by Joel Varty
The “technology,” as I had been referring to it for many months, since my brother Ruben had first uncovered it, has always been an enigma as to what we should do with it. On one hand, the entire project had been accidentally uncovered as part of a corporate funded university project related to the breeding of white rats for lab use, and was largely theoretical in nature. On the other hand, the possible uses for what he and his team had uncovered are limited only to the imagination. Normally I didn’t take much interest in my brother’s work, since it seemed rather mundane research to me – I like to focus on microchips, robots and computing systems – but this was different.
First of all, it was the kind of engrossing work that took Ruben away from me, and he and I had been best friends our entire lives. He was the best man at my wedding; I was the god-father of his son, who would turn seventeen this August. We told each other everything and talked often. There were no secrets between us – until this.
He had spent the better part of his adult life researching the life spans of white rats and other “lab creatures,” as I liked to call them, but it wasn’t until the last few years that he crept further into his work and away from the trappings of normal life. He would send Aeron to spend the summers at my parents’ farm, up north, or, more recently, with us. Christmas and Easter, too, would often produce no sign of a man that would normally, even as a single parent, never have sacrificed lab time for family time.
Last month, I had received a phone call asking me to identify a body at the university hospital. Something in me had broken that day.
And now, looking inside myself, I still feel the wound, festering away with guilt and doubt about what had actually happened.
I kiss Rachel and the kids.
“Be safe, Jonah,” she says to me as I step outside.
“You too,” I whisper to her, unwilling to stop my outward momentum for fear of losing my nerve.
…
The train is crowded; nobody is staying home today, although the looks on most faces tell me that most people feel they should be somewhere else.
With the news yesterday and today about the rationing of fuel and other resources, I can almost hear the passengers listening for the sounds of the big diesel engine on the locomotive spluttering as its tanks are pumped dry.
We speed through the fog. I stare through the windows at the translucence over the lake, hiding its depths from view in a white haze of unknowable doubt. I sink into my thoughts.
Ruben. Fuel. Terrorists. The mayor. Death.
Ruben fuel terrorists, the mayor, death.
Dead and gone and gone and dead.
And Aeron left behind.
And Jonah and Rachel and Gwyn and Jewel.
Not dead. Not gone.
What are they worth to you, Jonah? I ask myself. That you are on a train to this wide city chasing an imaginary thought so that you can feel like you are trying. What is it that takes you from your family at a time like this?
Habit? The routine of a job that has lasted too long that you can’t even break free of it when you know –
My thoughts are terminated. The train stops its motion at the station with the usual abruptness and leaves its contents behind to shove their way out.
I join the cattle and make my outside and into the rain. I have no direction except to escape the torrential downpour, so I dash across the street in my usual path and try to stay somewhat dry.
Up the small staircase, across the street, across the parking lot... blah blah blah... STOP!
No line for coffee – no beggars either. The street in front of the coffee shop is empty.
Feeling like a small boy who has had his head turned by a parent wishing them to take a new direction, I twist my view slowly around so that I can see the building where I thought I saw a small boy shouting yesterday.
The tall brick building is gone, but the church is back.
Chapter Seven – The Basement of the Church
Jonah
Ruben had discovered a bio-technology that allows most insects and rodents to be mass re-produced in the span of several minutes. With the combination of very simple gene therapy, hormone injections and a special diet, a pair of rats could produce thousands of offspring who themselves would mature extremely rapidly, albeit unable to mate themselves. Likewise, a queen bee, cockroach, earwig, grasshopper or several other varieties of insects and rodents could be given a similar treatment that would seem to unlock a hidden biological potentiate in them.
I remember the day that he told me what it was. It comes to me now, as I look at that church across the street. I had just managed to get the kids to bed and was just trying to settle down myself for a few quiet moments with Rachel before we passed out ourselves.
The phone rang and Rachel picked it up. It was Ruben, she could tell from the call display, and she handed me the phone without stopping on her way up the stairs. I couldn’t tell if she rolled her eyes or not, but she certainly had cause to, since my discussions with Ruben were rarely short.
This one had been short – too short for a last conversation with a brother.
“Jonah,” he said to me. “I can’t talk long. Go check your email right now and then unplug your Ethernet cable.”
“Huh?”
“Just do it now, you’ll know why soon.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked him, wondering whether I should be as worried as I felt I was becoming.”
Silence – an emptiness where there should have been a carrier signal.
And that was my last conversation with Ruben. Many hours and days would pass before I got the nerve to plug that cable back in.
I released the contents of my brother’s research into a public forum on genetic animal pharmacology the day after I wrote the article, meant for a non-technical audience, on the general outline of the research and its conclusions based on practical tests. The article attributed all research credits to my brother, as they should have, and even though I had been unscrupulously careful in my wording, I had always known the risks of what I was doing.
Therefore, it is my fault, I think to myself, as I walk slowly across the street, that the world has learned how to create a plague.
…
My emptiness grows deeper as I tug on the locked church doors. Soaking wet, I wonder whether the rain on my face is mingled with long-overdue tears from the death of my brother. I circle the building back to the alley I had exited yesterday in my escape from the rooftop.
A find the back door – this one is open – so I step inside to see whether Michael and his friend Gabe are for real or just in my imagination.
The stairs are carpeted and smell somewhat mouldy. It is a good sort of a smell that I attribute to churches which don’t open their back doors often enough to remember to lock them. I climb the steps and enter a room just off the main sanctuary through a narrow doorway in the corner. The lighting is dim, provided only by several stained bubble-glazed windows.
I move across the small antechamber and walk several steps to stand in the center aisle, wondering whether I ought to be here alone. Through the slanted roof I can hear the spatter and drizzle of raindrops.
“Hello?” I call out. “Is anybody here?”
No sound except for the rain.
“Hello-oh!” Nothing.
I turn to face the front of the church. There is a pulpit on one side, and another lectern up a little higher on the other side. In the middle is a long communion table with the words This Do In Remembrance of Me on it. There is a white candle on top. It is burning.
I stare at it, mesmerized for several seconds at the slightly-flickering flame before me, before turning from side to side to see if I am being examined in the silence.
Nobody. It is musty and old-smelling here, too.
The light of the candle shows dust particles in the air above and around it. They swirl backwards beyond the choir pews over to the organ, before being slowing tossed higher: air rising from a staircase down below
.
Meet me in the basement.
“Well I tried to meet you in the basement yesterday, Michael,” I say to myself under my breath, “But your little church turned into an office building with a deranged child on top of it.”
I climb up three stairs and pass the burning candle on my way over to the stairs. There is a light shining down below, and I can feel warm air on my face as I descend. These stairs are carpeted, too, so the quiet of the sanctuary is not threatened by the sound of my steps.
“It’s alright,” I hear Michael’s voice call from the room below. “I don’t mind waiting.”
I continue down the stairs, ducking my head under the ceiling of the stairwell as it opens in the lower anteroom. Michael is standing in the center of the wood-panelled space under a bare light bulb.
The place looks to be rather old and stately, yet seems to have been renovated rather poorly with a smattering of modern conveniences, although I suppose lighting as a modern convenience is a relative term.
“Have you been down here the whole time?” I ask.
“Well now, that depends,” he answers. “I’ve been down here a long time, but here isn’t always where I am, even now.” He winks at me, “And there’s something you have to remember about places like this,” he says. “You can always get from one to another without too much difficulty.”
“Right,” I say, non-committal. I don’t see any reason to believe anything this man says, but I walk over to stand directly in front of him anyway.
“You see, Jonah,” he continues, “We’ve been waiting a long time for you to find this place. We need that rock, and we need it now.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“We means WE,” he says, his eyes bulging with emphasis. “I thought by now you would have figured out what it is you need to do.” He turns his unseeing eyes directly to mine.
I hesitate to respond. I can’t imagine what I could possibly be expected to do for this man, or whomever he is representing. “I don’t follow you.”
“You ain’t expected to follow.” His voice is a whisper now, yet his expression doesn’t change. I feel like I should say something to assuage the feeling of dread building up inside me. It’s like we’re approaching something inevitable, some decision that I won’t be able to turn away from.
“You have to connect things together, man!” Michael goes on, becoming more animated. “Things are never what they seem to be. Everything is bound together and there ain’t nothing just happens out of chance. The choices you make today are built upon yesterday’s raindrops. We need someone that won’t just float away when the current moves swiftly down the river. We need our rock to seat itself in the middle of that commotion and resist the flow.
“You got to have the faith that you can do what you need to do to.” He leans towards me, saying more quietly, “You got to make things right.”
There is a rumbling noise from high above as the storm increases in strength. Michael reaches out and touches my arm, a hint of desperation on his face. “You must endure this storm. The questions will be answered, in time.” His lower lip is trembling. He asks me, “Will you serve?”
I stand there, flabbergasted. I haven’t the faintest idea what he is asking of me, and yet I feel the need to comply, like some deep-rooted purpose within me, rising to the surface. Surprisingly, Michael’s face erupts in a smile, those white teeth flashing with a delightful brilliance which belies the perturbing nature of his puzzling speech. “Don’t worry too much though,” he says through the smile. “I can give you a hand.” He squeezes my shoulder again and starts toward the stairs.
“Come on,” he says, waving me forward without looking back.
I start to follow him, and then I see a door, off in the shadows, on an outside wall. It seems a strange place for a door to be, so I walk over and open it. There are a set of stairs leading down, and I start walking down them.
“Not yet, Jonah,” calls Michael from upstairs. “You got to wait till later to take that route out of town.”
“What?” I ask, totally perplexed as to how this doorway could lead out of town. “Where does this go.”
There is no answer. I return to the other stairs and climb back up to the main hall.
When I get there, Michael is gone.
I feel the rumble of the thunder right through the floor before I hear the enormous crashing of its sound.
I reach the top of the steps and look over at the table with its burning Christ candle flickering slightly in the breeze caused by the vibrations. Something niggles at the back of m mind, and I wonder if I should be frightened or not. I decide that I’m not.
Michael: he hadn’t even waited for his answer. Will you serve? It’s not the kind of question you get asked these days; it’s too open ended, too much room for misinterpretation, although, in this case, and in this place, it doesn’t seem to matter. I know exactly what he means by serve, I just don’t know what I am supposed to do.
I sit down on the steps that lead down into the rows of pews. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to think. I wonder if I have been imagining voices in my head – whether it be guilt, or stress, or some innate need to right a wrong, I don’t know. I am guilty, I think. I am guilty.
I close my eyes and wonder what it is that I could possibly do to help sort out the wrongs I have caused. But all the time, I can’t really believe that it is my fault. What could I have done differently? Where did I make a choice that could have been different? Why am I guilty?
When the article with Ruben’s research was first published, we were hit with a deluge of phone calls and reporters asking for quotes, or offering money for a “scoop.” The research that I had published brought the world tantalizing close to God-like powers of biological dominion – close but not quite. And there was a key element to the research that I felt had been left out, purposefully, so that the work could be validated, but not implemented.
Ruben’s son Aeron had come back to stay with us at the time following his father’s death. The change in him from kind, gentle and easy-going, to cold, distant and hard had been nearly instantaneous. It had been a switch that flipped in him – a decision, I am sure, that he felt compelled to make in order to justify his own place in a world that would take his father from him. With all the hype and press coverage, it seemed best for him to get away for a time.
Aeron went from my place back to boarding school. It seemed the best thing to do at the time. What he was doing now, I don’t know. I have put the matter as far from my mind as I can. The passing of time and the creation of space was supposed to help us to heal, but all it seemed to do was insulate me temporarily from the ills I had caused. It was my fault that Ruben’s work had been squandered – my fault that his son had been pushed away from the family that was meant to help him through his difficult times. What could I have done differently? Everything.
I close my eyes against the tears that won’t come.
“We sink into guilt sometimes, Jonah,” a voice says from the back of the church. “It’s like a quagmire that waits for us when we are weak in the spirit. It sits there, restless but silent, until we stumble blindly into its depths. Usually we need help to get us out of a place like that.”
I look up, blinking into the beams of sunlight that sweep impossibly through the frosted windows – giving the place an other-worldly feel.
“Who are you?” I say, wondering why my solitude can be so complete on a crowded train, yet I can’t seem to get a moment to myself in an empty church.
“I’m Jim Black,” he says, and looking closer I can see that he is the minister here. His presence is a reassurance that the place is just empty of people, not abandoned. “Michael asked me to have a word with you. He’s worried about Gabe.”
This isn’t what I expected to hear at this moment. Any chance for further introspection is gone as Jim approaches me. His earnest eyebrows are the only shield for his bright blue eyes, which are his most prominent feature. Plain clothes, gr
ey hair and a medium build complete the picture of a man whose strength emanates from inside, as if the confidence in his bearing comes from knowing that he is on the right path. I see instantly in him what I am lacking.
He stands before me and holds out a gnarled, strong-looking hand that both contradicts and compliments the gentle nature of his manner. I take his hand and rise to stand. I am a full head taller than this old man, but I seem to be standing in his shadow, and the light seems to shift behind him for a moment, causing a glowing effect above and around him.
“Guilt is a trap we make for ourselves, and you simply don’t have time to go in that direction now.” Jim’s eyes are kind, but hard, and he gives me a sense of understanding and forgiveness at the same time that his eyes expect something more.
“Alright,” I say. “What do I need to do?”
Jim smiles a crooked, lopsided smile that reaches all the way to his eyebrows. This time he manages to look slightly mischievous while being completely joyful. “You just need to look after your family.”
“Oh. Well that doesn’t seem so hard.”
“You haven’t read your bible lately, have you?”
“Not really,” I say. “What does that have to do with my family?”
“That depends,” he says. “On where you go and who you take with you. Those who follow will become your family. And they’ll follow you because they can’t stay here. Neither can you.”
“What do mean?” I ask, feeling, as always, like I am missing something.
“You need to find a place where you can look after people. I can help you a little bit, but things are complicated right now. You have to find Gabe before he makes things more difficult than they already are.” He trails off a bit, looking down and to the side, as if there are a lot of things unspoken that I have missed.