The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (28 page)

So you have a daughter now who’s not a daughter, or she’s both, boy and girl. The operation cost four grand, and you don’t want to think how she got the money. Everyone’s doing it, you tell yourself. But the operation doesn’t take. She gets an infection, and the thing stops being fun, and six months later she’s got no neurological response to some of the tissues the doctors have slapped on her, and pain in the others. It costs money to reverse. She doesn’t have it. She spends it on other things, she says. 

She wants money for the operation, she says, standing in front of you. You owe it to her, she says. 

You try to find the ten-year-old in those eyes, and you can’t. 

Did you ever? 

The call came through at six, and I knew it was County. 

A full jacket—ward status, medical action, all of it—had been put through. The fetus would be aborted—“for the mother’s safety . . . to prevent further exploitation by private interests . . . and physical endangerment by the spouse.” 

Had Timosa been there, she’d have told me how County had already gotten flack from the board of supervisors, state W&I, and the attorney general’s office over a V.R. like this slipping through and getting this much press. They wanted it over, done with. If the fetus were aborted, County’s position would be clear—to state, the feds, and the religious groups that were starting to scream bloody murder. 

It would be an abortion no one would ever complain about. 

The husband was down at County holding with a pretty fibercast on his left tibia, but they weren’t taking any chances. Word on two interstate conspiracies to kill the ten women had reached the D.A., and they were, they said, taking it seriously. I was, I said, glad to hear it. 

Mendoza said he liked sassy women as much as the next guy, but he wanted her back in custody, and the new D.A. was screaming jurisdiction, too. Everyone wanted a piece of the ten o’clock news before the cameras lost interest and rolled on. 

Society wasn’t ready for it. The atavistic fears were there. You could be on trillazines, you could have an operation to be both a boy and a girl for the thrill of it, you could be a walljacker, but a mother like this, no, not yet. 

I should have told someone but didn’t. I took her to the zoo instead. We stood in front of the cages watching the holograms of the big cats, the tropical birds, the grass eaters of Africa—the ones that are gone. She wasn’t interested in the real ones, she said—the pigeons, sparrows, coyotes, the dull, hardy ones that will outlast us all. She never came here as a child, she said, and I believe it. A boyfriend at her one and only job took her once, and later, because she asked her to, so did a woman who wanted the same thing from her. 

We watched the lions, the ibex, the white bears. We watched the long-legged wolf, the harp seals, the rheas. We watched the tapes stop and repeat, stop and repeat; and then she said, “Let’s go,” pulled at my hand, and we moved on to the most important cage of all. 

There, the hologram walked back and forth looking out at us, looking through us, its red sagittal crest and furrowed brow so convincing. Alive, its name had been Mark Anthony, the plaque said. It had weighed two hundred kilos. It had lived to be ten. It wasn’t one of the two whose child was growing inside her, but she seemed to know this, and it didn’t matter. 

“They all died the same way,” she said to me. “That’s what counts, Jo.”
Inbred depression,
I remembered reading.
Petechial hemorrhages, cirrhosis, renal failure.
 

Somewhere in the nation the remaining fertilized ova were sitting frozen in a lab, as they had for thirty years. A few dozen had been removed, thawed, encouraged to divide to sixteen cells, and finally implanted that day seven months ago. Ten had taken. As they should have, naturally, apes that we are. “Sure, it could’ve been done back then,” the cocky young resident with insubordination written all over him had said. “All you’d have needed was an egg and a little plastic tube. And, of course,”—I didn’t like the way he smiled—“a woman who was willing. . . .” 

I stopped her. I asked her if she knew what The Arks were, and she said no. I started to tell her about the intensive-care zoos where for twenty years the best and brightest of them, ten thousand species in all, had been kept while two hundred thousand others disappeared—the toxics, the new diseases, the land-use policies of a new world taking them one by one—how The Arks hadn’t worked, how two-thirds of the macro kingdom were gone now, and how the thing she carried inside her was one of them and one of the best. 

She wasn’t listening. She didn’t need to hear it, and I knew the man in the suit had gotten his yes without having to say these things. The idea of having it inside her, hers for a little while, had been enough. 

She told me what she was going to buy with the money. She asked me whether I thought the baby would end up at this zoo. I told her I didn’t know but could check, and hated the lie. She said she might have to move to another city to be near it. I nodded and didn’t say a thing. 

I couldn’t stand it. I sat her down on a bench and told her what the County was going to do to her. 

When I was through she looked at me and said she’d known it would happen, it always happened. She didn’t cry. I thought maybe she wanted to leave, but she shook her head. 

We went through the zoo one more time. We didn’t leave until dark. 

“Are you out of your mind, Jo?” Timosa said. 

“It’s not permanent,” I said. 

“Of course
it’s not permanent. Everyone’s been looking everywhere for her. What the hell do you think you’re doing?” 

I said it didn’t matter, did it? The County homes and units weren’t safe, and we didn’t want her with Mendoza, and who’d think of a soc worker’s house—a P.D. safe house maybe, but not a soc worker’s because that’s against policy, and everyone knows that soc workers are spineless, right? 

“Sure,” Timosa said. “But you didn’t
tell
anybody, Jo.” 

“I’ve had some thinking to do.” 

Suddenly Timosa got gentle, and I knew what she was thinking. I needed downtime, maybe some psychiatric profiling done. She’s a friend of mine, but she’s a professional, too. The two of us go back all the way to corrections, Timosa and I, and lying isn’t easy. 

“Get her over to County holding immediately—that’s the best we can do for her,” she said finally. “And let’s have lunch soon, Jo. I want to know what’s going on in that head of yours.” 

It took me the night and the morning. They put her in the nicest hole they had and doubled the security, and when I left she cried for a long time, they told me. I didn’t want to leave, but I had to get some thinking done. 

When it was done, I called Timosa. 

She swore at me when I was through but said she’d give it a try. It was crazy, but what isn’t these days? 

The County bit, but with stipulations. Postpartum wipe. New I.D. Fine, but also a fund set up out of
our
money. Timosa groaned. I said, Why not. 

Someone at County had a heart, but it was our mention of Statute Forty-A, I found out later, that clinched it. They saw the thing dragging on through the courts, cameras rolling forever, and that was worse than any temporary heat from state or the feds. 

So they let her have the baby. I slept in the waiting room of the maternity unit, and it took local troops as well as hospital security to keep the press away. We used a teaching hospital down south—approved by the group that was funding her—but even then the media found out and came by the droves. 

We promised full access at a medically approved moment if they cooled it, which they did. The four that didn’t were taken bodily from the building under one penal code section or another. 

At the beginning of the second stage of labor, the infant abruptly rotates from occiput-posterior to right occiput-anterior position; descent is rapid, and a viable two-thousand-gram female is delivered without episiotomy. Interspecific Apgar scores are nine and ten at one and five minutes, respectively. 

The report would sound like all the others I’d read. The only difference would be how the thing looked, and even that wasn’t much. 

The little head, hairless face, broad nose, black hair sticking up like some old movie comic’s. Human eyes, hairless chest, skinny arms. The feet would look like hands, sure, and the skin would be a little gray, but how much was that? To the girl in the bed it wasn’t anything at all. 

She said she wanted me to be there, and I said sure but didn’t know the real reason. 

When her water broke, they told me, and I got scrubbed up, put on the green throwaways like they said, and got back to her room quickly. The contractions had started up like a hammer. 

It didn’t go smoothly. The cord got hung up on the baby’s neck inside, and the fetal monitor started screaming. She got scared; I got scared. They put her up on all fours to shift the baby, but it didn’t work. They wheeled her to the O.R. for a C-section, which they really didn’t want to do; and for two hours it was fetal signs getting better, then worse, doctors preparing for a section, then the signs somehow getting better again. Epidural block, episiotomy, some concerted forceps work, and the little head finally starts to show. 

Lissy was exhausted, making little sounds. More deep breaths, a few encouraging shouts from the doctors, more pushing from Lissy, and the head was through, then the body, white as a ghost from the vernix, and someone was saying something to me in a weak voice. 

“Will you cut the cord, please?” 

It was Lissy. 

I couldn’t move. She said it again. 

The doctor was waiting, the baby slick in his hands. Lissy was white as a sheet, her forehead shiny with the sweat, and she couldn’t see it from where she was. “It would be special to me, Jo,” she said. 

One of the nurses was beside me saying how it’s done all the time—by husbands and lovers, sisters and mothers and friends—but that if I was going to do it I needed to do it now, please. 

I tried to remember who had cut the cord when Meg was born, and I couldn’t. I could remember a doctor, that was all. 

I don’t remember taking the surgical steel snips, but I did. I remember not wanting to cut it—flesh and blood, the first of its kind in a long, long time—and when I finally did, it was tough, the cutting made a noise, and then it was over, the mother had the baby in her arms, and everyone was smiling. 

A woman could have carried a
Gorilla gorilla beringei
to term without a care in the world a hundred, a thousand, a million years ago. The placenta would have known what to do; the blood would never have mixed. The gestation was the same nine months. The only thing stopping anyone that winter day in ’97 when Cleo, the last of her kind on the face of this earth, died of renal failure in the National Zoo in DC, was the thought of carrying it. 

It had taken three decades, a well-endowed resurrection group, a slick body broker, and a skinny twenty-one-year-old girl who didn’t mind the thought of it. 

She wants money for the operation, my daughter says to me that day in the doorway, shoulders heavy, face puffy, slurring it, the throat a throat I don’t know, the voice deeper. I tell her again I don’t have it, that perhaps her friends—the ones she’s helped out so often when she had the money and they didn’t—could help her. I say it nicely, with no sarcasm, trying not to look at where she hurts, but she knows exactly what I’m saying. 

She goes for my eyes, as if she’s had practice, and I don’t fight back. She gets my cheek and the corner of my eye, screams something about never loving me and me never loving her—which isn’t true. 

She knows I know how she’ll spend the money, and it makes her mad. 

I don’t remember the ten-year-old ever wanting to get even with anyone, but this one always does. She hurts. She wants to hurt back. If she knew, if she only knew what I’d carry for her. 

I’ll find her, I know—tonight, tomorrow morning, the next day or two—sitting at a walljack somewhere in the apartment, her body plugged in, the little unit with its Medusa wires sitting in her lap, her heavy shoulders hunched as if she were praying, and I’ll unplug her—to show I care. 

But she’ll have gotten even with me, and that’s what counts, and no matter how much I plead with her, promise her anything she wants, she won’t try a program, she won’t go with me to County—both of us, together—for help. 

Her body doesn’t hurt at all when she’s on the wall. When you’re a walljacker you don’t care what kind of tissue’s hanging off you, you don’t care what you look like—what anyone looks like. The universe is inside. The juice is from the wall, the little unit translates, and the right places in your skull—the medulla all the way to the cerebellum, all the right centers—get played like the keys of the most beautiful synthesizer in the world. You see blue skies that make you cry. You see young men and women who make you come in your pants without your even needing to touch them. You see loving mothers. You see fathers that never leave you. 

I’ll know what to do. I’ll flip the circuit breakers and sit in the darkness with a hand light until she comes out of it, cold-turkeying, screaming mad, and I’ll say nothing. I’ll tell myself once again that it’s the drugs, it’s the jacking, it’s not her. She’s dead and gone and hasn’t been the little girl on that train with her hair tucked behind her ears for a long time, that this one’s a lie but one I’ve got to keep playing.