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dude," and try to give the paper back. . .
When I do that, Denny says, "Sorry, I didn't mean to, you know, incriminate you. If
you want, I can just read it for you."
The grade-schoolers who come here, it's a big deal for them to visit the henhouse and
watch the eggs hatch. Still, a regular chick isn't as interesting as, say, a chicken with only
one eye or a chicken with no neck or with a stunted paralyzed leg, so the kids shake the
eggs. Shake them hard and put them back to hatch.
So if what's born is deformed or insane? It's all for the sake of education.
The lucky ones are just born dead.
Curiosity or cruelty, for sure, me and Dr. Marshall would go around and around on
this point.
I shovel up some cow piles, careful so they don't break in half. So the wet insides
don't stink. With all the cow crap on my hands, I have to not bite my nails.
Next to me, Denny reads:
"Free to good home, twenty-three-year-old male, recovering self-abuser, limited
income and social skills, house-trained." Then he reads a phone number. It's his phone
number.
"It's my folks, dude, that's their phone number," Denny says. "It's like they're
hinting."
He found this left on his bed last night.
Denny says, "They mean me."
I say I understand that part. With a wood shovel, I'm still getting the poops, piling
them in a big woven thing. You know. A basket thing.
Denny says, can he come live with me?
"We're talking plan Z here," Denny says. "I'm only asking you as a last resort."
Because he doesn't want to bug me or because he's not nuts about living with me, I
don't ask.
You can smell corn chips on Denny's breath. Another violation of historic character.
He's such a shit magnet. The milkmaid, Ursula, comes out of the cow shed and looks at
us with her stoner eyes just about filled with blood.
"If there was a girl you liked," I say to him, "if she wanted to have sex just so she
could get pregnant, would you?"
Ursula grabs her skirts up and comes stomping through the cow poop in her wooden
clogs. She kicks a blind chicken that's in her way. Somebody snaps her picture, kicking.
A married couple start to ask Ursula to hold their baby for a picture, but then maybe they
see her eyes.
"I don't know," Denny says. "A baby's not like having a dog. I mean, a baby lives a
long time, dude."
"But what if she wasn't planning to have the baby?" I say.
Denny's eyes go up and then down, looking at nothing, then he looks at me. "I don't
understand," he says. "You mean like sell it?"
"I mean like sacrifice it," I say.
And Denny says, "Dude."
"Just supposing," I say, "she's going to scramble its little unborn fetus brain and suck
the mess out with a big needle and then inject that stuff into the head of somebody you
know who has brain damage, to cure them," I say.
Denny's lips hang open a crack. "Dude, you don't mean me, do you?
I mean my mom.
It's called a neural transplant. Some people call it a neural graft, and it's the only
effective way to rebuild my mom's brain at this late stage. It would be better known
except for problems getting, you know, the key ingredient.
"A ground-up baby," Denny says.
I say, "A fetus."
Fetal tissue, Paige Marshall said. Dr. Marshall with her skin and her mouth.
Ursula stops next to us, and she points at the newspaper in Denny's hand. She says,
"Unless the date on that's 1734, you're fucked. That's a violation of character."
The hair on Denny's head is trying to grow back, except some is ingrown and trapped
under red or white pimples.
Ursula steps away, then turns back. "Victor," she says, "if you need me, I'll be
churning."
I say, later. And she slogs off.
Denny says, "Dude, so it's like a choice between your mom and your firstborn?"
It's not a big deal, the way Dr. Marshall sees it. We do it every day. Kill the unborn
to save the elderly. In the gold wash of the chapel, breathing her reasons into my ear, she
asked, every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the
future to preserve the present?
The whole pyramid scheme of Social Security.
She said, with her breasts wedged between us, she said, I'm doing this because I care
about your mother. The least you could do is your small part.
I didn't ask what she meant by small part.
And Denny says, "So tell me the truth about yourself."
I don't know. I couldn't go through with it. With the fucking part.
"No," Denny says. "I mean, did you read your mom's diary yet?"
No, I can't. I'm a little stuck around this dicey baby-killing issue.
Denny looks me hard in the eye and says, "Are you really, like, a cyborg? Is that
your mom's big secret?"
"A what?" I say.
"You know," he says, "an artificial humanoid created with a limited life span, but
implanted with false childhood memories so you think you're really a real person, except
you're really going to die soon?"
And I look at Denny hard and say, "So, dude, my mom told you I'm some kind of a
robot?'
"Is that what her diary says?" Denny says.
Two women come up, holding out a camera, and one says, "Do you mind?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]