Future Home of the Living God(36)
When Phil comes in the door, I call him into the kitchen and tell him that a giant cat is sitting out back in an oak tree munching on a chocolate Lab.
“I didn’t know cougars liked chocolate,” he says.
I stare at him thoughtfully until he looks away, then he turns and glares back at me.
“You’ve lost your sense of humor.”
“That’s not funny.”
Phil looks down at his shoes and I can tell that his feelings are actually hurt.
“You are not registering this,” I say in my most intense voice, “there is a saber-toothy cat thing in the oak tree eating a chocolate Lab.”
We lock gazes and then, all of a sudden, with no warning, we are both collapsed in laughter, spinning out of control, crazy, weak, until we’re gasping on the floor.
*
We go out on the roof instead that night, and Phil hauls along the Bushmaster. We sit on the low peak in the shadow of the small brick chimney. From there, as we are on the side of a hill, we can see down over the half-grown trees that replaced giant elms, into the miles of neighborhoods that spread south from downtown. They are lower-working-class and working-poor neighborhoods with rickety old Victorians or small ramblers like mine packed together neatly, just a strip of lawn between, or maybe a chain-link fence. Everything is dark now. Just flickers of light. Sometimes, rarely, a bonfire or a larger fire illuminates some corner of the city. Tonight, a house spouts huge orange flames. The cries and shouts are too small and far away to hear. Even the crackle of gunfire, far off, inconsequential as a string of firecrackers. And the sky has bloomed, it is verdant with stars. I’ve never seen stars like this before. Deep, brilliant, soft. I am comforted because nothing we have done to this earth affects them. I think of the neurons in your brain connecting, branching, forming the capacity I hope you will have for wonder. They are connecting, like galaxies. Perhaps we function as neurons ourselves, interconnecting thoughts in the giant mind of God.
“What really happened,” I say to Phil. “Do you know, do they know?”
“Your explanation, God got tired of us, makes about as much sense as anything I’ve heard,” says Phil.
Again, it seems to me that he wants to elaborate, to say something else that is dangling in his thoughts. But he holds my hand with both of his hands. His hands are always warm and I let myself be enveloped.
After a while he starts talking again, and we both pull out everything we ever learned or read about in biology classes, about duplications in the human genome. How the duplicated genes and chromosome segments suggest that our genome has doubled, maybe even more than once. When’s unclear, but roughly around the time we diverged from one of our vertebrate ancestors—500 million years ago, give or take a mil? Anyway, this doubling means that our genome is full of rearrangements and repeats. Riddled with redundancy. On one hand, this gives us a certain evolutionary advantage because we’ve got some built-in flexibility. A copy of a DNA sequence can mutate, can even find out whether its new function works, and there’s often a spare to carry on. More often, though, there is this weird thing that happens.
We stop talking. Phil shifts the heavy rifle, pulls me against him. I’m still looking up into the sky.
“The weird thing?”
We talk about how the redundant gene, or twin, becomes a kind of ghost gene, a silent pseudogene. An untranslated DNA sequence.
“So imagine, metaphorically and physically, what this says about us,” I say.
“We carry the history of our genetic mishaps.”
“And we live with, and our bodies are aware of, the successful history of our own mutations.”
Exactly right—folded quietly and knitted in right along with the working DNA there is a shadow self. This won’t surprise poets. We carry our own genetic doubles, at least in part. What if some of those silenced genes were activated? I don’t know how, but what if they were? And they decided to restore us to some former physical equilibrium?
“What if?” I say, and you kick, hard. “Here, feel.”
I put Phil’s hand on the place I felt you, but you’ve shifted away. I understand why so many people did not believe in evolution before last month, and still don’t, and never will. It means that perfect physical harmony, grace, and in Darwin’s phrase, endless forms most beautiful, resulted slowly as the result of agonizing failures. In their eyes, evolution makes life on earth a scenario of bloody, ham-handed, ruthless, tooth-and-nail struggle. So they point to some miraculous structure, like the eye, each part dependent on the next, and say There, how could that be done piecemeal? How could anything but perfection produce perfection? Impossible! But there it is, I think now, the evidence coded and encrypted within each drop of blood, each hair and fingernail paring. For every intelligent piece of design, for every perfection, ghosts of failures exist, too. Mistakes. Whales have vestigial leg bones, pelvises, from their land origins. We survive with certain of those imperfect flaws in our design, the most immediate for me being that the size of the human upright and walking female pelvis is often incompatible with the size of a human baby’s head.
“I’m not afraid,” I say to Phil, only out of bravado. “I am really not afraid to have our baby.”
“Right this moment? Or all the time?”
“Usually, I’m scared.”
He buries his face in my hair.