Zadie Smith - White Teeth

Irie let out a little scream and rushed to give her grandmother another hug.

Hortense wiped her tears with her apron. ‘Lord Jesus, I live dis century! Well and truly I live dis terrible century wid all its troubles and vexations. And tanks to you, Lord, I’m gwan a feel a rumble at both ends.’

‘Excuse me, you’re not going to smoke that, are you?’

Marcus closed his eyes. He hated the construction. He always wanted to reply with equal grammatical perversity: Yes, I’m not going to smoke that. No, I am going to smoke that.

‘Excuse me, I said you’re-’

‘Yes, I heard you the first time,’ said Marcus softly, turning to his right to see the speaker with whom he shared a single arm-rest, each two chairs being assigned only one between them in the long line of moulded plastic. ‘Is there a reason why I shouldn’t?’

Irritation vanished at the sight of his interlocutor: a slim, pretty Asian girl, with an alluring gap between her front teeth, army trousers and a high ponytail, who was holding in her lap (of all things!) a copy of his collaborative pop science book of last spring (with the novelist Surrey T. Banks), Time Bombs and Body Clocks: Adventures in Our Genetic Future .

‘Yes, there’s a reason, arsehole . You can’t smoke in Heathrow. Not in this bit of it. And you certainly can’t smoke a fucking pipe . And these chairs are welded to each other and I’ve got asthma. Enough reasons?’

Marcus shrugged amiably. ‘Yes, more than. Good book?’

This was a new experience for Marcus. Meeting one of his readers. Meeting one of his readers in the waiting lounge of an airport. He had been a writer of academic texts all his life, texts whose audience was tiny and select, whose members he more often than not knew personally. He had never sent his work off into the world like a party-popper, unsure where the different strands would land.

‘Pardon?’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t smoke if you don’t want me to. I was just wondering, is it a good book?’

The girl screwed up her face, which was not as pretty as Marcus had first thought, the jawline a tad too severe. She closed the book (she was halfway through) and looked at its cover as if she had forgotten which book it was.

‘Oh, it’s all right, I suppose. Bit bloody weird. Bit of a headfuck.’

Marcus frowned. The book had been his agent’s idea: a split-level high/low culture book, whereby Marcus wrote a ‘hard science’ chapter on one particular development in genetics and then the novelist wrote a twin chapter exploring these ideas from a futuristic, fictional, what-if-this-led-to-this point of view, and so on for eight chapters each. Marcus had university-bound sons plus Magid’s law schooling to think about, and he had agreed to the project for pecuniary reasons. To that end, the book had not been the hit that was hoped for or required, and Marcus, when he thought of it at all, thought it was a failure. But weird? A headfuck?

‘Umm, in what way weird ?’

The girl looked suddenly suspicious. ‘What is this? An interrogation?’

Marcus shrank back a little. His Chalfenist confidence was always less evident when he strayed abroad, away from the bosom of his family. He was a direct man who saw no point in asking anything other than the direct questions, but in recent years he had become aware that this directness did not always garner direct answers from strangers, as it did in his own small circle. In the outside world, outside of his college and home, one had to add things to speech. Particularly if one was somewhat strange-looking, as Marcus gathered he was; if one was a little old, with eccentric curly hair and spectacles missing their lower rims. You had to add things to your speech to make it more palatable. Niceties, throwaway phrases, pleases and thank yous.

‘No, not an interrogation. I was just thinking of reading it myself, you see. I heard it was quite good, you know. And I was wondering why you thought it was weird.’

The girl, deciding at that moment that Marcus was neither mass murderer nor rapist, let her muscles relax and slid back in her chair. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Not so much weird, I guess, more scary .’

‘Scary how?’

‘Well, it’s scary isn’t it, all this genetic engineering.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yeah, you know, messing about with the body. They reckon there’s a gene for intelligence, sexuality – practically everything, you know? Recombinant DNA technology,’ said the girl, using the term cautiously, as if testing the water to see how much Marcus knew. Seeing no recognition in his face, she continued with more confidence. ‘Once you know the restriction enzyme for a particular, like, bit of DNA, you can switch anything on or off, like a bloody stereo. That’s what they’re doing to those poor mice. It’s pretty fucking scary. Not to mention, like, the pathogenic, i.e., disease-producing , organisms they’ve got sitting in petri dishes all over the place. I mean, I’m a politics student, yeah, and I’m like: what are they creating? And who do they want to wipe out? You’ve got to be seriously naive if you don’t think the West intend to use this shit in the East, on the Arabs. Quick way to deal with the fundamentalist Muslims – no, seriously, man,’ said the girl in response to a raised eyebrow from Marcus, ‘things are getting scary. I mean, reading this shit you just realize how close science is to science fiction.’

As far as Marcus could see, science and science fiction were like ships in the night, passing each other in the fog. A science fiction robot, for example – even his son Oscar’s expectation of a robot – was a thousand years ahead of anything either robotics or artificial intelligence could yet achieve. While the robots in Oscar’s mind were singing, dancing and empathizing with his every joy and fear, over at MIT some poor bastard was slowly and painstakingly trying to get a machine to re-create the movements of a single human thumb. On the flip side of the coin, the simplest biological facts, the structure of animal cells for instance, were a mystery to all but fourteen-year-old children and scientists like himself; the former spending their time drawing them in class, the latter injecting them with foreign DNA. In between, or so it appeared to Marcus, flowed a great ocean of idiots, conspiracists, religious lunatics, presumptuous novelists, animal-rights activists, students of politics, and all the other breeds of fundamentalists who professed strange objections to his life’s work. In the past few months, since his FutureMouse had gained some public attention, he had been forced to believe in these people, believe they actually existed en masse, and this was as hard for him as being taken to the bottom of the garden and told that here lived fairies.