Paul did research and found that the pigmentation loci of mice were well-mapped and well-understood. He categorized his population by phenotype and found one mouse, a pale, dark-eyed cream that must have been a triple recessive: bb, dd, ee. But it wasn’t enough to just have them, to observe them, to run the Punnett squares. He wanted to do real science. Because real scientists used microscopes and electronic scales, Paul asked for these things for Christmas.
Mice, he quickly discovered, did not readily yield themselves to microscopy. They tended to climb down from the stand. The electronic scale, however, proved useful. He weighed every mouse and kept meticulous records. He considered developing his own inbred strain—a line with some combination of distinctive characteristics—but he wasn’t sure what characteristics to look for.
He was going over his notebook when he saw it. January-17. Not a date, but a mouse—the seventeenth mouse born in January. He went to the cage and opened the door. A flash of sandy fur, and he snatched it up by its tail—a brindle specimen with large ears. There was nothing really special about the mouse. It was made different from the other mice only by the mark in his notebook. Paul looked at the mark, looked at the number he’d written there. Of the more than ninety mice in his notebook, January-17 was, by two full grams, the largest mouse he’d ever weighed.
In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God’s words. God wrote the language of life in four letters—A, T, C, and G. That’s not why Paul did it though, to get closer to God. He did it for the simplest reason, because he was curious.
It was early spring before his father asked him what he spent his time doing in the attic.
“Just messing around.”
They were in his father’s car on the way home from piano lessons. “Your mother said you built something up there.”
Paul fought back a surge of panic. “I built a fort a while ago.”
“You’re almost twelve now. Aren’t you getting a little old for forts?’
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
“I don’t want you spending all your time up there.”
“All right.”
“I don’t want your grades slipping.”
Paul, who hadn’t gotten a B in two years, said, “All right.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence, and Paul explored the walls of his newly shaped reality. Because he knew foreshocks when he felt them.
He watched his father’s hands on the steering wheel. Though large for his age, like his father, Paul’s features still favored his Asian mother and he sometimes wondered if that was part of it, this thing between his father and him, this gulf he could not cross. Would his father have treated a freckled, blond son any differently? No, he decided. His father would have been the same. The same force of nature; the same cataclysm. He couldn’t help being what he was.
Paul watched his father’s hand on the steering wheel, and years later, when he thought of his father, even after everything that happened, that’s how he thought of him. That moment frozen. Driving in the car, big hands on the steering wheel, a quiet moment of foreboding that wasn’t false, but was merely what it was, the best it would ever be between them.
“What have you done?” There was wonder in John’s voice. Paul had snuck him up to the attic, and now Paul held Bertha up by her tail for John to see. She was a beautiful golden brindle, long whiskers twitching.
“She’s the most recent generation, an F4.”
“What does that mean?”
Paul smiled. “She’s kin to herself.”
“That’s a big mouse.”
“The biggest yet. Fifty-nine grams, weighed at a hundred days old. The average weight is around forty.”
Paul put the mouse on John’s hand.
“What have you been feeding her?” John asked.
“Same as the other mice. Look at this.” Paul showed him the charts he’d graphed, like Mr. Finley, a gentle upward ellipse between the X and Y axis—the slow upward climb in body weight from one generation to the next.
“One of my F2s tipped the scales at forty-five grams, so I bred him to the biggest females, and they made more than fifty babies. I weighed them all at a hundred days and picked the biggest four. I bred them and did the same thing the next generation, choosing the heaviest hundred-day weights. I got the same bell-curve distribution—only the bell was shifted slightly to the right. Bertha was the biggest of them all.”
John looked at Paul in horror. “That works?”
“Of course it works. It’s the same thing people have been doing with domestic livestock for the last five thousand years.”
“But this didn’t take you thousands of years.”
“No. Uh, it kind of surprised me it worked so well. This isn’t even subtle. I mean, look at her, and she’s only an F4. Imagine what an F10 might look like.”
“That sounds like evolutionism.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s just directional selection. With a diverse enough population, it’s amazing what a little push can do. I mean, when you think about it, I hacked off the bottom 95 percent of the bell curve for five generations in a row. Of course the mice got bigger. I probably could have gone the other way if I’d wanted, made them smaller. There’s one thing that surprised me, though, something I only noticed recently.”
“What?”
“When I started, at least half of the mice were albino. Now it’s down to about one in ten.”
“Okay.”
“I never consciously decided to select against that.”
“So?”
“So, when I did culls … when I decided which ones to breed, sometimes the weights were about the same, and I’d just pick. I think I just happened to pick one kind more than the other.”
“So what’s your point?”
“So what if it happens that way in nature?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like the dinosaurs. Or woolly mammoths, or cavemen. They were here once; we know that because we find their bones. But now they’re gone. God made all life about six thousand years ago, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But some of it isn’t here anymore. Some died out along the way.”
It happened on a weekend. Bertha was pregnant, obscenely, monstrously. Paul had isolated her in one of the aquariums, an island unto herself, sitting on a table in the middle of the room. A little tissue box sat in the corner of her small glass cage, and Bertha had shredded bits of paper into a comfortable nest in which to give birth to the next generation of goliath mice.
Paul heard his father’s car pull into the garage. He was home early. Paul considered turning off the attic lights but knew it would only draw his father’s suspicion. Instead he waited, hoping. The garage was strangely quiet—only the ticking of the car’s engine. Paul’s stomach dropped when he heard the creak of his father’s weight on the ladder.
There was a moment of panic then—a single hunted moment when Paul’s eyes darted for a place to hide the cages. It was ridiculous; there was no place to go.
“What’s that smell?” his father asked as his head cleared the attic floor. He stopped and looked around. “Oh.”
And that was all he said at first. That was all he said as he climbed the rest of the way. He stood there like a giant, taking it in. The single bare bulb draped his eyes in shadow. “What’s this?” he said finally. His dead voice turned Paul’s stomach to ice.
“What’s this?” Louder now, and something changed in his shadow eyes. Paul’s father stomped toward him, above him.
“What’s this?” The words more shriek than question now, spit flying from his mouth.