The Two Laws of Hospital Lifts. Always at the opposite end of the lift shaft when needed. Always stopping at every floor when in a hurry.
The hour was still early, pre-secretary. I knocked unannounced on the door of Scanlon’s sixth floor office, and when there was no answer pushed at it vainly.
No one home.
I walked further along the empty corridor, pushing at doors. The Seminar Room was locked, the main laboratory, home of the tiger, likewise. A third door marked ‘Cell Laboratory’ yielded to reveal a benchtop crowded with standard laboratory ware: test-tube racks, centrifuges, pygmy fridges, incubators. The lights were on, but the room was deserted. A campstretcher on the floor in a far corner caught my eye. The sheets were disarrayed; this was a bed recently slept in. A collapsed pile of books and journals sat on the floor alongside it. I sniffed the air, dog fashion: the scent was almost feral, but it was not the scent of the Nocturnal Animal House. This was the scent of unwashed man, the scent of a male human lair.
I stepped further inside; behind me, the door clicked shut. I poked at one of the books on the floor with my toe: a massive tome titled DNA, a book many billions of times larger than the molecule it attempted to describe. And containing far less information. An array of viewing screens on the far wall was covered with what looked like X-ray films. I flipped the switches, the opaque white screens blinked and flickered into life. Not X-rays, I found; these were thin bands of electrophoretic tracings, unintelligible to me. I peered more closely: the labelling on the films was by number only, no names.
‘Find anything interesting?’
Scanlon’s voice startled me; my glasses slipped forward on my nose. I half-jumped, half-turned to find him standing in the door, holding a red-striped box.
He had caught me snooping, but mine was the greater righteousness: ‘I want to talk to you,’ I said.
He moved towards the nearest bench, hoisted himself on to a stool, flipped open the lid of his box. A warm, deep-fried aroma filled the room.
‘French fries?’ he offered.
‘Not for me.’
He began to poke hot chips into his mouth, a clutch at a time.
‘Excuse me,’ he mumbled through a revolving mouthful. ‘Long night. I’m a bit low on complex carbohydrate.’
His shirt looked slept in, a week’s sweat-rings could be counted in the usual places. My anger melted as I watched him: there was too much of the waif about him, too much that I found endearing. And suddenly, somehow, I sensed, I knew the roots of this: he had been a child with no mother. Women’s intuition? It’s not a force I believe in. Call it an educated guess. Spreading butter on bread with his finger, wearing the same clothes for days on end, shovelling food into his mouth while trying to maintain an uninterrupted flow of talk — he had the manners of an orphan. I was willing to bet he had grown up in the care of a single father, or worse.
‘I often sleep here,’ he was explaining. ‘I don’t like to waste time when things are going well.’
‘Things are going well?’
He shrugged, non-committally; I was reminded that I was angry. I began pacing the floor on the other side of the bench, wondering where to begin.
‘Sit down,’ he said through another mouthful of chips. ‘You’re making me uptight. What’s the problem?’
‘You are the problem, Professor. I’ve a bone to pick. A big bone.’
He upended the box and shook the last of the chips out, then opened a second, flatter box: drumsticks of deep-fried chicken. I found the rich, fatty aroma nauseating.
‘Sure you won’t eat anything?’
I turned away: ‘You’re joking.’
‘Suit yourself. So let’s have it. What’s the bitch?’
I took a deep breath, a conscious attempt to keep things civilised, to allow him his day in court: ‘I can’t understand why I wasn’t told about Schultz.’
‘What about Schultz?’
I declined to answer. He shrugged, dropping the pretence of ignorance: ‘You knew the Schultzes were infertile.’
‘I didn’t know he was azospermic. Funny coincidence that.’
‘I couldn’t tell you. There’s the small matter of confidentiality. I do know that Hollis planned to discuss things with you. In time.’
‘And what about the relics? That’s another thing. I caught you redhanded — among the relics — and even then you didn’t tell me the whole story.’
‘It’s no great secret.’
‘I thought the Research Committee existed to discuss these things.’
‘Fingerprinting relics is a hobby. Something I do in my spare time. It’s common knowledge. Tad knew. I’m happy to answer any questions.’
He smiled, disarmingly. It was hard to stay angry with the man. There was something too innocent about him, too boyishly charming; his orphan clothes and manners, his clear child’s gaze.
‘That’s my point. Tad knew and I didn’t.’
‘I don’t see you all that often, Mara. You’re always locked away in your office.’ He chuckled. ‘Usually alone.’
‘Very funny.’
‘I see a lot of Tad. He works for me.’
‘Tad works for me. He sometimes uses your equipment.’
His eyes hadn’t wavered from mine, as if he had nothing to hide: ‘My understanding was that Tad had a foot in each camp. But if that’s the way you want it — fine. No skin off my nose.’
I turned away. I could see him reflected, clearly, in the window: unconcerned, picking clean a slender bird bone. He tossed aside the bone, tore open a small packet and wiped his hands on the wet, scented refresher towel within — a nicety I would have thought beyond him.
‘I’m happy to tell you all about it,’ he said. ‘Since you’re here. You must remember that no one’s seen you since you got your hands on that fibrescope.’
He paused, and attempted another joke: ‘That is, no one’s seen your exterior.’
I didn’t smile. He rose and beckoned; I followed him to the bank of illuminated viewing screens. He tapped the first radiograph: several narrow vertical bands, or ladders, ran the length of the grainy film, their blotchy rungs irregularly placed.
‘Seen this kind of thing before?’
‘Some kind of electrophoresis?’
‘Gel electrophoresis. Of whatever genetic material we could find on the relics.’
‘Why the X-ray film?’
‘We use a radioactive probe to tag the bits we’re interested in.’
I peered more closely: ‘These are taken from the crucifixion nails?’
He smiled, smugly. The screen lit his face with a white, cold glow: ‘Mostly other things. The nails were a blind alley, with one exception. But we’ve been busy. Very busy. Scavenging.’
He tapped a radiograph: ‘From the veil of St Veronica.’
Curiosity bettered my anger again, or at least deferred it: ‘What exactly is the veil of St Veronica?’
‘You haven’t been reading your scriptures, Mara. St Veronica stepped forth and wiped His brow. On the path to Calvary. Or so I’m told.’
He tapped another screen, another radiograph: ‘The Crown of Thorns from the treasury of Notre Dame.’
‘You’ve got the actual Crown of Thorns here?’
‘Not likely. We can move mountains, but not all of them. The Crown wouldn’t come to me, so I went to it. Field work.’
His finger tapped on across those illuminated radiographs; I followed, mesmerised. The gallery was impressive. The entire face of the planet, it seemed, had been combed for forensic material. Bone fragments from lost Armenian monasteries. Filaments of hair from mountain-top shrines in Crete and Cyprus. Cloth relics from Egypt and Palestine and Syria and Turkey and Italy and France. There were even items from South America. Scanlon had all their fingerprints on screen, and wanted to give me the full tour: details of Where and When and even How. And as he spoke there was something new in him, some glow of heat that I hadn’t felt before in that cool mind. The more he spoke, the m
ore enraptured he became. I recognised the source of that rapture immediately: my own religion, magnified.
‘I still don’t understand what you’re hoping to achieve,’ I finally got in. ‘Every relic carries a different genetic print, but what does that prove? That they’re all fakes?’
He paused; he seemed to be making some sort of decision: ‘You think that no one tells you anything?’
‘I don’t think it.’
‘What I’m about to show you must go no further than this room.’
He reached out and took my hand in his. I felt a sudden lurch of heartbeat — what was he doing? He tugged me to the end of the row of screens: three long, narrow, striped bands were set apart from the others, all three indistinguishable.
He turned to me: ‘Not all the fingerprints are different.’
‘You’ve got some that match?’
‘I’ve got three that match.’
He paused, self-satisfied. For the first time ‘I’ had replaced ‘we’.
‘Out of all the hundreds — all of them different — three are the same.’
He stood close behind me, balancing on tip-toe perhaps, reaching over my shoulders, touching the illuminated films.
‘This from the Holy Nail of the cathedral of Monza, near Milan. I managed to find a few molecules of protein. This from a scrap of ancient bloodstained cloth from a crypt in Antioch. The Maronite Church. And lastly this: a bit of bone from an Armenian monastery in Turkey.’
I could feel his closeness, his breath in my ear, but was too astonished to move. Astonished at the things he was telling me, yes, but also astonished to find that he had sneaked — physically — inside my defensive perimeter, that he was almost touching me. I found it hard to breathe; I tried desperately to maintain the dialogue: ‘You can find protein in bone?’
‘In. On. Wherever. Bone is easier to work with than crucifixion nails.’
Our voices had diminished to whispers, increasing the air of intimacy. The smell of his sweat filled my nostrils; the rank staleness of his unwashed clothes for the first time did not seem unpleasant. My thoughts felt warm and heavy, as if thickened, a kind of gravy. It was hard to think, to actually move those thoughts around. Half-forgotten things came back: of similar feelings, of being on the edge of such feelings, just past such feelings, when waking from dreams as an adolescent, once or twice.
‘But whose protein is it?’ I said, too loudly, and immediately lowered my voice. ‘Half the human race must have handled these relics over the years.’
He backed away; had his intimacy been an accident after all?
‘You get a lot of junk readings,’ he said. ‘Epithelium mostly. But here and there you get a real clump of cells; blood, hair, skin. There are billions of cells per square inch, Mara. Most of the stuff degrades quickly, but fragments of DNA survive.’
‘Whole strands?’
‘Bits and pieces. Are you up with new enzyme technology? Polymerase Chain Reactions? It’s like xeroxing the stuff: the sky’s the limit. You fill a beaker with copies of whatever fragments are there.’
‘So you can’t be sure; you have lots of different fragments. It’s a soup, an alphabet soup of everybody’s DNA. Everybody who touched a relic in the last two thousand years. How can you possibly piece it together?’
He shook his head, smugly: ‘Don’t need to. We don’t need it all, not every single base pair.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Humans look different, but we’re mostly the same. You and I look different — well, a little,’ he smiled, ‘but in fact we are nearly twins. Genetically.’ He paused before continuing, savouring the moment: an odd sort of joke.
‘All of us are nearly twins. Ninety-nine per cent of our genetic code is identical. Yours, mine — and every other human.’
I knew this — knew the cold facts — but was happy to listen as he brought those facts to life.
‘Actually it’s more than ninety-nine per cent. Less than one per cent of the genome determines our differences. I’m only interested in that one percent. In fact it’s even less in practice — a few hundred genes. The forensic people have been doing this for years — looking at a tiny part of the DNA only.’
‘Core sequences?’
He was impressed: ‘You read widely. A few key sequences are all I look for, all I have to find. Our tiny differences. The rest of the chain is mostly the same: you, me, Jesus Christ. Coffee?’
‘Please.’
He filled an autoclave with water from the nearest tap as I tried to marshal arguments: ‘You and I might be the same, perhaps. But we might be very different to someone two thousand years old. The DNA may have evolved.’
He shook his head: ‘Maras, ninety per cent of our DNA is identical to rat DNA. Ninety per cent! We are very nearly twins with rats. We are ninety per cent identical to rats!’
‘Some of us.’
He smiled, tolerating the joke: ‘You don’t want a rat as a relative? Try a chimp — somewhere near ninety-nine per cent at a guess. No one’s done the chimp genome yet.’
He took two chipped mugs down from a shelf, shovelled in the coffee — several heaped spoonfuls.
He opened the chuggling autoclave, leant back from the rush of rising steam, and carefully scooped each mug into the boiling water.
‘White? Sugar?’
‘Black.’
He smiled: ‘See, we are identical.’
‘Not quite,’ I said, as he began stirring in his fix of sugar. ‘I don’t take sugar.’
For a time we stood there, sipping in silence. His eyes were fixed on me across the rim of his mug; I couldn’t return his gaze.
I tried to distract him: ‘What about the dodo?’
‘A bit lower than ninety per cent. But not that much. Eggs, beaks, wings — the bird equipment takes up a bit of space on the genome.’
He lifted the chipped cup to his lips and sipped again; I set mine down on the bench.
‘We all have livers,’ he said. ‘We all have hearts. You, me, the dodo. Our hearts work the same way, are built from the same basic blueprint. Yours might be a little bigger maybe.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Okay, a little differently shaped.’
‘You’ve made your point. Our similarities are greater than our differences.’
He nodded: ‘We have more in common than you think.’
The thought would not lie down and die: he was courting me, this was some sort of weird line — the courtship ritual of the male geneticist.
‘Maybe it’s the one per cent that’s different that matters,’ I said.
I was referring to him, and me; he had returned to the starting point, Jesus Christ: ‘Exactly my point, Mara. So we’re not interested in piecing together every base pair on every strand. dust the differences.’
‘How do you find them?’
‘Restriction enzymes. Snip off the pieces we want, or find them in the soup if they’re already fragmented. Where have you been, Prof? This technology is a decade old.’
‘Let’s say I accept that you can do it. I don’t — but let’s say that I do. What have you proved? That these three relics are all from the same fake Jesus?’
‘Spread over three different countries? A thousand miles apart? Besides,’ — he reached behind and tapped one of the X-ray films — ‘we’ve carbon dated the cloth from Armenia.’
I didn’t ask. His smirk told me the date: 33 AD, plus or minus whatever significant figure.
‘It’s still a long shot,’ I suggested.
He stood there smiling: smug, immune, invulnerable. I tried again: ‘And what about the bone fragment? There isn’t supposed to be any flesh, remember? Christ rose from the dead. How do you get a bone fragment from someone who never died?’
‘You’re not getting supernatural on me, Mara?’
‘I didn’t say I believed it.’
‘Not even the early Christians believed it. Talk to Grossman. The early belief in the first Christian sects was that
He did die, in the flesh. Those early writings were suppressed by the Church.’
‘Gnostics,’ I remembered from my father’s library, as a teenager.
‘Whoever. The word is that Christ appeared after death only as a dazzling light, not in the flesh.’
He turned away, pulled open his benchtop fridge, reached in and produced a small frosted beaker. He passed it across; the glass was too cold to hold. I moved it from hand to hand as I peered inside: another wet, translucent mass of fettucine strands.
‘Tasmanian Tiger?’ I said.
He shook his head: ‘This is human DNA.’
He watched me across the beaker, his face no more than a foot from mine. I held my breath; I didn’t want to ask.
‘It’s not — it can’t be …’
He nodded: ‘You are holding the actual genes of Christ.’
His hand was suddenly behind me, in the small of my back, pulling me towards him. The grossness of this sudden physical act broke whatever spell I was under. I twisted free, repelled.
‘That’s preposterous,’ I said, and thrust the beaker back at him, and turned and fled at the most dignified walking pace I could manage.
11
I had thought my work was dabbling in the shallows of science fiction. Suddenly it looked tame. To speculate on controlling cell division, or transforming cells taken from the skin or the gut into sperm cells was one thing; to hold the reclaimed DNA of Christ in my hand, the actual genetic blueprint of the God of half the human race, salvaged across two thousand years, was another. This was a quantum jump in ambition, an idea of outrageous hubris. And of stunning simplicity: an idea hidden in full view.
Not that I believed that the beaker of pasta strands in Scanlon’s refrigerator belonged to Jesus Christ — merely that it was possible that it belonged to Jesus Christ. The theory was enough: I had admitted to myself, despite myself, that it could be done. If not here, now, then tomorrow, elsewhere.
Honk If You Are Jesus Page 10
