Honk If You Are Jesus

by Peter Goldsworthy

  Heather Sims corrected me: ‘Looks like a dog, but it’s a marsupial. Carries its young in a pouch. More closely related to the kangaroo than to the dog. Strictly speaking.’

  I knew a little of the teleology of this: ‘Mother Nature came up with the same dog-shape to fill the same dog-niche?’

  She nodded, but this time it was Scanlon who spoke: ‘Evolution does it all the time. Recycles the same shapes. Limited repertoire. Function determines form.’

  ‘Ever seen a marsupial mole?’ Sims put in.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Spitting image of the European mole, but a marsupial. Not even a remote relative, strictly speaking — completely different evolutionary path.’

  Strict speaking: Heather Sims seemed to do a lot of it.

  ‘If there is intelligent life on other planets, it will therefore look like us,’ B.B. said.

  Both women groaned.

  ‘Don’t get him started,’ Sims said.

  ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’ from Ruth Bogart.

  B.B. smiled; I got the impression that he enjoyed the teasing, perhaps even went out of his way to provoke it. He sat back in his chair and began to worry at his bun again.

  Scanlon took up the theme: ‘Australia was another planet, Mara. A continent in quarantine. The placentals never reached here, but it came up with much the same animal shapes for the same purposes: marsupial rats, moles, dogs, cats. It found all the usual solutions.’

  ‘Marsupial men? Marsupial women carrying their offspring around in pouches?’

  He laughed, a quick snort of appreciation: ‘Given long enough, even those — yes. It would have happened. Australia or Mars, it doesn’t matter. Where there is a vacancy for a life-form, it will be filled. Martians might have green skin, but B.B. is right; they probably look much the same as us.’

  ‘They might not walk like us,’ Sims said. ‘They might hop. The kangaroo is not quite the same shape as the deer. Speaking of filling the same niches.’

  Scanlon pushed his empty plate aside and rose: ‘Speaking of niches — it’s time to show the professor our own.’

  I rose with him, rose a good foot above him, and followed him out into the corridor. Heather Sims also followed, the others remained, eating. Scanlon paused at a door which I hadn’t tried, and extracted a bunch of jingling keys from his pocket.

  ‘What have you got hidden in here? The crown jewels?’

  He smiled as he chose a key: ‘If it were only the crown jewels I wouldn’t worry.’

  The laboratory beyond the door was large: rows of stainless steel sinks, benchtops crammed with glassware and instruments. But all this was secondary, one object only arrested the eye: something soft and furry and foreign among the sharp-edged metal and gleaming glass.

  A full-grown Tasmanian Tiger stood frozen on a bench.

  ‘She won’t bite,’ Sims said.

  I stepped through the door, realising, after a momentary opening up of possibilities, that the animal was stuffed, a museum exhibit; that it — that she — was in fact attached to a small flat display platform. She was definitely a dog, at least in the front half: narrow muzzle, short-ears, square powerful forequarters. Thylacinus cynocephalus was etched into a small identification plaque — which meant, I translated roughly (calling back some disused medical Latin, the dog-headed one. The body was oddly cylindrical — a dachshund on stilts — and the rear half was perhaps more cat-like: tiger-striped, long-tailed, the haunches rounder, and lower-slung than any dog.

  I stepped closer. The fine-haired coat was threadbare and moth-eaten; it had even worn shiny in places.

  I was more amused than impressed: ‘You’re planning to harvest DNA from this piece of old carpet?’

  Scanlon opened a fridge door and lifted out a stoppered flask. He looked me in the eye, expressionless. ‘Have harvested DNA,’ he said. ‘past tense.’

  I bent and peered into the frosted glass: a tangle of opaque white fettucine-strands.

  Scanlon also bent towards the flask. Our heads were close, when he spoke again he was whispering: ‘Easier than the dodo, Mara. Much easier. This baby was only sixty years extinct, not four hundred.’

  Sims was also whispering, reverentially, as if we were handling some holy artifact: ‘Some people think they are still out there,’ she said. ‘In the forests.’

  Scanlon rotated the flask in the light. ‘Wishful thinking,’ he said. ‘UFO sightings.’

  We stared together. The fine frost-filigree on the outside of the glass had melted around his fingertips.

  I was impressed: ‘I didn’t realise you were so far down the track. Nothing’s been mentioned at Research Committee.’

  ‘Nothing’s been mentioned beyond these walls.’

  ‘I’m flattered. Why take me into your confidence?’

  That same boyish smile: ‘I owed you one. Besides, it’s up your alley, so to speak. Especially what we are going to show you now.’

  ‘There’s more?’

  He replaced the flask in the fridge, and pointed to a door in the far wall of the laboratory: NOCTURNAL ANIMALS.

  ‘You’ve got one running around?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  A red lamp glowed above the door. Somewhere behind us Sims flicked a switch; the laboratory was plunged into darkness apart from that dull red lamp. I realised for the first time that there were no windows to the outside world; that the lighting in the laboratory was entirely artificial. Scanlon flipped two door clasps and pulled open the door; he was silhouetted against an even brighter red glow from within. I followed him inside; an overpowering stuffiness filled my nose, a feral rankness. Cages were arranged along one side of a narrow walkway, and I sensed vague movements and scrabblings inside several.

  Heather Sims flipped open a wire-mesh cage-top, plunged in her hand and emerged with a black furry bundle. She held the animal — the size of a plump cat — in the crook of her arm, one hand cradling the head, the other stroking gently. I recognised the dark, blunt snout instantly, even in the dull red twilight: a Tasmanian Devil.

  ‘Meet Angel,’ she said.

  She eased the animal on to its back, and probed two gentle fingers at the abdomen. An opening seemed to unzip in the fur; she deftly inverted the outer wall of the pouch, like turning back an eyelid. I bent closer: in that small pink pocket nestled a tiny foetus, no more than a centimetre across, a fat, pink tick stuck to what was apparently a nipple.

  ‘And this is Truganini.’

  ‘A devil?’

  ‘A tiger,’ Scanlon said behind me. ‘A two-week-old tiger.’

  The light was too dull to make out his expression; his tone of voice was surprisingly flat.

  I was incredulous: ‘Already?’

  ‘We were ready to go when we arrived,’ he said. ‘We knew it would be quick. Perhaps not quite this quick.’

  We stood for a time in the dull reddish light, squinting.

  ‘When are you going public?’ I finally said.

  ‘When our baby is big enough for the TV cameras. A month or two — no more.’

  Sims allowed the pouch to slip back over the small bloated tick, and returned the surrogate mother to her cage. We stepped out through the hatch, the door sucked shut again, the lights of the laboratory came up, dazzling.

  Scanlon’s clear gaze met mine: ‘I think we can help each other,’ he said.

  ‘You flatter me. But I’ll take all the help from you I can get.’

  ‘There are papers you should read. A colleague of mine: Steven Chu at Stanford. Heard of optical tweezers?’

  ‘Tad has been working on it,’ I said. ‘Using light beams to hold the cells immobile. Or push them around, flip them over, play with them.’

  ‘That’s just the beginning. How do you think we inserted tiger DNA into a devil egg?’

  ‘I hadn’t really thought. Fine needle?’

  He shook his head: ‘Ultraviolet laser. Highly focused. Pulsed. You can punch actual holes in cell membranes. Slip whatever you want through th
e zona pellucida. Plant scientists have been using it for years to improve the crops. Someone showed me an article. The bells rang.’

  ‘I’ve been using a carbon-dioxide laser in surgery.’

  He snorted: ‘Okay for clearing paths through forest. But this is precision work. We’ve got an excimer laser in the next lab. Small beam.’

  ‘How small?’

  ‘Point two microns.’

  I was impressed: ‘I’ve been using mine through fine fibre-optics. But nothing under fifty.’

  ‘You’re out of touch, Prof. Come up and play with my toys. Come up again tomorrow. I’ll show you the ropes.’

  ‘Tomorrow is Sunday.’

  ‘What’s Sunday? It’s just a day, isn’t it? I’ll be here.’

  ‘I’m going to church.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  6

  I filled my quota of church-going during childhood, many times over. As for God, or gods, I currently believed in nothing; or nothing beyond a few simple laws of nature. My interest in hearing Schultz preach was mostly curiosity. And partly cynical: the desire to view the human comedy in one of its more absurd forms.

  I liked, also, to occasionally renew my lack of faith. To attend church and confirm again all the worst memories of my childhood. To be, in a sense, Born Again as a non-believer.

  Was it that bad? Worse. My father was less a preacher than a small-town minister. There were four churches in the Barley Capital of the World, and five pubs. To me each church seemed more a kind of pub itself, a Sunday social centre for use on the one day of the week when the pubs were shut. A small, serious man who drove a small, serious car — a Morris Major — my father had long before lost whatever zeal or energy had driven him into the job. He might have been filling out a timebook, or punching a time-clock each day. If pressed, he would have claimed to believe in something — in various somethings — but no one in those parts would have had the bad taste to ask. No one would have been curious enough to ask. He attended to his duties seriously, especially the handshaking and chatting on the church steps afterwards. Much of this Sunday pub side of his work was shared with my mother. She ran the Church Guild, the Choir, the Organ Fund. She was a great organiser of flower rosters, trading tables, church fêtes, quiz nights …

  His Sunday sermons were low-key, and spoken in a monotone; reassuring rather than crusading. Once or twice a year he recited, mechanically, the social code of Thou Shalt Nots from the pulpit, in case any of the congregation needed a reminder.

  There was something laconic, something … Australian about this form of worship; something understated, that refused to take itself seriously. Or not at least in public.

  My own childhood beliefs were a little more intense. Plagued by asthma from birth, I spent most of those early years indoors. The world of childhood I knew largely through windows; the windows of my bedroom, the windows of various school classrooms, the windows of my grandparents’ farmhouse. And occasionally a window of the District Hospital. I might have been watching that world on television — slow television. I made few friends; by my mid-teens I was the oldest child in the local school; my own age group had left for city boarding schools years before, or left school altogether to work on the family farm. Luckily I grew up in a house full of books: unread philosophy texts from my father’s days in theology college, novels from my mother’s school days. What I couldn’t find on their shelves I borrowed; thick parcels from the Country Lending Library in the city arrived in the post each month.

  By my early teens I knew it all. Or thought I did. The Meaning of Life. The Possibility of Evil. The Free Will Defence. Important issues these, to a fourteen-year-old asthmatic in a wheat town back of beyond.

  For a time I also read the Bible, force read long tracts each night in bed. Perhaps this was my first rebellion: the desire to take seriously, zealously, the things that my parents paid no more than lip service to.

  ‘You’re always so intense,’ my mother would complain. ‘You should be out having fun.’

  I got into religion in a big way at fourteen. At fifteen I got out of religion in a big way — the second, opposite rebellion. And perhaps my mother was more relieved, secretly, by my announcement of atheism than my earlier missionary zeal.

  That zeal had lasted … what? Six months? Nine? I can still clearly recall the day of my final Coming Out: the annual Sunday School picnic.

  A Question Box had been stationed in the Sunday School Hall for some weeks beforehand — into which any troubling questions could be slipped, confidentially. A panel of three wise men — comprising the local doctor, the Sunday School superintendent, and my father — had promised to provide all the answers at the picnic.

  The Box was exactly what I was waiting for. Months of reading had left me perplexed.

  I slipped in some curly ones, some humdingers. Nothing less than the Nature of Good and Evil. The Mind–Body problem. Knowledge–How versus Knowledge–That. More statements than questions many of them. The disguised manifestoes of a hick autodidact, many wrongly spelt.

  The picnic was held on a perfect December day. The sky was the clearest and bluest of enamels, the sun was shining, the magpies mucking about noisily in the trees — all of which interested me not in the slightest as I huddled in the shade of a pepper tree: a skinny bespectacled girl with a flushed face and a wheezing chest, waiting impatiently for the sports events to finish. On they dragged: the three-legged race, the egg-and-spoon, the obstacle, the sack. It seemed the compulsory fun would last forever.

  At last it was time. The other children were summoned together and seated beneath the pepper tree, chipped china cups of lime juice cordial were handed around, the seal was broken on the question box, the first question read out.

  Why is there something rather than nothing?

  It was one of mine. I listened with growing impatience to the string of home truths which followed. I had brought a notebook with me, but sitting there, cross-legged, wheezing, I heard nothing worth noting down.

  Is the logical apparatus of the mind prior to the world of experience it organises, or part of it?

  The second question was also mine, and its sequel: If the latter, how can anything be knowable?

  Was no one else interested in the Great Questions?

  By the fourth question — Is humankind perfectible? — the wise men were looking nervous, the audience was growing increasingly restless. My Sunday classmates wanted to get back to obstacles, to eggs and spoons — to fun. The older boys at the fringe began drifting out into the sunlit patches between the trees. Soon the older girls followed. Cricket games of various types began again: French, tip n’ run, one-hand-one-bounce. Fingers were beginning to be pointed in my direction, accusations were being whispered.

  Fortunately I had written half the questions with my left hand, some in pencil, some in ink. Nothing could be proved.

  ‘Is Spinoza correct’, the fifth question was read out, ‘in his belief that the nature of the world can be established by wholly non-empirical deductive reasoning?’

  My father, the Reverend Fox, dabbed a handkerchief at his brow, and glanced at his watch.

  ‘I think we are running out of time, children.’

  I cornered him in his study later that night, unwilling to let him escape so easily. He was sitting with his feet on the desk, reading a gardening journal, a cosy pot of tea stewing at his side. Somewhere in the kitchen behind us my mother was humming to herself, cooking date-loaf and Jubilee cake for the Wednesday Trading Table.

  ‘Can we talk, Dad?’

  ‘What about, sweetheart?’

  ‘I’m having some problems.’

  ‘School?’

  ‘No, not school.’

  ‘Boys?’

  ‘No, not boys.’

  ‘Well, what sweetheart?’

  ‘Logical Positivism. The Vienna Circle. Truth as a relation of correspondence between propositions and extra-linguistic reality. Could you spare a moment?’

  ‘Not
right now, sweetheart. I have a sermon to write.’

  If you don’t laugh, you cry. I have exaggerated, of course, sketched these events with comic-book strokes. These were not the exact questions; I was never quite that precocious. But if these weren’t my exact words, this at least was their gist.

  This is how I choose to remember those years. This was their essence.

  Plus this essence, sometimes, also: my former friends and classmates astride their tractors in the nearby fields at harvest time, framed always in a window, receding inexorably from me through the last dusty flush of some summer afternoon, a soft golden nimbus of chaff and dust surrounding each one of them.

  7

  I offer these stories from childhood as part excuse, part apology. They help explain my state of mind, my set of blinkers, as I climbed the pink marble steps of the Rose Cathedral to hear Hollis Schultz preach.

  I was looking for entertainment. I was looking to be amused.

  I appeared dispassionate enough, dressed in the simple Sunday best of a professional woman: a skirt and collarless jacket capped off with a black hat, spoils of a shopping trip I had tormented myself with the previous of ternoon.

  The pews were packed, standing room only.

  I once visited the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, twenty-five years ago. I was touring Europe at the time, solo: the air ticket was a graduation gift from my parents. Unable to shake off years of study habits I didn’t so much see Europe as swot it. I tried to take in everything: all the towers, upright and leaning, all the alps and castles and islands — and every cathedral in every city, large and small. Notre Dame came at the end of a long and comprehensive day in Paris. I broke the lap record for the Louvre, covering those endless galleries in forty-five minutes flat, roughly equivalent (at least in memory) to a four-minute mile. I ascended Montmartre to the cathedral of Sacre Coeur, and rode the Eiffel lifts to the summit. I walked at speed through the cemetery of Père Lachaise, ticking off names on my map of the famous dead: Pasteur, Pinel, Guillaume Dupuytren. I was exhausted, physically spent, but Notre Dame lifted me, rejuvenated me, found some last deep spring. Guidebook in hand I clambered up and down the South Tower, scrutinised all visible gargoyles and flying buttresses, inspected the Rose Window and the Treasury.