So how do the pieces of a life fit together?
As he was finishing off his second generous helping of couscous, Jonas, fired by the chillies in the Harissa sauce, had the urge to tell Axel something about his own studies, first and foremost about how scientists were trying to locate unknown planets, calculating on the basis of minuscule, inexplicable disturbances on known planets, something he knew would strike a chord with Axel, for whom the whole question of cause and effect never palled. Following on from this, he told him about Percival Lowell’s somewhat confused hunt for Planet X, a hunt that eventually led to the discovery of the planet Pluto, although Lowell himself did not live to see it. It was a little like the hunt for the genes, Jonas thought. Even Lowell’s Christian name, Percival, put one in mind of the search for the Holy Grail.
By a strange coincidence, that evening they had both brought something to show the other. Axel had a copy of an article from a relatively recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which he showed Jonas some electron-microscope pictures from Herbert Boyer’s and Stanley Cohen’s successful attempt to create and duplicate a plasmid made up of DNA fragments from various sources, an attempt which, incidentally, introduced the methods which to this day form one of the cornerstones of the furiously expanding — and as furiously debated — recombinant DNA technology. Jonas, for his part, produced a book containing two telescope images from the 1930s that enabled Clyde Tombaugh at long last to detect the planet Pluto, ten thousand times too faint to be discerned with the naked eye. Just as Bényoucéf came over to ask if they were enjoying their meal, they noticed, to their astonishment, how alike the two pictures were. The electron-microscope images of plasmids with their DNA loops might have been a picture of the stars in the heavens, especially of the sort in which the outlines of the constellations have been drawn in, and vice-versa. Jonas had a fleeting vision of a day when scientists would discover patterns in the galaxies not unlike the coiling form of the DNA. Jonas was aware, in other words, of a childish notion, magnified only slightly, resurfacing: the suspicion that the universe, all of that inconceivable vastness, amounted to no more than one teeny-weeny cell in the fabric of something else entirely. Axel, who had also been musing over the similarity between the two pictures, wondered out loud, ‘What if the guys who were straining to catch a glimpse of Pluto’s secrets quite unexpectedly discovered a new clue to the mysteries of DNA, or that the guys who were trying to chart our genes unaccountably stumbled on a new planet. What if it were all somehow part of a circle?’
Such a thought called for at least one glass of calvados, not to say two, and it was after a much more down-to-earth conversation, more in the vein of the sable eyebrows, when it was almost time to meet up with the other Nomads as agreed, in front of the National Theatre, that Axel first told Jonas about his feelings of frustration. He confessed that he had immersed himself in the study of molecular biology and biochemistry and groped his way towards an understanding of DNA and the genome in an attempt to find out who he was. ‘No, I mean it,’ he said when Jonas laughed. But he had been disappointed. ‘Christ, Jonas, we’re talking out-and-out reductionism. An attempt at utter simplification. Downright materialism. A one hundred per cent mechanical view of life. A totally passé bit of Newtonian logic when you come right down to it.’ Axel was more than just frustrated, he was undergoing a crisis; even his thick shock of hair was looking a little limp. ‘I mean, it goes without saying,’ he said. ‘There are some things that occur in biology for which there is no simple explanation.’
‘Like what?’
‘How a person is formed. How the pieces of a life fit together. Why a person can suddenly change.’
‘I thought that was exactly what DNA was — quite literally the story of how the pieces of a life fit together.’
‘Yeah right, a life, in purely biological terms, but what is Life?’
It was all Jonas could do not to make a face that said ‘bullshit’. Instead he said: ‘Maybe we should get going.’ The minute he said it he regretted it. Jonas Wergeland had nothing against extravagant issues, questions that were two sizes too big, that made pragmatic individuals and, not least, commonsensical Norwegians snort. Besides which, Jonas knew that this was one of Axel’s great goals in life: to pose questions that were worth more than a hundred answers. ‘How’s about another calva for the road?’ he said.
Axel waved to Bényoucéf, simply raised two fingers, and seconds later two glasses of calvados were set on the table. ‘Promise you won’t laugh,’ said Axel, ‘but here’s what I’ve been thinking: what have been the most important experiences in my life?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Amazing as it may seem, the most important experiences in my life are experiences I have heard about from other people.’ Axel waved his arms in the direction of the other people in the restaurant, or bistro as Bényoucéf insisted on calling it. ‘In other words, other people’s experiences have become my experiences.’
‘I still don’t see what you’re getting at,’ said Jonas.
‘I think what I’m trying to say is that every human being could be said to be as much an accumulation of stories as of molecules. I am, in part, all the things I have read over the years. They don’t leave me. They settle inside me like — how can I put it? — like sediment.”
‘So you believe that the stories you have heard are every bit as important as the genes with which you’ve been endowed?’
Axel looked thoughtful, as people often do on hearing someone else neatly summing up their own thoughts. ‘Why not?’ he said.
‘Yeah, why not?’ said Jonas. ‘So you think a person can actually be changed by hearing a particular story?’
‘Exactly. Maybe that’s what life is all about. Collecting stories,’ Axel said. ‘Building up an arsenal of good tales, that can be put together in all sorts of complicated ways: like DNA.’
‘If you’re right, then it’s not a matter of manipulating our genes but the stories in our lives,’ said Jonas.
‘It’s not the sequence of the base-pairs, the genes, we ought to be mapping out, but the sequence of the stories that go to make up a life,’ said Axel. ‘And who knows? Arrange them differently and you might get another life altogether.’
They sat for a while in silence, each fingering his empty glass.
Jonas looked at his watch. Axel nodded. They were both feeling a little sheepish.