A Stranger's House (17 page)

“And?” I whispered.

“No,” he said, “it's nothing.” He rolled over away from me. “I shouldn't have even started. Good night.”

“Now, wait a minute,” I said, my words even louder than his had been. I sat up in bed. “You can't do that to me. You tell me. You started this. Now I want to know.”

He lay still for a moment, then moved onto his back. He let out a breath.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay.” He paused. “So we get this press release. And it's on this impressive paper, this nice letterhead. Across the top it reads in caps
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
, and beneath it is this headline,
VALLEY COUPLE'S TRIUMPH COMPLETE
. And then I go on and read it, and it reads something like, ‘Amherst—Linda Schulbred and Sky Winter found they were victorious last week when they were told they were indeed pregnant, this after months of emotionally debilitating efforts—”

“I gather this is two women,” I cut in.

“Wait, wait, wait,” he said, “there's more. And it is. Two women.” In the dark I couldn't see his mouth move, only felt his words rise from somewhere next to me. “This release goes on and on, the first paragraph using all these words like ‘strife' and ‘glorious' and ‘success.'
Then the second paragraph, and the rest of them—this thing went on for four pages—went on to tell about exactly what happened. Turns out that one of them got her brother up here from New York and got him to hand over some semen. Then she took the semen and used a turkey baster to get the other one pregnant. And they got pregnant.”

I said, “A turkey baster? Are you serious?”

He said, “I am.” He paused. “But it's okay. Their having a baby is kosher, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Well,” he whispered, “for one thing this Schulbred and Winter are married. And because this press release quoted the happy mother and mother as saying they would, quote, ‘assure this child, whether female or otherwise, of a strong familial home-structure.' Unquote.”

Whether female or otherwise, I thought, and I wondered who these people were that they could become pregnant in this plastic way and then discount the possible results, a boy merely referred to as “otherwise.” Whether a boy or a girl, it would be a life. A life.

Tom sat up next to me, put his arms around me. He whispered, “I wonder what kind of press release we'll receive if they get an otherwise child,” and I smiled, and then I laughed, something, some pressure in me broken, a laughter that was deep in me and that was caught up by Tom, so that the two of us were laughing in the darkness, holding each other, the sound of our laughter like some foreign language in our room.

 

With the scalpel I gently cut into Chesterfield's head, the scalpel so sharp it was as if I'd only let it touch the pink skin, barely pulled it across to find a line of red chasing after the blade. Once the cut was finished, a four-inch incision across the top of the skull from just above and between the eyes to immediately behind the ears, I drew back the skin with three hemostats so that the bleeding would stop, and to expose the skull.

Here was the next step in running the rabbits, this surgery. Chesterfield hadn't suspected anything, only settled right into the Gormezano box as if it were a second home, ready for the black of the filing cabinet Instead, I'd taken him upstairs to the operating room, just another ex-dorm room, and given him the injection of Thorazine to mellow him out, a few minutes after that the Nembutal. Twenty minutes later I pinched his hind foot, got no reaction, then gently tapped his eyeball. Nothing happened, no jerk, not even a groggy flinch. He was out.

I'd slipped the box into place on the surgery table, and moved into place the stereotaxic frame, the system of bars and joints and clamps that would hold the drill and, later, the electrode in perfect, measured place, allowing three-dimensional coordinates that would ensure I entered the brain at precisely the right point

I'd done this enough times now so that I figured I'd feel nothing, but today was different somehow. I thought about it as I bent over the exposed skull, the bone covered with the thin fascia, the tissue that was to protect the skull but which was useless now. I scraped away the tissue with my scalpel.

Perhaps this odd feeling was because of Chesterfield, my pet now, a rabbit who had taken to eating out of my hand; sometimes I carried him around in my arms like a big cat. But it wasn't him, I knew. A particular sadness came over me whenever I operated on the rabbit I'd named, a childlike sadness, a sadness I indeed felt just then, the scalpel in hand, the tissue pushed back to the hemostats. But there was another feeling in me, a different, darker, more penetrating one.

Finally before me lay the scraped and clean pink of the skull itself, the midline fissure like a thin fault, the anterior bregma and posterior lambda fissures crossing over the midline like thin, red wires meandering across and perpendicular to the midline. These crossings were my landmarks, simple lines on a skull that signaled where to begin measurements: 8 mm posterior the bregma along the midline, 1 to 1½ mm left lateral the midline, that point marked with the tip of a pencil. That feeling, the scratch of graphite across hard, dull bone to leave a small gray x, was at once awful and exciting to me, entry into the brain only moments away now.

I moved into place the drill and small-bore bit, the whining piece of machinery that reminded me always of visits to the dentist, of buffing and polishing, of grit in the mouth and friction against bone, my bones, my teeth; a sound that sent chills into me in a moment. I brought the bit down into place, the tip poised a fraction of an inch above the skull, and I switched on the power, heard the high-pitched whirr. With the calibrated dial at the base of the frame, I lowered the bit even farther, touched bone, sent small grains of it into the air. Here came the grinding sound again, and those same chills went right into me. I gave the dial a moment's more pressure, and I was through the bone. I retracted the bit.

For a moment the dark feeling in me had left, gone with the whine of the drill, the disintegration of bone. I took the drill from the clamp on the frame and replaced it with the electrode carrier assembly, its needle insulated with Epoxylite everywhere but at the tip; the exposed metal, that portion that in a few moments would be in the midst of the Red Nucleus, would bum only the brain cells immediately around it. Burn them into extinction, we hoped, so that the conditioned response, the blink before shock, back inside the file cabinet, would disappear.

The feeling was gone, but as I fixed the alligator clip first to Chesterfield's right ear, then attached the opposite end to the lesion maker, and as I attached the second clip to the top of the electrode carrier and the appropriate end to its own post on the lesion maker, that strange feeling came back, with it a notion as to
why
I had the feeling, this feeling of dread. That was it, I knew: dread, a dread deeper than that caused by what I knew I was doing to Chesterfield, my pet: destroying brain cells, wiping them out in the Red Nucleus in the hopes that what little he'd been taught would be forgotten, that pieces of whatever small thought the animal could muster would be exterminated.

It was my dream that was causing the feeling, I thought, the dream I'd had again last night: children and wind and black holes. The dream had changed, I realized. In some minute way a detail had been added, something that might mean nothing. But my dream was different now.

I sat with the needle suspended over the hole I'd just drilled, but I did nothing. I did nothing, except try to remember the dream.

And then there it was, the small thing, the insignificant: the boy, my oldest, the child who stood in the middle of my three, had lifted his hand up from the edge of the bed. He'd lifted it up, and had started moving it toward me as if, I saw, he'd wanted me to take it. His hand had been milk-white in the moonlight, a young boy's hand, soft and unwrinkled and dimpled at the wrist. He'd held it out to me, but in my dream my hands were stumps, useless. I could not have taken his hand even if I had tried.

The dream had gone on as usual after that, the wind picking up, the children swirling round the room, disappearing, me waking up with my eyes wide open to the alarm clock, to my husband snoring quietly next to me. To this day, and my job entering brains.

I felt a touch on my shoulder, and I realized I'd heard my name.

I turned. It was Sandra.

She said, “Who were you talking to in here?”

“What?” I said, and I tried to smile, to look as if I hadn't blinked out in the middle of surgery.

“Who were you talking to in here?” she said again, the same puzzled look on her face as the first time she had asked. “I was in the staining room blocking brains, and I could even hear you over
the radio in there. It sounded like you were saying the same word again and again.” She paused, waiting for me to say something. “Come on,” she said, “you know what I'm talking about.”

I didn't. I said, “You're kidding me. Jack put you up to this, or Paige or Wendy. I'm in here working, and you guys are trying to give me a hard time.”

She was quiet, her mouth open, and for a moment I didn't recognize her, didn't know the woman before me. Her skin had gone pale somehow, the color lost, and her hair, usually up in a clean bun or perfect braids, had been only clipped back with barrettes, the ends shaggy, wisps of hair down over her forehead. Her eyes, too, seemed smaller, the skin around them a little darker than the rest of her face, a pale blue I hadn't seen before.

“Claire,” she said. “What's wrong?”

I said, “Nothing,” and adjusted myself on the stool, shook my head. “Nothing. If I was talking in here, I didn't know it.” I smiled, put my hands together in front of me. “Maybe I was just goofing around in here, singing or something, and didn't even know it.” I paused, and looked in her eyes, trying to turn this conversation away from me and back to her, because the idea of me talking in here by myself frightened me. I couldn't remember anything. Just the dream.

I said, “You're asking me if I'm okay, when it should be the other way around. You don't look very well. Are you okay?”

Suddenly she changed, became animated, took her hand from where she'd had it on the door frame and touched it to her hair, looked down, smiled. She stood straighter, put her other hand in her lab coat pocket and fished around for something.

She said, “My hair. It's just my hair. I got tired of wearing it back and tight and worrying about a hair being out of place.” She stopped, seemed to have found what it was she was looking for in her pocket. She pulled out a pencil, examined it and, without looking at me, said, “You're in the middle of things, though. You've got surgery going on, so I'm getting out of here.” She looked up at me, gave a faint smile. “You just keep on frying brains in here.”

She turned, started out the door, but stopped and leaned back in. She said, “Who's Martin, anyway?”

I swallowed too fast, and coughed hard, felt my face going over
into the heat of red, the blood rushing there as I coughed. She came to me and patted my back. “Settle down,” she said, “settle down.”

When I got my breath, I said, “How do you know Martin?”

Again she gave that puzzled look, her eyes focused on me as if I were some stranger. She said, “That's what you were saying in here. At least that's what it sounded like to me. That name over and over.”

I took a few more breaths, my hands on my knees. I turned from her and looked at the floor.

I said, “I can't remember. I just can't.”

She gave me one last pat, said, “You take it easy,” and left.

I turned back to the surgery table, the needle ready to slip down into the burr hole, then pierce the dura mater, that sheet of tough, thin tissue keeping things whole inside the skull, and plunge into the brain itself, sink into the Red Nucleus, where, indeed, it would fry brain cells.

I pictured the electrode down inside the brain, saw the tip of it send out sparks I knew I could never actually see, saw brain cells fold and implode one after another, unable now to regenerate, dead for all time.

Then I saw the electrode, the current off, lift from inside the brain, track up along its own path, up through the dura mater sealing itself off once the needle had been pulled up through it, the electrode emerging from the burr hole, the needle clean and harmless and gleaming. Next I pictured the Gelfoam being packed into the hole, that toothpastelike synthetic material we pretended was as good as bone, tamped down and sealing off the skull as if it were a tomb we had entered only to steal small items, nothing significant. Then came the removal of the hemostats, the skin pulled back into place, and the black thread—always black, a horrible, stark black against pink skin and white fur—that would lace things back together, Chesterfield as good as new, but never as good as new.