Reprobation

by Catherine Fearns

  Mikko began the introductions, and while he did Helen realised that they didn’t really have a decent story for why they were there at all. She tried starting in the same way as they had in Manchester, asking Baptiste about the drawing she had seen in Shepherd’s flat, and how it matched with Mikko’s vision.

  ‘Ah, the gates of Heaven and Hell,’ Baptiste said with grandeur laced with sarcasm. ‘You saw them too did you?’ He looked at Mikko but seemed only mildly interested in something that to Helen was an astonishing phenomenon.

  ‘Vous savez, Andrew was obsessed with near-death experiences. He collected them. Searched out stories on the internet. Visited hospitals, dying people, made a terrible nuisance of himself. He often talked to me about those gates.’

  Helen nodded. ‘He wanted confirmation that everyone was seeing the same thing. And were they?’

  ‘According to him, yes. Everybody saw the gate, the path that forks, the mysterious figure, the two skies. But my friends, that can all be explained by neuropsychology. And it cannot be the only reason you came here.’

  One of the women flanking Baptiste on the sofa took out a silver case, opened it and began to prepare a line of cocaine. Baptiste admonished her in French, nudging her too roughly to get up and leave, so that some of the white powder spilled onto the table, and she licked it up with her finger as she slunk off grumpily. ‘Sorry about that,’ he smiled. ‘Filthy habit.’

  ‘Oh please, don’t mind me,’ said Mikko. ‘I have, like, a bunch of drug convictions, so no judgement here.’

  ‘Then would you like some, my friend?’ Baptiste began to take something out of his pocket, and Mikko looked keen to partake, but Helen glared at him disapprovingly.

  ‘OK, no thanks, dude. Another time.’

  Helen asked ‘When was the last time you were in touch with Andrew Shepherd?’

  Baptiste looked at her for a long time; but since he wasn’t answering, she continued:

  ‘Did you know he had a laboratory inside his apartment?’

  ‘Ah, so you know about that as well. Alright, yes, Shepherd last contacted me three years ago. He wanted me to buy him a Revelon Sequencer. They cost over a hundred thousand dollars, you know. And you can’t just buy one from a shop. He said that I owed him. And I did, I suppose.’

  ‘Why did you owe him?’ asked Mikko. ‘If it was his fault that your team was disbanded and you lost your job?’

  ‘Let’s say I owed him in other ways. He took care of me on a… spiritual level. And anyway, look around you! Everything that happened has led to this. I am a very wealthy man, a very fortunate man, with not a care in this world.’ He said this with an odd bitterness. ‘One hundred thousand dollars is nothing to me, so why not?’

  ‘Do you know what he was doing in that home laboratory?’ asked Helen. Again, Baptiste did not answer, but focused intently on lighting his cigar, so she continued:

  ‘We spoke to Professor Clancy, and he told us about the marker for the elect. Was Shepherd testing people to see if they were going to Heaven or Hell? Do you think he killed those people because he thought they were sinners? To stop them from sinning in the future?’

  ‘You’re not quite on the right lines, shall we say. Shepherd tested himself, that’s for sure. And he didn’t have the marker. He was a Reprobate, destined for Hell.’

  ‘So, he decided to just go crazy, start murdering people, because it didn’t matter?’

  ‘No. Not that.’ Baptiste was enjoying this. He put down his cigar, poured himself a large whisky and drank most of it in one go. Helen was very glad he was drunk, since this might help him reveal more of what he knew. He leaned back, and slid his arms along the back of the sofa and around the girls, the second of whom had slipped back into the room sheepishly, sniffing through one nostril then the other.

  ‘What’s the next step after genetic testing?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Gene therapy. Andrew wanted to mutate the gene, to add the marker to his own body, and then to the bodies of others. To play God. And I mean, that’s what we do, we’re geneticists, and genes can be modified. But who on earth was going to sanction that? Who was even going to believe him? We had to stop him, and that’s why the team was disbanded. I mean, the idea of fixing the gene we could dismiss. But telling people – it would discredit all of us.’

  ‘OK, so perhaps he was trying to add the marker to these people. But then why would he kill them?’

  ‘Perhaps it didn’t work. Gene therapy is still a very new and experimental technique, we don’t really know if it works, or what the side effects are. It could be very dangerous.’

  Mikko leaned back and began to put his arm around Helen in a gesture that unconsciously mimicked Baptiste, but she looked at him with the same disapproval as before and so he shied away, asking quickly, ‘So if you were Shepherd, how would you do it? How would you change someone?’

  ‘Well. There are two types of gene therapy. The first is called somatic cell gene therapy. This involves obtaining blood cells from a person with a genetic disease, or in this case without the x marker, and then introducing a good gene, i.e. with the marker, into the so-called defective cell. It’s normally done virally, by injecting a retrovirus into the body and hoping it will spread. And it would have to be done several times over the course of a person’s life, as the effects don’t last very long. The retrovirus inserts its genetic code directly into the chromosomes of the host cell. But the problem is you need to weaken the patient’s immune system first so the virus can take hold. There are other ways, but the viral method is the most effective.’

  At this point Mikko had lost track, but Helen was concentrating intently, trying to understand. ‘And would this… cure… then be passed on to the next generation?’

  ‘Non non, pas du tout.’ Baptiste wagged his finger as he downed another large slug of whisky.

  ‘This type of gene therapy is not passed on from generation to generation. And in any case the marker – the soterion mutation we, sorry he, called it – is not inherited. It occurs spontaneously on the OS1 at the moment of conception. Like a genetic disorder. Or the opposite of a genetic disorder, I suppose. Since it is a rather, shall we say, favourable mutation.

  ‘But you raise an interesting point there, Madame, about the other type of gene therapy. The other type is known as germline therapy. Germline therapy takes place in the reproductive cells. It involves the genetic modification of germ cells that will pass the change on to the next generation. This type only has to be done one time to be permanent. You can treat a pre-embryo before it is placed back in the mother by IVF. Or, you can treat both adult sperm and egg cells so the genetic – defect, shall we say – is not passed on to children.’

  Helen tried to process this. ‘Do you think that Shepherd wanted to remove the gene for sin? Remove original sin… forever?’

  ‘Perhaps. But for that he would need a pregnancy. I suppose he could try and get a job in an IVF lab and do it covertly. Or find someone willing to be his Sainte Vierge.’ Baptiste poured another large whisky. Helen wondered if his drinking was something to do with having had to cope with the enormity of these ideas.

  Mikko spoke again. ‘So, Monsieur Baptiste, I get the impression you don’t believe in Shepherd’s theory. But presumably you still tested yourself?’

  Baptiste said nothing; he just laughed enigmatically.

  ‘And after all this happened, you decided not to pursue your career as a geneticist?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Look around you, I think it was a pretty good decision, no? Look, I’m a statistician, and I got treated badly by my research institution. Academia is a brutal and corrupt profession, much more so than any of the business I do now. I gave ten years of my life to pointless stochastic variations. So I decided to use statistics for something else. And look at me. Couldn’t be happier.’ It was said with that same hint of bitterness that failed to convince them fully.

  ‘Clancy tested us, you know,’ Mikko said, eyeing Baptiste from behind his raised whisky glass.
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  ‘And?’

  ‘She has the marker, I don’t.’

  ‘Then you had better find Shepherd, my friend. So he can do his God thing and send you to heaven. If. If. If you believe, that is.’

  ‘It’s OK, I don’t.’

  ‘Ah, in that case you’re fine. Always better to be on the safe side though, no?’ he asked mischievously. ‘Atheism is a dangerous game. Even the devils never fell into that vice. For the devils also believe and tremble.’

  ‘Book of James, chapter two, verse nineteen,’ said Helen.

  ‘Indeed. I’m a gambling man. I play the odds. And as you can see,’ he gestured to the luxury surrounding him, ‘it has worked well for me so far, no?’ Baptiste poured both he and Mikko another whisky, and clinked glasses with him, before looking at him provocatively as they drank. ‘So you really don’t believe in God, my friend? No Heaven or Hell for you? No paradise filled with beautiful women, no fiery torture, just eternal blackness as your body is slowly decomposed by worms?’

  ‘Look, man,’ said Mikko. ‘All I know is what I saw, and that was one hooded dude. One dude. Or lady, I guess; sorry, don’t mean to be sexist. But it didn’t feel like God or Satan, it felt like both. I mean, God and Satan are basically the same, depending on which way you look at it.’

  Helen shuddered, and hid her face in her drink. She felt that she had displayed an extraordinarily high tolerance for blasphemy over the past few weeks, but she was struggling with this drunken and facile way of discussing religious belief.

  ‘Look,’ said Mikko, ‘even if I did believe. It just seems ridiculous – to trick God? Trick your way into heaven, like He didn’t notice what you were doing? Come on, dude.’ But at Mikko’s words Baptiste just shrugged theatrically.

  Helen spoke up. ‘Do you think Andrew Shepherd killed those people, Monsieur Baptiste? I don’t profess to know him at all, but I was in his apartment, and he was clearly struggling spiritually. He didn’t seem like the type of person who would really want to play God.’

  Baptiste thought for a moment. ‘Andrew was capable of a lot of things. In many ways he was the most brilliant man I ever met. I wouldn’t put anything past him. But there are other people who might have a lot more to lose from what he was doing. In fact, just about everybody in the world stood to lose out if his theories became public knowledge. Imagine a world where we all knew, or thought we knew, the future? It would be a nightmare. People would go crazy. People could do whatever they liked!’ At this he gestured around him and laughed. ‘And now, my esteemed guests, on that bombshell, as they say: who would like another drink?’

  The talk descended, the volume of the music increased, and one of the vacant girls began dancing languidly around the pole, even though nobody was watching. Mikko and Helen soon managed to extricate themselves, since Baptiste was almost paralytic by now. As they walked back along the quay, Mikko said:

  ‘That guy is like the least happy person I’ve ever met. Anyone who says ‘Look how happy I am!’ is definitely not. Anyway – so. Let’s review. First of all, it seems that plenty of other people had the same vision as me, and that freaks the shit out of me, I can’t even go there. So let’s talk about Shepherd. From what Baptiste says, it seems that Shepherd was trying to help these people, to save them. But if he was trying to help them, why would he kill them? Maybe it didn’t work? But why make a statement about it?’

  But Helen was quiet, racking her brains and trying to remember all the things she had seen in Shepherd’s room, wishing she had Mikko’s photographic memory. She felt close to Shepherd’s struggle and wanted desperately to understand it. But most of all she wanted to think about the other thing. The other type of genetic modification – to create a human born without sin – those were Baptiste’s words. It made her shudder and she could hardly articulate it. Surely there could be no greater blasphemy.

  But Mikko did not seem to have picked up on the significance of this, and had moved on. ‘So here’s the big question. This guy has clearly tested himself, and clearly believes it. So which is he? Heaven or Hell?’

  Helen sighed. ‘That really is the big question – and it centres on whether human nature is fundamentally good or bad.’

  ‘I mean,’ continued Mikko, ‘I’m not going to suddenly start sinning because I’m going to Hell anyway. I mean, I wouldn’t, if I believed I was…anyway, whatever… And you’re not going to start sinning just because you’re definitely going to Heaven, and therefore you’re fine. Or are you?’

  ‘It’s certainly a fascinating question.’ she said, and she tried to add some theological exegesis to Mikko’s musings; to elaborate on the ideas of antinomianism to which she had alluded in her lecture the previous week, and which now seemed somehow so much more real. But it was late, they had been drinking, and the layers of belief, disbelief, and the grey spaces in between were too overwhelming for either of them to comprehend. Furthermore, part of her terror lay in the fact that antinomianism, the principle that the elect had no need to follow moral laws, it could be argued, was effectively the principles of Calvinism, the religion that she had chosen, taken to their logical conclusion. And there were other feelings too; feelings about Mikko that she could neither admit nor deny to herself.

  Mikko nudged her and she smiled back at him, but there were levels of awkwardness in this conversation that were impossible for either to decipher. They walked back to the hotel slowly, dragging their feet, wanting and not wanting this moment to end. It was out of season, so tourists and party-goers were few and far between. The occasional party group trampled past noisily, but it was mainly couples, residents of Monaco, or foreign rose-sellers eking out the last of the year’s business. Helen and Mikko walked past a couple passionately kissing, leaning against the promenade, and they automatically shrank away, giving the couple a wider berth.

  As they approached the hotel they both made some awkward efforts at small-talk. And then they fell silent as they entered the elevator up to their rooms. They both made exaggerated fumbling gestures of taking out their room keys, and then faced each other in the corridor.

  ‘Well, goodnight,’ he said, swaying from foot to foot with his hands in his pockets. ‘God bless. I guess.’

  ‘Goodnight, Mikko.’

  Helen closed the door quickly but held on to the lock for a moment and pressed her forehead to the door, closing her eyes, trying to breath, and to lower her heart rate. This state of agitation was unbearable. To pray in this state was unthinkable, to sleep was unthinkable, and she wondered whether to go back out, walk along the promenade, or even go to a bar and obliterate everything. She sat on the bed, because the room was spinning, swirling into different dimensions, scattering into pixels that reformed into images of Mikko, of her brother, of the detectives, of dead bodies, and of the black gates and the hooded figure.

  In one single movement she stood up from the bed, lurched out of the doorway and across the corridor and knocked on his door. He opened immediately, as if he had been standing right behind it. They kissed and she tasted nicotine and smoke and alcohol and when she felt his hands on her she did the same and touched his shoulder blades, his ribs, and his waist. He looked into her eyes and put his hands to her cheeks.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  As they fell to the bed the same phrase kept running through her mind, even though she had never been Catholic. She mouthed the words repeatedly 'Father forgive me for I have sinned, Father forgive me for I have sinned.’ She was teetering on the brink of that abyss now, and she allowed him to take her over the edge, falling, falling and she didn’t want to stop.

  14.

  High above the River Mersey, another body is about to fall into darkness. The Runcorn Bridge is another liminal space, a bridge between worlds, or between Liverpool and the outside world. The old bridge is now dwarfed by the Mersey Gateway Project, a symbol of regeneration, the new versus the old. But the old bridge still remains, and parallel to it is the Runcorn Railway Bridge
, also known as the Ethelfleda. Ethelfleda is the wonderfully evocative name of the Lady of the Mercians, sister of King Edward the Elder who helped him to build fortifications at Runcorn in the tenth century. Appropriately then, this bridge has a castle-like structure at either end. Now derelict, these mini castles have been poorly locked-up, so that anyone desperate enough to be needing shelter out here would find the doors easy to open. A man opens the door, looks around as if to check the coast is clear, then drags out a black refuse bag from behind the door. The man has matted hair and an unkempt beard, and his face is gaunt although his body shape is disguised by the layers of clothing and filthy shapeless coat he is wearing. He kneels down and takes two items out of the bag, placing them on the ground in front of him: a laptop and a hammer. He takes the hammer and begins smashing at the laptop. For several minutes he smashes, sometimes tentatively, sometimes with a desperate anger, until tiny springs and pieces of circuit board fly at him and the laptop is as nothing. He then puts down the hammer and climbs the ramparts to the very top of the battlements.