The lofty biker ascends the stairs three at a time, whips through the fire door on the second floor, slips by the director’s office hermetically sealed in metagenomic thoughts. She arrives in her laboratory that smells, like every laboratory in the world, of chemicals and plastic, says hello to her fellow researchers, who respond with that bleak affability typical of the disciples of genetics. Her purple-pimpled colleague, as soon as he sees her, turns the color of red-hot lava and looks like he’s about to burst into tears. She raises her eyes heavenward and puts on a white coat over her post-punk uniform.
The tall one’s at work on a project that aims to create (yes) bacterial strains that can produce alcohol from wood waste. They blast helpless microbes with scorpion and porcini mushroom genes hoping to activate an appetite for sawdust.* Her job title (adjunct technical staff) and pay rank might suggest she was hired as unskilled labor, but in fact she’s so good at inventing modifications and calculating results (she’s always been nuts about mathematics) that the director of the laboratory has published eminent scientific papers under his own name. Papers written by her, naturally.
* The unfortunate bacteria have lived in peace for four billion years reproducing themselves millions of times a day, thus giving birth to billions of individuals. (If some bacterium wanted to organize a Christmas dinner with his closest relatives, even supposing he could track down the names and addresses, he would have to send out billions of billions of billions of invitations.) If there’s something that bugs me (just a figure of speech, obviously), it’s that instead of going to battle with crocodiles or piranhas, creatures that can defend themselves somewhat, that lily-livered species of humans go after bacteria. One more proof, should we need another, of their cowardice.
Cellulose-digesting bacteria excite her only up to a point, however; she’s keener on microbes that produce electricity. She wrote her PhD thesis on bacteria-powered batteries, and even won one of those scientific prizelets awarded for original ideas considered completely impracticable. And she’s continuing the project on the sly, secretly putting together a network of researchers from various countries who think the idea is promising. She’s convinced it’s just a question of time.
Mid-afternoon, the unfailingly well-dressed lab director strides in, and uttering a tangle of phrases that hover over the void like unfinished bridges, asks the giantessa where she is with the statistical calculations they spoke of the day before. He studies the floor, his brow just slightly less unlined than usual, his perennial self-satisfied smile bobbing up to the surface like a stubborn corpse. Extracting one earbud, she replies that the results are very interesting indeed and she’ll send them right over by email. She too speaks as if she has a mild stomachache, in their usual style of communication. Or rather, their usual style since one evening six months before when they found themselves alone together because they had to complete (she did; he, for the most part, obstructed) an important trial.
He, stroking his wondrously relaxed jaw, had asked why didn’t they step out on the balcony and smoke one of her hand-rolled cigarettes. She had knitted her brows slightly because the desire in his tomcat eyes looked somewhat more sexual than nicotinic (not to mention that he doesn’t smoke). But hooking the distal phalange of his little finger in hers and looking him in the eye, she smiled faintly the way she does when going into sex mode. At that point his perfectly shaven and cologned face advanced on hers (although he is the shorter) and she somehow made their lips meet. She put a hand on his fly, squeezing his already erect member. After some tottering and fumbling with buttons and zippers he had tried to penetrate her by shoving her up against the big 15,000-rpm centrifuge, the way they do in the movies.
Then she sat him on the floor under the plastic beaker collecting distilled water, and mounted him the way she does her bike when she’s in a rush. This for coitus number one. For number two, she knelt and he took her from behind, also on his knees (the height difference here being insignificant). This second time, too, she had no orgasm; it was 2–0, in short. Honestly, I don’t like to watch some things human beings do. But as you can imagine there’s no roof nor wall nor duck blind nor sheet nor wile that stands in the way of a god; unfortunately I must put up with all of it. And then they actually did go out on the balcony of the reagent room to smoke a cigarette. He lit one too, coughing a little.
The dapper director, who’s a practicing Catholic† with a wife and two daughters at home, trusts that the matter’s been filed in the top-secret drawer; he’s fervently counting on it. For the most part it is only at scientific conferences (which seem to serve primarily that purpose and where the risks are minimal) that he will jump a female colleague, jump her like a rooster in the henhouse. He feels pretty sure that the purple-haired girl is not the sort of nitwit who’s going to preen about the thing in public or even confide in some bosom friend. In spite of the neo-metropolitan get up, her only real heartthrob is scientific research, he reckons, and from the way she fixes him with those far-apart eyes, he doesn’t think she’s upset with him. However, he’s not one hundred percent easy about it. That mummified gentility of his, in short, is fear.
† It is no secret that those who pontificate and preach are the same who trespass most in the shadowy backwaters of practice; if I had to tote up all the merriment taking place in sacristies and convents over the past thousand years it would take me a decade.
I watch the narcissist stride athletically back to his office, his behemoth of a desk perfectly clean of any clutter, and can’t help but reflect that men, in their grotesque presumption, consider themselves superior and unique when instead they are clumsy and shapeless, obtuse, sex-crazed‡ and monomaniacal, ready to fall for every sort of superstition and fanaticism, to mutually eradicate one another and commit bestial acts that make your hair stand on end. And if that were not enough, they’re infested with parasites inside and out and with terrible contagious diseases. They’re dangerous, in short. Not to mention quick to putrefy.
‡ Merely in order to copulate, those big hairless apes lie to each other and themselves, dissimulate, cheat, squander fortunes, destroy friendships and marriages, bleed themselves dry, murder each other, all the while employing creativity and invention far beyond that applied to their technical progress. If I could begin again I’d endow them with a libido (a term that always reminds me of the name of a rock group) one hundred times more moderate than what they have, or limit its activity to a brief period each year, as I’ve done with many other species (and therefore, among other things, there would be a lot fewer of them).
If I were capable of second thoughts (a priori out of the question), the one thing I’d regret would be having created them. Without men, evil would not exist, nor the whole shebang of infamy and atrocities that go with it, and the cosmos would be utterly perfect. No infanticides, no blood feuds, wars, massacres of the innocents, holocausts. If I could do it again (another meaningless expression) I’d recreate the giraffes, the fleas, the walruses, the dinosaurs (poor things, came to a bad end), the salamanders, and I might even throw in some novel items, as always happens when you remake something from scratch and new ideas come to you, but one thing I wouldn’t do is put man back in circulation. I’d leave Noah on the dock. Ban the Man, as the nuclear disarmament people would say.
Having completed what she was meant to do and also what according to the protocol she wasn’t meant to do, the brainy biker now heads straight home to the former fishmonger’s shop she’s minimally converted into a dwelling, and once inside the door strides straight to the toilet and sits down to pee with her blind cat on her knees. She then empties a tin of rice and tuna into the cat’s dish. For herself, she snaps open (dull thwack) a can of sweet corn, adds some olive oil, half a finely sliced onion, some salted capers, some white raisins, and seated on the floor in front of the television, digs in with a spoon, from time to time biting off some cheese (fontina) from the piece she holds in the other hand. Before retiring to sleep in the large green-tiled fish tank, she watches a ghastly TV show about a beautiful young woman who was supposed to marry an airplane pilot but instead dallies with his ex, a female lifeguard. First she masturbates by kneading the cushion between her legs and then using her fingers (in short, a real eyeful).