All I Ever Dreamed

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All I Ever Dreamed Page 39

by Michael Blumlein


  “How do the pants fit?” she asks.

  “Perfectly.”

  “You look good.”

  “I feel good.”

  She nods, as though this were obvious. “I’m going to be gone for a couple of days. There’s a conference I need to attend. It’s a last-minute thing.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll call.”

  She’s standing by the window that overlooks our weedy and neglected yard. Usually she keeps the curtains drawn because she hates how it looks. She hates clutter and chaos of all sorts, whether natural or man-made. You’d think we’d get out there and do something about it, but neither of us has had time.

  Today, for whatever reason, the curtains are open. I find myself staring.

  “See something?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. I had a thought.”

  “Which was?”

  “The weeds. Look at how they grow—higher and higher, as though reaching for something.”

  “The sun.”

  “In their case, yes. But something else could reach for something else.”

  “Such as what?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You going to cut them down?”

  “The weeds? I might.”

  “Do you know how happy that would make me?”

  “Put something else in their place.”

  “Anything would be better.”

  “Not just anything.”

  She gives me a look. Her eyes like diamonds. Her short blonde hair (which is how she wears it, having no use for the long and messy curls nature gave her) rimming her perfect face like a nimbus.

  “You had a glimpse of something,” she says. “What?”

  I shrug.

  “C’mon. You did. What was it?”

  “It’s gone.”

  She comes up and punches me on the arm. “It’s not gone, bozo.”

  She tightens the knot on my tie, straightens my collar and smoothes my shirt. Making me neat and tidy, folding me—like the stuff she brought in the box—into the right shape, bringing order to chaos, bringing me, that is, into her own special universe, accepting no less. In response, I throw back my shoulders and straighten my neck, as if rising to her expectations, and in a flash it comes to me, like a bolt from above: the epigene is a marriage. It’s the union of two separate and complementary entities, two lovers—gene and protein—in an ever-changing dance. And if all goes as it should, an ever-changing harmony. It’s a piece of work that’s never finished, like a building under continual construction and remodeling. One small alteration—to the histone, say, the protein scaffold—and the entire complex changes. If one were to build the epigene, represent it visually, in space, it would be a structure of constant self-adjustment and shifting shape, with a default of perfect balance. It would be mobile and highly internally interactive. A thing of perfect logic and supreme beauty.

  A ballroom of coupling and uncoupling molecules.

  A church, wedding form and function. A reflection, however pale, and a conduit, however hidden at this point, to the Highest Power, The Unifying Principle of Life.

  This is the epigene, and I can demonstrate it.

  And the perigene? The Highest Power itself?

  That comes next.

  All this occurs to me in the blink of an eye. Carol, my delivering angel, smiles a knowing smile, takes me by the shoulders, turns me around and gives me a gentle shove in the back.

  “Go get ’em, champ.”

  * * * * * * * * *

  It’s a huge relief to use his body instead of his head. He spends a good week clearing out the yard. Gets rid of junk, pulls weeds, digs up roots, cuts down shrubs and the one small, disease-ridden tree. When he’s done, there’s a clearing about half the size of the house’s footprint.

  For the next stage, he’s jotted down some notes and drawn up a preliminary design. The idea is that the structure will be a bridge to the book. When completed, it will loosen his tongue, unblocking whatever it is that has him at such an impasse, and the rest of the epigene section will write itself. That’s the plan, and why the hell not? Man had hands long before books, and he used them quite nicely to express himself. Caves were painted long before the Dead Sea Scrolls were inscribed. Pots were thrown. Figurines were sculpted. Cairns and henges were built to communicate complex ideas, only much later transcribed with ink and pen. All of which merely goes to show what every monkey knows: the spatial brain underlies the speaking brain, just as the roots and trunk of a tree prefigure its crown. Dreams and wordless visions traffic between the two, and Dr. Jim intends to take advantage of this by writing his dream and his vision in space.

  He’s no Michelangelo. But what he lacks in expertise, he makes up for in panache. He uses bought, found, and scavenged materials—from copper pipes to plastic tubes, from lengths of wood to auto parts (axels, shafts, and rods), from moving gears to strips of sheet metal, from circuit boards to computer screens—basically anything he can get his hands on. These he attaches and assembles in whatever way seems most suitable and appropriate: by bolt, nail, glue, duct tape (naturally), wire, rivet, weld. A fat extension cord snakes from the house to power the electronics as well as the small motors that move the various ball joints, winches, chains and gears. The years he spent in his uncle’s machine shop, daydreaming and slaving away, are finally rewarded. In a month, his creation stands five feet tall and ten feet wide. It moves with a ceaseless, jerky, rickety-rackety energy, some­how managing not to tip over. It resembles a spastic, multi-limbed robot that can’t make up its mind what to do with itself. That, or a primitive, possibly alien, probe. It also resembles what it is: a junkyard raised by its bootstraps. To Dr. Jim, however, who knows that the epigene is comprised of molecules at least as odd-looking and diverse, it’s just the beginning of his life-sized model of reality.

  He works nonstop, from dawn to dusk, breaking only when Carol happens to come out. He loves her visits, which never fail to take him by surprise, so absorbed is he in his project. He loves her fearless eye and supple intelligence. He loves how she keeps her distance, allowing him his freedom, and at the same time finds ways to encourage him. He loves her face and her body, and how, on occasion, usually at his instigation, that face and that body attach themselves to him.

  She, in turn, loves to see him being productive again. She loves to watch him from the kitchen window, half-hidden, before she leaves for work. His boundless energy. His brain. His hair, which is lengthening, and the way he tosses his head to get it out of his face. His shirt (she makes sure he wears a clean one every day) stained with sweat. His facility with tools. His creative bursts. It’s as though, through this new, sideways endeavor, this temporary substitution of one form of expression for another, he’s been unchained.

  Like Hercules, she thinks proudly.

  Like Samson.

  Like that animal . . . what’s its name? The one with three heads. The dog, straining at its leash. Cerberus.

  But no. That would not be her Dr. Jim. Dr. Jim has freed himself of his leash.

  Cerberus would be someone else.

  Carol’s Diary:

  Carol’s diary is blank.

  * * * * * * * * *

  Carol, née Schneeman, now James, took her degree in anthro­pology, with a minor in biology, and parlayed these into a doctorate in one of late-century academia’s favorite inventions, the hybrid career. Hers is called ethnobiology, and her particular area of interest is inheritance, specifically the interplay between individual inheritance and group inheritance, between genetic and non-genetic modes of transmission of human information and behavior. The dance, as she likes to say, between molecules and memes. She teaches and does research at the local university, and unlike her formidable husband has no trouble fitting in and getting along.

  On the contrary, the job is nearly a perfect match. She likes being part of an institution, likes the stability, the structure, the hierarchy, the clear expectations and tiered chain of comma
nd. Having rules frees her from having to waste time ruling herself, and knowing her role frees her to inhabit that role fully. She’s a star on the rise and has been steadily climbing the academic ladder. Her sights are set on tenure, and a decision on whether or not she receives it will be made before the year is out.

  The chances are good, but there’s no guarantee. The field is small and highly competitive, and budgets everywhere are tight. What she needs is another publication. And not just any publication, but something exceptional, to put her name squarely on the map.

  She has no dearth of ideas and has made a list of the seven that excite her most. She has put in countless hours of preliminary research, drawn up detailed outlines, including a meticulous inventory of the pros and cons of each. She is nothing if not conscientious, which for her is merely another word for doing the job.

  She has set herself a deadline of December 1st, so she’ll have the winter break to get a jump start. By the end of November she has whittled the list to three topics. She saves then e-mails the list to herself, intending to have a final look at it that night. If necessary, she’ll sleep on it and come to a decision in the morning.

  Arriving home, she finds her husband hard at work, and she takes a moment to watch him unobserved. The piece is growing, in both size and strangeness. No surprise there. Nor is she surprised by her reaction to it: amazement and indigestion. The thing has not yet reached above the fence, and they have an agreement that he will stop before it does. The question is, will he honor the agreement? And how far is she willing to go to enforce it if he doesn’t? A clash seems inevitable, which she’d prefer to avoid, not for fear of conflict so much as for the chaos of emotion that is sure to follow in its wake. As a preemptive measure, a sort of prophylactic antidote, she goes inside and straightens up the house. Afterwards, she feels better, and better still after swigging down a healthy helping of antacid, its viscousy chalkiness dulling the burn like a protective coat of paint.

  Fortified, she’s able to turn a calmer and less partisan eye on the mad chimera of her husband’s fevered brain. She asks herself if good science can truly come of bad, or at least undisciplined, art. She herself could never work this way, but she herself is not the subject.

  The man who is has his own trippy way of thinking when he’s doing science (conceiving and designing experiments, for example), or when, like now, he’s doing science once removed. He appears to work at random, but she knows this isn’t the case. He has a plan, even if he can’t articulate it. He’ll execute it, and once it’s done, he’ll know what it was to begin with. (This would be like working backwards for her.) His eccentricity looks eruptive, even slapdash, but it bears the stamp of an interior design.

  She can kind of see what he’s getting at, the spiraling core of pipes and tubes, which must represent strands of DNA, the chunkier lattice of wood and metal surrounding it, like a supporting structure, each section moving and bending through hinge and ball-and-socket joints and rotating gears, smoothly at times but mostly not. Herky-jerky and spastic, like a newborn’s twitchy limbs, but less every day, also like a newborn. Self-corrective and decidedly interactive. It’s his vision of the epigene, which they’ve talked about, and which, in fact, is on her final list of topics. Not his vision of it, but hers.

  The epigene, so her thinking goes, is not simply a biological phenomenon, it’s a model for how change of any sort—on an individual level and on a larger scale, a societal scale—occurs. And how the different levels of change influence one another and interact. It can be used to describe and predict political, cultural, biological, psychological, anthropological and sociological transformations (any and all of which, she suspects, can be given eigenvalues). Potentially, a powerful tool. And it hasn’t been written about, not in the ethnobiology literature, which means the field is wide open.

  She sleeps a dreamless night, which is how she likes them, wakes early, and intercepts her husband before he disappears downstairs. This is critical, because once he does that, any meaningful conversation is pretty much a lost cause.

  “Can we talk for a minute?” she asks.

  He steals a glance at the basement door, gives a curt nod.

  “It’s about me,” she adds in the interest of full disclosure.

  What he wants most is to get to work. Second-most is for his Carol to be happy.

  “You know what I was before a scientist?” he asks.

  It’s not the best beginning, but she plays along. “What’s that?”

  “I collected beetles. Studied them, labeled them. Like Darwin. Raised some, too. Left the collection to my science teacher when I graduated high school.”

  “And you tell me this because . . .”

  “There’re three skills you need to be a successful collector. One, you need to be curious. Two, you need to be patient. Three, you need to be able to pay attention.”

  She gives him a look, like “are you kidding me?” Then one of her eyebrows rises, just the one, which she can do only if she doesn’t try. If she does try . . . nothing. It’s controlled from somewhere beyond her control, like a tic but with a beautiful, arching purpose, and it happens once in a blue moon, when curiosity, skepticism, and annoyance intersect.

  “So this is what? Yes, you’ll listen to me? Or yes, you’ll observe me and take notes?”

  “I’ll give you my thorough and undivided attention.”

  She knows he’s capable of this. For how long is always the question.

  “Thank you. I could use your help.”

  She leads him to the living room, which has a pair of windows, one facing the street; the other, the yard. The latter is a potential distraction for him, but less of one than the door and stairway to the basement, which are like the siren’s call. He can only resist them for a certain amount of time, mainly, she assumes, because he doesn’t want to resist. If he did want to but couldn’t, she would worry that something was seriously wrong.

  He takes the sofa, placing his back to the window overlooking the yard, and makes eye contact with her.

  It’s a gesture of sincerity on his part, and feeling bullish—provisionally—about the upcoming conversation, she lowers herself into an armchair. “I’m coming up for tenure soon.” Pauses, can’t tell if his look is expectant or blank. “You know that, right?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “I’ve decided to write a paper on the epigene. My side of it, my version. A view through the ethnobiological lens.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I’d like to pick your brain.”

  He half-turns his head toward the window and makes a flourish with his hand. “There it is.”

  “Will it bother you? My writing about it?” She means before he does.

  “Not at all. Pick away.”

  She summarizes what she’s read: the epigene is a dynamic system. It’s in a state of continual flux, but every so often something gets fixed in place. A molecule is attached at a certain spot, and this causes a permanent change.

  “Correct,” he says. “Relatively permanent.”

  “And this is different and distinct from a change—a mutation, say—in the DNA. Which is what people usually think of when they think of permanent genetic change.”

  “Not molecular biologists.”

  “Normal people,” she says.

  “A benighted bunch.”

  She pushes on. “And the reason this molecule is formed, then attached, can be due to a number of factors. Hormones, for example. The environment. Stress.”

  “Yes. The engine of progress, fortunately, has many triggers­.”

  “And this change can be inherited.”

  “For a generation or two. In certain cases more.”

  “So evolution can be fast, not slow. It doesn’t need eons to manifest itself.” The idea is as exciting now as when she first heard of it.

  “It’s always fast, when it happens.”

  “What I mean is, it doesn’t have to be random. It can be responsive and even p
urposeful.”

  Purpose, he would say, is a human concept. Evolution of whatever stripe conforms to the laws of chemistry and physics, not the laws and needs of man. But that’s a discussion for a different time and place. Fundamentally—biologically, that is—she is right.

  “Expression is the key,” he says. “Everything else is just wishful thinking. A change in the epigene or even the DNA sequence does nothing if it doesn’t result in other changes: transcriptional or translational changes, in RNA expression and protein synthesis. Otherwise it just sits there, like a train in the station. Only when the train starts moving does it actually become what it is. Only then does it deserve the name train.”

  “I like this,” she says. “Random mutation is so . . . so . . . random. So passive. So gloomy. It cheers me up to know we can do something. We can adjust. We do adjust.”

  “Constantly.”

  “I like the idea that we’re in active conversation with everyone and everything, whether we know it or not. We’re participants, not bystanders. We can control who we are and who we become.”

  “To a degree,” he says, then adds, “Control appeals to you.”

  “Self-control, yes. And I like that we’re not complete pawns in the game. That we have something to say about our destiny. I like it because I like it, and I like it even more because it’s true.”

  “You’re an idealist.”

  “I’m an optimist,” she offers as an alternative.

  “I’m one, too. But realistically, there’s only so much we can do.”

  “Of course. We’re only human.”

  He grins. “Will you mention Lamarck?”

  “I will. How could I not? Epigenetics should have a footnote with his name attached.”

  On this they agree. It wasn’t called epigenetics back in those explosive eighteenth and nineteenth century days of observational science, but rather the inheritance of acquired traits, a controversial theory, the most famous example of which was the progressive lengthening of a giraffe’s neck so that it could reach higher leaves and thus out-compete its fellow giraffes. Such a trait, so the thinking went, was passed on to its progeny. A fair number of scientists held this opinion in an often heated and partisan debate, but it was only one arrow Lamarck’s remarkable quiver. His observations and conclusions about the natural sphere were seminal. He was among the first to believe—and demonstrate—that the world was an orderly place, built and governed according to immutable natural laws. This was before Darwin, who later paid homage to him.

 

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