How High We Go in the Dark(27)
The staff simply nods, but that isn’t good enough for me.
“I need to hear you say it: Yes, I won’t say a word.”
Yes, I won’t say a word, they repeat in unison like we’re in grade school. Okay, good. But this isn’t some top-secret facility. There are no security clearances or repercussions here. The grad students were suspect even before the outbreak, swiping medical supplies for god knows what. I worry it’s only a matter of time.
We divide the days between working with Snortorious and fulfilling our hospital organ orders. I pay Patrice’s sister, Ammie, a speech therapist, to assist us in our research. We clear out one of the lab rooms to create a study/play area for Snortorious. We set up a television and a computer equipped with programmed paddle buttons specially modified for pig feet. I dig through my attic for my son’s old books and toys. Dahktar. It’s no surprise the word he heard the most around the lab would be his first. When Ammie and I work with him in his room, we break lab protocol and remove our masks and gloves. He seems to soak up everything we share with him—flash cards, cartoons, children’s books, including The Three Little Pigs and Charlotte’s Web. We treat him like a child, though it’s hard to say where his mind is at any given moment. Ammie gives him treats, gold stars. Positive reinforcement is important, she says. He’s learning so fast. At first, he has a new favorite word each day— sheep, horse, farmer, bus, yellow, mud, Ammie. Mornings and evenings, he screams the word hungry or makes a specific request from his rapidly growing vocabulary.
Apple, he says one morning. Please.
The other day he told Patrice Thank you after he finished eating. Good pig. He favors reruns of the old Crocodile Hunter show on Animal Planet, snorting excitedly whenever he sees a hippo. He also has a fascination with rocket launches, the test flights for a manned mission to Mars that somehow always seems a decade away. He counts down with mission control before running excitedly around the room at liftoff. We try to change the station whenever anything disturbing comes on—neglected and starving farm animals whose owners have died, rotting crops, the displaced clambering onto relief cruise ships after wildfires drove them from their homes. But he’s seen the reports of hospital plague wards overflowing into trailers in parking lots and airport hangars. Sick, people. Sick, people. Dahktar help. He’s seen the funerary industry take over our banking system, the footage of people paying for food at the grocery store with mortuary cryptocurrencies tied to ad-ridden phone apps. Come laugh with us at the see-tee of Laugher, Snortorious repeats like a mantra until he can form the words. Come laugh with us at the City of Laughter. For only one thousand bereavement crypto-tokens, you can scatter your loved one’s ashes on a one-hour cruise around SanFancisco Bay.
And then tonight, right as I’m about to leave the lab, I hear Snortorious say a new word: Lonely. I approach his playroom and sit with him, scratching behind his ears. Lonely pig, he says. My phone buzzes; it’s my ex again, a photo of Fitch holding a giant stuffed tiger on his final day. Snortorious repeats himself, and I feel guilty for having given him this life, one that would have ended weeks ago had he remained silent—a heart to Indiana, a liver to Michigan, lungs to Washington, DC. Of course, we’ve made other arrangements, sent other pigs. But something tugs at me as he speaks. I think about how when I go home, I’ll heat up a microwave dinner, curl up in bed, watch one of the few videos I have of Fitch, a two-minute clip of him building a sand castle, over and over until I fall asleep. Instead, I grab the sleeping bag I keep in my office for when I’m burning the midnight oil and decide to keep Snortorious company.
He rests his chin on my shoulder as I read to him. His snorts create a tiny slimy pool in a wrinkle of my lab coat. We read Where the Wild Things Are. He points a foot when he wants me to linger on a picture, sometimes bringing his snout to the page as if he might inhale the words.
Max, he says. Wild Rumpus.
“That’s right,” I say. He can’t quite read yet, but Patrice and Ammie are working with him. He’s got his ABCs down and I linger over each word so he can put two and two together. We finish and switch to The Velveteen Rabbit. I try to flip past the title page and Snortorious sticks his foot on my hand, points to the orange stegosaurus nameplate pasted inside the front cover with my son’s name scrawled in black crayon.
“Fitch,” I say. I take out my phone and show him a few photos. I point to myself and then back to the pictures to drive home the relationship. “My son.” I don’t know if Snortorious can comprehend what I’m saying, though. He was raised in this building since he was a piglet.
Fitch, he says. Fitch son.
I recall how Fitch used to yell to me from across the hall after he brushed his teeth, telling me it was story time. He always asked for one more fairy tale, a few more pages, always falling asleep as soon as I gave him what he wanted. Snortorious is growing sleepy, too. His eyes are fluttering. At home, on my nightstand, story time has been waiting for years. There’s a bookmark a few chapters shy of the end of The Return of the King, right as they’re approaching Mount Doom. Fitch had been trying to read it on his own despite the book being much too advanced for him, but when he was admitted to the plague ward, he’d asked if we could finish it together, our words drowning out the sounds of the hospital. I put away the books and drape a blanket over Snortorious, lie down beside him, dwarfed by his body that’s never seen an open field or another barnyard animal. I wonder if he dreams of that life (or if he dreams about the kind of life we once took for granted, until the plague threatened to take it away).