The Curiosity

by Stephen Kiernan

  The tape rolls, a dozen postdocs take notes, Dr. Billings stands against a sidewall with his face droopy from ennui. Can anyone express boredom more articulately than the British? Dr. Philo, by contrast, stands alert, as if her entire body were an ear.

  An unfamiliar man comes to the mike. “May I add to the discussion?”

  He identifies himself as Orson, of Loma Linda Hospital in San Diego, a medical ethicist. “This marvel we are contemplating is stretching our minds in wonderful ways. But I would encourage all of us here to pause, and consider that Subject One is also a human being. He inhabited a set of circumstances at the time of his death—family, a job, a faith. Our potential to awaken him raises many issues. Would he want us to do it? Does he have descendants who ought to be consulted? Will he suffer from our actions?”

  You write on an index card and display it to Thomas: Who invited him?

  “I propose that we keep Subject One on ice,” Orson continues. “Let us convene ethicists, theologians, and thought leaders, to weigh what we are doing before we do it. Otherwise our technological triumph could prove to be a deed of unprecedented cruelty.”

  There is a smattering of applause, of all things. Can they be serious?

  Then Gilhooly is shouting, something about impeding the progress of science. Likewise Petrie is on his feet. “Who do you think you are?”

  Orson holds his ground. “I am an appeal to your conscience. If you have one.”

  Pandemonium. In an instant everyone is standing, voices raised. Is the energy useful? Quickly you deduce that it is not. This is a contest of egos, the central question forgotten. You sit at the front, watching your masterpiece disintegrate. The videographer stalks the room with the camera on his shoulder. Thomas looks to you for direction. You wish you had thought to bring a gavel.

  A diminutive man steps forward, looking like a child at a bullfight. He has a black beard, groomed almost to a point, and somehow it makes him seem shorter. He lowers the mike stand, then clasps hands behind his back. “Excuse me.”

  The others continue shouting, pointing at the ceiling. One fellow throws his necktie from side to side, perhaps to punctuate his outcry. You find the gesture absurd.

  “Excuse me.” The little man persists. Something about his shortness has an effect, and the people nearest him begin to quiet. He appears unmoved, waiting without a single gesture of annoyance or haste, not so much as adjusting his glasses. You take an immediate liking to him.

  “Excuse me,” he says a third time, and inexplicably, it is enough. The shouters sit, grumbling a final word or two. Once the room quiets, he waits a moment more. It is a commanding move, assertive in its stillness. You tuck this lesson away for another day.

  “I am Christopher Borden, of St. Aram’s in Kansas City,” he begins. He has a nasal voice, elfin, yet he speaks with authority. “I am a transplant surgeon. To answer Dr. Orson, and all the discussion here, permit me to describe something I have witnessed hundreds of times, which, to judge by the credentials of today’s conferees, I believe none of you has seen once. I refer to the restarting of a human heart.”

  He turns to address the full room. “In a transplant, we remove the heart from a donor already pronounced dead, place it in a bucket of cold brine, bring it to the recipient, and connect it vessel by vessel. A lot of sewing, nothing fancy. Fifteen minutes.”

  He smiles a little. “All that time the donor heart is warming up. We have all kinds of equipment ready to restart it: shock paddles, adrenaline needles. But they’re rarely needed. Once the heart is warm and attached, usually it starts up again all by itself.

  “Think of it.” Now he is speaking to you, no one but you. “It may not matter what we want for science, or what we think is ethical. All we must do is provide the right environment, and let the heart do what it desires. The heart wants to beat.”

  He tugs on the pointed tip of his beard and waddles back to his seat.

  There are others, but their concerns are technical. Borden has silenced the ethical debate. Scientists stand in line at the microphone, willing to offer ideas for successful reanimation. Late in the third hour Thomas comes to your side and whispers.

  “Sir, I hate to interrupt you—”

  “Then don’t.”

  “There’s something you need to see.”

  You frown at him.

  “Sir, you know I wouldn’t dare bother you if I didn’t think it was warranted.”

  He knows just how to put it, doesn’t he? Thomas is really coming along. The current speaker is an endocrinologist from Chicago, who wonders if Subject One’s sperm can be extracted by syringe and reanimated separately. When you start for the door, the endocrinologist stops talking, pulling back his head as though he’d been slapped.

  “Excuse me,” you say. “An urgent matter has arisen that requires my immediate attention. Please continue”—you gesture at the endocrinologist, then the video camera—“for the record of course, and I will return momentarily.”

  As Thomas leads down the hallway you clear your mind, readying it for whatever comes next. He arrives at a smaller meeting room, with windows along one wall, and steps aside for you to enter.

  You stride to the glass, cast your gaze six flights down, and observe. A dozen people stand on a patch of lawn across the street. They carry hand-painted signs: DON’T TOY WITH LIFE, RESPECT THE DEAD, and one, STOP PLAYING GOD, shaped like a stop sign.

  “Clever,” you say. “How long have they been here?”

  “A noon news program reported that your conference was happening. They arrived an hour later.”

  You nod, then notice a familiar bulk, thick as an aging linebacker, working the group’s perimeter with his notebook. It’s that reporter from the ship, his name momentarily escapes you. Utter fool, but he has proven reliably sympathetic, which is to say possibly useful. You rub your hands together. “Splendid.”

  “Sir?”

  “Do they have a name, these people?”

  “A guard downstairs said they call themselves One Resurrection, sir. They believe Jesus should be the only one to rise from the dead.”

  “Do these idiots not understand? We are not raising anyone. We are bringing forth the reanimation potential that has always been there.”

  “Nonetheless, sir, our work is blasphemy, apparently.”

  “But wait.” You tap a finger on your pursed lips. They are still tender. “Wasn’t there someone else?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Some other person raised from a tomb? In the New Testament?”

  Thomas steps back. “I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t raised in any religion.”

  “Nor I. Find out. There was someone, I’m sure of it.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  But you raise one hand to stay his departure. Below, they appear to be chanting something. Through the glass, you cannot make out what it is. Those not holding signs clap along with the chant.

  “Is there something more, sir?”

  “Dismiss the good doctors. Give them each five thousand dollars and my thanks for their time.”

  “Yes, sir.” Thomas scribbles on his clipboard. “Anything else?”

  “Bring me that midwestern physician, the heart transplant man.”

  “Dr. Borden?”

  “Exactly. Bring me Christopher Borden. And then we must rename the institute.”

  “Really, sir?”

  “We are no longer seeking. We have found.”

  “Pardon the question, sir, but isn’t the Carthage name enough?”

  “We need a name that is an irritant, Thomas. Like the grain of sand in an oyster.” You point out the window. “Do you know what I see down there?”

  “Malcontents, sir?”

  “No.” You sigh, as contentedly as if finishing a fine meal. “Money.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The La
zarus Project

  (Kate Philo)

  Where did I come from? I don’t know. Why was I put on this earth? I don’t know. Where will I go when I die? I don’t know. What an intrepid woman scientist I am. Everything that really matters is something I don’t know.

  As I walked through the city that morning, the tang of spring sharpening the air, multitudes on their way to work, I could not shake the feeling that marching beside me was one beast of a don’t-know. What were we going to do that day? What were we daring to attempt? Sometimes I couldn’t decide if I wanted us to succeed or fail.

  By then I lived in Cambridge, in a tiny side-street apartment. Though I strolled past Harvard every day, my only affiliation was with Carthage, who had become more freelance than ever. Tolliver at the National Academy e-mailed me, told me to be careful not to ally myself too much with one enterprise. He was probably right, but there were so many directions this research could go, I felt like I had lots of options.

  So did my commute. The T could get me to the lab in minutes. I preferred to walk: crossing the Charles River, wending through Back Bay. Work was intense enough; I needed the decompression of the walk home, too. It takes time to regain a relaxed attitude about all the don’t-knows.

  We put our eye to a microscope and there’s a universe we never knew existed. We do the same thing with a telescope, same realization. There are ideas, too, from Darwin and Gauss, from Pasteur and Newton, that reveal universes as clearly as any instrument.

  That morning, an otherwise ordinary day in April, I was marching to the main lab, now known as The Lazarus Project, for possibly the biggest day of my life. Ever since I’d aligned my fate with Carthage’s, there had been a steady sequence of biggest days.

  The morning of the find, back in August, that had been huge. Within hours Dixon had called the story in from the ship to his magazine, which immediately sold it to the international press. By the next morning the whole saga was in print, from the midnight wake-up call on the ship to everyone on the team eating ice cream. My name made papers worldwide before we’d reached landfall. Strangers found my online address. Three offered me jobs. One decided I was Satan. My sister, Chloe, took it upon herself to send a snarky e-mail about me falling for another cold guy. Apparently she also could not resist the opportunity to urge me to make sure no one stole my limelight—provided that I had actually done something significant. Thanks, Chloe, for being you.

  When we docked in Halifax, TV cameras waited on the wharf. They pounced before the engines were off. We had our gear to haul, not to mention moving our frozen friend, but they insisted on a statement. I nearly asked them: What do you want me to say? Fortyscore and seven years ago some unknown guy got iced? Did you know Dixon has already named him Frank, as in Frankenstein? No? Too dehumanizing? Then how about this: We have a frozen body. We have a technique. It works on creatures an inch long, for about two minutes. Beyond that, we’ll get back to you.

  Besides, with all those cameras pointed at me, I looked about as put together as any woman would after ten weeks at sea. Skin like leather, hair like a hurricane. My fifteen minutes.

  But Carthage was there, Carthage took charge. For the first time I was glad for his overbearing ego. He made sure we received royal treatment: a nice hotel, warm meals, a hot shower so long my skin pruned like a baby’s. His insistence that Billings and I accompany the body by train, that was showy for my taste. There were trawlers right there in port equipped to haul tons of frozen fish. There were refrigerated air-freight carriers at an airport just miles away. Carthage maintained that his method would guarantee temperature consistency, but we knew he had another motive.

  That meant twenty hours with Billings on the trip south. On the overnight we did the proper, correct, appropriate thing: we got smashed.

  “Don’t worry, lovely, I’m not going to attempt some tawdry seduction on you,” he said, wobbling in the aisle against the sway of the train. “Altogether too much the scientist, don’t you know.” He flopped into the seat beside me. “Socially spastic, few deep allegiances, suspected of borderline Asperger’s. You know the lot. My brother aside, you’re the closest thing I have to a friend.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’ve nine hundred miles to cover.” He held up a large bottle. “This seems like the best way.”

  “Bourbon?”

  “Yes, I drink like a Yank now, blast it.” He flashed his crooked-toothed grin at me. “But it does the trick.”

  I was won over completely. “At the risk of being too formal on you, Billings, could I go get us a couple of glasses?”

  “Brilliant.”

  We sipped and supped, we told old tales, we laughed ourselves weak.

  The following noon we chugged into customs to learn that Carthage’s slow train had been a masterstroke of media manipulation. Just over the border, American cameras stood in a line, reporters shouting questions. Anticipation had brought them to a froth.

  That meant my face appeared on a national magazine cover three days later, looking not scientific but hungover. Billings was pale as a frog’s belly. He even asked one reporter if he knew where a poor soul could get some tea.

  That welcome marked the beginning of a media avalanche. By the time we’d stowed the frozen man at Carthage’s Boston lab, we were nonstop with talk shows, radio interviews, meetings with reporters over breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was more exhausting than fun, to tell the truth. More spectacle than substance. I felt like a magician, wiggling my hand over here so no one notices my deception over there.

  A week along, I was in a hotel pulling off a blouse before bed when I encountered an unfamiliar odor. I put the shirt to my face and discovered the sour scent of stress. Imagine declaring on TV with certainty things you harbor huge doubts about. I stuffed the blouse into the lower suitcase with my shoes. I had enough to contemplate besides the smell of my own fear.

  The science, to begin with. We ought to have been in the lab, not the TV studio. We were delaying all the potential discoveries, while traipsing around and proclaiming the extremely little that we knew.

  Something else also made me nervous. This was not some mute creature we’d found, some oddity like an oversize lobster or a giant squid. This was a human being. The research imperatives had to be ethically different. We found too many familiars.

  The boot, for example. Soon after settling in the Boston lab, we’d done a preliminary scan through the shell of hard-ice, and learned that the frozen man was wearing boots with the maker’s faded imprint on the heel. This wasn’t just any guy, I realized. It was a particular guy, with a particular life he’d died out of. He had a shoe size, there had been a place where he bought boots. Carthage saw only the media potential, or the possibility of funding from the boot company, if it still existed. Thus it became my job to find out everything I could about our frozen man. Even with two inches of ice encasing his body, there were many indicators: the clothes, muttonchop sideburns, height, and yes, boots. I remembered a friend’s cadaver dissection in medical school, how she was fine with all of it until she got to the hands. Then she encountered fingernails, ring marks, a thumb whose callus came from some unknown lifetime friction. The humanity of her assigned body was no longer deniable. That is what the frozen man’s boot did to me.

  I discussed it with Billings. We’d begun having lunch together every Monday to review findings and generally gossip. “My advice, lovely, is to be careful,” he said. “We serve at the king’s pleasure, and all he sees in that block of ice is Subject One.”

  “That’s my whole point. We’re dealing with a person in that ice.”

  “There are about three thousand assays we might conduct with materials at hand, none of them possible without Carthage’s goodwill. And, lovely, I needn’t tell you that our man is more intent on fame and glory than on ethical particulars.”

  “That’s why I think my job is to raise these questions.”


  “Thus do I repeat: careful.”

  Good advice that I was unable to follow. Instead I found myself daydreaming in the control room, imagining the frozen man’s former life when I ought to have been watching the monitors. During my tasks in the sterile, chilly observation chamber, I found myself pausing to study his whiskered face through the blur of ice. Hello in there.

  Later, Carthage told the press he thought in those weeks that I’d gone soft, lost sight of the goal, that sort of thing. Actually, after the boots, I felt the goals becoming clearer. They just weren’t the same as his.

  Carthage treated the frozen man like a diamond. He had the doors at the Lazarus Project’s Boston office, now our headquarters, changed to bulletproof glass. Guards stood at both entries, and it took the swipe of a security badge to get into the control room, onto the elevators, even into the bathrooms. It made me nervous. I often checked my bag multiple times on the way to work to make sure I hadn’t left my badge at home.

  The walk each morning crossed the park where sometimes as many as twenty people gathered to condemn us. Carthage won a court order to keep them from the front door, but truthfully the security goons scared me more than any protesters did. One Friday, back in March, it was chilly and raining, so I brought down an urn of coffee. The guards turned away, didn’t even take their shades off. The chanters thanked me, however. One even God-blessed me. An old man offered me cookies. I took one, too. Why not?