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 worl
d 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.
Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense Page 12
