“I’m starting to think maybe I don’t,” he said, and Julia started to turn away. “Angel. Go ahead and play it anyway.”
Angel said nothing more. She just let the recording play.
“This is about the — the experiment. I know it is. What? No. No, I want to tell you. I need to. It started in 1984.”
Marcia Kennedy’s voice was thin and whispery. It sounded like her mouth was dry when she spoke, like getting the words out took real effort. Even distorted by the speaker of the motel room phone, the urgency in the voice was plain.
“Please, just — please. Please let me talk, I have to get through this in one go or I’ll start—
“1984, like I said. I was in a hospital then, a hospital in Oregon. I was in one of my depressive phases at the time. It was a bad one. I… I tried to hurt myself.
“They took me to this hospital. They pumped me full of lithium, which is the best drug they have to treat my disease. It works, I guess. It makes me feel normal again. It also makes me so thirsty I feel like I’m going to die, and it makes me gain all this weight, and… I don’t like it. I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I complained about it. They took me to see a doctor I’d never met before. I thought he was going to admonish me for complaining so much, but instead he was very kind. He said he understood that the side effects of lithium were bad, but that I had to take something. He said there was something else they could try. Some new kind of drug that the army had developed.
“I jumped at the chance. I mean, why wouldn’t I? He said it was experimental, that they weren’t sure what the side effects would be like, but I was so thirsty. I was so thirsty. I had to beg my father to sign the papers, the, the consent forms or whatever, but he did it. He looked so hopeful. He thought they were going to cure me. I just wanted to get out of that hospital so I could go home.
“They started me on the drug right away. They said it might make me gain weight, and I might have some problems with memory. They weren’t kidding. The trial for the drug ran nine months. I don’t remember more than a handful of days in that time. I remember sitting in a day room at the hospital, playing chess with somebody. She was schizophrenic and she cheated. She cheated at chess; she would just, just make up new rules, and say I had to play by them, but they didn’t make sense. I got really frustrated and I could barely breathe. I remember looking down and there was my stomach. It was huge. I felt like I’d swallowed a bowling ball. I started to cry because I’d gotten so fat. Weight gain was one of the side effects of lithium, too. I guess I thought they must be related kinds of drugs.
“Except this one didn’t make me thirsty. It made me nauseated. I don’t remember much of those months. But I remember always wanting to throw up. I remember my hair thinning, and my sweat smelled funny. I have little glimpses, sometimes. Little recollections. I remember the pattern of light on a wall, or I see myself in a mirror, and my skin was so clear. It had never been that clear in my life.
“At the end of the nine months I woke up in this bed, there was blood on the sheets and I had no idea what I was doing there. The doctor, the kindly doctor was there and he held my hand. He held my hand for hours because I was crying, except I didn’t know why I was crying. I felt like something had ended. Like something had been taken away from me but I didn’t know what. He told me I wasn’t thinking straight, that the drug had unexpected side effects. One of them was that it made me hallucinate some things, except I couldn’t remember any hallucinations. He told me it had also interacted badly with my digestive system, which explained the nausea. He said that because of the drug my appendix had become inflamed and that they had to remove it. I had a scar on my stomach, this huge scar right at the bottom of my stomach, right at my bikini line. He said that was where they took out my appendix.
“They stopped giving me the new drug, which was fine, I didn’t want it anymore. I figured lithium was better. Anything would be better. I got to go home. The weight came off pretty fast and I guess — I guess I just went on with my life. I didn’t think about it too much. I didn’t want to. It was like I went to sleep and had a nightmare, and when I woke up, it was nine months later.
“I had dreams sometimes but they were just… dreams. For years I had them and I told myself they meant nothing. When you’re bipolar, you learn to make a lot of excuses. That’s what my therapist tells me. You make excuses for your behavior. When you’re manic and people tell you you’re acting crazy, you just tell yourself they’re jealous because you’re having more fun than they are, or that they just can’t keep up with you. When you’re depressed, on the other end of the cycle, you make up excuses why you need to spend the day in bed, or why the rent is late…
“So every time I thought about that drug trial, every time I would remember something, I would just tell myself none of it was real. That the things I was thinking were just disordered thoughts, or misinterpreted memories, or whatever. Nothing really happened to me in that hospital except I went a little loopy, and wow, how fortunate was it that I couldn’t remember what I did all that clearly. I didn’t want to remember. I wanted to put it behind me.
“Sometimes people would ask me about my scar. You know… boyfriends, mostly. I’ve had a few, and they always ask where it came from. I tell them I had my appendix out a long time ago. In 1985. Usually nobody asks twice. But there was one guy, once. He asked and he said his mom had a scar like that. I said she’d probably had her appendix out, too, but he said no. He said she’d had a cesarean section when he was born. He was upside down in her womb and they had to cut him out.
“I don’t… I don’t want to say what I think. It sounds crazy. It just sounds crazy. But you know, don’t you? You’re a woman. You know what I think.
“You know what I think they took from me.”
SUPERIOR, COLORADO: APRIL 15, T+70:31
CPO Andrews wiped a tear from her cheek. She had turned her face away from Chapel’s, so he couldn’t tell what she was thinking, though he could guess.
Julia got up without a word and left the room.
“Angel,” Chapel said, “I didn’t know.”
“No, Chapel, of course you didn’t. None of us did. We never stopped to ask where the chimeras came from.”
Chapel had imagined they must have been grown in vats somewhere, fetuses floating in glass tubes in some dark laboratory. When he thought about it now, that seemed ridiculous. That kind of technology didn’t even exist. Whereas even in 1984 it would have been child’s play for a scientist like William Taggart to implant embryos in unsuspecting women all over the country.
The thought made him gag a little.
“I suppose we can assume Olivia Nguyen and Christina Smollett underwent the same… procedure,” Chapel said. He stopped talking then. He wanted to ask more questions, but with CPO Andrews lying next to him it felt like it would be in bad taste to continue his line of thought. “Maybe we should talk about this later,” he said.
CPO Andrews turned to face him again. Her mouth was set in a hard line. “No,” she said. “No. This is inexcusable. You’re a man, and I don’t expect you to understand the level of violation we’re talking about.”
“I guess you’re right about that,” Chapel admitted.
“But even worse,” Andrews said, and she pressed her lips tightly closed for a moment as if she couldn’t bear to speak, but then went on, “even worse than what the government did — would be to just keep it secret. To not do something.”
Chapel nodded slowly. “This isn’t about hunting down the chimeras anymore. Not for me. It’s about finding out what was done back in 1984 and 1985, and finding out who’s responsible.”