I’m not sure how it started. Might’ve been an electrical problem, or maybe somebody was smoking in one of the restricted areas where we keep the bottled oxygen, or maybe – but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up. First you should understand some basic details about the lab.
The work we do here is for couples who want to be parents but for some reason can’t conceive the old-fashioned way. They need a little help at the fertilization phase, or what I refer to as the “ensoulment phase.” And I’m sure you’re at least somewhat familiar with how that works, that we take some ova that we’ve removed from the mother’s ovaries and we place them in a solution with the correct temperature and salinity to which we've already added a sperm sample from the father --usually about 75,000 sperm per every ovum. After eighteen hours we take all the successfully ensouled little people and we sort them for quality based on several criteria and those that have a high probability of successful implantation and don’t display any serious genetic defects are culled from the rest and preserved until they can be injected into the uterus.
As you might imagine, one drawback to this procedure is that it produces a lot more fully-realized human beings than can possibly be successfully implanted. There is a certain amount of error built into the process and in order for it to be effective we have to play something of a numbers game. On the plus side, the extra humans that we’ve created can be preserved for quite some time awaiting implantation. They’re very tiny at this stage, so small that you can’t even see them with the naked eye, but all the same they are full-fledged people. Tiny, Lilliputian people! So what we do with them is we preserve them cryogenically. We have these refrigeration units that can hold thirty of the cylinders at once, all preserved in liquid nitrogen until the day when parents can be found for them. Each refrigeration unit stands about three and a half feet tall. They’re pretty heavy, so they need to be moved around (very carefully!) with a sort of modified hand-truck that’s used exclusively for that purpose.
I was there in the lab when the fire broke out. Like I said, I don’t know how it started, but I knew as soon as I heard the alarm go off that it wasn’t a false alarm, it was the real deal. The evacuation order came over the intercom and I could already smell smoke coming from somewhere. It smelled like burning plastic at first. My heart was in my throat because obviously this is a worst case scenario in a hospital – there are so many patients who can’t evacuate themselves and the staff can only do so much. Instantly I realized the moral quandary I was facing: I could only count on saving as many people as I could get out in one trip. If the fire was spreading quickly --and the billowing black smoke I could see coming from the stairwell doors told me this was so – I would likely not get to return for more. I quickly loaded the refrigeration unit onto its special cart and calculated that the tiny humans inside would only live for about fifteen minutes on the unit’s auxiliary power before it would have to be plugged in again to maintain the proper temperature. I began to roll it down the hall in front of me as quickly as I could.
As I exited the fertility lab I came out into the hallway that ran through the maternity ward. I didn’t see any other staff around. The shift nurses must have already evacuated. I rolled past the incubators and looked in at the rows of babies behind the glass, sleeping in their little beds. And this is where it really broke my heart. I could see all those infants in there and I realized that nobody would be able to make it here in time to get them all out. I was probably their only hope of surviving. And here I was faced with the most painful moral calculus that I will ever, God willing, be forced to perform. Reasoning carefully that I could at best carry two babies under each arm, it would only be possible for me to save four of them. Whereas the thirty children I was pushing down the hall in their cryogenic slumber would then be left behind to perish.
“The greatest good for the greatest number,” I told myself through gritted teeth as I fought back tears and resumed my dash down the hallway towards the emergency exit. Now in hindsight the weight of that decision fills me with horror and revulsion, but it’s amazing how in a crisis one can sometimes put such considerations aside and simply do what must be done. With grim determination I continued without looking back. I could hear some of them crying as I hurried on my way.
Then I passed the room where world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking was staying – I didn’t even know he was at the hospital! He must have come in for a check-up. Ordinarily I would have been delighted and probably a little star-struck to meet the premier analytical mind of our times, but as I stated I was literally weighted down with matters of life and death. I did momentarily wonder why Mr. Hawking was there by himself – I didn’t see anybody around looking after him, and I also couldn’t help but notice that he wasn’t in his motorized wheelchair. He was lying down on a hospital bed and I could hear him calling out for a nurse in that electronic voice of his but of course nobody would answer. It dawned on me that he was as helpless to leave under his own power as were the tenants of the ward I had just left behind.
Again, it broke my heart to do it, but what kind of person would I be if I chose to save one person, no matter how brilliant and clebrated he may have been, and in the process let twenty-nine innocents die? I have always believed in the greatest good for the greatest number, and today I know that I do indeed possess the courage of my convictions, although I wish that I had never been forced to find out.
Fighting back a flood of tears that I knew I could not allow, I rolled the cart on down the hall, through the lobby, past where the Mona Lisa and Picasso’s “Guernica” were hanging in their dispay cases without even turning my head to look. I pushed aside a basket filled with adorable mewling kittens that was blocking the exit and rushed outside, where a crowd of hospital employees were being prevented from re-entering the facility by teams of firefighters. There were twenty-foot tall plumes of flame consuming the walls of the hospital and the air was filled with a dense black smoke and the most ghastly smell you could ever imagine. Firemen were rushing everywhere with high pressure hoses but it was clear even to my untrained eye that the fire was completely beyond their best efforts at control or containment. From back inside I swore I could hear the cries of those left behind as they called out for help that would never come. That odd computerized speak-and-spell monotone calling out “Nurse! Nurse?” --I’ll never forget it, no matter how hard I may try. It haunts me.
Even so, I did not allow myself to be distracted from the matter at hand. I explained to one of the paramedics about the little ones I had preserved inside the refrigeration unit and we had it hooked up to the power supply in one of the ambulances within a minute’s time. I thought of all those tiny little human lives and as the torrent of tears I had been holding back finally broke, I told myself that I had done the right thing. I had saved thirty little boys and girls, and I know that no matter what horrors I may have been witness to that day, still I would be blessed by the knowledge that in midst of life-threatening peril I had managed to do the right thing.
The greatest good for the greatest number.
Tonight when you’re saying your prayers, say one for me because God knows I need all the help I can get living with what I’ve seen. But also, say a prayer for yourself that you never find your own convictions tested like I did mine. It is a heavy burden indeed.
I found this great magazine ad from the 1920s for Listerine. The header reads: "You wouldn't care to meet Marvin." Underneath is an illustration of a handsome, square-jawed young man sitting on the beach in a stylish robe, smoking a pipe. At his feet are a beachball and a little red book entitled "Popular Men." The ad text follows:
Money. Charm. Ability. In all New York there was no abler man in his field. Yet people called him "the prince of pariahs."
Men thought him a great fellow -- for a little while. Women grew romantic about him -- until they knew. People welcomed him at first -- then dropped him as though he were an outcast.
Poor Marvin, yearning so for companionship and always denied it. Poor Marvin, ignorant of his nickname and ignorant, likewise, of the foundation for it.
Halitosis (unpleasant breath) is the damning, unforgivable, social fault. It doesn't announce its presence to its victims. Consequently it is the last thing people suspect themselves of having -- but it ought to be the first.
This is followed by several more paragraphs concerning the seriousness of this ailment and its causes, accompanied by assurances that "Intelligent people recognize the risk and minimize it by the regular use of full strength Listerine as a mouth wash and gargle.”
There is a very similar ad from the same year done in the same exquisitely-rendered style depicting a well dressed and fetching young socialite feeding a caged bird under the caption "The one true friend she has." The gist is more or less the same. She's got looks, wealth and charm, but everybody shuns her because of her halitosis.
Advertising and PR have come a long way in the past hundred years. For instance, ads used to have a lot more text (the preceding represents about half the text in the ad) and a lot less subtext. There was a time, long ago, when people evidently took the time to read six paragraphs of ad copy whilst casually flipping through the pages of Harper’s Bazaar. Simpler, more innocent days when copy writers could simply openly declare that failure to buy their proffered wares would result in social ostracism, rather than having to imply that this was the case through the elaborate dance of sparse, loaded verbiage and cryptic visual signifiers that we now recognize as advertising. The intervening eighty years have seen enormous refinements in the methods applied towards those ends, but at heart the underlying psychological appeals haven’t changed much. Fostering an insecurity and then immediately offering up its remedy still remains a wildly popular approach. You go with what works.
Some of the changes that have occurred since then have paralleled advances in psychological research. * In spite of the gains made in the art and science of selling, advertisers have faced problems of diminishing returns on several fronts. The first and most obvious front is the ubiquity of advertising: It’s possible that one reason that Harper’s Bazaar readers in the twenties took the time to read six paragraphs of ad copy had to do with the fact that they weren’t exposed to hundreds of ads every single day from a dizzying array of sources. Advertising has been something of a victim of its own success, with more and more products vying to get their pitches heard over the barrage of messages aimed at an increasingly numbed and unresponsive public.
*.
But there’s another kind of diminishing return to contend with: Finding new maladies that can be elevated to the level of "damning, unforgivable, social faults" and alleviated for a fee. The easy targets were claimed long ago: Underarm odor, halitosis, acne, etc., all with resounding success: There is probably not a television-watching commuter alive who doesn’t have at least a momentary thought about deodorant when they raise their arm to grab the strap on the bus or subway. The blast of breath-freshening spray before knocking on the door for the Big Date has become a cliché in its own right. And try to find a teenager who doesn't know what Clearisil is and how it is used. But since then the manufacturers of face-saving products have had to work harder and harder to come up with things that are wrong with us to which temporary fixes are readily available. I’m not sure I’ve ever lost interest in a woman because I suspected she had a dandruff problem, but I am sure that without the benefit of advertising, the term “problem dandruff” would be a complete non-sequitur to me.
In the wake of advertising's inexorable advance I see an unbroken continuum of escalating hygiene demands placed on an increasingly beleaguered public stretching all the way back to "You wouldn't care to meet Marvin" and continuing on into the present day, where I am daily reminded of new miracle advances in medical science that will kill the invasive fungus under my toenails before I even have any and make my teeth shine forth with the blinding luminescence of 800 Watt halogen bulbs.
Which is how I find myself at the current juncture, wherein approximately two months ago the idea entered my consciousness, seemingly unbidden, that perhaps it has now become normal and therefore expected for men to shave their nether regions. The appearance of this odd thought coincided perfectly with the arrival of new products on the market designed specifically for this use (because, honestly, you don’t want to use the same razor on your face that you just used to shave your asshole), although I did not at first make this connection. So apparently the campaign to convince young women that the proper model for their own genital appearance is to be found in hardcore pornography has proven so successful that the purveyors of this advanced depilatory technology have now set their sights on the irresistibly vulnerable neuroses of men.*. Besides assuring more attractive, hair-free genitalia (Hello, ladies!), the new products also promise an “extra optical inch.”
Not since Certs breath mints informed us that every mint contained a “glistening drop of retsyn” *. has there been an advertising phrase as brilliantly constructed as “extra optical inch.” The ad copy writer who came up with it deserves a big imaginary raise.
I look forward with great anticipation to the fresh neuroses that advertising will be implanting in my subconscious mind twenty years from now. I am left scratching my head in befuddled amazement as I contemplate the myriad glaring physical defects from which I might unknowingly be suffering in the interim. All the while aware, of course, that all this head-scratching might in fact be warning me of the onset of problem dandruff...
