Walked the walk, grandaddy did. He was unfailingly polite to the waitstaff when he'd take me to Denny's for a grand slam. He kept on good terms with the neighbors, even welcoming the Kerebotsos into our clan by way of matrimony. And he got a generous severance package when the local Monsanto factory closed up shop, but I like to think that was just a coincidence. It's what a just society does, right? Rewards faithful service? People shouldn't require a threat of total annihilation just to hold up their end of the social contract.
I spent many a lazy Saturday in grandaddy's library as a LabKitten, paging through thick tomes filled with modern hieroglyphics. Sometimes he would bounce me on his knee and tell me tales of isomerases and topogonators, the Crab cycle and Nernst equations, lions and tigers and bears. While the other Circle Pines children were out throwing rocks at police cars and feeling up girls , grandaddy would take me to lectures on reconstructive surgery and framebox mutations. We bought a microscope from Edmund and on the day it arrived went to the pond and put a drop on the stage to watch the microscopic life teeming within. The beginning of the food chain, the alpha to our omega. The ultimate sovereignty upon which all other sovereignties depend.
I would soon learn the real world was not interested in such musings. From the saccharine pointlessness of Gymboree to the violent physicality of Camelback High School ( remember the Coop! ), it was a world not so much indifferent as actively hostile to my kind. Which was a right puzzle, given not only the swell toys and gewgaws academics have made possible, but also their dark shadows. GE may bring good things to life, but they also ran the Hanford plutonium plant for a time. Your team has big biceps. My team has nuclear weapons. Who do you think is going to win this? Alas, all too abstruse to have any immediate effect on my classmates.
Public school became an exercise in ducking the savage advances of our resident Boo Radleys and Scut Farcusus whilst attempting to keep the light of inquiry burning. Hide it under a bushel? No! I'm gonna let it shine! That might have worked for John Calvin, but for those of us who couldn't ring up Zwingley's pikemen to deal with the troublemakers, a wiser course of action was laying low. Which my teachers either did not comprehend or took sadistic pleasure in flushing out. Yes, Mr. Bahloh, the answer is the square root of two and not "potato" as Scut has proposed. Now if you don't mind I'll go wait outside for my after-class beating.
If you can get a sample of his DNA, I can make this problem disappear, grandaddy said in a hushed tone. I imagined the morrow sun rising to find the Farcus residence eerily silent, Scut's desk empty in homeroom now and forever. Rumors would surface about how the Farcuses just up and dissolved in their beds. But then my mom would invariably intercede. None of that talk, dad! The spell would be broken, the promise of salvation snatched. Probably for the best. Getting a DNA sample sounded like something only grownups did, the sort of thing you'd see on one of the scrambled cable channels.
In grad school, my advisor had things in the fridge that could wipe out the eastern seaboard. Most university labs do. It turned lunchtime into an exciting game of refrigerator roulette (no, I said behind the six pack of IPA!). One summer an affable albeit notoriously clumsy prof was visiting a lab upstate and knocked over the wrong vial of something and a hazmat team shut down the place for six months. That really put the brakes on our faculty exchange program.
Here our attention turns from accidental release to unauthorized release, as the inventor of the PAL pitched it. The Mississippi's mighty, but it starts in Minnesota at a place you can walk across with five steps down, the Indigo Girls sing. Currently next door to ground zero in the Republican's war on my people. Behold, I saw a dark horse, and upon it sat a demagogue . Scott Walker and his relentless attack on the University of Wisconsin. Now threatening to be turned into national policy, should the ghost of Ronald Reagan so decree. Apparently his supporters believe longer lasting light bulbs and cures for diseases just fall out of the sky.
The voice of reason will not prevail against the armies of ignorance, I hear a voice say. Finishing that thought, botulinum toxin has an LD50 in the nanogram range and you can order it right out of the Sigma catalog. Toss in a fistful and the Mississippi turns into a ribbon of death that extends from Michelle Bachmann's home district to Bobby Jindal's. Revenge of the nerds, indeed.
After grandaddy died the CDC came and cleaned out his work shed. Well, less cleaned it out and more hauled it away on the back of a big flatbed truck after sealing it in a ginormous tarp, the kind exterminators use to bug bomb your house. I remember the truck being impossibly clean, immaculately aligned vinyl appliqués on the doors. CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL they read in a tasteful sans serif beneath a tiny American flag, as if zoonotics respect national boundaries.
It somehow seemed a waste of effort, making their Kenworth spotless.
It's really the unseen dirt that's the dangerous kind.
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