Pepsi Bears and Other Stories (16 page)

The colony's surgical notables decide to toast his life with rum.

‘To Owen,' they raise their glasses, ‘a great explorer. A navigator in God's mysterious realm.'

‘Hear, Hear.' They drink.

‘To Owen,' they raise their glasses, ‘the Hammer of Evolution.'

‘Hear, Hear.'

They toast Owen into the night.

There they lie; the great anatomist and his specimen, gone their separate ways. But what killed Owen? The leading medical men of the colony begin a speculation. What on earth can have felled this Titan? A strapping fellow, seemingly in the pink.

Perhaps the brain of a gorilla gives off a toxin into the air that wreaks a dreadful revenge on its attacker.

Bollocks, Sir. His manservant would be dead as he.

Then perhaps it was cholera, tuberculosis, influenza.

No symptoms of any illness, Sir. The man dropped dead in harness while standing over his prize.

An aneurism. Some torrid internal disturbance of the emotions that grasped the capillaries of his brain and squeezed them until the brain was desiccated of its vital fluids.

I should say so.

It would be my conjecture the emotions wrought this upon the physic. The man's brain swooped from the height of victory to the depths of outrage in the blink of an eye and the pressure drop in such a vast fall ruptured a blood vessel. In short, gentlemen, crushed by a sudden and extreme anxiety.

Possibly that.

Yes. A mighty and justifiable outrage, sparked by that young man in his coloured waistcoat, caused a vicious turbulence inside Owen.

That brash atheist with the showy side-levers turned the wave of Owen's triumph into a cesspool of spleen and poisoned his brain.

A provocative and dangerous act if it were proven.

That young fellow's rank heckling was a virtual act of manslaughter and he must be brought to account.

Who is he?

Where is he?

Where is this young atheist who killed Owen?

A consensus is reached: it was the young man and his talk of pig's privates that swept Owen from his peak of triumph unto death. For the genius mind is a delicate thing and might well be dashed and torn by an effrontery that would leave a dullard merely musing.

The scientific men form a posse. They find a policeman on Pitt Street and engage him by telling him a deadly chemical transformation has been performed in the cerebrum of a visiting dignitary by a fancy-pants upstart with a foul mouth. The policeman says ‘Oh' and ‘Aye' as if he is familiar with this style of depravity. The perpetrator must be run to ground.

By morning the perpetrator in the claret waistcoat is located aboard his ship and spilled from his hammock aplunk onto the deckboards of his cabin. Those parts of him that do not ache with this rude awakening ache with drink. He moans and rubs his stomach. A summons is presented to Captain Fitzroy for his detention at the Governor's Pleasure until a post-mortem is carried out on Owen and his cause of death established. The young man is chivvied up Pitt Street by the scientific men, who have been up all night celebrating, with
rum, Owen's triumph over evolution, and mourning, with rum, Death's triumph over Owen. The young man is given cause to regret again, through his buttocks, the contemporary penchant for sharp-nosed Spanish footwear. Once, after he is kicked, a scientist makes a joke: ‘Careful, Sir, for his ship's captain says he is a Wedgwood and passing fragile.'

Back in the operating theatre the young man is shocked to see Owen lying alongside the gorilla on which he had operated. ‘Owen. Dead. But … dead of what?'

‘Well may you ask, you China-rich blackguard. Dead of outrage, if we can only prove it. Dead of you and your rank interjection.'

Forcing the young man to sit and watch so he might be witness to whatever wound they find he has inflicted upon Owen's mind, the surgeons begin a cranial post-mortem. No need to search elsewhere, for the cause of death will be found in the brain. Onfray, Surgeon to the Governor, takes up the handsaw that was used to open the gorilla and prove it no child of God. He flips the top off Owen's head like it were his breakfast egg and brings Owen's yolk forth, and the surgeons coo over it because it is the very most beautiful brain they have ever seen and nothing at all like a boar's left one.

When the learned men get done admiring it they begin to examine it for the wound the young man inflicted. But what do they hope to find? Do they expect to see some goo pooled in his cranium like the afterbirth of a very nasty insult? A vessel ruptured by a rudeness? A clot of bile formed by this young fellow's blasphemy?
Some cooked lobe where alkaline triumph soured into acidic outrage? What sort of evidence would an insult of this magnitude leave on the brain? They examine the thing by gaslight and under microscope, and they turn it this way and that, and they bathe it in a litmus bath, and they massage it desperately that it might give off some hint. But no examination reveals it anything but a normally expired brain; bulbous vessel from which a world has ebbed.

As enthusiastic with rum as they have been, they are now sobering and beginning to doubt their ability to prove their diagnosis. They stare at the young murderer. The young blackguard. The young atheist. Sitting there with his shoulders drooping under yesterday's excess. They are sure he killed Owen with his jibe, but perhaps he will get away with it.

‘Constable,' Onfray says to the officer seated alongside the young fellow, ‘watch him while we confer.'

Onfray places Owen's brain back in its skull and the learned men retire to a chamber attached to the operating theatre, and the hungover young man in the claret waistcoat and the policeman are alone. The young man gets to his feet and rubs his poor stomach through his waistcoat. ‘Have you any idea of what I am accused?' he asks the policeman.

‘To tell the truth, Sir, I haven't the faintest suspicion about what it is you done or even if you're guilty of the doin' of it.'

‘And, Officer,' the young man wanders to the operating table, ‘here we have a dead ape and a dead man.
And those gentlemen who sawed the dead man's head off, if my nose is not as ignorant as they, smell of strong drink.'

The policeman nods, ‘I caught a whiff, Sir. I seen the signs.'

‘You are sharp, Constable.'

‘I been a long time a constable, and if it wasn't for whiffin' of drink occasional meself I'd be sergeant.'

‘You should be.' The young Englishman nods.

‘Thank you, Sir.'

‘Not at all, Sergeant.' The policeman smiles and a blush comes to his weathered face.

The young Englishman suddenly snatches Owen's and Nusuzu's brains from their gaping skulls and brandishes them at the policeman and whispers urgently, ‘It seems unnatural, Sergeant, wrong that they are opening the heads of men and apes side-by-side and ogling their brains like crystal balls. It seems … well, is there evil afoot here, Sergeant? With your long time in the game, can you tell me, do you whiff skulduggery here?'

The policeman's face is bafflement. ‘Sir …?'

‘Do you not think, Sergeant, that these …
scientists …
might be about switching the brains of these two deceased?'

‘Oh, Lord, Sir. Please put them brains back.'

‘I will, Sergeant. But being …
scientists …
do you think they might be about putting this gorilla's brain in this man's head?' The young man places Owen's brain back in his skull. ‘And this man's brain here,' he waggles
Nusuzu's brain before placing it back in her skull, ‘in the gorilla's head. So as to bring the man back as a rapist and the gorilla back as a scientist? Could it be that, Sergeant? Is that what this is? An … experiment?'

‘Ohh …' the policeman moans. ‘Ohh … science. Sure God would have commanded against it if it was afoot in Moses' time. Sure he would have throwed over that silly one about coveting thy neighbour's wife and bid Moses chisel
Thou Shalt Not Experiment
instead.' And thinking the young man has swapped the two brains, he tells him, ‘Now put them brains back in their rightful heads, Sir. It's almost certain a sin, swappin' brains.'

‘I don't like the feel of them,' the young man folds his arms. ‘They are squishy.'

‘My God. Then you shouldn't've played with 'em in the first place, if you got no stomach for it.' The policeman leaps forward and taking a deep breath plunges his hands into the open skulls and winkles out both brains and crossing his arms thrusts Nusuzu's brain into Owen's skull and Owen's brain into Nusuzu's skull and rubs his hands up and down his woollen trouser legs, murmuring, ‘Urgh … urgh …' and shaking his head from side to side to keep the feel of their squishiness from settling on his own mind.

‘I told you,' the young man says. ‘Squishy.'

There are sounds at the door and the young man rushes to sit down and the policeman is left standing near the cadavers as the learned men enter the room. Onfray, at the head of the sobering posse, tells the policeman, ‘He is fortunate. We cannot prove his crime
to a level a court would require. You may dismiss him.' He flicks his fingers, dismissing the young man and the policeman.

The policeman takes a breath and twitches his nose like a rabbit, letting the learned fellows know he is awake to the whiff of rum. ‘That's very good, Sir. That's very well. But what is this here with this ape and this other dead un in the finery? You wouldn't be thinkin' to shuffle their selves and turn about their natures so the man's a ape and the ape's a man, would you? 'Cause if you were it would be a rank ungodly …
experiment
. And the law couldn't stand for it.' He has his hands on his hips and his head tilted to a serious degree, risking his very career to talk to these men this way.

‘Oh, oh.' Onfray's face breaks into a broad grin and he lays his hand on Owen's cold chest to steady himself. ‘This policeman has notions of metamorphosis, gentlemen. He thinks we are wizards.' The gentlemen laugh and slap each other's backs and one or two make claws of their hands and they grimace and advance on the policeman playing at being vampires. ‘You dumb brute,' Onfray says to him. ‘You poor, dumb fellow.' He takes the brain from Owen's skull and holds it before the eyes of the policeman.

‘Do you not think if we brought Owen back as an ape, a female ape at that, he might not have harsh words to say to us while he learnt afresh how to pass water without hosing his toes?' He thrusts the gorilla's brain beneath the policeman's nose. ‘This, Sir, is the mind of a great genius. Behold its beauty – its fullness of size,
its convex rampancy, its many chapels and intricacies – truly it is to cerebra what the Notre Dame is to churches. It is a jewel.' He places it gently back in Owen's skull and takes Owen's brain from the gorilla's skull. ‘The gorilla's brain,' he scowls at it, ‘is, as you may note, an organ with the consistency and intelligence of tripe. The two are not interchangeable, my good fellow.' He places Owen's brain back in the gorilla's skull. ‘The two are alike as chalk and stilton. However …' Onfray eyes the policeman up and down, ‘perhaps your own brain placed in a gorilla might empower the beast to walk the beat and deliver a buffeting to a gang of scoundrels. A new super-constable. Yes …'

The policeman begins to edge toward the door. ‘Quite so. Get out, you ox, before I have you in chains and you are given thirty licks of the governor's cat.' He is out the door and gone when Onfray turns toward the young man in the claret waistcoat. ‘Begone yourself, Sir. Back to Blighty and let's never hear of you again. And should you ever pass Westminster Abbey you might drop in and say a prayer over Owen's tomb and beg forgiveness for what you have done.' The young man in the claret waistcoat nods as if he might indeed kneel before Owen's tomb in the glorious Abbey. He smiles as if the idea were agreeable, and looks set to laugh aloud, but contains himself, nods to the learned gentlemen and is out the door and gone.

Onfray is assisted by two surgeons as he sews Owen's skull back together. It is not easy. Considerable force must be brought to bear. Owen's brain would seem to
have swelled with rigor mortis and they are forced to poke it and prod it and cajole it and finally slam the lid on it as one does on a jack-in-the-box.

Onfray has an assistant place the gorilla's brain in a large glass specimen jar filled with clear spirits and he marks it himself:
Gorilla Gorilla
.
Cerebrum, Professor Owen's gorilla Nusuzu, his dissection of which proved epochal in the denunciation of evolution. (No hippocampus minor.)

And though the London Zoo paid for Nusuzu, and she rightfully belongs to that institution, Onfray asks for a show of hands from the learned gentlemen and they agree to donate her brain to the Sydney School of Surgery.