The Explanation for Everything (9 page)

“I think a better question is why
would
they.”

“Because that's how evolution works. We have all evolved, mutation by mutation, from single-celled organisms that existed hundreds of millions of years ago. There's molecular evidence. There's proof!” And here he wished he really was Rosenblum, who always had the numbers at his disposal, the right way to recount the history of DNA.

“Your argument is so circular,” Melissa said. “Evolution exists because we're the products of evolution.”

“Is that what I said?” He feared it was.

Melissa sighed again, but this time she seemed almost disappointed, or, far worse, compassionate. “Sometimes I think Darwinians don't know how ridiculous they sound. Like
we're
the ridiculous ones, when all you have to go on are mutations—”

“That's not all we have to go on,” said Andy.

“
Mutations!
”

Andy, who had never before found himself mocked for holding fairly conventional beliefs, was even more annoyed with himself than usual. Why did she have to keep saying “mutations” in that tone of voice?

“So that's why we're here, then,” she said. “Instead of God, you choose mutants.”

“All right,” Andy said, “I get it. Enough.”

What he knew of evolution was what he'd learned as an undergraduate and applied to the rest of his research: that genes were hereditary, that mutations in those genes expressed themselves in different behaviors or traits, and that the different behaviors or traits that led to more successful reproduction were the ones that were more likely to be passed on. This was the way of life. If it wasn't, he couldn't conduct his research. He couldn't teach biology.

“Here,” Melissa said, opening
The Macroevolution Myth
to a passage she'd highlighted in pink. “Listen, Professor Waite. Just so you can see where I'm coming from. I'm quoting: in order for supposedly ‘helpful' mutations to randomly arise in organisms, an organism would have to wait approximately 216 million years, according to conservative estimates, to see this mutation arise. If one accepts the secular estimation that life on this planet dates back 3.5 billion years, one only has to do simple math to realize that enough time simply hasn't occurred since life began to account for every single mutation necessary to create something as complex as the human heart, much less the brain.” She closed the book triumphantly. “See?”

“You realize this language isn't particularly convincing,” Andy said. “What do you mean ‘conservative estimate'? What is a ‘secular estimation'?”

“Do you really want all the numbers?” Melissa asked. “I mean, there are footnotes if you want them—”

“I don't need to see the footnotes,” he said. “I just—listen—” and here his mind went, without bidding, to his NSF grant, his mice, the volcano he and Belle were supposed to make for her presentation on North American geology, “when I said I would oversee this independent study with you, I suppose I was hoping you'd go with a different thesis.”

“Well, what thesis were you hoping for, exactly? That intelligent design is wrong? That the Great Biological Powers That Be are right because everyone says they are?” Frustration put an appealing flush in her cheeks, which Andy noted and dismissed.

“Why don't we take out the right and the wrong,” he suggested, letting his voice grow more gentle, supportive. “How about we revise your thesis to be that intelligent design represents an alternative to Darwinian evolution that's, I don't know—that's worth investigating. As opposed to what you have now, which is that it's a better alternative. Because it's not, and I can't support your investigation into an untruth.”

Melissa rolled her eyes. “That just sounds flaky,” she said. “And also it's not what I want to say. I want to talk about intelligent design. I want to make an argument for it. I want to prove that the world is simply too complex, too perfectly designed, to be a product of,” here she wrinkled her nose again, “
mutation.
”

“But you're only saying that because the only literature you read supports your beliefs.”

“I could accuse you,” she said, “of the same thing.”

His grant was only a quarter finished, and the first part was due in a month. He hadn't done laundry all week. Dinner, homework, the volcano.

“So are you in or are you out?”

“I don't know,” he said, scratching his cheek.

Melissa's face went slack with horror. “I need these credits, Professor Waite!”

“I mean, I'm in. But only because I said I was in. Not because I think you're going to convince me that,” he picked up one of her books again, Saint Jesus of the Test Tubes, “that God is a rainbow.”

“Fine,” she said. “As long as you sign.” She bent down again to her backpack, took out a folder, removed a blue sheet of paper—the official Independent Study Faculty Agreement—and a white sheet of paper, which laid out her goals for the year: to read and analyze the following books and articles, to put together a bibliography of useful materials on intelligent design, and to write a thirty-page research paper.

“Thank you,” she said.

“No problem,” Andy lied.

She put her haul into her backpack and stood. Now that she was standing straight, Andy realized how tall she was. “You have young daughters, right, Professor Waite?”

How did she know? But the proof was all around him, in the photos tacked up to the bulletin board on his wall, the lunch sitting on his desk, packed in Rachel's old
Mulan
lunch box.

“If you ever need a babysitter, you know, I love kids.”

Andy smiled. Once upon a time, he imagined, female students offered up their bodies. Now they offered up their Friday evenings. “That's nice of you, Melissa. I don't go out much, though.”

“Well, just in case,” she said. “And thanks for signing those papers.”

“You bet,” Andy said. As soon as she was gone, he removed Rosenblum's letter from the drawer.

What kind of man have you become, anyway?

The kind who can't slam-dunk a fight with a creationist. The kind who can't prove a simple hypothesis about drunken mice.

But, he thought to himself, reading Rosenblum's letter for the fourth, fifth, sixth time, the kind who would take on Melissa in the first place. The kind who would find the time to debate her. The kind who takes reasonable care of his girls, who's a decent enough neighbor, who tries to be cheerful most of the time. The kind who, when he becomes too resentful about the life fate has handed him, looks in at his daughters sleeping in the same bunk and feels a renewed ability to go on.

There are worse men out there, Hank.

When he was a child in Shaker Heights he would walk to Horseshoe Lake with his mother on chilly March mornings to collect paramecia. They would each have two big jelly jars, and they would crouch by the creek and dip in their jars and collect all sorts of terrific things: paramecia and amoebas and sometimes, accidentally, tiny golden fish arching like thumbnails. They would take them back to their living room and Andy's mother would pull out the microscope, set it down on the kitchen table. She'd make pond-water slides, stick them under the scope, adjust the magnification. There the paramecia would flutter, the hydras would bulge. Andy's mother would turn up the magnification and suddenly Andy would be able to see the insides of the tiny creatures, the micronucleus and macronucleus, the vacuoles, the dozens of quivering cilia.

“Life exists on scales beyond our imagination,” his mother would say, her face warm next to his by the microscope.

What kind of man have you become, Andy?

The kind who still sometimes remembered that the world is full of wonder.

He put Melissa's books in his backpack and headed home, thinking more frequently than he wanted about the way her cheeks flushed and her fleeting smile.

T
HA
T NIGHT, THE
volcano flowed over the kitchen counter, onto stacks of dirty dishes and the remains of Rachel's chicken and broccoli casserole (low-fat sour cream, low-fat cheese). Belle squealed in delight, reminding Andy of his own reaction when his mice behaved the way they were supposed to (why wouldn't they behave the way they were supposed to?).

“This is some serious lava flow, Dad,” she said, mopping up the floor with a rag. “This is like some Pompeii-level stuff.”

“I was going to send Dad in with those leftovers tomorrow, FYI,” Rachel said, glaring at the mess from her perch at the kitchen table. She was engaged in a back-and-forth with someone on Google Chat, which was a program Andy wasn't sure he'd permitted. House rules dictated that all computer use had to stay in the kitchen, under public eye, because Andy had read one too many articles about perverts trolling and high school bullies sexting and whatever else happened in the grubby corners of the Internet and he was not going to let any of it happen to his girls.

“He could still eat it, if he wanted,” Belle said.

“Excuse me? It's been volcanoed.”

“It's not real volcano, idiot,” Belle snapped. “It's soda water and vinegar. Oh, and I guess a little dish soap, but not that much.”

“I know you didn't just call me an idiot.”

“Girls,” Andy said. “Enough.”

They cleaned the kitchen and bathed with a certain amount of persnicketiness and fell asleep in their respective bunks. After Rachel was out, Andy went to the laptop to see what she had been typing with such ferocity, and to whom.

Lilybeansxox. He didn't really like the sound of that at all. Rachel's handle (racherache) at least had a sort of alliteration thing happening. Who was this lilybeansxox and what did she (that was a she, right?) want with his Rachel?

Was it wrong to spy on his girls? Andy bit a nail. Perhaps it would have been if he'd had any idea what they were talking about, but the whole back-and-forth between Rachel and Lily, set up in choppy little lines, was so full of acronyms and references to things he didn't understand (what was a 303, a DGT?) that he didn't really feel like a spy as much as a visitor from another planet. What did AYTMTB mean? BBIAS?

His daughters were studying Spanish in school but they already spoke another language. This disconcerted him, as it was a language he knew he would never master, while the various languages he spoke (as parent, grown-up, biologist) would all be available to his girls should they want to know them one day. They were privileged in a way he wasn't. It didn't seem fair, that he should be raising them and yet they should be, in so many ways, profoundly unknowable.

Still they murmured in their sleep, he thought. Still he could admire them and know how lovely they were, and maybe that was his compensation. But on the other hand, what the hell was an IWIAM?

It was midnight, but the idea of getting in bed seemed depressing. He went out to the porch, fingered a cigar. He could go see if Sheila was around but—but no, he didn't feel like seeing Sheila. Four houses down, her downstairs light was still on, and he knew she'd keep him company, but the thought of her loose breasts came to mind and he inadvertently shuddered.

Back inside, he thought, well, I could work on the grant. A page at a time and by the end of the month he'd be done—but the truth was as long as his mice refused to behave the way he wanted them to, it seemed silly to ask for any more government money. Almost half a million dollars, and it would certainly come in handy, but there was no way the NSF would write him a check without first approving of his findings. And right now, for reasons that were beyond him, his findings were a mess. What would the tenure board say if they knew? Who would give him tenure on the basis of a half-dozen failures?

Still, maybe he was just looking at things the wrong way.

He opened his briefcase to take out his notebooks, but the first thing he grabbed, glossily bound, was one of Melissa's paperbacks.
God Is a Rainbow.
He opened it, took it to the bathroom, where he often got his best leisure reading done. But waiting for him in the basket next to the john was a copy of
The Onion
he'd been meaning to read, and so he sat there, chuckling to himself, until his back started to hurt, which was a sign that he was an hour closer to death and it was time to go to bed.

SEVEN

Three months after Rachel was born, Lou admitted smuggling her into church. “It wasn't my fault,” she said, after she'd confessed. “I was compelled.”

“What do you mean, compelled?” Andy had asked, annoyed, betrayed, but also consumed by tenderness the way he always was when he watched Louisa breast-feed.

“It was like—it was like something had taken over my body.”

“Yeah, but—”

“It was almost like I was possessed.”

“Give me a break, Lou.”

She shrugged.

In the months and years before in the NICU, Lou witnessed the hospital chaplain perform baptisms every few months on her tiny patients, touching them gently with thumbs moistened from flasks of holy water. Once, when nobody could find the chaplain, a devout nurse performed an emergency baptism on a boy who had been born at twenty-three weeks, plum purple and monkey-faced, and who died a few minutes later. The boy's parents had asked her to do it; they watched as he was blessed and held him, together, as he died
.

Throughout her pregnancy, Lou would come home and report on these baptisms, Andy listening patiently as she told him about the chaplain and the nurse and the dead babies, gauging him for his reaction. What did she want him to say? Of course he understood: if ever there was a time to be suspicious, to think toward miracles, it was when your child was struggling for life, when the distance between life and death could be measured in milligrams. And if these ritual blessings gave parents comfort . . .

“So you understand?”

“I understand,” he said. “That doesn't mean I approve.” For even then it was hard to discount his years with Rosenblum: fairy tales were meant for children. Adults should find their consolation in the truth.

Lou stuck her feet in his lap. “I don't know, Andy, if only you could be there—it's really beautiful to see these parents watch their children get baptized. It gives them strength to keep going, you know? And also, when you're in there for so long, and there's so little to get excited about, it's nice to have a ceremony. Something to welcome the baby into the world, not just get ready for another intervention. Worry about whether or not he's going to die.”

“But isn't that what baptism is? Protection against death?”

“Andy, come on, it's more than that. It's like a declaration of love.”

“Were you baptized?”

“You know I wasn't,” Lou said.

“And didn't your parents love you?”

“Oh, cut it out.” Lou had been raised in Arizona by parents who explored various faiths with fleeting but passionate resolve: Unitarianism and Zen Buddhism and for a brief, uncomfortable moment, Scientology. Lou and her sister had announced to their parents in early adolescence that they would no longer participate in their religious experimentation; since then they had only rarely visited a house of worship or even wished someone a happy holiday. Her father had died of cancer an evangelical Christian; her mother lived peacefully in Sedona as a yogi. Before Lou met Andy, she'd spent most Christmases by herself, handing out sandwiches to homeless people; now she and Andy did that together. But she was never as vitriolic about her faithlessness as Andy was, nor was she as smug. She had never had Hank Rosenblum as a professor.

“I wish you would just have an open mind about these things, Andrew,” Lou said. She only called him Andrew when she was annoyed, so he apologized, rubbed her feet in his lap. Later on, he did the laundry.

And then the baby was born: healthy! Enormous! A full head of hair! Rachel after her father, Ray. Lou's mother came in from Arizona, Andy's mother from Ohio, and they both marveled at the baby's alertness, her solidity, her eager feeding and sound sleeping. They made soups and lasagnas and let Lou take naps and when they left Lou dissolved into tears until the baby started crying too. And then, three months after Rachel was born, Louisa confessed what she'd done. Andy had left early to go to the lab, and Louisa was panicking about the end of her maternity leave; to distract herself she took a long morning walk with the baby, in her new expensive stroller.

Unintentionally, the walk took her past Christ the King. That it was a Catholic church, that it was Tuesday morning, that the place was officially closed—Lou didn't consider any of it. She said, later, that what she did felt as instinctive as nursing her baby when she cried, as instinctive as kissing her head while she slept. “I'm telling you, Andy, I was compelled.”

She parked the stroller at the base of the church's stairs and walked her up toward the double doors, cradling Rachel's solid body against her chest. Although the place was officially shut for business, one of the front doors was partway open and Louisa shimmied in. A janitor looked at her crossly, saw the baby in her arms, waved her through the vestibule into the large, chilly sanctuary with the marble basin at the rear.

Rachel, startled by the sudden cold, opened her hazel eyes wide as if she were going to yell. “Shhh,” Lou said, kissing her forehead, keeping her quiet. She took the baby to the marble basin and dipped a finger in the water, then dotted the water on Rachel's forehead. The baby started to cry for real this time, and Lou rocked her and sang to her until she stopped. The janitor gave her the stink eye now but still didn't tell her to leave. And Lou couldn't leave until she said something.

But what to say?

Her early years of religious pilgrimage had not prepared her for this kind of moment. And even the things the chaplain had said—Jesus Christ, banish the devil—none of that felt right either. So, when she was sure Rachel could be quiet—for whoever else would hear this, she wanted Rachel to hear it—she made up her own small prayer: “Dear Whoever Is in Charge, if there is indeed Someone in Charge, please bless this baby. Please keep her safe from harm. Please let her live a life of joy, surrounded by people who love her. Do not let her be troubled. Protect her. Please. If You're in charge—if You're out there. Please watch over this child.” She recited all this to Andy, later, during her confession.

And then, although it seemed selfish, she added, “And please watch over my husband and me so that we can always be near her, as long as she needs us to be.”

It didn't seem like enough but she wasn't sure what else to say. She thought of her dead father, and Andy's dead father, whom she had never met. She thought of her grandparents, whom she had loved, and their parents, whose stories she'd heard when she was little. She imagined a great link of ancestors standing over her, watching her hold this baby in her arms. Generations of men and women who came together and created one another. And now she was here, having created this little girl. She was an ancestor too now. She remembered the way her father improvised bedtime stories, the way her mother sewed them superhero capes.

She lifted her baby toward the church ceiling, the sky. “Amen.”

She said thank you to the janitor, who murmured, “God bless,” and then she hurried back out of the church. “Are we gonna tell your daddy we did this, Rache? What do you think? Are we gonna get in trouble or what?” But it was too late. Someone had stolen her stroller.

W
HE
N
M
ELISSA CAME
back to Andy's office with a draft of her thesis statement, he found, to his relief, that she had replaced the cross around her neck with a dormitory ID on a long beaded chain. He took the paper she extended, looked at it. “Did I tell you to bring me this?”

“Why are you always asking me that?” she said, perching on the chair opposite his desk. She was wearing a black turtleneck and jeans and looked older, more serious than the last time they'd met, just a week before. “Sometimes I think you have no memory at all, Dr. Waite.”

“I'm just distracted,” Andy sighed. “Or it's possible you're right, I have no memory at all.”

She chuckled because she thought he was kidding. Andy scanned her paragraph until he got to the meat: intelligent design is provable because studies of natural phenomena are best explained by the intervention of a Designer.

He scratched his head, wondered again why he'd said yes to this project, and how to navigate a fight he was too tired to have.

“So what do you think?”

“You've got a lot of passive voice in here.” He pushed the paper back at her. “See if you can rewrite it more clearly. And be sure to be specific about ‘natural phenomena.' I want to know exactly what you're referring to.”

“I was going to talk about the bombardier beetle, and the explosive mix of chemicals it uses for self-defense. And also the heart of the giraffe, how it's strong enough to pump blood up its neck but doesn't get crushed by the weight of all that blood. And also I was going to talk about DNA.”

“How so?”

“Well,” she said, leaning forward, her breasts straining heavily against her turtleneck (why did he notice her breasts, and the way the black fabric made her skin look so white?), “DNA is a code, right? It's the code, the language, that provides instructions on how all living things develop and behave. But codes aren't random. Codes aren't created by chaos. Codes are only the product of a design. So who could be the designer of DNA? Some kind of alien intelligence? Human beings? Or was DNA designed by mere luck? I don't think so. The only real rational explanation for the coding is an Intelligent Designer who planned it out.”

Andy sighed. If he were Rosenblum, he would be able to expound briefly on the conditions of chance, on the viral proteins that almost certainly first created DNA, on energy and possibility and why God was even more unlikely than Melissa's “mere luck.” If he were Rosenblum, he would say, in a voice so drippingly gentle it was cruel, “Dear girl, please don't be fooled into thinking that religion is an answer to a scientific question. We can answer the questions of why people are religious by using science, but we cannot answer basic questions of science by pointing to miracles. Don't forget, dear, that to your great-great-grandfather my crappy cell phone would have seemed like a miracle.”

But Andy was not Rosenblum, so he just sighed and said, “I'd skip the giraffe and go straight to the DNA part of the thesis.”

“You think?” she said. “'Cause the giraffe stuff is pretty interesting. The pressure per square inch of blood in a giraffe's vessels is so strong it should theoretically cause a stroke, but instead, the giraffe has this sponge of blood vessels under its brain that relieves the pressure. Nothing else in the animal kingdom has anything like this, so it's clearly the product of spontaneous design.”

“Or else it slowly evolved along the singular branch that eventually produced the giraffe.”

Melissa grinned and shook her head. “It's so crazy how Darwinists refuse the simple answer when a complicated one will do.”

“It's even more crazy how intelligent designers refuse to use science when a magic wand will do.”

For an instant they smiled at each other. “So if I cut the giraffe can I keep the thesis?”

What could he say? “Cut the bombardier beetle too.”

She nodded, folded her paper into her backpack. “Well, thanks again, Dr. Waite. How's everything with your mice, by the way?” She'd gotten what she wanted, so now she was cordial.

“Eh,” he said. “I'm supposed to finish a grant application, but it's tough going. I can't replicate my initial findings.”

“So then what?”

“So then—” He flicked on his computer, a signal that he was planning on getting to work and she could leave. “So then I don't get the money.” She stayed quiet. “And I suppose I start to feel even more insecure about everything my research is supposed to prove.”

“Does this affect your job here?”

“Not really,” he said. “But it doesn't help.”

“Are you worried?”

Who would even ask that? “Sure, sometimes. I mean, it's better to have a job than not to have one. And my girls—I need to provide for my girls.”

She looked thoughtful. Her eyebrows were knitted.

“Anyway, it will all work out,” he said in his class-dismissed voice. He swiveled toward his computer. The monitor was frozen on the welcome page.

“Your girls will be okay,” Melissa said.

“Will they now?”

She ignored his sarcasm. “It's a cliché, but it's true—kids are so resilient. Lots of dads change jobs. I mean, I'm sure you're not in danger, but worst case—” He looked at her. She was tucking a hair behind her ear. “Worst case, I'm sure you guys will figure out another happy way to live.”

“It's just that they've already been through a lot.” She was still looking at him so intently. “Their mother is gone.”

“My dad left when I was two. The guy I call my dad is actually my stepdad.”

“Oh.”

“And he's a good guy and everything but he's not so great at keeping a job. We've been foreclosed on, we had to live with my aunt for a while. Now there are five of them living in a two-bedroom apartment. They just had to move again. I'm the only one who got away.”

“That sounds tough.”

She shrugged. “Things aren't always easy, I guess is my point, but you know what? You ask my brothers and they'll tell you they're happy. They play football, don't really care that they get free lunch at school. And me too! I mean, I'm in college! Can you even believe it?” Had he ever met someone like her before, someone who was so literally transformed by a smile? “Anyway, your kids have a great dad. That's really what matters.”

“I guess.” This wasn't the sort of thing he usually discussed with students, with anybody.

“Look, I don't want to sound like a nag or anything but you really might want to take a look at some of the books I gave you. They're really good at pointing out the bigger picture.”