Pig Son
After my ex-wife mailed half of my son’s ashes to me in an urn, I committed myself to growing the hearts and other organs that might have saved him inside of pigs. It’s Fitch’s birthday today, which means Dorrie texts me more than usual, which is pretty much never. Do you remember how I told you that he liked to fall asleep hugging his new collection of comic books? I’ve forgotten what he smelled like. I never respond to these messages. Dorrie doesn’t really want a conversation. She still blames me for not being there in the end. She’s never understood how hard I fought trying to save him. A real conversation would be too painful. It’s the same reason I’ve never addressed Fitch’s failed transplant in my peer-reviewed articles. His file sits inside my desk, rather than among the lab’s program records, like a lost statistic.
My graduate assistant, Patrice, is shouting through the intercom, telling me to come to the lab quickly. I hear another voice I don’t recognize, muffled and nasal and a little bit frantic, repeating the word doctor as if it’s trying to convey an entire thought with a single word. I pull on my face mask and lab coat, open the outer door of my office. My staff is gathered around one of the glass holding pens where we keep our donor pigs. The pigs are all destined to help infected people like my son whose organs have given way to the plague. The timing is crucial, though. We need to reach the infected before they slip into the comas that mark the advanced stages of the illness. This one, donor 28, was nicknamed Snortorious P.I.G. after an intern put a gold chain and shades on him during a Halloween party. The pig studies me as I approach, wiggling its behind, and barely opens its mouth: Dahktar. The sound seems disembodied, like a ventriloquist is throwing their voice.
“Okay, very funny,” I say, turning to my staff. “Who said that?”
They look at each other and Patrice points back to the pen.
“We think it’s Snortorious,” she says. Okay, sure. Forget that these pigs lack the necessary vocal cords for human speech, even if we have genetically modified them for accelerated growth and organ donor optimization.
Dahktar. This time the pig’s mouth doesn’t move at all. I’m starting to get annoyed, but there’s something about the voice.
“Again,” I say. I hop into the pen, nearly sliding on a piece of shit, and kneel, looking into the animal’s blue eyes. “Say it.”
Dahktar, he says. Jesus. The pig’s strange voice, like a mouth filled with cotton balls, reverberates in my mind. After several more tests, there is no mistaking it. The pig’s brain, not quite human and not quite swine, lights up like a firecracker on the MRI whenever he speaks.
“This does not leave the building. Not yet,” I say. “We need to know what we have here. And we don’t want someone else taking him away.”
The staff simply nods, but that isn’t good enough for me.
“I need to hear you say it: Yes, I won’t say a word.”
Yes, I won’t say a word, they repeat in unison like we’re in grade school. Okay, good. But this isn’t some top-secret facility. There are no security clearances or repercussions here. The grad students were suspect even before the outbreak, swiping medical supplies for god knows what. I worry it’s only a matter of time.
We divide the days between working with Snortorious and fulfilling our hospital organ orders. I pay Patrice’s sister, Ammie, a speech therapist, to assist us in our research. We clear out one of the lab rooms to create a study/play area for Snortorious. We set up a television and a computer equipped with programmed paddle buttons specially modified for pig feet. I dig through my attic for my son’s old books and toys. Dahktar. It’s no surprise the word he heard the most around the lab would be his first. When Ammie and I work with him in his room, we break lab protocol and remove our masks and gloves. He seems to soak up everything we share with him—flash cards, cartoons, children’s books, including The Three Little Pigs and Charlotte’s Web. We treat him like a child, though it’s hard to say where his mind is at any given moment. Ammie gives him treats, gold stars. Positive reinforcement is important, she says. He’s learning so fast. At first, he has a new favorite word each day— sheep, horse, farmer, bus, yellow, mud, Ammie. Mornings and evenings, he screams the word hungry or makes a specific request from his rapidly growing vocabulary.
Apple, he says one morning. Please.
The other day he told Patrice Thank you after he finished eating. Good pig. He favors reruns of the old Crocodile Hunter show on Animal Planet, snorting excitedly whenever he sees a hippo. He also has a fascination with rocket launches, the test flights for a manned mission to Mars that somehow always seems a decade away. He counts down with mission control before running excitedly around the room at liftoff. We try to change the station whenever anything disturbing comes on—neglected and starving farm animals whose owners have died, rotting crops, the displaced clambering onto relief cruise ships after wildfires drove them from their homes. But he’s seen the reports of hospital plague wards overflowing into trailers in parking lots and airport hangars. Sick, people. Sick, people. Dahktar help. He’s seen the funerary industry take over our banking system, the footage of people paying for food at the grocery store with mortuary cryptocurrencies tied to ad-ridden phone apps. Come laugh with us at the see-tee of Laugher, Snortorious repeats like a mantra until he can form the words. Come laugh with us at the City of Laughter. For only one thousand bereavement crypto-tokens, you can scatter your loved one’s ashes on a one-hour cruise around SanFancisco Bay.