The Explanation for Everything

by Lauren Grodstein

  “Well, listen, I have to head down to my lab right now, I don’t have a lot of time. If you’d like to make an appointment—”

  “I can walk with you.”

  Andy took a half step back. “Of course.” So silently they made their way down the concrete-block stairwell to the basement labs, and silently the girl waited while Andy fumbled with his keys, turned on the lights, and was greeted by the cheery squeak of various Mus musculus and the chemical funk of paraformaldehyde. The girl stood in the corner of the pale green lab and watched as Andy made his rounds from one cage to another, making sure none of his animals were seizing, making sure his hard-core alkies had enough ethanol in their bottles that they weren’t going to start frothing from delirium tremens, assuming they acted like they were supposed to act.

  “Professor?” said the girl in the corner.

  Jamie, his tech, had taken good care of the mice since he’d last seen them, keeping their shavings fresh, their water bottles full, but still they seemed (Jesus, what was happening to him?) glad he was back. They squeaked amiably at his attentions.

  “Professor Waite?”

  Andy murmured to them softly as was his way, because by certain lights they were his closest colleagues, and sometimes it was hard not to get attached.

  “Professor?” the girl said for the third time, softly, like a plea.

  “I’m sorry,” Andy said. “Yes, here we go.” He tipped a dropperful of ethanol into a C56BL/6’s cage, then made his way back to the front of the room, the tall black lab table, his stacks of notebooks of mouse pedigrees. “So how can I be of service?”

  “I’m looking to do an important project,” the girl said. “My name is Melissa Potter, and I’m a transfer student here, I just got my associate’s degree. I’m really interested in doing this research, and then this guy I know, Lionel Shell, said you’d be the one to talk to, so—”

  “Lionel said you should talk to me?”

  “He said you were really nice.”

  “Did he now?” Andy said.

  The girl looked at the floor; he’d embarrassed her. “He did.”

  Andy let the silence fester.

  “Well anyway, he said you’d probably help me, and I’m really anxious to get this done, I need to take a lot of credits at once since I can’t really afford to spend too many semesters here, so I… so…” Andy was flipping through his notebooks, marking down the dose of ethanol he had just doled out.

  “So I was hoping…”

  “You were hoping…?” He pivoted to look at her. She was fingering a gold cross she wore around her neck.

  She stood up taller. “I was hoping you’d sponsor me for an independent study.”

  An independent study: a nightmare in all ways, especially bureaucratic. He ambled to a cage in the front of the room, peeked in, six mice dreaming happily of whatever mice dream of. “What would you like to design a study in, Melissa?”

  The eyes back on the ground. She sucked on her cross for just a moment, then let it drop from her mouth. She said, “Intelligent design.”

  Andy stopped ambling.

  Lionel had set him up.

  Then again, without really thinking about it, Andy had been waiting for someone to mention intelligent design for years. But all he said to Melissa Potter was, “Excuse me?”

  “I really wouldn’t make it too much work for you to sponsor me, Professor Waite. I would do all the background research and find the textbooks and the scholarship,” she said, quickly, for someone (he?) had already taught this young lady that not taking too much of a professor’s time was paramount in getting one to agree to anything. “I just need someone in the sciences to sign the paperwork and help oversee my project.”

  “Melissa, I wish I could help you—” he said.

  “Great.”

  “—But you should know that I’m a Darwinian. I teach a class some people call There Is No God. I’m not sure why Lionel would suggest that I—”

  “He said you were smart,” Melissa said. “Tough and smart. That you’d challenge me.”

  Flattery. Jesus. “Look, Melissa, intelligent design isn’t a scientifically proven theory. You know that, right? Not only is it not proven, but it’s not provable.”

  “Well, nothing is totally provable.”

  “Actually, some things,” he said. “Some things are.” He watched her heavy face crumple, then rearrange itself in an expression of fierce determination.

  “But Darwinism is unprovable too, right?” she said. “It’s just a theory too—I mean they call it the theory of evolution, don’t they?”

  Ah, this old chestnut. “But when scientists use the word theory, they don’t mean something that can’t be explained. They call it the ‘theory of gravity,’ for instance, but the force of gravity isn’t open to debate.”

  “So maybe there’s another explanation for life on earth,” Melissa said. “A better one than just natural selection or whatever kind of crap that is.”

  Natural selection or whatever kind of crap. Andy sighed: American education.

  “I was thinking,” she continued, “what you’re doing in this lab is experimental. I mean your whole career is based on things that are experimental, isn’t it? Isn’t that what science professors do? So couldn’t you help me design some kind of experimental system, some kind of curriculum, to help me prove that there was an intelligent force behind the creation of the planet? Just, like, an experiment? And then if it doesn’t work then, whatever, at least we tried.”

  Andy sighed, ran a hand through his hair. He had spent the past five years at Exton Reed just, like, experimenting, trying to prove that the genetics of alcoholism lead to immutable behavior patterns. Something as basic as this—genes lead to behaviors—felt, at this moment, impossible to prove, felt like trying to prove that the Beatles were better than the Rolling Stones. Who could say for sure? Weren’t there outlying examples? He had, for the past four years, overseen a small laboratory and a vivarium which stocked, at the moment, forty-two mice in varying shades of drunk. He clocked more hours with these mice than he did with almost anyone else in the world. And yet even they remained essentially mysterious to him, even after he cut them open and looked inside their brains. Four years and hundreds of mice and thousands of dollars and simple questions of behavior could not be solved, so how on earth did this girl want to solve the origins of life?

  Or, to put it another way: how to explain to a girl like this the difference between that which could be quantified and that which could be taken only on faith?

  Andy looked down at the glossy black lab table, saw his face reflected back. He was forty for a few more months, and looked exactly forty, exactly average, except for what might be thicker-than-average sandy-colored hair. He had blurry bags under his eyes. He no longer slept very well. He was haunted by a ghost.

  “Melissa, I’m an advocate of student inquiry, I really am,” he said, hearing himself retreat to pedantry, irritating even himself. “And if you’d like to inquire into the nature of God, I’m sure you can find a religion professor—”

  “I don’t want to inquire into the nature of God. That’s what I do at church, not at school.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I want to study the origin of life, and that’s something you study in the biology department.”

  “I suppose so,” Andy said. “But I think it depends on the way you undertake the study.”

  “So you’re saying you won’t support my research,” the girl said. Her voice was matter-of-fact, but she was slumping.

  “Melissa,” Andy said, “the thing about intelligent design is that there’s no way to put the theory through the scientific method, so there’s no way to say whether or not it’s right or wrong. I can’t support your research because there’s no real research that can be performed on the subject. No way to apply the scientific method toward questions of intentionality in the design of the planet.”

  “So you won’t sponsor me?”

  The b
lack-rimmed clock above his lab table clicked loudly toward 3:55. It would take him thirty minutes minimum to get to Rachel’s practice, and he still had a few papers to file upstairs. Still, the look on this girl’s face, disappointed, maybe even disgusted. Well. It was the first day of the semester. Would it kill him to try to be a little generous? To try to recapture just a bit of the optimism with which he’d arrived this morning?

  “Let’s brainstorm for a minute, Melissa. I bet we could come up with something else. Something we could try out in the lab—maybe we could even do a little experiment with the mice. Would that work for you?”

  “No,” she said.

  Andy forced himself not to sigh. The clock ticked again, as was its irregular habit.

  “Intelligent design,” said the girl, “or nothing,” and first Andy wanted to punch her, but then, regarding her stubborn expression, felt curiously and briefly cheered. A determined student! Well, good on her. Also he thought, fuck this, he had to get out of there, he needed to prep for tomorrow’s undergraduate onslaught, and he wanted to see his daughter’s practice, but Melissa looked so grim, so enormous with steely grimness, that despite himself he pulled out the stool from behind his lab table and with a chivalrous hand gesture invited her to sit down.

  “There are so many issues concerning evolution that scientists haven’t even begun to fathom, Melissa. I feel certain there’s something you’d find interesting if you just agreed to look.”

  She shook her potato-shaped head. “I have a question for you, Professor Waite.”

  He noted that her eyes were surprisingly light, a greenish gray.

  “There are two ways to see the world, right?” she said. “I mean, there are probably many more than two ways, but what I’m asking you here is to imagine two ways of looking at the world.”

  “Two ways,” Andy said, neither frustrated nor hurried. “Fine.”

  “There’s your way,” she said, “where everything is accidental, where the fact that the earth tilts on an axis, the fact that it has a moon to control the tides, the fact that it is just the exact distance from the sun to keep us warm without boiling us alive—and even more than that, the fact that we’re here, the fact that we love each other and protect each other, is all an accident of timing and chemicals.”

  “That’s my way?”

  “Yes,” Melissa said. “That is your way, because that is the way of Darwin, which says that we are no more important, no more intentional, than the dust on your desk. We might as well be like your caged mice for all the agency we have in the grand scheme of things.”

  “All right,” Andy said, neither aggravated nor impatient.

  “But here’s your other option. A world in which life has purpose,” Melissa said. “God put us here for a reason, and that reason is out in the world for us to discover. There’s a reason we can see stars in the sky. There’s a reason we can dig into the crust of the earth and find out what came before us. There’s a reason we were given the kinds of brains that would further your… scientific inquiry. There’s a reason for life. There’s a design behind it.”

  Andy did not look at the clock. “I see what you’re saying, Melissa, but that’s not a binary I’m comfortable with.”

  “Your world is the world of coincidence, of meaninglessness. You choose the world that would have us as specks of dust, as mice in a cage. Is that the kind of world you want to live in, Professor Waite?”

  Andy took a breath.

  “Professor?”

  He hated these rushes of memory, these forces that sucked him in like dark matter at the least convenient times, shattering him. But there he was, out of the shabby lab in the basement of Scientific Hall and instead in Miami, the apartment in Miami, four lushly carpeted and heavily air-conditioned rooms. It was night, and Lou, hugely pregnant with Belle, was lying down next to Rachel in her big-girl bed. Reading Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever. Giggling together. Louisa’s belly rising up and down.

  Specks of dust, dust to dust. Andy blinked his eyes, hard. He came back to where he was.

  “Professor?” Melissa tried again. “Is that what you want?”

  “It’s not,” Andy said. “But I’ve realized over the years that what I want doesn’t really matter either way.”

  “But that’s not true,” Melissa said. “You get to decide what you want and you get to decide what really matters.”

  The chill from the air-conditioning had made the hair on his arms stand up. For a moment, he lost his head. “Melissa, if you can come up with a reading list I approve of, I’ll do your independent study.”

  “I can do that,” she said, cheerfully. “That’s no problem.”

  “But you should know I’m going to include some scientists I believe in. Henry Rosenblum, you heard of him?”

  “You want me to read Henry Rosenblum?”

  “Lots of him,” Andy said. “Dawkins too. Those are my conditions.”

  Why he was bothering with conditions at all he wasn’t entirely sure, but if he was going to jump through hoops for her, then he would make her do the same for him.

  Melissa sighed. “Do you think there’s anyone else in the bio department who will take my project on?”

  “I’d be shocked,” Andy said. “In fact, I’d be shocked if there was anyone else in the department who would ever let you finish a sentence about intelligent design.” She fingered her cross. “So are you willing?”

  “I guess I have no choice,” Melissa said.

  “Not if you’re serious about this study.”

  “Okay,” Melissa said. She hoisted her backpack over her shoulders and galumphed out of his basement laboratory. Andy watched her go, listened to her heavy footsteps. She didn’t even have the courtesy to say thanks.

  He returned to his drunken mice, dreaming their placid, inebriated dreams. He reached in and scratched one on the nose; like a bum, or one of his daughters, it seemed to snort before it rolled over. Poor mice. They were the only animals whose alcoholism he was able to forgive—he knew the genetics behind it, after all—and he often found himself envying them their single-minded devotion to drinking, and their peace.

  EVERY YEAR, ANDY took his girls out for ice cream on the first day of the semester, because the first day of the semester usually coincided with the last day of the season at Curley’s, the custard stand at the end of Deborah Boulevard. The girls had been planning their ice cream orders all week, and refined them as they cut across the park to Curley’s.

  “I’m having a caramel – peanut butter sundae with M&M’s,” said Belle, who was eight and prone to overkill. “Or maybe banana fudge with M&M’s. Dad, if I get banana fudge will you get caramel?”

  “What you’re getting is type 2 diabetes,” said ten-year-old Rachel. She tossed her long hair. “I’m getting a frozen banana. You should too, Tubs.”

  “Don’t call your sister Tubs,” Andy said, even though Tubs had been Belle’s nickname until just this past year.

  “Whatever. Eat a banana. I’m getting a sundae.” In unison, the three hopped over a marshy puddle at the edge of Memorial Park.

  A small crowd had gathered under Curley’s flashing neon sign, gravely licking their cones. Andy recognized most of the faces: kids from his girls’ classes, Joe who ran the pizza place down the block, and his neighbor, Sheila Humphreys, who was probably his closest friend in this town, even though they rarely spent more than an hour or two together at a time. Sheila was a single mother whose son was in Belle’s class, and who invited him over for dinner sometimes, or who joined them for pizza at Joe’s. Sometimes he changed her oil for her; sometimes she watched his girls on the weekends.

  “You guys still coming over tomorrow night?” Sheila asked, in lieu of hello. She popped the last of a cone into her mouth. She had a spot of something greenish on her chin.

  “Sure,” Andy said, even though it took him a moment to remember what she was talking about. Oh, sure—a few weeks ago she had invited him over for a “celebration,” which
was both kind and perplexing. What were they celebrating? “Oh, you know,” Sheila had said. “The start of a new semester. New school years for the kids. Jeez, Andy, can’t a woman just celebrate every so often?”

  Andy had acquiesced, even though the idea made him antsy; he worried that after dinner was over he’d owe her something, more energy or kindness.

  “Dad! C’mon, Dad, it’s our turn to order,” said Belle, pulling on his sleeve.

  “How was your first day of school?” Sheila asked.

  “It was… adequate. The mice behaved.”

  “Did they miss you while you were gone?”

  “I think one of them might have had a seizure.”

  “Ah,” Sheila chuckled. “That’s how you know it’s love.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “When someone has a seizure,” Sheila said. “That’s how you know he really loves you.”

  She laughed, so Andy did too, even though he wasn’t entirely sure he understood the joke. “So what should I bring tomorrow?”

  “Bring? Bring yourselves,” Sheila said. “Your girls. I’m making seafood stew. Will everyone eat that?”

  “Dad!”

  “Sounds great,” Andy said, even though he had no idea whether his girls would eat seafood stew. “We’ll be there.”

  “It’s been so long since I’ve had a real dinner party!” Sheila said. Her son, Jeremy, was working intently on his chocolate soft-serve, forming concentric circles in its surface with his spoon. “I’m excited.”

  “So are we.”

  “Oh my God, Dad, you’re holding up the line!”

  “I’ll let you go,” Sheila said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And then she put a hand on Jeremy’s back and led him toward the boulevard, away from Curley’s. The boy was still staring into his ice cream. And Andy felt an odd sense of wanting to start that conversation over again, even though he had no idea what he’d say differently. He paid for the girls’ ice cream and banana, and then stood where Sheila had just been standing over a few dribblings of green, looking out into the darkness where she’d disappeared.