In a normal conversation, that’s when Dolly would have said something, and the conversation would have proceeded with the usual back-and-forth rhythm. But Dolly didn’t have normal conversations with the doctor, and she knew silence didn’t mean he was waiting for her to speak. He was merely pausing for effect. He was merely letting the tension build to make adequate space for his next pronouncement. But she liked it when he talked as if she wasn’t there. That was when she learned things.
“You’re thinking there are multiple factors to take into consideration — genetics, parental health and drug use, environmental toxins, both naturally occurring and man-made. And you can’t forget about random mutation and plain old bad luck. Not to mention that these women neglected to get adequate prenatal care.”
The doctor thrust the file he was holding at her, indicating the end of the discussion. But then he muttered, almost to himself, “And then there’s the concern about munitions safety. I’ve been sent an eye-opening report.”
That was the night Dolly started to look into things. That was when she started to listen extra carefully whenever the doctor was on the phone. But it wasn’t until January, when she heard about a baby that had been born with cleft ears and no eyes, that she started writing letters and emails. She wrote to politicians and to captains of industry and to the heads of research institutes, and when she didn’t receive any satisfactory replies from those people, she wrote to their secretaries and administrative assistants. She even put a classified notice in the newspaper, but six weeks had passed since then, and she had yet to receive even a single form letter in reply. Now she guessed she never would.
1.3 Will
Will Rayburn slouched in front of the television set and watched the penguins string out single file across the ice. Each step transformed four or five inches of the snowy expanse in front of them into the snowy expanse behind as the sturdy bodies trudged across the ice floe, shuffling footstep after shuffling footstep, a testament to survival through unquestioning singleness of purpose. The scenery was bleak — gorgeous and deadly. The narrator announced that the temperature was eighty degrees below zero, that Antarctic winds rose regularly to one hundred miles per hour, and still the penguins put one stubby leg in front of the other as they made their way back to the ancestral birthplace — home! Will’s blue eyes watered to think of it. There was honor in conformity, beauty in unquestioning obedience to instinct, comfort in knowing what the next step was, even if it was genetically programmed and identical to the last million steps, which, he calculated in his head, was how many four-inch increments it was from the edge of the ice to the inland nesting ground.
A commercial for deodorant came on just as his mother entered the room. “Are you crying?” she asked. “What are you crying for?”
“Just something in my eye,” said Will without looking up. It certainly wasn’t because he, too, struggled with hormonally induced odor or because neither of his parents had thought to clue him in about bodily changes in general or about the difference between antiperspirant and deodorant in particular, both of which it appeared he needed, or because Tula Santos had turned him down that afternoon when he’d finally gotten up the nerve to ask her out.
“Here, let me see.”
“No, no, it’s gone now,” said Will, batting her hand away and sinking farther into the shapeless cushions of the couch.
“Well, you can’t sit in front of the television all day. Don’t you have homework?”
“Okay, okay,” said Will, hoping she would leave the room. He liked to be alone. He liked to think of himself as coming from and going nowhere — untethered, unaffiliated, even unnamed. But he couldn’t figure out whether conformity or nonconformity was what he wanted. Of course he wanted to be an individual, of course he wanted to do something no human being had ever before done, but he also wanted to fit in. He wanted to merge with something bigger than himself, to be an integral part of something transformative and grand, though he also wanted to be completely recognizable and unique in case Tula ever looked in his direction and said “Hey” in the breathy way Sammi Green said “Hey” to whichever of the football players she was dating at the time.
“Look, Will. This letter is addressed to you.”
His mother was going on about something from the state university she had found among the junk mail and bills, an envelope with his name on it — what did it have to do with him! The show was coming on again, a distant shot of a lone penguin, a tiny black speck against the ice. Just as the narrator, his voice heavy with inevitability, started to explain what happened to stragglers, his mother hit the off button and repeated, “You can’t sit here all day.” Then she went out of the room, leaving Will behind to ponder what lessons the penguin’s plight might hold for his own.
He couldn’t sit there all day.
He knew he couldn’t, but somehow he was powerless to move. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, he told himself the way his parents had always told him, as if his name conferred special powers, but all he could do was twitch his wrist in the direction of the remote control, which had fallen to the floor on top of the envelope from the university. Not that he had any doubt about what happened to stragglers and not that the next day wouldn’t find him going through the motions at school — not because of some burning desire to better himself, but because he didn’t know what else to do. Sitting on the worn corduroy couch, he was suddenly assailed by questions of free will and self-determination that couldn’t be easily answered, not by the narrator, who was clearly reading from a script, and not by people who willfully stepped out of line but who were still completely bound by convention — if not the convention of going along with everyone else, then the convention of reacting against them — the way they were all bound — or were they? Suddenly the answers to such questions seemed critical before Will was able even to consider taking the next step.
He sat for a while deciding what he would need to survive in the Antarctic, what he would take with him if he had only a sled dog and a sled to carry his gear, or if he had only snowshoes and a backpack and the clothes on his back — no dog, no sled, and certainly no GPS. He would take a down parka with a fur-lined hood, a box of matches, a compass, a pair of sturdy boots, a sharp knife in a leather sheath. He would take a magnifying glass because he liked magnifying things and because a full-sized microscope probably wouldn’t fit. Then, with a huge effort of will, he bent forward and stretched his right hand toward the remote control, clawing until he could just reach the edge of the envelope it had fallen on and slide it toward him, inch by inch, until both the remote and the envelope were cradled in his big outstretched hand.
1.4 Tula
As a young girl, Tula Santos had been able to convince herself that her lowly birth was an advantage, that her feet were firmly planted on the hard rock of existence instead of on unstable elevations, but at sixteen, she knew she was deluding herself. She now suspected that she had been invited to join the Order of the Rainbow for Girls more as an experiment or an act of charity than as a statement of equality, and that her mother’s employer, who was next in line for the position of Mother Advisor and who had no children of her own, thought of her as a project. “I am fortunate to be in a position to give back,” Mrs. August Winslow would proclaim whenever the spotlight shone on her silken shoulders and well-coiffed head. Tula knew that Mrs. Winslow wouldn’t have chosen a project who was ugly or blemished, which is why she spent her pocket money on lotions and oils — not out of vanity, as her friend Sammi Green did, but out of self-preservation, as a stay against the sucking circumstances of her birth.