The great frustration, p.1
The Great Frustration, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
LOEKA DISCOVERED
FROST MOUNTAIN PICNIC MASSACRE
LIFE IN THE HAREM
THOSE OF US IN PLAID
THE MISERY OF THE CONQUISTADOR
THE GREAT FRUSTRATION
THE SIEGE
THE FRENCHMAN
LIE DOWN AND DIE
THE SCRIBES’ LAMENT
ANIMALCULA: A Young Scientist’s Guide to New Creatures
—THE DAWSON—
—THE ELDRIT—
—THE KESSEL—
—THE MELITE—
—THE BARTLETT—
—THE BASTROM—
—THE PRINCIPLES OF OBSERVATION—
—THE HALIFITE—
—THE KIRKLIN—
—THE KAYLITE—
—THE LASAR—
—THE PAGLUM—
—THE ADORNUS—
—THE PERIGITE—
—THE SONITUM—
Copyright Page
LOEKA DISCOVERED
Whether or not it had been his intention to impress anyone, Loeka, the lab favorite, had managed to climb four thousand feet without modern mountain-climbing equipment—and those of us on the research team had to admit that was pretty damned impressive. Objectivity is important, but we liked Loeka. What was the matter with that? The ice had kept him in good shape for more than seven thousand years, and in his wrenched-up face the flesh was warped into an excruciating grimace. The pathos of the whole thing was unshakable. After our third day of working on Loeka, Doc Johnson (who was somewhat of a relic himself and who until then hadn’t shown more than an ounce of emotion in his forty years as Director at the Institute) started the day by reading aloud from a poem he had written about Loeka. The poem focused on what were presumed to be his last moments, shivering on the mountainside. In the poem, Loeka is determined to get back to his family but is too weak to move. In the end, he looks up at the stars and feels warmed by their distant light. His last thoughts are of the fate of his poor family, huddled together in some primitive, thatch-roofed dwelling. He bravely attempts to stand and keels forward, taking on the prone, abject pose in which he was found by Norwegian tourists more than a half dozen millennia later.
The poem wasn’t very good. It rhymed too much, and Doc Johnson’s voice warbled in a way that made us feel uncomfortable. However, most of us were still somewhat touched. We watched Doc Johnson’s hands shake a little more than usual as he folded the sheet of notebook paper with his poem on it and returned it to the pocket of his lab coat. Gathered in a circle, our eyes misty, we began to get the sensation, a swelling in our chests, that what we were working on was important—that it was bigger than all of us.
There was something spellbinding about it, peering down the vast well of time at Loeka’s small, puckered face. While extracting a tissue sample for analysis, it wasn’t uncommon for any one of us to sing to Loeka sweetly or to talk to him as if he were an obedient child. Whereas before we would march down the sterile, artificially lit halls of the Institute, nodding to one another as we passed, the air around us a cold flutter of clipboards and clicking pens, we now began to stop and greet one another, laughing. Two weeks with Loeka, and some of the men started showing up to the lab in more brightly colored shirts and gag neckties. Some of the women traded their slacks for skirts that ended just below the knee, traded their sensible loafers for something with a heel; their vibrant, exciting clacks echoed down the corridors, which, once gray and subdued, now seemed charged with untold possibility.
Every day there were more newspapers and magazines clamoring for interviews about Loeka. We tried to be as calm and plainspoken as possible, but the fervor of the moment quickly overtook us. We delivered our interviews breathlessly to an unending bank of microphones. Yes, his leather boots were being developed commercially. Yes, they were surprisingly comfortable. No, his axe was made of copper. Yes! Yes! We gave the reporters large, toothy grins and finished one another’s sentences. We winked wryly at one another when a question was broad or obvious. When leaving the interviews, we took one another by the arm, walking back to our posts with a sense of privilege, a kind of giddiness.
There was an excitement building in us. The isotopic analysis of his tooth enamel, as well as the paleodontal staining, determined Loeka’s point of origin to be a small village in northern Italy near modern day Vahrn, some three hundred miles from the place of his discovery. We marveled: what could have caused him to travel so far, so high? Geological records confirmed that at the time of Loeka’s death, his native region would have been in the throes of a prolonged drought. This, combined with the fact that we found no processed grains in Loeka’s digestive tract, only conifers and berries, suggested that he was most likely a type of scout, heading out into dangerous, unknown lands to find a place more livable for his drought-wracked village. Instantly, Loeka was miraculous and selfless. Loeka was endeavor.
Somewhere in the lab a machine would whirr and clap and we would draw our faces in close, waiting for the results. Our hot, eager breath clouding the film of some X-ray, we would imagine Loeka swaggering up the mountainside with savage bravado, mumbling softly to himself in some ancient tongue as the dangers increased, “I’ll think of something.”
It’s no surprise that small romances began to bubble up throughout the lab. At the time, it seemed to make sense. It wasn’t long before our working in such close proximity, together with the general excitement of the task at hand, led to lingering glances over calorimeters, colleagues leaning in to share the dual eyepieces on comparison microscopes, the sudden, accidental brush of hands simultaneously attempting to adjust the needle valves of Bunsen burners. When we examined some of the pollen we found in Loeka’s colon, it turned out that the cells within the pollen were still intact, which meant that Loeka’s death could be placed sometime during the spring. Spring! Even Doc Johnson developed a somewhat platonic crush on Laurel, one of our interns. His eyes would follow her longingly across the lab as she shuffled papers or fetched a pair of forceps or, engrossed in some menial task and feeling unwatched, blew a distracted puff of breath through her dark, lovely bangs. Doc Johnson seemed afflicted but happy, and his old, soft leather briefcase bulged with what we could only assume to be an outpouring of new, unreadable poems, which had most likely been written, in some harmless sense, for Laurel.
The lab was alive with a strange new confidence. We all moved with a rakish strut, our clothing slightly disheveled. Some of us high-fived and slapped backsides. Others adopted nicknames. Dr. O’Reilly started calling himself “the Clipper.” Dr. Clifford and Dr. Simmons demanded that we refer to them as “Scooter” and “Long Shot,” respectively. Dr. Stevens insisted that we call him “Big Tex,” despite the fact he was only 5’6” and from Maryland.
The subtle flirtations in the lab grew into white-hot animal compulsions. We attacked one another’s blouse buttons and pant zippers in storage closets, revealing surprisingly taut, youthful bodies long obscured by baggy clothing and the horrible fog of professionalism. Those of us who were married came home early, sending our bewildered children to their rooms long before their usual bedtime. We took our husbands and wives wherever we found them, in a loud clamor of unwashed pots, TV trays, and laundry baskets. We scratched and pulled toward one another madly. Laurel began wearing ribbons in her hair, and one bright afternoon Doc Johnson sauntered into the lab wearing a pair of white shorts and a striped boatneck.
We fell into our research as if it were the most lurid, tempting thing of all. We performed simple tasks diligently and with a heightened sense of responsibility. Our minds raced. When faced with various disjointed segments of data, complex mental associations on our part, precise leaps of intuition, and all-out breakthroughs were immediate and common. It was a pace that was not easily contained. During an idle moment, many of us would take the opportunity to scribble in the margins of our notepads ideas for the types of personal projects that hadn’t haunted our private ambitions in years. Rushing between tasks, we would write the titles of possible articles on coffee-stained napkins, quickly folding them into our pockets. We drummed our fingers while we worked, thinking about the world in terms of problems and philosophies of improvement. There was a creative mania spreading everywhere, a contagious energy which, though intoxicating, never distracted us from our primary task: Loeka. We threw ourselves passionately into our investigation. We pursued it with the utmost care and fastidiousness, as even the simplest procedure had become for us a deliberate act of celebration as well as a rejection of the pessimism and doubt that we felt had characterized our lives up to that point.
Every morning we wrote out affirmations in the steam on our bathroom mirrors, sang with the radios in our cars. The world was new. Everything flew forward. One discovery unfolded into two, three, several. Laurel’s youth and beauty descended over the lab like a cloud. Doc Johnson’s heart rang out. In his eyes we could see the first cannon shot, the first launched ship, the first cry of victory and defeat. The world was ancient.
Some nights we threw impromptu parties on the roof of the Institute. We would watch the stars, wondering how they might have looked to Loeka some seven thousand years ago. Drinking champagne, we would laugh and lift our glasses. Drunker and drunker, we toasted in unison: “Loeka! Loeka!” We kept it up for as long as our voices held out, the toast becoming steadily louder and more jubilant—“Loeka! Loeka!”—until the name itself grew shorter, its vowels and consonants softer, eventually sounding, per
haps not coincidentally, something like “Life!”
Then they found the Big Man.
Just as our research was achieving new heights, a call came in about another body. On the same mountain where Loeka had been discovered, another natural mummy was uncovered several hundred feet higher. The Big Man, so named immediately due to his large frame, which early reports remarked as being intimidating even in death, was found, ironically, due to the attention the area had received as a result of the publicity surrounding Loeka. While we first expected something similar to Loeka (a thought which excited us) the initial photographs emailed to us at the Institute were not promising. Unlike Loeka’s small, endearing face, with its features lumpy and vague like something molded roughly out of clay, the face of the Big Man was freakishly well-preserved and hideous. With a prominent forehead, sunken eyes, and smashed-in nose, he had the look of something alien, violent and unfriendly. Most of us were put off by the photographs but easily recovered. Charged by the notion of a new specimen and all its mysteries, we cheered. We banged on the tube of the MRI machine, shouting in to Loeka over the sound of the Eric Clapton we pumped in sort of as a joke, as if to prevent him from being frightened by the incessant knocking-sound produced by the machine. We hollered into the tube stupidly, telling Loeka, “You’re going to have a friend!”
Within days of the discovery, the Big Man was shipped to the Institute in a large, pressurized crate. Our playfulness over the idea of another mummy had subsided, and for the first few hours following the Big Man’s arrival we managed only to stare at the crate uncertainly. Most of us seemed to feel a certain uneasiness with respect to the Big Man and a desire to return our attention to Loeka. Our excitement about the Big Man as an abstract idea quickly gave way to defensiveness the moment he became a physical presence in the lab, as if the existence of the Big Man were somehow an affront to Loeka. Half the morning was spent in silence before Doc Johnson shuffled up to the crate and punched in the nine-digit passcode, upon which the crate opened with a slow and unsettling hiss.
We were anxious to see what we might be able to learn from the Big Man, but something about him had cast a shadow over our research. We managed to establish him as contemporaneous to Loeka, and we initiated the analysis of his tooth enamel, but tasks that had only recently seemed to perform themselves—so ecstatically involved were we in their execution—now seemed insufferable. One of us would return from a remote testing facility with a fresh printout, and all activity in the lab would stop. “Well,” someone would ask, “what does it say?” At which point whichever one of us had fetched the data would hold the paper uncomfortably, as if unsure which way to turn it, eventually saying, “I don’t know.”
The reaction from the press was marked with a curiosity that was similar to that with which they had received Loeka. However, their overall excitement was diminished. Even the sharp slaps of their flashing cameras were somehow less urgent. The questions asked were quietly skeptical, as if the inability of the Big Man to surprise them after Loeka allowed the reporters to call into question the value of both discoveries. If the presence of the reporters had once excited us, it now left us feeling a little upset, not only because we recognized that the press was fickle, that it was only able to judge the importance of things on their ability to awe and confound, but because, in terms of their misgivings and vague disinterest regarding the Big Man, we completely agreed with them.
It was not possible to approach the Big Man without first considering him in relation to Loeka; the differences between the two were staggering. Loeka’s anguished look caused him to seem no longer as courageous in his frozen torment as we had first assumed. Observing him next to the Big Man, we had to admit that Loeka’s expression didn’t appear as heroic. It was suddenly groveling and bullied, simply greedy for life.
In our minds, Loeka began to seem like a coward.
However, we did not find the brutish look of the Big Man more appealing. Rather, his impressive stature reminded us only of the incredible violence and cruelty of which humans were capable. While all that had been found in Loeka’s digestive tract suggested the diet of a vegetarian, the Big Man’s was packed with one continuous hank of red meat. The Big Man made clear how dangerous the past must have been, how easily someone like Loeka might have been exploited, how grim and pointless anyone’s fate would have been, grunting, struggling in the dirt, if they were to have found themselves in the Big Man’s hands.
The Big Man had carried with him a bow, along with a quiver of bone-tipped arrows. Attached to his belt were two knives and a small leather pouch filled with human teeth. His ears were notched in several places, and his forearms were heavily scarred. We were repulsed. When preparing the Big Man for any of the countless procedures that were required, we squinted in disgust and breathed through our mouths, as if we were bathing a vagrant. We found ourselves so overwhelmed by our dislike of the Big Man that if we dropped an instrument or stubbed our toe on the observation table, we had to restrain ourselves from taking out our anger on the Big Man’s corpse or the surrounding equipment. We even had to fire an intern who, after a simple complication, swore at the Big Man and threw a scalpel at his forehead. An undergraduate from Brown named Kenny, he emptied out his work station in a huff, stopping to look over the lab and declare briefly that the situation was “such total bullshit.”
And while none of us had ever really liked that particular intern and had, in fact, been looking for a reason to let him go since the day he arrived, we still empathized with him. Though we would never admit it, many of us felt that the Big Man had it coming. When the airborne scalpel trembled to a stop in his forehead, many of us had even smiled approvingly. If anything, we found it touching that this young man who had paraded around the lab for seven months wearing the same Rolling Stones T-shirt and referring to all of us as “Dr. Dude” had sensed in his own vacuous way that the Big Man represented something awful. It had worked on his nerves as it had ours. In fact, he may have said it best. Though we couldn’t put our fingers on it exactly, something about the Big Man was bullshit. However, Doc Johnson insisted on Kenny’s dismissal, and in the end we were perfectly happy to see him leave. We watched him depart without comment and then returned our attention to our tests, our spread sheets, our mummies and our dwindling spirits.
Naturally, the air of romance in the lab diminished as well. As our enthusiasm for our work suffered, so did our attitudes toward our colleagues. We grew frustrated with each other. Those people in the lab who had excited us before—those with whom we had slipped off into storage closets for quick romps under fire blankets and between mop buckets, those who had only recently filled us with an unequivocal joie de vivre, our eyes meeting from across the lab, our laughter booming out together in the decontamination chambers—those same people began to bore us. Even Doc Johnson appeared to suspect something suddenly undesirable about Laurel. It was difficult to say what. Perhaps it was the way she pouted when Kenny was let go. Or perhaps it was that Doc felt her looks were finally too childish—those ribbons!—or that her shyness, which had appealed to him at first, was really just the conceited silence of a brat. Perhaps he imagined in her face something that was ready to age prematurely, something fat, stupid, and selfish. Whatever the case, his demeanor toward her changed entirely, and his briefcase slowly deflated.
We now regarded each other as almost poisonous. We saw our colleagues as robbing us of not only our creative potential but also our ability to complete the most basic tasks. They were parasites, demanding, with their idiotic pleasantries and mere presence in the lab, more than we were prepared to give. All their good ideas were just simple variations on our own. We found their work insipid and kept our own as closely guarded as possible. Although, once we succeeded in avoiding one another or in driving one another away with harsh words, we just as quickly turned on ourselves. Left alone, we began to see our work as obscure and self-indulgent. We wondered if the quality of our ideas was actually dependent on the ideas of those colleagues we had just driven away. We wondered if we were parasites. Had our relationships with our colleagues changed so quickly because of something latently flawed that they had recognized in us? We began to think that maybe there was nothing wrong with them at all but that we were just oblivious, emotionally handicapped monsters, doomed for the rest of our lives to commit the same sins against all the well-meaning people who would ever be unfortunate enough to find themselves in our paths.
