He’ll come to lunch. Remember Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt?”
“What would a discovery of extraterrestrial life mean to people?”
“Different things, of course. Fundamentalists in any religion are literalists. They take the words of their scriptures to be true in a literal sense, not evocative, not symbolic, not sometimes mysterious and incomprehensible, not reflective of the historic moment when they were written. Beyond their literalist interpretations, they’re cocky enough to think they believe they have access to the mind of God.”
“What did Gabriel want you to do?”
Thom kissed first one cheek and then the other. “‘Consider the repercussions,’ was all Gabriel said. Adam was created in God’s image. If extraterrestrial life looks like green mold, then so must their god, I suppose.”
“I thought Adam was made of mud.”
“From the dust of the soil—adamah, in Hebrew—hence Adam. But made in the image of God.”
“Maybe polytheism is a better belief,” I said provocatively. “I always thought monotheism was an arrogant idea designed to serve repressive political goals. We ought to go back to the Greeks—the Egyptians! Over to India! Dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of gods.”
After remarking that those cultures certainly had had their own forms of political oppression, Thom added, “Think how the discovery that the sun did not travel around the earth influenced our concept of our cosmic importance.”
“Why does Gabriel engage in extraterrestrial research if he doesn’t want to find life on any of the new planets?”
“Sometimes one does research to prove an idea is wrong.”
Squinting in the bathroom mirror the way he always did, Thom made his usual effort to part his curly hair with a small fine-toothed comb. “Twenty-twenty could be the scientists’ Year of Clear Vision,” he replied. “Let’s hope we’re ready by then. Today I’ll just talk about refinements in the methods of spectroscopy.” Amused at the prospect of seeing clearly, Thom turned to regard me through his own thick lenses. He slid his glasses to the end of his nose. “Remember, a president of the United States thought the rights of his God would be violated by stem cell research.”
In five minutes I knew those loose brown curls, increasingly tinged with gray, would be all over Thom’s head again in sweet disarray. He was a large man and strong; I thought he was aging just as gracefully as he did everything else.
I replied, “I’ll just meet you inside the Blue Tulip, right?”
When I explained how I planned to spend the morning at the house where the Frank family had hidden, Thom reminded me that his mother had known Anne Frank when they were both young children.
“I remember,” I said.
“Sometimes,” he said soberly, “I think we should achieve peace on earth before we deal with extraterrestrial life. It would be a sign that we’re ready. Fission and fusion, the bombs, came too soon.”
I felt a surge of love for Thom. He was a scientist who cared about human life, about politics, about culture. But I said, “Thom, I feel frightened. I don’t think I should wear the memory stick.”
“It’s safer on you than on me. I could be kidnapped.” He smiled.
“So could I. And what should I do if—”
“If I keeled over from a heart attack?”
“If anything?”
“Well, wait for a sign. Wait till your heart tells you it’s time, till you see clearly. Consult Gabriel if you want to.”
The conversation was too spooky. We both stopped. Dazzled. My mind was dazzled by the magnitude of Thom’s discovery. He bent down, and I stretched up. Tenderly, we exchanged our last kiss.
More than twenty years earlier, in 1995, I had been a better-than-fair high school classical musician, but upon graduation I renounced playing the viola; I knew I was already nearing the limits of my musical talent, though not of my intellectual curiosity about my own mind or the minds of others. The last year in high school I read psychology on my own and insisted on taking the standardized exam for graduating college psychology majors. I scored well. In selecting a college from among several offering nice scholarships, I told my grandmother, “I want to be in the middle of the country,” and I somewhat capriciously chose Iowa as the heart of the Midwest, though I considered Chicago. Three weeks after my arrival in Iowa City, I met Thom at an orchestral rehearsal held in the Union at the University of Iowa. Despite having aborted my own musical career, in my loneliness I had been drawn toward the familiar scene of rehearsal.
At the rehearsal I became irritated when