Malignant: The Giraffe
- Nicholas Linke
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
Context: Although it is the end, this is an excerpt of the second chapter in the new adult novel Malignant by Nicholas Linke.
An excerpt from CHAPTER 38: THE GIRAFFE
The wheels squeal like a pig drowning in its own blood on the slaughterhouse floor as I turn into the subdivision. Each house is disappointingly similar. Fourth of an acre lots, if even that, packed around meandering concrete cul-de-sacs. I don’t even break at the stop sign between Ash Street and Benton Lane. All I can think about are the questions that will finally be answered. What happened those first nine years of my life?
The yellow blur of a “Slow — Children at Play” sign flies by on my right. I don’t even think a ball rolling out into the road could make me slow down now.
Where did I come from?
Overwhelmed by the possibility I almost miss my turn onto Peachtree Court. I meet a minivan probably on its way to practice and swerve, coming within centimeters of clipping a mailbox while Soccer Mom shoves her palm through the center of her steering wheel.
The first secret to writing an autobiography is to relive the day — to make every event in the present, to make the audience feel as though they are experiencing it with you — right then — for the first time. The past is expired like graham crackers that have taken on the flavor of the cardboard box. The audience feels behind, struggling to catch up so that eventually they can experience something fresh. But they never get there with words that end in “ed.” It leaves them somewhere between stale, mind-numbing mush and pre-chewed boredom.
This is the same critique I have of the way students are currently educated. Children are born into this world ambitious and curious, under the impression that the breakthroughs they make every day have never been obtained or even pursued. Then the child enters the school system, where lectures dominate over authentic inquiry. The student’s aspirations to contribute to mankind’s collection of knowledge are stifled by what the species already knows. There appears to be nothing left to ascertain, just information to collect and memorize. A young mind is filled with history, formulas, facts, conclusions… and discovery, experience, practice, experimentation, and innovation are pushed aside because there is too much to pour into their little head.
In all this, the flames of curiosity are extinguished.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. — Plutarch
The frame grinds against the tapered curb as I barrel into the driveway. Who funded this? Who is responsible for me being this way? The momentum from braking throws me forward and back in my seat with a force that only answers can compete with. I’m unlocking the front door before I even realize I removed the keys from the ignition.
The second secret is to alternate between the intense actions of the day and the internal thoughts that lead to the conclusion of the chapter. The mind naturally shifts quickly between introspection and sensory perception. Consciousness can only focus on one thing at a time, entertain only one unit of thought at a time.
Multitasking is a myth. Doing two or more things at once is really just being able to switch between thoughts fast enough that no one notices. The efficiency of cognitive juggling has been heightened by the demands of a television internet culture. It is debatable whether this societally-induced A.D.D. is a benefit or a burden.
Because attention spans have been reduced by mass media’s endless bombardment of sound snippets, subliminal product placement flashes, Impact font memes, and twist-after-du-ex-machina-twist in generic crime scene shows, audiences have acquired an appetite that requires constant change. They’ve lost the capacity and patience to follow one idea through to its logical end. They demand distraction to feel successful. Therefore, the only thing to do is cater to the inconclusive. The author has to make the audience feel as though they are checking off a litany of objectives, while, in reality, they aren’t finishing anything.
Racing though the house, I finally come to the doorway of my old bedroom. I pause for a moment to take in the time capsule of the last years of my childhood, everything right where I left it years ago: The digital microscope with a USB cord so I could view slides on my computer screen. The never lit candle that looks like the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. The band posters hung edge-to-edge to cover the white walls.
I repeat what mom said aloud. “Behind the giraffe you’ll find everything you want to know about yourself.”
I grab the edge of Dark Side of the Moon and rip it off the wall. Poster after poster, I clear the walls desperately searching. Under the bands and under the thin layer of white paint is a mural of a jungle and a savannah that my mother painted for my arrival home. As a teenager, I put up all the posters because the white paint didn’t completely conceal the foliage and animals. At that age, it was a bit embarrassing.
With every frantic pull, I’m regressing. I’m exposing my childhood. I’m tearing away at the mask of my adolescence to find myself through a bleached giraffe.
I shed the posters to the ground smiling, and then I snicker, partly out of excitement but mostly because my mom couldn’t help herself. Her background as a geneticist and evolutionary biologist shows through in her last words to me. The long neck of the giraffe is the tired but popular choice to introduce Lamarckian acquired inheritance, which was the popular explanation of how evolution occurred before Darwin proposed natural selection.
The third secret is to inject facts and details into the story, inviting the audience to a surreal comfort of reference points. This also helps the audience feel as though they’re learning something as they’re being entertained which lapses back into the second secret.
Lamarck thought that organisms had an innate desire to improve and that through attempts of reaching and augmentation of body structures, over time, would acquire improved characteristics. So as the high school textbook says, the giraffe stretched its neck to reach the leaves that were higher in the trees and their necks grew longer. Then, somehow the giraffe passes this newly acquired characteristic on to its offspring.
Lamarck’s theory doesn’t align with our present understanding of genetics. Then again, Darwin didn’t know about the epigenome.
Evolution by natural selection is understood as genetic variation. Evolution by acquired characteristics maybe realized in the epigenetic regulation.
It could be that the male with a longer neck had the advantage to fight off other males and have more sex and consequently more calves? Or any mutation that gave him a longer neck simply allowed him to eat higher vegetation. So if he was well fed, he simply lived long enough to have the chance to have more sex, which means more calves? Either way, or any other way for that matter, the recurrent laryngeal nerve in giraffes is the perfect example of unintelligent design.
Evolution: planning for the past, spending the inheritance, and never considering the future.
The answers to my past… this close to me the whole time.
Under my Lateralus poster, I find the tallest living land animal, pale and elusive. I hear a hollow echo as I pound my hand against its brown-patched body.
Throwing open my closet, I push aside clothing and boxes in search of my aluminum tee-ball bat. Raising the three-foot blunt instrument over my head, I murder my old safari friend, repeatedly embedding the bat into its fragile drywall body. With each swing comes a new question, though one resonates above all the others: what will I do after I know the answers?
The fourth secret is to disregard linear time. Begin at the end. Shuffle the middle so that the audience knows just enough to ask how they got there. Flashback and flash-forward so that the audience is always guessing where this piece or that fits into the puzzle. You want them to see the trees for the forest, and don’t worry: they won’t realize that the forest changes wildly from sentence to sentence.
Seconds later the hole is large enough to step through and I stand in front of a doorway to my past. After dropping the bat to the carpet floor I grab the cheap Mickey Mouse flashlight from under my nightstand. Clicking it on, I take a deep breath and step over the threshold.
Behind the giraffe large filing boxes are stacked to the ceiling in a room that is about the size of my room. At a glance there appears to be hundreds of boxes organized and marked with different names underscored by a series of numbers. I wander the labyrinth of boxes searching with Mickey. And then the yellow light falls upon my name, Nathan Lewis 31542, and my mouth falls wide open. A whole section of boxes, four wide, six high, and two deep, dedicated to me. I pull 31542 out from the stack. Inside file folders hang organized into months and stuffed full of all types of reports. I remove August and select a packet at random and quietly read aloud:
Subject currently shows no negative symptoms or side effects of T-193… preliminary blood tests give evidence of full integration of
T-193 into leukocytes… promise of other tissues being affected by therapy… additional tests should be conducted including extractions of sputum and spinal fluid…
I stop and fall back into the boxes behind me as the answers deliver their force. Sitting there lost in darkness, only guided by the light of a cartoon mouse, I fall into an abyss of vacant memories.
The fact that I know nothing about my past throws my forehead into my hands, and then, as I look around, I recognize that I am far from alone.
Give 3: Hope
The final secret is to create overwhelming curiosity, to build paralyzing anticipation of the great reveal, to fake a premature climax, and then to abruptly stop.
Learn more about the new adult novel by Nicholas Linke: Malignant.
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