Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

by Ehrenreich, Barbara

  Alcohol played a part in the escalation of the fight; at least I can think of no other excuse for my father’s behavior, not that alcohol ever performs very well as an excuse. He bellowed that he never wanted to see that “Jewboy” in our home again, leading my mother to tell him to “get the fuck out,” and I didn’t know which word to be more shocked by. I’d never heard “fuck” from my mother before, and I’d never heard “Jewboy” at all. My father obliged, slamming the door after him and no doubt heading for a dimly lit martini source where he could drink until closing time. This was the event that set my parents on the fast track to divorce. Within a year and a half, my father would marry his secretary and my mother would establish the hazardous habit of picking up men in bars and bringing them back to the apartment she shared with my siblings. Neither of them ever qualified as a role model, but as far as I was concerned, my mother had won her almost two-decade-long war with my father, who stood revealed as a stupid, drunken, bullying bigot. For the first time in my life, but by no means the last, I was ashamed of him.

  After I announced my upcoming wedding—to be performed with no fuss by a justice of the peace—I received a letter from my father’s mother saying that it was too bad I had to marry a Jew, but at my age, which was all of nineteen, it was probably the best I could do. At the time I had no idea of anti-Semitism as a widespread condition, so this seemed like an etiological breakthrough: My own grandmother was the source of contagion. I pictured her as I had last seen her in Butte, sitting in her favorite chair, as usual, because she was too fat to do much moving around, lost in a reverie about the possibility of making some money by raising chickens in the backyard. Maybe she was secretly soothing herself with the thought that, squalid and limited as her own life turned out to be, she was at least superior to Jews, though I could not imagine what they had done to incur her contempt. The Jews of Butte were mostly shopkeepers, butchers, and tailors, and not rich or overbearing at all. If you wanted someone to resent, it would be the mine owners, and they were Christian to a man. I didn’t know it at the time, but when it came to my father and grandmother, the operative slur was “white trash.”

  I didn’t marry Steve, though for reasons that had nothing to do with our ancestral religions. I may be forgetting a lot of details, but our vision of married life seems to have been notably sketchy all along. What would we do for money, since my father was unlikely to subsidize my “shacking up” with a person of dubious ethnicity? And where would we live—in the dank basement apartment that Steve shared with three other math grad students, all as pale as H. G. Wells’s Morlocks and morbidly quiet? The one thing that Steve had worked out with some precision is that although still an undergraduate, I would have a place in the University of Oregon’s brand-new Institute for Molecular Biology, assisting in their cutting-edge work on t-even phages.

  Phages are viruses that prey on bacteria, and their impact on twentieth-century biology could be compared, hyperbolically perhaps, with the impact of animal domestication on Neolithic humans. Here, finally, was an organism far more elegant and minimal than, say, fruit flies or mice—consisting of just a strand or two of nucleic acid coated with the protein it codes for. Life gets no simpler than this: a bit of genetic information and the means to make copies of it, assuming some vulnerable bacteria lie at hand to supply the machinery of protein synthesis. “Life” is of course a misnomer, since viruses, lacking the ability to eat or respire, are officially dead, which is in itself intriguing, showing as it does that the habit of predation can be taken up by clusters of molecules that are in no way alive. But in the University of Oregon laboratory, where I went to meet with my future scientific mentors, phage were just another substance, like the bottles of chemical reagents lining the shelves. They could be produced in bacterial cultures, and their nucleic acid, once extracted, could be fractionated, sequenced, and even attached to foreign genes for the experimental fun of it. Each one of these operations would require racks of sterile glassware, stacks of petri dishes maintained at constant temperature, dozens of carefully labeled test tubes, and elaborate exercises in electrophoresis. As the time for our wedding approached, I began to see that I would not only be giving up the congenial bohemian enclave that was Reed, but I would be descending to the status of a lab technician.

  It was my grandmother, the anti-Semitic one, who provided the deal-breaker, and I offer her my posthumous thanks for it now. She sent me, as a wedding present—the only one I was to receive—an electric frying pan. The implication was that Steve and I would not be able to afford a proper stove and would be reduced to cooking on a kitchen or even a bathroom counter. The prior implication was even worse—that I would be doing any cooking at all. So here was the death threat posed by human reproduction, or even marriage as a preliminary to it. I would be forced into domestic service, or at least a desperate, poverty-stricken variety of it. I sent the frying pan back to my grandmother and told Steve tearfully that I didn’t want to get married or move to Eugene or even continue to see him on weekends. He took this fairly stoically, for which I count myself lucky, because he later received a twenty-three-year prison sentence for the attempted murder of the woman he eventually married, who had, according to the local Eugene newspaper, made the mistake of asking for a divorce.

  Reimmersed in my studies at Reed, I plotted my escape from chemistry into physics. One reason was that chemistry was becoming less satisfying, more baroque and convoluted with every passing year. I’d been through the inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry courses and was facing the dense forest of “natural products” when I decided I had to try to get to the bottom of things, to the hidden level where matter was interchangeable with energy and energy could, if so inclined, resolve itself into particles. In what I can now only describe as a fit of machismo, I bypassed the first year of physics, went straight to the second, and was then catapulted, with unholy haste, into the occult world of electricity and magnetism, followed by the austere beauty of classical mechanics. Part of the allure was that the further you advanced in physics, the less likely you were to find yourself imprisoned in a lab, even for a few hours a week. Then there was the fact that I was the only girl in my physics classes, and I reasoned that the farther I got from others of my gender, the less likely I was to end up like my mother.

  It was agreed between the chemistry and physics departments that I, their awkward half-breed spawn, would be awarded a degree in something called “chemical physics.” The one remaining hurdle was my senior thesis project, which was devised by my beloved classical mechanics professor, the French-born physicist Jean Delord. Who could not love Dr. Delord, a small, wiry man with bright innocent brown eyes and, to round out the mystique, a youth spent involved in the French resistance? In addition to teaching, he consulted at Tektronix, a local company that made oscilloscopes and other equipment, and it was no doubt there that he came up with my senior thesis project. Someone had to measure “semiconductor effects on the corrosion of silicon,” as my thesis stated the project’s initial purpose, an undertaking just dull and routine enough for a reliable but hardly brilliant student like me. My father was impressed that I was finally about to contribute to the nation’s great scientific-industrial enterprise.

  But I didn’t. Delord helped me set up a little lab in what I recall as an isolated spot at the end of a dark corridor, in a building far removed from classrooms or any other form of human traffic. I had an electrometer from the physics department and a shelf full of reagents supplied by the chemistry department—my own tiny world to dominate. The expectation, as in any experiment, was that at any level of current there should be a single value of voltage to record. No freakish surprises, such as might occur while observing aggressive behavior within a troop of wild baboons, were expected, because what you hope to find in a lab is nature at its most submissive, ready to give up its secrets on command. But as I reported in my thesis, things went wrong from the start. I could not get just one value to record. “The electrode potential of 0.2 o
hm-cm. p-type Si never attained a steady value,” and “attempts to eliminate the disturbing influence failed.” In a certain ranges of voltages, instead of giving me a single number to record in my notebook, “the Si potential continued to oscillate with the regularity and persistency of an AC current.”

  Naturally the first suspect was dirt, though it was hard to imagine how a speck of foreign matter could produce such neat and orderly results. I dismantled my apparatus, replaced the polyethylene beaker that my electrodes were suspended in, scrubbed everything, and tried again. The oscillations continued as before, and repeated this idiosyncratic behavior the next day for Delord, who, suspecting “noise,” the electronic equivalent of dirt, was moved to get me a new potentiometer to replace the old electrometer, as well as a fresh supply of electrodes from Tektronix. Nothing helped. I worked late into the night, sustained by black instant coffee and Lorna Doone cookies from the snack dispenser down the corridor—adjusting one thing after another, recalibrating, recleaning—but still the system refused to cooperate. The lovely regular sinelike waves kept coming, but from what? I had to suppress the dangerously heretical thought that I was not alone in my lab.

  You see, in a laboratory the objects of interest are supposed to be dead, as they are in a morgue, or at least very near death at the time of their arrival. I learned this in the years of lab work that, sadly enough, ended up as my graduate studies in cellular and molecular biology. If you want to study cells, you have to kill them first—scrape them onto a microscope slide and “fix” them in formaldehyde. In general, the study of life usually begins with violent death, or as scientists call it, “sacrifice.” Alexander the Great is said to have begun each day with the public sacrifice of a goat or a sheep, and in the research that finally led to my Ph.D., I started each day’s work with the murder of about a dozen white mice. Holding the mouse by the tail with tweezers, I plunged it into a jar containing formaldehyde-soaked cotton batting, then pinned it down face-up with a tack through each paw, so I could cut open its belly, clamp back the skin, and remove a syringe-full of peritoneal fluid from the still-living creature. I, the Dr. Mengele of the mouse world, killed approximately twelve hundred mice this way, in the service of an education I never made any occupational use of.

  So of course I was alone in my little chemical physics lab at Reed, the peculiar voltage oscillations notwithstanding. If experimental biology begins with killing, physics, as I had concluded in high school, rules out all life from the start. I’m not just talking about Newtonian “inertia,” the property that prevents inorganic matter from going anywhere on its own. There is the, from my point of view, even more formidable second law of thermodynamics, which says that, at least in a “closed system,” everything tends toward death, or toward rot, or at least toward extreme boringness. Add a few drops of red liquid to a beaker of water and the intricate swirls of color will quickly dissipate into a homogeneous pink. Let the universe run its course and it will eventually arrive at state of uniform “heat death,” without stars or planets or of course astronomers to observe them. Entropy can only increase; order cannot arise out of disorder; patterns do not emerge out of formlessness. And if electrons have to get from one electrode to another, they’re going to take the shortest route, without breaking out into some ritual of rhythmic swaying on the way, as my voltage readings seemed to suggest.

  Dr. Delord’s disappointment was obvious. I had been given a simple, even conceptually simple-minded task and had failed spectacularly. One of his classical mechanics lectures had begun with the electrifying words, “Take the sun…,” and I had felt for a moment as if that burning orb had been passed directly to me. Now I had dropped it. He alone could testify that I had done nothing wrong. He had supplied my equipment and materials; he had run the experiment himself and I had seen his shoulders slump when he generated the same bizarrely lifelike results as I had. But the bottom line was that Tektronix would not get the straightforward data it was expecting, and I had no “thesis” to advance, which meant that I might not graduate and move on, as in the normal course of human development, to graduate school.

  It was almost April and time was running out. My life contracted into the confines of my lab, where for a while I tried to reassert control by determining what factors, such as temperature and the concentration of hydrofluoric acid, affected the frequency and amplitude of the oscillations. But no consistent patterns emerged. I was in charge in only one way: I controlled the switch that supplied the power that set the whole ungovernable chain of events into action. When I decided to bike home at the end of the evening, through the rain and fog of a Portland night, that was it: The party was over. Other than that, though, the oscillations kept recurring—sometimes neat and sinusoidal, sometimes spiky and irregular. Of course nothing in my little circuit “wanted” anything, but the persistent oscillations invited a kind of anthropomorphism: Something was mocking me. I began to look at my smooth-faced electrodes with fear and the beginnings of anger. How would you like it, fuckers, if I gave you a bath in pure hydrofluoric acid?

  When the time came to write up my results, such as they were, only a few weeks before the deadline, I made a cool assessment of the situation, then went to the chemical supply room and ordered a jar of reagent-grade Dexedrine, which as far as I knew was perfectly legal. I’d had very few experiences of psychoactive drugs, which were just beginning to show up on campus, but my one prior use of a drug as a study aid had been brilliantly successful. A few months earlier I had taken a Ritalin pill the afternoon before an oral exam in organic chemistry and stayed up all night rereading the textbook, right down to the footnotes, in a state of obsessive fascination, with the result that I dazzled the organic chemistry professor, whose enthusiastic recommendation helped earn me admission to the elite graduate school of my choice.

  I didn’t know exactly what Dexedrine would do, but I was pretty sure the effects did not include sleep, which I calculated I had no more time for. The initial surge of the drug empowered me to fill page after page with differential equations and graphs linking current, impedance, and concentrations of reagents, desperate to see some new pattern emerge. But about forty-eight hours into sleep deprivation, the waves of oscillations in my graphs began to take liquid form and carry me out into a dark and infinite sea. Maybe this was just too deep for me and I would never make my way out. Dexedrine offers no hallucinations or, as far as I can tell, any insights of either the mystical or rational variety. But it did occur to me again, as the sky lightened on the third morning of sleeplessness, that maybe I had not been alone in the lab. I could have been up against some sort of living antagonist, a low-level demiurge concerned with protecting the surface of semiconductors from the etchings and other torments inflicted by humans. It is striking, when I look back on it, how much my experiments, with their acid baths and jolts of current, resembled contemporary forms of torture. The information I wanted to extract was simple enough, something like, “The effect of corrosion on the silicon electrode was found to be…,” which could then be further condensed to “Barbara Alexander has completed her thesis requirement…”

  Or maybe I had encountered something higher up in the chain of command than an ordinary demiurge, something that was attempting to communicate with me through the voltage tracings, if only I could make out the message. What if it was the same Other, or at least the same category of entity, that I had encountered in the mountains and desert almost exactly four years earlier?

  But that would be crazy—worse than crazy, it would be paranoid. What was I imagining—that I was being pursued? I had decided shortly after Lone Pine that there was no Other to encounter, that what had happened in the mountains was a process occurring entirely within my own mind, meaning brain, and eventually explainable in terms of observable activities at the cellular level, such as the synchronization of neuronal firing patterns and sudden “avalanches” of neural activity. So too the much simpler silicon electrode could be forced to give up its secrets, because it is the b
usiness of science to crush all forms of alien intention and replace them with predictable mechanisms.

  Upping the dose of Dexedrine barely allowed me to tread water, with the result that as soon as I turned in my thesis, I collapsed, turned blue, and became too breathless to ride my bike. Medical attention was certainly warranted, but I just drank a couple of beers with my housemate, who had participated in the Dexedrine orgy with me, and fell into a fourteen-hour sleep. If I can no longer understand my thesis today, entitled “Electrochemical Oscillations at the Silicon Anode” and kindly shipped to me by Reed College, it may not only be because I have forgotten calculus and electrochemistry. I suspect that a deep, churning, chemically induced incoherence runs through it.

  Dr. Delord accepted the draft of my thesis, thus allowing me to graduate, but only on the condition that I spend part of my summer in the superior technical libraries of New York City, where my graduate school was located, trying to find a few more precedents than the rather diffident and inconclusive ones I had so far collected. It would be impossible, in the view of the physics faculty, to report something completely anomalous that had never been observed before. The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education. So if I had seen waves, someone before me, older and suitably credentialed, must at least have seen a few ripples. In the hierarchical world of science, the young have little to offer except their obeisance.

  Thanks to the 42nd Street New York Public Library, with its deep archives of foreign and early-twentieth-century scientific journals, I did find a few more precedents, both for oscillations at the silicon electrode and for “anomalous,” lifelike chemical reactions in general. At that particular time, the consensus among the small number of chemists who had looked into these matters seemed to be that the voltage oscillations corresponded to the formation and subsequent dissolution of an oxide film on the silicon electrode, although the reason for the oscillations, as opposed to normal, continuously flowing chemical reactions, remained unclear. Still, I was by no means exonerated. When I told my father about the oxide film theory, he snorted that the only thing I had “discovered” in my research was a “dirty electrode,” which left me feeling that I was the source of pollution after all. For decades, I tried to put that thesis out of my mind, as if it had been a bout of public incontinence or some similar occasion of shame.