Nathalie’s death was enough to send Koo and his half-French son, the boy with the melancholy green eyes, abroad. They made a new start in the most empty and beleaguered of desert communities, Rio Blanco, Arizona, United States of America. Koo couldn’t relinquish the conviction that the South Korean medical community had been too busy chasing research money to show a little kindness to a man whose wife was dying. If, as Koo meanwhile theorized, it would be possible, with special applications of steroids and other growth enhancers, to make strides in the matter of regrowth among the adult stem cell lines that were now available in the grant stream in the United States, such that even tissue that was in the process of necrotizing could be reattached or regenerated, then it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to apply the same stem cell principles to Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Bell’s palsy, ALS, and other impairments. No one would have to suffer the way his wife had suffered.
Uprooting Jean-Paul and bringing him here had not been easy. But Koo was certain that he could better pursue his research at URB. Rio Blanco was so empty of the prying eyes of regulators and government intrusion that he could specifically do what he had not been able to do in South Korea, namely work on Nathalie’s corpse. Not her corpse, exactly, but certain bits of her cadaver, to use the term he preferred, that he had harvested soon after her moment of transition. Such a little thing, that movement of the blood in and out, not so very complicated at all, but once it was stopped for a certain length of time, it was hard to restart. Koo knew the way of nature, that all things should end, but not when the equilibrium of others depended on the gentle, smiling face of Nathalie Fontaine. He had already regrown a length of her colon, a portion of her right ring finger, her pancreas, some locks of her hair, and when the time was right, he would sew these and other organs back into her.
That is, he would sew these back into the cryogenically frozen Nathalie Fontaine. The very Nathalie Fontaine that he had shipped to Rio Blanco with great difficulty. There was only one way to insure, these days, that you could ship a cryogenically preserved cadaver for medical research without arousing intrigues, and that was by cooperating with certain kinds of international intelligence initiatives, the kinds of initiatives launched by organizations that have no acronyms, organizations that don’t turn up on a budget line on any government’s published budgets, except perhaps as discretionary spending. The greatest purveyor of discretionary spending funds was NAFTA, where, in the dilapidated present, everything was for sale, everything, and where the government would use whatever varieties of espionage and mercenary incursion necessary to attempt to restore the reputation of American ingenuity and American capital markets.
Chief among the initiatives of the American intelligence community was trying to learn if there was a wartime application for stem cell research that could treat all the head wounds coming back from the various Middle Eastern and Central Asian theaters where our troops were as yet stationed. Triage was good at removing body parts. Triage piled up whole mounds of limbs, and it could take a shattered femur or an ulna that had once been attached to some grasping hand, and it could make a fine stump of what was still left. But as yet medicine had not found a good way to reattach a head. Still, the Americans were planning. They were trying to find ways to make do with less head, wherever possible, to ship a young man or woman back with a third of a head, if necessary.
The military therefore required the kinds of medical researchers who could make this dream a reality without moral or ideological complaint. Who, at the very least, could pass on anything they heard or learned about international researches along similar lines. The hunt for information needed to take place outside the glare of publicity, away from round-the-clock web news outlets, because the military wanted to have an advantage that other international defense departments didn’t have. They were willing to pay a South Korean MD, if he had a little information on what was and what was not possible, and, additionally, in compensation for services rendered unto the American military, which was in the business of shipping a great number of bodies around, they would be willing to ferry a body from South Korea to the desert of the American Southwest in a large refrigerated container. No questions asked.
How did Koo live with himself? How did the doctor live with the compromises that he had made in order to come to this place, this hellish landscape of drought, flash flood, and wildfire, with the frozen body of his deceased wife in the garage, attached to a generator so that she would not be warmed, or even cooked, when the electricity went off each day? How was he able to live with keeping all this secret from a teenage son who wanted nothing much to do with him? Who didn’t realize the things that Koo had voluntarily given up in his life, the esteem of colleagues, the friendships from medical school back in Seoul, the satisfaction of knowing that his community understood what a fine husband and parent he had been. Koo had allowed these consolations to pass him by, and what he replaced them with, instead, was a teenage son who claimed to find the empirical methodology of the medical community beneath contempt.
For all these reasons, there were many days when Koo could not live with himself at all. Koo glided like a revenant from departmental common areas to laboratory as though he heard nothing, and as though he were unable to master even the most basic English dialogue. His parents were gone, his distant cousins never wrote to him, he had a sister in South Korea who felt that his traveling to the United States was unpatriotic, though she called him every Christmas and wept; how was it that families fell so ineluctably apart? she inevitably asked. At night, when he hadn’t made any progress on the grants that supported the laboratory, he stretched his modestly proportioned body across his desk and gripped his face with his hands. The office linoleum dated back some thirty years, to a time when city universities sprang up everywhere, propelled by the idea that there would be ever more students funneled into their classrooms. The linoleum, like the university itself, was cracking, scuffed, was unreplaced. The ceilings in the building leaked during the monsoon season, and there were buckets underneath the leaks, so that occasionally the janitor, a fellow with some sort of disability, busied himself emptying them. He chased off the laboratory mice that had begun nesting in the drywall. Norris, the janitor, had some kind of affinity for Woo Lee Koo, it’s true, and the two men, one among the most brilliant medical researchers in his field, the other scattered and disassociative in his faculties, sat together and failed to talk.
“What you up to?” the janitor might ask, looking pensively at the array of petri dishes, renal tissue, pancreatic tissue, nasal tissue, the various spectral dyes and extracts that were to be injected into them. He invariably pronounced the question with vigor.
“Raising the dead,” replied Woo, with accented English.
Norris said, “Had a dog once that died.”
To this, Woo Lee Koo said nothing at all. Not only because Norris’s linguistic skills were difficult to parse. More important, Norris’s disabilities endowed him with a superhuman ability to tolerate silences. About this Koo felt especially grateful. Allowing Koo to say nothing was among the kindest things a person could do. Thus, the two men sat on the stools in the laboratory for some time until the medical researcher recollected that an eventual response was required.