The Great Perhaps Read Online Free PDF Page B

distinguish: puffing up their chests as she opens the cage door each morning, bullying the other birds out of their way when it comes time to be fed. Madeline, quite unscientifically, thinks of these birds as smug little right-wing assholes, ruling the rest of the coop with physical intimidation, cruelty, and terror. These dominant birds, she hates to admit, demonstrate the worst aspects of human nature: loud, obnoxious, selfish, violent, needy, with an overpowering sense of entitlement.
    To better understand the hierarchy of dominance, these three dominant males have been removed from the experimental coop, and are now being kept in their own separate cage, which is what makes the discovery of the dead females so puzzling. Staring at the rest of the birds in the experiment, the beta males, tagged yellow, and the females, tagged green, she wonders how this tragedy might have happened. Did she mislabel one of the males? Did one of the other females, having temporarily lost its mate, react in some radically barbaric way? With the most dominant birds in isolation, why were these three female pigeons murdered?
     
     
    H. Before Madeline disposes of the three dead females, she makes another terrible discovery. They have been raped. Hurrying back to the indoor lab, she places the remains of one of the victims in a tray and inspects its cloaca, the opening through which waste and sexual fluids pass. The fleshy gland is irritated. She prepares a slide for the microscope, which reveals the presence of sperm. She checks each of the three birds and is saddened to discover all three of the dead females have been inseminated with the reproductive fluid of one or more male pigeons. Madeline does not tell anyone about what she has found. She is humiliated by the distressing results of her experiment and decides she needs to find out what is happening first.
     
     
    I. Madeline does not like to think of herself as a bad researcher, but she is afraid she is. She has begun to treat her subjects anthropomorphically, which is a serious mistake. There is one female pigeon, tag-numbered 26, from Group B, with a striking purplish white coat of downy white feathers, that Madeline has, against all scientific and ethical norms, named Lucy. She has begun to remove Lucy from the coop at odd intervals, and, holding the frightened animal against her chest, she has started singing to it, usually random, nondescript songs, though lately she finds they have been all nursery rhymes. It does not take much of a researcher to figure out what is going on there, she thinks. She does not feel like she is doing much good as a mother. She does not feel like she is doing much good as a scientist either.
     
     
    J. Madeline does not like to think about it, but she has been smoking cigarettes with Laura, an intern, and Eric, another researcher, almost every day on their lunch break. Together, they climb into Laura’s awful Ford Escort, then secretly, surreptitiously, they all light up. Madeline is ashamed she has started smoking again but feels this may be the only way to get through her day. Today, sitting in the backseat, Eric, his large glasses shiny with the afternoon sun, lights Madeline’s cigarette, touching her hand so softly. When her fingers meet his, she smiles, brushing the hair from her eyes, but he does not let go of her hand. She looks at him and immediately feels a jolt of panic, smiling wider now, nervous. He is staring deeply into her eyes and with his flickering irises he is saying: In our minds, we are making incredible love together. Come be with me in my mind. We can be together. In our minds. Madeline is still smiling, shaking her head, and he has now let go of her hand. Laura, in the driver’s seat, is completely unaware of what is happening, the Kinks playing loudly on the stereo. Madeline decides not to look Eric’s way again, not ever, because her heart is beating so quickly and somewhere between her thighs, something has begun to ache