In short: Kurton’s genes might have led him to genomics, no matter what environment threw at him. But environment pulled all the right triggers, at just the right times. All the right teachers, the right toys, the right texts in the right order. In the first month of college, he came across the most beautiful concluding sentence in world lit, words that gave him far more epiphany than any novel. The book itself was a long, hard slog, but oh, that arrival!
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
By sophomore year, he was spending long hours in the lab, in his private chapel with its very own fume hood. Do not put your nose over the unknown; waft the air of the unknown to your nose. In his third year, he earned a key to the storeroom, where all the supplies were lined up in orderly glorious ranges on the shelves. Sometimes he would simply stand among them, as if on the podium in front of an orchestra, listening.
In graduate school at Stanford he made his first real discovery-a gene-promoter mechanism that no one on earth knew about. The find infused him with terrible urgency, a hurry to discover something else, now, before all the discoveries were made. And when, in his late twenties, his research team assayed the milk of their transgenic cows and confirmed the presence of a protein they themselves had placed there alongside all of nature’s own tangled enzymes, he felt for two months that he could die satisfied.
Then the two months ended, two months during which he had done absolutely nothing new for the world. Frantic again, he returned to the lab, to learn something about real work.
He and his girlfriend-a sociologist who studied the power of crowds-got married. They had two children, one of each. He and his wife raised the kids somehow, between them. It crushed Thomas to discover his daughter could not abide the smell of life science. It hurt him worse to discover that his son preferred making money to making discoveries. He released the children into the laboratories of their own lives. He got divorced. He wished his ex-wife all the world’s fresh horizons. Later, he had affairs, when there was time. But the love he really lived for was knowing.
That thrill of first discovery returned a handful of times over the next twenty years, in diminished forms. He pushed himself forward on the pleasure of first: first place, first to lay eyes on, first in the hearts of his peer reviewers. But he wanted more than simple primacy. First was just a sporting bagatelle. To look on a thing that had been true since the start of creation but never grasped until you made it so: no euphoria available to the human brain could match it. Cleaner than drugs, broader and more powerful than sex-Huxley’s “divine dipsomania.” Anyone who tasted it once would spend the rest of his life trying for more.
Science fit the very folds of Tom Kurton’s brain. Its exuberance tempered the tedium of daily lab work, kept him alert, overrode fatigue, and rendered risks trivial. And the goal of scientific exuberance, like the goal of life, which it helped to propel, was to replicate itself.
And so his life, from the simplest of beginnings, has spun out endless living forms, not all of them viable, not all of them pretty, not all of them sane or even wise, but each a turbulent attempt to lay bare the order in things, and all of them variations most wonderful.
Russell Stone lies in bed at night, reading about Algeria and its victims until he can’t breathe. He reads about a “vast national passion for reticence.” He reads about a culture struggling to emerge from feudal female sequestering and subservience. He can’t connect these accounts to his student’s existence. Even her years in Canada don’t explain such a leap.
When the Algeria books threaten to suck him under, he switches to a layperson’s handbook on happiness that he’s checked out from the public library. He flips around in it, buffet style, hoping that some paragraph somewhere might explain something, or at least lull him to sleep.
Sleep is not an option. He reads on, squinting at the clinical studies. One study claims that the most satisfied people are also those who can list the most peak experiences in sixty seconds. He sits up in bed with his yellow legal tablet and tries to write down the happiest moments in his life. The first one he remembers stops him cold.
He’s tried to kill it, over the years: the three-day escape with Grace Cozma to Flagstaff that frosty March, in their last spring in the writing program. Her idea: Come up with me to see the canyon. I have to see the damn Grand Canyon before I escape this place. Until then, the farthest they’d gone was her ordering him to lick Mexican beer off her fingers one crazed happy hour after workshop.
They rented a car-midsized luxury sedan, when they couldn’t afford economy-and drove up. But until they were standing at the reception desk in the ponderosa-pine lodge in Flagstaff, he had no idea whether Grace would ask for one room or two.
She asked for one. One of everything, for the next three days. Come up with me. Come hike with me, eat with me, bathe with me. Come learn how to want something more than you want to write. Their first night, after burritos in a dusty dive, they holed up in their chilly room. He looked to her to set the pace. Her pace was geological. She wanted him naked under the covers with her, knees up, reading, as if their thirtieth anniversary came before their honeymoon. He was reading The Varieties of Religious Experience. She was deep into Far Tortuga. He loved when she wore her glasses, which she hated to put on. She curled over her book like in prayer, the back of her hand distractedly grazing his thigh. He did not know a body could pound like that. Reading lasted maybe forty minutes, until she turned to him, slipped one leg over his, and asked, “How’s the book?” They read no more that night.
In the morning, after gorging on complimentary breakfast, they stood on the South Rim giggling like maniacs at the bizarre optical effects: near, middle, and distant cross sections of the earth sliding decoupled against one another like bad back projection in a forties movie. He could not accept the colors, the rose irons and coppery greens. They climbed down Bright Angel into the chasm on foot, she singing Ferde Grofé’s clumping mule theme, he wanting to take her into the thickets of tamarisk and do her like deer. She was insane, insisting that they descend to the Inner Gorge, all the way down to the Vishnu Schist. They made it as far as Plateau Point and barely dragged themselves back up to the rim by nightfall. That night, as if they weren’t dead with fatigue, they skipped the studying and went right to the exam.
He never imagined that Grace might feel any less than he did. Just hearing her hum contentedly under her breath as she drove home was like returning to a country he didn’t even know he’d been banished from. But back in Tucson, they didn’t move in together, didn’t join futures, didn’t even change their old routine except for sleeping together eight increasingly tense times before her departure to France that May.
As she left the country, she goosed his ribs and said she expected great things from him. To date, his greatest achievement has been his appearance as a most convincing character in Grace’s deeply convincing first novel.