SUCCESS
Dr. Jim lost his job at the University at the unripe age of 36. As brilliant as he was (and this was one brilliant man), his eccentricity had mushroomed during his tenure, and in the end this made him a liability. In his early years at the U he had published extensively, dozens of papers, all of them notable and a few truly groundbreaking. Then, abruptly, he stopped. Not for lack of results or new ideas (or, for that matter, requests from eminent journals for a submission—any submission—he might deign to send their way), but because, in his words, he had better things to do with his time.
“Better? Meaning what, exactly?” the chairman of his department had asked.
“Meaning I can’t be bothered with publishing papers. Meaning the answer is bigger. Meaning I have an idea how it all fits together. All of it. Molecule, cell, person. There’s a Unifying Theory of Life, and I get a glimpse of it sometimes, and I feel it sometimes, too, in my body, a tingling, a premonition, but I can’t feel it, or see it, for long. Holding on to it is like balancing a pin on my forehead. I need practice. I need time. I can’t be interrupted. Grant applications are an interruption. Bench work is an interruption. Thinking up one new experiment after another gets in the way. I’m not interested in data collection anymore. I need to do research of a different kind.”
These were not the words of a man who valued his professional career, and certainly not of a man who lived to please his employers. Still, the University indulged him. His work was too respected and important not to. But after several years of escalating complaints from colleagues and students—he was rude; he was unprofessional; he was unapproachable; he was monstrous; he was grandiose—they cut him loose.
Over the next year reports trickled in of continued erratic and unpredictable behavior (spending sprees, e-mail rants, public and professional diatribes), and at length he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. All such admissions require a diagnosis, and his, provisionally, was Mania, of the sub-type Accelerando, of the sub-sub-type Non Fugax. Mania Accelerando Non Fugax, known commonly as Flaming Man Disease. By this point he had been flaming for quite some time and had burned many bridges: he’d spent all his money, lost his home, his professional standing, his friends, and, finally, his wife.
There was some disagreement among the psychiatrists as to his diagnosis. There were features that didn’t fit the classic definition of FMD, one being that he had no history of mental illness. Another: there was no family history of it, either. Most troublesome of all (and most problematic, diagnosis-wise), he didn’t respond to medication. And FMD did, reliably. If not one drug, then another. And if not a single drug, then a combination of drugs: two, three, sometimes four of the bad boys, what they liked to call a cocktail.
But two, three, four had no effect on Dr. Jim. No matter what he took or was forced to take, he remained the man who first was wheeled down the corridor: wild-eyed, wacky, savage at times, brilliant at other times, hyperactive, insomniac, volatile, and unreachable, as detached from his caregivers as a hinge torn free of its door.
A meeting was held regarding what to do next. When a treatment that is known to succeed one-hundred percent of the time does not, there are basically two choices, as his panel of clinicians well knew:
1. Question the diagnosis.
2. Question the treatment.
In the best of all worlds, the questioning should proceed in that order, but time was short, the budget was tight, and there were other meetings to attend and other patients to cure. And while diagnosing a tricky illness was always satisfying, discovering a new treatment, for those impatient to get on with things, was an order of magnitude more satisfying: it was the difference between building a rocket and flying a rocket, between Sherlock and Santa.
A combination of electric, magnetic and sonic shock, both extra-corporeal (at a distance) and intra-corporeal (by means of a cranial stimulator, linked wirelessly with esophageal and anal emitters), delivered in asynchronous “swan-neck” pulses over a period of hours, was settled on. (The idea, basically, was to shock the bejesus out of him and hope for the best.) The night before he was to enter the pantheon of brave and nameless medical pioneers (in this case, as the first to receive a treatment that would later, god help us, become the standard of care), he was shaved, showered, and dutifully prepared.
At nine o’clock he was seen nervously pacing his room. He looked agitated. His eyes were as wild as ever and he appeared to have no idea who or where he was.
At ten o’clock he was seen lying on his bed.
At eleven o’clock he was still lying on his bed, but this time his eyes were closed.
At midnight the room was empty. It was as if he’d vanished into thin air.
The alarm was raised. Patients were roused from sleep. Every inch of the hospital was searched. Eventually, the police were called in, but they had no better luck than the hospital staff in finding him. A day went by, then another. His disappearance fueled rumors among the patients of alien abduction, interdimensional travel, suicide, homicide, and your basic institutional foul play. A meeting was scheduled to squelch these rumors, but the night before, the third night of his disappearance, an orderly and a nurse slipped into his now vacant room for a quick one.
It was dark, and they didn’t see the shape stretched out on the bed. Didn’t know there was a shape, much less a human one, until the nurse, straddling the orderly’s hips, arching back and uttering a crescendoing series of deep-throated moans as he acrobatically and prestidigitationally multitasked her voluptuous external and internal parts, felt the touch of flesh on her shoulder blade. She let out a yelp.
The orderly, fully aroused, delivered his package, then eased her down to the floor. Hurriedly, they reassembled themselves, then flicked on the light. Lying on the bed, freshly shaved and in a natty new set of threads, was Dr. Jim. His eyes were closed, as though to spare them the embarrassment of having been seen. Neither of them believed he was asleep.
The nurse smoothed her rumpled scrubs, cleared her throat and said his name. His eyelids fluttered open and he turned his head. He looked surprised to see them, or at least he acted surprised, along the lines of “what a nice surprise,” as though theirs were an unexpected but welcome visit. Pointedly, he didn’t act crazy.
He sat up in bed, and he and the nurse had a conversation. It was lively, amicable, comprehensible, and sane. In short, nothing like previous conversations he had had. What it wasn’t was informative. Dr. Jim offered no explanation for where he’d gone or what had happened. When asked, first by the nurse and later, repeatedly, by a procession of psychiatrists, he professed ignorance. But clearly something had.
He was changed in nearly every way, from his appearance, which was no longer slovenly, to his manner, which was no longer like a relationship gone bad. His voice was calm and composed. His speech was clear, his reasoning logical and precise. He looked his interlocutors in the eye when he spoke. His facial expressions were appropriate accompaniments to what he said. He smiled when a smile was called for, knit his brows when a difficult question was asked. His behavior, which, at best, had been bizarre, and at worst, menacing and provocative, could have been lifted from Emily Post.
He was, in short, an exemplary patient. A civilized, approachable man and a credit to his—the human—race.They observed him for a week, tested him, retested him, then let him go. With no job, no house, and no wife, he pretty much had to start from scratch.
Fast-forward five years. Dr. Jim has a new wife. He has a new house, a modest two story post-and-beamer with a basement and a fenced-in backyard. His dream of finding and elucidating the Unifying Theory of Life on Earth is very much alive, as is his faith that the answer lies in the biological sphere, and further, in the molecular biological sphere, to wit, the gene, the epigene, and the perigene, the so-called holy trinity of creation and life. There are, of course, other spheres, non-biological ones, along with non-biological answers, and these, he assumes, will make themselves known when the time is rig
ht.
For now his hands are full. There’s the house to take care of. There are his daily visits to the basement. There’s his wife, Carol, a stellar woman of unparalleled beauty and intelligence. And of course there’s the dream, which occupies center stage.
For the past four years, Dr. Jim has been working feverishly to put his dream into words, to make it concrete, comprehensible, and readable, so that others can know it, too. He no longer uses a lab of his own, has no need of a lab—his mind is a lab, and it pullulates with thought experiments. In addition, he culls through the work of others. He has learned the rudiments of half a dozen languages, reads extensively, and keeps in touch with researchers around the globe. His name can still open doors (though with roughly equal frequency it closes them); to avoid awkwardness or misunderstanding he mostly uses a pseudonym: Dr. Jean Marckine, a play on the great Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, unjustly disdained and discredited in his own time and for many years thereafter, and presently in the process of being rehabilitated. And soon, if Dr. Jean Marckine has anything to say about it, to be raised to the pedestal upon which he belongs.
Dr. Jim is writing a book. Already it’s more than five hundred pages long. The first three hundred pages describe, in the briefest possible terms, the gene, a hopeless but necessary task. The next two hundred concern the epigene, and he is far from done. The complex of histone, protein, and DNA, the shifting chimera of amino and nucleic acids, forming and breaking covalent and ionic bonds like on-again, off-again lovers, deserves a book of its own. For if the gene is the key, the code of life, the epigene is the hand that turns the key, the force behind the code. The epigene cradles the gene, it gives structure and organization and flexibility to the genome. Elucidating it has been his life’s work, up to now.
Of late the going has been slow. Some days he sees clearly and writes up a storm; other days his vision is clouded, cataracted, and he produces little of worth. The epigene will not give up its secrets lightly, and the closer he gets, the more it seems to resist his efforts. Now and then he feels as if he’s in a dogfight, much as he feels when he goes downstairs. But it will yield to him: in time it will yield completely. Of this he has no doubt.
The perigene, he hopes, will also yield, though the when and the how are less certain. The task confronting him is so much greater and will therefore require commensurately greater, deeper, and more profound levels of imagination and thought. For as the epigene is to the gene, so the perigene is to the epigene: more complex by far, cryptic, Delphic, cosmic, grand, and elusive. It will be the final section of the book and its crowning achievement, the centerpiece of the Unifying Theory of Life.
He can’t wait to get started on it and at the same time is almost afraid to begin, a paradox common to all great endeavors and forays into the unknown, and the perigene most certainly is this. Its existence, far from being the subject of a healthy debate, is on nobody’s radar, nobody’s tongue. It’s a mystery of the most mysterious sort—one that is never mentioned, never acknowledged, never discussed. One might say it’s his own conceit and creation.
To which he would respond: not a creation but a prediction, along the lines of gravity, relativity, and the Higgs boson. The perigene is a fact of life and law of nature, merely waiting for the proper experiment to be observed firsthand.
But that’s in the future. His present task is to do justice to the epigene, which is taking all his considerable mental muscle and then some. In periods, like now, when the going is slow, frustratingly so at times, calculated, or so it feels, to bleed a man of his confidence, he gives thanks for the two pillars of his life, without whom he would almost certainly crumble:
*** First and foremost, his wife Carol, an impeccable woman of energy, stability, self-discipline, and mental prowess. She heard him lecture once when she was in graduate school, was duly impressed, ran into him years later as a post-doc, and from there things evolved. Like him, she values the life of the mind, but she’s not apt to go overboard and lose her mind—to impulse, say, or whim, or folly. She’s as balanced as a judge, as organized and orderly as a statistician. She’s driven, but not to distraction, has a clear vision of her future and feet that are planted firmly on the ground.
*** Second and also foremost, the creature downstairs, who is nameless. He gives himself no name, and Dr. Jim is not about to give him one either. Providing him a name would be like bestowing on him a quality he lacks, legitimizing and at the same time compromising him, robbing him in a sense, like offering a man a suit of clothes in exchange for the man himself.
From Dr. Jim’s Diary:
Wednesday, October 14th. Wake up, roll out of bed, throw on some clothes, go downstairs. He’s waiting for me, as usual.
We fight.
I win.
Hunker down with Chapter Seventeen (Epigenetic Control of Transcription). Progress slow, then sudden. Inch inch inch along, then leap ahead.
Very much like evolution.
Which had a middling good day.
Thursday, October 15th. Wake up, stagger out of bed, take a leak, stop in the kitchen for a mini-bowl of Mini-Wheats, then down to the frigid basement. There’s a twisted hairline crack developing in the concrete floor. Resembles a helix, smashed and flattened like a bug on a windshield. The bars of the cage are icy cold.
He looks sleepy. I’m unimpressed. He has a million looks.
We fight.
I win.
Get stuck on the idea of the histone as a spool of thread. Perseverate. Get nowhere. Rescued by Carol, who takes me to lunch.
Tuesday, October 20th. Get downstairs later than usual on account of last night, when Carol came to bed after I was half-asleep and made it known by lying absolutely and unnaturally still and quiet that she was not about to fall asleep anytime soon but was determined not to make me pay the price for that, bless her heart, although if I, of my own free will, chose to wake up in order to find out what was bothering her, not that I need to know everything, or that she even wants me to, but it’s a relief to talk and have someone listen, or even pretend to listen as long as it’s convincing (and why that is I don’t think anybody knows for sure . . . question: does talking upregulate genes, leading to more talking, and is this Lamarckian, i.e., inheritable? Will future generations of upregulated talkers increase their affinity for oxygen so they don’t turn blue in the face, or talk themselves to death? Will listeners similarly upregulate their listening genes? Crazy people often talk—and listen—to no one, and no one wants to be like that, but I digress), then that would be a mark in my favor. It’s the little sacrifices that keep the marriage ship on course.
So we talked, and after that we made love. Carol was a hellcat, which talk can do to a woman. She tore off my clothes, then pushed me down, sat on my chest, and raked my sides with her nails. While she was doing that, she bent over and poured her tongue into my mouth, soft and sweet as honey, then hardened it and rammed it at my throat, like I was ramming her. She bit my neck, then moved south and had a go at my nipples. I wasn’t complaining through any of this, except when she got carried away and took the poor little nubs between her canines. I yelped then and she stopped, no blood drawn.
Woke in the morning with the sun on my face. Still wiped out from the previous night, but do what I have to. He’s standing on the other side of the cage when I stumble down, big and tall and hairy, puffed out in the chest like a bag of Cheetos. He smiles that toothy smile of his, looking smug, and sensing an advantage, takes a step forward. The punk. Trying to get me to make a false move. That, and pull me down to his level. That low-ass level of his. Daring me to dirty my hands.
Thing is, I got no problem with that level. I like that level. He of all people should know.
We fight. Boom boom. It’s over in an instant.
I’m buzzing with energy when I get upstairs, but for some reason it doesn’t translate into progress on the book. This is becoming more and more of a daily occurrence, and I can’t begin to describe how frustrating it is. It’s not like the e
pigene isn’t known. It’s been studied and characterized in a fair amount of detail, and while it’s true that I’m breaking new ground, it shouldn’t be this hard. The damn thing should be there for me, but I keep hitting a wall, and I know it’s a wall of my own making. Can’t see over it and can’t quite punch through it. As if something besides the epigene is at work, raising and thickening the wall, making it impervious to me. This, I’m convinced, can only be one thing: the perigene, its commander-in-chief.
So elusive. So potent. Taunting, humbling, and, so far, defeating me.
Carol’s in the kitchen when I come downstairs from a wasted morning in my study.
“How’s it going?” she asks.
I grunt my displeasure.
She motions toward the basement. “How about down there?”
I shouldn’t have to tell her that conversation’s off-limits.
There’s an awkward moment, then she hands me a king-size box. “I bought you something yesterday.”
Inside is a brand-new shirt with a matching tie and a crisp new pair of pants. The woman is devious.
“A little pick-me-up,” she says. “That’s all.”
“Dress for success” is one of her mottoes. Meaning, do something for yourself, and your self will thank you. She’s very Lamarckian that way.
“You might want to shave, too.”
It’s been a few days. I see where she’s going with this.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her.
“I’ll wait,” she says.
I end up doing the whole works—shave, shower, shampoo, new duds. Half an hour later I return to showcase the updated product.
All I Ever Dreamed Page 38