How High We Go in the Dark(30)

“I really thought I could save him,” I say.

“I know.”

“And I’m glad you took Fitch.” I think about how I might have been there for his final months if I weren’t so stubborn. I picture Snortorious at a park like that, asking me to help him into a seat, to end it all.

“I need to go,” Dorrie says.

“Do you think if I had gone with you—” I begin.

“Look, I hope you feel better,” she says.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” I say. “I’m glad Fitch had him. He mailed me some of Fitch’s drawings. I have them on the fridge.”

I’m about to ask if I can visit her sometime, if she ever wants to come back. I want to hear her favorite stories about Fitch. I could linger in the silence of our conversation forever, imagining us able to talk to each other again.

“Goodbye, David,” she says, before quickly hanging up.

You are a doctor. He is a doctor. Everybody doctor. Snortorious’s speech abilities have improved dramatically over the past few weeks. We’ve reached a point where Patrice, Ammie, and I think it might be time to have a serious talk with him, our pig son, as Ammie refers to him. When we’re near his pen, we clear our minds as much as possible. We still don’t know for sure how his telepathy works, if he’s able to hear our thoughts or not. I am a pig. What job is pig? He has begun placing people into categories, purposes, asking the big questions, like why are we all here? Why can’t he talk to other pigs? He asks about love and friendship when he watches soap operas, war and the Arctic plague when watching the news. He asks about people in Washington fighting over a moratorium on gas automobile production and aid to California towns destroyed by wildfire. He asks What is a moratorium? Kissing means love. Many sick people. Nobody agree on anything.

“We can’t keep telling him that we’ll answer these questions later.” Ammie corners me in the lab parking lot, climbs into my car. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to spend time with someone outside of the lab. She squeezes my hands. I linger on how that feels.

“I know,” I say.

“I know you’re only trying to protect him. But it’s not like he’s a boy. As much as we might wish it, he doesn’t have the same rights in that lab as we do. He’s going to have even less freedom once the government gets involved. You know they’ll move him away from us. Soon.”

“It’s just that . . . what is he going to do with what we tell him?”

Ammie remains silent, looks out the window. Her dangling crystal earrings cast tiny rainbows on the dash.

“We help him,” she finally says. “We give him options.”

At night, after the lab has cleared, I let the guard know that I’ll be working late. I disconnect the security camera in Snortorious’s room.

Story time? he says.

“Yes, soon,” I say. “But first I need to talk to you about something. You asked me yesterday about a pig’s job.”

Snortorious comes closer and sits in front of me. He’s wearing a bright red cardigan that Ammie knitted for him. Now, fully grown, he towers over my head when I sit on the floor. I knew I would choke up if I tried to tell him the truth, so I’ve come prepared with a slideshow, videos on a tablet to help illustrate my points.

“You might have had a very different life,” I begin. I show him a vegan activist video. I explain to him that the “Old MacDonald” song he learned with Ammie has another side and it isn’t just about animals living together with their human. Snortorious takes a moment to process this.

Pig is food?

“Yes, sometimes,” I say. “But some people keep pigs as pets and there are wild pigs like the ones you see on your nature shows.”

People eat pig.

Snortorious’s snorts become frantic, like he can’t quite catch his breath. He is squealing, a shrill, somber wail that shoots through my body. I stand and scan the lab, make sure the guard didn’t hear anything.

“Shh, shhh.” I embrace Snortorious, rub his back, his ears, allow myself to feel my pig son for the first time without my gloves. “But that wasn’t your job, okay?” I continue my slideshow. I come to a diagram showing the anatomy of humans and pigs, our organs. “Inside,” I say, pointing to my heart, to his heart. I pull up the ultrasound cart and run the probe over my chest. “See?” Thump, thump, thump thump, thump, thump. I tap my hand to the beat. When I run the probe over Snortorious, his ears automatically perk up.

Heart make us live, he says, studying the next slide.

“Yes, that’s right. The heart is very important.” I pull out my phone and show him a photo of Fitch.

Son Fitch, he says. Son Fitch. Fitch sick, too?

“Fitch had a bad heart,” I say. “He had the sickness you saw on TV.” I tap Snortorious’s normal heartbeat on his side— babumbum, babumbum—and then mimic arrhythmia— bababumbumbum bumbum bababum bababum bababum. “Your heart is a human heart.” I advance the slide to a diagram and trace my finger along a big yellow arrow from a pig’s heart to a human body. “Your job is to save people.”

Again, Snortorious takes time to process this information. He rolls on his side, his ears twitch. Pigs not save Fitch, he says.

“No,” I say. “But pigs have saved many other people.”