While I write this all down, I am very near to tears. God, give me the strength to free myself from this dilemma. The stray I recently picked up, now sitting on my desk, is watching me with a reverent look. Except perhaps for Ziebold, he is probably the only one who understands my troubles. The others have adopted an air of indifference toward my project. They are tops in their fields and can find work at a firm or institution anywhere they please. They probably regard me as an idiot because I'm devoting my time to an idea as childish as this. Not without reason, perhaps.
7 May 1980
With great fanfare, spring has made its festive appearance in the garden behind our building and has awakened in it a dizzily colorful life. With the never-ending, dazzling sunshine and the festival of scents all around, one could shout for joy. Yet I may very well be the unhappiest man on earth. This morning we conducted a new experiment on ten animals. The result was our worst defeat up to now. Long incisions were made in various body regions of the subjects creating large, gaping wounds. After we coated the incision areas with the soup, we pressed the edges of the wounds together with forceps. It was horrifying. At first, the edges actually did stick together, but within seconds the mixture ate its way into the tissue, fraying it and turning it to pulp. The wounds became larger and larger until finally, with blood spewing out and a purulent discharge, they could no longer be recognized. When the reaction was over, all ten animals were dead.
I simply do not understand what happened. It contradicts all logic. Although we have learned how to deal with the acidity problem, living cells still cannot tolerate the preparation. I am so overcome by shame, anger, and self-doubt that my whole body is shaking. Now more than ever, I would like to step up the pace of the experiments, but I have no idea how to justify that to the team ...
11:25 P.M.
Since the others left the building, I have been consoling myself with a bottle of red wine. The whole time my thoughts keep circling around this seemingly insolvable problem. But my ruminations haven't provided me with any particularly good answers, because I find no mistakes in the concept. That's why, in just a moment, I'm going to start a new experiment. Although I am not accountable to anyone, I must keep this experiment a secret, because, to be honest, 1 myself see no justifiable reason for it. The one who'll have to have faith in it, I'm afraid, is the nameless stray.
2:30 A.M.
A miracle, has happened! It worked on the very first try!
That is, perhaps, a little exaggerated, but you could certainly call the experiment a success, if only a rudimentary one.
While I was carrying out the small operation, I suddenly asked myself what I was doing in the operating room in the middle of the night. I felt like a criminal, and everything I had done seemed senseless and crazy to me. I had not counted on success right from the beginning. It was more like the defiant behavior of a child desperately rebelling against his omnipotent father although the child knows that he doesn't have the slightest chance, against him. And then this happened …
After I had shaved the stray, injected a muscle relaxant, and tied him down with his paws extended on the operating table, I made an incision of about six inches in his belly. He cried out and growled miserably, trying to bite me. Before blood could actually start to flow out of the wound, I treated it with the mixture. I pressed the edges of the wound together with my thumb and index finger, and then, in the twinkling of an eye, the wonder occurred: they stuck together for a moment. I was so amazed that I thought I was hallucinating on all that good red wine, which, I must admit, had clouded my senses a bit. But with my success, I sobered up right away. A thousand questions shot through my head, but having been triumphant, something I had wanted for so long, they lost all significance. Why did the same preparation work that had failed sixteen hours earlier? Was it a matter of the dosage? Had my staff done slipshod work? I sat down on a chair and, smoking a cigarette, watched the patient, who, himself seemed surprised at his sudden healing. For the next hour and a half, I cleaned up the operating room and struggled to come down from seventh heaven. Then I examined the wound again. The edges had separated a little from one another, which was negligible, since we are only in the initial stage of development. To be safe, I sewed the incision together and put the patient into a cage. He looked at me perplexed, as if wanting to know what the whole business was supposed to mean. I chuckled softly, and then was about to leave the room when it suddenly occurred to me that the patient didn't even have a name. After thinking for a moment, I decided to use the classical method of naming, and baptized my helper and friend "Claudandus."
10 May 1980
They took it with nonchalant equanimity, not because I had abused Claudandus for the test, but because I had done it behind their backs. As if I were an unimportant lab assistant that had to ask for permission just to clean a test tube. They still do not take me seriously. That's the bottom line. There must be something about my face, about my behavior, about my entire personality that makes people doubt my
