A Stranger's House (28 page)

I put my hands to my face, and between my fingers I caught the
last glimpse of me before the mirror, my pregnant body, my abdomen huge with the advent of birth, the dead room behind me, my own face ashen, my eyes lost in their sockets.

I screamed, finally, the strength given me from somewhere, and then I closed my eyes, shut them as tight as I could, my scream letting loose the terror I felt, and launching me into the pain of imminent labor I felt low in my abdomen. I shut my eyes tight, my hands still at my face, and screamed, before me now the same circling squares I'd seen when I'd passed out after having been bitten.

Then the wind stopped, and my scream tore into the black quiet around me. I stopped, and my ears filled with the rush of blood through my head, the pierce of that silent, high pitch.

“Claire?” Tom shouted from behind me. I heard him throw back sheets, turn in the bed, his feet on the floor. Then his hands were on my shoulders. “Claire?”

I opened my eyes, took my hands from my face.

In the mirror was my reflection. Me. I stood before the mirror, my body the gray of moonlight through a window, my skin covered with goose bumps. I was not pregnant, my abdomen flat and shallow, my navel a small black hole leading back into me. My pubic hair was the same small black triangle there between my legs. And my breasts were small again, insignificant, the nipples and aureoles the same size as always, the nipples erect, not from being ready to give milk, but from the cold of the room.

Our room, the same old room in the same old apartment, the same old walls around me.

Tom said, “Claire?” again, and I felt his warm body next to me, pressed into me. “What's wrong?”

I was shaking with the dead adrenalin in me, and I wanted to tell him it was a bad dream, a terrible dream, but I wanted to take those thoughts back, because I remembered the glimpse of the future, me there and pregnant, my body with our child, and I knew,
knew
that even though the children had disappeared I was still pregnant, that we had but nine months to wait: we would by that time have finished work on the house, my room in the home in Chesterfield changed magically into a nursery, waiting for this new baby.

I still felt pressure down below my abdomen, still had that bloated feel, and I felt in spite of this dream somehow happy, rewarded for having come through, and I turned around to Tom, and I held him, felt his warm hands on my back again.

But then there came a sudden, small movement deep inside me, and I felt the wet issue descending, and I felt the warmth between my legs.

I pulled away from Tom, still without having said a word. I put my hand down to my vagina, gently placed my first two fingers there—the same two fingers with which I had tasted my own milk—and brought them close to my face. The blood there on my fingers was thick and sticky, as black as blood ought to be in the dark of a cold bedroom. My period had begun.

“What is it?” Tom said. “Claire?”

I said nothing, merely turned from him and headed, still silent, still in darkness, to the bathroom.

 

I listened all that week, waiting for my father's voice, waiting, waiting. I listened for him when I stood in the shower, and when I climbed down the stairs to the car, and when I drove over the bridge into Hadley, headed for work, the fields dead, covered with ancient corn stubble like long rows of twisted and broken bones sticking up from the earth. I listened for his voice as I ran the rabbits, Chesterfield and all the rest now, as planned, successfully void of any remembrance whatsoever of that conditioned behavior. Now, when the tone came, they did nothing, only let the electric shock spark into them, rush through their bodies in some sort of tacit agreement that, yes, their brains had been tampered with; yes, they could not remember that they should wince at the coming pain; and, yes, the search for Artificial Intelligence moved on.

And I listened whenever I saw Sandra, paler now than ever, her face fatter, her hair greasy. I listened when I passed her in the hall, listened as I caught glimpses of her staining and mounting, listened as I saw her walk into the computer room at lunch now, alone.

I listened, and listened, ignoring everything and everyone around me. The rest of the week I spoke little to Tom who, I assumed, only imagined it was me having my period, that I ought to be feeling this way, that it was my right to say nothing, to do nothing, only come home at night to lie on the couch with the television going until after midnight, then coming to bed and sleeping as far away from him as I could possibly get. He said nothing to me.

The next day, Friday, was the day perfusion began.

Sacrifice
was the word used, uttered by Will and Sandra and myself and in all the literature, a word that veiled what we did, hid the fact that we killed them next; a word that elevated things some-what, and made us feel, perhaps, that indeed we were doing some sort of favor to these animals for whom we'd already destroyed some center of thinking, cells that made them blink in anticipation.

Sacrifice.

Still I was listening for my father, the image of my dream still with me four days later, seared into my own brain every time I went to the bathroom, each time I had to pull out the swelled and brown-red tampon and drop it between my legs into the toilet, where I would flush the thing down, those bits of possible life shed voluntarily by my own body, a traitor. Still I bled, and bled, and bled, as though this steady flush from my own system were one long reiteration of the truth: I could not have a child, my pregnant body only a dream. Nothing more. Some accident of God, who'd given me this. An accident.

Sacrifice.

Chesterfield was the first to go, and I felt nothing. I wore no gloves, merely picked him up from the cage in the basement, walked with him upstairs, cradling him, his paws up in the air as I scratched his chest. I felt nothing for the animal, felt only its rapid heartbeat beneath my fingertips.

I started down the hall, and saw that Paige and Wendy's office door was open. From inside came a low voice, Will's, perhaps, speaking in a quiet monotone, and then it stopped. I was even with the door, and looked in.

There were all four of them: Paige and Wendy both leaning on the edges of their desks, heads down; Will leaning against the back wall, his arms crossed; Sandra in the oak rocker, her elbows on her knees, looking at the floor.

They all looked up at me, as if they had prearranged it, the four of them waiting for me to pass. Their faces, though, were blank, eyes dead. They didn't move, say anything.

I hesitated a moment, wanting to know what was going on, but
then I moved on down the hall. I had a rabbit in my arms. I had my job to do. I was listening for my father.

I moved down the darkened hall, all the way to the far end, to the perfusion room, a room whose walls were covered with green tiles, what had once been the dorm showers. When I reached the heavy wooden door, I leaned my back against it, and looked down the hall, half hoping Sandra would be following me to fill me in, and half hoping that no one would be there.

There was no one, and I pushed hard against the door, and moved in.

The room was actually two rooms, the front room set up with necessary equipment: water bottles, tubing, metal shelves laid out with scalpels and Rongeurs shears, hemostats, boxes of syringes and surgical masks and gloves, bottles of Nembutal. Everything needed to sacrifice an animal.

In the room beyond was the stainless steel sink, over it the rack with its four small pieces of nylon rope, one fixed to each corner, upon which the rabbit—Chesterfield!—would lie; above the sink was a shelf holding two huge plastic bottles, one of saline solution, the other of Formalin.

Chesterfield lay still in my arms, content, his nose slowing down, his eyes nearly closed.

I took him to the table, where sat yet another Gormezano box, and I placed him in it, closed off the two Plexiglas ends. I got a syringe from one of the boxes, and drew from a bottle of Nembutal a little over three milliliters. A lethal dose, one that would lull him at first, then slow his heart rate down next to nothing.

I pulled up the scruff of his neck with my left hand. There, on the back of my hand, was the scar. That God damned scar on my hand, that pregnant rabbit never leaving me, and though I'd no reason to, though Chesterfield had never been anything other than the calmest, most cooperative, most peaceful rabbit I'd ever handled, still I took the syringe with my right hand, held it up to pop off the last small bubble at the tip of the reservoir, and I jammed the needle into the rabbit, jammed it hard, so that Chesterfield, startled and pained, let out the first scream I'd ever heard from him, a small shattering of sound that broke through the room and boomed and
ricocheted across the tiles and stainless steel to settle into my ears, the sound magnified by the room, loud and shrill and cold.

I pulled out the syringe, and I started waiting.

Ten minutes later he was out. I took apart the Gormezano box, and laid Chesterfield on the table. I put my hand to the fur of his chest, felt his brittle ribcage. His heartbeat was almost nonexistent, just a small, muffled vibration every second. Almost nothing.

I picked him up, limp in my hands, so much dead weight, as though he had doubled in weight since just a few moments ago, when he had been in my arms and awake.

I took him into the second room, and put him on the metal rack over the sink. I touched a finger to his chest. The pulse was slowing down even more. I had to work fast, I knew, to start perfusion before the heart stopped completely. The heart had to be pumping in order for the fluid to be taken up. Perhaps I'd given it too large a dose; perhaps, with the jab of the syringe, I'd startled it too much, its adrenalin rushing its heart rate, the dose taken up too quickly. I had to move.

And I felt nothing, no remorse. I wondered at this; each first rabbit I'd ever named I'd felt sorry for, felt pained by this point at having to put the thing to sleep.

But now. Now I was cold, my hands smooth-moving and unhesitant as I flipped the rabbit onto its back, pulled its forelegs up and to either side and tied them to the rack with small pieces of nylon rope, pink now from so many sacrifices. I tied its forelegs down, and did the same with its hindlegs, pulled down and to the side and tied off so that the animal lay on its back, limbs pulled taut and away, ready for the next step.

I touched the chest. Slower still.

I went to the metal shelves in the other room, got a paper surgeon's mask from one of the boxes, put it on. Then I got a pair of surgeon's gloves, pulled them on, and picked up a pair of surgical shears, a scalpel, a clamp and two hemostats, and the Rongeurs shears.

I went back to the sink, turned on the water, let it run as I uncoiled first the tubing from the saline jug, next the tubing from the Formalin bottle. I connected the tubes to the juncture, a Y-shaped piece of tube that would allow me to feed through the same tube
and into the animal first the saline, then the Formalin. I made sure the clips that held the tubes closed at the base of the jugs were tight so that no liquid would escape until I let it. I turned to the animal.

I took the scalpel and made a small cut just below the sternum, right into the pink skin and fur.

Still I felt nothing, only watched my hands move in their calculated, practiced manner. I watched as my hand put the scalpel on the stainless steel countertop next to the sink, and picked up the shears.

The shears were small, sharp, and I held them open, pushed the bottom tip deep into the incision, and I started cutting, moving up through the sternum, through that small, flat bone, and on up through the ribcage, each
snip
of the shears laying open the chest of that animal, more blood with each cut, the bones so fragile and thin I could have been cutting through thick paper.

Then I was finished, and rinsed the bloodied shears off in the water, the red only faint in the bottom of the sink. I placed the shears next to the scalpel, fixed the hemostats in place to clamp off the blood from the flesh, and with both hands I pried open the ribcage, pulled it open wide to reveal the chest cavity.

Before me lay first the lungs, wings of soft pink barely moving, surrounded by red, bloody tissue, the ribs blue and red. Below the lungs lay the diaphragm, the thick membrane wall that moved too slowly.

I peeled back the lungs to the heart, nearly buried beneath other organs—the liver, the stomach, the pancreas. It was still beating, a regular but weak jump of maroon muscle, blood still pumping through it, the animal still alive.

I wriggled a finger down below it, pushed back organs to expose the descending aorta like a red worm, and I got the clamp from the countertop, closed it on the aorta so that, now, all the blood was circulating up into the brain.

I picked up the scalpel, held it, poised above the heart.

I wanted to stop, to stare, to wonder at the moment of death and the act of deciding which moment it might be; and I thought of my own brain, wondering which neurons would fire into which synapses to start the chain of firings on down from inside my skull
through my muscles until the endpoint, some particular muscle in my forearm, would contract, and the scalpel would sink into the tough muscle of this animal's heart. I felt something then, too, some sharp pain at the center of my head, some show of something going on there that made me want to cry, and I thought that this was emotion, that it was in me after all, my feelings for a rabbit, for Chesterfield, hidden and buried under all the dead tissue of my life, hidden under my dead womb, under my dream of being pregnant. I wanted to cry, to let the pain in me go, but suddenly, as if out of reflex or some unrecognized instinct, a muscle in my forearm contracted, and the blade, sharp and glistening and silver, sank into the heart, that thick red marble; sank into the left ventricle at precisely the correct spot, precisely the correct depth, precisely the correct length. And just as suddenly, just as precisely, my hand and the scalpel moved lower on the heart, made another incision in the vena cava, just a small slip of the blade, and the moment of wonder in me, of awe, of wanting to hold back from this task, was gone.