The Curiosity (12 page)

Tucking the button in my pocket as I march up the walk, and lo—the little one is not inside readying for bed. She is outside, waiting for me in her red wool coat, and runs to greet me as though out of a dim corner of the mind. Her shoes slap on the stones. I remember my delight as if it were just this moment. I squat down to embrace her, she burrows against me like some wonderful animal. Her tiny hand digs in my pocket, and her chilly little nose pokes right in the middle of my cheek.

Agnes. Her name was Agnes. My daughter, Agnes.

The woman from now rushes into my chamber before I can hide my tears.

CHAPTER 12

The Smell of Memory

(Kate Philo)

O
n my walk to work that night, a bluster of unseasonably late snow caught me unprepared. All I'd worn was a light fleece jacket, not nearly enough for the wind and wet. I hunched into myself, hurrying to stay warm, thinking about the night of work ahead. Suddenly a protester stood in my path.

“You, woman, are going to burn in hell,” she snarled as I jumped in surprise. She pointed at our building. “Just like all the rest of them in there.”

I stepped back, taking in the full gang on the sidewalk. The group had definitely grown, up to maybe forty. Half stood under umbrellas, the rest clustered in raincoats or ponchos. There was no one else on the street, it being Friday night and the weather nasty. The front door guard was inside by the security desk. I was on my own. So I brought myself to a calm place.

“Every one of you,” the woman cried. “Life is sacred and you are demeaning it.”

“Life is sacred, I agree,” I said, using an intentionally quieter voice. “But what we are doing—”

“Stop.” She clapped her hands over her ears. “Don't you dare try persuading me, seducing me with false science. What you are doing is morally wrong, and you know it.”

“I know no such thing,” I replied. “I was simply trying to tell you—”

“Don't,” she said, backing away as if I held a gun. “Don't you dare.”

Another protester, an older man, guided the woman away by her elbow. She stared back at me with venom. I escorted my rattled self across the street.

Minutes later in the control room, I could think of plenty of snappy replies I might have made, but none was the equal of her passion and certainty. Where did it come from, this twisting of faith into judgments of others that bears no doubts?

Meanwhile the red digital clock reminded me that fourteen days had passed since the frozen man's reanimation, two weeks in which life was being redefined. Or, to be accurate, the old definition discarded but the new one not yet written. Carthage made regulations about the rare circumstances under which entering the observation chamber was permitted. Essentially, male technicians helped the frozen man into an upright position to go to the bathroom, or performed rudimentary physical therapy to restore his atrophied muscles. That was all. Watching them manipulate his legs like so many parts of machinery, I complained; Carthage ignored me. It felt like the rules were designed to prevent my efforts, or anyone's, to humanize the poor lab creature we'd awakened.

If not for the frozen man trusting only me, speaking clearly only to me, I probably would have been unemployed. Carthage had sat at his desk a few days earlier and made that clear with his usual pompous overstatement, Thomas nodding along like a baseball player's look-alike bobble-head. My ability to remain calm in dramatic circumstances served me well during that particular chewing-out.

So did the frozen man's behavior. When Carthage entered the chamber, the person in the hospital bed conspicuously looked the other way. Perhaps he'd heard himself referred to as Subject One a few times too many. How I longed to know his true name. But he was occupied with trying to understand what had happened to him, his reaction alternating between panic and lethargy. So I spent my nearly idle nights at his bedside, easing him into the now. He'd ask questions in a frightened voice. I would answer almost in a whisper. Around everyone else, the frozen man was silent. Without me, there was no link. It was not an ironclad job protection, but someone had to establish rapport across the centuries.

My father would have told me to resign. Dust off my résumé, renew contacts, maybe sublet the apartment. Tolliver would always take my call. In hindsight, that advice would have been sound. But at the time no one knew where we were headed. So I decided to indulge Carthage, for the privilege of witnessing history.

Moreover, this scientific marvel was not a special bacterium, or a cloned sheep. We were now responsible for a living human being, which carried ethical obligations whose depth we had not even begun to fathom.

My remaining tasks, however, barely reached the graduate assistant level. Ph.D. notwithstanding, I took every overnight shift without complaint. Arriving at work that snowy evening, I accepted that my job was to check monitors, reset recording devices, perform other administrivia. Billings was busy downstairs, experimenting on sardines. Gerber was MIA, but would likely surface before dawn. The last tech grunted “have a good shift” to me and escorted his backpack out into the weather.

I slipped off my coat, hanging it on a chair, and scanned the gauges. The frozen man's blood pressure had spiked steeply in the last fifteen seconds. Then I heard him through the audio monitor, snuffling.

Of course I dashed in. Respiratory stability had been an ongoing concern. I raised my hand to slap the red button on the wall, hesitated, then punched the password into the numeric keypad instead. No point calling the cavalry till I'd investigated.

It was not his breathing. It was his heart. The man was crying.

What I did—sure to bring a fresh round of recriminations the next day—is what I believe any human being ought to do for a fellow traveler on this planet who is overcome by sadness. I rushed over, I hugged him.

The frozen man curled into me, sobbing. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders. He tried to lift his arms but the straps prevented him. He fell back then, clenching his jaw to regain self-control, so I made my next mistake. Or no, others later called my actions mistakes. I call them caring. I undid his wrist straps. Covering his face, he spoke through his fingers. “I am ashamed.”

“Don't be,” I reassured him. “Please. There is no shame in sadness. Besides, being restrained like this would depress anyone.”

I knew Carthage would not hesitate to put the frozen man's weeping on the Web, if he thought it would generate donations. I felt the impending invasion of privacy with dread.
This was not science, it was voyeurism.
Here was a moment for me to retreat, cover my ass and stay out of trouble, yet my impulse was the opposite. Only a monster can see a person weep and not take action because of something as lowly as a boss. So I leaned down, opened the ankle straps, lifted his legs so he could know he had liberty.

From the hallway I fetched the wheelchair set aside for a moment that everyone thought was months away, but which had now arrived. By the time I rolled it to the bedside, the frozen man had composed himself. He was sitting up, stretching his ankles this way and that. “I need to tell you something.”

“And I need to show you something,” I replied. “You first.”

“My name.”

“Your name? Fantastic. I've been dying to know. Please.”

He put a fist on each thigh. He straightened his back. He looked me in the eye. I cannot express how riveting it was to make eye contact with a man from another time. Feeling the thrill, I went calm, folding my hands. Waiting.

“My name is Jeremiah Rice.”

“How do you do, Jeremiah Rice?” I laughed, clasping his hand, giving it a vigorous shake. “Kate Philo, at your service. It is a pleasure to meet you. When . . . how do I ask this? When are you from?”

“The last birthday I recall was my thirty-eighth. Today I deduced with fair certainty that my last clear memory comes from nineteen hundred aught six.”

“Wow. You died over a hundred years ago, Jeremiah Rice.”

“A paradox that warrants considerable explanation on your part.” He tugged on one whisker. “Is there anything from my time that remains in the here and now?”

“Good question.” I scanned the chamber, looking for something reminiscent of a world so far in the past. But it was all new, everything: fluorescent lights, digital clocks, the security keypad instead of an old-fashioned key. “I'll have to get back to you on that,” I said. “But Jeremiah: that's a biblical name.”

“I came from a mother of faith.”

“Were you a member of the clergy?”

He shook his head. “I was a judge.”

A judge. How lucky was the project, to have reanimated a public figure? I stifled an urge to run to the computer, ferret out the history of the man with that name and profession. There would be ample time for digging later. Instead I pointed at the main camera, his eyes following my finger. “World, this is His Honor Judge Jeremiah Rice.”

“Good evening.” He smiled wanly, not at the camera but at me.

“You are remembering things now?”

“All day.” His smile vanished. Then he turned his face sideways, as if listening to something in another room. “It has been a flood.”

“Do you think you could handle some new memories? Created right now?”

After a moment he returned from wherever he'd gone. “That would be welcome.”

“Excellent.” I knelt by the bed, drawing slippers onto Judge Rice's feet. “Remember I said I had something to show you? Well, here we go.”

One summer in college, when I was still debating whether to pursue medicine or bio research, I worked in a nursing home in Atlanta. One afternoon Nurse Emma pulled me aside. She was an enormous woman with a small head, an almost comical appearance, but she possessed the confidence that comes from rock-solid competence.

“I seen how you hoisted that big fella earlier on today, and you listen, honey. They's only one way to lift a fat old man without you hurting yourself,” she said. “You watch me now. Like this.” She squatted, bending her legs like a longshoreman, keeping her back as stiff as wood. “All the hoist is in the knees.”

Emma was right. Over that summer many workers injured their backs, but I used her lifting technique without coming to harm. I also fell in love with colorful, patient, frail old people, watching nine of them die before I went back to school. I cried openly over each one, Emma shaking her head. “I woulda took you for a weeper, sure, but criminy what a faucet you got.”

The grief from those nine put an end to my career indecision. Laboratory creatures were never going to break my heart. Or so I thought.

Remembering Emma's instructions now, I squatted beside the bed and extended my head. Judge Rice hesitated, so I lifted his arms and wrapped them around my neck. He pulled back. “Forgive me. I am not accustomed to being so familiar.”

I faced him. “Did you ever have to surrender some of your reserve to a physician, or give up your privacy?”

“Of course. Once on the voyage when I lacerated my thigh, the ship's physician cut away my trousers before the whole crew.”

“Well, I am a kind of doctor.”

“You are? What kind?”

“Cells, actually. Cell biology.”

“What are cells?”

“Ah. A long story. Let's just say they're a very tiny part of the body, of which I am a doctor.”

“I surmised that you were a student. From observing the way they treat you.”

“That's a long story, too. For now I just want you to think of me in a medical way, all right? My supporting you when you stand, that's therapeutic.”

“Therapeutic.” He raised his arms again, lamely, but I ducked under them and locked his hands behind my neck. Next I straightened, lifting him from the bed. Judge Rice's legs touched my legs, his torso draped against me like in some high school slow dance, we stood in an almost embrace. I felt myself flush. So much time had passed since I'd last been that close to a man, experiencing the solidness, the weight of him. So I went to my usual place when flustered, my inner island of calm. I looked past Judge Rice's shoulder to see the time on the control room clock—8:52—fixing it in memory to put in my notes later as the moment he first stood.

“You smell good,” Judge Rice said.

“Thank you,” I said, stepping sideways like in a half waltz, bending my knees, depositing him gently in the chair. I hurried around behind so he would not see me blush. “It's lavender.”

“Where are we going now?” His voice sounded small, almost young, vulnerable.

“That is my question precisely.” Billings stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. “Lovely, may I ask what you think you are doing?”

“Freeing the prisoner.”

“As your friend, I urge you to reconsider. Merely entering the chamber could be grounds for dismissal.”

“Pardon my manners,” I said, easing the chair forward. “Dr. Graham Billings, allow me to introduce Judge Jeremiah Rice.”

“How do you do?” The judge held out his hand.

“A judge? It is an honor, sir.” Billings shook hands, recrossed his arms, glared at me. “You will do this man no good if you are terminated.”

“He has been awake and strapped down for fourteen days. How long do you think is acceptable?”

“Kate, lovely, you have to maintain a long view of these things. Patience now makes possible all sorts of actions later.”

“Is fifteen days, okay? Sixteen?”

“You know the politics here. Give an inch to gain a mile.”