Free A Beautiful Young Wife by Tommy Wieringa Page A

that flare up in Edward, and takes over when she feels he is rocking the baby ‘unnaturally’. ‘He’ll never quiet down that way,’ she says.
    His son, the organ pipe.
    Sometimes, when Morris seems to recognise him, Edward is touched. His little red hands clutch at nothingness. Edward caresses his thin blond hair, his face smoother than smooth. At the fontanel, you can see the beating of the blood.
    â€¢ • •
    The days are long and hot, unseasonably early that year. In the kitchen, flies swarm around the cat box and the cutting board. He swats them with a rolled-up dishtowel. Each time he thinks he’s killed them all, new ones appear. They burst open under the dry whacks of the towel, but don’t always die right away. In the block of sunlight on the floor, he watches their death throes. They pull wet tracks behind them across the tiles, an alphabet of fly pain.
    In 1780, Jeremy Bentham wrote:
    The day has been, I grieve it to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated … upon the same footing as … animals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognised, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum , are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse? … the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
    The page was stuck to the bulletin board in the bathroom. It was ammunition . Long ago he had made the mistake of telling Ruth about his animal testing lines. The course of viral infections was easiest to see in ferrets. It was precision work; with a few slight mutations, a deadly influenza virus could change into a mild variation, while mild viruses could suddenly become deadly.
    Sometimes he looked through Ruth’s eyes at the animals in their cages and saw that boredom was the first form of suffering to which they were exposed. They no longer groomed themselves, and they exhibited compulsive behaviour. Endorphins provided some relief from their stimulus-starved existence. The longer and more often he watched, the weaker his denial of their suffering became. It was because of the shattered nights, he thought. His son’s crying had debilitated him. The ideas of his wife and of a British utilitarian had broken like parasites through his faltering defences. He had even become more susceptible to certain TV programs. While watching one program in which old sweethearts were reunited, he had to fight back the tears.
    Long ago he had been taught that animals knew no pain — an old Cartesian tenet that had been revised only recently. The denial had become more sophisticated these days. Animals could experience pain, but not suffering. Suffering was reserved for humans. People owed their suffering to their consciousness. To be more precise: pain augmented by the memory of pain and the expectation of pain to come was one of the causes of human suffering. Animals possessed no such consciousness, and if they actually felt pain, it disappeared as soon as the pain stimulus was taken away. As his son was still largely non-conscious, Edward assumed that he did not suffer, but that he did feel pain.
    It was a mechanistic approach that worked well as long as you didn’t muddy it up with tricky questions and the notion of interspecific empathy, which — until recently — he had dismissed as sentimental. It was hard enough already to feel for the