There was this buzz about that scientist gone crazy. His decline got people’s attention after he sneaked into the penguins’ habitat in the Bio-World Complex to get their DNA. In the morning, security guards found him cuddling with the birds, in a state of hypothermia. Out of respect for the man’s status and accomplishments in biogenetics, they let him keep the DNA samples. “We can’t put the blood back in the birds”, the owner said. They settled for a trespassing fine. 

Soon after, Dr. Denis Anemone proudly announced he would dedicate his life to a new project—adding penguin genes into people to make them more human. 

Goodbye credibility, reputation, and entourage. 

The media frenzy took a while to die down, so that even months after the night of the penguins, a young reporter was tickling the scientist’s doorbell at nine in the morning. 

He would revolutionize modern journalism by writing an article reflecting the point of view of the interviewed instead of everyone else’s. A renowned researcher turned laughingstock was a perfect story for his journalistic breakthrough. Both sad and funny. People never tired of those stories. They wanted to see the underdog get famous, the geniuses go mad, the successful fall. 

Weeds and confetti covered the porch. Three rings, many knocks, and a couple of rounds of shadow boxing later, the door opened. 

Dr. Denis Anemone was a middle-aged man shaped like a candy cane. Too many years of looking down a microscope. 

As the reporter followed him to the living room, he pulled his notepad out of the breast pocket of his impeccably ironed shirt, scribbled unshaven, tropical birds bathrobe, bad smell. 

The place was alive, peppy, organic—literally, you’d expect plants to grow out of the carpet, amongst the crumbs and stains. Trinkets inhabited most flat surfaces, peacock feathers hung from the drapes. Everything worked with anything to create a disorienting impression of confused bliss. 

The vinyl records were aligned in alphabetical order, from AC/DC to ZZ Top, while the books were dispersed on crooked shelves in a chaotic orgy of scientific literature. A desk had been rubbed raw while an inch of dust covered the floor. Between two armchairs was a bathtub, half-filled with water and plastic penguins. A large glass panel had been placed on top to complete the transformation into a coffee table. A scent of butter took a subtle control of the atmosphere. 

They sat facing one another. The armchairs made a crushing sound every time they moved.

“I thought my story would have been outdated by now,” the scientist said with a smirk. 

His eyes sparkled with energy behind a big pair of glasses with only one lens.  

“I want to make an accurate and in-depth portrait of everything that led to your… radical turn. I’m here for the story behind the story.” 

“Radical turn?” the scientist asked. 

The reporter hesitated, looking for the right words.

“Oh, you mean my going crazy?” the doctor said. 

“Yes. That’s what I meant.” 

“Insight. That’s what did it.”

“What kind of insight?”

“The best and the worst kind.” 

The reporter lay his recorder on the glass, turned it on, and waited for an elaboration that never came. He’d go straight for the big chunks of meat. Nothing gets accomplished by licking around the wound; you got to sink your teeth in. 

“Did your wife’s death have something to do with it?”

“Yes. No. Maybe,” Anemone said with a grin exposing yellow teeth.

The journalist sighed. Was he playing with him or was he really that far gone? Maybe he’d get nothing out of the scientist. After all, insanity wasn’t a line you could cross at will, but a popping cork. 

“Do you consider yourself crazy?” he asked.

“Would you like some coffee?”

Anemone jogged to the kitchen. As he listened to sporadic grunts and clanking porcelain, the reporter wrote down avoids questions. 

The scientist came back with a tray mounted by a coffee pot, two cups, and two identical penguin-shaped shakers. His hand hovered over the shakers before he picked one, poured in his cup.

“Crazy’s relative, my dear info-probing friend,” he said. “Sugar?”

“Yeah.” 

“We call crazy the actions with motivations we can’t grasp, but the most illogical act isn’t considered crazy if you got a soi-disant rational reason behind it. Like fear, hate, love, jealousy, revenge, and all the spectrum of everyday life madness. These reasons we understand, but are they sane? I put a bathtub in my living room; now that’s crazy. Nevertheless, it was a conscious decision, motivated by a taste for a lively décor, not by irrational feelings.”   

The scientist opened the zipper of the cushion he was sitting on and grabbed a handful of popcorn. The reporter held his laughter. 

Anemone picked up the recorder and chewed into it. 

“The subject suffers from an extreme lack of sanitary conscience,” he said before putting it down. “Let me guess, you’re the hungry journalist who tries to do better than everyone else. You want to be respected, even admired. Your younger colleagues see you as the go-getter type while the older ones think you’re arrogant. Your boss doesn’t know yet if he likes you or hates you, but you draw confidence from that. Well, guess what, the more you climb up the ladder, the less down-to-earth you become. You’ll join the crazy club soon enough, will probably get promoted for it.” 

“That’s me. Now let’s talk about you. Where did the idea for your… research come from?”

“One day, I woke up and got sick of everyone. So, I fantasized about a vaccine that would cure humanity.” 

“From what?”

“From itself.” 

“How’s that possible?” 

Anemone passed a hand through his long, messy hair. 

“I pictured a vaccine made with bits of weakened ideas, stripped down from the power we give them. Toxic beliefs broken down to their simplest form so we can see how insignificant they really are. With this vaccine, when we’d encounter one of those social pathogens, we’d see the greed behind the lottery ticket, the ignorance behind the prejudice, the fear behind the hate. We’d be immune through awareness against all the dirt accumulated in our collective subconscious.”

“Is that what you’re trying to do with the penguin DNA?” 

“Oh no, that came after I realized a vaccine’s no good when you’re already sick. But I had other ideas in between.” 

The journalist leaned forward.

“What were they?”

“Well, one day I was watching the news, and I felt like making a big messy bomb. Or some chemical plague. Something like anthrax or radioactive gluten. I even had a name for it: Reverse Big Bang. Then I got bored with it, so I started making models of little ships, and I drank a lot of wine bottles to fit the ships in. And after that, I didn’t feel like doing anything at all.”   

“And then the penguins came along.” 

“Indeed, they did.” 

“How did that happen?”

“Remember when we had that heatwave?”

“Sure.”

“I’d spend my whole days in the polar ecosystem of the Bio-World Complex. At first, because it was fresh, but I’ve come to find the penguins very soothing. They helped with the grief, with the bitterness. Those birds don’t have a care in the world. They slide around all day, not going anywhere, but they don’t mind. They just enjoy themselves.” 

“Do I sense envy?” 

“Of course! We have a lot to learn from them. That’s when I thought: what about implanting penguin genes in human beings? Those genes filled with prosocial behaviors and collective instincts. It might result in people sticking together instead of competing and destroying one another. Swim in the water instead of dumping waste in it. Slide and play in their environment rather than build towers. Warm each other rather than live in cold, distant indifference. Genetically Modified Humans, that’s the way to evolve, flush out our outdated beliefs and patterns. What do you think about that?”

“Sounds amazing. It’s the method I’m skeptical of. You really think it could work?” 

“Oh, but I don’t care.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s like with the fortune cookies, it’s the message that counts.”

“You’re working on a project and you don’t care about the outcome?”

“I dance on the fence. I’m not sure if I want to see this world crumble or be cured. A part of me says I gotta help, another says well-deserved. I wish the best to everyone on this big blue ball. I also wish it blows up. I was taking a walk and saw a little girl help a dog with its paw tangled in its leash, and it was damn charming, so I leaned toward the humanity-saving business. There you have it, my motivation. Put that in your article—dog paws—but don’t cling to it. Tomorrow, I might hit my big toe and get back to the bomb.” 

He laughed. 

“How can you be that… detached?” the reporter said. “About things like life and death. You don’t care about people’s fate?”

“Oh please. People only care about people if they have something to gain out of them. Money, favors. A story.”

He looked at his interviewer. The reporter held his stare.

“There are two kinds of indifference,” Anemone said. “One’s individualistic and is rewarded. A means to an end. Shut down your empathy and the sky’s the limit. Don’t look back even if you rolled over someone. It’s encrypted in our genes now. The other one comes from insight and is a product. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the concept of a human being and I think life is magical, but don’t think I give a duck turd about any of it. I freed myself from the pressure of caring. I just slide around all day.” 

The reporter’s brain needed something to sustain the interview. He sipped the cold, bitter coffee. 

“I’ll be honest with you, Dr. Anemone,” he said. “I’m not sure I get what you’re all about.” 

“You don’t have to.” 

“What do you want? What’s your purpose? What do you eat for breakfast?”

“I named my goldfish Stay because he’s always floating on the surface.” 

“Are you trying to avoid my questions?”

“Are you trying to avoid my answers?”

The reporter looked down and bit his lip. 

“That’s not what you came here for, am I right?” the doctor said. “You expected melodramatic quotes and crispy anecdotes easy to paraphrase.” 

“I did expect more straightforward answers.” 

“Why don’t you try something? Take a cookbook, pick a sentence at random, and quote that as my answer. That would be fun.”

“It would make more sense than what I’ve got so far.”

“You wanted an ‘accurate portrait’ of me. Those answers, that’s me.”

“Look, if that interview’s a big joke to you, fine, but it’s important to me. So could you—”

“The bloodthirsty journalist pleading for compassion. Like you’re not doing this just so you get a big boner when you see your name under the title.”

“I’m doing this to inform people.”

“Oh, please, cut it out. I’m not some girl in a bar you’re trying to impress. We both know this is just a fancy version of gossip. Take a look inside the mind of this week’s lunatic, have a good laugh, feel better about yourself, and get back to watching reality shows.”  

“How can you call yourself a scientist and be against knowledge and the spread of information?”

“Knowledge’s overrated. You don’t get to understand everything. That’s the arrogance of mankind, in its well-groomed, success-driven form. To think we can dominate the world. That we can’t be wrong.”

The scientist leaned back, crushing popcorn in the process. 

“What’s the point of knowing how molecules interact or how the universe started if we don’t know what to say to our estranged son? To predict the next solar eclipse, but not know when someone we love will die? In the end, we don’t get to control life. You might start the afternoon saying ‘Honey, could you get some pickle chips while you’re out?’ and the world’s response would be a cop knocking on your door to tell you your wife got hit, and the guy didn’t even stop. I’ve already made my big discovery, and I needed no research for that. Our obsession with making life logical is illogical. I just drift to the will of the wind! Existential swinging, how do you like that?” 

He giggled.

“How can you laugh at this?”

“How can you not?”

The reporter scribbled in his notepad. He knows his genetic project is nonsense. Lost faith in science. 

“Make sure you underline the word disenchanted,” Anemone said. 

He got up and stretched, grabbed an origami bird, and threw it on the coffee pot.  

“Do you think I’m crazy, dear journalist?” the scientist said. “You haven’t said it straight yet.”

“I thought you were. Now I think you’re an attention whore, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“Will that change your angle? Should I put on a bra and strut around so you can get a good picture?”

“I just wanted some answers that fit the questions.”

“I used to be like you, obsessed about finding the big answers. I dragged my tired carcass through endless classrooms and hallways, I stared down at textbooks until they got blurry, and I hyperventilated my way through college. Now there’s a picture of a dog with sunglasses lying on a beach in the frame where my diploma used to be. You don’t get wiser by learning things; you do so by letting go and watch the bullshit dissipate.” 

The journalist scribbled something in his notepad. Fake detachment to hide pain.

“Congratulations,” the doctor said, “you caught something.”

“I may end up with something usable after all.”

“Well, I couldn’t make it too easy for you. After all, you did kill my wife.”  

“What?”

“Why?”

“What are you talking about? I wasn’t the one driving that car.” 

“Didn’t you get the message from the Buddhists? We’re all one. You’re the proud incarnation of our modern society. You’re the ideas, the behaviors, the attitudes, the guilty, the victim, the bearer of the sick genes.”

The doctor clapped as he said that. 

“You’re driven by the same egocentric indifference that drives everyone else,” he said. “You write your articles the same way that asshole drove his car.”

“This is ridiculous.”

The reporter finished his coffee. 

“Thank you so much for the interview,” he said. “I think I got enough bullshit to fill a septic tank.”

He put the cup down. 

“What’s in the other shaker, cocaine?” he said, pointing at the penguins. “Is that where you get your ideas?”

“Arsenic trioxide,” the scientist calmly replied.

The reporter froze. 

“You’re kidding, right?” he said. 

“Always kidding. Never lying. I keep some next to the sugar in case I change my mind and don’t feel like waking up anymore. The thing is, I forgot which is which.”  

He laughed. 

The reporter’s hand started shaking. 

“You can’t be that crazy.”

The scientist shoved a handful of popcorn in his mouth. 

“Did you really…?” the reported muttered. 

“Is that how they taught you to formulate a question? Seems like you’re missing a couple of words.”

“What did you put in it?” the journalist said through gritted teeth. “The sugar or the…?” 

“Honest to gods and dogs, I don’t know. I frankly, sincerely, passionately have no idea. Maybe you’ll have a spicy story to tell, maybe you’ll drop dead.” 

“You sick bastard.”

“Accurate portrait.”

The reporter soiled the carpet with sweat. 

“You came here to get my perception of things,” the doctor said. “This is a concrete example of it. And it fits in a cup!” 

The journalist jumped off his chair and ran outside. The scientist drank his cup of coffee.