The Stud Book (36 page)

He said, “This is not good.”

She felt accused. “What?”

“Spotting. Blood, discharge on her hindquarters.” He nodded toward the mandrills.

Sarah felt it in her body like it was her own. She’d been jealous of that monkey, she really had. Now she merged with her, was there alongside her in the pregnancy. Her job was so removed from the bodies of animals—she wasn’t allowed to enter the cages. There was a constant and reasonable fear of anthroponosis, reverse zoonosis, human-to-animal disease, like she—and anyone else not trained in handling animals—carried the plague.

But Dale handled their genitals, palpated their stomachs, and studied their gums. The mandrill was spotting?

He shook his head. “We’re taking her off exhibit.”

Already a handler had opened a door to the enclosure and was luring the mandrill in question out with food. The crowd was a swarm, with their face paint and slabs of sheet cake.

“How will they guess the mother’s girth?”

“Nobody here can tell which one is pregnant. We’ll point to another one.” His voice was nearly a whisper.

The city was compiling baby names on a computerized screen, right then, even as she and Dale spoke. Each child had a celebratory paper mandrill mask. Some put them on right over the face paint. Two mandrills in one, two man-apes over a human face.

He said, “Could be placenta previa. That worries me. Or an infection, or early labor. We’ll try to get an ultrasound. We’ll definitely be able to save the mother. I mean, we’ll try to save them both.” He was sweaty and distracted. “They should get these people out of here. It’s too much.”

Sarah’s heart melted. They were in complete agreement: too many humans. “Is she in pain?”

“She’s showing anxiety signs.” He folded his arms. The cold, damp air made Dale’s skin blotch in a way that only made him more
clearly alive. He turned to Sarah, as though to see if she, too, were showing anxiety signs. “I’ll do what I can.”

He was there to help.

Then he changed the subject. He said, “Listen, you still want to catch the show today?”

This was the day they’d planned to go to OMSI, that other sea of children across town, to see his ex’s work.

It seemed completely wrong to leave the mother mandrill now. “Don’t you need to be here? We can cancel.”

“I’ll stick around for the next hour or so, monitor things, see if we can get the ultrasound set up. I hate to anesthetize her if it’s not necessary. Mostly, chances are, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.”

Behind him a woman with a troop of kids picked out crayons, while they all kept one hand on a rope to stay together, a chain gang family.

That’s how many of them there were! They were slaves to one another.

Sarah wiped her nose on the back of her coat collar. How could Dale not notice she’d been tearing up? She wasn’t crying over the mandrill. She was crying over her own dead babies. A volunteer passed by with her hands in plastic gloves held up like a surgeon going in for surgery. She said, “Can I score you a slice of cake?” and gave a wink.

That cake screamed a baby is coming! in giant cursive on the top, and was laden with plastic storks and monkeys in a scientifically confusing array.

Dale said, “Let’s take a break from this place.”

Sarah’s timer went off. She checked “Motoring” for Lucy.

“We’ll take my car,” Dale said. “Meet you in an hour.”

It was a date.

After her shift she practically ran away from the pink and blue baby balloons to join the relatively sparse crowd of winter visitors on the zoo’s twisting back walks.

Dale was at the gate. He said, “Two hours till they close.”

Sarah was taller than Dale. She swung her legs as they walked to his car, and thought,
Motoring
, one in a pair of awkward animals.

Dale opened the passenger-side door of his car and held it. She folded herself in fast, afraid he’d shut it too soon and accidentally catch a foot or ankle. She said, “I don’t want to see OMSI’s baby exhibit, though.”

“We won’t, then.” He closed the door gently.

At the museum, Dale paid for them both. They sunk into a mass of couples, in the maze of halls. The crowd was full of acne-faced teenagers, families shuffling in packs, and overweight and underweight men and women holding hands. Everyone looked uniformly unhealthy under the green of fluorescent lights.

A lek is the place where male animals gather to fight and preen, to establish a hierarchy and attract mates. It’s a team sport, all competition and cooperation: The alpha male might score the best breeding rights, but the group brought females around, increasing the reproductive odds for the species as a whole.

In a species on its way to extinction, without enough males to form a lek, females don’t even know where to look.

It’s like a town without a good bar.

If OMSI were a lek, Sarah wouldn’t know who to root for. A prairie chicken would look for a male with bright air sacs and a loud cry. An elephant cow would seek out the bull with the largest proboscis. A certain fish would amass sand, building what researchers called a sand castle contest, no joke.

They passed the doorway to the babies exhibit. Those dreaded, haunting little babies. A red and white sign on the wall said attention! viewer discretion advised!

The sign was like something you’d see on a biohazard bin or a nuclear waste site. In smaller letters it read
THE HUMAN EMBRYOS AND FETUSES IN THIS EXHIBIT ARE REAL
.

Real human babies.

And some of those babies? They were older than Sarah.

It was a permanent exhibit of dead babies through all stages of development, preserved and on display. She’d seen it as a kid, then later as an adult, waxy little babies with knobby backbones and wrinkled skin. More than one sucked its miniature thumb in the clear glass display case of its cold womb. The babies who had
lived past the first four months of gestation were coated in fine hair, lanugo, their little woolly down. Sarah wanted to pet them.

Dale said, “I thought we agreed to skip the babies?”

“We will,” she said.

It was a lie. She couldn’t walk past. She was drawn into their rotunda, a round, dark room where the babies lined the walls, each one mounted against black velvet and glowing with a hidden light. The first were weekly embryos. Sarah found the tiny curl of a child at week eight, smaller than a bay shrimp, with its big head and tadpole body.

She leaned her forehead against the glass. It was already marked with the handprints of children.

Mine
, she thought. That was her baby: eight weeks.

There was a woman on her knees changing a baby’s diaper. Really. In the back of the dimly lit display room. OMSI had bathrooms and changing tables. What was that woman thinking? Sarah saw the live baby’s fat, healthy thighs.

“I hate babies,” she said. Another lie.

“Babies are assholes.” Dale’s voice was gentle. He’d make a good father. His hand wrapped around her arm. His body heat quieted her skin. She let him lead her out.

The first part of the reconstructive surgery exhibit was cosmetic—rhinoplasty, dental work, and tattoo removal. Then it moved from elective surgeries to the more serious—tragedy and recovery. Sarah and Dale stood in front of a series of light boards, like giant slides lit from behind, documenting the trauma of a woman who’d been in a car wreck at seventeen. According to a sign on the wall, the car had blown up and the fire burned 80 percent of the woman’s flesh. She’d spent the next ten years in clinics. The woman’s skin had been regenerated and grafted to create a puffy, red, and inflamed covering. Her lips were tattooed on. Hair was grafted in the place of eyebrows and tattooed underneath. After ten years of medical technology, the woman still looked nothing like the girl she’d been.

A row of microscopes made the steps of regenerating skin visible, each one offering a view of a more advanced stage of growth. When it was Sarah’s turn to lean over and watch cells divide, at first she saw only her own eyelashes flickering back.

“Adjust the distance,” Dale said, and helped move the lenses
until she could focus on the thin, penciled-in-looking lines of transparent cells. She felt his hand on her elbow, his breath a soft motion in the air alongside her cheek.

They watched a movie of an endoscopic ACL replacement: A freckled leg rested on the edge of a metal table. A hand in a rubber glove punctured what the voice-over called “portals” into the skin—bleeding holes, really. The same hand wrestled a cannula under the kneecap, through the skin. The cannula held a camera that brought viewers inside the body to see the torn ACL where it floated, barely attached to the femur.

Dale said, “Like hardware. The body is just parts, put together.”

“And sometimes falling apart,” Sarah said.

The next light board showed a blown-up photo of a giant pale, hairless ear. The ear was perfect, sculptural and smooth.

“This may look like a human ear,” a recorded man’s voice said when Sarah touched a flat red button, “but what you are looking at is an artificially cultivated growth of human cells structured to recreate the curving form of ear tissue.”

The next image showed the ear was attached to the back of a live rat.

Tissue engineering.

Dale said, “That’s it! This is her work!”

His ex helped engineer a human ear grown on a rat?

The ear didn’t look real, so much as it made all the other ears in the room look waxy and fake, even against living heads.

Five more photos illustrated how the ear had been grown through cloning human skin cells and farming them on the back of the rat.

“Initial cells are harvested from human foreskin,” the recorded voice said. Dale loved it. The rat looked hungry and frightened and oblivious to the ear. Its eyes gleamed under the photographer’s lights, and its dark, handlike paws were tense.

The picture was horrifying, the whole idea wrong. Sarah paused. People gathered behind her. She said, “Why do this?”

Dale answered, “Someone loses an ear, they want another one. But the bigger point is, tissue engineering is the basis of stem cell research, heart surgery options, brain reconstruction.”

Sarah couldn’t leave the rat. She stayed, fascinated by the shine
in its eyes, the tension in its body. Every inch of the animal addressed the camera. The ear grew like a fungus from its back. The more Sarah looked at the growth, the less it looked like an ear. It was smooth, pale, and unmarked. It was nobody’s ear, just a crazy work of art molded from human foreskin.

After the rat, the rest of the show appeared desperate, a collective effort toward recovery and anticipated loss: emu-to-human cornea transplants. Tendon replacements harvested from a bird called a rhea, reconstructed in a human.

It was all animals serving human needs.

Someone, somewhere, would be grateful for that ear, and for the rat that carried the ear, the foreskin, the grafting.

Dale reached for Sarah’s hand. He touched her smallest finger. Sarah let her fingers slide, one between each of his, to feel the bones of his knuckles, the muscle and skeleton underneath. It was an experiment. She folded a second hand over the top of his, to find the thick rope of vein that ran along the back.

It was evening as they left OMSI. In the zoo the cats, nocturnal, would skulk along the edge of their confines. Good-bye rabbits! Sarah would soon be home with Ben, making dinner. The mandrill was in her holding area, with a few mandrill friends to keep her calm, and Dale would visit her. He would take care of his pregnant animal.

Sarah shortened her stride to match his. Their hands pressed together like there was a wound between them, something they needed to keep direct pressure on.

He reached his other hand to unlock the car door and brushed against her. Then he brought his lips in. His breath touched her first. His lips were on hers. She kissed him, too. It was awkward. It was skin. Grafting on each other: She felt that ear grow on the back of the rat—a mismatch, and a solution. She was the ear on the rat now.

B
ecause she lacked the cultural reach to demand reforestation of the world’s mangrove trees, Nyla put paper in one bag and bottles in another. She couldn’t stop oil from seeping along the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. She couldn’t save baby oysters in Oregon’s own Willapa Bay from death by acidification of the waters, but she could dig her fingernails into the magenta paper wrapped around a bottle of natural cherry soda and peel it back like so much sunburned skin.