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Then Anna’s phone rang and she picked up.
“Charlie! Oh dovelie, how are you?”
“Screaming agony.”
“Oh babe. Did you take your pills?”
“I took them. They’re not doing a thing. I’m starting to see things in the corners of my eyes, crawlies you know? I think the itches have gotten into my brain. I’m going nuts.”
“Just hold on. It’ll take a couple of days for the steroids to have an effect. Keep taking them. Is Joe giving you a break?”
“No. He wants to wrestle.”
“Don’t let him! I know the doctor said it wasn’t transmissible, but—”
“Don’t worry. Not a fucking chance of wrestling.”
“You’re not touching him?”
“And he’s not touching me. He’s getting pretty pissed off about it.”
“You’re putting on the plastic gloves to change him?”
“Yes yes yes yes, tortures of the damned, when I take them off the skin comes too, blood and yuck, and then I get so itchy.”
“Poor babe. Just try not to do anything.”
Then he had to chase Joe out of the kitchen. Anna hung up.
Frank looked at her. “Poison ivy?”
“Yep. He climbed into a tree that had it growing up its trunk. He didn’t have his shirt on.”
“Oh no.”
“It got him pretty good. Nick recognized it, and so I took him to urgent care and the doctor put some stuff on him and put him on steroids even before the blistering began, but he’s still pretty wiped out.”
“Sorry to hear.”
“Yeah, well, at least it’s something superficial.”
Then Frank’s phone rang, and he went into his cubicle to answer. Anna couldn’t help but hear his end of it, as they had already been talking—and then also, as the call went on, his voice got louder several times. At one point he said “You’re kidding” four times in a row, each time sounding more incredulous. After that he only listened for a while, his fingers drumming on the tabletop next to his terminal.
Finally he said, “I don’t know what happened, Derek. You’re the one who’s in the best position to know that … Yeah that’s right. They must have had their reasons … Well you’ll be okay whatever happens, you were vested right? … Everyone has options they don’t exercise, don’t think about that, think about the stock you did have … Hey that’s one of the winning endgames. Go under, go public, or get bought. Congratulations … Yeah it’ll be fascinating to see, sure. Sure. Yeah, that is too bad. Okay yeah. Call me back with the whole story when I’m not at work here. Yeah bye.”
He hung up. There was a long silence from his cubicle.
Finally he got up from his chair, squeak-squeak. Anna swiveled to look, and there he was, standing in her doorway, expecting her to turn.
He made a funny face. “That was Derek Gaspar, out in San Diego. His company Torrey Pines Generique has been bought.”
“Oh really! That’s the one you helped start?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, congratulations then. Who bought it?”
“A bigger biotech called Small Delivery Systems, have you heard of it?”
“No.”
“I hadn’t either. It’s not one of the big pharmaceuticals by any means, midsized from what Derek says. Mostly into agropharmacy, he says, but they approached him and made the offer. He doesn’t know why.”
“They must have said?”
“Well, no. At least he doesn’t seem to be clear on why they did it.”
“But it’s still good, right? I thought this was what start-ups hope for.”
“True …”
“You’re not looking like someone who has just become a millionaire.”
He quickly waved that away, “It’s not that, I’m not involved like that. I was only a consultant, UCSD only lets you have a small involvement in outside firms, and I had to stop even that when I came here. Can’t be working for the feds and someone else too, you know.”
“Uh-huh.”
“My investments are in a blind trust, so who knows. I didn’t have much in Torrey Pines, and the trust may have gotten rid of it. I heard something that made me think they did. I would have if I were them.”
“Oh well that’s too bad then.”
“Yeah yeah,” frowning at her, “but that isn’t the problem.”
He stared out the window, across the atrium into all the other windows. There was a look on his face she had never seen before—chagrined—she couldn’t quite read it. Distressed.
“What is then?”
Quietly he said, “I don’t know.” Then: “The system is messed up.”
She said, “You should come to the brown-bag lecture tomorrow. Rudra Cakrin, the Khembali ambassador, is going to be talking about the Buddhist view of science. No, you should. You sound like them, at least sometimes.”
He frowned as if this were a criticism.
“No, come on. You’ll find it interesting, I’m sure.”
“Okay. Maybe. If I finish a letter I’m working on.”
He went back to his cubicle, sat down heavily. “God damn it,” Anna heard him say.
Then he started to type. It was like the sound of thought itself, a rapid-fire plastic tipping and tapping, interrupted by hard whaps of his thumb against the space bar. His keyboard really took a pounding sometimes.
He was still typing like a madman when Anna saw her clock and rushed out the door to try to get home on time.
The next morning Frank drove in with his farewell letter in a manila envelope. He had decided to elaborate on it, make it into a fully substantiated, crushing indictment of NSF, which, if taken seriously, might inspire some changes. He was going to give it directly to Diane Chang, head of NSF. Private letter, one hard copy. That way she could read it, consider it in private, and decide whether she wanted to do something about it. Whatever she did, he would have taken his shot at trying to improve the place, and could go back to real science with a clean conscience. Leave in peace. Leave some of the anger in him behind. Hopefully.
He had heavily revised the draft he had written on the flight back from San Diego. Bulked up the arguments, made the criticisms more specific, made some concrete suggestions for improvements. It was still a pretty devastating indictment, but this time it was all in the tone of a scientific paper. No getting mad or getting eloquent. Neither chicken nor ostrich. Five pages single-spaced, even after he had cut it to the bone. Well, they needed a kick in the pants. This would certainly do that.
He read it through one more time, then sat there in his office chair, tapping the manila envelope against his leg, looking sightlessly out into the atrium. Wondering, among other things, what had happened to Torrey Pines Generique. Wondering if the hire of Yann Pierzinski had had anything to do with it.
Suddenly he heaved out of his chair, walked to the elevators with the manila envelope and its contents, took an elevator up to the twelfth floor. Walked around to Diane’s office and nodded at Laveta, Diane’s secretary. He put the envelope in Diane’s in-box.
“She’s gone for today,” Laveta told him.
“That’s all right. Let her know when she comes in tomorrow that it’s there, will you? It’s personal.”
“All right.”
Back to the sixth floor. He went to his chair and sat down. It was done.
He heard Anna in her office, typing away. He recalled that this was the day she wanted him to join her at the brown-bag lecture. She had apparently helped to arrange for the Khembali ambassador to give the talk. Frank had seen it listed on a sheet announcing the series, posted next to the elevators:
“Purpose of Science from the Buddhist Perspective.”
It didn’t sound promising to him. Esoteric at best, and perhaps much worse. That would not be unusual for these lunch talks, they were a mixed bag. People were burnt out on regular lectures, the last thing they wanted to do at lunch was listen to more of the same, so this series was deliberately geared toward entertainment. Frank remembered seeing titles like “Antarctica as Utopia,” or “The Art of Body Imaging,” or “Ways Global Warming Can Help Us.” Apparently it was a case of the wackier the topic, the bigger the crowd.
This one would no doubt be well attended.
Anna’s door opened; she was leaving for the lecture.
“Are you going to come?” she asked.
“Yeah, sure.”
That pleased her. He accompanied her to the elevators, shaking his head at her, at himself. Up to the tenth floor, into the conference room. It held about two hundred people. When the Khembalis arrived, every seat was occupied.
Frank sat down near the back, pretending to work on his pad. Air-conditioned air fell on him like a blessing. People were sitting down in groups, talking about this and that. The Khembalis stood by the lectern. The old ambassador, Rudra Cakrin, wore his maroon robes, while the rest of the Khembali contingent were in off-white cotton pants and shirts, as if in India. Rudra Cakrin needed his mike lowered. His young assistant helped him, then adjusted his own. Translation; what a pain. Frank groaned soundlessly.
They tested the mikes, and the noise of talk dampened. The room was impressively full, Frank had to admit, wacky factor or not. These were people still interested enough in ideas to spend a lunch hour listening to a lecture on the philosophy of science. Surplus time and energy, given over to curiosity: a fundamental hominid behavioral trait. Also the basic trait that got people into science, surviving despite the mind-numbing regimes. Here he was himself, after all, and no one could be more burnt out than he was. Still following a tropism helplessly, like a sunflower turning to look at the sun.
The old monk cut quite a figure up at the lectern, incongruous at best. This might be an admirably curious audience, but it was also a skeptical gang of hardened old technocrats. A tough sell, one would think, for a wizened man in robes, now peering out at them as if from a distant century.
And yet there he stood, and here they sat. Something had brought them together, and it wasn’t just the air-conditioning. They sat in their chairs, attentive, courteous, open to new ideas. Frank felt a small glimmer of pride. This is how it had all begun, back in those Royal Society meetings in London in the 1660s: polite listening to a lecture by some odd person who was necessarily an autodidact; polite questions; the matter considered reasonably by all in attendance. An agreement to look at things reasonably. This was the start of it.
The old man stared out with a benign gaze. He seemed to mirror their attention, to study them.
“Good morning!” he said, then made a gesture to indicate that he had exhausted his store of English, except for what followed: “Thank you.”
His young assistant then said, “Rimpoche Rudra Cakrin, Khembalung’s ambassador to the United States, thanks you for coming to listen to him.”
A bit redundant that, but then the old man began to speak in his own language—Tibetan, Anna had said—a low, guttural sequence of sounds. Then he stopped, and the young man, Anna’s friend Drepung, began to translate.
“The rimpoche says, Buddhism begins in personal experience. Observation of one’s surroundings and one’s reactions, and one’s thoughts. There is a scientific … foundation to the process. He adds now, if I truly understand what you mean in the West when you say science. He says now, I hope you will tell me if I am wrong about it. But science seems to me to be about what happens that we can all agree on.”
Now Rudra Cakrin interrupted to ask a question of Drepung, who nodded, then added: “What can be asserted. That if you were to look into it, you would come to agree with the assertion. And everyone else would as well.”
A few people in the audience were nodding.
The old man spoke again.
Drepung said, “The things we can agree on are few, and general. And the closer to the time of the Buddha, the more general they are. Now, two thousand and five hundred years have passed, more or less, and we are in the age of the microscope, the telescope, and … the mathematical description of reality. These are realms we cannot experience directly with our senses. And yet we can still agree in what we say about these realms. Because they are linked in long chains of mathematical cause and effect, from what we can see.”
Rudra Cakrin smiled briefly, spoke. It began to seem to Frank that Drepung’s translated pronouncements were much longer than the old man’s utterances. Could Tibetan be so compact?
“This network is a very great accomplishment,” Drepung added.
Rudra Cakrin then sang in a low gravelly voice, like Louis Armstrong’s, only an octave lower.
Drepung chanted in English:
He who would understand the meaning of Buddha nature,
Must watch for the season and the causal relations.
Real life is the life of causes.
Rudra Cakrin followed this with some animated speech.
Drepung translated, “This brings up the concept of Buddha nature, rather than nature in itself. What is that difference? Buddha-nature is the appropriate … response to nature. The reply of the observing mind. Buddhist philosophy ultimately points to seeing reality as it is. And then …”
Rudra Cakrin spoke urgently.
“Then the response, the reply—the human moment—the things we say, and do, and think—that moment arrives. We come back to the realm of the expressible. The nature of reality—as we go deeper, language is left further behind. Even mathematics is no longer germane. But …”
The old man went on for quite some time, until Frank thought he saw Drepung make a gesture or expression with his eyelids, and instantly Rudra Cakrin stopped.
“But, when we come to what we should do, it returns to the simplest of words. Compassion. Right action. Helping others. It always stays that simple. Reduce suffering. There is something—reassuring in this. Greatest complexity of what is, greatest simplicity in what we should do. Much preferable to the reverse situation.”
Rudra Cakrin spoke in a much calmer voice now.
“Here again,” Drepung went on, “the two approaches overlap and are one. Science began as the hunt for food, comfort, health. We learned how things work in order to control them better. In order to reduce our suffering. The methods involved, observation and trial, in our tradition were refined in medical work. That went on for many ages. In the West, your doctors too did this, and in the process, became scientists. In Asia the Buddhist monks were the doctors, and they too worked on refining methods of observation and trial, to see if they could … reproduce their successes, when they had them.”
Rudra Cakrin nodded, put a hand to Drepung’s arm. He spoke briefly. Drepung said, “The two are now parallel studies. On the one hand, science has specialized, through mathematics and technology, on natural observations, finding out what is, and making new tools. On the other, Buddhism has specialized in human observations, to find out—how to become. Behave. What to do. How to go forward. Now, I say, they are like the two eyes in the head. Both necessary to create whole sight. Or rather … there is an old saying. Eyes that see, feet that walk. We could say that science is the eyes, Buddhism the feet.”
Frank listened to all this with ever more irritation. Here was a man arguing for a system of thought that had not contributed a single new bit of knowledge to the world for the last 2,500 years, and he had the nerve to put it on an equal basis with science, which was now adding millions of new facts to its accumulated store of knowledge every day. What a farce!
And yet his irritation was filled with uneasiness as well. The young translator kept saying things that weirdly echoed things Frank had thought, or answered questions occurring to Frank at that very moment. Frank thought, for instance, Well, how would all this compute if remembering that we are primates recently off the savannah, foragers with brains that grew to adapt to that surrounding, would any of this make sense? And at that very moment, answering a question from the audience (they seem to have shifted into that mode without a formal announcement of it), Drepung said, still translating the old man:
“We are animals. Animals whose wisdom has extended so far as to tell us we are mortal creatures. We die. For thousands of years we have known this. Much of our mental energy is spent avoiding this knowledge. We do not like to think of it. Then again, we know that even the cosmos is mortal. Reality is mortal. All things change ceaselessly. Nothing remains the same in time. Nothing can be held on to. The question then becomes, what do we do with this knowledge? How do we live with it? How do we make sense of it?”
