The Animal Girl (8 page)

Leah was unpleasant to be around, and she knew it. Franklin was too much in love. Only three years ago, her mother, Margaret, or Maggie, as everyone had called her, had died and left Leah and Franklin devastated. Leah wasn't ready for her father to be happy again. How weird and stomach-turning it was to see him emerge in the mornings from his room, still in his pajamas, with a full smile above his thick beard—all that bushy facial hair he'd grown in the last years because he'd been too grief-stricken to trim it. And now he was smiling, too often and too obviously. He'd been nagging at her to make more of a social effort, to go out. “Boys aren't against the rules, you know,” he said. “You're allowed to be interested in them.”

She'd shrug. “Whatever,” she said. Once, she had let him have it. “I don't need to fall in love, okay? Maybe you do. But I don't.” He'd backed off and left her alone.

So when he asked her to consider the job, she said no. “Please, Leah. You already have an interview. It's a chance for you to learn about science, to see what's going on, to get some exposure.”

“I'm not interested in science.”

Franklin slumped over in his chair. He was a large man, six foot three, with big bones and a soft midsection, and seeing his thick, ungainly body fall in disappointment, seeing his hands, large as bowls, beseechingly laid out on the table, had its effect on Leah. “Okay,” she said. “I'll go. Then I'll say no.”

“Thank you,” Franklin said.

Leah showed up at the interview looking as she usually did: dumpy in her overlarge Levi's and white T-shirt. The laboratories were subterranean, windowless, a labyrinth of narrow hallways with exposed water pipes running the length of the low ceilings and long fluorescent-tube lighting that coated everything in a naked whiteness. The close, unnatural odors of chemicals hung in the air, despite the respiratory whirl of the ventilation system. Max, an old colleague of her father, was the researcher she'd be working with. He kept his office dark: Two desk lamps and the bluish glow of his computer screen gave the space a cavelike dimness. The air was a complex mix of smells: tennis shoes, coffee, and microwave popcorn. “The last time I saw you, you were this high.” He put his hand out at waist level and laughed. Leah remembered him, too: the picnics years ago at his yellow house and his then-young wife.

He started by explaining that his work involved animal experimentation. “I want to be frank with you,” Max began. “We've had a lot of people quit this job after a few days. It's not for everyone.”

“Oh,” Leah said. She hadn't expected to be discouraged, to be warned away.

“I wish I could tell you that you'd be doing a lot of science. But I'm afraid you won't be. Of course, I'll be happy to tell you all about what we're up to here. But your job would be taking care of and feeding the animals.”

He had big, fleshy lips and heavy eyelids that made him look both morose and jolly. Leah liked his thick sideburns and unruly hair. She had immediately sensed something in Max, something both depressive and good-natured, that she wanted to be around, and that suddenly made this job more appealing. “That's all right,” she said. “I enjoy animals. Working with animals will be great.”

Max smiled sadly. “The animals will die,” he said. “So if you enjoy them …”

“They're dying for science, right? I won't give them names or anything.” Leah had just noticed two anatomical diagrams, one of a human and the other of what seemed to be a small cow, hanging on Max's wall; and looking over them, she was struck by the crammed complexity of innards—vessels, organs, layers of muscle, fat, and skin—and felt a visceral unease at knowing that she too was made of this mess. On the wall opposite his desk, Leah saw something she hadn't expected in a scientist's office: a poster of Clifford Brown, eyes closed, blasting his trumpet as curls of cigarette smoke rose between the valve casings. “I'm into jazz, too,” she said. “It wasn't fair he had to die so young. If he'd lived, we wouldn't have to settle for that terrible amplified funk Miles started playing at the end of his life. He would have been too embarrassed to play music like that with Clifford around to hear it. Clifford would have kept him honest.”

Max grinned and put a hand thoughtfully to his fleshy cheek. Leah was trying to figure out what she liked about this bearish man who couldn't have been much younger than her father and who wore an old yellow T-shirt, untucked, beneath his lab coat and a pair of frayed Adidas with brand-new, superwhite laces that clashed with the dirty off-white of the old leather. “Maybe so,” he said.

“Is that a baby cow?” Leah asked, pointing to the anatomical poster.

He shook his head. “That's a sheep. We work with sheep and dogs. The sheep seem to bother people less than the dogs, for obvious reasons. Our animals don't stay with us longer than a week. You won't be involved with the elimination and disposal. We have somebody else to do that. You'll be responsible for feeding them, cleaning out their cages, and doing pre-op.” Leah didn't know what pre-op was, and she wasn't going to ask. “You won't have to be in the lab during any procedures, if you'd rather not see them.” He paused then, seeming to give Leah time to think. “You're sure the job won't bother you?”

“Will the animals just die sometimes?” she asked, trying to sound as clinical as he and failing. “When the bigger experiments are performed, I mean.”

“I'm afraid they always die. That happens to be the nature of our work.”

Leah took in a deep breath before she said, “It won't bother me.”

The morning Leah was to start her new job, Noelle and her father ambushed her with her favorite meal—strawberry crepes and fresh whipped cream—and Leah knew they had difficult news for her. They had already showered and dressed. Noelle, who was in real estate, wore Franklin's apron, which said “King of the Kitchen” on it, over her gray suit. She poured the batter while Leah's father stood in sunlight slicing strawberries and humming. The table was set, the orange juice in glasses. The aroma of brewing coffee mixed with the warm pancake air of the kitchen. “What's happening?” Leah asked. “Something's up. You're going to tell me something.”

“Why don't you sit down, Leah?” Franklin said. He'd just had his hair and beard trimmed, and his neatness and good grooming made him look more and more like he belonged to this woman.

Leah didn't sit down. “I've got my first day of work. I can't eat.”

“Your father told me. Congratulations,” Noelle said. She really was a sweet woman, and Leah was at times disgusted with herself for disliking her. “What exactly will you be doing?”

“I'm an executioner. I'll be killing animals.” This answer silenced Noelle so completely that Leah felt compelled to take it back. “I'm working at a lab where they do experiments. I'll be feeding and cleaning up after the animals they use. Sheep and dogs.”

Noelle placed a plate of stacked crepes on the table, and Franklin followed her with bowls of strawberries and whipped cream. “So,” Leah said, “I suppose you two are getting married. That's the news, I bet.”

Standing behind his chair, Franklin's face turned a deep red. Leah couldn't remember ever seeing her father blush, though she had seen him weep, his eyes raw and beaten, until he could cry no more. “Not quite,” he said.

“So what's the good news? Why are you bribing me with strawberry crepes?”

Franklin all at once was nervous and started playing with his fork.
“Noelle and I have been talking about the possibility of her moving in with us.”

“The possibility,” Leah said. “Are you asking me?”

“How about sitting down and eating a crepe, Leah?” Franklin said.

When she didn't sit, he turned to Noelle, who'd taken her apron off and looked powerful and businesslike in her gray suit. “No,” she said. “We just thought we should let you know.”

“Great. That's great. Congratulations.” Leah felt her throat catch and the tears rise to her eyes, despite her best effort to hold them off. “I'm being a baby. I'm sorry for being a baby,” she said. Then she rushed out the front door.

On Leah's first day, they gave a sheep a heart attack, though Max and Diana, Max's graduate student, called it a minor infarction, which Leah gathered was not quite the same as a heart attack. Leah was afraid she might relate to the animal, care for it; and so, midway through her workday, when she stood next to the sedated sheep and watched it jolt and begin to die on the operating table, she was proud of herself for feeling so little. It was a large animal, after all, so obviously alive, stinking with aliveness, with barnyard odors that permeated the laboratory. “Why are we doing this?” she asked, a question that Max, absorbed in the careful killing of the animal, had seemed not to hear. She didn't ask again, though she did want there to be a good reason for destroying this creature, which she and Max had had to force down every inch of the hall between its pen and the operating room. From the moment Leah had sheared the wool from its left foreleg, where Max would insert the lethal device, an inflatable catheter, the sheep had seemed to guess its fate. The sound it made as they pushed it down the corridor was not unlike a child crying, though there was something purely animal and stupid in it. This beast wasn't smart enough to care about, she told herself. Halfway to the operating room, it stopped, eyes athwart and glaring fixedly at nothing. Leah felt the warmth on her leg before she looked down and saw that it had shit on her. Then it pissed, the linoleum floor suddenly slick as ice with the warm flow of urine. “That wasn't supposed to happen,” Max said. “They weren't supposed to feed or water
it last night.” Evidently, the person for whom Leah was taking over had been incompetent.

When they finally got into the operating room, Diana, a beautiful if slightly heavy woman, whose neat, made-up face contrasted oddly with this place and the jumbo syringe in her hand, administered the anesthetic. It took the three of them to lift the animal, now docile and drowsy, onto the table. Once the sheep was completely out, they began to kill it in a very slow and complicated way. Max inserted the catheter along with a microscopic camera, which relayed a black-and-white image of the sheep's artery and the pathway of the catheter onto a computer screen fixed to the wall. Max studied the screen as he worked the catheter meticulously through the artery and into the animal's heart. “Bingo,” he said. “We're in.” Leah knew what would come next. They would inflate the catheter and induce a heart attack. But before they did, Max, who evidently thought Leah was a wimp, said, “You don't have to stay. This isn't part of your job.”

“I'd like to watch, if that's all right.” Max nodded, and Leah stayed, though in truth she wanted to leave and would have if some part of her didn't wonder what it would be like to watch something die. Besides, she liked being near Max, especially when he worked. Max's lumbering body became focused and alert as he directed the catheter. He kept his eyes on the echocardiogram and the computer screen at the same time, seeing a great deal where Leah saw only a whirl of gray images. Max put his hand on the animal's heaving side for a moment, as if to prepare it, then took his hand away and pressed the button that would kill it. Leah was impressed by her indifference when the animal suffered a heart attack on the table, its body jolting, its legs kicking so suddenly that Leah stepped back and watched its sleeping struggle wane, now only its rear legs paddling a little, then becoming still again. “It can't feel anything, by the way,” Max said.

“It doesn't bother me,” Leah said, unable to suppress a tone of excitement. “Is it dead yet?”

Max was leaning forward, his eyes still on the screen, when Leah was tempted to touch him. Under the circumstances, this impulse seemed all the more wrong. Nonetheless, she felt it. Her back to them, Diana was watching a printout of the EKG. And so Leah placed
her hand on his shoulder, as if momentarily balancing against him. The simple presence of him, his solidity, his body heat, was astonishing to her, and she left her hand on his shoulder for a long moment before lifting it again. He made no sign of noticing, and Leah was thrilled and suddenly nervous. “Nope,” he said. “We don't want to kill it. Not right away. That's not the point. We're giving it a minor heart attack, causing an infarction, in order to kill some cardiac tissue. We use the balloon to simulate a thrombosis—a blockage of the vessel—long enough to bring about necrosis. To kill or damage the tissue. Then we deflate the balloon and measure the capacity of the damaged heart. How long can he live on this heart, and how much of the tissue in the affected area is necrotic? How much is still healthy? How much is damaged but capable of healing? He might live for hours or even days. He might even experience a full recovery. He might not die at all, in which case we'll have to do that part for him.”

“Why?” Leah asked.

“We need his heart,” Max said. “After all this is done, we remove it and study the extent of tissue damage.”

Later in Max's office, after they'd left the sheep on the table with an IV dripping lactose slowly into its body and a partially dead heart keeping it alive for now, Max and Leah ate their sack lunches together. Max had put on a Charlie Parker CD, and they listened to the high-velocity riffs of Bird's solo to “Now's the Time” while Max ate his tuna-fish sandwich and told her more about the experiment: how the sheep heart is similar enough to the human heart to be helpful as a model, how minor heart attacks in humans are much more common than major ones, and therefore very important to understand, how they'd be inducing thousands of heart attacks of varying severity, involving different parts of the cardiac muscle in an attempt to be “comprehensive.” Finally, in a later stage of the study, they'd be testing different strategies of emergency treatment, designed to minimize the area of necrosis. Max became animated, spoke with his hands, and forgot about his lunch as he spoke. “A patient with a history of heart disease comes to the ER complaining of chest pain. He's most likely suffering a minor heart attack. So what should the
physician do first, and how quickly does he have to do it in order to reduce permanent damage? What's the window of time the physician has to make his decision? And what are his”—