Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

Ollie stood up and went into the bathroom. I could see her reflected in the full-length mirror, hoisting herself up on the toilet.

  “I was a little drunk. Make that very drunk. I’d gone to see Jay’s act. He was dying onstage. I don’t know. I admit it, I lost control. I went up on the stage to help him. I wanted to tell off the hecklers in the audience, but instead I ended up explaining the Second Law of Thermodynamics to them.”

  “Oh.”

  “Jay was furious. After we left the club and I sobered up a little, I saw his face and understood the enormity of my mistake. But, God, you know: I had good intentions. I wanted to ease his suffering in some way. I’ve gone through years of his terrible routines.”

  Ollie flushed the toilet and returned to sit on the rug, minus her underpants. She grinned at me and began picking her nose.

  “Terry? I’ve got to get going. I’ve got to take Ollie to school.”

  “Wait, wait. Wait. Jay has requested a visit with Ollie this afternoon. After school. Can you arrange this? He also requested that you not be present at the house when he picks her up. He wants to visit with her for two or three hours. Take her to dinner.”

  A lightninglike cold passed, glittered through me. “Do I have to agree to this?”

  I looked up and saw Ollie, who’d wandered off, reflected in the bathroom mirror: half naked, spinning. I watched her twirl too close to the sink. “Ollie,” I called out. “Be careful!”

  “If you want to appear reasonable to the court and you don’t want to generate sympathy for him, yes, I would say, yes, you have to agree. Do you have any reason to deny him a visit?”

  “Hey, of course not. Can you think of one? I mean, what a good sport, huh?”

  She said nothing.

  “Fine,” I said. “I can get Mrs. K. to be here when he comes, and he can leave her on the porch when he brings her back home and I won’t come out till he’s in his car.” I held the receiver away from my mouth. “Ollie—watch out!”

  “Esme?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything else I should know? I mean, so that I’m not taken up short like this again. You swear you didn’t hurl sushi or something at somebody else, right?”

  “Nah. Just some bagels and lox.”

  “Esme?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know, this really isn’t funny.”

  “I know. I know that, Terry.”

  Driving Ollie to school, I remembered the shrink. No wonder he’d grilled me about violence. I should have pelted him with bok choy, I thought. But somehow, this time, I couldn’t work up a laugh. And Ollie sat, one hand held dramatically against her forehead, which she had bumped. There was a tiny swelling—we’d put a boo-boo strip on it. I eased up on the accelerator, but somehow the car seemed to go faster and faster.

  Mrs. K. arrived and I left the house before four, kissing Ollie goodbye and holding her close for a long moment. I sang her a song about a flying cat and then she drew her finger down the middle of my face “bisecting” me. I did the same to her. “Good-bye, Mother,” she said clearly. “I’ll miss you!” I hugged her again. “I’ll miss you!” she called after me. “I’ll miss you, Mommy!” Then I drove to the lab.

  I nearly reeled when I opened the door. Faber had obviously organized regular staffing and maintenance. Everything was clean and kept up—but the power of my memories, pure lab memories, almost overcame me. A laboratory is so physical: Everything is touch and observation, measurement and pouring and enzyme-snipping. Your skin remembers tactilely—goose bumps rise, the ends of your fingers tingle, old acid burns shift under the old proud flesh. I couldn’t believe the feelings that swelled in me, standing in that doorway. And the smells and sound, acetone, sulfur, and dripping faucets, spinner hum—all jostled for the attention of my senses, pulling me in back into the flicker and swim.

  Then I turned and spotted Rocky’s key with its red diamond charm attached, hanging on its hook by the door. On a hook next to that was her ratty stained lab coat—and, taped on the wall nearby, a scrawled note in her big loopy hand: LATER, PROF. I pulled the note down and stuffed it in my pocket.

  All the ghosts, all the gathering sorrows in the lab began to circle me. Rocky’s sorrows and mine, the osmotic presences of all the Organic students I couldn’t teach anymore, even poor Donald Brandeman. The accusing faces of the victims of Alpha1 Antitrypsin Deficiency. What am I hiding from? I asked myself. The lab? The students? I don’t need to hide anymore. I felt ready to return.

  I checked out the freezers, the bases, the spinners, and the Drosophila communities and then I sat down and wrote out an apology to Rocky. Then one to my Organic students:

  Forgive me. It’s a lie to try and teach order when your world is coming apart. I’m trying to work this thing out. Forgive me for missing our labs and classes.

  To Rocky I wrote simply: “I miss you. Ollie misses you. She asks for you every day. Come back, please.”

  After I’d sealed them both (one I’d drop in the mail to Rocky; the other I’d post in the student lounge) I sat down again. It occurred to me that though Ollie hadn’t asked much for Jay, when I’d told her he was coming to visit her she’d smiled and laughed and pointed to his Dodgers cap still hanging from the front-hall peg.

  Terror ran through me when I thought about her: alone somewhere with Jay. Would he bring her back? Would she be frightened without me? I wondered where they were having dinner—a restaurant? Or at Paloma’s house? I held my head. The thoughts stopped.

  I pulled some papers out of my bag. I read a little, then began to write.

  Imaginary Lecture,

  or Letter to Ollie—Mamma’s Theory—

  Ollie, someday you’re going to ask me about this period in both our lives. I’d like you to be able to read my excuse, my theory, the reason for all this unseemly behavior.

  But I have to go back a little in scientific history. I drew you some pictures before of the four universal forces (in descending order of power): the Nuclear (or Strong) Force; Electromagnetism; the Weak Force; and Gravity.

  Protons and neutrons are held in the nucleus of an atom by the Strong Force. Electromagnetism (Faraday’s baby!) binds electrons to the nucleus, atoms to molecules, molecules to liquids or solids. See how this works? Then good old gravity, as you know (the force with which one mass attracts another mass), keeps us on earth.

  The force involved in weak nuclear interactions, has been a kind of mystery. We know this force exists because of certain particle dances that are slow (if you can call a ten-billionth of a second slow)—slower, indeed, than if the electromagnetic or the strong nuclear forces were calling the shots. Scientists, some time ago, found that particles acted weirdly in weak interactions with each other. They acted as if they were being tugged more in one direction than another. Was it possible that parity, the perfect mirror symmetry that everyone wanted to believe in—the universe’s elegant consistency from top to bottom—was being violated here?

  Let’s go back to 1956. Enter two young Chinese-American physicists, Lee and Yang. These guys thought up a series of tests to check the conservation of parity in weak interactions—to see if weak interactions separated right from left. Their published paper (when it was finally understood!) shook the foundations of quantum theory because they said absolutely that parity was violated.

  Then there were experiments to prove or disprove their theory. Another Chinese-American, Ms. Chien-shiung Wu, professor of physics at Columbia, performed the tests that clinched the hypothesis. (Though she was not included in their Nobel Prize!) Her experiment is a little complicated to explain, but it all hinged on this: If, after her testing, the number of electrons she was using divided evenly into two sets, some zooming north and some zooming south, parity would be proven and completely preserved. If this process, however, showed a “handedness” (a larger number of electrons galloping in one direction than in the other), parity would be history. Ms. Wu’s experiment showed what no one in the history of science had bee
n able to demonstrate before: a way of “labeling the ends of a magnetic axis,” or that the universe definitely had a handedness. Zip! More electrons zoomed to one end than the other.

  The theoretical scientific community was in shock. Wolfgang Pauli, the great physicist, said: “I am not so much shocked by the fact that the Lord prefers the left hand as by the fact that he still strongly appears to be left-handed symmetric when he expresses himself strongly.” In other words, why is the strong nuclear force so right-and-left symmetric in interaction, and the weak so definitely handed? Another scientist commented that what Lee, Yang, and Wu had found out was that space was a weak left-eyed giant. Not a cyclops, with the eye in the middle, but a weak left-eyed cyclops. That should give an astronaut pause, no?

  What does all this have to do with my theory? Well, we still haven’t taken in all the implications of the Weak Force. If the Weak Force seems to be saying that nature is asymmetric, many scientists do not want to listen. They want their universe balanced, rational. But Roger Penrose, a cosmologist colleague of Stephen Hawking’s doesn’t care that the universe is asymmetric; in fact he has no trouble at all believing in fundamental asymmetry.

  There’s a lot of talk that it was an “asymmetric underlying field” that caused the Big Bang to produce more matter than antimatter, which is the way our world’s set up. They think this underlying field might be a Superweak force. Or broken symmetry. Or there’s an even deeper asymmetry—Roger Penrose’s notion. His theory is an asymmetric geometric structure called twistor space.

  He invented twistors—and they’re fun, you’d like this, Ollie: asymmetric geometric shapes underlying everything. Twistors are structures that can define the motions, spins and bumps and grinds, of massless particles. They are the “points” of four complex dimensions. If we could see them in ordinary Euclidean three-space they’d look like a twisted family of circles, lying on each other like stacked doughnuts or used tires. Twistors are helical, as their name implies, and their helical nature explains the chirality of particles, the violation of parity in weak interactions, the difference between positive and negative charges, and maybe even the Unstoppable Arrow, the one-way direction of time. Penrose thinks of twistors as the underside of the universe. I think of them as huge bright mattress springs or fields of Oz-like tornadoes. Anyway, Penrose believes he’s discovered a nonambidextrous universe.

  Now, the Superstring guys, on the other hand, believe that particles like fermions or quarks have tiny one-dimensional line pieces, or strings. A couple of physicists had the idea of combining these snippets with Superstrings: open, massless, incredibly strong strings moving in and out of all spatial dimensions. This is a TOE, not a GUT (Grand Unified Theory), and it underscores Einstein’s theory of gravity because the vibration of the strings demands gravity interaction.

  The latest version of String Theory is heterotic string theory, combining string and superstring theory. Many, many dimensions fold up in these strings; ripples go around loops. Chirality and positive-negative charges are explained. But it would require far larger supercolliders than the ones we now have to prove heterotic string theory.

  What L.R. and I hit on, moving our asymmetric chiral molecules through space, was a kind of adjacent calculation, regarding particles without mass. Our chiral molecules recognized each other and this demonstrated certain proclivities of the weak force interaction and mass—but if you take mass away, move into hyperspace, into four dimensions (get out of space-time), and apply Penrose’s twistors, you avoid the infinities (or “ghosts”) that have plagued particle theory. We began to derive values of particle masses—on a primitive level, of course, because our technology is not up to the real assessment—but we derived the first, the beginnings. But the end result hinted at a successful TOE, linking Penrose’s asymmetric geometry with String Theory. Interpreting the world in such a way that gravity, the only one of the four forces of nature to remain unexplained by quantum theory, could be quantized.

  Ollie, it’s there, it’s in place. Experiment will prove or disprove or elaborate on it: But it is odd and beautiful, it works and it’s mine. And L.R.’s, I thought belatedly.

  I stopped writing and rubbed my eyes. It was late, I had to lock up and go. Across the room, a spinner set by a computerized timer turned itself off with a shudder. I looked at my watch. Jay would be bringing Ollie back soon.

  The wall phone began to ring. I considered not answering it. I figured it was probably a student or a postdoc, looking for information or a colleague. Or worse, Faber.

  After four rings, I gave up and picked it up.

  There was a lot of static on the line; it sounded like a satellite transmission. Then the static cleared and I heard a voice calling my name.

  It was Michele Mueller, an old friend of mine from Cambridge. We’d gone to Harvard together, different majors. She was in journalism and we’d probably never have met except that she grabbed me one day outside the Organic lab and began querying me about everything from quarks to neutrinos, which I knew very little about at the time, but we went for espresso and ended up talking about women in science, and became fast friends. Later, she became fascinated with the work going on in Q’s lab and had written a series of articles for the Crimson about the biochem scene. Now she worked at a very influential academic journal called Theory Abstracts.

  “I can hardly hear you,” I called into the shifting sizzle.

  We chatted, or shouted at each other a bit, catching up. She complained about trying to reach me for two days. Nobody answered at home and so she’d finally tried the lab—what was I doing, trying to hide from my demanding public? Then a pause.

  “So, Esme. You were working on that chirality theory, right?”

  “Right. I still am.” A little ripple of fear.

  “Well, you know something? I don’t want to lower the boom on you—and I’m really going against the Commandment of Confidentiality here, but I felt, as an old friend, I should alert you to the fact that one of, the older novas out there on your coast, L. R. Atwater, has sent us abstracts from a manuscript that looks hot—and according to my editor in chief concerns itself with chirality and the Weak Force. You know, the staffers can’t see her envelope till right before publication. But he told me it’s not just Q-and-A stuff, it’s hard, it could even be approaching a TOE. I thought you should know anyway, that—”

  “Michele?”

  “What?”

  “You’re saying that it’s from L.R., Lorraine Atwater?”

  “Yeah. Old L.R.—Lorraine, Lorrie, Ms. Atwater. Whatever.”

  “She sent you an article on—”

  “Chirality. My editor said. Chirality and the Weak Force. I was rather proud, Esme, that I remembered you mentioning the last time we talked, that you were doing some work in that area, too. So I knew you’d be intrigued. Think she’s hit pay dirt? Her name in lights?”

  I looked at a hood, the yellow-and-black nuclear triangles. I rubbed my eyes again.

  “Michele? You know what? I gotta go now or I’ll miss Ollie.”

  There was a squeal. “How is she, Esme? Why don’t you ever send pictures of her? I’m dying to see—”

  I hung up. I looked down at the papers before me, all my painstaking scribblings to Ollie. Mamma’s Theory. I looked straight ahead again and then laughed. Mamma’s Theory. I laughed again, louder; the sound echoing off the lab walls. Then I slowly tore the sheets of paper up.

  I drove around till it was time for Ollie’s return. Scooped. I drove, watching the bumper lights in front of me, the turn signals, traffic lights. I drove like an automaton—I registered nothing of my surroundings. Once, cars honked behind me and I realized I’d been sitting before a green light for seconds. Scooped. Then I looked up and realized I was nearing my street.

  I turned into my driveway, parked, and put my head on the steering wheel. I knew I had to get out of the car, get into the house, get the lights on before Jay arrived with Ollie—but I couldn’t move. Scooped, you poor sad-asse
d dolt—and by a colleague. A woman. My head throbbed. I’d helped her. I’d helped her finish it—I’d pushed her over the top. I lifted my head, then forced myself to open the car door and get out. I staggered a little as I walked to the house. The porch steps seemed enormous; it took all my strength to climb them.

  Inside the house, I walked around numbly, turning on lights, pulling down shades. I picked up Ollie’s dragon from the braided rug. She must have dropped it on her way out with Jay. I knew she’d miss it by now. I propped it in a little red plastic chair in the entranceway, then glanced at the clock over the mantel. It was late. It was nearly eight. He was supposed to have brought her back by seven-forty-five. I held my head. Had I gotten the time wrong? Had I screwed that up, too? A pile of my legal pads sat on the coffee table and I grabbed them up suddenly and threw them against the wall. They landed next to Ollie’s box “TV,” propped in a corner. Scooped. Rosalind Franklin, Mileva Maric. I beat my fists against my temples. Shit, I’d looked up to her—she was my inspiration, Atwater—a great woman scientist! My inspiration. Still, some part of me couldn’t quite believe this had happened, could not believe that L.R. had done such a thing. I couldn’t accept it. Maybe, I thought, she’d tried to call me. Maybe I should check the machine. Maybe this can all be cleared up.

  The phone rang and I jumped, then ran for it.

  “Hello, Esme.”

  “Jay—where are you? You’re late, aren’t you? Wasn’t Ollie supposed to be back before eight?”

  “Yeah I guess she was, but that’s of little consequence now.”

  My heart stopped, then slowly began again.

  “What do you mean, Jay?”

  “What I mean, Esme, is that I’m not bringing Ollie back.”

  I tried to speak, but nothing would come out of my mouth. Then I shouted.

  “Jay? What have you done with her?”

  “Isn’t that funny, Esme. That was just the question I was about to ask you. For starters, there’s this b-bump on her head—above her eye? Where did that c-come from, Esme?”