Heidi Verbrecher ++D6++ done

"And I am freaking out in the middle of the street
With the complete conviction of someone
Who's never had anything actually really bad happen to them
But I am committed, now, to the feeling"

”Daddy what happens to the rats after the trial phase is over?” I looked up at him with the hope I would be welcoming a new pet home soon enough.

Gosh I was so stupid.

I still think about that day. The way I could now recognize the battle displayed clear as day on his face. The question if he could preserve my innocence for a few more days, trading it off for the feeling of betrayal that would cut deep when the day came I would inevitably learn the truth.

My father to this has never lied to me. He promised he never would, but I could not say the same thing about myself. He watched the tears start to roll when he told me how all test subjects that survive the trials will be eliminated.

He never used the word death. I chose to believe it was because the rats were never given the opportunity to truly live.

________________________________

The choice to work in the labs once my cousin, Gunnar, had expanded the business of Verbrecher Pharmaceuticals was never mine to begin with. My father was given a cushy job running the labs and it was expected I would find my place alongside everyone else in the family.

Lab work was not foreign for a little girl who spent more time with test tubes and Bunsen burners than with toys. The eldest daughter of a man with too many ideas, always chasing the next high of success. A true idealist and the corporate worlds worst nightmare. There were weeks the two of us would not leave, sleeping in the hallway with our lab glasses still glued to our faces.

Mother complaining we were lost in a world of possibilities and shady ethical practices, but her complaining stopped when the money started rolling.

Everyone who has met me would say I was my father’s daughter.

Slowly I have become his greatest failure, an experiment gone wrong. For a scientist with a conscience will never dare to push the boundaries that needed to be blown up in the high and mighty name of the craft.

When my dad would be consumed by his work, I never forgot to say a prayer for the animals we abused so casually. At night when he thought I was deep asleep, I would tell them a story. Naively choosing to believe they could understand and find comfort in a world of make belief.

Hoping their imagination was as colorful as mine.

Maybe it was my own self-pity, their cages equivalent of the claustrophobia of the lab. Never knowing anything else, never given the choice to choose a different life. As the time went by, I began to resent the very thing that I used to consider the highest form of truth.

From molecules to misery. I wanted to knock over the Bunsen burner to my right and set the whole place ablaze.

The next day I put a smile on my face as I did the day before that and the one before that.

My rage lived just as caged as anything else in these haunted halls for I had never seen it myself, but I knew it was not just the life of rodents my father has taken. His ideas became more absurd, often found muttering to himself in a sleep deprived frenzy. Hushed meetings with Gunnar had become more frequent, and slowly he had begun to shut me out.

”You’re not cut out for this, you let your emotions get in the way of the work.”

Obviously catching onto my Achilles heel – a soul. Not that he seemed to understand what it is like to have one.

What sounded like harsh criticism and rejection was the greatest gift he could give to me. He was cutting me off, not completely, only from what he thought I could not handle. I think he forgot that he raised me to be curios. Every part of me itching to know everything I could. Craving the ability to save him from himself, his weakness to recognize a boundary. If I had to go behind his back to sabotage him for his own good, I would not bat an eye. My moral boundary was a lot more blurred than anyone could have ever expected.

I had learned to find comfort in his blunt sentences, a reminder that he was keeping his most important vow, but the damage had been done. Now I had something to prove, something to keep me going.

My very own experiment.

The Hypothesis: Empathy is not what kills passion, it’s the goddamn spark that makes the flame burn bright!

I never could have predicted that it would have me turning my back on my family, introducing me to people who had every right to complain. I was just along for the ride, the walls of my own ignorant privilege crashing down and changing everything.

I still have so much to learn.