IN JANUARY of nineteen hundred and ninety-five the esteemed movie critic of the San Francisco Chronicle took an unapproved leave of absence from his job and went back to Berkeley full time to study biochemistry. He gave his editor ten days’ notice, turned in five hastily written, unusually kind reviews of American movies, and walked out.
Why did the feared and admired Nieman Gluuk walk out on a career he had spent twenty years creating? Was it a midlife crisis? Was he ill? Had he fallen in love? The Bay Area arts community forgot about the Simpson trial in its surprise and incredulity.
Let them ponder and search their hearts. The only person who knows the truth is Nieman Gluuk and he can’t tell because he can’t remember.
The first thing Nieman did after he turned in his notice was call his mother. “I throw up my hands,” she said. “This is it, Nieman. The last straw. Of course you will not quit your job.”
“I’m going back to school, Mother. I’m twenty years behind in knowledge. I have led the life you planned for me as long as I can lead it. I told you. That’s it. I’ll call you again on Sunday.”
“Don’t think I’m going to support you when you’re broke,” she answered. “I watched your father ruin his life following his whims. I swore I’d protect you from that.”
“Don’t protect me,” he begged. “Get down on your knees and pray you won’t protect me. I’m forty-four years old. It’s time for me to stop pacing in my cage. I keep thinking of the poem by Rilke.
“His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
“As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
“Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly – An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.”
“You are not Rilke,” his mother said. “Don’t dramatize yourself, Nieman. You have a lovely life. The last thing you need is to go back to Berkeley and get some crazy ideas put in your head. This is Freddy Harwood’s doing. This has Freddy written all over it.”
“Freddy’s in it. I’ll admit that. He and Nora Jane and I have gone back to school together. I wish I hadn’t even called you. I’m hanging up.”
“Freddy has a trust fund and you don’t. You never remember that, Nieman. Don’t expect me to pick up the pieces when this is over….” Nieman had hung up the phone. It was a radical move but one to which he often resorted in his lifelong attempt to escape the woman who had borne him.
Nieman’s return to academia had started as a gesture of friendship. Nieman and Freddy had attended Berkeley in the sixties but Nora Jane was fifteen years younger and had never attended college, not even for a day.
“Think how it eats at her,” Freddy told him. “We own a bookstore and she never even had freshman English. If anyone asks her where she went to school, she still gets embarrassed. I tell her it’s only reading books but she won’t believe it. She wants a degree and I want it for her.”
“Let’s go with her,” Nieman said, continuing a conversation they had had at lunch the day before. “I mean it. Ever since she mentioned it I keep wanting to tell her what to take. Last night I decided I should go and take those things myself. We’re dinosaurs, Freddy. Our education is outdated. We should go and see what they’re teaching.”
“Brilliant,” Freddy said. “It’s a slow time at the store. I could take a few weeks off.”
“Here’s how I figure it.” Nieman stood up, got the bottle of brandy, and refilled their glasses. “We sign up for a few classes, pay the tuition, go a few weeks, and then quit. The university gets the tuition and Nora Jane gets some company until she settles in.”
“We have spent vacations doing sillier things,” Freddy said, thinking of the year they climbed Annapurna, or the time they took up scuba diving to communicate with dolphins.
“I need a change,” Nieman confessed, sinking down into the water until it almost reached his chin. “I’m lonely, Freddy. Except for the two of you I haven’t any friends. Everyone I know wants something from me or is angry with me for not adoring their goddamn, whorish movies. Some of them hate me for liking them. It’s a web I made and I’ve caught myself.”
“We’ll get applications tomorrow. Nora Jane’s already registered. Classes start next Monday.”
Nieman went to the admissions office the next day and signed up to audit Dante in Translation and Playwriting One. Then, suddenly, after a night filled with dreams, he changed the classes to biochemistry and Introduction to the Electron Microscope.
This was not an unbidden move. For several years Nieman had become increasingly interested in science. He had started by reading books by physicists, especially Freeman Dyson. Physics led to chemistry, which led to biology, which led to him, Nieman Gluuk, a walking history of life on earth. Right there, in every cell in his body was the whole amazing panorama that led to language and conscious thought.
The first lecture on biochemistry and the first hour with the microscopes excited Nieman to such an extent he was trembling when he left the building and walked across the campus to the coffee shop where he had agreed to meet Freddy and Nora Jane. A squirrel climbed around a tree while he was watching. A girl walked by, her hair trailing behind her like a wild tangled net. A bluejay landed on a branch and spread his tailfeathers. Nieman’s breath came short. He could barely put one foot in front of the other. Fields of wonder, he said to himself. Dazzling, dazzling, dazzling. If they knew what they are carrying as they go. Time, what a funny word for the one-way street we seem to have to follow.
“This is it,” he told Freddy and Nora Jane when they were seated at a table with coffee and croissants and cream and sugar and butter and jam and honey before them on the handmade plates. “I’m quitting the job. I’m going back to school full time. I have to have this body of information. Proteins and nucleic acids, the chain of being. This is not some sudden madness, Freddy. I’ve been moving in this direction. I’ll apply for grants. I’ll be a starving student. Whatever I have to do.”
“We don’t think you’re crazy,” Nora Jane said. “We think you’re wonderful. I feel like I did this. Like I helped.”
“Helped! You are the Angel of the Annunciation is what you are, you darling, you.”
“Are you sure this isn’t just another search for first causes?” Freddy warned. “Remember those years you wasted on philosophy?”
“Of course it is. So what? This isn’t dead philosophical systems or Freudian simplicities. This is real knowledge. Things we can measure and see. Information that allows us to manipulate the physical world.”
“If you say so.”
“May I borrow the house at Willits for the weekend? I need to be alone to think. I want to take the textbooks up there and read them from start to finish. I haven’t been this excited in years. My God, I am in love.”
“Of course you can borrow the house. Just be sure to drain the pipes when you leave.”
“It might snow up there this weekend,” Nora Jane put in. “The weather station warned of snow.”
Two days later Nieman was alone in the solar-powered house Freddy and his friends had built on a dirt road five miles from Willits, California. The house was begun in 1974 and completed in 1983. Many of the boards had been nailed together by Nieman himself with his delicate hands.
The house stood in the center of one hundred and seven acres of land and overlooked a pleasant valley where panthers still hunted. In any direction there was not a power line or telephone pole or chimney. The house had a large open downstairs with a stone bathroom. A ladder led from the kitchen area to a loft with sleeping rooms. There were skylights in the roof and a wall of glass facing east. There was a huge stone fireplace with a wide hearth. Outside there was a patio and a deep well for drinking water. “This well goes down to the center of the earth,” Freddy was fond of saying. “We cannot imagine the springs or rivers from which it feeds. This could be water captured eons ago before the crust cooled. This water could be the purest thing you’ll ever taste.”
“It tastes good,” his twin daughters, Tammili and Lydia, would always answer. “It’s the best water in the world, I bet.”
Nieman stood in the living room looking out across the valleys, which had become covered with snow while he slept. He had arrived late the night before and built up the fire and slept on the hearth in his sleeping bag. “It was the right thing to do to come up here,” he said out loud. “This holy place where my friends and I once made our stand against progress and the destruction of the natural world. This holy house where Tammili and Lydia were born, where the panther once came to within ten yards of me and did not strike. I am a strange man and do not know what’s wrong with me. But I know how to fix myself when I am broken. You must change your life, Rilke said, and now I am changing mine. Who knows, when I come to my senses, somebody will have taken my job and I’ll be on the streets writing travel articles. So be it. In the meantime I am destined to study science and I am going to study science. I cannot allow this body of information to pass me by and I can’t concentrate on it while attempting to evaluate Hollywood movies.”
Nieman moved closer to the window so he could feel the cold permeating the glass. Small soft flakes were still falling, so light and small it seemed impossible they could have turned the hills so white and covered the trees and the piles of firewood and the well. I can trek out if I have to, he decided. I won’t worry about this snow. This snow is here to soothe me. To make the world a wonderland for me to study. Life as a cosmic imperative, de Duve says. I will read that book first, then do three pages of math. I have to learn math. My brain is only forty-four years old, for Christ’s sake. Mother taught math. The gene’s in there somewhere. It’s just rusty. Before there was oxygen there was no rust. Iron existed in the prebiotic oceans in a ferrous state. My brain is like that. There are genes in there that have never been exposed to air. Now I will use them.
Nieman was trembling with the cold and the excitement of the ideas in his head. Proteins and nucleic acids, the idea that all life on earth came from a single cell that was created by a cosmic imperative. Given the earth and the materials of which it is created, life was inevitable. Ever-increasing complexity was also inevitable. It was inevitable that we would create nuclear energy, inevitable that we would overpopulate the earth. It was not as insane as it had always seemed. And perhaps it was not as inevitable once the mind could recognize and grasp the process.
Nieman heaved a great happy sigh. He left watching the snow and turned and climbed the ladder to the sleeping loft. There, on that bed, in that corner beneath the skylight, on a freezing night ten years before, Freddy and Nora Jane’s twins had been born, his surrogate children, his goddaughters, his angels, his dancing princesses. Nieman lay down upon the bed and thought about the twins and the progress of their lives. Not everything ends in tragedy, he decided. My life has not been tragic, neither has Freddy’s or Nora Jane’s. Perhaps the world will last another hundred years. Perhaps this safety can be stretched to include the lives of Tammili and Lydia. So what if they are not mine, not related to me. All life comes from one cell. They are mine because they have my heart. It is theirs. I belong to them, have pondered over them and loved them for ten years. How can this new knowledge I want to acquire help them? How can this new birth of curiosity and wonder add to the store of goodness in the world?
Well, Nieman, don’t be a fool. It isn’t up to you to solve the problems of the world. But it might be. There were ninety-two people in that lecture room but I was the only one who had this violent a reaction to what the professor was saying. I was the only one who took what he was saying as a blow to the solar plexus. This might be my mission. It might be up to me to learn this stuff and pass it on. It is not inevitable that we overpopulate and destroy the world. Knowledge is still power. Knowledge will save us.
Nieman was crying. He lay on the bed watching the snow falling on the skylight and tears rolled down his face and filled his ears and got his fringe of hair soaking wet. He cried and he allowed himself to cry.
I had thought it was art, he decided. Certainly art is part of it. Cro-Magnon man mixing earth with saliva and spitting it on the walls of caves was a biochemist. He was taking the elements he found around him and using them to explore and recreate and enlarge his grasp of reality. After the walls were painted he could come back and stare at them and wonder at what he had created. Perhaps he cried out, terrified by the working of his mind and hands. I might stare in such a manner at this house we built. I could go outside and watch the snow falling on those primitive solar panels we installed so long ago. It is all one, our well and solar panels and the cave paintings at Lascaux and microscopes at Berkeley and this man in Belgium writing this book to blow my mind wide open and Lydia and Tammili carrying their backpacks to school each morning. The maker of this bed and the ax that felled the trees that made the boards we hammered and Jonas Salk and murderers and thieves and Akira Kurosawa and Abraham Pais and I are one. This great final truth, which all visionaries have intuited, which must be learned over and over again, world without end, amen.
Nieman fell asleep. The snow fell faster. The flakes were larger now, coming from a cloud of moisture that had once been the Mediterranean Sea, that had filled the wells of Florence, in the time of Leonardo da Vinci, and his royal patron, Francis, King of France.
The young man was wearing long robes of dark red and brown. His hair was wild and curly and his feet were in leather sandals. His face was tanned and his eyes were as blue as the sky. He had been knocking on the door for many minutes when Nieman came to consciousness and climbed down the ladder to let him in. “Come in,” Nieman said. “I was asleep. Are you lost? I’m Nieman Gluuk. Come in and warm yourself.”
“It took a while to get here,” the young man said. “That’s a kind fire you have going.”
“Sit down. Do you live around here? Could I get you something to drink? Coffee or tea or brandy? Could I get you a glass of water? We have a well. Perhaps you’re hungry.” The young man moved into the living room and looked around with great interest. He walked over to the window and laid his palms against the glass. Then he touched it with his cheek. He smiled at that and turned back to Nieman.
“Food would be nice. Bread or cheese. I’ll sit by the fire and warm myself.”
Nieman went into the kitchen and began to get out food and a water glass. The young man picked up the book by the biochemist de Duve, and began to read it, turning the pages very quickly. His eyes would move across the page, then he would turn the page. By the time Nieman returned to the fireplace with a tray, the young man had turned half the pages. “This is a fine book,” he said to Nieman, smiling and taking a piece of bread from the tray. “It would be worth the trip to read this.”
“You aren’t from around here, are you?” Nieman asked.
“You know who I am. You called me here. Don’t be frightened. I come when I am truly called. Of course, I can’t stay long. I would like to finish this book now. It won’t take long. Do you have something to do while I’m reading?” The young man smiled a dazzling smile at Nieman. It was the face of the Angel of the Annunciation in Leonardo’s painting. It was the face of David. “You knew me, didn’t you?” the young man added. “Weren’t there things you wanted to tell me?”
Nieman walked back toward the kitchen, breathing very softly. The young man’s face, his hair, his feet, his hands. It was all as familiar as the face Nieman saw every day in the mirror when he shaved. Nieman let his hands drop to his sides. He stood motionless by the ladder while the young man finished reading the book.
“What should I call you?” Nieman said at last.
“Francis called me da Vinci.”
“How do you speak English?”
“That’s the least of the problems.”
“What is the most?”
“Jarring the protoplasm. Of course, I only travel when it’s worth it. I will have a whole day. Is there something you want to show me?”
“I want to take you to the labs at Berkeley. I want to show you the microscopes and telescopes, but I guess that’s nothing to what you’ve seen by now. I could tell you about them. Did you really just read that book?”
“Yes. It’s very fine, but why did he waste so many pages pretending to entertain superstitious ideas? Are ideas still subject to the Church in this time?”
“It’s more subtle, but they’re there. The author probably didn’t want to seem superior. That’s big now.”
“I used to do that. Especially with Francis. He was so needy. We will go to your labs if you like. Or we could walk in this snow. I only came to keep you company. It’s your time.” He smiled again, a smile so radiant that it transported Nieman outside his fear that he was losing his mind.
“Why to me?”
“Because you might be lonely in the beginning. Afterward, you will have me if you need me.” The young man folded the book very carefully and laid it on a cushion. “Tell me how cheese is made now,” he said, beginning to eat the food slowly and carefully as he talked. “How is it manufactured? What are the cows named? Who wraps it? How is it transported?”
“The Pacific Ocean is near here,” Nieman answered. He had taken a seat a few feet from the young man. “We might be able to get out in the Jeep. That’s the vehicle out there. Gasoline powered. I don’t know what you know and what you don’t know. Do you want to read some more books?”
“Could we go to this ocean?”
“I guess we could. I have hiking gear. If we can’t get through we can always make it back. I have a mobile phone. I’d like to watch you read another book. I have a book of algebra and a book that is an overview of where we are in the sciences now. There’s a book of plays and plenty of poetry. I’d be glad to sit here and read with you. But finish eating. Let me get you some fruit to go with that.”
“Give me the books. I will read them.”
Nieman got up and collected books from around the room and brought them and put them beside the young man. Then he brought in firewood and built up the fire. He took a book of poetry and sat near the young man and read as the young man read. Here is the poem he turned to and the one he kept reading over and over again as he sat by the young man’s side with the fire roaring and the wind picking up outside and the snow falling faster and faster.
… Still, if love torments you so much and you so much need
To sail the Stygian lake twice and twice to inspect
The murk of Tartarus, if you will go beyond the limit,
Understand what you must do beforehand.
Hidden in the thick of a tree is a bough made of gold
And its leaves and pliable twigs are made of it too.
It is sacred to underworld Juno, who is its patron,
And it is roofed in by a grove, where deep shadows mass
Along far wooded valleys. No one is ever permitted
To go down to earth’s hidden places unless he has first
Plucked this golden-fledged growth out of its tree
And handed it over to fair Proserpina, to whom it belongs
By decree, her own special gift. And when it is plucked,
A second one always grows in its place, golden again,
And the foliage growing on it has the same metal sheen.
Therefore look up and search deep and when you have found it,
Take hold of it boldly and duly. If fate has called you,
The bough will come away easily, of its own accord.
Otherwise, no matter how much strength you muster,
You never will
Manage to quell it or cut it down with
The toughest of blades.
“Now,” the young man said, when he finished the biochemistry textbook. “Tell me about these infinitesimal creatures, amoebas, proteins, acid chains, slime molds, white cells, nuclei, enzymes, DNA, RNA, atoms, quarks, strings, and so on. What an army they have found. I could not have imagined it was that complicated. They have seen these creatures? Many men have seen them?”
“We have telescopes and microscopes with lenses ground a million times to such fineness and keenness, with light harnessed from electrons. They can magnify a million times. A thousand million. I don’t know the numbers. I can take you to where they are. I can take you to see them if you want to go.”
“Of course. Yes, you will take me there. But it must be soon. There is a limited amount of time I will be with you.”
“How much time?”
“It will suffice. Will your vehicle travel in this snow?”
“Yes. Perhaps you would like to borrow some modern clothes. Not that there’s anything wrong with your clothes. They are very nice. I was especially admiring the cape. The weave is lovely. They’re always worrying about security. I want to take you to the laboratories at Berkeley. I can call the head of the department. He will let us in.”
“You may have the cloak since you admire it. It can remain here.” He removed the long brown garment and handed it to Nieman.
“I’ll give you a parka.” Nieman ran for the coat rack and took down a long beige parka Freddy had ordered from L.L. Bean. He held it out to the young man. “I guess I seem nervous. I’m not. It’s just that I’ve wanted to talk to you since I was ten years old.”
“Yes. You’ve been calling me for some time.”
“I thought you would be old. Like of the time when you died. Did you die?”
“I thought so. It was most uncomfortable and Francis wept like a child, which was not altogether unpleasant.” He laughed softly. “It is better to come with my young eyes. In case there is something to see.”
“Where are you when you aren’t here?”
“Quite far away.”
“Will it matter that you came here? I mean in the scheme of things, as it were?”
“It will matter to me. To read the books and see these instruments you are describing. I have always wished to have my curiosity satisfied. That was always what I most dreamed of doing. Francis never understood that. He could never believe I wouldn’t be satisfied to eat and drink and be lauded and talk with him. It kept me from loving him as he deserved.”
“I meant, will it change the course of anything?”
“Not unless you do it.”
“I wouldn’t do it. Could I do it by accident?”
“No. I will see to that. Do you want to go out now, in the vehicle in the snow?” There it was again, the smile that soaked up all the light and gave it back.
“Let’s get dressed for it.” Nieman led his guest upstairs and gave him a warm shirt and socks and shoes and pants and long underwear. While he was changing Nieman banked the fire and put the food away and set the crumbs out for the birds and locked the windows and threw his things into a bag. He forgot to drain the pipes.
“Well, now,” he said out loud. “I guess I can drive that Jeep in this snow. Let’s assume I can drive. Let’s say it’s possible and I will do it.” He turned on the mobile phone and called the department at Berkeley and left a message saying he was bringing a senator to see the labs. Then he called the president of the university at his home and called in his markers. “Very hush-hush,” he told the president. “This could be very big, Joe. This could be millions for research but you have to trust me. Don’t ask questions. Just tell the grounds people to give me the keys when I come ask for them. I can’t tell you who it is. You have to trust me.”
“Of course, Nieman,” the president answered. “After everything you and Freddy have done for us. Anything you want.”
“The keys to everything. The electron microscopes, the physics labs, the works. We could use one of your technical people for a guide but no one else.”
“There’ll be people working in the labs.”
“I know that. We won’t bother anyone. I’ll call you Monday and tell you more.”
“Fine. I’ll look forward to hearing about it.” After he hung up the phone the university president said to his wife, “That was Nieman Gluuk. Did you know he’s quitting writing his column? Took a leave of absence to go back to school.”
“Well, don’t you go getting any ideas like that,” his good-looking wife giggled. “All he ever wrote about were foreign films. He’d gotten brutal in his reviews. Maybe they let him go. Maybe he just pretended that he quit.”
There was a layer of ice beneath the snow. Nieman tested it by walking on it, then put Leonardo into the passenger seat and buckled him in and got behind the wheel and started driving. He drove very carefully in the lowest gear across the rock-strewn yard toward the wooden gate that fenced in nothing since the fence had been abandoned as a bad idea. “Thank God it’s downhill,” he said. “It’s downhill most of the way to the main road. So, when was the last time you were here?” He talked without turning his head. The sun was out now. Birds were beginning to circle above the huge fir trees in the distance. “Have you been to the United States? To the West Coast?”
“Once long ago. I saw the ocean with a man of another race. I walked beside it and felt its power. It is different from the ocean I knew.”
“We can go there first. It won’t take long once we get to the main road. I’m sorry if I keep asking you questions. I can’t help being curious.”
“You can ask them if you like. I was visited by Aristotle in my turn. We went to a river and explored its banks. He was very interested in my studies of moving water. He said the flow of water would impede the mixture of liquids and we talked of how liquid forms its boundaries within a flow. He had very beautiful hands. I painted them later from memory several times. Of course everyone thought they were Raphael’s hands. Perhaps I thought so too finally. After he left I had no real memory of it for a while. More like the memory of a dream, bounded, uncertain, without weight. I think it will be like that for you, so ask whatever you wish to ask.”
“I don’t think I want to ask anything now. I think we should go to the ocean first since we are so near. I forget about water. I forget to look at it with clear eyes, and yet I was watching the snow when I fell asleep. Also, I was crying. Why are you smiling?”
“Go on.”
“I was thinking that when I was small I knew how to appreciate the ocean. Later, I forgot. When I was small I would stand in one place for a very long time watching the waves lap. Every day I came back to the same spot. I made footprints for the waves to wash away. I made castles farther and farther up the beach to see how far the tide could reach. I dug into the sand, as deep as it would allow me to dig. I was an infatuate of ocean, wave, beach. Are you warm enough? Is that coat comfortable?”
“I am warm. Tell me about this vehicle. What do you call it?”
“Automobile. Like auto and mobile. It’s a Jeep, a four-wheel drive. We call it our car. Everyone has one. We work for them. We fight wars over the fuel to power them. We spend a lot of time in them. They have radios. We listen to broadcasts from around the world while we drive. Or we listen to taped books. I have a book of the Italian language we could listen to. You might want to see how it’s evolved. It might be the same. It might be quite similar to what you spoke. Would you like to hear it?” Nieman shifted into a higher gear. The road was still steep but lay in the lee of the mountain and was not iced beneath the snow. “We’ll be on the main road, soon,” he added. “We’re in luck it seems. I wouldn’t have driven this alone. One more question. How do you read the books so fast?”
“I’m not sure.” Leonardo laughed. “It’s been going on since I quit the other life. It’s getting better. At first it was not this fast. I’m very fond of being able to do it. It’s the nicest thing of all.”
“Where do you stay? When you aren’t visiting? I mean, going someplace like this.”
“With other minds.”
“Disembodied?”
“If we want to be. Is that the main road?” It was before them, the road to Willits. Plows had pushed the snow in dirty piles on either side of the road. In the center two vehicles were moving in one lane down the mountain. A blue sedan and a white minivan were bouncing down the road in the ripening sunlight.
“I believe this,” Nieman said. “I’m in my red Jeep driving Leonardo da Vinci down from the house to see the ocean. My name is Nieman Gluuk and I have striven all my life to be a good man and use my talents and conquer resentment and be glad for whatever fate dumped me in Northern California the only child of a bitter woman and a father I almost never saw, and I never went into a movie theater expecting to hate the movie and was saddened when I did. Maybe this is payback and maybe this is chance and maybe I deserve this and the only thing I wish is that my friend, Freddy, could be here so it won’t destroy our friendship when I am driven to tell him about it.”
“You won’t remember it.” Leonardo reached over and touched his sleeve. He smiled the dazzling smile again and Nieman took it in without driving off the road and took the last curve down onto the highway. “You will have it,” Leonardo added. “It is yours, but you won’t have the burden of remembering it.”
“I want the burden.” Nieman laughed. “Burden me. Try me. I can take it. I’ll write a movie script and publicize intelligence. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smarrita. Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte. That’s the beginning of The Divine Comedy. That’s what I went back to Berkeley to take. Instead, I’m in this forest of biochemistry. I’m dreaming the things I’m reading. They put literature into a new light. The artist intuits what the mind knows and the mind knows everything, doesn’t it? Past, present, and forever-more.”
“Some wake to it gradually. Some never know.”
“I’ve worked for it,” Nieman said. “I have worked all my life to understand, to see myself as the product of five hundred million years of evolution. You seem to have known it always.”
“I was taken from my mother’s house when I was four years old. On the walk to my father’s house, the fields and the wonder of the earth came to console me. But I worked also. I always worked.” He laid his hand on Nieman’s arm. Nieman steered the Jeep across a pile of snow and turned onto the road leading down to Willits. Around them the snow-covered hills with their massive fir trees were paintings of unspeakable complexity. Neither of them spoke for many miles.
It was past noon when they drove through the small town of Willits and turned onto Highway 20 leading to the Pacific Ocean. “I’m going to stop for gasoline for the automobile,” Nieman said. “We collect it in foreign countries. The countries of the Turks and Muslims, although some of it is under the ground of this country. We store it underneath these filling stations in large steel tanks. Steel is an alloy made of iron and carbon. It’s very strong. Then we drive up to the pumping stations and pump the fuel into our tanks. Even young children do this, Leonardo. I don’t know what you know and what you don’t know, but I feel I should explain some things.”
“I like to hear you speak of these phenomena. Continue. I will listen and watch.”
Nieman spotted a Conoco station and stopped the Jeep and got out. He took down one of the gasoline hoses and inserted it in the fuel tank of the Jeep. Leonardo stood beside the tank watching and not speaking. “Don’t smile that smile at anyone else,” Nieman said. “We’ll be arrested for doing hallucinogens.”
“They never explode?” Leonardo moved in for a closer look, took a sniff of the fumes, then put both hands in the pockets of the jacket. There was a package of Kleenex in one pocket. He brought it out and examined it.
“It’s called Kleenex. We blow our noses on it,” Nieman explained. “It’s a disposable handkerchief.”
“Could one draw on it?” Leonardo held a sheet up to the light. “It’s fragile and thin.”
“Wait a minute.” Nieman pulled a notepad and a black felt-tip pen out of the glove compartment and handed them to Leonardo. Leonardo examined the pen, took the top from it, and began to draw, leaning the pad against the top of the Jeep. Nieman put the hose back on the pump, then went inside and paid for the gasoline. When he returned, Leonardo had covered a page with the smallest, most precise lines Nieman had ever seen. Leonardo handed the drawing to him. It was of the mountains and the trees. In the foreground Nieman was standing beside the Jeep with the gasoline hose in his hand.
Nieman took the drawing and held it. “You are a microscope,” he said. “Perhaps you will not be impressed with the ones we’ve made.”
“Shall we continue on our way?” Leonardo asked. “Now that your tank is full of gasoline.”
They drove in silence for a while. The sun was out in full violence now, melting the snow and warming the air. “The air is an ocean of currents,” Nieman said at last. “I suppose you know about that.”
“Always good to be reminded of anything we know.”
“You want to hear the Italian tape? I’d like to hear what you think of it.”
“That would be fine.”
Nieman reached into a pack of tapes and extracted the Beginning Italian tape and stuck it into the tape player. “This Jeep doesn’t have very good speakers,” he said. “We have systems that are much better than this one.” The Italian teacher began to teach Italian phrases. Leonardo began to laugh. Quietly at first, then louder and louder until he was shaking with laughter.
“What’s so funny?” Nieman asked. He was laughing too. “What do you think is funny? Why am I laughing too?”
“Such good jokes,” Leonardo answered, continuing to laugh. “What questions. What news. What jokes.”
It was thirty-six miles from Willits to the Pacific Ocean. The road led down between mountains and virgin forests. They drove along at fifty miles an hour, listening to the Italian tape and then to Kiri Te Kanawa singing arias from Italian opera. Nieman was lecturing Leonardo on the history of opera and its great modern stars. Long afterward, when he had forgotten everything about the day that could be proven, Nieman remembered the drive from Willits to the ocean and someone beside him laughing. “Are you sure you weren’t with me?” he asked Freddy a hundred times later in their lives. “Maybe we were stoned. But Kiri Te Kanawa didn’t start recording until after we had straightened up so we couldn’t have been stoned. I think you were with me. You just don’t remember it.”
“I never drove in a Jeep with you from Willits to the ocean while listening to Italian tapes. I would remember that, Nieman. Why do you always ask me that? It’s a loose wire in your head, a precursor of dreaded things to come.” Then Freddy would smile and shake his head and later talk about it to his psychiatrist or Nora Jane. “Nieman’s fixated on thinking I drove with him in a Jeep listening to an Italian tape,” he would say. “About once a year he starts on that. It’s like the budding of the trees. Once a year, in winter, he decides the two of us took that trip and nothing will convince him otherwise. He gets mad at me because I can’t remember it. Can you believe it?”
Outside the small town of Novo, Nieman found a trail he had used before. It led to a beach the townspeople used during good weather. He parked the Jeep in a gravel clearing and they got out and climbed down a path to the water. The ocean was very dramatic, with huge boulders jutting into the entrance of a small harbor. The snow was melting on the path. Even now, in the heart of winter, moss was forming on the rocks. “ ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,’ ” Nieman said.
“Dylan is happy now,” Leonardo answered. “A charming man. I go to him quite often and he recites poetry. It makes the poetry he wrote when he was here seem primitive. I should not tell you that, of course. We try never to say such things.”
“Look at the ocean,” Nieman answered. “What mystery could be greater. Shouldn’t this be enough for any man to attempt to understand? This force, this power, this place where land and air meet the sea? ‘… this goodly frame, the earth… this most excellent canopy, the air… this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire…’ ”
“Will loved the sea and wrote of it but had little time for it. Plato was the same. He talked and wrote of it but didn’t take the time to ponder it as we are doing. Of course, in other ages time seemed more valuable. Life was short and seemed more fleeting.”
They were walking along a strip of sand only ten to twenty feet wide. It was low tide. Later in the day it would have been impossible to walk here and they would have had to use the higher path.
“We could just stay here,” Nieman said. “We don’t have to go to the labs. I just thought you might want to see the microscopes.”
“We have all day.”
“They’re leaving the labs open in the biochemistry building. We can go to Berkeley or we can stay here. I saw you looking at the atlas. Did you memorize it? I mean, is that how you do it?”
“I remember it. It is very fine how they have mapped the floor of the oceans. Is it exact, do you think?”
“Pretty much so at the time of mapping. The sand shifts, everything shifts and changes. They map the floor with soundings, with radar. When you leave here, where do you have to be? Is there some gathering place? Do you just walk off ? Where do you go?”
“I just won’t be here.”
“Will the clothes be here? I only wondered. That’s Freddy’s coat. I could get him another one but he’s pretty fond of that one. He took it to Tibet.”
Nieman moved nearer to Leonardo, his eyes shifting wildly. The day had a sort of rhythm. Sometimes it was just beating along. Then suddenly he imagined it whole and that made his heart beat frantically. “I don’t care, of course. You can take it if you need to. You can have anything I have.”
“I will leave the clothes. It would be a waste to take them.”
“When will you go? How long will it be? You have to understand. I never had a father. No man ever stayed long enough. I was always getting left on my own. It’s been a problem for me all my life.”
Leonardo turned to face him. “This is not a father who leaves, Nieman. This is the realm of knowledge, which you always longed for and long for now. It is always available, it never goes away, it cannot desert you, it cannot fail you. It is yours. It belongs to whoever longs for it. If you desert it, it is always waiting, like those waves. It comes back and back like the sea. I am only a moment of what is available to you. When I am gone the clothes will be here and you can wear them when you are reading things that are difficult to understand. You will read everything now. You will learn many languages. You will know much more than you know now. Tell me about the microscopes.”
“I haven’t used one yet. But I can tell you how it works. It concentrates a beam of electrons in a tube to scan or penetrate the thing you want magnified. It makes a photograph using light and dark and shadow. The photograph is very accurate and magnified a million times. Then a portion of that photograph can be magnified several million more times. It’s so easy for me to believe the photographs so I think it must be something I know. My friend, Freddy, thinks we know everything back to the first cell, that all discovery is simply plugging into memory banks. Memory at the level of biochemistry. Which is why I can’t believe it took me so long to begin to study this. I had to start in the arts. My mother is a frustrated actress. I’ve been working her program for forty-four years. Now it’s my turn. But this is plain to you. You’re the one who saw the relationship between art and science. It never occurred to you not to do both.”
“I am honored to be here for your birth of understanding. Where I am, the minds are past their early enthusiasms. I miss seeing the glint in eyes. I miss the paintbrush in my hand and the smell of paints. If you wish to show me this microscope we can go there now. The sea is very old. We don’t have to stay beside it all day.”
It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Berkeley. They drove along the western ridge of the Cascade Range, within a sea breeze of the Mendocino Fracture Zone. Beside the Russian River. They drove to Mendocino, then Littleriver, then Albion. At Albion they cut off onto Highway 128 and drove along the Navarro River to Cloverdale. They went by Santa Rosa, then Petaluma, then Novato, and down and across the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge and on to Berkeley.
It was six o’clock when they arrived at the campus. It was dark and the last students were mounting their bicycles as they left the biochemistry building. Nieman nosed the Jeep into a faculty parking space and they got out and entered the building through iron doors and went down a hall to an elevator.
“Have you been on one of these?” Nieman asked, holding the elevator door with his hand. “It’s a box on a pulley, actually. It’s quite safe. When they were new sometimes they would get stuck. Some pretty funny jokes and stories came out of that. Also, there were tragedies, lack of oxygen and so forth. This one is thirty years old at least, but it’s safe.”
“Arabic,” Leonardo said, touching the numbered buttons with his finger. “I thought it would continue to be useful.”
“The numbers? Oh, yes. Everyone uses the same system. Based on the fingers and toes. Five fingers on each hand. Two arms, two legs. Binary system and digital system. We run our computers on the binary system. It’s fascinating. What man has done. There’s one playwright dealing with it, a man named Stoppard.” Leonardo stepped back and stood near Nieman. Nieman pressed 2 and the box rose in space on its pulley and the door opened.
Waiting for them on the second-floor hall was the head of university security. He was wearing a blue uniform with silver buttons. “Hello,” he said. “If you’re Mr. Gluuk they have a lady waiting for you. President Culver said to tell you she’d show you the machines.”
“Oh, that wasn’t necessary. We only wanted to look at them.” He took Leonardo’s arm. So he looks like a genius who has spent a thousand years on a Buddhist prayer bench. So the smile is so dazzling it hypnotizes people. No one would imagine this. No one would believe it.
“Don’t I know you from when I was a student?” Nieman asked. “I’m Nieman Gluuk. I used to edit the school paper. In the seventies. Didn’t you guard the building when we had the riots in seventy-five?”
“I thought I knew you. I’m Abel Kennedy. I was a rookie that year and you kept me supplied with cookies and coffee in the newspaper office. I’m head of security now.” Captain Kennedy held out his hand and Nieman shook it. He was trying to decide how to introduce Leonardo when a door opened down the hall and a woman came walking toward them. She was of medium height with short blond hair. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt. Over the shirt was a long white vest. There were pencils and pens in the pockets of the vest. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses was on her head. Another pair was in her hand.
“I was wondering if one could wear bifocals to look into the scope,” Nieman said. “I was afraid I’d have to get contact lenses to study science.”
“It’s a screen.” She laughed. “I’m Stella Light. My parents were with the Merry Pranksters. Some joke. I meant to have it changed but I never did.” She held out her hand to Nieman. Long slender fingers. Nails bitten off to the quick. No rings. She smiled again.
“I’m Nieman Gluuk. This is our distinguished guest, Leo Gluuk, a cousin from Madrid. I mean, Florence. Also from Minneapolis.”
“Make up your mind. Nice to meet you. I’ve read your stuff. I’m from Western Oregon. Well, what exactly can we do for you?”
“Just let us see the microscopes. Leo is very interested in the technology. It’s extremely nice of you to stay late like this. I know your days are long enough already.”
“I was here anyway. We’ve had an outbreak of salmonella in the valley. We’re trying to help out with that. It gets on the chicken skin in the packing plants or if they are defrosted incorrectly. Well, I’ll let you see slides of that. They’re fresh.”
They walked down a hall to a room with the door ajar. Inside, on a long curved table, was the console. In the center, covered with a metal that looked more like gold than brass, was the scanning electron microscope. The pride of the Berkeley labs.
They moved into the open doorway. Leonardo had been completely quiet. Now he gave Stella the smile and she stepped back and let him precede her into the room. She and Leonardo sat down at the console. She got out a box of slides and lifted one from the box with a set of calipers. She slid it into a notch and locked it down. Then she pushed a button and an image appeared on the screen. “To 0.2 nanometers,” she said. “We can photograph it and go higher.”
Nieman leaned over their shoulders and looked into the screen. It was a range of hills covered with cocoons. “A World War I battlefield,” he said. “Corpses strewn everywhere. Is that the salmonella?”
“Yes. Let’s enlarge it.” She pushed another button. The hill turned into crystal mountains. Now it was the Himalayas. Range after range of crystals. Nieman looked down at his own arm. In a nanometer of skin was all that wonder.
Leonardo began asking questions about the machine, about the metal of which it was made, about the vacuum through which the electrons traveled, how the image was created. Stella answered the questions as well as she could. She bent over him. She put pieces of paper in front of him. She put slides into the microscope. She asked no questions. She had been completely mesmerized by the smile. She would remember nothing of the encounter. Except a momentary excitement when she was alone in the room at night. She thought it was sexual. She thought it was about Nieman. There I go, she would scold herself, getting interested in yet another man I cannot understand. The daddy track, chugging on down the line to lonesome valley.
They stayed in the laboratory for half an hour. Then they wandered out into the hall and found a second microscope and Stella took the thing apart and let Leonardo examine the parts. Then she let him reassemble it. She stood beside Nieman. She sized him up. He was better looking than his photograph in the paper. His skin was so white and clear. He was kind.
“You really quit your job?” she asked.
“A leave of absence. I was burned out.”
“Who is he?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone I liked as much.”
“We all love him. The family adores him. But it’s hard to keep track of him. He travels all the time.”
Leonardo put everything back into its place. He laid Stella’s pencil on top of the stack of papers and got up from the chair. “We are finished now,” he said. “We should be leaving. We thank you for your kindness.”
Stella walked them to the elevator. They got on and she stood smiling after them. When they had left she went back into the laboratory and worked until after twelve. Two children had died in the salmonella outbreak. Twenty were hospitalized. The infected food had reached a grade school lunchroom.
When they left the building there was a full moon in the sky. There was so much light it cast shadows. Leonardo walked with Nieman to the Jeep. “I am leaving,” he said. “You will be fine.” He kissed Nieman on the cheek, then on the forehead. Then he was gone. Nieman tried to follow him but he did not know how. When he got back to the Jeep, the clothes Leonardo had been wearing were neatly stacked on the passenger seat. On top of the clothes was a pencil. A black and white striped pencil sharpened to a fine point. Nieman picked it up and held it. He put it in his pocket. I might write with this, he decided. Or I might draw.
He got into his Jeep and drove over to Nora Jane and Freddy Harwood’s house and parked in the driveway and walked up on the porch and rang the doorbell. The twins let him in. They pulled him into the room. “Momma’s making étouffée and listening to the Nevilles,” Tammili told him. “She’s having a New Orleans day. Come on in. Stay and eat dinner with us. Daddy said you’d been in Willits. How is it there? Was it snowing?”
They dragged him into the house. From the back Freddy called out to him. Nora Jane emerged from the kitchen wearing an apron. It was already beginning to fade. Whatever had happened or almost happened or seemed to happen was fading like a photograph in acid.
“Come on in here,” Freddy was calling out. “Come tell us what you were doing. We have things to tell you. Tammili made all-stars in basketball. Lydia got a role in the school play. Nora Jane got an A on her first English test. I think I’m going bald. We haven’t seen you in days. Hurry up, Nieman. I want to talk to you.”
“He’s your best friend,” Lydia giggled, half whispering. “It’s so great. You just love each other.”