The Oregon Experiment (28 page)

But as a pricey-looking light meter passed under his chin, more faculty and students peering in from the hall, he felt as if he’d stepped onto a platform and the department now had to live up to him. Being director of the secessionists could be perceived as naive—akin to his past mistakes—but Sequoia was right, the quality of his research would be enhanced. And as director he was suddenly an important voice, valuable currency in a profession full of people who feared that none of their work really mattered. He might not even need the book; this new visibility and the authority that came with it could be his ticket back east.

Sanchez squeezed into the corner in front of his bookcase and spoke to him with a bubbling urgency. Scanlon leaned toward the camera, straightening his glasses, the glowing lights warm on his face as the crowd out in the corridor, packing in tighter, was hushed by the soundman.

The interview lasted ten minutes. As she left Sanchez said, “It’s so great to meet you,” in the exact same tone she’d greeted him with.

Everyone was gone from the hallway when Fenton strutted into Scanlon’s office. “Quite a show,” he said. “Quite a razzle-dazzle.”

“Thank you, Cebert,” Scanlon said, not trusting him for a moment. “It’s really nothing.”

“You got that right,” Fenton said. “How’re those articles coming?”

Scanlon could easily grab the little prick and toss him through the window. “Nicely.”

Fenton stepped closer, arms crossed over his chest. “These fleeting spectacles might impress for a week or two, but they’re meaningless in the end. Publications, Pratt. Publications are forever.”

“I’ve got a draft about ready to go,” Scanlon bluffed. “Needs some punching up, some polishing.” Ron would no doubt
give
the café building to Sequoia when he saw Fenton lying with a broken spine on the crushed roof of his Porsche.

“What’s your argument?”

Scanlon stared him down. “The goals of present-day American anarchists, while apparently no better than hooligans, do in fact have theoretical ties to Max Stirner and Proudhon and Mutualism.”

“Send me the draft,” Fenton said.

Scanlon looked away. “You’re too busy for that.”

“This is what colleagues are for, Pratt. I know a lot of editors. Ties to Stirner
and
the Mutualists. Compelling. E-mail it to me, pronto.”

And then, with rapid clicks of his loafers on the tiled hallway, he was gone.

The rainy walk to campus had given Naomi a chill, and she was relieved to find the lab so warm.

“The animals just want to burrow if it’s too cold,” Blaine Maxwell explained, wiping one hand on her lab coat, the front of it dirty with the prints of webbed feet, canine paws, ungulate hooves. “The heat keeps them excited.” In her other hand she held up a syringe like a loaded revolver.

Naomi unzipped her raincoat. Sammy was snoozing against her chest, his head and the green cap pulled into the sling like a turtle.

“I hope I’ll get a look,” Blaine said.

The lab was much as she’d described it. Half a dozen treadmills, no different from those at the gym, were mounted with cameras and strobe lights. A goat tethered to one of them had figured out how to sidestep the moving belt and stand on the stationary frame, seeming to accept that this is what life had become: someone picks you up and sets you on a rubber belt, it begins to move, you step off, you do it again, and soon there will be food. At another treadmill, grad students were varying the belt speed and experimenting by dropping, placing, and tossing a goose onto it. No matter what method they used, the goose shot off the back into someone’s waiting arms.

Naomi felt for the goose. The Oregon Experiment—
her
version, not Sequoia’s—would have worked: opening her neural pathways and forming associations between Scanlon’s smells and the pleasant smells of Willamette mint and sage and the stimulation of their lovemaking. But he’d blown it, and the betrayal had shot her squawking off the belt.

On top of that, the realization that Sammy couldn’t provide solace from the loss of Joshua had made her feel foolish. His birth only made her understand how completely, unforgivably selfish she’d been eighteen years ago. All those young single moms she’d met at Sequoia’s—they were packing picnics and walking the dog, taking night classes and holding down jobs. They were living. They were happy.

But it got worse: there were brief, shameful moments when Sammy felt like a burden. She’d been relieved to abandon him to meet Clay at the bar. Just this morning she’d thought, If only I could quit nursing, if only
my body could be my own, if only I could walk out the door without a care. The guilt and remorse that followed were suffocating. She was a woman who’d given away her first child and now couldn’t rise up to meet her second. If only Scanlon hadn’t taken her from New York, cutting her off from her old friends and her old life, if only she felt sure she loved him as she once had, if only she could overcome the goddamn breast infections, then maybe she’d find the inner strength to be the woman she wished she was.

She watched the goose run for its life as they dialed up the treadmill speed.
Bam
. The bird missed the grad student and tumbled across the floor.

Blaine led her over to terrariums along the back wall. The frogs were beautiful—the same electric green of the moss that covered trees from Douglas to the coast, amethyst rimming their eyes, tiny beads of maroon and chanterelle yellow dotting their backs. The Pacific leaping frog. Blaine gave her a refresher course on leaping versus hopping and then, with a wide-eyed reverence at odds with her scientific matter-of-factness, she concluded, “A true leaper.”

Naomi held one, the size of a small pond frog. She smelled it: frog. It urinated on her hand, which she smelled: ordinary swamp urine.

Blaine held another between her thumb and forefinger and flicked at its dangling legs. “Five grams of muscle,” she said, “maximum. Propelling a ninety-gram animal.” She placed the frog on the lab bench in front of the camera, and a green strobe light flashed almost imperceptibly. A video monitor showed Blaine’s fingertips holding the frog still. A grad student stood by with a butterfly net as Blaine positioned the frog, aiming it toward a mossy area impossibly far away. “The shock is very mild,” she said, removing her hands and pressing a button: the frog fired its legs, sailed through the air, and touched down, calm and cool, in the moss, where the net swooped over it.

Naomi’s heart was suddenly racing. “You weren’t kidding,” she said, with her own reverence for this magnificent spectacle. “Those little legs can jump.”

“Leap.”

The student handed the frog back to Blaine.

“Now,” Blaine said, “let’s get what you came here for.” She put on a pair of lab glasses, dabbed the frog between the legs with a cotton ball, and
stuck in her syringe. A minute later she handed over a tiny vial of the little frog’s magic, corked and labeled. Naomi squeezed it in her fist.

“Aren’t you going to smell it?”

“Not here,” she said. The goat, the geese—it smelled like a petting zoo. “Later, if that’s okay.”

“E-mail me, then. I’m dying to know what you think.” Blaine’s tone was girlish and conspiratorial, as if they were at the perfume counter spending too much on a scent too dangerously provocative. “And send me a jpeg of your progeny.”

Naomi had misjudged her. The two of them could be friends. “Let’s meet for coffee,” she said. Blaine’s intellect wasn’t dryly analytical. Sure, she engaged the world in a lab coat, but it was cloaked with a bright curiosity, a thrill of observation and playful discovery. She could be an excellent friend, and Naomi would make it happen. “Let’s meet next week. After I’ve had a chance to work with the frog juice.”

“I thought I told you,” Blaine said. “I leave Saturday on sabbatical. Lorenz Institute. In Vienna.”

“Oh.” Naomi squeezed the vial and touched the curve of Sammy’s back, feeling that something had been snatched away from her.

“Nine months,” Blaine said. “It’s always hard to be apart from Roger for so long, but we’ve managed before. Gets us both very focused on work.”

Not very difficult, Naomi thought, for a childless couple. After regretfully saying goodbye, she left the lab and soon was lost in deserted hallways underneath the building. Finally she found a stairwell—not the one she’d taken before—and pushed through the first of two steel doors, pausing in the overheated space between them, hot air blowing down from the ceiling, mildew rising from the wet mats. She reached into the sling at her chest, plucked off Sammy’s cap, and pressed her nose to his scalp: Joshua would turn eighteen in less than three months. On February 5th, if he chose to, he could view the file held on him by the State of New York; he could learn the name of his real mother; he could try to find her.

“Her hair didn’t have that floating-underwater look,” he told Naomi, “like it does on TV.” They were curled up with Sammy on the couch for the six-o’clock news. “It was short and choppy. Didn’t Liza Minnelli have hair like that?”

Naomi hiked up her shirt and Sammy crashed face-first into her breast. He settled in, with quiet groans of satisfaction.

The lead story was about Panama’s sentencing: America Sanchez, live, outside the federal courthouse downtown. The rain had let up, but angry chanting continued around her. She spoke too fast, breathless.

“Maybe it’s her mascara,” Naomi said. “She looks under water to me.”

Sanchez reported on the increased pitch of the afternoon’s demonstrations. Behind her, facing off a strict line of police, was a scraggly collection of local protestors, along with those who’d made this pilgrimage from Portland and Seattle. Scanlon’s heart ratcheted up a notch.

After the predictable sound bites from the prosecutor and defense attorney, Scanlon’s own face filled the screen. “The prosecutor inflamed the public,” he said from behind his battered oak desk, the photo of him with Abbie Hoffman partially visible on the back wall, “with terms like ‘domestic terrorist’ and ‘uncontrollable anarchist.’ Playing the press, I might add,” he said with a nod to Sanchez. There was a cut during which he’d shifted his weight.
Prof. Scanlon Pratt, Director, The Oregon Experiment
appeared below him on the screen. For the sake of credibility he was glad he’d shaved off his beard. “Twenty-three years is completely out of line with typical sentences for like crimes. We can’t overlook the politics of the sentence. The prosecutor essentially argued that these were political acts of terrorism that threatened the nation, and the punishment reflects the fact that the judge accepted those arguments. In my view it’s completely without merit. When a judicial system allows the emotions of an event like nine-eleven to blur its judgment of a very different sort of case, it fosters, historically, the kind of atmosphere that can trigger radical and even more violent action.”

They cut back to Sanchez outside and, as she spoke, a red splatter burst on the gray concrete facade of the courthouse. Red paint, he realized. A paint-filled glass bottle. Then, when a second bottle smashed against the building, the police, who weren’t wearing face shields or riot gear, gripped their batons across their chests and took two coordinated steps forward. The cameras remained fixed on the standoff as Sanchez filled airtime, but after a couple of minutes with no further escalation, the broadcast returned to the newscasters in the studio and a piece on Snake River dams that were devastating the sockeye run.

Scanlon muted the TV with the remote. “I like that last line about triggers, don’t you?”

“I’m proud of you,” Naomi said.

He brushed a finger along Sammy’s milk-filled cheek, then along Naomi’s breast. “It felt good. Sort of a rush.”

She smiled, the smile quickly turning to a yawn, and toted Sammy off, sacked on her shoulder, to the bedroom.

Sirens wailed without a break, mostly coming from downtown, but then one raced by their house. The news cut back to the protests: police handcuffing a kid in black; the courthouse splotched with dozens of red bursts; shattered plate glass at Starbucks.

He was revved, and when Naomi came back to the couch after putting Sammy down, he muted the TV again. “How are you feeling?” he asked, taking hold of her hand.

“Fine.” She nodded. “Good.”

He tried to kiss her, but she turned her face away. She’d never answered his question about disliking his smell, but the fact was they’d barely kissed since they got to Oregon, never mind anything approaching a sex life. The day she told him her nose was back was the last time they’d truly made love. Twice since then, lying on her side with her back to him in bed, she’d rolled into a ball of guilt and resignation and invited him in from behind.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“What does any of this have to do with getting your book written?”

He explained the currency that visibility had in academic circles, but she didn’t hide her skepticism, and of course he didn’t mention Fenton’s.

“You always said the book’s what counts.”

“Or articles, or talking-head stuff on TV. It’s all good.”

“But you’re still writing?”

“It’s coming along.”

“And does your girlfriend know you’re just using her movement to get a book out of it?”

He was
not
using the movement for a book. “She knows about my research.”

“And she likes the catchy new name?”

His eyes darted to the TV. “I intended to tell you about that.”

“America Sanchez knows. I see the fliers at Sequoia’s house, and some single mom tells me it was page two in the newspaper.”

“If you read the Douglas paper and not just the
New York—
”

“So that’s what this is about? What newspaper I read?”

He said nothing.

“That was supposed to be special for us.”

“Use it or lose it,” he blurted, immediately regretting it.

She started to cry, and he reached his arms around her. Although she turned her face away, she collapsed against his chest, shaking, whimpering. “If I’m going to be the best mother I can be,” she began, and he waited for her to finish, holding her as he hadn’t in months, her body warm and brimming with emotion, releasing to him, which released in Scanlon the flood of love and affection knotted up in his chest. While Sammy slept, they could reclaim the Oregon Experiment for themselves with leaves of mint, a mandarin, a pot of spicy tea.