There are many other more recent liturgical customs that irritate me. If there’s a class of buildings I never liked (for example), it’s churches. I find them dark and gloomy, too tall, too truculently monumental. Depressing, macabre. Full of chilly marble, ghoulish statues, sanctimonious paintings, furnishings and symbols in bad taste. And I could never bear the smell of incense; it gives me a headache (as it were) even to think of it.
But what leaves me most baffled is the self-serving side of their religious afflatus. It’s obvious that they pray because they want something in return. They bow down to me and try to get on my good side the way you would pay an insurance policy, so that you’re covered whatever happens. Or worse, they think of me only when things turn really awful, the way you call the fire department in an emergency. They praise me, pay me compliments, flatter me, but in fact their only concern is to cover their asses (apologies, but that is the most appropriate term), and of course to improve their material situation. They’d like to be able to acquire larger quantities of shares and real estate, they’d like to have access to more liquidity, they imagine this will make them happier. Above all, they don’t ever want to die.
It shouldn’t be so difficult to understand that their lives are thrilling and tender because they come to an end. But no, to deny the facts, to stave off resignation, to fool themselves into thinking they’ll continue to live on even after death, they invent a load of cock and bull. They dream that once they’ve passed (their term) they’ll find themselves in a beautiful park supplied with chaise longues and tropical fruit trees and the luxury hotel treatment. Utter foolishness, as even a child could see. You imbeciles, other animals also kick the bucket, and you can see in their eyes (those that have eyes) that they’re not bursting with joy, that it’s quite a nuisance, and yet they take it well, they just lie down and wait to expire.[3]
Humans haven’t learned how to die yet, and worse, the more time goes by, the more they think they’ve understood everything and the less prepared they are. It’s the rare specimen who faces the advent of decomposition with a modicum of dignity and gets it over with quickly. Most abandon what little restraint they have; they pray, they suddenly remember to pray, beseeching me to put them back together if only for a few days, or if there’s no hope at all, to make it easy on them. Even the ones who don’t seem to be in such a bad way can rarely resist the weeping and solemn declarations and crazy vows. They’re ludicrous. Sad sacks.
LAB TWO–ZERO
The lofty biker ascends the stairs three at a time, whips through the fire door on the second floor, slips by the director’s office hermetically sealed in metagenomic thoughts. She arrives in her laboratory that smells, like every laboratory in the world, of chemicals and plastic, says hello to her fellow researchers, who respond with that bleak affability typical of the disciples of genetics. Her purple-pimpled colleague, as soon as he sees her, turns the color of red-hot lava and looks like he’s about to burst into tears. She raises her eyes heavenward and puts on a white coat over her post-punk uniform.
The tall one’s at work on a project that aims to create (yes) bacterial strains that can produce alcohol from wood waste. They blast helpless microbes with scorpion and porcini mushroom genes hoping to activate an appetite for sawdust.[4] Her job title (adjunct technical staff) and pay rank might suggest she was hired as unskilled labor, but in fact she’s so good at inventing modifications and calculating results (she’s always been nuts about mathematics) that the director of the laboratory has published eminent scientific papers under his own name. Papers written by her, naturally.
Cellulose-digesting bacteria excite her only up to a point, however; she’s keener on microbes that produce electricity. She wrote her PhD thesis on bacteria-powered batteries, and even won one of those scientific prizelets awarded for original ideas considered completely impracticable. And she’s continuing the project on the sly, secretly putting together a network of researchers from various countries who think the idea is promising. She’s convinced it’s just a question of time.
Mid-afternoon, the unfailingly well-dressed lab director strides in, and uttering a tangle of phrases that hover over the void like unfinished bridges, asks the giantessa where she is with the statistical calculations they spoke of the day before. He studies the floor, his brow just slightly less unlined than usual, his perennial self-satisfied smile bobbing up to the surface like a stubborn corpse. Extracting one earbud, she replies that the results are very interesting indeed and she’ll send them right over by email. She too speaks as if she has a mild stomachache, in their usual style of communication. Or rather, their usual style since one evening six months before when they found themselves alone together because they had to complete (she did; he, for the most part, obstructed) an important trial.
He, stroking his wondrously relaxed jaw, had asked why didn’t they step out on the balcony and smoke one of her hand-rolled cigarettes. She had knitted her brows slightly because the desire in his tomcat eyes looked somewhat more sexual than nicotinic (not to mention that he doesn’t smoke). But hooking the distal phalange of his little finger in hers and looking him in the eye, she smiled faintly the way she does when going into sex mode. At that point his perfectly shaven and cologned face advanced on hers (although he is the shorter) and she somehow made their lips meet. She put a hand on his fly, squeezing his already erect member. After some tottering and fumbling with buttons and zippers he had tried to penetrate her by shoving her up against the big 15,000-rpm centrifuge, the way they do in the movies.
Then she sat him on the floor under the plastic beaker collecting distilled water, and mounted him the way she does her bike when she’s in a rush. This for coitus number one. For number two, she knelt and he took her from behind, also on his knees (the height difference here being insignificant). This second time, too, she had no orgasm; it was 2–0, in short. Honestly, I don’t like to watch some things human beings do. But as you can imagine there’s no roof nor wall nor duck blind nor sheet nor wile that stands in the way of a god; unfortunately I must put up with all of it. And then they actually did go out on the balcony of the reagent room to smoke a cigarette. He lit one too, coughing a little.
The dapper director, who’s a practicing Catholic[5] with a wife and two daughters at home, trusts that the matter’s been filed in the top-secret drawer; he’s fervently counting on it. For the most part it is only at scientific conferences (which seem to serve primarily that purpose and where the risks are minimal) that he will jump a female colleague, jump her like a rooster in the henhouse. He feels pretty sure that the purple-haired girl is not the sort of nitwit who’s going to preen about the thing in public or even confide in some bosom friend. In spite of the neo-metropolitan get up, her only real heartthrob is scientific research, he reckons, and from the way she fixes him with those far-apart eyes, he doesn’t think she’s upset with him. However, he’s not one hundred percent easy about it. That mummified gentility of his, in short, is fear.
I watch the narcissist stride athletically back to his office, his behemoth of a desk perfectly clean of any clutter, and can’t help but reflect that men, in their grotesque presumption, consider themselves superior and unique when instead they are clumsy and shapeless, obtuse, sex-crazed[6] and monomaniacal, ready to fall for every sort of superstition and fanaticism, to mutually eradicate one another and commit bestial acts that make your hair stand on end. And if that were not enough, they’re infested with parasites inside and out and with terrible contagious diseases. They’re dangerous, in short. Not to mention quick to putrefy.
3
We’re talking about millions of billions of ants every year, of billions of billions of billions of microbes every second, not some piddling number. What if every insect, every single earthworm, began to moan and groan when its time came, to issue solemn declarations and beg to be granted the big pardon?
4
The unfortunate bacteria have lived in peace for four billion years reproducing themselves millions of times a day, thus giving birth to billions of individuals. (If some bacterium wanted to organize a Christmas dinner with his closest relatives, even supposing he could track down the names and addresses, he would have to send out billions of billions of billions of invitations.) If there’s something that bugs me (just a figure of speech, obviously), it’s that instead of going to battle with crocodiles or piranhas, creatures that can defend themselves somewhat, that lily-livered species of humans go after bacteria. One more proof, should we need another, of their cowardice.
5
It is no secret that those who pontificate and preach are the same who trespass most in the shadowy backwaters of practice; if I had to tote up all the merriment taking place in sacristies and convents over the past thousand years it would take me a decade.
6
Merely in order to copulate, those big hairless apes lie to each other and themselves, dissimulate, cheat, squander fortunes, destroy friendships and marriages, bleed themselves dry, murder each other, all the while employing creativity and invention far beyond that applied to their technical progress. If I could begin again I’d endow them with a