The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  The odd thing was, I could understand how she felt.

  I called Timosa at three A.M., got her mad but at least awake, and got her to agree we should try to get the girl out that same night—out of that room, away from the press, and into a County unit for a complete fetal check. Timosa is the kind of boss you only get in heaven. She tried, but Mendoza stonewalled her under P.C. Twenty-two, the Jorgenson clause—he was getting all the publicity he and his new unit needed with the press screaming downstairs—and we gave up at five, and I went home for a couple hours of sleep before the paperwork began.

  I knew that sitting there in the middle of all that glass with two armed medics was almost as bad as the press, but what could I do, Lissy, what could I do?

  I should have gone to the hotel room that night, but the apartment was closer. I slept on the sofa. I didn’t look at the bedroom door, which is always locked from the outside. The nurse has a key. Some days it’s easier not to think about what’s in there. Some days it’s harder.

  I thought about daughters.

  We got her checked again, this time at County Medical, and the word came back okay. Echomytic bruises with some placental bleeding, but the fetal signs were fine. I went ahead and asked whether the fetus was a threat to the mother in any case, and they laughed. No more than any human child would be, they said. All you’re doing is borrowing the womb, they said. “Sure,” this cocky young resident says to me, “it’s low-tech all the way.” I had a lot of homework to do, I realized.

  Security at the hospital reported a visit by a man who was not her husband, and they didn’t let him through. The same man called me an hour later. He was all smiles and wore a suit.

  I told him we’d have to abort if County, under the Victims’ Rights Act, decided it was best or the girl wanted it. He pointed out with a smile that the thing she was carrying was worth a lot of money to the people he represented, and they could make her life more comfortable, and we ought to protect the girl’s interests.

  I told him what I thought of him, and he laughed. “You’ve got it all wrong, Doctor.”

  I let it pass. He knows I’m an MPS-V.R., no Ph.D., no M.D. He probably even knows I got the degree under duress, years late, because Timosa said we needed all the paper we could get if the department was going to survive. I know what he’s doing, and he knows I know.

  “The people I represent are caring people, Doctor. Their cause is a good one. They’re not what you’re accustomed to working with, and they’ve retained me simply as a program consultant, a ‘resource locator.’ It’s all aboveboard, Doctor, completely legal, I assure you. But I really don’t need to tell you any of this, do I?”

  “No, you don’t.”

  I added that, legal or not, if he tried to see her again I would have him for harassment under the D.A.’s cooperation clause.

  He laughed, and I knew then he had a law degree from one of the local universities. The suit was right. I could imagine him in it at the park that day.

  “You may be able to pull that with the mopes and 5150s you work with on the street, Doctor, but I know the law. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stay away for the next three months, as long as you look after the girl’s best interests, how’s that?”

  I knew there was more, so I waited.

  “My people will go on paying for weekly visits up to the eighth month, then daily through to term, the clinic to be designated by them. They want ultrasound, CVS, and amniotic antiabort treatments, and the diet and abstinence programs the girl’s already agreed to. All you have to do is get her to her appointments, and we pay for it. Save the county some money.”

  I waited.

  His voice changed as I’d known it would. The way they do in the courtrooms. I’d heard it change like that a hundred times before, years of it, both sides of the aisle.

  “If County can’t oblige,” he said, “we’ll just have to try Forty-A, right?”

  I told him to take a flying something.

  Maybe I didn’t know the law, but I knew Forty-A. In certain circles it’s known simply as Fucker-Forty. Under it—the state’s own legislation—he’d be able to sue the county and this V.R. advocate in particular for loss of livelihood—his and hers—and probably win after appeals.

  This was the last thing Timosa or any of us needed.

  The guy was still smiling.

  “You’ve kept that face for a reason, Doctor. What do young girls think of it?”

  I hung up on him.

  With Timosa’s help I got her into the Huntington on Normandy, a maternal unit for sedated Ward B types. Some of the other women had seen her on the news two evenings before; some hadn’t. It didn’t matter, I thought. It was about as good a place for her to hide as possible, I told myself. I was wrong. Everything’s on computer these days, and some information’s as cheap as a needle.

  I get a call the next morning from the unit saying a man had gotten in and tried to kill her, and she was gone.

  I’m thinking of the ones I’ve lost, Lissy. The tenth-generation maggot casings on the one in Koreatown, the door locked for days. The one named Consejo, the one I went with to the morgue, where they cut up babies, looking for hers. The skinny one I thought I’d saved, the way I was supposed to, but he’s lying in a pool of O-positive in a room covered with the beautiful pink dust they used for prints.

  Or the ones when I was a kid, East L.A., Fontana, the drugs taking them like some big machine, the snipings that always killed the ones that had nothing to do with it—the chubby ones, the ones who liked to read—the man who took Karenna and wasn’t gentle, the uncle who killed his own nephews and blamed it on coyotes, which weren’t there anymore, hadn’t been for years.

  I’m thinking of the ones I’ve lost, Lissy.

  I looked for her all day, glad to be out of the apartment, glad to be away from a phone that might ring with a slick lawyer’s face on it.

  When I went back to the apartment that night to pick up another change of clothes for the hotel room, she was sitting cross-legged by the door.

  “Lissy,” I said, wondering how she’d gotten the address.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  She had her hand on her belly, holding it not out of pain but as if it were the most comforting thing in the world.

  “He wants to kill me. He says that anybody who has an animal growing in her is a devil and’s got to die. He fell down the stairs. I didn’t push him, I didn’t.”

  She was crying, and the only thing I could think to do was get down and put my arms around her and try not to cry myself.

  “I know, I know,” I said. The symptoms were like Parkinson’s, I remembered. You tripped easily.

  I wasn’t thinking clearly. I hadn’t had more than two or three hours of sleep for three nights running, and all I could think of was getting us both inside, away from the steps, the world.

  Maybe it was fatigue. Or maybe something else. I should have gotten her to a hospital. I should have called Mendoza for an escort back to his unit. What I did was get her some clothes from the bedroom, keep my eyes on the rug while I was in there, and lock the door again when I came out. She didn’t ask why neither of us were going to sleep in the bedroom. She didn’t ask about the lock. She just held her belly, and smiled like some Madonna.

  I took two Dalmanes from the medicine cabinet, thinking they might be enough to get the pictures of what was in that room out of my head.

  I don’t know whether they did or not. Lissy was beside me, her shoulder pressing against me, as I got the futon and the sofa ready.

  Her stomach growled, and we laughed. I said, “Who’s growling? Who’s growling?” and we laughed again. I asked her if she was hungry and if she could eat sandwiches. She laughed again, and I got her a fresh one from the kitchen.

  She took the futon, lying on her side to keep the weight off. I took the sofa because of my long legs.

  I felt something beside me in the dark. She kissed me, said, “Good night,” and I heard her nightgown whis
per back into the darkness. I held it in for a while and then couldn’t anymore. It didn’t last long. Dalmane’s a knockout.

  The next day I took her to the designated clinic and waited outside for her. She was happy. The big amnio needle they stuck her with didn’t bother her, she said. She liked how much bigger her breasts were, she said, like a mother’s should be. She didn’t mind being careful about what she ate and drank. She even liked the strange V of hair growing on her abdomen, because—because it was hairy, she said, just like the thing inside her. She liked how she felt, and she wanted to know if I could see it, the glow, the one expectant mothers are supposed to have. I told her I could.

  I’m thinking of a ten-year-old, the one that used to tag along with me on the median train every Saturday when I went in for caseloads while most mothers had their faces changed, or played, or mothered. We talked a lot back then, and I miss it. She wasn’t going to need a lot of work on that face, I knew—maybe the ears, just a little, if she was picky. She’d gotten her father’s genes. But she talked like me—like a kid from East L.A.—tough, with a smile, and I thought she was going to end up a D.A. or a showy defense type or at least an exec. That’s how stupid we get. In four years she was into molecular opiates and trillazines and whose fault was that? The top brokers roll over two billion a year in this city alone; the local capi net a twentieth of that, their street dealers a fourth; and God knows what the guys in the labs bring home to their families.

  It’s six years later, and I hear her letting herself in one morning. She’s fumbling and stumbling at the front door. I get up, dreading it. What I see tells me that the drugs are nothing, nothing at all. She’s running with a strange group of kids, a lot of them older. This new thing’s a fad, I tell myself. It’s like not having your face fixed—like not getting the nasal ramification modified, the mandibular thrust attended to—when you could do it easily, anytime, and cheaply, just because you want to make a point, and it’s fun to goose the ones who need goosing. That’s all she’s really doing, you tell yourself.

  You’ve seen her a couple of times like this, but you still don’t recognize her. She’s heavy around the chest and shoulders, which makes her breasts seem a lot smaller. Her face is heavy; her eyes are puffy, almost closed. She walks with a limp because something hurts down low. Her shoulders are bare, and they’ve got tattoos now, the new metallic kind, glittery and painful. She’s wearing expensive pants, but they’re dirty.

  So you have a daughter now who’s not a daughter, or she’s both, boy and girl. The operation cost four grand, and you don’t want to think how she got the money. Everyone’s doing it, you tell yourself. But the operation doesn’t take. She gets an infection, and the thing stops being fun, and six months later she’s got no neurological response to some of the tissues the doctors have slapped on her, and pain in the others. It costs money to reverse. She doesn’t have it. She spends it on other things, she says.

  She wants money for the operation, she says, standing in front of you. You owe it to her, she says.

  You try to find the ten-year-old in those eyes, and you can’t.

  Did you ever?

  The call came through at six, and I knew it was County.

  A full jacket—ward status, medical action, all of it—had been put through. The fetus would be aborted—“for the mother’s safety . . . to prevent further exploitation by private interests . . . and physical endangerment by the spouse.”

  Had Timosa been there, she’d have told me how County had already gotten flack from the board of supervisors, state W&I, and the attorney general’s office over a V.R. like this slipping through and getting this much press. They wanted it over, done with. If the fetus were aborted, County’s position would be clear—to state, the feds, and the religious groups that were starting to scream bloody murder.

  It would be an abortion no one would ever complain about.

  The husband was down at County holding with a pretty fibercast on his left tibia, but they weren’t taking any chances. Word on two interstate conspiracies to kill the ten women had reached the D.A., and they were, they said, taking it seriously. I was, I said, glad to hear it.

  Mendoza said he liked sassy women as much as the next guy, but he wanted her back in custody, and the new D.A. was screaming jurisdiction, too. Everyone wanted a piece of the ten o’clock news before the cameras lost interest and rolled on.

  Society wasn’t ready for it. The atavistic fears were there. You could be on trillazines, you could have an operation to be both a boy and a girl for the thrill of it, you could be a walljacker, but a mother like this, no, not yet.

  I should have told someone but didn’t. I took her to the zoo instead. We stood in front of the cages watching the holograms of the big cats, the tropical birds, the grass eaters of Africa—the ones that are gone. She wasn’t interested in the real ones, she said—the pigeons, sparrows, coyotes, the dull, hardy ones that will outlast us all. She never came here as a child, she said, and I believe it. A boyfriend at her one and only job took her once, and later, because she asked her to, so did a woman who wanted the same thing from her.

  We watched the lions, the ibex, the white bears. We watched the long-legged wolf, the harp seals, the rheas. We watched the tapes stop and repeat, stop and repeat; and then she said, “Let’s go,” pulled at my hand, and we moved on to the most important cage of all.

  There, the hologram walked back and forth looking out at us, looking through us, its red sagittal crest and furrowed brow so convincing. Alive, its name had been Mark Anthony, the plaque said. It had weighed two hundred kilos. It had lived to be ten. It wasn’t one of the two whose child was growing inside her, but she seemed to know this, and it didn’t matter.

  “They all died the same way,” she said to me. “That’s what counts, Jo.” Inbred depression, I remembered reading. Petechial hemorrhages, cirrhosis, renal failure.

  Somewhere in the nation the remaining fertilized ova were sitting frozen in a lab, as they had for thirty years. A few dozen had been removed, thawed, encouraged to divide to sixteen cells, and finally implanted that day seven months ago. Ten had taken. As they should have, naturally, apes that we are. “Sure, it could’ve been done back then,” the cocky young resident with insubordination written all over him had said. “All you’d have needed was an egg and a little plastic tube. And, of course,”—I didn’t like the way he smiled—“a woman who was willing. . . .”

  I stopped her. I asked her if she knew what The Arks were, and she said no. I started to tell her about the intensive-care zoos where for twenty years the best and brightest of them, ten thousand species in all, had been kept while two hundred thousand others disappeared—the toxics, the new diseases, the land-use policies of a new world taking them one by one—how The Arks hadn’t worked, how two-thirds of the macro kingdom were gone now, and how the thing she carried inside her was one of them and one of the best.

  She wasn’t listening. She didn’t need to hear it, and I knew the man in the suit had gotten his yes without having to say these things. The idea of having it inside her, hers for a little while, had been enough.

  She told me what she was going to buy with the money. She asked me whether I thought the baby would end up at this zoo. I told her I didn’t know but could check, and hated the lie. She said she might have to move to another city to be near it. I nodded and didn’t say a thing.

  I couldn’t stand it. I sat her down on a bench and told her what the County was going to do to her.

  When I was through she looked at me and said she’d known it would happen, it always happened. She didn’t cry. I thought maybe she wanted to leave, but she shook her head.

  We went through the zoo one more time. We didn’t leave until dark.

  “Are you out of your mind, Jo?” Timosa said.

  “It’s not permanent,” I said.

  “Of course it’s not permanent. Everyone’s been looking everywhere for her. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

 
I said it didn’t matter, did it? The County homes and units weren’t safe, and we didn’t want her with Mendoza, and who’d think of a soc worker’s house—a P.D. safe house maybe, but not a soc worker’s because that’s against policy, and everyone knows that soc workers are spineless, right?

  “Sure,” Timosa said. “But you didn’t tell anybody, Jo.”

  “I’ve had some thinking to do.”

  Suddenly Timosa got gentle, and I knew what she was thinking. I needed downtime, maybe some psychiatric profiling done. She’s a friend of mine, but she’s a professional, too. The two of us go back all the way to corrections, Timosa and I, and lying isn’t easy.

  “Get her over to County holding immediately—that’s the best we can do for her,” she said finally. “And let’s have lunch soon, Jo. I want to know what’s going on in that head of yours.”

  It took me the night and the morning. They put her in the nicest hole they had and doubled the security, and when I left she cried for a long time, they told me. I didn’t want to leave, but I had to get some thinking done.

  When it was done, I called Timosa.

  She swore at me when I was through but said she’d give it a try. It was crazy, but what isn’t these days?

  The County bit, but with stipulations. Postpartum wipe. New I.D. Fine, but also a fund set up out of our money. Timosa groaned. I said, Why not.

  Someone at County had a heart, but it was our mention of Statute Forty-A, I found out later, that clinched it. They saw the thing dragging on through the courts, cameras rolling forever, and that was worse than any temporary heat from state or the feds.