The Viral Epiphany (8 page)

Nine

Life is precarious,
Stephen Itagaki thought to himself as he drove past the traffic accident.
 
He was late, about fifteen minutes late, for his morning visit to the Tokyo Zoo.
 
He glanced quickly at the mangled car and the unconscious woman pinned behind the steering wheel.
 
The fire department had just arrived and a rescue crew was trying to free her. A tow truck was attaching a cable to the concrete delivery truck that had run the red light.
Could have been me,
he thought as he maneuvered his car over one lane and into moving traffic.
 
A few minutes later he was on the highway and accelerating to his usual ten miles an hour over the speed limit.

As he drove toward the zoo he cleared his mind of the images he had just seen. “What a glorious day!” he said aloud.
 
“Glorious.”
 
He was right. It was late summer without a cloud in the sky. A mild breeze rippled the leaves on the trees and the water birds had not yet departed on their winter migrations.
 
He pressed the electric window control on his armrest and his window quietly glided down.
 
Sweet, fresh air poured in.

Stephen hadn’t meant that the weather or the scenery was glorious. No, it was something entirely different.
 
He was reveling in his remembrance of the events of last night and his expectation of what he would see at the zoo this morning.

I wonder what Dan has been doing?
He thought for a moment as he glanced in his rear view mirror for possible police cars.
 
 
It’s been – what, two years now since we met in Siberia? Not a lot I’ll bet.
 
He doesn’t understand life. It’s a competition, that’s all it is.
 
It’s a struggle. You have to be first – you have to be the best.
 
That’s all that matters in the end.
 
Dan’s a nice guy, of course, but everyone knows where they finish.
 
He will be absolutely shocked. Ha!
 
So will everyone else...
He allowed himself a smile.

It was, indeed, almost two years since Stephen and Dan had participated in the mammoth expedition to Siberia.
 
Stephen had started work extracting the mammoth DNA as soon as he had returned to Tokyo. Like Dan, he had been astounded at the quality of the samples he had obtained; however, while Dan preferred to find a grad student to perform the research, Stephen had begun work immediately - alone and in complete secrecy with only the help of his lab assistant Shaylin Nakamura.

 
His DNA extraction results had gone well and within two months he had inserted mammoth DNA into the nucleus of an Asian elephant egg in his laboratory and then he had inserted the egg into the elephant’s womb at the Tokyo Zoo.
 
There was nothing revolutionary about that.
 
Cloning methods had been well established for years.
 
But, last night had been spectacular.
 
Shortly after 10 PM the female elephant had given birth to a baby mammoth.
 
From a distance the baby looked very much like a baby elephant; however, upon a closer look it was immediately obvious that it was covered with long, fine brown hairs.
 
Within minutes of birth it had sought its mother’s teat and she willingly obliged, accepting the baby as her own.
 

It had been an almost overwhelming experience for Stephen. First, just conceiving of the idea had been a masterstroke, and then the careful DNA extraction and implantation, the long gestation period where so much could have gone wrong, and then the birth and the female elephant actually nursing the mammoth.

The risk, the odds, the complete improbability of it all,
he gloated.
So many things that might have gone wrong…
 
But they didn’t!
 
He clenched a fist in victory.
 
Just think how many female elephants refuse to nurse even their own offspring that are born in zoos.
 
This is so incredible. This is where I will make my mark in history.
 
Amazing.
 
You never know about life.
 
He couldn’t stop grinning as he drove.

A few minutes later, Stephen turned into the Zoo entrance.
 
Only the director of the Zoo and the head of the Zoo’s mammal section had known the truth about the cloning of the baby mammoth. Stephen had bought their secrecy with a promise to give them a percentage of the money that could be earned from the mammoth. The potential was seemingly unlimited.
 
Not only would there be worldwide interest in visiting the zoo to see the mammoth but there were the possibilities of an entire industry based upon this one animal.

Thoughts of movie rights, toys, clothing lines, and more came to them immediately, but Stephen also told them there was great potential for biological products derived from mammoths.
 
Herds of mammoths could be raised for meat of course, but there might well be other products that would be much more lucrative such as medicines, tissue and serum products for biological experiments, and of course the vast Asian market for aphrodisiacs.
 
Each of them could earn fortunes from the mammoth.
 
All they had to do was to take good care of the animal.

They had transferred a gifted young elephant handler, the best they had, to be the primary caretaker of the newborn animal for the first few days of its life.
 
“Sam”, as he was called, was twenty years old and had completed only three years of school, but he had a way with animals.
  
He had been judged by the school system as being marginally capable of reading and writing and virtually incapable of mathematics.
 
Years of remedial efforts had failed to teach him anything more than what he had learned in his three years of school.
 
He had never heard of mammoths.
 
For him this baby would only be a slightly unusual elephant, nothing worth mentioning to anyone. Stephen had insisted on meeting Sam to make sure he could be trusted not to tell anyone about the mammoth.
 
His doubts were allayed almost immediately.
 
Sam didn’t have much to say in their meeting and spent most of the time looking at the floor or his feet.
 
It was clear to Stephen that Sam was trying hard to be friendly, but at the same time he was extremely shy – a young man lost in a world of men like Stephen that was too confusing, too fast.
 
Stephen almost felt sorry for him, but he didn’t.
 
Sam was just what they needed.

 
During his usual workday Sam bathed the animals, cleaned their cages, fed them, and did whatever else was necessary to ensure that they had as healthy a life as possible while confined in a cage.
 
Sam didn’t mind doing these menial tasks. No, not at all.
 
He knew what they were experiencing: a mind-numbing life behind the bars of the zoo, the cruel punishments for misbehavior, and, for some, the frustration of trying to learn meaningless tricks.
 
He understood this very well and so he did his best to make their lives a little more comfortable.
 
Animals were his true friends.
 
He knew that from long ago.
 
It was people he couldn’t trust.

Sam was waiting for Stephen at the locked gate to the elephant nursery.
 
Now that the mammoth had been born no one was admitted to this part of the zoo without special permission and escort.
 
Stephen had expected the mammal section manager to be there too, but it appeared that he was late.
 
No doubt due to Tokyo’s horrendous traffic.
 
Stephen didn’t hesitate a moment; he didn’t really need the manager anyway.

“Let’s go in,” he said

“Yes sir,” Sam replied and took the key from his pocket.
 
They went in through the main door and then walked through a corridor to a changing room where employees could change into their work clothes. Sam was already wearing his zoo uniform, but Stephen decided to put on a coverall to protect his suit.

They crossed to the other side of the changing room and Sam opened the heavy steel door in front of them.
 
They entered the straw-strewn mammoth nursery.
 
It was an old wooden structure that smelled of elephants, dung, and damp straw.
 
It had three windowless walls that reached twenty feet up to a corrugated metal roof.
 
The fourth side was open to the air except for a low iron gate that would prevent the baby from wandering into the main elephant compound.
 
The mother elephant was across the room, chained by her right rear leg to a massive iron stanchion.
 
The baby was calmly standing near her side.
 
It had just finished nursing again and it looked curiously but without fear at the newcomers.

Sam immediately walked over to the baby mammoth but Stephen hesitated a moment, unsure.
 
Then he followed slowly, keeping an eye on the mother elephant.
 
The mother elephant shook her head and stared at Stephen while ignoring Sam.
 
Stephen stopped walking and decided to stay where he was for a few moments.
 
He watched from a distance while Sam began stroking the hair on the baby mammoth.
 
He was talking to it in a soft voice and the mammoth responded by curling its little trunk around his arm and seemingly caressing it.
 
Sam continued talking and stroking the baby for a few more minutes then he turned and picked up a bucket and brush and began giving the baby a bath.

Stephen stood watching with a mixture of emotions.
 
The sight of the mammoth enraptured him, he felt almost giddy with excitement, he wanted to go over and hug the creature himself but the mother continued to look at him with a baleful look that was unmistakable.
 
He looked at the chain that bound her and decided not to take the risk.
 
He would speak to the mammal section manager about the problem later this morning. Maybe they could have the mother removed when he was visiting.
 
Meanwhile, for now, he would content himself with watching Sam bathe the baby.

Because one side of the building was open to the air, birds and insects occasionally flew inside the building but they didn’t usually stay and neither Sam nor Stephen paid any attention to those that did fly in.
 
Mosquitoes are not very common at the Tokyo Zoo and neither Stephen nor Sam noticed the small Aedes mosquito that had flown in and was now circling the head of the baby mammoth.
 
Perhaps it was something in the scent of the mammoth or maybe it was the baby’s skin temperature that was the attraction.
 
Maybe both.
 
The mosquito soon landed on the baby’s head, amidst the jungle of mammoth hair. It was, however, not a good location and it immediately took to the air again.
 
It then landed beside the mammoth’s eyelid. Here there was soft tissue, moist with fluid from the baby’s eye.
 
The mosquito inserted its needle sharp proboscis and released a flood of anticoagulants into the mammoth and blood began to flow into the mosquito.
 
But only for a moment.

The mammoth’s eyelid came crashing down in response to the itch of the anticoagulant material and the mosquito flew away, barely escaping death.
 
It flew far from the animal and then began circling back, still in need of nourishment. This time it landed on a more familiar type of host. It landed on Sam’s neck. A moment later – Slap! Sam took his hand away from his neck and looked at his palm.
 
He saw the splattered remains of the dead mosquito and a smear of blood.
 
He didn’t know it was a mixture.
 
It was not only his blood that he saw but also the blood of the mammoth.
 
He never gave it a moment’s thought.
 
It was just part of life and nothing more, not even worth a shrug.
 
He picked up the brush and continued washing the mammoth.

Ten

       
It can be a cold universe when one is autistic, even if only mildly so.
 
Sam Tanigawa’s autism would have been diagnosed as mild.
 
Perhaps one of his schoolteachers might have said something; maybe his parents should have noticed his preoccupation with animals to the exclusion of human friends and had him checked by a doctor.
 
Maybe his employers at the zoo should have done something.
 
But no one ever did.
 
Nor did anyone ever realize that Sam’s private world was also a world of muted sepia tones.
 
He was profoundly colorblind.