Each egg was struggling with minute hectic life. Shards of shell broke off. The tiny limbs of unknown creatures were pushing themselves out.
“What are they?” Max said.
They didn’t have to wait long to find out. When the first flipper appeared, Newton whispered: “They’re turtles.”
The scenario played out in Max’s mind: a mama turtle swims in with the high tide to lay her eggs. She gets stuck in a tide pool. Next a pair of horrible two-legged things blunder into the pool, heave her onto the sand, and…
The baby turtles didn’t even look like turtles, the same way those baby shearwaters on the kitchen table hadn’t really looked like birds. They had no real shell, only a translucent carapace draping their grape-size bodies. You could see through their skin as if through a greasy fast-food bag: the dark pinbone of their spines, the weird movement of their organs. For all their newborn freshness, they still looked ineffably old. Max reached to touch one. Newton grabbed his wrist.
“You can’t. If it gets human smell on it, its mom won’t take it back.”
It took a moment for it to sink in.
“Let’s just get them into the water,” Max said softly.
Newton nodded. “I guess it’s okay to touch them for that.”
With infinite care, the boys picked up the baby turtles and carried them across the sand. They tenderly picked the shards of eggshell off their bodies. They knelt at the shore and let them go. Their flippers paddled as they made a beeline for the open sea.
The air above was alive with harried wing beats and livid screeches, the bats and gulls having been thwarted in their attempt to poach an easy meal.
The boys made sure every turtle made it safely into the water. The birds made crazed dive-bombs: their wings pelted the ocean, desperate to snag the babies before they submerged.
“No, you bastards!”
Max stumbled into the water, waving his arms. He shadowed the turtles into deeper waters, wading out as they skimmed through the sea, coaxing them lightly with his hands.
“Go on, now. Swim, swim. Fast as you can.”
The water rose to his stomach. The riptide sucked at his legs. Only then did he reluctantly return to shore, dripping and shivering.
They returned to the fire. Newton smiled wanly and made a checkmark in the night air.
“That’s our good deed for the day.”
LIKE TOM PADGETT, Dr. Clive Edgerton has earned his fair share of nicknames.
Dr. Mengele 2.0.
Dr. Death.
Then there are the garden-variety appellants that society as a whole tends to apply to men like him.
Megalomaniac.
Mad scientist.
Psychopath.
Then there is the sobriquet that Edgerton himself insists you call him by—it was, in fact, one of the conditions of our interview—the title he’s rightfully earned, having graduated with top honors from the finest medical learning institute on the east coast:
Doctor.
“Dr. Edgerton is most likely pathologically insane,” says his administering physician, Dr. Loretta Hughes. “If you look at the things he has done—compounded by his near total lack of remorse regarding them—you can’t help but draw that conclusion.”
She leads me down an austere hallway inside the Kingston Penitentiary, her crepe-soled shoes whispering on the pea-green tiles. Edgerton has been incarcerated here, in the mental health wing, since his arrest. The ensuing trial became a sensation; Edgerton had sat defiantly in the middle of the media storm. His shaven head and outrageous courtroom antics—the grandstanding, the fulminating—gave him the air of a revivalist preacher. The talking heads and pundits dined out for months on Edgerton’s daily servings of bloody red meat.
“But perhaps he’s not insane,” Hughes tells me. “The fact may be that his brain is simply unmappable. He is incredibly intelligent. I hate to use a cliché like ‘off the charts,’ but… the fact is that modern science has no real means to judge an intellect like his. It would have been the same with Leonardo da Vinci. The dividing line between genius and insanity is very thin and quite permeable—which is why so many geniuses descend into madness.”
When I remark that Edgerton’s genius was incredibly destructive, Hughes matter-of-factly says: “Da Vinci drew up the blueprint for the first land mine. There’s plenty of blood on his hands, too.”
Edgerton’s cell is 18-by-18, gray brick, with a single cot and a stainless steel commode. As the prison’s marquee prisoner, he doesn’t share his cell. The walls are festooned with charts and formulae and an oversize poster of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
“Da Vinci came up with the idea for the land mine,” I tell him by way of introduction. “Did you know that?”
“Of course,” he tells me in the bristly manner that would be familiar to anyone who saw his televised trial.
Up close it is shocking just how un-academic Edgerton looks. He’s big. Tall. Muscular. Thick across the shoulders, which taper down to a trim waist. Twice during our interview he will drop without warning and pump out exactly fifty push-ups before returning to our conversation. He’s got a Joe Namath quality: Broadway Joe a few years past his prime, going a little to seed but still possessed of the grace and quickness from his playing days.
There are two concessions to the scientist stereotype. The first is his head: he prefers to keep it shaven; it is bulbous, venous, ovoid, vaguely alien in appearance. The second is his glasses: thick lensed, black and boxy. The lenses are stuck with an accretion of grit and eye crust: it’s as though Edgerton can’t be bothered to wipe them. His chilly green eyes seem to be staring at me through a grease-streaked window.
Those eyes. They are not normal eyes. They seem to stare through me as though I were glass, focusing on the dead brick behind me.
“Do you know anything about Asian killer wasps?” he asks abruptly. “The Asian killer wasp is the only insect on earth that kills for fun. They’re just gigantic. A full two inches long. They love killing honeybees. They’ll destroy entire colonies. Only takes a few minutes. They grab a bee and lop its head off with their giant mandibles, like popping the head off a dandelion. It would be like a giant mutant running loose in a nursery, stomping babies to death. No reason. They just enjoy doing it.”
I ask if wasps are as fascinating to him as worms.
“Oh no,” he says. “Worms are much more interesting. Worms are indiscriminate, you see. They will eat anything from a hippopotamus to an aphid. They are the ultimate piggybackers: invite one inside and it’s there for good. They’re nightmare houseguests: once they’re in, you’ll never get rid of them. They’re one of the oldest species on earth. Right after the crust cooled there were worms swimming in the primordial soup. The first creature to flop out of a tide pool onto land had a worm inside of it, I guarantee you.”
He smiled vacantly. “They say cockroaches will be the last things left on earth after a nuclear holocaust. Don’t believe it. The last thing on earth will be a worm in the guts of those cockroaches, sucking them dry.”
He pauses as if to regroup. Our conversation has this tenor: elliptical, backtracking, dead-ending.