Excerpt from The Adjudicator — Susan Daitch

When I ride the subway, I like to stand in the front window, the absolute front, so I can see down the long tunnel, at least as far as sporadically placed lights provide illumination. As I travel underground, I need a sense of distance; that assurance that there is a way out if one is needed, because every once in a while, there is a mechanical malfunction: signal, rail, human error, fire, or body on the tracks, pump failure, water pours in (a particular nightmare). You need to know, or to have some idea of how you can get out, especially with thousands of people stampeding behind you, as if Godzilla was down there, munching on the rear of the train, making his way to the front. If I turn around and look at fellow commuters holding their water bottles advertising their gym or radio station or coffee cup, scrolling through messages, reading newsfeeds, playing Dragon Krush or Creepsville or whatever, I feel the walls close in, as if the shaky metal capsule is heading to the center of the earth. I envy their calmness, their oblivion. As I look down the tunnel, I imagine being like one of those long gone Wave Pilots of the Marshall Islands interpreting the motion of the ocean as it rocked their canoes traveling hundreds of miles between coral islets, archipelagos and atolls. I recognize and register every swaying movement of my commute, acknowledging curving track and change of speed. I know what is customary and what could signal a problem. It remains to be determined what use this information could be put to.

There’s another reason I prefer to look down the tunnel rather than face my fellow passengers. Unbeknownst to them, they’re a riot of sensations, a bombardment of throbbing, itching, twisting. I feel the constriction of a hoodie tied too tightly around a child’s head, string digging into neck, the jab of an umbrella through the toe of a rubber boot, the drumming of fingers against a pole. It’s an old man playing I Wanna Be Sedated, eyes shut as if the metal subway pole were an electric guitar, and it’s 1978 which is way before even he was born. Why I feel what they all are feeling used to be called mirror touch synesthesia, but no one has tangled neural pathways anymore. No one sees sounds or tastes colors or give graphemes personalities. If folks at work knew that somehow those genes snuck through, and as a result I struggle with the anomaly of a premotor cortex gone kablooey, I’d lose my job, and that would only be a best case scenario. The expression, no longer used, do you feel me? My answer is always, yes, I can’t not.

That morning the conductor draped his jacket over the window, so instead of the tunnel, all that could be seen was quilted lining and seams. This happens sometimes. Once a conductor taped a newspaper page over the window, and I read the funny pages between stops. This could be interpreted as an aggressive gesture on the conductor’s part, though he or she might just want privacy, and has no idea who Zedi Loew could possibly be, or why she, above all other passengers, really needs to see and assess what lies ahead. That day, the conductor, apparently a young man, was singing Sloop John B at the top of his lungs. I looked around, but nobody smiled; earbuds and headphones blocked the sound. This is the worst trip, I’ve ever been on. He repeated over and over. Since I couldn’t post myself as look out for tunnel collapse, of which the odds are small anyway, I opened my book, and began to read.

The Shadow Prince, troubles me. It’s the true story of a prince, Eugene, born in 1600 something, whose his brain is completely out of sync with his body. A great military strategist but a hunchbacked dwarf, rumored to be queer, in love with another prince. His mother was a great beauty, sort of, depending on who was looking, but rumored to be a sorceress. Is physiognomy destiny? How can a particular physicality enable a particular personality, like a trellis the personality grows over and takes the shape of accordingly? For Olympe, yes, alluring to some, a witch to others. The body she inhabited was money in the bank. For her son, the prince, no. He was supposed to be a monk, his deformities and proclivities hidden away, but he said, screw you, buddy, and he led an army that kicked the Turks’ ass out of what was then some idea of Europe.

If the prince was born today, none of these contradictions would manifest themselves in any way, shape, or form. Pangenica, Inc. and concerns like it, locally and globally, turn parents’ desires into offspring. If, for example, parents who might want the next Prince Eugene, come to us requesting a boy or girl with a military bent, we analyze their genetic codes. (If they want such a child, they probably already have such a background. It’s already in their genes, so martially-inclined offspring makes sense. Their wishes don’t come out of nowhere.) The parents’ genetic codes are stitched, snipped, adjusted, so that the requested talents, proclivities, drives, height, coloration, etc. are all, within government guidelines, and the future soldier is created. We adjust skills for marksmanship, courage, foolhardiness, risk-taking non-aversion, tendency to resolve conflict by violence, but not by tyranny (that’s a tricky one but not impossible). There are no more hunchbacks, no more sexual peculiarities as determined by ruling AX-RT 6703, originally Vatican approved in some districts, but long since altered for greater flexibility. Homosexuality, for example, is off the taboo list.

We practice eugenics, locally and globally. The word used to have a comet’s tail of bad news attached to it, but let me explain.

If everyone is genetically engineered, there are no more hunchbacks, psychopaths, no physical deformities, no or limited mental anguish insofar as genetic engineering can exert control. Environmental circumstances aren’t within our purview. There were doubters who feared so-called designer babies would turn out to be just bland boring cookie cutter humans. Nature pokes an oar in from time to time. Statistics show that the same number of geniuses occur whether naturally (as in the past) or engineered (now), and there are fewer deranged, miserable people, which, to most citizens is a desirable outcome.

People used to debate the dangers of genetic alterations. What if mistakes are made, and a super-predatory animal, some kind of marine organism could be as small as a virus, destroys every living thing in the ocean? Even destroying a majority of things, or even some lesser percentage than majority, is catastrophic. We are careful. This hasn’t happened over the years, so I expect odds are it won’t in any overreaching way. The rogue genes for rapaciousness, for tyranny, seem to be gone, along with narcissism and obsessive compulsive syndromes. In the past, jumping genes were a source of fear and caution, perhaps over caution. Whoops, signs of schizophrenia, didn’t see that coming.  Parents requested Einstein but got Mad Ludwig instead. We check and double-check at every step of the way, so this won’t happen, and it never has, therefore the company states with confidence that the jumping gene anxiety turned out to be baseless.

Couples pick up their infant or infants nine months to the day after their forms have been approved. They stand in line with fellow prospective parents at one of the local incubatoriums or at Pangenica itself, if they’re in the tri-city area. (Originally the centers were all pastel-colored, and filled with anodyne music, meant to be soothing and welcoming, but after a number of years, this design was completely altered. All music ends up meaning something, dislodges some memory, and furthermore, around the clock, repetitive sound can be oppressive, so now the centers are white and silent.) Parents’ DNA is checked and double-checked to be sure no one is given the wrong child. Some are nervous, but all are clearly overjoyed and readying their phones and cameras. Unlike the old days, there are no tragic surprises. Ever. We all know that humans used to be born like any other mammal, by random, haphazard sperm meets egg, and you really had no idea what kind of person would emerge. Humans blundered along for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe. Now the nature of creating humans is about equality. No one is necessarily considered enormously more beautiful or intelligent or capable than anyone else. Engineering, of this kind, is about leveling the field.

A few generations ago you would hear about outliers in remote mountains, jungle, desert, a south Pacific archipelago, those who had babies the old-fashioned way, but now that’s impossible.  Reproductive systems with their fallibilities, lethargic sperm, acidic fallopian tubes, ducts that twist and self-seal, eggs that would turn out not to have all their marbles, all the multitude of formerly moving parts are no longer functional. The chanciness and risks of millennia have been eliminated. Globally, if these outliers were discovered, the penalty was death, not just because it’s illegal, but because of the risk of contamination, of scrambling a carefully curated gene pool.

Mutations still occur from time to time, so the earth’s population isn’t entirely uniform, but there are no extreme cases of physical or mental aberration. When they do appear, they are a reminder of natural chaos, entropy cleansed by death. Exerting control over haphazard outcomes was a good choice in an age of chaos when mutations, following periods of increases in radiation, intensify, though the debilitated tended not to reproduce. And now here we are, on a planet where only animals are left to their own devices, so what passes as human knows how things used to be done, reproduction-wise, and is very glad this is no longer the case. It’s what separates us from animals. There are benefits to this system.

Advantages: fewer doctors. People get sick in mild ways, get colds or have accidents, but there are no more major diseases like cancer, no auto-immune or hereditary diseases, no dormant genes for illness waiting silently to be turned on and then, get to work with corrosive intent. People just peter out, die of old age for the most part. Crime is down. Wars tend to be about information, attention spans, client bases, technological innovation, and aggression takes other forms, such as computer hacking, theft of resources, identities, but not termination of lives, at least not immediately. Doctors now mostly work as geneticists, administrators of palliative, end of life care, or trauma in the case of accidents. There are downturns in other professions, as well.

So, it’s difficult to imagine an era when bodies arrived on the planet with physical disabilities and unpredictable mental impairments. We have all kinds of images for that unfortunate period, but a picture of literal daily life when one was so hobbled, for this, the characters in whatever film runs in my head as I read, these characters eventually straighten out, and they’re just like everyday walking around people here. My imagination fails. I shut The Shadow Prince and put it in my bag.

At the first stop after the train emerged from the tunnel, a man got on wearing only a T shirt, shorts, and flip flops. It had been raining while he waited on the platform, a pleasant early morning rain, and he had no umbrella. I could feel the wet cotton of his t-shirt clinging to my shoulders and my fingers tensed as his did around his phone. He was oblivious to the fact that everyone could hear him, or maybe he just didn’t care. It’s people like me who get the short end of the stick every time, he rasped, while the other guys are making a bundle.

His sense of not knowing everything there was to know about one project after another, not getting the inside information, and so consistently shuttled off to schmuckdom, it sounded like a finely tuned story of which the speaker had no doubt whatsoever. Had his genetic code with markers for innocence and credulity soured into gullibility? I don’t think it quite works that way. He was just a guy who was continually snookered, it sounded like. I appreciated the desire to stand in the rain, pre-ordained or not.

Though rush hour trains were crowded, my commute took me away from the center of the city, and eventually as the train emerged above ground, apartment buildings gave way to clusters of office buildings. Pangenica was a large complex of glass buildings and labs, an office park with a view of the bay and the ocean beyond it. The sea was reflected in all those glass surfaces, giving an impression of the infinity of the ocean, but also, during the day, one couldn’t see in, man-made structures disappeared in the reflection. Looking north, from my office, there was the illusion the Arctic was just over the horizon, if the world were flat, and there were no obstructions in the way. That the company was located just outside of the city, and in this environment, was meant to imply, not just cheaper real estate, but that we operated within a natural ecosystem whose rules dominate, and we were helpless to alter them in a serious way, but in fact, we did exactly that with great seriousness. It was our theology, a given and accepted set of circumstances that determined how people entered the world, who those bodies were and, odds are, who they will become.

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Susan Daitch is the author of seven published novels and a collection of short stories. Her work was the subject of a Review of Contemporary Fiction, along with that of David Foster Wallace, and William Vollmann, and her first  novel,  L.C., was  a  recipient  of  an  NEA  heritage  award  and  a  Lannan  Foundation  grant. She has also received two Vogelstein Foundation awards and a Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her novel, Siege of Comedians was listed as one of the best books of 2021 in The Wall Street Journal and one of her essays was listed as a Notable in The Best American Essays 2022. Her books have been translated into German, Spanish, and Italian (forthcoming). Her most recent, The Adjudicator, is a novel about genetic engineering and consciousness.

The Adjudicator is now available from Green City Books