‘So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Genesis 1:27….’
Eloise now understood what was meant by the paralysis of terror, but also knew that she must try to respond. How could she answer this in any way that he would listen to? How could she confront the cognitive dissonance within his citadel of belief? How could she explain that maybe, yes, maybe, certain aspects of his supposedly infallible Bible had been drawn from a ‘well’ of greater wisdom (cellular or ethereal) but that it was written down then translated, compiled and edited by the cultural limitations and personal or political impositions of men? A few well-intentioned men maybe, seeking to explain and guide and give shape to deeper insights, but without the language or understanding to extrapolate beyond accessible metaphor. That these men had been followed by several less well-intentioned editors looking to exploit the dogma in order to enhance their own ambitions or empires. How could she argue, without incurring his wrath, that those words had been taken down when we still believed the earth was flat, for heaven’s sake – and who now could deny the circling of the spheres?
‘I am not descended from an ape or a monkey,’ proclaimed her captor. ‘I am descended directly from Adam. Made in the image of God.’
Yes, thought Eloise, from Y chromosome Adam, the last shared male ancestor, mathematically traced back to about 190,000 years according to the molecular clock. But she decided to try to reach him in a different way, not to argue but to try to re-align his views, however risky it might be.
‘Yes, Calumn, in his image, from the stardust created during the first explosions into being. And no, Calumn, you are not descended from an ape, neither am I. But all primates are descended from a common ancestor.’
‘And where is that ancestor? This missing link? It never has, nor ever will be found.’
‘Well, it’s still possible that it might be, Calumn, we have found so many transitional species, humanoid or otherwise… a fish with a neck and the beginnings of digits, dinosaurs with feathers. And we can see evolution at work in a single generation of microbes, or insects becoming resistant to pesticides. Yes, the fossil record does have some glaring gaps, but despite the very real difficulties in finding fossils, we are finding them all the time and we will continue to…’
‘All fossils are relics from the Flood.’ Calumn was so sure, standing to attention as if trying to please a drill sergeant, or resist a torturous inquisitor. Eloise wondered how long she might be allowed to keep talking, how long before he pulled out that roll of silver gaffer tape from his pocket and threatened to gag her once again. Before he told her to be silent while the ‘silenced’ spoke through him. Right now however, it seemed that he wanted some kind of verbal response from her, if only to acknowledge that she was listening.
‘No, Calumn,’ she corrected gently, aware she should maintain a soothing, non-combative tone, ‘fossils have been found in many layers of slow and gradual sedimentation, they’ve been found in bogs and tar lakes. The earth is four and a half billion years old. Some bacteria have been around for three billion years. And life exploded into diversity during the Cambrian era, over five hundred million years ago.’
‘Lies! Clever confusions. You have been led astray by deliberate temptations planted to test our commitment.’
Then it dawned. ‘Oh, wait… Calumn… Was it you who was coming in here and handling Sarah’s bones? Before we put in the CCTV? Calumn, did you not feel then how real they are, how very old, how very precious? I am sure you must have had some sense of that?’
‘All lies. All bedevilment. And to name her after one so precious in The Book, such blasphemy!’
‘Well, that’s just a coincidence, Calumn, I’m sure no insult was intended. But I promise you, those bones are 74,000 years old.’
‘No. The world is no more than 6,000 years old. It was made by God in six days. As he has told us. Let there be light, He said, and there was light.’
‘But how could there have been light, Calumn, as we know it, before the sun or the stars ignited? The sun was there before the earth, so how was there even a ‘day’ as we call it, before the earth turned on its axis? Or a year before it went around the sun? Can’t you see that these terms are just poetic figures of speech? Symbols, maybe, to be better understood once we had the evidence? I mean, if we ourselves have learned to use such expressions as a short cut to meaning, why would God not have done the same to speak through the prophets?’
She knew she could not diminish his god, but perhaps she could try to help him interpret the verses less literally?
Then Calumn moved, but only a few inches from the spot in front of the door to which he had been rooted, a foot soldier refusing to leave his post. It seemed his legs were beginning to cramp (hers too, she took the opportunity to shift positions subtly at the same time). Was he tiring? And would that be a good or a bad thing?
‘The Almighty has no need of the ways of men. His light is beyond our understanding. He can do anything that pleases Him.’
‘And does hatred please him, Calumn?’
‘He has smote His enemies, and so will I, in His name.’
‘Calumn, you will kill us both if you drop that lighter.’
‘I am prepared to die for Him. For all mankind, as did our Lord.’
Eloise clung to something, to certain words of pacifist wisdom she’d always admired in the scriptures of Calumn’s ‘Saviour’ – this figure who seemed to embody the potential for the best in humanity, in spite of how it all had been twisted or enlisted since.
‘Oh, Calumn, yes, but as I understand it Jesus died out of love for of all us. For forgiveness. And he did not kill?’
He stopped to think, as if he was searching for an answer that would not be beyond her understanding of his truth. Eloise looked closely at her captor, trying to establish some connection. In less adrenalin-charged circumstances Eloise might have looked more kindly upon Calumn, perhaps even found him sadly appealing, regardless of a nose that strayed too long over narrow lips, a chin cut too short. If his hair was washed, his skin clear, his teeth attended too. If his eyes had showed her anything other than aggression.
She pitied him. Who has done this to him, she wondered, what has made him this way? Could it be a genetic predisposition, or a prefrontal cortex damaged by indoctrination? What had created the void that allowed all this nonsense to rush in and give him such a warped sense of purpose or belonging? And who had exploited all this fear and anger so cruelly to their own ends? That woman so fond of her scarlet insignia must have played her part, for sure, but not she alone.
Then, above the settling pools of kerosene, Eloise caught an unusual aroma and she was a child again in her grandfather’s old Rover, searching through the glove compartment for the bag of pear drops that he always kept there. One for her and one for him. Why am I smelling pear drops? She shook off this perplexing flashback and looked back at Calumn. She noticed how he scratched at his skin where he could reach it under a white jumpsuit that was at once too small and yet too loose for his emaciated height, the friction rendering his neck and forearm livid and raw. He seemed to have trouble focusing on her, rubbed his angry eyelids.
Then Calumn found something else to parry with, something that might well have been spoon-fed from a pseudo-scientific sermon.
‘The Second Law of Thermodynamics! It means your EVIL-ution was never possible!’
Yes, here it comes, she thought. That old creationist chestnut. That all closed systems have constant amounts of energy and matter and are subject to inevitable entropy, disorder and decay, rather than the upwardly mobile order and irreducible complexity found in biology, and the argument that therefore natural selection could not have occurred spontaneously, if at all.
Eloise also knew the standard evolutionist rebuttals: that the earth cannot be considered a closed system due to the energy of the sun (and eons of celestial impacts) or that life is somehow not subject to this otherwise irrefutable law
, seen everywhere except in the animation of organic matter. That entropy may in itself lead to consciousness, as some experiments had suggested, and so perhaps even to life itself? Yet, inwardly she had to admit that she remained intrigued by aspects of the argument, for how, indeed, despite the algorithmic patterns that arose out of apparently nothing, had that first self-replicating molecule found the information, the instruction, the cause, to do what it did? To build itself into a cell, and then to divide onward into all of the dazzling diversity that had ever lived? Could she use this somehow, explore it with Calumn, engage him?
No. There was neither the time nor the available level of reason to address these issues with him, it was likely only to further enrage. She decided to try a different tack, to personalise herself. After all, was not the process of dehumanising the enemy the way that every sick death cult in history had brainwashed its followers into massacre without remorse… by making whoever was in the way of what they wanted seem less worthy of life? Eloise knew that she must try to reconnect Calumn with his sense of empathy. She thought of what John had said about love being the greatest message of the gospels.
‘I have a friend, Calumn, a man of god… yes, I know that might surprise you, but when he talks of his Lord, his Saviour, he talks only of love and compassion and forgiveness. He says that these were his greatest messages, his deepest truth, and that these commandments supersede all others. That above all we must do no harm.’
She heard him clear his throat, noticed that he swallowed often and with difficulty, as if his mouth was dry. Was this the climate-controlled air of the clean room? Eloise decided to turn this observation to her advantage.
‘Are you alright, Calumn, are you thirsty? I’m sorry, I can’t offer you anything to drink I’m afraid, no food or beverage is allowed in here, but I could ask for some…’
‘I need nothing from you, I am sustained by the strength of the Lord…’ but his voice was disintegrating.
His breath became shallow, gasping. He seemed to wobble and had to steady himself against the examination table with the hand that was holding the naked flame, still burning, as he had promised, since he had first flicked the flint. Time stalled. But then he was still again – and still gripping the lighter. Eloise caught that fruity pear drop smell once more and at last recognised it as the sickly sweet aroma of ketosis, of a body breaking down. The symptomatic clues came together sufficiently now for her to grasp at a notion.
‘Calumn, are you diabetic? Do you need insulin? I have access to a range of medicines here, or I could ask the paramedics?’
Eloise could hardly bear the absurdity. Before Sarah – and in those lulls when her progress had stalled – she’d been working on a project to replace faulty pancreatic cells. Calumn might have been a prime candidate for the ultimate clinical trials. On a different collision course, she might have been able to help him.
‘I said I need nothing but the grace of God! He will heal me in His mercy if He sees fit.’
‘Calumn, I am so sorry if I have offended you. You know, I don’t presume to have sole possession of the truth and I respect your love for God, I really do. I’m only a doctor, Calumn, trying to do the best that I can, trying to help people…’
‘By your disgusting vivisection of babies?’
‘What? Calumn, I have never vivisected a baby!’
‘Oh yes, you would rip them from the womb and use them to harvest these cells you speak of!’
‘No, no, Calumn, I promise you, I am not doing that, nor do I want to! Yes, some research elsewhere does use spare human embryos donated from IVF, but that’s not what we do here. The stem cells we can get from the umbilical cord after birth, or indeed in some truly amazing new processes, are helping us to acquire the knowledge we need.’
‘Knowledge!? Trickery. Wasn’t it someone exactly like you who exiled us from Eden? With your filthy, greedy hunger for knowledge?’
Eloise exhaled. She had no answer for biblically sanctioned misogyny or wilful ignorance. She was running out of ideas.
And then a miracle. The phone began to ring again and as she looked out through the glass she could not believe what she was seeing, had to whisper it silently to herself to make sure.
Oh my life… it’s John.
Eloise thought she might be hallucinating for a moment. How could he be here? Then she remembered the breadth of his ministry, remembered that he attended the cells of police stations on request, so why would he not be known to the force and on their books for persuasions of a more pastoral nature? John looked at her, right into her startled eyes through the toughened glass and she wanted to cry.
It’s alright, everything will be alright.
Calumn looked out through the glass too and appeared taken aback at the sight of a crisp white dog collar. John smiled at Calumn and motioned politely for him to pick up the phone.
The ringing began to hurt her ears. Eventually, Calumn answered the call. Eloise could not hear what John was saying but she could imagine. He would not argue or accuse or patronise or dismiss but he would find a way, through his unshakeable love, to reach him. Was she still breathing? She wasn’t sure. Then Calumn responded, at last, to John.
‘Yes, of course I remember the testing of Abraham. Yes… yes…’
He kept listening. His posture softened, his eyes seemed to moisten, he looked at John as though he had found something, something he had not known he was looking for. Something important had changed and Calumn was allowing that rigid arm holding the lighter to relax a little, to ease down to his side.
‘Yes, yes. Alright. I will pray with you.’
He closed his eyes. He listened to John, he nodded, he breathed deeply. Eloise inched closer to him, close enough to see the sweat that now slicked his sallow skin despite the chilly air. His eyes rolled back. Was this some kind of spiritual ecstasy?
Then he convulsed – and then it became clear. Calumn was slipping into a hyperglycaemic fit. As his knees buckled, one hand dropped the receiver and the other jerked up in reflex, arcing the lighter across the room. Eloise tracked its endless flight, willing it away from the pools of kerosene. But then a face flashed into her mind, a face that she wanted to keep seeing, keep looking at, clearer to her now than ever. A face that she needed to live for, to see again.
It was no longer enough to will or to hope – she must act, now. She dived forward with hands still bound together, crashed hard to the floor too soon, but then slid through a slick of kerosene and somehow… somehow, caught and extinguished the lighter.
A fire officer in full protective gear rushed to ram the door but it would not give. Pavel finally came to some clarity and pulled out his all-access pass card.
As he fought to keep his hand steady enough to open the door, Eloise pushed herself to her knees and pressed the closed lighter deep into her pocket. Her eyes raked the room for a makeshift weapon in case Calumn recovered too soon. Briefly, she considered opening the chiller drawer to grab Sarah’s thigh bone, but then as she glanced through the glass at John she felt something change. Eloise smiled back at him through rising tears. Then she mouthed the word ‘Diabetic’ to the waiting paramedics and ignoring the pain in her elbows and knees, shuffled over to sit behind Calumn. With cable-tied hands she lifted up his thrashing head and cradled it gently above the cold and pitiless floor.
*
She knows that her mother will not return but she waits, even so. Each sunrise, each sunset by one of her beloved trees. She lays a new stone or pebble there each time. Soon, one or two of her friends begin to come. Then one day they all come, each to lay one stone.
After every season has turned she decides that she does not need to do this every day. She goes only once, at each new moon. It is enough.
*
My Dear Charles
Yesterday, I nearly died for my work. For my ideals. I write this now at home, alone (by choice) and more at ease with that condition than ever, and yet also feeling more open to whatever may come. My work has be
en everything, my hope that we can keep evolving, keep getting better at being human. Not only fitter, but wiser. And kinder. (A vain hope, perhaps, witnessing the world that we have made – even if the world has also made us. But can each yet re-make the other?)
And is that it for me now… my work, my observations, my wish to contribute?
You waited so long to publish, for various reasons it seems, from needing to present the most detailed supporting work, to health problems and a variety of other conflicting demands? Until Wallace spurred you to action. But you must also have understood the shockwaves it would produce, and what effect that might have upon your family. And they brought you such comfort, Charles, did they not, they were not only a distraction? But I’m forced to wonder, can love really nestle comfortably within the life committed to discovery or will it always wheedle away at the dedication, particularly if it demands a greedier share of time and care? Must one or the other always suffer in some way from neglect?
Family. What now defines our fitness to breed, Charles? (Or indeed, to parent?) To have a line of surviving offspring. And now that our ‘information’ can be carried by other means than competitive sexual reproduction, does it matter anymore?
We may never know for sure whether Sarah’s descendants survived, or if she remains a part of us now, but I find that I want to believe they did, and that she does. I want to believe that she mattered and that she matters still. (That I matter?) We do so want to believe, in something, don’t we? Even in the face of any evidence against.
Well. I may not write again for a while. I think it really is high time I took a holiday. I love my work, of course, but I am feeling a deeper and more forgiving love for so much more lately, for nature, for people, for life – but what use is any of that if I don’t live it as fully as I can, in the here and now?
I’ve been thinking about taking up something more adventurous, climbing perhaps. Maybe I should join young Max, that fine fellow who found Sarah, on his next expedition? No, perhaps not. Sailing is more my style. I must find a way to get down to the coast more often. I must make that happen somehow, find my own weekend ‘Beagle’. And perhaps I should take up painting, do something purely creative? Oh dear, no. It’s not likely I’ll be any good at that (unlike your own talented children). How about pottery? Yes, that would be better. Get my hands dirty, shape something new out of this glorious earth.
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