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 N____ speaks stiffly, the outdated Western racism offensive to his Asian ears.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 f
ingers. 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. Ver
y 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.
Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense Page 17
