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 No. 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.