Reanimating Irwin

Harriet had broken up with me three months before and I still felt devastated. We’d only been going out for three or three and a half months, depending on how one looked at what our first date was. That’s been in dispute, but I’ve always gone with three and half and I thought I was in love and that we could have had a real future together and at least for a while, I thought she felt the same way. In hindsight, I can see how my disappearing and not telling her where I was for a day or two a few times started to wear on her, but the time we spent together felt like magic. That she immediately went to Brandon Tully afterwards is probably the part that hurts the most. If she had just ended our relationship without moving on to him, I might be OK now. I should not have done most of the things I did, but Brandon Tully? He is truly one of the most mediocre people I’ve met in my life, in every single way you could possibly imagine. The guy is the middle of the bell curve in absolutely everything I can possibly think of, except for one, and that I can see made a huge difference: he is very attentive to Harriet and to everything she does, wants, and needs. Personally, I think it gets to the point where he acts like a pathetic puppy dog bowing to every whim she could possibly have. Can I help it that I have other interests I wanted to explore at the same time, even if these interests, especially the reanimation of animals, might be considered unusual by most people? That some of the actions I undertook to explore my interests were illegal? And yes, also with hindsight, it is very possible that I was not looking at this in an entirely rational way.

           I need to back up a little bit. I’ve known Harriet since we were in high school. She was a couple of grades below me and I didn’t know her well until after college when I started working at the Sundial Sanctuary, and science-themed animal sanctuary, theme park and art museum specializing in birds and local aquatic creatures. There was a group of about twelve of us, all relatively recent college graduates working there in various capacities with several of us involved in the three times daily avian show in which birds that had been injured and then rehabilitated at the center flew around and wowed the tourists who came through. The show was mainly run by Burt and Kelly, an older couple, probably in their forties, but several of us helped them with the show doing whatever they needed help with. It was doing those shows where I got to know Harriet. I always liked her name; something about it just sounded a little old-fashioned but classy to me and that’s how I saw her. At work we all usually wore a Sundial Sanctuary t-shirt and blue jeans, but away from work Harriet usually wore dresses that buttoned up to her neck and usually looked like something a schoolgirl from the 1960s or 70s might wear, except that she would usually also wear some kind Dr. Maarten boot or shoe. Something about that, along with her smile and that she’s a female who actually talked to me only added to that.

           Most of us had worked at the sanctuary before. It was my second summer and Harriet’s third. Most of us just did whatever random tasks that needed to be done every day, but one day both Harriet and I were tapped to be in the show with Burt and Kelly. They said they’d been watching us and thought we’d be good, but I still think that she and I, along with Ryan and Daphne all happened to be in the right place at the right time when they decided they wanted four new people for the show. They trained us quickly, mostly over a weekend and a few nights of staying late after the park closed. Burt and Kelly are very dedicated to the birds and the sanctuary and they were really patient with all of us. We didn’t have to do a lot. The show’s held in a big open area with benches that can seat about a hundred people. We just needed to learn some movements and where to be at certain times, and when to move to other places. It was pretty easy to memorize. Then, at certain points, Burt and Kelly would have the birds; a falcon, a raven, a turkey vulture, and a couple others I always forget, fly across the area from person to person. It’s pretty amazing how well-trained they are. We just needed to not be nervous and know how to balance ourselves and to make sure we were ready and able to have the birds land on our hawking gloves instead of our arms or heads.

During all of this, Harriet and I started to talk. It was mostly about the show and working at the sanctuary, but it was fun, and we were really getting along. It felt natural and we started spending our lunch breaks together and before we knew it, we were going places outside of work too. Sometimes with others, but sometimes by ourselves too. There isn’t a lot to do here, but we’d go get a couple of drinks at the Pizza Shack or the Beer Barn, go to the movies, or just go chill in someone’s backyard. I’m more of a horror person, but I pretended to be a superhero movie fan because those were some of her favorites and I found out I actually liked a few of them and I could fake it or find ways to be a little critical if I didn’t. If we both had the day off, part of it would be spent taking her dog Irwin out on a walk and some kind of outing. She loved that dog as much as she loved anything, and he was adorable, a little black and tan pug that I swear you could hear breathing from a block away. Harriet and I were making out a lot too, pretty much anytime other people weren’t around and we spent the night together sometimes too. It’s possible a lot more than making out happened then, but I don’t need or want to say any more than that.

From the beginning though, I kept some of my interests secret from her because I thought she’d think that they were really weird, or really dark, or both. The main one was my interest in reanimation. I’d become pretty obsessed with it after reading Frankenstein. I’d majored in biology in college and from that and the book, I started to think that it had to be possible. I was about two years into this when Harriet and I started going out. I’d transformed the basement of my parents’ house into a laboratory of sorts and based on what I’d read in the book and elsewhere, I started gathering equipment. My main sources of information were the works of would-be reanimators Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov and Giovanni Aldini and the alchemical texts of Harwood Fritz Merrill. Getting the equipment was difficult at first, and it also took me several months to figure out what I really wanted and what I wanted to try. I could find some items like beakers, wiring, and tubing at thrift stores or discount supply stores, but I just didn’t have the money I needed for good equipment like circuit boards and Bunsen burners. That’s when my friend Tony told me about all the extra supplies that were in storage at our old high school. His dad was head of maintenance there and Tony had found the alarm codes one day when looking for God knows what in his dad’s dresser so we could easily get in without being caught. I was really hesitant about breaking into the place and taking what I needed. Just thinking to myself that I was going to break into a high school and steal equipment I needed sounded horrible, but Tony kept telling me how much extra of what I was looking for was there. Something about grant money that the school district had gotten a few years earlier and evidently there were still extras of everything that had just been sitting in storage, still in its original packaging at least two years later. After talking to him about it a few times, I gave in, rationalizing that I could always take back anything I didn’t need, or even everything if none of my ideas actually worked. Over the course of a couple of weekends, Tony and I broke in took what I needed and before I knew it, I had a lot of equipment to experiment with.

           I started going out with Harriet as this was happening and there were a handful of occasions where I would disappear from her for a day or two, using some kind of flimsy excuse that I worried that she would see right through. At first though, I know she gave me the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to be with her, but the reanimation was really calling to me, and I can see now that I had become slowly obsessed with it. And this part of my life I decided to keep secret from her until I could show her, and the world, some results that might somehow do the world some good. I’d learned from Frankenstein that I would need to be in control of anything I might ever be able to bring back and that a scientist had to take responsibility for anything he or she created.

           My early attempts did not go well. I was working with small mice I would find dead. Also, small birds, and one time a gopher. Nothing. I can see now how idiotic these early attempts were, but I thought I was learning, and if I studied more, I’d be able to get closer and closer until one day I would be able to bring something back.

           In the meantime, things were still mostly good with Harriet and I though I’ll admit I would get distracted sometimes, lost in my thoughts about what my next experiments should be. When she’d ask me what I was thinking I would tell her that I was just feeling tired or thinking about ways we could maybe change the show the Burt and Kelly. And I did actually think about that sometimes because the show was the same every single time and having some variety in it would help and Harriet agreed with me about that. Still, I started to feel just a little bit of distance between us, and then, to make things worse, Irwin got really sick. Harriet spent every free moment she could with him and I started to as well. We must have taken Irwin to every vet in town until we found one that diagnosed him with a rare blood disease, but that came too late. Irwin became progressively weaker and the night before a scheduled surgery and blood transfusion, he died in Harriet’s arms as we sat on her living room couch. Harriet was devastated, and I felt terrible for her and sad myself as I had become attached to the little guy too.

We kept him there wrapped up overnight and agreed that we would take him in to be cremated in the morning. When morning came, Harriet couldn’t bear the thought of taking him in, so I said I would take him in myself, but in the meantime I’d gotten it into my head that maybe I could bring Irwin back, and that if I could bring him back, Harriet would be eternally grateful and that she would always want to be with me, and forget about any of my weirdness over the previous few weeks. We had wrapped him up in a blanket and put him in a duffle bag which I gently carried to my car and rather than taking Irwin to the vet, I took him to my laboratory. My parents weren’t home a lot so it wasn’t a surprise to come home to find the house empty and it was easy to take Irwin down to the basement unseen by anybody. I took him out of the duffle bag, unwrapped him, and placed him on the little gurney I’d created out of a metal tray and a short step ladder. I spent the next hour reading and re-reading through some of the texts, especially one written by Fyodorov to make sure I hadn’t missed something before. And just as I was about to hook Irwin up to the wiring, I realized just how wrong this was and there was a voice pointing out to me that I really didn’t know what I was doing. I looked around at all my equipment, thought about how I had acquired most of it, realized how poorly designed it all was, and that if it were possible for my chances of reviving Irwin to be less than zero, they were. I felt like an idiot and realized just how much time I had been wasting. Everything had to go, starting with Irwin, I had to wrap him up again and go do what I told Harriet that I was going to do.

           When I stepped outside to take Irwin away, there was Harriet on my front porch. She’d decided to go for a walk and our houses were only a few blocks away from each other. From the corner she’d seen that my car was parked out front, so she came to see what I was doing. I felt the blood drain from my face and I must have looked paler than I ever had in my entire life.

           “What are you doing with Irwin?” she asked.

           I knew I had to finally tell her truth about everything, and especially about Irwin. I stumbled terribly through my entire explanation as it also covered a lot of the times I’d cut out early from her and revealed many of the times I’d lied to her about what I was doing. Naturally, she was upset and completely horrified. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t gone through with it, as that shouldn’t have mattered. That I’d gone as far as I had was incredibly disturbing to her, as it now was for me too. Everything about our relationship ended in that moment and the first thing she did after taking Irwin from my arms and taking him to be cremated was to quit her job at the sanctuary in the hopes of never having to see me anywhere again. I’ve stayed at the sanctuary, I like it there, and Harriet and I see each other around town every now and then. There’s usually a glare, but she’ll say hi and generally be polite, but our interactions typically last about five seconds, ten if she’s feeling more generous with her time. Then she goes off with that hopeless mediocrity Brandon Tully. The more that I think about it, the more I realize that my seeing her with him must be part of my deserved punishment.