Saving St. Germ (22 page)

“I have a TOE, Dr. Faber. I know that you didn’t hire me to be a theoretician, but I’ve been working on questions of chirality in space. I’ve consulted Lorraine Atwater at USC. I’m on the right track here, in fact, as of the last week or so, I think I’m—”

“Esme. Please. What are you trying to say?”

I jumped up and approached his desk. He recoiled instinctively.

“Dr. Faber, I need some time. A little time to work this theory out.” I grabbed the edge of his desk and leaned across. “I have been given a
gift
.”

He shook his head. He crouched in his chair, ready to spring, staring at me with, for once, both eyes. Had I cured his optical problem?

“It’s like chinning yourself on the topmost rung of the ladder to heaven. You lift yourself up and just get this
flash,
a glimpse of the angels and the reaches of paradise, all making
sense
suddenly—a flash. And then your grip gives and you fall back down into the dark.”

He cleared his throat. “Please sit down, Esme. You’re very excited.”

I threw up my hands and sat down. “Of course I am. Of course I’m excited. I’ve seen it! The post-ambidextrous universe!”

I sat down, breathing heavily. I realized with relief that my hiccups were gone.

Faber cleared his throat again. He lifted a manila folder—a file?—from the papers on his desk. He peered inside it, then looked at me.

“Some weeks ago, as you know, Donald Brandeman made several rather serious allegations about your conduct in the laboratory. And we had the question about the ‘politics’ of your lectures. I was inclined at the time to dismiss all this, given your record at Harvard and your teaching reputation—but since then, Esme ... your strange behavior ...”

“What strange behavior?”

“You know as well as I do that you’ve been consistently late for classes and laboratories, often not showing up at lab at all. You have failed to provide substitute instructors to cover your absences. You did not register midterm grades. I was also informed by personnel that you took the highly irregular step of hiring an undergraduate as your lab assistant, using grant funds. A Miss”—he peered into the file again—“Rocio Salinas.”

“I hired Rocky because she is the best young scientist I know. More imaginative and finally more capable than any of my graduate students.”

He looked up. “The young woman who was just ... lying on the lab floor next to you?”

I smiled. “
That’s
the one!”

He looked down again. “It’s against university policy. We have also had complaints about the presence of your child in the radioactive areas of the Oberman labs. I hope I don’t have to remind you, Esme, as a mother, about the inherent dangers for children of low levels of—”

“I take care to ensure my child’s safety in the lab. She is restricted to the outer area, where there’s about as much radiation as she’d get on a flight to Chicago.”

“Nevertheless, we’re talking about a number of imprudent decisions made willy-nilly, if you ask
me.
This is highly disturbing behavior. And since you yourself brought up the subject of chemistry theory, I will reiterate what
you
said. You were not hired to theorize; you were hired to do biochemical research in the area of single-gene-deficiency disease, most specifically Alpha
₁
Antitrypsin Deficiency.”

There was a silence.

“I need some time, Dr. Faber. To work out this theory.”

“I am warning you, Esme. Failure to appear at your regularly scheduled lecture and lab meetings will be looked upon as breach of your teaching contract. These students pay a lot of tuition to learn certain things from you. I am not in a position to hire someone else at this late date. I have to inform you that continued unexplained and un-provided-for absences will lead to your suspension by this university.”

I stood up. “This is all about
students,
right? Nothing to do with the two million in grant money invested in my lab—or the pressure to find a cure for a
₁
AT, right?”

He looked morosely at me. “I’m not denying that you have
another
serious responsibility to NIH, Derridex, and everyone else involved in your lab.
Of course
I’m concerned about that.”

“No
shit.
”

“Get your midterm grades in, Esme. Teach your courses. And
yes,
do your lab research. Otherwise you leave me no alternative.”

“You didn’t hear anything I said. Did you?”

Both his eyes were focused on me. Now I was positive I’d cured his wandering eye.

“Esme, please. I’m talking about
no alternative
.”

I turned in the doorway. “Right,” I said. “I know. I haven’t any either.”

He laughed, not a pleasant sound. “Esme,” he said, “does it strike you as just
slightly
ironic that you sat in this office not long ago, going on about the lack of moral standards among science students? And now here you are,
abandoning
your teaching duties to these very students?”

“How can I possibly teach anybody about
morality
if I abandon my own values? You and I both know that you can find someone to fill in temporarily for me in Organic. These are extraordinary circumstances! And I’ve clarified my moral position these last months. I’m not made to be a
crusader;
the best example I can give students is my own thinking. Hawking said—”

He interrupted me. “Oh my my my. Oh, Esme, Esme. You and Stephen Hawking. You and Einstein. You and Newton. Do you think maybe you’re living in a
fantasy
world?”

I smiled sweetly. “So were
they
.”

His phone began to ring.

“I’m sorry,” we said together, as if we’d rehearsed this final moment, worked it out months ago—perhaps around the time I’d first arrived at UGC: the real thing, a successful woman scientist.

After the wind an earthquake ... And after the earthquake a fire ... and after the fire a still small voice
.

I Kings 19:11-12

I
MADE MY
way to a table that was near the stage but slightly obscured by a pillar. I thought it made a good vantage point. When the waitress came, I ordered a rum and Coke, since the house wine looked like scarlet hair tonic.

I got a few stares, a woman by herself at a nightclub table, but after a while everyone stopped stealing little surreptitious glances at me and I became invisible again. I sipped the rum and Coke. It reminded me of grad school and postdoc parties, and I thought of Jesse again, then put him out of my mind. As soon as my glass was half empty, the waitress, in punk attire, appeared at my elbow.

“C’getcha somethin’ else?”

“Sure, another one of
these.
Great rum!”

She looked at me, tongued her gum into the opposite cheek, then winked.

“Like that rum, huh? I’ll see the bartender fixes you up right. He’s my pal.”

“Hey, thanks.”

Actually I had forgotten in my nostalgic haze that, in fact, rum wasn’t my favorite, but so what, I thought. It was sort of like the taste of certain cough syrups one remembered from one’s childhood; the terrible flavor was comforting.

Suddenly, there was a second drink before me; the waitress winked again and was gone. Then the room went very dark, the table candles lit people’s faces upward ghoulishly. The spot hit the stage, the three-piece band rattled and honked, there was a silvery clash of cymbals and the toupee’d emcee slouched out.

“I’d like to say that we have a really unusual group of performers tonight. A lot of them write their own stuff, so don’t go to the rest rooms and read the doors till the show’s over, it might spoil some of these hot jokes!” He showed his teeth and there was the familiar rim shot on the drums.

He buzz-sawed on and I stopped listening. A very young, pimply guy hurried out—he looked like a high school kid—the first stand-up of the night. It was painful. He made bad joke after bad joke; no one would laugh. I laughed a little, hollowly, and people turned around and stared at me. Then someone behind me growled, “Take a walk, lame-o!” and the poor boy, sweating and bowing again and again and crying thank you to no one, relinquished the stage to a very large Tootsie-ish woman. Midway through her routine (“Don’t make any jokes about mother-in-laws, I
am
your mother-in-law!”), I began picturing us, the audience, as a vast compact sea of particles, all possessing negative inertial mass. (A simple concept—it means that if a force pushes on the particle, it moves in a direction
opposite
to the way in which the force is urging. You know, like when your mother nagged at you as a kid and you did just the opposite of what she wanted?) The stand-ups, as they arrived one by one and stood heroically, gladiator-ish, in the dazzling ray of light, tried pushing this mass, the audience, with their naked embarrassing need to be funny (“Please laugh at me, I’m funny, I’m funny, don’t you think?”) and the audience not only resisted, they moved in the other direction— active disapproval, boos, rude comments, heckling. It was amazing how neatly the paradigm worked. I was on the fourth rum and Coke now, and my brain whirled with bad analogies.

“What a buncha
dogs
tonight!” I heard someone behind me mutter as the Tootsie-woman started doing a little soft-shoe. I loved her suddenly, she reminded me of a ghost who’d floated in straight from the vaudeville stage; though she was extremely heavy and carried a great wedding-cake wig on her head, she was light on her feet and she danced with a natural dip and girlish quickstep and sway. She seemed lost in reverie as she moved—for just that second I believed people were charmed—and then the catcalls and whoops of ridicule started and she opened her eyes very lazily, like an old sea turtle, fixed the house with a death stare, and croaked into the mike, “Bugger you all!,” soft-shoe-ing with enormous dignity into the wings. I clapped heartily for her, but my applause was drowned out by jeers.

Fear snaked through me. When would he come on? After this next jittery, Lenny Bruce-ish fellow or two or so down the stretch? Whenever he appeared, I knew he was in for trouble, and the thought of him suffering onstage filled me with dread. I’d begun the day facing Faber; then Rocky had driven home with me and suggested she babysit and I take the night off. “Go to a movie, have a massage,” she’d cried, pushing me out the door. “You gotta relax.” So I came here, to the Club Sez Who on the Strip. If not to relax, to at least relieve my heart of some weighty anxiety: I just had to see that Jay was alive, I told myself. That’s all. Anyway, that had been my plan a while back when I’d first seated myself. I’d intended to see if he was OK, then slip unobtrusively out. This still seemed like a workable idea, but this crowd was going to make it all harder, I could see. I could remember this future easily.

The Lenny Bruce guy was holding his own. He had a nervous high-pitched laugh, contagious, and whenever he broke up after a long spacey riff, the audience would titter a bit too. Finally he got off a few decent one-liners and people started warming up. One or two even clapped.

“Commitment? Yeah, this town’s so incapable of commitment, people are afraid to use their turn signals!”

“Yeah, my friends thought I got it easier—my Jewish mother moved to Miami. Now she
faxes
me guilt.”

People chuckled and buzzed to each other. I could see Lenny breathing easier.

“Yeah, so how do you give a blonde a CAT scan? Shine a flashlight in her ear, right? Am I right? Forgive me, all you blondes in the audience, but you know people got to wonder. Are you or aren’t you? I mean
real
blondes. I asked a date of mine to prove she was a real blonde and she got right up and showed it to me ... yeah, the hair on her chest.”

The audience roared; they were with him now. He was beaming.

“Hey, I was satisfied, right? She could have gotten insulted and hit me with her jock strap! ... Yeah, I was lucky ... yeah.”

Smoke swirled in the air and I began thinking about a cigarette again. When the urge got too strong, I redirected my thoughts to chirality. In our world there exists a chiral right-handed twin of nicotine called dextro-nicotine, not found in tobacco plants. It has been synthesized, and guess what: It is far far less toxic than old left-handed death-nicotine. I briefly, drunkenly, played with the notion of synthesizing and marketing dextro-nicotine cigarettes: Virginia Switch. What a genius idea, I thought, and smiled to myself as Lenny lifted the mike off its stand and pranced about, triumphant. Then I remembered that it was the
tars
that got you cancer—the nicotine only addicted you.

Then, I caught a glimpse of movement in the wings, just beyond Lenny. I saw his face. He was next. I could see him moving his lips, he was repeating his jokes, like he always did, getting the timing just right. Or, in his case, just wrong. I drank down the last of my drink, and my faithful pal the waitress appeared again.

Lenny left in a flurry of enthusiastic applause and the band gave him a glittery spiral of rim shots. Then Jay was standing there. He didn’t say anything for what seemed an eternity. He looked tired and (I squinted, I was having a little trouble seeing through the layers of smoke) he looked sad. A tall, thin, worried-looking guy.

“Hi everybody.” He peered out at the audience, squinting into the lights. “Hi,” he said again and there were a couple of groans. He snapped to finally.

“Well, I’m Jay
Talkman,
they call me Talkman ’cause I’m really
wired
! Hah, hah.” There was silence, terrible premeditated silence. I considered chuckling, but he knew my laugh too well.

“Well, anyway, folks, I see we’ve got a
tough crowd
tonight—but hey, you don’t scare me, my last gig was for Caligula.” (A few snorts.) “He was a great guy; he wanted to feed me to the lions but they were on a corn-free diet. Hah, hah.”

“Hey,” yelled the guy in back of me, “the lions didn’t wanna get sick!”

Jay ignored the guy. “So, anyway, folks, they did things back in Rome a little differently than they do them now—and I think they did them right! For one thing, when
their
senators screwed up, they made them sit in the bath and b-bleed to death. In the U.S. we do it differently—when our senators screw up,
we
take the bath
and
they bleed
us
to death.”