The Explanation for Everything: A Novel

by Lauren Grodstein

  “So you haven’t been sober?”

  “Andy! I’ve been sober as a deacon! I mean I’ve never been drunk. I don’t get drunk anymore. I just had that one glass every so often. Or sometimes two.”

  Which was nonsense, he’d seen her in the car, but he let it pass.

  “Anyway, Thursday’s my day off, and I drove by the liquor store on Route 84, and I thought, what the fuck, I don’t feel like going to a bar in Philly, I don’t feel like finding some sad New Jersey pub somewhere, I want to go home and sit outside in the grass and have myself a drink. Or several. I mean I knew when I bought that big bottle that maybe I’d have several, but that’s not what I told myself. I told myself it would just be one glass, outside, because it’s such a nice day. But also if I was going to start drinking again in a responsible way then it would be responsible, costwise, to just buy the big bottle.” Downstairs, Jeremy shouted at his game.

  “I could see how that might seem logical,” Andy said.

  “Please, it’s bullshit. But that’s what the alcoholic brain instructs you to do. Or at least my alcoholic brain.”

  People and mice. Mice and people. Andy felt he should confess to her the failure with his mice but he would wait, tell her later.

  “Anyway, I forgot about the medication I’m on. Wellbutrin, it’s like an antidepressant, but it’s also supposed to help me stay sober. It makes you really, really sick if you drink too much. You can get away with one glass, maybe—but drink as much as I did and it really knocks you out. I’ve been out on my ass since three this afternoon.”

  “How much did you drink?”

  “As much as was there,” Sheila said. She put a hand on her head, was quiet for a while. “I think I got most of it out of my system, but I still feel like shit.”

  “Do you want anything?” Andy asked her. “I have some Aleve at home.”

  “No, I think just rest. I don’t want to take anything else,” she said. She was still sweating, but her sweat smelled faintly sweet and familiar. Could it be that Sheila’s sweat smelled like lilacs? No—that would be silly, romantic. And he would have noticed before. She rubbed at her temple with her left hand. “I think I’ve ingested enough.”

  He looked at the patterns of cracks on her ceiling, tried to find some symmetry.

  “Wellbutrin’s pretty primitive, as far as medication for alcohol dependency goes,” Andy said. “Within ten years, we’ll see much more effective treatments.”

  “That’s your research, right?”

  “Well, other people develop the medicine. What I do is really nothing,” Andy said.

  “Ah,” Sheila said. She sighed. The lilac smell again, which he realized was probably her room freshener; underneath was something more honest and acrid. “So have you unlocked any mysteries yet?”

  “Just that things are more complicated than they seem,” Andy said. “I thought I had some answers, but the mice just refused to behave the way I thought they would. I don’t know. It’s been a surprising failure.”

  “How many mice did you have to dissect to figure that out?”

  He snickered. Next to him, Sheila sighed. He did not reach out for her hand or even let the side of his body casually touch hers but still he had that urge to take her in his arms.

  “You really hurt me, Andy,” she said. “I don’t know any other way to say it.”

  He wanted to pretend that he didn’t know what she was talking about, but that would be impossible. He had hurt Melissa and he had hurt Sheila, and the fact that he’d never meant to hurt anyone—the fact that he’d been so hurt himself—it was no excuse.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You were seeing that student, weren’t you? Your babysitter?”

  He didn’t want her to think of him as the kind of person who dated students. He thought back to September, the lobsters, how she used to seem like she admired him. “I got a little overinvolved,” he said. “I regret that.”

  Even though she didn’t move, her body seemed to recoil from his. “What happened?”

  “I ended things,” he said. “She’s threatening to tell the chair.”

  “So you might not get tenure?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And then what?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  Sheila laughed, a bitter little bark. “That’s a pretty big punishment.”

  “I deserve it.”

  “I suppose,” she said. “It’s not nice to take advantage of students, Andy. I’m sure you knew that.”

  “She talked to me about God,” he said. “She told me things I really wanted to hear.”

  “And this is how you repay her?”

  He didn’t say anything. Sheila put the heels of her hands in her eyes, rubbed. He didn’t know why he was still lying next to her but it seemed penitential to be prostrate. Or was that something Melissa would say? Rosenblum? Louisa?

  “I’m sorry I hurt you, Sheila. You didn’t deserve it.”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t.” Rosenblum, Louisa, Melissa, Joyce McGee, but the only voice in his head was his own. How could he have left her in the car like that? She could have frozen. She could have been attacked. And that was the crime she didn’t even know about. Should he tell her? He moved his mouth, trying to think of what to say, trying to think if this was how he was supposed to come clean. But the words wouldn’t come.

  “Do you want me to invite Jeremy over for some foosball? That way you could sleep for a while, if you wanted.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “No, I want to,” he said. “Please, let me help.”

  “I don’t know if he’ll want to go.”

  She didn’t say anything else, and Andy waited a few moments before realizing that she was asleep. Conscious, though—when he poked her she said, “Hmmmm?”—but exhausted, which made sense. Lots of depressants in her system. She could probably sleep through until morning, when she’d wake up with a splitting headache.

  “Sheila,” he said. “Sheila, I’ve done so much I regret.” She didn’t answer. He felt fairly certain she was sleeping.

  “Jeremy,” he said, finding the kid alone in the glow of the television. He was firing rapidly at some masked gunmen on the screen, his little hands moving with unnerving speed. “Listen, the girls are at home with some pizza, and I was thinking of taking everyone out for ice cream tonight. Curley’s just opened up again for the season. It’d be great if you came along.”

  “How’s my mom?” he asked, still shooting.

  “I think she just needs some rest,” he said, then added, tentatively, “stomach bug.” He wanted to protect Sheila, just like Jeremy did.

  “Yeah, some kids at my school had that,” he said. He put down his weapon, wiped his sweaty hands on his sweatpants. “We should leave her a note.”

  “Of course,” Andy said.

  They left the note for her on the big dining room table, where a school year ago he had eaten Sheila’s seafood stew, a gesture he had never entirely thanked her for. He would start making up for that now.

  “What’s your favorite flavor?”

  “I like vanilla-chocolate twist,” Jeremy said, as they walked back down Stanwick Street. “And maybe we can bring home mint chocolate chip for my mom.”

  “Does she like that?”

  “It’s her favorite,” Jeremy said.

  “I’ll remember that,” said Andy, who would.

  NINETEEN

  Then there’s the question of what to do with laboratory mice when you don’t need them anymore. Feed them to the owls? Let them run free? Treat them like lobsters and take them down to the shores of the Atlantic, let them scamper into the dunes? But he imagined his poor alcoholics without their ethanol, and their delirium tremens, and of course it was irresponsible to introduce laboratory mice into the natural environment, their immune systems were so shot—but maybe they’d still figure out how to breed. Maybe they’d give rise to a whole new subspecies of alcohol-crazed house mice! When future teena
gers were accused of raiding the liquor cabinet, they could legitimately say, wasn’t me, we must have an alcoholic mouse infestation. Evolution gone awry, like science fiction. Andy rubbed his arms in his chilly basement laboratory. It wouldn’t do. So he sat down at the lab table, opened up his laptop, and methodically erased, page by page, his NSF grant. He would never have gotten almost half a million dollars and he didn’t need it for this garbage, anyway.

  The mice could go to researchers up at Rutgers, or at Princeton, he thought. Or maybe he could just dose them all into a gentle slumber, or dose them to death and ask the tech to burn their carcasses. Or he could let them live out their natural life spans, years and years of running around their same bleak cages. Years and years of feeding and cleaning up after these poor patented mice. He could make their care the responsibility of some dedicated undergraduates. Animal Husbandry 101. An independent study.

  Well, it was an idea.

  He’d solve this one later. For now, his plans during the upcoming weeks of waiting to hear about tenure: the great pleasure of dreaming of a new future, somewhere beyond this patch of New Jersey.

  As his reward for giving up, he extracted Rosenblum’s manuscript from his briefcase. Another thing he was going to do this summer was edit this thing, get it into some sort of shape for publication—surely some journal somewhere would want it. Maybe he could go to Montauk, get some of the work done there. Evidently there were motels along the ocean, and he and the girls could go to the beach, maybe try a little fishing. Fish! Another thing he could study. Or maybe just hand Rachel some bluefish fillets and see what she could come up with. And when they returned from the beach, sunburned and sandy, they would get in the car and drive inland, house to house, and Andy would find where Rosenblum used to live and he would tell his girls about his old friend.

  He thumped the pile of papers up and down on his lab table, then returned them to his briefcase, from which another, smaller letter slipped out. What was this again? Rosemary, right, the other day, Melissa, there is no God, Melissa walking out, the end. The letter without a return address.

  Dear Professor Waite:

  I am writing this letter and mailing it from my home in Delaware where I’ve been coming on weekends. It has been easier to be here for many reasons which you’ll soon understand. I’ve also wanted to see my sister I mentioned she’s a student at community college here and she still lives at home. She’s my twin sister, I think I mentioned. She and I talk a lot about ideas about God and the point of it all.

  On the bus to Delaware I’ve been rereading a lot of the texts you gave us in class like Darwin and Dawkins and Rosenblum. I started to become interested in a lot of the things they said and thinking about them in as scientific a way as I can. What I’ve decided after doing this reading and talking to my sister is that they might very well be right. What I mean is the more I read, the harder it is to keep my faith in God as the Father and Creator of all things. As you know I have been a devout Christian Believer my entire life and so this loss of faith has been very traumatic for me. I have had a hard time keeping up with my studies and have been wondering a lot about what the point is of everything if there is no God behind everything.

  I have also taken special note of the Anita Lim story, which is the story of your friend Rosenblum, which I’m sure you know. I find this story quite interesting because Anita Lim found faith where I have lost mine, and yet both of us seem to have been driven to despair by the change in our beliefs. I do not know much about Ms. Lim but her story feels very heartbreaking to me and yet I do understand why she felt she had no choice but to do the terrible thing she did. And also in a world without God it seems to me that it is maybe less terrible because nobody will judge you on the other side.

  Anyway, Professor, I feel that I wanted to share these realizations with you, as you have been kind enough to entertain my delusions all these years and also ask after me and my health. I am not going to come to your office to bother you anymore but if you would like to find me I have been spending time on campus in the classroom where you taught There Is No God. It is not as crowded there as it is in the library so nobody will bother me or find me.

  In closing I would like to say that you were right, and I am sorry.

  Sincerely,

  Lionel Shell

  Andy sighed, stuck the letter back in his briefcase. What a pain in the ass that kid was. Linda was right—they probably should refer him to mental health, although mental health’s credibility had been shot for a few years now, ever since that kid jumped to his death from the top of Carruthers. When was that, 2006? A while ago, anyway, and the kid had a drug problem, but he’d been in mental health counseling for a while before then and they never noted any suicidal tendencies. They hadn’t even put him on antidepressants. And then that gruesome death.

  Still, there’d been some turnover in mental health since then, and at least they were a decent first stop. Andy wondered if he knew anyone over there.

  What had Rosenblum advised him? To be good to other people? In a way that he hadn’t been to Melissa, hadn’t been to Sheila, hadn’t been to Oliver. Well, maybe it was time to try something new, try reaching out to Lionel, who was clearly depressed and probably needed the kind of help an older, professorial type could provide.

  Andy took out the letter again. I have taken special note of the Anita Lim story. Both of us seem to have been driven to despair by the change in our beliefs. In a world without God, nobody will judge you on the other side. You were right, and I am sorry.

  Rosenblum’s death had taken him by surprise. He was so blind sometimes.

  For the second time in two days Andy found himself racing out of a room with his heart in his mouth, only this time he had the icy feeling he was too late.

  Should he take the elevator? No, no time, he kept running, imagining the plumbing pipes crisscrossing the classroom’s ceiling, and how Anita hanged herself from a pipe of the very same kind. Up two flights, three. What would he say to Lionel’s parents? His twin sister? I had the suicide note in my bag for a day and a half before I made the time to read it?

  But was it a suicide note? Nobody will judge you on the other side. Too horrible, keep running.

  I’m sorry.

  The door to Scientific Hall 501 was stuck and impossible to open; had Lionel jammed it? Andy was sweating, his face wet from sweat or panic or some combination. He had left his briefcase in his lab and with it the building’s master key. He was reduced to banging the door back and forth in its jamb and screaming Lionel’s name. Would someone hear him downstairs? Would someone magically appear with a key? He imagined Lionel’s small body hanging from one of the sturdy ceiling pipes. Oh God, no. No. That poor fragile body. The sweater-vest, the glasses, the hopeful, scornful face. What would happen next? He wouldn’t touch the body, he would run downstairs and call—who? Nina? Linda? The dean? The police? He’d call the police. Maybe that’s what he should do right now, call the police.

  Lionel!

  He banged the door back and forth more ferociously, thought: please please please.

  And then, the door opened. “Sorry,” said Lionel, very much alive. Earbuds around his neck. “My music was turned up.”

  Lionel. A sweaty T-shirt. No sweater-vest. “And I was busy reading too.” Andy thought he might fall over from exertion. He wanted to punch the kid in the smug face.

  “You’re here,” was all he said.

  “Thanks for coming,” Lionel said. “Are you crying?”

  Andy wiped his face again. Soaking, he was soaking.

  Lionel opened the door wider. “Come on in,” he said, and invited Andy into Scientific Hall 501 as if it were his own room. In fact, he had made it like his own, spreading out his books on the table, drawing the blinds. He had his computer open—a beat-up laptop, much like Andy’s—and a stack of notebooks.

  “You set me up,” Andy said.

  Lionel looked at him, confused.

  “That was a manipulative note.”r />
  “It was?”

  “And Melissa Potter,” he said. “Sending her to try to change my mind.”

  “I didn’t send her,” Lionel said. “I just made a suggestion. The rest was her. And it was in the spirit of love.” He took off his glasses, the kind that changed color in the sun, and wiped them on the corner of his T-shirt. “You want some water or something? It gets hot up here, I always keep a few bottles.”

  Andy sagged in the corner of the room. Above him, the web of pipes gurgled. “What are you doing here?”

  “Mostly reading,” he said. “The Origin of Species, The Selfish Gene, stuff you gave us and also some secondary sources.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The Will of DNA, that’s a good one,” he said. Early Rosenblum.

  “Why here?”

  “I told you, it’s quiet,” Lionel said. “And I know I won’t bump into any of my Campus Crusade peeps up here. I’m not really ready to come out to them yet.”

  “Come out?”

  “As a bright. That’s Dawkins’s word for atheist.”

  “You’re an atheist?”

  “I prefer bright,” Lionel said.

  “You’re kidding,” Andy said again.

  “You did a good job, Professor,” Lionel said. “You presented good materials, you explained to us the way evolution works. And I mean, like you said, the thing is—the majesty of the world, the way the world works, is so profound, you don’t really need to make it extra profound by layering in the supernatural on top of it.”

  “Is that so?” Andy said. His heart was slowing back down to its normal pace, but still that urge to punch Lionel in his smug little mouth.

  “You can look at only one thing,” the kid said. “Like take the owl, right? An owl has serrated wingtips which silence airflow around them, so they can hunt in total silence. And their facial structures, their flat faces, help channel sounds into their ears so they can hear their prey. And their brains contain auditory maps, in a way—so all they need to do is hear a faint sound and they can pinpoint where it’s located to a degree.”