A delaide, mid-winter. The days were dark and wet and cold; never before had I felt so hemmed in, so trapped by the wintry elements. My winters in Adelaide had always been spent inside hospitals with bright lights and central heating, twenty-four hours a day. I hid in bed till noon each morning, sitting out the afternoons in the dark, small-windowed lounge, sealed inside by the rain, huddled by the gas heater, wheezing on and off.
For much of those long afternoons my mother sat opposite, knitting. Her friend, Bert, seemed to be keeping his distance. The phone tinkled from time to time; she answered it in whispers, her head and shoulders enclosing the receiver, her back turned to me. In the early evening she usually went out, leaving me to my brooding.
I wanted to separate the various strands of my confusion; to tease them apart, study each separately. In practice this was difficult: the mammal parts of the brain, the emotional parts, interfered too much with the human, rational parts.
The decision to return came quickly with help from an unexpected source: television. I wandered from my bedroom cell one night to find my mother watching a twenty-fifth anniversary commemoration of the moon landing. Those familiar, blurred, Houston-Control voices drew me down on to the arm of her chair; I perched there for a time, listening, remembering the elation that had filled me twenty-five years before. No — feeling the same elation again. July 1969. I had been studying postgraduate anatomy at the time, slicing human pelvis in the Dissecting Room of the old Medical School. A bank of TV monitors had been mounted on the central pillars for the big day, high above the rows of stainless-steel benches and white, stiff, hacked-open corpses. Those flickering television images, travelling across a quarter of a million miles, were beamed down to us through the reek of formalin and cold, greasy long pork: a small step for a man …
When I had seen and heard enough I pulled the covering sheet across the remains of my cadaver, threw down my scalpel, peeled off my gloves, and walked out of the room with the rest of my colleagues — not so much with them, but for once, at least, parallel to them. We headed for the nearest bar to celebrate, as much as anything, it seemed, ourselves. Our whole species, H. Sapiens, but especially our own smaller subspecies, H. s. scientificus. And the fact that we — that it — could produce something that was better than ourselves, or itself: something as far and high above our squalid world as those TV images in the Dissecting Room.
I’m trying to explain why I returned to Queensland. Why certain issues, certain wishes — research funds, my own Chair — should matter so much to me. Why ends mattered more than means. Why even Scanlon’s absurd project — the genetic fingerprinting of Jesus Christ — had the power to excite me, to suppress all reservations. In the end, this was the only world that I trusted: the world of science. This was the only world I finally believed in: the world of data and measurements, of accuracy, of results that could be reproduced, objectively, of facts that could be verified by others — or better still, falsified.
In this world my shrivelled heart could still be felt, beating. I could feel it beating as I boarded the early-morning flight for Queensland barely a week after I had left. A fog had slipped from the hills down on to the plain; the airbus was delayed on the tarmac for more than an hour until visibility lifted. Nervous murmurs were exchanged among the passengers, but I was breathing freely, easily. The fog was merely the last in a string of last minute difficulties. It amused me to see these as a conspiracy of inanimate objects, an attempt to prevent, or at least delay, my departure: blocked drains requiring an emergency plumber; the misplacing of an air ticket; a taxi that failed to arrive. Parts of my body also seemed party to this conspiracy; an attempted boil on the buttocks the night before, symptoms of early flu which vanished as soon as I boarded the plane. If I had been superstitious I might have taken these for messages of some kind. Warnings.
But I believed — I believe — in nothing supernatural.