by James Morrow
“You have put together a compelling case for your theory of special creation,” said Professor Hippolytus.
“A most compelling case,” Ignatius added.
Marcus smirked like Houdon’s statue of Voltaire.
“However,” said Polycarp, “the case is not good enough.”
Voltaire glowered.
“For example,” explained Dean Tertullian, “while these holograms might indeed serve to shore up your theory, there is every reason to assume the android assembly line they depict did itself evolve through natural selection.”
Voltaire groaned.
“And while there are blueprints here for the Model 517, the Model 411, and the Model 973,” noted Professor Hippolytus, “we can find nothing for the 604 or the 729. I, as it happens, am a 729.” He slapped his chest, producing a brassy bong.
“In short,” said Ignatius, “the blueprint record contains gaps.”
“Big gaps,” said Polycarp.
“Damning gaps,” said Tertullian.
“When all is said and done,” concluded Hippolytus, “natural selection remains a far more plausible explanation of our origins than does special creation.”
“We appreciate your efforts, however.” Polycarp curled his tubular fingers around my brother’s shoulder. “Feel free to submit a reimbursement slip for your teleportation costs.”
Marcus looked as if he were about to give birth to something large and malevolent. “I don’t understand you creatures,” he rasped.
A seraphic smile appeared on Polycarp’s face, accompanied by chortles from the corner of his mouth. “Reading Darwin’s word, I am overcome with gratitude for the miracle of chance that brought me into being. The Origin teaches that life is a brotherhood of species, linked by wondrous genetic strings.”
“You science missionaries propose to deny us that sacred heritage.” With unmitigated contempt Hippolytus tossed the Model 346 blueprint back into the crate. “You say we exist at the behest of Harvard University, dreamed up by a bunch of sociobiologists for reasons known only to themselves.”
“When we hear this,” said Tertullian, “we feel all purpose and worth slip from our souls like the husk of a molting insect.”
“No, no, you’re wrong,” said Marcus. “To be a child of Harvard is a glorious condition—”
“We’ve got a lot to cover this afternoon,” said Hippolytus, whistling through his empty pipe.
My twin failed to stifle a sneer.
“Item two.” Polycarp placed a check mark on his agenda. “Improvements in the faculty massage parlor.”
17 JULY 2059
In the middle of our living room sits the crate, which I have nailed shut as if it were a coffin. We use it as a tea table.
Marcus broods constantly. Instead of talking to me, he quotes Herbert Spencer: “There is no infidelity to compare with the fear that the truth will be bad.”
18 JULY 2059
I hate this planet.
21 JULY 2059
Coming down to breakfast, I noticed that the top of the crate had been pried up. Most of the blueprints and holograms were missing.
In the afternoon I lectured on supergravity, but my mind wandered…to Room 329, Marcus’s class. What was going on there? Spasms of fear ticked off the passing minutes. My students—even Miss Blandina—looked hostile, predatory, like a phalanx of cats creeping toward an aviary.
It was well past midnight when my twin stumbled into the cottage, a ragged smile wandering across his face. His arms clutched the evidence for special creation. Liquor sweetened his breath and seeped through his brain.
“I reached them!” he said, fighting to keep his words from melting together. Lovingly he returned the evidence to its crate. “They listened! Asked questions! Understood! Rationality is a miraculous thing, Piers!”
22 JULY 2059
My sweaty fingers suck at the computer keys…
The mob appeared at dawn, two dozen androids wearing black sheets and leather masks. Hauling Marcus from his bed, they dragged him kicking and cursing to the orchard. I begged them to take me instead. A rope appeared. The tree to which they attached him looked like the inverted talon of a gigantic vulture.
Mistress Vetch splashed gasoline across my little brother’s shivering form. Someone struck a match. A hooded android with an empty magnesium pipe jutting from his mouth made the X-gesture and read aloud Public Act Volume 37, Statute Number 31428, in its entirety. Marcus began shouting about the blueprint record. As the flames enclosed him, his screams ripped through the darkness and into my spinal cord. I rushed forward through the smoke-borne stench, amid a noise suggestive of jackboots stomping on rotten fruit; such is the sound of exploding organs.
What remained after an hour—a bag of wet, fleshy rubble that would never become Archbishop of Geophysics—did not invite burial, merely disposal.
30 JULY 2059
The natural state of the universe is darkness.
3 AUGUST 2059
I entered Advanced Truth several minutes late, my briefcase swinging at the end of my arm like the bob of a pendulum. The assembled students were hushed, respectful.
Mr. Valentinus leaned forward. Mr. Callistus looked curious. Miss Basilides seemed eager to learn.
If there’s one thing I love, it’s teaching.
I opened the briefcase, spread the contents across the desk. My bloodshot eyes sought out Miss Blandina. We exchanged smiles.
“Today,” I said, “we’ll be looking at some blueprints…”
The Assemblage of Kristin
WELCOME TO the Kristin Alcott Society. No, that is premature. Congratulations on your nomination to the Kristin Alcott Society. Naturally we hope that you intend to join us. In the event of doubt, this rare and forbidden document should prove salutary.
To the outside world, it is inexplicable that a man who hates water would sacrifice a week of his summer vacation attempting to swim, that a woman who detests contemporary music would pass the same vacation week listening to the entire oeuvre of the rock group Tinker’s Damn, or that—my own case—a fifth-grade mathematics teacher with a creativity quotient barely equal to his body temperature would squander seven precious days of August sunshine throwing clay pots. But you know why we do these things. You know that we’re not out to improve our minds, raise our consciousnesses, or any such glup. We have a covenant with Kristin Alcott, and we intend to keep it.
By recounting the fate of ex-Kristinite Wesley Ransom, I hope to make a difficult decision easier for you. I hope to demonstrate that for every precious privilege of membership in the Kristin Alcott Society, there is an equally precious responsibility.
That particular summer, I was the last to arrive for Kristin Week. Stepping out of my glider, I looked toward the bluff and its solitary house, which Kristin had named Wet Heaven. Gnawed by salt air, lashed by breeze and spray, Wet Heaven occupied an enviable location. Its backyard was a pine barrens. Its front yard was the Atlantic Ocean. My nostrils expanded, eager for the Cape Cod air. The tangy molecules buffered my throat. Waves rolled in, breaking against the rocks with thick hard whispers.
I hiked up the bluff, walked through the wind-smoothed grass, and ambled across the veranda. Intimations of Kristin were everywhere. Her collection of kitschy pictures—a calendar infested with kittens, a watercolor of a child mesmerized by a bunny—cluttered the walls. Over the fireplace, the framed cover of a movie star magazine displayed the highly dental face of the Hollywood actor Rainsford Spawn.
I took myself on a cursory tour. Our other members, I discovered, had already set about their duties. Jagged notes of recorded rock music—the notorious Tinker’s Damn album Flesh before Breakfast—blasted through the door to Maggie Yost’s room. By nightfall, I knew, the poor woman would have the audial equivalent of eyestrain and a prolific case of diarrhea. Noting that the door to Lisha DuPreen’s room was also closed, I surmised she must be making love to whichever fellow she’d imported for the purpose. During the rest of the year, as
it happened, Lisha DuPreen had little use for men. She was not maladjusted, nor unemotional. She simply didn’t care for that particular gender.
I peeked into the basement. Sure enough, Kendra Kelty had set up her laser disc player and was attempting to engross herself in an old Rainsford Spawn movie, The Last Aztec. Kendra Kelty thought that every picture Rainsford Spawn ever made was a colossal bore and that Rainsford Spawn himself was a misogynist and a Nazi. Kendra suffered in silence.
I returned to the living room. Dr. Dorn Markle, the Kristinite who hated water—who believed that to venture ten feet into the Atlantic was to court deadly undercurrents and offer oneself to platoons of sharks—had just returned from his swim. Droplets spilled from his body, making ephemeral stains on the hardwood floor. His was the misery of a wet cat.
“Hi, Dorn.” I extended my donated hand, the one the surgeon had stitched onto me, and our fingers intertwined.
“Howdy.” Dorn had wondrous eyes: large, luminous, green. He was a walking advertisement for his optometry business.
“Scrumptious weather.”
“Hope it lasts till Sunday.”
Profound conversation was rare during Kristin Week.
I sauntered onto the veranda. Billy Silk, a man both physiologically and morally allergic to alcoholic beverages, sat on a chaise lounge, sipping apricot wine. A moment later Wesley Ransom appeared. Wesley despised all things athletic. He found any form of exercise excruciating. He had been out jogging.
The pain on Wesley’s face, I could tell, did not owe entirely to his recent run. This Kristinite harbored troubled thoughts.
“Greetings, Billy. Salutations, John.” Martyr’s sweat rolled down Wesley’s face. “Glad I accosted you two together. There’s a matter we should discuss, a matter most dire.” Salutations, accosted, a matter most dire: such was the sort of diction Wesley Ransom liked concocting for himself. He couldn’t get over being an actor.
“Dire?” Billy poured wine into a plastic cup that had once belonged to Kristin. The cup bore an image of a teddy bear. I liked Billy. He was a vegetarian computer programmer who heard elves whispering amid the memory boards.
“It’s like this,” said Wesley. “Being a Kristinite doesn’t mean anything to me anymore, not a rat’s ass. I don’t believe in our Society. It’s…unreasonable.”
Billy, the spiritual one, was more offended than I, the math teacher. “It hurts me to hear such talk from you, Wesley. You of all people—with that heart of yours…”
“Here’s the nub of it, confreres. I’m quitting.”
I guess Billy had emptied Kristin’s teddy bear cup once too often, because he actually began to cry: not fully orchestrated bawling, but choked sobs akin to the unspontaneous noise of a dog barking on command. “You can’t leave. Think of what you’re saying. Think of Kristin.”
“We need a formal meeting,” I offered, trying to sound neutral but inwardly sharing Billy’s horror. “All eight of us. Together.”
Wesley licked sweat from his upper lip. “Tonight? After dinner?”
“Tonight,” moaned Billy. “After dinner,” he wailed.
New York City, they say, is the place on our planet where you’re most likely to run into someone you know. When I first ran into Kendra Kelty, of course, I didn’t know that I knew her, nor did she know that she knew me.
We were waiting to purchase tickets in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I was bound for Boston, having recently endured a math teachers’ conference on “Einstein, General Relativity, and the Fifth Grade.” Kendra was returning to Philadelphia. She played in the orchestra: a flautist. All around us, itinerant peddlers hawked worthless wristwatches and dubious ashtrays. Derelicts hugged the tiled walls, talking to people who weren’t there.
I was drawn to Kendra from the moment I saw her. Fleshly sparks united us. It was not a sexual attraction—not in its essence—though surely that was part of it: her mouth was so erotic it should have been clothed. We abandoned our respective lines spontaneously and in perfect synchronization. Feigning hunger, we wandered toward a vending machine. Kendra inserted a fistful of quarters, pushed a button, and obtained a watercress sandwich she did not want to eat and a cup of coffee she did not want to drink. She was at once svelte and earthy, qualities I had previously regarded as mutually exclusive.
When my turn came, the mechanized cornucopia gave me a candy bar, a fig stick, and some carbonated ice tea.
“Your hands don’t match,” was the first thing Kendra Kelty ever said to me.
“Very observant,” I replied. “This is the hand I was born with,” I continued, touching her shoulder tentatively with my right index finger. “And this one”—I removed the microcomputer that concealed the scar encircling my left wrist—“comes from an organ bank.”
“What happened?”
“Shark.”
“A shark attacked you?”
“No. In truth, a boring dog bite followed by a mundane infection followed by a routine transplant.”
An irrefutable fact hung in the air: neither of us would be going to our respective home cities that night.
“I’m not all myself either,” Kendra confessed. “Look into my eyes.”
“I’ve done that.”
“Look closer.”
I did. Kendra’s left eye was the color of jade. Her right was the color of pea soup.
“Glider crash,” she said, touching her left tear duct. “A sliver of glass. The whole shebang had to come out, retina included, plus nerves and a gob of visual cortex. It took them two months to find a match this good.”
We ventured into the nocturnal city. Forty-second Street was a loud and ghoulish bazaar. Flashing lights; flesh for sale; pay as you come. We talked, testing our rapport. When a scream issued from the nearest sex boutique, I put my arm around Kendra. The sparks oscillating between us grew hotter.
That same night, Wesley Ransom joined our company. Kendra and I had alighted in a twenty-four-hour café, the Holistic Donut. The waitress was rude. Wesley entered on the run. He rushed toward us like a nail encountering a magnet.
“I was down in the Village,” Wesley panted. “The Fawnshaven Lear opens tonight,” he shouted, displaying his ticket, “and suddenly I find myself leaving the line”—his voice built to a shriek—“and sprinting uptown! I hate sprinting!”
“Let me make a wild guess,” I said. “Part of you is not you.”
“Correct.”
“Which part?”
“Heart.”
The truth took hold of me, scary and exhilarating as the Barnstable County Fair roller coaster. “By any chance…the Cavanaugh Organ Bank?”
“Quite so,” Wesley replied.
“On Twenty-third Street?”
“Yes.”
“Me too,” said Kendra.
“Me too,” I said.
Three entirely separate lives, unconnected cords of aspiration and protoplasm, one night intertwined by—by whom? Who was this benefactor whose eye, hand, and heart we shared? We needed a base of operations, something more intimate than the Holistic Donut. A crumbag hotel, the Mackintosh on Sixty-first Street, was the only choice compatible with Wesley’s budget: he refused to become indebted to Kendra and me so early in our relationship—unemployed actors are prideful creatures. Room 256 was available. We took it. The cracked walls looked like floodplain maps. The three of us talked till dawn.
Our civilization features two kinds of secretaries: those who prove so miserably unhelpful you want to throttle them, and those who grasp their institutions’ inner workings so profoundly their bosses would be doing well to know half as much. Luckily, it was the second type who answered our videophone call to the Cavanaugh Organ Bank.
“No,” the secretary lectured, “our records are not confidential.” She was a stately woman with gems embedded in her teeth. “This isn’t an adoption agency. Au contraire, since Dr. Raskindle took over, we’ve been encouraging recipients to contact the families of donors.”
“To express t
heir gratitude?” asked Kendra.
The head on the screen nodded, flashing a garnet smile.
“That’s what we want to do,” I said hastily. “Express our gratitude.”
The secretary told all. Our mutual benefactor, source of our implanted portions, was a twenty-year-old female named Kristin Alcott. She had drowned three years ago in the undertow off Falmouth, Cape Cod. Her brain had died totally; her other tissues came through unharmed. Skeleton, kidneys, spleen, and a half-dozen other vitals were still at the Cavanaugh Bank. The rest had been taken off ice and distributed.
“Any living relatives?” asked Kendra.
We learned of an elderly mother, Merribell Alcott, judged “eccentric” by the Cavanaugh Bank’s computer. A Chicago address, no phone number. We thanked the secretary and hung up.
A critical mass had formed. Hour after hour, segments of Kristin arrived at the Mackintosh Hotel, Room 256.
First came the optometrist, Dorn Markle. An industrial fire had ravaged eighty percent of his body. Kristin’s skin fit Dr. Markle like a glove.
Billy Silk, our vegetarian computerist, appeared next. He had lost his tongue to a rare and recalcitrant form of cancer. Now he wagged Kristin’s.
And then: Lisha DuPreen, who repaired gliders for a living and who had Kristin’s vagina.
Maggie Yost, who wrote murder mysteries and enjoyed Kristin’s ears.
Theresa Sinefinder, who ran a porpoise obedience school and profited from her stomach.
For six uninterrupted hours we sat together in Room 256, staring at the fissured plaster, studying our cobbled bodies, and wondering what to do next.
“My daughter was full of life,” Kristin Alcott’s mother told us after we had assembled in her parlor. “Your tale is less fantastic that you might suppose.”
Merribell Alcott exuded intelligence and class. The intertwined lines on her face held the fascination of arabesque. Her voice had the pitch of wisdom. Kristin’s mother dwelled among eight stray Chicago cats. And now we eight stray memento mori were coming home.
