Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (9 page)

In a way it was like reliving the past, reenacting a version of the scorpion-collecting treks of my childhood—or just as easily, I could have inserted our faces (mine and my father's) in a
Land of the Lost
fantasy; instead of rushing through the rapids in a blow-up raft and plunging through a dinosaur-day time warp vortex like Father (and Will) and Holly did during each Saturday morning's opening credits, we trudged through Mexican desert sands and climbed the boulders in search of a certain dark cave.

As I've said, it probably wasn't the Mexican cave paintings themselves that mattered so much—what they looked like, I mean, or their shapes or intended meanings. It was the journey that mattered. And more specifically, it was the fact that this hike, this impromptu diversion from the highway, evolved spontaneously. My father had “heard about the trail from someone,” he'd said, “or else I read about it somewhere.” Based on that scrap of information, we asked the locals if they knew what we were searching for, if they knew where we could find the cave paintings.

And here we were.

The sun had moved slightly to the west by the time I caught up to my father. Several more makeshift signs pointed me in the right direction through the maze of boulders, and when I arrived at the base of a particularly high piling, maybe a hundred feet tall, my father called down to me, shouting and waving his arms overhead. I climbed up with ease. At the top of the rock pile we found the
respaldo
overhang, a cave-like shelter that had been formed when a massive boulder came to rest on smaller surrounding boulders. We stepped into a shallow tunnel that was perhaps ten feet deep, six feet wide and five feet tall. The ceiling and sloping sides of the cave were covered in pictographs, overlapping images painted in red, orange, yellow, black, and white.

We sat for a long while in the shaded overhang, sipping from our canteens and gazing silently at the faded amorphous shapes stained into the granite walls. I didn't know what the pictures were supposed to represent or how to interpret them. It did appear to me, though, that this artwork had been created over a long stretch of time. Layers of images overlapped, with vivid lines—perhaps the most recent—covering bits of faded images beneath, and fainter images still beneath those. I imagine these walls had been decorated over time by many generations of indigenous kinsmen, extended family members from long-lost tribes who reigned for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

I tried to make sense of these tantalizing pictures. A yellow circle with black lines radiating outward: perhaps a sun. A red circle outlining a larger red circle: maybe an eclipsed moon. A cloud shape filled with dots: a rare, impending storm. A long yellow cylinder, narrowed to a point at both ends, with claw-like protrusions reaching outward from the belly: could be a scorpion. Two squiggly lines paralleling each other, trailing up the wall, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top: a path. My brain tried to assign meaning to the chaos of images, but they were impossible to interpret.

My father and I didn't talk much, at least not then. We just sort of sat. Nodded, sipped.

“I have so many things I want to tell you,” my father finally said.

“Hmm?”

“About the origins of life and the universe and what it all means.”

Here he picked up the thread of what had been, since the onset of this road trip several days before, his ongoing monologue about the Big Bang, the chemical composition of the sun, the diameter of Jupiter, the evolution of life on Earth, the anatomy of scorpions prehistoric and present, the loves of his life unrequited and otherwise, career accomplishments and regrets, the impossibility of God, the impossibility of a universe without God, his hope for immortality—if not via the dogma of organized religion, then how? An associative, non-linear discourse that circled around itself and repeated many times—a soliloquy I'd hear for years to come, often verbatim, other times expanded, reframed, reimagined, re-questioned, re-answered. Curiosity pulses through my father's veins—his whole life has been a search for something more, a quest to answer his own intellectual queries, a series of questions that lead one to another, culminating with perhaps the biggest question of all: why are we here, us humans on Earth?

Isn't that the driving force behind so much of what we do? We seek answers. We want to know more. One question leads to another.

This strange motivation we humans have, to explore our world, to gain knowledge beyond what we need to survive, has taken us to the moon, expanded our mastery of internal medicine, and lent us a better understanding of our neurological functions, of our very genes. We search for our place among other humans—people living among us: father to daughter; people living epochs apart: prehistoric hunter to modern scholar. I'm drawn to these impos-sibilities—of understanding the world, understanding my father.

I'm still not exactly sure who sat with my father in the cave, which of my many selves sipped from the canteen. I was three people at once: part Holly, following her father in
Land of the Lost
; part Indiana Jones, swashbuckling through the snake-filled Well of Souls; and as much as I hate to admit it, part
Fear Factor
contestant, a bare-legged hiker craving a blended rat smoothie.

Herein lies a major difference between my father and myself: for him, the meaning of life might be found somewhere in absolute facts and scientific theory. For me, the answer (or at least part of the answer) might hide in the shadows cast by humans as they interact with nature and with each other. Still, I'm smitten by scientific inquiry. What fun it is to follow the circuitous path of question-leads-to-question—to reconstruct or deconstruct the making of knowledge based on observation and experimentation and quantifiable outcomes. But I'm even more interested in how the quantifiable sheds light on the unquantifiable, the human spirit. Human interaction. My own interaction with the world, with other people, my parents, myself.

When I study the personality traits my father and I share—our openness to adventure, our inquisitive minds, our fears that perhaps our personal and career accomplishments don't add up to anything that will outlive our mortal existence, our self-centered natures—perhaps I can find a place for myself on the spectrum of reconciliation that allows for our commonalities and our differences. While our individual choices and approaches to life differ, we also overlap. As I grapple with the new rules of engagement, as I take on these new adult-daughter responsibilities, obligations I simultaneously resist and surrender to (
even though you didn't take care of me one iota, dear father
), our relationship, even today, still evolves. I suspect that after he's gone, the relationship will continue to shape itself, to stretch and change from the perspective of hindsight.

So there we sat.

From inside the cave, which was very wide and shallow and not quite as dark as I'd imagined it would be, I watched the boulders' shadows stretch across the sand below. They overlapped, layers of shadows blending, morphing together in places yet remaining distinctly separate in others. Keeping pace with the sun's migration, the shadows stretched eastward and elongated so slowly that their inch-by-inch evolution was almost imperceptible. But they did move nonetheless.

 

PART III

Sitting-Up Mud

 

Twenty-Two

 

(2013)—

When I arrive at my mother's assisted-living apartment, she's sitting in silence with the blinds drawn. The caregivers dote on her. They would open the blinds if she would only push the button on the pendent she wears around her neck and ask, but my mother's cognitive connections, while improving at a slow, less-than-steady pace, aren't anything like they used to be, so it doesn't occur to her to let in the natural light. She's the youngest resident here. She requires a higher than average level of care—on a scale of one to four, one being independent and four being completely bedridden, she rates at level three, which sharply contrasts with her former, active and independent self.

Level three.

Life changes in an instant. One minute you're living your life—manning the Master Gardeners' booth at the farmers' market or making a cup of peach tea or helping your eight-year-old granddaughter memorize her multiplication tables—and the next minute you're on the floor, not sure if your granddaughter heard you say she should call 911 right away, not sure if the sirens are outside your house or inside your head, not sure if those are your children gathered round you in the emergency room. You're incoherent when the Mayo Clinic–trained cardiologist whispers to your son and daughter, “Less than a one percent chance. Say your goodbyes.” No one survives a ruptured aortic dissection. No one has multiple strokes at once—ischemic on the right, subarachnoid hemorrhage on the left.

Sixty-seven years old.

It's not fair.

And even if you somehow survive—if you make it through a month of cardiovascular intensive care, months of sub-acute hospital care, multiple surgeries, multiple skilled nursing facilities, a summer of home healthcare in your daughter's spare room, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, cognitive therapy—what does it mean to merely “survive” if you're no longer your full self?

There in her new assisted-living studio apartment—a dim cave equipped with a call-button chain that dangles from the wall next to her motorized recliner, and an additional call-button pendent she wears like a necklace—my mother reaps the paltry rewards of her yearlong struggle that began a few minutes before that 911 call. Partly aware, partly not. Somewhat mobile, mostly not. Left side neglect; paralysis on one side—leg, arm, visual impairment. Chicken arm. Torso leaning, hunched chronically to the right. Weak as a baby bird. Flat affect. Chronic pain. Confusion. Short-term memory shot. Long-term memory spotty. Helpless, defiant, apathetic. Technically alive but sort of not.

To be in limbo is to inhabit an intermediate, ambivalent zone.

Level three.

 

Twenty-Three

 

I suppose my father and Stephen J. Gould are right. In the whole scheme of things, we're damn lucky to be alive in the first place.

You had a one in a googolplex chance of being here.

I'm grateful for that, to be alive. The world is a wonderful place. Relative to the universe's timeline, though, our lifespan is but a blip. A blip framed by...what? Nothingness? Darkness? Unaware, pure-matter existence? The universe is a swirling mass of atoms forming clumps of various things and then dissolving. Most of those atoms don't get to be alive at all. Most of those atoms don't get to be a person, fall in love, see sunsets, eat ice cream and ride bikes, feel the ground shake when the continent shifts.

Lean. Let up. Lean.

You and I are extraordinarily lucky to be one of the select, fortunate few. Kurt Vonnegut conveyed a certain kind of gratitude in his book,
Cat's Cradle
, in a deathbed confessional prayer expressed by one of his characters:

God made mud.

God got lonesome.

So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up.”

“See all I've made,” said God. “The hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”

And I, with some of the mud, had got to sit up and look around.

Lucky me, lucky mud.

I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.

Nice going, God!

Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.

I feel very unimportant compared to You.

The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.

I got so much, and most mud got so little.

Thank you for the honor.

Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.

What memories for mud to have!

What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!

I loved everything I saw.

I think what Vonnegut means is that whatever the content of your life, the fact that at least you've been able to live at all is something in itself. Most mud isn't lucky enough to sit up. We're the sitting-up mud, you and I.

You had a one in a googolplex chance of being here today.

I guess the question is, then: how should we live, knowing that we're a statistical long shot and we're going to die? My immediate response is that perhaps we should be careful. Live cautiously.

Many years back, my mom and I would sometimes watch
Hill Street Blues
, a television cop show that began every episode with the sergeant summing up the various crimes and investigations that would play out in the day's program. As he sent his men out to fight crime on the streets, he'd always end by saying, “Be careful out there.”

But the particular kind of care I have in mind isn't this logistical type of fact-based caution, where if you're not careful, you won't notice the big truck barreling down the street and you'll get hit and killed; or if you walk through the desert carelessly, you'll get bitten by a rattlesnake.

I stood in at least a four-foot snake-free radius, which included the upcoming two or three divots. I thought about turning back.

The fact that we're going to die seems intuitively to require a particular kind of care, because, to state the obvious, hey—you only go around once, right? The fact that we've got a finite lifes-pan requires us to face the fact that we could blow it. We could do it wrong. Sure, we might get some do-overs. If you live to be eighty years old, you have the chance to reappraise your life at, say, the age of thirty or forty or fifty, choose a new path. Buy a red sports car or donate all your worldly goods to charity. Or connect with your estranged daughter by taking a road trip to Baja, hike through the desert in search of ancient cave paintings. But knowing we'll die pushes us in the direction of thinking we've got to be very careful because we only have a limited period of time for those do-overs.