Age of Blight. Kristine Ong Muslim

circumstances. It was a moot point. “So, why do you keep doing it?” I could not help but ask.

      And he said with the air of the unflappable, “Because I can.”

      I have not seen Harry since, and I can’t say I’m surprised.

       3.

       [Harry Harlow] “kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive. It’s as if he sat down and said, ‘I’m only going to be around another ten years. What I’d like to do, then, is leave a great big mess behind.’ If that was his aim, he did a perfect job.”

      – An account by William Mason, one of Harlow’s students, as reported by Harlow’s biographer Deborah Blum in The Monkey Wars (Oxford University Press, 1994)

      George Bernard Shaw, who lives next door in a sunlit bungalow surrounded by his wild orchids and well-trimmed shrubbery, is not good friends with Harry Harlow. Commenting on his neighbor’s achievements, Shaw once remarked, “Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.” And although I found myself agreeing with Shaw, I did so grudgingly as it meant that I had failed as a proper wire mother to nurture Harry; to encourage him to become a man of dignity and honor—two qualities that escaped him entirely as he hurtled toward his great all-American dream and the pageantry that went with it, leaving me and his early experiments far behind.

      When the humidity is just right and there is no need to worry about my teeth chattering, I find myself wondering about Harry a lot. I wonder what goes on inside that mind of his. My wires twitch and my imagined folds of skin wrinkle, sometimes in terror, sometimes in awe.

      Let me tell you about a third thing, the rape rack, a crude piece of equipment Harry designed as an adolescent and always carried with him inside his alligator tote bag. The rack was intended for disturbed monkeys finally freed from the total isolation chamber, for disturbed monkeys that had regressed such that they refused or did not know how to mate. A simple affair, the rape rack secures the female monkeys in a mating posture and forces them to copulate.

      As for the offspring born out of the ghastly rape-rack-method, they ended up being ignored by their mothers, had their heads crushed by their mothers, or held down against the floor as their mothers bit off pieces of their feet and fingers. Mothers.

      As a mother myself, although of the wire variety, I cannot stop seeing the triumphant glee in Harry’s eyes when he discovered the monkeys mutilating their young. I imagine his delight, the glow in his eyes, and sometimes, I feel dread constrict my nonexistent stomach, a tingling in my nonexistent knees, a weakening as the vacuum in my nonexistent throat closes in. But when the days are long and there is nothing else to do but wait for my long-gone son’s return, I dream up scenarios where I whisper to my boy as he reaches out to me for his daily ration: Come to mama, Harry. Come forth and drink your milk. The wires are waiting, waiting, waiting to prick you with their barbs, love you to hell and damnation with their invigorating pinpricks of pain. I’ll shake you and I’ll shake you and I’ll shake you until death does us part. And until then and because you need me, Harry, you need me to stay alive, the wounds from my love-embrace will continue to fester, to be reopened, to never ever heal. The blood from the wounds scoured afresh would taint everything you do and everything you are as you go fashioning despair out of steel containers, irradiating and maiming and taking what you don’t own, tying the unwilling ones to your rape rack, reintroducing them into the natural world after torturing them, when all this time you knew, Harry, you knew that they were irreparably damaged. Because nothing ever heals, my boy. Nothing really ever heals.

       The Ghost of Laika Encounters a Satellite

      I, Alpha Space Dog and only passenger of Sputnik 2, am trained to keep my head, paws, and tail inside the spacecraft at all times. I am the first animal launched into orbit and the first animal to be deliberately killed in space—or that was the plan at least.

      My real name is Kudryavka, Russian for “little curly,” before they changed it to Laika. I was a stray, and I thought God-Dog had finally beamed Its mercy-paw on me when somebody took me from the streets of Moscow, scrubbed me clean, and fed me the tastiest, juiciest meat I ever had in my life.

      There were three of us at first, three not-so-lonely but starving strays. They made us do a battery of buoyancy exercices, tabletop jogging, spin routines, the whole nine yards. At the end of the training period, it was none other than the chief scientist, Dr. Gazenko, who picked me to board the great rocket. He said I was in tiptop shape. I was also described as quiet, charming, not quarrelsome with the other dogs.

      On November 3, 1957, they put me in the capsule. What was on my mind at the time? The juicy steak, of course. The one they always gave me each time I successfully completed a task. The technician kissed my nose. Another hugged me tightly before strapping me into my harness. That hug should have alerted me to what they had in store for me. Then they locked me inside, and maybe for the first time I felt lonely. I was shot into space.

      There’s no pleasant way to state what happened next, so I’ll just say it. The core sustainer failed to automatically disengage from the payload, and I died by extreme overheating a few hours after launch.

      In 1957, the Soviet PR machine put out all the stops and told people that I was euthanized when the oxygen ran out on day six. I would have loved it had they given me a time-release lethal dose of poison. That meant I could’ve expire painlessly, while they still got their readouts—temperature, radiation levels, etc. That would have been a gentler, friendlier way to die. What really happened eventually came out in 2002: excruciating death by boiling of internal organs, which was, unfortunately for me, not instantaneous.

      Have you seen my collectible stamp? (I had my face on a postage stamp.) I am gazing in the direction of the person who was coaxing me to mug for the camera because I was going to get a steak later. I was looking toward the direction of men. I was looking toward the direction of hope. In one corner, Dr. Gazenko seemed pleased and happy.

      I thought I got the window seat, which was exciting. But when they sealed the hatch, I could not see anything anymore. There were tiny lights before me. All the lights were strange and red and ominous during liftoff. In an hour or two, the heat became unbearable. The thermal insulation was coming off. And there I was inside a space capsule without a window, orbiting the earth, slowly cooking.

      You should know that there are no speed bumps in zero gravity. Freefall is a wonderful experience, but only if you are still alive to enjoy it. Oh, speed bumps would have been most welcome.

      I remember being in the backseat of a car once. There is a child beside me, and he is giggling. The child’s mother is in the front seat, the back of her head refuses to look at us, but I am happy because the child is happy. That’s as far back as I can remember before I ended up prowling the farmers markets of Moscow. Speed bumps would have been nice, would have jolted me back to where I could be sitting right beside you—you could be that child or his mother. Inside the car, I remember the woman’s voice intoning: I know, I know. All you do is watch, hide, watch, hide. See that? Is she talking about the anger of the discarded, as it is the only thing in the world that is instantly recognizable? No one can look away from it without first being challenged. And that’s my kind of anger, the one felt by the discarded, the type of anger that most people are compelled, for purposes of survival, to ignore. When you look at me long enough, you might catch a glimpse of it. Do you feel challenged? It’s true that we always grow back into our triumphant stable shapes, where we pose as if to contain something, something with a purpose, something with a will to entertain, to love, to hope.

      In my memory of being in the backseat of a car with people who appear to be my keepers, the woman in the front seat and the small child giggling beside me, something must have happened. I just cannot remember what it is. But I know it is important. One of the child’s fingers is crusty with peanut butter.