I arrived an hour early to get a seat in the first row. Half an hour later, no one had shown up. Nervously, I checked my schedule. Room 241, nine a.m., Old Testament.
I joined my palms for morning prayer, nibbling my tongue until it bled slightly. This, I knew, must be done daily.
At nine, the other students crowded into the last two rows. Doctor Westway strolled in with a cup of coffee, finished his doughnut, and clapped his hands free of sugar. He wore a red and black lumberjack shirt, black jeans, and high-top trainers with no laces. The curls of his hair descended below his collar. He reminded me of an undercover policeman.
With a stifled burp, he asked, “Who wrote La Dame aux camélias?”
“Flaubert?”
“Alexandre Dumas?”
“Which one?”
“The father?”
“The son?”
“Who wrote the first doctrine on spontaneous generation?”
“Francis Bacon?”
“I’m asking you. Well?”
No answer emerged despite Dr. Westway’s expectant stare. “The Symposium?” he scanned the faces of the class.
“Socrates, Plato, Aga you know, Eryxima-whatever, and all them others at the booze party …” advanced a muscular individual in army trousers.
Dr. Westway didn’t comment on the answer before continuing, “Who wrote the Bible?”
I was the only one to raise my palms towards the sky.
“Yes?”
“God.” I rejoiced.
“God?”
“How do you like to be called?”
“Kate.”
“Kate. Good. Can you start reading Genesis to us. I hope you’ll be using the Oxford revised standard version I put on your reading list.” He squinted at the minuscule pocket Bible on my desk.
Having read in the bulletin that Dr. Westway held a Doctorate in Theology from Princeton, I assumed he would like a fervent recitation. My goodwill was short-lived. Dr. Westway stopped me constantly, asked me to go back to different passages until I was confused and had to refer back to the pages of my Bible. The thinness of its pages didn’t allow vigorous manipulation, and I lost the corners of some in my haste.
Vegetation concerned him particularly.
I read, “Let the earth cause grass to shoot forth, vegetation bearing seed …”
“Stop! What day was that on?”
“And there came to be evening, morning, and a third day, sir.”
“What day was man made on?”
“The sixth.”
Dr. Westway had me proceed to the second chapter, where I read, “Now there was yet no bush of the field found in the earth and no vegetation of the field.”
“Then what happened?”
“God makes man out of dust, or clay, or whatever,” boasted the boy in army trousers, hugging himself as if to make sure he was now made out of muscle.
“So if I get this right, in the first version, vegetation precedes man. In the second version, man precedes vegetation. Hm. Did God blunder?”
How dare he postulate such blasphemy. Surely, the confusion must be attributed to the translations from Hebrew to Latin, from old English to modern. I said something to this effect.
“Who else besides me reads Hebrew around here?” asked Dr. Westway.
One student, so gaunt that the Coca-Cola glasses he wore across his face seemed a prank of cruelty, had the force to raise a long finger. The student only pretended to read. I watched his eyes pivoting in the wrong direction, from east to west.
“Is the contradiction there?”
“Yes, it is.”
For the next several minutes, Dr. Westway referred to the creation of the earth as the “seven day myth” opposed to the “Adam and Eve myth”. I was dumbfounded. Sacrilege was not what I had expected from a college called Trinity. Dr. Westway lectured on the “hodgepodge” of authors of this “bestseller”, making jokes about the copyright had the “book” been written today, as though Jehovah and Job were mere “characters”.
“This is not a book!” I snapped.
There were a few snorts of accord.
“What is it then?” Dr. Westway asked me.
I stood up to say, “Jehovah God is the heavenly author of this sacred library of six and sixty testimonies.”
The applause was meagre, but there.
Dr. Westway stated, “I might as well make it clear, this class has nothing to do with belief in God. You are all free to believe or not to believe in whoever or whatever you want, I don’t give a damn. This class is about a book, some parts are magnificent, others are trashy literature, blatant propaganda, some of the ideas hold true today, others are long outdated, some of the authors had talent, others stank. If anyone has a problem with that, he or she is free to withdraw. Drop/adds are until Wednesday. No one’ll ever know you were here.”
As I walked out the door, I stumbled.
I turned the knob quietly and before I even stepped in, found myself the concern of an entire population of faces.
“You must be Lester, Kate. There’s one seat left over there.”
My neck sank into my shoulders as if a meek bearing could quiet the sound of my steps. Professor Ranji scratched the formula of an amino acid onto the chalkboard. He looked at me peculiarly before writing GLUTAMINE. He added glutamine onto leucine, proline onto serine, valine onto tryptophan. The amino acids linked like chains.
Dark hairs covered Professor Ranji’s knuckles. Like air plants, hair trailed out of his ears and nose. His eyes, dark and a trifle protruding, were protected by thick brows. His untidy beard framed teeth as white as any sun-bleached clam shell, and so straight, they seemed filed that way.
Professor Ranji began his lecture, “There was no life whatsoever on the young earth; for over a billion years, it was covered with boiling water, you can imagine the steamy vapours, the moist heat … but no life … no life whatsoever …”
He continued, “The early conditions of the earth can be simulated in the laboratory, hydrogen, water vapour, methane, ammonia, heat and electrical discharges break the gas molecules down and they re-form in these very organic molecules we have been talking about. Scientists call this period on earth, lasting a few billions years, primordial soup, oh, just fancy jargon for chicken broth, you know, water, amino acids, simple proteins, harbingers of the first living cells … Um, yes, Kate?”
“You mean to tell me that the origin of life is the birth of protein?! The miracle of life is but a fatty acid? The first living organism but a simple cell already concerned with assimilation?”
Professor Ranji smiled. “The living and the non-living are made up of the same elements, so to speak. One of the characteristics that separate the living from the non-living is the capacity to steal energy from the environment and transform it to its own use.”
I clamped my arms between my knees so they would not be seen shaking.
“Then the definition of life is: an edible, that eats?”
“Depends on what you mean by eat. All forms of life do not have mouths. Autotrophs steal their energy from the sun, you know, photosynthesis. You and I can’t do that. Edible for some doesn’t mean edible for others, look at the detrivores, you know, worms, maggots, vultures, hyenas, it seems they steal the scraps no one else wants.”
“So no one escapes the soup??”
“It depends what you mean by escaping the soup?”
The chairs of some of my classmates shifted in boredom.
“Sooner or later, everyone eats. Sooner or later, everyone is eaten. If you’re not eaten when you’re alive, you’re eaten when you’re dead. So no one escapes being eaten. It’s just a question of time.”
“The first law of thermodynamics: energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed.”
Notes were unanimously taken, for the verbatim law interested my classmates more than did its dire consequences.
Professor Ranji was inspired; he defined other laws of thermodynamics and assigned the chapters of a heavy reading assignment before darting out of the classroom.
“Professor Ranji!” I cried, forcing my way through the slow moving students after him. I reached him as he was opening his office door. I’d never seen so many paperback books in my life. There were glasses of leftover juice on piles of books, tall piles, short piles, you could hit each one with a spoon and make a tune. The walls were covered with shelves, the only place free of books, and consecrated to carvings of a smaller elephant within a larger. There was a plastic flute and a rubber cobra on the floor, maybe a child’s because there were also a line of fallen Dominos nearby.
“Professor Ranji?” I mouthed gently.
The first thing I noticed when he turned around was a pattern of black points on the tip of his nose which upon scrutiny proved to be razor stubble.
“Professor Ranji. I’m sorry to bother you, but there are two questions still troubling me. I would not like to die without knowing their answers …”
“Well, I hope I can be of help and well before then.” He crossed his arms and smiled.
I heard myself which is always annoying, “Biologically speaking, it took two parents to make you, and your two parents had parents, which makes four, and these four had parents, which makes eight it took to make you. If we kept going, we get to 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, just to make you.”
My ability for basic arithmetic was slowing, so I did not go on further though logically, I should have, for these far-off relatives did not come into being by spontaneous generation.
“Okay …” he stroked his beard, pulled down his thick, curly moustache and turned over his lower lip.
I detected the impatience in his eyes and accelerated, “Well the same holds true with all of us. Which means, mathematically speaking, the former population must have been much greater than the present population.”
“Are you promoting colonization from another planet?”
“No, sir, I’m not. According to the Bible, we come from two people only, Adam and Eve, so the sum of people it took to make each of us must grow smaller as we count back … the former population must be less than the present overpopulation, according to God …” My voice weakened on the last words.
Professor Ranji looked startled; he blinked his eyes slowly. “Don’t tell me you take all that biblical folklore word by word?
“No, no, no, of course I don’t … word by word …” I twisted my braid around my wrist until it hurt.
“Every civilization made up stories to explain natural phenomena, you know. That does not mean even they took them literally. You know that? Science has the strength to admit what it doesn’t know, that doesn’t mean we’ve proved God does or does not exist, but a bearded man in the sky looking down at us sounds a lot like what humans would invent.”
I felt tears swelling in my eyes and looked down. His wedding ring was blurry. So every cell of my flesh was irrevocably made, to feed, to consume, to engulf. Individually, they shimmered, I could feel them starting up one by one, tingling for his own tasty cells, their protoplasmic sauce of life. I imagined boiling an eye of his, white and brown spotted like a billiard ball. The moral dam holding the current back for so long was weakening, as were my legs. Professor Ranji sensed a metamorphosis.
“And the second question?” he asked, making it a point not to blink his eyes.
I took in a deep breath, “If what you say about evolution is true, my ancestors are carnivorous reptiles?”
“What we refer to as ancestors are usually the preceeding generations of the same species. But yes, all life has derived from the earliest forms of life.”
I found myself shifting my hips slowly from left to right.
“Perhaps we can have a bite to eat together and talk about this more?” he asked.
My heart thumped so, for adult ways were yet unfamiliar to me.
I struggled to keep my voice steady, “Do you like meringue?”