Pit of Despair
By Hamish Dee
The rabbits shivered at the sound of running water. It was a conditioned response. For them, the sound always carried the memory of a “bath” or the expectation of one. The laboratory sink had a deep, stainless steel basin and a long-necked faucet that only gave cold water. Whenever the valve was opened, it hissed and the falling water beat against the sink like a large, metal drum. The rabbits scooted into the back corner of their cages; their tall ears perked and their bodies stood upright, shaking.
* * *
“Did you know it takes an average of 200mg per kg for a mouse to overdose on caffeine?” asked Jan. “It would take six times as much cannabis to kill the same mouse.”
I was leaning against the wall, thinking I was alone, and gazing through the lunchroom window, which was frosted over from the previous night’s freeze. I turned, looked at her, the coffee mug between my hands and then her again, responding, “It sounds like your suggesting something, but I’m not sure what. When they make cannabis into a delicious tea, I’ll switch, but for now I’ll just enjoy my coffee.”
My intern’s face turned the color of her wavy, red hair, and she turned from me slightly, in child-like embarrassment. For Jan, thought and speech were so closely linked it was hard to know where one ended and the other began. As soon as a thought was born, it wanted to be blurted. It’s a despicable quality in the stupid or depraved, but in intelligent and innocent people like her, it’s endearing.
Trying to change the subject, she asked, “Enjoying the cool weather?”
“I like winter because the picketers usually stay home.” As I walked to the table to sit across from her, I continued, “Were they injecting mice with caffeine in the LD50 lab today?”
“Something caffeinated, yes.”
“Did you put wheels in their cages to see how fast they would run?”
“Doctor?” she asked. She paused and turned further from me, as her embarrassment became humiliation.
I sipped from my mug once and took another sip to finish it.
“Tell me what they do in the LD50 laboratory.”
She turned forward, head down. “Why, Dr. Bowman?”
“Everyone has their own ideas about what happens in these labs, and I’m interested to know how you view it. Some interested parties say we’re protecting consumers, while others claim we’re needlessly torturing and killing animals.”
“What would you say?” she asked.
“You’ll find many lab employees are passive observers. They have no interest in the information or its application. They walk from cage to cage, filling out their clipboards and transferring the information to computer, but it doesn’t mean anything to them. If I were to ask Dr. Wilkes in LD50 what he did, he would say, ‘I inject animals with chemicals, until we find a dose that is lethal to half of them. Then we multiply the dose to human scale to predict when it becomes harmful to the average human.’ Did I get his voice right? Too robotic?”
“No, it was good.”
“I hope so, years of practice. Anyway, I would say we’re simply doing experiments, trying something new to see what happens. If a coffee chain or a bottling company want us to inject mice with their coffee drinks to see how much you need to kill them, fine, good. And what’s the harm of putting a wheel in their cage to see if they’ll break the sound barrier, too.”
Jan adjusted her thick-framed glasses and gave a half smile.
I continued, “No matter what your answer is, I’ve seen rodents on all sorts of drugs and I think it’s fascinating.”
The pocket of my lab coat buzzed. I picked up the cellphone and looked the blue-LED screen to see I had a text message. Jan took the opportunity to excuse herself, saying “Thanks, Doctor,” as she left the lunchroom. I waved her away. The message read: Trouble in paradise. Meet at The Fix at 6? No emergency, but v.v.v.v.v. important. XO, Frida.
I
replied: If there were one less v…c u. Derrick.
I washed the coffee mug and went back to the lab.
There were two main laboratories at the Denver Animal Research Institute, the Median Lethal Dose Lab (or LD50 Lab), and a lab used primarily for Draize testing, which we simply called the Draize Lab. While the LD50 Lab injected their animals with lethal doses of every known substance, the Draize Lab was rubbing different ingredients and products onto the eyes and skin of our animals to check for irritation. Normally, albino rabbits were used in the Draize lab; we were limited in the number uses for an individual rabbit and the amount of discomfort they were allowed to suffer, so once either of these limits was reached, they were injected with a pentobarbital solution called Euthatome, putting them to sleep.
I was the head researcher at the institute and permanently assigned to the Draize lab, along with my assistant and an intern, presently Jan. My assistant was on a vacation that was to finish that weekend, and mine was to begin the same weekend. Since he and I were taking our respective holidays, the attending veterinarian Dr. York agreed to cover us by spending as much time as he could spare in the Draize Lab. He’d already been putting in extra hours there, ever since Jan started her internship, but if he volunteered to stick around, I wasn’t going to talk him out of it.
As I turned the swivel handle, the faucet hissed and water slowly sputtered out; the wire cages rattled behind me and the rabbit clutched to my chest began to shiver. Jan appeared next to me, so I passed the white rabbit onto her. She pinned it against the countertop, while I took a yellow vial from the wooden rack and a cotton swab from the drawer. Jan held one hand beneath the rabbit’s chest and put the other over its head, using her thumb and forefinger to pry open its eye, and gently scratching the crown of its head with her middle finger. It was easier and less risky to apply restraints and eyeclips, but I didn’t like using them when a steady hand would work just as well. The cork lid of the vial opened with a low pop, and was followed by a soft tin-tin, as I stirred the cotton swab within the heavy mixture. The vials were numbered not named, ensuring that we never knew exactly what we were testing, but this one had the texture and transparency of honey; it was probably a hair gel, possibly shampoo.
Giving the rabbits a bath, meant rubbing the contents of the vials in their eyes. The running water and massaging finger, served as a distraction for the pain they were about to experience, and made it tolerable. We couldn’t use anesthetics because they would interfere with the test results, so creating a relatively soothing atmosphere kept them from jerking free, darting away and dashing their heads against the wall. Like most, this rabbit’s eye stared into the distance, failing to focus on the object coming towards it. There was a reflection of the swab in its glassy, pink pupil, as I streaked the sticky gel across the lip of its lower eyelid. The facial muscles wanted to twitch, but Jan held it steady for a further half minute, until the face relaxed and the creature became placid, a passive witness to its own nightmare.
I checked my watch, which cued Jan to lift the furry, white creature from the countertop and put it back in its cage. The attending vet, who had been keeping an unusual silence at the opposite corner of the lab, walked up behind me precisely as Jan left and I turned from the countertop.
“Hey! Just because your bald, doesn’t mean you have to take it out on the rabbits by rubbing shampoo in their eyes,” Dr. York said blaringly, laughing at his own joke. “So Derrick! The big vacation is two days away. You excited?”
“Yes, the time away from work will be most welcome,” I replied mockingly.
“Right, stupid question. Do you want to hit one last happy hour before you take off?”
“Dr. York, my memory isn’t perfect, but I don’t recall ever going to happy hour with you. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a happy hour.”
“It’ll be the first and last, then. How about it?”
“Can’t do it.”
“C’mon,” he persisted. “I’ve been coming in here for almost a year now, and we haven’t gone out. You too good to have a drink with me?”
“Sorry, I’m meeting the girlfriend.”
“Frida? Isn’t she going away with you for two weeks?”
“Yes, plus coffee this afternoon.”
He slowly looked over his shoulder to locate Jan, who was a safe distance away, pretending to go over charts while wearing an impish smirk.
He lowered his voice, “Well, the thing is, I asked her to go already. She said she’d think about it and told me to ask you, too. If you don’t go, I think it’s a no.”
“I think it’s a no this time,” I whispered. Then, raising my voice, I said, “Sorry, I can’t make it, old friend. We’ll have a proper booze-up in a couple weeks. Whadyasay?”
“Great. Thanks,” he said through clenched teeth, turning and marching through the door.
When the swinging door stilled, Jan called, “Doctor, any more tests?”
“Not today. That was a new solution. If nothing goes wrong, we’ll try it on the complete group tomorrow.”
She leaned down for a closer look at the cage, “And if something is wrong?”
“What? The rabbit was fine two minutes ago,” I answered, walking towards her. I peered through the wire to see the rabbit staring back at me; the tear ducts were inflamed and swelling, and the eyelids turning the color of a deep bruise. Absent and disinterested, the rabbit twitched its nose, while the gel infected and attacked the eye. Stunned, I exhaled, “Jan, get a shot of Euthatome and kill this rabbit, quickly. I’m going to call the branch office and remind them this isn’t a dungeon.”
“Yes, Doctor,” she answered, running towards the shelf.
* * *
As much as I despise picket lines, the most positive aspects of my life had come from them. The owner of The Fix, Gerry, had picketed my laboratory once and one of his fellow picketers called me, “Animal Torturer!” I yelled back, truthfully, that I was a vegetarian, causing the small group to fall silent and Gerry to laugh. He left his card for me at the office, and treated me to a latte when I stopped by the café. From then, we became good friends. The Fix was my favorite café, later becoming our favorite, when Frida and I started dating exclusively. Despite the wooden tables that looked hand-carved and the menus written on lined paper, The Fix still managed to look slick. I was about twenty years older than the average clientele, bald and round of stomach, but I had a well-trimmed goatee and a continuously updated wardrobe that made me look like a celebrity author or a heterosexual fashion designer. It kept me from seeming too out of place.
The previous summer, I attended group therapy because my confidence started to falter due to the constant harassment from animal rights groups, and this was where I met the lovely Frida. Athletic and full-figured with dark hair and eyes, and ten years my minor, this woman was suffering from picketers of another, more militant, advocacy group, the pro-lifers. Frida worked at a parental planning office and, while she spent most of her time advocating prevention or talking youths out of an abortion, she would take the right choice where she saw it or when the patient insisted. Her personal issues were the same as mine but for an added element of fear, on her part. What originally bound us together was our disdain for interest groups and idealists. On our first date, we charted imaginary plans for publicly burning opinion polls and making public service announcements that promoted long stretches of silence. After three meetings, we stopped seeing the therapist in favor of seeing each other. The vacation that started the following Saturday was to be our first together, and a big step forward in our relationship.
The brass bell rang, as she walked through the door, and I was already at the table with two coffee cups and an old fashioned, tin kettle in front of me. I started pouring her glass when I saw her, finishing just in time to stand and exchange a kiss over the table. She took off her white, silk-lined coat and red scarf, and laid them over a chair. She was tastefully made up and perfumed; her mouth betrayed no anxiety, but her eyes were moving quickly, refusing to hold eye contact or focus on any one object.
She dropped into her chair and I retook my seat. There was an unknown and uncomfortable pressure in my front pocket, as I sat again, but I ignored it.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Marvelous, I think.” I sipped my coffee mug, adding, “But they were testing mice with caffeine in the other lab today and I’m starting to sympathize with them. This must be my fifth today.”
She laughed.
“You look amazing, Frida. It feels like ages since I saw you last. How long has it been?”
“Tuesday,” she smiled.
“Ages. Are you sure we can’t set off tonight?”
“Derrick…” she said, struggling to continue.
“Yes, you had something very, very important to say. It isn’t about the trip, is it?”
“I can’t go.”
I answered with a prolonged blink. Many physical and verbal reactions crowded my thoughts, but I merely closed my eyes slowly and opened them again. I locked eyes with her and waited.
“My mother broke her leg and I have to drive to Arizona tonight to be with her. I have no choice in this. I’m sorry,” she said, reaching over to grab me by the wrist.
“I’m sorry, too.”
“Are you still going?”
I thought about this a moment and answered, “My other option is to linger in Denver for two weeks, and I think I’d rather be somewhere else.”
“You’re going then?”
I nodded curtly.
The lines of her mouth mirrored the concern of her eyes. She said, “Truly, I’m sorry, Derrick. This trip was just as important for me and all I can say is, I’ll make it up to you. I know…I know it’ll sound like I’m trying to make this about you, but I need to ask you something, too. Is everything all right?”
I leaned back and glared incredulously.
She said, “No, I said that horribly. Forgive me. What I mean is, I enjoy our relationship and I love being with you, but you seem withdrawn to me. I don’t mean just now, but before this, before the trip. Is there anything you haven’t shared with me?”