← Paper A4 — The Ascent of Man
Adam A5: The Same Room
It was clear now where the whole thing was going. He had felt it gathering for two papers, and now he could say it outright: they were walking toward the Life of Christ. Everything leaned that way — the Word entering the world, the body coming up out of the dust — a road to the manger, and they were most of the way down it.
What stopped him was the route. He had read, in his time, a great many attempts to walk a man to that particular door. He had never once seen anyone try to walk him there through evolution. Up the entire material climb — the first heavy nuclei, the stars cooking the carbon, the long patient business of the cell, the fish, the lizard, the small wary mammal, the ape that stood up — and then, without so much as clearing its throat, on through Roman Judea to a particular body in a particular year. The fossil record run straight into the crèche.
He sat with that a while. He was, he had to admit, genuinely stumped — and not in the way the other papers had stumped him, where the trick was somewhere in the room if only he bore down hard enough to find it. This was the flat kind. The kind a man feels in front of a thing he has simply never seen anyone do.
Because it was being done in the one place he had spent sixty years keeping the doors shut. There had always been two men inside him, and they had been careful, the whole of his life, never to be seen in the same room. The seminarian could argue from Vespers to Lauds over the weight of a single word — whether this Hebrew carried what that Greek had made of it, where precisely the line of a given sin was drawn — and it was joy, it was sport, the old men leaning in over the table. But let the talk come round to Darwin, or worse, his theories, and the young man who already knew perfectly well which way that conversation went, learned, and learned quickly, to bite his tongue and say nothing. The positions in that room had been staked out long before he walked into it. He had kept the peace the only way it could be kept: the scientist built his own house, off the grounds, and in sixty years had not once sat down at the same table with the Jesuit.
And here was a typed page, no return address, doing exactly that without a flicker — drawing out the second chair and seating the two of them together as though there had never been a quarrel, as though a man’s life did not have a wall laid straight down the middle of it, brick by brick, on purpose.
He did not reach for the red pencil. There was nothing here to mark. The science was the science he had believed his whole life; he could no more fault the ascent than fault the periodic table. And they had not, this time, overclaimed a single thing — they had only declined to keep the two rooms apart, and that was not an error he knew how to circle in red.
He read on, slower than before, with the unfamiliar sensation of a draught moving through a house — through a door he had nailed shut a long time ago, and which now, somehow, stood open.