The Last Samurai

Then I thought he might give a talk somewhere, and I could follow him home. But I thought it would end in drinks, and be hard for me to follow. I could try the hunchbacked midget costume I had to wear when we went to see The Crying Game—but I thought I might have trouble getting into a bar even as a midget sensitive about his height.

Then I had an idea. My father wrote a lot of journalism, and he always got a lot of things wrong. Science held a fatal fascination for him. He had never really mastered the difference between the special and general theories of relativity, but for some reason could not keep from bringing both into his articles whenever he could. Sometimes he would take a word which had both a technical meaning and an ordinary meaning (chaos, string, relativity, positive/negative, half-life, you get the idea) and then take statements applicable to the word in its technical sense to support generalisations about the word in its common sense. Sometimes the technical meaning would be something that could only be expressed in mathematics, so that it didn’t really have a correlate in ordinary language— that never stopped him. It was really just a matter of waiting for his next piece to come out & then writing to correct the mistakes in an engaging, innocent, boyish way, signing the letter Steven aged 11—this would be bound to get a response, and with luck he would put his address on the letter.

The next day was Monday. I went back to the library and went through all the Sunday papers, but there was nothing by my father. I went through all the Saturday papers, but there was nothing there either. Then I went through the papers for Monday, 30 March. Nothing there. I had known who he was for 10 days.

I went back to the library every day to go through the papers. There was nothing by my father. I would stand at the table, leafing through the pages, and sometimes I’d see an interesting story and get excited and suddenly remember. I knew who he was.

On Saturday I went back to the library again, and this time there was a piece in the Independent Magazine on the Galapagos. It talked about extinction and selection. There were lots of logical fallacies, and also some factual mistakes about dinosaurs, and he seemed to have misunderstood the selfish gene theory. Here was my chance!

I wasn’t going to point out the logical errors, which might put his back up, and I decided not to say anything about the part where he mixed up DNA and RNA because I thought that would be too embarrassing, but I thought I could safely point out more abstruse errors of fact, and this would be the type of thing I could sign Steven aged 11. It was hard to know how simply I should put the selfish gene theory: since he hadn’t understood it I didn’t want to make the explanation complicated, but I thought it would sound obnoxious if I stuck to words of one syllable.

I wrote the letter ten times trying to sound clever and not obnoxious. I could have printed it out on the word processor, but I thought my atrocious handwriting might be more appealing, so I wrote the final version out by hand.

It took two days to write. I could have written it in 15 minutes if I hadn’t had to worry about sounding obnoxious. Still, as Sibylla would say, it’s not nice to go around constantly offending people.

A week went by and I thought the Independent might not have passed it on straight away.

A week went by.

A week went by and I thought he must have it by now.

Three days went by and April was over. I thought he might actually be travelling. A day went by and I thought he might have a secretary to deal with correspondence. Four days went by. The secretary might have instructions not to answer letters unaccompanied by SAE.

His letter came the next day.

I took it to my room to read.

The address was handwritten; I thought this looked promising. The envelope was one of those self-stick envelopes; he’d written in black ballpoint. I opened it slowly; there was a sheet of A5, folded once, inside. I unfolded it. It said:

6 May, 1998

Dear Steven,

Thank you for your letter. As you probably know, there are a lot of different theories about why the dinosaurs became extinct. I admit I used the one most convenient for my argument. The point about the selfish gene theory would be fair enough if that was what I was relying on, but in fact Dawkins’ theory does have some rivals.

I hope you won’t be discouraged if I stand my ground. I think it’s wonderful that you show such a grasp of the importance of the theory, and I’m thrilled that you like my writing.

Yours,

Val Peters

I had told myself not to expect anything, but I must have been expecting something. In spite of the article, in spite of all the books, I’d kept hoping for something so brilliant I couldn’t have thought of it myself. I looked down at the piece of paper in my hand with its bold careless signature, and I wished more than anything in the world that it had not been written by my father.