Finally someone was coming out. His curly hair came into view, he was straightening his shirt and looking relieved. My heart sank. His phone rang and he put it on his shoulder as shut the doors and clumsily climbed back inside.
He pulled forward out from under the ER roof and parked a couple spaces away from the cruiser. He climbed out with his phone still held to his ear by his shoulder at an unnatural crook. I could hear him talking through the open windows.
"Yep, I know mom. We're here so it's all good. They said we still have time... I know, I know. I will... sure okay that's fine... I'm getting it right now. i gotta get back in there." He walked around to the passenger side and opened the sliding door. He found a camera bag and tripod and pulled them out, but he set his keys on the roof to do it. "Yeah I know that... I know." Then he shut the door and walked away towards the hospital, his head still on his shoulder and the camera bag in one hand the tripod in the other. My heart skipped beats. I felt like I was going to hyperventilate.
Then the tripod began to slide open, one leg dropping down threatening to trip him up. "Look mom, I got to go... Ok... Ok... Love you too," he fumbled with the tripod, phone and camera bag.
Arlene stepped up to him, "Need a hand with that?" She held the camera bag while he slipped the phone into his pocket and slid the leg back in.
"I'm such an idiot, I feel so nervous, it's our first and I'm so excited I just can't seem to think." He confided.
"Don't worry everything will be great. It's going to be amazing, you're going to be amazing." Arlene squeezed his forearm and smiled.
"Thanks," a genuine smile warmed his face and he was gone.
Arlene stepped up to the cruiser. She put her hand on the window and looked at me. "And life goes on... doesn't it." She glanced back to the doors of the ER.
"Natalie is here, but there is no word on her condition. At least she was still alive when she got here."
I felt like I'd swallowed a mexican jumping bean. I couldn't find a place to put my feet, I just had to keep moving, keep stepping here and there. In frustration, I whuffed, "Hurry up!"
"What's got yer dander up? You need to go?"
I nodded.
She opened the door and I shot across the parking lot and up the side of the minivan.
Arlene followed me.
"What is it girl?"
I nosed. I looked. I barked. I did my best pointer imitation.
Finally Arlene followed my gaze. A smile broke across her face, "Do those by any chance go to this fine mini van?"
I nodded.
"Well, we best not dilly dally or look a gift horse in the mouth.", She picked up the keys and opened the door. I climbed in. She put the key in the ignition.
"Nice, full tank. Well where to?" She looked at me.
I thought for a moment. Again I had the feeling that somehow I was being out manuevered. I wondered desperately, hopelessly about Apoc, where had he gone? Had he been hurt, captured, or worse? My mind could conjure up plenty of scenarios where I would never see him again. Inwardly, I cursed my active imagination as it served up gruesome pictures of him in progressively more horrific scenarios. Finally, I had to shut those thoughts up into a little box and just focus on what was right in front of me... what was happening right now.
As my thoughts turned inward, I realized that a part of me was spinning with pent up energy, I felt like I could run for twenty miles without stopping. That swirling aimless energy made me feel like at any moment one of my limbs might shoot out in an uncontrollable effort to bleed off a little of this energy.
I blinked as I realized that I truly valued Arlene and her calm confidence and her limitless desire to help the down trodden. Thank heaven for self-less people I guess.
I kept thinking that I needed to start at the beginning. I needed to find that lab. The lab that had spawned me and twisted me into the form I had today. Neither quite human nor animal. I remembered that I'd heard about animal testing and wondered idly if I'd have rights? Did I have human rights anymore? What rights did I have? Was I an animal to be owned like so much chattel? Even though I'd once been inarguably human... I was no longer at my foundational core 100% human, I'd have known that in my bones even if Shen hadn't talked ad nausem about all of it. He had somehow modified my DNA and then regenerated me over and over again. Building a new body with the new DNA. Early in my captivity, he would come sit with me in my room and we'd talk late into the night.
I'd entertained the idea that I could someday convince him that he should let me go... but alas that was not to be. A zealot can only be dissuaded from their holy quest for so long by earthly matters especially when the zealot is convinced of the absolute rightness of their actions no matter how it flies in the face of reality. And it was ultimately what Mr. Swanpool her Political Science 114 instructor would have termed, the asian mindset. He had taught English in Japan for years after he got his bachelors, and found them inscrutable. Tall white and probably good looking in his youth he'd been entranced by Japanese women, but his time there had convinced him that he was an American idealogue. He'd fallen in love with the idea of the innate power, and worth of the individual. It was an idea so powerful and pervasive that it ultimately fueled his return to school in America for a teaching degree, so that he could study how his own culture had made him what he was.
I realized that I was going to have to back to Shen's beginning if I really wanted to understand him and what had happened to me.
