David Tenenbaum Tenenbaum

In the book of Exodus, Moses carries out God's will to inflict 10 plagues on the land of Egypt. Of these scourges, one stood out among all the others, the slaying of the first born, the last plague.

Chapter 1

My name is Eli Ogden. Even though my last name’s as Yankee as they come, my whole family doesn’t go back to people who came over on the Mayflower. My mom is from Quanzhou, China (hybrid vigor😊). I’m a bit of an idealist, but which kid born after 2000 isn’t?The last generation didn’t exactly leave us a choice if we want to be able to breathe carcinogen-free air.

And if I was keen on saving the planet, I knew this is the kind of place I’d have to start. Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. Here one spring a group of tourists on safari were taking in the lush flora of the Amazon Rainforest. The travelers passed a part of the jungle that’d recently been torched by farmers. Blackened tree limbs and the charred grass extended as far as the eye could see. The tour leader stopped the bus right in the middle of the plot of scorched earth. Why? Though these burned-out swathes of forest wasteland weren’t what the safari brochures had advertised, the guide felt the environmental destruction was something the vacationers should witness. For one, the safari leader knew the tour participants would be curious after all the tree hugger sob stories about the devastation the media’d blitzed the airwaves with. The second reason? This was a platform to encourage the outrage at what was being done to his country’s natural habitat.

With the vehicle at a standstill, the guide got up out of the driver’s seat and turned to the sojourners behind him. “As you can see, the deforestation has destroyed this entire area of the rainforest.”

The tourists all looked around at the remnants of what had remained a pristine section of the jungle for hundreds of years. One woman shook her head in absolute disgust. Another member of the group, a naturalist who ran a conversation website, took a set of pictures for his blog.

As the tourists surveyed the devastation, a male albino chimpanzee came bounding between the charred tree stumps towards the bus. Many of the safari participants pointed at the unusual creature in awe.

The monkey jumped up on the railing of the vehicle right in front of Lewis Sutton, a 46-year-old hospital administrator from the United States, who wore a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts. His goal had been to snag an action photo of himself in the company of some of the South American wildlife. During an earlier stop on which the tourists had all disembarked for a short walking expedition, the group had come upon some rhinoceroses. Mr. Sutton tip-toed towards the animals, but one of the pachyderms began charging. The tour participant fell to the ground as he tripped over a loose branch in an attempt to avoid the quickly approaching rhino. This immediately ended the photo op.

Here was his chance, Lewis thought to himself. He turned to his wife Victoria, a woman a few years younger than him, who wore a white cholo shirt she’d picked up at a local outfitter. He handed her their digital camera and reached into the bag containing their pre-packed lunches. Mr. Sutton pulled out a banana and started to peel it. He held up the fruit for the visitor as he removed the skin. He was confident that the offer of an afternoon snack would yoke the creature in. The chimp eyed the delicious looking fruit, the first one he’d seen after a fire two days earlier had destroyed the remainder of his habitat. Unfortunately, the message behind Mr. Sutton’s pantomime was lost in translation.

“No, don’t do that,” the guide cautioned Mr. Sutton. “He won’t understand. He’ll think you’re planning to eat it yourself.” Unfortunately, the trip leader’s warning had come an essential second too late.

The monkey’d already strategized how to grab the prize from the tourist who mocked his hunger with a show of his own feast. The chimp had been waiting for the vacationer to take his eyes off of him. Mr. Sutton was about to stop and hand the banana to the simian half-peeled. But just before he did, his wife provided the distraction the monkey’d been looking for. She asked her husband whether or not he’d remembered to switch off the camera’s flash. The moment Mr. Sutton’s head was turned, the chimp sprung at the unsuspecting tourist. He grabbed hold of Lewis’ forearm just above the wrist and dug his teeth in full-force.

“Son of a bitch!” Mr. Sutton screamed grabbing his arm in pain as he dropped the banana onto the floor of the vehicle.

The chimp leapt down off the railing and snatched the prize from under Mr. Sutton’s feet. He then jumped back up onto the side of the bus and off the vehicle cradling his stolen haul.

The guide rushed over and examined Mr. Sutton’s arm. “Oh, that’s a nasty one. Let’s take care of it.” He returned to the driver’s seat and pulled down a first aid kit stored just above the visor. Mr. Sutton wasn’t the first dumbass he’d led through the jungle. The leader was just happy this incident didn’t require hospitalization. The guide removed some gauze and medical tape from the plastic container. He ripped the adhesive with his teeth and started bandaging the wound. “That’ll give you a nice souvenir to take back home with you.”

Once the leader had attended to the bite, Mrs. Sutton handed her husband back the camera. After glancing at the photo she’d snapped, Lewis grimaced, partly from another bolt of pain that suddenly shot through his lower arm, but also from the fact that the only photo his wife had taken that day was of him cursing out a chimpanzee. Brazilian wildlife 2, Mr. Sutton 0.

Two days later, as Lewis and Victoria sat on the plane back to the U.S., Mr. Sutton put his hand up to his face.

“You feeling alright?” his wife asked.

“Just exhausted.”

“You sure?” Victoria inquired as she put her hand on her husband’s forehead. “You feel hot.”

“We’ve been living in 90 plus degrees for the past week. Of course, I’m hot.”

As the couple talked, Juan Cabrero, a Spanish national sat on the other side of Lewis reading a SkyMall catalog. Juan had been in Brasilia on business. Overhearing the conversation of the man and woman next to him, he suddenly grew concerned about how close he was to a passenger displaying signs of illness. Juan had just gotten over being sick recently and hated the idea of having to start downing cold meds again. He thought about ringing the call bell and asking the stewardess to reseat him in another part of the plane. Then he remembered his breakfast that morning—a large bowl of fruit and a tall glass of orange juice. He’d be fine, he thought to himself.

Later that day, Mr. Sutton and his wife pulled into their driveway as they arrived back home from the airport. After climbing out of the car, Lewis walked around to the rear of the vehicle and began taking suitcases out of the trunk. As he did so, he handed Victoria a mesh sack of mangos they’d brought back from Brazil with them.

That evening, Mr. Sutton walked into his bathroom holding his neck. He looked in the medicine cabinet. “Honey, do we have any Vitamin C?”

Moments later, Victoria entered the bathroom wearing a robe. “No sorry, hon,” she said. “Still feeling sick?” she then asked her husband as she dried her hair.

“A little.”

“There’s that whole bag of mangos we bought sitting in the fridge. One’s just as good as a tablet.”

Lewis nodded his head. Mangos—that was what he needed.

Chapter 2

Back in my hometown, I was playing in a little league game. I held my bat high over my shoulder and squinted at the pitcher staring me down from 40 feet away. A nasty changeup came in over the outside corner of the plate. The ball was in the catcher’s mitt before I even finished my swing. Strike one. I was 13, the oldest member of the Brookville Owls, a little league team that’d won the district tournament the year before I’d joined them. My father had explained to me that there was no shame in playing baseball with kids so young they had to choke up three inches on the bat on every trip to the plate. It took some time, but I’d finally internalized this wisdom. Slowly my self-consciousness about being the only member of the team allowed admittance to movies with “adult situations” began to subside. I just wished I had a better on-base percentage than even one of them.

Another pitch—a hanging curveball. “Strike two!” the umpire called.

“Come on, you can do it, Eli!” shouted my grandfather Sid Ogden, his untidy grey hair floating in the wind as he yelled out from the stands. He wore a brown sweater that kept him warm in the early May breeze. This was the first Owls game he’d been to all season. Grandpa Sid said he didn’t think he needed to put on an outer covering so late in the spring. Andrew Ogden, my father, who sat next to him cheering me on too, had convinced him otherwise. My dad was a virologist. He was always lecturing me about spring colds, and he wore a sweater and a fleece jacket, even though the temperature that day hadn’t dropped below 60 degrees.

My dad had recognized early on that I wasn’t gonna’ be a baseball star. But since my only achievements since early childhood had been spelling bee prizes and science fair awards, he felt, along with my mom, that athletics would help round me out.

The pitcher wound up again. As the ball flew from his hands, I panicked, and swung at a wide breaking ball the catcher had to lunge at to secure.

“Strike three,” the umpire called.

“Damn, he struck out!” Grandpa Sid exclaimed to my father shaking his head.

“No, they get four strikes now, Dad.”

“Four strikes?”

“Yup, the league thinks it’ll improve their self-esteem.”

My grandpa contemplated such a change in the by-laws of America’s pastime. What nonsense, he thought to himself. In spite of his attitude towards this kind of coddling, he momentarily forgave any rule amendment that still gave his grandson life.

I squatted down lower for the fourth delivery. I looked into the pitcher’s eyes again. His blond hair, imposing height, and rugged look told me that this was a kid who’d probably never suffered an ounce of ballfield humiliation in his whole life. I took a long breath. Three straight swings and three straight misses. The law of probability said that I was bound to make contact on the next pitch.

“Strike four,” the umpire called. “You’re out!”

Or not.

I ambled away from the plate, the bat draped over my shoulder. My teammates avoided looking at me as I entered the dugout, except the youngest ones. These kids stared at me with a kind of bemused glee. The fact that they were better players than someone two years older than them gave them a real ego boost.

“You’ll get ‘em next time,” said my dad as he and my grandpa walked me to the car after the game.

“Hey, at least I got to see my grandson play ball,” my grandpa said mussing my hair. “You had that walk. That takes a good eye.”

“Not really,” I responded. “I just calculated the pitches’ trajectories based on the wind direction. That and I crouched down really low.”

“All part of the game’s skill,” my grandpa replied. “You think Tiger Woods would’ve gotten so good at golf without that same kind of intuition?”

“Maybe I should try that sport,” I responded throwing my mitt down onto the back seat of my dad’s car. “You get unlimited swings…I might actually hit the ball once in a while.”

The next day, I walked into a Worwick High School chemistry class and took a seat. Even though I was a freshman, I’d been put into the course after placing out of first year biology. I raised my chin to my friend Adrian Hughes, a sophomore, who sat two chairs away. He pulled buds from ears that’d been laid bare by his outer fade haircut. He then greeted me with his own head nod.

On the board was an osmosis reaction that the other students were already copying down. I took out a notebook and began to do the same. Finally, our teacher, Ms. Williams, stood up from her desk. “Okay, who can explain how this chemical process works?”

My hand was the first one up, as always.

“Yes, Eli.”

“Molecules of a solvent pass through a semipermeable cell wall from a less concentrated solution into a more concentrated one, and this equalizes the density of solution on each side of the membrane.”

“Very good, Eli,” Ms. Williams said before launching into the day’s lesson.

At the end of the period, the bell rang announcing the close of the school day.

“Okay, folks,” said Ms. Williams, “don’t forget. Midterm Friday.”

Logan Burris, the captain of the junior varsity baseball squad and his friend Eric Halton, both wearing their team jackets, walked up to me as I collected my things.

“Hey, Joe DiMaggio, saw you playing at my kid brother’s little league game.”

My stomach suddenly tightened. So far, the only public humiliation I’d faced as an Owl was the giggles of a few of my teammates’ sisters from the stands. Now here was someone who could expose me to the entire Worwick student body.

Adrian seemed to have overheard Logan’s statement, an opening he could tell was the prelude to an insult. Adrian played on the school baseball team along with Logan and his friend. He’d recently partnered with me for that year’s Westinghouse Science Competition. We’d been developing a neutrigenomics project together. Adrian had started to feel a little jazzed about the endeavor—unusual given his general attitude towards academic extracurriculars. However, he still didn’t enjoy the idea of his connection with members of the Science Club becoming common knowledge among the entire school community, especially his baseball teammates.

Adrian had been about to join me before I was accosted by Logan and his buddy. The two of us almost always walked to the organization meetings after school on Thursdays together. However, today he held back, intentionally avoiding any involvement in my beef with Logan.

“Would five strikes be enough for you?” the baseball team captain then asked.

Adrian tried to avoid facing me in the wake of this burn. As I looked around for him, he pretended to be occupied with searching through his backpack for an essential item. Seeing my friend distracted and hoping to get away from the two sophomores as quickly as possible, I grabbed my things and headed towards the door. Feeling really guilty, Adrian watched as I slinked out of the classroom with Logan and Eric laughing as they trailed behind me.

When I walked into the Science Club meeting room 10 minutes later, I saw, among the other members of the group, Haley Anderson. She was a sophomore with dark brown hair and a demeanor that reminded me of Gail Bromberg, a young teacher I’d crushed on from September to June of my fifth-grade year. The way Haley spoke reminded me of the way Ms. Bromberg would lecture her class of 10-year-olds about the properties of matter and the solar system. When Haley explained the facets of an aviary phylum, she gave off this scientific passion that just drove me wild. “That was fire,” I so wanted to tell her after the meeting. But I didn’t have the guts to even speak to her, much less gush over her poster session. I might’ve been in the same year as some of the other clubbies, but after skipping the eighth grade, all of my friends thought of yours truly like a little brother. Why should Haley be different?

There among the other members of the group also sat my friend Olivia Sanchez. I knew Olivia from the sophomore math section I’d also placed into. As a high school newbie her previous year, Olivia was the first Hispanic student ever to win the Westinghouse prize solo at Worwick. She owned Cliodynamics. She actually intimidated a lot of her instructors. When they’d lecture the class’s other brain-dead kids on mammalogy and etymology, she’d be one of the few students listening. It was only out of politeness though. She mastered everything they were regurgitating years before. At least she still wore braces—the one reminder to her teachers that she really had once been a child.

Olivia was seated at a long black desk in the classroom talking with her BFF Maddy Rehnquist. Maddy’s father and mother were both professors at the local college. Though her brain was wired for science, her eye was set on fashion. She’d never dream of missing a sale at Gucci or Tom Ford. Her hair was long and fringed at the ends, and she wore a Prada purse, a gift from her grandmother. Her mom humored her own mother, who loved fueling Maddy’s obsession with clothing and apparel—aspects of their child both her parents avoided encouraging at all costs.

As I greeted the two girls, Olivia pushed down a lock of my hair that stood out awkwardly from the rest. Whenever I’d forget my actual age, Olivia’s maternal impulses were all the reminder I needed that I was still a preemie. I glanced around, hoping that no one, especially Haley, had noticed Olivia’s unconscious gesture.

A few moments later, Adrian entered the room. He stood 10 feet away from me and the two girls. He steeled himself before approaching us, Maddy in particular. He could only take so much of this particular classmate at a time. While he certainly thought she’d glo’d up since her ugly-duckling freshman year, he found himself irritated by the fact that she felt, almost without fail, that every top she wore had to match her shoes. What to other kids might be considered en fleek, Adrian only saw as spoiled.

“So, after soloing, you’re giving a partner a chance to share in some Westinghouse glory?” I queried Olivia.

“Who says she was the one who wanted to work with me?” Olivia asked in response.

“Oh, don’t tell me Ms. Forever 21 is gonna’ be the real brains here,” Adrian said finally now walking over to where we sat.

Maddy exhaled slightly as he joined us. To the young lady Adrian wasn’t so bad looking himself. However, the problem for her was that he knew it. She also resented the fact that the only times he’d acknowledge other “clubbies” were occasions when he was far from his baseball teammates’ critical eyes.

“Better be careful,” she said in reply to Adrian’s comment about her and Olivia’s project. “Word gets around you’re splitting your time now between the baseball team and the nerd squad, you might find yourself in left out-ville.”

Adrian didn’t counter her dig. He was above acknowledging such pettiness, he told himself—that plus what could he say in response that wouldn’t be an outright lie?