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Evolutionary Shift

Contributed by Rivka Jacobs on 18/12/09

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through,
and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
~ From Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

I sat on the dank, weed-choked cement, my back against a cinder-block piling that had once been covered with pale yellow tile. I watched the man across from me, too tired to care if he might be a threat. The afternoon winter sun was rapidly fading, too weak to give warmth or comfort. A chill breeze began to blow.

My neighbor was bearded, his body leathery and boney. He wore a dark-green jacket that was caked with grime. He was eating out of a dirty food-storage container, his eyes like red ice as they locked on me from under his lids every time he lowered his face to shovel what was in the plastic box, into his slopping mouth.

I smiled at him thinly, glanced down at my battered boots wrapped with rags, and wondered what picture I presented to him

We didn’t speak. I listened to his spoon rapidly stroking plastic, the clink of his teeth on metal, and a kind of snuffing sound — animal hunger and greed.

He abruptly froze, his hand poised in mid-feed, his eyes darting around our small protected space.

I concentrated, then recognized the particular trill and scuffing noise, and relaxed. “It’s okay, they know me,” I said, understanding from experience that my words would have no immediate impact.

He threw his spoon into the container, rose to his tattered knees, and pressed himself back against the rust-streaked column behind him. Our refuge had once been an exit ramp for some interstate in New Jersey. It had been reduced to chunks of reinforced concrete, piles of tile, and scattered lumps of asphalt and stone that looked like a giant had picked up the highway and smashed it back to the ground.

The man raised himself to a squatting position, still clasping his precious Tupperware. I could see he was trying not to breathe.

A soft, scratching, slithering noise reached my ears. I lolled my head casually to the right, to get a better view.

The man came to his feet now, in a slightly bent posture, preparing to flee. I watched his eyes, out of a genuine interest in his reaction, as a thing came into view from around a section of corroded guardrail.

“Don’t run,” I said. “Stay still.” The look of shock and disbelief on his face was fascinating.

At the sound of my voice, our visitor skittered around to face me. It was about three feet wide, one foot off the ground, with eight legs — if you want to call them legs. One extremity was a tiny human baby limb, several were insect-like, one seemed to possess the tarsus, metatarsus, and hoof of a cow. Arms were more like crab claws with opposable thumbs. It blinked one human fetal eye bulging from a mass of exposed viscera on the left lateral flank. A lump on it’s right seemed to be an amalgam of a bovine testicle, a trachea, and parts of a brain; I couldn’t tell what kind. A large yellow-brown coiled mass formed the dorsal surface — this was slippery and viscous and pulsing — I could tell by the consistency and appearance it was human colon and rectum, possibly adenocarcinogenic. I recognized pieces of primate skin, teeth, and bone, and a bovine epididymis. I counted a porcine kidney and bladder, seven mouse mammaries and at least one human penis growing from its belly.

My friend across from me made a gagging, retching sound, then muttered something like “Oh geezus, oh … oh geezus….” before he moved, as if in slow motion, trying to step further and further away.

“I’m warning you, don’t move,” I said in a light, conversational tone. “I told you, it knows me.”

Most of the creatures retain some kind of sense-memory of me, a genetic imprinting of some sort, I suppose. While I drift through what’s left of our civilized world, anonymous to my fellow human beings, the things, the monsters, remark my passage, pause to consider me. As of now — and this is always changing, that’s the entire point — as of now, I am sacred and immune to harm.

But the man, if he was a man, wasn’t paying any attention to me. He groped his way with his left hand along the freezing concrete, moving sideways, picking up his pace. The shadows lengthened and the wind gusted; a blackness would swallow us unrelieved by any artificial illumination, and there would be no moon or stars. It looked like it was going to snow. The thing with eight legs scampered around in a circle, tracking the escaping man with its one bulbous fetus eye.

“I’m telling you,” I said, trying to sound non-threatening and reasonable, “I told you, you’re safer here with me.”

But he was gone, and the thing, the monster, scurried after him.

Throaty, garbled shouts of terror and pain ripped through the frosty twilight a few minutes later.

~*~

I’m constantly on the move. I don’t remember when I left Cleveland. I sleep where I want, I eat what I can salvage or procure. I pass through apartments, homes, and businesses that stand abandoned and empty. I try to avoid men and women, when I find them, holed up in small groups, defending themselves with guns or weapons they’ve designed themselves. I have no idea what happened to our government, despite the fact my Bioprinting Research Center worked snugly with the HHS, and the work we did at the Department of Cellular Biology of Western University, which I chaired, was all federally funded, and I was the co-author of the Human Cell Culture Protocols published by the Department of Homeland Security.

I have considered the irony of my accomplishments, and sometimes when unfamiliar snorts or howls or growls crowd around me, and on clear nights when dark shapes fill the skies and block the moon, I think about my bioink particles and how I endowed them with such superb self-assembly properties. My goal, the aim of my entire team, was to heal the human body, to repair any injury to any organ or tissue. We created a successful organ farming process, we perfected recombinant DNA technology. With our bioprinting techniques we could regenerate anything from a piece of skin to an entire heart. My team and I revolutionized medical science. I remember thinking that I was going to win a Nobel Prize.

I don’t know what happened.

Some of our people did have a problem with standard precautions, biohazard bags, and the concept of the hermetic environment.

~*~

I see beauty in the midst of the decay. City intersections at night, empty rusting vehicles seemingly paused for a red light. Terra cotta stucco white with mildew, plaster peeling away, old wrought iron crumbling; like still-life paintings. Squat and sturdy dark-red buildings that once housed schools and offices and residences, their windows broken or blocked with plywood, mortar dissolving, bricks falling, fire-escapes now twisted wreckage torn apart by the inhabitants themselves when they barricaded themselves in on higher and higher floors.

Amidst the oxidizing cars and piles of bones and rubble, surrounded by the sniffing, scurrying, scampering, and flapping of wings made of human skin — and the occasional scream — I am moved and impressed by the resilience of human beings. In former days, I would scowl upon seeing graffiti — quick and sharp symbols of anger and alienation. Now I see entire walls filled with writing, and it moves me to tears. Everywhere I go, people have left something of themselves before they disappeared for eternity. Names, dates of birth, instructions as to where family members can find them, or, paragraphs telling some unknown future about wives, husbands, lovers, children, jobs lost, babies born. Entire blocks of buildings from Cleveland to Pittsburgh to Philly read like tombstones in an ancient graveyard; “I was born on….” and “The names of my pets are….” and “My favorite songs are….” What I like best, though, are the epilogues — I call them epilogues — paragraphs summing up lives, written in marker or chalk or anything at hand that can scratch a word. I find these scribbled on interior paneling, paper, and paint in the more secure, enclosed, and private places where survivors stayed briefly before they escaped again, or before they met one of the monsters.

And I guess that’s what I’m doing now; writing my epilogue.