The Second Cure Read online

  The burning agony of the blister causes the host to seek relief by immersing itself into cold water, and as the female emerges into the water, she releases her thousands of larvae. In turn, they’ll be eaten by copepods, and the cycle continues.

  Without the impulse to seek relief through water, humans (and other mammalian hosts) would not provide the parasite with the means to maintain its existence.

  Zinn, Charlotte, ‘Symbioses’, In: JF Thompson and C Loh, eds, Evolution and Ecology, 2nd ed, Fitzroy University Press, Sydney, 2012

  11.

  As they left the lecture theatre, Charlie and Shadrack were subtly escorted by two university security officers. She thought it was overkill, until the crowd of protesters outside made their presence heard with shouted abuse, including allegations of ‘eugenics’ and ‘vivisection’.

  ‘They probably don’t even know what that means,’ said Shadrack.

  ‘Maybe we should have coffee in the staffroom instead?’

  ‘Where’s your sense of adventure, Charlie?’ he answered, striding toward the cafeteria. She sighed and hurried to keep up. Shadrack, of course, had had his share of protesters over the years.

  Now Charlie watched him as he stood in the coffee queue, tapping emails into his mobile. The security guards had taken a table nearby. When had Shadrack turned grey? He wasn’t even forty. But he was still good-looking, and he knew it, judging by the carefully dishevelled shock of shoulder-length hair he’d retained, the fashionable spectacles, and the designer suit. Vanity was always his flaw – well, one of his flaws. It was the flaw that made him susceptible to the attentions of eager and admiring young students, the flaw that had seen him succumb to their adulation and destroy his marriage. She found herself wishing he’d aged badly, paunchy and jowly.

  She also wished she didn’t feel a vague pang of long-suppressed desire for him.

  He turned, as though he’d felt her gaze upon him, and sent her a lopsided smile, the one she’d once read as endearingly self-deprecating but later realised was just muscular weakness. She didn’t smile back, but instead went back to reading the paper someone had left on the table. Or pretending to read the paper. His sudden reappearance in her life had thrown her, but she was determined to maintain her cool. Keep it professional. When she looked back at him, she saw a couple of young students – male – in the queue behind him nudging each other as they watched him. They had recognised him. Shadrack had quite a following, particularly online, among certain types of post-adolescent fanboys. Sceptical, rationalist and atheist, they boasted high intelligence, less impressive interpersonal skills, and a keen knowledge of the Latin names of logical fallacies that they proudly displayed in social media flame wars. Argumentum ad verecundiam at thirty paces. Charlie had sporadically followed this online adulation over the years, sardonically entertained by the switch from besotted female undergrads to besotted male ones. She presumed he didn’t screw the latter, his dedicated heterosexuality having never been in doubt. These students didn’t get their chance to gush at him. He had taken possession of the coffees and was on his way back.

  She was still reeling over what he had revealed at the seminar. Her curiosity was so urgent that she had no room left to be angry with him for upstaging her. It was astounding research, and important not only because of its relationship to her work, but also because of Richard.

  Shadrack placed the two paper cups on the table. ‘Reed completely blindsided you with that, didn’t he? You had no idea I was going to be here.’

  ‘Not a clue,’ Charlie confirmed. She removed the tubes of sugar and artificial sweetener from their container and laid them on the table before her. Shadrack reached for one.

  ‘He hasn’t grown out of playing games, then.’ He poured the sugar into his flat white and stirred it with a wooden stick.

  ‘He’s even worse now he’s Head of Department.’ Charlie wasn’t letting her defences down, even though she was relieved to learn that Shadrack wasn’t part of Reed’s little stunt.

  ‘I really am sorry. I didn’t want to interrupt your big moment. And it is a very big moment. The work you’ve been doing is excellent.’

  She allowed him a small smile at that, and continued to line the sugar and the sweeteners up in neat rows.

  ‘I should have contacted you directly, and I would have if I’d realised Reed was just enlisting me to perform in his piece of psycho-theatre. I just thought that face-to-face would be easier. Given, you know, we haven’t talked for so long.’

  The last conversation was when Shadrack had rung from Harvard to check whether she’d received the divorce papers. Not one of the more uplifting moments in their relationship. She sipped her coffee, having no intention of making this any easier for him.

  ‘So, here’s the thing. I’ve got great access to MRIs, diffusion tensor imagers, a lab full of post-docs, funding. There’s a microbiologist on board, an immunologist –’

  ‘Where are you going with this, Shadrack? Apart from showing off?’

  ‘Ah, here you both are, thick as thieves …’ Reed was upon them, bland smile not reaching his eyes. ‘It’s like old times, my two best honours students, my two Zinns. May I join you?’

  Neither Charlie nor Shadrack responded. Reed took that in.

  ‘No, perhaps not,’ he said. ‘You’ve got lots to catch up on, after all. How is the lovely wife, Shadrack? Meredith, isn’t it?’

  ‘Divorced,’ said Shadrack, glancing at Charlie. She didn’t know wife number two was no longer. Nor did Reed, it seemed. His attempt to sink another barb into Charlie had failed.

  ‘And, yes, we do have a lot to discuss, actually,’ Shadrack told him. It was blunt enough for Reed to realise he was being snubbed.

  ‘I have a meeting with the VC shortly, anyway,’ said Reed, checking his watch. ‘I’d best make tracks.’ He cleared his throat, checked his watch again, nodded and left them.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, Charlie released a dry laugh. ‘God, I wish I could be that rude to him.’

  ‘Independent research beyond academe has its benefits. As I hope to persuade you.’

  ‘Are you offering me a job?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘A collaboration. Between you, my lab and Joseph Banks University. I think I could arrange a visiting fellowship up there, so you’ll have access to their resources, but the idea is to set you up with your own lab, your own team at Zinn Neurotech. We could make it a hub of excellence investigating all aspects of Toxoplasmosis pestis, the first in the world.’

  ‘You could afford me?’

  ‘I’ll double your current salary. Funding isn’t an issue, Charlie. We get significant resources from our commercial work and our benefactors, and it’s our policy to cross-subsidise worthwhile research projects. Mind you, once we’ve announced we’re chasing down the cure for pestis, we won’t be short of a penny anyway. I don’t need to remind you of the patent implications of a vaccine. The venture capitalists will be knifing each other to get at us.’

  ‘Well,’ she replied. This was not what she’d expected. ‘Can I think about it?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Shadrack.

  She began returning the paper tubes to the jar. She carefully divided them so that the sugars with their blue printing were on one side, the pink papered sweeteners on the other, a clear line between the two. His offer was more than tempting. The findings Shadrack had outlined during the seminar were tantalising. Brain changes caused by the parasite to the limbic system, to the visual and auditory cortices, to the temporal lobes … No wonder Shadrack was excited. This stuff was exactly what he loved in neuroscience, the physiological basis of perception and self. The field where he’d made his name – and infamy. With good resources for her work, no matter how it helped inform his, a cure might be found in time to save at least some cat species. Instead of writing endless grant applications, she could get straight down to business.

  But, but. It would mean relocating to Townsville, and Richard would never leave Sydney. And it woul
d mean working with her ex-husband.

  She changed the subject, returning to the topic that had led her to accept Shadrack’s offer of coffee. ‘Tell me about your synaesthesia findings. Are you really seeing a statistically significant correlation between Toxo infection and the onset of cross-modal interactions?’

  ‘We certainly are. We’ve documented a number of instances of rapid-onset grapheme-colour synaesthesia, as well as with sound, colour and texture.’

  ‘Going both ways? Sound triggering perceptions of colour and texture, and vice versa?’

  ‘Yep. And confirmed by fMRI scanning, showing activity stimulated in the relevant brain regions. One aspect that’s really intriguing is evidence in infected subjects of a disinhibition in cross-talk in multi-modal regions like the superior temporal sulcus.’

  Charlie wasn’t across the neurology and didn’t ask for clarification, but was quietly entertained that Shadrack would be attracted by the most dramatic neurological aspects of the infection. So typical. She put down her empty coffee cup. ‘My partner, Richard. He has developed synaesthesia – chromaesthesia – just in the last couple of weeks. He’s a painter and a composer, and when I came home the other night, he was having a florid episode, painting like a crazy person while he was listening to music full blast. It was terrifying; it was like he was possessed.’

  ‘Has he been tested for Toxo?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Does he want to be?’

  ‘I want him to be.’

  ‘Well,’ said Shadrack, ‘I’m here till mid next week, based over in the teaching hospital. I’m doing some scans of infected synaesthetes. I could fit him in, if you like?’

  ‘Let me talk with him, okay?’

  ‘No problem.’ He gave her his business card. ‘Mobile number’s on there.’

  She slipped it into her wallet. ‘Thanks, Shadrack.’

  He nodded at the neatly organised sugar container, his eyes twinkling. ‘You haven’t changed, have you? Still verging on OCD.’

  She threw him a sardonic look.

  ‘And you’re still letting people push you around. Like Reed.’

  She frowned. ‘Don’t judge me on today. I have changed, actually. Lots.’ She feared, though, that he was right. She was the one doing the research, she had the power. So why was she letting Reed get away with it?

  Shadrack was regarding her. She couldn’t maintain the eye contact. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘It would be weird if we hadn’t, after all these years. I better get back to the hospital. Lots to set up.’ He stood and looked at her. ‘It’s really good to see you again, Charlie.’

  She was happy to see him too, happier than she cared to admit. ‘And you. I’ll think about the job.’

  ‘You do that,’ he said. ‘Oh, one thing. You made a big mistake calling it Toxoplasmosis pestis.’

  ‘We did?’

  ‘Should have been Toxoplasmosis curiositas. Since it killed the cat.’

  She shook her head. ‘Shit, Shadrack. You’ve been waiting all day to drop that line in, haven’t you?’

  He feigned hurt feelings with a pout. ‘Maybe. A bit.’

  She watched him walk away through the melee of students invading the cafeteria, twelve o’clock lectures having just finished. Seeing Shadrack had left her unbalanced. Her ancient fury at him had morphed into anger at herself. Anger that she still cared. She picked up the coffee cups and tossed them into the recycling bin and then went back to work.

  12.

  Brisbane and Sydney

  ‘So, Effen Jerkberg, you’ve done it. All hail.’ She raised her bottle in a toast. Her second bottle.

  Brigid, in singlet, undies and a thin layer of perspiration, ate her takeaway satay tofu and noodles straight out of the container and drank her lager from the stubby. Her latest piece on Jack Effenberg – an analysis written in anticipation of his win – had earlier been uploaded to the Brisbane Chronicle, and she basked in the temporary bliss of having written the news before it happened. Stretched out on the sofa, the television screen visible between her naked feet, she’d been channel-hopping, catching as much as she could of the coverage of today’s successful leadership spill. Jack Effenberg had won in a landslide. Three opposed, two abstentions, and the rest prostrated themselves at the feet of his electoral popularity. Popularity among the faithful, anyway. If the loathing the left felt for him carried as much weight in votes as it did in passion, he wouldn’t have been able to win a bent chook raffle.

  Now Oversight, a flagship national current affairs program, was on, attempting a more in-depth report than the local commercials had managed. It looked at Premier Jack Effenberg’s history: his birth on a cattle station in southwest Queensland and the early death of his mother; his education at a boarding school famed for its exorbitant fees and population of sons of rich graziers; his membership of the National Conservative Party from the age of eighteen. He met his future wife, Marion, at a church camp when he was nineteen. They were married a year later, in 1973, and within five years had a child and had established the Song of Light New Apostolic Church together. There was no reference to his controversial mining interests, the affair he’d had with a colleague’s wife in the mid-nineties (which Marion had famously announced had strengthened their marriage, not weakened it, because God was sending them both an ‘important message’), and only a brief mention of the multiple lawsuits that once saw him close to being declared a vexatious litigant. A puff piece, in other words.

  ‘Pack of wusses,’ Brigid told the television. She was about to turn it off when a name caught her attention. The next item was an interview with ‘controversial neuroscientist and prominent New Atheist, Shadrack Zinn’. Two Zinns in a week? She wondered if this Shadrack and Richard’s Charlie were related. Not a very common name. And both scientists. The host was giving some background, some of which was vaguely familiar to Brigid. A man with a mane of grey hair and intense, earnest eyes appeared on the screen as the voiceover introduced him.

  ‘Doctor Zinn came to prominence in twenty oh-eight with the publication of his popular science book, The Neuroscience of Belief: politics, gods and the brain which was banned in a number of countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa. His claims that religious belief and conservative politics are based in neurological flaws in the brain drew fierce criticism from many quarters, notably in Iran, where a fatwa against him was decreed. In the US four years ago, during a lecture tour, Shadrack Zinn was shot in the leg when he confronted demonstrators in South Carolina. He is based in North Queensland, where he heads up a private research facility, Zinn Neurotechnologies. Doctor Zinn, welcome to the program.’

  ‘Thanks for having me.’

  ‘You have made some extraordinary claims about the effects of the “Cat Plague”, Toxoplasmosis pestis, on its human hosts.’

  ‘Host behavioural manipulation.’ He nodded. ‘It’s well understood as a process in many parasitical relationships. Zombie caterpillars that are forced by their flatworm parasites to display themselves to predators so they are ingested and the parasite life-cycle continues. There’s the horsehair worm, whose larvae infect grasshoppers, and force the grass-hopper host to commit suicide by jumping in water, where the adult worm can be released. But in this case, with humans being the host, my team and I have been looking at changes in brain function caused by the Toxoplasmosis pestis parasite. Now, we know that the original parasite, Toxoplasmosis gondii, has significant behavioural effects on its main hosts. In rats, it stops them from being repelled by the scent of cats, and they become attracted to cats. Changes like these occur, obviously, in the brain itself. So we’re using functional MRI and diffusion tensor imaging to examine changes in brain states, and increases and decreases in brain activity, in humans infected by pestis.’

  ‘And what have you found?’

  ‘We have found strong activity occurring in the anterior cingulate cortex and decreased activity in the amygdala.’

  ‘And that translates as what, in terms of beha
viour?’

  ‘A decrease in fear, in particular. It’s well established now, by my group and others, that fear and anxiety largely correlate with political conservatism. Simplifying, obviously, the conservative response to ambiguity initially tends to be emotional, processed in the more primitive part of the brain, with a lot of activity in the amygdala. There is increased disgust and greater cognitive rigidity. Socially progressive brains tend to activate the anterior cingulate cortex to a greater extent, analysing the value of the input and assessing more rationally the degree of threat. If the brain alterations we believe we are seeing in people infected with Toxoplasmosis pestis are in fact occurring, it is not implausible that the social effects could be significant. The political effects.’

  ‘You’ve stated before that you consider these traits in conservative brains to be more primitive, less evolved.’

  ‘Those certainly aren’t terms I have used, or that you will hear among serious evolutionary biologists. I have noted, however, the anterior cingulate cortex, like our large cerebral cortex, is a relatively new acquisition among mammals. The limbic system, and particularly the fight-or-flight response of the amygdala, by contrast, are ancient elements of the brain and behaviour. Their evolution back in the Pleistocene would have conferred a real benefit in term of survival – avoiding threats from others, from predators, even, in the case of disgust, from contaminated food. If those parts of the brain have greater primacy in some people, they’re going to look for political solutions that include black-and-white analyses, lack of tolerance for difference and change, authoritarianism, hierarchical structures and reassuring daddy-figures. Despots and gods.’