Intimations of Geography

chapter one -- fourteen million generations

Her astigmatism was advancing slowly; boundaries of white on black spawned frustrating ghosts, and the crosshairs of her favorite thirty-ought-six underwent a sickly mitosis. Streetlights bled into the night sky as though a thumb were smudging them.

"Up and to the left," she said with a vague grin, a portent of the wry commentary which was to come. She pulled her right hand from her jacket pocket, and drew her thumb across her stomach and chest from navel to left shoulder. "Just like the bastard who caught me a few years back."

"Did I forget to tell you about that? Well shit, what the hell do I keep you around for if I can't do the proper thing and tell you when I get knifed?"

Jane reached across the arms of her chair, placing the rifle on the floor. She stood up from her seat and made a face; she called it the closest she could get to real regret. She claimed to be devoid of a natural-born conscience and eventually learned to make faces when context or social pressure indicated a certain emotional response. They strongly resembled those made by newborns in the first weeks of life, comically exaggerated contortions which look wholly unintentional. Among the emotions which her various lovers and friends were able to distinguish, her display of regret and apology was the least comical. Eyebrows dipping sharply in the center of her face, making a clear V with the bridge of her nose, and the edges of her mouth easing slowly into the most subtle of frowns, she reeked -- visually -- of genuine remorse. Without exception, she garnered ample forgiveness and even praise for her compassion and forthright apologies. She was well known in the Los Angeles circles through which she moved for her ability to emote severely, never failing to provoke an empathetic response from her accusers.

Jane continued making that face even after she had walked past Lincoln, her long, slender fingers gripping his shoulder as she went by. Her grasp was reassuring, conveying to Lincoln that she genuinely sought his forgiveness for such an unforgivable breach of etiquette. Lincoln's posture relaxed slightly after having stiffened when he had heard of her mishap with "the bastard" some years before.

She made her way into the small alcove of her loft which served as her kitchen and locus of inspiration. Various firearms and other weaponry were strewn about in a haphazard way, as though in some alternate reality everyone kept derringers, morning stars, and Navy SEAL knives laying around the kitchen. In her loft, it looked natural, in much the same way that plates with half-eaten, woefully desiccated eggs would look in a bachelor's sink. As she approached the Hotpoint gas-powered refrigerator and opened it, a small cascade of unused .22 long-rifle bullets cascaded from the butter tray to the floor, reverberating like an automatic-weapon barrage in microcosm.

"Damn, if I've told him once..." she trailed off as she began to gather the bullets into a small collection in the center of the floor beneath the fridge.

Lincoln turned to investigate the cause of the noise and Jane's venting, stood from his stool beneath the industrial-shaded window, and crossed the concrete floor to the part of the room which served Jane as kitchen (when the mood to eat struck her). The boundary and shape of the shells on the floor reminded him of images from his college days in Seattle, watching slides of spirochete bacteria multiplying in a sucrose-agar medium. Two could become sixteen million in a 24-hour period.

"Exponential," said Lincoln under his breath as he stooped to gather the cold bullets from the floor. After a few moments, he said, more loudly, "I wonder why people are so surprised by the fact that antibiotics aren't working anymore. Think about it."

"Think about what?" asked Jane as she patiently plucked the shells, bullet by bullet, and placed them carefully in the butter tray of the open refrigerator door.

"I mean, they've been going through a bunch of these generations, right?"

"Sure they have, love. Sure. Now would you mind terribly sharing with me what exactly the fuck you're thinking? You're going non sequitur on me and it makes me nervous when you do that. I'm supposed to be the impulsive one, don't you forget that."

"Sorry. The way these shells are laid out on the floor makes them look like bacteria in a petri dish. I mean some bacteria can go through, what, three divisions in an hour. Provided, of course, ideal conditions of resources, temperature, and environment. That's 72 generations in a day. Penicillin was discovered in the twenties, came into wide use in the forties and fifties. Let's assume that antibiotics have been in use an even fifty years, so-"

"OK. Let's assume. I love to make assumptions, things like I'm assuming that you know what you're talking about, and I'm assuming that your ever-so-extensive training in the biological arts provides you with a pedigree of the level of Watson and Crick and whatever-his-name-is..." Lincoln took this slight pause as an opportunity to make his point.

"Fleming. Alexander Flem-"

"...and that I should therefore stop picking up my damn bullets so they don't get warm because I'm about to hear the most important thing I've heard since my dad told me not to eat the bleach under the sink. Let's just assume."

There was a slight pause. Jane could hear the ice-maker in the freezer dump another load of cubes into the ice tray.

"Thank you. May I continue?"

"I would assume so," said Jane.

"Where was I?"

"Making wild assumptions," said Jane nonchalantly as she picked up another bullet and dropped it into the butter tray. Click.

"A little more than that, please?" begged Lincoln.

"Um, something about fifty years..."

"Yeah, so let's assume that antibiotics have been in extensive use for fifty years, and you know that prostitutes from Bangkok to Rio de Janeiro to West Africa to fuckin' Calcutta have been popping these things like aspirin, so, um, fifty years. That's what, in generations..."

Lincoln got a look on his face of a three-year-old child trying to get a lace through the eyehole of his shoes. Suddenly, his face lit up.

"Somewhere between thirteen and fourteen million generations."

"Excellent, Linc. You figured that out all by yourself. I'll give you a little silver star sticker that you can put on your collar."

"What I'm saying is, how many generations of people have there been since the fifties?"

"Well, there was the beat generation, you know Kerouac and Ginsberg and that lot. Then there were the flower children, the disco generation, the Me generation... um... Generation X? Shit, they're a punk band from the seventies. Well, as far as Gen X is concerned, I'll go with Coupland's stipulation of the laziest, most hopeless, downtrodden, and disillusioned generation since The Great Gatsby... And what's these kids nowadays, the high schoolers? Let's call them-"

"Let's say that there has been a generation every fifteen to seventeen years since 1940, so we're talking, um, about four generations."

"The beatniks, the discolniks, and the refuseniks," declared Jane brightly as she picked the butter tray up from the floor, replacing it in the open refrigerator door. She pronounced the 'refuse' portion of refusenik as in another word for garbage.

"So to speak," responds Lincoln in his most digression-halting deadpan.

Jane rose to her full height, with a popping of her knees and a barely discernible grunt. After brushing some invisible dust from her legs and hands, she spun on her heel, closed the fridge, and returned to the conversation space which lay between her and the south-facing windows. She sank back into her favorite chair, a deep-blue overstuffed armchair with aluminum legs which had the brushed, frosted look of standard assay weights. With her right leg crossed under her and her left dangling over the arm of the chair, she turned and called toward the kitchen-area.

"So. Do you want to hear about the bastard or what?"

"Can I make my point?" called Lincoln from the kitchen, exasperated.

"You can get a Coke if you want one," said Jane.

"Gee, thanks."

"Yeah, no problem. After all, you're practically living here now anyway. Wanna go halves on rent?"

"Can I make my point?"

"You have one?"

"Yes. My point is, shit, what was my point? Where were we?"

"My point exactly," Jane sighed evenly.

"Ah, yes. They've got something like four million generations of evolution on us to each one of ours. Are the implications of this totally lost on you? I was watching the Discovery Channel, and there was a story about this lady in Ohio."

"The pedigree rears its ugly head. I'm in awe of your savantry."

"She had surgery for something... endometriosis or gall bladder or something. Then she got this wicked infection. The more antibiotics that they gave her, the sicker she got. Eventually, one of the doctors tried something. He put a pill in a petri dish, put the bacteria on it, and it started to multiply. The germs were using the drug as food."

"I know some people like that," interjected Jane wryly.

"So this doctor puts the same bacteria on a petri dish with a normal growth medium. The bacteria all die. You know what they figured out?"

"No, but I've figured out that you're going to tell me."

"They figured out that the bacteria weren't only resistant to the antibiotic, but needed it to multiply. You don't see that as a problem? It's evolution gone wild. By the time we're eighty, we'll be dying of things that they could've cured in the sixties. It's like medical science is moving backward, because we sure as hell can't seem to keep up."

"I see. So my hoarding of Ampicillin, Keflex, and Flagyl won't do me any good?"

"So to speak."

"Okay. I'm going to take a shower, and I'm going to use antibiotic soap. It is, of course, the equivalent of smoking an asbestos cigarette, after all. I'll get where I'm going faster."

"Alright, alright," said Lincoln, coming out of the kitchen and pouring his Coke into a glass that looked like an overturned Coke glass. On the side was a 7-Up logo and the words The Uncola. "I'll just hang out."

Jane got up from her half-lotus position on the armchair and swept out of the main living area, toward the accordion divider behind which she sleeps and changes her clothes.

In the closet which served Jane as a shower, the water which cascaded over her shoulders smelled distinctly of chlorine. Lincoln heard her complain to this end, and walked over toward the bedroom.

"You know, it's not done doing its job if you can still smell it. Means it hasn't finished killing all the microbes," he called out. Lincoln's habit was to over-pronounce words when uncertain of the linguistic, vocabulary, or hearing status of his listener. Jane was nonplussed.

She replied, in a barely distinguishable murmur, "That's why I use the antibiotic soap. It's my protector against the slavering masses of viruses, fungi, and bacteria which conspire to destroy me."

"I should think you would better worry about mysterious bastards."

Jane opened the shower door and began to dry off in the bedroom. Steam curled behind her, searching for a glass or metal object on which to condense. It found Lincoln's rimless glasses an ideal place. Frustrated, he removed his spectacles, conceding defeat to the most powerful substance in the physical world.

"I should think that you're beginning to imitate, in the most pedestrian and mediocre way, my convoluted grammatical patterns, dear. One might suggest that you be more careful when treading on such uncertain ground. Don't get me riled."

"Just tell me what you were about to tell me before you got in the shower."

Lincoln cleared the condensed water from his lenses. As Jane turned to face him, he saw her nude form, and was instantly drawn to the large, wide scar which ran from her navel, over her breast to her left shoulder, accompanied by staggered points where stitching entered and exited the skin. Taken aback, Lincoln turned away.

"I recognize that look on your face, Linc. It's the same look that burn victims and children with cleft palates get to see turn away just as eye contact is made while they're walking down the street."

"Oh, shit. I'm sorry, Jane," whispered Lincoln, still looking away. His focus was intent on some imaginary flaw in the slick concrete floor. "Look, I-"

"Why apologize? Was it you that did this? I doubt it. The bastard was taller than you."