaks passionately, both hands now resting on her belly.
“Really? Why?” N____ regards the experimental subject with something like wonder.
“Because he would be ours—yours, and mine. Because he would have no one else but us to love him. That’s why!”
Mary Frances seems both agitated by N____’s close questioning and thrilled and excited by it as if such an interrogation, uncharacteristic of N_____, were a kind of intimacy; and N____ is not very intimate with Mary Frances, usually; affection between them is one-sided.
“Oh gosh yes, I would love him to death. I mean—I would!”
Has to admire her, such conviction. Optimism. Perhaps it is only naivete and ignorance but there is something noble in it, N____ thinks. Every other girl he’d known would have been frantic to have an abortion, to rid herself of even the possibility of such a burden, but here is Mary Frances claiming tearfully that she would love the hybrid specimen no matter what it looks like, and no matter what, in scientific terms, it might be called.
Mongoloid! A Humanzee might be mistaken for a “Mongoloid” baby, N____ thinks, depending upon the degree to which chimpanzee features were dominant, and depending upon the degree of wishful naivete in the mother.
“In approximately seven weeks it should be born. If it is going to be ‘born’ at all.”
Hearing these clinical words uttered by the embryologist N____ thinks reprovingly—Not it. He.
Shadowy ultrasound images of the maturing fetus are being passed about the oak table, marveled-at. No one has seen such images in the history of science!—the astonishing fact ripples about them like a crashing surf.
Coiled in the mother’s womb in the birth sac is a small creature with a large head and flat puckered face, tight-shut eyes, tiny clenched fists, that could be mistaken for a purely human fetus, or, from another angle, a chimpanzee baby with somewhat human features. It is normal for a chimpanzee mother to have a single baby, as it is normal for a human mother to have a single baby. The shadowy fetus has a slightly rounder head than one might expect in a human baby, and the face seems flatter and broader; the miniature nose flatter, with wider nostrils. The mouth is wider, the area of the chin more pronounced. The arms are just slightly longer. The miniature ears are slightly larger, and rounder. Except for the small puckered face, the tiny palms of the hands and the soles of the feet the epidermis appears to be covered in a very fine down that is thicker and darker on the scalp than elsewhere. The fetal heartbeat is “strong.” The expectant mother has reported that the fetus kicks intermittently through the day and night but whether the activity is more or less than that of the average (male) fetus at this point in the pregnancy, the embryologist can’t say.
The embryologist reports that the hybrid fetus weighs nine pounds, six ounces. It will continue to grow and will likely weigh more than ten pounds by the time it is born—“A large baby, that may present ‘complications’ for the mother.”
With much excitement N____’s colleagues peer at the pictures. These unique documents! When N____ holds one in his fingers, his fingers shake. His mouth has gone dry, his brain feels numb, obliterated. His!—the hybrid baby is his.
With the passage of weeks at these (classified, confidential) meetings on the eighth floor of Rockefeller Life Sciences it has come to seem, strangely, inexplicably, that N____’s colleagues are starting not to associate the chief technician with the pregnancy; without N____’s noticing, his role is being usurped by the Professor, and by the embryologist, who do most of the talking and answer most of the questions at the meetings. It’s as the experimental subject who was N____’s discovery has been appropriated by them. As if the experimental subject has been impregnated by their agency, and not his. N____ wants to drum his fingers on the oak table—Wait! Look at me. I am the father.
It makes N____ uneasy to hear the Professor reiterate another time that the primary, indeed the sole purpose of Project Galahad is to create a hybrid specimen; once the creature draws breath and utters its first cry, the mother’s role will have ended—“Maude will do as well as any human mother and if not, we will find other means.”
The embryologist concurs: “The primigravida has put on more weight than I’d advised, thus risking her health. If something happens to her in the delivery it might be argued that it’s her own fault.”
“Certainly, yes. She has received the very best prenatal care.”
“It would hardly be our fault, if …”
Hemorrhage. Embolism. Heart failure. Rapid drop in blood pressure. Allergic reaction to the anesthetic.
Any of these. All of these.
It is rare now for anyone at the table to object, even mildly. Without N____ seeming to realize, the possibility of the experimental subject’s being given the opportunity to nurse the hybrid specimen seems to have been dropped.
“She isn’t very bright, poor thing. That has been her disadvantage, and it is our advantage. We would be very foolish not to seize that advantage.” The Professor smiles wryly even as he continues to stare at his trophy, the shadowy ultrasound image.
N____ takes notes on his laptop. N____ is a pair of hands, remarkably adept fingers. Though he feels as if he has been shot full of Novocain.
N____ has sensed the senior members of the Professor’s team exchanging glances at times. Not only are they forgetting what N____’s role has been in Project Galahad, N____ is certain he has heard them alluding to lab meetings of which he hasn’t been aware. Are they meeting without him? Is the Professor grooming a replacement, among the technician’s own young assistants? Is the Professor who has always seemed to favor N____ going to cut N____ out of this historic project, exploit his heroic work, betray him?
(Of course it is hardly the first time that a distinguished research scientist has exploited a younger associate, passed his work off as his own, terminated the younger scientist and banished him from the laboratory. And N____ is more vulnerable than most for he is not (yet) a US citizen.)
“If there’s a miscarriage?”—N____ hears himself ask.
“Well. If a miscarriage, we get to keep the remains.”
“She will never see the remains. We’ll send her home.”
What N____ has dreaded has come to pass, at last.
It is a poor recording, on Nurse Betty’s iPhone. In the background are voices, a clatter of spoons, cups. All around the oak table N____’s colleagues listen bemusedly while the Professor’s chief technician sits very still and his face stiff as a papier-mâché mask.
A plaintive female voice, that of the experimental subject:
Ohh I guess—I don’t know—sometimes I just—wonder—(unintelligible)—Nath’iel doesn’t, like, love me?—
I mean—it’s embarrassing, gosh!—he’s, like, if he has to like touch me, with my belly so big, he doesn’t seem to—it’s like he is—wishing he was somewhere else …
A more forceful, mature voice, that of Nurse Betty:
Oh no—he loves you, Mary Frances! I know he does. It’s just that a man has more trouble than we do connecting with his emotions. That’s all it is, hon—he’s, like, when I saw you with him, Mary Frances, I could see—he’s shy, he’s awkward with women, one of those scientist-types like there are in this building, and Asian too, who are like geniuses almost, but you can’t talk to them and they can’t talk to you … (Laughter)
Aggrieved-child voice of Mary Frances:
… all I know is, I love him like crazy, but I can see, like, he doesn’t love me—much. All the time I am praying for our baby to be born healthy, I am praying for Nath’iel to love him and me—I mean, as much as he can. Like maybe, being Asian like he is, and coming from someplace where (I guess) there was war and famine, maybe he can’t “love” people the way we can—like, if he was wounded in his soul? Sometimes in his eyes I can see (unintelligible) … And so I am praying for that too, that I can help him. And I am feeling the love from Jesus, and I think it will happen, and will be strong enough, we will be a family and he will come to love me.
At the conclusion of the recording there is an embarrassed silence. N____ cannot lift his eyes to the faces of his colleagues. His face is a mask of humiliation. Scarcely can he breathe. A wispy female voice hovers in the room distracting as a moth fluttering about—will come to love me.
Shuffling papers the Professor says in a voice of disdain, “Well. No scientific content there. Recommend delete.”
6.
… will come to love me.
In his cubbyhole of an office on the eighth floor of Rockefeller Life Sciences not far from the Professor’s large office N____ sits at his desk computer, fingers poised.
So large is the computer, it blocks N____’s view of an obscure corner of the University campus. Rarely in his many years at this desk and facing this window (a narrow column of green-tinted glass from floor to ceiling, soundproof) amid a constant churning of cooled air against his face and hair has N____ troubled to lean around the computer to gaze out the window.
Nor does N____ now. Sitting numbed, vacantly staring at the computer screen. What does it hold? Is the screen a way into the future, a way into N____’s own, elusive soul? Or is the screen but a thin plastic scrim over nothingness?—N____’s soul?
Fingers poised at the keyboard. Waiting.
While in the apartment on Edgar Street the experimental subject is waiting.
Is she lying hugely pregnant, part-naked slovenly-sumptuous as an odalisque on the familiar sofa sagging beneath her weight, eating cereal in handfuls, chewing on broken cinnamon doughnuts, her favorites; is she frowning over a pamphlet given to her by Nurse Betty, My Baby & Me: Our First Month, like a methodical schoolgirl underlining crucial phrases in yellow Magic Marker? N____ squints but N____ cannot see: is the frizzed rust-colored hair brushed back from the low, earnest brow? Are the bare swollen legs spread, that have not been shaved in weeks, and sprout distinctive dark hairs? Inside the belly swollen tight as a drum the baby-to-be gives a kick. “Hey!—That hurt!”—Mary Frances laughs in delight. So happy, God has blessed her.
Or is she, as N____ has more than once discovered her, busily engaged in cleaning the kitchen? Wiping down she calls it, paper towels and Windex.
And the linoleum floor, with a sponge mop. Other rooms, tidying up. Who would have guessed, the experimental subject enjoys housekeeping, even hugely pregnant? To N____’s astonishment one day seeing that Mary Frances had started alphabetizing haphazardly arranged books in several bookcases as if these were actual books in an actual library carefully selected by “Nathaniel Li.”
Yet more unexpectedly N____ one day discovered that Mary Frances was reading, or trying to read, Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals; another day, a neuroscience textbook titled Brain, Body, and Behavior which she’d shut quickly with an embarrassed laugh when N____ came in. “Oh gosh! Hope nobody’s gonna quiz me.”
As a graduate student N____ had annotated virtually every page in this classic textbook. Out of curiosity when Mary Frances was out of the room N____ leafed through the first chapter to see that Mary Frances had been annotating as well, in yellow Magic Marker; she’d gotten only to page nineteen before being interrupted. The last highlighting was Microglia function like astrocytes, digesting parts of dead neurons. Oligodendroglia provide the insulation (myelin) to neurons in the central nervous system.
How totally obscure this information must have been, to an undergraduate who’d barely passed Introduction to Biology! N____ was touched by the effort. Guiltily wondering if Mary Frances was making the effort in order to relate to him.
Not knowing that, very soon, as soon as the hybrid specimen is born, N____ will disappear from her life.
N____ wakes from his trance. Fingers briskly typing on the computer keyboard.
How will Project Galahad proceed?—N____ speculates.
1. Most likely: spontaneous miscarriage. The hybrid specimen is genetically unstable and not capable of living outside the mother’s womb. In the last weeks of the third trimester a miscarriage will be physically traumatic for the primigravida but if she is strong, and receives good medical care, she will survive. What will be issued from her body will be fetal remains, not an “infant”—not a “baby.” Yet, these remains will be precious to researchers, particularly immunohistochemists who will prepare photomicrographic slides of the specimen’s brain and other organs. The chief technician will help, and will be crucial to the research.
2. Another possibility: induced miscarriage. N____ has access to lab drugs including an abortifacient used to induce miscarriages in chimpanzees which he could dissolve into Mary Frances’s food, inducing violent contractions and hemorrhaging; he would have to ensure that she wasn’t taken to the local ER but to the Clinic in Life Sciences, where the fetal remains could be salvaged, with results identical to those of 1).
In this way (N____ reasons) less is left to chance, he would be in control and no one (including the Professor) would ever know why the hybrid specimen was a miscarriage. And the experimental subject’s life would (probably) be spared.
3. Possible: the hybrid specimen is born in the Clinic on the tenth floor of Life Sciences. Very likely it will be a caesarean birth. The Humanzee is immediately taken away from the mother who is heavily sedated. When the mother is wakened she is informed that her baby died at birth—it was a stillbirth. The Humanzee will be confined to a highly secure area of Life Sciences, or to an equally secure, restricted space elsewhere, to live out its (his) natural life as one of the most remarkable experimental subjects in the history of science. (Eventually, if he dares to publish his findings without being charged with grievous scientific misconduct, and proof that a Humanzee was born in the Professor’s laboratory can be established, it is very likely that the Professor will receive a Nobel Prize.)
A. Possible: the (physically traumatized) mother receives excellent medical treatment in the Clinic and is soon released. She receives financial compensation in exchange for “confidentiality.” She departs the University without a degree. In sorrow but not in rancor.
B. Possible: the (physically traumatized) mother does not survive the ordeal of giving birth to a hybrid specimen weighing in excess of ten pounds. In the Project Galahad official (classified) report it will be noted In the difficult labor, which lasted for __ hours, the mother died suddenly of what an autopsy revealed as an embolism in the heart. Died suddenly of what an autopsy revealed as an allergic reaction to the anesthetic. Died suddenly of what an autopsy revealed as cardiac failure. The infant Humanzee survived and was given to a mature female chimpanzee on the premises, to be nursed.
Beyond this N____ can’t imagine. Though if he continues as the Professor’s chief technician he will be involved in the battery of experiments that will define the Humanzee’s life.
Especially, the Professor is eager to establish whether language can be taught to the Humanzee as it is routinely taught to Homo sapiens but has failed to be taught to apes despite countless experiments over decades.
In time, it will be established whether the Humanzee can mate with any female specimen, human or chimpanzee, or whether the Humanzee, like the donkey, hybrid offspring of horse and mule, is sterile.
How lonely the Humanzee will be, isolated in its (his) clinical quarters on the eighth floor of Rockefeller Life Sciences! Though possibly, sooner rather than later, another Humanzee specimen will be created by the Professor’s lab team, a sibling that might (if it is female) be a mate for the Humanzee …
In his state of trance N____ sits at the computer, thinking. Or rather, thoughts move through his brain as through a convoluted and contorted maze.
… we will be a family and he will come to love me.
Hurriedly N____ clears out his office in Rockefeller Life Sciences Hall taking computer files on memory sticks, documents, papers, a selection of books that are essential to him.
Returns to the apartment on Edgar Street. Tells the astonished Mary Frances that they must leave at once: the State Department has learned of N____’s engagement with her and that she is bearing his son and so a warrant has been issued for N____’s arrest and without being allowed a legal hearing N____ will be deported to a “hellish” part of the world he has not seen in more than thirty years and their baby, when it is born, will be taken into detention by the US government under the Illegal Alien Act of 1971 …
Hurriedly they must pack. Must pack!
No time to waste, no time for explanations other than the bare stark terrifying fact that Mary Frances will lose not only her fiancé but her baby as well if she does not flee with N____ that very day. If she stays behind it is highly probable that she will be arrested and charged with “aiding and abetting” an individual arrested under the Illegal Alien Act and in any case, the baby will be taken from her and she will never see it again.
Wide-eyed Mary Frances never doubts these fantastical words of N____’s uttered in a voice of heightened calm. Mary Frances has not ever doubted N_____, and will not doubt him. When she stammers asking where can they go N____ tells her that eventually they can cross into Canada—“There are relatives of mine in Vancouver, they will take us in and protect us”—but in the meantime they can hide in the Sierra Nevada Mountains where no one would ever think to look for them.
It is true, N____ has saved a good deal of money over the years. Few expenses, a frugal bachelor life. As if for such an occasion: a sudden disappearance, fleeing federal authorities, exile. Fleeing the Professor. Perhaps N____ has been on the run, an illegal alien, for most of his life.
As they pack suitcases and cardboard boxes N____ tells Mary Frances about the beautiful scarcely populated mountains west of Red Bluff. They can rent a cabin easily, he recalls a trailer village beside a lake, yes and the small town Red Bluff, no one would know where they’d gone, no one would have the slightest idea, cleverly he’d consulted several websites about hotels in Costa Rica and if/when his office computer is examined in an effort to track him these sites will be discovered and it will be believed he’d gone to Costa Rica … With tearful but trusting eyes Mary Frances listens to her fiancé, she has never seen N____ so fiercely animated, so certain of what must be done, the two of them together, a couple. N____ pauses to take her warm moist hand tenderly and squeeze it in the way that one might squeeze the hand of a frightened child to comfort her, a gesture he has never made before.
“Oh but, Nath’iel—what about the baby? How will he be born—safe?”
“We can do it. I can help you. Our ancestors knew how. We don’t need the Clinic. ‘Natural childbirth.’ The hell with them.”
“The hell with them! Good.” Mary Frances laughs wildly, her eyes are shining with tears of wonder, devotion. “God will protect us.”
“God will protect us. I know it.”
Elated N____ runs to his apartment to load the van (armloads of books, it is his books N____ most values, which he will bring with him into exile) and to bring it around to Edgar Street. By this time N____ has convinced himself that they must leave at once, he must not be detained, they are both in grave danger, their baby is in grave danger, at any moment government gestapo will be knocking at their door, they are equal to the challenge of natural childbirth in the mountains, there will be no need for a medical doctor, a hospital or a clinic. For how can N____ explain to Mary Frances that if she gives birth successfully, her baby will be taken from her and her life will be snuffed out? How can N____ explain to Mary Frances that it is he, her fiancé “Nath’iel,” who has herded her, like a heifer into a chute leading to the slaughterhouse, to this fate? Telling himself the crucial thing is the prevention of infection of the mother’s birth canal. N____ will boil water, sterilize surfaces. N____ will wear latex gloves. (Must remember to purchase gloves and other items needed for the home birth, en route to Red Bluff.) Something in the refugee N_____, primitive, defiant, gives a little lurch, this will be the challenge of his life.
Mary Frances is not likely to panic when contractions begin, as another woman might in such circumstances. Mary Frances is solidly built to give birth, wide-hipped, a wide pelvis, heavy breasts bursting with milk. Mary Frances will pray for courage, and her God will give her courage. Mary Frances will deliver her baby by instinct, grunting and heaving as her female ancestors delivered their babies, managing to survive against the odds.
And whatever is issued from between Mary Frances’s great straining thighs streaked with blood and sweat, she will honor as a gift of God.
By four-twenty P.M. they are prepared to leave. Breathless, exhilarated! It is strange, N____ has not wanted Mary Frances in his van before, had not even told her that he owns a vehicle; he has not (he’d thought) wanted the female presence to linger in it, her scent, the impression of her body, the dampness of her perspiring thighs, yet now he has not the slightest concern but is deeply grateful that he owns a vehicle, that they can flee together. Indeed N____ adjusts the sun visor so that the afternoon sun won’t glare into Mary Frances’s eyes.
Boxes of books, hundreds of books gathered from both apartments, fill the van. In his fever of anticipation N____ imagines long idyllic evenings of reading aloud to Mary Frances from such texts as the great works of Charles Darwin beside a birch-wood fire, Nathaniel, Jr. in a cradle, or in a crib, in a shadowy alcove, features blurred in the innocence of sleep.
On the interstate they should get to the Sierras by sunset and in the morning to Red Bluff. That night they can rent a motel room or, maybe, sleep in the van in sleeping bags within earshot of the white-water rapids cascading down the mountainside.