Coe Review

Redwood
Letitia L. Moffitt
Something always happens when I order a drink in a bar—something
I dread. I take out my ID and give it to the bartender. He reads the birth
year: 1985. He looks at me. He looks at lineless eyes and acne. He says
You're 45years old, in a tone that doesn't require adding You've got to be kidding
me. So then I have no choice; I have to explain that I'm one of the Lao
babies, otherwise I won't get my glass of merlot. In New York that's usually
enough; the bartenders look surprised and pleased, as though I'm a minor
celebrity gracing their humble watering hole, but they don't ask questions,
instinctively assuming a desire for privacy. This one was no exception.
But then you happened to be sitting next to me.
The Lao babies?
Yeah, don't you read the papers, the bartender sneered at you. He looked
at me with that we-get-all-kinds-in-here look. You looked abashed, then
curious—then something else. Something I've seen before, the kind of look
only men in bars have.
Lao. It means old. Old babies. I told you this as you kept looking at me,
hoping it would be enough, but of course it wasn't.
And this has happened before, too: Someone will start telling the
story, the bartender or another customer or even someone on the TV news.
They always tell the same things, because they don't know about the other
things—-the things I remember, the things I won't tell either.
The Lao babies. The covert joint operative in China. The funds turned out to
be European and American; the scientists and the subjects, Chinese; the location, a
few extremely remote villages where the women had an unusually great life expectancy,
remaining neotenous from puberty through menopause, each stage stretched out longer than
normal. The women were studied, examined, and ultimately persuaded to give up their
newborn daughters. It didn't take much persuasion—a little hush money, an implied
threat, and the promise that no one would ever know. And, of course, that the girls would
be more than adequately cared for.
I remember a sound, not a room. As though we were contained by the
sound. The sound was us. When we were crying, when we were silent,
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