8
Chiralities
To break out of the lassitude of the vacation, Corey roused himself and hiked around the shore with his hammer in his backpack, looking for contractors. He stood on the wooded streets, misty and gray near the ocean, and searched for trucks and vans with ladders strapped to the roofs. Naturally, he didn’t see anyone; it was New Year’s Day. Since he couldn’t call Tom, he called his old employers—Star Market, Darragh, men he’d worked for in the past—but this was also unavailing.
The winter semester began. At school, Corey looked for Molly to ask if her father had a job tip, and beyond that, how her break had been, but didn’t see her in the swarming kids. He went to the principal’s office. This semester, his biology class was doing human physiology, an advanced course. Thanks to his poor performance last semester, he wasn’t eligible to take it. Corey petitioned Mr. Gregorio to let him take it anyway. He said he was going to make the winter better than the fall. Gregorio gave him permission. After school, Corey crossed Route 3A and wandered down the long hill back to the seashore. On the way, he stopped at the DB Mart and bought a new notebook for 99 cents, planning to fill it with notes.
When he got home, he discovered to his surprise that Leonard was still there. He had imagined that his father’s sojourn with them was tied to the holidays, but apparently it was continuing.
Several of their books from their milk-crate library were open on the futon. Leonard had pulled out one of their Noam Chomskys, the Great Open Heart of Sadness, a Shambhala book with a torn cover, Elmore Leonard’s Freaky Deaky—all books that Corey and his mother had found together years ago. Sitting on the futon with his feet on the coffee table, Leonard looked especially sallow in the gray light. He had football-shaped calves, blanched white skin the color of a dying Jesus in a Caravaggio painting—his loincloth was a pair of boxers—and banana-colored bruises on his knees and shins as if he’d been laying tile. Corey stood in the middle of the living room floor, his schoolbag trailing from his hand, regarding Leonard. They were alone.
“I remember the first time you told me there were multiple universes.”
Leonard looked at him. “Do you?”
“We were in Ayer. Don’t you remember that?”
“I don’t know if we were in Ayer.”
“We were on Route 2.”
“I see.”
“We were at a D’Angelo’s. Do you remember?”
“You’re going to make me remember every time I had to buy you lunch?”
“No. I was just thinking about it. My mom was okay back then.”
Leonard kept reading.
“You like science a lot, don’t you?”
“Like’s really the wrong word. That reduces it to entertainment.”
“Do you work on physics at home? When you’re not at work?”
“That’s what I’m doing now.”
“No, I mean at your own home.”
“When you enjoy something, you do it in your free time.”
“But where do you live?”
“In Malden.”
“Is that where you’ve been this whole time?”
“It depends what time you mean—but probably. I’ve always lived in Malden.”
“And you just got curious about us?”
“Your mother called to tell me she was sick.”
“Back in August.”
“July.”
“Right. July. She called you, and you’re here now?”
“She told me she was sick, and I did some research for her. I tried to make sense of her disease. I thought I could explain it to her better than an article in Nature magazine. Without jargon.”
“I’m trying to do the same thing, make sense of it.”
“It’s fairly complicated.”
“Is there anything you could tell me?”
“To what end?”
“So I can help her.”
“If you want to help her, get a job.”
“I have a job.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I work. I have worked. I’m gonna work. But I have a mind too. I want to know what’s wrong with her. If I were this friend of mine who’s good in science, I’d know everything about it already down to every molecule. That’s what I want to know.”
“To what end?”
“So I can help her.”
“Help her do what?”
“Live, obviously.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not, because it’s a terminal illness? No, what I’m saying is, she’s alive now. I’m saying, I want to help her now. Like, what if there’s stuff she can do so she doesn’t get sick as soon? Maybe there’s a medication she could take. Is there anything like that? That’s what I want to know.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Isn’t there stuff you could tell me about research, like what to look at? Like websites?”
“You turn on the computer…”
“Okay.”
“You type in a search term…”
“Okay.”
“And you hit Enter.”
“Okay. I will. I just thought there was more to it.”
“What more to it do you think there could be?”
“I don’t know. I just thought you’d know something special.”
“I do know something special: It’s that if you want to learn something, you learn it.”
“Okay.”
“You could put me next to someone from an elite school—a Harvard, an MIT—and if I’m doing the work, then I’m the one who’s developing knowledge of the discipline. The pampered kid could just be sitting on his ass. Science doesn’t care about your family tree. That’s the beauty of it. The greatest mind of the twentieth century was a working-class kid from Far Rockaway. A Jew. He didn’t have any advantages. He didn’t have affirmative action. But he beat everyone.”
“That gives me a sense of power.”
“Science was his elevator to the elite level. He gets up there, and who does he meet? Newton, Aristotle. You can’t deny him. That’s what’s beautiful.”
“That is beautiful,” Corey conceded. But he continued to press Leonard on ALS.
Leonard declared that Gloria could halt the progression of her disease by consuming large amounts of dark leafy vegetables for their antioxidant effects.
“She was trying that.”
“Maybe she should keep going. It would be interesting to see if I’m right.”
“Is yoga like an antioxidant, because you hold your breath? She was doing that as well.”
“Yoga reduces stress, and stress breaks down antioxidants, but holding your breath isn’t the same as an antioxidant.”
“But they’re related.”
“Maybe if you insist. At the high school level.”
Corey laughed, flattered to be made fun of.
“Is pot bad for her?”
“Pot’s good for practically every medical condition,” Leonard said. “Pot’s the least of her worries. It’s way better for her than plenty of things she could be doing. Like taking Rilutek. Don’t let her give her money to GlaxoSmithKline. That’s the one responsibility I’ll charge you with. Don’t enrich GlaxoSmithKline.”
“Why not? Isn’t that the only drug for what she’s got?”
“It extends survival. That’s all it does.”
“Isn’t that good?”
“All it does is keep you alive.”
“You mean, when she may not want to be?”
“Exactly. It’s an example of a bad drug. Like chemotherapy for stomach cancer. There’re lots of drugs like that. You sell them to people if you’re amoral. They’re worse than crack. Did you hear about the kids at MIT who fell asleep and never woke up?”
“No, what happened to them?”
“They thought they were taking Ecstasy. Something else was in it, and they died.”
“What was in it?”
“How should I know?”
“I don’t know.”
“The only person who would know that is whoever gave it to them.”
“Did you catch whoever did it?”
“If you were to ask me, do I know who the drug dealers are on campus, I have my sources.”
“So, you know?”
“We have a lot of rules in our legal system, probable cause, and so on. So maybe I know who’s a problem. That doesn’t mean I can go and crack heads. If these were moolies, as we used to call them, I could deprioritize their civil rights. But these are rich kids, so maybe I ‘know,’ but I have to pretend I don’t know.”
“So you actually know?”
“Oh yeah. Twenty years in law enforcement, they’re not hiding shit from me. You’d have to get up pretty early.”
“It’d bother me to know that they’d gotten away with doing something that bad, though. Haven’t you ever wanted to take the law into your own hands?”
“I have to uphold my vows as a peace officer.”
“Isn’t that frustrating?”
“I have to uphold my vows as a peace officer.”
“Are you telling me something?”
“Listen to how I’m saying it: I have to uphold my vows as a police officer.”
“So you might have done some head-cracking?”
“I would deny that in court.”
“Holy shit.”
“I would never do anything in my official capacity to violate my legally mandated duties as a peace officer in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Official capacity. Listen to the words. Official. Capacity.”
“But in your unofficial capacity…”
Leonard deadpan-stared at Corey.
“I really respect that.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Leonard said.
“You must have stories…”
“Who knows?”
“But you can’t tell me.”
“Every relationship is a proof, you understand?”
“Uh…not really.”
“A proof. A mathematical proof. You want to prove a theorem, you have to demonstrate it. If A then B. A relationship’s the same.”
“You have to prove yourself to another person. I have to prove to you that you can trust me.”
“He catches on quick.”
“I would never tell on you to anyone. You’re making the world a better place. If you fucked up a drug dealer who was hurting kids, why would I tell anyone?”
“Corey?”
“What?”
“Relax.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
“Little by little. When you are ready. Have you ever fucked a girl?”
“Uh…”
“That’s an eloquent answer. I take it the answer’s ‘no.’ Well, it’s like fucking a girl. It’s when she’s ready.”
“Okay. Good metaphor.”
“And don’t try so hard.”
“What do you mean?”
“To impress me. Just calm down.”
“All right. I’m calm.” Corey reddened and laughed at himself. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“About what?”
“About ALS.”
“I could tell you a lot about it if I wanted to.” Leonard basketed his hands behind his head and looked up at their low ceiling. “The question is, what are you capable of understanding? There’s no diagnosis for ALS. You can’t see it in the body until someone’s dead. All we have is a name floating around until you’re lying on a table in the morgue. A long time ago, a French scientist did an autopsy on a patient and found these hardened neurons in the spine, and gave it a name. His sole contribution is a name. To me, that’s not science; that’s taking a nature walk. It’s like if I went out and pointed up at the night sky and named a star. As a result, he got his name in the history of medicine. Ironically I can’t remember who he was. Thanks to this, now we have all these different models of the disease: glutamate toxicity, autoimmune disease, protein misfolding, or the genetic explanation. We know the pharmaceutical companies are developing drugs for each one. I see a corruption of the scientific method, because of the profit motive. As a physicist, I feel there has to be a single cause, ultimately, if there’s a single disease. Otherwise it’s not a single disease; it’s bulbar palsy or prion disease or radium poisoning or dot dot dot. My personal feeling is that it’s going to be the genetic explanation. It’s not going to be autoimmune or prions; when they get to the bottom of it, it’s going to be the gene, the most elegant explanation. A nucleic acid that should have been right-handed is going to be left-handed. We have all these chiralities out there, and they determine what happens in the universe. It’s quantum logic: right hand, left hand. On or off, sick or well, friend or foe. This is what’s telling the body what to do, basically. Just this.”
Leonard held up his hand and turned it palm out, palm in—and Corey watched it turning.