I Keep Koi

“…a stately, a good, and a very subtil fish…the Carp indures most hardness, and lives longest out of his own proper Element.”

          Izaac Walton, The Compleat Angler, 1653

Our ponds loop back on themselves but the lakewater eventually finds its way to the sea.

At my annual garden party for Mom’s favorite charities, inevitably someone or other will admire the landscaping and ask keep koi in there?

Oh yes, I say.  I keep koi.

***

My mother had purpose and will and elegance of mind and she pursued her research with the highest standards of scientific rigor.  Irreplaceable.

Her mentors had been shocked when she wouldn’t reapply for her fellowships.  She’d been the department showcase; their most brilliant lure for grants.

The chair had humbled his august self to ask her one more time if she’d reconsider, and I can imagine both their faces when she’d said she would prefer not to.

Look it up, she told me.  Drove me nuts when I was little but I was grateful, later, to have been seeded so early with habits of good research.

“It’s a very useful rejoinder,” Mom said.  “Just skip the fatal decline.”

But what will you do? everyone asked.  There were rumors of some prestigious appointment that couldn’t yet be publicly announced.

Make skin cream, she said.

She made a fortune though it took her a decade to do it, and the fortune let her do what she’d always wanted to do from the start.

***

“What have they in common?”

Ichthyosis; sirenomelia—the names were enthralling but the syndromes caused great suffering.

We were drinking tea on the patio and eating anchovies and mushrooms on toast.  I shared so many of her tastes.

She worked long hours but always took a break for these late afternoon conversations with me.  The company’s small campus was ten minutes down the road. 

I looked them up.

“Renal abnormalities.  Profoundly in sirenomelia, and complicating ichthyosis in its more severe forms.”

“Yes,” she said; “the mother of all glitches.”

***

Marine mammals retain the primordial ability to thrive in a sodium-rich environment because of their reticulate kidneys.  Their circulatory and thermoregulatory systems are highly stable, well-adapted to the demands of what is frequently an amphibious existence.

Successive evolutionary adaptations made humans the dominant terrestrial species.  But each one came at a cost and streamlined kidneys pay much of it.

To Mom, this strongly suggested a need for refreshed genetic vigor.

“As a scientist I was delighted,” she said, “when they discovered those Denisovan genes in the Inuit population of Greenland, which are thought to confer enhanced ability to survive in brutal cold.  More proof that modern humans have always had considerable variations in their lineages.

“But Denisovans, like Neanderthals, are safely extinct.  No living specimens to be brutalized in the name of science.  With Greenland under Denmark’s jurisdiction, they’ve got pretty good human rights regulations.  At least in theory.”

“Do—”

Mom felt there’d already been as much scientific inquiry as could be safely done on those intriguing populations known as haenyeo in Korea and ama in Japan. 

They’d supported their island economies for centuries because of their unique physiological capacity to free dive in frigid ocean waters without protective equipment or supplementary oxygen.

It had always troubled Mom that any achievement of a purported greater good often meant, in practical terms, causing great harm to individuals.  Every advance grew from suffering—that of human beings or other living creatures—mostly without their consent or understanding. 

So she focused on mechanisms of genetic repair rather than reintroduction of archaic or compatible genetic codes in order to replace faulty DNA.

***

 I was sure I’d always work alongside my mother.  For six months following college I did.

Scientific truths are implacable.  Genes favoring hardiness aren’t protective against drunk drivers.  One smashed into Mom and changed my ever after.

***

Grief can be a hallucinogen; you entertain fantastical ideas just to keep yourself from cracking.

I couldn’t continue Mom’s research on my own.  She had an original gift and much more preparation.  I wasn’t at her level.

What I was beginning to contemplate might not be entirely sound.  But just imagining its potentialities was extracting me from the black hole of anguish.

Life chooses its own direction.  Humans do a lot of harm, but that tends to self-correct though not always to humans’ advantage.  And the universe has the luxury of a leisurely timeframe.

I was pretty sure my plan for a wee little bit of biological tinkering wouldn’t cause any damage in the overall scheme of things.  Of course others have thought the same and been wrong.

But really.  My idea was pretty much likely to fail.

I called Smoltz.

“Let’s begin with the stipulation,” I said, “that I’m not completely nuts…”

***

Smoltz ran our lab—he’d been with Mom from the start.  He was a rigorous chemist and a good man who gave whatever was needed.  The cosmetic business required nothing more than continued sensible oversight; we manufactured one product and it needed no improvements. 

Mom’s ongoing research had been done in another part of the facilities.  Now everything belonged to me.

Smoltz was no authority on paraphyletic aquatic life forms, like fish, but he’s a true man of science.

“I’m encouraged,” he said, “by that speculative glint in your eye.”

Friends and staff had shown me a lot of caring.  But I’d still needed an awful lot of effort to get out of bed each day.

We went for a stroll on the estate, past the koi to where the less formal ponds are.

“You know those bits of Mom we’ve still got in the freezer?”

I wouldn’t have said it this way, of course, to anybody else.

My mother had been culturing her own cells for almost two decades, stockpiling mitochondrial DNA.  Though my own mitochondria are almost identical to hers, it’s Mom’s I wanted.

“You’re familiar with her theories and why she felt our own—uh—heritage contributes important traits to the human genome.  She—” and I had to stop for a minute—“was surely one of our finest specimens. 

“Fish may be lower down on the family tree but they’re equally complex creatures.  Some have what were once considered purely mammalian traits, like internal temperature regulation and even the production of bodily fluids with which to nourish liveborn young.  Using specimens from those species might possibly be like leapfrogging over some intermediate stages.

“But”—I felt silly, my throat starting to thicken at this—“there's a sort of splendor to carp.”

“You understand,” Smoltz said, “that the timeframe for obtaining therapeutically-valuable results will be considerably out of the range of even our most optimistically-predicted lifespans?”

“You know that Talmudic parable about the old man and the fig tree?”

“You might be reaching record heights of altruistic forethought here.”

Then for awhile we were quiet.

“Well,” he said finally, “if it’s off to the loony bin at least we’ll be there together.”

***

To get a natural mix of personalities, I chose candidates randomly.  Best not to overmanage.  Anyway the odds were ridiculous.  Carp produce a lot of eggs and we’d be replacing mitochondrial DNA in only a handful each time.  And limiting the project to no more than five years of annual attempts.  I didn’t want to use up all of Mom on this.

Smoltz felt less peculiar about his own contribution when I explained I’d be using it to stimulate gynogenesis.  He deserves a lot of credit for being a really game guy.

***

Mom and I had always swum every day.  We had an indoor natural pool for winter.  She'd built a pretty modest home considering our level of wealth, but that pool was worth it.  We loathed dead water.

The other three seasons, we always used the lake.

***

This spring I was pregnant.  A friend gave the vital gift, and was pleased to be a father.  Smoltz would make a wonderful uncle.

I carried well but you reach a point when your soles start aching night and day.  Just another curse of terrestriality.

It was mid-morning; the water deliciously cool.

The weeds had been tickling my feet and I was enjoying a sort of pleasant indolence.  The subtle alterations in sensation took a long time to register.  Nibbles, growing more intense.

Carp have exceptional senses of sight, taste and smell; to recognize and remember specific scent molecules even when diluted in large bodies of water.

Four or five of them now, rubbing against my toes and nipping the inside bends of my knees and elbows.  Frisky greetings, like I was an old schoolmate they’d just re-encountered.

Their eyes were sharp and intelligent, the way carp eyes are.  A pair of them had a little bit more. 

A look I’d have known anywhere.