Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  “You look tired,” said Rocky as I came in, slipping a little on the sandy floor.

  “You look bored.” I knelt down and accepted the pink and green handful of sand Ollie offered me. There was sand in her hair and around her mouth.

  “No, no, man—I love this. Maybe I could try it in lab, since I bombed out on every other procedure.”

  Rocky was having trouble lately in Organic; her grades had fallen and she couldn’t seem to get anything to work for her. She set a pie tin of sand aside, looking preoccupied. She had so much curly dark hair that her face seemed overshadowed, a tiny planet surrounded by flames.

  I didn’t want to pry. I watched Rocky pick up her Walkman and her red bookbag; I stuffed some bills in her leather jacket pocket.

  “Thanks, Rocky.”

  “Sure. Anytime.” Rocky bent down and kissed Ollie, who was still at work, pouring orange food coloring from a large bowl to a small one. Ollie reached up quickly and touched Rocky’s nose. Rocky laughed and smeared the orange dye all over her face. She was so pretty, I thought, tall and thin, coltish.

  “Better than blush-on, right?”

  “Rocky, you want a tissue? What’s the matter?”

  Rocky stood looking straight at me and made a strange noise, a muted cry. Her face was full of panic.

  “I’m going to flunk out, I know it. I can feel it happening to me in this kinda slow motion. I just can’t hack Organic, Prof.”

  “You know, Rocky? You shouldn’t start thinking this way! This is what happens to women in Organic—they start out—”

  “Please don’t give me no big lecture, OK? I’m not all the women who ever took Organic. I’m me and I’m selectively fucked up.”

  I put my arms around Rocky. Her thin shoulders shook. “Would you like to stay to dinner, Rock? I don’t know if Jay’s going to make it, and it’s only stew on the menu, but you’re very welcome.”

  Ollie stood up, poured green dye over her head, and walked out. I indicated her with an extended hand. “And the company!”

  Rocky hung her head. “I’m supposed to meet this guy.”

  “Selectively fucked up, huh?”

  “Yeah, it’s always somebody. But I don’t feel nothing—I’m gettin’ laid, that’s it.”

  “There’s a test tomorrow. Column work. But you know that.”

  “Oh yeah. I know that. I’m going to try and get in real early tonight.” We looked at each other and laughed.

  “Rocky. Please don’t flunk out,” I said. I felt close to tears myself. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re gonna be a goddam depressing statistic if you do. I can help you, we can work a little extra in the lab, what do you think?”

  “What I think is that I have to go give Lance a blow job. I mean Troy. Man, these Anglo names! This guy should be called Ski Mask.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m going to try not to flunk out. But the thing is, I’m not as good as a lot of other ones in that class. I see it. Real clear. Maybe I should admit it, you know?”

  “No. I don’t think so. You just need a little tutoring.”

  “Good night, Prof.”

  I watched her drive off. Rocky had a little Austin, dented and rusted, but it gave her an aura of freedom, her radio blasting Bonnie Raitt. I envied that freedom for a split second, staring out the window, till I remembered the clichéd ending Rocky was probably headed toward. I closed the window. It was cold. When had it gotten so cold?

  “Come on, Ollie,” I called. “Let’s get washed up. Time for dinner.”

  Chapter 8

  Imaginary Lecture:

  Ab Initio—Earthquakes

  OLLIE DEAR, LISTEN to me. It’s late at night, I stare at a buzzing, blinking tube light on the lab ceiling. Driving over here to work, I realized that I hardly even notice my surroundings anymore. But the day I arrived in Los Angeles I saw into its heart.

  I was more than a little out-of-it from gunning through the last leg of my cross-country trek. I’d driven through Needles and Barstow—having crossed the Mojave—where it was still ninety-seven degrees at four in the afternoon.

  I hit Los Angeles at rush hour. All the freeways were jammed, then on the 10 West, I watched as one of the many hot and exhausted motorists, lurching toward his exit across four lanes, cut in front of a young man on a car phone who’d been trying to whipsaw diagonally across to the fast lane. The cars jackknifed over each other: a Porsche and a Toyota Camry: snared and yoked at the jowls. No one was hurt, but traffic in three lanes stopped and the left lane slowed to a crawl, as the drivers got out to argue.

  I’d been on cruise control for some hours—images flying past the windshield with the depthless vibrancy of travelogue film. I’d seen desert, mountains, oil refineries, miles of fast food and motel clutter, military bases, and I’d driven for some minutes in the folksy shadow of the Goodyear blimp. But for the last few miles, as we neared the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles, I’d noticed an odd phenomenon. Alongside the streamlined, late-model, fabulously expensive cars were wrecks-on-wheels: old trucks, ramshackle trucks. Old pickups and broken-down dumpers with rust rot and crunched fenders and flatbeds loaded with people: up to eight or ten Hispanic men and boys, filthy and exhausted, crushed together, sweaty bandannas wound around their skulls, torn dirty shirts. They rode squatting on their heels or leaning on the wheel bulkheads, bouncing, facing backward into oncoming traffic. They shared their space with gardening equipment, blowers and rakes, or construction equipment, sledgehammers and picks and—most extraordinary—they stared with a single collective gaze into the eyes of the drivers following behind. It was not a stare of accusation, I thought, but straightforward acknowledgment. This was El Norte. This was the City of Angels, city of high wages and steady work that so many of them had risked their lives to see.

  I sat waiting for the Lexus in front of me to move, exhausted, my chin on the wheel, watching the profile of a blond lacquered woman in the silver Mercedes in the lane next to mine. A ragged band in the wreck in front of her sat gazing into her eyes. She stood it for a while, then flipped down an overhead mirror, applied lipstick, bared her teeth at the mirror, checked her nails. She tapped a finger on the wheel in time with her favorite CD. She looked at me, bored, then away. The men continued to stare solemnly across a fantastically bright chasm of sunlight and after a while, the woman in the Mercedes just glared back, her profile jutting belligerently, as if there were nothing before her but the rear end of a truck—and the men, whose faces had been occasionally animated, now faced her hungrily, transfixed. I watched. The traffic moved slightly. A police car and a fire department vehicle tried to fight their way through traffic to the smashed cars. She stared, the men stared. We moved forward inch by inch.

  Nevertheless, Los Angeles is not a bad city for a scientist. Those gardeners riding backward into the future reminded me of an early theory of Stephen Hawking’s, since rejected. This theory, predicated on the Big Bang (and everything expanding away from that initial explosion), said that certain high-density regions stop expanding and collapse to form galaxies, stars, and us. But what if the universe itself stopped expanding and decided to contract? We might notice, Hawking said, as the universe shrank back on itself, broken cups gathering themselves together on the floor and jumping back on the table. And people’s “psychological arrow” of time would be backward. In other words, they would remember events in the future and not remember events in their past. When the cup was shattered, they’d remember it being on the table, but when it was on the table, they wouldn’t remember it being on the floor.

  I can’t think of a better scientific analogy for my town—a town that remembers the future, but not the past. L.A.’s psychological arrow of time, with all those past lives and New Age channelers and conveniently amnesiac agents skewered on the shaft, is shooting forward into the past, into a perfection of forgetfulness, effect preceding cause. Isn’t that relaxing when you think about it? Causeless effect: no history, no accountability—but
backwards order. Results before action. Answers, then questions. No self to speak of, but nostalgia for the future. Pure desert under policed water, reconstructive surgery, MTV, freeway exit signs that you forget as you exit the entryway. Miss Orange County’s tears fly back into her eyes, as the crown is lifted from her head and held in the hands of the former queen ... as the new queen opens her mouth to scream, as her name is announced.

  And after all, I came here to forget. I wanted to lose my past, whistle off toward dawn with my boon companions—the thermodynamic and the cosmological arrows, and, naturally, the psychological arrow of time, which informs us (yes!) that if disorder is increasing, then we must be on the right planet. And the universe must not be contracting.

  Though the earth does funny things out here.

  I came to think of earthquakes as the perfect disaster for Southern California. Terra firma: the illusion. There was an earthquake during my third week in Los Angeles. The day of the earthquake, a documentary TV crew was shooting on the UGC campus. The documentary was about students who had chosen a career in science. I was asked by the biochemistry department chairman, Professor Walter Faber himself, if I would agree to be interviewed for a segment of it, called, unhappily, “The Female Element in Science.” The department had decided (rather shamelessly, I thought) to get immediate mileage from its new girl colleague.

  I was wearing a red-and-white-striped T-shirt and a short white skirt with white high-top Reeboks—an unfortunate early notion of an L.A. look—and I was being videotaped walking here and there in the high-noon sun, on a tree-lined campus walk. Beside me, a man with dreadlocks was kneeling on the seat of a wheelchair, rolling down the narrow paved walkway with a video camera in front of his face. The wheelchair had been explained to me as a steadying technique for the moving camera. I’d been speaking loudly, in what sounded to me like a painfully false voice. Every so often, someone would signal to me to pump up the volume.

  My interviewer, full of uninspired, surly questions about women in science, was a chubby fellow with a nose ring, dressed in what appeared to be a black scuba diving suit, with small round espresso-black glasses.

  As we stood in the center of a grassy expanse, I felt something like the uptown IRT under my feet. My mind stuck on the word “subway” and I watched an arc lamp across the walkway shudder and sway, its metal shade swinging wildly. Then a student lifted off her skateboard and stepped into thin air as if she were being assumed bodily up into heaven; she staggered and fell and the board rocketed away. Underfoot, the ground shook and shook, then stopped. The air rippled like a frame of film stuck in a projector. I got the feeling of something missing at my side; then I remembered: Just before the earthquake hit, my interviewer had asked a brilliantly stupid question: “In what style do you dress in the laboratory?” Then he’d dropped to the ground and rolled up in a tight ball. I stepped back and nearly fell over him. I noticed his spiked hair standing up like a porcupine ridge.

  Afterward, I invented a couple of giddy responses to his question. “Well, I tend to wear clothing that shakes things up” was one, followed by: “Why yes, I do have my crotchless red lace panties on today!” Terrible jokes, but for days afterward, I loved laughing at the earthquake. It reaffirmed my sense of L.A.’s passive extremity. But the thing really scared me.

  As soon as the ground stopped moving, I turned to the cameraman, swaying in his wheelchair. I was looking for reassurance. “What was it?” I asked, knowing full well what it had been, but knowing also that it was important for me just to hear somebody say the word.

  When he did, I smiled conspiratorially at him, as if the documentary team had somehow staged this temblor as a test of my mettle. I wanted to appear brave, unflappable, a pioneer: First Woman Faculty Member in Biochemistry at UGC Unruffled by Major Quake.

  At the time, I was confused—how did people act after earthquakes? I stood still in the enormous silence, watching people gather in small groups, shaking their heads. A blast of static came through the earphones the cameraman had pulled away from his head. The interviewer, who’d gotten himself sheepishly back on his feet, glared at me. “You’re supposed to fall down and protect your head if there’s a quake,” he said peevishly, as if I’d committed a faux pas at a cocktail party.

  I winked at him, but then I noticed that I was staggering a little. I felt drunk. An ambulance siren rose, came closer and closer. There was a bullhorn announcement, indecipherable. Then another. I felt sweat moving down my back. Then a hand on my shoulder.

  There stood a tall ponytailed guy wearing a wine-colored corduroy jacket and blue jeans, bending solicitously toward me. He wore earphones pushed back on his head; then he slid them off so they settled around his collarbone as he spoke. His face was lean and tan, and it wore a fairly continuous look of pleasant incredulity, as if he’d just surfaced from a punt overturned on the sunny Cam, still holding his glass of hock.

  Was I OK? he asked.

  I nodded, then I found myself, to my shock, leaning against him.

  “I’m fine,” I said, “but what the hell am I doing?”

  He laughed. Feeling his laugh rise up in his chest and ripple outward reassured my body. I straightened up again. We stared at each other. His eyes were very pale, blue-grey, with laugh lines around them. I liked this laconic person.

  “It’s so weird,” I said. “So unlike anything else. The earth is supposed to hold still.”

  He put out his hand. “Jay Tallich. I’m the d-director of Science: The Fit Survivors. I apologize for not introducing myself sooner. I was in Burbank. I’ve b-been tied up by our shoestring budget for the last couple days. If you’ll excuse the pun.”

  “Well, yeah, I guess you know what my name is, then.” I grinned stupidly at him. I wondered, idly, if his slight speech impediment was a temporary result of the quake.

  Abruptly, we were surrounded by people: the documentary crew, students, everyone speculating loudly on the quake’s Richter rating. “A 5.1,” someone yelled. “No way, we’re talking at least a 6.5, I bet.” There was a much repeated report of damage to a campus parking structure. A concrete overhang had buckled and broken into massive, sliding chunks. Someone else said that a student had been injured by a piece of concrete. Power was out. Yet the atmosphere was relaxed, even festive.

  I turned back to Jay. I could hear crackling voices in the earphones around his neck. I was pleased that he didn’t answer the tiny interrogating voices and that he still stood near me.

  “I think,” he said, “we might j-just as well wrap for today. We’ve already got a lot of good stuff on you. In your office, sitting by the fountain. We can f-finish tomorrow when the power’s back and we’ve looked at exactly what we’ve got.”

  “Too bad,” I said, “that you can’t keep the earthquake on the tape. It must be all there, right? The sound, the shaking, people’s fear and everything?”

  He just looked at me.

  “You s-sure are new to this town,” he said.

  We began seeing each other. First as friends, then as lovers. At first, we seemed so much alike. Jay’s mind was technical, like mine. He could explain how television used space and time, should anyone care to know this. He could have been a scientist, had he wished. When he began doing technical directing he invited me to run-throughs, blockings, tapings.

  I came to know his other side. Like many people in the television and movie business in L.A., he was patriotically sentimental about Hollywood: its history, its stars, its gossip. I myself had very different heroes. I decided that I needed to broaden my definitions of entertainment. And I quickly found out about Jay’s secret life as a stand-up. For some reason, I liked this alter-ego Jay, unstuttering, brazenly bad in performance. Still, I let him down, I had no Hollywood I.Q.

  One night, before a movie, he showed me some of the famous footprints and handprints in the cement in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater.

  “Peter Lorre,” I murmured, staring at a pair of cement feet. “Was he one of the guys in T
he Magnificent Seven?” It happened that this was the only movie title I could remember from my childhood.

  Jay looked sad. “‘L-Lor-ree.’ Peter Lor-ree. Not ‘Lor.’ I don’t see how it’s p-possible not to know who he is. You’re kidding, right?”

  “OK, so he’s not the one who can’t talk and plays the harp, right?”

  Jay stared at me. “I hope you’re kidding. I find this really d-disturbing, Esme.” He kept staring at me as I put my feet in Mr. Lor-ree’s. “It’s genuinely pathetic,” he said.

  “Do you know M-Marilyn Monroe’s real name?” he asked, after a second or two. Then: “Esme, it’s kind of a-anthropologically startling, like f-finding a tribe in West Guinea or someplace who’ve never seen an airplane.”

  I took my feet out of Mr. Lee Marvin’s feet and looked up at the real stars in the murky L.A. night heavens. As if Jay had ordered it from Props, a small plane whined overhead.

  “Do you know who Lavoisier was? Or let’s just take women—Madame Wu? You don’t know? She did the definitive experiments that disproved the Conservation of Parity in the Weak Force. Do you know who Arda Green was? She’s my personal favorite, by the way. She discovered what a firefly’s light is made up of—a luciferin, isn’t that a great word? It took a century to figure out that little blinking light—or Gertrude Elion, she won the Nobel in 1988, or Barbara McClintock?

  Jay squinted hard at me as if I had just dropped in from the rain forest, carrying my stone tools.

  “Esme, why would anyone c-compare the two? Nobody knows anything about science. Nobody has ever kn-known anything about science—it’s too d-difficult for civilians. People want to be entertained, Esme, they want to relax and have fun.”

  “People want to be brain-dead, have you ever noticed?”

  We squared off and faced each other. Jay’s lips were moving, he was trying to stay calm by repeating what he wanted to say next to himself—if the emotion got control of him, his stuttering worsened dramatically. The plane droned off and away.