Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes.― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
Rexburg, ID
Dr. Bruno Abrams never stopped being Jewish, deep inside in a place even his Catholic wife never knew. When the insomnia struck, as it usually did, he walked around the empty house, turning on lights to push back the darkness in each room, and then went to the study and worked. Each time he walked through the living room, to the kitchen or the bathroom, he’d catch a glimpse of the decorative fixtures by the fireplace, and he’d think he was back in Temple. The two ornate brass candelabras attached on each side of the dark brick fireplace prompted the occasional double take, resembling menorahs next to the ark. The symbolism of the fireplace representing the core of his original faith wasn’t lost on him.
He’d wanted a house unlike before and barely furnished it when he arrived in Idaho. No pictures, none of their old furniture. Everything from strangers, used, cheap, and temporary. A fresh start.
The ultracold freezer sat in the living room, empty and covered with books and old documents, the incongruous furnishing the only remaining evidence of his deception, his crime. It was a confession in plain sight, reminding him of his tortured rationalizations, his pain, and the coming consequences.
He had the run of the systems at the lab in these early morning hours. After corresponding with his European and Asian collaborators, he logged into his accounts, then used the shells and false fronts that would mislead the network administrators and security AIs to create the activity logs and audit trails necessary to conceal other activities. Even this far into the project, the genomic AIs they used for most of their gene regulatory network engineering also remained blissfully unaware of his deceptions, largely as a result of the assistance of Dr. Trey Isaac, the brilliant genomic researcher assisting him since almost the beginning.
It was Dr. Isaac who developed the shell technique for spoofing the data, concealing the deceit but still utilizing the incredible power of the software systems. Despite their capabilities, the AI systems still relied on the humans to tell them what was true and what was significant. Values and judgement were still the provenance of the humans, for better or worse.
Unlike Isaac, who he trusted implicitly, why had Cole lied to him about his concerns when the Sherriff visited?
More lies. To what end? He knew what Cole’s motivations were, and he had a good idea about those of their backers, both seen and unseen. That was never in dispute. A necessary means to an end, even in the beginning, when Cole thought he was calling all the shots. But now, with everything they’d achieved, each new breakthrough, he questioned himself about how far things had gone. Vindication? Revenge? Love?
He stared out the window across his backyard, into the darkness east of Rexburg, towards the beautiful Tetons and Yellowstone beyond the unseen farms and scrub. The circle was closing, options and contingencies vanishing, resolution, and perhaps redemption, bearing down like the dawn he knew was a few hours away.
In the distance, lightning flickered.
“Gam zu l’tova.” This too is for the good.
Is it? His retreat into the scriptural studies of his youth and the Guide for the Perplexed gave him some consolation, though seemingly less each day. His research, all his life work, pulled him inexorably further from divine wisdom the closer he came to the powers of creation. Maimonides was right about one thing: each flash of insight and inspiration, no matter how bright the lightning, plunged him further into darkness.
Maybe his equanimity about the coming crisis was because of that deeper need for insight, the relentless pull of the truth, the light, each new dawn one day closer. He reviewed the footage from the latest field trials. The younger ones learned even faster than their elders, each generation of genetic enhancements yielding more operational improvements they failed to anticipate. He mulled the new challenges these results presented for simultaneously nurturing and restraining Cole’s enthusiasm.
Another flash of lightning drew his eyes away from the screen, and he reached over and picked up the well-thumbed, creased book at the edge of the desk. He paged through the small post-its and underlined sections, locating the one he sought.
“When a man reflects on these things, studies all these created beings, from the angels and spheres down to human beings and so on, and realizes the divine wisdom manifested in them all, his love for God will increase, his soul will thirst, his very flesh will yearn to love God.Do not imagine that these most difficult problems can be thoroughly understood by any one of us. This is not the case. At times the truth shines so brilliantly that we perceive it as clear as day. Our nature and habit then draw a veil over our perception, and we return to a darkness almost as dense as before. We are like those who, though beholding frequent flashes of lightning, still find themselves in the thickest darkness of the night. On some the lightning flashes in rapid succession, and they seem to be in continuous light, and their night is as clear as the day.”
Chapter 8
The thing is I don’t think in a language, and animals don’t think in a language. It’s sensory based thinking, thinking in pictures, thinking in smells, thinking in touches. It’s putting these sensory based memories into categories. – Temple Grandin
So far, so good. They crossed into Wisconsin and Adam slept slumped against his balled-up Thomas blanket, still apparently unaware of the missing jiggle bag.
The headlights illuminated the sign for the Lovely Lakes Motel just outside Lacrosse, Wisconsin and Michelle made the decision to call it a day, one down on their three-day trip.
She gathered their belongings while the car parked itself next to the office. She woke Adam and he followed calmly inside, and they rented a room without incident. Michelle’s eyes burned with fatigue and she hoped Adam’s calm demeanor foretold an uneventful stay.
The otherwise clean room held only a faint musty mildew smell of prolonged disuse which didn’t seem to provoke Adam. She threw her purse on the bed and went to the bathroom and flicked on the light, giving it a quick inspection. Nothing amiss, unsoiled, unobtrusive. Adam stood by the door absorbed with one of his electronic toys.
Michelle drew the heavy curtains on the windows to block the sweep of headlights from the road. The beds were neatly made, the linens clean if a little coarse, the blanket a cheap woolen blend but not too scratchy. Michelle ran her hands over everything and deemed the sleeping arrangement within the range of what Adam found acceptable in the past, though she knew that was never a guarantee.
She shuttled necessities from the car, her overnight bag, Adam’s blanket and pillow, her tablet. Michelle spread Adam’s blanket, Thomas the Tank Engine smiling up from the blue background, the frayed corners stitched several times over. Another balancing act: he would have no other blanket, but also resisted attempts at repair. She changed Adam out of his clothes and into pajamas while he continued playing the game.
They settled into the room just after midnight and Michelle dozed. Adam played with his toy sitting on the floor, back against the bed. At first the buzzing and beeping didn’t bother her, but as the minutes passed, she lay awake, the noises now seemingly amplified. She put the pillow over her head and turned away from the light they had to leave on, at least until Adam fell asleep. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore.
“Adam, it’s time for sleep. Give me the game.” She took the toy out of his hands and led him to the bed. She pulled the covers back and put him in bed with little resistance. She left the light on, went back to her bed, and put the pillow back over her head. This was the price for deviating from Adam’s routines. For what? What new future? Was it worth this, or worse to come? Despite the nagging doubts, the silence was bliss, and she relaxed quickly, then sank swiftly into deep sleep.
She was woken by Adam moaning, and she rolled over to see him pacing in the room, flapping his hands and vocalizing anxiously. The blankets on his bed were jumbled on the floor. She squinted at the clock. 1:15? Forty-five minutes of sleep?
She heaved a big sigh, got up and led him back to his bed. This time he resisted, pulling away, something about the bed now deeply aversive to him. The texture of the sheets? A smell on the blankets? There was no way to know. Once more, Michelle berated herself about not having the jiggly bag to calm him.
“Adam, we have to sleep. C’mon.” She stood behind him and circled her arms around his torso and laid her head on his shoulder from behind, singing softly. He calmed for a moment as they stood swaying. He struggled briefly, but she tightened her grip. He seemed to relax, but cobra quick he lifted her hand and bit down hard. She jerked away with a shriek.
“Goddamit Adam! No biting!”
She examined the mark, a ragged blanched white oval, reddening in the middle, but no broken skin. She stomped to the bathroom and washed, looking at the injury more closely under the light while Adam stood by himself in the room, moaning and biting his own hand.
She turned back to the room and yanked him toward the bed.
“Cut the crap! We have to sleep, Adam! We have a long day tomorrow. Get in the bed!” She pulled Adam’s arm. He resisted and escalated his moaning.
Michelle could feel her control slipping, but she knew his present size and strength precluded using the old methods of compulsion.
“Get. In. The. Bed.”
Knowing full well in the back of her mind where this was headed, Michelle tugged him toward the bed. With a lightning flick of his hooked fingers, Adam slashed her forearm. She screamed and let go, grabbing at the red tracks. Angry tears welled in her eyes, and just like so many times before, rage took over. She snatched up her sneaker and threw it at him with a snarl.
“I hate you, you goddamn brat!” The shoe bounced off his shoulder harmlessly but it did quiet his moaning. Michelle stifled a sob and pulled her hand away from the scratches. The burning pain exceeded the amount of actual damage. She went back to the bathroom and rinsed the scratches then patted them dry with a towel, leaving little pink stains on the coarse white terry cloth. There was a knock on the door and she looked up into the mirror at her guilty, tear-streaked face.
She patted her eyes dry and walked to the door with her finger on her lips, making faces at Adam to be quiet.
“Yes?”
“Everything okay in there?” a muffled voice asked. “We’re getting complaints from some of the other guests. All good?” Michelle checked the chain on the door then opened it a crack, standing to the side to conceal the fact that she wore only a t-shirt and panties.
“I’m sorry, my brother and I are having an argument. We’ll be quiet. I’m sorry.”
Michelle could see the manager’s eyes darting back and forth, attempting to see past her into the room.
“You sure everything’s okay?”
“Yes. We’re fine. It’s over now. I’m really sorry.”
“Okay.” The manager turned away and Michelle closed the door. A heavy weariness descended on her and her shoulders slumped. Hands on her hips, head down, she turned to Adam and stared at the bed, avoiding eye contact.
“Adam. We’ve got to sleep. No more fooling around. Do you want to sleep on the floor? Do you want to sleep with me? C’mon.” She reached out for his hand, and he pulled away, agitated again, hands flapping. She stood silent and still, glaring. Then, she lifted up the suitcase and threw it on the bed.
“You know what? Fine. You big baby. That’s just fine. Who needs sleep? Who needs a nice bed? Not the Shank family. Nope. Not us. We’ll just keep driving. Because Adam is a big bratty baby.”
With each word she slammed another item into the suitcase, and then she jerked the zipper closed. Adam quieted and watched. She pulled on her jeans, then stormed around the room, packing the few remaining items, then loaded them in the car. She returned to the room and started to change him out of his pajamas, then stopped, steering him toward the door in his bare feet, and roughly pushed him back into the car, buckling him in. She drove around to the office and had to wake the manager to return the key. Embarrassed, she declined his offer of a different room. She didn’t get a discount for only using the room for a few hours.
They were back on the road in the darkness. Of course, Adam fell asleep in the seat next to her as soon as they hit the highway. She stared out at the dark landscape as her anger cooled into the hard certainty that Adam needed something more to help him, more than she could give, and she was ready for him to be out of her life, or at least less involved. She checked the autopilot and leaned back in the seat, staring out at the stars through the window, listening to her music, one of her few personal indulgences Adam consistently tolerated these days. Ella Fitzgerald cooed and scatted, soothing her, reminding her of earlier happier times, sharing music with her father, before Adam.
***
Her father’s love of music was their bonding activity from Michelle’s earliest memories. It was something he got from his own father, a drummer in Chicago bands in the 50’s and 60’s, before the drinking drove them apart, his father struggling with the loss of work and the frustrations of his thwarted passion.
Steven Shank was a mathematician who wished he was a musician, playing bass with his friends in various bands, sharing music with little Michelle, sometimes to the consternation of her mother.
“Should she really be listening to that at her age?” she’d often ask. When Michelle learned about Keely Smith, she fell in love, and would prance around the house singing at the top of her lungs, “Giddy up Ding Dong, Giddy up!” over and over again.
“Steven! She can’t go around saying that! What will she think when she learns what that song is about?”
Her father held up his hands defensively.
“It’s about a horse! C’mon!” Michelle looked back and forth between her parents, and her father gave her a wink.
He taught her drum sequences, prompted by her wild dancing to the drum solos in “Swing, swing, swing”, then they watched videos of Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, and Art Blakey.
“That’s what grandpa used to do. He played drums in a band just like these guys.”
Michelle watched the videos, thinking how glamorous her grandfather was, dressed in a tux, hanging out in swanky clubs with all the fancy people, playing drums for people like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, though the reality of the career of a journeyman musician was much more prosaic, and ultimately destroyed him. She didn’t find out about that until much later.
During the Fun Times, she was newly independent, living the life of a young, single professional making her own money with her own apartment, free of Adam and almost all responsibilities for his daily needs. When she visited, she and her dad would sit with beers and talk about the music she’d heard out at the bars with her friends, what clubs opened, which ones closed, who was coming to Chicago, who dropped in for a surprise set. She loved this connection with him, just them, being treated like an adult, basking in his undivided attention, sharing about work, her friends, their adventures.
Until the car crash on Lakeshore Drive that awful day, her father seemed to be trying to recapture something he missed, or lost, with his own father, something to do with music and sharing. It was always their special thing. Until Adam.
She wiped away an angry tear. Why did things have to change? For those first few years after Adam was born, she was the second mom. She called him her “brother-baby.” She expertly changed his diapers, fed him, openly wished she could breast feed him like mom, carrying him around perched on her bony pre-teen hip after school while her mother worked in the afternoons. She was the envy of her friends, rushing home after school to assume care for him, bringing him along whenever she could. He took his first steps with her, said his first word to her. When her parents began voicing their concerns about his development, and had their fears confirmed by their pediatrician, it was Michelle who defended him, arguing that he was just shy, that he just needed time.
Once they had accepted the diagnosis, it was Michelle who worked with him, figuring out his likes and dislikes, keeping him entertained, coaxing new skills from him. His slow progress eventually convinced her of his difference, and she became his biggest ally and advocate. She watched her parents go in divergent directions, her mother obsessively researching alternative treatments, promised magic bullets that always failed. Her father sat back, observing, trying to get inside Adam’s head, connect with him. But it was Michelle who sat with him, played, talked, sang for hours on end. It was Michelle who discovered his aversion to certain fabrics, and his facility with puzzles, challenging him with ever more difficult sizes and numbers of pieces. Then she noticed he wasn’t looking at the picture but only the shapes, so she turned the pieces over, and he actually could do them faster. Then she started mixing two or three puzzles together, with pieces of different sizes, and looked on, amazed, as he separated and assembled them with perfect precision.
One day, she and Adam were playing with one of his favorite toys, colorful wooden tiles, with a smooth hard surface. Michelle loved pretending they were candy, making up fanciful flavors for each bright color, super mango and purple berry. They were slippery in the hand, clicking and sliding, and felt like treasure when she’d fill a sock full of them. It was her idea to create the jiggle bag from these.
Adam sat quietly arranging them in rows, sorting them, building shapes. One day he struck on a pattern that he repeated endlessly, fashioning rectangles of different sizes, some nested inside others, adding colors, making interesting chaotic designs. He would sit for hours, making shapes. Michelle tried to join him, but as soon as she would finish a shape, Adam would reach over and scatter the tiles. If Michelle persisted, he would start his noise, the high, keening whine that was the last stop before a full-blown meltdown.
Michelle complained to her father. “He won’t let me play. He makes me sit there, but if I make a shape, he wrecks it!”
“Show me.”
Michelle led her father to the living room, where Adam played quietly.
“See?” Michelle pointed. Her father squatted, looking at the tiles and the various arrangements.
“Who made that one?” Her father pointed at one of Michelle’s shapes, a blue rectangle.
“Me.” Michelle hadn’t noticed that Adam had spared that one.
“See the similarity? How yours and Adam’s are the same?”
Michelle furrowed her brow and looked at the rectangle. Hers was simple, one color, the lovely royal blue that was her favorite. Adam’s was many colors, rectangles within rectangles, forming a growing spiral. Michelle shook her head. Her father smiled.
“Wait here, I want to show mom.”
Both parents returned, her mother with her glasses perched on her forehead, wearing sweats and a t-shirt, immersed in casework on the weekend. She looked at Michelle and Adam, then back at her husband, still pointing at the toys on the floor. Finally, she shook her head. Michelle’s father laughed.
“Adam is making Golden Rectangles. He only likes ones with certain proportions. See the similarity? They’re all the same proportion, just different sizes and colors. Look at yours, Mimi. Count the number of tiles on the sides.”
Michelle pointed with her finger, silently mouthing the numbers.
“Eight and five,” she concluded.
“See Adam’s? Can you find your rectangle inside his?”
Michelle bent over, hands on her knees, while her father sat next to Adam. He remained intent on his task, ignoring the people around him. Her father picked up a tile and added it to a row Adam was building. Adam hesitated for a moment, then selected another yellow tile and put it in his father’s hand, guiding it to the next spot. They repeated that wordless sequence several times, cooperating on the expanding design. Michelle’s dad looked at her mom, who held her hands to her mouth, eyes welling with tears.
The details of that day, and especially that moment, remained etched in Michelle’s memory, because she learned in that moment three important things that shaped her life. The first was about her skill at reading the content of looks and expressions, which she’d taken for granted until then, but in that moment, she knew what her father was saying with his eyes, and she knew why her mother cried. Though she felt lost and excluded, she realized she could glean as much important information from paying attention to what people didn’t say, as to hearing their words.
The second was a glimpse into the relationship between her father and mother, suddenly seeing them for the first time as two separate people with different ideas and priorities, the tension and the love between them that didn’t necessarily involve her. The sudden shift in perspective was dizzying, but it opened up a new world of imagining and interpreting the information she had access to in new ways, from other people’s perspective. Knowing that something important was happening that didn’t involve her, and the hurt that caused, revealed a new level of awareness.
She turned away from the scene and went to her room, sulking over the third thing: how angry Adam made her, and how she hated how her parents ignored her when they obsessed over him.
Her father contacted one of his mathematician colleagues for more ideas for puzzles he could challenge Adam with. That initiated an interlude of peace for the house, her father and Adam working with tiles on increasingly complex problems, her mother happier than ever, and Michelle ignored and left to her own devices, stewing in jealousy.
“Leave them alone. Dad and Adam are geeking out,” her mother would advise when Michelle tried to intrude.
Later, her father told her about Fibonacci numbers, recursion, and fractals, and how they revealed some of Adam’s hidden skills. None of that changed the hurt and only added to the tangled jumble of emotions between her and Adam and her parents.
Despite the resentments, there were moments of closeness. One in particular still exerted a powerful hold between them. When Adam was five years old, Michelle had to stay home from school to take care of him when he was sick with the flu. Michelle’s father was out of town, and mom had unavoidable work obligations. They watched movies. She gave him medicine and she fretted over him, especially when the fever was high. During one of those bouts, he was so still, so hot, yet he seemed particularly alert. For the first time since his diagnosis, he made eye contact with her, holding her gaze. He didn’t speak, but looked her in the eye, was calm, obedient, and gave her a little secret smile.
He did it a few more times during that illness, only while burning up with fever. He never did it with her parents, and it was a secret between them, one that convinced her there was more to her brother, locked deep inside.
Maybe it was this closeness that led to the fighting. At first it was just kid stuff, the usual sibling rivalry. But later, when she was in her teens trying to venture out into the world, Adam’s needs interfered in new ways. That’s when the real brawling began. And who always was punished? She understood now why her parents always intervened on Adam’s side, but the bitter hurt of that favoritism remained deep and raw. No amount of support group conversation, or wine with sympathetic friends had healed that, at least not yet.
Then, just as she was achieving some adult independence, her career taking off, the one-two punch of the accident, then her mother’s cancer, just nine months apart. Now they were alone.
***
She leaned her head against the side window listening to the music and looked up at the stars as the car slid through the night. Frankie began crooning as if just to her:
“It’s quarter to three
There’s no one in the place
Except you and me…”
Chapters 9 and 10
Robert Wack 