Girls passed, slit skirts from another era swinging, on the plaza that in my childhood had been flooded with riot police and tear gas. Two streetcorner prophets, not yet extinguished by the natural selection of social history, hung on the edge of campus, one reading scripture from file cards, the other preaching a philosophy of hate. Undergraduates crowded the avenue. Everything looked so new. It was unlike anyplace I had been in the east, and for the first time since my arrival my heart lifted.
I was not after all badly matched, in my motives of denial and escape, to this place of lost connections and shallow history. I still courted the faith that one could start anew.
Murphy's connection was real enough. He was a street vendor with a folding table in front of the Bank of America, stocked with drawings and photos of local scenes. He accepted Murphy's rolled sheaf and shook his head.
My man, why don't you get yourself a matte knife? Now I have to take these to the frame place and you know it comes out of your money.
Murphy shrugged. The vendor counted off twenties and pushed them across the table. He left his hand on them.
Listen, you want some coke?
Murphy said no.
All right. The vendor smiled as his hand came off the bills. But don't tell me you do this stuff straight. Take it in trade sometime, okay? I got cash flow problems.
From here Murphy crossed to a bookstore with an Indian name. He circled the shelves deliberately, pulled down six or seven books without examination, and laid them on the counter. I read the title on top.
Bergson? I said snottily, with superior glee. Even as I groped for some witticism I knew I was being a shit. The Harvard habit dies hard. For apology I was ready to broaden my comment into self-parody, another Harvard habit, but as the cashier rang up the rest of the titles, I was silenced. Flying saucers. Gods. Magic.
It's bullshit, said Murphy pleasantly as we left the store. But it's true bullshit.
I'm sorry, I said uncertainly. It's just my training talking. I'm.
Oh, I know you're a biologist.
How did you know that? I felt violated. The secret had been easy enough to keep at the dinner table.
By the way your eye traveled over my drawings.
I did not believe he had seen this. I could not. Yet he had known.
Because, when you look at things. He seemed suddenly panic-stricken at the crowds. Do you mind if we take the long way home?
We followed a road up past a stadium and some practice fields and into the hills. We were entering a botanical garden when I heard an insistent shrieking.
What's that?
Dogs. The university has labs up here.
Murphy stopped by a large cactus and broke off a lobe. Gingerly he slid it into his shirt pocket. We went on past succulents, camellias, rhododendrons, eucalypti, sage, manzanita, stopping in a stand of sequoia, the ground thick with ferns. My sense of time suffered another shift: in the plants, in the shape of these hills, was the sense of a prehistoric Earth. Cars took the curves below us dreamily, their carapaces gleaming.
Murphy picked a cone from the ground and looked at it curiously.
They won't grow unless there's been a fire. He said this with wonder, as if he had just discerned it. He turned to me. If you look at things, really look, after a while something emerges, and you find th-that things want to change into other things. And y-you can draw that. You can see what they were or what they want to be. And in, in people too.
In people?
He looked at me. For example, you want to be dead.
I stood appalled. And then I laughed. Murphy, you're an idiot.
You mean that I can't speak, I don't know what to say to others.
I'm sorry, I just meant. but yes. the Greek root of idiot, idios, it means self, private.
That's so. It's a ceding of self to be understood. Do you know much about genetics?
I was still unused to his abrupt shifts. No one does, really. They all pretend.
I read a story. It was about books, a library made of all the combinations of letters.
Permutations, yes. The library of Babel.
You know it? It exists?
Murphy, it's a story. A fantasy.
Yes, but DNA is like the letters of the alphabet, isn't it, the molecules
A C T G and, and if you rearrange them.
You could have a menagerie of Babel.
Yes. Yes, that's right.
No, it's not right. The metaphor of the alphabet is defective. There are laws. And I stopped. For I realized that what he was saying was indeed a corollary of Darwin's idea, that, as Julian Huxley said, "given sufficient time anything at all will turn up" from this promiscuous shuffling of genes, and I realized also, hardly for the first time, that the theory of genetics was therefore as fantastic as any of Murphy's, acceptable to scientists only because it fit the historical form of their method. What could give this infinity of possibility any human meaning? No one knew. And not knowing turned the plenum into a chaos.
The function of DNA is to copy itself. Yet it does not, not exactly. There are sports and mutants. So life diversifies, and not, we must believe, aimlessly; but what, if any, are the laws? If we knew them, it would change us.
This was my work, I confessed. I majored in genetics.
But what happened?
I quit.
But why?
I was eased out. Discouraged from a certain line of research.
You let them? Let them discourage you? But th-this is important! This is my work, too.
What do you mean?
I draw in order to learn. If you draw things, using always the same, the same kinds of lines, you can learn about growth. About form. The b-books I read, they help, they don't all use the same methods, but I can see past that. Look, look at it all! The plants, the animals, the superabundance, and no reason except for nature's h-hunger for new forms. The diversity!
Life is, is nothing but a freak show! Look at it, just look!
I had been following him to learn, as I said, the form of his delusions.
Now he had touched the core of his obsession, and his lean nervous body shook with its zeal, his thin stuttering voice was driven by its force. I may have been his first audience. He spoke of the forces which could thrust up from common proteins a whale, a hummingbird, any of a thousand cacti. He spoke of resemblances between the enzymes of sharks and those of grasses. But if all this was a source of wonder to me, to him it was a horror. His world was the fever dream of a mad, insomniac intelligence. I remembered the anthropologist's old saw that intelligence is pathological; the rapid evolution of man's forebrain, that diadem of the species, is anomalous, apparently unique in evolution. More than one scientist, trying to explain it, has likened it to a cancer. I wondered again if Murphy were sane. Certainly if an intelligence governed his cosmos, it was pathological, and its means were those of Darwinism, which limited the mechanism of creation to permutation and mindless competition.
It was strangely touching. He had read widely, if indiscriminately, and his attempts to find an order were like mine in everything but method. My work too was a heresy against the dogmas of science, though constituted by them. So I did not tell him how the idea of an ordered world had always faced contradictions and inadequacies, from Plato through Spinoza, even after Darwin. Its history was a history of failure, though of a kind I aspired to. Such a grand failure. It alone opposed the brute mechanistic vision that the current paradigms of science offered. Was the world indeed an inescapable nightmare of congenital competition, or might there yet prove to be some need for cooperation at the center of being? For my own reasons I needed to believe the latter; I needed also, unlike Murphy, some evidence that I was not deluded in my belief.