I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: GIL SHAHAM-“Partitat No. 2 “Gavotte en Rondeau” by J.S. Bach” (Field Recordings, January 12, 2012).

This was the very first Field Recording posted on the NPR site back in 2012 [Gil Shaham: A Violinist’s Day At The Museum].

Shaham plays Bach in the Hirshiorn Museum.

As Gil Shaham wandered through the back offices of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., he said he felt “like Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum.” For this impromptu Bach mini-recital, the violin superstar momentarily became part of the art, bathed in the modish lighting and projections of a multimedia installation during the performance.

He is introduced with the rather amusing:  “A world famous, world renowned violinist who, by the way, starts every morning with a bowlful of Cap’n Crunch.  He told me that.”

I love that this first Field Recording was, like many of NPR’s best things, a spontaneous idea:

A crowd packed the exhibit room to watch as Shaham launched into Bach’s third partita. After the performance, the violinist greeted fans in the museum, many of whom were headed to his concert at the Kennedy Center that night. He seemed surprised and delighted that the guerrilla concert, announced only on local classical station WETA and Twitter that day, drew so many people willing to hear Bach in the afternoon.

[READ: January 22, 2017] “Are We Not Men”

Boyle’s stories aren’t usually as fanciful as this.  But I loved it just as much as many of his other more down to earth stories.  I particularly enjoyed that it was set in the future, although there was no real statement of that until late in the story.  There were hints, which seem obvious in retrospect, but which at first just seemed like hyperbolic or metaphorical.

Like “the dog was the color of a maraschino cherry” or that the lawn incorporated “a gene from a species of algae that allowed it to glow under the porch light at night.”

The story opens with the cherry-colored dog killing an animal in the narrator  Roy’s front yard (on that grass).  He wanted to chase the dog away because it might ruin his grass.  Then he noticed that what the dog had killed was his neighbor Alison’s pig.  She loved that pig and anthropomorphized it.  To try to salvage the pig, he ran up to the dog waving his arms.  It immediately latched onto his forearm instead.

As Roy fights with the dog, the dog’s owner, well, the daughter of the owner, came running across the street.  She looked like a teenager but was actually 11 or 12.  When the girl says, “You hit my dog,” he replies that she bit him.  The girl says Ruby would never do that–she’s just playing.

Amid this horrorshow of blood and violence and death, and a sprinkling of genetic splicing, Boyle throws in a very funny experiment gone wrong.  Crowparrots were a modified bird which blended crows with the invasive parrot population.  It believed that the experiment would turn the parrots into carrion eaters.  But instead it made their calls loud and more frequent.  And they mimicked, so they “were everywhere, cursing fluidly, (“Bad bird! Fuck, fuck, fuck!“).”

When Alison gets home, she is devastated by the death of her pig, of course.  When the girl sees this she runs over and apologizes profusely to Alison in French.  When he looks at her like she is crazy, she informs them both that her I.Q. is 162.

When Roy’s wife Connie arrives home, we learn a bit more about their relationship.  “We often talked in non sequiturs.” When he told her that he was bitten by a dog, she said, I want a baby.”

And that’s when we learn a lot more about the technology available.    CRISPR gene-editing technology allowed you to choose the sex and other features of the child–“like going to the car dealership and picking out which options to add to the basic model.  Connie and Roy had been married for 12 years and she felt it was time for them to have a baby.  He wasn’t so sure  So instead, he bought her a dogcat (people still aren’t quite sure what to call the young, even now, fifteen yeaes after they were first created.  Kitpups? Pupkits?”).  But she is pissed at him for thinking that she was so easy to buy off.

He storms out and decides to give the pet to Alison in replacement for her dead pig.  She invites him inside.

The next paragraphs inform us that seven month later, Roy is now living with a pregnant woman and they are next door to another pregnant woman.  Connie doesn’t know that Roy is the father of Alison’s baby.  Alison told him he didn’t have to be involved.

How will all of this play out?  The rest of the story is as interesting as the beginning with the same amount of tension and humor (those crowparrots!).