The Mechanic's Daughter

The Mechanic's Daughter Part 15 : Paramecium love

Nancy Burden called Nikki to say she had news. Nikki asked Barbara and me to come with her, all of us squeezing into Burden's tiny office. She didn't question our presence.

"I have investigated what happened to you, Nikki, and have been able to identify three the students involved," she said. "Disciplinary action will be taken against these three young men. Two will face a full expulsion – the other has a three-month suspension. This action does not preclude some sort of charges laid by police, but I have to say the police have not been proactive in this matter. They were forthcoming with the evidence from the medical exam, but I do not expect them to go further once the university has acted."

Nikki bit her lips. "Can we know who they are?"

Nancy Burden named them. I did not know the boys involved, but Nikki began crying quietly. I put my hand on her shoulder. The little room seemed stifling.

"Who is getting the suspension and why is he different from the others?" Barbara asked.

"He was the one to take Nikki to the empty bedroom. He claims they had consensual sex. And Nikki admitted herself that she may have agreed to it before she passed out. The board deliberated a long time over this young man – as it did not want to seem to be punishing a male student for having intercourse in a case where the female student has consented. But we concluded that his conduct was not appropriate, in part because Nikki had had so much to drink. She was not capable of making a rational decision."

Nikki snorted incredulously. "He's being punished because he went ahead when I was so drunk?"

"He used very poor judgment, then he left you open to abuse later. This young man was not co-operative with my investigation. We felt there should be consequences."

"Can you go further? Is there any movement toward getting better security on campus?." The question was from Barbara, but it made Nikki straighten and wipe the tears from her face.

"I'm afraid the university now considers this matter closed. It wishes me to return to my usual duties. But I want to thank you, Barbara, for your quick action in rescuing Nikki and getting her to hospital. Also for pressing for an investigation. I'm afraid many people on this campus have some way to come in their attitudes toward women."

"I'm going to do some conscious-raising."

"Yes, well. Good luck."

She told Nikki the expelled students have already left the campus, and offered professional counselling through the student health clinic. Nikki nodded mutely.

It seemed an anti-climax. I was amazed that anything had happened and kept expected to hear something to counter these measures. We all trooped out and climbed into Magda and went to buy some wine.

"You know, it should always count as rape when a woman is too drunk to consent," Barbara said in the car.

At Barbara's we got on the phone to call other women who helped us, and soon most of Barbara's Thursday night women's group were in the house. Barbara held court about her plans for consciousness raising and maybe women's self- defence. Nora was on a soapbox about sexual harassment in the workplace. The music was playing and people were laughing and drinking the wine before I noticed that Nikki was no longer in the room.

I found her in her bedroom, lying curled on the bed. She was staring at the patterned wallpaper in front of her – not crying, her body radiating tension. I shut the door and sat on the chair by the bed.

She rolled over to look at me. "You know that one boy, the first one, he could be back here next year."

"We know who he is, Nikki. He can't hurt you."

"I know I should be grateful something has been done, that someone is being punished. But it's like they just walk away. No one stares at them and wonders why they're all changed."

The statement didn't need a reply, not from a friend.

"It's true, though. I was too drunk to consent. I can't even look at wine."

 I nodded and studied the M.C. Escher posters she has up on the walls, trying to follow a set of stairs up to their logical end point. The perspective was wrong. "Is it meant to be a nightmare or just a visual joke?"

"I see it as kind of like my life – an impossible maze." Nikki's voice seemed more cheerful as if she'd caught some of the optimism in the music percolating up from below us – Stevie Nicks's sweet tones.

"Seems like we're in for some conscious-raising."

"Ah, don't want to talk about that. Tell me about that guy you had the date with. How was it?"

It was the most personal thing Nikki has asked me to date. I haven't spoken to Cheryl since she left after Christmas and I need to tell someone about Andrew's kiss. Just to make it real.

Then we went downstairs together and Nikki was absorbed into the party. I ended up talking to Marion, who described a new project to study the reproductive cycle of the paramecium. These single-celled organisms live in fresh water. Most of the time they reproduce by simply splitting in two, but every so many generations there must be what she called "an exchange of genetic information" between unrelated paramecia. Marion was attempting to determine how they achieve genetic diversity.

"The two of them get together and this exchange goes on – no one is quite sure how," she said, speaking as if she's sharing a personal secret. The world-weariness she adopted when talking about men dropped away with this topic. "It can last for eight hours."

"So every ten generations or so, someone gets to have really great sex." My head had been in this track for days; I wasn't proud of it.

She looked at me and laughed. "Have a little respect. I spend my life researching this stuff. There's no comparison to mammals. I want to find out what the trigger is – if it's number of generations or some breakdown in the genetic makeup."

I thought the university's decision to expel those boys was the high point of my week. But now I was caught up in the mystery of paramecium love. Creatures so simple they are a single cell, yet so complex that we did not know how they reproduce successfully. Though I'd never thought about them before, the paramecia seem to fit so beautifully into the heirarchy of the natural world. I felt the kinship of all carbon-based creatures. It altered my concept of water. It could be moving gently, seeming clear and empty, but all the time it was alive with single-celled creatures. I asked her how a paramecium chose a mate.

"Is it just the paramecium next door? Or someone who has certain attractive features of the paramecium world?"

"I don't know yet. My theory is that they're attracted to the one that's most genetically different. That would make sense for strengthening the species." This was the real Marion, who thought like a scientist.

"Makes you wonder about people, doesn't it?"

"Yes, I think about that all the time. Whether love is just chemistry and we just imbue it with emotion because the human head has a tendency to magical thinking."

"Would it do us any good, to know it was chemistry?"

"Maybe not. Maybe we'd still feel as strongly. But at least, we'd be aware."

Aware. Walking around with your eyes open. It ought to be the feminist mantra.