The Experiment Read online

It had begun to happen on a summer day after the science lesson in the lecture hall, a one-room wooden structure set high on cinder blocks. Even with windows on two sides propped open, the hot, thick air barely moved. Above the blackboard was a customized couplet, printed in handsome script:

  Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:

  Bacon said, "Let Newton be!" and all was light.

  In unison they had recited Rincon's First Law, named after the Lab's founder, Dr. Rincon, who did not live on the island and was known to them only through his teachings and his research: "Human life alone is sacred; its preservation and extension is our mission." Scientific facts were drummed into them, learned by incantations and memorization. They learned the periodic table of elements, the name of every part of the body, the biological kingdoms and phyla, all the known planets of all the known solar systems, even the four-letter coded DNA sequences surrounding a hundred and twenty disease genes. On this particular day they received back papers they had written, most with high marks. Outside the lecture hall, Raisin pulled Skyler aside.

  "It's phony, you know—this whole thing."

  "What is?"

  "Writing papers, getting grades. They don't even read them."

  "How do you know?"

  "I tested them. After the first two paragraphs I made it up. I wrote complete gibberish."

  He showed his paper and the grade he had gotten, scrawled at the end: VERY GOOD.

  "I don't think they care whether we learn or not—you ever get that feeling?"

  In fact, Skyler realized, he did have that feeling sometimes, but he had never put it into words.

  "But then why would they teach us?"

  Raisin shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe to keep us busy."

  For days afterward, Raisin kept up a tirade. He harped on the restrictions that circumscribed their lives: the books in the library that they could not read because they were "not fit," TV shows that they saw advertised but were not permitted to watch, games of roughhouse they could not play, questions the Physician Teachers never answered.

  One hot afternoon, through the open windows, they heard, as they sometimes did, distant cries carried by the wind—the sounds of younger children at play at the Nursery. The Nursery was a small adjacent island—it could be reached across a narrow sandbar at low tide—but the Jimminies were not allowed to go there. Nor were the toddlers ever brought onto the mainland.

  "Did you ever wonder," Raisin asked later, "why we never see them? What would be the harm in it?"

  There was another group with whom the Jimminies were permitted no contact—the Gullah, a tiny community of black people. Skyler and Raisin had heard—from where they did not remember—that these were descendants of slaves, and that many years ago scores of them had inhabited the southern half of the island. Now there were only a dozen or so, mostly fishermen living in shacks on the western shore. A few brought fish to the Big House, and they were objects of fascination to the Jimminies, mysterious silent beings who walked on the paths, carrying glistening trout and yellowtail on long fronds ripped from the fan-shaped palmettos.

  "They have boats," said Raisin. "Why don't we have any boats? Why is the only boat in the Lab locked up inside the boathouse?"

  Skyler finally turned on Raisin, demanding that he stop posing his stupid, troublesome questions. "Why are you doing this?" he shouted.

  Raisin smiled. "Asking questions is supposed to be part of science" he replied. "It's called the scientific method. Remember?"

  And then gradually a strange thing happened: Skyler began asking questions, too—to himself—little ones first and then bigger ones.

  One Sunday morning, he gazed up at Baptiste during Dogma and had a remarkable sensation. Not so very long ago he had been enthralled by Dogma. The services had given structure to his week, in the same way that science gave meaning to his life. Even before he understood the full meanings of the words, he loved to hear Baptiste roll them out, starting softly and then raising his voice gradually until, gripping the lectern with both hands, he was practically yelling. Skyler would sit there spellbound.

  But this day he felt nothing. He looked at the symbol upon the wall, the twin-headed snake coiled around a staff. He looked at the blown-up photograph of Dr. Rincon in his white coat, gazing off confidently as if he were surveying a future in which Reason and Science had triumphed. And he looked at Baptiste, whose coal black hair was pulled tightly around his head, accentuating a skull that seemed as narrow as an ax blade. And he felt nothing.

  The Chief Elder Physician spoke.

  He spoke about the "beauty of reason and organization over the chaos of superstition and religion." What did he mean? He spoke about "the pendulum of the historical-cultural cycle swinging to our side." The words sounded hollow. It used to make Skyler feel privileged, all this talk of how they were so special, raised by the Lab as acolytes of science. A chosen tribe—stronger, healthier, purer, longer-living. How they were kept away from "the other side" to avoid contamination from the "modern-day Babylon" of the United States. But now he didn't know what to feel—he didn't feel much of anything.

  How strange it was. Baptiste kept speaking, but Skyler blocked out the words. He stared at this man who had been the magnetic force at the center of his life for as long as he could remember. And it was then that the remarkable sensation happened: slowly, as he looked, Baptiste began to appear smaller, frail, aging with specks of gray in his hair and crow's feet around his eyes. He even seemed—was it possible?—slightly ludicrous.

  Skyler leaned forward and turned slightly to catch a glimpse of Raisin. He could tell by his posture, hunched in on himself as if in concealment, that he was undergoing the same epiphany. They locked eyes, and Skyler saw an ember of defiance burning there. At that moment the two exchanged an unspoken, unspeakable secret—apostasy.

  * * *

  The next year the restlessness got worse. The questions wouldn't go away. Odd things kept happening. A girl named Jenny disappeared into the surgical ward for six days, and when she returned, they were told her left eye had been diseased; in its place she wore one made of glass. A boy was taken away in the middle of the day, held in the ward for two days, and then just as mysteriously released—the attending physician said his illness had been successfully treated.

  Raisin, tall and gangly with his hair sticking out in all directions like animal fur, was turning strange. He had always been different. For one thing, he was an epileptic, subject to sudden fainting spells. Though it was never stated outright, both he and Skyler knew that the illness was troubling to the Elder Physicians—anything less than perfect health was deemed a failure.

  For another, Raisin had stopped taking the daily pill handed out to all the Jimminies at evening meal. He insisted the pill robbed him of energy. Proudly, he showed Skyler how he concealed it under his tongue when the Orderly passed, saving it for a collection stashed in a tin can under his bed. Wherever he went, he secretly carried a child's toy, a wooden soldier four inches tall, so bruised and knocked about that its blue and red paint was largely gone; even when they went on forced marches around the Campus, he kept it in his pocket, and sometimes at night when the others were sleeping, he would take it out and play with it and show it only to Skyler.

  Increasingly, Raisin was on the verge of open rebellion. He had become a target of attack at the Lab's Self-Criticism sessions. He was denounced by the Orderlies for various offenses and spent hours with the Psychologist Physician. Three times he was punished for disobedience, forced to spend the night hungry and alone locked inside "the Box," an old chicken shed at the edge of forty-foot pines; the sounds of the animals foraging in the darkness around him frightened him, and in the morning he was welcomed warmly back into the group and given a large breakfast. For days afterward he behaved himself, but it didn't last.

  The only saving grace was that Skyler and Raisin and many of the other Jimminies had turned fifteen, and so their schooling stopped and instead they took on chores. Skyler was
a goatherd. Every morning he rounded up a band of the scrawny animals from the barnyard, shepherded them to distant pastures and brought them back in the late afternoon when the sun was low in the sky. This brought him a taste of freedom.

  Raisin was given the worst chores, but one of them had a hidden blessing. Once a week he was sent to collect honey from beehives in the woods—a job few others were brave enough to do—and these turned into occasions for celebration. He would abandon his honey jars and meet up with Skyler. Away from the Lab together, they could do whatever they wanted.

  Sometimes when the two of them were alone in the woods, Raisin would have a seizure, and Skyler learned to care for him. As he lay thrashing about on the ground, Skyler would hold a stick in his mouth so that he wouldn't swallow his tongue. Afterward, Skyler would cradle his head and murmur gentle phrases to him as he came back to consciousness, surfacing from some dark depths, blank-minded and confused. They, of course, kept the fits a secret.

  Way up in the northern forest, Skyler discovered a hidden meadow reached through a narrow passage in a ravine. It was hemmed in with boulders and trees, and, ringing it around with branches and underbrush, he turned it into a makeshift corral for the goats. By confining them inside, he was able to roam free. From then on, when he met with Raisin, their horizons expanded. For a few watchful hours at a time, they had the run of the wild area to the north. They explored the swamps and dense woods, running along the paths made by wild boar and deer. They gamboled in the fields and climbed trees so tall that they could see the whitecaps of the ocean. That such dangerous activities were proscribed made them that much more delicious.

  On one particular spring day, when the outlying blanket of cordgrass waved in the ocean breeze and the loblolly pine smelled fresh of sap, something extraordinary happened to them.

  With the goats securely tucked away in their enclosure and the honey jars already full, they were lying upon their backs in a field, when Raisin, a piece of straw sticking from his mouth like a cigarette, turned to Skyler and suddenly announced that he wanted to explore the western shore.

  "But that's where the Gullah are," protested Skyler.

  "That's the whole damn point," he replied, using the one profane word he had picked up from TV.

  And before Skyler could think of an objection, Raisin was on his feet, off and running. Skyler kept up and followed, but he was at pains to keep up, running as fast as he could. They tore along a path toward the shore and then through a patch of swampland, sending the water splashing around them. Raisin lengthened his lead. Skyler saw his back receding ahead of him, zigzagging between the trees until he disappeared altogether. Then suddenly Skyler heard a sharp cry, followed by a long moan. He recognized it instantly—the onset of a seizure. By the time he caught up, Raisin was writhing on his back, his limbs jerking in spasms and his eyes turned up in the sockets.

  Quickly, Skyler covered him with his own body and placed a stick between his teeth. He thrust his head to one side and held on with all his might, trying to deaden his weight to keep Raisin close to the ground, riding out the seizure like a wrestler pinning an opponent. Gradually, he felt the spasms subside and the body beneath him turn limp. But as he rolled off, something lashed his arm, thin and strong as a whip. For an instant, he imagined Raisin had sprouted a tail. Then he saw what it was, and as he leapt up and turned the body to one side, the snake was hanging there, its fangs embedded in the back of Raisin's leg. He got a branch and beat it until finally it released its hold and curled up. He smashed the head until it stopped moving and then ran back to Raisin.

  "Don't move him, child!"

  The command came over his left shoulder. He obeyed it instantly without even thinking about it. He was pushed aside, and a pair of coal black hands ripped Raisin's pants open, exposing a red welt and two tiny blackblue holes in the milky flesh. A knife came out, moving quickly to make four slits in a crosshatch. The elderly man with gray hair bent down, pursing his lips and sucking the wound with a slurping sound. He turned and spat out venom and sucked some more, and soon he was extracting mouthfuls of blood and expelling them upon the leaves of a berry bush. Raisin began to stir.

  "Hold him still," the man directed, and Skyler did as he was told. The old man made deeper cuts and turned Raisin on his side so that he bled into the ground.

  "Don't pay to take no chances," he said. "That'd be no ordinary snake. That's a water moccasin."

  Soon, Raisin was awake, and Skyler was ordered to carry him. He did, and followed the large elderly man, who was dressed in a bulky blue sweatshirt and wide-bottomed blue pants. They went down the path until finally they came to a clearing and he could smell the mudflats. Ahead was a grove of cypress, and on the other side, a shack no bigger than a garage, made of shingles painted blue. As he carried Raisin inside, he looked to his left and saw an expanse of water coming right up to the grassy bank. There was an old wooden dock, and tied to it—Skyler's heart skipped a beat when he saw it—was a boat with an outboard motor.

  "Put him down," the man said, gesturing to a sagging iron-frame bed covered with a quilt. Skyler was dying to ask all kinds of questions—he had never been inside such a place, with so many new and intriguing objects—but he kept silent as the old man bound up Skyler's wound and even sewed together his pants leg.

  "No reason to go around talkin' about this," he said. "Those people you live with, they don't take to your talkin' to strangers. You go tellin' anyone, and you're going to have to deal with me—and I got my ways."

  The man cast a hard glance at Skyler, who was sitting quietly in an overstuffed easy chair, and at that point the boy suddenly recognized him—one of the fishermen who brought their catch to the kitchen window of the Big House.

  "We won't, I promise," he said.

  "Damned right—we won't."

  Raisin suddenly sat up in the bed, surprising both of them.

  The old man took Skyler over to a window and pointed at the backyard, a jumble of long weeds and engine parts. To the rear was a tupelo maple, and from its branches hung more than a dozen round, shiny objects—hubcaps, Skyler later realized. They turned, glistening in the sunlight.

  "I have my ways," said the old man. "You ever heard of juju?"

  Skyler shook his head.

  "Magic. You talk about this and it'll be the last talkin' you do. You'll just open your mouth and nothin' will come out."

  Raisin, intrigued, asked his name.

  "I don't go tellin' my name till I know the other 'ns."

  They introduced themselves, awkwardly. They had never done that before.

  "I'm Kuta."

  "How come you're called that?" asked Raisin.

  "How come you're called Raisin?"

  "I don't know. It's just a nickname."

  "Mine's more than a nickname. It's a story."

  And the old man settled into the easy chair. Skyler sat next to Raisin on the bed.

  "Kuta's Gullah, what some folks here speak, though you wouldn't know nothing about that. It means turtle. I'm called that, 'cause when I was born, I was such a little thing, the midwife held me up in the palm of her hand, lying on my back, and I was so small they didn't expect me to live. She says: 'Why, this little babe's no bigger than a turtle.' And so I was. But I kicked my legs and I kept on kicking and I just willed myself to keep on living. Even when I was growed, the name stuck."

  "And what's that?" asked Raisin, pointing at a trumpet hanging from the wall by a peg.

  Skyler knew Raisin knew the answer; they had seen bands playing on television.

  "That," said Kuta proudly. "That's my instrument." He fixed Raisin with a stare. "You usually ask so many questions—or is that the snake talking?"

  But he didn't wait for an answer. He told a long tale about his younger days playing the trumpet in jazz bands on the mainland. He talked about juke joints in New Orleans and life on the road, playing for ten bucks a night and gambling it away and waking up next to beautiful women whose names he could not recall. />
  "Nothing like the travelin' life," he declared, rubbing a gray beard that stood out against his black leathery chin. "Broadening to the spirit. Good for the soul. A man needs travelin' the way a fish needs the ocean."

  And as he talked, Skyler looked at Raisin and could see that he, too, was entranced.

  They stayed, that first day, more than an hour. Kuta saw them off, standing on his doorstep, leaning his bulk against the frame, while Raisin asked one final question—could they come again to visit? Kuta pawed his cheek, thinking.

  "You know you ain't supposed to be 'round here."

  Silence again. Finally, the old man looked them over, sizing them up.

  "Shoot. I guess it's no harm, so long as you don't go tellin' nobody. Specially those Orderlies. I don't want no trouble, now."

  When they returned to the Lab, Raisin limping on one leg and Skyler trying to shoulder his weight, they talked excitedly. Skyler hadn't seen Raisin like this in years. It seemed a whole new world had opened up, and their minds were suddenly reeling with new possibilities.

  "We got to be careful," Skyler said as they approached the Campus. "Can you walk without a limp?"

  "Damn right I can."

  And he did.

  The boys returned six days later. Kuta was sitting under a palm tree, repairing a fishing net, which was spread out on the sand before him. Raisin walked up and sat on a rock five feet away, silently watching as the bony black hands moved a three-inch needle back and forth through the wire mesh. Skyler sat next to Raisin and they stayed like that, awkward and silent for quite a while, until finally Kuta broke the silence.

  "What you lookin' at, child?"

  Raisin shrugged, gave a hint of a smile and replied simply: "You."

  "What's a matter? Never seen a body work before?"

  "Not sitting down."

  And so was born an unusual friendship.

  Skyler and Raisin visited Kuta about once every two weeks, whenever they could get together and whenever they dared to risk it, moving cautiously along the path to make sure they were unobserved and looking in his window to see if he was alone. He always was. He had been married twice, but both women lived on the mainland and he hadn't seen either for years. He seemed equally fond of both wives, and he loved talking about them—especially how good they were in bed.