The Explanation for Everything (6 page)

What would the royalties look like on that patent? A pill you could take before you left the bar, diminishing the effect of whatever you'd just imbibed, refocusing your mind so you could take the wheel. A pill that would let you get crazy on the dance floor, then go to work the next day clear-eyed and levelheaded. Andy and his colleagues called it the Margaritapill. Other labs were making some headway on this—dihydromyricetin looked promising—and the drug company gave his lab millions to try to catch up. Not that Andy himself was fueled by imagined riches. His fuel came from somewhere murkier—to understand, to know what to blame.

He was hired a year later at Exton Reed, a college he'd never heard of, on the strength of his coauthored papers, and his research was the object of some fascination during his interview. “So tell me, Andy,” said Linda Schoenmeyer, an ornithologist who'd never had anything to do with rodents. “How exactly do you give an EEG to a rat? Do you have, like, tiny little sensors? Do you have to shave their little heads?”

How to explain? “We, you know, we insert receptors into their brains. While they're under general anesthesia,” he said. “And then we hook the receptors up to an EEG reader. The rats don't even notice.” This wasn't exactly true—the rats awoke from anesthesia groggy and pissed off, with little white plugs sticking out of their bloodied heads, but there was no reason to get into the nitty-gritty on his interview.

“You stick receptors?” Linda asked. “Into their brains?”

“That is how they do it,” Marty Reuben, the botanist, said. “I've read about this sort of thing.”

The biologists seemed much too dismayed for what was, in the annals of animal research, actually fairly benign intervention, but they didn't judge him unkindly for it. They just seemed chastened by their ignorance, and apologized, when he accepted the job, that they really didn't have the resources to conduct brain surgery on rats but perhaps they could support him in simpler research, if he was so inclined?

A simple house, a simple life, a simple job, simple research: he was so inclined.

“Laurence and I would love to have you and your wife to dinner once you get settled,” said Nina Graff.

He hadn't wanted to explain it to them in the interview. “Louisa was killed in a car accident last winter,” Andy said. “But thank you for your invitation.”

FIVE

Members of the Florida Prison Parole Board:

It is with great sadness that I write, once again, my victim impact statement regarding parole for Oliver McGee, prisoner N24633. Mr. McGee killed my wife, Louisa Waite, in a motor vehicle accident in August 2004. As you undoubtedly know, Mr. McGee's blood alcohol content the night he drove his car into my wife's was almost four times the legal limit; that he was able to drive the car at all seems like the darkest sort of miracle, since someone that drunk shouldn't be able to fit a key into the ignition, much less put a car into drive. Yet there he was, nineteen years old, swerving back and forth on Eighty-seventh Street before slamming, for no reason except the perverse misfiring of the drunken brain, into the Mazda my wife was driving to McDonald's to bring back dinner for me. Our daughters were then one and almost four.

In previous letters I have prevailed upon you to keep Mr. McGee locked up as a preventive measure, a way to keep a killer behind bars for the protection of society, the logic being (logic that's been borne out by my own professional studies into alcoholism) that once a drunk always a drunk—or, to be more politic about it, the logic being that alcoholism is a genetic state, not a curable disease, and therefore Oliver McGee will almost certainly drink again, and if he does, there is a chance he will kill again. He has shown neither the ability to stay sober nor the conviction that he should, if he must drink, at least turn in his keys.

I believe that he might kill again. But this is not why I want him to stay in jail, as he has already inflicted his damage upon me and I am not generous enough anymore to give a shit about who else he hurts. This time I am writing my letter with a different set of justifications, a different set of reasons I want Oliver McGee to rot in jail. Expressly:

Have I ever mentioned to you, esteemed members of the parole board, that my wife, Lou, was a NICU nurse for eleven years? Do you know, parole board members, what a NICU nurse does? Let me explain the work for you here: A NICU nurse warms and soothes and feeds with a dropperlike feeder the palm-sized babies who were born at twenty-five, twenty-six weeks' gestation. These are babies who by all means should not be alive, but by some miracle (that word again, and again so dark) they are alive, and they will grow and thrive, except for the ones who won't. The ones who won't, with the translucent skin threaded by desperate veins, and the tangerine-sized heads in knit caps, and the eyes covered by strips of gauze because the undeveloped corneas will be damaged by the light—these babies with the brain damage and the breathing trouble and the spastic limbs and the chickenlike cries, some of these babies will teeter on the brink of death, and the parents will look at the NICU nurse with their hearts in one place and their heads somewhere else and they will say to that nurse, “What do we do?”

The nurse will hold their hands. She will tend to their babies. She will, if they want her to, pray for them.

And the parents and the doctors will go back and forth and back and forth—proceed with one intervention after another, keep this squawking chicken baby alive another hour, another day, the hope of a normal future coming in and out of focus like a lens splashed with rain. Or maybe merciful providence will perform the intervention and the baby, who has only known in its short, pathetic life the heat of the incubator and the dropperful of liquid—if providence is merciful, this baby will be allowed to pass into the hereafter.

Despite the mercy of the thing, however, when one of these infants would give up its sad struggle, my wife, Lou, would come home from work and cry and cry. She would sit there on the couch—I can see her sitting there—with her beautiful hair streaming down her back and her shoulders shaking and I would rub her shoulders and she would cry it out, letting out whatever she could not reveal in front of the grieving parents. In front of the parents, she was warm and reassuring and invincible. At home, she was a puddle.

It has occurred to me so many times, members of the parole board, that these NICU babies have the great privilege of time and love and interventions and, when the time comes, if the time does come, they are allowed appropriate, stricken good-byes. They have whole bodies to bury in family plots. And who are these babies? Who are they? They have been on the planet for twenty-six weeks. They are the barest minimum of what it means to be a person. They are skin and skittish hearts and squawks and blind eyes and clogged lungs and nothing. And yet these babies are so often saved. Yes! Saved by my wife! And the ones who die at least get a proper good-bye, and when she was alive my wife came home and mourned each one of them.

Of course you do not need me to elaborate on the obvious, members of the parole board, that these NICU babies, these barely viable blobs of nothing—most of them live. Parts of my wife's skull, on the other hand, were found on the curb in front of a fast-food restaurant.

Andy stopped typing. His fingers ached. He felt sweaty. This was the part where he always felt sweaty. And someone was breathing behind him.

“Are you working on your grant stuff, Dad?”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I was thirsty.” Belle was standing on her tiptoes, searching through the cabinets for the cup she liked, the oversized purple one. She was wearing one of his old T-shirts to sleep in, which hung down to her knees and rode low across her shoulders. He didn't know whether she wore the shirt because she liked it or because he'd neglected to buy her pajamas. He often didn't know what he was supposed to buy them until they'd gone without for too long.

“You shouldn't drink too much before you go to bed,” he said mildly, watching Belle fill her cup with milk.

“I know,” she said. She sat down at the table across from him, pushed her cup across the table. “You want some?”

“Sure.”

Belle too was starting to change—she still had that tubby belly but she was starting to show the collarbones of an older girl, thin and sharp. “Who's Mr. McGee?” she said.

“What?”

“On your computer,” she said. Jesus Christ, her eyes were good. And she could read! Of course she could read, she was eight years old. She read all the time. She had stacks of books in her room.

“Is he a friend of yours?”

“Yes,” Andy said.

“Why do you call him Mr. McGee if he's your friend?”

“I don't know his first name,” Andy lied.

“You don't know it?”

Andy had never told his daughters the real reason he went, alone, to Okeechobee every few years. He told them it was a conference. He didn't want them to think of their mother's death, or her killer, or that, perhaps most frightening, that their father felt vengeful often to the point of derangement. “Why don't you know your friend's name?”

He stood, opened the refrigerator, poured her some more milk.

“Is it Oliver?” Belle asked.

“Yes,” Andy sighed.

“He's the one who killed my mom?”

“Yes,” Andy said. The chill of the refrigerator air on his arms.

“What are you saying about him?”

“I'm writing to the jail,” he said. He closed the refrigerator door. “They want to let him out.”

“Will they?”

“I hope not,” he said.

“Why not?

“I don't know, Belle.” What should he say? “I hope they don't, but I actually don't know. But even if they do, you know—even if they do, he can never hurt us again.”

“Thank you,” said Belle, taking the milk from his hands. Andy waited for the warmth to return to his hands. Oliver McGee was sitting in a jail cell just outside Okeechobee. His wife was cremated and sprinkled into the Atlantic. But he and Belle and Rachel were here, in this kitchen, in this house; they were together, they were alive.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I shouldn't have lied to you.”

“What did you lie about?” Belle said.

“Not knowing Oliver's name,” he said. “I know it.”

Belle didn't seem to care one way or another. She poured the rest of the milk in the sink, deposited the cup. “I didn't think he would hurt us. Grandma told us he was just a kid who made a stupid mistake.”

“Grandma said that?”

“She said he would suffer for it the rest of his life, just as much as we would.”

“Wow,” Andy said. “I never knew you talked to Grandma about it.”

“I used to, when I was little,” Belle said. She stood in the half-darkened doorway, her lovely face invisible in a shadow. “They should probably let him out of prison by now, don't you think? He's been there a really long time. Especially if he was just a kid when the accident happened.”

“I don't think so,” Andy said. “I don't think they should ever let him out.”

“Yeah,” Belle said. “I guess.” She blew him a kiss, their good-bye sign, then disappeared down the hall.

He had to remind himself that to Belle, Lou was just an idea, not a memory.

Andy reread his statement. It filled him with shame. He pressed delete, stretched his fingers, started again.

O
N
THE SUNNY
October day Andy's mice once again refused to drink as much as he predicted they would, Lionel Shell stood outside his office for three hours with a sign around his neck that read,
G
ENESIS
1
:
1
. Andy was downstairs, staining slides, listening to the radio, could have stayed there for hours, but eventually Rosemary panicked and called him in his lab. “This kid's not going anywhere. He's just staring like a lunatic. What if he starts shooting the place up?”

Andy sighed, turned off the radio,
This American Life.
His thumbs were stained from methylene blue. He'd always imagined he'd have a grad student or several to help him with this kind of work. He scrubbed his fingers with Borax in his tiny industrial sink, headed upstairs slowly, thinking about the proteins in the drunk mice's brains.

When he got to the fourth-floor biology suite, he found Rosemary standing by the door, twisting her watchband. Down thirty paces stood poor Lionel, ramrod-stiff. “It doesn't look like he's packing, Rosemary.”

“You never know these days.”

This was true. At each new school shooting, high school or postsecondary, the entire Exton Reed faculty began assessing their classrooms for the militant or suicidal, plotting escape plans out of hard-to-open windows or heavy doors. “I'll talk to him,” Andy said. It was a Friday afternoon, typically empty, and he wondered if Lionel had organized his lonely protest deliberately for a day when he wouldn't have to confront anybody.

“Hey, Lionel,” he said. “Everything okay?”

Lionel blinked. He didn't turn around. Andy noticed the white earbuds.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Lionel! Turn off that iPod and talk to me.”

Was it possible the kid had tears in his eyes? Lionel shrugged, turned off the music, and buckled to the floor, assuming a cross-legged slump in front of Andy's door. His sign rested against his folded legs.

“Sorry, Professor.”

“It's okay.” He wasn't sure if he should bend down or make Lionel stand up. “What are you doing here?”

“I'm protesting.”

“Clearly,” Andy said. He sighed, bent heavily to the floor himself so he could be closer to Lionel's face. “Listen, Lionel, it's fine if you want to protest, but I'm not sure what sitting outside my office on a Friday is going to do for you.”

Lionel waved him away. “It's important to me that people know about what you're teaching. Or I guess it's just important to broadcast that somebody cares. It's easy to think nobody cares about anything at this place, but I do. I hate what you teach. I'm sorry,” the tears filled his eyes but did not spill over, “I just hate it.”

“You don't have to apologize,” Andy said, although, petulantly, he did feel a little stung. Disagreement was one thing, but hate? “So why are you taking the class again if you hate it so much?”

“Because somebody has to keep tabs on what you do! Somebody has to keep an eye on you.”

“Ah,” Andy said, letting his butt sink down to the floor to ease the twinge in his back. Poor Lionel. The kid wore dirty sneakers, loose jeans. He probably weighed 130 pounds. Andy knew he was on a full scholarship, and there was that underfed, vulnerable look about him, that full-scholarship look. “But why don't you write letters to the editor, that sort of thing? It might get more done. I mean, I appreciate what you're trying to do here but what's the point of a protest if there's nobody here to see?”

Lionel shrugged. He fiddled with his iPod. He'd been listening to someone British read the Bible.

“My sister's an existentialist. Do you know what that is?”

“An existentialist?” Andy said. “In Delaware?”

“She's actually my twin. She goes to community college. Her name is Sara.”

“That's my daughter's middle name,” Andy said, to make a connection. Lionel didn't bite.

“She thinks that there's no point to anything. That we could live or die, and it doesn't really matter, and anyone who thinks it matters is a fool. She reads a lot of French writers.”

“It's a pretty French idea,” Andy said.

“And she's very dismissive of the way I think, that there's a God who's watching over us. And I think she's as wrong as anyone can be, but then I look around at the stuff we do to each other, the stuff we teach, and then I think maybe she's not so wrong, you know?”

“Which scares you.”

Lionel shook his head no, and Andy remembered he should never accuse a young man of feeling scared. “It just makes me sad.”

“I'm not an existentialist, Lionel,” Andy said. “I don't know if that makes you feel better or not. I believe that life matters.” As he said that, he felt it to be true, although he also knew this wasn't always what he felt.