Textile (6 page)

At Charles de Gaulle Airport he got off and waited, according to instructions, in an isolated hall with cold croissants on plastic plates and a hot water urn that refused to come to a boil.

When the call to return to the plane came over the loudspeaker, he grumbled out loud, making some critical remark, but the other passengers, who heard him, failed to react. Despite the fact that he himself was an inventor and discoverer, he was not in the least impressed by the invention of the airplane. He had irritable bowels, and he swallowed a pill.

In the heights over the Atlantic there was a storm, and the captain said, “This is your captain. Passengers are requested to fasten their seatbelts and remain in their places.” As soon as the storm calmed down, the food arrived. Gruber lifted the aluminum lid from his meal and saw what it was he was supposed to eat. He was surrounded on all sides.

He hardly ate a thing, and signaled for his tray to be removed. The flight attendant who arrived was very ugly and she looked sadly at his tray and at him, as if she herself had prepared the meal. She and her colleagues had done their best to improve the conditions of the flight for the grumpy passenger in 48H, they had helped the two Americans to control the youths from Chicago, gone back and forth to bring Gruber another blanket that didn’t scratch, an extra pillow, more water, more coffee.

Around him, sleep had fallen on everyone. He was amused by the fact that the flight attendant took an interest in his future wishes too: “Would you prefer beer or water to drink?” He could hardly pour the beer, because the storm wasn’t really over, and there was no room for him to raise his elbows either. The beer made his stomach feel even worse, and he really needed to go to the toilet.

He tried to stand up, packed in between two sleeping sons of ex-Israelis from Chicago, and in the end he was obliged to climb over one of them, and then to take five or six steps to the tail of the plane and join the line. Although he took care to count the people in front of him, he wasn’t sure that he had kept his place. As soon as he entered the little cubicle and shut himself in, the plane shook and the light instructing passengers to return to their seats and fasten their seatbelts went on again. There was an extension of the fasten seatbelt light in the toilets. Gruber actually felt rather relieved at not having to fasten any seatbelt, and he reassured himself by imagining that he wasn’t in a plane in the sky but in a train in Israel traveling to Beersheba, which explained the swaying left and right.

Now he looked around at the most popular place on the flight. Everything was wet from the urinating of his all predecessors, down to the first generation. He vomited his modest meal, flushed the toilet (which made a noise, as the warning notice in Hebrew and English warned), washed his face, and again felt the stab in his irritable bowels, which symbolized anxiety with regard to the future, and outrage at what had already happened and could not be changed.

The source of the genius’s agony was the sudden, simultaneous death of four thousand golden orb weavers (
Nephila maculata
), known for their strong, flexible golden webs, from which he had hoped to produce the T-suits and turn Israel into a Security Textile Power.

In the tropical regions where
Nephila maculata
originates, the inhabitants succeeded in exploiting their strong webs to make fishing nets and lines, and in South America there were attempts to use
the webs of this talented spider in the manufacture of safety nets for circus acrobats.

Gruber went further.

He emerged from the toilet pale and swaying. His exhaustion was evident to all, and he himself felt that he could no longer stand being himself. A genius, sensitive, vulnerable, the joke of the week, a complete floor rag. The two Chicago youths did not wake up in the course of his efforts to return to his seat, and he collapsed into it with a sigh.

All the hopes of the Israeli scientist were pinned on an American colleague by the name of Bahat McPhee, an ex-Israeli he had met on the Internet, in the international forum of arthropod lovers. The relationship between Irad Gruber and Bahat McPhee was one of the strangest and most complicated ever formed between an Israeli living in Israel and an American-Israeli colleague.

In the beginning they asked each other ordinary questions, such as, when and where were you born, why did you leave Israel, what’s new in Israel and in America, what school did you go to, what did you do in the army, how did you come to dedicate yourself to the study of the arthropods, etc.

In one of their conversations, Irad let slip to Bahat, without paying attention and without thinking, his birth date: the twenty-fifth of December. From that moment on Bahat changed her attitude toward him and became full of reverence and respect, exceeding anything he could remember even in the days when he was awarded the Israel Prize.

The meaning of the glory with which she showered him after discovering his birth date, he learned directly from her. She worshipped Rod Serling, she wanted to set up an Internet site in his memory, at the moment she didn’t have the time, but soon she intended to go into low gear and do it.

“Who’s Rod Serling?” asked Gruber hesitantly.

“The genius who wrote
The Twilight Zone
. You remember the series? Didn’t you watch television when we were children?”

“Aah, I saw it,” he said.

“You and he were born on the same day, albeit not the same year. He died in seventy something, and you’re still alive.”

“I’m still alive,” Gruber confirmed.

After Bahat McPhee discovered that Irad Gruber and Rod Serling were born on the same day (you can never know what biographical detail will connect a man to his fellow), she not only treated him with great affection, she went much further and disclosed
secrets
to him. She too was working on increasing the productivity of the spinning glands of the golden orb weavers, and her goal was his goal: to manufacture a lightweight protective suit, flexible and effective, in an era of uncertain personal security.

The prestigious Cornell University, situated in the town of Ithaca, together with the municipality of that same town, in conjunction with other bodies she preferred not to talk about on the Internet, were funding her research. She asked who was funding his research, and he didn’t mind telling her.

DURING THE PAST terrible week when all his spiders died at once while he was investigating the genome of their silk proteins, he had not spoken to her, because he was afraid she would make fun of him. Everyone knew that the spider was not a social animal, and collecting four thousand of them in a single space, however big, was asking for trouble. He knew this, but for some reason he hoped it would work out, that the spiders would not let him, Dr. Irad Gruber, down. After their death he also asked that the possibility of the spiders having been deliberately gassed be investigated, but he didn’t know if anyone had bothered to check it out.

In the nights following the death of the four thousand
Nephila
he suffered from insomnia (exactly like Rod Serling), and on the third night he called her up on the ordinary telephone and told her about the catastrophe. To his astonishment she did not laugh or mock, but listened with empathy, and when he concluded his confession, she went so far as to volunteer to help him and fill him in
on all her research findings to date. “You are not alone,” she said to him, and his heart filled with hope. She added, “Get on a plane and come here. You won’t be sorry. It’s a beautiful place too.”

Gruber didn’t think twice. He would have traveled to any godforsaken hole in the world to save his project from capsizing. He applied to the defense minister to approve a trip to New York State, in order to meet an ex-Israeli American who for mysterious reasons was willing to donate her research findings on the golden orb weaver free, gratis, and for nothing. The defense minister was a forgiving man and he approved the trip, which seemed to him an act of despair and an escape from reality.

Gruber knew that the ministry had already approached his rivals from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who were working with biophysicists from Munich on producing extremely strong spider webs without spiders. From an article published in
Current Biology
he learned that the Jerusalemites had succeeded in transferring the web-producing genes, albeit not in commercial amounts, to the fruit fly
Drosophila melanogaster
. The flies had begun to produce spider webs from their saliva glands, which are equipped with giant chromosomes.

Clearly, therefore, the Jerusalemites too were intent on the mass production of spider webs, and in light of the new circumstances, they were likely to get there before him.

McPhee claimed to have made far more significant progress, but she was not willing to go into detail on the Internet or on the phone, but only face to face. He hoped all this wasn’t some day-dream, even though he was afraid she might be somewhat eccentric, because of her attitude toward Rod Serling, and especially because she was so proud of the fact that for a number of years he had taught communications at one of the excellent colleges in her town, Ithaca. There was something boastful too in her claim that everyone knew that Ithaca provided the best educational services in the world, about which she bragged as if she was one of the founding fathers.

But he knew that if after he met her and it all turned out to be wishful thinking, he would die in America of a stroke or cardiac arrest. He was already suffering from health problems as a result of the hell of the previous week. An irregular heart beat, an antsy feeling at the tips of his fingers, and shame, great shame. He couldn’t look his biophysicists in the eye. They had spent months prying into the spinning glands of the right spiders, but apparently that wasn’t enough.

Success in the mass production of spider webs was a one-way ticket to eternity, and Gruber longed to leave his mark on eternity, like Copernicus, Galileo, the inventor of the pendulum clock whose name he had forgotten, and the same with the steam engine and the small pox vaccination, Darwin, Michelangelo, and Nobel himself, who invented dynamite.

Gruber knew very well that a Nobel Prize for the invention of the ultimate protective suit was already waiting in Stockholm for the person who came to pluck it. In his mind’s eye he could already see the trivia question: What is the name of the man who removed the sting from war and international terror by inventing the protective suit against deadly weapons?

But at this point reality suddenly intruded again, and the up-to-date facts overcame his being like a natural disaster, and at precisely ten thousand miles above the Atlantic, at a temperature of minus fifty degrees Celsius outside, Gruber fell into a deep depression. He tried to go to sleep but failed. Destructive thoughts ravaged and riddled his brain. His head became hollow.

If he returned from his trip to the United States empty handed . . . It would be Titanic three—if Titanic one was the disaster of the Titanic itself, and Titanic two was the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.

In his mind’s eye he saw himself coming back with nothing. And the force of the blow made him lose consciousness. The flight attendants and the passengers all thought that the person leaning back with his mouth open was sound asleep, and left him alone
until an hour before landing. Only then did they grasp his situation and they shook him until he woke up and found himself looking at a doctor who was asking him if he suffered from epilepsy. Gruber replied in the negative, and the flight attendants pampered him in the hour left before landing.

And during that hour Gruber also pieced together the visions he had seen while his mind was wandering.

He had spent the time in question at a cocktail party with representatives of enlightened countries. They were angry with him and told him that the success of the protective suits, and their distribution worldwide, were paradoxically harmful to the welfare of mankind. The covering of humanity in the work of his hands would damage one of the pillars of war: the dead.

One of the guests volunteered to explain to him that the industry of mourning and bereavement employed many people in the global village, and also that there were countries in the world which were so multicultural, that grief and bereavement were the only things that kept the peace there and prevented civil war from breaking out.

“It’s impossible to establish a new state every two streets and a square,” said the man. And the prophet Isaiah too suddenly appeared to him toward the end of the flight, not in the shape of flesh and blood, but as an inner command, since Gruber knew that in the book of Isaiah, chapter 59, verse 6, it said, “Their webs shall not become garments, neither shall they cover themselves with their works.”

The plane landed. Gruber was as wet as after aerobic activity. He stood up to take the heavy bag containing his laptop computer down from the luggage compartment.

4

THE ANESTHETIST GAVE MANDY AN ADDITIONAL SHOT IN the vein. Her upper back had already been opened up: two nice, neat cuts to the right and the left, parallel to the spinal cord.

“Unbelievable the things people do today,” said the OR nurse, “a friend of a friend of mine in Ohio had a collarbone implant on both sides to improve her decolletage, and that’s even before what she did to her breasts. It’s insane what people do to themselves. I even heard about someone who had the backs of her hands lifted. The only operation I’d be prepared to have would be a
look
implant, but nobody’s invented one yet. If they had—I’d like to have it.” And after a second she added longingly, “Aaah, if only there was such thing, a look implant!”