The Curiosity (10 page)

Oh, temptations. Sometimes we give in after a long tussle with our consciences. Other times we surrender with a kind of glee. I hurried to the security panel, punched in the access code, waited for the door to hiss aside, tiptoed into the chamber.

The cameras panned mechanically to face me, so I felt like a fool. Of course the monitoring system would record my every motion. The damage was done. Still, what misdeed was I committing? Breaking an arbitrary rule? I could argue that I was responding to a change in the patient's respiration. The video would confirm it.

I approached the padded table on which he lay. His chest rose and fell. There was no other activity, no further “hoop.” Just a body in the deepest imaginable sleep. Leaning over, I studied the frozen man's face. Deep lines crow-footed out from his eyes, as though he had spent a century not waiting in ice but staring at the sun. His jaw was straight and angular. Sideburns puffed from his cheeks like the tufts of a lynx. His expression was perfectly, inscrutably blank.

I leaned down . . . who can say what possessed me? Call it curiosity, call it wonder. I brought my face closer to his neck, nearly to his chest, felt his presence. This man was not an abstraction but an actuality. Never in my life did I feel clearer about wanting to know about something. I took a good deep sniff. He smelled like leather, old leather.

Suddenly I remembered finding my father's briefcase in the back of a downstairs closet. I was thirty, it was ten days after he died, Chloe was preparing our childhood home for sale. The briefcase held no papers, it was as retired as my father had been. But when I lifted it to my face, the leathery scent contained the memory of him: a lovable round man who over the decades had encouraged me in every enterprise that captured my attention: dolls, dentistry, design, then dissection and doctoral studies.

The frozen man's smell was similar, but dustier, richer. Like an ancient dictionary. I should have brought a clipboard, to record my observations. But what value is there in documenting something as subjective as scent? I straightened with a sigh. In the morning, Carthage would demand explanations.

At once I realized. Inadvertently—I will maintain that view till my final days—accidentally, I had placed my hand on his wrist. We were skin to skin. I jerked back as if stung. Or as if I had done the stinging. Had I washed my hands when I arrived at work? No, not since eating supper hours earlier. Then I'd walked through Boston, held stair railings, used my keyboard, swiped my security badge. My hand could have carried all manner of potential infections. I backpedaled from the table, then spun for the door and the quiet sanctuary of the control room.

Billings had gone somewhere, the tube tray half filled. Gerber hunched forward, contemplating the floor between his feet while his forehead pressed the keyboard, one letter repeating endlessly on the screen:
VVVVVVVVVVVVV.

I sat at my desk and willed myself calm. I made a show of checking e-mail, not registering what was on the screen. My infraction might prove minuscule. Probably I had not done the frozen man any harm. Maybe where I'd stood made it impossible for the cameras to see.

His skin was warm, like any man's.

I noticed something then, a grittiness on my hand. I rubbed my thumb and pinkie against each other; there were granules like sand. I brought my forefinger to my mouth. I tasted.

Sure enough: salt.

CHAPTER 10

Contamination

(Erastus Carthage)

Y
ou are never the person who cannot sleep. Your life is so hectic, your hours so full, the end of the day has for decades provided a reliable routine, dull as it is effective: washing up, drawing drapes, slipping on an eye mask, and sleeping like a child. No nightmares, no waking till morning. Pity those whose sleep is a lesser experience.

Yet here you are. You've stirred in your bed, watched the clock drip away a tedious hour, mashed your pillows and tugged your sheets, and still your mind can't stop a cycle of thought that spirals only to the end of this project, straight to ruin. Unproductive, but rest draws no nearer. In capitulation, you've dressed, left the hotel, taken an appallingly filthy cab, and arrived at the Lazarus Project to find the place all but asleep.

The control room is unmanned. Totally unacceptable. What if Subject One experienced distress? The monitors are off, breaking the video feed. What if Subject One began to move with intention? It would not be captured for posterity, nor for proving success, nor for persuading future benefactors. The only mildly reassuring discovery is that Gerber is away from his desk. You wondered if that oddball ever slept.

The reanimation clock marches onward, now reading 11:14:46:22. Eleven and a half days gone already. Time is the enemy and you know it. If Subject One follows the pattern of every other creature revived by your lab, more than half of the opportunity with him has passed. Twenty-one days, that is the outermost life-span projection, based on the patterns of revived krill. Three weeks, and the man shall be once again dead.

Moreover, you know well that sound research does not occur quickly. The scientific method is a taskmaster sterner even than you. Yet the project has mere days remaining, after which this costly reawakened flesh will frenzy itself back into uselessness. The media is already gone, except for the plaything you keep handy for propaganda. The extra animation staff returned to their regular lab jobs. You have even received offers from nursing homes—nursing homes!—as though Subject One were some weak-bladdered geriatric rather than one of science's greatest achievements.

Time may be measured in seconds but you feel its weight by the ton. Nonetheless, grains of sand are cascading through the neck of the research hourglass while the creature lies inert, there in the dimly lit chamber, his heart beating on like the world's most expensive watch. Thus have matters at the Lazarus Project stood for eleven and a half days.

You cross to the schedule chart, and observe that it is Dr. Philo's shift. She has abandoned her post. Were she present, you would fire her immediately. But wait: there is an instructive power in dismissing someone in the presence of others. Tomorrow morning, with an attentive audience, heads will roll.

Till then, the boss is on duty. A superstitious person would say you couldn't sleep because you intuited that Subject One was unwatched. Superstitious people are fools.

You turn the video monitors on, screens crackling as they warm up, and wonder how things could have slipped so far. Has frustration distracted you? The science was unimpeachable. The methods, if inelegant, were defensible. And the findings were revolutionary. Your discovery that cells whose functioning had ceased through rapid freezing were not dead but rather possessed a residue of latent energy, and your application of this revelation to raw material provided by the laws of chance and opportunity—these achievements ought to stand on a par with those of Einstein, Darwin, and Freud. Then why has Subject One not awakened? Why hasn't this damned slab of meat opened his eyes?

No danger of that happening anytime soon either. A yawn insists itself on you. The clock shows there are hours till morning. Which is better, then: for the next shift to come to work and see you covering the lapse, or for them to arrive and find no one here? In the former case, the implication would be that people can shirk their duties and expect a superior to compensate. You can't have that. No, back to bed with you. But you will leave a note on the control desk, so that whoever has the next shift feels the fear of imminent consequences, and predictably conveys that concern to others in the project. Yes, that's the way. There's a pad and pen on the back table.

Tonight upon inspection the control room was empty and video feed turned off. Worst, the subject was unattended, risking his life and the future of this project. Tomorrow, those who are responsible will face the utmost consequences.

There. Three sentences. And no one can accuse you of being self-important. You didn't even use the word
I
. You tuck the paper between rows of letters in the master control keyboard and start for the door. But at the last minute some movement at the periphery of your vision turns you back.

You hadn't looked since the screens warmed up but now it's there on all the monitors. Dr. Philo is not absent: she is inside the chamber. She brought a metal stool, on which she perches like a bird. She's wearing a white surgical mask, but otherwise has ignored sterility protocols and dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt. She's looking the subject directly in the face. The motion that caught your attention was her arms, coming up to hug her knees.

And then, from the video feed, you see her commit the unthinkable. She reaches forward and places her hand on the subject's forearm. She has touched him, skin to skin. She has contaminated everything.

You reach down for the switch that opens communication with the chamber. Someone has moved it. Impossible. You search the desk and cannot find it. There it is, under a sheaf of papers, Gerber's clutter where there should be cleanliness and order.

You press the button marked
SPEAK
. “Dr. Philo.
Dr. Philo
.”

She does not turn or even blink. The chamber's audio must be turned off somehow. How could you have missed the project's weakening discipline? How has Thomas failed to keep you informed? Her hand remains foolishly on his arm.

You feel an impulse to rush in there and—what? shout? assault her?—but any further intrusion would increase the contamination. Does this imbecile not understand about bacteria, immune systems, germs?

Impulse suppressed. Options exhausted. You stand mute before her act of breathtaking ignorance. She has risked everything you have accomplished, your entire life, for some meaningless, sentimental gesture. How can she not see this? She sighs, you can tell even through her mask. You thought you had hired a genius; that's the word Tolliver from the academy had used:
genius
. Instead Dr. Philo proves herself no more than a schoolgirl, fretting away over this inanimate subject like some strange reversal of “Sleeping Beauty.” It occurs to you: if she kisses him, you might kill her.

But there is another motion, caught in the overhead video. Could it be? What? You grab the switch panel that controls the camera and zoom in on his face. Yes, there is no doubt of it: His expression is changing. His facial muscles work. They twitch, they frown. Praise the fates that you restarted the taping when you did. Here is history, witnessed by you and logged, in real time, on a tape that belongs to you alone. The images could be hawked online at prices that might subsidize months of hard-ice collection.

The subject still moves. His throat muscles clench and release, clench and release. His jaw lanterns side to side. You zoom the camera lens even closer, not wanting to miss the slightest detail. Nothing surpasses reason and the scientific method. And then he does the most astonishing thing: he coughs. It comes through the monitor—the audio must be working in that direction at least, and you stand amazed. More than one hundred years after his life appeared to have ended, Subject One has coughed. Never before has a simple human throat clearing had such profound implications.

He coughs again, harder, his face showing sharp displeasure. His wrists tug at the restraints. Then his mouth opens wide and takes a huge breath, a great gulp of air.
Yes,
you say to him in your mind.
Life. Breathe it in.

And then the miracle, if such things existed: His eyelids flutter. They pull. They strain. The subject opens his eyes. They are wide, hazel-colored, struggling to focus. Finally something clicks into working order. With rapidity those eyes take in the room, the lights, the machinery, and lastly Dr. Philo with her hand on his arm.

The expression on his face is utter terror.

“Are you—” he croaks, then swallows, then attempts again in a whisper: “Are you an angel?”

Dr. Philo hooks her surgical mask down with one finger and you can see that she is smiling. It is a grin for the ages.

“No.” Her voice chimes through the audio feed. “I'm Kate.”

PART II

Reanimation