T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

In that moment — the moment of Howie’s disfigurement — Beatrice’s own heart turned over in her chest. She looked at Konrad, perched atop poor Howie, and at Howie, who even in repose managed to favor Agassiz. They were beyond Long Island now, headed out to sea, high over the Atlantic. Champ had tried to teach her to fly, but she’d had no interest in it. She looked at the instrument panel and saw nothing. For a moment the idea of switching on the radio came into her head, but then she glanced at Konrad and thought better of it.

Konrad was looking into her eyes. The engine hummed, Howie’s head fell against the door, the smell of Konrad — his body, his shit — filled her nostrils. They had five hours’ flying time, give or take a few minutes, that much she knew. She looked out over the nose of the plane to where the sea swallowed up the rim of the world. Africa was out there, distant and serene, somewhere beyond the night that fell like an ax across the horizon. She could almost taste it.

“Urk,” Konrad said, and he was still looking at her. His eyes were soft now, his breathing regular. He sat atop Howie in a forlorn slouch, the cigarette forgotten, the controls irrelevant, nothing at all. “Urk ,” he repeated, and she knew what he wanted, knew in a rush of comprehension that took her all the way back to Makoua and that first, long-ago touch of Agassiz’s strange spidery fingers.

She held his eyes. The engine droned. The sea beneath them seemed so still you could walk on it, so soft you could wrap yourself up in it. She reached out and touched his hand. “Urk,” she said.

(1988)

The inventor is in his laboratory, white smock, surgical mask, running afoul of the laws of nature. Schlaver and Una Moss are with him, bent over the Petri dishes and dissecting pans like conspirators. Overhead, the hum of the fluorescent lights.

He snaps his hands into the rubber gloves, flashes the scalpel. His touch is quick, sure, steady as a laser. The blade eases through the shaved skin of the abdomen, his fingers flutter, vessels are clamped, ligatures tied. Una is there, assisting with sponges and retractors. The Inventor’s eyes burn over the mask like the eyes of an Arab terrorist. A single sweatpearl stands on his forehead. Strapped to the table before him, teats sleepy with milk, irises sinking, the sedated sow gargles through her crusted nostrils, stirs a bristling hock. Una pats the pink hoof.

Then he is speaking, the tones measured, smooth, the phrases clipped. Schlaver moves in, draws off the amniotic fluid. Una takes the forceps, offers the scalpel. The Inventor slits the sack, reaches in, pulls his prize from the steaming organs. He slaps the wet nates: the wrinkled little creature shrieks, and then again, its electric wail poking into mason jars, behind filing cabinets, rattling the loose screws in the overhead lights. Una and Schlaver tear off their masks and cheer. The Inventor hefts his latest coup, a nine-pound-three-ounce boy, red as a ham and perfect in every detail: his firstborn son and heir. The black eyes grin above the mask.

From The Life:

To say merely that he was a prodigy would mock the insufficiency of language. At five he was teaching in the temple. By age seven he had built his first neutron smasher, developed a gnat-sized bugging device that could pick up a whispered conversation at two miles and simultaneously translate it into any one of thirteen languages, and devised a sap-charging system which fomented rapid growth in deciduous trees of the temperate zone.* At nine he was admitted to MIT, where he completed advanced degrees in physics and mathematics prior to his thirteenth year. During the course of the next eleven months he studied surgical medicine at Johns Hopkins.

At fifteen he stunned the world with his first great advance, the stoolless cat, which brought him the financial independence to sustain his subtler and more meaningful future work. Through an accelerated but painstaking process of selective breeding he had overseen the evolution of a strain of common housecat — the usual attributes intact — which never in the course of its normal lifespan was actuated by the physiological demands of micturition or defecation. Within six months after its introduction the major producers of cat litter had thrown in the towel and pet shops were opening next to every liquor store in the country. His photograph (contemplative, the horn-rims) appeared on the covers of Newsweek and Time during the same week. He was hailed. “An Edison for the Seventies,” “The Pragmatist’s Einstein,” they said. Housewives clamored. The Russians awarded him the Star of Novgorod. Encouraged, he went on to develop the limbless, headless, tailless strain that has since become an international institution. A tribute to his disinterestedness: “Under no circumstance, no matter how attractive the inducement,” he said, “will I be persuaded to breed out the very minimal essence of the feline — I refer to its purr.”†

He is in his study, musing over the morning’s mail. The mail, corners, edges, inks and stamps like the tails of tropical birds, lies across his desk in a welter. In his hand, the paper knife. He selects an envelope printed in a blue and yellow daisy pattern.

It is a threat.

Next he picks up a business envelope, imprinted with the name and logo (an ascending rocket) of his son’s school: WERNHER VON BRAUN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. It is a letter from his son’s teacher. She is alarmed at what appears to be a worsening deformity of the boy’s feet (so misshapen as almost to resemble hoofs, she says) and hopes that his father will have the matter looked into. She is also concerned with his behavior. The boy has, it seems, been making disruptive noises in the classroom. A sort of whinnying or chuffing. The Inventor carefully folds the letter, tucks it into the pocket of his shirt. At that moment the double doors yawn and Una Moss, in deshabille, ambles in behind the tea cart. Her pet python, weaving a turgid S in the rug behind her, stops at the door.

She pours the Inventor’s tea (two lumps) while he frowns at the mail. As she turns to leave, he speaks. “Una?” She looks, puckers a moue. “What is this business with the boy? It seems he’s been emitting those noises in the schoolroom.” Una’s expression irons to the serious. “We can’t have that,” he says. “Will you speak with him?”

“Of course, pumpkin.”

He looks down again. The door closes behind Una, a gentle click, and he turns back to the mail. A brown-paper parcel catches his eyes. The paper knife makes a neat incision and he extracts the contents: a hardcover book. No letter, no inscription. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells. He folds back the page, begins to read.

From The Life:

His second major breakthrough was also a humanitarian effort. A committee from the Gandhi Foundation had come to him asking for a solution to the problem of world hunger. He told them he would consider their petition, though engaged in other projects at the time. That afternoon, while he was rooting through a local wrecking yard in search of a tailpipe replacement for his automobile, the solution rushed on him like a firestorm. “Of course,” he was heard to mutter. He retraced his steps to the proprietor’s blistered shed. There he borrowed a #2 faucet wrench, ball peen hammer and screwdriver. He then removed the tailpipe from a sandwiched auto of identical make and model to his own. This involved twelve minutes, thirty-seven seconds, as near as investigators have been able to determine. In the short space of this time he had worked out the complicated structural formulae which resulted in one of mankind’s biggest boons — that is to say, he discovered the method by which a given tonnage of spotted chrome and rusted steel could be converted to an equivalent weight of porterhouse steak.