The Axolotl Colony

By Jaime An Lim

After their divorce his wife promptly married her American lover of ten months and moved out of Bloomington, Indiana, to the East Coast, taking their ten-year-old daughter along. The court, rather unfairly in his thinking, had granted his ex-wife child custody because of her “financial stability.” Tomas Agbayani, feeling betrayed but unable to do anything about it, continued to stay in Campus View, the housing on Tenth and Union reserved for student couples, though this was now an irregularity. The Residence Hall people, had they known of his altered marital status, would have reassigned him to Eigenmann, the graduate dorm of unmarried students located just across the railroad tracks, or to an efficiency at Redbud, a one-room affair where a folding sofa-bed marked the austere living-sleeping area.

But Vilma Teare, the apartment manager, probably feeling sorry for him, had chosen to look the other way and allowed him to stay another year, which was the time for it would take him to wrap up the final draft of his doctoral dissertation (“The Third World in America: A Study of Ten Minority Writers” included the Filipino poet-exile José Garcia Villa, among others). Tomas had been working for her for eight summers now, as part of the motley crew of student hourlies hired to clean the empty apartments for the incoming batch of new tenants flying into town each September, the start of the academic year at Indiana University. “It’s a pain in the neck. I should know. But believe me, Tom, it always works out for the best in the end. For everybody. Though it may not look that way right now.” Vilma was sympathetic but hardly surprised. She was a tall, matronly woman who apparently knew what she was talking about. She herself had been twice divorced.

“Though I’ve always thought… Aren’t you Filipinos Roman Catholics?” A confused frown looked him over from her white-framed eyeglasses. Over the years as apartment manager, Vilma had seen all sorts of foreign students come and go: Singaporean, Japanese, Nigerian, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Malaysian, and even Red Chinese. Enough, at least, to be able to pick up on some of their peculiarities. Iranians and Saudi Arabians don’t eat pork. Indians eat an awful lot of hot peppers. Filipinos eat an awful lot of rice. South Koreans prefer that odoriferous salted vegetable called kimchi. Muslims worship on Fridays. Roman Catholics do not allow divorce and contraceptives. The idea of Filipino Roman Catholics practicing divorce in America bothered her. And it was not the first time either, Tomas had to admit. Nor the last. He had heard of many sad stories. “Just wondering. Of course, nowadays it’s hard to tell.”

Actually, the Agbayanis were Presbyterians. In fact, their graduate studies in the States (Edith was doing her doctorate in zoology and he in American literature) were partially subsidized by the United Board of Christian Education for Asia. But in the sleepy provincial town of Dumaguete, Tomas could not remember a single instance of a divorced Filipino couple. Theirs would be the first, a dubious distinction. He was not naive. Of course, he had known of separated Filipino couples. Of course, he had known of husbands taking on mistresses on the sly. Of course, he had even heard of wives committing an occasional indiscretion. But divorced Catholic Filipinos?

Tomas himself, despite his long years in the States and the gradual liberation of his values, could not quite get used to the idea of being one of those family men who, at the stroke of a pen, had suddenly found themselves divested of home, wife, and children. It had seemed terribly unfair. In those first months after the divorce, he moved in a daze like the walking wounded, a bloody casualty of a marriage on the rocks. What had he done wrong? There had never been any ugly scenes, bitter quarrels, or brutalities to prepare him for this. Like Edith, he worked and studied at the same time (he handled three sections of Freshman English every semester), adroitly balancing the many responsibilities of graduate student, associate instructor, and family man. He taught and studied, did the laundry on weekends, cooked occasionally, took an hourly job here and there to be able to afford the little extravagances for his family during birthdays and holidays. So where did he err? Edith would have rephrased the crucial question: What had he not done? But Tomas would insist, self-righteously, that he had done everything for them, short of robbing a bank. Well, all right. Perhaps, not everything exactly.

There was that small matter of their piddling sex life. They had taken to sleeping in separate bedrooms in the last couple of years. One of the luxuries of Campus View was that you could have a room of your own. Edith used to say, “Why is it that I always have to make the first move?” Meaning: she found sneaking into his room (after Suzie had gone to bed) increasingly humiliating. It was the woman’s prerogative, after all, to be desired and pursued, not to pursue. But what did she expect? After doing the day’s assignment on Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (interesting), making ten pages of translation for French 501 (tedious), and checking seventy-five freshman essays in various stages of incoherence (excruciating), then picking up Suzie from the Japanese babysitter, heating the TV dinner, and taking out the trash (Edith did the dishes while half-watching the eight o’clock news on Channel 30), after doing this and doing that, Tomas felt totally exhausted and in no mood for an energetic wrestle in bed to cap his long wearying day. Could anybody blame him? He was not Tom Selleck, nor was meant to be. In any case, why take unnecessary risks? At this point in their lives, they needed another baby like they needed a hole in their head, woman’s prerogatives notwithstanding. As Professor Chaitan, that understanding old man, would have allowed: “Il leur faut du repos….”

Another time Edith had gazed out of their apartment window to a world suddenly empty of people. “Everybody’s gone for spring break,” she said wistfully. Campus View was a boxy nine-storey building, of unprepossessing architectural provenance despite the elegant limestone facade quarried from south of town. Shaped like a massive T, the horizontal bar (consisting of the south and north wing) ran parallel to Union Street, while its legs (the east wing) jutted out toward a grassy knoll in the back. This area was usually littered with people: boisterous picnickers chasing frisbees, cyclists gearing up for the Little 500, baseball players on weekend practice, sunbathers in skimpy bikinis baring the paleness of their winter flesh to an unseasonably warm spring sun. The Agbayani apartment was ideally located on the third floor of the east wing (high enough to allow a birds eye view of the grounds but low enough to make the escape down the stairwell manageable, in case of fire). But that day the area was desolately empty. Even the resident Peeping Tom in Apt. 606, probably an onanist to boot (in the daylight just a balding middle-aged man from Turkey doing postgraduate studies in environmental planning), had disappointedly retired behind the drawn curtains with his binoculars. Edith had watched the scene with an expression that barely concealed her wistful longing. Where had all the young men and young women gone? Probably to Florida for a bit of tan, sun, and fun, like turtles in heat during their annual pilgrimage to their mating ground.

Tomas and Edith, of course, never traveled during the holidays, like most other foreign students on a strict budget. The Thai occupants of Apt. 312 were home, catching up on their term papers because you could hear a typewriter thoughtfully going tak tak-tak tak tak-tak. The Japanese couple in Apt. 301 across the hall were doing their spring cleaning and moving furniture with a lot of scraping. In Apt. 308, the young El Salvadoran couple, husband and wife, were sobbing again. Were they homesick? Did they leave small children behind? Had something terrible happened in their troubled homeland? It was ironic that, for all the vastness of America, Tomas and Edith, holed up in Campus View, had seen so little during their long stay in the States. They had gone outside the state only twice: once to Louiseville to watch the Kentucky Derby and once to Chicago where they visited the Art Institute and the Museum of Natural History and went up the Sears Tower to marvel at the dark choppy waters of Lake Michigan that looked wide as a sea. Both times were sponsored by a church hospitality group that matched foreign guests with local families willing to entertain them for the weekend.

Surprisingly, the divorce proceedings went without a hitch, largely because Tomas did not feel like contesting any of the allegations. He was confident that Edith would eventually come around and see the foolhardiness of this grand guignol. The petition for the dissolution of a marriage, drawn up by the Legal Services of Indiana that provided free legal counsel to indigents, simply stated that the marriage was “irretrievably broken.” There was one further business of a property settlement, but Edith, in a gesture of generosity or relief, offered him a free hand to do whatever was proper or necessary. She got to keep Suzie. And he, if he liked, could keep their small house and lot in Dumaguete, their rusting appliances, their mismatched pieces of furniture. After the court hearing the three of them walked up Kirkwood Avenue to the bus stop. Anybody who saw them would have thought that this was some ordinary happy family out for a leisurely stroll or a bite of pizza at Little Caesars, and not a family already irretrievably broken.

In mid-February, Edith dropped out of graduate school and moved with Suzie to Newport, R.I., where John Steinbergh taught at a community college. Only then did Tomas feel the full force of the divorce. He was angry and bitter. Suzie had written: Dear Daddy, Dad, we have a sailboat and we live in a big big house…. What civilized law would take a daughter from her father? If he had entertained scenes of eventual reconciliation and forgiveness, that possibility was now dashed to pieces. The sneaky bitch! Plotting behind his back! Never in a hundred years did he expect this, and he could not imagine how they — the sneaks! — had managed to know each other. He recalled a conference on genetics held in Athens, Ohio, that Edith excitedly attended. When he carefully looked over the old telephone bills, Tomas discovered that there had been long-distance calls between then for nearly a year. And probably while he was right there in the kitchen too, frying their chicken dinner or slicing the onions! He could have kicked himself. How could he have missed what was coming? Regretfully, he had to admit he had been too engrossed in his own ambitions to see anything else. Looking back, he could now see obvious signs of impending disaster, some deep unhappiness on her part that he, in his ignorance or distant preoccupation, was unable to forestall. There was nothing else to do but pick up the broken pieces.

“Is Edith coming back” The voice on the phone was brisk. It was the zoology department secretary.

“I don’t know. She didn’t say.”

“Well, she still has her things in the office. Would you mind picking them up? We really need her table for another GA.”

Jordan Hall was on Second Street, a more interesting older building with ivy creeping up its limestone walls. The hallways, painted the usual beige, smelled strongly of formaldehyde. At regular intervals, display windows were punched into the walls, where stuffed birds and animals crouched in arrested motion and stared out with glassy eyes. Through a half-opened door, he caught a glimpse of several stretched boards where crucified cats, skinned to their raw muscles, grinned their eternal grimace of pain. Great, he thought, and nearly bumped into a waste container in his hurry to get to the end of the hallway.

“Mrs. Weinstein? I came for Edith’s….”

“Oh, yes. This way, please. I’m sorry to bug you about the table but we’re a bit overcrowded this semester.” She looked more kindly than she sounded almost motherly, in her gray cardigan and loose brown dress.

“That’s all right. I understand.”

Tomas followed the broad efficient back into another room filled with microscopes and glass jars, then to yet another adjoining room. This must be their special laboratory. He remembered Edith mentioning it in passing. A huge airy room with greenish light, it was completely lined with metal racks running the entire length of the room, standing eight racks thick. On the shelves were arranged some two or three hundred fishbowls half-filled with water. And at the bottom of each bowl stirred a strange orange-gray creature, half-lizard and half-fish, with feathery things coming out of its gills like red corals. His gasp of amazement was audible.

“Our axolotl colony,” Mrs. Weinstein beamed a proprietary smile. “I bet you’ve never seen anything like this.”

“No. I can’t say I have.”

“They’re Mexican salamanders. Ambystoma mexicanum.”

One smiling graduate assistant looked their way. (Chinese? No, probably Japanese. Most Japanese he knew had terrible teeth.) With a long teaspoon he was feeding an axolotl something that looked like frozen ground meat. The creature remained motionless, smelling the meat in the water; then with lightning quickness, it snatched at the food. Its throat quavered once, twice. Bits of meat swirled in the water.

“We alternate chicken liver with beef liver.”

“No wonder they’re so plump.”

It was only after a minute that Tomas noticed something very strange and very wrong: the axolotl crawled in a lopsided way, its tail end dragging to the bottom. Then he saw two perfect depressions of raw flesh where its hind legs should have been. They had been sliced off at the joints, where limb and body joined, with a very sharp instrument: the cuts were so clean. When he looked more closely at the others, he saw that all of them had been mutilated in one way or another. In a petri dish near the sink he saw shiny pieces of axolotl flesh and internal organs. Another graduate assistant, an Indian, was dissecting a dead axolotl.

“Unfortunately, a few do die. Despite the care and precautions.”

Tomas turned to Mrs. Weinstein. “Was Edith involved in any of… these experiments?”

“Of course. It was part of her assignment. She was pretty handy with the scalpel, if I may say so myself. And she kept meticulous records of their rate of regeneration.”

Regeneration? Or mutilation and forced mutation? On another axolotl, where there used to be a tail, two rudimentary pinkish knobs had begun to sprout like forked branches.

Poor axolotls. After they were through with the creature, what freak human invention would bungle into amazing existence?

Tomas gave a faint shudder, remembering the Jewish men and women whose flat buttocks were pumped full with melted paraffin to voluptuous proportions, and the Jewish children whose genitals were sliced off or sewed shut to prevent the procreation of the race.

“The regeneration part is routine. What we are really trying to discover is the threshold of recovery.”

“You mean just how much you can slice off without killing the poor thing?”

“Not quite that crudely… but, yes, I suppose that’s another way of putting it. I know all this seems cruel to you. But axolotls are very hardy animals. They don’t feel much pain. They grow their missing parts. They heal rapidly.”

“I see,” he said, with some irony because he was growing inexplicably angry. Such obtuseness. Just because they cannot cry does not mean they don’t feel pain. “All for the benefit of science, I presume.”

Mrs. Weinstein drew herself up, straight as a ramrod. “Knowledge has its price, like everything else,” she said, almost coldly.

Sure. And the axolotl shall pay.

“But we’re making progress,” she went on. “We’re getting there. Too bad Edith had to drop out of the program.”

Too bad she did not drop out sooner, Tomas thought bitterly, before the coldness had worked its way into her heart. He suddenly felt suffocated, as alien and out of place in that antiseptic laboratory as the wild axolotls in their glass bowls. He could not get away from the blank stares of the mutilated creatures fast enough.

As it turned out, what Edith had left could easily fit into one brown grocery bag: romance novels in paperback, the score of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, some old test papers that she failed to return, old Christmas cards and letters from home, and a fading Polaroid of the three of them taken during their first winter in Bloomington nearly six years ago. It was a gentler time then. They looked younger, slim and clear-eyed, the bright future still ahead of them. They were laughing, the three of them, the snow falling dreamily on their hair and eyelashes. The snowballs in their mittened hands seemed like the most extraordinary things in the word. Christmassy and magical. (They could not guess the snow’s malevolent power until years later, during the blizzard of 1978, when snow fell for days in slanting sheets, piling up chest-deep everywhere, cutting off roads, burying abandoned cars, bursting water pipes, and leaving a family of four in an isolated farmhouse in Brown County frozen to death.)

In the photo, Suzie was warmly bundled in a red fur coat. Tomas recognized the coat as coming from the Opportunity House, a church-run store selling used things, located on the west side, the poorer side of town. They often bought their clothes there at bargain prices: shirts for a dollar a piece, dresses for two, coats for three, T-shirts for a quarter, socks for a dime.

Since it was still early and the spring weather warmish, Tomas decided to walk back to Campus View. At the back of Jordan Hall was Ballantine where he used to have most of his classes. He thought that in four months he would be through with his program. It was now just a matter of running off the required number of copies and having them bound. The approval sheet had already been signed by his dissertation committee. And then he would be flying home to the Philippines. Alone this time. He felt nostalgic and sad, as though he were already missing everything: the great revolving globe in the foyer of Ballantine, the echoing classrooms, the maple and tulip trees outside, bare since last fall, just beginning to bud. Many other Filipinos had walked the meandering campus pathways, now edged with a few blooming forsythias. Juan C. Laya was there during the forties. (On the seventh floor of the university library, he once came across an old yellowing copy of His Native Soil, inscribed to his American foster parent: “In gratitude for taking me into your hearts and home.”) He crossed the bridge over Jordan River and went round the Showalter Fountain where a reclining Venus floated in the air amidst the sprays of water jetting out of the mouths of dolphins.

One block further north was 10th Street and from the corner of the university library, he saw Campus View burning.

Fire, smoke.

But, no, it was just a violet Indiana sunset reflected on the tiers of glass windows and the plume of black smoke from the basement trash incinerator coming out of the smokestack on top of the building. In the hallway of the east wing he caught a whiff of beef teriyaki and broiled lambchops. The wing used to be known as Little Tehran because most of the occupants were Iranians. But times had changed. The Shah was out, and many of the Iranian students dropped out of school. Now it might become a Little Tokyo or a Little Riyadh.

Tomas took out two pieces of fried chicken wrapped in foil from the freezer and heated them in the oven. There was still some leftover rice. He sliced a tomato and an onion, and shook the half-empty bottle of catsup. While eating dinner, he watched TV. Debonair Bob Barker, host of The Price Is Right, was calling out for the next lucky number. “Contestant №27 of Venice, California, (shriek, applause), come on down!” A screaming overweight woman in a red halter and black stretch pants ran panting down the stage. “Now, ladies, what would you give me for this luxurious water bed and bedroom suite from Broyhill (shriek, applause)… plus this entertainment package (shriek, applause)…” Tomas flicked the channel to the 8 o’clock news. Bearded Iranian youth, carrying giant posters of Khomeini, were chanting “Death to Reagan! Down with the USA! Death to Reagan! Down with the USA!” After rinsing the plate, glass, and spoon, he watered the potted begonia on the windowsill, another one of the things that Edith had left behind. It was dying. From too little sun? Too much water? He thought of a sailboat and a white clapboard house on Narragansett Bay. It was terribly unfair. She was his daughter, too. Despite himself, he was dialing their number in Newport, R.I.

After the fifth distant ring, a voice came through. “Yes?”

“Hello? Edith?”

“Do you have any idea what time it is here?”

“I just need to talk to you.”

“Are you all right? You sound terrible.”

“I’m okay. Just a slight cold. How are you and Suzie?”

“We’re fine.” She paused, then added. “She asked about you today.”

“Sometimes, I wish we…”

“Tom, please.”

He did not mean to say that at all. He had promised himself never to beg or cry. Even before the divorce was finalized, when some passionate pleading on his part might have changed her mind, he did not beg. He was not about to start now. “Sorry,” he said and had to swallow hard to regain his voice, “Anyway, when I go home, what shall I tell them?”

“I don’t know. The truth, I guess.”

“The shock will probably kill them. Nanay had a weak heart. You know that.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. They’ll get over it, soon enough. It’s not as if somebody had died or something.”

But somebody or something has, he thought, but did not say it. Instead he said, “I hope you’re right. For our sake. How’s Suzie’s taking it?”

“As well as can be expected. She’s too young to really understand what’s going on.”

“When I think that I may never see either of you again, once I go…” There again, the self-pity in his voice edging out any sense of pride.

“Oh, Tom, please.” She sounded wretched and tearful enough. But the wretchedness went as quickly as it came. “Don’t do this to me.”

“I mean, it’s true. I can’t just come over to the States and visit. Just like that. It’s not going to be easy.”

“We’ll write,” she said. Then she brightened up. “Hey, we can even visit you in Dumaguete for a few weeks. Won’t that be neat? Suzie would just love to visit.”

“She’ll be different then,” he said. Because people do change, despite themselves; he knew that now, even the ones who love you. Distance can do that, and time and ambition and carelessness. Most of all, carelessness, as they were careless once, taking the tenuous joys of home for granted. “Perhaps she won’t even recognize me.”

“Let’s not go into that right now, okay? We’ll work something out, Tom. Okay?”

“Okay, I’m sorry.”

“Have to go. I’m freezing. The forecast said it could get as low as 30 degrees. Can you imagine that?”

In one leap she was gone. He had lost her. Her mind was elsewhere, on the turning weather and the warm bed where a naked, blue-eyed man waited to make love to her all night. After the goodbyes and goodnights (“Kiss Suzie for me….”), Tomas held on to the phone and a moment longer and heard the severed connection humming in empty space.

Later he woke up in the night, sweating, his left leg dead, his throat dry, as though he had been breathing through his mouth or pleading in his sleep. When he got up for a drink of water, tiny needles pricked his numb foot. He looked at his watch. Three o’clock. Outside the window, the world lay sleeping. Lights lined the streets, but in Campus View almost all of the apartments were dark. Only the insomniac in Apt. 511, pursued by some private demon, was till pacing the floors. Bluish shadows leaped and scuttled around his room. The rest were in bed, breathing quietly in the healing dark. The dirty old man in Apt. 606 entered his Turkish seraglio of veiled voluptuaries. The couple in Apt. 308 had followed their tears home to the misty grasslands of Cojutepeque. Freud was right: our night selves always return to the wellspring of our deepest desires. Some dream of women; others dream of home. Some want to go home; others want to stay.

Edith, Suzie, he called out, in his heart. What would happen to him now? What would he do for the rest of his life? I grow old…. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. He slid the bay window shut. A wind had swept down from the north, bringing the enduring chill of snow. Tomorrow there would be more frost powdering the grass, and the spring forsythias would prematurely shed their yellow blooms. He thought of the drugged apparitions in fishbowls, living on an over-rich diet of chicken liver. In the forest and warm lakes of Mexico, in their element, they could have been the fierce golden creatures that they were. He felt suddenly cold. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. He sat in the easy chair and, drawing his legs underneath, bundled himself tight in an old woolen quilt. He sat like that for a long time, without moving. He would watch the night rise into morning. But even as he steeled himself for the long vigil, his eyes grew heavy and his head slowly sank against his chest.

The last thing he heard, in that half-wakeful state before sleep, was the distant wail of a freight train moving across the landlocked vastness of the Midwest.