“The Risk-Taking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects” in The Denver Quarterly.
Vol. 39, No. 1, 2004. (Nominated for a Pushcart Prize; named one of 10 best stories of 2004 in the Sturgeon Award). Reprinted in The Year’s Best: SF #10 . David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer eds. EOS/Harper Collins, 2005.
The Risk-Taking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects Their shirts had the uniform neatness of suburbia: chemically fortified green, polo. White father, mother, symmetrical child: a Family Unit (FU) with n members where FUn = π (the mother was pregnant). Contrasting their statistical tidiness to the thrown-together character of the Three Happiness #1 Chinese Restaurant we had each in turn stumbled upon, I couldn't help but wonder if the great fattening in comfort won by Western nations has not been paid for by an equal narrowing of imagination. Not an imagination to create wealth, or even scientific knowledge, for in this we Westerners obviously live at a time of genius. Rather, I refer to an imagination—or call it a gut feeling—that can so powerfully apprehend an other world that the dreamer risks all and leaps!—a blindfolded trapeze artist without a net!—sure that the trapeze swing he has flung himself after, a world he has never actually seen, will be there when he closes his grip. The waitress, a dried apple of a woman with no English, bowed to her guests as she had welcomed me. But instead of following her shuffle to the table a busboy had reluctantly gotten up to wipe, they stood gaping at the surrounding shabbiness: American colonial and other mismatched chairs (refugees no doubt from some doomed IHOP); faux windows, their Colonial frames now painted red and gold; and paper lanterns that were as ashen as the old Chinese men sagging about the other tables, squinting through the smoke of their cigarettes at the new arrivals as if a decision to stay or go would be the most dramatic thing they would witness in this the Year of the Snake.
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“The Atlas of Man” in McSweeney’s. No. 8, 2002.
The Atlas of Man If I see further than other men [or not], it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants. —Sir Isaac Newton A single photo of a nude man is mute. But photograph 50,000 nude men, nude women also, and just as celestial bodies divulge their temperatures to astronomers, so the bodies of the jealous, the bed wetter, the murderer, the pickpocket, and alas, also the heart-sick, will speak themselves. Or so Dr. Johnson, our director, maintained. For my part, I couldn’t help but recall an anatomy lesson from my undergraduate days. Directing our attention to the nude cadavers around which each team of students huddled, the instructor commanded us to begin, saying only, “Observe!” After a period of silence during which we merely blinked at one another, one student meekly raised his hand and asked, “Observe what?” And so unfolded the lesson of that day—that it was impossible for the researcher to merely gather “data.” It was only by looking for some thing that data could be seen. Nevertheless, even though Dr. Johnson and I did not know precisely why we did what we did, we believed our work to be, from the vantage of 1957, vital. Even exhilarating. In this sense we were like Christopher Columbus unrolling the world map, had Columbus been armed with an aerial camera and his New World been a geography of the body that would call out to us “Land Ho!” once we were in sight. That is, once we had photographed enough subjects for their statistical significance to emerge. When it did, as Dr. Johnson was fond of saying, our nudes—50,000 strong—would sing a chorus of operatic dimensions.
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“Self Portrait(s)” in The Iowa Review. Vol. 33, No. 1 Spring 2003.
Self Portrait(s) The neck of a mouse is easier to snap than a pencil, Mary had said. Hundreds of necks later, it was the ease of the words that most bothered Jim. He laid the mouse stomach-down on the lab bench, whiskers twitching, the mouse curious about what its nose was against, though of course, oblivious to the big picture descending from above. Like all of us, Jim thought, wishing he hadn’t been so quick to tell Mary he’d help her make an embryo. He stroked the mouse for a five count, the minimum time one study said was necessary to calm small animals enough to prevent fear’s adrenaline rush from skewing the hormone measurements he’d later take. Then he held the rod he used against the base of its skull, close to the C1 vertebrae line as Mary had taught him, twining its tail around a finger. A stiff yank and the mouse twitched, dead. After “Hello,” how to euthanize a mouse was the first thing Mary had said to him. It was the reason they’d been introduced, so that first impression partly explained why he remembered her voice so clearly, her tone casual, familiar, the same way she’d later tell him she was borrowing his lighter. The same way she’d later ask to use his semen.
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“The Color of Pain and Suffering” in Chelsea. No. 77, Spring 2005.
The Color of Pain and Suffering To get flesh right, Tomasz used to mix his own on-screen colors: a touch of red to make cheeks ruddy, if the drawing was for the defense, or maybe a tincture of gangrenous green, if the illustration was for the prosecution, what was right for the prosecution being wrong for ruddy, and visa-versa. Obviously. But no one worked that way anymore. Not at Medical Illustrators, Inc. Instead of the millions of colors that came with the paint program he used, the company had reduced the palette on his and the other two computers in the studio to a standard set. Then they’d assigned the premixed colors names like “Bone”; and “Internal Organ”; and “Flesh: 2nd Degree Burn….” As if giving them those names could make it true. As if a burn from a malfunctioning tanning booth was the same as a burn from a Moltov cocktail; as if blood from a hunting accident was the same as blood from a death squad. And to remind himself that blood wasn’t just red, Tomasz liked to think through the projects in the old way—or maybe even as that surgeon from America’s own civil war who made charcoal drawings of skull fractures, works of 19th century science that were also memento mori.
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