Acid Song

by Bernard Beckett

  She was right, although he couldn’t remember why. But he did remember that last night, as he’d fallen asleep, he had been trying not to worry about something. Which, he now realised, was excellent news. A smile crinkled his sleepy face. ‘You know what, I think I’m there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Last night, well, it wasn’t the perfect lead in was it? But then, when that kicked in …’ he motioned to the small device on the floor beside the bed, from which wires extended to the cap he slept with nowadays. An alarm clock of sorts, designed to measure brain waves and wake him between sleep cycles, when he would emerge at his most refreshed; or so went the theory. This one had been modified for the purpose of the experiment. It gently prompted Simon as he entered the night’s last dream cycle, giving him the best chance of coming half awake, of entering his dream.

  ‘I still dreamed, didn’t I!’

  Simon looked at Amanda, who if impressed was hiding it.

  ‘This is the breakthrough.’

  Amanda looked at him, and unable to resist his enthusiasm, smiled back.

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘What did you dream about?’

  ‘Just flying.’

  Simon thought of her again – Alice was her name – and wanted her. His hand ran down over Amanda’s stomach. Amanda took his hand and moved it off her. She had passed through to the waking side and was already preparing for action. It took him so much longer.

  ‘Sorry, no time. Today’s going to be crazy. Shall I write you a list?’

  ‘Let me wake up a bit. Then I’ll remember.’

  Amanda pulled the covers back.

  ‘Go and have a shower,’ she told him.

  ‘You go first.’

  ‘If I leave you here, you’ll go back to sleep. Go on, I’ll get some coffee on. You’re sure you don’t need a list?’

  Simon tried to remember.

  ‘Pick up the car. Do the shopping, and …’ there was one more. ‘Check out that guy selling film stock.’

  ‘You forgot Sky. You have to take the decoder back. I’ll write you a list. And …’

  ‘And what?’

  She gave him the look he had grown oddly addicted to. Her ‘How can you be so stupid?’ look.

  ‘Your meeting, with the film people.’

  ‘Right, oh, Jesus. What time did I say that was?’

  ‘Not till three.’

  ‘That’s all right then.’ He tried to burrow back beneath the sheets but Amanda gave a sharp shove with her feet and he rolled out of bed. The floor was cold. His erection was subsiding.

  IT WAS THE place Richard felt most comfortable. He wasn’t the sort who could unwind walking along a beach. Television reminded him he was out of step; small talk made him feel small. A bottle of wine and a good book could take him out of the world, but here he could settle into it.

  In the lab Richard lost track of time and space. He only had to open the door to experience an untangling in his head. He could happily spend all day here, twenty-four hours solid, and there had been a time when such stints were not uncommon. But life moves on. The first roadblocks feel temporary, the detours a transitory evil, until the moment you forget where you were headed. Nowadays the lab was luxury, a child’s tree fort, a place to hide away.

  Richard stood in the doorway and let the room come to him. Three long benches defined the space. On each sat a jumble of the equipment he loved: the rounded, flower-like computers, chosen by the lab manager, he knew, for their looks; stacks of pipette-tip boxes colonising the empty spaces; the ever-changing chemical kits, emblazoned with corporate logos, looking as if they had escaped from a toy store; bright red lab books, last bastion of the hand-written word; the hi-tech contribution of the small squat incubators, centrifuges and PCR machines. Heat, spin, cycle. Here at last was a place that had defied abstraction, where one could still be dirtied by reality. Stainless steel sinks stood sentry at the end of each bench, as if to underline the point. And Richard’s favourite thing of all: the glass. Everywhere there were bottles: different sizes and labels, half empty, half full, a defiant finger raised against a plastic world. To an outsider it might have looked haphazard, but only because the order was functional rather than cosmetic. From the boxes of rubber gloves at every station washed the smell of latex, a strange scent to find comfort in, but it was the strangeness Richard clung to. Instinctively he reached behind the door and took his lab coat from the hook, his costume. Around the room’s perimeter the industrial fridges hummed their greeting. Richard had a separate office, off to the side, but rarely used it. When he came here, it was for the benches.

  He had an hour at least, before any of the others would arrive. Margaret, the lab manager, was on leave for the week, and Klaus and Melissa were at a conference. The rest of them were start-late stay-late types. There were windows like this occasionally, when the space was still his. Technology moved rapidly, and every week it seemed there was a new chemical on offer, a new technique to learn and machine to master. When the lab was bustling he felt like a dinosaur; his impressive form turned clumsy in the presence of mammals. They treated him with great respect, of course. His reputation was still the foundation upon which The Institute relied. But if they looked closely, they would see his time was passing. What would I give, he wondered, to be young again? And the honest answer was anything. He would give anything.

  On the wall was a framed photograph, and beneath it the carefully printed title, Richard Bradley: Self Portrait. The photo was purple on tan, a combination demanded by the stains, and showed his forty-six chromosomes, a splatter of Xs: headless dolls pinched at the waists, frozen mid-dance, caught out. He knew them well enough to recognise the mischievously named Y, small and malnourished, watching from the perimeter as if awaiting permission to join the swirl. This was not the chromosomes’ natural state. They had to be coaxed into this position, like children squeezed into their Sunday best for a family portrait, coming together only that they might be torn apart; split and divide, one cell made two, life continuing with its business, the most everyday of miracles. For the photo they had been trapped in pro-phase, holding back the formation of spindles to which each pair would attach itself, that it may rip itself asunder. A violent sort of poetry.

  Richard saw in this picture those towering intellects who had designed the microscopes, refined the cameras, imagined the computers, engineered the centrifuges… Life writ large by the miracle of human curiosity. Richard started each course he taught by parading before the students the genuises who had brought them to this point: Darwin, Mendel, Fischer, Dobzhansky, Huxley, Mayr, Watson, Monod, Hamilton … the list changed with his mood. Because they have thought and wondered, he told his students, because they have asked and argued, measured and examined, we can view the world from our privileged vantage point. Knowledge as reason for being, for knowledge’s sake. If we are not the ideas we carry, share, reshape and contest, then what are we? Such was the florid rhetoric he was capable of, when none but the young and impressionable were there to call him on his excesses.

  Not that every student was so easily impressed. Richard remembered a debater fresh from five years boarding at a local Catholic college, majoring in law but hedging his bets by spending a little time in the biology pool. He was a tall boy, dressed in the preppy way of the rural wealthy, a collared shirt only half subdued by his merino top, striped and untucked, flaring over the top of his jeans like the beginning of a skirt. His skin was clear and he walked with an athlete’s confidence: long-jumper, flanker, second fifteen. These and other facts Richard picked up a year later, when he attended the boy’s funeral. His name was Thomas Walden.

  That was six and a half years ago. He approached Richard at the end of the introductory lecture and without a word of introduction presented his argument.

  ‘I don’t see how you can call it glorious, Sir, when all it does is reduce us so.’

  A careful first speaker’s voice, measured and polite.

 
‘And what do you mean by that?’ Richard replied, the technique which in his later years had replaced recommending readings. Few students could maintain the momentum of their opening statement. Lack of experience makes counterpunchers of the young.

  Thomas Walden gave the question full consideration, apparently untroubled by what for many would have been an awkward silence. No um to hold the place, no bluster. A strange boy, Richard thought at the time. The sort that years later, standing alone in a laboratory, looking at a photo of your self, you might remember.

  ‘I suppose I mean, wouldn’t it be ironic, if all our big brains ended up gifting us was an insight into the emptiness of it all? What would we do, if we found out there was, well, I don’t want to sound melodramatic – but nothing more to it in the end? Just biology. What would we do then?’

  ‘We could always wait for Godot,’ Richard replied, an unworthy remark. Dismissive. He could have invited the boy for coffee, listened to his concerns, led him through the arguments. But he was busy, perhaps: had a meeting to get to, didn’t have the time to give, or didn’t trust the boy to be worthy of the investment. Whatever the case, that was the last time the boy stayed behind, and a year later biology had the final say. Meningitis.

  And what would he have said to Thomas – if he’d known that, by the measure of the uncountable time remaining – the boy was so old? George Bernard Shaw once said of evolutionary theory, ‘There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honour and aspiration’ – and a hundred times Richard had used that line to open some address. That he may proceed to counter it. Science, he had spent a career explaining, is like a builder inspecting a house for restoration. It removes from our stories only those planks which are rotten, that they may be replaced before the structure itself is compromised. Far from destroying our most precious stories, science keeps them strong.

  For perhaps twenty-eight years the metaphor had proven adequate. But everything corrodes. For wasn’t the truth of it that for all his bluster, staring at this damned photograph made him feel not triumphant but tiny, just as the boy had warned? Richard Bradley, renowned professor, loving father, muddling husband, fickle friend, contemplating his own sorry recipe. Forty-six chromosomes, twenty-two pairs plus the telltale male mismatch. Written along them the secret code, all three-point-one thousand million bases of it; scattered amongst those the twenty-one thousand genes required to assist in the construction of exactly one of him. Here was the recipe for his sweet tooth, his arthritis, his thinning hair, his failing eyes, his impatience. And here, in the end, the end itself. He – a collection of a hundred trillion cells, which copied itself and its genetic message again and again, fighting to maintain pattern in a world defined by entropy – was destined to end in error. Transcription mistake by transcription mistake he would be rendered inoperable, as we all are. It was a race between the decaying of the body and the flowering of the mind. What type of animal would ever find it necessary to ask these questions, to stare so resolutely into the face of God?

  As atheists go, Richard was a devoutly religious man. He had a taste for religion’s imagery, and shared its sense of awe. Before him were the burn marks of life itself, the signal of the code which nearly four billion years ago learned the trick of assembling itself, and from there – well from there came here. Four billion, a number which can so easily slip past the tongue without the mind doing its work and grasping some sense of the magnitude. It was a million times longer than the time since the rise of the first civilisations. If the time of life were a football field, then humanity’s first written records appear somewhere a tenth of a millimetre from the goal line: less than the thickness of a blade of grass. He explained it this way to his students but saw in their eyes that this meant too little to them. The damnable work involved in shifting perspective, in seeing oneself as small.

  In Richard’s university days, back when the virus of curiosity first took hold, a professor told him: ‘There are only three big questions worth being interested in. Why is there something in this universe, and not nothing? How did life come about? And how did it in time develop the ability to know itself?’

  The hard problems. An elaborately choreographed ritual of ignorance and disappointment, curiosity pulling them closer, contradiction hurling them back. The second question, his question, was closest to being solved.

  Richard had no trouble imagining the beginning. In amongst the chemical soup, at a certain speck of space and time, circumstance gave birth to crystals with the most remarkable property, the tendency to make copies of themselves. Perhaps the most unlikely of all coming togethers, but it had happened, so what then are we to make of unlikely? If the experiment was rerun a million times, maybe it would never again occur. Yet it had occurred, that was the apparent truth of the matter. Without cause or meaning, oblivious to implication or purpose. The new creation myth.

  Tonight, with the polls closed, and the nation holding its breath, waiting to be brought news of the collective resolution, Richard would be the keynote speaker in the celebration of The Institute’s first thirty years. People would gather to pay homage not to the details of its discoveries, but the ideas behind them, the meaning. For The Institute was, in the end, an agenda. So he would claim at least, at the start of his address. And they, the colleagues, students, reporters, benefactors, rivals and refugees, would happily receive his message. It was what they came to hear. What they would hear, even if he did not say it. They would come to be reminded of the agenda, to bask in its righteousness. After three decades of peddling the message, Richard would have no difficulty mouthing the platitudes. ‘We may be constrained by our physical world, but we are not defined by it.’ An idea, he would tell them, has a history which can not be read in our DNA. If you want evidence of the non-physical, he would say, look no further than a simple joke. One told and retold a million times over, spreading like a virus, mutating, reshaping, and yet at every telling colliding with that most physical, most human phenomenon, the smile. The relationship between the world of the physical and the world of the idea is this simple, and this mysterious.

  Easy, reassuring stuff. And they would applaud with more generosity than such recycling deserved. For this was his role. To climb the mountain on their behalf, and come back with word of the view. Yet this morning the nagging doubt that had brought him back to the lab told a different story. His last hope was that he had made a mistake, but that hope was fading. If he had a colleague he could trust, he would get them to check his processes. Eventually, if the results ever became public, they would be subjected to this sort of scrutiny. And it would become public, of course, one way or another. It wasn’t feasible he was the only person asking these questions. As the technology advanced, finding the answers would only become easier.

  Never before had Richard ever been so frightened of an idea. Alone in the lab on a Saturday morning, stepping across the floor with particular care, as if any unconsidered movement might set off a landslide. He had told Elizabeth he needed to get a copy of his speech off the work computer. An unnecessary lie: he could easily have told her he was just going to tidy up some research findings, and she wouldn’t have asked any more. It had fallen out anyway, without effort or thought.

  The computer hummed and the screen glowed bright blue. Richard typed in his password, and clicked through the tangle of subfolders and files he had used to obscure the data’s address. The stuttering code of the gene in question spread itself across the screen. He highlighted the variant section and scrolled down through the alignments. It looked as simple as a single base mistranslation. A mistake made perhaps only once in humanity’s history, and destined, like every error before it, to spread or to disappear. Five thousand years on, and still it spread. This one was a stayer.

  Each set of numbers represented part of a life. Richard did not know the individuals’ real names: each was identified by a number. Yet he knew so much about them: their age, position i
n the family, aptitude test results; it was the richness of the data that had attracted him to the study. He flicked through the profiles, half hoping that this time something new would show itself. But four times he had performed the analysis from scratch, and four times it had produced identical results.

  Richard navigated his way to the incriminating screen, exploring the pain compulsively, like a tongue probing a decaying tooth. A correlation table, distributing intellectual aptitude variance amongst the usual suspects: region, school, income, household structure. And there, hanging off the end, the strongest predictor of all: the elephant in the room, not just unspeakable but made invisible by fear. A single gene. Less than that, a single, simple mutation. That such a thing was possible was disturbing enough. That its spread should be so clearly contained by geography, that it had a racial profile, that was terrifying. Once again Richard looked, and once again he could not find the place in his head where such information might fit. Which of his most cherished thoughts would survive the rearranging, in order for this mutant to be accommodated?

  The data was only suggestive, of course; the study was not big enough to provide conclusive evidence. More work would need to be done. And he would not do it. Every time he visited this unholy shrine he told himself the same thing, he would not be this secret’s midwife. Yet he returned, again and again. He did not delete the data. It fascinated him, made him shiver with the thrill of the forbidden. He could not yet say if it was principle or fear then, that kept him from the next step. William’s argument was a strong one. Last night Richard had almost told him, forced his own hand in the manner of a coward.

  Richard closed down the computer. From the lab window he could see the university library, and beyond that, the city, smudged grey by the persistent cold. It would take determination to vote today. The uncommitted had a further reason for their silence.

  ‘ARE YOU GOING to get out of bed or what?’