‘Common frogs,’ said the man at the other end.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I assume these were …?’
‘Laboratory-quality specimens in formaldehyde,’ said the man.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘Now I remember the project. Thanks very much.’
The next thing was a handwritten recipe for primordial soup which included 20 gallons of chicken noodle, 500 Oxo cubes, 500 mg of polypeptides, 40 bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree (an obvious codename) plus quantities of ginseng and assorted multivitamins.
It was the polypeptides that convinced me that I was well out of my depth so I rang up Irv and asked him to come over. He came with a new bottle, sensitive human being that he is, and we looked the whole lot over togezzer. Together. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a good thing that I have a nephew who’s a polymath. He knows everything.’
‘I don’t care if he’s a merphradomite,’ I said. ‘Bring him on.’
So the next day or some other day Artie Nussbaum turned up. He’s at the Guy’s, King’s & St Thomas’ School of Medicine and he’s good with chemistry, biology and computers. He’s a little guy and he looks as if you added water you’d have four or five Charlie Sheens.
‘Oho,’ he said when he looked through what we had. ‘Is this legal?’
‘Artie,’ said Irv, ‘are you going to ask dumb questions or are you going to help your uncle?’
‘Sorry,’ he said. To me he said, ‘Have you got a computer with a modem?’
I led him to the computer and he sighed and said, ‘If you could order me a pizza with pepperoni and a six-pack of John Smith?’
‘No prob,’ I said. I got him what he needed and we left him to it. He had to go to lectures from time to time but after three days he gave us a shopping list for all kinds of things plus three Rana temporaria. We ordered the laser gear, the extra computer software, the oil drum and the rest of it. For the primordial soup there was the matter of the forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree. Artie was not bothered about that. ‘What we’re doing here,’ he said, ‘is creating a suspension of disbelief in which the visual particles of Justine Two will be held pending the zapping which will precipitate the whole woman. For Ring-Bo-Ree read any high-calorie filler that will enhance the body of the soup, say John Smith, forty cans of.’
‘Julv,’ said Irv.
‘Sorry?’ said Artie.
‘Just thinking out loud,’ said Irv. ‘I agree that John Smith can go in for Ring-Bo-Ree.’
I did too, so that was one less problem. When we got to Rana temporaria Thierson & Bates said, ‘Sorry, we’re temporarily out of frogs. Would you like some other batrachian?’
‘Like what?’ I said.
‘Toads?’ said the man. ‘I can do you some nice Bufo bufo in formaldehyde.’
‘Yes,’ I said, going all goosepimply, ‘those will do nicely.’
24 Artie Nussbaum
30 January 2004. OK, so I didn’t ask dumb questions. Actually, after a while I became completely involved in what I was doing and I stopped worrying about legality and morality. Like the guys who worked on the first atom bomb, I guess. Once you see that something is possible, you’re damn well going to make it happen if you can.
After I gave Irv and Grace my shopping list they handed me one: a whole blood transfusion kit. Irv put the cash in my hand for the necessaries and I got everything at Chiron Medical Supplies near Middlesex Hospital. ‘We’ll need it for when she comes out of the soup,’ said Grace.
When our preparations were complete there was nothing to do but Justine Two. Irv and Grace assured me that Justine One had been created by this procedure so we did the same thing with isolating the image, lasering it through the diffraction grating, printing the interference pattern, then reducing the pattern to its particles and putting the particles into the soup in the drum. ‘There’s our suspension of disbelief,’ said Irv.
Grace said, ‘Please don’t say, “This is the moment of truth”.’
‘I’m not sure what kind of a moment it is,’ said Irv, ‘so I’m saying nothing.’ He handed Grace the 240-volt zapper we’d rigged up. ‘You do it,’ he said to her.
Grace closed her eyes and did it. There was a flash, a primordial electrical smell and somebody belched loudly. Then there she was rising out of the soup, all black-and-white in her sopping wet western clothes: Justine Two. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘where’s my fucking horse? Am I supposed to walk to El Paso?’ Then she stared wildly around and clambered out of the drum so violently that the three of us had to hold it to keep from spilling the primordial soup all over Grace’s studio. As it was, there was a big puddle and Justine Two stepped into it, sat down, and belched. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I don’t see anybody I know, so what kind of party is this?’
‘It’s not a party,’ said Grace.
‘Why are you talking funny?’ said J Two.
‘I’m English,’ said Grace. ‘You’re in London.’
‘That’s a crock of shit,’ said J Two. ‘There aren’t any London locations in this picture.’
‘You’re not in a picture now,’ said Irv. ‘This is reality.’
‘That’ll be the day,’ said J Two, and she fainted and fell back into the puddle.
‘I wonder if Istvan’s Justine started out like this,’ said Grace.
‘I wasn’t there so I couldn’t say,’ said Irv.
She was really an awful-looking thing in black-and-white, and when we got her out of her wet clothes it was even worse. ‘I forgot about clothes,’ said Grace. ‘We’ll have to get her other things to wear. Underthings as well, tights, shoes, whatever.’
‘Then what?’ said Irv.
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Grace. We’d been working for a couple of weeks to bring this creature into the world but Grace was looking at it, at her I should say, as if the whole thing was totally unexpected.
‘Well,’ said Irv to Grace, ‘while you’re thinking about it you know what we have to do.’
‘I know,’ said Grace, ‘and I’ll go first. Bleed me, Artie.’
‘I don’t want to take too much,’ I said. ‘Let’s just get her into full colour so we can see where we are with this.’ Mind you, while we were doing all this the rest of London was going on as usual. Some trains were running, some weren’t. The streets were full of buses and cars and pedestrians, the pubs were full of drinkers, and we were putting blood into this thing that had climbed out of our suspension of disbelief. Great.
As J Two filled up with colour I felt a little stirring of interest. She was a good-looking woman, you had to give her that. ‘Hello, honey,’ she said as she came round. ‘Why don’t you get naked with me.’ She stuck out her tongue which was quite a long one and gave me the wettest kiss I’d ever had. She tasted like a swamp full of incontinent crocodiles. My head went round, the room tilted several different ways, and the wall opened up to let some huge hopping thing into the room. ‘Mmmmm!’ said J Two. ‘Oh yes, gimme that old-time religion, do it, do it, do it.’
‘Are you talking to me or the huge hopping thing?’ I said. ‘I don’t usually tilt this much on the first date.’
‘Artie, try to come down a little if you can,’ said Grace. ‘Justine, you’ll have to slow down if you want to hang out with us. We’re actually a pretty quiet crowd.’
‘Oh yeah?’ said J Two. ‘Who died and left you in charge, Grandma?’
‘Watch your mouth,’ said Irv.
‘Up yours, Grandad,’ said J Two.
The room was heaving around and the thing that had hopped out of the wall was making obscene gestures but I still couldn’t see its face. Maybe I’m St Anthony, I thought. Is this a temptation?