Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  There was a silence.

  “I need some time, Dr. Faber. To work out this theory.”

  “I am warning you, Esme. Failure to appear at your regularly scheduled lecture and lab meetings will be looked upon as breach of your teaching contract. These students pay a lot of tuition to learn certain things from you. I am not in a position to hire someone else at this late date. I have to inform you that continued unexplained and un-provided-for absences will lead to your suspension by this university.”

  I stood up. “This is all about students, right? Nothing to do with the two million in grant money invested in my lab—or the pressure to find a cure for a1AT, right?”

  He looked morosely at me. “I’m not denying that you have another serious responsibility to NIH, Derridex, and everyone else involved in your lab. Of course I’m concerned about that.”

  “No shit.”

  “Get your midterm grades in, Esme. Teach your courses. And yes, do your lab research. Otherwise you leave me no alternative.”

  “You didn’t hear anything I said. Did you?”

  Both his eyes were focused on me. Now I was positive I’d cured his wandering eye.

  “Esme, please. I’m talking about no alternative.”

  I turned in the doorway. “Right,” I said. “I know. I haven’t any either.”

  He laughed, not a pleasant sound. “Esme,” he said, “does it strike you as just slightly ironic that you sat in this office not long ago, going on about the lack of moral standards among science students? And now here you are, abandoning your teaching duties to these very students?”

  “How can I possibly teach anybody about morality if I abandon my own values? You and I both know that you can find someone to fill in temporarily for me in Organic. These are extraordinary circumstances! And I’ve clarified my moral position these last months. I’m not made to be a crusader; the best example I can give students is my own thinking. Hawking said—”

  He interrupted me. “Oh my my my. Oh, Esme, Esme. You and Stephen Hawking. You and Einstein. You and Newton. Do you think maybe you’re living in a fantasy world?”

  I smiled sweetly. “So were they.”

  His phone began to ring.

  “I’m sorry,” we said together, as if we’d rehearsed this final moment, worked it out months ago—perhaps around the time I’d first arrived at UGC: the real thing, a successful woman scientist.

  Part Three

  After the wind an earthquake ... And after the earthquake a fire ... and after the fire a still small voice.

  I Kings 19:11-12

  Chapter 16

  I MADE MY way to a table that was near the stage but slightly obscured by a pillar. I thought it made a good vantage point. When the waitress came, I ordered a rum and Coke, since the house wine looked like scarlet hair tonic.

  I got a few stares, a woman by herself at a nightclub table, but after a while everyone stopped stealing little surreptitious glances at me and I became invisible again. I sipped the rum and Coke. It reminded me of grad school and postdoc parties, and I thought of Jesse again, then put him out of my mind. As soon as my glass was half empty, the waitress, in punk attire, appeared at my elbow.

  “C’getcha somethin’ else?”

  “Sure, another one of these. Great rum!”

  She looked at me, tongued her gum into the opposite cheek, then winked.

  “Like that rum, huh? I’ll see the bartender fixes you up right. He’s my pal.”

  “Hey, thanks.”

  Actually I had forgotten in my nostalgic haze that, in fact, rum wasn’t my favorite, but so what, I thought. It was sort of like the taste of certain cough syrups one remembered from one’s childhood; the terrible flavor was comforting.

  Suddenly, there was a second drink before me; the waitress winked again and was gone. Then the room went very dark, the table candles lit people’s faces upward ghoulishly. The spot hit the stage, the three-piece band rattled and honked, there was a silvery clash of cymbals and the toupee’d emcee slouched out.

  “I’d like to say that we have a really unusual group of performers tonight. A lot of them write their own stuff, so don’t go to the rest rooms and read the doors till the show’s over, it might spoil some of these hot jokes!” He showed his teeth and there was the familiar rim shot on the drums.

  He buzz-sawed on and I stopped listening. A very young, pimply guy hurried out—he looked like a high school kid—the first stand-up of the night. It was painful. He made bad joke after bad joke; no one would laugh. I laughed a little, hollowly, and people turned around and stared at me. Then someone behind me growled, “Take a walk, lame-o!” and the poor boy, sweating and bowing again and again and crying thank you to no one, relinquished the stage to a very large Tootsie-ish woman. Midway through her routine (“Don’t make any jokes about mother-in-laws, I am your mother-in-law!”), I began picturing us, the audience, as a vast compact sea of particles, all possessing negative inertial mass. (A simple concept—it means that if a force pushes on the particle, it moves in a direction opposite to the way in which the force is urging. You know, like when your mother nagged at you as a kid and you did just the opposite of what she wanted?) The stand-ups, as they arrived one by one and stood heroically, gladiator-ish, in the dazzling ray of light, tried pushing this mass, the audience, with their naked embarrassing need to be funny (“Please laugh at me, I’m funny, I’m funny, don’t you think?”) and the audience not only resisted, they moved in the other direction— active disapproval, boos, rude comments, heckling. It was amazing how neatly the paradigm worked. I was on the fourth rum and Coke now, and my brain whirled with bad analogies.

  “What a buncha dogs tonight!” I heard someone behind me mutter as the Tootsie-woman started doing a little soft-shoe. I loved her suddenly, she reminded me of a ghost who’d floated in straight from the vaudeville stage; though she was extremely heavy and carried a great wedding-cake wig on her head, she was light on her feet and she danced with a natural dip and girlish quickstep and sway. She seemed lost in reverie as she moved—for just that second I believed people were charmed—and then the catcalls and whoops of ridicule started and she opened her eyes very lazily, like an old sea turtle, fixed the house with a death stare, and croaked into the mike, “Bugger you all!,” soft-shoe-ing with enormous dignity into the wings. I clapped heartily for her, but my applause was drowned out by jeers.

  Fear snaked through me. When would he come on? After this next jittery, Lenny Bruce-ish fellow or two or so down the stretch? Whenever he appeared, I knew he was in for trouble, and the thought of him suffering onstage filled me with dread. I’d begun the day facing Faber; then Rocky had driven home with me and suggested she babysit and I take the night off. “Go to a movie, have a massage,” she’d cried, pushing me out the door. “You gotta relax.” So I came here, to the Club Sez Who on the Strip. If not to relax, to at least relieve my heart of some weighty anxiety: I just had to see that Jay was alive, I told myself. That’s all. Anyway, that had been my plan a while back when I’d first seated myself. I’d intended to see if he was OK, then slip unobtrusively out. This still seemed like a workable idea, but this crowd was going to make it all harder, I could see. I could remember this future easily.

  The Lenny Bruce guy was holding his own. He had a nervous high-pitched laugh, contagious, and whenever he broke up after a long spacey riff, the audience would titter a bit too. Finally he got off a few decent one-liners and people started warming up. One or two even clapped.

  “Commitment? Yeah, this town’s so incapable of commitment, people are afraid to use their turn signals!”

  “Yeah, my friends thought I got it easier—my Jewish mother moved to Miami. Now she faxes me guilt.”

  People chuckled and buzzed to each other. I could see Lenny breathing easier.

  “Yeah, so how do you give a blonde a CAT scan? Shine a flashlight in her ear, right? Am I right? Forgive me, all you blondes in the audience, but you know people got to wonder. Are you or aren’
t you? I mean real blondes. I asked a date of mine to prove she was a real blonde and she got right up and showed it to me ... yeah, the hair on her chest.”

  The audience roared; they were with him now. He was beaming.

  “Hey, I was satisfied, right? She could have gotten insulted and hit me with her jock strap! ... Yeah, I was lucky ... yeah.”

  Smoke swirled in the air and I began thinking about a cigarette again. When the urge got too strong, I redirected my thoughts to chirality. In our world there exists a chiral right-handed twin of nicotine called dextro-nicotine, not found in tobacco plants. It has been synthesized, and guess what: It is far far less toxic than old left-handed death-nicotine. I briefly, drunkenly, played with the notion of synthesizing and marketing dextro-nicotine cigarettes: Virginia Switch. What a genius idea, I thought, and smiled to myself as Lenny lifted the mike off its stand and pranced about, triumphant. Then I remembered that it was the tars that got you cancer—the nicotine only addicted you.

  Then, I caught a glimpse of movement in the wings, just beyond Lenny. I saw his face. He was next. I could see him moving his lips, he was repeating his jokes, like he always did, getting the timing just right. Or, in his case, just wrong. I drank down the last of my drink, and my faithful pal the waitress appeared again.

  Lenny left in a flurry of enthusiastic applause and the band gave him a glittery spiral of rim shots. Then Jay was standing there. He didn’t say anything for what seemed an eternity. He looked tired and (I squinted, I was having a little trouble seeing through the layers of smoke) he looked sad. A tall, thin, worried-looking guy.

  “Hi everybody.” He peered out at the audience, squinting into the lights. “Hi,” he said again and there were a couple of groans. He snapped to finally.

  “Well, I’m Jay Talkman, they call me Talkman ’cause I’m really wired! Hah, hah.” There was silence, terrible premeditated silence. I considered chuckling, but he knew my laugh too well.

  “Well, anyway, folks, I see we’ve got a tough crowd tonight—but hey, you don’t scare me, my last gig was for Caligula.” (A few snorts.) “He was a great guy; he wanted to feed me to the lions but they were on a corn-free diet. Hah, hah.”

  “Hey,” yelled the guy in back of me, “the lions didn’t wanna get sick!”

  Jay ignored the guy. “So, anyway, folks, they did things back in Rome a little differently than they do them now—and I think they did them right! For one thing, when their senators screwed up, they made them sit in the bath and b-bleed to death. In the U.S. we do it differently—when our senators screw up, we take the bath and they bleed us to death.”

  A few people made appreciative noises, I laughed carefully, in a disguised register. But then the guy in back chimed in again:

  “Whyn’t you drown yourself in the goddam bathtub, you stupid dickhead!”

  Jay swallowed. “But L.A., hey L.A., what a c-city! We all hate it, we all l-l-love it. I mean, is this a g-great city, or what?”

  I swallowed. The worst had happened, it was all coming apart: He was starting to stutter.

  “Hey! Are you a great d-d-d-dickhead, or what?”

  “I really love this c-city. Even when I get up in the morning and see smog, I’m happy here. R-really, I am. If there’s an i-inversion layer—”

  “A what, d-d-d-dickhead?”

  Jay smiled into the lights. I could see sweat streaming down his face. “An ... ah, i-i-inversion layer—”

  A few other drunks were joining in now. “A what, d-d-dickhead? A wh-wh-what?”

  I got up. I don’t know how it happened but I was on my feet, brushing tables and mumbling “Excuse me” and I was stumbling up the steps to the stage in the dark. I fell down and bumped my knee, but I kept moving. Then I was onstage. The lights were white-bright, blinding, and for a second, I froze. I always think I’m just a mind: I had a body. A visible form for people to look at and judge. Black jeans and sweater, little black heels. I felt enormous.

  The hecklers were yelling things I couldn’t understand. Then I saw Jay looking at me. He had backed away from the mike. I could never describe the look he was giving me. I suppose if your wife died, then suddenly showed up in bed with you and a new lover, it might approach that gaze. But I’d recovered myself now; nothing could stop me. I marched to the mike. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the emcee gesturing at Jay, What gives?

  I stood in front of the mike. The room reeled before me, then slowed down. The hecklers were wild, whistling, stomping and making kissing noises.

  “H-hey,” someone cried, “maybe your f-f-fuckin’ girlfriend is funnier than you.”

  “Shut up,” I said into the mike.

  My voice surprised me. It was bigger and calmer than I thought possible, given my state of mind.

  “Shut up,” I repeated, and the room actually fell silent.

  “You like that word ‘dickhead,’ huh? You think that’s a funny word, dickhead?”

  I squinted out into the audience trying to find the dread heckler. My words echoed.

  “This is my husband. Standing right here. Yeah.” It was eerily silent. “Here’s his problem. He’s too smart for you—talk about dickheads, you guys need to pull jockstraps over your ears to keep your thoughts straight! You need a condom to keep your head dry when it rains! Hey, you’re such a dickhead that when you come, your I.Q. drops forty points! Which means, in fact, you can only come twice?”

  I was dimly aware of laughter but my fury hadn’t abated enough for me to really hear it. Where does this shit come from? I wondered, shocked, in the back of my mind.

  “You know, I just wanna tell you jerks something. My husband” —I gestured again at Jay, who looked paralyzed—“Jay, gets up here and tries to entertain you. Tries to be funny—but what can you do when people just don’t get it? Hey, I’m a biochemist—I know what it’s like! He uses a phrase like ‘inversion layer’ and that bozo over there thinks an inversion layer is when he barfs in his Cheerios.”

  Laughter. Then: “Hey Mrs. Dickhead, why don’t you sit down? On my face! We’ll talk some biology!”

  “Hey Slick!” I cried. “Don’t give me any shit. I know who you are. You couldn’t take high school biology because they wanted to put you on the syllabus.”

  “E-Esme?”

  I heard him, but I didn’t turn.

  “You wanna know something? As a biochemist, I can tell by looking at you, pal, your DNA is DOA. I can look at you, pal, and see what went wrong with the family genetics. Oh yeah, old Uncle Walt, he was a great guy but he kept trying to fuck trees. And all those cousins intermarrying ...”

  People were laughing, but now Jay was standing beside me.

  “P-please get off the stage, Esme!”

  “Hey, Mrs. Dickhead, if you’re a scientist, what’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics?”

  I glanced at Jay. I couldn’t quite bring him into focus.

  “You want to know what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is? The Second Law of Thermodynamics is like Murphy’s Law: Everything eventually screws up.

  “Look,” I said, swaying a little, “I can explain it. The Second Law of Thermodynamics.” I paused. The three beautiful, hopeless Laws, the holy trinity of dissolution, presented themselves glittering before my mind’s eye. Maybe I could actually make them clear to these raucous Goths?

  “If a rain of glass fragments fell from the ceiling right now, none of them would form into beautiful wineglasses in your hands, right? The pieces shatter into worse shatter. We call that entropy. How everything works, or doesn’t work. Things keep breaking down, things move in the direction of greater chaos, that’s how we know we’re still alive. People age, people get sick, relationships fall apart ...” I finally looked at Jay, who stood stock-still, his gaze riveted on me. I turned back to the audience. “But what you come here to see, what you came here to see tonight, was the Second Law, the breakdown. You all came to see people fall apart—see things shatter—and hey, you got it!” I opened my arms wide. “Before you
r eyes—entropy! The Second Law! And what about you—you all? Look at you there, the guy in the front row here, drunk, slobbering on your tie: Second Law. Look at this: You and your girlfriend look like you got hung up on a power line by your hair. Second Law. Excuse me, you look like a victim of designer drive-by—yes. We’re all going to hell because of a thermodynamic principle; now, isn’t that funny? Nothing that good is going to happen to you again and a whole lot of bad is.”

  “Esme.”

  I looked at him.

  “We’re g-getting off the s-stage now.”

  And somehow, we did. He freed my sweaty hold on the mike; the band started playing. People began clapping and whistling, still looking at us strangely. I nodded at everyone; I was having trouble walking.

  As he steered me by a group at a table, a guy jumped up to shake Jay’s hand.

  “Great bit—the wife coming up like that! Very odd, but it flies.”

  Another guy poked me in the side as I lumbered by. “Hey,” he growled, “what’s a quark?”

  I stared at him.

  “A fart in the bathtub!” he hollered. “You don’t even know that one?”

  “C-come on!” cried Jay, and tugged harder.

  We stumbled out together, into the chilly night, the bright lights of the Strip.

  Chapter 17

  ENTROPY. IT WAS the same force Lorraine Revent Atwater and I were attempting to elude on our computer screens; the luminous graphics-created molecules danced in their axes, within the alternating vector lines. If we pushed them fractally, fast enough, we might, cosmologically speaking, create a local naked singularity, that is to say, a human-made version of the start-up singularity. What does this mean? It means that we had big plans for those chiral particles. We were trying to connect them (tie them up with?) Super String Theory, with the Big Bang. But that’s another story.