Cetus and Chimera - Part I
I first came across Christopher R. Alonso’s work on literary Twitter and was instantly compelled. His stories are imaginative, and his prose is propulsive (if you want to read more, check out his story in Strange Horizons).
“Cetus and Chimera” tells the story of Matthew, a recent PhD graduate who is deep into research on sea coral bone grafts. When one of these grafts goes wrong, he connects with Hector and continues his work. In the speculative mode that Christopher does so well, the story charts Matthew’s competing desires for romance and research. I’m really excited to share this sexy, speculative story for our July issue and hope you enjoy.
-Michael
When David and I first moved in together, we’d wake up slow, sunlight creeping through the curtains, the room going cold in the blue, dark morning hours. We’d tangle in each other to keep warm, measure time by counting heartbeats, like it was the only sound that ever existed.
This morning, after I dress, I pour my café con leche and prepare lunch, but in my rush to put something together, I spill coffee on my shirt and down my pants. I change into the same ones I wore last night and the first shirt I see in the closet, then finish cleaning up. I brush my hands against my pants and feel something rock-like in my front pocket.
A piece of Hector’s coral is nested there. I take it with me.
Fresh from a PhD, I’m the only one of my cohort who stayed with the university hospital, monitoring patients who received sea coral bone grafts last fall, continuing research while the others went off to the Keys, Mo’orea, Puerto Rico to continue their work with sea life. Coral, not the human body, is my specialty. I’ve spent years studying these organisms, their role as agents of life in ocean ecosystems and their possibilities. Coral to bone grafting is not new, but Hector’s case is different. The refined calcium carbonate extraction from the corals should have grafted seamlessly. A month after the surgery, Hector sprouted an exoskeleton. His bones took quickly to the coral graft. This morning he sits on the bed, left arm scarred pale pink and grey. The coral didn’t biodegrade the way it should have. Instead, the bone, coral, and bacteria fused and grew. According to the doctors here, no other human reacted the same way Hector has. He needs regular seawater baths. His diet has changed, mostly vegetarian. I expect he’ll be plant-only soon.
Because the coral is a living thing on him, Hector is the only patient I’ve been assigned to now that the others have recovered. I’ve been watching him for three months. The university hospital loves him: he has no family, no one to take care of him, so he depends on the researchers for survival—researchers like me.
“How are you feeling?” I say.
“The same,” he says. “Mostly itchy.”
He’s been moved to a specially outfitted room, larger than the others. A nurse heaves tanks of seawater onto a rack. In a corner, a doctor consults charts. I’ve tried remembering all the doctors’ names, but there are so many—hematologists, surgeons, orthopedists. I’m like them only in title, a piece of paper that tells me I know something about something.
Inside the lab, doctors and staff discuss Hector: The bone graft, which would normally take three months to heal, has healed in less time than anticipated, which is great news, but the coral’s growing faster.
“Matthew,” says one of the doctors. This one I don’t recognize, a tall white man with gray hair and lab coat, as nondescript as any. “Looks like we’ll need to move the patient to a new facility closer to the ocean. More space and resources to monitor him.”
“But I can still work with Hector?” I say.
“Of course. He’s your masterpiece. We’ve never seen anything quite like it, and we think this is for the best.”
“Plus, he’ll have a nice view of the ocean,” says another doctor, like this helps.
Hector looks away from them. He scratches at his arm and then stops, likely reminding himself not to further aggravate his discomfort. I can imagine the conversation about him is uncomfortable enough.
“Could you excuse us?” I say. “I don’t like to be bothered while I’m working.”
They leave the room, keep the door ajar.
“I wish they’d stop talking about me like I’m not here,” says Hector. Picking at his arm, he looks at the wall. Maybe he’s imagining that’s where the ocean is. His fingernails have turned a dull gray, dusky, and the coral has grown beyond his elbow. “This is worse than when I had a cast.”
I sit on the bed and place my hands over his. They’re stiff, rigid, slick with water and the smell of brine. I feel the piece of coral in my pocket every time I shift my legs. It pokes at my thigh.
“It’ll be all right. I’ll be there when they move you. I’ll make sure of it.”
“You weren’t supposed to come in today,” he says.
“I decided I would.”
He smiles, shifts on the bed. Whether he’s comfortable or not, I can’t tell. He says, “Tell me where you and David went last night.”
I tell him about how we looked through telescopes on the rooftop of the science museum, how cool last night was for October in the city, cooler than the forecast suggested, how David’s smile kept me warm. He was happy I could show up to one of the viewings because work had kept our nights busy. We’d missed each other, arrows flying in opposite directions, so he asked me to lie in order to escape for once. David, who’d been lucky and received a huge scholarship to research star formation theory at another university in the city. Haze covered the stars last night, but when I looked through the telescope, I saw Jupiter, its red spot, and four moons. Another telescope pointed toward the moon. David led me to it, and I saw crater upon crater, the seas of the moon. I thought of the quiet, how silent it must be up there, like diving into the ocean in reverse.
“You’ve never told me how you both met,” says Hector.
I rub his knuckles, all hard and ridged. The opening night of the science museum, I looked at David and he looked at me, shooting stars at each other. I wasn’t sure who followed who, from the planetarium to the biology exhibits to the aquarium, where we watched fish swim through giant reefs, where the aqua light danced across our faces. We left together and walked the length of the bay. That night, from the darkness beyond the city lights, I heard the atmosphere buzz and hum and sing. We walked with the ocean in our veins.
“I can see you walking,” says Hector and holds on to my hand. “In my head. I know the street.”
“We’ll get you back out there,” I say.
There, I want to tell him about what happened later that night, after dinner and drinks, how David traced his hands down my arm and pulled me by my wrists, the fire in our bed like a match igniting, alive, a cluster of space dust pulled by our gravity, my blood pulsing through my neck the way I feel it now and how maybe I made that happen the way I made Hector happen. Last night, I dismissed the times I’d come home to an empty room and David had forgotten to tell me he’d be in lab working late, and I chose to forget the times I’ve done the same and he’d fallen asleep on the couch. These are moments I think about over again, a looping current.
It was my idea to graft the coral to Hector’s bones so badly broken from a jet ski accident.
I believed this would lead to further research on the uses of coral. Of course, no one expected what would happen. But here was an opportunity for me to study its survivability in new conditions, something so new I had no name for it.
Doctors couldn’t use Hector’s own bones. He lacked sufficient bone supply replacements, so they decided on coral, and because of my unique position within the university, I observed the surgery from behind a window. Blood bloomed on every shining metal instrument, gleaming in the white lights of the chamber like faraway satellites. No calculation, no worst-case scenario could have prepared me for what would happen to Hector, and I felt like every battle through years of school placed me in direct collision with his body. There I am, looking through every species of coral consulted for grafting—acropora, goniopora, porites—species that, until now, were free of complications. No rough regiment of antibiotics to stave the coral. Near nonexistent risk of infection. While David spends his nights researching star formation theory, I learn the language of the body, culling every physiology textbook available to me, printing pages of bone structures, images of diseases and infections until they grow in my mind’s eye, bubbling into being. I familiarize myself with bone diseases, osteomyelitis, marble bone disease, even graft-versus-host disease, which still doesn’t quite explain what’s going with Hector, his body an organism I attempt to name.
Now, Hector nods and smiles, his eyes still shut. He tightens his hold on my hand, and I wonder if the coral will stop growing, if he’ll ever be able to live the life he used to before the accident, to be the person he was instead of the person he’s becoming.
“Sometimes when we go out, David and I pretend not to know each other and meet for the first time,” I say.
“Do you do that often?”
“No, it’s been a while.”
“How would that even go down?” says Hector. “What’s an opening line for you?”
“Something stupid, badly put together.”
“Pretend I’m David.” Hector leans toward me. “You see me at the end of the bar. What would you say?”
“Ask what you’re drinking and why you haven’t bought me one.”
“If I was your mother, I’d call you bold, maybe un sinvergüenza.”
I laugh and don’t tell him it wouldn’t be the first time someone’s mother called me that.
“Tell me what else happened,” says Hector.
There’s a knock at the door, and Hector and I let go of each other’s limbs. How far our hands moved on their own. A nurse comes in with a pad and paper. I back away. She asks him a series of questions, any changes in sleep, discomfort, and what about eating, any changes in hunger, and his eyes flash at me, sending static up my spine. Finished with her questions, she leaves the pad on the table next to me and inspects his scars. I look through the pad, a file on Hector’s humanness, nothing like the information I’ve collected on him, which is not really him so much as a part of him, not enough.
My phone buzzes while I wait for the nurse to finish, David asking to meet for dinner. I decide to wait until I’ve left Hector to respond. I’ll explain the latest update, that he’s being moved somewhere else, not just some other room. Would David want to see him? Meet him?
The nurse makes final notes and excuses herself from the room. Hector and I are alone again.
The coral is growing over scars and onto the skin, snaking and twisting like tree roots against the ground. I move the tub of seawater closer to his bed, within his reach. Then I slip on gloves and inspect his arm. I prod at the branches.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he says. “Just tingles a bit. I’ve been thirstier than usual.”
I make a note then take a pair of tweezers from my pocket, clamp them on the tiniest end of coral. The branch is dry, brittle, comes off easily. I slip it into a plastic bag. This new piece I keep in my section of the lab, hidden away so I can look at parts of him under a microscope, pick at the pores and catalogue what I find.
“Is there anything I can get for you next time?” I used to bring him candy until he could no longer stomach it. Once, I brought him flowers because I thought it’d be nice, and the room needed color aside from the mint of his hospital gown.
“Only if you can somehow get me out of here,” he says.
I throw the gloves away and make a few more notes on my pad, observations like Hector’s vitals even though that’s not my job. My focus is the coral and its acclimation to bone, but this is Hector’s body. I can’t help but check his blood pressure, ask about his joint pains. I stand, and he catches me by the wrist, his movements unencumbered for now.
“Will you be back?” he asks. His hand lingers.
“Later this week,” I say, and tighten my hand. “I will.”
How does something so fragile survive against every odd?
*****
That night, David and I go out for sushi. We order too much food and drink. He adds a lot of wasabi to his soy sauce, more than I prefer. I drench my food in eel sauce, too sweet and sticky for his liking. We talk about work and the nothing that comes with it. I mention Hector. David hesitates with his chopsticks, fidgets and drops a roll so he uses his fingers instead. This isn’t the first time I’ve talked to him about what’s happening to Hector’s body, though whether David’s uncomfortable from the descriptions or something else, I can’t tell. It’s hard not to talk about it, this grim wonder. It’s hard not to think about every moment I’ve spent with him, tracing the coral up his arm, across the back of his hand.
“It really is incredible,” I say. “You should come by one day. He doesn’t get visitors, and I think it would be good for him.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ll think about it.”
David picks up another piece of sushi, a gulp of his drink. He starts to talk about the next telescope viewing. Mars will be the closest to Earth in some dozens of years, and the museum is planning a great show for it. The planetarium is even finalizing a new laser show to premier. He mentions that members of his cohort want to attend; there are some cuties to ogle over, “for when you get bored of me.”
He keeps talking, but all I can think of is that if David needed surgery to reconstitute parts of his body, coral would be an easy option. I imagine how it would look creeping up his body. So commonly used for dental grafts, I imagine a white scar across his face sealing his mouth nearly shut. I wonder how the coral would change if it started at his feet, rooting him to the earth, or maybe it’d start at his shoulders, branching into pale wings.
“I really want to go to the beach this weekend,” I say. “I know we’ve been talking about it, but the weather is supposed to be perfect.”
“My schedule should be open,” says David.
“You need some sun.”
“You sound like my mom.”
“Isn’t that why we date?” I say, and when I look at him, he wears something between incredulity and arousal.
“Nina’s having a get-together later tonight,” he says in between bites. “I promised I’d go since it’s Friday. She wants you to come.”
I shove another spicy tuna roll in my mouth. “Should we take a bottle of wine of something?”
“She’s got plenty,” he says.
“I feel bad not taking anything, and I like her the most of your cohort.”
“Fine.” He dunks a roll into his soy sauce and winces once it hits his tongue, heat stinging his nostrils. “You asked so nicely.”
“You know I try my best.”
David reaches over and with a finger wipes a stray speck of eel sauce from the corner of my mouth and licks it clean. I want to bite his lip and draw blood, give him something real to taste.
To be continued…
Christopher R. Alonso was born and raised in Miami, FL. He has worked as an indie bookseller and is a graduate of the NEOMFA program. His work has appeared in Catapult, Strange Horizons, and Fireside Fiction, among others. His writing has received support from Juniper Summer Writing Institute, the Miami Writers Institute, and the Periplus Fellowship. He was awarded Tin House's 2022 First Book Summer Residency. He is querying a novel.
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