This is a preview of my new novel, now available at www.amazon.com/author/gsrichter. The preview is taken from the first two chapters of the second part.
1
Franklin Michaud will perish in a car wreck at the age of sixty.
He will bleed out two feet away from his wife, Karen, who is also bleeding out and will perish three minutes after him, at the age of sixty-one. Their lives will not have been in vain. That is, they will thrice already have reproduced, thus giving to the world more people than will be subtracted at the hour of their expiration: a net gain.
What will happen on this balmy eve is that on a singularly deadly stretch of I-95 in Connecticut, the vehicle (driven by Franklin) will hit a patch of sand and veer off the freeway to collide with a rocky embankment. Emergency personnel will arrive swiftly and shut down the highway. Resuscitation attempts will be made and, as we already know, will fail. Franklin and Karen will be pronounced dead at the scene: Karen, a primatologist, a published Darwinist who prefers mankind’s closest cousins in the evolutionary record to her own species; Franklin, a social anthropologist, a published social Darwinist who, despite his lifelong study of the human animal, has never evinced much interest in personal relationships with his fellow humans. Each one will have contributed greatly to their respective field of expertise and to the greater body of scientific knowledge, and yet jointly they will have failed to leave their mark on what one means when one speaks about the world. Corpses now, they command respect not for their individual works but for their enduring commitment and great sacrifice as carriers for the human genome. Their partnership—officially a marriage—remains less remarkable for what it was than what it produced.
No one can say whether or not they will understand this at the moment of death. Regardless, neither one would have been terribly disappointed to die this way.
—
They first meet at a conference on evolutionary curriculum in public schools and, after one too many complimentary glasses of champagne (a midrange Taittinger Brut, nonvintage), they decide to go to bed together. The decision is not quite based on physical attraction, as neither one has been endowed by the genomic roll of the dice with emphatically comely attributes; nor is it a pragmatic one based on matters of financial or intellectual compatibility, though they are certainly compatible in either case; nor is it even wholly a matter of the fact that, due to the rigor of their studies and subsequent fieldwork, neither one has had sexual intercourse even once in the preceding decade. No, the decision to copulate is much less the result of free will or the vagaries of impulse than that of peer pressure: Karen and Franklin have been methodically steered toward each other by colleagues who find their mutual asceticism unnerving. The going hypothesis being that perhaps all these two kids need in order to lighten the fuck up is a good round in the sack (or a bad one—it hardly matters).
Even supposing that the union is satisfactory (or at least not traumatic) for both parties involved, there are great obstacles to establishing a deeper connection. Franklin is not unhandsome, although by thirty what little hair he has left is almost completely gray; he walks with a slight stoop, is half-blind and hysterically hard of hearing; and he has the soul of a sixty- or seventy-year-old man. He is an indoor person, a man of books, periodicals, lectures. Nature is less a source of wonderment or reverence for him than an obstacle: Biology is torture; the elements, an inconvenience. One day in his childhood, while playing in the sunshine with a cousin, he found a wounded garter snake. The poor thing had been run over; it was wriggling on the hot pavement, a thin string of innards spilling out of its punctured side. His cousin, fraught with compassion, found a stick and tried to nudge the creature to the comfort of the grass. Franklin took the stick from his cousin and poked at the spilled innards for a while, then went to find a rock big enough to crush the snake’s skull.
His fear of women—or, shall we say, his reticence to engage with them romantically—is most likely the result of being the only child of a single mother, a working-class lush who never revealed anything about his father to him, who left him to his own devices almost from the moment of his birth, and who lived and died in a general fog of hateful misery.
As a man, Franklin is polite and gently mannered, and his thinly veiled alcoholism, inherited from his maternal Irish line, lends him a sheen of normality. All the same, he has made few lasting acquaintances in his life and no real friends. Those who come into contact with him find his monolithic neutrality disquieting. They sense that the politeness is born of a fear of confrontation, that the alcoholism is a mask for social nausea born of anxiety and contempt. Indeed, some privately wonder if he is an automaton: a living, breathing, thinking being with no conscious experience of its living, breathing, or thinking. In that Franklin is not particularly warm or enthusiastic in his social relations, it might be argued that his anthropological study of mankind is, on some unconscious level, an ongoing attempt to understand the basic behavioral and cultural mechanisms that govern the strange kingdom into which he has been born.
The study of primates has taken Karen, also an only child, all around the world and exposed her to innumerable alien landscapes, most or all of which she prefers to her own. Her beauty is moderate: dark hair webbed with gray, straight white teeth, and small, hard eyes like burnt almonds. She does not appear to inhabit her body completely, her use for it is uncommonly limited, as opposed to her use for her mind, which is limitless. Physically, one could say, she is running on 45 percent, while intellectually she fires at full capacity. She killed a chicken once as a child on an uncle’s farm in southeastern Massachusetts, removing its head with an axe, and watched with serene curiosity as jets of blood spurted out of the hole in the neck. Her uncle—childless, a widower—looked on proudly and even put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. She spent many a summer day at that farm, tending to the horses, feeding and grooming them, but never riding them for fear of her own clumsiness. Caressing their manes was enough. That said, in adulthood she suffers a severe aversion to the intimate or even purely formal caresses of her own species. Like Franklin, she prefers not to hug or touch hands; like Franklin, her sexual desires are severely banal, a matter of annoyance. She has starved her libido into atrophy, and on those rare occasions when it gets the upper hand, she finds any prolongation of the procedure, especially foreplay, to be a torment.
Miraculously, the story of Karen and Franklin does not end with a one-night stand. Though the tryst is over quickly, the thrill of contact haunts them well into the coming days; it is a taste of the road not traveled, a view into another life whose potentiality, due to innumerable factors, has collapsed. This thrill, this distraction, an unfortunate result of codes entangled in their DNA, is not enough to foster a classic romance, but already more serious and insidious biological processes are at work. Two weeks after their night of passion, Karen and Franklin are married in the office of the justice of the peace; by the end of the month, they have purchased a three-story house on the west side of Providence, Rhode Island. No one who understands them entertains the delusion that they have acquired all this space in order to fill it with more Michauds—more likely that it will optimize their ability to avoid each other—and yet, at the end of the next month, it is announced that Karen is six weeks pregnant. The resulting effusive praise from family and colleagues baffles the new procreators. True, true, an abortion (carried out in secret for matters of social and professional security) would have been far less costly than a marriage license, a house, and a child—and no one who has experienced Karen’s sharp pragmatism or Franklin’s limpid passivity would believe for a second that the option was not, at the very least, discussed. . . . Nevertheless, Karen carries the child to term, and even names it Seth.
2
Sentience is not the first source of pain in life, although it is undoubtedly the one most worthy of address.
Franklin Michaud is thirty-two, already a doctor of social anthropology, when his first child is born. Standing in the delivery room amid doctors and nurses, in a pair of blue scrubs and a mask, while his wife (thirty-three, already a doctor of primatology) screams and bleeds on the bed, he does not know how to behave. Extreme fear and extreme joy alike are beyond his experience and, likewise, his aptitude for mimicry. He has never felt a single emotion in the extreme (not even during ejaculation, which for Franklin is a purely physiological phenomenon, as well as a welcome end to the miseries of intercourse), and the birth of a son does nothing to alter the keel. He watches the thing squirt out of his wife’s body covered in brownish slime. It looks, above all else, dead, and Franklin sighs strangely inside his mask. Then the thing begins to scream, and he understands that his fate is sealed. He understands the fate of all mankind.
Franklin notes that the child (Seth) has a penis—which, on the one hand, is a relief, meaning he will not have to contend with the puzzle of yet another vagina in his life, while, on the other hand, is a disappointment, meaning in the long term that the child will require more from Franklin, who also has a penis, than from Karen, who does not. Such is the extent of Franklin’s fatherly meditation there in the delivery room, in the presence of a healthy, screaming baby boy and his bleeding, bedraggled wife, whose eyes have already attained the glaze of sweet, merciful dissociation.
By the time the child is brought home, an in-house nanny has been installed, whose job in part is to dispense as needed the breast milk that is daily siphoned via mechanical pump from Karen’s mammary glands and stored in a refrigerator in the basement. Aside from feedings, the other part of the nanny’s job is to see to all of the child’s other needs, from the moment it wakes (screaming) to the moment if falls asleep (begrudgingly) and at most of the moments in between, thus freeing Karen and Franklin to pursue their separate and beloved lifelong pursuits.
For Franklin, who has decided to write a book and so works from home more and more, this means locking himself in his first-floor den (where he cannot see the child or hear its screams) with his tobacco pipe and his aged single-malt scotch. That is, the birth of a child has not significantly altered Franklin’s life in any way; at most, it is a curious circumstance that he ponders in the abstract at odd intervals, between puffs on the pipe, and always with a marveling little chortle, because while he generally lacks anything resembling a sense of humor, there is nothing funnier to him in all the world than the idea of him playing father.
For Karen, this means leaving the country as often as possible to observe and report upon the activities of primates living in other countries. Her lust for travel has taken a new and secret aspect. Beyond merely escaping her child and its ceaseless demands, she seeks, however unconsciously, to outrun the disenchantment that has dogged her since she first laid eyes on the boy, hobbling her scholarly pursuits. (Note: in the first two years of motherhood, she fails to produce or contribute to a single scientific paper.) Her emotional detachment from the infant comes as no surprise to her. Nevertheless, she remains confused by thoughts, feelings, dreams that she can barely grasp, let alone explain. In her most vivid glimpses of the truth, it is as if she can feel that bright, studious only child she used to be dying within her. She no longer quite understands her place in the world now that she is, if only by law, responsible for someone other than herself.
Why, having thus replenished the gene pool with the added benefit of not increasing its unruly circumference—why decline once more to terminate a pregnancy? A mystery for the ages. The fact being that a mere three years into Seth’s life, Karen carries a second pregnancy to term.
—
Franklin feels even less when his second child is born. He does not even experience that vague sense of expectation, he knows more or less what to expect, the thing will scream and shit and generally fail to resemble a human being at any point. The fact that his second child is female is of limited interest. Franklin is no stranger to the world of men, inasmuch as he is, to a somewhat abbreviated extent, of this world. The world of women, however, is largely unknown to him; it is a world he has glimpsed briefly (he prefers to make love in pitch darkness) or from a discreet (read: scientific) distance, and one to which he does not particularly desire further access. He imagines himself at least capable of tossing a ball around with little Seth for a minute or two when the time comes—but what to do with a daughter? Leave her to Karen, he decides; it’s nature’s way.
No sooner does he do just that than Karen leaves the little girl with the nanny and promptly jets off to Nepal. If anyone asks, she is there to observe and report upon the nuances of the social bonding rituals of the rhesus macaque. The reality being that she has come to Nepal to do nothing. Or, to put it in more forgiving terms, to just be in Nepal. (She is quite aware that all there is to say about the social bonding rituals of the rhesus macaque has already been said.) The depression that followed Karen’s first go at giving birth seems mild compared to that which manifests in the wake of the second go. This one yields no scientific output whatsoever. She feels a great blankness rolling in like a sea fog; if it should touch her flesh, she thinks that she will perish. (Franklin has lived inside this fog all of his life and knows—albeit without ever doing his wife the courtesy of explaining so to her—that it is not lethal, or in any case lethal only in the sense that it has the space of an average human lifespan in order to kill.)
Karen sits in Nepal, watching clouds and sipping from teas or barbiturate cocktails, and daydreams of a field full of dandelions where she once lay down and cried because she hated her mother so much. Franklin sits in his study in Providence, sipping a seventeen-year-old Highland and dreading the sound of footsteps on the floor above, which signal that, in spite of his deep desire to be so, he is not alone. And little Seth alternately adores and hates the new little monkey his phantasmal mother has brought into this world.
It is only after there is something weaker than himself in the household that Seth is faced with his first moral conundrum: He can become his sister’s protector or, just as easily, her tormentor. When little Julia is seventeen months old, he performs his first experiment in cruelty, throwing a small toy truck at her head. The resulting wound bleeds profusely, and Julia screams the screams of the damned; alas, no stitches are required, and the nanny, too drunk on her daily portion of wine, never gets around to properly punishing him. Unimpressed with the results—and with siblinghood altogether—Seth abandons the experiment, leaving the little girl to her own devices. From this point on, she is not his problem.
—
Two years after Julia’s birth, the Michauds are sacked with another pregnancy. Although alcohol and the dangers of suppressed loneliness may have played a role in this turn of fate, no one can say for sure why. Needless to say, by the time his third child arrives, Franklin has had enough of the miracle of life and does not attend the birth. Karen does not blame him—she would have been absent herself if it had been medically possible (alas, it will be decades yet before technology enabling human fetuses to gestate ex utero hits the market). This time, once rid of her uterine freeloader (a baby girl named Melissa), Karen convalesces at the small farmhouse in Massachusetts that was bequeathed to her in her uncle’s will. She goes there to contemplate the overgrown fields and encroaching forest; the slow, lethal creep of nature, its pitiless strangulation of civilization; and her cynical subordination to the evil intellect lurking in civilization’s seed. She ends up contemplating a career in botany instead. A planned two-month hiatus from her research (and from her family—sure, why not?) turns into nearly two years of solitude and indolence, during which she grows gaunt (more gaunt than she has always been), more drawn in her sparse professional or quasi-social interactions, more glib in her Darwinian thought patterns. Though she does eventually manage to leave the decrepitating farm, she will remain absent from the scientific community for the better part of a decade.
In fact, she truly returns to full-time research only once her children are out of her hair; that is, once all three have flown the coop. Seth and Julia leave more or less right on schedule. The last one (Melissa), however, takes flight earlier than expected, having dropped out of high school at sixteen at the urging of a boyfriend in order to pursue an exciting life of pure freedom that others refer to as “drug addiction” and “intermittent vagrancy.” Soon after she vanishes, as a matter of pure happenstance, Karen and Franklin find themselves co-inhabiting the house once again. At last, the nest is empty. The silence is resplendent. They have been living in chains all along, and they are finally free. Free to travel, free to write, free to file for divorce, and free to die together in an automobile accident—a sudden and brutal turn of events that, nevertheless, lacks the element of tragedy.