Wonderland (41 page)

A young man came out of the next prefab, letting the screen door slam behind him. Jesse recognized him as a faculty member. “Hello, Trick, what are you doing back here?” He grinned and waved at the others. “It’s a bad day for a visit. The flies are biting.” Everywhere there were large blue-black flies, drowsy with their weight or with the rich, slightly rotting odor of the place. They crawled on the sheep’s splotched hides and passive, patient faces. A bedraggled sheep with the number 18 painted in red on her side approached the fence near Jesse, nudging it. Jesse and Helene glanced at each other. On the side of the sheep’s neck were a number of pus-rimmed scabs. Flies crawled on them lazily.

“What are they doing with the sheep?” Jesse asked Peggy.

“Oh, it’s a fertility experiment. I think they put some stuff in the jugular vein and see what happens—I mean, how the lambs turn out. How they’re changed. I don’t know what results they’ve gotten yet. They have an awful lot of money to fool around with though,” she said, dropping her voice, “and Phil over there is jealous as hell about it.
His
project is going under, everybody says. Come look in the window at his stuff; he won’t mind,” she said. She took Jesse’s arm. She was so short she had to stand on a concrete block to look in the window, but Jesse could look right in just by standing on his toes—he saw pens with dogs crowded into them, a number of single, small metal cages crammed with dogs. Most of the dogs were hunched over and motionless. A large collie with most of its fur shaved away and long purplish incisions on its body stared back at Jesse from a few feet away; it reminded Jesse of a patient he had seen the day before on his rounds at the hospital. A cocker spaniel lay beneath the collie, between its legs. The spaniel’s fur was frayed and was coming off in unsightly strips. Flies crawled over a large open sore on its neck. “Maybe you shouldn’t look,” Jesse said to Helene, but she had already looked in. She turned away coolly, showing no distress.

“Why are the dogs so quiet?” Jesse asked.

“They’ve been fixed up,” Peggy said, drawing a finger swiftly across her throat; “they had their barks removed. God, can you imagine what it would be like? That’s what makes everyone mad about Bruner’s
monkeys. It’s like a jungle out here sometimes, the way those things shriek! Luckily, old Edna is the only one out today and she must be writing up reports, so it’s quiet. They’re experimenting with burns, using flame throwers, and it’s the goddamnedest smell you ever smelled. You can smell it right now, and they haven’t been fooling around since last week. That singed smell—it smells like fur and meat—that’s from the monkeys. Do you smell it?”

“I guess so,” Jesse said.

“God, I hate monkeys,” Peggy said. “They shoot some of the fire down the things’ throats, so those monkeys don’t make much noise. But it’s like a slaughterhouse out here, the way it stinks sometimes. I’ve been asked to join a reform committee and I just might do it.”

Jesse saw more sheep moving in a corral behind the barn. They moved slowly, stiffly. He had a sudden vision, an involuntary vision, of the countryside filling up with sheep, their battered, clumsy, dirty bodies moving slowly, sleepily, bumping into one another as their eyesight deteriorated, sinking to the ground as tumors rose in their bodies, the lambs nudging the ewes, all of them crowded sleepily together and too stupid to cry out in pain, crowding the landscape, easing outward so that they strained against the fences and broke them down.…

If Helene was upset by this she did not show it; she stood a little apart from the others, watchful and poised.

Trick took them to another shed, where several people were sitting eating sandwiches. One of them, a man in his forties, was Gordon Howe, a professor in the biology department; the two younger men Jesse did not know by name; and the single girl, who had Asian features, was a stranger to him. They were sitting on the front steps of their prefab, waxed paper spread neatly on their knees. They offered everyone coffee but only Trick accepted. Peggy came hurrying after them and cried out that they should not miss the “egg room”: “It’s refrigerated—it’s the only place out here that’s bearable.” The Oriental girl stood, as if made uneasy by the visitors or by Peggy’s loud voice. She wrapped up what remained of her sandwich in a piece of waxed paper. The talk here was of hamsters, evidently an unexciting topic. Howe took them inside to look at the cages: row after row of nervous little animals with pink ratlike tails and curious twitching faces. The stench was sharp. “We’re working with their tongues. Sensory paths,” Howe said. As he walked between the rows of cages he
tapped at them fondly. Trick seemed quite interested in the project. “We’ve got a new grant for next year,” Howe said, and Trick congratulated him.

Nearby there was a shriek—a rising series of shrieks—then silence.

Howe showed them a graph with a complicated system of lines and bars of red and black. Jesse tried to interest himself in it but he kept glancing at Helene. She had worn a yellow dress that day, and though the color was attractive, it gave her complexion a yellowish cast; she looked a little sick. Her hair was parted neatly as always, drawn back behind her ears, and she wore small jade earrings. She seemed cautious, guarded. There was something of her father’s cool haughtiness in her. The shriek came again from next door—Howe explained that it was a monkey—and Helene’s mouth tightened. Jesse took her hand. It remained in his, inert and damp.

They went back outside. Someone had just driven up in a station wagon and several students were busy unloading boxes. Trick walked them down to the end of the row of prefabs where a radio was blaring and around to the sheep pen again. Jesse noticed how passively and fixedly Helene stared at the sheep. “This is a very important project they’ve got going,” Trick said excitedly. “Putting radioactive stuff in the sheep to test for mutations—It should make big news. I wish them well. But I wonder what the hell they do with the dead sheep? I don’t think you could dispose of a dead radioactive sheep in any ordinary way, do you?”

“No,” said Jesse.

“I must ask about that,” Trick said.

Peggy took them across a meadow strewn with concrete blocks and other junk, to the big barn. They could hear a humming noise. Another radio was playing inside, turned up high, and as they entered the barn Jesse smelled the sharp, half-pleasant stench of old blood. Yes, there were bloodstains on the floor, great dried pools everywhere. Only a few graduate assistants were around but they didn’t look busy. On the counters there were rags and needles and bottles, tubes, rolls of tape, lunch bags, half-empty bottles of soda pop, tin cans, boxes. Against one wall were shelves of jars with embryos in them, one embryo to a jar, row upon row. The embryos were small, hunched-over, perfect little creatures.

“At least this place is air-conditioned,” Peggy said. “Gatti himself
designed the inside. He has a thing about stuff collected in bottles. He insists upon his people collecting a few hundred specimens, so in case of fire or breakage or anything he has a lot left over. He’s very conservative. Isn’t this place elegant? They give themselves airs over here. But I wouldn’t want to work with all these dead things.”

“Peggy likes live things. Sheep and goats and things like that,” someone snickered.

“Oh, shut up! Just because I saved your sheep from bleeding to death.… Tell your kids not to bother me next time. I got blood all over my clothes, even down inside my shoes. How the hell do you think I looked going back to Ann Arbor?” she said angrily.

The boys laughed.

They went back out into the warm air. Jesse looked at Helene, but her expression was demure and opaque. She seemed slightly withdrawn from him, as if surrendering him to Peggy’s boisterousness. Her passivity disturbed him. Trick kept turning to her, trying to include her in his noisy conversation with the others, but she did no more than smile tensely, slightly. Once he even reached out to touch her shoulder, an absentminded gesture, only part of his conversation. Helene’s expression did not change but she stepped back. “As with the animals, so with us,” Trick said. “They heal without as many complications, though, and don’t know enough to sue us. I thought I was fed up with cats, but on second thought I prefer them to your sheep. They don’t stink as much. The best material to work with would be human beings, of course, but that’s not possible in this country. We are so civilized,” he said, leering, scowling. He walked briskly ahead of the others as if leading them, the center of their attention. Jesse, walking with Helene, felt sodden, satiated with the sights of this place and with the odor of singed flesh and blood and rot. He was tired of Trick’s voice. He would have liked to take Helene aside and explain to her that he had not chosen this kind of life for himself, not this particular life: it was necessary to work through it, to push oneself through it, to come out at the other end as … as a man who might save the lives of other men.… What other way was there, except to pursue truth through the bodies of animals?

Trick was saying something about beer. Would they all like to drive out for some beer?

“It’s getting late for us. We’d better go home,” Jesse said.

“What? Why?”

“We have to get back.”

“Oh, hell. Don’t let him push you around, Helene,” Trick said. “He always wants to bring the party to an end, he always wants to work! Let’s all go out somewhere and have some beer.”

“I’d rather go back to Ann Arbor,” Jesse said. “I have some hospital reports to write up.”

“God, my dear girl,” Trick said, sliding his arm around Helene’s shoulders, “you are obviously not going to remain faithful to Jesse for long. Work, all he knows is work! Not being a genius like me—how many of you are?—the poor guy has to frazzle his brain out. He’ll disappoint you—and when he does, remember to give old Trick a call; command me and I am yours, I’ll hurry to your side—”

Jesse flinched; Helene, unsmiling, moved away from Trick. The others laughed. Peggy poked Trick in the stomach. “You, what do you need beer for? You carry it all over with you like a camel!” she cried.

“Don’t do that,” said Trick. “I haven’t had a bowel movement for fifteen days. I’m a walking disaster. It’s all coiled up inside me and I need the extra space.” They laughed. Jesse grinned in a sudden hot anger and walked Helene back to the car. The others laughed behind them. Trick called out: “Be right with you, kids! Be right with you!”

And he did hurry after them, puffing, panting, red in the face, and looked ashamed.

With a weary yodel he slid into the car beside Jesse. “Ah, I talk too much. I know it,” he said.

Jesse and Helene were silent.

“I just thought it might be a nice idea to have a few beers,” Trick said lamely. “But you probably have no appetite for it. You were right, Jesse, absolutely right. I don’t like this crowd anyway. Except for Gordon Howe, they’re bores.” He chatted at them all the way back to Ann Arbor, his spirits rising slowly even though Jesse did not bother to reply. Helene stared out the window.

Trick seemed not to know the extent of their displeasure, or pretended not to know. When he let them out near campus he grinned happily at them. “Well, it was interesting, wasn’t it? Great day for a drive in the country!”

When they were alone in the Cadys’ apartment Helene sat down as
if exhausted. She put her hands to her face, massaging her eyes. Jesse, standing above her, was fearful of touching her—she was so cool, so withdrawn, so independent of him.

“Did it upset you?” he asked.

She shook her head slightly, without looking at him. Outside the window an elm tree blocked out the sun; this room, a kind of sitting room, was shaded and cool. Jesse felt the presence of Dr. Cady here, though they were alone. On a nearby table stood the framed photograph—Cady and his two co-winners of the Nobel Prize, smiling gentlemen who seemed to be looking directly at Jesse, inviting him to join them. If he had to make his way to them through the stink of blood and intestines and burned flesh, taking wisdom where he found it, what did that matter? What did it matter?

Jesse kissed Helene’s forehead and embraced her without force. She did not draw away. He wondered what she was thinking. Her scent was light, pale, blond-colored scent. She was a mystery, like the mysteries explored out there in the sheds, beneath the rusty corrugated roofs, in the din of portable radios and lunchtime joking. What was living performed the rites of living; when it no longer performed these rites it was not “living.” Wasn’t Jesse himself a kingdom of these living cells, all of them performing excellently? Wasn’t Helene, so sternly attractive, so stubborn beneath her appearance of submission, herself a marvelous kingdom of cells, unfathomable cells that demanded awe? It was necessary that a man throw himself into the study of such mysteries, Jesse thought. All truth, any truth, justified itself.
That collie’s large glassy eyes. The stink of putrid flesh, singed flesh, the shriek of a terrified animal, Peggy’s shrill flirting with him
.

“Did all that upset you?” Jesse asked.

“No. But I’m thinking of what we have to go through.”

“What? Who has to go through?”

“You and me. People. How we have to live and die. How our bodies will smell,” she said faintly.

She looked up at him. Her eyes were darkened by threads of blood, as if by the seriousness of her thinking. Jesse was astonished. He had wanted to comfort her, but how could he comfort such words? It hurt him to think that she should contemplate suffering like that, moving restlessly and independently of him, of his love for her, as if he had not
the power to protect her.… Did she really think they must suffer like those animals? Her flesh and his flesh, flesh no more divine than that of the animals, doomed to the same bawdy fates?

And your family is …

Scattered
.

Your entire family is scattered …?

My parents are dead
.

I’m very sorry to hear that
.

An automobile accident. It happened a long time ago. Around Christmas … the roads were icy
.