Darwin's Bastards Read online

  GROTESQUE IN NATURE

  The Aurochs was made for an age when people believed human beings were a separate spectacle of the grotesque, practically unrelated to nature. They also thought a shopping frenzy was outside nature, or overspending in a jewellery store or auto mall an irrational and vulnerable mindset, or the gut instinct that drives franchise obesity or bulldozing or ghettos or congested sinuses—none of this seemed natural to our ancestors. Doctors, medicine, hospitals, these were all legal. Because they were shook by the face of death. This was an age of unfetteredness, freedom heaped upon freedom, vice upon vice, and, shook to the core, they watched their health. The closer they came to neutralizing cancer and dementia the less they smoked—now we encourage smoking and criminalize synthetic treatments. Thirty-six billion people on earth and we’re proud of a billion or more dying a year—there’s too many of us! I’ve seen many go, we all have, until the ordeal of living becomes unbearable. I get shook by death, too, but like a late-twentieth century Boomer. I don’t run towards it, I defend myself against it. I know where to buy antibiotics when I need them. Chemos got me through the bouts, without them I’d be dead, too.

  As I said, I was never naturally healthy. I failed to mention that along with asthma and astigmatism, my hair went prematurely white when I was three. I chipped a tooth on a banana around this time and was almost willing to believe my own rep, weak at the soul the nannies used to call me around Sotheby’s daycare, and the label stuck. I give off this deathly pall apparently, even though I live and everyone around me dies. My cheeks, my eye sockets, how sunken are they? As I grew older I hoped the grey made me look like my father before his death, and I used my hair to get me the respect granted an adult before I gained some confidence in my voice. I never said a word in protest when I stood by and watched my mother wave so long and leave the planet without me, not so much as a, No, Mama! I said nothing at my father’s death, either, not a year later, and my memories of their funerals are as fresh and lurid as if they both happened yesterday when I rewatched the footage. Mother waving her hand from there inside the silk interior of the coffin and a smile of such contented self-satisfaction as she lay her palm back on top of the white bow on her chest. They both seemed so proud to be leaving me, last of the Rupes, as they did their duty for the planet. I remember my mother’s last words to me: See you soon.

  I’m divorced twice and a widower four times over. My parents raised me briefly, between smoke therapy and vomits, and then left me with nothing besides a scholarship to an auction school. My siblings and relatives all took their lives or caught a similar plague trend. The few dear friends I once had have all passed. My last wife Polaris sold black-market chemos and antibiotics out of her skytaxi until she was murdered by twelve members of a drug cartellite. Of the nine, all but one of my children are gone, and my frail son Melvin’s on his way out soon, too, I fear. I’m the only one left. I raised a devout family. I spent my life among the devout. I acted devout. I acted natural through every pandemic, disease outbreak, and infection. They died. I didn’t. I never explained myself. But among those who ignore the natural health law there is an unspoken oath, and that’s never snitch on a doctor. We take our medicines and have the surgeries but not even my dying child learns the name of my GP. If you’re caught, the police are merciless and the law is unforgiving.

  Had I not learned to conceal from myself the dark sorrow I should have felt over my parents’ deaths, I’m sure I would be dead, too. Everyone at Sotheby’s expected me to follow my parents at any moment. The Aurochs was how I pulled through; it’s how I’ve always pulled through.

  Mars has known the name Verona Rupes since I was a grad student. As intern auctioneer I was notorious for driving up prices for neglected masterpieces of the post-Industrial market. I was in my thesis year at Sotheby’s—on the post-Indies—first in my class, and even had the strongest chin, like a cliff, and weakest temper, like a cave where my heart was meant to be. There was nothing I could do about my temperament. But in my field, self-centredness is an asset. Bidders bought into the arrogance and vanity I exuded. Ever since I was in school I’ve regularly visited surgery parlours—they’re in every city, it’s the first thing I need to know about a new place—where’s the doctor’s den. I’ve justified breaking the law in the name of historical research and as a sentimental attachment to the manners of post-Indies. I have a strong survival instinct. Say if another student auctioneer outsold me on a Tuesday, I found a way to ruin his confidence. For example, I’d say something like, Hey, Burke, I watched you at last evening’s Ikea auctions. Oh, is that so, Rupes, I didn’t see you. And I’d say, I thought your descriptions of the objects sounded like greeting-card free verse and wondered if by your tone of voice you meant to infantilise my field of expertise? And this combined with your misguided précis in the catalogue made the evening go from ambient to kinda suffocating. Then I’d watch as the auctioneer would sweat furiously, sure to go home gnawing over my comments, spend a sleepless night in bed shouting at me, and draw hardly a single sale on Wednesday. By Thursday I’d have ostracized the nuisance Burke from his and my colleagues, exposing him as a dilettante and memorizer, regaining my leadership and top ranking.

  MODIFIED AUROCHS

  A second Aurochs did go on the block in Spring 2255. I was two years fresh on the job as director and couldn’t raise the ears. I couldn’t sleep until I saw it though. I flew around the clock to see the thing where it was stashed in a suburb of Xamar, Usaomalia. It turned out to be a phoney third, or not a phoney, but a viciously superficial restoration job. A collector had found it on bricks being used as a shelter for a family of seven in the Adabiyat jungles of Qaraqalpaqstan. Father of the family sold it for a tune, and the new owner went looking for cans of a 1999 brand of Calcutta latex paint to match the period-accurate gunmetal-grey used on this Aurochs, which was stripped bare to the foam shell in places. Couldn’t find paint, couldn’t find parts or repairman willing to work for him. So besides reconstructing the entire interior with stem-cell leather, a great deal of fake restoration was done to the chassis, which was bullet-riddled. And the original overhead cam engine was half-missing. What was left of the parts the slum family had rigged into an ingenious indoor plumbing system. So the restoration team used parts from a mass-produced engine of a Chrysler Dynasty from the period, easy enough to come across. Like patching up a shattered Ming vase with scraps from your grandmother’s mugs-of-America collection.

  The auctioneer for the event was Burke Nkubra, whose oily moustache I’d known since school days. For this event he was also boasting a virulent tumour on his neck the size of a gavel-head and in his opening remarks he justified this whole charade with some gak about how the restorers wanted to sell a roadworthy vehicle and so on. I loathed this funky Aurochs and I found Burke a tedious auctioneer, and I couldn’t afford it, I couldn’t afford the thing that wasn’t even close to what I really wanted, so I decided to poison its sale, deflate the bids, kill the buzz. I still had what looked like my same white hairstyle from when I was a kid, except now I was a man. I went before the cameras with my lens-corrected eyes and enhanced lips and albedo-like chin and argued vehemently that whatever the outcome of the auction this was not a legitimate Aurochs, nor, I added, was its sale representative of any market price for genuine post-Industrial antiques, and being well regarded and having spoken first on the subject naturally the majority of the hamsters in my field agreed with me. In the end the sale went to a race-car junkie for a little under six-and-a-half-billion ears, and that was fifty-nine years ago.

  I walked away from that phoney auction with a weird hunch. I’m flying home to meet my kids and Coleco, my third wife, for dinner, and slapping my proverbial forehead the whole time thinking why hadn’t it occurred to me sooner: There must be more Aurochs out there. Two mint and a third refurbished? Is that really all? If there’s thirty-plus billion people on the planet, can’t there be someone out there like me, an educated man with a full head of hair-grafts who beat
bone marrow cancer, colon cancer, and childhood leukemia, and an abiding love for the tangible beauties of bygone days, but this alter-ego of mine is doing business on the other side of the fence from the institution, so to speak, and all he wants is to highway-drive an Aurochs, and day by day he’s stockpiling parts as they come on the block or whispering in parallel shadow markets, all to eventually mick-eymouse a roadworthy model of his own. A man might want one Aurochs for the secret ex-airport hangar showroom and one Aurochs to take out on private ranch raceways.

  Occasionally someone like Burke would auction a piece, some cracked crankshaft might surface in a dig—a rusty fan belt or a muffler—that I refused to go near. They all sold for astronomical sums, of course. I only wanted my name associated with perfection. This is also our natural way, though, and I couldn’t blame the buyers for having a bricoleur’s mentality— just as I wasn’t surprised by the public’s reaction when the suggestion of jettisoning all our garbage into space was put to referendum. Because I was born in the dump I know what a lot of people were thinking when they cast their vote, What if there’s something valuable in there I could use or sell? Many people have Noah’s instincts to build an Ark of their own, someplace to put all the precious things they come across for safety, stow them away in sets of two from the uncertain tides of oblivion.

  CASHMERE MOUNTAINS

  I found the museum its male and female aurochs specimens on an expedition thirty years ago, into what was then a war zone. Or rather, the animals were found on protected land, frozen in time, and I shipped them out. When I was Director of the Extinction Museum I’d thought if I acquired an aurochs, an actual skeleton of one of these mammoth oxen, for the museum, then I could position it centre stage, as it were, and begin to push the aurochs forward as the narrative for the museum, and inch myself closer to a budget for the vehicle. I think I was quoted at the time as saying it was the great hand of fortune that helped me to find those two enormous aurochs specimens. After all they weren’t skeletons, these were beasts on ice. It was all well publicized—we filmed the entire visit to the remote Cashmere Mountains Resorts where the world’s multi-billionaires own millions of acres of private property behind giant electrified walls that protect them from tour guides and insurgents while their names rise on the waitlist for homes on Mars.

  My aurochs discovery was all thanks to a couple of bony-necked and bucktoothed young hermaphrodites interning for Extinction.com who skyped me one night from seven thousand metres above sea level, where they’d found the two frozen inside a big bobbing ice cube they’d watched roll down a serac and go floating out into the glacial meltwater lakes in the Gas-broom Valley. I tracked their coordinates and promised to buy the specimens from them at a boner of a price and grant them staggering promotions to VPs of .com—with their promise of strict confidentiality and exclusivity. The interns were to wait at the nearest private resort until I came and met them. I told them I wanted to see the beasts on ice for myself. Unfortunately, when I arrived the two .com interns were nowhere around, and I learned from the security guards they had disappeared shortly before I arrived—likely kidnapped and tortured by the so-called Bermuda Shortstroopers, the guards guessed. The region’s tourists claimed the land as a traditional site of attraction and were at war with the local security guards and megawealthy residents over the right to vacation in Cashmere; so no easy place to remove giant frozen oxen from, and shaggy and sharp extinct animals don’t just slip under your anorak. But knowing the right people helps, and after another six months of negotiations with agents and lawyers and producers I was able to extract the aurochs-on-ice with my own museum team and a documentary crew and a publishing deal in place. The aurochs were sent to our lab to be plastinated, and a year later I installed them as the main attraction.

  BURKE NKUBRA

  Thirteen years ago, on a bright winter day, I was walking to work. I remember the air tasted distinctly of aluminum, a cleansing chill off the ashy sea. Just as I pulled into my office I got a call with a Martian area code. It was the representatives of a prominent financial backer to the museum saying it was time I retired as director. I insisted I had to stay; my work was incomplete. I was told to quietly step aside and welcome our new director, Burke Nkubra, who was already in place, yes, as I learned like everyone else when I read it in the newsfeed the moment I hung up from the meeting with the representatives and walked out my office door into the press conference. That’s how quickly I was swatted out of the way, like that. Burke had somehow lived long enough to replace me; the once-oily moustache now dandered, the pink grapefruit hanging on his neck had been a benign pulp this whole time, more of an affectation than any kind of life-threatening risk. Only day of my life I wanted to die, really wanted to.

  Without the overwhelming distraction of my directorship and all my daily bullying around the halls to preoccupy me, left to my own devices, I found myself easily bored, anxious, and, on a good day, prone to really childish, bestial rages. I pursued the Aurochs with an even greater zeal; perhaps now, looking back, I could say it was irresponsible zeal—but not reckless. It was a depressive zeal. That is, I pursued the car all the more anxiously while developing an even greater sense of stealth in my approach. My self-discipline over myself was punishing. In public I showed absolutely no interest in the aurochs or the Aurochs now that I was out of the museum. So far as I was concerned, publicly, the aurochs was their business. Secrecy was my only way of knowing that the dream couldn’t be taken away from me. Knowing that my love for the Aurochs was a secret was all that kept me from disintegrating. Otherwise I was a leper. I felt pulled apart. I was nothing without the directorship. I was falling apart one limb at a time, a cheek in bed, an eyelid over the phone, a toe floated to the surface of the bathwater. I left my fingers behind at a restaurant.

  A couple of years after my retirement—by force, from a position I’d held for most of my life, a handful of profitable decades, nothing more—I was wallowing in the black market while sucking up to narcopharmaceutical gangs, and that’s when I met Polli, my most recent wife. Thanks to her, I found the spunk to forge ahead and forget the past. I downloaded a new hairstyle. Enough with my white hair from childhood, I didn’t want to be an old man a minute longer. I got a completely new cut, dyed an all-natural purple wow by essence of jacaranda. I designed myself a whole new wardrobe to coordinate with my colourful new wife, new hair, and new career—importer-exporter—even switched my irises, and immediately began brokering sales of antiques and offering my consulting services to large estates needing expert evaluation of holdings before going to an auction house or institution.

  And I had better black market opportunities now that I was with Polaris, who was in league with health criminals and corrupt Martians of all variety. I encouraged her and through her I met at least twenty-three dead-serious parts collectors on Mars. They didn’t know each other. All bidding was by proxy. But I knew them all, and how much they all hated the thought of each other and had suspicions about who was who.

  To start with I was careful to only sell small things in large quantities when I was buying and trading objects on the black market, like Aztec gold medallions, ostrich eggs, or once in a while swap a sea serpent for something worth a little more, like Hitler’s brain, the Bagram ivories. These bargains earned me trust among the agents and proxies. Along the way I discovered underground hospitals and learned who fronted as convenience stores or public relations firms, and who could put me in contact with the owners of famous Caravaggios stolen five hundred and fifty years ago, Tupac verses thought to be destroyed, lost religious knowledge, coercion technologies no one is aware exist but are still being used today. I traded it all, as well as live animals thought to be long extinct, like the polar bear. Lazarus Taxa, it’s called.

  POLARIS FROM DURBAN

  When I met Polaris she was a young idealistic soldier strapped for cash—but very aggressive. She drove an armoured skytaxi over Durban that doubled as a travelling pharmacy and made deliveries. I was
going through another bout of the C— and needed a lift. I called a number and she arrived. Meds up, she said, and walked in to my place and took a seat. I loved her fiercely from the moment I saw her, how confident she was in her long tousled wig, sunken eyes and cheeks, thin spotty torso, and a taxi-driver’s fidgety legs. Narrower shoulders than even an old bone-rack like me. What ails you? she asked, jingling with pockets full of pills. I told her my condition, the smoke-like frailty of my existence. She let me peruse among her specialties, she was selling pure chocolate, homemade chemo drugs, and whatever was fresh from the Alzheimer’s labs. I wanted a little of everything. She said I couldn’t just take pills, I’d also need the pricey twice-daily intravenous injections into the tailbone and monthly blood transfusions to cure me. After a few sessions with the needles, and getting a chance to talk and touch veins, I could tell Polli saw past my wiki-gen16 to the real me. She asked me what I did for a living now that I’d been fired, and I said that I too survived in a secondary market. I said that whereas her business was in medicine trafficking, mine was the memory market. The antiquities game. That keening in the heart for the thing, I told her. The special thing. The must-have. If enough people are keen, the thing itself begins to glow or beat. Consumer aura determines price.