Inkleaf's Blog

A long short story

 “As you can see,” Professor Robinette’s voice carried through the amphitheater-style tiers of seats, “McCall’s transformation was startling.”

Jacob Hammond stood at the back of the room and seethed.  Robinette, addressing the gallery of students, had dimmed the light for better viewing of the screen that glowed behind him.  Jacob had come in from a side door, shut it silently behind him, and crept in the shadows.

 Paralyzed by his anger, he couldn’t hear the voice of reason, from some cool recess in the back of his mind, that tried to soothe him.

“Naturally,” Robinette went on, “this strengthens the university’s case for mandatory waiting periods and extensive psychological screening for anyone wishing to undergo reverse-genetic treatment.”

Jacob ground his teeth together as another image of Kathryn flared to life on the screen.  She’d gained a lot of weight after her reverse-genetic treatments, but he wouldn’t have called it startling.

A young voice came from one of the front row seats, “Did the treatments cause her death?”

The old professor explained, “She lost many of the healthful benefits of genetic manipulation, she may have lived longer without the reverse treatments.”

 “But,” the same student pressed, “she didn’t die because of them?”

“The issue here,” Robinette avoided the question doggedly, “is that her quality of life plummeted.  She had hoped to make a statement about genetics that would cause the public to question modern medicine.”  He gestured, his own spare frame silhouetted by the screen, “The impacts of her decision went beyond physical appearance, McCall’s mental state was such that-“

“Doctor McCall,” Jacob heard his own voice booming from the darkness while his legs, as if of their own volition, carried him down the aisle between the banks of seats.  He couldn’t stop himself, he marched towards Robinette’s podium as if leading an army.  “She was your colleague.  And her name was Doctor Kathryn McCall.”

Robinette punched a button on the podium.  Kathryn’s image washed away in the room’s normal lighting while rows of second-year students blinked in the renewed brightness.  “Mr. Hammond, I don’t recall inviting you to today’s lecture.”

Jacob, previously so unaccustomed to anger, felt as if a vice constricted his lower ribs, he couldn’t get a deep breath.  For the first time in his life he wished he’d spent his boyhood in playground fights, or that his academic experience contained a single course on the art of debate.  Though an able researcher, Jacob had none of the argumentative skills he admired in others.  “Of course you didn’t invite me,” he shot back, reckless.  “If you only have students in the room, you can disparage a dead colleague all you like.”

To Robinette’s credit, he only raised a graying eyebrow and said, “Mr. Hammond, find the door.  I won’t suggest you find your manners, we both know it’s beyond you.”

Jacob went back up the stairs, ignoring the students’ stares.  He hadn’t come to insult Robinette, or disrupt the class.  Yet, he’d accomplished all those things and not the only one he’d intended: to argue for access to Kathryn’s research.  He  reached the door and left, his anger dissipating as he walked down the quiet corridor, pausing to study the collection of photographs at the intersection where a left turn led to the department offices.  An older picture of Kathryn, taken in her 60s, showed a pert, brown-haired woman whose eyes sparkled with intellect and humor.  Jacob hadn’t known her then.  They’d met later, when she’d campaigned to have a historian added to the department – they had let her hire him, acquiescing to a whim she’d forced upon them.

 Jacob sighed and went to his own small office.  He hadn’t imagined he would miss her so much; he hadn’t expected her to die before reaching 100.  Idling, he let his eyes wander through the titles on his bookshelf.  Few of the professors kept bookshelves, or books at all, for that matter.  Old-fashioned, clutter, sentimental… he’d heard all the teasing and criticism, he even agreed to some extent.  The names on the faded book spines called out to him – Emerson, Eliot, Hugo, Bishop – and Jacob knew that they, too, had died without living a century.  Kathryn should have made it to 120 at least.     

He checked the clock.  Robinette would finish his class, and come searching for him, and Jacob wanted to get the reprimand over with.  He shouldn’t have gone in the classroom, he’d forgotten Robinette held longer sessions the first Tuesday of the month.  Picking up the collected works of Eliot, he let the thin volume fall open to his favorite page.  “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” he read the line aloud, his heart aching.

He had tried to change her mind.  He remembered the day he had sat on the edge of the desk and pointed to the same books he now dredged for solace and said to her ‘what if you don’t live as long, can you imagine how much more they all would have done if they’d had more years in their lives?’  Kathryn had pulled out half a dozen books, and settled their weight in his hands, Poe, Thoreau, Dickens, Keats, Shakespeare, Paine.  She’d refused to explain herself, she’d only foisted the books upon him and asked ‘what do you think inspired them?’

He hadn’t known.  He still didn’t.

“Hammond.”

Jacob let his eyes rest, for a moment, upon human voices wake us, and we drown, before he straightened up and closed the book.  He turned around, and faced a livid Professor Robinette.  “I’m sorry,” Jacob heard the formality in his words, and no sincerity.

“You are risking your position at this university,” Robinette informed him starkly.

“I know.”

After a moment, Robinette seemed to lose a measure of his ire.  “Hammond, I know she was your mentor.  I know you miss her, but you cannot destroy your career by-“

“What if I think she was right?”  Jacob asked it without malice, hearing his desperation and uncertainty in each syllable.

“Right about what?” Robinette motioned vaguely with his thin hands, “What point was she trying to make in standing in the way of mandatory genetic treatment?  Hastening her own death did nothing to support the cause, I assure you.”

Jacob, at a loss, felt the difference of their ages keenly as he stared at Robinette.  He’d never felt that way with Kathryn.  Even after the reverse treatments, when her hair turned white, he’d never felt that their respective years separated them.  But he looked to Robinette and felt the senior professor was just too old to understand him.  “She had to have a point,” Jacob insisted, “she was too smart not to.”

“And yet she did not divulge her grand scheme to you, her protege?”

Jacob heard Robinette’s condescension and refused to respond to it.  He only said, “I have a flight to catch.”

“You’re really going?”  Disapproval, apparent though it was, held a trace of curiosity.

“It’s a place to start.”

Robinette gave a short laugh.  “You think that a historian can stop the Medical Board from overturning the legislation?  You think you can take Kathryn’s place in stopping standardized genetic treatments?”

“No, but she’d expect me to try.”  Jacob countered bitterly.  When Robinette stepped back a pace, Jacob moved past him and started down the hallway.

“You’d better be here tomorrow if you want to defend your position.”  Robinette called after him.

Jacob paid him the courtesy of stopping and turning around to say, “I’ll be here.”

#

Tristan Sheppick met Jacob in the terminal.  Everything Jacob meant to say, his questions, his concerns, vanished from his mind as he blurted out, “You have green eyes!”

Sheppick, his dark brown hair showing hints of gray, smiled.  “That was what Dr. McCall noticed, too, the first time I met her.”  He shook Jacob’s hand and gestured, inviting, “This way.”

“When was that, that you first met her?”

“Years ago, now,” Sheppick led the way, out of the terminal and to a private vehicle.  “Go ahead, get in.”

Awkward, Jacob fumbled with the handle on the passenger’s side.  Life in the city had left him familiar only with public transit.  He hadn’t seen a personal vehicle in years.  He reminded himself that he’d entered rural country, where people went without modern conveniences, where people had green eyes.

When Sheppick got in, Jacob asked, “If you’ll forgive my curiosity, you haven’t had any genetic treatments?”

Sheppick laughed.  “That was her second question.  Yes, I have.  But my parents didn’t, hence,” he gestured near his temple, indicating his eyes, “the recessive trait.”  He shook his head, the laughter gone, “I was sorry to hear about Dr. McCall.”

It pained Jacob to hear it, perhaps because no one else had said such a thing.  The department had seemed quietly grateful for her absence.  Rather than tell a stranger how much he missed his mentor, he asked, “Did you know her very well?”

As he took them through the quiet streets, Sheppick told him, “She came here every few years, and contacted me regularly about Gerold but,” he glanced over, “I didn’t know her well.”

Silence fell over them.  Jacob thought about his own meager ambitions and wondered what Kathryn had seen in him. 

“Hammond?”  Sheppick’s voice held the tone of repeating a question.

          “I’m sorry,” Jacob shook off his reverie, “I wasn’t listening.  You were saying?”

          “I asked what you do at the university.  Which sort of scientist are you?”

          “I’m not.  The department decided that their emeritus professors had done enough to change modern science that they should hire a historian to document the impact of their work.”

          “You’re a historian?”

          “I studied the role of science in social history.”  Jacob felt unworthy, anew, of Kathryn’s legacy.  “She should have chosen someone else.  Whatever work she wanted me to carry on,” he shrugged, “I can hardly recognize genetic code when I see it, much less read it.”

          Tristan glanced over with a thoughtful frown and said, “I think I know why she sent you.”  He stared ahead, to where the buildings thinned out and the sky arched over a near-empty horizon.  “Did she tell you about Gerold?”

          Jacob thought idly that he hadn’t seen real countryside for a decade or more, he’d lived hemmed in by metropolis for so long that he had forgotten the unruly beauty of wild trees.  “She wanted me to meet him.  I don’t know anything more than that.”

          Twilight set in, silhouetting distant mountains.  “He’s a student.”

          “There’s a university out here?”

          “He’s doing his dissertation via correspondence.”  After a pause, Sheppick added, “I’m his social worker.”

          Jacob half-turned to ask three questions at once, and then he said nothing.  Kathryn must have meant for him to discover something.  Better to wait, and make the discoveries, than to ask personal questions.  As night fell, they arrived at a one-story house, situated well off the road.  No neighboring houses broke the emptiness, and only the light spilling from the lone structure lit the darkness. 

          “Don’t mind dogs, do you?”

          The question shattered Jacob’s concentration.  “I’m sorry, what?”

          “Gerold’s dogs, I hope they won’t bother you.”  Sheppick shut down the engine and, as he opened the door, creatures erupted from the house.  A motion-activated light flared to life, revealing a roiling mass of canines.  “They’re friendly,” a chorus of barks drowned out Sheppick’s assurance.  

          Jacob hesitated a second before getting out into the cool night air.  He knew only a few people with dogs, and those people had one apiece.  The dogs and their shadows merged in the porch light, dashing from Sheppick to Jacob and back again, barking eagerly, tails wagging.  One was quite large, another quite small and three of sizes in between.  Sheppick waded through them and opened the door, announcing, “Gerold, it’s Tristan!”  He let himself in, beckoning for Jacob to follow. 

          The two men went in the house, buffeted initially by the dogs, and then abandoned by them.  Jacob trailed behind, craning his neck when the hallway widened into a sitting room.  There, a young man knelt amid the five dogs, petting them and talking quietly.

          “Gerold,” Sheppick interrupted the young man,  “how are you this evening?”

          Gerold turned to face the men, and sat down as he shifted around and wrapped one arm around the shaggy creature at his side.  His face betrayed the sort of intrigued apprehension Jacob associated with small children.  After making brief eye contact with Sheppick, Gerold muttered, “Well enough, but I’m busy.”  With that he began speaking to the dogs again in so low a tone Jacob couldn’t tell what language he was using.

Sheppick sat on the arm of a nearby sofa; he looked unfazed.  Jacob couldn’t help staring.  Gerold displayed no indication of interest in his visitors.  He maintained his one-sided conversation with the dogs and, after a minute, got up and led the creatures away with a backward glance.  Sheppick moved with casual grace to the middle of the sofa and sat there, as if nothing strange had happened.  “You look a bit taken aback,” he offered at last.

 “Pardon my reaction.  I just-“ Jacob paused, and chose his words with precision, “I’ve never seen such aberrant behavior, not in person.”

Sheppick wore an expression that seemed like pity, “You’ve lived too long in an overly-ordered society.  Gerold’s behavior is not aberrant.  It’s merely different from yours and mine.  He’s just bashful.”

Jacob shook his head, “Anti-social,” he countered, “is the term I would use.”  And it was a term he encountered in research literature, not something that plagued a modern soul.  Suddenly the criticisms of Kathryn’s peers sounded valid.  Suddenly her suggestion of reversing genetic treatments sounded quaint, misguided.

The dogs and their owner returned, Gerold distributing small biscuits to the dogs and then making eye contact with Sheppick.  “You don’t come at night, usually,” his gaze roved, restless, through the room, skirting around Jacob but never settling on him.

“My friend wanted to meet you,” Sheppick answered, reaching down to pet a medium sized dog.

Gerold, fidgeting, looked directly at Jacob for a few seconds and then, wringing his hands, asked Sheppick, “Why?”

“He wanted to meet your dogs.  He’s from the city, he’s never seen so many dogs at once.”

“From the city,” Gerold parroted, “from the city.”  He sat crossed-legged among the dogs and put his arm around the largest one, “He’s from the city,” he told the dog earnestly, pointing at Jacob.

Obligingly, the dog looked at Jacob, and then turned its attention back to Gerold, licking his face.  Gerold talked quietly to the dog, what little Jacob could hear sounded like utter gibberish. 

“Gerold, do you want to talk about your research?”  Sheppick invited.

“No,” Gerold stood and stepped carefully over the smallest dog, disappearing again into the next room.

“Strangers make him nervous,” Sheppick offered.

“No kidding,” Jacob, still standing, felt out of place, unwelcome, and off-balance.  Robinette’s grim pronouncements made sense.  Kathryn’s protests against standardized genetic treatment really had been wrong.  Genetic restructuring hadn’t just freed humanity from cancer and heart disease and premature death.  It had freed people from the personality disorders that warped and isolated them. 

What had Kathryn been thinking?

Aloud, Jacob ventured,  “When Kathryn came here, was she investigating Gerold’s, ah,”  he paused, courtesy and embarrassment robbing him of a way to continue.

“Aberrant behavior?” Sheppick quipped.

Jacob offered an apologetic frown and waited, shocked that Kathryn had studied Gerold instead of finding a way to help him.

“She said the assertations in his research were the most unusual and the most inspired in three generations.”

“Well, what-“

“Time for bed!”  Gerold’s shout interrupted Jacob’s attempted question.

“Indeed,” Sheppick stood up, and in a lowered voice said to Jacob, “I’ll meet you outside.”

“But-“

“Time for bed!”  From the insistence in the young man’s voice, Jacob decided the visit had ended.  He went out and stood beneath the cold, starry sky. 

Sheppick came out a few minutes later, and thrust a worn folder into Jacob’s hands.  “He said the dogs liked you.”

“What’s this?”  Jacob followed, got into the vehicle, knowing he’d wasted his time and feeling he’d lost sight of everything he believed in Kathryn.

“A copy of his dissertation,” Shepppick guided them back onto the dark road.

“It’s on paper!  Who uses paper?”

“Gerold says it makes his ideas tangible, so they can’t get away.”  After a pause, Sheppick added, “Contrary to appearances, Gerold is a genius.”

Jacob sighed and wondered if he could gracefully reverse his position on the whole matter.  Kathryn, he looked out at the stars, I’m sorry.  He’d failed her, but clearly, when he reflected on Gerold, living alone in the middle of nowhere, isolated and talking to dogs, she’d been wrong.         

“You didn’t find what you were looking for?” 

“No,” Jacob admitted, “I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

#

He arrived back in the city too late to go home and get any sleep, too early to get into the university buildings.  Jacob found a coffee shop and sat, bedraggled and alone, at a corner table.  Could he salvage his career?  Tell the department that, after insisting on a meeting, after threatening to take the matter to the dean, that he had changed his mind?  That after all his conviction and complaint, he agreed with them?

“They’ll probably fire me, whatever I do,” he muttered over his cup of coffee, reflecting miserably that he must seem as crazy as Gerold.

Poor Gerold.  Poor Kathryn.

Jacob leaned back in his seat and tried to decide what to do.  He didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep until a rising undercurrent of conversation dredged him from an unsteady dream.  Sitting up, squinting in the watery sunlight that streamed through the window, he gasped.  The coffee shop was filling with patrons, some of which snickered at him as he fumbled with his watch.  His brain lagged behind his eyes, he blinked at the watch face for a full thirty seconds before he calculated the time and put together that he had twenty minutes to reach campus.

Clumsy, chagrined, Jacob gulped the now-cold coffee and collected his briefcase and the folder Sheppick had forced upon him.  He hurried out of the coffee shop, and jogged to campus, giving fleeting and despairing thoughts to his wrinkled clothes and the fact that the hadn’t shaved.  He arrived with five minutes to spare and resigned himself to making a mockery of his reputation.  He walked into the meeting room and five minutes by the clock dissolved when he realized everyone else had already taken their seats.  Of course they were all early, eager to watch Kathryn McCall’s protege fail.

“We’re glad you could make it,” Robinette, at the head of the table, arched an eyebrow.  He didn’t sound glad, and no one on either side of the table looked remotely pleased.

Breathless from jogging, Jacob nodded and took the last seat.  What must they think of me?  And what, he wondered dismally, had he been thinking?  He wanted to weep.  Tired from traveling all night, dispirited from the bickering and unfriendliness of his colleagues, Jacob knew that certain defeat awaited.  Robinette began the preliminary discussion on the legalities of the disputed ownership of Kathryn’s research.  Jacob, well-versed in the mundane details, hid his nervousness by opening Gerold’s folder.  The front page contained the abstract for his work, a brief and, to Jacob’s surprise, coherent statement.  Gerold’s dissertation theorized that the domestication of dogs proved the existence of god.  He had written it with eloquence.  Deaf to the proceedings, Jacob paged through the draft, recognizing half the quoted authors as leading experts in theology.  He skimmed through a handful of paragraphs, astonished by the ideas, by the quality writing itself.

Gerold was, indeed, a genius.   

While Robinette droned on, Jacob’s mind reeled.  Kathryn had said it herself, they had never found a genetic link to genius.  She’d also said that hardship bred the Renaissance.  Jacob thought of Gerold, on the outskirts of society, literally and figuratively.  Did intellectuality make up for the loneliness that his oddities imposed upon him?  Was genius not genetic, but circumstantial?  What if exile, and exile alone, spawned genius?  Did Gerold look for a connection to god in canines because he didn’t have some edifying social activity to otherwise fill his time?

He could hear Kathryn as clearly as if she whispered into his ear: what do you think inspired them?

“Mr. Hammond?”

Startled, Jacob realized the room had grown still and everyone was looking at him.  He turned to acknowledge Robinette.

“Mr. Hammond,” the aging professor spoke with apparent disdain, “I realize you’ve been under a great deal of stress lately, but if you’re going to ignore me and sit through this meeting with your jaw hanging open-“

“Genius must suffer,” Jacob interrupted, still grasping at the threads of implication.

“What?”  Robinette narrowed his eyes.

“Science has,”  Jacob clenched Gerold’s papers in his hand and waved them about for emphasis, “bred complacency into the human race.”

Robinette heaved a sigh.  “Hammond, you have sorely tried the patience of this department for-“

“Genius must suffer.  Don’t you see?”  Jacob could not share the revelation because he did not quite understand it himself.  “Einstein, Edison, Da Vinci, all of them, they,” he thought of Gerold, he couldn’t explain, “they were different.  Their differences forced them to achieve mental brilliance.”

Across the table, another professor said,  “Hammond, you’re not going to sell anyone on Kathryn’s theory that the human race was better off when everyone lived short, miserable lives.”

Jacob paused.  Part of him ached at the thought of Gerold’s lonely existence borne on a tide of dogs.  “But-“

“Hammond,” Robinette spoke with a tone of finality, “the only way you’re getting McCall’s research is if you resign from this university and take it with you.  We can’t deny it to you legally, but we won’t be party to whatever you do with it.”

A few startled expressions broke out around the table.  It was a harsh offer.  Jacob swallowed hard.  If he re-embraced the belief that Kathryn had, truly, been the greatest thinker of her age, then what else could he say?  But where will I go?

He took a deep breath and gripped Gerold’s dissertation so tightly the papers twisted in his hand.  “I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

 ###