Adam & Eve (2 page)

As the huge black piano fell a little crookedly, its lid opened out, flapped slowly like the single stiff wing of a monstrous bird. The protective felt socks dropped away, and sunlight transmogrified the pedals into the brass talons of a stooping bird of prey.

I began to run. Still running, I heard the impact of the instrument, heard how it broke in jangled discord and the terrified screams of people close by. I ran harder. Approaching the door of the café, I gasped first with relief to see our friend Gabriel Plum lying beside the wrecked piano on the cobblestones. Stretched out, unhurt, he held Thom’s eyeglasses with the thick black plastic frame in his hand and seemed to be studying the pavement through one of the lenses. Then I saw a pool of blood seeping from underneath the golden struts and snarled strings, the scattered keys and felted hammers of the shattered piano.

“Thom!” I screamed. My knees buckled, and I would have fallen but felt under my elbow the supporting male hand of some stranger who muttered in an unknown tongue the word
Igtiyal!

Three years later, I would learn that this Arabic word meant “murder.”

The day of Thom’s death, I felt myself disintegrating, turning into dust, into nothing.

Earlier that morning, after Thom and I got up, Thom had taken his computer flash drive, which I called the memory stick, though the term usually applies to a device for cameras, from around his own neck and lowered the black silk cord over my head. It was a familiar ritual for the first morning after our arrival for a conference in a foreign country. During the scientific meetings, I would venture out mostly on my own; Thom’s flash drive was a talisman, a love token, and a reminder that he was with me on my rambles. Without fail, I would return the memory stick to him at a shared meal just before he spoke at the conference.

That fateful day in our Amsterdam hotel, as he positioned the cord and its pendant around my neck, he said, “The keys to the kingdom.” Smiling fondly at me, he gave the titanium case of his flash drive a little pat against my breastbone.

Adjusting the stick so that it hung concealed inside my silk blouse between my breasts, I smiled to recall that as a child in Memphis I had sometimes worn the key to my grandmother’s home on a string around my neck.

“The keys to which kingdom?” I asked Thom.

“The inhabited universe.”

“Only that?” I teased.

“Let me show you, Ms. Smarty,” he said.

Drawing shut the hotel’s blackout curtains, he turned morning into night. By lamplight, his large adept hands moved automatically among the utilitarian instruments of his profession: a small projector, his computer, a connecting cable. When he retrieved the flash drive, cupping it in his hand, he remarked, “Already warm,” kissed it, and winked at me. Then he inserted the device into a port on the computer and turned off the table lamp.

In the darkness over our heads appeared a dazzling star-studded sky, clouded occasionally with reddish-pinkish zones.

“Behold,” he said dramatically. Then he spoke in his normal, soft voice, full of intimacy. “The reddish clouds indicate a statistical reality—where extraterrestrial life is most likely to be found.”

So many reddish areas! My knees felt wobbly. The tints of thin red and purple—sunset colors, dawn colors—looked like veils dropped here and there over the vast array of stars.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Spectroscopic analysis—new methods—for detecting the presence of biomolecules in deep space. Other life is very far away, but it exists.”

Like heaven, but where?
I wanted to ask. Cloudy wisps of colors represented various biomolecules—pink, magenta, lavender, orange, a waver of green. Overlapping and combining in some places, the colors veiled the swirls of galaxies, stars, and golden intergalactic dust.

“It’s gorgeous,” I said, and my voice trembled. “You represent statistical reality as gorgeous.” I was moved by his graphic, the way works of art sometimes move me in their ability to combine truth and beauty. Sometimes the paintings of my patients moved me that way—I was an art therapist at University Hospital in Iowa City.

“I suppose we’re hardwired to see creation as beautiful,” he replied.

In one reddish area, a drop of pure crimson, red as blood, caught my eye. I pointed and said, “It’s throbbing.”

“Growing larger, actually,” he said.

As the dot enlarged, it lost its circularity and took on the point and lobes of a valentine. I realized I was seeing a love note from Thom emerge from the universe. The dot had become a heart. Hubris! I thought, but I was amused and pleased, too. In a red arch across the night sky I saw letters emerging. A message: “A Valentine to all the Lucys of the Universe.” I felt embarrassed, giddy, and terribly in love.

“Oh, Thom!” I said. “You’re not going to show this at the meeting. It’s too much!”

“No,” he said. “Not this part.”

Then he made the sun rise. The stars on the ceiling dimmed, and finally the letters faded away into artificial dawn. While Thom opened the curtains to admit the real world of a busy Dutch morning, he mentioned that the flash drive held his backup data and the programs for interpreting it. “Much of it’s also on the printout in my briefcase—the part I’m ready to present at the meeting.” He unplugged the drive from the computer and placed its cord around my neck again. “But you’ll bring me the memory stick, like always?” In the early days of our travels I had wondered why Thom wanted to risk the
possibility that perhaps I would be delayed, through no fault of my own. Then this gesture of trust—in me, in good luck—became a ritual of our faith in each other. Again he patted the titanium case against my heart. “I won’t show ELF my love letter,” he answered.

As he bent to kiss my forehead, he remarked, “I’m not ready to tell them yet.”

“Tell them what?”

“It’s more than statistical probability. The place marked by pure red—that’s it.”

“What do you mean?” I felt blood suffuse my face, while my body flooded with fear.

“It’s there. The red dot marks the place. It’s there. Some form of extraterrestrial life.”

I was stunned. It was as though I were seeing an alien in Thom. Then came an impulse to throw my arms around him, to recover my Thom with a barrage of kisses all over his face, his head, his neck. Instead, I kissed him once, slowly and tenderly on the mouth.

“Gabriel Plum called last night,” Thom said quietly.

Gabriel was British, very dry and rational, a dear enough friend so that sometimes we called him “Sherlock” to tease him. Part of the Geneva group, he was enthusiastic about finding planets.

Thom went on, “Some fundamentalist group feels threatened by our search for extraterrestrial life.” My husband spoke the sentence thoughtfully; it wasn’t his style to ridicule anybody. “They contacted Gabriel.”

“You’ve told Gabriel? The red dot?”

“Before showing you? Not on my life.” He smiled at me. “But we communicate. He knows my methods for analyzing the data. He knows a discovery is imminent.”

“When will you announce it? At the meeting? At lunch?”

“All the amino acids are there, in the spectra. It’s life. I’m sure of it.”

“But?” I could feel his hesitation.

Thom glanced away from me. He studied the carpet in our hotel room. He seemed embarrassed. “You know Gabriel is looking for planets.”

“We’ve found thousands,” I said.

“They’re sterile. Gabriel wants them to be sterile.”

“Why?”

“He wants us to be the only ones. Earth is God’s chosen place. Where he sent his Son, in Gabriel’s belief.”

“But Gabriel was your student, years ago. He wants ELF to succeed.” I took off the memory stick. “I don’t want to wear it, Thom. It’s too important.”

He shrugged. Then he tapped his head. “It’s all in here. I could do it again if I needed to.”

“Yes, but how long would it take?”

“A few years. The programs are on the drive, too, the ones that make sense of the data.”

I heard the enthusiasm in Thom’s voice. Next he would offer to show me the programs, but I’d seen programs before—a jungle of numbers, tedious ones strewn with symbols, full of repetition. I had no training or ability to read them.

“I want to prepare people for the news. They aren’t ready. It’s too big. It will affect everything about our identity, about being human.”

I knew myself to be shaken in a hair-raising way. “It’s an earthquake of an idea,” I agreed. “A tsunami.” I squelched the impulse to ask him again, Have you really found life in space? Real life?

“I’ve invited an anthropologist, a Franco-Egyptian, to talk to them about the social and moral impact of scientific discoveries. He’ll come to lunch. Remember Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt?”

“What would a discovery of extraterrestrial life mean to people?”

“Different things, of course. Fundamentalists in any religion are literalists. They take the words of their scriptures to be true in a literal sense, not evocative, not symbolic, not sometimes mysterious and incomprehensible, not reflective of the historic moment when they were written. Beyond their literalist interpretations, they’re cocky enough to think they believe they have access to the mind of God.”

“What did Gabriel want you to do?”

Thom kissed first one cheek and then the other. “‘Consider the repercussions,’
was all Gabriel said. Adam was created in God’s image. If extraterrestrial life looks like green mold, then so must their god, I suppose.”

“I thought Adam was made of mud.”

“From the dust of the soil—
adamah,
in Hebrew—hence Adam. But made in the image of God.”

“Maybe polytheism is a better belief,” I said provocatively. “I always thought monotheism was an arrogant idea designed to serve repressive political goals. We ought to go back to the Greeks—the Egyptians! Over to India! Dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of gods.”

After remarking that those cultures certainly had had their own forms of political oppression, Thom added, “Think how the discovery that the sun did not travel around the earth influenced our concept of our cosmic importance.”

“Why does Gabriel engage in extraterrestrial research if he doesn’t want to find life on any of the new planets?”

“Sometimes one does research to prove an idea is wrong.”

Squinting in the bathroom mirror the way he always did, Thom made his usual effort to part his curly hair with a small fine-toothed comb. “Twenty-twenty could be the scientists’ Year of Clear Vision,” he replied. “Let’s hope we’re ready by then. Today I’ll just talk about refinements in the methods of spectroscopy.” Amused at the prospect of seeing clearly, Thom turned to regard me through his own thick lenses. He slid his glasses to the end of his nose. “Remember, a president of the United States thought the rights of his God would be violated by stem cell research.”

In five minutes I knew those loose brown curls, increasingly tinged with gray, would be all over Thom’s head again in sweet disarray. He was a large man and strong; I thought he was aging just as gracefully as he did everything else.

I replied, “I’ll just meet you inside the Blue Tulip, right?”

When I explained how I planned to spend the morning at the house where the Frank family had hidden, Thom reminded me that his mother had known Anne Frank when they were both young children.

“I remember,” I said.

“Sometimes,” he said soberly, “I think we should achieve peace on earth before we deal with extraterrestrial life. It would be a sign that we’re ready. Fission and fusion, the bombs, came too soon.”

I felt a surge of love for Thom. He was a scientist who cared about human life, about politics, about culture. But I said, “Thom, I feel frightened. I don’t think I should wear the memory stick.”

“It’s safer on you than on me. I could be kidnapped.” He smiled.

“So could I. And what should I do if—”

“If I keeled over from a heart attack?”

“If anything?”

“Well, wait for a sign. Wait till your heart tells you it’s time, till you see clearly. Consult Gabriel if you want to.”

The conversation was too spooky. We both stopped.
Dazzled.
My mind was dazzled by the magnitude of Thom’s discovery. He bent down, and I stretched up. Tenderly, we exchanged our last kiss.

More than twenty years earlier, in 1995, I had been a better-than-fair high school classical musician, but upon graduation I renounced playing the viola; I knew I was already nearing the limits of my musical talent, though not of my intellectual curiosity about my own mind or the minds of others. The last year in high school I read psychology on my own and insisted on taking the standardized exam for graduating college psychology majors. I scored well. In selecting a college from among several offering nice scholarships, I told my grandmother, “I want to be in the
middle
of the country,” and I somewhat capriciously chose Iowa as the heart of the Midwest, though I considered Chicago. Three weeks after my arrival in Iowa City, I met Thom at an orchestral rehearsal held in the Union at the University of Iowa. Despite having aborted my own musical career, in my loneliness I had been drawn toward the familiar scene of rehearsal.