He could, of course, have seen these disagreements in a negative light, as yet another symbol — even the definitive symbol — of the infinite void that yawned between them. But, as it happens, the son was powerfully moved by the comprehensiveness, the exactitude, the perfection of the disagreement here with his father. In fact, he had never felt closer to him.
85: SHIMURA’S ROBOT
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The inventor Shimura’s much-anticipated robotic father — which was designed to provide orphanages with a paternal presence, albeit a humanoid one — has turned out to be a total disaster. Mostly he ignores the orphans. Every fifteen minutes he raises one of his robotic arms and violently hushes the entire orphanage. He consumes the biographies of business titans, which, according to the manual, are actually scanned via the eyes and downloaded onto his massive hard drive. Shimura seems baffled by the negative response to his robot, which has led to speculation about his childhood.
86: HUMAN CONSUMPTION
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Until Thursday, the Hirsch Company had produced its artificial food dye — used mainly to color sausage casings — continuously since 1868, when it was synthesized by the Breslau-born chemist Felix Hirsch. Hirsch got fantastically rich off the chemical. On his deathbed he summoned his eldest son, who was about to inherit both the fortune and the company, and confessed, in an agonized tone which his son had never heard before, that the synthetic dye was poisonous to human beings. In large quantities it shut down major organs, brought on huge tumors, caused the heart to rupture.
His son was struck dumb.
“Say something,” his father begged.
The son murmured, “How long have you known?”
All along, Hirsch admitted. From that winter morning in 1868 when he had first synthesized the chemical. He was weak, he said. He was corrupt. He wanted money; he wanted his family to have money. Until this moment, he had not told a soul. But his son was free to do with the knowledge as he pleased. “Expose me,” whispered Felix Hirsch. “Repudiate me.” His last words were: “Renounce me.”
But the son decided to say nothing. His father remained a chemical hero, the Hirsch Company kept churning out gallon upon gallon of the poisonous orange dye, and the Hirsch family continued to live in luxury. In fact, the son cornered the global market for sausage casing coloration, driving out of business the organic, immensely salubrious dyes manufactured by his competitors. But on his deathbed, wracked with guilt, he summoned his son, the new chairman, and told him the family dye killed organs, caused tumors, and exploded hearts.
His son was aghast. “How long have you known?”
“All along.”
“It explodes hearts?”
“Yes,” said the father. “Tell the world.”
But the son told no one. His grandfather remained a chemical hero, his father was considered a business legend, casings around the globe continued to be colored by Hirsch dyes, and the family fortune grew without bound. And as he died he mentioned to his son the organ-killing, tumor-causing, heart-exploding properties of the family dye and encouraged him to come clean.
A dynastic pattern had been established, and whenever such a pattern has been established — son inherits sausage casing colorant, son learns truth about lethal nature of casing colorant, son nevertheless exploits to the fullest the financial potential of colorant, son divulges truth about colorant to his own son and moments before death counsels him to confess the family’s crimes to the public — it is actually very hard to break. So it happened that the Hirsch family continued making their noxious dye for nearly 150 years, causing tens of millions of organs to fail, tens of millions of hearts to explode, and tens of millions of tumors to grow to unbelievable sizes. If the dye consumer did not die of organ failure or heart explosion, his big, abundant tumors would impinge on the few organs that did survive and bring about the most gruesome death imaginable. Yet so many other chemicals caused similar problems in the period between 1868 and now that these deaths were never traced back to the sausage casings or from the sausage casings to the dye. Till last week, only the Hirsch fathers and sons knew the truth. They inherited their death toll reluctantly, they invested their death toll prudently, they watched their death toll grow by several percentage points a year, and in the end they left their death toll and all of its ethical considerations to their sons.
Last week, of course, saw the publication of the first study to suggest that Orange 6, the colorant in certain sausage casings, is toxic. Researchers fed a large quantity of these casings to twenty rats, all of whom died, twenty cats, all of whom died, and twenty dogs, all of whom died instantly. Then three hundred white mice died after ingesting the casings. In a final round of testing, eleven monkeys were fed an extract of Orange 6 mixed with milk. The monkeys died.
The public outcry was immediate and intense. Yet the current head of the Hirsch Company, Adam Hirsch, stood by his family’s product. The dye, he insisted, is absolutely safe for human consumption. To prove it, he pledged to eat one thousand sausage casings on a platform in the center of the Hirsch Family Atrium, home, as it happens, to one of the finest bonsai collections in the Western hemisphere.
There has been plenty of speculation about his motives. Some say his father, who died young, failed to pass on the family secret. Others believe Hirsch had been told that the dye was toxic but couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that his family was capable of such villainy. A third camp thinks Hirsch had been told the secret, believed it, and wanted to atone for the family sins in a “poetic” manner, by eating a bunch of his own colorant and suffering the consequences in public. Whatever the reason, that is what happened Thursday in his family’s atrium, surrounded by their stunted Japanese trees. After 70 sausage casings his spleen shut down, after 110 casings his kidneys failed, and as he ingested his 233rd casing, his heart exploded. When his body was cut open by the coroner it was found to be filled with tumors.
The company, headed now by Adam Hirsch’s son, has issued a press release announcing that it would halt production of Orange 6 temporarily, pending further study of its possible effect on the human body.
87: STUNT
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A Las Vegas illusionist who rose to fame in the 1980s and ’90s with a series of televised stunts — including jumping from an airplane without a parachute, hanging upside-down from a crane in Times Square for forty-four hours without a safety net, and crossing the Grand Canyon on a high wire without a harness — pitched last week to ABC, NBC, and CBS a stunt in which he would discuss politics and modern-day society with his octogenarian father for ten straight hours, without, he said, a safety harness. He would discuss power, money, unions, war, Social Security, human nature, anti-Semitism, and the JFK assassination, among other topics, with his elderly, extremely frustrated father for ten hours without a break, and with no harness. At the end of the discussion, he would jump onto a landing platform, where he would receive careful medical attention. The illusionist called it his “greatest stunt yet,” though all three networks ultimately passed on his pitch.