Howie appeared at ten of three, his rust-eaten Datsun rumbling at the curb, the omnipresent grin on his lips. It was unseasonably warm for mid-April and he wore a red T-shirt that showed off the extraordinary development of his pectorals, deltoids, and biceps; a blue windbreaker was flung casually over one shoulder. “Miss Umbo,” he boomed as she answered the door, “it’s one perfect day for flying. Visibility’s got to be twenty-five miles or more. You ready?”
She was. She’d been looking forward to it, in fact. “I hope you don’t mind if I bring Konrad along,” she said.
Howie’s smile faded for just an instant. Konrad stood at her side, his lower lip unfurled in a pout. “Hoo-hoo,” he murmured, eyes meek and round. Howie regarded him dubiously a moment, and then the grin came back. “Sure,” he said, shrugging. “I don’t see why not.”
It was a twenty-minute ride to the airport. Beatrice stared out the window at shopping centers, car lots, Burger King and Stereo City, at cemeteries that stretched as far as she could see. Konrad sat in back, absorbed in plucking cigarette butts from the rear ashtray and making a neat little pile of them on the seat beside him. Howie was oblivious. He kept up a steady stream of chatter the whole way, talking about airplanes mostly, but shading into his coursework at school and how flipped out his anthro prof would be when she heard he was taking Beatrice flying. For her part, Beatrice was content to let the countryside flash by, murmuring an occasional “Yes” or “Uh-huh” when Howie paused for breath.
The airport was tiny, two macadam strips in a grassy field, thirty or forty airplanes lined up in ragged rows, a cement-block building the size of her basement. A sign over the door welcomed them to Arkbelt Airport. Howie pushed the plane out onto the runway himself and helped Beatrice negotiate the high step up into the cockpit. Konrad clambered into the back and allowed Beatrice to fasten his seatbelt. For a long while they sat on the ground, as Howie, grinning mechanically, revved the engine and checked this gauge or that.
The plane was a Cessna 182, painted a generic orange and white and equipped with dual controls, autopilot, a storm scope, and four cramped vinyl seats. It was about what she’d expected—a little shinier and less battered than Champ’s Piper, but no less noisy or bone-rattling. Howie gunned the engine and the plane jolted down the runway with an apocalyptic roar, Beatrice clinging to the plastic handgrip till she could taste her breakfast in the back of her throat. But then they lifted off like gods, liberated from the grip of the earth, and Connecticut swelled beneath them, revealing the drift and flow of its topology and the hidden patterns of its dismemberment.
“Beautiful,” she screamed over the whine of the engine.
Howie worked the flaps and drew the yoke toward him. They banked right and rose steadily. “See that out there?” he shouted, pointing out her window to where the ocean threw the sky back at them. “Long Island Sound.”
From just behind her, Konrad said: “Wow-wow, er-er-er-er!” The smell of him, in so small a confine, was staggering.
“You want to sightsee here,” Howie shouted, “maybe go over town and look for your house and the university and all, or do you want to go out over the Island a ways and then circle back?”
She was dazzled, high in the empyrean, blue above, blue below. “The Island,” she shouted, exhilarated, really exhilarated, for the first time since she’d left Africa.
Howie leveled off the plane and the tan lump of Long Island loomed ahead of them. “Great, huh?” he shouted, gesturing toward the day like an impresario, like the man who’d made it. Beatrice beamed at him, “Woooo!” Howie said, pinching his nostrils and making an antic face. “He’s ripe today, Konrad, isn’t he?”
“Forty years,” Beatrice laughed, proud of Konrad, proud of the stink, proud of every chimp she’d ever known, and proud of this boy Howie too—why, he was nothing but a big chimp himself. It was then—while she was laughing, while Howie mugged for her and she began to feel almost whole for the first time since she’d left Makoua—that the trouble began. Like most trouble, it arose out of a misunderstanding. Apparently, Konrad had saved one of the butts from Howie’s car, and when he reached out nimbly to depress the cigarette lighter, Howie, poor Howie, thought he was going for the controls and grabbed his wrist.
A mistake.
“No!” Beatrice cried, and immediately the tug of war spilled over into her lap. “Let go of him!”
“Eeeee! Eeeee!” Konrad shrieked, his face distended in the full open grin of high excitement, already stoked to violence. She felt the plane dip out from under her as Howie, his own face gone red with the rush of blood, struggled to keep it on course with one hand while fighting back Konrad with the other. It was no contest. Konrad slipped Howie’s grasp and then grabbed his wrist, as if to say, “How do you like it?”
“Get off me, goddamnit!” Howie bellowed, but Konrad didn’t respond. Instead, he jerked Howie’s arm back so swiftly and suddenly it might have been the lever of a slot machine; even above the noise of the engine, Beatrice could hear the shoulder give, and then Howie’s bright high yelp of pain filled the compartment. In the next instant Konrad was in front, in the cockpit, dancing from Beatrice’s lap to Howie’s and back again, jerking at the controls, gibbering and hooting and loosing his bowels in a frenzy like nothing she’d ever seen.
“Son of a bitch!” Howie was working up a frenzy of his own, the plane leaping and bucking as he punched in the autopilot and hammered at the chimp with his left hand, the right dangling uselessly, his eyes peeled back in terror. “Hoo-ah-hoo-ah-hoo!” Konrad hooted, spewing excrement and springing into Beatrice’s lap. For an instant he paused to shoot Howie a mocking glance and then he snatched the yoke to his chest and the plane shot up with a clattering howl while Howie flailed at him with the heavy meat of his fist.
Konrad took the first two blows as if he didn’t notice them, then abruptly dropped the yoke, the autopilot kicking in to level them off. Howie hit him again and Beatrice knew she was going to die. “Er-er,” Konrad croaked experimentally, and Howie, panic in his face, hit him again. And then, as casually as he might have reached out for a yam or banana, Konrad returned the blow and the plane jerked with the force of it. “Wraaaaa!” Konrad screamed, but Howie didn’t hear him. Howie was unconscious. Unconscious, and smeared with shit. And now, delivering the coup de grace, Konrad sprang to his chest, snatched up his left hand—the hand that had pummeled him—and bit off the thumb. A snap of the jaws and it was gone. Howie’s heart pumped blood to the wound.
In that moment—the moment of Howie’s disfigurement—Beatrice’s own heart turned over in her chest. She looked at Konrad, perched atop poor Howie, and at Howie, who even in repose managed to favor Agassiz. They were beyond Long Island now, headed out to sea, high over the Atlantic. Champ had tried to teach her to fly, but she’d had no interest in it. She looked at the instrument panel and saw nothing. For a moment the idea of switching on the radio came into her head, but then she glanced at Konrad and thought better of it.
Konrad was looking into her eyes. The engine hummed, Howie’s head fell against the door, the smell of Konrad—his body, his shit—filled her nostrils. They had five hours’ flying time, give or take a few minutes, that much she knew. She looked out over the nose of the plane to where the sea swallowed up the rim of the world. Africa was out there, distant and serene, somewhere beyond the night that fell like an ax across the horizon. She could almost taste it.
“Urk,” Konrad said, and he was still looking at her. His eyes were soft now, his breathing regular. He sat atop Howie in a forlorn slouch, the cigarette forgotten, the controls irrelevant, nothing at all. “Urk,” he repeated, and she knew what he wanted, knew in a rush of comprehension that took her all the way back to Makoua and that first, long-ago touch of Agassiz’s strange spidery fingers.
She held his eyes. The engine droned. The sea beneath them seemed so still you could walk on it, so soft you could wrap yourself up in it. She reached out and touched his hand. “Urk,” she said.
>
(1988)
DE RERUM NATURA
The inventor is in his laboratory, white smock, surgical mask, running afoul of the laws of nature. Schlaver and Una Moss are with him, bent over the Petri dishes and dissecting pans like conspirators. Overhead, the hum of the fluorescent lights.
He snaps his hands into the rubber gloves, flashes the scalpel. His touch is quick, sure, steady as a laser. The blade eases through the shaved skin of the abdomen, his fingers flutter, vessels are clamped, ligatures tied. Una is there, assisting with sponges and retractors. The Inventor’s eyes burn over the mask like the eyes of an Arab terrorist. A single sweatpearl stands on his forehead. Strapped to the table before him, teats sleepy with milk, irises sinking, the sedated sow gargles through her crusted nostrils, stirs a bristling hock. Una pats the pink hoof.
Then he is speaking, the tones measured, smooth, the phrases clipped. Schlaver moves in, draws off the amniotic fluid. Una takes the forceps, offers the scalpel. The Inventor slits the sack, reaches in, pulls his prize from the steaming organs. He slaps the wet nates: the wrinkled little creature shrieks, and then again, its electric wail poking into mason jars, behind filing cabinets, rattling the loose screws in the overhead lights. Una and Schlaver tear off their masks and cheer. The Inventor hefts his latest coup, a nine-pound-three-ounce boy, red as a ham and perfect in every detail: his firstborn son and heir. The black eyes grin above the mask.
From The Life:
To say merely that he was a prodigy would mock the insufficiency of language. At five he was teaching in the temple. By age seven he had built his first neutron smasher, developed a gnat-sized bugging device that could pick up a whispered conversation at two miles and simultaneously translate it into any one of thirteen languages, and devised a sap-charging system which fomented rapid growth in deciduous trees of the temperate zone.* At nine he was admitted to MIT, where he completed advanced degrees in physics and mathematics prior to his thirteenth year. During the course of the next eleven months he studied surgical medicine at Johns Hopkins.
At fifteen he stunned the world with his first great advance, the stoolless cat, which brought him the financial independence to sustain his subtler and more meaningful future work. Through an accelerated but painstaking process of selective breeding he had overseen the evolution of a strain of common housecat—the usual attributes intact—which never in the course of its normal lifespan was actuated by the physiological demands of micturition or defecation. Within six months after its introduction the major producers of cat litter had thrown in the towel and pet shops were opening next to every liquor store in the country. His photograph (contemplative, the horn-rims) appeared on the covers of Newsweek and Time during the same week. He was hailed. “An Edison for the Seventies,” “The Pragmatist’s Einstein,” they said. Housewives clamored. The Russians awarded him the Star of Novgorod. Encouraged, he went on to develop the limbless, headless, tailless strain that has since become an international institution. A tribute to his disinterestedness: “Under no circumstance, no matter how attractive the inducement,” he said, “will I be persuaded to breed out the very minimal essence of the feline—I refer to its purr.”†
He is in his study, musing over the morning’s mail. The mail, corners, edges, inks and stamps like the tails of tropical birds, lies across his desk in a welter. In his hand, the paper knife. He selects an envelope printed in a blue and yellow daisy pattern.
It is a threat.
Next he picks up a business envelope, imprinted with the name and logo (an ascending rocket) of his son’s school: WERNHER VON BRAUN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. It is a letter from his son’s teacher. She is alarmed at what appears to be a worsening deformity of the boy’s feet (so misshapen as almost to resemble hoofs, she says) and hopes that his father will have the matter looked into. She is also concerned with his behavior. The boy has, it seems, been making disruptive noises in the classroom. A sort of whinnying or chuffing. The Inventor carefully folds the letter, tucks it into the pocket of his shirt. At that moment the double doors yawn and Una Moss, in deshabille, ambles in behind the tea cart. Her pet python, weaving a turgid S in the rug behind her, stops at the door.
She pours the Inventor’s tea (two lumps) while he frowns at the mail. As she turns to leave, he speaks. “Una?” She looks, puckers a moue. “What is this business with the boy? It seems he’s been emitting those noises in the schoolroom.” Una’s expression irons to the serious. “We can’t have that,” he says. “Will you speak with him?”
“Of course, pumpkin.”
He looks down again. The door closes behind Una, a gentle click, and he turns back to the mail. A brown-paper parcel catches his eyes. The paper knife makes a neat incision and he extracts the contents: a hardcover book. No letter, no inscription. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells. He folds back the page, begins to read.
From The Life:
His second major breakthrough was also a humanitarian effort. A committee from the Gandhi Foundation had come to him asking for a solution to the problem of world hunger. He told them he would consider their petition, though engaged in other projects at the time. That afternoon, while he was rooting through a local wrecking yard in search of a tailpipe replacement for his automobile, the solution rushed on him like a firestorm. “Of course,” he was heard to mutter. He retraced his steps to the proprietor’s blistered shed. There he borrowed a #2 faucet wrench, ball peen hammer and screwdriver. He then removed the tailpipe from a sandwiched auto of identical make and model to his own. This involved twelve minutes, thirty-seven seconds, as near as investigators have been able to determine. In the short space of this time he had worked out the complicated structural formulae which resulted in one of mankind’s biggest boons—that is to say, he discovered the method by which a given tonnage of spotted chrome and rusted steel could be converted to an equivalent weight of porterhouse steak.
He is at Horn & Hardart, surrounded by strangers. The boy sits across from him, head down, heels swinging, fingers fluffed with the meringue from his third slice of pie. Una’s handbag perches like a sentinel at the edge of the table. Suddenly the boy begins to grunt: hurp-hurp-hurp. The Inventor looks uncomfortable. He raises a finger to his lips—but the grunting cracks an octave and the boy pins the plate to the table, begins licking. The Inventor remonstrates. The plate rattles on the Formica. Heads turn. The Inventor stands, looking for Una. Then strides to the bank of tiny windows and stainless steel doors, fishing in his pocket for coins. Behind him the grunting increases in volume. He peers into each window until he finds a slice of lemon meringue pie, yellow sliver, brown peaks. He puts the coins in the slot, tugs at the door. It does not open. He tugs harder, taps at the glass, tries another coin. There is the slap of the boy’s plate on the tiles, and then his angry wail. A middle-aged woman, a stranger, is trying to comfort him. The Inventor’s armpits are moist. He jerks at the door, tries to spring it with his penknife. The howls at his back, the ripe flush of the woman’s face. And then, from the Ladies’ Room, Una. Like a savior. Green eyeshade, black caftan, copper anklets.
From The Life:
The Inventor’s marriage with Roxanne Needelman was never consummated. She was twenty-nine, a laboratory assistant, twice married and widowed. He was eighteen, raw, ingenuous, in the first flush of his monumental success with the stoolless cat. After a disastrous honeymoon at Olduvai Gorge the two set up separate households. Three years later the marriage was terminated. The Inventor, immersed in his work, retired to his estate in northern Westchester.
During the course of the next five years he lived and worked alone, perfecting the Autochef and laying the theoretical groundwork for expanding the minute. On the eve of his twenty-sixth birthday he began his association with Yehudi Schlaver, the German-born physicist who would be with him to the end. Two years later, on a rainy April evening, the front buzzer sounded through the umbrageous corridors of the Westchester mansion. At the door, Una Moss. She was wearing a backpack. Two tote bags lay at her f
eet. She had followed the Great Man’s career, saved the clippings from over fifty periodicals, and now she had come to live with him. The Inventor stood in the doorway, his brow square as the spine of a book. He pushed open the door.
Una, Schlaver, the Inventor, his son. They stand at the rail of the Dayliner, in identical London Fog overcoats. On their way to Bear Mountain, for an outing. The air like bad breath, sky black, the water thick and dun-colored. An amateur photographer, passing in a small craft, recognizes the celebrated faces and takes a snapshot: Una, eyes shaded in purple, the rock python wrapped under her chin like primordial jewelry and disappearing in the folds of her overcoat, its head visible beneath the sleeve; Schlaver, small, gray, nondescript; the Great Man, his blocklike brow, the creases like chains running deep into the hairline, the black eyes pinched behind the horn-rims, the point of the beard, lank arms, stooped back; and the boy, feet concealed in custom-built boots, ears already growing to the point and peeping like tongues from beneath the bristling hair. Waves lap, the deck rises, dips. Una, Schlaver and the boy wave. The Inventor hangs his head and disgorges the contents of his stomach.
At the dock, the boy darts ahead, repeatedly stumbling in his boots. Schlaver and Una follow, the one taking charge of the Inventor’s compass, calculator and notebooks, the other dragging a picnic basket. The Inventor, sulking, brings up the rear. It begins to drizzle.
A picnic table, prettily reflecting inverted treetops in a sheen of rainwater. The three, collars up, noses dripping, chewing stolidly. In silence. The boy, boots in hand, merrily roots among the wildflowers, nudging at the wet red earth with the bridge of his nose. “Screee-honk-honk,” he says, at intervals. The Inventor looks unutterably depressed. He stands, buckles the belt round his raincoat. “Una. I will take a short walk. I wish to be alone, and to be among the trees and mosses.” He strides off, into the black bank of pine and beech. Continues on, deep in thought. The trees look alike. He loses his way. When night falls, Una and Schlaver become alarmed. They step into the shadows of the first trees and halloo. There is no answer.