Perfect People

26

Four news vans were parked outside the university entrance as John approached, hurrying for his meeting. In front of them stood a gaggle of people, some holding cameras, some microphones. He heard his name called out. Then again, more loudly.

‘Dr Klaesson?’

He heard a different voice say, ‘Are you sure that’s him?’

‘That’s Dr Klaesson!’

A short, dark-haired woman he vaguely recognized, with an attractive but hard face, thrust a microphone in front of him. Then he remembered why she was familiar: he saw her face often on a news show. ‘Dr Klaesson, could you tell me why you and your wife made the decision to have a designer baby?’

Another microphone was thrust in his face. ‘Dr Klaesson, when actually is your baby due?’

Then a third microphone. ‘Dr Klaesson, can you confirm that you and your wife have preselected the sex of your child?’

John weaved through them and, more politely than he felt, said, ‘I’m sorry, this is private, I have nothing to say.’

He felt a moment’s relief when the elevator doors closed behind him in the lobby. Then he began to shake.

We still retain many of our primitive instincts, he thought, arriving in a harassed state ten minutes late for the meeting. Before man had learned to speak, he relied so much on his eyes, observing body language. The way people held their bodies, shifted in their seats, positioned their arms and hands, moved their eyes, told you everything.

He felt like he’d just entered a room that had been skewed ever so slightly out of kilter. The ten colleagues with whom he had worked closely for the past two and a half years, and thought he knew reasonably well, all seemed to be in a very strange space this morning. He felt like an intruder who had entered a private club.

Mumbling an apology for being late, John sat at the conference table, dug his BlackBerry out of his pocket and his laptop out of his bag and placed them in front of him. His colleagues waited for him in silence. John didn’t want to be in this meeting at all right now; he wanted to be in his office and on the phone to the reporter.

Sally Kimberly.

Wow! I must give Naomi a call, have lunch with her!

He was almost beside himself with anger at the woman.

Off the record. It had been off the bloody record. She’d no right to print a word of what he’d told her.

‘Are you OK, John?’ Saul Haranchek asked in his nasal Philadelphia accent.

John nodded.

Nine pairs of eyes flashed doubt at him, but no one commented and they got on with the business of the meeting, which was to review their current curriculum. But after only a short while, as had become the norm these past few months, the meeting turned to the more pressing question on everyone’s mind: what was going to happen to the department collectively, and to themselves individually, at the end of the next year? Saul Haranchek had tenure, but for the rest the future was still bleak. None of the government funding agencies, institutions, charities, companies or other universities they had approached had yet shown any interest.

John contributed nothing to the discussion. With the newspaper headline this morning, and the expression on his colleagues’ faces, he wasn’t sure he had any kind of a future in academic research.

He wasn’t even sure he had any future in his marriage either.

At half past nine he pocketed his phone, picked up his computer, grabbed his bag and stood up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Please excuse me, I-’ he hurried out of the conference room without finishing his sentence.

He walked down the corridor towards his office, his eyes brimming with tears, hoping to hell not to bump into any of his students, unlocked the door and went in, closing it behind him.

There was a pile of mail on his desk, and thirty-one new messages on his voice mail.

Christ.

And fifty-seven new emails.

His phone rang. It was Naomi, sounding livid.

‘I’m being bombarded with calls here. Your new lover’s done a great job circulating my office number.’

‘Jesus, Naomi, she is not my bloody lover!’ he yelled, then immediately felt terrible. This wasn’t her fault, she had done nothing to deserve this; it was his own stupid goddamn fault. No one else’s. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘I-’

She had rung off.

Shit.

He dialled her direct line number but it was busy.

He looked despairingly at the phone, at his computer screen, at the bare walls of his office. His secretary had stuck this morning’s post on his desk and near the top of the pile was a handwritten Jiffy bag with something hard inside. Curious, he ripped it open with the silver letter knife Naomi had given him for Christmas, and pulled out the contents, two stiff sheets of card held together by elastic bands, protecting something.

Inside was the photograph of Naomi that had been missing from his desk, the one of her taken in Turkey. The photograph that was on the front page of USA Today.

A folded slip of paper was also in the envelope. A short, handwritten note, with no address and no phone number. It said:

Hi John! It was great meeting you. Thanks for lending me this! All the best. Sally Kimberly.

You bitch! My Christ, you bitch!

His door opened. Saul Haranchek came in. ‘Can I – er – bother you for a moment, John?’ He hovered, rocking on his beat-up trainers, wringing his hands as if he bore news of the end of the world.

John looked at him and said nothing.

‘You’re a dark horse,’ he said. ‘I ah – we – I mean – like – none of us – you know – we didn’t have any idea that you and-’ He wrung his hands again. ‘Look – your private life is your affair but I – someone showed me the newspaper – USA Today. ’ He shook his head nervously. ‘If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine – just tell me?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ John said.

Nodding like some kind of automaton, Saul Haranchek turned back towards the door. ‘OK, right-’

Interrupting, John said, ‘Saul – look, I don’t mean it that way, it’s just – I guess – I’ve blown my chance of tenure, right?’

His phone was ringing again.

‘You want to take that?’ Haranchek said.

John answered it, in case it was Sally Kimberly. It wasn’t. It was a woman called Barbara Stratton asking if he could do a quick down-the-line radio interview. He told her again more politely than he felt that he couldn’t, and replaced the receiver. ‘I’ve been an idiot, Saul,’ he said.

‘Is it true what I read? Did you and Naomi really go to Dettore?’

The phone was ringing again. John ignored it. ‘It’s true.’

Haranchek put his hands on the top of a chair-back. ‘Oh boy.’

‘Do you know something about him?’

‘He was right here at this university back in the eighties for a couple of years. But no, I don’t know anything about him – only what I read – and now he’s dead, right?’

‘Yes. Do you have a view on his work?’

‘He was a smart guy – had an IQ that was off the scale. Having a high IQ doesn’t necessarily make you a great human being, or even a good one. It just means you can do shit in your head that other people can’t do.’

John said nothing.

‘Look, it’s none of my business. I’m rude to ask about it. But the real problem is, John, that this article doesn’t do your credibility as a scientist much good – nor our department, by implication.’

‘The truth is not at all how the paper put it, Saul. You know how things get distorted. Papers love to claim that science is more advanced than it really is.’

His colleague looked at him dubiously.

‘You want me to resign? Is that what you’re saying?’

Haranchek shook his head adamantly. ‘Absolutely not. No question. It’s unfortunate timing – let’s leave it at that.’

‘I’m sorry, Saul,’ he said. ‘Is there anything I can do to salvage my tenure chances?’

Haranchek glanced at his watch. ‘I have to get back to the meeting.’

‘Apologize for me, will you, Saul?’

‘You got it.’ He closed the door.

John stared down again at the note from Sally Kimberly. Although angry at her, he was even more angry at his own stupidity. He’d been nice to her, opened up to her in the hope she would do a good piece on his department. Why the hell hadn’t he remembered the world didn’t work that way?

He got himself a coffee then sat down. Almost immediately his phone rang again. It was Naomi and her voice was very small and quavering. ‘John, have you seen the news – in the past half hour?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Why, what it is?’

‘Dr Dettore. He was killed by religious fanatics – they’re claiming responsibility, saying Dettore worked for Satan. They’re called the Disciples of the Third Millennium. They’re saying they put a bomb on the helicopter. And they’ve announced that anyone tampering with genetics will be a legitimate target. I’m really frightened, John.’