Safe Passage (21 page)

    
"I don't mind the killing when it's necessary," he'd told her, making it clear that killing
had
been necessary at
Biolab
, in order to study the kidneys and adrenal glands afterward. "But it tears me up to be involved in it." He hadn't the heart for it, he'd said; he liked his animals to live. At the time,
Izzy's
story had moved Jocelyn almost to tears. She'd made love to him for an hour without him having to do any of the work—which he'd more or less expected, because Debbie and Traci had done the same thing. But that night she was waving the Michelob bottle at him and looking at him sideways, showing off her eyelashes to good effect. "Want one?" she asked, pointing to the beer.

    
He shook his head no. She didn't take his concerns seriously. He was running a simple behavioral study, and Jocelyn's attitude was, as she put it: "For God's sake,
Izzy
, what do you get so worked up about? None of the dogs are even killed or hurt." She didn't see, as
Izzy
did, how much the dogs hated being caged up. The spirited ones like Rusty came running up to the bars of their cages as soon as he walked into the lab—running as best they could with their paws getting stuck in the metal flooring-whining for his attention, licking his fingers, playing. He couldn't take them outside and roughhouse with them as he would have liked because it would skew the test results, but he felt for them. The only thing that kept him going
was knowing
these experiments might mean a breakthrough in cancer research someday—or, as Jocelyn pointed out, "It might not mean a damned thing." But in any case he liked to find homes for his dogs when he was finished with them, especially ones like Rusty.

    
Jocelyn took another swig of her beer and slithered over to him. She read too much literature, which made her feel she had to do things dramatically. This was not her normal walk at all. Watching her move made
Izzy
think of a snake he once had—Henry. He had liked the snake a lot. Henry had no choice but to slither, but on Jocelyn it looked ridiculous.
Izzy
was in a poor frame of mind before Jocelyn even touched him. She pulled his glasses off. "You and your poor bleeding heart," she murmured. She placed his hand on her rear end. "My sweet
Izzy
, who puts a dozen dogs in little metal cages and then tries to find them a home." She was being
Scarlett
O'Hara—seductive but heartless. Part of her attraction for him was that she was in the English department, with a whole different set of friends who might take his dogs. But he hated the dramatics. And besides, what good was she doing him now?

    
She put her hands under his shirt. She was drunk. He didn't like
drunk
women when he was trying to think.

    
"
Izzy
the Vivisectionist," she said. "
Izzy
the
Vivi
, trying to soothe his conscience."

    
That did it. The opaque feeling started inside him, of not caring anymore. Exactly that feeling had come over him when he broke up with Debbie and Traci and Arlene. Jocelyn did not sense his distance; she was too drunk. She kept rubbing against him. He took his hand off her underpants.

    
He poured tea into his cup. Obviously this was not a story he could tell his mother. But a sudden idea occurred to him.

    
"Mother, how would you like one of the world's nicest watchdogs?" he asked.

Mag
, who had been staring at the unopened newspaper, looked up. "Lord, no," she said. "Unless maybe he'd eat Lucifer."

    
There was no sugar on the table. She sometimes hid it on the theory that if she made it difficult to find, her sons would learn to eat cereal and drink tea without it. His father had given up sugar entirely when the blind spells started, so maybe her campaign had done some good.

    
She watched him rummage through the cabinets for sugar but didn't tell him where it was. He finally found it behind a box of spaghetti in the pantry. His mother sighed.

    
"You're still killing dogs, aren't you?" she asked.

    
"We give them to the pound," he said. "
They
 
kill
them."

    
"Maybe you should find another line of work."

    
"I couldn't," he said. Of course his mother, of all people, ought to know that, and her suggesting otherwise made him feel desolate. She knew he expected someday to come up with a breakthrough, which would vindicate him for whatever pain he had inflicted on the animals thus far. The trouble was, more and more lately, he didn't believe he was capable of a breakthrough. Even when it came to his father's eyes…he ought to have some hint by now, but he'd watched him every time he'd been home for the past year, and he didn't have a clue.

    
"
Izzy
…you still get those migraines?" his mother asked.

    
"I only had them that one summer two years ago," he said. He rarely told anyone about those migraines. He didn't mind Jocelyn and the others knowing he had no heart for killing dogs, but he thought mentioning the migraines might sound unmanly
..
It was an honor to be hired by
Biolab
for the summer—Dr. McMillan hired only one graduating senior each year;
Izzy
wouldn't have wanted anyone to think he couldn't handle it.
Izzy
had read all of Dr. McMillan's papers before he started work. He knew Dr. McMillan was not a man who believed in letting technicians run his experiments. He did everything himself, down to cleaning out the cages, and
Izzy
assisted. There were a dozen puppies at a time.
Izzy
helped with the feedings, the injections, the keeping of records. When the dogs were ten weeks old, they were killed-painlessly, Dr. McMillan said—with a single shot of sodium pentobarbital.
Izzy
was expected to help with that, too. Afterward Dr. McMillan cut the corpses apart, to take out the kidneys and the adrenal glands.

    
It was an important experiment, and the puppies had to be killed. But there were two bad things about the killings. One was the individual deaths. He'd expected that. The puppies were not healthy and would not have lived long anyway. They were from a strain bred to be allergic to just about everything they ate. Their eyes watered, and they did not gain weight. But they were small and ("like any baby creature," Dr. McMillan had warned) they were cute.

    
The second difficult part
was knowing
that the other lab animals were watching while the puppy in question was being killed.
Izzy
had not anticipated that. It seemed childish and womanish to care that a dozen dumb animals were observing, but it preyed on his mind all the same. The cages lined three walls of the lab, and the examining table was in the middle. The other puppies watched while one of them was laid out on that stainless-steel table, held fast by
Izzy's
hands, and looked up with that sideways look of helplessness and fear. The others were watching while the puppy in question squirmed, as they invariably did unless they were one of the mute, trusting ones. They heard the puppy squeal as the needle went in…and listened as the squealing turned into more of a sigh, drawn out and lower-pitched, and the jerking limbs went still.

    
A phobia over such things would be anathema to a research scientist.
Izzy
had known he would be a research scientist ever since he put the snake, Henry, down in the cold basement for a science fair project, to see if it would hibernate.

    
In the lab, on the stainless-steel table, his hands had been steady, because if he faltered he would cause pain. An odd concern, considering. And from the cages a dense stillness while the killing and the cutting went on. "Animals can't reason," Dr. McMillan said, hearing it too.
Izzy
kept repeating to himself: Puppies don't think, they're not over there thinking, "Next time it will be me." But he left the lab with grinding headaches. He took aspirin and closed his eyes, but neither measure helped. "You're hungry," his mother said, dishing out plates of meat and potatoes. If he ate, he only felt worse. Sleep dulled the headaches, but sometimes they lasted for days. The pain was like a thing outside
himself
. The killings went on. He stopped trying to numb it and defied it instead. He went out almost every night with Arlene.

    
She was a redhead with apricot skin. Her eyelashes were black. She was the first girl he had actually loved—the girl he had loved since high school. He said to himself:
Set me as a seal upon your heart, a seal upon your hand. Love is as strong as death
.
  
He had read this in a Philosophy from the Bible course, and the words kept coming back to him. Love was as strong as death. He did not tell Arlene about the headaches. He only expected her to cure him.

    
This seemed reasonable because their love had already survived quite a lot. It was Arlene's porch roof he'd jumped from the morning he'd broken his ankle in high school. For weeks he'd been spending a half hour in her bedroom every morning during his paper route, although at that time she wouldn't let him actually have sex with her. But they spent half an hour in each other's arms before he climbed out of her bedroom window, tiptoed over her porch roof, and leaped over high shrubbery to her yard and his waiting bike. Her parents slept at the opposite end of the house and didn't suspect. But that morning
Izzy
didn't clear the junipers. He lost his balance and landed full on his ankle. The pain was so immediate and so searing that at first he did not think he could get up. Finally he managed to crawl back to his bike, so as not to implicate Arlene. He would rather die from the pain in his leg than be banished from Arlene's bed. Fortunately,
Izzy's
mother came looking for him a few minutes later—he could never understand why—and drove him to the emergency room. His family had always believed the accident happened because his bike jumped the curb.

Later, Arlene had gone away to college in New York. But every summer she came home, and every summer they realized anew that they were in love.

    
Looking at Arlene the year he worked at
Biolab
,
Izzy
did not feel just desire at the sight of her apricot skin, but also a thick sweetness at the back of his throat, like a permanent coating of honey. It sounded bizarre when he described it, but he didn't really mind. He liked the sense of something permanent. He believed that after his first two years of graduate school, they would marry. He believed his headaches would respond to her presence. Her love would be stronger than the deaths of those lab animals. So they went out every night, and she had no effect on his headaches at all.

    
One humid night in late July, lying next to her after they had made love, his head began to throb. Usually it did not do that so soon after orgasm. Arlene was half asleep in the crook of his arm. He looked at her. Instead of being overcome by tender ness, he felt an opaque and absolute cessation of emotion descend on him. It was almost as if someone had cast a blanket over his body, except that it was cold instead of warm. He felt no heat, no love,
no
anger. Arlene's black eyelashes cast a shadow on her cheek. Her hair was curled against her forehead, and her skin gave off its golden glow. He could not understand why he had wanted Arlene so much for so many years; why he had dreamed about her during those nights when he was at the University of Maryland and she in New York, why he had wanted her so absolutely even when other girls pursued him, even when (as happened sometimes) he had spent the evening in someone else's bed. His need for her—if she could not cure his headaches-seemed suddenly absurd. His head pounded, and the most compelling exhaustion filled him. He told her he was ill and he fled, wanting only to go home and sleep. She called the following evening to check on his health. He picked a fight with her—did it, he remembered, in the cruelest and most unfeeling way. He was not proud of that. Since then he had lived with three different women. His relationship with each of them had begun with the same sweetness he had felt for Arlene—and at some point the curtain of uncaring, even of revulsion, had descended exactly as it had with her. And each time, the incident precipitating it had something to do with his laboratory dogs.

    
After each killing at
Biolab
, in another section of the building, the kidneys and adrenals had been fixed in paraffin. The paraffin was sliced into fine strips, to be studied under the microscope.
Izzy
recorded the changes he saw, and Dr. McMillan recorded his own observations, slide after slide. For days there was nothing but that dry, clean peering under the microscope. In August, after he broke up with Arlene, there was a string of such days away from the dogs, and it was then that
Izzy's
headaches went away.

    
Izzy
believed this happened because when you brought an experiment down to the microscopic level—or at least down to the smallest level you could detect—it would begin to yield its sense. You could see in a very clear way what effect a certain diet would have on a certain species, and the individual creatures became less important. This had happened even when he was a child watching
Moanin
' convulse from distemper every day after school—convulsions that were the price of the dog's surviving the disease at all—and later when poor old Henry the snake had curled up like a dead thing and hibernated on the basement floor. He'd hated seeing it, but the records he kept showed that
Moanin's
fits occurred at the same hours each day, and Henry hibernated in the basement just like every other snake hibernated in the wild. He still struggled between wanting to complete his science fair project and wanting to carry Henry upstairs to the stripe of morning sun that fell into his bedroom. But he always managed to go on because there was some comfort in discovering the pattern.