Origins of the Universe and What It All Means

by Carole Firstman

  And then, before I decided what to say, he mended the moment himself. “Carole, would you please be kind enough to pass the salt?”

  The likelihood of our existence, of everything around us, in fact—all life on Earth—has been the subject of much scholarly discourse. In his book Wonderful Life, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould describes bio-evolution as a copiously branching bush that originated by an improbable accumulation of accidental contingencies. Gould posits that if the evolutionary tape were played again, there is no way to predict what would happen—and no reason to expect that humans would exist at all. He later explains in an interview with Time magazine, “It is like Back to the Future. In the movie, Doc Brown goes to a blackboard and draws a chart. The top line is history as it actually occurred. But if you make this teeny little change, which is Biff Tannen getting that sports almanac, then history veers off. It isn’t that it is random that it happened the second way…. It’s just that what actually happened is one of a billion possible alternatives, and you’d never get it to run exactly the same way again.”

  Eight

  There in my father’s office, next to the crumbled spider and shards of broken glass on his desk, the tail of the Paruroctonus silvestrii leaned against the inner wall of its narrow circular tomb. Las Estacas, Mexico—1971, the label said. The jar, two and a half inches tall and one inch in diameter, stood upright like a coffin set on end. The scorpion inside was positioned head down, tail up with its abdomen and front claws slouched unnaturally in the bottom corner. I wondered that afternoon as I went through his things, and I still wonder now, what the scorpion reveals—what it might tell me about my father’s life’s work, about my father himself. About the connection between my father and myself.

  I tipped the jar on its side so the scorpion rested more naturally flat.

  For the scorpion, its last day alive might have gone like this: With its two fighting claws thrust forward in guardian stance, the Paruroctonus silverstrii emerged with a dry rustle from a finger-sized hole under the rock. In the center of a patch of packed earth it balanced on the tips of its four pairs of legs, nerves and muscles braced for action. Hair-like protrusions on its legs quarried for vibrations, minute air movements which would determine its next move—attack or retreat.

  Normally the scorpion would not come out of its burrow during the day, but an overcast sky pushed inland from the Pacific and toggled between light and dark, creating a twilight effect the scorpion mistook for dusk. In a dome of shade cast by the rock, its two-inch yellow body glinted where the moist brown stinger protruded from the last segment of the tail, now arched over, parallel with the scorpion’s flat back. Slowly the stinger slid from its sheath. The nerves in the poison sac relaxed.

  A few feet away, at the base of a yucca, a small, oblivious beetle trudged nearer. The scorpion’s down-slope rush gave him no time to spread his wings. The beetle’s legs quivered in protest as the sharp claw snapped round his body. The stinger lanced into him from over the scorpion’s head. The beetle teetered between life and death for the slightest instant, then stilled.

  The scorpion stood motionless for several minutes, pausing to identify its dead prey and retest the ground and air for hostile vibrations. Confident, its claw retracted from the half-severed beetle and its two small feeding pincers stretched forward to pierce the beetle’s flesh.

  Deliberately and methodically the scorpion ate its victim.

  An hour later, as it slowly sucked the last morsels of beetle flesh off its pincers, the signal for the scorpion’s own death went undetected from behind the yucca—faint sounds audible to a human, but vibrations just outside the range of the scorpion’s sensory system.

  A few feet away, a freckled hand with uneven, dirty fingernails raised an overturned glass jar.

  The scorpion felt a tiny ripple in the air. At once its fighting claws hoisted and groped. Its stinger was erect in the rigid tail, its nearsighted eyes staring up for the enemy.

  The jar came down. From underneath, a heavy index card slid between the scorpion and the sand, and with one swift move the man flipped the jar and the card upright, then upside down again, dropping the scorpion into a second jar filled with formaldehyde. The scorpion clawed at the glass walls, writhed sideways and up. Submerged, it strained for the surface, snapped again at the walls, again down, again up, until finally its convulsions slowed.

  Still squatting, the man slipped the index card into his breast pocket. When the scorpion’s stinger finally relaxed and its pincers floated peacefully to either side, the man stood, rubbed his hands down the sides of his pants, and stepped past the yucca toward the road. In the echoing silence a cicada clickity-zinged from inside the thorny bush; below, an anxious lizard scuttled between leaves as dry and thin as molted snakeskin.

  Nine

  Over the next several days I ravaged my father’s personal belongings. I burrowed through drawers, cupboards, shelves, boxes, organizer trays, envelopes, cabinets, files, magazine stacks, grade books, checkbook registers, ornamental covered dishes, pockets, hampers, bills, memos, letters, receipts, journals, jars, crystal bowls, plastic containers. At some point my mission to collect the items he’d requested morphed into something else.

  How would I feel if he died today? We had shared homes, off and on, the first ten years of my life. Then we lived three hundred miles apart, visiting once a year at most, until a few years back he moved to the town I live in. In some respects, I hardly know this man. In other ways, I can anticipate his every move. What label describes our relationship? And would I regret not knowing him better—or could I at least appreciate him more if I understood him from a different perspective?

  Alone in his house, I pinched and clawed through his things. I wanted to know what my father sought in scorpions—if I could make meaning of his work, perhaps that would balance the equation for me; justify the uneven weight of family man versus scholar, intellect versus emotional connection. Snooping through his personal things was a way of getting closer to the man I consciously held at arm’s length, while rooting out his unsavory secrets would help me justify my ongoing participation in our father-daughter dance of disconnection. Intimacy from a safe distance. My eyes and fingers quarried for minute insights that would determine my stance as a daughter—poised to deliver the itemized goods, or reconciled to withhold his treasures? Let him squirm, perhaps. I am not proud of my actions. But I was driven. Even if I had wanted to cease my search, it would have been impossible to stop. Impossible.

  As an adult I recognize many qualities in myself that I also see in my father, some good, some bad. I think most of us can say that about our parents. So how do we distinguish between good parenting and bad? Good daughters and bad? If our life experiences contribute to determining the adults we become, and if some seemingly negative experiences germinate some sort of timely lesson, then how are we to judge the actions of our parents—of ourselves, of anyone—with black and white clarity? Each action, each event, each nuance of life introduces new variables, new risks, new possibilities. Perhaps the tall boy from the apartments across the street pushed my Schwinn bike with a slightly different velocity or angle than my father would have, or maybe Lana would not have been as shy around my father as she had been in the presence of the handsome, tall boy; had it been my father giving the lesson, perhaps Lana wouldn’t have waited so long to shout her instructions for me to pedal—in which case my bike riding experience might have evolved into a different lesson than the one I came away with that day, something other than how to compensate for a series of over-corrections, which weeks later translated to my intuitive strategy for counterbalancing the teetering bunk bed. Or perhaps I would have eventually learned the exact overcompensation counterbalance lesson under my father’s instruction, but too late to help me during the earthquake on February 9, 1971. Who knows?

  I wonder about the scorpion in the jar. If the evolutionary tape were played again in Las Estacas, Mexico, that hot July day in 1971, which variables woul
d remain constant and which contingencies, if altered, would have prompted the scorpion to act differently? And what repercussions might that have had for the scorpion? For the beetle? My father? One changed variable might set in motion another chain of reactions, a chain which may have altered the scorpion’s fate. Or my father’s. Or mine. Suppose the scorpion had stung my father. Suppose he died in the Mexican desert that day. Or suppose he lived, but was so shaken that he decided to change his career path. What if he had stayed in Pomona to read children’s books aloud to me on the sofa instead of driving twenty-five hundred miles cross-country to present his research to Harvard medical students?

  Gould, of course, is right—there is no way to predict what would happen. Even if we could change a particular variable in the past, the chain reaction of possible outcomes alters the very structure of the branching bush. I wonder how far each leaf reaches, how wide the circle of our apparent spheres of influence.

  During one of my scavenger-hunt days inside my father’s home, around dusk, a neighbor called to his dogs in the front yard, clinked tools on the driveway. He seemed to be looking my way, looking toward the window where I stood, where I scoured and pilfered. I stepped aside and reached for the plastic wand. Twist, twist, and the blinds tilted in unison, fluttered closed like the gills of a giant, hungry fish.

  Ten

  During the years I taught third grade, my students often picked scorpions as the topic for their independent research projects. A socially defiant but exceptionally bright boy named Tyler hunkered behind a barricade of several large hardbound books propped upright on his desk during sustained silent reading time one afternoon. He loved the close-up photographs depicting spine-like tail segments, nearly transparent abdomen cuticles, and elongated pincers. Earlier in the year I’d figured out that if I wanted Tyler to keep reading something, I had to feign disapproval—otherwise, he instantly lost interest in the topic and redirected his attention to something else, like flinging straight-pin-spiked spit wads across the room with a makeshift slingshot fashioned from a stolen pencil and his deskmate’s hair scrunchie.

  “What’cha reading?” I asked.

  Tyler lowered one of the books. He smiled at me through squinted eyes and pointed to an enlarged image of one scorpion cannibalizing another.

  “Gross,” I said. “Why do they do that?”

  “The females eat the males after they mate.”

  “Yuck.”

  “So cool.”

  “I think you should put this away. And if there’s a chapter on giant sea scorpions from the dinosaur days, don’t read that, either. Have you heard about ancient scorpion monsters? I wonder if it’s true. Never mind. You’ll have nightmares.”

  As I walked away Tyler flipped to the index at the back of the book, then spent the rest of the afternoon, including the time he should have been participating in a social studies lesson, scribbling in a notebook resting covertly on his lap.

  To the horror and gleeful fascination of his classmates, a week or so later, Tyler delivered his oral report, which explained that 400 million years ago, ten-foot-long giant sea scorpions violently reigned at the top of the food chain. “They grew so big because there was a lot of oxygen in the air,” he said, and then went on to explain that large fish, more fierce than the giant sea scorpions, forced the scorpions onto land, where they evolved back to a smaller size. “They went from small to huge to tiny,” he said, holding up a picture he’d drawn, a comic book–type scene with one scorpion biting off another scorpion’s head, while nearby a fang-jawed shark-looking creature dripped anticipatory globs of saliva from its tongue.

  “Any questions?” Tyler asked.

  Hands shot up.

  When I was a kid, my father led graduate students through the sand dunes of Baja to collect all manner of arachnids during university-sponsored field trips. I imagine they hiked among the yuccas, and when my father paused to speak in his undulating rhythm of overly pronounced words, longhaired twenty-somethings scribbled furiously in their notebooks.

  I recall one particular drive through the Mexican desert in our Volkswagen camper van with the music blaring, the windows down. I was around seven years old, small enough to stand upright on the floorboard between the driver and passenger seats. My father loosely fingered the steering wheel with one hand while his other hand rested on the gearshift knob. I swayed left-right-left in the growing, liminal gap between my parents as the van shimmied side to side from the vibrations of the tires. My mother mouthed the words to Biff Rose’s “Buzz the Fuzz” while I balanced barefoot beside her. I could have easily toppled over, but I kept my center of gravity low, like a scorpion braced for action, my legs slightly bent. With my bare thighs safely cradled against the armrests of the two seats, I danced. Lean. Let up. Lean. I danced with knees limber, danced to keep myself upright, danced in the hot Mexican wind like a folded piece of blank paper, flapping, free.

  Years after my parents divorced, when I had grown into the door-slamming teenager who laughed at my friend’s heebie-jeebie reactions to a room full of dead bugs, my father often tried to explain the nature of his work to me—some of which I understood, but mostly not. The problem was that he spoke to me in the only language he seemed capable of, which was the same language he used in his university lectures and scholarly publications. In 1973 he published a paper in the Journal of Arachnology on the evolution of the arachnid internal skeleton and its relationship to the evolution of the circulatory system. In this paper, he suggests “the neoteny as the major mechanism to explain the origin of the non-scorpion arachnids from scorpion ancestors.” Among other things, he details his discovery of what he calls “a perineural vascular membrane of certain lungless, rare arachnids.”

  In bits and pieces, I am slowly coming to comprehend some of the theoretical significance of his discoveries regarding the anatomy of the scorpions he collected during those trips. To paraphrase (and oversimplify) his words: tracing the changes of arachnid anatomy (specifically the circulatory system) through both fossil records and modern-day specimens provides evidence to support the evolution of ancient sea scorpions into many various modern-day spiders and scorpions. I glean from his research that, as sea scorpions evolved from gill-breathing swimmers to lung-breathing land walkers to vascular-membrane-breathers (with non-functional lungs), they were indeed liminal creatures.

  Eleven

  Among the items my father asked me to send him is a file folder containing his once-ongoing correspondence with Stephen Jay Gould. While fishing for Gould’s file among several four-drawer filing cabinets that line the walls of my father’s study, I discovered that the drawers hold hundreds of manila folders, each labeled and alphabetized by last name. Apparently, my father was quite the letter writer. Not only did he write hundreds, perhaps thousands of letters over his lifetime, but he kept copies of many of the letters he wrote as well as those he received. I don’t know why he did this. It could have been part of his compulsion to collect, inventory, and categorize things.

  After days of rifling his files, it began to appear to me that he has been documenting his life. Perhaps he anticipated his future value to the academic world would merit the preservation of his every printed word, both personal and professional. Poised for fame. Or posthumous recognition. I know that Thomas Jefferson copied everything he wrote, too; he used a cumbersome duplicating machine that produced a copy of a piece of writing simultaneously via a set of parallel pens attached to an elaborate configuration of wooden boxes. As a prolific letter writer and timely archivist, Jefferson managed to document his viewpoints and insights so that we could study his ideas long after his death. Perhaps my father was creating a body of work to be studied after his death, too. Or maybe the archive I retrieved from his office is a manifestation of his narrow yet multi-branched intensity. His groping on the edge of a neurological spectrum.

  It had been several days since my father called with his list. Technically, I had everything he’d requested, but still I holed up in my
father’s office. I scrutinized the files for hours, reading under a dim lamp while the sky outside turned black. I randomly pulled letters, one after another. When I look back on those hours now, I see myself as if through the wide-angle lens of an old camera mounted near the ceiling, a grainy image I have contrived in my mind: In the photo’s frame, I straddle the open sliding-glass door that separates the house from the backyard; I stand, papers in hand, with one foot on each side of the threshold; in the light, I will deliver—fulfill the request made of me by gathering items on a list; in the dark, I scavenge—search for meaning. I traversed the line between intimacy and emotional distance, empathy and resentment, self-serving voyeurism and objective observation. Good daughter or bad? More to the point, does the motivation justify the behavior?

  As I kneeled before an open drawer my eyes rested on a file name: Rolf Lyon. I remember Rolf from my childhood—a pre-med biology student who became a good friend of my father. He often camped with us in Las Estacas, patiently threading marshmallows on a wire for me, then blowing out the flames when they would inevitably catch fire. The letters in the folder span 1964 to 1999.

  April 4, 1977

  Dear Rolf,

  ...I’ve been sort of depressed lately because it seems to me that I haven’t accomplished anything important in my career as a professor. When I was your age I thought that by the time I was my age I would either be dead or else a world-famous zoologist. Well, I’m 48 and still alive and nobody.

  So my father, too, struggled to find meaning and purpose in his work. And to think, all these years I’d assumed him to be so self-certain. At the time he wrote this letter he was close to my age now. I understand his angst. The question gnaws at me, too. I’ve often wondered if and when I’ll make it, and if the value of my life’s work will appreciate or depreciate over time. For those of us who don’t have children, how do we contribute to mankind’s evolution if not through the passage of our genetic material? It seems so obvious to me that my father’s academic accomplishments were indeed worthy, that asking about the natural world may not result in definitive answers, much less fame—but the value is in the asking, the search that leads from one question to the next, like a ripple on the ocean’s surface that swells toward the quaking continental shelf, then crashes on the sand before pulling into itself again. All intellectual thought, all humanistic notions of education are based on the act of questioning. Socrates asked questions; his form of inquiry rippled debate between individuals with opposing viewpoints; it was the asking and responding that stimulated critical thinking, illuminated ideas. Plato asked. Aristotle asked. Ideas swelled, evolved into sub-ideas of related origin, answered or not. Modern scholars, giants in their fields of expertise, joined the collective discourse as it stretched upward, arched and curled with too many voices to distinguish one from another—scientists and spiritual leaders and laypersons and your next-door neighbor. My father. Me. My third-grade students. My current students at the university. Our ideas, our wonderings rush toward the shore and crash in on one another. Temporary chaos ensues. A beautiful cacophony of seaweed and salt that splays, then draws back to rejoin the huge body of water that pulls into itself again and again.