A woman spoke, her voice earnest, searching. “Hello, Kitty, yes—I have a question for both of you, if that’s okay.”
“It’s what we’re here for, ask away.”
“All this talk of science, it seems like it’s missing something. Vampires, werewolves, there’s more to them than just curing an illness, isn’t there? I guess I want to know where the mystery of it all is. The magic.”
I deferred to my guest. “Dr. Shumacher, you want to tackle this one?”
“I’m not sure that ‘science’ and ‘magic’ are such distinct categories as people sometimes make them out to be. I try to keep that in mind when I do my own studies, that this is all part of nature, no matter how strange it seems. I’m studying nature.”
I added, “I’ve heard a lot of variations of the saying that magic is just phenomena that science hasn’t explained yet.”
Shumacher said, “I became a scientist because the natural world fills me with wonder. I think DNA is magical—how does all that information come to be stored in a collection of molecules? How does it come to be expressed? Learning the answers to those questions doesn’t make me any less filled with awe.”
“Yes, exactly,” I said. “I’ve seen a lot of weird things in my time. Ghosts, channeling, fairies, you name it. It doesn’t matter how weird things get, I’m not going to stop asking questions and trying to figure out how things work. Otherwise, we’re sitting alone in our dark caves, waiting for something to come along and eat us.”
Nadia didn’t sound convinced. “Yeah, okay—but what if you never find real answers? What if it really is just magic?”
“As if ‘just’ is a word you can use with magic. It’s ‘just,’ you know, the universe.”
She kept pressing. “Surely there are some questions that will never be answered—why vampires are immortal, why werewolves are controlled by the full moon. It doesn’t make any scientific sense.”
“And it never will, if we stop asking questions,” I said. “Maybe it’s magic, yes, but we still need to figure out how magic works, don’t we? Moving on, before we get too philosophical, my next call comes from Providence. Hello!”
The caller was male, fast talking, and clearly short on patience. “Kitty, longtime listener and all that. I’ve been a fan for a long time, but why do you always fall for these so-called scientific explanations? You know it’s all a smoke screen, don’t you?”
The screener’s comment on this call was “opposing viewpoint.” I had a feeling what that viewpoint was going to be. Doing the show as long as I had, I’d heard just about everything at least once. But I was always willing to be surprised.
“Oh? A smoke screen? Do tell.”
“This isn’t about science, or magic, or anything like that. It’s about who controls our souls!”
Of course it was. Sometimes I thought I’d be better off if I hung up on these calls. Usually, though, I had way more fun letting them run on. Sure, I liked providing altruistic public service when I could. The rest of the time, I wasn’t above ratings-boosting conflict.
“This is a good and evil thing, I assume is what you’re getting at.”
“You know the stories: vampires and werewolves, lycanthropes, witches, all the rest of it—they’re a perversion of God’s perfect human form. They’re not nature, they’re a twisted mockery of nature! Your doctor there said basically the same thing—these monsters rewrite our DNA, DNA made in God’s image. How can corrupting that not be a sign of true evil?”
“Because … I don’t feel evil?” It got too easy to point and laugh at these guys. When they didn’t make me feel utterly exhausted.
“That’s the whole point,” the caller from Providence said, and even he sounded tired, like he’d had to explain this one too many times. “You’re a pawn. You’re being used. Maybe you didn’t start out evil, but your DNA, your very being, your soul has been warped. And why? Tell me that? What purpose does it serve? Think about it a minute and you’ll realize the answer.”
If I wasn’t playing dumb, I was at least playing stubborn. “Does there have to be a purpose? Do you know what the purpose of a cold virus is?”
“No?” the guy said, nonplussed.
“Dr. Shumacher?” I asked.
She said, gamely, “Well, the purpose of a cold virus is to make more cold viruses and then to spread. Reproduction. Biologists feel that this is the base purpose of most life on Earth.”
“There you go,” I said. “It’s a function of reproduction. Does it have to be more nefarious than that?”
“Yes!” he exclaimed. “Because this isn’t biology, this is about the war in Heaven, and the rebellion of Lucifer, and his entire purpose is twisting God’s creation and bending it toward evil! Spreading that evil! When you say this is all science and biology, you’re confusing people, turning them from the truth! Vampires, werewolves—you, even!—you’re a symptom of original sin! You’re being used!”
“You know,” I said. “There was a time when I’d say this rant never gets old. But I’ve changed my mind—this is getting old. You can’t call someone evil because of some aspect of their identity they can’t control. I’ll say it again: being a vampire or a werewolf doesn’t make a person evil. Doing evil things makes you evil.”
“You’re deluded, you’re a tool of Lucifer—”
I cut off the call. Because I could. “There’s definitely a tool here but it’s not me. Dr. Shumacher, do you ever get this kind of response to your work?”