“Let’s go with her,” Nieman said, continuing a conversation they had had at lunch the day before. “I mean it. Ever since she mentioned it I keep wanting to tell her what to take. Last night I decided I should go and take those things myself. We’re dinosaurs, Freddy. Our education is outdated. We should go and see what they’re teaching.”
“Brilliant,” Freddy said. “It’s a slow time at the store. I could take a few weeks off.”
“Here’s how I figure it.” Nieman stood up, got the bottle of brandy, and refilled their glasses. “We sign up for a few classes, pay the tuition, go a few weeks, and then quit. The university gets the tuition and Nora Jane gets some company until she settles in.”
“We have spent vacations doing sillier things,” Freddy said, thinking of the year they climbed Annapurna, or the time they took up scuba diving to communicate with dolphins.
“I need a change,” Nieman confessed, sinking down into the water until it almost reached his chin. “I’m lonely, Freddy. Except for the two of you I haven’t any friends. Everyone I know wants something from me or is angry with me for not adoring their goddamn, whorish movies. Some of them hate me for liking them. It’s a web I made and I’ve caught myself.”
“We’ll get applications tomorrow. Nora Jane’s already registered. Classes start next Monday.”
Nieman went to the admissions office the next day and signed up to audit Dante in Translation and Playwriting One. Then, suddenly, after a night filled with dreams, he changed the classes to biochemistry and Introduction to the Electron Microscope.
This was not an unbidden move. For several years Nieman had become increasingly interested in science. He had started by reading books by physicists, especially Freeman Dyson. Physics led to chemistry, which led to biology, which led to him, Nieman Gluuk, a walking history of life on earth. Right there, in every cell in his body was the whole amazing panorama that led to language and conscious thought.
The first lecture on biochemistry and the first hour with the microscopes excited Nieman to such an extent he was trembling when he left the building and walked across the campus to the coffee shop where he had agreed to meet Freddy and Nora Jane. A squirrel climbed around a tree while he was watching. A girl walked by, her hair trailing behind her like a wild tangled net. A bluejay landed on a branch and spread his tailfeathers. Nieman’s breath came short. He could barely put one foot in front of the other. Fields of wonder, he said to himself. Dazzling, dazzling, dazzling. If they knew what they are carrying as they go. Time, what a funny word for the one-way street we seem to have to follow.
“This is it,” he told Freddy and Nora Jane, when they were seated at a table with coffee and croissants and cream and sugar and butter and jam and honey before them on the handmade plates. “I’m quitting the job. I’m going back to school full time. I have to have this body of information. Proteins and nucleic acids, the chain of being. This is not some sudden madness, Freddy. I’ve been moving in this direction. I’ll apply for grants. I’ll be a starving student. Whatever I have to do.”
“We don’t think you’re crazy” Nora Jane said. “We think you’re wonderful. I feel like I did this. Like I helped.”
“Helped! You are the Angel of the Annunciation is what you are, you darling, you.”
“Are you sure this isn’t just another search for first causes?” Freddy warned. “Remember those years you wasted on philosophy?”
“Of course it is. So what? This isn’t dead philosophical systems or Freudian simplicities. This is real knowledge. Things we can measure and see. Information that allows us to manipulate the physical world.”
“If you say so.”
“May I borrow the house at Willits for the weekend? I need to be alone to think. I want to take the textbooks up there and read them from start to finish. I haven’t been this excited in years. My God, I am in love.”
“Of course you can borrow the house. Just be sure to drain the pipes when you leave.”
“It might snow up there this weekend,” Nora Jane put in. “The weather station warned of snow.”
Two days later Nieman was alone in the solar-powered house Freddy and his friends had built on a dirt road five miles from Willits, California. The house was begun in 1974 and completed in 1983. Many of the boards had been nailed together by Nieman himself with his delicate hands.
The house stood in the center of one hundred and seven acres of land and overlooked a pleasant valley where panthers still hunted. In any direction there was not a power line or telephone pole or chimney. The house had a large open downstairs with a stone bathroom. A ladder led from the kitchen area to a loft with sleeping rooms. There were skylights in the roof and a wall of glass facing east. There was a huge stone fireplace with a wide hearth. Outside there was a patio and a deep well for drinking water. “This well goes down to the center of the earth,” Freddy was fond of saying. “We cannot imagine the springs or rivers from which it feeds. This could be water captured eons ago before the crust cooled. This water could be the purest thing you’ll ever taste.”
“It tastes good,” his twin daughters, Tammili and Lydia, would always answer. “It’s the best water in the world, I bet.”
Nieman stood in the living room looking out across the valleys, which had become covered with snow while he slept. He had arrived late the night before and built up the fire and slept on the hearth in his sleeping bag. “It was the right thing to do to come up here,” he said out loud. “This holy place where my friends and I once made our stand against progress and the destruction of the natural world. This holy house where Tammili and Lydia were born, where the panther once came to within ten yards of me and did not strike. I am a strange man and do not know what’s wrong with me. But I know how to fix myself when I am broken. You must change your life, Rilke said, and now I am changing mine. Who knows, when I come to my senses, somebody will have taken my job and I’ll be on the streets writing travel articles. So be it. In the meantime I am destined to study science and I am going to study science. I cannot allow this body of information to pass me by and I can’t concentrate on it while attempting to evaluate Hollywood movies.”
Nieman moved closer to the window so he could feel the cold permeating the glass. Small soft flakes were still falling, so light and small it seemed impossible they could have turned the hills so white and covered the trees and the piles of firewood and the well. I can trek out if I have to, he decided. I won’t worry about this snow. This snow is here to soothe me. To make the world a wonderland for me to study. Life as a cosmic imperative, de Duve says. I will read that book first, then do three pages of math. I have to learn math. My brain is only forty-four years old, for Christ’s sake. Mother taught math. The gene’s in there somewhere. It’s just rusty. Before there was oxygen there was no rust. Iron existed in the prebiotic oceans in a ferrous state. My brain is like that. There are genes in there that have never been exposed to air. Now I will use them.
Nieman was trembling with the cold and the excitement of the ideas in his head. Proteins and nucleic acids, the idea that all life on earth came from a single cell that was created by a cosmic imperative. Given the earth and the materials of which it is created, life was inevitable. Ever-increasing complexity was also inevitable. It was inevitable that we would create nuclear energy, inevitable that we would overpopulate the earth. It was not as insane as it had always seemed. And perhaps it was not as inevitable once the mind could recognize and grasp the process.
Nieman heaved a great happy sigh. He left watching the snow and turned and climbed the ladder to the sleeping loft. There, on that bed, in that corner beneath the skylight, on a freezing night ten years before, Freddy and Nora Jane’s twins had been born, his surrogate children, his goddaughters, his angels, his dancing princesses. Nieman lay down upon the bed and thought about the twins and the progress of their lives. Not everything ends in tragedy, he decided. My life has not been tragic, neither has Freddy’s or Nora Jane’s. Perhaps the world will last anoth
er hundred years. Perhaps this safety can be stretched to include the lives of Tammili and Lydia. So what if they are not mine, not related to me. All life comes from one cell. They are mine because they have my heart. It is theirs. I belong to them, have pondered over them and loved them for ten years. How can this new knowledge I want to acquire help them? How can this new birth of curiosity and wonder add to the store of goodness in the world?
Well, Nieman, don’t be a fool. It isn’t up to you to solve the problems of the world. But it might be. There were ninety-two people in that lecture room but I was the only one who had this violent a reaction to what the professor was saying. I was the only one who took what he was saying as a blow to the solar plexus. This might be my mission. It might be up to me to learn this stuff and pass it on. It is not inevitable that we overpopulate and destroy the world. Knowledge is still power. Knowledge will save us.
Nieman was crying. He lay on the bed watching the snow falling on the skylight and tears rolled down his face and filled his ears and got his fringe of hair soaking wet. He cried and he allowed himself to cry.
I had thought it was art, he decided. Certainly art is part of it. Cro-Magnon man mixing earth with saliva and spitting it on the walls of caves was a biochemist. He was taking the elements he found around him and using them to explore and recreate and enlarge his grasp of reality. After the walls were painted he could come back and stare at them and wonder at what he had created. Perhaps he cried out, terrified by the working of his mind and hands. I might stare in such a manner at this house we built. I could go outside and watch the snow falling on those primitive solar panels we installed so long ago. It is all one, our well and solar panels and the cave paintings at Lascaux and microscopes at Berkeley and this man in Belgium writing this book to blow my mind wide open and Lydia and Tammili carrying their backpacks to school each morning. The maker of this bed and the ax that felled the trees that made the boards we hammered and Jonas Salk and murderers and thieves and Akira Kurosawa and Abraham Pais and I are one. This great final truth, which all visionaries have intuited, which must be learned over and over again, world without end, amen.
Nieman fell asleep. The snow fell faster. The flakes were larger now, coming from a cloud of moisture that had once been the Mediterranean Sea, that had filled the wells of Florence, in the time of Leonardo da Vinci, and his royal patron, Francis, King of France.
The young man was wearing long robes of dark red and brown. His hair was wild and curly and his feet were in leather sandals. His face was tanned and his eyes were as blue as the sky. He had been knocking on the door for many minutes when Nieman came to consciousness and climbed down the ladder to let him in. “Come in,” Nieman said. “I was asleep. Are you lost? I’m Nieman Gluuk. Come in and warm yourself.”
“It took a while to get here,” the young man said. “That’s a kind fire you have going.”
“Sit down. Do you live around here? Could I get you something to drink? Coffee or tea or brandy? Could I get you a glass of water? We have a well. Perhaps you’re hungry” The young man moved into the living room and looked around with great interest. He walked over to the window and laid his palms against the glass. Then he touched it with his cheek. He smiled at that and turned back to Nieman.
“Food would be nice. Bread or cheese. I’ll sit by the fire and warm myself.”
Nieman went into the kitchen and began to get out food and a water glass. The young man picked up the book by the biochemist de Duve, and began to read it, turning the pages very quickly. His eyes would move across the page, then he would turn the page. By the time Nieman returned to the fireplace with a tray, the young man had turned half the pages. “This is a fine book,” he said to Nieman, smiling and taking a piece of bread from the tray. “It would be worth the trip to read this.”
“You aren’t from around here, are you?” Nieman asked.
“You know who I am. You called me here. Don’t be frightened. I come when I am truly called. Of course, I can’t stay long. I would like to finish this book now. It won’t take long. Do you have something to do while I’m reading?” The young man smiled a dazzling smile at Nieman. It was the face of the Angel of the Annunciation in Leonardo’s painting. It was the face of David. “You knew me, didn’t you?” the young man added. “Weren’t there things you wanted to tell me?”
Nieman walked back toward the kitchen, breathing very softly. The young man’s face, his hair, his feet, his hands. It was all as familiar as the face Nieman saw every day in the mirror when he shaved. Nieman let his hands drop to his sides. He stood motionless by the ladder while the young man finished reading the book.
“What should I call you?” Nieman said at last.
“Francis called me da Vinci.”
“How do you speak English?”
“That’s the least of the problems.”
“What is the most?”
“Jarring the protoplasm. Of course, I only travel when it’s worth it. I will have a whole day. Is there something you want to show me?”
“I want to take you to the labs at Berkeley. I want to show you the microscopes and telescopes, but I guess that’s nothing to what you’ve seen by now. I could tell you about them. Did you really just read that book?”
“Yes. It’s very fine, but why did he waste so many pages pretending to entertain superstitious ideas? Are ideas still subject to the Church in this time?”
“It’s more subtle, but they’re there. The author probably didn’t want to seem superior. That’s big now.”
“I used to do that. Especially with Francis. He was so needy. We will go to your labs if you like. Or we could walk in this snow. I only came to keep you company. It’s your time.” He smiled again, a smile so radiant that it transported Nieman outside his fear that he was losing his mind.
“Why to me?”
“Because you might be lonely in the beginning. Afterward, you will have me if you need me.” The young man folded the book very carefully and laid it on a cushion. “Tell me how cheese is made now,” he said, beginning to eat the food slowly and carefully as he talked. “How is it manufactured? What are the cows named? Who wraps it? How is it transported?”
“The Pacific Ocean is near here,” Nieman answered. He had taken a seat a few feet from the young man. “We might be able to get out in the Jeep. That’s the vehicle out there. Gasoline powered. I don’t know what you know and what you don’t know. Do you want to read some more books?”
“Could we go to this ocean?”
“I guess we could. I have hiking gear. If we can’t get through we can always make it back. I have a mobile phone. I’d like to watch you read another book. I have a book of algebra and a book that is an overview of where we are in the sciences now. There’s a book of plays and plenty of poetry. I’d be glad to sit here and read with you. But finish eating. Let me get you some fruit to go with that.”
“Give me the books. I will read them.”
Nieman got up and collected books from around the room and brought them and put them beside the young man. Then he brought in firewood and built up the fire. He took a book of poetry and sat near the young man and read as the young man read. Here is the poem he turned to and the one he kept reading over and over again as he sat by the young man’s side with the fire roaring and the wind picking up outside and the snow falling faster and faster.
. . . Still, if love torments you so much and you so much need
To sail the Stygian lake twice and twice to inspect
The murk of Tartarus, if you will go beyond the limit,
Understand what you must do beforehand.
Hidden in the thick of a tree is a bough made of gold
And its leaves and pliable twigs are made of it too.
It is sacred to underworld Juno, who is its patron,
And it is roofed in by a grove, where deep shadows mass
Along far wooded valleys. No one is ever permitted
To go down to earth’s hidden places unless he ha
s first
Plucked this golden-fledged growth out of its tree
And handed it over to fair Proserpina, to whom it belongs
By decree, her own special gift. And when it is plucked,
A second one always grows in its place, golden again,
And the foliage growing on it has the same metal sheen.
Therefore look up and search deep and when you have found it,
Take hold of it boldly and duly. If fate has called you,
The bough will come away easily, of its own accord.
Otherwise, no matter how much strength you muster,
You never will
Manage to quell it or cut it down with
The toughest of blades.
“Now,” the young man said, when he finished the biochemistry textbook. “Tell me about these infinitesimal creatures, amoebas, proteins, acid chains, slime molds, white cells, nuclei, enzymes, DNA, RNA, atoms, quarks, strings, and so on. What an army they have found. I could not have imagined it was that complicated. They have seen these creatures? Many men have seen them?”
“We have telescopes and microscopes with lenses ground a million times to such fineness and keenness, with light harnessed from electrons. They can magnify a million times. A thousand million. I don’t know the numbers. I can take you to where they are. I can take you to see them if you want to go.”
“Of course. Yes, you will take me there. But it must be soon. There is a limited amount of time I will be with you.”
“How much time?”
“It will suffice. Will your vehicle travel in this snow?”
“Yes. Perhaps you would like to borrow some modern clothes. Not that there’s anything wrong with your clothes. They are very nice. I was especially admiring the cape. The weave is lovely. They’re always worrying about security. I want to take you to the laboratories at Berkeley. I can call the head of the department. He will let us in.”
“You may have the cloak since you admire it. It can remain here.” He removed the long brown garment and handed it to Nieman.
The Courts of Love Page 10
