Distracted by Death: New York Stories

By JJ Brown

Distracted by Death: New York Stories is a horror collection of short fiction and novellas from scientist author J.J.Brown. From the Catskill Mountains to New York City and it's science research labs, the tales uncover psychological horror in ordinary lives. The characters, young and old, explore the fine line drawn between life and death. J.J.Brown brings a biomedical science background to her new collection of deliciously dark stories. Included are The Finest Mask, Mosquito Song, The Doctor's Dreams, After the Layoff and 14 other stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JJ Brown
• Release date: Feb 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463156520

JJ Brown

J.J.Brown is a published author of 10 books including mysteries, speculative fiction and noir fiction infused with a passion for nature, science and family. Her books are published in print, ebook and audiobook editions.The author spent her childhood in the Catskill Mountain region of New York. She continued writing fiction during her career as a Molecular Biologist and Public Health Advocate in Philadelphia and New York City. Her fiction subjects often address current medical and mental health issues, and environmental concerns.J.J.Brown has a PhD in Genetics from earlier research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock. Brown’s genetics, medical education and public health works have been published in leading scientific and professional journals.When not writing, J.J.Brown enjoys reading, Tai Chi, and time with her companion rabbit, Belinda, and parakeets Sweety and Penelope. She has two daughters and lives in New York City.

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Distracted by Death: New York Stories

By J.J.Brown

Copyright 2020 J.J.Brown

All rights reserved.

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

Distracted by Death: New York Stories is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to people, living or dead is entirely coincidental. The Finest Mask was originally published in Alt.History 102 (The Future Chronicles) by Samuel Peralta, January 2016, in the bestselling Future Chronicles anthology series. Other short stories were previously published in Death and the Dream by J.J.Brown, 2011.

Table of Contents

Mouse Chimera

Lab After Dark

The Doctor’s Dreams

Mosquito Song

After the Layoff

The Finest Mask

Underground

Summer Off

Brooklyn Song

Mother’s Love

Before the Funeral

Rabbit Nightmare

Way to Heaven

Shepherd’s Night

Good Neighbors

Spring Awakenings

Rain Dream

Rose Death

About the Author

MOUSE CHIMERA

Dear Mom, Hope you got this notebook from the laboratory staff. There’s a story I have to tell you.—Anya

It all started as a rational and well-planned experiment in a set of rational, well-planned experiments. They were funded by the government and reviewed by the Institutional Review Board, both the management and the veterinarians. That was before something went wrong. I heard the door of the mouse-surgery laboratory room click shut while I was inside. I heard the sound of the lock engaging, or I thought I did, but I can’t be sure. It’s all getting fuzzy now because of the anesthetic I took. And the background noise made it hard to tell if it was really the lock. The pressurized ventilation in the room was loud. The mice were being noisy, up and about in the seventy-four little cages that line the mouse room on steel shelves. But the door locked alright. It locked. And so although you probably wouldn’t normally want to read my lab notebooks, if they give this one to you, please do. This is my record. This is what happened one night in New York City.

Mother, forgive me for my handwriting must be very messy.

LAB NOTES: Tuesday’s Experiment-Anya Minskova. NY, NY. In which I create the mouse-human chimera.

PROBLEM: Currently, the human subjects of drug toxicity experiments die.

HYPOTHESIS: The mouse-human chimera can be used for drug toxicity experiments, replacing people as the subjects.

EXPERIMENT: Injection of living, human cells harvested from organ donations into spleens of living mice. The chimeras are the new subjects for drug toxicity experiments.

A day like any other, I got here late. I often come to the laboratory late to perform the experimental surgeries. I wash the scissors and the tweezers and put them in the autoclave oven at a high temperature for forty-five minutes to be sure they’re absolutely sterile. Can’t do the surgery if the instruments aren’t clean. It is a rule in surgery, one of them. One of the golden rules.

Mother taught me, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

I harvest the living, human liver cells from the organ specimens I plan to inject later into the mice. I have to disrupt the organ into single cells; it’s messy, but it doesn’t take too long. These are organs not suitable for human transplants. I tested them the day before, so I was sure they were infected with HIV and ready to use. By the time everything is set up it is early evening, about seven o’clock.

When I go into the mouse room, no one is around. Not even Leon, the custodian on the night shift. Just me shuffling along in my paper booties with my cap and face mask on and my paper lab coat tied around me. I’m quite sure no one sees me. No one knows I’m in here. If they knew, they wouldn’t lock me in, of course; that would be cruel. What a sight I am going into surgery. I look like I’m in a hospital, somewhere where we swear an oath of first do no harm. But no, that’s not what we do here. Here nothing could be farther from the truth. It all relates to the same concept in a circuitous way, if you have long enough to think about it, long enough to make up some kind of internal dialogue.

I have that kind of time tonight.

BACKGROUND: Here’s the argument. The disease is a public health concern because HIV infection can lead to AIDS. The drugs we have do work to some extent, but with a lot of toxicity to certain organs. The drugs cause too many side effects, create too much risk. We want to understand and cure the disease and we can’t do experiments on people. We can, but we shouldn’t. It’s not cancer, not exactly like what happened to you, Mom. I still believe they shouldn’t have experimented with the cancer drug on you. The hope is that the experiments on the mice will help us understand the human disease so that we can prevent or cure it. Then, you see, we won’t have to try the drugs out on people, like they tried them on you. We’ll already know.

So far, as it turns out, we still don’t understand the disease. We didn’t cure it, and I kill the mice in the end anyway. See what I mean? Circuitous, but that’s the logic.

Mice are nocturnal. As we wind down for the day they get going for the night. They start to move around in the cages and look for food just around dark. Not the time when I’ve turned out the lights; I mean, the dark according to what it is outside in the natural world. Somehow they know the time and seasons even when kept here in the laboratory with no windows.

As the night wears on, the mice become more and more active. They jump around. They squeak. It’s their way of talking to each other or just expressing themselves. They have the I’m happy and I’m eating now squeak, the I’m bored and I’m running around now squeak, the I’m really mad at you now squeak. That one sometimes means you have to get one or two of the mice into separate cages right away, if there’s an extra cage in the room. They do bite and they can hurt one another.

In many ways the mice are like us, except, of course, they can’t write about it like I can here. The mice can’t say, Please cure my disease. Please make it go away. They can’t say, Hey, give this notebook to Mom if something happens to me. They can’t leave a suicide note, nothing like that.

The little mice are really something else at about twenty days of age. I don’t know if I ever talked to you about how cute they are, Mom. I’ve been working with mice for what, six years now, and I still never quite got used to it. When I open the top of the cage they just pop straight up in the air. It’s called the popcorn stage of mouse development. I don’t know if they are excited by life at that age or what, but they jump straight up when you come near them with anything, like they don’t know what’s coming. Of course they don’t. So how the cage is handled is critical, or a mouse will jump out and run down the shelves to the floor.

It’s no fun at all to chase a young mouse around the room, I can tell you. I’ve done it, and I’ve caught them, but it’s difficult. The full-grown mice are easier to catch, but then, they do bite. And depending on what experiment they are part of, that can be a definite health hazard. And it’s painful.

Tonight I shuffle in and set up the surgery area in the laminar flow hood with controlled air flow. This is how I keep the surgery area sterile. The air flow in the hood, which is about the size of a bathtub, is filtered and pressurized to always flow in an outward direction. This ensures that the hood is always clean. Not just clean, it’s sterile. Sterility is required so that after surgery the mice don’t get some kind of infection and die. I mean, it sounds sick, because they are going to die anyway—I’m going to kill them—that’s how the experiment always ends. But I definitely don’t want them dying because I got some contaminant in them during surgery. That would just be a waste and make the whole thing pointless. Cruel, even.

Mother taught me, Thou shalt not kill.

METHOD: I bring a mouse box over to the hood. I should explain that these are clear plastic, about the size of a bread basket, like nine inches by twelve inches, something like that. I lift off the top and reach in to get one of the five mice that were living in there together. The larger male I named Super-male because of the unusually large size of his balls and the way he attacks all the other mice, male or female. When I first reach into the cage, he bites my finger right through the plastic glove. I should just go straight back out the door, but I don’t. You see, he’s one of the mice I transplanted with human cells before and then infected with HIV already, so cause for concern right there. I really don’t want to be morphing into a mouse with AIDS here.

I take off the broken glove, look at the tiny twin bleeding spots on my finger, clean the punctures with alcohol, put on another pair of gloves. Super-male got me. I suddenly feel cursed.

On the second attempt I reach in and get a hold of the second largest female mouse in the box. I have no intention of picking up Super-male again tonight. The female is docile; she doesn’t try to get away, and she doesn’t squirm and wriggle like they usually do. Again, cause for concern. She is just too quiet.

As I slowly draw the anesthetic that I use to numb the mice, up from the glass vial and into the syringe, the female mouse stares at it. She starts to shake. I don’t know about this anesthetic. It’s approved for use in surgery, but it just blocks them from moving. The motor neurons are blocked, but then I realize that they can still feel things. They just can’t move; that’s the main goal for surgery. Right before I touch the female mouse’s exposed belly area with the needle tip, she suddenly expires. Just like that. It happens sometimes, and I believe that it’s fright. I have trouble accepting that I frighten a mouse so much that they die of terror before the surgery even starts. I feel like a horrible person. This is the third time it’s happened to me this year.

What has become of me?

I pick up another female from the cage, but before I have her anesthetized, Super-male scrambles out of his box and jumps to the floor. I must have left the top of the box ajar. So I have to put the female back in the box, and by that time she’s angry. She races in circles kicking up the box litter with her little feet while I pursue Super-male.

He runs from side to side of the little room, with me running after him. I think about it after a few failed attempts to grab him and decide to just sit very still. When he runs by again, I catch him by the tail. It’s especially difficult because I’ve already cut off more than half of his tail for the small tissue samples I take each week. I grind the samples, run them on a gel and analyze to test for the presence of HIV in his blood. The virus is always there. Come to think of it, I wonder whether HIV is also in the blood pooling in the tip of the glove of my finger that he bit through. It could be. How long does it take to replicate? What strain was it anyway? I don’t remember.

I’ve got Super-male now and I’m tempted to do the circling to disorient him, but I don’t. The circling is something the head professor of the lab does to the mice, because it makes any mouse very quiet for a few minutes. He holds the mouse upside down by the tail and swings it in a slow circle a few times. This puts the mouse off balance. The animal acts stunned for a while and staggers when he puts it down.

In this moment I think of the story Priya from the lab used to tell me. Anya, she used to say in her high-pitched, sing-song voice, When you die and go to heaven you know what’s going to happen to you if you do that, don’t you? You are going to be suspended upside down, swinging in a big circle. It will be a mouse that’s five hundred times your size holding you there by your little tiny foot. She’ll be saying, ‘Now, Anya, what have we here? What am I going to do with you now?’ won’t she. Doesn’t sound like my idea of the afterlife, but she’s from India and she’s Hindu.

Priya. Her name means beloved in Hindi, I think. She never actually did any of the surgeries herself. I’m not quite sure how she got out of it but I think it was something like conscientious objection. She said it was against her religion. It would be against any kind of religion if I really thought about it—most likely all kinds of religion.

I put Super-male in his own box to calm down by himself. I reach in and slowly cup the smaller female in my hand, hold the back of her neck and her right back paw with my left hand and successfully inject the anesthetic with my right. I use the finest-gauge needle available to cause the very least discomfort. But as the needle goes in, the female mouse stares at me and curves her tiny pink left back paw toes around the needle. She holds on tightly, pushing the needle away from her. I have never seen that before. It’s as if she were trying to communicate with me, to ask me to stop, I imagine.

The anesthetic works quickly, I can tell you that. So I have to finish up writing about this here for you, Mom. I’m getting sluggish.

I’m gradually losing control over my hand muscles.

These particular mice are very special. I bred them for lab use and they can’t survive in the wild. Not at all. They have no immune system of their own. This is how the human cells I inject into them are able to survive and grow. Without an immune system, the mouse can’t reject the human cells the way a normal immune system would reject any foreign object put inside a normal animal. But outside the lab, without an immune system, no animal can survive—not for long. Other invading living things like fungi and bacteria move in and kill the animal; it’s just a matter of time. This is one of the problems caused by HIV. It kills immune cells. I wonder how long it takes. I don’t remember.

I unwrap the sterile instruments and cut a fine line on the mouse’s side. I lift out the small tip of the organ, the spleen, for the injection of the cells carrying the virus. I take the tiny syringe loaded with human cells off the ice box and position the tip of the needle alongside her spleen. The injection goes smoothly. I replace the exposed organ and sew her up. It takes just 5 perfect stitches with the finest gut sutures. These are short lengths of super-thin gut strips, as thin as the kind used in plastic surgery on human eyelids or earlobes. It has to be gut. Synthetic is no good for the mouse. I’m an expert with the sutures. Sewing was my thing when I was a child, remember?

Thank you, Mom, for all that you taught me then.

RESULTS: I wrap the mouse in sterile cotton and wait for her to wake. I wipe the hood down with alcohol; I change my gloves and go over to try the door. Yes. Locked. It’s locked. I’m locked in here.

I can’t stop thinking about how I just inoculated myself with HIV when Super-male bit me. It isn’t something I want to think about all night here with the mice. But then, I am them and they are me, so what’s the difference? I’m in my box of a room with all of them in their boxes. We are all in this together now.

Seven surgeries later, it’s ten-thirty and I’m all out of human cells to inject into the mice. The first surgery subject is waking up now and she seems fine. Groggy maybe, but she’s alive.

No one is around, of course—no humans. I wish Leon had come by to check on me. The lights should have gone off at eight, according to the controlled artificial light, to mimic the daylight schedule, but I kept them on for the surgery. Probably it’s not good for the mice and their natural sleep-wake cycle. It didn’t seem to affect them tonight. They’ve been running around in the cages and speaking to one another nonstop just as if it were dark.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose.

DISCUSSION: Probably someone is likely to come by to clean in the morning, come by and open the door. I can’t think of one single reason why the rooms would automatically lock so that you could open them from the outside with a key but could not open them from the inside at all. Were the mice going to try and get away or something? Maybe it used to be a psychiatric ward. That’s probably it. It’s not the only thing around here that doesn’t make sense to me anymore.

I try the door. I call out a few times. Leon leaves by nine, or ten at the latest. Me in the box of a room, the mice in their seventy-five little boxes, five or six to a box, here we are together in a room full of around four hundred souls. Mom, it’s been a long night for me to think about all the mice I’ve cut open, all the mice I’ve injected, all the chimeras I’ve created, all the organs I’ve removed, ground up and analyzed in order to prove my experiments worked.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.

The time comes, you taught me, once in each life when we ask about what we have done. The time comes when we measure it, weigh it. The time comes when we ask how we dealt with others: the weak, the poor, the sick, the other creatures smaller than ourselves. And so this time has come for me. I’m asking what I have done, and what I have done to myself.

CONCLUSION: I can’t help thinking how in the biomedical research world, I let myself be someone else’s experiment in someone else’s box instead of my own. Maybe I should have paid closer attention to what they were doing with me. And I should have paid attention to what I was doing to myself, especially these last few years.

Mother, forgive me for I have sinned.

I’ve written my story, it’s all here. I used the last of the anesthetic on myself, you see, just to get through the night, and I’m not quite sure of the dose for a hundred and twenty pounds. I feel so sleepy. I expected my life to flash before me or something more poetic, but all I can think about is the mice. I’m writing this in the back of my lab notebook and leaving it open by the door here.

If you find this story, send it off to my Mom, if you could. Her address is on the next page. Just turn the page now and you’ll see it.

~~~~~~~~~~

LAB AFTER DARK

Leon, a big man of about forty-five, travels alone through the maze of the scientific research laboratories where he collects garbage six nights a week. He pushes along a huge plastic bin on rollers. It’s been a hot summer, but at this time of day the gray walls of the laboratories are blanketed in cool shade. Calm evening air rises through a window crack bringing along muted street noise of midtown New York City. Newly forming shadows soften the curls of peeling paint along the walls and blur the sharp edges of the steel rods that hold up the shelves of toxic chemicals.

Pigeons coo outside the corner windows. The birds sit puffed up together on the stone ledges of the building’s facade. Leon sits down in a plastic chair by the windows where he can see the pigeons, listen to them here from the fourth floor of the Biomedical Research Institute. The pigeons fly off suddenly and leave the lab silent. Leon listens to the push and pull of his own deep breathing.

The scientists who work here don’t usually talk to Leon. The visiting doctors from Rome can speak English, but none of them speak to him even if they are the last to leave. Every night he comes along with his garbage bin, empties their trash, puts in the clean plastic liners and they act like they still don’t know who he is.

Then there’s Antonia from the Bronx, still here at the bench. She’s one of the younger scientists. She might talk tonight; she’ll always listen a little, anyway. She never really says very much, not even to the other scientists or the lab technicians.

Leon watches Antonia work silently at the bench.

Antonia draws caustic, colorless phenol up into a long glass pipette and releases it into rows of tiny plastic tubes mechanically. She caps the twenty-four tubes tightly and violently shakes the rack that holds them. This mixes the phenol with the other contents of the tiny tubes, human cells that have spilled out all their secrets, their DNA and their proteins, into the toxic mess—that’s what she’s told him before, on other evenings like this one. She arranges the tubes in a miniature centrifuge machine and pushes the start button. The centrifuge spins wildly for two minutes. The spinning separates the contents of each tube into the protein in the bottom layer, away from the DNA in the upper layer. Leon thought it was interesting work for her when she first talked to him about it, but also very dirty work.

The centrifuge whines as if complaining as Antonia sets up another rack with two rows of identical tubes and waits.

So how you doin’ today, Antonia? Leon asks in his melodic, almost feminine voice. His voice is loud at first and trails off quickly. His eyes drop when he speaks.

Ah, same old crap, Leon. I’m alright, says Antonia without looking up from her work. How about yourself?

Leon watches Antonia. Her hair is thinning although she’s young. She leans over when she works as if she has a permanent hunch. She moves too fast most of the time, like she’s being pushed by something. Leon thinks Antonia looks confused, like she’s mad about something but she can’t figure out what it is. He likes her anyway, the way she looks like she would never give up on anything.

I rode my bike in yesterday, Leon says. He remembers that Antonia sometimes rides a bike too.

Yeah, Leon says softer, trailing off, and he counts the large gray tile squares surrounding the benches. He looks at the steel stools, at the benches loaded up with all the chemicals and glassware. The centrifuge decelerates and whines to a stop.

Antonia doesn’t say anything; she keeps working. Leon wonders why Antonia always looks like this. She wears her white lab coat unbuttoned with the sleeves rolled up halfway like she’s doing some kind of labor, but then it doesn’t really keep her clean. What is all this working? Maybe it’s to keep her mind off something else, something she doesn’t like. Or maybe she wants to make a name for herself, like the other scientists here. Wants to be recognized, respected, remembered. Well, she’s young.

Brought my two dogs in with me today, Leon says.

Did you? she asks without looking up at him.

They’re out in my truck.

You got a truck? Antonia seems surprised.

He remembers that Antonia doesn’t have a car. She probably wishes she did have a car, though. Uh-huh, he says, and looks away from Antonia.

I leave the radio on for them at home when they’re alone, you know. So they don’t get lonesome. Heh, heh, heh, Leon laughs a soft comfortable laugh that trails off to nothing.

For the dogs, she repeats.

He nods yes.

You think they get lonely? she asks and glances over at Leon.

They do, sure,’ he answers softly, when I’m gone. So I brought them in today. They won’t be so lonesome. You know. He looks out the window. It is dusk, magic dusk. The changing traffic lights, the gold-gray of the buildings, the slow traffic below on the streets. It’s the beautiful time of day in the city. You’d get lonesome too, if you were there at home alone all day like they are."

Like the dogs. What the hell, Leon? Forget about it. I don’t get lonely. I’m too busy to get lonely. The dogs, they just don’t have anything to do. That’s the problem, she responds.

I could bring a radio in here, Leon offers.

Antonia turns on the Geiger counter that measures radiation levels. She scans the sets of twenty-four tubes, looking for the most radioactive one as the peak. She’ll save it in the freezer for tomorrow’s experiments. The Geiger counter ticks, ticks faster, and then sings hysterically by tube 13. She’s got it. She places the tube carefully in a lead vial as a shield from the radiation and puts it in the freezer next to her.

No music, just—no. I have to finish this thing here, she says impatiently.

I know where you can get fifty pounds of carrots for five dollars, Leon