The Explanation for Everything (3 page)

A few of the students nodded. Lionel, of course, was already panting from the exertion of raising his hand.

“And some of you probably have some other ideas. Lionel, for instance.”

“I believe that God created the universe in seven days,” Lionel said, the words tumbling out. “I believe that God created man and woman, good and evil, and that the Bible is his living document, and that Genesis tells us the true story of creation, and without God there is no purpose or pleasure in our lives, but with him watching over us, we all have the opportunity to live lives that matter. Not just to ourselves, but to everyone. And I believe that—”

Andy cut him off with a hand. “Anybody agree with Lionel over here?”

A few Haleys, a Jordan, a Max or two tentatively nodded his head.

“Well,” Andy said, distributing his syllabus, “I look forward to changing your minds.”

L
UN
CH WAS COLD
leftovers under the shade of a dogwood by the parking lot, then back to his office to hand his first-day-of-the-semester paperwork over to Rosemary, the department secretary.

“Going home? If you leave now, you'll be early for soccer.” Rosemary knew him and his priorities.

“Just as soon,” Andy said, “as I check on my friends downstairs.”

In August, before he and the girls made their annual pilgrimage to Ohio, Andy had run a half-dozen spectrophotometer scans to confirm his thinking on the neuropeptide receptivity of certain members of his population. He needed a few more numbers to bulk up his grant application to the National Science Foundation (his very first such application: almost half a million dollars for new equipment, new animals, and perhaps a few postdocs of his own). At the previous year's Academic Biology conference he'd spoken to a few NSF reps, in vague but optimistic terms, of his research; they in turn encouraged him to apply for a midcareer grant, agreeing that his hypothesis seemed sound. “Of course,” said one, “you'll need some solid numbers to get your hands on our money.”

“Of course,” Andy said. “I've got solid numbers.”

“You do?”

“Very solid.” And at this, everyone in the group chuckled as if at a familiar punch line, leaving Andy to look down at his loafers, embarrassed and unsure why.

The grant wasn't due until early spring, however, and if Andy had been perhaps overstating his results, inflating the solidity of his numbers for the NSF reps' appreciation, he should have enough time to run the data again and straighten out his hypothesis. The problem was that a significant number of his mice weren't necessarily behaving the way their brain scans predicted. Some mice who had been bred to drink until their neurons seized were, for mysterious reasons, drinking in moderation, while other mice, mice who should have always chosen water over wine, were sucking down ethanol like junkies. Maybe he had ordered the wrong mice, or screwed up his records? He'd start over with another batch as soon as it was delivered—but the concerns persisted. Mice with brain chemistries that suggested one way of acting were stubbornly acting another way, and for a few delirious moments Andy wondered if they were playing a practical joke on him.

Still his mood remained surprisingly buoyant until, on the third floor of the staircase, he was waylaid by a tubby undergraduate in an Exton Reed sweatshirt.

“Professor? Are you Professor Waite?”

Andy fought the urge to deny it. “Can I help you?”

“I need to talk to you about a project.”

“You do?”

The girl nodded. She had wide eyes and wheat-colored hair, a poof of inexpertly cut bangs above a broad face.

“Well, listen, I have to head down to my lab right now, I don't have a lot of time. If you'd like to make an appointment—”

“I can walk with you.”

Andy took a half step back. “Of course.” So silently they made their way down the concrete-block stairwell to the basement labs, and silently the girl waited while Andy fumbled with his keys, turned on the lights, and was greeted by the cheery squeak of various
Mus musculus
and the chemical funk of paraformaldehyde. The girl stood in the corner of the pale green lab and watched as Andy made his rounds from one cage to another, making sure none of his animals were seizing, making sure his hard-core alkies had enough ethanol in their bottles that they weren't going to start frothing from delirium tremens, assuming they acted like they were supposed to act.

“Professor?” said the girl in the corner.

Jamie, his tech, had taken good care of the mice since he'd last seen them, keeping their shavings fresh, their water bottles full, but still they seemed (Jesus, what was happening to him?) glad he was back. They squeaked amiably at his attentions.

“Professor Waite?”

Andy murmured to them softly as was his way, because by certain lights they were his closest colleagues, and sometimes it was hard not to get attached.

“Professor?” the girl said for the third time, softly, like a plea.

“I'm sorry,” Andy said. “Yes, here we go.” He tipped a dropperful of ethanol into a C56BL/6's cage, then made his way back to the front of the room, the tall black lab table, his stacks of notebooks of mouse pedigrees. “So how can I be of service?”

“I'm looking to do an important project,” the girl said. “My name is Melissa Potter, and I'm a transfer student here, I just got my associate's degree. I'm really interested in doing this research, and then this guy I know, Lionel Shell, said you'd be the one to talk to, so—”

“Lionel said you should talk to me?”

“He said you were really nice.”

“Did he now?” Andy said.

The girl looked at the floor; he'd embarrassed her. “He did.”

Andy let the silence fester.

“Well anyway, he said you'd probably help me, and I'm really anxious to get this done, I need to take a lot of credits at once since I can't really afford to spend too many semesters here, so I . . . so . . .” Andy was flipping through his notebooks, marking down the dose of ethanol he had just doled out.

“So I was hoping . . .”

“You were hoping . . .?” He pivoted to look at her. She was fingering a gold cross she wore around her neck.

She stood up taller. “I was hoping you'd sponsor me for an independent study.”

An independent study: a nightmare in all ways, especially bureaucratic. He ambled to a cage in the front of the room, peeked in, six mice dreaming happily of whatever mice dream of. “What would you like to design a study in, Melissa?”

The eyes back on the ground. She sucked on her cross for just a moment, then let it drop from her mouth. She said, “Intelligent design.”

Andy stopped ambling.

Lionel had set him up.

Then again, without really thinking about it, Andy had been waiting for someone to mention intelligent design for years. But all he said to Melissa Potter was, “Excuse me?”

“I really wouldn't make it too much work for you to sponsor me, Professor Waite. I would do all the background research and find the textbooks and the scholarship,” she said, quickly, for someone (he?) had already taught this young lady that not taking too much of a professor's time was paramount in getting one to agree to anything. “I just need someone in the sciences to sign the paperwork and help oversee my project.”

“Melissa, I wish I could help you—” he said.

“Great.”

“—But you should know that I'm a Darwinian. I teach a class some people call There Is No God. I'm not sure why Lionel would suggest that I—”

“He said you were smart,” Melissa said. “Tough and smart. That you'd challenge me.”

Flattery. Jesus. “Look, Melissa, intelligent design isn't a scientifically proven theory. You know that, right? Not only is it not proven, but it's not provable.”

“Well, nothing is totally provable.”

“Actually, some things,” he said. “Some things are.” He watched her heavy face crumple, then rearrange itself in an expression of fierce determination.

“But Darwinism is unprovable too, right?” she said. “It's just a theory too—I mean they call it the theory of evolution, don't they?”

Ah, this old chestnut. “But when scientists use the word
theory,
they don't mean something that can't be explained. They call it the ‘theory of gravity,' for instance, but the force of gravity isn't open to debate.”

“So maybe there's another explanation for life on earth,” Melissa said. “A better one than just natural selection or whatever kind of crap that is.”

Natural selection or whatever kind of crap. Andy sighed: American education.

“I was thinking,” she continued, “what you're doing in this lab is experimental. I mean your whole career is based on things that are experimental, isn't it? Isn't that what science professors do? So couldn't you help me design some kind of experimental system, some kind of curriculum, to help me prove that there was an intelligent force behind the creation of the planet? Just, like, an experiment? And then if it doesn't work then, whatever, at least we tried.”

Andy sighed, ran a hand through his hair. He had spent the past five years at Exton Reed just, like, experimenting, trying to prove that the genetics of alcoholism lead to immutable behavior patterns. Something as basic as this—genes lead to behaviors—felt, at this moment, impossible to prove, felt like trying to prove that the Beatles were better than the Rolling Stones. Who could say for sure? Weren't there outlying examples? He had, for the past four years, overseen a small laboratory and a vivarium which stocked, at the moment, forty-two mice in varying shades of drunk. He clocked more hours with these mice than he did with almost anyone else in the world. And yet even they remained essentially mysterious to him, even after he cut them open and looked inside their brains. Four years and hundreds of mice and thousands of dollars and simple questions of behavior could not be solved, so how on earth did this girl want to solve the origins of life?

Or, to put it another way: how to explain to a girl like this the difference between that which could be quantified and that which could be taken only on faith?

Andy looked down at the glossy black lab table, saw his face reflected back. He was forty for a few more months, and looked exactly forty, exactly average, except for what might be thicker-than-average sandy-colored hair. He had blurry bags under his eyes. He no longer slept very well. He was haunted by a ghost.

“Melissa, I'm an advocate of student inquiry, I really am,” he said, hearing himself retreat to pedantry, irritating even himself. “And if you'd like to inquire into the nature of God, I'm sure you can find a religion professor—”

“I don't want to inquire into the nature of God. That's what I do at church, not at school.”

“Exactly.”

“I want to study the origin of life, and that's something you study in the biology department.”

“I suppose so,” Andy said. “But I think it depends on the way you undertake the study.”

“So you're saying you won't support my research,” the girl said. Her voice was matter-of-fact, but she was slumping.

“Melissa,” Andy said, “the thing about intelligent design is that there's no way to put the theory through the scientific method, so there's no way to say whether or not it's right or wrong. I can't support your research because there's no real research that can be performed on the subject. No way to apply the scientific method toward questions of intentionality in the design of the planet.”

“So you won't sponsor me?”

The black-rimmed clock above his lab table clicked loudly toward 3:55. It would take him thirty minutes minimum to get to Rachel's practice, and he still had a few papers to file upstairs. Still, the look on this girl's face, disappointed, maybe even disgusted. Well. It was the first day of the semester. Would it kill him to try to be a little generous? To try to recapture just a bit of the optimism with which he'd arrived this morning?

“Let's brainstorm for a minute, Melissa. I bet we could come up with something else. Something we could try out in the lab—maybe we could even do a little experiment with the mice. Would that work for you?”

“No,” she said.

Andy forced himself not to sigh. The clock ticked again, as was its irregular habit.

“Intelligent design,” said the girl, “or nothing,” and first Andy wanted to punch her, but then, regarding her stubborn expression, felt curiously and briefly cheered. A determined student! Well, good on her. Also he thought, fuck this, he had to get out of there, he needed to prep for tomorrow's undergraduate onslaught, and he wanted to see his daughter's practice, but Melissa looked so grim, so enormous with steely grimness, that despite himself he pulled out the stool from behind his lab table and with a chivalrous hand gesture invited her to sit down.

“There are so many issues concerning evolution that scientists haven't even begun to fathom, Melissa. I feel certain there's something you'd find interesting if you just agreed to look.”

She shook her potato-shaped head. “I have a question for you, Professor Waite.”

He noted that her eyes were surprisingly light, a greenish gray.

“There are two ways to see the world, right?” she said. “I mean, there are probably many more than two ways, but what I'm asking you here is to imagine two ways of looking at the world.”

“Two ways,” Andy said, neither frustrated nor hurried. “Fine.”

“There's
your
way,” she said, “where everything is accidental, where the fact that the earth tilts on an axis, the fact that it has a moon to control the tides, the fact that it is just the exact distance from the sun to keep us warm without boiling us alive—and even more than that, the fact that we're here, the fact that we love each other and protect each other, is all an accident of timing and chemicals.”