The yoga exercises had worked, along with alternating courses of doxycycline and erythromycin. He had to acknowledge that the very real advanced survival strategies of Borrelia burgdorferi were the result of evolution, not of malevolent design, and once he’d done so, the indifference of the universe no longer seemed to weigh quite so heavily on his mind. It might still be possible, he thought, finishing his stretches and easing into the corpse pose, flat on his back, arms outstretched, palms up, to argue from premises in the indicative to conclusions in the imperative. But how? Not without a “leap.” But what kind of leap? From what to what? He waited for his mind to clear, or empty. Surely the answer lay not in logic but in experience, not at the end of the road but at the beginning. Well, not at the beginning, but somewhere between the great apes and the beginnings of cooperative hunting.
But even if his fellow anthropologists—most of them—were right about the Great Leap Forward that took place about fifty thousand years ago—the development of cognitive abilities that distinguish Homo sapiens sapiens from archaic forms of human beings—the problem of consciousness remained exactly where it was. And Jackson did not believe that the neuroscientists would unlock this particular mystery. Imagine a model of the brain that’s big enough to walk around in. Like a factory. You’ll see gears and wheels and levers, but you won’t see a thought. You’ll see cells and synapses, but even if you get to the level of electrons and protons, you still won’t see a thought. You won’t see an idea, you won’t see a perception.
He turned his head from side to side to center his spine, and then stretched himself out as though someone were pulling his head away from his feet and his shoulders away from his neck. He breathed deeply and slowly from his abdomen and waited for his mind to clear. The dog, who was always excited—or worried—by the corpse pose, licked his face and neck. He didn’t move, because moving only encouraged her. Besides, he liked being touched.
After a few minutes the dog stopped licking him and lay down beside him. He could feel the warm pressure of her back, comforting against his side.
He held the pose for several minutes, but his mind didn’t clear. Instead of improving his mental concentration, the pose seemed to stir up the old worries that he thought he’d put aside. He thought about his intention to live a new life, to go back to Africa, or get married; to stop seeing Claire, who’d taken him by surprise the night they picked up Sunny at the prison. He hadn’t heard her car in the drive, hadn’t seen her headlights flashing through the glass in the door. “You know I still love you,” she said, which is what she always said. “I’m just a miserable sinner,” she said. And that too was something she always said. “But God will forgive me.”
And at the same time Claire was still enthusiastic about Pam. Jackson had taken Pam to dinner once, at Stefano’s. She tried to get him to invest in ShoppingKart.com. And he tried to remember one of the poems he used to memorize when he worked out on the stationary bicycle in the fitness center with a copy of One Hundred Poems for All Seasons propped up in front of him: “After Apple Picking,” for example. “To Autumn.” “The Long-Legged Fly,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb.” But he could remember only bits and pieces, a line or two here and there. And have I not Saint Praxed’s ear to pray horses for you, and brown Greek manuscripts, and mistresses with great, smooth, marbly limbs? But Pam had dropped out of the picture. It was Sunny who filled the frame. How funny she was when he had told her to sit. I’m not a dog. Her nerve anyway, coming into the house that day. He bet she’d had a good look around before he’d caught her with Untrodden Fields. She wasn’t just delivering a bottle of wine. What had she been looking for? What would he look for? He thought: Nothing she could find in the house would embarrass me. No pornography, unless you count Untrodden Fields. No vibrators or toys. Some stuff for Lyme disease, but no Preparation H, no Viagra. He congratulated himself, but then wondered: Is this good or bad?
He was glad to have someone living in Warren’s old place, and he was glad that someone was Sunny. She’d been there ten days now, and every morning he could feel her eyes on him when he threw the Frisbee to Maya. He listened for the sound of her truck in the drive in the late afternoon. His heart leaped up whenever she buzzed him on the intercom to ask a question about cooking, or about the computer, or about “lie, lay, lain,” or about the orientation schedule. At night he could look out his bedroom window and see her hunched over her computer in her own window.
He bent his knees and pushed himself up to one side and then into a sitting position, the classic Sukhasna, crossing his legs, his feet below his knees, his hands clasped around his knees, his head and body straight. But his mind continued to whirl. He was happy to start teaching again, to be back in the saddle, to feel that beginning-of-term euphoria; but his department chair had pressured him into creating a virtual classroom for his Human Origins course. Jackson wasn’t a Luddite, and in fact he thought the virtual classroom was a good idea that would simplify his life in the long run. But not in the short run. Every time someone from the computer center told him, “All you have to do is,” his mind closed down. “All you have to do is drag it onto the desktop and double-click”; “All you have to do is open your applications folder and …” In his experience it never worked.
He couldn’t clear his mind. He’d spent two days with a student helper working on the virtual classroom, downloading slides of the whole fossil record, from Sahelanthropus tchadensis, a fossil ape that lived seven million years ago, to Turkana Boy (Homo erectus, about one and a half million years ago), to the first Homo sapiens: Homo sapiens sapiens. Students would be able to drag images from one place to another to create their own hominid phylogeny. Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster, Homo georgicus, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens (Cro-Magnon), Homo sapiens sapiens. The idea was to make everything accessible on the computer. Everything would be linked to everything else. He moved the “slides” around in his mind. There was plenty of disagreement among the experts; how could students be expected to … But wasn’t that the point? They didn’t have to get it right. They had to experience the thought process …
He did his neck exercises, shoulder lifts, eye training, and then began the Salute to the Sun, a flowing series of twelve poses to warm the body and tone the abdominal muscles.
He continued to slide the images around in his mind. Back and forth. Up and down. In and out.
When he’d entered TF as a graduate student, the department of anthropology had been a band of hunter-gatherers—no headman, no chief, no oppressive hierarchy. But now it had evolved into a chiefdom, with a headman—Professor Baker Kimbrough—and a clearly established hierarchy.
He got down on the floor for the Bridge pose—to promote relaxation and reduce stress by strengthening the spine and lower body. He thought about the problem of Claude’s field notes, which he could see on the shelves next to his desk if he turned his head slightly to the left. And he thought about his new life: What would it be like? What did he want to happen?
The shutters on the window above his library table were not tightly closed and a thin shaft of sunlight streamed through the crack between the shutters and struck the surface of the desk and then the back of the leather sofa. Jackson spent several minutes studying the motes swirling in the beam of light. They are everywhere, he thought. We inhale them and then exhale them, but we can’t see them until they are caught in a beam of light.
He eased into the final corpse pose, flat on his back, arms at his sides, palms up. He lifted his right foot slightly, tensed his leg and lowered it to the floor. Then he did the same thing with his left leg. Then with his arms, making a fist, tensing the arm, letting it drop back to the floor. He tightened his buttocks, lifted his hips, held them up for a moment, then relaxed. Then his chest, lifting it without lifting his hips or head, then relaxing. The same with his shoulders, hunching them and then letting them drop. He pulled in his arms and willed them to relax. Finally he tucked his chin in
and rolled his head back and forth from side to side. He visualized his body, relaxing every part from toes to calves, up to the stomach, the lungs, the jaw, the scalp, his brain. He inhaled, feeling the oxygen flow down to his feet; he exhaled, feeling the tension dissolving. His mind was like the unruffled surface of a deep-water lake. In the center of the lake, in the depths, was his true nature.
His mind was calmer now, but he could still see the beam of light, like the shaft of a spear. He got up from the floor and moved to the library table. He put his finger in the beam of light, moved it back and forth, the way a child will move its finger back and forth through a candle flame.
Then he looked along the beam, through the crack in the shutters. He saw the sun setting behind the wooded hill on the other side of the stream, saw the big oak tree that had once been bent by the Sauk Indians to serve as a trail marker; he saw the stream, meandering toward the Mississippi, and the bridge that had been twisted off the banks by a flash flood the previous spring—two telephone poles that Warren had dragged across the stream with planks nailed across them.
And he was reminded how much time anthropologists spend looking at beams of light instead of along them, worrying about distinctions between witchcraft and sorcery and about different interpretations of initiation rites and burial customs, recording in minute detail the religious practices of different tribes all over the world without advancing beyond the views of Durkheim and Weber, or deconstructing binary oppositions and unpacking dialog practices without shedding light on a single lived experience.
If they hooked the tractor up to the bridge with two chains, attached them to the ends of the two telephone poles, they could pull it back up to the bank.
6
Thursday is Wednesday and Friday is Thursday
The orientation program was disorienting: what clubs to join, what intramural sports to play, where to park, how to locate your mailbox and get the combination, how to catch the shuttle from North Campus to South Campus, where and when to get your campus photo taken, how to set up your e-mail account. I could handle Black Alice, and I could handle rattlesnakes, but I was still intimidated by these eighteen-year-old girls with their stuffed animals and their green book bags and their PROPERTY OF T-shirts and their DON’T YOU WISH shorts, who wanted to know, at the mandatory sexual counseling session, if you could get AIDS by having oral sex or if you could get pregnant if you did it standing up, or what would happen if you got caught snorting coke in the privacy of your own dorm room, since Edward Coles, the second governor of Illinois, who put a stop to slavery in Illinois, had taken drugs. As Warren said, it was all interesting.
But what I really couldn’t understand was why Thursday was going to be Wednesday, and Friday was going to be Thursday.
I asked my faculty advisor, who turned out to be Claire. Claire seemed to know why, but it wasn’t something she could put into words.
Claire had already assumed the role of my financial advisor and had talked me into investing twenty thousand dollars of Warren’s money in something called ShoppingKart.com, and now I wasn’t particularly happy that Claire was going to be my academic advisor as well, especially when Claire told me that she’d pulled some strings, had told the office of the Dean of Students that I’d requested her. She put me in her course in Beginning Fiction Writing, and I wasn’t too happy about that, either. And she warned me against Jackson. She thought I should live in the dorm, or there was plenty of room at the rectory. I’d be lonely out in the woods. Jackson was in bad shape. He had Lyme disease. He had enough trouble looking after himself. She reminded me about what I’d said in the bar about what I’d learned in prison: not needing a man to look after me.
“But I don’t mind looking after a man,” I said, which I could see annoyed Claire. “Besides,” I said, “Jackson already warned me about you. When he found out your were my advisor.”
“About me? What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. It was just sort of a general warning. I still don’t understand why Thursday is Wednesday and Friday is Thursday.”
“It’s got something to do with the science labs. They want to get in an extra lab.”
“But I don’t see …”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “That’s just the way things are at universities.”
What I learned on my first day of classes was this: I learned that in the beginning—at the time of the Big Bang—everything in the universe was smaller than a grain of rice, smaller than the period at the end of a sentence, smaller than the point of a pin. I learned that the Sun would eventually burn itself out and that even it if didn’t, Andromeda and the Milky Way were on a collision course. I learned that the universe was winding down, that the temperature would finally get down to three degrees Kelvin. That’s cold. At three degrees Kelvin the molecules stop moving around. Somehow, in between, life happened, and I learned that Evolution, like the Big Bang, is not a theory in the sense of being a hypothesis; it’s a theory in the sense of being a law, of being the only way to explain the data, the only way to explain the diversity of life. That it explained everything that used to be explained by God. You didn’t need God to explain why we have eyes, which evolved through natural selection acting on small variations. This was Darwin’s big idea, Evolution, and it was an even better idea than Copernicus’s heliocentric universe, even better than Newton’s Laws of Motion or Einstein’s E = mc2. It was the best idea anyone had ever had.
And this was in the first ten minutes of my Bio 120 lecture.
I also learned that Homo sapiens is “a tiny new twig on the tree of life.” That if you thought of the earth as being formed on January 1, then towards the end of the month you’d see some rocks. Then in August you’d get your eukaryotes. I knew about eukaryotes and prokaryotes because I’d taken biology on the Hill. Then in October you’d find some algae; in November, shellfish and vertebrates. Lights out for the dinosaurs on December 26. Then homo sapiens shows up just before midnight on December 31. Ta-da.
And I learned that broccoli and Brussels sprouts evolved from wild mustard, which seemed like a comedown after the collision of the galaxies and the heat death of the universe and Evolution with a capital E as the cause of everything. Or the explanation of everything. I wasn’t sure of the difference.
Professor Cramer, who was six feet six and rather severe looking in his white coat—looking as if he’d just emerged from the lab, and he probably had—had a reputation for being a demanding teacher. He scared us about the heat death of the universe and at the end of the lecture he scared us even more about cutting a class or a lab or missing a field trip or not being prepared for class.
And then he explained why Thursday was Wednesday and Friday was Thursday. The whole thing had been his idea. If everyone pretended that today, Thursday, was Wednesday, then we could pretend that tomorrow was Thursday. Why would we want to do that? So that there would be room in the schedule for a lab in the first week of the semester. If Thursday were really Thursday, then the next day would be Friday, but since all the labs were held on Thursdays … This way we’d get in an extra lab.
I thought I understood.
Later that morning I learned how to introduce myself in French 101: “Je m’appelle Lise. Je viens de Naqada …” “Vous êtes Jean-Paul.” “Et vous?” “Vous êtes …” “Enchantée.”
“Lise” was my French name. I picked it because I remembered Leslie Caron was Lise in the only French film I’d ever seen, An American in Paris.
We were all stiff and self-conscious, but then Madame Arnot, who was très chic, taught us some French gestures, which she demonstrated enthusiastically—the moue, the nose tap, the eye pull. By the end of the class we were milling around pouting, tapping our noses, pulling down the skin under our eyes, zipping our lips, kissing each other on both cheeks (without actually touching our lips to the other person’s cheek), shaking hands properly (without pumping our arms up and down), executing the bof or Gallic shrug, and saying Let’s get t
he hell out of here by holding out one hand and tapping our watches with the fingers of the other hand.
In the afternoon, in my Great Books class, I learned that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves—Gilgamesh, Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, The Aeneid—are the deepest form of knowledge. Deeper than scientific knowledge. I had to think about that one, which I did with a cup of coffee on Seymour Terrace, at a white table with an umbrella over it, like the picture in my French book.
I’d dropped out of high school to marry Earl when I was sixteen, but I’d wised up since then, and I’d been a good student on the Hill. There were a lot of good students. There was a waiting list for almost every class, and you had to toe the line or you were out on your ass. Biology, American Literature, British Literature, American Government, Health, Geometry, Algebra. It took me four years to get through fourteen core courses and six electives. Most of the electives didn’t amount to much: Study Skills, Food and Nutrition, and Health Occupations, but I liked Computer Skills and Banking and Finance. If you wanted to know how to declare bankruptcy, you could come to me for help, and I’d download all the forms you’d need from the Internet: your voluntary petition, your individual debtor’s statement of compliance, your application to pay a filing fee in installments, your list of principal creditors. Everything you’d need, depending on your circumstances. You wouldn’t need a lawyer.
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