Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  “I’m not crazy,” breathed Anna, “It’s there, isn’t it. This is amazing.”

  “Not yet,” said Clare. “Transferred Y is not amazing yet. Benign miscopying between the X and the Y happens. We can’t be sure that further tests won’t explain away what we seem to see. Have you thought about how or why this could be happening?”

  Anna was reluctant to draw any conclusions. She’d prefer to stick to pure description, leave speculation to others. She remembered that interview with Nirmal, when the praise she desperately needed had come with a very clear price tag. Find out what the boss wants you to think…

  “Um, well, I haven’t really thought?”

  “I’d like to propose that you try looking for something. If you’re open to a supervisor’s suggestion.”

  “Of course.”

  “I see a pattern that suggests a lateral transfer. We have two locales for this mutation: one in the south of France, in an area of relatively high African immigration, and one in Francophone West Africa. Have you considered that a virus might be involved?”

  Ah, right.

  Clare Gresley was the virus queen. Viruses featured heavily in the way-out theory that she called Continuous Creation. According to Clare, viruses and viroids connected the web of life on earth: maintaining equilibrium, mediating change, sustaining the genetic homogeneity that orthodox science attributed solely to common ancestry in the far past. In her picture, virus-borne disease was the pathology of a far more significant function, and the use of viruses to mediate artificial genetic change was a “discovery” that mimicked a vast, unsuspected, natural communication and commerce between all living organisms.

  Unfortunately, the lateral transfer of chunks of functional DNA from species to species, and between the individuals of a population, seemed to most people well explained by current science, and it couldn’t possibly be the missing link of evolution, because evolution didn’t have a missing link. Continuous Creation was dead in the water: Clare Gresley had backed a loser. That was why she was here, not making her fortune, just turning out widgets in obscurity. Anna had grasped the whole situation by now, though Clare had never spoken openly about her plight.

  “Infectivity, Anna. That could be your answer.”

  Infectivity was a Continuous Creation keyword: meaning chemical information (in the form of a virus) that invades an organism bringing communication, not as a threat. Anna heard the suppressed excitement in Clare’s voice, and knew that she’d met her fate. She could forget the idea that Clare, who had brought up her daughter Jonquil alone while struggling to have a science career, had taken pity on her. She could abandon the fantasy that Nirmal had fixed things for her, as a secret amends. This was why she was here: Clare had seen Transferred Y as a way to promote Continuous Creation—the boss always has an agenda. Well, she’d learned her lesson—

  In the moment it took her to find the right words (lying would never come easily to Anna) it dawned on her that Clare could be right. A virally mediated mutation that took hold in a natural population without causing any effect…that would explain Transferred Y. No wonder Nirmal had been so enraged. He must have seen the connection with Clare Gresley’s doomed theory at once. But Nirmal could be wrong. Clare could be right. Anna could have found the evidence that Clare had been waiting for—

  Her heart thumped. She managed to keep her voice level.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s worth trying.”

  Clare had been collecting viruses and viroids for years. Customers sent the creatures to her from all over the world. There was always a new strain, a new protein coat to decipher, a novel species. Managing the database of her collection occupied Clare’s every spare moment. She turned over this remarkable resource to Anna, and Anna started looking for viral traces in her Transferred Y samples.

  The cunning wheeze of using “standard” technicians to cut down on staff meant that researchers had to do anything remotely specialized themselves: there was no project team to share the load. But luck was with them. It was only a couple of months before they could say, with reasonable confidence, that they had found something. They began to discover fragments of something resembling a virus, possibly some relation of the ubiquitous herpes simplex, the cold sore virus. (Clare didn’t agree with the conventional naming or ordering of virus species, but she admitted them to be useful shorthand, pro tem.) Anna’s next task was to culture this unknown strain to see if she could induce the TY phenomenon in the sex-pair chromosomes of uninfected living cells—finicky, delicate clumps of living human cells (there were no mass produced mice to be sacrificed in Clare Gresley’s lab)—a kind of work she had never done before. It was tough going, tough but good.

  Anna resisted Clare’s pessimism about the state of the world. Yes, okay, a culture of brutal self interest was destroying life on earth. But would Clare feel so sad about the great dying, without the added sting of personal failure…? People are still happy, life can still be good. Thinking like that, she would remember with a shock that she was unhappy herself, that she had lost her baby and would never cease to mourn; and then the permanent sorrow, etched in the back of Clare’s eyes, frightened her. Is that going to be me? Yet sometimes—as the road across the Pennines flew beneath her wheels in the early morning, or at evening as she stepped into the car, going home to Spence and their little house, the young moon in a blue sky and one star (actually Venus) below it—she would be transfixed by joy. Tears would start in her eyes, she could only think, I love you so much!

  You, meaning the world, meaning everything…

  Transferred Y was her refuge and her passion. But her soul had grown richer, stranger, stronger. She was in love with the world: the world that included, deeply woven and never to be lost, the death of her child.

  Spence got round to telling her that he’d had Lily Rose baptized. So they were out about it with each other. Good luck to those well-padded enough to need no shelter, but most people cling to something, once they’ve noticed how much grief there is in the world. Anna and Spence need not be ashamed to join the majority. Catholicism, tarnished mess, had the advantage that it didn’t tell you there was something wrong with you if you weren’t smug and happy. It allowed people to suffer. “I feel I know you better,” he said, after this conversation. And the sex was still good. Well, to tell the truth, the sex was mechanical these days, but declared wonderful, for old time’s sake.

  They didn’t do much socializing—which Spence had started to miss—because of Anna’s insanely long hours. When he went to London he would hang out with Rosey and Wol, and Marnie and the current toyboy. There was Simon Gough in Sheffield, and sometimes, rarely, he and Anna would go out with Roz and Graham, or some of the old Parentis gang. It wasn’t a bad life.

  He was reading a fat hardback biography of Keats that someone had abandoned in his room in Woods, back in first year. Because he only read it on the train he wasn’t getting through it very fast. It was a winter’s day, the beginning of another year. There were grim developments in the world and a brutal gap in the New York skyline that made him wince every time he saw it; but that was a reflex. He’d got into the habit of caring very little what went on beyond the narrow, weary confines of his life. History is not my business. The line from London to Leeds was routed through the ugliest face of the English landscape. One dirty-looking dormitory town followed another, separated by swathes of dingy agribusiness. He was tired. He wanted a drink but couldn’t be arsed to go down to the buffet car and the aisle trolley didn’t appear to be rolling. He was not getting off on Keats’s biographer, but he needed something to control the mental fidgets that always plagued him on this return journey. He kept his eyes trucking from word to word. A pet lamb in a sentimental farce. You couldn’t help but like someone who’d describe the failure of his first hopes that way. You could feel the sharp wit and raw distress, bleeding through the years.

  He read.

  “Ethereal thing(s) may at least be thus real, divided into three heads�
�Things real—things semi-real—and no things. Things real—such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakespeare—Things semi-real such as Love, the Clouds & which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist—and Nothings which are made Great and dignified by the ardent pursuit. Which by the by stamps the burgundy mark on the bottles of our Minds, insomuch as they are able to ‘consecrate what’er they look upon…’”

  A wash of dread fell through his mind, like the shadow of a manta ray dropping through blue water. He didn’t know what was happening. Then he realized that he was back in the sluice room or whatever that place was in the hospital. He was holding Lily Rose in his arms, and a voice he didn’t recognize but he had always known was saying to him you’re as well-qualified as I am. But she was dead, she was a piece of meat. The tiny child who lived in his mind had never been anything but meat. Wriggling meat inside Anna, then dead meat. There was no Lily Rose. She had never existed, except in that Spence himself had called her up, created her out of nothingness. He had to let her go, dismiss the phantom, or he was a pet lamb in a sentimental farce.

  He put the biography away, zippered his case, and got off the train. He must have done these things because he found himself standing clutching his bag among strangers, the train to Leeds sailing away. He walked up and down, he stopped and stared at the ballast between the tracks, in a state of horrible, bewildering agitation. His little girl, this tiny girl bundled up in woollies, trotting by his side… He had never told Anna, had never brought himself to confess how concrete the little ghost had become, growing instead of fading. Now she had to go, he had to tear her up and throw her away. He had been using Lily Rose’s imaginary existence as a crutch, secretly knowing that when he was stronger he would dump her into non-existence again. That had been his position: same as his attitude to religion. Believe it if you need it, and if that means you use the crutch lifelong, well why not? But why this panic, this shaking horror? It came to him that he was being told (that letter of Keats had slammed the idea into his head) that the reality of such things depends on the observer. This doesn’t make Lily Rose less real, it’s just the truth, the very truth, you make her be, she lives in you. He felt dizzy and sick. He felt as if he had been led through the mysteries of Eleusis. Lily Rose lives, if I can handle knowing that I am her creator, that Godhead is in me… He walked up and down, shuddering in the terrible rush of this vision: thinking, ah God, poor God, how do you stand this, you poor bastard.

  He was having a flashback, it happens to the bereaved: you think it’s all over and then wham, the thing is immediate again, driving you crazy. Maybe this happens especially after a death like the death of a stillborn child: which is not supposed to count, so that you hurried the original mourning.

  The skies had fallen, but he could pull it together. He felt better already.

  As it happened, Anna was even later at getting home that evening, so that Spence arrived expecting an anxious welcome to find the house dark and empty. The heat wasn’t on, because she hated to spend a penny on “unnecessary” bills. He understood that she needed her independence. She was trying to carve out a little poverty for herself, within the domain of Spence’s executive salary. But it was depressing.

  She came in to find him sitting in the dark on the folded futon couch.

  “Spence?”

  “I can’t go on.”

  His voice sounded oddly thickened—and of course accusing. “I’m sorry. I know it was my turn to cook. I’ll put something together quickly. Are you getting a cold?”

  “We could fucking have fucking takeaway, for once. Without breaking the bank.”

  “Spence, what’s wrong? It isn’t the end of the world. You could have started the cooking.”

  “It’s not that, didn’t you hear me, I said I can’t go on. I hate this life. I hate wearing a suit, I hate this house, I hate living with someone who barely knows I exist.”

  “Okay.” Anna was not surprised. Now that it had happened she knew this scene had been coming for a long time. Her pride rose up. “So leave. Go back to the States. We can get one of those no-fault divorces. I never meant to force you into marriage. Every day of my life I wish to God I’d never made that damned phone call—”

  Neither of them had noticed that the room was still dark.

  “Don’t do that, it’s what you always do, flying to extremes to escape an argument—”

  Then he really began to cry. She knelt on the couch and tried to hug him, but he pushed her away: and it all came out, how desperately he hated working for the company and living in this house, the house to which they would have brought home Lily Rose. Working in the room that should have been the baby’s, and Anna never there, even when she was at home, even when they were fucking, which was rare enough, she was thinking about her work, about anything but Spence.

  Anna wrenched her mind away from her flaky cell cultures. It was true, she had been neglecting him and neglecting sex. Spence didn’t understand that while for him sex made everything all right, for her the lead weight in her heart made sex all wrong. Sex was happiness and she had none, only endurance, pride, and sometimes joy. They should have talked the thing out. Too late now. Time to deal with the underlying reality.

  “I feel it too,” she said. “I bury myself in work, but I know. This isn’t what we planned.”

  She reached out her arms again. They lay huddled breath to breath. “I know what we can do,” said Anna. “I have a cunning plan.” (Thinking: so this is what I do with my new strength, and finding in herself a satisfaction greater than Transferred Y, her shoulders bowing willingly, proud to do the world’s work, any kind of world’s work, now I make my husband happy.) “We leave. Fuck my doctorate; fuck your company. I have marketable skills, I’ll market them. Infertility is big business, it’s international. We can travel the globe.”

  “I won’t let you do that. You live for your career.”

  She would lose Transferred Y, but she would have paid her debt. She would be equal with Spence again. Nothing could bring back Lily Rose, but she would recover the purity of their contract, and that would be plenty to live on.

  “I let you marry me,” she said. “Now you have to let me do this.”

  ii

  Ramone had a moment of epiphany on late night television. It was a program about decadence; she and the other guests were supposed to be collapsed at the end of a debauch, dressed in fancy underwear and rolling around in purple satin sheets. Ramone was trying to explain what Praise Song was about: this glaring flaw running through intellectual life, everyone stuck in the groove of the enlightenment experiment, calling betterment and progress failed concepts and still thinking in terms of betterment and progress. Epimetheus is one who builds on what went before; a praise song is what you do when someone is dead.

  But they had hired her because of Mère Noire, which was so much more accessible. So this man, fake debauchee who was actually a presenter, said but surely the writer of Mère Noire hates women. Ramone gave her standard answer. Any woman that doesn’t hate women is a bleep idiot (it was that sort of show). I want to exterminate women, wipe them from the face of the earth. I don’t want to be liberated, I want to be a monster. He didn’t get it. No one ever got it, and Ramone could have straightened them out by saying nobody is born a woman and that what she hated was the way she COULD NOT ESCAPE from the role of second-class person. No woman could, the only escape was to become SOMETHING NEW that had never existed before. And fuck them all; she’d rather be misunderstood than acceptable… But he was impressed by her anger. She saw the alarm coming up in his eyes. It never ceased to amaze her, that fear. For fuck’s sake, she thought, I weigh fifty kilos, that’s about seven stone twelve, o dweller in the shades of departed empire, and I’m not even armed: what do you think I’m going to do? His fear gave her the illusion she’d made contact. It was only afterwards, back in the smart little hotel where they were putting her up near the studio, that she realized something had struck home. L
ike swaggering away from a fight and then finding that you were bleeding, strangely there seems to be quite a lot of blood: and now the pain begins.

  I hate women.

  I hate myself.

  Okay, fine. She pondered this medieval syllogism in terms of her partnership with Tex. Ramone did not accept the role of victim easily. It was true that she and Tex hit each other, but if Ramone usually ended up getting the worst of it that was purely because she was smaller, there was no gender-role implication. Or if there was it was by Ramone’s own choice. She was her own victim; Tex was merely her blunt instrument, and he knew what was going on. People thought Tex was stupid, but he wasn’t. It was because she’d seen the possibility of an honesty about male/female relationships that she’d never found with any other man that she had taken him away from Daz. Well, that and wanting to come first with one of them. With somebody. She’d known she didn’t have a chance of being Daz’s own true love. Daz was the kind of lesbian who was convinced nothing you did with a girl was really sex.

  With this new insight, it began to seem to her that maybe Tex did not understand. Maybe he had never understood the heuristic message of furious irony in her Mère Noire scripts. In fact it was possible that he was simply a sexually insecure sort of lad, who had settled for not-so-great-looking Ramone in exchange for fabulous Daz, because Ramone was not a challenge to his own mediocre attractions, and because she encouraged him to draw pictures of naked women with enormous tits getting the shit dicked out of them. Since Ramone hated women and was herself a woman, wouldn’t she have chosen this kind of humiliatingly banal relationship? Rather than something deep, secretly very aware and post-gendered, about feeding off each other’s twisted desires…?