The Silk Moth
First and foremost, Dr. Fischer, despite his title, was a magician. Now of course considering the milieu in which he was raised—the two long-faced professors that comprised his parentage were of a traditional ilk hardly seen in these days, and his youth spent among a rotating series of Northeastern universities resulted in a strict and academic childhood—to pursue magic was tantamount to suicide, or worse, failure. So Dr. Fischer became a pediatric nephrologist. It was only in the years following his parents’ tragic deaths however (golf course, summer storm, lightning strike) that Dr. Fischer began to once again pursue his passion.
By then regret had long since taken root. (Dr. Fischer never failed to pronounce the word ‘regret’—either to others or to himself in his own mind—with the utmost meticulousness, placing particular emphasis on the final syllable and always making a show of the “t,” with much spittle and fancy, like how in his mind a real Englishman would ask for a ciga-rette, or waltz to the latest min-uette.) In actuality though, regret was much less refined. It was a dangerous and unpredictable concept, an idea that fluttered about in Dr. Fischer’s mind like an injured seagull, hobbling spastically through the air and on the boardwalk, screeching at passerby while heckling for French fries: in other words, it was to be avoided at all costs, made to disappear, shooed away with an umbrella or other long instrument.
At the current moment, with his long legs propped up against his desk, Dr. Fischer sliced and whipped about this instrument, waving away the poisonous thought with substantial effort. With each mental swipe he became less and less tethered to his past, graciously and intentionally so, but still no closer to peace of any palpable kind. A glass bowl of Hershey’s kisses sat on his desk beside his right foot, now crossed underneath his left, and with each attempt at clearing the air of his mind—Shoo! Go away! Caw! Caw!—the bowl gained in sparkling translucency and form, as if it were a miniature ocean glimmering increasingly bright beneath a setting sun.
As his nurse Marie shot through the hallway outside his door, greeting and rooming patients with her natural proclivity towards banter of all kinds (she had, in her years, elevated small-talk to a perfected game, like computers had decades ago done to Chess, and then Go, and then nuclear fusion), Dr. Fischer began to nod his head at this candy-to-scintillating-ocean transition; in his mind, it had all the components of a ready-made magic act. All sorts of transformations were magical, he knew, and had the potential to inspire with awe. Change was somehow both the ordinary experience known to man (in each and every moment the wheel turns, turning…) as well as the utmost unexpected and noteworthy of phenomena. Of course whether that unexpectedness becomes dread or ecstasy is left up to the beholder—one man’s treasure, or what have you. But there is often room for a third party here, Dr. Fischer had found, between the change and its observer. That is the role of the wise-concealer, the great dresser-upper-of-things, the magician.
The chrysalis, for example, plays this role in nature, and if one were to observe the slimy metamorphosis of a caterpillar to exalted butterfly in a petri dish (here Dr. Fischer imagined the meticulous and piecewise losing of limbs, next the growth of those illusory, cellophane-like wings; a magician is always interested in the mechanics of change more than the average spectator) one would perhaps never go near another butterfly again. But all it takes is that gray curtain to introduce a bit of carefully placed blindness, and voila—pure, life-affirming amazement.
Smiling, Dr. Fischer sat up straight. He pulled a white silk handkerchief out from his pocket and gently laid it atop the bowl of candy. Then, with his right hand still pinching square in the center, he waved his left hand in a halo above it. Quickly, like he used to pull tablecloths out from under a set table without disturbing it, he yanked the handkerchief away. The silvery chocolates glimmered in place. He smiled wider, and there was a knock on his frosted-glass door. The disembodied voice of Marie spoke from the door’s near-opaque obscurity:
“You’ve got a patient waiting in room two doc!”
“Marie,” he spoke with a voice like a steaming column of coffee pouring from a carafe, “can you please come in here for a second? I’d like to show you something.”
The door slid open and Marie entered in her usual carefree manner. She was a younger Latina woman and wore a black dress twisted in brightly-colored birds that fluttered about in all directions. It must be Friday—on Fridays Marie wore patterned dresses.
“We’ve got a busy schedule today doc, I hope this—”
“Do you see my bowl of chocolates, Marie? Take it in for a moment. Now just watch.” He once again placed the handkerchief atop the prismatic crystal bowl, waved his hand counterclockwise three times, and looked back at Marie. “I hope you were watching carefully.” Dr. Fischer pulled away the handkerchief, and where there once sat solidly dozens of wrapped chocolates now rested a rippling surface of water, dark blue-green like a miniature ocean, and complete with minuscule foaming wave crests that rose and crashed like the tiny motions in a teacup atop a shaking table. Gusts of sea spray rose off from its surface in tiny vortices, and once could even smell the salt rising in the air. Transformations, as we know however, are never perfect, and so the sea’s churning surface still sparkled deep within with star-like illuminations, left over as remnants from the aluminum foil it was before.
“Voila!” Dr. Fischer smirked—‘voila’ was his favorite word. With his neck arched over the chalice, now turned aquarium, he turned his eyes playfully and expectantly upwards towards Marie. “What’d you think of that?”
“I think I’d like to get out on time today doc—your patient in room two’s been waiting for twenty minutes now. And I have a date tonight.”
The door slid shut behind her with a vacuum-like seal. Change is wasted on the blind, Dr. Fischer thought. He snapped his fingers and in a flash the goblet once again was filled with Hershey’s kisses. Plucking into the bowl, he unwrapped one and placed in on his tongue to melt; he rolled it about inside his mouth methodically from the back to the front of his palate, then from the front to back, and finally taking turns in his cheek pockets before it had disappeared completely.
“Voila.” He muttered to himself, noting too now that the chocolate had a slightly briny flavor.
He was finally stirred to exit his office not by the presence of the patient in room two, but by a breakout of sudden commotion in the nurses’ office. There, the nursing staff was huddled around Marie’s desktop, watching a propped-up-appearing man walk back and forth across a sage to a frothingly cheering audience (Dr. Fischer had seen him on the internet before, he the CEO of a large tech conglomerate; his name was Ted something-or-other). Dr. Fischer took a stance behind the bunch of them with his long arms crossed at his chest. The stuffed man on the screen spoke after his applause had died down.
“Yes, people, we have finally done it!” More rapture from the crowd, “there will be no more war, no more needless struggle. We’ve given birth, taken that faithful leap forward—once again Prometheus has blessed us with fire from the gods! Artificial life, silicone consciousness, whatever you want to call it, in a few short moments when my presentation concludes, will go live across the globe! Free for everyone to use, and for the first time in history, experience for themselves the next step in human evolution!” At this there was cheering from the nurses, a few checking their smart-devices in hurried anticipation.
The man on the screen continued. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, even for those of you to whom this comes as a surprise, for those of you who weren’t even aware you were riding this train of progress alongside us, our final stop has arrived! This day, my sweet and fellow weary travelers, will go down as our point of no return!” He raised both of his hands into the air and the crowd followed. “What progress! What beautiful progress! Welcome!”
Dr. Fischer loudly cleared his throat, and the lot of them swiveled around in their seats. One might’ve seen Dr. Fischer’s gesture as a kind of work-alarm (as Dr. Fischer intended it to be), but the nurses nevertheless continued swiping on their phones, grinning wide, silly grins, and laugh-whispering to each other—Dr. Fischer couldn’t command their attention on a given day, let alone now that they were at the “point of no return.”
Marie spoke up on all of their behalf. “You know, doctor Fish,” (Dr. Fischer never failed to wince at this nickname), “that you’re going to have to be a lot nicer to us now. You heard Ted Towers just now. (Now that was it! You’d think he was a magician with a stage name like that!) In a few minutes we’re all going to be able to live on the beach all day. We could all just leave right now if we wanted to.”
“Who said anything about not working? You think that money is just going to start raining from the sky for all of you? If anything,” Dr. Fischer’s cheeks started turning scarlet here, “I’m the one who won’t be needing any of you!”
“Oh please,” Marie laughed, “you wouldn’t know what to do without me doc.”
One of the other nurses—a large woman who always wore dark sunglasses and whose hands were constantly fidgeting in her pockets—exclaimed, “Well consider me out! Y’all can keep your flirting. I haven’t got the slightest reason to stay in this dingy-ass office! I got better things to do!” She stuffed a couple of things into her gaudily studded hot-pink purse, stuck her wide hands back into her pockets, and walked out.
Both Marie and Dr. Fischer blushed. “Well, if it’s that easy, then I suppose anyone who wants to should go!” Dr. Fischer stomped his foot. “But consider this a warning—anyone who leaves right now should never come back. I don’t care who or what kind of AI is coming on-line. We’ve got work here to do!” Then, with a show of force he didn’t know he could produce, Dr. Fischer threw out his arm towards the door. The lights in the room flickered on and off rapidly, and then turned off for a few moments. From out of the silence there was a great whooshing sound—like that of a wind blowing through a field of tall grass—and when the lights came back on there had spurted from the tile floor a bright line of thorny, red roses, extending from the tip of his hand to the door. They burned on-and-off in sequence like the blinking lights of an airplane’s runway at night. Most, if not all of the nurses seemed not to notice, however, and they followed Sunglass’s lead out the front door. All the roses burnt up and shriveled away to ash and nothingness.
Marie was left. She sighed, sat back down at her computer, and again reminded Dr. Fischer of the patient in room two, luckily his last of the day. Either out of embarrassment or pity, he finally went in.
Originally, like most other pediatric nephrologists, Dr. Fischer saw a range of patients: kids with small kidneys at birth, kids with blood in their pee, kids with kidney stones, kids who couldn’t pee, etc. But these days, most of Dr. Fischer’s patients came to see him for the treatment of an aggressive kidney tumor called Wilm’s tumor. They’d become increasingly common year by year, until nearly everyone who came to see Dr. Fischer had one. Especially since the last crop blight, when most people in the country had finally transitioned to eating plastic.
Eventually, Dr. Fischer stopped seeing everyone else. It simply wasn’t ethical, he’d reasoned, to see a basically healthy kid instead of one of these sickly, tumor-stricken ones. Today’s patient was another Wilm’s kid. He was also from Venezuela, one of the first countries to transition to all plastic diets. There were a lot of Spanish-speaking patients from South America recently, perhaps trying to get away from it all. How disappointed they must’ve been to realize that we’re on our way here too… Either way it meant Dr. Fischer had to use an interpreter to speak Spanish, which was really an AI voice on a screen.
Dr. Fischer didn’t know why he was so disappointed when he entered the room and saw the patient lying there on the examination table—with the classic bulging abdomen and bruised, mottled skin—he’d seen a dozen other patients just like him earlier today. He figured instead that it was the worried gazes of these parents, fixed on their boy with such an intense longing, and their huge, watery eyes, surrounded by bags of red, swollen skin. Or perhaps it was their hunched-over bodies, drooping over their child like great willows that angered him so. There was something so grossly familiar about it, the longing and the regret and the drooping, but also simultaneously repulsive: ‘it was you who ate all that plastic, pregnant as a beach ball,’ he wanted to yell, ‘and now you want to act sorry?’ But then again, they hadn’t the choice, after all. None of us ever had the choice to go back.
Still Dr. Fischer kept a calm demeanor and went about his normal routine, asking the whole gamut of questions to which he already knew the answers. When he asked if the child was circumcised, the parents turned their heads.“¿qué es eso?”
Dr. Fischer responded, “It’s when they get their foreskin cut off,” and in its eerily human voice the computer-translator spoke in turn, “es cuando les cortan el prepucio."
The parents burst out in laughter: “No, no… ¿Por qué haríamos eso?” (“No, no… Why would we do that?”)
The family left with a surgery date and a prescription for chemotherapy, and Dr. Fischer returned to his office. The sun was setting now beneath an orange, hazy sky. In its glow he glanced at the candy bowl once again and cracked a slight smile. Dr. Fischer rarely smoked, even less so since he’d become a physician, but every so occasionally indulged—now he opened the lowest drawer of his desk and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. From it he poked out a single one and twirled it between his fingers. He never did have the choice to go back, he thought. But what would that choice look like if it were offered to him?
Finally he placed the cigarette between his lips and snapped his fingers, producing a small flame from the tip of his thumb and lighting it. He inhaled, and blew a plume of smoke out over his desk. Then he waved out the flame from his hand and noted the stinging pain. Most people wouldn’t imagine that the trick would actually singe his skin. They wouldn’t even imagine that it was real fire—but the real magic was always subtler than one could imagine.
Marie knocked again at the door. “I’m leaving for the night, Dr. Fischer, I’ll see you on Monday.”
“Marie? Could you come in for a moment?” She entered. “Is everyone really gone?”
“I think so doc,” and she pulled up her smart-device. “Take a look—it’s already doing everything. The government started giving out checks too, in preparation for a recession. Don’t worry though doc, I’ll still come in Monday. And since when do you smoke?”
Dr. Fischer flicked his wrist and watched one of the blue jays on her dress fly in dizzying circles around her waist. “Occasionally. Do you know what causes kidney stones, Marie?”
“I suppose I don’t, no.”
“They’re from the buildup of something called calcium oxalate in our blood. You see we eat oxalate in certain vegetables and leafy greens—when we used to eat those things anyway—and then our kidneys can’t get rid of it too well. So it binds to calcium in our blood, turns into crystals, and that’s how they end up there.”
“Hmm—that’s interesting.”
Dr. Fischer pulled out his silk handkerchief from his pocket. “The silkworm however, didn’t have this problem. Which is interesting, especially considering its diet was almost exclusively Mulberry leaves, which had lots and lots of calcium oxalate crystals in them. That’s what made Mulberry leaves so stiff, if you had ever seen ‘em.”
“I can’t say I have.”
“But instead of trying to get rid of the crystals like we do, it used them to make its cocoon. We then used to boil them alive in their cocoons to get the silk, which is why silk’s so nice and sturdy. Of course this is before we started making plastic silk. But if you don’t boil them, they use the calcium oxalate—that crystal we so brazenly call waste—to transform into silk moths! Have you ever heard of a silk moth?”
“Wow… No, I haven’t…”
“I never even thought about it until I looked it up. But anyway, maybe that teaches us something. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, I’m glad you’re staying.” Dr. Fischer looked up at Marie and nodded, smiling gently, then closed his eyes and puffed his cigarette.
“Me too, doc. I’ll see you on Monday.” She pulled the door closed behind her and turned off the lights in the hallway. Soon it almost sunset, and the evening light filled Dr. Fischer’s office with a warm glow. It was early summer, and yet all around outside the remaining trees were ripening into their autumnal foliage with a kind of dying glory. Inside, though, Dr. Fischer’s dusty bookshelves were lined with the same leather-bound books that had sat there unchanging for decades; between their silent covers, they quietly communicated now-useless medical knowledge to each other. Yes, despite Marie’s confidence, Dr. Fisher knew it was all over for them. For everybody. He blew out another plume of smoke, directly upwards this time. To go back…
Dr. Fischer removed the cigarette from his mouth and held it in front of his face. A thin orange line of fire marked lower and lower a growing column of ash. When he blew on it the line ever so delicately hastened its pace. Concentrating harder, he furrowed his brow. Voila. Soon he watched with satisfaction the line moving upwards, back towards the tip, the ash coating itself once again with a cocoon of paper. His lips broke out into a terrible smile.
He flicked the cigarette out in front of him. The solid mass of tobacco and paper broke apart into a white flurry—snowflakes and flames swirled around in erratic, senseless patterns. But rather than obeying gravity the mass expanded in mid-air, growing until it reached almost the height of the entire room, and dropping like a gray curtain over a stage. The lines and forms that it engulfed dissolved in its midst, only to precipitate down into new molds; at first an occasional shape could be made out in the whiteness, amorphous and indeterminate like the shadowy figures of dreams, but then increasingly recognizable: the convex curvature of an oak tree, a shingled roof with a row of icicles hanging delicately from its lip, the quiet brick of an ancient university hall. Noises too began to accompany their respective shapes, and the screeching of cicadas, shreds of music, and squeaking of frozen waterfalls began to fill the air. Rising from his desk now, Dr. Fischer pulled a heavy winter coat off of its hanger, closed an open suitcase on his desk, and stepped inside.