Saving St. Germ (24 page)

“Why
are
you dicking around with this theory, Prof? We got so much work in the lab—I don’t get it! This a
₁
AT’s enough to keep me busy night and day and you’re out there in the stars somewhere, even, when you
do
come in.”

She propped up her head with her hand and grinned lopsidedly at me.

“I miss you. The lab seems really empty these days.”

I raised my glass and sang: “I’ve grown accustomed to your
blots
!”

Rocky snorted and emptied her glass. I looked at mine halfheartedly. I’d been drinking, off and on, since eight or nine. When I’d come limping in after midnight, Rocky took in my agitated state and broke out an old bottle of Cuervo Gold of Jay’s she found in the pantry. We toasted him with the first swallow, lifting our faceted glasses to the dim yellow-domed kitchen light.

Now the bottle was half empty. Oreos and Doritos littered the table, and a fat low red candle had burned down into its hollow.

“To theory!” cried Rocky. “Fuck it.”

We clicked glasses and drank, then winced at the cactusy taste. I coughed a little.

“Rocky—why do you stay on in the lab?”

She wrapped a long spiral of hair around her finger, looked at it, then let it go; slowly, slowly it repositioned itself.

“I like the procedures. I like very much knowing, for just once in my life,
exactly
what’s going to happen.”

“Me too. That’s precisely why I chose science. From the time I was a little kid, I loved the sense it gave me, not so much that there were answers, as that certain things always happened the same way and you could count on them.”

I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

“And then, at Harvard, I had this professor, Q—right, I know I’ve mentioned him to you—who kept insisting that the answers be plugged into fairy tales, you know: The holy crusaders set off to save the babies. Or the Genome Project: We’re going to decode the language of life and thus end all human suffering, and triumph over death. Well, that’s admirable, but what if it’s not true? It takes the incorruptibility of the answers away. There are hardly any disinterested researchers anymore. Scientists are invested in these biotech companies up the old wazoo. I care a lot about those kids with gene deficiencies, but there’s not that much that can actually be cured. You know why? There is no
normal
gene sequence that we can use
as a standard.
All sequences are unique—
shit.
No more crippled babies, no more death.
Shit.
”

Rocky shook her head woozily, grinning. She pulled a Baggie from a jacket draped over the back of her chair, plopped it on the table, spat on a paper, and began rolling a joint. She spun it nimbly between her fingers into a cylinder, lit it, inhaled, sucked on it again, and passed it to me. I took a hit.

“I’ve
always
loved theory. Which I turn to again and again because there seems to be so little order at all in the universe, not since relativity’s real implications hit, anyway, and everybody’s making up voodoo hypotheses, but at least they’re humble, you know what I mean? Theoretical physicists and chemists don’t feel like they’re
designing
futures—they can’t even define what the future is, or the past. Nobody dares talk about Laws anymore, there are only models,
suggestions
of the way it
might
be possibly, in special circumstances. And then too, the observer unquestionably alters what is observed. They talk about
God,
Rocky, about finding God.”

“Wow,” squeaked Rocky. Her voice had gone tight as a drum and she squinted at me, then released a huge billow of smoke from her nostrils. “Wow. God!”

“No, look, I’m serious. And you know when scientists look for God, they
really
haven’t a clue. Which is a good state for a scientist to be in:
Clueless.
Starting from scratch.”

I swayed unsteadily, then slumped back down in my chair, exhausted.

Then I got up into a kneeling position.

“I mean,
OK,
the theory people use metaphors too! God knows they’ve got eleven dimensions squeezed up like Cheez Whiz in Super Strings. ... I know this biologist, Richard Lewontin? He made the distinction clear for me: There’s a difference between useful metaphors that allow the mind closer to a verifiable reality, and metaphors that are
identities,
that become the thing itself.”

I stood up on my chair, waving my glass. “They stole Descartes’s
clock
!” I shouted, almost falling. “Now they’re
selling
Descartes’s clock!”

I paused and regained my balance. “Rocky!” I cried, swaying. “Who owns the story of the future? Who owns the Bedtime Story?”

“You know what?” Rocky interrupted. I sat down, deflated, and she handed me the joint. “You know
what
? I’m the first one in my family to go to college.”

I held the joint to my lips, then stopped. I’d had enough for one night. I handed it back.

“Is that true, Rock?”

“Yeah! It’s a real smart family, my family, but no higher education. Except my mother’s sister in Guatemala. She’s a teacher. Everybody works in the store—the grocery store in Pacoima. But not anymore little Rocio! I go to school. They sent me. They put their hard-earned money behind me.” She looked up at the ceiling. Smoke, in a blue torrent, poured out of her red mouth. “I was good with numbers. That’s all. I could add
up
things in my head. Now I gotta be sure I don’t flunk out, ’cause my family, they think I’m so
great.
”

“You
are,
Rocky,” I said. “There’s no grad student who could do the job you do.”

She beamed at me. “I learn
fast,
huh? Too bad I forget just as
quick
.”

“Rocky,” I said. “You
are
the lab right now. You’re
it
.”

“But what about a
₁
AT?” she asked. “You given up on that?”

I held the roach, pincerlike, between my fingers; she shook her head and I stubbed it out.

“I think about it every day. Just because I’m not in the lab doesn’t mean it’s not on my mind. I just can’t stand Faber’s shadow all over me.”

“Yeah, I know. Bad, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s bad.”

“Well yeah. I know that. But sometimes I think, What about
me
? What about
me,
Prof? You plucked me off my motorcycle, got me hooked—and now, now you shake me off like water from a dog’s butt.”

“Rocky, don’t you start on me too. I can’t take it, I swear.”

“Well, fuck you, Professor. I have feelings too. You taught me a whole new way of looking at science, you taught me laboratory procedures, you were my teacher
and
my friend, at least I thought you were my friend. But then you just, like, walked out the door. What kind of friend leaves a partner high and dry?”

“Me. I’m terrible—a terrible wife who messes up her husband’s life, a bad mother who won’t get her weird kid professional help, an incompetent teacher who doesn’t teach, and a lousy lousy friend and lab partner who’s never there. That’s me, right? Did I sum it all up? Did I miss anything?”

Rocky laughed. “Yeah. You missed yourself. You’re messing up yourself. You think that you’re thinking for yourself but you’re just thinking
in reaction
to everybody else. You’re pissed off at the schools in L.A., you’re pissed off at Q and Faber, you’re pissed at Jay, at big-bucks science, money metaphors, but you run away, you don’t face up, man. Then you get yourself in trouble. Climbing around out in the galaxies ain’t gonna do nothin’ for it. That’s why I thought when you got up on that stage tonight it was
great,
you actually got real for once. You kicked
ass.
”

“Yeah, and
you
know what’s real, right?
You
really can tell me about the world from your vantage point: after dark in the back seat! Cholos, frat boys, what does it matter, right?”

I meant this humorously, or I thought I did, but it sure didn’t fly.

Her face turned dark. “I don’t fuck cholos!”

She leaped up, knocking the chair over.

“I don’t fuck frat boys, for the history books, either. I ain’t fucked
anybody
since I started this goddam
convent
job, working for Mother Superior.”

Her mouth turned down, like a little kid’s, like Ollie’s, and she started to cry.

“Rocky, oh God, wait. I’m sorry.”

She threw herself from her chair and went crashing around the room, picking up her jacket and bag, her cast-off bracelets, a jeweled belt, shoes.

“No. You’re right. Hey, I don’t belong in your lab. I’m not that far anyhow from Pacoima. I got no right takin’ up your space, huh? You got better things to do now anyway, right? You’re fuckin’
Einstein.
And me, I fuck
cholos
!”

“Rocky. Don’t do this, please. I’m sorry. I just can’t say anything right tonight. I’m not
funny,
I’m just not funny. Don’t go, Rocky, you’re in no condition to drive!”

“I just sobered up.”

I shook my head and laughed. “Jesus,” I said. “This is goddam entropy, the Second Law.”

Rocky walked up to me, bent over, and put her face in mine as I sat in my chair. “No,” she said. Her brown eyes looked huge from the dope, the pupils were dilated, tears glittered on her cheeks, and her hair was wild, it seemed to have grown longer and wilder through the force of her anger.

“This ain’t no Second Law. This is Rocky’s
First
Law, which says that if you treat people like shit, after a while they gonna treat you
ditto
.”

The door slammed. There was the sound of an ignition, then a screeching turn, loud acceleration off into the night. I sat for a while and then I went in to check on Ollie. She was sleeping on her side, holding her dragon tight. Then I went into the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked in the mirror. And there she was: the troublemaker, the great theorist, stand-up physicist. I didn’t cry, I didn’t do anything. I stared at myself. I remembered how Q had kept me feeling safe all those years. Remarkable, I thought. I couldn’t make Rocky feel safe for one semester.

I walked around the house, checking windows, locking doors, turning off the lights. I turned the phone machine on and I poured myself a large glass of water. I went back to the mirror and lifted the glass in a toast.

“Chirality,” I said aloud and drank it down.

Dimly, through a haze of impressions: Ollie standing sentinellike at the side of the bed, the phone ringing; I came awake. I patted Ollie on the head and felt around on the floor for the bedside clock. I read its luminous dial (caused by a form of radioactivity known as alpha decay) and gasped. Noon. The room was dark, the curtains were drawn.

“Shit,” I said to Ollie’s serious face. “My lab.”

“Shit,” said Ollie. “My lab.”

“Sweetheart, how long have you been up?”

“Two cookies fell on the raisins. Ollie danced and danced in her box.”

“Great. Since nine, huh?”

I felt I’d swallowed a dump truck’s load of sand, that same truck had backed up and poured some into my eyes for good measure. The phone rang again. I picked it up warily.

“Hello.”

“Hello? Professor Charbonneau? This is Mrs. Vickers, Dr. Faber’s secretary. He would like to speak with you, if you can just hold one—”

“Ah, that won’t be necessary, Mrs. Vickers. Just tell him I discovered a cure for cancer
and
AIDS this morning. That’s why I couldn’t make it to my lab.”

“I beg your pardon? I—”

“Thanks, Mrs. Vickers.”

I hung up.

“Well, Ollie,” I said, “it’s just you and me, kiddo.”

And it was. Just Ollie and me. We had breakfast, then we went to the store and stocked up on groceries. I bought enough for two or three weeks. Then we went to the children’s bookstore and the toy store and stocked up there too. I still felt light-headed and I had to stop every so often and breathe deeply, tell myself I was all right.

When we got home, I fixed lunch; then Ollie took a nap.

“No school today, sweetie,” I said. “And no school tomorrow.”

She fell asleep almost immediately, holding her new book,
Max, the Bad-Talking Parrot.

I took my legal pads into my study, turned on the computer, sat staring for a while, then lay down on the floor and fell into a deep sound sleep.

W
HEN EVERYTHING IS
chaos, Ollie, I like to think about Michael Faraday. Patron Saint of the Oddly Made, the Lispers, the Spinners, the Galaxy Leapers.

He was Einstein’s hero
and
Maxwell’s; Einstein kept a picture of Faraday on his wall. Why? Because, as Maxwell, who translated his ideas into math, said, “Faraday, in his mind’s eye, saw lines of force traversing all space.” He was a visionary. He discovered electromagnetic rotations, he discovered induction and the magneto-optical effect and diamagnetism. His ideas were the foundations for electromagnetic theory, even Einstein’s notions of field theory. He anticipated Einstein’s view of gravitation. But he had no math, no scientific language. He had no formal education.

He was a blacksmith’s son, born in 1791, of parents so poor that he ended up a child of the streets in pre-Dickens London. Close to homeless. But he made his own way. His family was proud
and
religious; they belonged to the Scottish Sandemanian sect, an austere, fundamentalist, plain-style faith that preached self-improvement. After an early, skimpy education in a country school, Faraday became a bookbinder’s apprentice in London and educated himself by reading the texts he bound. He taught himself to write. But people laughed at him: He had a severe speech impediment, he couldn’t say the letter “r” at all. And when he learned to write, he couldn’t get his mind around punctuation and spelling. He began to attend public lectures on science and through these lectures grew to idolize Sir Humphry Davy, a Royal Institution scientist. He carefully copied out Davy’s lectures, bound them at work, and presented them to Davy as a gift. He began to dog Davy’s steps, begging for a job in his lab. We have Davy’s comment, when a Royal Society associate suggested hiring Faraday “to wash bottles,” just to get rid of him: Davy insisted that the boy could be used for “something better than that.” Something about Faraday haunted him
—
he was sad, comic, yet
arresting:
a skinny, fire-eyed youth scrambling after him in the street, chattering in his r-less language, gesturing.