The Curiosity

by Stephen Kiernan

  “Instead they gave grown in size and rage every day.” He waved the eye tool at me. “Your meeting with the vice president sparked his political opponents, and I fed the flames. Now every news story, and every sign, and every shout I hear on the way in or out of work confirms that they are not the ignorant ones.”

  “I fail to see how responsibility for the protesters falls upon you. We are a free society, free to assemble and speak. Further, I do not understand how this relates to your medical scrutiny of me.”

  “There is one explanation for both things,” he said.

  I held my tongue, waiting. Dr. Borden shifted his weight from leg to leg. He flicked the eye device on and off, light projecting on his other hand. I kept my face in the cool posture of one hearing unreliable evidence.

  “What is your reluctance?” I asked finally.

  He pointed with the eye device at the ceiling, where a microphone hung.

  I nodded. “In Greenland, Second Officer Milliken injured his wrist, after a barrel fell on it. A week later he did not want to remove his bandage. Yet we could smell the wound, we knew what was happening. Finally the captain ordered us. We held him down and unwrapped the linen. The stench was unbearable. We knew, all of us, that he would have to lose the arm. We drew away, but he could not even weep in solitude. There is no privacy on a ship. Here, likewise.”

  Dr. Borden stood. “Hey, tech folks?” he called at the ceiling. “Hey, Andrew?”

  A control room technician, a handsome black man, raised his eyes from his desk.

  “Would you pause audio output for a minute?” Dr. Borden pointed at me. “Physician-patient confidentiality.”

  “Got it,” the technician said, pressing some buttons. “All dead on this end, Doctor. Just signal me to restart, okay?”

  Dr. Borden put his tool away, then closed his bag. “You know, Carthage is truly brilliant when it comes to cells. His discovery of their latent life potential? That’s genius, the real thing. And then proving his outlandish theory of hard-ice, something completely outside his discipline, by finding naturally occurring examples? Uncanny. Beyond comprehension. A cell, however, is nowhere near as complex as a human being.” He motioned at my chest. “I need to check your breathing.”

  I unbuttoned my shirt, letting it fall off my shoulders. He stepped onto the footstool and pressed the cold stethoscope to my skin. “Deep breath.” He checked high and low on my left side, then my right, then moved to my back. “Deep again, please. Now cough.”

  I did as I was told, until he stepped down, indicating for me to rebutton. “It is amazing, how fully you’ve healed. You’d never know those lungs were filled with salt water, and iced for a century.”

  “You were explaining the strengths and weaknesses of Dr. Carthage.”

  “Yes.” He folded the stethoscope away and gave a wan smile. “The truth is, you surpassed any expectation we had for your survival. My ignorance, and believe me, I am the ignorant one here, was in assuming you would die within days at most.”

  He went to the window, surveying the control room. “Then there’s you, the personality. We never knew if you would even open your eyes. That’s pretty far from you gallivanting around town, being smart, being popular.”

  The doctor faced me again and removed his glasses. His eyes looked sunken and small. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Carthage has grown too excited by controversy and attention. He insists on gathering data and on keeping you here because he cannot admit that we are out of our depth.” He placed the spectacles back on his face. “He has no idea what else to do.”

  “Doctor.” It was my turn to speak plainly. “I am not a cell. I am a sentient being. You could have asked me.”

  “Well now.” Dr. Borden’s face brightened, as if the idea had never occurred to him. “Tell me, your honor. What can I do to make you more comfortable here, until we can figure all of this crap out?”

  It was not a question I’d prepared myself to answer, despite my rhetoric. I scanned the room, every corner of it confirming the constraints on my freedoms. “I would like a curtain. The end of monitoring, of being filmed. I would like a chair, reading lamp, and some books.”

  “I can do those things.”

  “I would like variety in my foodstuffs.”

  Dr. Borden tugged his beard again. “Let’s put that one aside for a while, okay? That porridge must be pretty boring by now. But there are scientific reasons we keep your diet so simple.”

  “I would like the liberty to come and go as I please.”

  He chuckled. “I think Carthage is the only one here with that privilege.”

  “It is hardly a laughing matter.”

  “True. But it is also not within my powers to give you that freedom. I don’t have the authority.”

  Hm. There was more to be unearthed. “Let us stipulate to treat this matter as we are my diet. Which is to say, as tabled items which we will reconsider.”

  Dr. Borden nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “Lastly, I would like to be of use. There is much to enjoy and learn about here and now, but I am accustomed to a less ornamental existence.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I would like to be more than a curiosity. This second life contains the opportunity, and perhaps an imperative, to serve a larger purpose.”

  He stared at me then, holding perfectly still, before nodding quite a bit. “You’re correct, of course. There is a role for you to play besides being a celebrity. Let me take it up with Carthage. Very good.”

  He placed the clipboard beside his kit, lining things up so they were tidy. At the doorway he turned halfway back to me. “I’ll see about the curtains, and your greater purpose, if you’ll stay out of the nightclubs.”

  “A fair bargain.”

  Even as I watched his clipped walk through the control room, I heard the security door open again. I felt so certain about who it would be, I did not immediately turn from the window.

  “Good morning, Dr. Philo.”

  She laughed a little melody. “Good morning, Judge Rice.”

  CHAPTER 24

  In the Front Row

  (Daniel Dixon)

  I found him. It wasn’t that hard, when he’s so handsome his face belonged on a coin. He might spend his days wrangling shouters and marchers and public praying types, our organizer of protesters, but the guy’s mug was like a cross between a surfer dude and a Canadian Mountie. Yours truly just plopped down with the wire services’ photos from large protests, and sure enough he started popping up like corn in a hot frying pan.

  There is a little thrill that never goes away, when I dig something up for a story. One time I convinced a city coroner to give me the blood type found on a murder victim, and it matched the dead woman’s own son. Gruesome, but to me it was a little jewel.

  So the first thing was hunting down this protest leader’s name. That took digging, and the better part of an afternoon. Finally I found a photo in the Washington Post, taken on the steps of the Supreme Court: four lawyers all wearing their best credibility, and beside them, in a Stetson ten gallons deep, stood our boy: Wade, T. J. Wade.

  This rabble-rouser had given me the creeps right from the start. And once I read his background, I knew why: a pro, a full-time pitchman from Kansas, Wade was an evangelical hell-raiser about two inches shy of the Klan. He specialized in nasty tactics. For example, using a hidden camera to trap liberal politicians into saying something breathtakingly stupid—a job, I have to say, they seemed to make awfully easy for him. But worse, too: making noise outside a soldier’s funeral to protest federal spending policies. Holding a news conference to blame bad weather on the queers.

  I could just guess what T.J. stood for. Maybe the initials of the third president?

  Twice Wade had come before the Supreme Court to test the limits of free speech, and neither time did he stand a
nywhere near the side of reasonableness. Somebody with a fat wallet liked keeping him in the noise-making game, I suppose. Lawyers who argue in front of the Supremes don’t come cheap.

  Wade had management skills, I grant him that. He’d pulled the motley sign wavers together, increased their numbers a little every day, worked up schedules so they could still hold jobs, and through it all, raised their rage about four notches higher. But it was the box lunches that impressed me most: all these people sitting on the lawn munching quietly between their regularly scheduled outbursts. Wade started timing the demonstrations to suit the news cycle, a dirty move just like we did with video releases.

  He had one trick I hadn’t seen before: each morning he’d hold a news conference to review the coverage from the day before. Was this headline fair? Did supporters of the project get more column inches than his group? One day Wade read quotes from reports about the prior day’s press conference and compared them with what he’d said, which he verified right then with a tape recorder. Of course most reporters made errors, here and there. It’s tough to catch every word when you’re taking notes at top speed. But Wade wasn’t much on excuses. Who, he demanded—grimacing as though wounded, while facing the TV cameras that could not get enough of his pretty mug—who in that shoddy press corps would have the courage to print corrections and retractions? Who among them would have the integrity to tell the story about how his innocent group of life-loving protester-citizens was being hammered by the godless and unfair media?

  Well, a gold star to you, Mister T. J. Wade, because making a spectacle over tiny details had exactly the desired effect. Which was that every reporter—and probably every damn editor back in every damn newsroom—became supercautious with quoting, and headlines, and making sure stories were balanced right down to the word. It was a masterpiece: the man was all but looking over people’s shoulders while they wrote.

  For some reason he left me out of it, just completely cut me slack. I knew better than to think it was because my stories were fair. Look, if someone hits an old lady on the head with a baseball bat, do I have to go out and get a balancing quote from the president of the Society in Favor of Hitting Old Ladies with Bats? Hell, no. Fair is for sissies, afraid to take sides. Likewise I had no intention of giving this flake a break, handsome pro or not. Which made it a pretty puzzle why he left me out of the press attack. Did he think yours truly wasn’t important enough? Well, fine by me. But he might regret it.

  Besides, it wasn’t his politics that made me dislike Wade. I’ve seen all kinds. It was his calculation. Each morning he’d harangue the protesters about bringing someone new with them tomorrow. At noon, while he handed out those lunches, he’d tell the crowd they were being ignored, they were making no difference, what were they doing about it?

  “Remember the impact of Martin Luther King,” he said, “and what he said about ‘the fierce urgency of now.’ ”

  That’s right, Wade was invoking a civil rights leader on behalf of his anti–Lazarus Project agenda. Each afternoon before the protest for the 6 P.M. news, he’d count heads, frowning with disappointment. During the taping, he’d stand to one side chewing on the inside of his cheek. Like he was thinking and gnawing at the same time.

  I had a bad feeling this Wade was just biding time, keeping the crowd frustrated while he dreamed up some new maneuver to win headlines and make things nastier. The man was a mess on wheels, just waiting for the opportunity to inflict itself.

  And when it all came down, I aimed to be sitting in the front row.

  CHAPTER 25

  Independence Day

  My name is Jeremiah Rice, and the world begins giving itself to me.

  Moving stairways lifted me into the innards of buildings without my taking one step. Music played in elevators, waiting rooms, even the bathroom of one hotel, though the melody was appallingly drab. People were fat, gelatinous flesh spilling out of their clothes, or fit as a draft horse, or so slender I wanted to sit them down somewhere for a good hot meal. In the aquarium I saw a turtle the size of a tabletop, sharks with expressions a mixture of malice and stupidity. I fed penguins, who stank. At the science museum I stood mesmerized by a motorized sculpture.

  And motion? Everywhere people jogged, they strolled, they rolled in mechanical chairs with motors on the back. Dr. Philo and I stood on a bridge over the Charles and watched the sleek rowing crews dragonfly up the river, while cars honked and trucks bellowed and jets roared overhead.

  One afternoon we visited a zoo with crowds of children. A toddler girl lost hold of her balloon, and while she wailed in despair it rose like a red beacon, dwindling in size irretrievably every second. That night in the privacy of the laboratory’s shower, I thought about Agnes, what a balloon of a father I had proved to be, and I wept.

  Mercifully, the world offered an endless supply of distractions. The next morning we entered a shop for Dr. Philo to buy coffee. A line of people waited their turn, and their requests took fully twenty seconds to declare, there were so many options, so many preferences, I was astonished. I wondered how much time they had spent trying the various flavors and sizes before finding the one they liked. Dr. Philo ordered a tall double-espresso mocha latte with skim. She laughed when I made her repeat it, as though I were learning to say hello in a foreign tongue. It was no compensation for Agnes, no such thing existed, but that laugh leavened my heart nonetheless.

  I received gifts. Security people at the Lazarus Project opened most of them, for safety’s sake, and stored the better portion in the basement. Carthage forbade me to write thank-you notes, saying it would only increase the cult of me.

  “What does he mean by that?” I asked Dr. Philo.

  “That he is narrow-minded,” she replied. “Ignore him.”

  There were clothes, books, trinkets, dolls, hand-thrown bowls, sunglasses, a woven blanket, on and on. One day in the control room I opened a box to find a long, tapered cone of hard material. It was bright yellow, with a space in the underside the width of a head.

  “Go ahead,” Dr. Philo said, “try it on.”

  I did so, the odd hat fitting awkwardly, the cone projecting in front of my face. “At least it matches my tie.”

  “Oh my God, that is spectacular,” Dr. Gerber said, rising from his desk and approaching.

  “I feel like a duck,” I said. “What is this object, anyway?”

  Dr. Gerber’s eyes were wide. “It’s a bicycle helmet, and it is a beauty.”

  “Are you kidding?” Dr. Philo laughed. “It’s grotesque. Gaudy, too.”

  He shook his head. “I love it.”

  “Then you may have it,” I said, removing the hat.

  “No way,” he said. “Nobody gives Gerber anything.”

  “That may be so. But I am giving this to you.”

  Dr. Gerber took the helmet reverentially, it seemed to me. He turned it halfway round and nestled it down on his head. The cone was in back; I now saw how it gave the helmet a tapered stern. “Thank you, Judge Rice. Thank you.”

  That hefty reporter smirked at his keyboard. “You look like an alien.”

  “You know, Dixon,” Dr. Gerber declared, “I am not a clown.” Then, with consummate dignity, he and his crown marched back to the desk.

  Often a gift came with a request: would I please take a photo of myself with the object and mail it? I knew where that would lead. I had seen what Franklin did in the newspapers with the pictures of me trying clothes on in his store.

  Not all gifts came from strangers. One afternoon Dr. Gerber repaid the helmet by presenting me with a metal object the size of a packet of matches. A cord in its side ran to two tiny buds, which he instructed me to place in my ears. Then he thumbed a button and music began, sounding almost inside my head, as clear as if the players were in the room with us.

  “It only holds two hundred songs, so I picked the essentials.” He counted off on his fingertips
. “ ‘Jack Straw’ from Europe ’72, ‘Friend of the Devil’ from American Beauty, ‘Wharf Rat’ from Skull and Roses. The basics.”

  The other personal gift came on Independence Day. Promising a special evening, Dr. Philo brought me to a hotel beside Rowes Wharf. By this point the salt smell did not burn my throat as before. It seemed a fine, fancy place. We rode an elevator to the rooftop, where tables were arrayed as in a plaza. Dr. Philo spoke with a man at a podium by the door, and he led us to a table near the edge. There was a warm breeze, the sun was setting, and the city quarreled below. A waiter presented us with lists of the offerings.

  Until that moment I had remained under Dr. Borden’s dietetic dictates, lab gruel that nourished the body but not the palate. Yet my frequent indigestion had persuaded me that his approach was nonetheless prudent.

  “I am not sure I can eat any of this.”

  Dr. Philo nodded. “That’s why I chose this restaurant. These are raw foods, pure basics, all organic. This is as natural a meal as I could find with this view in the whole city. And you can have anything on the menu you want.”

  “Anything?”

  “Absolutely anything.”

  I ordered a slice of bread. Also a plate of tomatoes. Some bits of cheese. Dr. Philo smirked, encouraging me to be more adventuresome. But I demurred. After the first plates came, I took one bite and had to close my eyes a moment, the experience was so sublime: the pierce of sunshine, the malt of earth. When a man has gone a century without tasting a flavor, I explained to her, a simple slice of tomato, seasoned with salt, is a masterpiece.

  She gave me a wistful look. “Our time and culture take an awful lot for granted.”

  By way of reply, I tore into the bread, a huge bite. She laughed. I had wanted her to laugh.

  As night fell, the only light was a candle on the table. Hearing popping sounds down in the street, I imagined school boys playing with firecrackers. But at our table, there was quiet. For the first time, the very first since my reawakening, we lacked for things to say. Forks clinked, the ice in our glasses jingled, but conversation stalled. There had never before been a lull.