here's a short story! read if you are so inclined.
eyes are weary. i write in hendersonville. passes the time wonderfully.
CX-41: The Plight of Aldous P. Harpenny
by D. Patrick Rodgers
Around the turn of the 20th Century, there lived an American scientist and inventor named Aldous P. Harpenny. Harpenny, who spent the entirety of his life in Poughkeepsie, New York, was an obsessed man.
A master of formulae and chemical equations, Harpenny constantly separated the parts of mysterious substances, bonded ambiguous chemicals to one another, distilled various liquids, and carefully transcribed the results in his stacks and stacks of large scientific notepads. Harpenny did most of his research in a loft above the home where he lived with his family. Harpenny's wife, Gertrude, once loved the young scientist for his tenacity and daring. She met him at the local university while he was accumulating an enormous and entirely unnecessary collection of degrees, ranging from mathematics to pharmacology. They soon married and had two dashing boys, Phineas and Eustis.
Initially, Harpenny's colleagues looked upon him with promise. He showed great skill at composing complex equations, and he once patented a new means of producing saccharin, the increasingly popular sugar substitute of the day. Soon after, however, Harpenny became convinced that he could discover a chemical compound capable of increasing, perhaps doubling, a man's strength, speed, or even senses of hearing or sight. The scientific community of New York scoffed at him incredulously, but he did not abandon his search. As the years crept slowly by, Harpenny became increasingly obsessed with discovering his mystery formula, pushing friends, colleagues, and his own family away.
Harpenny’s transfixion with this theoretical elixir diverted his affections all but entirely from his wife. Gertrude, a sharp but often capricious woman, reacted with violent denial. She kept her stately Victorian household in a constant state of pristine immaculacy, always ignoring the violent noises and odors that drifted down from Aldous’s loft. She prepared meals and bathed her children punctually, but she rarely showed them even an ounce of physical affection. As her marriage to Aldous gradually grew cold, Gertrude developed a tendency to entertain the delusions of the Hypochondriac. She feared minute and invisible germs, viruses, and bacteria, and would rarely touch anyone as a result. Despite the painful air of emotional coldness that permeated the Harpenny household, Aldous never once considered anything amiss.
* * *
One sweltering summer evening, Gertrude sat stoically with her children in the dining room before a wonderfully prepared meal.
"Eustis!" she shouted at her youngest. "Do not touch those greens! You know we always wait for your father before dining. I’m certain he’ll be down momentarily."
Eustis frowned and returned his small, pink hands to his lap.
Phineas, the older, turned his sullen face to his mother. "He’s probably trying out his terrible potions on one of my frogs!"
"Phineas, don’t be preposterous. Just because they come from our yard, that doesn’t make them your frogs. And he hasn’t experimented with them in weeks."
Just then, Aldous barreled down the stairs.
"Hello family!" he shouted from under an enormous, black mustache.
Aldous was an exceptionally lanky and precarious man, and he styled his thick, jet-black hair with a great deal of pomade. He was currently dressed in an old undershirt and stained slacks, and his arm had been awkwardly bandaged just above the elbow.
"I’m onto something revolutionary, I tell you!" Aldous planted himself violently in the chair opposite Gertrude.
“Alright,” Gertrude said calmly to her eager children. “Now we may eat.”
“I mean it this time,” Aldous claimed as a bead of sweat rolled down his cheek, cutting a line in the dust that covered his thin face. “There is most definitely something about my latest formula…I’m quite confident that this will be the one to earn me that Nobel Prize!”
“I hardly think this alleged miracle drug of yours will ever earn you an award, Aldous,” Gertrude sighed exhaustedly. “Nevertheless, I hope your work soon proves fruitful.”
This was the closest thing to support Gertrude could still muster up. She had grown quite sick of the topic of Aldous’s work, because it was all he ever spoke about. While Gertrude had once feared and respected the great sciences, she now loathed them. She looked on chemistry and microbiology as the home wreckers who had seduced her husband and poisoned his mind. Just the thought of his laboratory, to which she was not allowed access, angered and frustrated her.
Gertrude had seen the contents of the laboratory only once. Months earlier, while Aldous was in New York City begging various institutions for grant money, she had climbed the stairs to the loft, venturing a peek at her husband’s private lair. Too meek and fearful of mysterious germs and chemicals to boldly enter the room, Gertrude opened the door only enough to take a glimpse. A small beam of light entered the musty, cluttered room through a circular window high on the wall, just beneath the peak of the roof. The light struck red and blue liquids contained in countless vials, beakers, and test tubes throughout the room, casting their shimmering reflections against the walls. Spirals of glass and copper tubing wound through the laboratory, and piles of soiled notebooks were stacked as high as five feet in every corner. The sight was enough to immediately convince Gertrude that only a maniac could live amongst this sort of madness. She was certain her husband was losing his mind.
Here at the dinner table, Gertrude shuttered thinking of the bewildering sight she had encountered months earlier. She saw the man across the dinner table as an utter stranger.
“Yes, yes,” Aldous said to no one in particular. “I’m so confident in this particular formula, as a matter of fact, that I personally imbibed one dose of it in order to properly test its effects.”
Gertrude gasped in horror. Her sons glanced up from their plates.
“Incidentally,” he continued, “I may need your assistance with this experiment, young Phineas.”
Phineas looked up curiously. He was a perfect miniature reconstruction of Aldous. His 11-year-old body was lean and awkward, and his dark hair was styled in the same fashion as his father’s. Aldous pulled a glistening syringe from his trousers and placed it on the table before his son.
“Take this syringe of morphine,” he said. “I may need to be sedated should I have a violent reaction to the drug. I have no idea its effects yet.”
“This is absurd!” Gertrude cried wildly. “How could you be so…so…mad?!”
“Is father going to die?” young Eustis said pitifully from behind his dinner plate.
Aldous laughed heartily. “Of course not, my dear boy. But I may strip naked and jump through the window or set the house ablaze. The syringe is just a precaution should my medulla oblongata become irritated.”
Aldous picked up his fork and began to eat his turnip greens casually. Eustis wept silently and Gertrude’s face flushed with rage.
“What is this infernal obsession of yours, Aldous?!” Gertrude, for the first time in over a decade, was shouting.
“Whatever do you mean?” Aldous asked as he continued to vigorously shovel sloppy green mush into the mouth beneath his glistening mustache.
“You had such potential,” she continued. “Your work with the saccharin people was published in journals! And your knowledge of the human body would have made you ideal for vaccine research. Think about Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch! They won countless awards! Why-“
“Poppycock!” Aldous cut her off. “Pasteur was a fraud! A germ-obsessed French lunatic! And Koch? Hah! He dabbled with Tuberculosis…a hobo’s disease! These names will be forgotten before the next century. The future is not about microbes and vaccinations, my dear. It’s about superhuman speed and virility! It’s about one man doing the work of two, three, or even a dozen! Just think of it!”
Aldous stood up powerfully, knocking his chair to the floor. His eyes widened and he raised a long, thin index finger into the air.
“I, my dear, will be solely responsible for a scientific revolution! Once I open this door, our pitiful species will gain the power to erect monuments in mere hours with but a handful of workers! Productivity will triple-nay, quadruple! My drug will be available only to the most intelligent and responsible men amongst us. And then we’ll speed about the globe at dozens of kilometers per minute, scaling buildings and browbeating the pernicious, pestilent paupers who now terrorize us, steal our coin purses and rape our women! My drug-this drug…Harpenny’s CX-41…will change everything, my dear Gertrude.”
Aldous’s family stared at the madman in astonishment. Eustis’s weeping had transformed into sheer confusion, and Gertrude struggled for several seconds before generating a response.
“Aldous,” she whispered. “God did not intend for us to have such power.”
Aldous leaned forward and peered across the table at his wife. His bloodshot eyes narrowed and a sinister grin spread across his face.
“If God didn’t want it,” he said softly, “then he shouldn’t have created those of us with the power to make it so.”
Just then, Aldous’s face twisted into a paroxysm of surprise and pain. His eyes slowly lowered to his stained gray trousers, where, in his left leg, the needle of a slender, silver syringe was buried in his flesh. Its plunger had been violently compressed, sending several milliliters of the translucent, brown liquid into his bloodstream. Aldous looked at the lanky arm holding the syringe in his leg, and then at the glimmering, ash-colored eyes of Phineas, whose expression was one of both penance and satisfaction. Aldous began to sway.
“That was three times the necessary dosage…it was in case my reaction…was violent. How will I know if…”
Aldous lurched forward and crashed violently onto the dining table, sending plates and glasses cascading to the floor. His face landed squarely in a bowl of gelatinous turnip greens.
* * *
That evening, as Aldous slept soundly in his bed of turnip greens and indignity, his family gathered their possessions and packed them swiftly into any suitcase, hatbox, and gunny sack they could find. Without a word, they filed out the door and into the street, where they hailed a driver. Gertrude took her children to her sister’s house in the Bronx, where she went on to spend the rest of her life.
Eustis and Phineas were soon shipped off to boarding school. They respectively took interests in baseball and literature, but they each thoroughly despised science. Rarely did the two boys speak of their father.
CX-41: The Plight of Aldous P. Harpenny
by D. Patrick Rodgers
Around the turn of the 20th Century, there lived an American scientist and inventor named Aldous P. Harpenny. Harpenny, who spent the entirety of his life in Poughkeepsie, New York, was an obsessed man.
A master of formulae and chemical equations, Harpenny constantly separated the parts of mysterious substances, bonded ambiguous chemicals to one another, distilled various liquids, and carefully transcribed the results in his stacks and stacks of large scientific notepads. Harpenny did most of his research in a loft above the home where he lived with his family. Harpenny's wife, Gertrude, once loved the young scientist for his tenacity and daring. She met him at the local university while he was accumulating an enormous and entirely unnecessary collection of degrees, ranging from mathematics to pharmacology. They soon married and had two dashing boys, Phineas and Eustis.
Initially, Harpenny's colleagues looked upon him with promise. He showed great skill at composing complex equations, and he once patented a new means of producing saccharin, the increasingly popular sugar substitute of the day. Soon after, however, Harpenny became convinced that he could discover a chemical compound capable of increasing, perhaps doubling, a man's strength, speed, or even senses of hearing or sight. The scientific community of New York scoffed at him incredulously, but he did not abandon his search. As the years crept slowly by, Harpenny became increasingly obsessed with discovering his mystery formula, pushing friends, colleagues, and his own family away.
Harpenny’s transfixion with this theoretical elixir diverted his affections all but entirely from his wife. Gertrude, a sharp but often capricious woman, reacted with violent denial. She kept her stately Victorian household in a constant state of pristine immaculacy, always ignoring the violent noises and odors that drifted down from Aldous’s loft. She prepared meals and bathed her children punctually, but she rarely showed them even an ounce of physical affection. As her marriage to Aldous gradually grew cold, Gertrude developed a tendency to entertain the delusions of the Hypochondriac. She feared minute and invisible germs, viruses, and bacteria, and would rarely touch anyone as a result. Despite the painful air of emotional coldness that permeated the Harpenny household, Aldous never once considered anything amiss.
* * *
One sweltering summer evening, Gertrude sat stoically with her children in the dining room before a wonderfully prepared meal.
"Eustis!" she shouted at her youngest. "Do not touch those greens! You know we always wait for your father before dining. I’m certain he’ll be down momentarily."
Eustis frowned and returned his small, pink hands to his lap.
Phineas, the older, turned his sullen face to his mother. "He’s probably trying out his terrible potions on one of my frogs!"
"Phineas, don’t be preposterous. Just because they come from our yard, that doesn’t make them your frogs. And he hasn’t experimented with them in weeks."
Just then, Aldous barreled down the stairs.
"Hello family!" he shouted from under an enormous, black mustache.
Aldous was an exceptionally lanky and precarious man, and he styled his thick, jet-black hair with a great deal of pomade. He was currently dressed in an old undershirt and stained slacks, and his arm had been awkwardly bandaged just above the elbow.
"I’m onto something revolutionary, I tell you!" Aldous planted himself violently in the chair opposite Gertrude.
“Alright,” Gertrude said calmly to her eager children. “Now we may eat.”
“I mean it this time,” Aldous claimed as a bead of sweat rolled down his cheek, cutting a line in the dust that covered his thin face. “There is most definitely something about my latest formula…I’m quite confident that this will be the one to earn me that Nobel Prize!”
“I hardly think this alleged miracle drug of yours will ever earn you an award, Aldous,” Gertrude sighed exhaustedly. “Nevertheless, I hope your work soon proves fruitful.”
This was the closest thing to support Gertrude could still muster up. She had grown quite sick of the topic of Aldous’s work, because it was all he ever spoke about. While Gertrude had once feared and respected the great sciences, she now loathed them. She looked on chemistry and microbiology as the home wreckers who had seduced her husband and poisoned his mind. Just the thought of his laboratory, to which she was not allowed access, angered and frustrated her.
Gertrude had seen the contents of the laboratory only once. Months earlier, while Aldous was in New York City begging various institutions for grant money, she had climbed the stairs to the loft, venturing a peek at her husband’s private lair. Too meek and fearful of mysterious germs and chemicals to boldly enter the room, Gertrude opened the door only enough to take a glimpse. A small beam of light entered the musty, cluttered room through a circular window high on the wall, just beneath the peak of the roof. The light struck red and blue liquids contained in countless vials, beakers, and test tubes throughout the room, casting their shimmering reflections against the walls. Spirals of glass and copper tubing wound through the laboratory, and piles of soiled notebooks were stacked as high as five feet in every corner. The sight was enough to immediately convince Gertrude that only a maniac could live amongst this sort of madness. She was certain her husband was losing his mind.
Here at the dinner table, Gertrude shuttered thinking of the bewildering sight she had encountered months earlier. She saw the man across the dinner table as an utter stranger.
“Yes, yes,” Aldous said to no one in particular. “I’m so confident in this particular formula, as a matter of fact, that I personally imbibed one dose of it in order to properly test its effects.”
Gertrude gasped in horror. Her sons glanced up from their plates.
“Incidentally,” he continued, “I may need your assistance with this experiment, young Phineas.”
Phineas looked up curiously. He was a perfect miniature reconstruction of Aldous. His 11-year-old body was lean and awkward, and his dark hair was styled in the same fashion as his father’s. Aldous pulled a glistening syringe from his trousers and placed it on the table before his son.
“Take this syringe of morphine,” he said. “I may need to be sedated should I have a violent reaction to the drug. I have no idea its effects yet.”
“This is absurd!” Gertrude cried wildly. “How could you be so…so…mad?!”
“Is father going to die?” young Eustis said pitifully from behind his dinner plate.
Aldous laughed heartily. “Of course not, my dear boy. But I may strip naked and jump through the window or set the house ablaze. The syringe is just a precaution should my medulla oblongata become irritated.”
Aldous picked up his fork and began to eat his turnip greens casually. Eustis wept silently and Gertrude’s face flushed with rage.
“What is this infernal obsession of yours, Aldous?!” Gertrude, for the first time in over a decade, was shouting.
“Whatever do you mean?” Aldous asked as he continued to vigorously shovel sloppy green mush into the mouth beneath his glistening mustache.
“You had such potential,” she continued. “Your work with the saccharin people was published in journals! And your knowledge of the human body would have made you ideal for vaccine research. Think about Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch! They won countless awards! Why-“
“Poppycock!” Aldous cut her off. “Pasteur was a fraud! A germ-obsessed French lunatic! And Koch? Hah! He dabbled with Tuberculosis…a hobo’s disease! These names will be forgotten before the next century. The future is not about microbes and vaccinations, my dear. It’s about superhuman speed and virility! It’s about one man doing the work of two, three, or even a dozen! Just think of it!”
Aldous stood up powerfully, knocking his chair to the floor. His eyes widened and he raised a long, thin index finger into the air.
“I, my dear, will be solely responsible for a scientific revolution! Once I open this door, our pitiful species will gain the power to erect monuments in mere hours with but a handful of workers! Productivity will triple-nay, quadruple! My drug will be available only to the most intelligent and responsible men amongst us. And then we’ll speed about the globe at dozens of kilometers per minute, scaling buildings and browbeating the pernicious, pestilent paupers who now terrorize us, steal our coin purses and rape our women! My drug-this drug…Harpenny’s CX-41…will change everything, my dear Gertrude.”
Aldous’s family stared at the madman in astonishment. Eustis’s weeping had transformed into sheer confusion, and Gertrude struggled for several seconds before generating a response.
“Aldous,” she whispered. “God did not intend for us to have such power.”
Aldous leaned forward and peered across the table at his wife. His bloodshot eyes narrowed and a sinister grin spread across his face.
“If God didn’t want it,” he said softly, “then he shouldn’t have created those of us with the power to make it so.”
Just then, Aldous’s face twisted into a paroxysm of surprise and pain. His eyes slowly lowered to his stained gray trousers, where, in his left leg, the needle of a slender, silver syringe was buried in his flesh. Its plunger had been violently compressed, sending several milliliters of the translucent, brown liquid into his bloodstream. Aldous looked at the lanky arm holding the syringe in his leg, and then at the glimmering, ash-colored eyes of Phineas, whose expression was one of both penance and satisfaction. Aldous began to sway.
“That was three times the necessary dosage…it was in case my reaction…was violent. How will I know if…”
Aldous lurched forward and crashed violently onto the dining table, sending plates and glasses cascading to the floor. His face landed squarely in a bowl of gelatinous turnip greens.
* * *
That evening, as Aldous slept soundly in his bed of turnip greens and indignity, his family gathered their possessions and packed them swiftly into any suitcase, hatbox, and gunny sack they could find. Without a word, they filed out the door and into the street, where they hailed a driver. Gertrude took her children to her sister’s house in the Bronx, where she went on to spend the rest of her life.
Eustis and Phineas were soon shipped off to boarding school. They respectively took interests in baseball and literature, but they each thoroughly despised science. Rarely did the two boys speak of their father.