Mendel's Dwarf (27 page)

And Benedict Lambert? What is his relationship with the Prime Mover?

“Don’t you believe, Ben?” Jean asked me sorrowfully. She asked it more than once, as though in the meantime I might have changed my mind, or seen the error of my ways, or suffered my own road to Damascus. “Don’t you believe in
anything?
”

“I believe you’re sitting there. I believe in you.”

“But that’s obvious.”

“That’s why I believe it. A merciful, personal God is far less obvious, which is why I don’t believe it. You must admit”—I held my hands out, as though to display myself just in case she hadn’t noticed—“it’s a bit difficult to believe that a loving God could do this to me.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Ben,” she said. “Poor, poor Ben.”

But, of course, there is more to it than merely being a victim of one of nature’s practical jokes. There is also my work. You see,
in my work I have called God’s bluff—I have looked behind the scenery. From the auditorium the whole set looks very impressive. There is a reasonable three-dimensional effect, a sense of perspective, an adequate illusion of depth. You can even believe it well enough when you are actually on stage and trying to remember your lines, trying to come in on cue, trying not to upstage one actor or steal the scene from another. But I have peered behind the scenery … and there’s nothing there. Just the darkness and a few bits of scaffolding. Nothing else. Not even the back wall of the theater.

Give me a platform and I can move the earth. Archimedes, of course—everyone knows that. But he was talking more than just a bit of elementary physics. He knew that he hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of moving the earth. He too had seen behind the scenery.

Give me the nucleotides and I can make Man in my own image.

How did Jean reconcile her faith with the fact that she was living in sin? That is a question I failed to answer. So too did she, I guess. It weighed on her, that’s certain. Those few weeks together were eaten into by guilt. Exactly how is difficult to explain. At the time I didn’t want to inquire too much, didn’t even want to talk about it, in case, as with so many phenomena in science, the mere act of observation changes what you are observing. Best leave it alone and see what happens.

And then again, does it matter? Seen from another perspective, those weeks appear strangely ephemeral, an evanescent coming together of persons to make a transgenic creature that doesn’t survive long, a chimera.

The practicalities of the relationship? You want to know, of course. How did we do this, how did we arrange that? How did we …?

What do you want—photographs?

I didn’t move into the bedroom with her. I suppose I wanted to spare her the fright of seeing me as I was; and as she never suggested that I should, I guess that she was happy to be spared. So it was in all-forgiving and all-absorbing darkness that we actually coupled. Sometimes it was funny—no, at first it was always funny—and sometimes it was ecstatic. Often we laughed; sometimes we wept; and occasionally, just occasionally, I had the sensation that I was almost freed from my bonds. Whoever, whatever, tied the knots of this tortured and twisted body of mine, for those few weeks Jean’s agile fingers began to loosen them. Sometimes I felt that her perfect body was almost consuming my own, the beautiful engulfing the ugly, the good swallowing up the evil; but on other occasions I sensed that I was fouling her.

You may have detected a change of tone in that passage. Benedict Lambert has lost his sharp, sour cynicism. Well, yes—for a while. But I’ll bring it back, don’t worry. Modern stories don’t have happy endings. For the moment, though, leave me with that: connubial bliss, domestic contentment, spiritual communion; and strange looks from the neighbors. At the corner shop I think they presumed we were brother and sister. At the Institute we began to keep strictly apart, indeed we actually stopped our biweekly lunches; and like any new wife she complained that she saw less of me than she used to before it all happened.

“You’re always coming back late.”

“Do you want to see more of me?” I asked.

She looked at me thoughtfully, her mismatched eyes seeing more than I ever used to give them credit for. “What do you want me to say, Ben? Of course I do.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Of course it’s the truth.”

“The whole truth?”

“Is this a court of law?”

“What are you hiding, then?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Ben, I’m hiding nothing.” She laughed. One of those bad-tempered, dismissive laughs. But I did wonder what her motives were for all this. I wondered it then, in my ignorance; I wonder it now, in my wisdom.

“I don’t understand what you see in me,” I told her, and her reply was subtly tangential to the question:

“It’s precisely what I see
in
you that matters.”

The trouble was, I had no experience, nothing beyond that awful abortive friendship with the girl called Dinah. I had no yardstick against which to measure things, no test of fidelity, no assay of affection. In the laboratory I understood the context in which my molecules, my fragments of DNA, my pet proteins, operated; living with Jean I was adrift. Often I found her distracted and miserable—“What’s wrong?” “Nothing.” “Is it my fault?” “No”—and I had no means of judging whether the problem was trivial or terminal. Sometimes she would laugh at something—a silly, edgy laugh—and I didn’t know whether it was laughter at my expense, or our expense, or just at herself.

So what did I bring to her? Isn’t love an exchange, a give and take? What was my own contribution to this
ménage à une et demi
, apart from sarcasm and impatience and an ego the size of my own overgrown head? Well, there is one part of my body that is entirely unaffected by my condition, I can assure you. I have already told you that. Once the barriers were down, once we had slipped past them and reached the territory of shared delights, Jean Piercey clung to that particular part with all the desperation of a shipwreck victim clinging to the wreckage.

I warned you that cynicism would return.

Then she began to tell lies. Truth is, after all, only relative, and even DNA, that most innocent of molecules, lies. For example, the dinucleotide sequence CG is a mutational hot spot
¹
—the cytosines (C) of such pairs tend to be methylated, and a methylated cytosine may be deaminated into thymine (T). Thus the message no longer reads CG but TG, and when the molecule replicates, the mistake will be repeated: the other strand in the ladder will no longer have GC but AC. A mutation. The lie will have been repeated, and like any lie it may be repeated often enough to be mistaken for the truth.

The result is me.

Jean’s lies were similarly trivial in their essence—hushed conversations on the phone, terminated abruptly when I came in (“Oh, no one that matters. A friend, that’s all”), unexplained absences from the library, that kind of thing. Nothing that mattered or was even significant except to a mind such as mine. I knew that she had been in touch with Hugo, but this was not that. I am trained to spot the lie, to pick out the mismatch, to see the mutation. This was something other. Eventually I confronted her, sat her down in the armchair in the sitting room, with subdued afternoon light coming down the light shaft from the exiguous garden, and quizzed her. She looked away from me.

“What’s going on, Jean?” I repeated. “You’re hiding something from me. What is it? Look at me, for Christ’s sake.” I remember that her tape of
On an Overgrown Path
was playing, the piece entitled “The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!” with its strange arpeggios and measured, hymnlike melody.

She looked at me. One blue eye, one green. The sky and the earth. “I’m pregnant,” she said.

1
. Duncan and Miller (1980), “Mutagenic deamination of cytosine residues in DNA,”
Nature
287, 560–61.

D
octor Benedict Lambert and Miss Jean Piercey discuss the future. The future is a mere jot buried somewhere within the endometrium of her uterus, a thing no larger than a grain of wheat but infinitely more alive. They discuss the chances, which are, precisely, fifty-fifty one to one, one half, point five. It’s the same thing, however you wish to look at it. I chose my words with care: “There’s a fifty-percent chance of it being”—pausing, loathing the word, finding no other—“normal. At present, prenatal diagnosis by ultrasound is uncertain. Anyway, it isn’t possible at all until after the twenty-fifth week, which is rather late. So it’s the toss of a coin …”

“Then we’ve got to stop it.”

“Of course. If that’s what you want. I can hardly plead on the part of the child.”

Her eyes, her matchless eyes, blistered with tears. “You’re not being fair.”

“Tossing a die isn’t very fair. It just happens.”

Abruptly she changed tone, like changing gear in a car. From muddled pleading she endeavored to become businesslike. “But we’re responsible. And the situation that we’re in. I mean, I’m still married. And we’re not. So how could we possibly …?”

I held up my hand. “There’s no argument. I agree.”

“But you’ve got to see things from my point of view. From
his
point of view—”

“His? That’s a toss of a coin as well. Same odds.”

She snapped at me. “His, hers, you know what I mean.”

“I do. I’ve agreed. There’s nothing more to discuss.”

“It’d be a terrible problem for the child, Ben,” she said. “Our situation—”

“Me, that’s what you mean. Me. The child might be like me.” That brought a moment’s silence.

“That’s being unfair.”

“Of course I’m being unfair. Unfair is the only weapon I have.”

She looked down at me. Miss Jean Piercey looked down at me just as I had, for so long, looked down on her. “All right, Ben,” she said. “If you want to force me to say it, I will: the child might be like you. And I wouldn’t want that.”

I am inured to hurt. You build bastions around you, Maginot lines of defenses, iron curtains of barbed wire and razor wire, minefields and free-fire zones. Watchtowers stand guard and searchlights play over the whole area with a chalky, bleak whiteness, throwing everything into harsh relief. There are no gates. And Jean Piercey had walked through, past the guards, over the tripwires, ducking beneath the coils of wire and skipping round the fencing and lying down before me with that magical, impossible thing: a normal body. Oh, how I loved her body! I’ll avoid the question of soul and stick with matters of the flesh, things I can measure, things I can understand. How I loved the trivial imperfections of her body, the rough skin of her knees, the tiny tributaries of broken veins on her legs, the variegations of color on her hands, the faint brushstrokes of hair on her arms, the embarrassed flush of a blackhead on her chin, the mole on her thigh, the looseness of her breasts, the unevenness of flesh around her nipples, the strange, hypnotic fragrance of beast and angel, of
mire and myrrh, that hung about her. And this body wanted to destroy my child, which might be me, a second Benedict, another squat and crumpled creature, betrayed by mutation and the courtly dance of chromosomes.