Recombinant Random, or, A Tale of Transfection and Transfixion

Foreward

This is my attempt to capture all the things I love about Cincinnati, from the landscape to the architecture to the culture, the art scene and the academic scene, the swanky restaurants and the dive bars, the hometown heroes and the villains swept under the rug. As Quentin Tarantino said, I made this for myself and everyone else is invited.

Rated for sexy times, various vices, and foul language. If you're under 17, go elsewhere. While I'd love to warp your fragile little mind, your parents and society probably wouldn't appreciate it. To paraphrase xkcd, this contains excessive references to religion (inappropriate for scientists), excessive references to science (inappropriate for religious types) and extremely immature humor (inappropriate for adults).

With regards to the culture, geography, history, etc. of the settings, everything is 100% accurate to the best of my knowledge and experience unless otherwise stated. The same holds true for any science mumbo jumbo or descriptions of academia one may encounter. Any reference to landmarks, institutions, schools, restaurants, hospitals, bars, local celebrities, etc. is not intended to offend, but to inform and entertain. Also, the characters and a lot of the plot isn't mine. They're Stephenie Meyer's (gasp).

Musically speaking, it's a very exciting time to be in Cincinnati. We finally got our own music festival (Bunbury FTW), Foxy Shazam, Walk the Moon, and The National are getting nationwide airtime, and The Afghan Whigs are back together. Life is good. With very special exceptions, all mood music is by acts from or residing in Ohio and especially Cincinnati (which have been marked with an asterisk) and is available on Spotify. There's a reason the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Ohio, after all.

Likewise, all quotes are from Ohioans past and present—natives and transplants—or about Ohio in some way. I'm just trying really hard to prove that Ohio's not just farmland, you guys.

Full disclosure: I've been sitting on this for two years because I'm a coward and the anonymity of the internet freaks me out. I hope you like it, please be nice.

PTB betas: GetDrunkOnVictory and darcysmom

Mood Music

Deep Woods—Paavo Jarvi and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra

And We Begin at the Beginning…

August 2005

I must have been extremely bored to resort to this. Renée was late to pick me up—again—and I was glaring at the only real reading material in my backpack. With a sigh, I ran a nail up and down the piles of translucent rice paper and watched the sheets separate and fall back together.

It would be nearly two more years before I would be able to drive myself to and from school, but I ached for that day. I yearned for the independence. I wanted to set my own schedule instead of being a slave to my mother's warped sense of time. It was only my third week of high school in a new city, and she had been late twice before.

Glancing across the manicured lawn, illuminated by the unforgiving sun and bright green from the hot summer showers that had been occurring for the past couple of weeks, I felt the dejection rise again. Cars zoomed up and down the road beyond, but none turned onto the drive leading to the school building.

Determined not to waste time navel-gazing and do something a little more productive, I opened the book that everyone in my religion class—save myself—seemed to have a fundamental knowledge of and flipped to a page near the front.

You have to start somewhere, I reminded myself. Besides, the teacher had made the first half sound almost…exciting. He said it was a chronicle of "who's ruling who, who's slaying who, and who's screwing who."

As I glanced at the page, a bolded heading caught my eye. It sounded gripping enough, like the stuff of human drama. Taking heart, I read on.

The Fall of Man

Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals that the LORD God had made. The serpent asked the woman, "Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?"

The woman answered the serpent: "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;

it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, 'You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.'"

But the serpent said to the woman: "You certainly will not die!

No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad."

The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

When they heard the sound of the LORD God moving about in the garden at the breezy time of the day, the man and his wife hid themselves from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.

The LORD God then called to the man and asked him, "Where are you?"

He answered, "I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid myself."

Then he asked, "Who told you that you were naked? You have eaten, then, from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat!"

The man replied, "The woman whom you put here with me - she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate it."

The LORD God then asked the woman, "Why did you do such a thing?" The woman answered, "The serpent tricked me into it, so I ate it."

Then the LORD God said to the serpent: "Because you have done this, you shall be banned from all the animals and from all the wild creatures; On your belly shall you crawl, and dirt shall you eat all the days of your life.

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; He will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel."

To the woman he said: "I will intensify the pangs of your childbearing; in pain shall you bring forth children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall be your master."

To the man he said: "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat, "Cursed be the ground because of you! In toil shall you eat its yield all the days of your life.

Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you, as you eat of the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat, Until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; For you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return."

The man called his wife Eve, because she became the mother of all the living.

For the man and his wife the LORD God made leather garments, with which he clothed them.

Then the LORD God said: "See! The man has become like one of us, knowing what is good and what is bad! Therefore, he must not be allowed to put out his hand to take fruit from the tree of life also, and thus eat of it and live forever."

The LORD God therefore banished him from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he had been taken.

When he expelled the man, he settled him east of the garden of Eden; and he stationed the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.

By the time I reached the last words, my mother had arrived. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught her turn into the long semicircular drive leading up to the school. I sped to gather all my things and raced to jump in to the air-conditioned car, escaping the sticky and hot late afternoon.

"I'm so sorry I'm late, baby, I couldn't find the keys! They ended up in the fridge somehow," she laughed.

I smiled at how easily I could see her doing such a thing.

"What was that I saw you reading to pass the time?"

"I was reading about the Garden of Eden," I shrugged.

"Ooh, an oldie but a goodie. That reminds me—do you want me to show you Eden Park this weekend? If my memory serves me, it was built because a bunch of priests decided a long time ago that it was the Garden of Eden."

"No kidding," I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.

"When I was a kid, my neighbor was an old lady who went to the dedication. It hasn't quite been a paradise on earth, though. Once, a bootlegger chased his wife's cab there and shot her after their divorce hearing while his daughter was in the car. And Mirror Lake's there. I remember all the tales the older kids would tell about it. Supposedly, it's only a few feet deep, but the bottom is quicksand so everyone who falls in drowns. My friends and I would take turns walking along the edge to see who was the bravest. The park itself is breathtaking, though." She sounded like a child telling her friends about the PG-13 movie she'd secretly watched, with how she excitedly retold her illicit and gruesome anecdotes.

I tapped my fingers on the dashboard. "Mom?"

"Yes, honey?"

"You've been reading those murder mysteries again, haven't you?"

She threw her head back and laughed. "Oh, Bella, you know me so well. I take it that's a yes?"

"Sure. Eden Park sounds lovely. You know me—I love places with a good, dark history."

Several days later, I stood in the vaguely Moorish gazebo overlooking Mirror Lake, on the very spot where Imogene Remus was shot dead by her (ex-) husband, George Remus. Amusingly enough, it was but a short walk away from a bronze replica of the Capitoline Wolf—depicting a she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus—which had been given to the city by none other than Benito Mussolini. It was a truly beautiful park with shadows lurking at every corner.

At first I'd thought that it seemed a bit conceited to name a place "Eden," but the park certainly lived up to it. It was a feat of landscaping, effortlessly waving away any thought of the metropolis surrounding it. The close-cropped grassy hills gave way to flourishing forests and Technicolor gardens, full of groves and ponds. Walkways overlooked banks of chaparral that sloped down into the graceful bend of the river, and the breadth of bluegrass beyond sweeping into the distance. Tucked away in the greenery were the white columns of the free art museum, and the steel-and-glass frame of the exotic greenhouse.

Earlier, I'd watched the floating black mountains that were coal barges pass frilly white riverboats whose waterwheels were churning furiously. A few jet skis and sport boats zigzagged about. I decided that it was a nice river to look at, although if what I'd heard was true, totally unsafe to swim in. I shuddered at the thought of radioactive man-eating catfish the size of Volkswagens.

At that moment, as I took in the picturesque park that came close to paradise, my thoughts were filled with the words which had led me there.

The creation myth.

It took a while to put my finger on it, but I realized that I felt so unsettled because there was so much of it I didn't know, or didn't recall from my short stay in Sunday school. I got the gist from cultural osmosis, but there were so many details I'd missed.

It didn't mention anything about apples or Satan. It did mention God strolling around the garden like a tourist, which I found amusing somehow. It said that God sent Adam and Eve packing, but only after making them leather outfits. I wondered whether they were hand-stitched or conjured out of thin air.

The thing I still hadn't wrapped my head around was the fact that there were two mystical trees. And that the tree of knowledge was the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Somehow, I'd always imagined it as a tree whose fruit would make you a genius, which made it seem very tempting. Knowledge is power, after all. I could understand defying a god who by all accounts was infinitely smarter and more powerful than you if there was ultimate wisdom at stake.

But no. Those two threw away everything for a conscience and an afternoon snack.

That fruit had better have been the most delicious damn thing to ever exist.

The idea that the burden of a conscience made humans "like gods," according to that rascally serpent, was food for thought. What would people be like without any Jiminy Crickets? Like remorseless sociopaths or more like puppy dogs who chew on your shoes and can't understand why that made you angry? Without conscience, would we be innocents or monsters?

And that left the tree of life. Immortality. I wondered why Eve didn't choose it instead of knowledge of good and evil. Did they not know about it? It seemed like the tree God was more gung-ho about guarding. If the snake was trying to rustle some jimmies, why didn't it point the lady to that one?

I cast my eyes towards the tree line. I'd looked up what Renée had said about the park—that it was one of ten places on earth thought to be Eden, according to a committee of Protestant and Catholic priests. They took the many rivers, thriving temperate forests of fruit trees, and the Pre-Columbian serpentine earthworks that dotted the land as their evidence.

This place could have truly been Eden. As I searched through the trees, straining to see into the dark woods beyond, I wondered.

Somewhere out there, was there a tree that held the secrets of good and evil, secrets worth throwing away everything for?

Was there a long-forgotten tree guarded by an angel with a flaming sword?

Was there a fruit, juicy and ripe for the picking that gave you eternal life with a single bite?

The excerpt was Genesis 3:1-24, New American Bible translation, which is public domain. I figured, hey, Twilight began with a quote from Genesis, too.

Have a lovely All Saints' Day.