The Explanation for Everything: A Novel Read online

  He had never grown used to her absence, but he had learned to endure it, and to ignore her ghost, who was often waiting for him around the corner, or behind him in the office when he thought he was alone. He used to talk to her; during his first several years in New Jersey he talked to her several times a day. She would smirk or nod or roll her eyes, as expressive in death as she had been in life. When he said something to her she didn’t believe, she would laugh silently. But when he told her, “I like it here, Lou, and I’m doing okay,” she didn’t laugh, even though he was lying. When he told her, “I guess I’ll stay here for the rest of my life,” and looked up to meet her eyes, he found her looking away, and then disappearing, a magic trick.

  Would he stay here for the rest of his life? He supposed he would, if he got tenure. And this was where he thought about what Rosenblum often told him about tenure: it’s like a prison in all the bad ways—you know where you’ll be stuck for the rest of your life—but in the good ways too, since you’ll always know where your next meal’s coming from. He had filed his paperwork just before he took off for the summer. It had felt, in some small way, like resignation.

  Still, he did enjoy his reputation as a campus provocateur. On the first day of the fall 2011 semester, a Septemberish breeze blowing in his hair, Jackson Browne on the radio (“Doctor My Eyes”), it was pleasant to imagine himself a seasoned academic off to raise undergraduate hackles at the dawn of a bright new school year. Sure, yes, everything would be all right. There was a crease in his Dockers, a glimmer in his eye as he drove his girls to school. “You’re teaching There Is No God, huh?” Rachel asked when he dropped them off.

  “How did you know?”

  “You’re whistling.”

  His morning class, colloquially called There Is No God (Special Topics in Evolutionary Biology: Ethics and Debate, Course B:413), was one he taught every third semester, subject to demand. It was a distillation of a similar course Hank Rosenblum had originated at Princeton, but whereas the Princeton course drew consternation, even controversy, the Exton Reed version was delivered to students who were happy to swallow whatever they were fed. Which, in this case, was a big bowl of Darwinian theory spiced with a few contemporary major thinkers: Dawkins; Dennett; Rosenblum, of course (who, despite his downfall, was still considered a player in the evolution game). The students were generally seniors, most of whom had no particular feeling for or against Darwin. The hard-core religious types, the Campus Crusaders for Christ, tended to stay away, although occasionally a few of them would infiltrate for purposes of either changing Andy’s mind or reminding their classmates that fellowship and pizza were available in the campus center Thursday evenings from seven to nine.

  At a larger school, a research-oriented biologist like Andy almost certainly wouldn’t be allowed to teach a course like this; it would be given to a social scientist or an evolutionary theorist. But at Exton Reed, eleven hundred students and forty-two acres of crumbling quad hidden in the ass end of New Jersey, there was nobody else even interested in teaching There Is No God, much less capable of it. The other members of his department included a seventy-year-old microbiologist, a politically rowdy ornithologist, a grumpy botanist, and a fashionable ecologist who taught the department’s global warming seminar with appropriate hysteria. The five of them rotated through the teaching of biology’s academic cornerstones: the 101, 102, 201 rotation required to get kids into med school or master’s programs. They hired adjuncts to oversee labs. They kept boxes of dead frogs and fetal pigs in the cafeteria’s deep freezer. They rarely socialized.

  At 8:17, Andy pulled into the faculty parking lot, collected his briefcase, straightened his tie. He was still whistling. He was glad to be getting on with things. He had forced himself, this summer, to try to relax—his tenure paperwork was in, after all, and he knew his file looked good: three conference papers, two published articles, a mini-grant from the New Jersey Institute of Research Science. Possible important progress with his mice. So now all he could do was wait until April for the board’s final decree. Yet although he’d planned to spend his summer reading historical biographies and camping with his girls, he found himself, by July, prone to long bouts of desolation. He worried constantly about what he’d do without tenure, tried to come up with Plan Bs. He could teach at a high school (even though the thought of high school students made him fearful and exhausted). He could work in someone else’s lab (but whose?). He could use the hours the girls were at school to obsessively clean the house.

  But now, as the campus shifted into new-semester gear, Andy found himself crossing its weedy gravel pathways with optimism, almost delight. He stopped in the campus center for a cup of coffee and became immersed in unusually nimble chitchat with the barista, the janitor, a student who looked familiar but whose name he couldn’t place. By the time he opened the door to his fourth-floor office in Scientific Hall, he felt almost—yes, there it was—he felt cheerful.

  Louisa’s ghost nodded her greeting to him as he opened the door. He had expected to see her, but he said nothing to her, and soon enough she shimmered away.

  EXTON REED WAS small, but also perversely overcrowded; as a result, there was nowhere to teach There Is No God but the tiny seminar room on the top floor, the fifth floor, of Scientific Hall, searingly hot and serenaded by the whoosh of the building’s plumbing, as a network of drainpipes ran across the ceiling. Scientific Hall, like most of Exton Reed’s buildings, dated from the 1950s, when the smell of GI profits convinced the trustees of the Exton Ladies’ Institute of Reed Township to transform their small, underfunded finishing school into a small, underfunded liberal arts college. Scientific Hall went up in the northeast corner of the quad, where it stood opposite the campus center and freshman dorms; in the adjacent corner hulked Carruthers, the humanities building, named for Exton Reed’s major donor, the Carruthers family of Carruthers Cranberry. In the middle of the quad stood an oversized statue of Henrietta Exton, who founded the Exton Ladies’ Institute at the end of the eighteen hundreds. Inscribed on the statue’s pedestal were several inspirational themes and quotations translated into Latin, including the campus’s motto, ABOVE ALL, RHETORIC, which only Andy seemed to find amusing.

  The campus itself was ringed by parking lots and the bait-and-tackles and convenience stores of Reed Township, whose Main Street offered, for entertainment purposes, a single-screen movie theater and a bar called the Library. Anyone who wanted something better could drive to Philadelphia, forty-five minutes away, but most kids simply skipped town on the weekends to visit their boyfriends or do their laundry back home.

  Already parched and overheated in the far reaches of Scientific Hall, Andy hung his blazer on the back of his chair and wrote his introductory statements on the blackboard.

  1: Evolution is the explanation for everything

  2: Darwin is right

  3: And people who don’t believe Darwin are wrong

  Then he wiped the dust off his hands (Christ, was it too much to ask for a PowerPoint setup?) and sat down to wait for his students. A few minutes before nine, they started to trickle in, already bored-looking, some wearing clothing they had probably slept in. Andy didn’t begrudge them. Twenty years ago, during his own undergraduate days at Ohio State, he once went two weeks without changing clothes on a ten-dollar dare.

  A few of them nodded at him as they took their seats; others, eager to show how little they cared, took out their iPhones and started fiddling. Eight women, four men (on par with the campus 2:1 ratio) and then, in a last-minute dash through the door, Lionel Shell, in a Rick Santorum sweater-vest and the kind of glasses whose lenses turned dark when you stood in the sun.

  “Professor,” Lionel Shell said, crisply. He was a skinny devout Christian from rural Delaware who had taken the course three semesters ago as a sophomore, and who had spent those fourteen weeks alternately glowering at Andy and raising his hand with a passion that dragged him halfway across his desk.

  “I got special permission from
the registrar to take this again for credit,” Lionel said. “Before you give me any grief.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “On the grounds that I’m writing a response paper to this course that will change the university’s position on letting you teach atheism every other year.”

  “Are you now?” Andy said, outwardly civil, inwardly delighted. When Rosenblum taught this course at Princeton, he had jackoffs like Lionel every other seminar (Andy, who served as his reader/grader, remembered them all). He had always found it a little disappointing that his own course engendered such mild protest, so much acquiescence. “Well, that’s great. I look forward to hearing what you come up with.”

  “And when I’m done, I’ll be sending it to the Board of Trustees.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Andy suppressed a smile.

  Lionel took off his glasses, cleaned them primly, slid them back on his face. “I just think this is an issue that deserves broader attention on campus. It’s not personal.”

  “Well, I agree with you, Lionel, that issues of scientific ethics deserve broader airing on campus, and across the country.”

  “Indeed,” said indomitable Lionel, refusing to fall for Andy’s condescension. “Still, I think I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

  “I would expect nothing less,” Andy said. He stood, eyed his students (the sloppy, the angsty, the covert nose-pickers) and launched into his spiel.

  “Are you guys aware that of the eight major Republican candidates who ran for this year’s nomination, six said publicly that they didn’t believe in evolution?” He waited for gasps, and a few students, to their credit, did look faintly surprised.

  “Did you know that 71 percent of Americans say that science is a matter of opinion, not fact? And 64 percent believe that God has a place in the scientific curriculum?”

  They opened their notebooks, unsure whether or not class had already started. “Friends, I view this set of statistics as a national emergency (calling students “friends”—that was another move from the Rosenblum playbook). And by the way, Lionel, if you want to help me draw attention to these issues, I would welcome the help entirely. Believe me.”

  Lionel arranged his face into its glower.

  “Now guys, before I hand out your syllabus, I’d like you all to take a moment to read the three statements I’ve written on the board.” He gave them their moment. “Anybody have any questions? Objections?”

  Predictable silence. “So who are you people, anyway?”

  The thirteen went around the room clockwise, introducing themselves by name and major (seven biology, two English, three chemistry, and Lionel: an independently designed major in Public and Religious Discourse). As always, Andy attempted to link each name to a defining feature, a mole or a haircut; this was a memory-enhancing technique he kept trying but was never quite able to master. These students had all been born in the early nineties, a generation of Maxes and Hunters and Kaylas and Ariels. This particular group was an indistinct mix of Haleys and Jordans, and Andy forgot each name the minute a student said it. But he nodded at each of them and smiled, and most of them smiled back.

  “So, as you all know, this is Special Topics in Evolutionary Biology: Ethics and Debate.” Andy, per his shtick, let his introductory smile dissolve into a pissy little frown. “But listen, guys, I have to say, I’m rather interested in the fact that none of you seem to want to debate. Interested, and maybe even a little disappointed.”

  The students looked worried. They had already disappointed the professor. One of the Haleys put down her pen; another started frantically taking notes.

  Andy walked the perimeter of the room. “I asked you if everybody would agree to the statement that people who don’t agree with Darwin are wrong.”

  The class eyed one another, knowing they were being set up and resenting it already.

  “Nobody said they would disagree with Darwin, and ordinarily this would make me happy. However, there are thirteen of you in this classroom, and twelve of you seem to agree with what I wrote on the board. But it is statistically radically unlikely that thirteen Americans in the year 2011—even twelve college students, even twelve thoughtful young people like yourselves—it is statistically very unlikely that each one of you accepts Darwinian evolution as the fundamental explanation for everything in the universe, from the way life expanded to fill every niche of habitable space on the planet to perhaps, as physicists are now proving, the universe itself.”

  A few of the students resumed note taking. A few others just looked annoyed. “Guys, Darwinian evolution explains everything about us,” Andy said. “Everything.”

  He took a second to let this sink in.

  “So what that means, of course, is that we do not need a supernatural explanation for life. We don’t need God, or gods, or four turtles carrying the planet on their shells. We don’t need the myths of religion. Americans, as a rule, don’t appreciate this line of thinking. And your accents and presentation tell me that all of you are Americans. And yet each one of you agrees with this fundamental truth—that natural selection, not God, is responsible for the diversity of life on the planet. At least, that seems to be what you’re telling me.”

  Now the students checked one another out to see who would crack first. After twenty seconds, nobody did.

  “But I would imagine that deep down,” Andy said, “at least some of you think that although maybe God didn’t separate the land from the waters, specifically, he probably got this whole ball rolling, somehow, in a sort of deist sense. Or maybe you hold some kind of Bible-as-metaphor opinion that God might have taken more than seven days to do it, but still he had some hand in fashioning the lion, the lamb, etcetera. Am I right?”

  A few of the students nodded. Lionel, of course, was already panting from the exertion of raising his hand.

  “And some of you probably have some other ideas. Lionel, for instance.”

  “I believe that God created the universe in seven days,” Lionel said, the words tumbling out. “I believe that God created man and woman, good and evil, and that the Bible is his living document, and that Genesis tells us the true story of creation, and without God there is no purpose or pleasure in our lives, but with him watching over us, we all have the opportunity to live lives that matter. Not just to ourselves, but to everyone. And I believe that—”

  Andy cut him off with a hand. “Anybody agree with Lionel over here?”

  A few Haleys, a Jordan, a Max or two tentatively nodded his head.

  “Well,” Andy said, distributing his syllabus, “I look forward to changing your minds.”

  LUNCH WAS COLD leftovers under the shade of a dogwood by the parking lot, then back to his office to hand his first-day-of-the-semester paperwork over to Rosemary, the department secretary.

  “Going home? If you leave now, you’ll be early for soccer.” Rosemary knew him and his priorities.

  “Just as soon,” Andy said, “as I check on my friends downstairs.”

  In August, before he and the girls made their annual pilgrimage to Ohio, Andy had run a half-dozen spectrophotometer scans to confirm his thinking on the neuropeptide receptivity of certain members of his population. He needed a few more numbers to bulk up his grant application to the National Science Foundation (his very first such application: almost half a million dollars for new equipment, new animals, and perhaps a few postdocs of his own). At the previous year’s Academic Biology conference he’d spoken to a few NSF reps, in vague but optimistic terms, of his research; they in turn encouraged him to apply for a midcareer grant, agreeing that his hypothesis seemed sound. “Of course,” said one, “you’ll need some solid numbers to get your hands on our money.”

  “Of course,” Andy said. “I’ve got solid numbers.”

  “You do?”

  “Very solid.” And at this, everyone in the group chuckled as if at a familiar punch line, leaving Andy to look down at his loafers, embarrassed and unsure why.

  The grant wasn’
t due until early spring, however, and if Andy had been perhaps overstating his results, inflating the solidity of his numbers for the NSF reps’ appreciation, he should have enough time to run the data again and straighten out his hypothesis. The problem was that a significant number of his mice weren’t necessarily behaving the way their brain scans predicted. Some mice who had been bred to drink until their neurons seized were, for mysterious reasons, drinking in moderation, while other mice, mice who should have always chosen water over wine, were sucking down ethanol like junkies. Maybe he had ordered the wrong mice, or screwed up his records? He’d start over with another batch as soon as it was delivered—but the concerns persisted. Mice with brain chemistries that suggested one way of acting were stubbornly acting another way, and for a few delirious moments Andy wondered if they were playing a practical joke on him.

  Still his mood remained surprisingly buoyant until, on the third floor of the staircase, he was waylaid by a tubby undergraduate in an Exton Reed sweatshirt.

  “Professor? Are you Professor Waite?”

  Andy fought the urge to deny it. “Can I help you?”

  “I need to talk to you about a project.”

  “You do?”

  The girl nodded. She had wide eyes and wheat-colored hair, a poof of inexpertly cut bangs above a broad face.

  “Well, listen, I have to head down to my lab right now, I don’t have a lot of time. If you’d like to make an appointment—”

  “I can walk with you.”

  Andy took a half step back. “Of course.” So silently they made their way down the concrete-block stairwell to the basement labs, and silently the girl waited while Andy fumbled with his keys, turned on the lights, and was greeted by the cheery squeak of various Mus musculus and the chemical funk of paraformaldehyde. The girl stood in the corner of the pale green lab and watched as Andy made his rounds from one cage to another, making sure none of his animals were seizing, making sure his hard-core alkies had enough ethanol in their bottles that they weren’t going to start frothing from delirium tremens, assuming they acted like they were supposed to act.