The family business: Some embrace it, some reject it. But for one family whose “business” means accepting science and religion, each sibling takes a side. Can something as simple—and complicated—as a rat settle the most important questions in life?
“Year of The Rat,” by Hugo-award winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch will be free on this site for one week only. The story is available for $2.99 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Omnilit, and in other ebookstores.
Year of the Rat
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The first rat I ever saw belonged to Barb Bellill, who lived just down the block.
Barb’s house was a marvel, because it was messy (ours wasn’t), because her dad had all these souvenirs from World War II (like skulls and pistols and Nazi uniforms), and because Barb had cool pets, like this rat.
The rat had a name, which I’ve forgotten, and its own cage. The cage smelled like rodent droppings, and was filled with sawdust, a water tube, and a food dish.
But the coolest thing about that cage was the rat itself.
It had pure white fur, beady red eyes, and small pink feet that looked like miniature hands. The rat, which was an albino, used to come when Barb called it. It would climb along her arm up to her shoulder and nest in her hair. Sometimes it would run from hand to hand, using her shoulders and arms like an oversized version of its little rodent wheel.
That spring, Barb and her family went on their annual spring vacation. We never went on a spring vacation. Spring vacation always coincided with Easter Week, and we spent Easter Week in church—first rehearsing for the big Easter Service, and then attending services—on Thursday night, Friday afternoon, and twice on Sunday morning. Yes, there were new dresses and chocolate bunnies and colored eggs. But no long drives to Grandmother’s house or special trips to Florida or other such exotic places.
Which is how I ended up with custody of Barb’s rat. I had visions of that rat becoming mine. I wanted it to run from my hand up my arm, over my shoulders, and down the other arm, just like it did for Barb. I wanted it to nest in my hair and to peek its beady little red eyes out of my blond curls.
Deep down, I wanted to be cool, Barb style.
I walked that rat from Barb’s house to ours, holding the blanket-covered cage gingerly. Somehow I made it to the back door, which I managed to open on my own. I went inside and set the cage on the kitchen table.
My mother, who had been cleaning the dining room, came into the kitchen, Lemon Pledge in hand.
“What’s that?” she asked in her most pleasant tone.
I removed the blanket with a flourish.
She stared at the rat cowering in the far corner of the cage and then she started screaming.
The rat moved onto the unheated front porch for that week. I was not allowed to remove it from its cage (“What if it got out?” my mother asked nervously. “We’d never find it.”), and so I couldn’t achieve my dream of training the rat to run across my shoulders.
But sometimes I imagined what might have happened if I had trained that little white head to peek out of my blonde curls. Would my mother have screamed louder? Would the rat have truly fled? Would my brothers have been impressed that their oldest sister could tame a rat?
Deep down, I really wanted to know.
***
My second encounter with rats came during my senior year in high school. Out of a class of 500 students, only 25 of us managed to qualify for Mr. Dunleavy’s Advanced Biology Class Two, and only 18 of us survived the mid-term.
The dissection assignment for the previous year’s Advanced Biology Two class had involved frogs. Something had gone horribly wrong, and no one would talk about exactly what it was, although I do remember going to Advanced Biology One (for juniors—75 of us had qualified for that) and seeing frog legs hanging from light fixtures, and bits of frog intestines squished to the fake wood tables.
Mr. Dunleavy clearly believed the fault lay with that year’s senior class. Shortly after the frog disaster, he told our Advanced Biology One class that any group of students would have been better than that senior class—and, as needy juniors, we believed him.
It wasn’t until our own dissection day that we learned dissection and disaster often went hand in hand.
Our year, Mr. Dunleavy had received permission to use rats. Maybe some hapless (and ignorant) administrator thought Mr. Dunleavy could help with a local rodent problem. Or maybe Mr. Dunleavy believed that rats would work better than frogs.
Whatever the reason, it certainly had nothing to do with science. No young science class should dissect a mammal. Mammals are much more complicated than amphibians. Besides, mammals look cute even when dead while amphibians just look gross.
But rats it was, preserved in their little formaldehyde jars. Each team got one.
Usually Mr. Dunleavy paired us up like March Madness basketball teams—the brightest with the dumbest, and so on, until the final pair was pretty much equal in science smarts.
Only on this day, however, he seemed to believe that gender would provide ballast—that the boys would handle the disgusting stuff while the girls watched.
But that theory did no good, since the first person to throw up was none other than Mr. Dunleavy’s son, Thomas.
The cause of the nausea was simple: In those days, we didn’t wear gloves.
So, one member of the team had to reach into that jar of formaldehyde and remove the dead rat. Its fur was wet and matted and its body was slippery.
Then we had to pin the body to the board in front of us, paws extended, head back, stomach exposed.
Those paws, remember, that look like little hands, and the heads that look like cat heads or dog heads, with only a few variations. Heck, they even have some of the same features as human heads—noses, two eyes, a recognizable mouth.
As I said, Tommy Dunleavy—my partner—threw up first. Which was irritating, since I was the one who grabbed the rat from the jar, and I was the one who pinned the disgusting creature to its little board.
Now, I might have caused the problem by curling the rat’s little paw-like hand around my pinkie and saying to Tommy (who was known to have a sensitive stomach), “Look, it grabs on just like a newborn would.”
He couldn’t grab the wastebasket fast enough.
I don’t need to tell you that when one person throws up, others are soon to follow.
I can say I didn’t throw up. And, I can add proudly, that I managed to carve open that little rat belly using my X-Acto knife, and remove the rat’s heart before the entire experiment was aborted.
In fact, I was the only one to get an A in dissection, because I was the only one who managed to peer inside a rat’s belly, and keep a cool head.
***
Clearly, that cool head did not come from my mother. For a woman who bore five children, she was unbelievably squeamish. We weren’t allowed to chew with our mouths open because that would put Mother right off her food. If she saw a spider, she wouldn’t kill it. Someone else had to because squished spiders often produced a yellow goo that disgusted her.
Mother wouldn’t even cook fish because she’d have to clean it, and she couldn’t handle those glassed-over eyeballs staring at her from the fish’s smelly head.
My cool head came from the confluence of events. First, I had grown up with Mother. Someone had to kill the spiders, and clean the matted hair out of a drain.
Second, I was the oldest. When you’re the oldest of five, you can change diapers in your sleep. You can eat meals through the scent of vomit, and you can clean a wall decorated in baby poop with little more than a grimace.
The third, and most important reason I had a cool head, was a little more complicated. My mother was very religious. Her father had been a minister and her mother the daughter of a minister. In other words, my mother was both a pastor’s kid and a pastor’s grandkid.
She had swallowed Scripture with her mother’s milk, and unlike many PKs, she didn’t rebel. (Which probably made her more of a PGK, since grandkids usually identified with their grandparents over their parents.)
Needless to say, there wasn’t a Christian holiday that wouldn’t be better celebrated in church. Discussions at the dinner table came after grace and the reading of one Bible passage. The discussions were often about that passage, usually in the form of a pop quiz.
My father followed the entire proceedings with a jaundiced eye. He was a mathematician and a pragmatist. He didn’t believe in God per se, but he didn’t not believe in God either.
My father believed in proof—not the legal kind, which establishes evidence that an argument is true, but the mathematical kind, the kind that used equations to establish the validity of a proposition. If he couldn’t write an equation about something, it didn’t exist, at least not in his mind, and while he could never find the God equation, he placated my mother with discussion of infinity.
“Mathematics recognizes the infinite, my dear,” my father would say. “And you’ll recall that the Infinite is another name for God.”
That satisfied her, but long about 1975, it no longer satisfied my brother Matthew. Matthew was two years younger than I, and at thirteen had become one of those obnoxious nerds who believed he knew everything.
“Infinite,” he said during one of those interminable dinner discussions, “is from the Latin, Dad. All it means is ‘unlimited.’”
“True enough,” my father said. We all hushed and listened to him. Dad rarely spoke during dinner, leaving that to Mother and her pop quizzes.
“But,” my father said, “infinity is a true mathematical concept. We even have a symbol for it.”
“So?” Matthew said, which was his fallback argument for anything he didn’t entirely understand.
“So,” my father said. “When you get to study the infinite in math, we’ll finish this discussion.”
“No, we’ll finish it now,” Matthew said, and the hush around the table grew. “What does infinity have to do with God?”
“In math,” my father said, using his best teacher’s intonation, “we often arrive at a quantity of unbounded magnitude. It’s too large, larger than any assigned number. It is, in other words—”
“God,” my mother snapped. When she used that tone, it always ended the conversation.
How all of this relates to me is simple: My heritage gave me a great appreciation for Christianity and for science. But not in equal measure.
I like proof. I am constantly seeking that which faith says we do not need.
But I’m conflicted. I understand that faith is a belief not based in proof. In fact, many would argue that faith with proof is not faith at all, but knowledge, and knowledge often interferes with the act of belief.
In other words, it’s easy to believe in something when you have proof that it exists. It’s difficult to believe in something when there is no proof at all.
My brother Matthew is looking for the Anti-God equation, the one that proves God doesn’t exist. He doesn’t do this at a university, but in a roadside motel room, with his notebooks, his books on mathematical theory, and the 500 dollars a month I manage to find for him out of my tighter-than-I-want-it-to-be budget.
My other two brothers are professors, like I am. My sister Sarah teaches too, but at the high school level.
Our parents are long gone. As Sarah says with something like glee, at least for our parents the familial argument has ended.
They know whether or not God exists.
None of this would have any importance at all if it weren’t for one thing: The speech I gave at the Conference on Religion and Science held in San Francisco last year.
The conference was held at the Moscone Center, which is San Francisco’s big conference venue. The CRS, which is an annual event, hadn’t needed Moscone until George W. Bush became president. Even at the beginning of his term, we could hold the CRS in the conference area of one of the larger downtown hotels.
But as religion impinged on real science or science impinged on religion (depending on your philosophical point of view), the conference had changed from a gathering of active minds there to present their latest papers and get credit toward the ever-elusive grants or the even more elusive tenure, to a gathering of very angry people with an agenda.
In the early years of the conference, you’d have to wait until someone made a pass at someone else in the bar to hear any raised voices at all.
Now, the fights were epic, and often written up in various journals. Famous speakers filled entire conference halls, and fended off hostile questions, asked in a do-you-beat-your-wife fashion.
I used to be the oddity at the conference. As a professor of philosophy with a specialty in ethics, I could talk religion or science with equal ease. People loved to read my short vitae in the program book, because it (appropriately they thought) stated that I had a B.S. in Philosophy, as well as a Masters in Ethics, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Religions.
My B.S. was a true Bachelor of Science, which I was awarded because my minor in biology required more class hours than my major in philosophy. I had planned on continuing my science degree, but found the need to pick a specialty discouraging.
As a result, I found myself doing post-graduate work in science while teaching a full load in the philosophy department. To hold onto my associate professorship, I had to publish, and what I found myself writing about more and more was the philosophy of science, which morphed into the ethics of science.
It wasn’t as small a niche as it seemed.
Ethics and science had been on a collision course since man discovered the test tube—and maybe long before that.
The arguments covered an entire spectrum of beliefs, some of which we would now consider antiquated. We continue to have these arguments about modern concerns. Ever since George W. Bush became president and allowed the religion and politics to taint the scientific message that came out of his White House, the arguments became fraught.
From 2003 onward, my presentations at the conference were among the most likely to have hecklers or doubters or exceedingly angry people from all sides of the argument. My training as the eldest in a family of disparate beliefs made it easy for me to defuse a situation, either with humor or a real answer to someone’s question or even the suggestion that the questioner be the one to write the position paper on that particular topic.
Such tactics worked until Gregory Von Hastings asked his question about rats.
***
First, a word about Gregory Von Hastings: He was infamous in conference circles. Small, dark-haired and always overdressed, Von Hastings was the guy you never wanted to see at your presentation.
He’d started out as a representative for PETA. He claimed to believe in the ethical treatment of animals, but when PETA (and others) realized that wasn’t his real agenda, he lost their sponsorship.
Not everyone in PETA was the blood-throwing, lab-burning nutjobs that filled the press. In those days, a lot of PETA representatives simply had problems with the ways that animal experiments got conducted in the laboratory.
And PETA had good reason for their concerns. If animals are sentient creatures—and more and more scientific research is showing that they are—then experimenting on them presents the same ethical challenges that experimenting on humans does, maybe even more, since animals can’t grant consent.
But Von Hastings wasn’t one of the reasonable voices in PETA. He wasn’t even one of the wildly unreasonable ones—the ones that threw the blood on women wearing fur coats or used hydrochloric acid against poor clerks at make-up counters.
He was something other, someone who really didn’t believe in PETA’s pro-animal rhetoric as much as he believed in its anti-science minority.
Somehow Von Hastings pissed off PETA so badly that they denounced him. I got a press release on PETA stationary stating quite clearly that nothing Von Hastings said in any way had anything to do with them, an extreme measure, I thought, to get rid of a troubled representative.
Then I forgot about it until the next conference, when Von Hastings showed up as some sort of free agent.
Who turned up at my talk with a bizarre question about rats.
***
I wasn’t in charge of picking the questioners. If I had been, I would have avoided Von Hastings all together.
But that year’s conference had been set up on the academic free speech model, which meant that the first person to get in line behind the microphone was the first person who got to ask a question.
The petitioners lined up in the back of an auditorium that seated eight hundred; I couldn’t see them until the graduate students who’d been drafted as gophers brought the petitioner to the microphone down front.
As I watched a hooded, tattooed, and nose-ringed grad student lead Von Hastings toward the mike, I felt my stomach muscles clench. While I was good at answering all kinds of do-you-beat-your-wife questions, I never had the patience for the questioner who cared only about their opinion and not my answer.
Von Hastings and his ilk were like a political push-poll. The question wasn’t designed to illicit an interesting response from me; it was designed to inform the audience about a fact or a series of facts or a pretend group of facts that the questioner felt the audience needed to know.
I braced myself for the inevitable inane question and the angry follow-up. I took a sip from the water glass I always stowed beneath the podium, and put on my best older-sister expression, the one that showed great interest while hiding extreme annoyance.
My talk that day was one that that conference had requested I reprise from a 1999 conference; my topic was about the need to keep scientific research clear of any bias whatsoever, and methods in which human beings could discover their own prejudices and expectations, and eliminate them before embarking on a scientific branch of study.
To the poor grad student who had to vet the questions before the questioner could be led to the microphone, Von Hastings’ written notes had probably seemed on topic. He had said he wanted to know whether the use of animals automatically tainted the validity of most experiments.
He phrased the question so that it didn’t sound like a PETA trap, but an on-point discussion of the flaws inherent in animal research.
But when he got to the microphone, he asked a completely different question.
He looked me in the eye, and said, “What about the rat?”
And I responded—primarily because I had no other choice—“What about it?”
“Well, it seems to me,” he said, cluing those of us who knew him that this was the push-poll part of the question, “that the rat was perfectly designed for scientific experiment. It catches many of the same diseases that humans do, and when it has those diseases, the symptoms are almost exactly the same—down to the moment of onset. It shadows human existence—living in the abandoned parts of our buildings and eating the wasted parts of our food. It—”
“Are you saying,” I interrupted, because I couldn’t bear to hear the entire argument, whatever the hell it was, “that God created rats so that we could experiment on them?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” He looked pleased with me for the first time in our somewhat tenuous relationship. “God created the rat so that we could understand human beings. He gave the rat the power to spread disease, so that we would notice the rat, and He then made certain that the rat would also give us the answers to those diseases, if we only knew how to look.”
I blinked at Von Hastings. I wondered who fed him his latest round of Kool Aid, because he didn’t sound like the old anti-science guy that we all knew and hated.
“Are you asking me if God created the rat for the advancement of science?” I asked, unable to keep the incredulousness out of my voice.
“Yes,” he said with the biggest smile I’d ever seen.
And then I paused, searching the question for the do-you-beat-your-wife aspect of it. It took a moment, but I found it, and it wasn’t even buried. It was a part of the question all along.
It was there in my paraphrase. Did God create the rat…?
“Who do you work for now, Gregory?” I asked, because I needed time to rephrase his question into something I really could answer, without losing my objective observer status.
His smile faded. Apparently he hadn’t been prepared to answer questions himself.
“I don’t work for anyone,” he said in that I’m-innocent-of-all-charges voice he managed so well. “I was just curious.”
Sure he was. And I was equally sure that someone had paid him to ask that question, whether or not they paid him an actual salary.
But the little back and forth had given me time to come up with an answer of my own.
“We are fortunate that a lot of animals share biological characteristics with us,” I said, not to him, but to the entire group. “Those characteristics enable us to learn the trajectory of a disease without exposing a human being to it or the possibilities of a vaccine before we test it on a human volunteer.”
I noted some skepticism in my audience. The animal research in the areas of sentience and degrees of pain felt by mammals had created a backlash within the scientific community. Scientists were a lot less willing to use animals in controversial research, and found creative ways to avoid the animal problems altogether.
The audience was staring at me. They almost seemed hostile. Von Hastings stood with his hands wrapped around the microphone, as if it could hold him up.
“We have seen a lot of changes in this area,” I said. “For example, many drug companies now pay human volunteers to live through prolonged trials—sometimes in secluded venues. These volunteers are compensated for their time, and they are apprised of the potential risks. In fact, the volunteers must sign off on those risks.”
A few people stirred in their seats. The drug companies provided the most controversy in current scientific research; they were at the cutting edge of the changes—and not always to the good.
“But, in some ways, we have moved backwards,” I said. “We have gone back to the early 20th century when human volunteers tested scientific theory. Now paid volunteers do the same thing. Is it ethical?”
I paused and watched half of my audience nod, and the other half shake their heads.
Then I gave my less-than-profound answer.
“I don’t know if it’s ethical,” I said. “But you have to wonder: who dies so that one of us might live?”
***
I didn’t see Von Hastings after that. I’d heard he’d asked various other push-poll questions in other presentations, all of which forced the less-careful speakers to say that, indeed, God existed.
I managed to avoid the trap just barely, and only because I knew Von Hastings. Most of the other speakers were more concerned with answering the second part of the question (are rats the perfect creature for all scientific research?) instead of the first part (did God create?).
It seemed to me that for all his efforts, Von Hastings scored only small rhetorical points, not something any organization could take to their constituents or use to contradict some atheist somewhere.
But his question haunted me. The entire question—not just the rat part, but the God part too.
And I decided to present it to the only other people I knew who were as conflicted about science and religion as I was:
My family.
***
We hold a family reunion every spring. It always falls on Easter weekend to honor our mother.
She would have loved our Easter traditions. The host of the reunion changed each year, following birth order. Which meant that the celebrations themselves went from community to community, home church to home church. Except, of course, in the case of Matthew, who couldn’t have hosted a reunion if he tried, and who adamantly had no home church.
He was excused from services, and he became the family’s unofficial Easter bunny, putting out colored eggs and candied rabbits before everyone returned from sunrise services.
We had a large contingent of children (even though Matthew and I had none), and a growing contingent of grandchildren. The Easter egg rolls, which had a few down years, had become important again, and we all watched with joy as the youngest ambulatory members of our extended family toddled after brightly colored goodies.
When we weren’t in church or smiling at the children, we talked. We really didn’t need to catch up; somehow we had remained a close family, even though we populated four separate states.
So instead, we talked about our other interests, which were—not surprisingly—science and religion, in various combinations.
The afternoon I brought up the rat question, there were only four of us in my sister Sarah’s kitchen. She was preparing the first of two favorite Easter meals—baked ham with spiced apples, twice-baked potatoes, and asparagus au gratin. The room was warm despite the threat of holiday snow.
The three of us who weren’t cooking hovered: we were the chefs in the family and in the years when it wasn’t our turn, we felt useless to the entire celebration. Luke had made his special coffee to compensate, and John and I were sipping ours slowly, in case we couldn’t get a second cup.
Sarah taught Earth Science to high school kids. Last year, our conversation had focused on the creationism fight that her school was waging (and won—she didn’t have to teach the dreaded fake science). This year, she was quite pleased to tell us she had no new updates at all.
John was a theoretical mathematician. His area of specialty was so esoteric that only Luke and Matthew had more than a passing understanding of it. Sarah tried to grasp the fundamentals of John’s lifelong obsession, but she got lost among the imaginary numbers.
Luke was an actual research scientist. He loved biology, and sometimes moved from specialty to specialty because (like me) he couldn’t be tied down to one idea. That held him back in scientific pursuits—scientists had to be more like John, fascinated with their own niche—but Luke didn’t mind.
He was searching for a new area to research.
And I made the mistake of wandering into his exploration with Von Hastings’ rat question.
Luke found the question immediately fascinating.
“I don’t think anyone has addressed intelligent design from this perspective,” he said. “It’s another lynchpin in the argument that God’s hand was at creation, but does not continue now.”
“I’m afraid to ask what that means,” John said. He poured himself a second cup of coffee, then waved the pot at me. I nodded, even though I hadn’t finished the first.
“It means,” Sarah said, “that the creationist nutballs believe that God created disease so that we could solve it. That’s why there are medicinal herbs in the tropical rain forests and stuff. God already provided the solutions; we just have to ask the right questions.”
“It doesn’t sound like creationism to me,” I said. “Luke is right. This is intelligent design, but with a somewhat nasty twist.”
“Nasty?” Luke poured himself another cup, then grabbed the bag containing his special blend. As John and I knew would happen, Luke cursed softly and muttered that he hadn’t brought enough.
“Nasty,” I said, trying not to feel disappointed about the coffee. “It’s like God’s the ultimate Gamemaster, setting up traps for humans and then standing back and watching as we failed to resolve them.”
John leaned against the counter. “It’s not probable. If it were probable, everything would exist in co-equal states.”
“Huh?” Sarah asked.
“He means,” Luke said, “that the rat would cause as many diseases as it cured.”
“That’s the simplistic way to look at it,” John said.
“Intelligent Design is simplistic,” Sarah said.
“But it’s not,” I said. “Taken to its logical end, it allows both Mother’s belief in an all-powerful God to coexist with Dad’s vague comments about Infinity.”
“So it’s a philosophical question,” John said, looking at me.
“Actually,” Luke said. “It’s a scientific one, maybe the first that we could actually prove.”
I looked at him. He looked at me. And there it was: the sibling challenge. Which one of us could make this work?
“I think it’s an April Fool’s joke,” Sarah said bitterly, and cut the mood.
We moved onto an argument about whether butter or sour cream belonged in the twice-baked potatoes, and then Matthew found the three-year-olds bowling with DVDs in the family room, causing one skinned knee, one crack in the glass-topped coffee table, and several bruised feelings.
The rat topic vanished from the family discussion book.
Until the following year.
***
The first frenzied phone call came from Luke’s wife. Luke had gone missing—was he with me? He wasn’t; I reassured her that I’d track him down.
The second frenzied phone call came from Matthew. Luke had shown up at his motel room door, wanting to know if Matthew would defend him.
Defend him against what? Matthew asked.
The publications committee, Luke said.
He’d been fired. Spectacularly and humiliatingly fired. The news was already on the academic science blogs. It would be in the academic trade journals during the next month.
His career, as he had known it, was ruined.
Matthew sounded panicked. He never had visitors, and he hated anyone violating his space. He even supervised the motel’s maid when she came in to clean the room—and this maid had been at the motel for 25 years.
I promised I would be there as soon as I could. I pulled out old pop quizzes for each of my next six classes, gave them to the appropriate graduate assistants, and drove to Matthew’s tiny roadside motel.
It took four hours—Matthew wanted to be close, but not too close. I hadn’t been to the motel in nearly two years. It looked shabbier than it had, as if it had aged 48 years while the rest of us aged 48 months.
Luke’s Prius seemed out of place next to the three rusting cars, so old and decrepit that their make was indeterminate. I parked next to the Prius, and knocked on Matthew’s door.
He pulled it open before I finished. His face was pale and covered with sweat. He wore a grayish sweater that was too big for him, and grayish pants that were too small. His bottom lip was bleeding. He’d been biting it, something he only did when he was really distressed.
He stepped aside so I could go in.
Luke was sitting on the bed, the chenille comforter bunched up beneath his legs. He had clearly been in that position since Matthew called.
When Luke saw me, he shook his head. “I came for Matthew,” he said. “I need Matthew.”
“Why do you need Matthew?” I asked.
Matthew was gathering his notebooks. Most of them were piled on the desk. A few blank notebooks sat on top of the round table near the television.
“His Anti-God equation. The publications committee has to know that science can serve any agenda.”
“Agenda?” I felt odd towering over him, but there was nowhere to sit. “You had an agenda?”
“They think so.” Luke reached out and took my hand. “I proved it. The rat. You were right. It’s proof that the universe has balance.”
“Balance doesn’t prove that God exists.” Matthew was adjusting his pens, lining them all up perfectly.
“See?” Luke said. “Matthew balances me. If the committee heard that, they’d know that there are other interpretations.”
The carpet was spotted and smelled faintly of mold. I wasn’t going to sit there.
“I thought you’d been fired,” I said.
“I called them idiots,” he said. “Narrow-minded bigots. They went to the blogosphere, and said I’m being funded by some rightwing intelligent design group.”
I felt it: that chill that a sudden unprovable yet right realization gives you. Maybe Von Hastings hadn’t been out to score verbal points. Maybe he’d been out to get someone to do research, research that his people could then claim.
“Run by Gregory Von Hastings?” I’d asked.
“I don’t know,” Luke snapped. “I’d never heard of the group before. I could prove that they hadn’t funded me, but by then it was too late. You should see the discussions. They say that if you start with a premise, you can prove it. Someone even quoted you, saying that scientific research should be conducted without bias. Did you actually say that?”
I preach it at every conference I speak at. But I wasn’t going to tell him that.
“I want to know how you proved the rat hypothesis,” I said.
He shook his head. “I have the research in the car. That’s the ironic thing. I could sell it a thousand times over to these conservative think tanks. I even got a job offer this morning from Bob Jones University. I don’t want to teach at Bob Jones University.”
“So you came to Matthew.”
I looked at the brother I’d been supporting, the one whom we had always assumed was the slightly crazy one, the one who didn’t have a firm grip on the way the world worked.
He seemed much saner now.
Luke said, “I’d take him to the committee as exhibit A. The same family could produce him and me. We’re both scientists.”
“I’m more of a mathematician,” Matthew said.
Luke moved his hand in dismissal. “You know what I mean. You have your agenda; I have mine.”
“I don’t work at a university,” Matthew said. “No one funds my research.”
Except me, I thought. But I didn’t see it as funding his research. I saw it as keeping him alive.
“You think you actually proved this,” I said to Luke.
He grabbed my hand. “Come to the car. I’ll show you.”
Matthew was shaking his head.
“Let her download it later,” Matthew said. “The stuff on disease vectors alone should keep her occupied for days.”
“Disease vectors?” I asked.
“Do you know how many diseases that rats give to humans?” Luke asked. “Do you know how many of them devastated human populations for centuries? The academicians should love this stuff, because I can prove without a doubt that research on rats is God’s plan. That should answer PETA and all those anti-animal research people. That should enable us to discover cures for everything that rats bring us. The committee should have loved me. Instead, they told me to take time off. And when I wouldn’t, they demanded that I set aside my research, and when I mentioned that no one listened to Galileo either, they pointed out that Galileo disproved religious theory, like a good scientist should.”
Matthew sighed. Apparently, he’d been hearing this all afternoon.
“It doesn’t matter what they said,” I started, but Luke glared at me.
Matthew made his shut-up-with-that face. So I tried a different tack.
“What I mean is, what do you want, Luke? I mean, research and specialization has never really been your forte. You would rather think than experiment.”
He stared at me. “What’re you getting at?”
“I’m getting at the idea that maybe you’re in the wrong profession.”
“What profession should I be in?” he asked.
I shrugged, pretending a calm I didn’t feel. “Well, you realize that no one has really followed Mother’s wishes.”
“We’re all in the family business,” Luke said.
“Dad’s family,” I said.
He stared at me. “You want me to preach?”
“Or maybe move to religious theory. Which you can bring science to. It’s a natural.”
Luke looked at Matthew. I held my breath. Matthew had the real power here. His contempt for anything religious had tainted the younger kids, made them afraid of their own theological impulses.
“I’m looking for the anti-God equation,” Matthew said, sounding unbelievably reasonable. “That’s melding science and religion.”
My heart started pounding, hard.
“But you’ve already brought science to religion,” Matthew said. “Maybe you should build on that.”
“But Dad…,” Luke said.
“Dad had his proof,” Matthew said. “He never wavered from that infinity thing. He wouldn’t’ve put up with Mother if he hadn’t agreed with her on some level.”
Luke frowned. I was still holding my breath.
“C’mon,” Matthew said. “You know Dad. Would he have allowed all of us to have Biblical names if he disagreed with Mother?”
Luke blinked. I let out a small breath. I hadn’t thought of that either.
Then Luke giggled. “Can you imagine if Dad had his way? You’ve been named Euclid.”
“There are worse things,” Matthew said, putting his hand on his notebooks. I caught that breath again, afraid he was going off on an anti-God tirade.
But he didn’t. He was solid and strong. Maybe living alone and working on his theories was good for him. He hadn’t gotten angry at any of the family gatherings in almost a decade.
And the little kids loved him.
Maybe allowing him to be himself was all that he needed.
I stared at Luke. Maybe that was what Luke needed too.
Luke rubbed his hands on his pants. Then he looked at me. “Would you mind if I went back to school?”
“Me?” I asked. “Why ask me? You’re a grown man with a wife and family. You can make your own choices.”
He shrugged. “It’s just—you know—I’ve always wanted—you know—your—um—respect. You know. And you believe in reason.”
I blinked again. “I don’t….”
Then I stopped. I wasn’t the Thomas Paine of this family. I never shredded the logic in the Bible. That was Matthew’s job. But I did insist that we look at all sides and all positions, that each side had validity.
That quote which Luke threw at me—an absence of bias—that was my religion.
And he must have absorbed that from his earliest days.
Religion, by its very nature, had bias.
If I told him I’d respect him, it would sound hollow. He would think I was just saying that to calm him down.
So I sat beside him on the bed.
“Have I ever told you my history with rats?” I asked.
He frowned at me.
“You know I actually like rats,” I said.
Matthew smiled. He remembered the Barb Bellill rat incident. Luke was barely out of diapers then.
“You like rats,” Luke repeated in a flat are-you-crazy? tone.
“And yet,” I said, “I’m the only person in this family who cut a rat’s heart out and got an A for it.”
Luke shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Dad said I had a cool head.” I spoke softly. “But you—you and Matthew both—have the courage to chase your passions. That’s why you came to him and not me. I could—and can—tell you all sides of any problem. I can explain each side clearly and without bias. But you don’t want clarity. You want unity. You want to merge your two loves, science and religion. And you want to do it in the opposite way that Matthew has.”
Luke was nodding. Matthew had tilted his head slightly as if he hadn’t thought of this.
“So do it,” I said. “The world will thank you for it.”
“Not the whole world,” Luke said.
“‘If you were of the world, the world would love its own,’” Matthew said, shocking me. “‘But because you are not of the world…therefore the world might hate you.’”
I almost corrected him. The quote came from the Gospel according to John. There were some references to Christ that Matthew had missed, and then there was that word “might.” The Bible never hedged its bet. That passage said the world would hate him.
But Luke’s eyes lit up. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I forgot that quote. It’s true, isn’t it?”
Matthew grabbed something off the side of the bed, then extended his hand. In it, he held a cell phone.
“Call your wife,” he said. “I’ll bet she’s worried.”
Luke grabbed the phone. “Thanks,” he said and went outside with more energy than I’d seen him display since I arrived.
I turned to Matthew. “Quoting the Bible?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “I never said I didn’t pay attention to all those damn church services,” he said. “I have an eidetic memory.”
“Then you know that you misspoke.”
He shook his head. “Luke doesn’t like absolutes. So I didn’t give him one.”
I smiled. “What do you think of his research?” I asked.
“At first,” Matthew said, “I almost told him you don’t complete important research in six months.”
“But?” I asked.
“Then I looked at it.” Matthew cleared his throat. “It’s good.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”
“Maybe that’s what scared his publication committee,” Matthew said softly. “It certainly scared me.”
***
Luke’s research is Luke’s research. It’s as sacred a topic as Matthew’s research is. They continue to struggle with their proofs, and I struggle with their biases.
Now we take none of that to the family reunions, because there are generations of little kids who need to chase eggs and embrace their extended family and think about things no more significant than whether chocolate bunnies are better if they’re hollow.
As for me, I’m done with rats.
Except in my dreams. Rats haunt my dreams.
Sometimes a rat runs along my shoulder and peers out of my graying curls.
And sometimes I hold a dripping albino rat that reeks of wet fur and formaldehyde. I shake it at Luke who laughs while Matthew complains bitterly in the background.
Sarah makes twice-baked rat so that she can keep her job. And I shout down Von Hastings before he can make any more suggestions.
My father watches the proceedings, my mother at his side. When we get too fraught, he reminds us of a simple truth:
The questions we grapple with are as old as time and human consciousness.
They are unanswerable and infinite.
And, my mother would say, they were probably designed that way.
“The Year of the Rat” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
First published in Intelligent Design, edited by Denise Little, Daw Books, 2009.
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