Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

These developments on the domestic front left me feeling so refreshed and renewed that when I next sent Louie through the maze and saw him give up after only a few steps, I dropped my face down over him like some benevolent god descending from the clouds and offered him a few encouraging words: “C’mon, Louie, you know how it’s done! Left, right, left, c’mon, now!”

Moments later, Hickey emerged from the primate room, scribbling onto his clipboard.

“He won’t run the maze,” I said.

My lab-mate looked up from his work, distracted.

“It’s taken him longer and longer each week,” I said, “and now he won’t even give it a go.”

Hickey glanced back into the primate room, and only then did I realize it myself: they weren’t making any noise. Hadn’t made any all day, in fact, perhaps all week.

Hickey walked to his desk shaking his head. “They just sit there and stare right through me.”

“The monkeys?” I followed him over, so glad to hear the strain in his voice — it wasn’t just in my head, then! I thought this might be our breakthrough. Silent monkeys and apathetic rats! We’d be like Crick and Watson, volleying wild conjectures back and forth over pints of warm bitter. But then Hickey draped his lab coat over the back of his chair and continued around me to the door.

“Calling it a day,” he said.

Nothing more. Not even an encouraging word about the weekend.

* In this regard I am not quite a fundamentalist. Life, I say, at least any sense of life that rises above the mere biological, begins after conception, most likely during the seventh week of pregnancy, when a fetus develops taste buds and first senses the sweetness of the amniotic fluid, thereby establishing a flavor preference that will later be reinforced by the equally sweet taste of mother's milk. What is flavor perception if not the first hint of a soul?

* Louie is a strange name for a female rat, I confess, and one that no doubt could cause certain members of our nation’s professoriate to parse out the differences between the homosocial and the homosexual. But if I am to make this my first attempt at full disclosure, I suppose I had better not allow myself to edit even those details that I believe are inconsequential or not connected to the story of The Nine.

* The increased blood flow of pregnancy dilutes a woman’s normal level of sodium, triggering the craving for salty foods.

IN MY YOUNGER AND MORE impressionable years, a classmate of mine felt something turning over in his stomach before at last he leaned forward and vomited. This was at an assembly, when I was still just a lad in short pants at infant school. I don’t remember exactly where I was sitting in relation to the sick child, but I know it was close enough that I could smell the bitter odor of the slick of vomitus on the hardwood floor. In America, this would have been cause for a riot. But in England, after my fellow students and I had allowed ourselves a quiet collective gasp, the headmaster clapped his hands and called us to attention, saying there was nothing to be alarmed about. Just as quickly, sawdust, kept nearby for just such an occasion, I suppose, was poured over the offending item, and I was pulling the end of my striped tie away from my mouth and nose, the assembly continuing as if nothing had happened.

When I tell people I consider myself more British than American, if only because my most formative years were spent in England, I often think of this scene. It happened long before Lady Di’s untimely death sent the country wailing out into the streets, back in that era when memoirs were still written only by explorers and great men of state. All of which is to say that while I may have been developing suspicions in Animal Testing, I felt no need to share them with my wife. A good man didn’t bring his work home with him, least of all if it was troubling. He deposited the money in the bank and provided for his family as best he could. We were going to have a baby, remember. So what Betty needed was comfort and shelter, not a steady diet of darkness and doubt.

But, of course, if there is one thing I’ve learned after all these years, it’s that darkness and doubts will visit you no matter what, and that’s exactly what happened to us.

The Sunday after we visited Le Petit Cochon, I stood at the stove cooking bacon and eggs for breakfast when I heard a sudden half-muffled yelp over the sound of the popping grease. I shut off the fan, then turned round holding the spatula up in one hand as if it were a torch. There it was again, a little louder this time. I turned the stovetop to low and followed the sound to the door of the bathroom, from behind which running water could be heard.

I knocked with the knuckle of my index finger. “Betty?”

Like a gymnast thrown higher by a trampoline, her yelping soared. I pushed inside and found her crying at the sink, wearing only one of my undershirts. She’d gotten out of bed a minute or two earlier and was standing there with her panties in her hands, washing them beneath the faucet. I didn’t have to ask. I could see it well enough myself: a spot of blood.

Foolishly, I thought we should rush to the hospital, but what could they do? Deliver a fetus at six weeks, before it could tell the difference between bitter and sweet?

“Maybe it’s just spotting,” Betty said. She threw her panties down into the bowl of the sink — a loud, wet smacking sound that told me how little she believed her own words. “You hear about women who accidentally get pregnant,” she sobbed, “or teenage girls who…” The thought trailed off; she shook her head and looked at me with her washed-out eyes. “Why is it so hard for us? Why?”

I still had the spatula in one hand, the eggs and bacon crackling in hot grease behind me. I stepped toward her and wrapped her up in one arm, my body there beside her but my mind thrown back to the summer before my senior year of high school, when I’d last felt such grief. “There, there,” I said. “There, there.”

As a Fighting Quartermaster assigned to the 3032nd Mobile Baking Division, my father led a trailer-mounted dough mixer, divider, and rounder into the horrors of Buchenwald. A nominal Catholic at the time of his enlistment, he turned his back on organized religion after walking away from the spent loaves of the battlefield, and began to retreat, in either mind or body, to the cathedral that was Yankee Stadium, a place where he would rise at one with the crowd and feel the thrill of hope each time a foul ball came arcing up through the air toward him.

I was not very different. Though I had been raised singing alongside my mother in the Church of England, I too preferred a religion of my own creation, one that came to me with the same power of revelation that I suspect Joseph Smith and William Miller must have felt. It happened in a Waffle House on Guadalupe Street, the morning after my parents had been shot at the University of Texas.

Pimply and seventeen, I sat in a booth by the window, facing an old army buddy of my father’s who had come up from San Antonio to comfort me until my grandfather could fly in from the coast.

From my seat I could see a newspaper vending machine on the sidewalk outside, complete with the day’s most obscene headline framed in its window: SNIPER IN U.T. TOWER ‘FORTRESS’ SHOT AFTER 90 MINUTES OF TERROR. STUDENT SLAYS WIFE AND MOTHER, KILLS 13, WOUNDS 31 ON CAMPUS. I had found myself standing before it while my father’s old friend circled round from the driver’s seat of his Cadillac, and though I should’ve known better, I hadn’t been able to look away. THE DAY OF DEATH: SEE PAGES 17, 18, 19. I could resist the pull of these words no more than I’d been able to resist watching Chet Huntley the night before, the opening remarks of his newscast still looping round in my mind all these hours later: For an hour and a half today, the normally placid university and capital city of Austin, Texas, was held in the grip of a terror that began in killing and ended in killing. A maddened former marine, a twenty-four-year-old student in the architectural school…