The Explanation for Everything

by Lauren Grodstein

  Lou stuck her feet in his lap. “I don’t know, Andy, if only you could be there—it’s really beautiful to see these parents watch their children get baptized. It gives them strength to keep going, you know? And also, when you’re in there for so long, and there’s so little to get excited about, it’s nice to have a ceremony. Something to welcome the baby into the world, not just get ready for another intervention. Worry about whether or not he’s going to die.”

  “But isn’t that what baptism is? Protection against death?”

  “Andy, come on, it’s more than that. It’s like a declaration of love.”

  “Were you baptized?”

  “You know I wasn’t,” Lou said.

  “And didn’t your parents love you?”

  “Oh, cut it out.” Lou had been raised in Arizona by parents who explored various faiths with fleeting but passionate resolve: Unitarianism and Zen Buddhism and for a brief, uncomfortable moment, Scientology. Lou and her sister had announced to their parents in early adolescence that they would no longer participate in their religious experimentation; since then they had only rarely visited a house of worship or even wished someone a happy holiday. Her father had died of cancer an evangelical Christian; her mother lived peacefully in Sedona as a yogi. Before Lou met Andy, she’d spent most Christmases by herself, handing out sandwiches to homeless people; now she and Andy did that together. But she was never as vitriolic about her faithlessness as Andy was, nor was she as smug. She had never had Hank Rosenblum as a professor.

  “I wish you would just have an open mind about these things, Andrew,” Lou said. She only called him Andrew when she was annoyed, so he apologized, rubbed her feet in his lap. Later on, he did the laundry.

  And then the baby was born: healthy! Enormous! A full head of hair! Rachel after her father, Ray. Lou’s mother came in from Arizona, Andy’s mother from Ohio, and they both marveled at the baby’s alertness, her solidity, her eager feeding and sound sleeping. They made soups and lasagnas and let Lou take naps and when they left Lou dissolved into tears until the baby started crying too. And then, three months after Rachel was born, Louisa confessed what she’d done. Andy had left early to go to the lab, and Louisa was panicking about the end of her maternity leave; to distract herself she took a long morning walk with the baby, in her new expensive stroller.

  Unintentionally, the walk took her past Christ the King. That it was a Catholic church, that it was Tuesday morning, that the place was officially closed—Lou didn’t consider any of it. She said, later, that what she did felt as instinctive as nursing her baby when she cried, as instinctive as kissing her head while she slept. “I’m telling you, Andy, I was compelled.”

  She parked the stroller at the base of the church’s stairs and walked her up toward the double doors, cradling Rachel’s solid body against her chest. Although the place was officially shut for business, one of the front doors was partway open and Louisa shimmied in. A janitor looked at her crossly, saw the baby in her arms, waved her through the vestibule into the large, chilly sanctuary with the marble basin at the rear.

  Rachel, startled by the sudden cold, opened her hazel eyes wide as if she were going to yell. “Shhh,” Lou said, kissing her forehead, keeping her quiet. She took the baby to the marble basin and dipped a finger in the water, then dotted the water on Rachel’s forehead. The baby started to cry for real this time, and Lou rocked her and sang to her until she stopped. The janitor gave her the stink eye now but still didn’t tell her to leave. And Lou couldn’t leave until she said something.

  But what to say?

  Her early years of religious pilgrimage had not prepared her for this kind of moment. And even the things the chaplain had said—Jesus Christ, banish the devil—none of that felt right either. So, when she was sure Rachel could be quiet—for whoever else would hear this, she wanted Rachel to hear it—she made up her own small prayer: “Dear Whoever Is in Charge, if there is indeed Someone in Charge, please bless this baby. Please keep her safe from harm. Please let her live a life of joy, surrounded by people who love her. Do not let her be troubled. Protect her. Please. If You’re in charge—if You’re out there. Please watch over this child.” She recited all this to Andy, later, during her confession.

  And then, although it seemed selfish, she added, “And please watch over my husband and me so that we can always be near her, as long as she needs us to be.”

  It didn’t seem like enough but she wasn’t sure what else to say. She thought of her dead father, and Andy’s dead father, whom she had never met. She thought of her grandparents, whom she had loved, and their parents, whose stories she’d heard when she was little. She imagined a great link of ancestors standing over her, watching her hold this baby in her arms. Generations of men and women who came together and created one another. And now she was here, having created this little girl. She was an ancestor too now. She remembered the way her father improvised bedtime stories, the way her mother sewed them superhero capes.

  She lifted her baby toward the church ceiling, the sky. “Amen.”

  She said thank you to the janitor, who murmured, “God bless,” and then she hurried back out of the church. “Are we gonna tell your daddy we did this, Rache? What do you think? Are we gonna get in trouble or what?” But it was too late. Someone had stolen her stroller.

  WHEN MELISSA CAME back to Andy’s office with a draft of her thesis statement, he found, to his relief, that she had replaced the cross around her neck with a dormitory ID on a long beaded chain. He took the paper she extended, looked at it. “Did I tell you to bring me this?”

  “Why are you always asking me that?” she said, perching on the chair opposite his desk. She was wearing a black turtleneck and jeans and looked older, more serious than the last time they’d met, just a week before. “Sometimes I think you have no memory at all, Dr. Waite.”

  “I’m just distracted,” Andy sighed. “Or it’s possible you’re right, I have no memory at all.”

  She chuckled because she thought he was kidding. Andy scanned her paragraph until he got to the meat: intelligent design is provable because studies of natural phenomena are best explained by the intervention of a Designer.

  He scratched his head, wondered again why he’d said yes to this project, and how to navigate a fight he was too tired to have.

  “So what do you think?”

  “You’ve got a lot of passive voice in here.” He pushed the paper back at her. “See if you can rewrite it more clearly. And be sure to be specific about ‘natural phenomena.’ I want to know exactly what you’re referring to.”

  “I was going to talk about the bombardier beetle, and the explosive mix of chemicals it uses for self-defense. And also the heart of the giraffe, how it’s strong enough to pump blood up its neck but doesn’t get crushed by the weight of all that blood. And also I was going to talk about DNA.”

  “How so?”

  “Well,” she said, leaning forward, her breasts straining heavily against her turtleneck (why did he notice her breasts, and the way the black fabric made her skin look so white?), “DNA is a code, right? It’s the code, the language, that provides instructions on how all living things develop and behave. But codes aren’t random. Codes aren’t created by chaos. Codes are only the product of a design. So who could be the designer of DNA? Some kind of alien intelligence? Human beings? Or was DNA designed by mere luck? I don’t think so. The only real rational explanation for the coding is an Intelligent Designer who planned it out.”

  Andy sighed. If he were Rosenblum, he would be able to expound briefly on the conditions of chance, on the viral proteins that almost certainly first created DNA, on energy and possibility and why God was even more unlikely than Melissa’s “mere luck.” If he were Rosenblum, he would say, in a voice so drippingly gentle it was cruel, “Dear girl, please don’t be fooled into thinking that religion is an answer to a scientific question. We can answer the questions of why people are religious by using science, but we cannot answer basic
questions of science by pointing to miracles. Don’t forget, dear, that to your great-great-grandfather my crappy cell phone would have seemed like a miracle.”

  But Andy was not Rosenblum, so he just sighed and said, “I’d skip the giraffe and go straight to the DNA part of the thesis.”

  “You think?” she said. “’Cause the giraffe stuff is pretty interesting. The pressure per square inch of blood in a giraffe’s vessels is so strong it should theoretically cause a stroke, but instead, the giraffe has this sponge of blood vessels under its brain that relieves the pressure. Nothing else in the animal kingdom has anything like this, so it’s clearly the product of spontaneous design.”

  “Or else it slowly evolved along the singular branch that eventually produced the giraffe.”

  Melissa grinned and shook her head. “It’s so crazy how Darwinists refuse the simple answer when a complicated one will do.”

  “It’s even more crazy how intelligent designers refuse to use science when a magic wand will do.”

  For an instant they smiled at each other. “So if I cut the giraffe can I keep the thesis?”

  What could he say? “Cut the bombardier beetle too.”

  She nodded, folded her paper into her backpack. “Well, thanks again, Dr. Waite. How’s everything with your mice, by the way?” She’d gotten what she wanted, so now she was cordial.

  “Eh,” he said. “I’m supposed to finish a grant application, but it’s tough going. I can’t replicate my initial findings.”

  “So then what?”

  “So then—” He flicked on his computer, a signal that he was planning on getting to work and she could leave. “So then I don’t get the money.” She stayed quiet. “And I suppose I start to feel even more insecure about everything my research is supposed to prove.”

  “Does this affect your job here?”

  “Not really,” he said. “But it doesn’t help.”

  “Are you worried?”

  Who would even ask that? “Sure, sometimes. I mean, it’s better to have a job than not to have one. And my girls—I need to provide for my girls.”

  She looked thoughtful. Her eyebrows were knitted.

  “Anyway, it will all work out,” he said in his class-dismissed voice. He swiveled toward his computer. The monitor was frozen on the welcome page.

  “Your girls will be okay,” Melissa said.

  “Will they now?”

  She ignored his sarcasm. “It’s a cliché, but it’s true—kids are so resilient. Lots of dads change jobs. I mean, I’m sure you’re not in danger, but worst case—” He looked at her. She was tucking a hair behind her ear. “Worst case, I’m sure you guys will figure out another happy way to live.”

  “It’s just that they’ve already been through a lot.” She was still looking at him so intently. “Their mother is gone.”

  “My dad left when I was two. The guy I call my dad is actually my stepdad.”

  “Oh.”

  “And he’s a good guy and everything but he’s not so great at keeping a job. We’ve been foreclosed on, we had to live with my aunt for a while. Now there are five of them living in a two-bedroom apartment. They just had to move again. I’m the only one who got away.”

  “That sounds tough.”

  She shrugged. “Things aren’t always easy, I guess is my point, but you know what? You ask my brothers and they’ll tell you they’re happy. They play football, don’t really care that they get free lunch at school. And me too! I mean, I’m in college! Can you even believe it?” Had he ever met someone like her before, someone who was so literally transformed by a smile? “Anyway, your kids have a great dad. That’s really what matters.”

  “I guess.” This wasn’t the sort of thing he usually discussed with students, with anybody.

  “Look, I don’t want to sound like a nag or anything but you really might want to take a look at some of the books I gave you. They’re really good at pointing out the bigger picture.”

  “Melissa—”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Thank you,” he said, curtly.

  “Oh, it’s no problem, really,” she said, leaving him to his cluttered office and the computer that refused to turn on.

  GOD IS A RAINBOW was still in his bathroom while Belle took a bath (she still preferred long, dreamy sessions in the bathtub to the brisk efficiency of the shower); he picked it up when he brought her a fresh towel, moved it to the kitchen countertop, left it there.

  “Dad, what’s this?” Nosy Rachel, making tomorrow’s lunches. “This isn’t the sort of thing you usually read. What is it, a kid’s book?”

  “It belongs to one of my students,” he said, frowning over Rachel’s shoulder as she peered at the jacket photo.

  “You’ve got some wackadoo students,” she said.

  His plan that night was to go over his data, try to see any inconsistencies. In a one-man lab it was so easy to get things wrong: he could have adulterated the ethanol, mixed up the specimens, poorly recorded the levels they were drinking, fudged his brain scans. Every part of his experiment required attention to detail, which was a quality he prized in himself when he was a graduate student but now felt almost impossible to achieve. The milk in his fridge was past its expiration date; the girls had permission slips for school a week overdue. Well, at least he’d fill out the permission slips. Melissa’s book glared at him from his countertop. It was that or sleep or his dysfunctional notebooks; the book disheartened him the least. He filled out the slips, then took it to the den.

  The book was written and self-published by Stephen and Michelle F. Cling, the husband-and-wife pastor team who tended the flock of the Hollyville Mission Church in Hollyville, New Jersey. Melissa Potter’s pastor and his wife. They were writing from the perspective of small-town theologians, not scientists, and they began by presenting a folksy summary of who they were and what their flock was like (this was a word they actually used, flock). But in reading their description of Hollyville and its Mission Church, Andy found himself, despite himself, charmed. This part of New Jersey, south and west of the pines, was still mostly family farms, specialty crops, tomatoes, peaches, lettuce. Not enough land for agribusiness, not enough real-estate pressure to sell out for new developments.

  The Clings described their town as two stoplights and a general store, the kind of place that made Mount Deborah seem bustling by contrast. The kids drove tractors before they drove cars, and spent summer nights swimming at the quarry. And everyone went to church on Sundays: Hollyville Mission or their friendly competitors, Hollyville Baptist and Hollyville Word of God. After church, neighbors ate lunch together, and the kids and old people took naps.

  It sounded like a nice enough life, or a nice enough life to keep reading about, anyway. And as he read, Andy found himself admiring the Clings for other reasons. Primarily, in their two hundred pages of Christian chitchat, they didn’t pretend to know more about evolution than people who were actually trained in evolutionary biology. In fact, as the Clings moved from small-town history to introductory theology, their book spent only a few pages on evolution. It assumed that its readers believed in a God who created the earth and everything on it in seven days, so it didn’t spend much time trying to argue that notion. Instead, it talked about why people were here in the first place—why God had even bothered.

  And because the book wasn’t trying to seem scientific, and because he found Stephen and Michelle’s prose style charming, complete with anecdotes from the church and diversions into song lyrics they both liked, Andy found himself unexpectedly immersed in God Is a Rainbow. That first night he read until one in the morning, and the next night too, and the next, keeping it by his bed and reading from it at night when he couldn’t sleep, or when an ephemerally horrifying dream woke him up at four in the morning. He found himself slowing down, in fact, so that he wouldn’t finish it too fast, and underlining the passages he liked: the church luncheon menus, softball games on neighboring farms. He imagined Melissa helping her
mother make fried chicken, blueberry pie with blueberries from New Jersey bogs. He was surprised by how much these images pleased him: her large forearms beating down pie dough, her cross resting above her breastbone, shining under the church’s stained glass.

  He read the book for two week’s worth of late nights, memorizing, despite himself, the comforting words of Stephen and Michelle Cling. It wasn’t all tractors and quarries and pies. There was religion here too, but under the spell of all that pie Andy couldn’t help but take in the religion. “You are here because of divine will,” the Clings said. “You are here because God wanted you to be here.”

  It was late, he was tired, he kept reading.

  We are here to fulfill our divine purpose in life. To make the world a place fashioned in our image, which is, of course, to make it in the reflected image of God.

  And everyone you have ever lost has fulfilled his or her divine purpose. And he or she is waiting in the presence of God until the day you will be reunited.

  Andy rolled over in bed. He was becoming, now, too acquainted with four in the morning, and in the small bedroom which still felt weirdly unfurnished, papers everywhere, books everywhere, clothing in an Ikea bookshelf—what kind of grown man kept his clothing stacked in an Ikea bookshelf?—he took out his pen and underlined.

  Have you ever spoken to a small, guilty child who’s trying to get out of telling the truth? Ever notice how, when the child starts spinning his story, it becomes more and more complicated, more and more fanciful? He would need a mere sentence to tell the truth; to tell his elaborate tale requires paragraphs.

  Life is like that. It can be read in a sentence: in the beginning, there was God. But the fabulous tales of nonbelievers require paragraphs and paragraphs, books and books, nutty theories upon nuttier theories because fiction is always more dressed up than fact. God is a fact. Atheist theory is fiction.