Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  I was looking at these two letters when Jay came in. He glanced at me quizzically and I flipped them in his direction. He put down his gym bag, frowning at me, and slumped against the wall to read.

  When he finished the second letter, he frowned harder at me.

  “OK. I don’t g-get it. How can she need special ed at the same time as she’s gifted?”

  “You know, I wish I could answer that one. But I’ve been sitting here for the last half hour, stumped.”

  He threw the letters down on a side table, heading out to the kitchen for a beer.

  “She needs a p-private school, I told you this, Esme. But did you listen? D-does anybody?”

  He was opening the refrigerator door; I raised my voice.

  “You think paying a lot of money provides your kid with people who have insight, are aware of her needs? Or care more? Think again.” I was touchy here—I know schools didn’t matter, teachers mattered, and Gloria Walther had been transferred (for some obscure bureaucratic reason) at the last minute to another district. Ollie’s teacher now was an elderly woman who turned off her hearing aid when the kids got noisy.

  I heard the refrigerator door shut and the sound of a metal cap hitting the wastebasket. Then silence as he drank.

  “Think again,” I repeated.

  The bottle followed the cap into the basket and I heard him opening the refrigerator again.

  “Please don’t,” I added softly, but he didn’t hear me. He came out of the kitchen with the second beer in his hand; he brushed by me on the way to the TV. He clicked it on with the remote channel selector and then, as a picture of dancing cartoon bears flashed, flipped it off.

  “You look tired,” he said, but his voice sounded accusing, instead of solicitous.

  “I am.”

  “How was l-lab?”

  “Routine. How was work?”

  He laughed softly. “Ah, come on, Esme. You d-don’t really want to know about my w-work, do you?”

  “I asked, didn’t I?”

  He shook his head slowly and downed his beer. A thin high whine filled our ears. It sounded like a human mosquito.

  “W-what the hell is that?”

  “That’s Ollie humming. It’s a new habit. She sings songs and hums.”

  He raised his eyebrows at me—then backed out of the room still staring at me. At the hallway intersection he inclined his head.

  “Ollie! S-stop that noise now!”

  “You don’t have to yell at her.”

  “Yeah, I do. I have to yell at her. I c-can’t s-stand all this unearthly shit anymore.”

  “Maybe it seems worse than it is ’cause you’re drinking.”

  “Maybe I’m drinking because it’s w-worse than it seems.”

  He smirked at me and moved toward the kitchen, defiant.

  “Wait,” I said. “Are you telling me that Ollie is the reason that you’re drinking so much?”

  “God. Esme. You f-figured that out just like that.”

  I followed him out to the kitchen, watched him open the refrigerator. The possibility of conflict, even this spiritless argument, in the wake of our recent numbness toward each other seemed appealing to me. Since my night with Jesse, we’d spoken in strained but neutral tones. I felt sparks moving in the air.

  “I don’t think Ollie should be blamed for what you choose to do of your own free will.”

  His shoulders hunched, then he straightened up again.

  “You know, Esme, I’ve been th-thinking. Ollie seems like a living symptom of what’s wrong with our ... with us. She can’t t-talk, or won’t talk, she turns till she’s d-dizzy. We have a difference of opinion. You say she’s ... p-preoccupied. I say she’s sick.” He closed the refrigerator door, holding the sweating beer bottle upright till he fished up the silver opener swinging on its rusted wall chain, prying the cap off with a soft pop. I noticed, idly, burying deep inside a reaction to what he’d said, that he operated on my “wrong” side as I watched him; he was left-handed. He let the opener on its chain fall heavily against the wall.

  “I don’t know. I k-keep asking you if you love me, Esme. You say yes, but I think m-maybe you’re incapable of loving me. Believe me, I’ve been through all the possibilities. I’m the one on the outside.”

  He set the bottle down on the counter. Then put his head in his hands.

  “It’s not even about your f-fucking someone else. D-do you have any idea of w-what it’s like living with you t-two? You’re like some mother-daughter act—the weird duo: Mom has her head in the stars and the kid acts like she’s from Mars.”

  He looked up at me, then down again.

  “You turn from me in bed because you’re thinking about Ollie. She sleeps between us.”

  He was drunk now—I’d watch his face flush and fill slowly with rancor, red annoyance—but now he looked so broken, so defeated, that I reached out instinctively to touch his hair. But as my fingers grazed his head, a storm of chemical dissolution blew in. The molecules of the fibers of his hair, his scalp, the bones of the skull—all unmeshed and leaped out at me, and I pulled my hand back. Insects boiling out of a hive. I stared at his head, then abruptly, superimposed over the turbulent molecules, I saw a Jay, reaching forward again and again, opening a beer bottle with his left hand. Then I saw him putting a hand up suddenly to catch the phone receiver I’d thrown to him last week, reaching up to the shower caddy for soap.

  “What about we?” I heard him cry, shaking his head. “What about we?”

  Vertigo: I put my hand to my own head. It wasn’t enough that I had to watch the world come apart, reducing itself to its particulate structure before my eyes—now, literally on top of that, I was conjuring phantom images. “Mars,” he said, “stars”— Then, abruptly, it all stopped. Simultaneous to my pain and with the force of absolute certainty, I understood what was really happening: I saw that I was being given a gift; maybe a vision. Out of my store of domestic images, from the shards of chemical fragmentation, a door was forming, opening—the hand beckoned from inside, Come, this is the way.

  “Jay,” I murmured like someone in a trance. “Do that again.”

  He raised his chemically eroded head to stare at me. “D-do what?”

  “Open another beer bottle.”

  He gawked at me. “You’re asking me to d-drink another beer?”

  “Go ahead.” I laughed. “Just do it.”

  “Esme, l-let me get this straight. You want me to drink another beer right now? Before I’m even f-finished with this one?”

  I smiled dreamily at him. “I didn’t say drink another beer. I said would you please open another beer.”

  “You mean you w-want one?”

  “No.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, apparently thought better of it, then strode to the refrigerator. He pulled out the fourth bottle, his movements a little stiff and unsteady, transferred the bottle to his right hand, then picked up the opener in his left. He looked over his shoulder, smiling a little, uncertain, as if we were playing a little game. What was this leading to?

  I laughed. “Bingo,” I said to myself softly.

  The sound of Ollie’s tuneless humming grew louder as she approached.

  Jay dropped the opener and whirled around, suddenly furious.

  “OK, wait a minute. This is a Scientific Moment, right?” He came closer, glowering at me, I could smell the beer on his breath, and another, subtler smell, which I couldn’t place. Then I got it: aftershave, a woodsy lime-y smell.

  “Here is a m-man, some poor j-jerk trying to talk to his wife about how their marriage is f-falling apart and his wife, his wife is ...” His face twisted. “I’d like to know. Where are you?”

  “Where am I? I’m right here. I’m listening to you. I’m listening to what you’re saying, but it happens that what you’re saying hurts me. It’s like Philip Glass music. It’s right but it drives you nuts. I listen and I don’t listen. I love you and I don’t love you. And yes, I just saw something. I saw s
omething ... connected to everything, you know, that I’ve been thinking about.”

  Jay flipped the full, just-opened bottle in the trash. “And whatever you do, Esme,” he said grimly, “stay connected.”

  It was funny. I saw him go out the door. I heard what he was saying as he left, but it just didn’t touch me. I was talking a little to myself. I sat looking at the refrigerator, the opener, a couple of things Jay had set up in the kitchen for his southpaw convenience: left-handed scissors on a string, reversed handles, an extra pencil on the left side of the grocery pad (where he wrote his work messages). I kept shaking my head and laughing to myself. And the whole time I heard her behind me, humming her tuneless song.

  Chapter 12

  Imaginary Lecture:

  Theoretical Chemistry, or A Bedtime Story for Ollie

  LET ME TELL you a little story—the plot’s a familiar one. Only the circumstances of the tale won’t be readily recognizable.

  Here’s how it begins: Everyone in the world is right- or left-handed, right? Well, amino acids in almost all living things on earth are made of, though it seems odd to think of it this way, left-handed molecules. How can an amino acid, or its molecules, be any kind of handed? Well, to understand, you must think of a screw. You cannot twist a right-handed screw into a left-handed nut, no matter how hard you try. The building blocks of life have a “twist,” almost as if some great right hand had turned us, given us a spin into ourselves.

  This twist I’m talking about is called chirality, from the Greek, meaning “handedness,” and the equations I’m writing out daily happen to be obsessed with chirality as a phenomenon in the universe.

  If I told you some stories about chirality here on earth you’d be intrigued. It happens that chemical compounds are chiral—in other words, they have “handed” molecules and some of these molecules have enantiomers, opposite twins. Think of a left-handed glove and its right-handed mate. But the opposite “glove” can have completely different characteristics: For example, DARVON is a sedative, and its twin, NOVRAD is a cough medicine. The chemical compound carvone, C10H14O, has a left-handed twin that smells of spearmint; the right twin smells of caraway. Pharmacological researchers are out there locating the right-handed mirror-image twins of certain left-handed chemicals in order to produce drugs or perfumes or sugar substitutes that we will buy and take into our bodies to soothe headaches or smell good or help us sleep. You want to lose weight? It happens that the sugars used by the body are right-handed; left-handed sugars are indigestible. Is it surprising that someone is patenting a sweetener that is completely unfattening, made up of some left-handed sugars? So you can have your Frosted Flakes and zero calories too?

  But this is not the story I want to tell. My story takes place in space, in deep space, where all direction becomes relative. And because the direction of a molecule’s handedness determines the types of interactions it can have with another molecule, why not picture these particles turning around freely out there and then ask if they could react without direction? That is to say, in deep space they have only each other to lend orientation. These are lovers, each half of a set of twins—and my question is, has been for some time now, Would these chirals recognize their enantiomers deep in disoriented space? When I saw Jay repeating a series of left-handed tasks I saw a halo around him, as if his image had been lifted up and out of matter; that image raised over the churning molecules gave me new insight into my approach: Let the chirals float out into the universe, get them moving.

  Francis Crick (you remember Watson and Crick, the DNA vaudeville team?) Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist, asked the question, but kept it earthbound: “Could we not have two distinct types of organisms, one the mirror image of the other, at least as far as its components are concerned? This is what is never found. There are not two separate kingdoms of nature, one having molecules of one hand and the other their mirror images. ... The first great unifying principle of biochemistry is that the key molecules have the same hand in all organisms.” But, Dr. Crick, if we take biochemistry into space—what then?

  If I were rephrasing this for my TOE, my series of equations, I’d say something like: Surprising as it may seem, the asymmetric nature of tetrahedral carbon has been recognized for more than a century, and yet no attempt has been made to evaluate the interaction energy between two asymmetric tetrahedral molecules. Two tetrahedral asymmetric but chiral molecules whirling in space. With math, a series of equations, I define the coordinates in a Cartesian system. That is to say, I look at Nature and I try to reduce the infinitely complex questions to a model that is “solvable.” Will these two come together out there?

  Why should these two rather ordinary molecules popping around in space interest us—won’t they just hum and click together when and if they bump up against each other? No, here’s the thing: Chirality cannot be superimposed—you can’t just push these two together and make them “fit.” The molecules have atomic bonds which, even as they tumble over each other’s surfaces in space, have to be matched, lined up exactly; if they are not, chiral “recognition” does not take place: The lovers do not rise, on fire, swaying toward each other, arms outstretched, on target.

  So my experiment is this: I take my chiral tetrahedral molecules and I analyze them in the limit of free relative molecular rotation and thus I add another variable: a very very high temperature. Whew, it’s hot! When these lovers try to touch (molecules are attracted to each other, but they can get stuck on each other too soon) they require high energy, which is high temperature to make them move fast. But it’s not, by any means, balmy (palm trees, a beach in Aruba, coconut scent of suntan oil)—it’s astro-hot, star-hot, which makes my molecular sweethearts spin and spin even faster, since heat increases velocity. And why, as author of this experiment here in the red-shifted Now, do I simulate such torchy circumstances—why do I create such unimaginable heat, heat we’ve never experienced on earth? Because, it’s simple, it’s elegant: I’m after the Origin, I’m trying to re-create conditions as close to the Bang as I can, as close to the beginning of the world or even the millisecond before the explosion, before matter and radiation flew outward in all directions, before hydrogen formed and mixed with dust and created protogalactic clouds, before ellipticals, spiral galaxies, before supernovas. I want the moment when it was all one, before God’s chiral hand came down, spun us, asked the question—and blew us apart forever.

  If I could reproduce that moment, in theory, the moment the cosmic soup thickened—say I got my chiral molecules to find each other and flip correctly, what do I prove? I don’t know. Maybe the circumstances of chiral recognition will indicate how the four forces of the universe (electromagnetism, gravity, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force) influenced molecule formation; maybe I’ll get a glimpse of the hierarchy of these forces. If it gets hot enough, the center will not hold, as Yeats said; the bonds will blow apart, the molecules blast off. You see, they touch, they kiss, then BOOM, the kernels pop. What is there before the moment of conception? The thought of conception?

  Jay comes into the kitchen, Jay opens a beer, his brain calibrates exactly what infinitesimal adjustments are needed to guide his extremities. Pop the top, flip the cap in the trash, shift the bottle to the other hand to pass the beer to a right-handed receiver. Shake hands with a right-hander at a party, palm the bottle to the other hand, lift the fork from the left side of the plate to your mouth, turn to the right to tell a joke, flip the beer (a trick), drop it, watch it shatter. Turn to make a point over your shoulder to your wife, whirl around to face her, furious, raise the left hand to point at her, shout, let the left hand make a fist, threaten, let it drop. Sit with the left hand over your eyes, slumped at a kitchen table. Crawl into bed later, touch her with your left hand, touch her left breast with your left hand, begin to talk to her in the strained tones of the wounded loyal. And stutter: The synapse circuit closes, the neurons quiver, but the tongue resists slightly the cerebral command—this is not a misfire, thi
s is an exquisite hesitation, pre-aural sabotage by the mind, which wants to say something else, something different, something it will never be able to say.

  In space, my molecules keep turning. They have to fit together, and now my calculations are telling me they have to have three pairs of centers on the atoms where they touch—in other words, they can’t just like each other, they have to attach surfaces, they have to have a lot in common. It wasn’t enough that they made each other laugh, it wasn’t enough that they had dynamite sex. They had to recognize each other, on some other level. They had to fit. So Ollie, they’re still spinning Out There. And Daddy’s gone now. I can’t say if he’ll be back. I don’t think he will be. I’m the one who failed. His nature was, I suppose, kinder, till he realized I didn’t believe in his kindness. The cruelty he invented to defend himself. Marriage allows you an unremitting gaze at the other person; even when you don’t want to stare any longer, you can’t stop looking. You have to know when to look away. Then you can move together again; your eyes search each other out again, abashed, humbled. I could not let him love me, I could not muster the attention forgiveness demands, because I lived in distraction. Now he is falling away through the space I am trying to reassemble in a theory. To understand—what? The origins of life, the order of the universe? Will I walk out into the cosmos? Giddily, gladly. But I won’t follow him out the door, I won’t stand by the car, arguing. I have no interest in human drama. Why don’t they understand that the damage has already been done? Even Q misunderstood me there. I am in a despair so joyful only the elegant precision of your inward-turning face, Ollie, of your unconventional speech, expresses it exactly. The damage has been done to us. But I can choose the conditions of my defeat. And that’s the end, Ollie. The End. Except they’re still out there, whirling, turning around and around each other, stalking each other, in the vast, indifferent, storybook night.